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I didn’t outlive Stalin to be depressed.”
That’s what wealth is, he realized: to live in a house where all the tools of living are out of sight. There were no brooms or mops or laundry baskets, no endless trays or cubbies for receipts, bills, or pills and keys.
She was the kind of person who would say “You look tired,” her head tilting with feigned concern, and mean that you were actually ugly.
It was that vast emptiness one feels after any gathering, where the muscles still throbbed with people’s voices, energies both expelled and unspent, and the cab became a kind of cradle lulling them to stillness.
“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all. You think being president is hard? Ha. Don’t you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough. Look at my girl, all that talent and for what, just to drown in Bud Light?” Water dripped from her nose. “People don’t know what’s enough, Labas. That’s their problem. They think they suffer, but they’re really just bored. They don’t eat enough carrots.”
I know it will be a good rest when we go—but—oh, to taste freshly brewed tea, with a spot of cream. I still want that.
“Tu esi mano draugas.” “That some sort of Christmas prayer?” She shook her head. “Then what’d you say?” She stared at the water, saying softly, “You are my friend.”
Sony turned to his hero with a hurt look. “But I love it here. East Gladness is the best place on earth. We have two McDonald’s and a GameStop. Who can say that?
“Who the hell are you anyway? Some kind of vigilante?” “No.” BJ stood up and put her hands on her hips. “I’m the fucking manager.”
How did I give birth to a stranger? All these years and I still don’t know that boy.”
That’s the only real thing about me, that I’m sitting here next to you at this bus stop. That’s it. Everything else, what I do, what I’ve done, the goals and promises, they’re all, like, ghosts. For most people, their ghost is inside them, waiting to float out when they die. But my ghost is in pieces.”
Sometimes you have to be lucky but also very brave. And I wasn’t either. But you are.
Because his mother worked six days a week in Meriden, in the opposite direction of East Gladness, Hai was able to avoid running into her this whole time.
I've been wondering about this the entire time
“It’s Sergeant Pepper,” he tried. “You gotta use English with me, okay? Listen.” He managed to hold her thumb. “London’s only a day away. We’re so close. I told you I was gonna get you to America and we’re doin’ it. You believe me, don’t you?”
Wow my chest hurts
“With him,” he said, “it wasn’t that I was happy—but that I was okay. And okay was even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.”
The superpower of being young is that you’re closest to being nothing—which is also the same as being very old.
Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them, he thought, you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive. But what do you do with that kind of box? Where do you put it down?
“Where’s Noah now, Sergeant?” Hai dipped his head. “He was storming Normandy, like J. D. Salinger did, and was wounded. We enlisted together. To be heroes of East Gladness. Then he took medicine to make his wounds go away. He wanted too much of one feeling—and I guess his heart gave out because of it. I don’t think we’re made to hold too much of any one thing.”
He had dropped out of school in New York not because he was getting headaches from reading too much, as his mother had thought, but because one day Noah stopped breathing and a week after that was lowered in the cold November ground. What could he have said to his mother about a boy she’d never met?
“So you’re a liggabit then,” she said, sniffling. He looked at her hand on his sleeve. “What?” “You’re—” she gestured at him, “a liggabit. Boy and boy, girl and girl. I see them in newspapers. Liggabit community.”
LIGGABIT
“But am I still me if I don’t remember who I was?” “I don’t know!” “I can still hear the river from here,” she said. “It’s saying I did a good job. It said I did good.”
Hai was actually there the day Sony first became enamored of the Civil War. It was like witnessing Larry Bird pick up a basketball for the first time, he thought.
What does it do to your mind to see “your people” die so vastly that you can’t even tell that they are not, in fact, your people at all?
All this, the debris of her living, somehow made her absence feel absolute and stifling. She was everywhere and nowhere at once.
“You never know how big a horse is until you have to bury it.”
Sony always wanted to take the train north to see his father and had been studying the Amtrak maps.
Hes just like me
“The fuck was that? You can’t hit me. You’re autistic.”
😭😭😭 what
“I’m not an idiot, Hai. My dad died three years, seven months, and fourteen days ago. He burned up inside his ’98 Nissan Maxima. I read all about it online. They even have a printout of the article at the group home in my file.
Oh this poor baby
“BJ told me that. A diamond can survive a fire. She told me that when I started. No one gave me a job cause of my brain problems, but she did. She believed in me.” His eyelids flickered. “She said, Anybody can become a diamond. All they need is a bit of pressure.”
“Most people are soft and scared. They’re fucking mushy. We are a mushy species. You talk to anybody for more than half an hour and you realize everything they do is a sham to keep themselves from falling apart.
Robert E. Lee sent all those people who believed in him across a half mile of hell because he was too scared to say he fucked up and had no cavalry. His generals told him to fall back to the mountains, but he wouldn’t listen. You told me that, right?” “He also had dysentery,” Sony mumbled.
“They’re just scared somebody will look at them bad and judge ’em. Scared somebody will see through the fake-ass armor they’ve wasted their whole lives building. And for what? To have fucking dysentery while a bunch of people who think you’re some god walk into a wall of bullets? Don’t you see it? We all want some story to make it bearable so we can keep living long enough to work our asses off until we’re in the ground,
Fucked up is the most normal thing in the world.
How come every time he said anything important, it felt like it was coming from somewhere else, from a cesspool collected from shitty movies at the base of his skull?
“People aren’t so bad. They’re just wounded little kids trying to heal.
BJ was driving, Maureen up front, Sony alone in the middle, and Hai and Grazina in the back, all of them huddled together like some ghoulish family vacation.
What if this old-ass lady dies in this van or something? What am I—and you know it’s gonna be me—what am I gonna say to headquarters?” “She’s not gonna die,” Hai said from the back. “She just has memory issues. You don’t die that way.” “Oh! How lovely!” Grazina suddenly sat up. “Why don’t we keep talking like I’m not here. Like I’m meat on a hook. How nice, huh? I’m not slow, you know. My brain is just on and off.” She looked over to Hai, stunned at her own brashness. He squeezed her hand.
“Just say it,” Maureen said. “Didn’t know lesbians beat around the bush so much.”
“To have wings you need to want to go somewhere. But it feels wasted on me, you know? In my dreams and in real life, I always wanted to stay in East Gladness.
“I should’ve known all along that you were liggabit.” “Really? How so?” he whispered. “You ask so many damn questions. Normal boys don’t ask so many questions.” She chuckled and turned the other way. “Good night, Labas.”
He lifted the headrest with both hands and stared into it as though into a face, one hand smoothing out the crinkled cloth where the burning stopped. “I miss you so much, Ba. I won’t ever do anything to make you not proud of me. And I won’t forget you long as I live.” He stroked the headrest.
Oh I'm a mess
These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other’s coughs and exhales better than those of their kin and loved ones. They, who owe each other nothing but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they
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I love this so much
“Gentlemen, fix bayonets! And…on my mark…” “Charge!” Grazina lunged from behind them all and raised her fist in the air next to Sony’s headrest. Everyone followed suit and shouted Chaaarge!
Grazina, who’d been mostly quiet, went over to Sony and gently squeezed his foot. “This…” she gestured to the forest, “is not new. It is same story. Okay? Don’t be too sad, boy. You still have your hands. And with these what you make is yours.”
But this morning, for the first time, he saw the becoming of the season—and it looked to him false,
Of all the money that ereeee I’ve had, I’ve spent it innnn good company. Of all the harm that ereeee I’ve done, alas it waaaas to none but me.
Maureen please!!
They spent the rest of the day watching reruns of The Office and eating Stouffer’s and drinking tea like nothing had happened.
They were a nightfall away from the end, he thought, and almost laughed at the absurdity of it. She must have sensed it, because she turned to him and smiled. “Labas, we did a lot, didn’t we? Didn’t we do so much?”
Im so sad
Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but for a minute he had this insane urge for Grazina to start speaking to him in Vietnamese, and knowing the impossibility of it crushed him in his seat.
“I wish I knew you when I was a girl.” Grazina sighed. He leaned back, a vague emptiness spreading through him, like his organs were dissolving one by one, and soon Grazina’s face, the whole room, started to blur. “Stop that. Don’t cry, boy.” She reached out to him, but her arm couldn’t reach and she let it lie there by the wounded meat loaf.
