YZ Chin

Tone

I love it when my friends introduce me to new people, although I never let on. I love the proud and honorable expression they wear when they say "This is Sandy - she's deaf", as if I were evidence of their benevolence. I also love the split-second shocked expression on the new people, the hasty smiles and their best imitations of what they think of as their "normal faces". If they do the ritual well enough I turn my head ever so slightly and tuck my hair behind one of my ears, whichever one's closer to them. They never fail to say something nice about my pink hearing aids, while my regular friends beam on.

I'm thinking of starting a hearing aid collection, actually. They'd make better accessories than earrings. I once saw a catalog for clip-on hearing aids and hearing aid covers, and the products were most definitely fashion statements in various shapes and hues. It'd be like the exquisitely expensive handbag Esther's dad got her when we were in high school. The rest of us could only admire, but could not imitate, because our dads weren't rich enough to spoil us that way. And now, only I can wear hearing aids. My friends can do nothing but gush.

To be honest, I quite like my deafness. It wasn't easy the first few years after the car accident and the stupid exploding airbag, but now it's become something that makes me special among my friends. None of my close friends are hearing impaired, simply because I wasn't born deaf. By the time I lost my hearing, I'd already accumulated a fixed circle of people, and they mostly rushed to participate in the drama.

You know how when you talk about your friends, you refer to them as Drew the Bartender, Carol the Feminist, Greg the Guy Who Can Knot a Cherry Stem with His Tongue and so on? I'm Sandy the Deaf Girl. I like it. I don't have any other particularly outstanding traits or skills. Never did.

It's more than just standing out, too. I'm sure a lot of important events in my life wouldn't have happened or worked out quite the same way if I weren't wearing pink hearing aids. For example, the thing with Colin.

I first met Colin at an apartment party. When Carol the Feminist introduced us to each other, I tucked my hair behind both my ears and leaned closer, not because he did the ritual particularly well, but because he was a stud. You should have seen his recovery smile after the inevitable surprise.


We went in search of drinks after the handshakes, and somewhere between what was functioning as the wine bar and the couch, we lost Carol.

"Do you usually read lips like this? Or do you sign too?" he asked after a while.

"I mostly just read lips because it was easier to pick up than signing, although that's not the only reason I was staring at your lips," I told him.

He laughed. We talked more, and then the host upped the music volume and dimmed the lights for the "dance floor", and I had to lean in much, much closer to be able to continue reading his lips in the semi-darkness. And read his lips I did.

We did the usual and exchanged numbers, and a week later Colin did the unthinkable and called. We went out, satisfied ourselves that the other person still looked good in sober daylight, and read more lips. Within two months Colin and I were dating.

Colin was the first after the accident, and now that I think about it, I wonder if my dismal post-accident love life had anything to do with feelings of self-consciousness. I don't know. I try not to think about the first few years when it was hard.

There were minor difficulties and awkwardness, of course. On our fourth date, Colin invited me back to his apartment to watch a Blockbuster movie. Apparently it was his modus operandi, and I can't say I didn't see it coming, although I felt a little miffed when he didn't realize immediately what he was doing wrong.

We'd turned the lights off and the subtitles on for the movie, of course. Halfway through I suddenly had a disorientating sensation - I thought Colin had melted into or had somehow become his couch, and that I was sitting on and being enveloped by Colin, floating isolated in darkness and unable to look away from the bright pulsating other-world five feet away. It was strange. And then Colin leaned in and started whispering sweet nothings into my hearing-impaired left ear. All I got were spurts of warm breath against my ears.

I pushed him away. I suppose I just got weirded out by the reminder that I was deaf, and that coupled with the darkness...the sensation of losing two senses was a little too much.


It was the first hiccup we'd had, and such a tiny one that we got over it instantaneously. The rest of the night was spent researching how his lips could be fully utilized in ways I could understand, even in the dark.

So Colin learned. It was no different from figuring out each other's quirks over time, really. I sometimes thought it made the relationship fun and interesting for him, sort of like an added twist to a game that he had perfected long ago, so that the game was once again challenging. He did play the dating game quite well, from what I found out.

Our first birthday was his twenty-third. I got him a pair of tickets to the Rammstein concert; I knew he loved that band. When I flashed the tickets, he started exclaiming and laughing, but then abruptly stopped.

"Sandy, are you sure? I mean, can you...enjoy the concert?"

I tucked my hair behind my left ear and smiled at him.

"First of all, who said I want to enjoy the concert? I never did like those kinds of violent, head-exploding noise you call music..."

"Hah!"

"...Second of all, I can hear most everything above a really loud shout, remember? So we're fine for the concert."

His smile was beautiful. I tucked my hair behind my other ear.

It turned out to be quite a success, the Rammstein concert. I'd never seen him so shot full of enthusiasm, so propelled by energy before, nor did I ever see him like that again. We weren't even close enough to see much of the band, since I wasn't exactly raking in the money for front row seats. Colin was just driven purely by the music. I imagined his eardrums, the pair of them vibrating like mad, writhing in non-stop orgasms somewhere inside his ears, unseen by the naked eye.

I felt a little jealous then and there, actually, something I thought I'd stopped doing for good when I'd quit asking "why me?"

I looked at Colin for most of the night, taking in his jumping up and down, his whoops, his huge grin, and his sweat glistening in the colored lights that traveled as if they were alive. I could hear the amplified electric guitar parts and the screams just fine, and I could feel the drum beats through the floor. But it wasn't the same.

A month and a half later, Colin presented a pair of tickets on my birthday, tucked into the band of his trousers and only discovered after his shirt came off. They were for a book signing and reading event featuring Emily Barnes, a writer I absolutely adored.

"I'm sorry the thing is next weekend and not today, but I thought we could celebrate your birthday a second time just the same," he winked.

I was more than thrilled. The week leading up to the event, I re-read all of her books and agonized over which one of the four I should bring to have her sign, since we were only allowed one signature each. Colin laughed at me and said I was acting like a teenybopper when I made him promise to get in line as well, so that I could have two signed books instead of just one.

On the day of the event, we arrived at the bookstore early. They had cleared a section of the store by pushing bookshelves back, so that the whole place looked denser than I remembered, like a jungle that had turned magical and overgrown itself overnight. I certainly felt the magic, looking at the temporary stage and the half-filled rows of chairs in worship before it.

Colin held me by my hand and led me to seats in the last row. When I protested, he smiled and pointed to the speakers mounted just behind us.

"But I can read her lips if we sit up front!"

"But that's not the point of readings, is it?"

"But-"

"Do you admire her words or her looks? Would you rather hear her own interpretation of her text or see her face?"

I sat down, clutching two of Emily Barnes' books, convinced of the evening, and also of Emily Barnes, of Colin, of us.

It would have been perfect. Sometimes I still think about it.

The store manager walked up the temporary stage promptly at 6 PM. Her turquoise green heels were precarious, and I imagined the clicking that came with each step.

"Welcome, ladies and gentlemen," she said.

The P.A. system was not of very high quality, and the bookstore really wasn't set up for that kind of thing, but I could make out every word of the store manager's introduction of Emily Barnes if I focused. Colin squeezed my hand and raised his eyebrows at me. I gave him my sweetest smile and nodded.


Then Emily Barnes herself stepped onto the temporary stage. Hands clapped in every row ahead of us, all the way up to the stage. Emily Barnes bowed a little, and smiled, then accepted the microphone from the manager's outstretched arm.

"Hello." She said from behind me, from the speakers. After a pause she smiled apologetically and said, "I never really liked these things."

And then she put the microphone down on the floor of the stage. She straightened up, and her lips started moving. I didn't notice this at first, or if I did, my brain didn't process the first few seconds of it. I was caught by surprise.

A second later, when it occurred to me to start reading Emily Barnes' lips, I felt Colin's eyes on me. I looked up and caught his eye, and he started to raise his arm.

"No!" I hissed and grabbed the arm.

Colin gestured towards Emily Barnes angrily. Seeing his forehead in creases, his eyebrows in frowns, I suddenly had a very clear mental video of him at the Rammstein concert. How excited he was. His jumping up and down, his whoops, his huge grin, and his sweat glistening in the colored lights that traveled as if they were alive.

"No." I told him. Sitting in my plastic chair with the video of his birthday running in my head, I suddenly had the most ferocious desire to be happy, to be excited, to jump up and down and whoop and grin. I was determined to be happy, here and now, with my birthday present.

"Why not?" Colin asked.

"I can read the tone of expression from her lips," I told him.

"What?"

"Shhh."

I stood up, inched my way past knees and walked until I took up a spot near the stage where I could stand without occluding anyone's view. Colin remained in his plastic chair for a while, but he eventually came up from behind and slipped his arms around me. I twisted around to smile up at him, a smile as bright as I felt inside.

For the record, Emily Barnes' reading was exceptional. She breathed life into her own words. Made them alive in ways I had not been able to imagine. Her lips moved, parted, close, moved, and I heard the subtle sadness, the cautious joy, the gentle regret - all of it contained in her prose all along, never fully discovered until then.


"So how exactly do you determine tone of expression from reading lips?" Colin asked on the way out.

I smiled down at my autographed books.

"That's a silly question. It's like asking blind people what they dream of when they sleep."

I walked faster. Colin kept up. We didn't talk on the drive back to my apartment.

*

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If two people argue, and one of them doesn't hear the argument, can the damage be undone?

*

A few weeks after the book reading, Colin and I fought for the first time. He wanted to cancel a dinner we'd planned long ago. The reason was the premiere of his indie filmmaker friend's first movie.

"Premiere? What premiere? It's going to be in his fucking basement, for God's sake!"

"It doesn't matter, okay, his specialty is low-budget films, and besides, he spent one whole year on the damn movie, all right? You just can't appreciate movies, that's all!"

"Don't you use that kind of tone with me!"

It took me a moment to comprehend his silence.

"Right," he eventually said. "right. You can read my tone of expression from my lips. That's it, right?"

And he left. For the premiere.

It went downhill from then on, and I suppose we both knew it. The last argument we had, he yelled at me so loud I thought I'd regained my hearing.

"I'm breaking up with you!"

I didn't say anything for a while, and when I did, it was nothing but a "Are you serious?"

"Why?" He sneered. "Can't you tell whether or not I'm serious from my lips?"

And that was it. Colin and I broke up.

I have few nice memories of the last months of the relationship. The most vivid one of them is of Colin fussing with my bangs and tucking my hair behind my ears.

"You look pretty like that. How come you never do it anymore?" he'd said.

I never told Colin that he sometimes shouted so loudly at me that I didn't need to read his lips to know his tone of voice. Colin was never very good at determining at what level I could start hearing clearly. I also never told him what it felt like to realize that he didn't sound like what I'd imagined, because, of course, I had never heard his voice until he started shouting and cursing at me.


I've had a haircut since. I wear my hair really short these days. Shows off my new fluorescent green hearing aids better. I still love it when my friends introduce me to new people. Sometimes I forget, and lift my hand to tuck my hair behind my ears, but the reaction is never the same anymore, now that my hearing aids are unconcealed. They see it coming.

My girlfriends asked, of course. I told them that it was human nature. That people just can't accept other people who see or hear or feel or know things they aren't supposed to. If you see UFOs, you're crazy. If you see spirits, you're a fraud. If you sense true love when he just wants a fuck, you're a whackjob, and if you can read the tone of his voice just from the way he moves his lips, you're a bad girlfriend. And deaf, of course

Charles Kaufmann

The Pilgrims

Even after just one night, John could tell he would not like the night nurse. She was thin. Her skin was leathery, her hands rough. Her voice was gravelly. She was an unhappy sort of person. She didn't like her job. Moreover, John didn't feel much like cooperating with her.
Taking up residence in this - what was it? Loony house? - hadn't been his idea, but he guessed he'd put up with it. He assumed there was reason behind his moving in, and he'd simply have to trust his son. He supposed this was the right place for him. He imagined he wouldn't be here long.
The morning nurse, a big, jovial woman, was very pleasant, though. And there was something else that was pleasant about the place. Separating the slats of the horizontal blinds of the one window in his room, peering out, he said to his son, "Did you see the Pilgrims?"
"What, Dad?" His son was unpacking books from a cardboard box, aligning them in neatly ordered rows on shelves.
"The Pilgrims," he said, again. John was a physicist. He believed in scientific method - phenomena were explainable. Increasingly, though, he found himself dealing with remarkable thoughts that, if true, demanded a new sort of logic. He turned to his son and repeated what he believed was one of these new, strange, self-evident truths: "There is a family of Pilgrims living in a little house just outside my window, at the top of the meadow, just at the edge of the woods."
His son pretended - at least - to take a careful look. He joined his father at the window, squinted through the space between the slats. He furrowed his brow with the quizzical, appropriately-concerned expression John was seeing more and more of, and said, "I don't see any woods back there, Dad. What I see is the parking lot, and the service road. There's the U-Haul I rented to move your things. A large, green Dumpster. A couple of the maintenance folks. I see asphalt - lots of it. But, no meadow, no woods, no Pilgrims."
His son seemed to be taking his father's oddness very pleasantly. He supposed he, too, would have to resort to pleasantness whenever he found himself at the dead end of an illogical thought.



*

John didn't tell everyone about the Pilgrims. Not the chronically perplexed old woman across the hall, who kept asking, "Where am I?" and, "Will you please take me home, now?" She was a little batty. Poor woman. No answer to that question, now, not in this place.
John didn't tell the night nurse, who was not kind when it came to needles. Oh, how a needle could hurt in her hands.
"You aren't taking your medication," she said to John.
"I've had enough, thank you." Rebelliousness would get him into trouble with this one. But how would he know if she were giving him the correct dosage? The proper prescription? For such a thin woman, she was as strong as a bear. John's thin frame was no match for her, and her needles left large red and blue bruises on his arms and thighs.


It was childish nonsense - the chimerae of frazzled ganglia, or the unadvertised side effect of an anti-psychotic drug - but over the course of the summer, John and the Pilgrims became friends. John would have found comfort in the duplication of these visions by a witness, in the customary manner of peer review. John made sure to ask first thing each time his son visited: "Do you see the Pilgrims out there?" He'd repeat the question two or three times, even after the son had replied, "I don't see anything, Dad," because this was a very important question: "Do you see the Pilgrims?" and "Are you sure you can't see the Pilgrims?"
Behind the window was a meadow with tall, lush grass, and wildflowers. There was a narrow dirt path that led directly through the meadow to the door of a quaint-looking house built at the edge of the woods. This was where the Pilgrim family lived: father, mother and young boy. John watched them daily.
The boy's hair was light brown and cut very short. His shirt and pants were made of coarse fabric. Usually, in the morning, barefoot, the boy followed the cow into the meadow, disappeared beyond John's view, and did not return until dusk. The father wore a tall, black Pilgrim hat with a silver buckle. At the evening meal, and afterwards, he sang songs to the family. The mother seemed too young and too frail. She had a habit of taking a hand and brushing away the strand or two of rusty hair that refused to be confined under her white bonnet. She seemed gentle, yet indefatigably determined to survive. She was a good wife. They were good people.


The Pilgrim mother awakened feelings in John similar to the feelings his own mother had awakened in him as a child. She was some sort of beautiful mystery. It was in the way she leaned her hip on the edge of the fieldstone-lined well, pausing during a hot day. It was how, standing there, she caused John to imagine the rich fragrance of the meadow, and how glorious the summer sunshine was. It was how she made John ache for something he once knew, but would never again find - innocence, a sense that life was full of undiscovered pleasures, a feeling he would live forever.
The father, in his tall Pilgrim hat, was like his own father - stern, someone to be respected. And perhaps because of this, perhaps because, deep inside, he was very kind, perhaps because he very rarely showed anger, and then, if he did, seemed to regret it, the father inspired in John a sense of reassurance and comfort. John felt better at the end of the day when he saw the father returning from the fields, as if that made the day complete, as if things were safe. He especially liked the father when he sang those Pilgrim songs.

*

John discovered that he, too, enjoyed singing songs at evening meals. At 4:45 PM the evening nurse arrived at his room with his walker. John thought this was funny. He needed no walker. "I would like to walk under my own power to the dining room," he would frequently tell the nurse, who would always insist on the clumsy thing. John would tell her how delightful she looked this evening. And wouldn't she take his arm as they walked together down the hall, through the common room, where Singing in the Rain was playing on the big screen TV? But, no, no. The walker must be used. A strict rule.
In the dining room, the evening nurse usually sat him alone at a table with a white tablecloth. A waitress would come with a menu. The waitress was a young girl just out of high school. There were several such young waitresses. They all were about to go to college, or get married, or travel Out West. It was very formal. John felt very spoiled in this rest home for privileged old scatterbrains.


With a pencil, he checked boxes of choice on the menu. He liked ham, and potatoes au gratin. When he saw the word PEAS, he always placed a pencil-check. For dessert, he liked bread pudding with raspberries. The Pilgrims waited until late May to plant peas. There were wild berries in their meadow; the boy collected them for his mother.
John would leave his barely legible pencil markings on the menu, and give it to the girl the next time she came round. Then he'd begin singing the even songs. The others in the dining room didn't pay much attention. They hadn't seen the Pilgrims. But he wanted the others to know how beautiful the Pilgrim songs were. He sang to himself - mumbled, really - making up the words as he went in a silly way; people would have thought he was a little crazy:
Bim-bom, bim-bom, a bom, bom.
Pray you; give them leave to play with John,
To make his bed, and comb his head,
And come again, anon.
Tweedle-tweedle, a bom, bom
He sang as the ham and peas arrived on a plate. A regular Thanksgiving feast:
For me a table thou hast spread
In the presence of my foes
Thou dost anoint my head with oil
My cup it overflows.
He always spilled things: damn - he always spilled things, especially now. Especially when they tied a bib around his neck. One night, he hadn't managed to get the au gratin potatoes cleanly into his mouth. Oh, how he was embarrassed about that.
Oh! - tweedle, tweedle, twino,
And what shall we have to our supper?
Three beans in a pound of butter,
Tweedle, tweedle, twino - Oh!

*

The Pilgrim boy had an Indian friend. Mother and Father Pilgrim didn't know about this secret Indian friend, who would creep low across the meadow in the early morning hours until he was within hearing distance of the loft where the Pilgrim boy slept. The two boys had a secret signal - the call of a mourning dove, which the Indian boy would make by blowing through his cupped hands: whoo-whoo...whoo-whoo. Then he would creep away in the tall grass and wait for the Pilgrim boy to run out of the house, down the long dirt path.
Sometimes John tried to give the secret call he learned by observing the Indian boy: whoo-whoo...whoo-whoo. He'd go to the window, cup his hands together. His own breath across his thumbs sounded like a gale wind across a frozen landscape: whooshshsh...whooshshsh. This sound captivated him; to him the sound was mysterious and beautiful. And for a few minutes the sound of the whooshshsh into his cupped hand mesmerized him, hypnotized him. Hum. Hum. He'd make a comical Indian - a little too tall, a little too thin, hair disheveled, in pajamas, supported by a walker.



*

Once, when the morning nurse found him trying to make the dove call, she asked, a little too nicely, "Are you lost, Mr. Lindstrom?"
"I'm giving the secret Indian signal," he told her.
"Let's take you back to your room," she said, as if he were a lost child. "Will you be good today, Mr. L.?" She led him by the hand to his bedside. She took his pulse and his blood pressure, but at least she was pleasant.
Not so the night nurse. John hated the feel of the blood pressure cuff...as if he...were...a prisoner. He couldn't stand the pressure around his arm, the hiss of escaping air. He wanted to rip the cuff off while the nurse listened. He didn't mean to be angry or uncooperative, but didn't she realize...? The night nurse always kept meticulous notes on her clipboard. And then she would force his pills into his mouth.
Why didn't anyone tell him what drugs they were giving him? "I do not want to take these pills," he told the night nurse, and then the morning nurse, and the day nurse and the evening nurse.

*

Early one morning John heard the Indian boy's secret call, whoo-whoo, and he got up from bed and went to the window. It was midsummer. He thought the air outside his window ought to smell like the sea. Wisps of mist floated above the meadows. John tried to make the secret call, too, though he couldn't quite manage: whooshshsh-whooshshsh. He saw the door of the Pilgrim house swing open, and the barefoot Pilgrim boy, holding a large, shallow round basket, race down the dirt path across the meadow to where the cow was standing. She raised her head as the boy approached. He took an end of the rope around her neck and led her through the meadow, stopping just below John's window.
The Pilgrim boy seemed to look directly at John. Their eyes met for a moment, and John raised his hand. The boy smiled, and pointed. And the Indian boy joined him, gestured to John, nudging the Pilgrim boy, Who is that? Will he come play with us?
The Pilgrim boy beckoned to John with his right hand, and John heard him say, John, Seest thou my cow? Seest thou my friend? Come pick Raspberries for dinner.


Raspberries for dinner!
We'll have red berries for our dinner,
He and thou, thou and me,
And bally-wally-wally!

*

John was a master of undiscovered passageways, secret hideouts and hidden doors. He loved to figure things out, solve equations, decipher puzzles, mazes, complex riddles. He was a physicist. A magician. A cutpurse. A lock-pick.
John left his room, singing under his breath. The hallway was still dark. He saw no nurses. He moved quietly though the hall, past the front desk, where the chair was empty. There was a code box next to the door. He had seen this done many times: 1-6-2-3 and it opens automatically, whooshshsh. Pass through the entrance hall, and another door, another code box, whooshshshsh.
About thy paths, so shall I find
The fair Center of my mind,
There I'll dwell forever.
There will I find purer air,
There I'll sup Balme and nectar
And will my ripe soul
Breathe Warm into the arms of death.
Have you seen the Pilgrims? The thought went through his mind again, Have you seen the Pilgrims? John could smell the sea, the meadow, the forest. The air was cool, and the cold dew glistened on his bare toes.
He found the boys at the far edge of the meadow.
The Indian boy led them through the woods to a bramble patch with red, ripe berries. The Pilgrim boy dropped the rope he was using to lead the cow, and began filling the broad wicker basket with the soft fruit. John helped. His fingers became stained with red. 1...2...3...24...25...61...62... . He counted. He ate every fourth berry. He loved berries and numbers, and this wonderful summer morning.
Shall we show our friend our secret garrison? the Pilgrim boy asked.
Can we trust him? replied the Indian boy.
You can trust me, John said. I swear.
Show us.
You must mix your blood with ours; then we will trust you; then we will be Brothers Three.
The Indian boy took a sharp thorn from a bramble. He pricked his own finger first. The Pilgrim boy held out his finger. Second, there was Pilgrim blood. Now yours, he said.
John felt the sharp jab of the thorn, and he winced, but he didn't want to show he was a coward, not like how he was with the night nurse. A small bubble of blood appeared at the tip of his finger.


Hold your finger high.
Hold your finger high.
Three fingers were raised in the air. Three fingers met.
Blood into blood.
Blood into blood.
Blood into blood.
Now we are Brothers Three, said the Pilgrim boy.
Brothers Three! The two other boys ran into the bushes, John following closely behind. They scrambled through leafy tunnels, under arches of bramble branches. In the center of the bramble was a long, low chamber - dark, moist, wormy.
The secret garrison!
The secret garrison!
The journey through the bush had caused John to tear his pajamas, and scrape his chin, knee and elbow. There was blood running down his calf, and on his hands.
John started crying.
Stop, child, said the Pilgrim boy. If you want to be our brother, you must learn not to suffer.
You've hurt yourself, said the Indian boy. His voice was comforting.
The Pilgrim boy nodded towards the Indian boy, He will show you how to make bandages from trees.
The Indian boy led John out of the bushes and into the woods, while the Pilgrim boy went to find the cow. There, by a stream, the Indian boy found a grove of alders. He broke a small branch from a young tree and stripped the bark with his teeth. He chewed, and chewed, and chewed. Next he took the paste, moist with saliva, and applied it to John's hand, his chin, his knee. It felt warm. It eased John's pain. The Indian boy's fingers were muddy. There. You'll learn to take care of yourself instead of crying, said the Indian boy. He smiled. He gave John some alder bark. You try. The gummy substance on his skin had begun to dry.

*

"Oh, Mr. Lindstrom, what a muddy mess you’ve made of yourself. And you’ve cut your knee," said the day nurse, the big one, the pleasant one. "You shouldn't be wandering outside alone. We don't allow that. It's not safe."
He was in the parking lot. The nurse brought him back inside to his room, cleaned him, wrapped his knee in a gauzy bandage fastened with white tape.
"I don't need a bandage. I know how to make Indian bandages from trees."
"Mr. L.," she shook her head, "you're a very sweet man, aren't you?"


After that, he became more and more dependent on the wheel chair. Now, he missed the walker. Now they insisted he ride a wheelchair. The trouble was, you got used to riding, you forgot how to walk. "Why don't you let me walk?" he asked the nurse. Doesn't anyone understand?
Once he heard his son tell the social worker, I don't want him restrained.
"How are they treating you, Dad?" his son asked when they were alone. John didn't tell him about the night nurse, the thin one, with rough hands.
"The Pilgrims are very nice people," he said. "I'd like you to meet them."
"Dad, it's just a parking lot."
"Are you certain? Won't you go out and check? Look carefully."
"I'll check on the way out."
"Call me when you get home."
"I will, Dad."

*

One night late he heard the bears roaring. In late summer, the bears were rutting, and it made them mean. John's mind was filled with fear. He got up from bed and went over to the window. There was a full, yellow moon over the meadow. A harvest moon, John thought, as he saw an enormous herd of bears gathering in the meadow below the Pilgrims' house - thirty or forty prowling bears. John worried about the Pilgrim family. He wanted to warn them, help them, cry out, but he was paralyzed with fear. He felt rough hands on his shoulder pull him backward, a claw-like hand over his month. He could hardly breathe. He wanted to hit and to kick, but the rough hands kept pushing against his chest.

*

John wanted to go back to the woods, to the stream and the grove of alders. There were bruises on his chest. I showed you what to do, he heard the Indian boy say. In the morning, no one saw him. He found a secret way. He was a master of mazes and tunnels: whooshshsh; another secret code: whooshshsh.
He found the stream where the alders grew. The leaves - beginning to turn yellow - rustled as he broke several small branches, peeled the bark, and began chewing. He tasted birch, and tannin, green sap, and sweet, pungent wood. He applied the paste to his chest, his stomach, his side. His body became sticky. He had painted his body like an Indian. He shivered in the early morning cool.


And then, he heard a cry in the bushes. He crawled on his hands and knees into the bramble. There, nearly concealed among the scratchy branches, was a bundle of bear cloth. He carefully took the bundle in his arms and crawled back to the edge of the stream. He lifted the folds. Oh, my. This was a beautiful infant, dark-skinned, with black eyes. Someone has left you alone, he said. And he began singing, the way he knew the Indians sang:
Wayo-yi, Wayo-yay, my precious flower,
Wayo-ee, Wayo-ee, the moon sleeps by day;
Wayo-ee, Wayo-ah, my little daughter,
Wayo-ee, Way-yay, the sun sleeps by night.
As he sang, he noticed an Indian woman standing by the alders. The Indian woman wore a necklace of bear teeth, bracelets of colored beads on her wrists. Her shirt was a piece of faded red cloth fastened with a band of deerskin. Her waist was wrapped in a moose-hide skirt. Her hair, as black as the infant's, tied behind her head, shone in the morning sun. She motioned to him: come.
"She is beautiful. Son, she is such a beautiful woman. Do you see? Do you see the lovely woman?"
Come, she said, taking his hand.

*

"Mr. Lindstrom, what are we going to do with you?" the pleasant morning nurse said. She looked worried. "You've been in the mud again, and hurt yourself, too. I'm so sorry. We are going to have to watch you more carefully." Soon, he was clean, in his bed, and the pleasant nurse was rubbing his bruises with an oily lotion.
"My little daughter is very beautiful," he told her.
"You didn't say you had a daughter, Mr. L."
"Didn't I?"
The pleasant nurse shook her head. She rubbed his shoulder, and John found this comforting. He fell asleep.

*

Around Thanksgiving, the hallways and the dining room had been decorated with corn stalks, pumpkins, and cutouts of turkeys. The batty old woman across the hall had died. John knew this because he didn't see her in the hallway anymore, and when he poked his head into her room, he saw that her bed was empty. Her possessions had been removed. Make room for the next batty person, John noted to himself, dryly.
John was not sure when Thanksgiving Day was. He kept calling his son. "Will you be here for Thanksgiving dinner?"

"Yes, Dad, I've told you each time you've called." His son's voice sounded patient. John hung up. A while later, though, he wanted to make sure his son was coming for Thanksgiving. He dialed the number, and heard the beep of his son's answering machine. "Just want to see if you're coming for...." The machine cut him off.
That evening, he called his son again. "Are you coming for Thanksgiving dinner?" Had he asked him this? He wanted to make sure.
"Yes, Dad, as I told you. I am coming for Thanksgiving dinner. You've called ten or eleven times."
"Have I? Are you coming?"
"Yes."
"Good."
"How is Kate?"
"Kate and I are divorced."
"You didn't tell me that."
"I've told you many times, Dad."
"I think that's a shame. How are the girls?"
"The girls are fine, Dad."
"I think it's a shame about you and Kate."

*

Now, in the halls, and when his wheelchair was wheeled into the dining room with the other residents, he sang the songs he heard the Pilgrims singing in the evenings:
About thy paths, so shall I find
The faire Center of my mind
Thy temple, and those lovely walls
Bright ever with a beame that falls.
There I'le sup
Balme and nectar in my Cup.

*

Not too many days later, John saw the Indian boy looking into his window. Behind him, in the meadow, where the tall brown grass was harvest brown, the Pilgrim boy was crouching low.
Hush.
What do you see? John asked.
Hast thou seen the turkey flock? the Indian boy asked.
There, by the edge of the meadow, were thirty or forty wild turkeys sunning themselves in the bright autumn sun.
A turkey for the feast! whispered John.
Ten turkeys for the feast! whispered the Indian boy. The Pilgrim boy leapt out of the grass, and flew towards the flock, the Indian boy not far behind. John laughed, run, run run. The flock scattered. Turkey feathers flew. The Pilgrim boy had one under each arm. The Indian boy held one by the neck. O what do I do with my delight, delight? Ring its neck till it cries good night, good night. Tomorrow is the feast! Tomorrow the thanksgiving feast.

*

That night, John saw the wolves. Fifty, sixty, one hundred howling wolves gathering on the meadow outside his room. He heard them scratching at the window, and he was afraid they would break down the outer doors. Soon he heard them running down the hallway, sniffing, pawing at the door of his room. And then shadows in his room, running at him. How-oooo, how-ooo, how-ooo. He struck out with his hands and fists. He kicked with his feet.



*

When he awoke in the morning, there were bruises on his chest. His eye was black.
There was a motion detector in his room now. It played a children's song whenever he got out of bed: a, b, c, d, e, f, g...as a way to warn the nurses he was up, or had fallen out of bed. It made the loudest, most awful racket. John had never fallen out of bed. But he was apt to get up when the nurses were not looking. He was a master of secret ways, secret codes, hidden corridors.
Toll we the Boles,
Bim-bom, bim-bom,
When John's got up and gone,
Bim-bom, bim-bom,
You'll find him again,
Bim-bom, bim-bom,
With the ducks and the hen,
Bim-bom, bim-bom.

*

When the morning nurse came into his room, she said, "Happy Thanksgiving."
"Thanksgiving?" John said.
"Your son is coming, today, Mr. L."
"Is it Thanksgiving?"
"It's Thanksgiving, Mr. L."
John looked out the window. "What about them?" he said.
"Who?"
"They will freeze to death."
"What do you mean, Mr. L?"
"The Pilgrims."
"No one's going to freeze, Mr. L."
It was a terrifying thought. The Pilgrims would freeze to death this Thanksgiving. They would not be prepared for such harsh weather. He waited until the morning nurse had finished washing him clean of his own feces, changing the sheets soaked with his urine, giving him his medication, taking his blood pressure.

*

The motion detector didn't go off this morning. Clever, clever John. He made his own sound, cupping his hands to his mouth, blowing the cold wind across his thumbs: whooshshsh-whooshshsh - the secret call.
He walked down the hallway, meeting no one. The nurse's station was empty. He turned a corner, and another. He was a physicist, an observer of phenomena. It was a simple matter of slipping through the secret door: whooshshsh, whooshshsh.
And there he was in the meadow. John felt an icy blast against his face and the sting of ice pellets. Where are the boys? He put his cupped hands again to his lips: whooshshsh - whooshshsh, the sound of a gale across a frozen landscape.
He needed to help those Pilgrims. He turned and faced the wind, going in the direction he thought the Pilgrims' house was, though he couldn't see all that well, and, oh my, humble-dee, humble-dum it was so very cold.


He was weak. Humble-down, humble-dum. He sat on the hard, cold ground, shivering. His chest was tight. Hard to get air.
For a moment, the Indian woman appeared at the edge of the field: come. She was dressed in a robe of white owl feathers trailing behind her in the howling wind.
Humble-dee, humble-down, a down, a down.

Couldn't he hear the Pilgrims singing their lost songs?

He doth fold me in clothes most safe.
And tender grass fast by;
And after drives me to the streams
Which run most pleasantly.

Couldn't he help them?

And though I were even at death's door
Yet would I feare no ill;
For with thy rod and shepherd's crook
I am comforted still.
Too late. Come. Bells do ring and birds do sing. Bim-bom. Bim-bom. And what for supper? Three beans and butter. For me a table thou hast spread in the presence of my foes.


"Dad?" "Dad?"
They were wrapping blankets around him, trying to warm him. But never mind. He'd sing himself to sleep: bim-bom, bim-bom, sleep my little flower.
There were no Pilgrims. No father, mother, little boy. No Pilgrim house. They had vanished long ago. A myth. Necessary propaganda.
In thy house forevermore my dwelling place shall be;
In thy house, will I dwell most peacefully,
Humble-dee, humble-dum....

*

John was vanishing with them. He imagined he'd say one thing to his son. He saw the woman standing there quite clearly, in her dress of snowy owl feathers:
Isn't she beautiful? Look at her, son; isn't she beautiful?
John had barely enough breath for it; he didn't quite know why he was asking, and couldn't remember now - had he said it? The woman in the white feathers...beckoning... come.
What sort of new conundrum was this? What sort of conjecture? If you want to be our brother, you must learn not to suffer. Can't you hear those wonderful songs? Won't you sit with me and listen?

*

In the morning someone closed his mouth for him. This was done very professionally, right before the bag was zipped closed around him and an attendant lifted his stiff, light body in his arms and carried him out. Mouth agape, John looked as if he had sung his way warmly into the arms of death. John's pilgrimaging had led to the fair center of his mind: innocence, the promise of undiscovered pleasures, a feeling sure enough that he would live forever. Ho. Hum. Make room for the next scatterbrain.

Good night, good man John,
We'll come and play again anon;
Goodnight, goodnight,
Humble-dum, humble-dum John.

David Gaffney

Gossamer

Just tell her. Just open up your heart and spill it out. That's what some people do. But Damien's plan was special and as he began to put it into action, everything in the universe seemed to click into place, and all things rang with Emma; even the muted throb of the car's engine sang her name - Emma, Emma, Emma. He looked in his rear mirror at the diminishing oblong that was Industry House. Emma would be sat there this very minute, right next to Damien's empty desk. Every evening she lingered in his thoughts. Did he exist in hers? He was about to find out.
At the junction he hesitated. Usually he turned right and headed straight for junction nine. Fourteen minutes and three junctions later he'd roll off the slip road and another eight minutes thirty saw him in his flat eating toast and staring at the fridge. But tonight was different. Instead of turning right, he turned left, then left again, and into the supermarket car park where he stopped. He laughed and slapped his hands on the steering wheel in a rapid tattoo. 'Woo-hoo,' he cried, self-consciously. Exuberance didn't come easily to Damien; he couldn't understand why people whistled and hollered out at concerts - he was unable to find the motivation within himself, even though he was sure he enjoyed the gigs as fully as he was intended to. Tonight was different. A new life was spread out before him, a life that would give the answer to the one question that mattered; could Emma love him as he loved her? He sat for a time listening to the ticking of the metal as the bonnet cooled down.
Half an hour later he glanced at himself in the rear mirror. 'Bye-bye, Damien Jones, legal consultant. Nice to know you.'
In the supermarket toilets Damien's transformation took place. He climbed into baggy blue overalls, glued on a false beard, jammed a woolly hat onto his head and balanced a pair of giant oval green-tinted spectacles on his nose. He nodded at his reflection in the mirror, made a gun with his finger and pointed. 'Hey! Kev! Kevin. Kevo. Kevvy. Kay. Kev. K.man. The k-miester. What's going on mate? What's going on pal, mate, pallo. . . matey - What's happening dude. Hey, how you doing? How's it hanging? What's going down - dog. Dog? What's new? Hey, lad, what's the crack? What's new fellah?'


More of this, and more, and yet more, until slowly, incrementally, Damien, the dull, be-suited legal consultant disappeared and Kevin the down-to-earth cleaner was nodding and smiling back at him from the mirror. There was a bold swagger in his walk when he left the supermarket toilets. Mr De Niro had immersed himself into his new role.
Back at Industry House he waited for the security man to buzz him through. Normally the man would have recognised him and given him that ironic half salute he seemed to reserve for Damien and Damien only. Damien could never think of anything to say to the security men. Some of Damien's colleagues chatted away to them, but Damien had no idea what they spoke about. He didn't even know the names of the security people, never seemed to need to. Mate was always enough.
Donny, the shift supervisor, had constructed a miniature living room in the corner of the utensil cupboard - coffee table, stool for his feet, pile of Daily Mirrors for cultural diversion and an arm chair in which he was sat, sipping from a jam jar an amber liquid the consistency of varnish. A tiny radio on the front of his baseball hat emitted the soft drizzle of drive-time pop. Damien had no idea there were people in the utensil cupboard. He was entering a new world, all the more fascinating because it was hidden away inside the same building in which he worked during the day.
'Here,' Donny said. 'Have a look at this.'
Damien went over and Donny showed him a Polaroid of a crumpled bundle of blankets with, sticking out of it, a tiny baby's head that was wrinkled like a monkey's, and very red.
'My grandson,' he said. 'Two pounds only, that's what he weighs. Born last week.' He slid the picture back in his wallet. 'He's in an incubator, ventilated at the moment, but they expect him to be breathing for himself in a few days.' Donny's eyes were filling with water.
'I'm sorry. They can work wonders now, you know.'
'I know. His oxygen level is a bit high. The mix, you know? Forty per cent. Normal is twenty one per cent so they need to get it down to twenty one per cent. I didn't know there was twenty one per cent oxygen in the air, did you? I thought it was all oxygen, to be honest.'


'Your grandson looks great. I'm sure he'll be OK. I'm the new fellah by the way. Kev.'
Donny indicated a sheet of paper blu-tacked to the back of the door. 'Take a look at the rota. You're on bogs.'
'Sorry Donny, I can't do toilets. My, er, skin condition - I did tell them at the interview.' He hadn't gone to all this trouble to be stuck inside the toilets, seeing no one. The whole idea was to hang about near Emma, get her talking and find out what she really thought about him.
Donny twiddled the volume knob on the side of his baseball cap. 'What?'
'The skin condition. Didn't they say?'
Donny pushed his lips out, emitted a long puff of air and twiddled up the volume on his hat.

Plucking fag-ends from lukewarm puddles of urine and wiping slithery snot trails off the tiles did not help Damien in his quest to discover the secrets of Emma's mind. The only advantage to being on toilets was the faint thrill to be had from cleaning the seats in the women's cubicles, and to be honest even that wasn't worth it. He was about to pack the job in altogether when Donny asked to see him in the utensil cupboard again.
The cupboard looked different. A new lamp sat on the table, its light softened by a coloured cloth that Donny had thrown over it, giving the room a gelatinous green glow. There were a few sofa cushions on the floor which weren't there before, and Donny indicated Damien should sit down on one, which he did. Then Donny lifted a demi-john out from behind a metal cabinet and poured two servings of the viscous brackish brew he'd been drinking the other night into two jam jars.
'You'll join me, won't you?' he said. 'Tomato wine. I make it myself. Sometimes I sit here and listen to the music, sip the wine. It's like a little island away from everything.'
'I bet,' Damien said. 'How's your grandson?'
'He's, he's not that good. He's, uh, he's had a stomach infection and they had to scan it. And then one of his lungs collapsed and they had to put a machine on him to drain that. So he's in the wars to be honest, not so good. Tough little mite, though. But I've been doing my garden plan.' He nodded his head towards a pile of graph paper on which were drawn neat circles and oblongs and a winding path. 'For when he comes out. Me and the missus, we're gonna make that garden for him and he'll be round when his mum's at work. His mum's on her own you see, so she'll need us. And in a city, you need a garden. At the moment it's just a big empty space - all lawn.'

Damien looked at the diagrams and Donny explained which were planters, which were beds, which were raised, everything. He had a sheet of paper on which the cost of all the materials was laid out in a complicated matrix of heading and sub-totals, above a timeline showing completion dates for each element.
'If he's out by next month we will have made a start. From next month's salary I'll get the top soil, from the next I'll get shrubs, the month after that the rocks for the rockery. You see? It'll all be great. When he gets out. No pond by the way. You'll have noticed that. No pond 'cos of little Sid, see?'
'Oh,' said Damien.
They sat in silence for a few minutes.
Then Donny said, 'You can re-tune the radio if you want. It's in my hat. I bet you wondered where the music was coming from.' He chuckled. 'A radio in a hat. My daughter got me this. Sid's mum. It was a joke present, I don't imagine she thought I'd wear it. But I do. Come on, you tune it in. The tuning knob's here,' he tapped the side. Damien said he was happy with the station as it was, but Donny shook his head. 'No, no, no. You're young, put something else on. Whatever you want. You've got ten minutes before your shift starts. Enjoy yourself.'
So Damien began to turn the knob on Donny's hat. The speaker whistled, squealed, spat static, hissed at him, but no other station could be found. Fuzzy voices drifted past below the crackle, but he couldn't catch them, couldn't get just the right notch on the dial. Up close he could smell Donny's breath - tobacco, tuna fish, foul tomato wine - and he wanted to move away as quickly as he could.
'I can't,' Damien said. 'You'll have to do it.'
'Ok, Ok,' Donny said, 'Sit down. What I've really asked you here for is about your work in the toilets. This is a piece of card onto which I have sellotaped an object. The item was found,' he paused and levelled his face at Damien's, 'on one of your toilet seats.'
Suddenly they were Damien's toilet seats.
'What do you think it is?'
'I think it's a hair.'
'It is a hair. And what sort of hair do you think it would be on a toilet seat?'

'Well, Donny, you know, there's bound to be the odd one. Toilets aren't really my thing, I think I'd be better off doing the office. My skin, you see. Remember I told you about my skin?'
Donny took a sip from his jam jar and Damien did too and they both looked at the hair sellotaped to the card.
'What are you doing to do with it?' Damien wondered whether it would be filed as part of his personnel record. But Donny picked it up and flipped it over his shoulder. 'You have my full respect as a professional,' Donny said. 'I didn't find that hair on one of your toilet seats. It's one of mine. It was a test, to see whether you would lie. But you didn't. You admitted that you weren't perfect and agreed that it could have been there, that you could have missed it, and that's good. I like a man who recognises his own imperfections. I'll tell you what I'll do for you. From tomorrow night you can do the office, OK? Dawn will go back to toilets. She likes 'em anyway, and she's good at it. Damn good.'

To clean his own office. This was what Damien had been waiting for. The next evening, as he applied his beard glue and polished his oval reactalites, he felt a quiver of excitement. For the first time he would be somebody else. He would hear what Emma said about him when he wasn't there.
It was strange to see his own desk from a new perspective. It looked dirtier than he'd expected. Why had he left it so untidy? Case files all over, some gaping open, innards disgorged, revealing confidential case information for anyone to read. How was he expected to clean a desk in this state? How thoughtless the daytime Damien was. There was even a half drunk cup of coffee he hadn't bothered to take into the kitchen. It would be he, the evening Damien, who would make this trip, tip the fermenting contents into the sink, rinse the cup and place it in the dish washer. How difficult would it have been for the day time Damien to have done this? Not very difficult at all. There were scraps of paper on the floor that had missed the bin and here was a chewing gun wrapper that he'd just left sitting on the desk. What a slob. Damien was learning so much about himself already. He looked at the way the daytime Damien had personalised his desk; the postcard from Blackpool he'd thought so ironic looked, from this new vantage point, like a clumsy advertisement for a quirky personality, an attribute that, in honesty, Damien did not possess. And the gig tickets he'd stuck up as proof of an active social life had become more crinkly and faded than he'd realised. Damien moved a few things about and dragged a cloth up and down listening to the conversation Emma was having with Rebecca.

'What do you think of this lipstick? Too bright? My lips are so fat. I think this deep colour over-emphasises them. You know what I've got Becky? I've got big, plump, near-to-exploding bicycle tyre lips' Emma moved her lips apart making a popping sound. 'Look at me, I'm like a fat ugly fish.'
Emma's lips were indeed special. Like an over-engineered solution to some problem, something sexual, possibly.
'No way,' said Rebecca. 'You've got good lips. Emphasise those LIPS girl. Those lips are your ATTACK BRAND.'
Emma broke into a larky smile. 'You think so, darling?' She pouted into her pocket mirror, Jagger-style.
Damien turned to Emma. 'He's a bit messy, this fellah.'
Emma looked as surprised as if Damien's mop head had begun to recite poetry.
'What?'
'This desk. Messy.'
'Oh, that's Damien's desk. He's mortal busy.' She put away her mirror and tapped her computer keyboard. 'Rebecca, look at this site, here. Haircut One Hundred are so the eighties.'
'Should I throw this out?' Damien said, holding up the lump of hematite the daytime Damien had collected from his hometown in West Cumbria and left on his desk as a conversation starter.
'No, no, no,' cried Emma. 'That's one of Damien's special things'. She exchanged a small smile with Rebecca. 'Damien likes to collect.'
'Sounds a bit of a saddo.'
'He's all right.'
She turned her face back to the screen.

Donny called him into the utensil cupboard again the next night, and again he had made some changes. Damien had to struggle through a bead curtain Donny had hung up behind the door and a photo of a Dolphin with the words run free underneath was on the wall. Orchestral music whined and parped from out of his baseball hat.
Little Sid was getting over the chest infection, and he was off the ventilator, he was in oxygen still, but breathing for himself. His oxygen was down to thirty per cent and he was getting back some good bloods. They took bloods every hour to see whether they needed to reduce the oxygen mix. Donny was there last night. Bells clanged, monitors beeped, alarms shrieked, babies stopped breathing and nurses panicked. One nurse even ran across the ward, pushing visitors out of the way. That wasn't right. It was, he explained, a nightmare. His daughter was going through a lot of stress.


'How's the garden plan?' Damien asked.
'Well, look, I've made a new start. There were too many planters on the last one, and the raised beds might have been dangerous for Sid, so we've changed it around a little. What you think?'
Again Damien looked at the circles, squares, oblongs and winding path.
'It's gravel there instead of grass, and here we'll have wood chippings. See? See? And see this?' He took out a small pot in which a plant the size of a cashew was coiled. 'This is a tree fern. It takes twenty, thirty, forty years to mature. I can't afford a big one. That's gardening. You plant things you won't live to see the beauty of. In the winter you have to take it indoors and wrap its roots up in a blanket. Imagine that? Like it's a little dog or baby. That's what attracted me.'
'It's going to be nice,' Damien said. 'Nice for little Sid.'
'For little Sid, yeh. You like this music?'
'Classical? No.'
'Me neither.'

The next night Damien again spent a long time cleaning his own desk, listening to Emma and Rebecca talking about travel. For Emma, every sunset, cathedral, or mountain-top was a heartbreaking, moving experience. Damien longed to experience it with her. He watched Emma's mouth as she spoke, remembering his name on her lips the night before. He's all right. That's what she'd said. All right. That was good, all right was good. He remembered how the two of them used to chat about some reality TV show. They had laughed together, and once, while laughing, Emma placed her hand on Damien's upper arm. One evening Damien had dropped into the conversation that he was off to see The White Stripes and Emma said that she was desperate to see them herself, but Dunc - the bloke she lived with - hated gigs. Before he could stop himself Damien had asked Emma if she'd like to come with him. A thick membrane grew between them. The air tightened. They were both thinking about Emma's hand on Damien's upper arm.
During a lull in the two girl's chatter he turned to Emma. 'You know, this fellah, I clean his desk, and I have no idea who he is.'
'Join the club,' said Emma.
'I've heard he's very popular.'

Emma slotted her eyes. 'How long have you been working here?'
'Long enough. Hours and hours scraping shit off this ungrateful bastard's work station.'
'JESUS. You need to be less, like, involved with your work?'
'I know. It's just, you clean someone's desk you feel you really know them.'
'You ever met Damien?'
'No, I'm a creature of the night.'
She stared at him.
'Late shift, you know?'
Emma leaned back in her chair and put her hands behind her head. 'OK. Describe what you think Damien is like, based on his desk. And we will tell you how well you do.'
Emma's world view accommodated a hunch that all people have a certain level of extra sensory powers, so he wasn't surprised at this exercise. He gripped his chin and stared at the desk for a long time. 'He's single.'
'Ding.' she said. 'But how did you know that?
'No family pictures, no kids, nothing like that. But I sense there's a special someone in his life.'
'Oh yeh, how do you get that?'
'See all these little postcards he has stuck up? I bet if you took one down it would have a little personal message on it.'
'Well, you're wrong there 'cos I've taken them all off and had a look. They're blank, blank, blank. Like his life.'
'Oh Emma, don't,' said Rebecca.
'Well, listen to Houdini here.'
Damien made a mental note to put a few messages on the back of the next postcard he stuck up - something spicy to intrigue these prying women. There was one fact about Damien that no one should ever know; his life had no meaning.
The next morning the daytime Damien spotted Donny up a ladder, fiddling with a light fitting. Damien went over, in his smart suit, note pad against his chest and pen dancing between his fingers.
'How's it going, mate?'
'Nothing you need to worry about,' Donny said. 'Soon have it done.'
He wondered why Donny didn't tell the daytime Damien about little Sid and the garden plan. What was the difference? He was still a human being despite the suit. Still a person.
Later he found a post-it note on his bucket. Kev. See me in the utensil cupboard. Donny.
Donny was in a good mood. He had tuned the station to radio one and a dance track was buzzing out.

'See,' he pointed to the radio. 'For you. Give you a boost before your shift.'
'How's little Sid's chest infection? Improved?'
'Not much change, but last night, I was in there, and we got him out of the incubator and we all had a hold. His little fingers have a strong grip, for someone so tiny. Not feeble. We fed him a couple of inches of milk in a syringe.' He held his thumb and forefinger apart to indicate the portion of milk. 'That's all his little stomach can handle. Have some wine.' He shoved a half full jam jar into Damien's hand.
'You know Donny, I'm not too mad about wine. More of a lager man.'
'No class,' Donny laughed. 'That's your problem. You need to be more aspirational. You know, Kev, I sense you could do better than this. That's why I asked you down here tonight. I saw something in the paper for you and me.' He took out an ad and held it up.
MAKE THOUSANDS GROWING MUSHROOMS.
'I'm thinking, when the garden's finished for little Sid, I might get a shed and that's where you fit in. You and me, we could be business partners in the mushroom business. They send you spores and you do the growing and then they find you a market. This fellah here, see the quote? He made five hundred a week, just from his shed. From a few spores. What do you say? You and me?'
Damien took a sip of the tomato wine and winced at the rancid taste. 'I don't know Donny. I haven't got the capital.'
'Where's your entrepreneurial spirit?'
They sat in silence for a time, listening to a rap track followed by some yearning ballad from the latest indie wonderkids, sipping their tomato brew until Donny finally said, 'Well, you know, you're probably right. Mushrooms. You know what they are? They are sinister. Did you know they were fleshy? I never eat them myself. Fungus aren't they? But others shovel them down. Who's to stop them?'

Emma was rummaging through some papers on Damien's desk when he approached.
'Here he comes, international man of mystery. You know, cleaner man, I can never find anything on Damien's desk.'
'Well,' he said. 'He's a sensitive sort.'
'How do you work that out?'


'The way he orders the items on his desk. It looks like a chaotic mess, but its kind of intuitive. Means he's good with other people's feelings.'
'Not too sensitive I wouldn't have thought,' said Emma.
'I don t know,' Rebecca offered. 'Damien told me he cried his heart out at Toy Story.'
'Male sentimentality.' Emma snorted. 'That's not sensitivity. Sensitivity is what you anticipate, what you infer, what you deduce. It's about putting out antennae. My boyfriend, Dunc, is dead sensitive. Let me tell you what he did last week. I went to the town hall for a council tax form and I had to walk past a long line of taxi drivers queuing up to renew their licences. I'd forgotten it was that time of year. And seeing them all queuing up reminded me of my dad, who died last August. He was a cabbie and when I was an eleven year old girl he used to take me with him to renew his licence and we'd queue up together with all the other drivers, and have a laugh. It all flooded back, and I got quite upset, so I rang in sick and went straight home. And you know what? There was Dunc waiting for me, a big mug of hot chocolate in one hand and tissues in the other. He'd taken the day off as well. He knew I'd have to walk past the taxi drivers, knew that I'd be upset, knew that I would ring in sick, knew I'd need some company.'
Rebecca looked at Emma for a long time. Then she said, 'Hardcore. I would keep hold of him, mate.'
Damien cleared all the papers off the desk and threw every one into the recycling bin. Emma watched him with her eyebrows raised. Then he gave his desk a really good clean - polished it too. He would never clean it again. Whilst he scrubbed he thought about Dunc, Dunc with his heightened sense of other people's feelings.

When he went to hand in his notice he found that the utensil cupboard had changed completely. The bead curtain had gone, as had the picture. Only the chair remained and Donny was sat on it in silence. His radio hat was on the floor, next to a heap of torn up graph paper.

'Sid,' he coughed. 'You know.'
'Oh.'
Damien picked up the graph paper and began to smooth it out. 'You know Donny, you shouldn't give up on the garden plan. Because you know what? Your daughter, she'll meet someone else. There'll be another kid, and they'll need a garden the same way Sid did. This garden should be like in memory of little Sid. Little Sid's garden.' Damien touched Donny's shoulder. Donny squeezed his fingers into his eyes. His body vibrated and from his throat came a noise like soft humming.
'You should go home Donny. I came to tell you that I'm leaving. I'm not cut out for this sort of work. I'm sorry. Dawn said she would do my shift tonight.'

A few months later Donny's wife opened the door to find Damien standing there. In his hand was a gleaming new garden spade, its price tag still attached.
'I've come to help Donny,' he said. 'With the garden.'
She brought him inside. Donny hadn't lived there for a long time. Damien asked about Sid and she told him that there was no daughter, never had been, and no little grandkids. Donny had a few cleaning jobs she said. As well as offices, he cleaned a ward at the children's hospital. He used to get attached to the poor wee mites, get really choked up. He was a good man.
She took Damien out the back. There was no garden, just a dusty cement yard with a little raised pond in the middle. Damien went to the pond and looked in. Just under the surface, he thought he could see Donny's face, beyond reach, and still receding.

Colin C. Conway

86th Street and the Summer of Love

I despised the dumpy kid for curling up and letting us beat on him. He didn't know it, but the less he fought the worse he made it on himself and the harder he made it on me. I hated feeling the guilt for something we hadn't even done yet.
We'd found the kid walking alone a few blocks from 86th Street, our turf. He was walking with a fudgesicle in one hand and a bottle of Coca-Cola in the other. He didn't have a care in the world as he waddled down the street. For him, summer vacations meant time away from the teasing and cruelty of high school. Being a tubby kid with pimples would be tough amongst the sharks that stalk the halls everyday. When I had that realization, I felt sorry for the little bastard and what we were about to do to him.
I don't think the rest of the guys felt the way I did. They looked forward to moments like this. Miles Morgan, Ronnie Dougan, Terrance "Terry" Smalls and Jay O'Neal were my friends, my family, my brothers. Together we were the 86th Street Choppers. All of us were eighteen except Ronnie who was nineteen and the meanest motherfucker in the bunch.
We stopped the pudgy kid in the middle of the sidewalk and surrounded him. He wore a dirty white t-shirt and high-water jeans. Everything about him practically begged for this moment.
The kid stopped eating his fudgesicle and muttered, "What's up, fellas?"
Miles grinned and shook his head while clicking his tongue against his teeth. Miles was a thick guy, not fat, just naturally big. He weighed in around two hundred pounds and none of it was soft. Miles scratched his chin and said, "I'm thirsty."
The kid stared at the Coca-Cola in his hand, thoughts racing through his mind. The fudgesicle dripped down onto his other hand.
Jay O'Neal snatched the bottle of soda away from the kid and handed it to Miles. Jay was Miles' shadow and a scrapper in the best Irish tradition. He hated his red hair so much that he always had on a Yankees baseball hat to cover the flat top he sported.
Miles studied the bottle and growled at the kid whose eyes were now wide in fear. "Coke? I hate Coke."

Miles glared back up at the kid. "You know I hate Coke, right?"
Jay laughed before saying, "Shit, everyone knows you hate Coke."
Mile nodded at Jay and held the bottle up to the kid's face. "Then why isn't this Pepsi?"
The fat kid stuttered, "B-b-b-because I l-l-like C-C-Coke."
Miles threw the bottle against the nearby brick building. It shattered, exploding shards of glass everywhere.
Terrance smacked the fudgesicle from the kid's hand, sending it to the sidewalk. The kid squealed in fear. Terry had a chip on his shoulder because he grew up black in this neighborhood. I could care less what color Terry was. His blood was red just like mine and we had spilled plenty of ours together in battles over turf and respect. Until he got in with us, things were tough for Terry. There were plenty of ignorant bastards around who would attack any person because of their color. Maybe that's why Terry liked these moments so much.
An evil smile found its home on Ronnie's face. He stepped in front of the kid and laid down the rules. "Fight back or it'll get worse."
Confusion spread on the kid's face. "Huh?"
Ronnie whipped out a punch to the kid's nose and sent him reeling backwards. Terrance caught him and shoved him back into the circle.
Fight back, I chanted to myself in hopes it would somehow magically inspire the little bastard to come up swinging.
Ronnie slammed two punches into the kid's head before stepping back to let the others in.
The kid held up his hands and cried out, "I don't wanna fight." His voice was suddenly high and screechy.
Miles slipped in and hook-punched the kid in the kidney. As the kid screamed in pain, Miles laughed and danced around like Cassius Clay.
I stepped in front of the kid and slapped him hard across the face. His eyes focused hard and drool ran from his lips. I leaned into him and ordered, "Fight back."
The kid bawled and shook his head wildly.
"Fight me," I growled and drove a punch deep into his soft stomach. Tears and dirt covered his face as he begged for us to stop.
Ronnie kicked him in the back of the thigh, ending the whimpering by dropping the kid to the ground.


Miles booted the kid's big belly, doubling him up and forcing him to suck for more air.
Ronnie yelled "Grab him" and we scrambled for a hold as the kid thrashed around. I ended up grabbing his legs with Miles.
All of us dragged the kid into the street and Ronnie pressed the kid's face on to the edge of the curb. He kept pushing until the kid opened his mouth in pain and ended up with a mouthful of concrete. The rest of us pinned the kid down on the ground. We all glanced around constantly, checking for witnesses and cops.
Ronnie asked, "Who's up?"
Jay said, "It's Mike's turn," as he struggled to keep the kid's chest pinned to the street.
Ronnie looked at me and nodded. I knew it wasn't a request.
My stomach grew queasy as I let go of my hold on the kid and stepped up next to his head. Everyone yelled at me to hurry up since the kid was panicking and trying to take his mouth off the curb edge.
I lifted up my foot up over the kid's head, closed my eyes and stomped down. I felt the crunching of teeth rattle its way through my leg, work its way up my body and slam into my brain. I hated doing that. I didn't mind beating the kid. I just hated destroying his teeth.
I could hear the guys cheering as the kid let go of an inhuman shriek. I opened my eyes when Ronnie shook me.
"C'mon, man, cops'll be here soon."
I looked down at the kid who had rolled over onto his back. Blood covered his face and his eyes looked like they had seen the devil up close and personal.
Ronnie yanked on my arm one more time before I turned and ran.

The summer heat was stifling. So was the world for that fact. The country was at war in Vietnam and some of our family was there.
Miles' cousin died one month after he got in to country. Ronnie's brother came home missing a leg. Jay's twin older brothers came home in boxes. Terrance's dad, his real dad, went to war and ended up missing. The Marines couldn't find him and apologized to his mom in a telegram.
My brother, Tom, was in country almost a year and fighting with the 101st. He actually volunteered to go Vietnam. He'd write me letters occasionally. When he first got over there, he used to say how important the war was for our country and the fight against communism. In his last letter, though, he said he couldn't wait to get away from that land and the war. He told me the only thing he'd miss would be the LBFs. Little Brown Fuckers. The Vietnamese prostitutes. He said they could do things with a pussy no American girl would ever figure out. I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but he promised to tell me when he got home.

We were all waiting for and dreading our notifications. That little white card that read US Selective Services Draft Card. Jay wasn't worried about the draft now that both of his brothers were dead and neither was Terrance who'd lost a kidney in a car accident and his dad to the war. But the rest of us knew those cards were coming soon and we hated the world because of it.

We had a rule in the gang; if they fought back hard then we let them go. That didn't mean they could fight half-assed to get away. No, they had to lay every thing they had on the table before we would let them walk. If they quit or if they didn't fight at all, then we busted them up hard. We busted them up permanent.
I don't remember how the fights started or why but I used to love them. It was about the combat, the challenge of pitting ourselves against others. Things went bad when people refused to fight us. I think it was one of those hippie fucks who first said he wouldn't fight. We had to show him the error of his ways and used the curb. It seemed like a good idea the first time until I saw the damage. Each time got worse for me especially after I had to do it a couple of times. If I was strong like my brother Tom, I would have stood up and said no more. But I wasn't so the fights continued.
People say life on the street is hard. They don't know anything. Life is easy. It's always there. Breathe in and breathe out and you got life figured out. It's the people who are hard. All you had to do was look at the war. All you had to do was look at us.

A few weeks later, we found another kid walking alone and singing to himself. He was tall and skinny with a sad kind of gait. When I saw Ronnie hunch his shoulders I knew we'd found the next victim.
As he got close, we got up from the steps we were sitting on and surrounded him. He didn't say a word and took his hands out of his pockets.
"Sing me a song, queer bait," Terry teased.


The kid eyed him but didn't say a word.
"Shit, I don't want that faggot singing again. He sounded worse than fuckin' Ringo." Jay slapped Terry on the back and laughed at his own joke.
The kid didn't move anything but his eyes. Something didn't feel right about this one which caused my stomach to knot up.
Ronnie shook his head and chested up to the kid. "Fight back or it'll get worse," he ordered.
The tall, skinny kid just stared into Ronnie's eyes.
Ronnie waved his hand in front of the kid's face. "Can you hear me, retard? Or should I just beat the shit out of you until you do hear me."
The bean pole slammed his fist into Ronnie's face before Ronnie even lifted a hand. Ronnie stumbled backward as confusion mixed with pain.
Jay jumped and swung wildly at the kid, missing him entirely. The kid moved to the side and used Jay as a shield for Terrance's haymaker. Terry tried to pull the violent punch but cold-cocked Jay in the ear. Jay wobbled for a second and then dropped like an anchor.
Miles surprised the kid with a bear hug from the rear that lifted him off the ground. As he struggled to get free, I ran up and sucker punched him in the gut. Miles threw him to the ground with a sickening thud.
The guys jumped on the beanpole and dragged him into the street. Ronnie grabbed his head and slammed into onto the curb, forcing him to open wide and breaking teeth in the process.
"Ronnie," I yelled. "Let him go."
"Fuck you, man," he screamed at me, his eyes wild with rage. He turned his lunatic gaze to Terrance. "Bust this bastard's teeth."
Terry jumped off of the kid and stepped up next to his head. When he lifted his foot, I shoved him over and sent him sprawling into the guys.
There were arms and legs flying everywhere as he fell. The guys let go of the kid to help catch Terry before he hit the pavement. In the confusion, the kid got up and sprinted away.
Miles chased him for a bit but eventually gave up.
When Terry found his footing, he ran towards me with murder in his eyes. Jay stepped in between him and me and held up Terrance. "Relax," he screamed at Terry.


Ronnie stood up and dusted himself off. He walked up to me and put his face inches from mine.
"What the fuck is your problem, man?"
"The kid fought back. We let him go."
Ronnie thumped me in the chest with his finger. "He started the fight. All bets are off at that point."
I shook my head and pointed back at Ronnie. "We started the fight. You were gonna break the rule."
"You betrayed us, you fuck. You crossed the line."
Miles ran back up to us and saw Jay calming down Terry while Ronnie and I yelled at each other. He jumped in between us and put a hand on each of our chests, forcing us apart.
"What the hell is going on here?"
Ronnie never took his eyes from me. "Mike is out."
"What?" I growled. "You can't make that decision."
Terry hollered at me, "You're gone, motherfucker."
Ronnie slid his eyes over to Miles and back to me. "What side of the line are you on, Miles?"
Miles met my eyes, his hands still holding Ronnie and me apart. "He's family, Ronnie. I say he stays."
Ronnie shouted over his shoulder. "It's up to you, Jay. Stay or go?"
Jay turned around, but held Terry back with one arm. His face was hard as stone. "You didn't stand with us."
"Jay, he fought back," I pleaded.
Jay shook his head. "Doesn't matter. We're family. You chose him over us. I vote you're gone."
Ronnie wiggled his fingers in front of my face. "Take off, pretty boy."
"Fuck you," I yelled and flipped him the bird.
Miles grabbed my arm and spun me around. He leaned in my ear and whispered hard. "Leave. Now. Don't turn around."
I walked away without looking back.

The next morning I laid in bed listening to Ain't No Mountain High Enough on the radio. As Marvin Gaye's voice floated through my room, I tossed into the air a baseball I once caught at a Yankees game. I went to that game with my mom and Tom on my twelfth birthday. That's all I wanted for a present and my mom made it come true. My dad lived in Portland, Oregon, and sent me a Yankees hat and a new mitt for that birthday. Six birthdays later and that one still rated the highest of my life.


A knock on the front door shook me from my childhood memories. I hoped it would be one of the guys, telling me that they would take me back. When my mom shrieked, I knew it wasn't them.
I sprinted into the living room and stopped when I saw the guy wearing Army dress greens. He had his hat tucked under one arm and wore a grim scowl on his face. He swallowed hard as he watched my mother weeping in front of him.
When I touched her shoulder, she turned to me and fell into my arms. I could barely support her weight and ended up helping her to the sofa where we sat.
The Army officer stood by and nervously looked around, not knowing how to comfort my mother but unable to leave the sad moment.
She cried into my chest.
"He's dead," she managed to say between sobs.
I patted her back. "I know, mom."

I didn't leave the house for two days. A parade of aunts and uncles came by the house to bring food and sympathy. I stayed in my room and looked through Tom's old stuff.
The first night after I found out about Tom's death I watched a news report about the fighting in Vietnam and the rising death toll. When the report ended, I realized I wouldn't have to go over there now that I was the only son left. Guilt washed over me when I felt that sweet relief. Ashamed, I turned off the television and cried myself to sleep.
The next morning, I morbidly read the letters he had sent me while he was over there. I cried again for a while after that and then put the letters into his high school year book. I slid the book under my mattress, hiding the memories but keeping them close.

"Fight or it'll get worse."
I could smell Ronnie's breath because he stood so close to me. It smelled like a rancid mixture of strong onions and stronger alcohol.
They cornered me in the alley just south of Rockaway. I was on my way to Mickey's Billiards to blow off some steam playing pool and pinball. I couldn't take the depression at home anymore and needed to get out.
When they first surrounded me, I learned the fear all the others had known. Except I was sure there would be no getting away for me.


"You hear about my brother?" I asked. My voice sounded strangely calm.
Terry shrugged. "So fucking what, man? You ain't shit to us, now."
I glanced at Miles who stared down at the ground.
Ronnie stepped up to me and swayed slightly. He'd been drinking which meant he was going to be especially mean. "Fight or it'll get worse."
Jay slammed into me from behind and sent me sprawling across the blacktop of the alley. Skin tore away from the heels of my palms as I slid to a stop. I scrambled to my feet and put my back against the nearest wall. Terry came running up at me and I kicked him as hard as I could in the balls. He collapsed, clutching himself and screaming in agony.
Ronnie caught me from the side and tackled me to the ground. He kneed me several times in the ribs as I clawed at his eyes. I felt something give under my fingers and Ronnie pulled back, clutching his face. I punched him in the throat a second before Jay came up and kicked me in the head.
I covered up and fought the bells clanging inside my skull. Jay stomped at me a couple of times before I staggered to my feet and launched myself at him. I caught him off guard when I ran into him and we both fell to the ground. I climbed onto to his chest, grabbed his head and slammed him into the ground. His eyes rolled backwards and he passed out.
My balance was shaken so I steadied myself on the wall of a building. I made my way over to Terry who was on his hands and knees and throwing up. I kicked him in the balls from behind and he let out a funny little shriek and dropped to the ground.
Ronnie lay on his back, kicking his legs in pain while his hands covered his eyes. When I punted him in the head, he went limp and his hands fell to the concrete. Blood covered his face. I grabbed him by the foot and dragged him into the street. I put his face up on the curb and stood over him.
I met Miles' eyes who stood frozen in the alley. Even though he was the biggest guy in the gang, he suddenly looked small. He shook his head at me, sadness consuming him. I stared at the only friend who didn't attack me and raised my foot up over Ronnie's head. Tears burned down my cheeks.

"I didn't want this," Miles said, regret in his eyes.
"Neither did I."
I put my foot down carefully next to Ronnie's head and rubbed the tears from my eyes with both of my hands. Men weren't supposed to cry and I'd been crying a lot over the past two days.
I grabbed a foot and dragged Ronnie out of the street and onto the sidewalk. He let out a small moan when I dropped his leg.
Miles never moved towards me. He shoved his hands into his pockets and nodded once. When he spoke again, his voice was soft. "I'm sorry about Tom."
I swallowed hard, a taste of bile invading my senses. I wanted to say something profound, something important. I'd lost my friends. I'd lost my brother. "Thanks," was the only thing that came to mind.
We stood there for a moment in silence, knowing none of us would ever be the same. With the sound of police sirens approaching, I left Miles standing in the alley and went home.

Crystal Gail Shangkuan Koo

Metropolis

This is how you talk about a city you love. You talk about it as if it's the only place in the world where this story can happen.
A friend of mine fell in love with someone when she went for a bite at a malatang one winter night. There was no snow; there is very little snowfall during Beijing winters. The film below the skies turns from yellow to gray, then the winds from Mongolia come and we would say, it's so cold already there might as well be snow. Some days there are, and those are the days when photographers go out to make postcards of fresh powder collecting over the shoulders of the stone lion finials perched on the gables of the Forbidden City.
But those are postcards. There are times you feel cheated when you glance at them and wonder at your inability to recall a greater feeling of grandeur when you had bought them in front of the pagoda. The event, like infinity, had been too big to be grasped and had only given way to frustration, a voice insisting with the strongest conviction and the vaguest meaning that there should have been something more.
I had flown to China with a postcard in my hand. My grandmother didn't want me to. Why should I go back to the place she had taken so many pains to run away from sixty years ago to get to Manila? The Philippines was glamorous then, before it melted in its own torpor. Europe and America creolized in Asia, Què hora es? A las ocho y media, sir, good morning, how d'ye do, how d'ye do? because the sun never sets in the Western empire. Before I left for the airport, my grandmother told me to be careful in the mud alleys.
The postcard I had was a picture of a language university in Beijing that specialized in teaching Mandarin to foreigners. Once in the Philippines, when I was eleven, I had to recite the week's lesson from memory to the teacher in Mandarin class. This was the way we learned the language carved on steles in a tiny family shrine somewhere across the ocean. I had spent the night before reading out loud from my little exercise book and hoping school would be canceled the next morning. It was monsoon season and the floods rose from the gutters blocked with garbage and the beggars' children played naked in the waters. But the storm left at dawn, and memory is unreliable, selective, compressed. The next day I finally received on my palm the two red stripes that I had been avoiding during the entirety of my young life in school.

Eight years later I was sent to Beijing with my parents' blessings, and a friend of mine fell in love one winter night when she went to the malatang.



Now malatang kept you warm. That's why my friend had gone to one. I'm not going to tell you what each syllable means; I'm not here to teach you Chinese. I'm here to tell you what Beijing was like beyond the language classes. Malatang was a street-vendor's boiler filled with skewers of meats, innards, seaweed, tofu, and mushrooms that floated in a dark oily soup of chili and cayenne pepper. Malatang was choosing pig intestines and whisking the oil off towards the pavement before burning your tongue. Malatang was huddling together with strangers who looked like you and reading advertisements pasted on electric poles. Malatang was sucking the bitter north wind to cool the spice in your mouth and keeping your eyes from tearing, while the vendor counted the wooden skewers that you had speared into your broken half of a Styrofoam rice box.
Malatang kept you warm and kept off hunger till you reached home.
My friend looked like me and studied in the same building as I did, but she was from Canada and never got stripes for not being able to speak Mandarin. She met a Korean student at a malatang. Love at first skewer just outside the campus gates, where the red-cheeked lady selling small bottles of fermented milk on her bike would look enviously at the little fish-cake stall across from her. Chocolate fish-cakes were pastries shaped like fish with hot chocolate inside, sold for one yuan each. No one bought fermented milk. The man who sold fish-cakes was called 'Uncle;' business was doing so well that for one week Uncle's stall disappeared because he was hiding from the police for making too much money without a license. He reappeared just in time for the winter frost.
The Koreans are invading the Beijing suburbs, but the city is still the stronghold of the Europeans. I have a map of what old Beijing was like in 1936, drawn just before World War Two. The Legation Quarter used to be on Chang An Road; now Chang An Road is lined with malls enclosing the Forbidden City. The foreign embassies have been moved to Jianguomen, in the Chaoyang district, European Union flags flapping over the wire fences. Europe is extraordinarily chic in Beijing nowadays; the city is making up for lost time. I have seen the diplomats' children in Chaoyang, with their white skin, brown hair, big blue eyes; pudgy eleven-year-olds speaking Mandarin over the counter at the coffeehouse. They never got stripes either, I would suppose. The cafè where I saw them had French movie posters on the walls and it was next to a little stationery shop that sold notebooks with old paint advertisements from Copenhagen printed on the cover.

I went to the Philippine embassy once, for fun. The building looked tiny and abandoned and there was no flag on the pole. The Chinese guard saw me looking behind the gate and chased me away from where I had stood. I hadn't brought my passport with me. If I had he would have opened the gate for me and I would have danced past him.




NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER WANTED. My friend had found a company searching for someone to teach English to their representatives, but they turned her down, saying she looked too much like a local. This is a story in Beijing. It is not likely that it would have turned out another way. It is likely that an Italian with a working facility in English would have been hired, but my friend did not look Italian.
He spoke little English and she spoke no Korean, so they used the language they were only beginning to grasp. In the brokenness of the Mandarin they spoke, they found the distance that they would need for their own defense later. All of us who knew transience understood that what happened in Beijing stayed there.
I met my language partners every Friday in the school library, two local girls who wanted to practice their English with me, but they frequently slipped back to Mandarin because there were too many interesting questions to be asked. How can you be Chinese? How can you be Filipino? How can you speak English? You speak Filipino too, right? How do you say, 'How do you do?'
I taught them to say kumusta, simplest thing in the world, contraction of como esta, consonants crunchy and hard, vowels wide and open. Back in the Philippines, some people would be so surprised with my speaking Filipino that they would forget to stop speaking English with me. Would you have to marry a Chinese too? You speak a little Chinese too, right? How do you say, 'How do you do?'
A French friend in Beijing, whom my language partners had first accosted, had referred Miao Ban and Xin Feng to me. Xin Feng spoke English with the recklessness and confidence of someone who wanted to learn. Miao Ban was made of inquisitiveness and less eloquence, looking for Xin Feng for the frequent translation.


What do foreigners think of us? Why does the government forbid Chinese people from entering your churches?
I did not quite look at their eyes. Perhaps if I had greater proficiency in their language, I would not have sounded so simplistic.
We foreigners look at the Chinese with the awareness that we come from a different world, I said.
How?
We think there are certain problems in the kind of government that cause a great deal of difference.
But certainly other countries, your countries, have your own problems as well!
This was Miao Ban. She knew where this would lead to if we pursued it.
It's different, I said vaguely, my vocabulary failing me. We shouldn't be talking about it here.
Oh, it's fine! Xin Feng. We know about those things that shouldn't be talked about.
I raised my head to see if anyone else was listening. There was a local Chinese boy two chairs down, buried in his book.
How is it different?
I found myself talking about the 'free world' as if months before I would not have laughed at myself for using those two words with such idealism in the Philippines. But when a language fails you, you use wide blanket statements and say to yourself, This conversation isn't so important anyway. Every minute I looked up to see if the middle-aged lady who had come and was standing nearby could hear us.
Xin Feng and Miao Ban brought me out for dinner. Across the restaurant was a frozen lake, fenceless, unwatched. I had never stood on iced water before. It was too dark to see how the ice was, but it seemed thick enough, and I stamped on it, the cold escaping into the soles of my shoes. Figures of twos or threes whispered and laughed softly around me, but the lake was quiet and the world was calm.




My friend's story does not have a happy ending. Very few of the international romances begun in Beijing by foreigners extend beyond the airport. This is a fact. There is a clear, identifiable glance that passes between lovers when a friend asks one of them for any plans to stay longer. It is silent, urgent. It is a source of anxiety because it is a perfunctory question frequently asked. BEIJINGERS ARE FRIENDS TO ALL THE WORLD / Beijing shi shijie de peng you says the blue billboard on the way to Sanlitun. The translation into English is slightly inaccurate. Beijing is the world's friend. Good for Beijing. For the last few years, the world had suddenly been just as eager to become Beijing's friend.





Sanlitun is in Chaoyang. Listen to Sanlitun crackling with neon life, Chaoyang laughing across its new skyscrapers and the cranes building more - a vibrant young man who has discovered that life is only beginning and that foreign women find him handsome in a suit. Ten years ago Chaoyang had been the poor man's district, waterlogged in its farmlands.
Sanlitun Bar Street is luminous after dusk, the sounds of entertainment eviscerating. My friend goes there with him every Saturday. The waiters stand outside the street, chanting the English they knew. Hello! Hello! Beer! When they see a white face they thrust themselves in front of it and go for the arm.
Both of them stumbled out of a bar into the fresh air, their steps uncertain from the alcohol.
'I am thinking of moving apartments soon,' he said as they slipped into a little alley that led to the labyrinth of old Beijing, the hutong. The brick of the dusty courtyard homes filtered the thunder from the bars. There are very few lights in a hutong at night.
'You have found one that you like more?' she asked.
'The Uncle in the fish-cake stall says he knows the landlord of an apartment that is cheaper and closer to the school.'
In the dimness of the light my friend bumped into a row of bicycles. The metal rang and the bicycles began to crash one after the other. A little yellow light went on in one of the scratched windows and someone began to curse. Laughing, both of them ran out of the alley and back to Bar Street.
'Would you like to share my new apartment with me?' he shouted as they returned to the blinding light of the traffic.
'Yes, I would like that very much!'
It would have been romantic if they had looked at the stars. But stars are rarely seen in the haze of Beijing.




I've gone walking in a hutong during lunch hour in spring. Pots of rice and cabbage boiled outside sheds made of iron sheets. The aroma of garlic and meat coming from the makeshift vents smelled of a home. Many of the crumbling brick walls washed in dirty white were marked with the word chai. Chai means to demolish.


Once I had stood before the Imperial Palace in the Forbidden City, hat in my hands, waiting for the realization to engulf me. It had only been in Beijing that I learned to say 'ancestors' without feeling too self-aware. But the tourists jostled around me, stepped on my foot, faces glowering in irritation at the sight of the crowd shoving each other to see the Imperial Throne, and the realization never came. The tourists in Beijing are the Chinese from Hong Kong or Taiwan or the other provinces in the mainland. They call my province Overseas.
I went to parks often to escape the crowds. One of them had a small pavilion midway the hill, the small inlaid paintings of willows and lakes on the ceiling restored. When I reached the pavilion, a few lights were turned on softly and old fifties music was being played and people were dancing. They were middle-aged, people who could have afforded to take dancing lessons. The music crackled through a radio somewhere. Some wore cocktail dresses; others office clothes. Swing, tango, waltz. They shook their arms and legs to help their blood circulate after every set as people walked around to change partners, their faces drenched in perspiration. Then the music would start and they would laugh and take each other's arms and twirl over the floor, these old people, lost in the sepia-colored music I was hearing. Spring was turning to summer. I sat on a nearby bench, feeling the air turn humid, and a dragonfly landed on my shoulder.




My friend and her boyfriend went traveling to Tianjin the weekend after they moved to their new apartment. Tianjin is Beijing's neighboring harbor city, two hours away by bus.
There my friend saw the saddest opera singer in the world. Up on a pavilion the middle-aged lady was dressed in her gaudy finery, a green lace tunic over a white gown with sleeves to the floor. Her face was powdered with the rouge of Beijing opera and she wore a headpiece of braids. The pavilion was in the middle of the souvenir bazaar that had been built for the tourists. People were looking at maps, calling lost friends on mobile phones, and had crowded there, drawn by the human tendency towards collectivity. She sang to the tourists in Tianjin, her eyes far away, one hand on her heart, the other arm up in supplication. She looked exhausted. The people below the stage came and went. The boyfriend took a Polaroid of the opera singer and the heads of the tourists, and my friend had written on the back in English: The meaning of indifference.





The indifference is almost symbolic. In Beijing, a pregnant woman dressed in raggedy overalls kneels on the sidewalk, her stomach bulging, her eyes caught in an empty stare at the asphalt. A rusty pan sits between her spread knees and she seems to be on the verge of giving birth.
Now you want to know how many people stop to put change into her pan to see if it matches with what my friend had written on the back of the Polaroid.
I had stood there on the sidewalk, all senses stirred by the lovely sorrow of it all. If only I could have taken a photograph. But I had driven past worse scenes of poverty in the Philippines where I had learned I didn't want my money spent on drugs or drunk husbands. When I walked past her, I looked at the pan. A few cents.
I once read in a magazine in Beijing about a man aboard a train who had been accosted by an old woman when the train stopped at a station. Through his window she tried to sell him cold bottles of mineral water, but he didn't want to buy any because he knew she would slink away without giving back his change. As she coaxed him noisily through the window, he grew more and more revolted by her presence until he resigned himself and pulled a note out to buy himself some silence. As she handed him a bottle, the train began to roll. The old woman had his change in one hand and she tried to run after his open window, her arm outstretched. Your change, your change! He was entranced by the sight. In her haste the old woman tripped and fell, and when she raised her head he saw a trickle of blood on her forehead.
I saw more pregnant women kneeling on the streets on different days. To redeem myself I finally gave a few notes to a bent old lady who cried her thanks to me while I turned and walked away.
Once, an old man in tatters and his sick wife stopped me on the way back to the university. His accent was missing the Beijing growl. He said they had come to the city because his wife needed to go through a surgical operation for her stomach. The wife was moaning to herself and her husband was close to tears. They were hungry and needed some money for a subway ticket to the hospital.


I told them to wait. I went to a small restaurant nearby and bought them two meals and bottled tea. Both of them were crying. I gave them some money for the trip, and as the old man took the coins he whispered to his wife in a dialect before thanking me and turning away.
A week later I heard someone saying that he had just given an old couple from the provinces some money for a subway trip to the hospital because the wife needed surgery.
It's very hard to talk about indifference without a photograph.



The months passed quickly. We overcame our brokenness in the language. We couldn't rely on blanket statements anymore to cover us with indifference.




'Have you decided which computer to buy?'
'Sort of. One of my Korean friend's classmates has a desktop she wants to sell before leaving Beijing. I'm going to take a look at it sometime this week at her house.'
'Her?'
'You can relax, she knows I have a girlfriend.'
'I'm not even going to dignify that with a response.'
'By the way, I've been thinking, I'm probably going to transfer schools next month.'
'Oh? Why's that?'
'Too expensive here. And there's a cheaper one nearby, the one across the bakery. You know that?'
'Oh, that. Yeah, I do. It's pretty small.'
'Yeah, but it's not bad. You're going to be looking for work when you get back to Vancouver, right?'
'Yeah. When you finish your bachelor's then go bum around in China for a while, you know it's time to get a job.'
'If I'm lucky, I can get a good job next semester and earn enough to visit you before I go back to Seoul with the proficiency certificate.'
'That's too tempting. Don't get my hopes up.'
'It can happen.'
'Well, what about after Seoul?'
'What?'
'I don't know. Everyone's just been asking.'
'Well, what if I ask you what happens after Vancouver?'
'Were you thinking of asking me that?'
'We still have two months left. I wasn't planning to ask you today.'
'We have to decide on something. I'm going to have to buy the plane ticket soon.'
'Do you think you can, maybe, just stay for another semester?'
'You know I can't do that. At some point, you're going back to Seoul.'

'I don't know when I'm going back to Seoul. I can keep on studying. I can tell my parents I still need to study more. Even if I pass the Chinese test and get a certificate, I can still keep on studying, get a job here -'
'That's stupid. You can't do that.'
'If you just tell me you can stay here -'
'You know my parents want me back home. You're Korean! You'd have a good idea what Chinese parents are like. They're not that different.'
'Hey, I know you better. It wouldn't be just family pressure. You'd at least try to fight for it if you really cared. '
'Okay. Okay. You know what? It's like this. I don't even know if it's going to be worth the effort.'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean...I mean, I can't just drop everything and stay here forever. I had a life somewhere else too.'
'But you're always saying how Vancouver is too slow and how nothing happens, that there's not enough there for you and Beijing is -'
'I know, I know, but I was already in the middle of something there. If I decide to stay here, I'll have to start new for real, and...and this was...I was only supposed to be here for a year. Everything has been great, everything good and bad, but I've just never thought that...that...do you see?'
'Look, I'm just...I don't know.'
'You know you're not going to stay in Beijing forever either, and...and I just don't see the point.'
'So what do we do? We just visit each other?'
'I don't know, all right? I don't know.'
'All right, there's still two months anyway.'
'All right.'
'Are you done with your plate?'
'Yeah. Thanks. Hey...come here. I'm sorry. You know we'd have to go home sooner or later.'



Beijing was a little detour to keep off the hunger till we reached home. That is why we write stories of it so we won't forget. That is why my friend's story cannot have a happy ending.
If I had found a home in Beijing, where I am disguised by my skin, where I am a nameless unit in a sea of faces, where I am finally part of the majority until I speak and the accent reveals everything, I would have forgotten all my wonder.


Only a foreigner writes a Beijing story like this.



The city is covered with sand. The Gobi Desert is next to Beijing and it inches closer towards the capital every year, threatening to choke it in a matter of years. When spring fades into the summer, clouds of sand move in and the sky turns into the color of unwashed fur. Waves of grit collect, and driven by the wind, they move languidly across the cityscape like gigantic phantoms, slamming into the first building that comes into their way and enveloping the horizon in an explosion of gray. The winds are tempests, and umbrellas are blown inside out across the streets. The sand is blinding and fills every orifice of your face to be spat out afterwards.
My friend had been watching the sandstorm from her apartment when I arrived. As I shook the sand from my hair and tried to mend the bent spokes in my umbrella, she said, 'He went out to buy some milk.'
I went to the toilet and washed my face. When I came out she gave me a Polaroid with the picture of a Beijing opera singer. 'A photo we took when we went to Tianjin. I know you like that sort of thing.'
'Thanks.' I read what she had written on the back. 'So how are you guys doing?'
'We're fine. You want anything to drink?'
'Thanks, but I have to go back to the dormitory soon, I still have a few things to do.' I unzipped my bag and brought out the DVDs and the books I had borrowed from her. 'These really kept me company during the nights, by the way.'
'You're welcome. So what's waiting for you after Beijing?'
'Looking for work in the Philippines, I suppose. Or maybe I'll go to Hong Kong and teach English there. Something.' I finished stacking the boxes on top of the television. She was looking at the sandstorm again. 'Are you sure you're all right?'
She shrugged. 'I think he's going to call it quits before I leave.'
I leaned against the wall and looked out the window with her. The storm was growing more ferocious. 'I've always thought that he always seemed to be the martyr type. Maybe he just doesn't want to lead you on with false hopes.'


'We could always call each other everyday.'
'Yeah, but for how long?'
She didn't answer immediately. She sat down on the couch and looked at the ceiling. 'He won't be leading me on. I understand how difficult this all is. I mean, if it all just falls apart in the future, it won't be completely unexpected.'
'When do you think he'll tell you?'
'I don't know. Hopefully not on the day I leave because then I'll be bawling my way to the airport.' She had crossed her arms and was staring at the floor. 'What do you think I should do?'
I slung my bag on my shoulders and moved towards the couch. 'I don't know. If you think he wants to break up, there's nothing much you can do. You still have a few days left. Just make the most of it.'
'You'll have to go back to the storm, won't you?'
'Yeah, I have to start packing now. You're done with yours, right?'
'I'm halfway through. Anyway, in case I don't see you again before I leave.' She rose and hugged me. 'Write me when you get home.'
'Of course.' I hugged her back. 'And thanks for the Polaroid. That was pretty random.'
She laughed, a little more quietly than she used to. 'Just get out of here.'
'Tell me what happens afterwards, all right?' I said as I opened the door.
I went down the stairs and twisted the knob. The gate gave a metal clang and I left the building. Then I opened my umbrella and started walking into the sand.




My friend left Beijing three days before I did. I heard from a few friends that they did break up, but I haven't heard from her since we parted. I think a great deal of Beijing winter and the malatang. I wonder how he could stay there seeing everything that would remind him of her.
This is how you talk about something you love. You tell why. And in the end it's really all about remembering. How the sun rose above the granite and concrete. How the pigeon flew above you, the whistle around its tail feathers trilling. Sometimes I remember it so well that I can still feel the sand being crunched between my teeth.