Chapter Text
When he wakes up in the hospital, he sees nothing but the white ceiling above him. For a while he lets himself exist as the ceiling exists: uncoloured, unthinking, unfeeling, floating somewhere far away. Then he remembers what happened — the appendectomy — and he moans. The elation of being awake and alive fades away to pain. His mouth feels like it’s coated in hot sand. People are speaking to him, and it takes dry, painful seconds for his brain to understand English: from one to ten, how bad is the pain?
He gives her a number. when nothing happens he realises he said it in Chinese.
“Seven,” he says in English. A nurse injects him with something that eases the searing pain in his lower torso but doesn’t remove it. After a few minutes the nurse asks him again if he feels pain. He shakes his head. She asks one more time.
“Three,” he lies, then shakes his head again. He doesn’t want to be more medicated than he already is. The nurse doesn’t give him anymore drugs but she does feed him pieces of ice, which tastes like nothing but feels wonderful.
Time passes. Things happen to him and around him. He’s somewhat aware that he’s being wheeled into an elevator and into a room. He begins to regret not telling the truth. The pain in his torso is growing. It’s a living creature that exists without him. It’s growling and impatient. It prowls around the room before circling back to his bed, where it settles on its haunches and presses down on his face with a heavy, furry paw. His mouth tastes like cotton with a metallic tinge. Blood. The tube they put into his throat before the operation had cut his lips. He’s still bleeding.
**
Watery light swims in under Piandao’s closed eyelids and wakes him up again.
Someone is sitting on the chair next to his bed, smoking a cigarette and reading – some book with a dark cover and a long title his bleary eyes can’t take in. Every now and then a page turns, the cigarette tip flares orange, and the tableau comes alive. Periodically the person hits on some particular line or page that enrages him and mutters, softly, “fuck!” At which point the little orange sun flares up with sudden violence. It goes supernova, dies, and is reborn again. Smoke wafts over.
Piandao takes a breath and lets consciousness seep in. For a long time he watches diagonal trails of rain run across the glass window, throwing rippled light on the whitewashed walls. He takes another breath, then another. The man holding the cigarette and the book hasn’t realised he’s awake yet: he’s still staring at his book, two dark eyebrows creased together in three deep, vertical lines that read like 川.But the illusion is broken when he tilts his head, and the watery light laps over a fourth line – a faint scar running down across one eye. Then it doesn’t look like any character at all. It’s unreadable. “Am I dreaming?” he asks finally, and the man jumps in his chair.
The creased lines between his brows smooth away. His face floods with shock and pleasure. “Fuck!” he says, and then, “Hey man, you’re awake!”
“JJ?”
“That’s right.”
Piandao swallows; his throat is scratchy. “How are you here?”
“It’s called getting on a plane.”
“But you’re in Los Angeles.”
“Correction: I was in Los Angeles. Now I’m not.”
The rising relief of waking up post- surgery meets the downing effect of the painkillers and Piandao, caught halfway between the two, is crushed by an overwhelming sense of chemically enhanced gratitude. His heart pumps painful blood around his body. He’s startled and apologetic and thankful all at once. He struggles up. “Why are you here? Did you come for me?”
Jeong Jeong pushes him back down again. “Woah, take it easy. Let the nurse take a look at you first.”
He dog-ears his book and bounds to the door. He calls out. Soon comes the squeak, squeak, squeak of sensible shoes on hospital linoleum. A nurse bustles in through the door and shoos Jeong Jeong away from the bed. She takes Piandao’s temperature and blood pressure, taps his IV drip, and then asks him, “What is your name?”
“Piandao Liu.” He sees the nurse glance down at her chart and adds, “Or Peter.”
“Do you know what year it is?”
“1993.”
“And do you know where we are?”
“In IU Bloomington.” He tries not to stumble on the syllables when he says, “For my emergency laparoscopic appendectomy.”
“Good, good. There’s still gas in your abdomen, so don’t be alarmed if your stomach is still swollen and things hurt, ok? I’ll be back every hour to check on you, Mr. Liu. Just to take your temperature and blood pressure. You’ll be fine.” She has the particular way of speaking that all nurses share: delicate and brusque at the same time. They all sound very practised at empathy but also weary of displaying so much of it all the time. Piandao nods his head, just to go along with it, and she ticks off a few mysterious things on her clipboard. “And I’m afraid your brother will have to leave soon. Visitor hours are over for tonight.”
“No problem,” Jeong Jeong cuts in before Piandao could react. “I’ll just check if he’s comfortable and then I’ll be outta here.”
The nurse’s shoes go squeak, squeak, squeak again as she disappears into the corridor. Neither of them say anything more until she’s gone. Piandao watches shadows from the rainy window dance on the ceiling, flickering like ghosts.
“JJ, what’s happening?” he asks. “Am I–am I dreaming?”
“No.”
“Is it still here?”
“What is?”
The pain, he wants to say. My pain.
“Are you still here?” he asks instead.
Jeong Jeong laughs. He pats Piandao on the cheek: once, twice. “Yeah. And I’ll be here until someone actually kicks me out. You’re lucky this isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone come down from a trip. And whatever I say, just go along with it, okay? I told the receptionist we’re related because sometimes they’ll let you stay longer if you’re immediate family.”
“They believed you?”
“Chinese, Korean – what does anyone here know? We all look alike.”
Piandao nods, too tired to say anything else. The earlier euphoria of being alive has ebbed away. He doesn’t even react when Jeong Jeong flicks him on the forehead, a delicate little tap.
“Dude. You look worn out. Get some rest before the rest of your organs explode.” He lights up another cigarette and picks up his book. “Shut your eyes and listen. If this doesn’t knock you out, nothing will. Ready? Get this: ‘Authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, are in principle better able to follow truly liberal economic policies undistorted by redistributive goals “that constrain growth. They do not have to be accountable to workers in declining industries, or subsidize inefficient sectors simply because the latter have political clout .’”
He flicks the page with a finger.
“And then, blah blah blah… during its period of high growth in the 1960s, the South Korean government was able to suppress wage demands by banning strikes and forbidding talk of greater worker consumption and welfare. See, no wonder everyone was in such a hurry to get out of there. This guy should have read Walzer.”
Saying this out loud would only irritate Jeong Jeong, but Piandao doesn’t give a shit about South Korea or liberal economic policies. How did you find me? he should have asked. What happened to your eye? He sees the animal again, sitting in the corner of the room and watching him with the yellow eyes. There’s nothing he could do. His eyes slide shut. He breathes in — he smells oranges in the air? why are there oranges? — mingled with the familiar scent of Lucky Strikes and laundry soap. He breathes out. He concentrates, sleepily, to the rise and fall of Jeong Jeong’s voice, the sound of the rustling pages.
“Watch out,” he mumbles. “It’s coming for you.”
“What? What did you say?” Jeong Jeong sounds agitated.
He’s not sure what language he had spoken in –- Mandarin or Taiwanese or English. Too late. He’s sliding. Everything goes light, then dark. Dark, then light. And then everything lifts; he is under, and then he is asleep again.
**
**
This time, he wakes up and his head feels clearer. Nighttime outside. The rain has stopped. A faint clear glow from the streetlights comes in through the window and paints everything amber and grey. When he sees the chair next to him empty, his heart lurches. For a second he thinks – did I —? but then he sees the overflowing ashtray on the table, the closed book. Next to it there’s a pyramid of oranges with a note tucked underneath, something scribbled on hospital stationary with atrocious handwriting.
He keeps the note in his hand and holds it until the night-shift nurse comes by to check on him. She tells him to urinate into a plastic bottle so they can check for urinary complications. He tries but his stomach muscles won’t cooperate. In the end they put in a catheter which works, but is humiliating. In the struggle he tears open one of his surgical wounds and bleeds again, but just a little bit. “Be careful while moving,” the night-shift nurse tells him as she cleans him up. “You’re very lucky not to have complications from peritonitis. PERI-TO-NI-TIS. It’s an infection in your spleen. Understand? Your SPLEEN.”
She gestures to her own midriff. He nods to indicate he understands. What he understands is that she thinks he doesn’t speak English. He considers informing her that he knows the word “spleen” the same way that he knows words like “appendectomy”, “anesthesia”, and “astronomical spectroscopic data” — but he doesn’t. He’s very tired. A lot of drugs are running through his system. And besides, he feels a kind of relief in being spoken to like a child or an idiot: it demands very little from him other than a certain quiet acquiescence. Soon all the commotion is over and he’s left alone again.
He takes out Jeong Jeong’s note, which he had tucked under his pillow. In this strange unfamiliar place he needs to hold onto something he understands. He touches it like a charm or talisman. The room is too dark for reading but the words vibrate in his mind in a clear steady thrum. VISITORS HOURS OVER SEE YOU TOMORROW WHEN YOU’RE LESS CRAZY. BE GOOD - JJ.
This makes it the third thing Jeong Jeong wrote to him in 1993.
The number he has written back is still zero.
**
Since January, Jeong Jeong has sent him two things: a letter that wasn’t a letter, and a postcard with nothing written on it. Those were the sole pieces of communication that passed between them for the first half of the year: a unidirectional flow of information reaching across the distance, like light from a fusing star. Both times after Piandao received them he almost wrote back; both times he never did. Twice he had picked up the phone to call; twice he had set it back down again. He just couldn’t think of anything to say. He could never figure out what Jeong Jeong wanted with him.
And — and it’s a weak defense, but it’s a defense nonetheless: Jeong Jeong never called him either.
The letter that wasn’t a letter came in January. Happy belated New Year. Piandao had opened the envelope to find no writing, just three newspaper clippings trimmed neatly with a hobby knife. They’re in three different languages but they cover the same event: on January 10, a man was beaten to a pulp and hospitalized. It happened on a coastal strip in Laguna Beach; a group of young white men assaulted him and then left his broken body on the rocky shore. When the police arrived, they couldn’t determine his race, but in any case — it had happened so close to the gay bars on the strip that they declared it a hate crime.
The man was Vietnamese, said the Los Angeles Times. He was Vietnamese but not gay, reassured the Chinese L.A. Daily News. The Times got a nice quote from his niece-in-law: “What matters here is that a man was beaten up by another just because he was walking and was by himself. He did nothing wrong.”
In the margin Jeong Jeong had scrawled a rebuttal. SO WHAT IF HE DID.
Piandao read the first two news articles a dozen times over, trying to figure out if there was another hidden meaning. Did Jeong Jeong know the man? Was he trying to warn Piandao about something? Did he mean, there are people beating up gay men (in which case, what did Piandao have to worry about?), or, there are people beating up Asian men (in which case, was Jeong Jeong saying that he felt like he was in danger?).
Did Jeong Jeong think something like this could happen to him? It was frighteningly plausible. If a fifty-five year old man could be assaulted for walking on the beach — with or without an ulterior motive in mind — then why not Jeong Jeong? “JJ can get a bit obvious,” someone had said once, and the oddness of the phrase had struck Piandao and stayed with him since. Jeong Jeong was obvious. An obvious target.
And then a third clipping: a page snipped out from a Korean language weekly, which Piandao supposed was included half for the sake of completionism, half for the fact that it was the only one with a photo of the victim. On the cheap paper the victim — his name was Truong — Truong was a blurry shape in black-and-white, on what must have been his hospital bed. Truong’s brother and his nephew stood by the bed. In the photo Truong himself looked neither Vietnamese nor gay nor like a man who had suffered the horrific loss of his family and his dignity. He looked like a sheeted thing with tubes coming in and out of it. His face, caught in shadow, was a single dark shameful bruise.
What did it mean?
And then: four months later, in April, Jeong Jeong sent him a postcard. On the front there were pictures of white buildings and cartoon letters that said Greetings from Washington, DC. On the back there Piandao’s name and address written in Jeong Jeong’s sprawling handwriting. Nothing else. No message.
What did that mean?
It took him a second, and then he thought, of course — that week he had watched the news and saw the news report of the gay march in Washington. It was Jeong Jeong’s sort of thing: collectives, alliances, the united groups of this and that. Politics. It was the sort of thing Jeong Jeong couldn’t stay away from. people carrying big cardboard signs (FUCK COLORADO, SILENCE IS DEATH, other sentences he couldn’t make out); women in ripped shirts and denim jackets; men wearing no shirts at all; sailors; old soldiers; old women; nuns; small children blinking at the television camera, shy and dazed in the spring sunshine, blinking sleepily before burying their face back into their parents’ chests. The reporter stops a man wearing a pair of sunglasses and puts the microphone in his face. What are you marching for?
We just want to be left alone, the man yells back. There's no mystery to being gay. We're just like everybody else in America.
Piandao always keeps the closed captions on; they help him understand the English. That day he noticed someone had made a mistake at the T.V. station. The text underneath the man said: There's a mystery to being gay.
He laughed. And when the postcard came he thought about calling Jeong Jeong then too, but he didn’t. What if Jeong Jeong was still in Washington? He didn’t know how to reach him. And then one thing followed another, and then life went on, and then slowness overtook his haste, and then he never got around to calling.
He has excuses: he was busy. He had things to do, a lot of things: the church; the two classes he was assisting; the miserable application process for time on the research telescope that summer; the miserable application process for funding; the miserable everything of Indiana itself, which lacks for any decent Chinese grocery stores and whose dry and grey and saltless air he continued to detest even after a whole year. He had a lot of things on his mind. And in the end it came back to the same problem: he didn’t understand what Jeong Jeong wanted with him. So. Well. What was there for him to say?
**
**
The next morning Jeong Jeong comes back and brings with him Piandao’s own backpack, which Piandao had last seen hanging off the hook on his kitchen wall. Inside is a change of Piandao’s own clothes. His own toothbrush. The science journal he’d left on his bedside table and the Casio watch he’d forgotten to put on the day he got rushed to the hospital. Jeong Jeong had even remembered his slippers, which are in a white plastic bag knotted tightly at the top. “How?” Piandao asks weakly when he looks up.
The chair by his bed is a hard wooden one with a slat for the back, not easy to slouch in but Jeong Jeong finds a way somehow. “I broke into your apartment.”
“ Why ?”
“I could ask you: why am I your emergency contact?”
It takes Piandao a moment to answer. “Back in September. I couldn’t find my uncle’s phone number.”
“The one in Albany?”
“In the first week of the semester — I was filling out a lot of paperwork. I couldn’t find my address book. I thought…I wrote down a number to fill the space. I didn’t think they would actually trouble you.”
“And here I thought I was special,” Jeong Jeong says lightly. “Don’t worry, man. No trouble at all.”
It is a lot of trouble, actually. It is also pure Jeong Jeong logic at work: two days ago, he got a call from the astronomy and astrophysics department secretary telling him that Peter Liu had collapsed in the grad students’ office and had been driven to the hospital. Naturally, he took the next flight out of LAX, hitchhiked from Indianapolis airport to Bloomington, and then, after he walked the rest of the way to Piandao’s apartment, hopped the yard fence, jimmied the lock of the backyard shed with a Movie Gallery membership card, found a garden trowel, popped the latch of Piandao’s kitchen window, and climbed in.
“And then, I also took this—” Jeong Jeong says. He pulls something out of his pocket with a flourish. “Gotta get to the hospital somehow.”
“You stole my car?”
Jeong Jeong tosses the keys to the bedside table. “I didn’t steal anything, your car’s right outside. The only one stealing anything is the parking lot attendant. Do you know how much he tried to charge me for parking? You know something’s fucked up with this country when my car makes over minimum wage sitting in a parking lot.”
“You mean, my car.”
“You, me, do-re-mi-fa-so , ” Jeong Jeong sings, and then, “You want some help?”
“No,” Piandao says. He has been trying to wrestle himself out of bed on his own. The nurse that morning had raised the head of the bed so he could partly sit up, but the result is that he’s wedged into an impossible trough where one part of the bed meets the other at an obtuse angle. He is discovering that the simple act of getting up out of bed requires a complex operation of abdominal muscles that, twelve hours after surgery, he just cannot perform. He grips the handrails and tries once more, then gives up, exhausted.
“Want me to call a nurse?”
“No.”
“Easy – you don’t have to do everything all at once.”
“I’m fine.”
“Fine. Let me try something.” Jeong Jeong doesn’t touch him, but he does fiddle with the bed buttons. The bed jerks. The head of the bed raises; the foot of the bed dips. Inch by inch, alternating between raising the top and lowering the bottom of the bed, he eases Piandao into an upright sitting position. “Okay, and now where to, cowboy?”
“Washroom. And after I want to walk.”
“You sure you’re allowed to? Really?”
Piandao nods. His stomach is bloated and painful from the surgery. The doctors told him that walking will help, get his bowels moving again; he’s determined to recover as fast as possible. He has work to get back to in the lab. There’s a teaching assistant application he’s supposed to hear back from any day now. And most importantly -- he hates the catheter, he can’t go through it again. Being touched there. He just can’t. He’s determined to get out of the hospital. “It’s good for me,” he says.
Jeong Jeong taps out the cigarette he was smoking. He picks up the thin blanket on the bed. “Fine then. Let’s go. I’ve done the scenic tour of every major hospital in the Bay Area, let’s see what the rest of America has to offer.”
**
**
They do a slow shuffle up and down the ward’s hallway. The blanket that Jeong Jeong picks up is useful for both warmth and dignity: the flimsy gown he has on flaps open in the back. Jeong Jeong had wrapped the blanket around his shoulders without a word. It was just one of the many things he miraculously knew: how to work a hospital bed. How to talk to nurses, what kind of questions to ask. How to ease someone to the toilet and then look away. How to support someone’s hobbling weight without any sign of impatience or worse, coddling. He doesn’t even laugh at passing the gas. When Piandao brings this up he looks wry. “Wait til you see me in my little white cap and uniform. My sexy nurse Halloween costume isn’t just for Halloween.”
They come back to Piandao’s tiny hospital room. Jeong Jeong helps him lie back down. He knows how to do this too: tugging the gown down so it doesn’t ride up, checking the IV line for tangles.
When they’re settled in the bed and the chair again, Piandao brings up the thing that’s been bothering him the whole time. “You really didn’t have to come here, JJ. The plane ticket must have been expensive.”
A shrug. “Couldn’t let you die alone in Indiana, of all places.”
“It was just an appendectomy. How much did you pay for the flight? I can pay you back. I can afford it.”
Jeong Jeong picks up one of the oranges he’d brought and plucks the stem off. He slides his thumb around the depression at the top and takes off a wide strip of peel. “Nah,” he says, after a long pause.
“Why not?” Piandao asks. “Why are you here?”
Jeong Jeong shrugs again. He’s reached the nub at the bottom of the orange. Deftly, he levers the top off with his thumb and two fingers. He lifts it up. The long continuous spiral of peel bounces loosely in mid-air, an oscillating body displaced from rest. If Piandao has a ruler and a weight, he could measure its displacement and calculate its spring constant. Then that would be one piece of information in the world that Piandao could know and be sure of, as useless as it is.
The silence stretches to its elastic limit.
“I don’t know,” Jeong Jeong says. He’s fiddling with the orange, pulling off long threads of white pith. “When I got the call that you were in the hospital— I thought—for a young healthy guy to suddenly go to the hospital, I thought—I don’t know.” He holds out the orange and then snatches it back. “Wait. Shit, you shouldn’t be eating citrus yet.”
The orange in his hands looks naked and spherical and unbroken. “You can eat it,” Piandao says.
Jeong Jeong doesn’t. He puts it down on the table on top of his book, then wipes his hands on his jeans. “I’ve been thinking about getting out of town for awhile. When I got that long-distance call I figured it’s as good as anywhere. I thought it was a sign, you know. Here’s something to do with yourself for the next week or so.”
“What about your job?”
“What’s my aunt going to do? Fire me from the family? Being her wage slave has its upsides. And anyways – listen: you cold? You want another blanket or something?”
Without waiting for an answer, he sails out the door. Behind him the room smells like disinfectant and the orange that Piandao, for some reason, is not allowed to touch.
**
Jeong Jeong is gone for a long time. Piandao waits for a while, watching the shadows shift on the walls. The bizarre truth of his removed appendix is beginning to sink in. Odd. A piece of him is gone. He thinks about how there’s a secret inner part of him that served no purpose and went unnoticed until it went wrong. Something invisible and dormant until it isn’t. Even odder is how he misses it. These sudden fits of melancholy happen sometimes, even though he’s not the kind of person who dwells on it. Although sometimes he’s afraid that if he ever starts to dwell on everything he misses or is missing from him he would never stop.
WIthout knowing it he falls asleep again. He slips into another dream where he’s back on an operating table and his belly is sliced open. The ground shakes. All his organs are shaken loose from their place. Woozy, he has to stuff them back inside, but they slip through his fingers, and his kidneys and liver and heart are wobbling jelly, loose, amorphous shapes. They make wet, slapping sounds when they hit the floor. He scrambles for them; in the red mess he finds a single tooth.
A knock wakes him up: Jeong Jeong at the door again, carrying something in his hands He steps in and asks, “Were you sleeping?”
Piandao blinks. His hands unclench. He tries to slow down his breathing and look normal again. “No, no. I was just resting.”
Jeong Jeong shows him his bundle: a cheap paperback novel, an extra blanket, and something else white. “Disposable underwear,” he says.
“What?”
“Disposable underwear. Adult diapers. I asked one of the nurses if you can have something to wear under the hospital gown so you don’t have to moon half the ward if you get out of bed again.”
“Oh.”
“The trick with hospitals is that you have to know what to tell the doctors and what to ask the nurses,” Jeong Jeong says. “You should ask them later to reduce the amount of IV fluids. It’ll stop you from having to use the toilet too often. The standard amount of IV fluid in hospitals is designed for a standard American, so like – a six foot tall fat person. Everyone else, the water goes right through and you piss like a drowning horse. What are you, 5’11”? six feet?”
“One hundred eighty three,” Piandao says automatically. His hands feel clammy. His shoulder still hurts. “Centimeters.”
“You metric motherfucker.”
“I’m a scientist.”
Jeong Jeong sighs. He sits down again and angles his knees towards Piandao. With one hand he lights up another cigarette, with the other he pulls the ashtray towards him. It knocks against the paperback book, which has a lurid . “Hey. You want something to read?”
“Nothing about economic policies.”
“No, no – this is from the hospital shop: they have a strict policy against books above a fifth grade reading level.” Jeong Jeong waves the book in the air: the cover has a lurid illustration of a skimpily dressed woman cowering against desert sand dunes. A worm or snake creature is menacing her.
“I’d rather rest,” Piandao says. “I’m tired.”
“C’mon, it’s set in space. You love space. I could read it out loud.”
“I guess no one can stop you.”
“Bite me,” Jeong Jeong says, then clears his throat and opens the book.
Piandao settles back into his pillow. Two days ago, he’d been alone and frightened. If Jeong Jeong hadn’t found him here, two thousand miles away from Los Angeles, he would still be alone and frightened. Already he’s solving problems that Piandao had never even considered. For instance: how was he supposed to leave the hospital? He supposes he could have called a cab, or asked someone else -- one of his classmates, maybe, or someone from the Chinese church to come drive him home. But he’s glad it’s his own car and he’s glad it’s Jeong Jeong, who is like some supermassive object that pulls everything around it into its own gravitational field. No one else in the world could have showed up like this. Only Jeong Jeong. He’s capable of actions that Piandao can neither see nor understand.
**
When they finally clear Piandao to leave the hospital, Jeong Jeong helps him hobble into the elevator, down the labyrinthine corridors, and through the big steel revolving doors to freedom. Piandao’s Corolla is parked outside and Jeong Jeong, whistling, pops the car doors open with insouciant ease as if he’s its rightful owner. He tosses the keys up in the air and then catches it with one hand. Once Piandao is settled in the passenger’s seat – bending his torso hurts, but once inside the car seat is far more comfortable than the hospital bed – Jeong Jeong nudges the door closed with his foot.
He drives them home carefully, or as carefully as someone like him can. It’s the longest Piandao has ever seen him keep both hands on the wheel. After a while he leans over to stab at the radio button. They whoosh through a cascade of staticky stations. “You have any decent music here? And yo, none of that Chinese ballad pop shit.”
Piandao doesn’t keep many cassettes in the car. Sometimes he puts on the radio to practice his English; most of the time he prefers silence. For Jeong Jeong’s sake he digs around in the depths of the glove compartment. Buried under some papers and dried-out pens he digs out a jewel box; the tape inside is homemade and labelless.
Jeong Jeong nods approvingly at the first song – “Yaz! Yes!” – but it’s at the dun dun dun of the following song’s opening synths he whoops and spins the volume up. He cranks down the window and sings along, badly off-key. It's no problem of mine, but it's a problem I find / Living a life that I can't leave behind .
“The Korean national anthem,” Piandao says, louder.
“What?” They’re both shouting over the noise.
“The Korean national anthem.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s something you said once. When you gave me the tape, remember?”
“Did I? When did I do that?”
Piandao opens his mouth. Closes it again. There had been a brief while when Jeong Jeong embarked on a doomed crusade to convince him to listen to “some real music you can dance to”. By real music he had meant music made by black rappers or curly-haired British men, all of which exerted an irresistible pull on him. “You gave this to me that time we drove to San Jose for the Go tournament. Do you remember? Your sisters were there too.”
“I gave this to you?”
“Yeah,” Piandao says. “And how are your sisters?”
Jeong Jeong’s grimaces. “Fine.”
“And your parents, how is Pastor Park? And David? Are you still —”
“David’s moved out,” Jeong Jeong says curtly. “My family’s fine.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jeong Jeong grunts. He takes the car around a corner with vicious speed. “Sorry that I kicked David out? Or sorry that my parents are still doing fine? Either way — thanks, I agree.”
“What happened—“
“How’s your doctorate going?” Jeong Jeong says loudly. “Checked all the stars still there? Moon’s still in the sky? Found any hot co-eds in the Midwest? Shoot any lasers into space yet?”
“I’m fine,” Piandao says. He is taken aback. “Spectroscopy isn’t shooting lasers into space—“
“Whatever.” Jeong Jeong leans over, spins the volume dial up another notch, and then there’s no more conversation to be had. Music blares. Pummelling drumbeats ricochet inside the car like a handful of rubber balls. It sets Piandao’s teeth on edge. He never understood Jeong Jeong’s music taste: most of it just sounds like noise to him. Especially this one, which is one of Jeong Jeong’s favourites, especially when he’s been drinking – “Yo, put on B.L.T.!”, and the dun-dun-dun is nearly always accompanied by flailing arm movements that Piandao supposes is the consequence of “real music you can dance to”.
He’s not a fan. To him it sounds like the over-strained rhythm of a heart murmur. Electrical impulses misfiring inside the human chest.
**
**
So Jeong Jeong has written to him , but the two of them haven't talked, not even on the phone since April of last year. That was the April when Los Angeles exploded.
Well. Exploded isn’t the right word. Crumbled. Collapsed. Descended into chaos, or, so it seemed at the time. In April of 1992, the televisions exploded with the news of riots and looting. Four police officers had beat up a black man; a Korean store owner shot a black teenager in his store. Ethnic tensions — that was how the news described it. By the time the police and the Korean were tried and then more or less let off the hook, the city burst. A lot of the chaos happened in Koreatown. The news played the blurry camcorder footage of the beating over and over again, and then it went to live coverage: burning stores and broken glass. Shop signs falling down. People streaming out of stores clutching absurd little trophies, shoes or electronics or even (Piandao was amused when he saw it behind the reporter) a basket of wigs.
Piandao was in New Mexico at the time for a student conference. He tried calling Jeong Jeong’s number. No answer. He went back to watching the news on the shitty hotel room t.v. -- most of his life’s most significant moments seemed to take place in hotel rooms, dormitories, bus stops; he was always in these places of transient experience. The news reporters filmed a lot of Koreans patrolling their streets holding guns. One of them, oddly enough, had an uncanny resemblance to his high school math teacher: something about the paunch and a flat-footed waddling gait. But instead of the piece of chalk or the bamboo cane, he was holding a silver handgun.
The news kept rolling: one of the Korean merchants was firing a gun in a parking lot. Something about these men -- squinting in the sunlight, smoking and pacing outside -- reminded Piandao of similar old men back home: dour, taciturn people who’ve been through the worst of the Communist turmoils in the 40’s and 50’s. People who never let the war go. Piandao almost forgot what it looked like; he’d been in America for so long. But there it was. A sort of hardness around the eyes.
Everyone seemed to have a lot of guns.
He didn’t think Jeong Jeong was that kind of stupid, but -- well. To avoid the exorbitant hotel telephone fees he went outside to use the pay phones instead. By then creeping twilight had turned the sky pink and dark blue, but heat kept rising out of the cement. He had to prop the booth door open with one foot to not suffocate in the sweltering heat.
He tried calling again. Still no answer. He put another few quarters in and called the Park family’s phone. Someone picked up and answered in Korean — Jeong Jeong’s sister, Gracie. When she realised it was Piandao, she sighed.
“We’re fine,” she said tightly. “All the crazy shit is happening in South Central. My aunt closed the beauty store yesterday and the family stopped her from going back. Dad’s been driving around visiting people in the congregation, but just around Westside.”
“What about your brother?”
“Who knows what JJ’s up to at any point in time? You wanna place bets? I have ten bucks going against Jess over whether or not he’s in the hospital because he’s been shot, or if he’s in jail because he’s shot someone.”
This seemed more than a little callous to Piandao, but then again — he was an only child. “When you see him again,” he said, “tell him to be safe. Look out for himself.”
Gracie laughed. “Fine. But if you hear from him first, tell him that Mom has been praying for him. Don’t let that go to waste.”
“But what if--” Piandao began, then trailed off, unsure. What if I don’t hear from him? What if he’s really in the hospital? What if, what if, what if.
He never got to finish the thought. There was a click. Gracie had hung up.
**
**
Piandao rents the cheap basement unit of a carved-up house close to campus. It’s not as comfortable as his old room back at Berkeley, but it’s bigger than the one he had at Taipei Tech and he doesn’t share it with anyone else, which makes it a thrilling experiment in living alone for the first time ever in his life. There’s a kitchen for him to clean or not clean as he pleases. A bathroom with a bathtub that hasn’t been stained and spat and masturbated on by dozens of other males. His own bed, which is a real bed, not a dormitory bunk, where every night he sleeps in unbroken silence.
He can almost disregard everything else about the place: the gloom, the frigid chill in winter, the constant damp, the fact that anyone in the backyard has a clear view into his kitchen through the small windows. Spiders drop from the ceilings with a worrying regularity: they crawl in and out of crevices before he can catch them. He doesn’t mind. Compared to the Taiwanese ants and termites, the size of American insects are almost cute. He’s fascinated by the animals in the streets: raccoons or skunks, digging through the trash bins at night. Once he saw a sleek thing darting through some hedges and thought it was a cat. Then he went closer, saw the thing’s pointed snout and thought it might be a wolf, or a weird type of fox.
“Coyotes,” one of the other PhDs said when he asked around. “We get a lot of them this time of year. They’re -- uh, a sort of dog. They’re wild.”
“But what is the difference?” Piandao had asked. “Between a coyote and a dog?”
“They’re all canines, I guess. But they’re different.”
“How?” He wanted something about genetics, ancestries, evolutionary trees, but then the other student said:
“They just are. Be careful though. Keep your windows closed, because sometimes they’ll come into people’s houses to find food and end up killing the cats.”
He tells Jeong Jeong about the coyote problem after Jeong Jeong shows him the kitchen window he forced open. Jeong Jeong grunts. He helps Piandao sit down on the sagging couch in the living room. There’s a pile of blankets already on it that he shoves to the floor. “I used to see coyotes sometimes. When I was a kid,” he says.
“Are they dogs or wolves?”
“To be honest, the only coyote I can tell you anything about is two-dimensional and carries a giant box that says ‘ACME CORPORATION’. But the ones around our house used to come for the deer.”
“Deer?”
“When we moved in the whole housing development was still pretty new. There were herds of deer roaming all over the place. They ate the shrubs and sagebrush, and they’re not scared by humans at all. Did I ever tell you about the time a live one wandered into our backyard at night? It came right under my bedroom window in the moonlight. I thought I was dreaming. Really majestic, right? It came so close I could see the little antler nubs poking out of its head. I was like, wow. Nature is amazing.”
Piandao nods.
“But then, as I was thinking this, the stupid deer bent over its back legs and took a massive shit. Right into our yard. And then it leaped away. And then, the next morning I went out and looked for it, but there’s nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Couldn’t find any deer shit. Which makes me wonder: either this is a magical deer with disappearing shit, or, of all the things I dream about, I chose to dream about a magical deer with disappearing shit. That’s when I knew,” Jeong Jeong says, seriously, “that there was seriously something wrong with me. Because that morning I woke up and realised I’ve also had my first wet dream.”
“What’s—”
“Nocturnal emission. Sex dream. Don’t make me go into details, alright?”
Jeong Jeong’s deadpan expression holds for a second, and then they both start laughing.
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“Would I ever lie?”
Piandao nudges the pile of blankets on the ground with his toe. It’s his spare set: a cheap duvet and some cotton covers bought on clearance from Kmart. Scattered around it are loose newspaper sheets, two books: The End of History and the cheap sci-fi paperback, deep cracks already creased into their spines. Jeong Jeong is in the kitchen section, fussing over something. He re-emerges from the kitchen with a glass of water.
“Have you been sleeping on the couch?” Piandao asks him.
“The stains are disgusting, but I tell myself it has less spiders than the floor.”
“You’re my guest, you should have taken the bed.”
“No.”
“I insist—“
“Would you really be okay with that?” Jeong Jeong says. His tone is still light.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You’re okay with having a gay man sleep in your bed when you’re not there?”
“As long as you wash the sheets afterwards.”
“Right.”
Nothing in Jeong Jeong’s expression or posture changes, but a long ugly pause stretches between them. The mood changes, and Piandao’s chest sinks. He knows about David, though he’s never met him, but the one between the latest cycle of breaking-up-with-David and getting-back-together-with-David he has no impression of whatsoever other than the fact he may have been from Boston. Rob, maybe. Or Richard. Ricky? Jeong Jeong rarely talks about his lovers, and when he does it’s with a forced casualness that repels questioning. All Piandao knows is: they’re usually American, usually white. He doesn’t ask for any more details. He knows he won’t get them.
Jeong Jeong stays where he is, holding the glass of water in his hand. Noon light slices in through the cracks in the flimsy polyester curtains. It hits the glass of water, throwing two pure lines across the front of Jeong Jeong’s t-shirt. They vanish when he moves to hand Piandao the water.
“JJ,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Why are you here? You did not have to. What’s wrong? Are you...are you hiding from something? Tell me the truth.”
No answer.
Jeong Jeong stoops down to gather up the blankets, the books. His back is to Piandao, and the line from his spine to his nape curves like a cubic function, the formula for a permanent stubborn slouch. When he does turn around, his face looks harsh and thin. His skin is sallow like damp paper. Piandao had noticed this before; under the hospital’s fluorescent lighting everyone looks grey. But now, standing in Piandao’s shitty living room, Jeong Jeong looks like he’s taken the hospital home with him. Like he’s still there now.
“I found a dead deer once,” Jeong Jeong says. “When I was out on my bike. It was just lying there; there was a big dark stain on the ground underneath — pretty gruesome. All its guts were spilling out. I poked it with a metal strip I found on the street, and all these bugs came out. I think some predator got it. A coyote or something.”
“That sounds bad.”
Jeong Jeong shrugs. “It’s just a deer. Who cares?”
He puts the duvet on a chair and scrubs at his eye with a knuckle. His watch, too loose for his wrist, slides helplessly down an arm as he picks up a sheet of newspaper, fiddles with it, puts it back down in exchange for the paperback novel.
Piandao feels awkward. He takes a sip of water. Jeong Jeong had heated it up in the microwave, so the glass is hot but the water is lukewarm. He says, “That’s why you have to keep my window closed. Or else wild animals might get in.”
“Too late. One already did.”
Piandao blinks. Before he can respond, Jeong Jeong punches him on his arm, hard, and then rubs his knuckles against his hair, gentle.
“Hey,” he says. “I found your typewriter under the kitchen table. Alright if I borrow it? I have a lot of ideas I want to work on.”