Andrew Zhou
Slant
I lied to the doctor; she thinks I have a ride waiting for me in the parking lot. I classify the night, sort it into colors: red cross, white gowns, orange flame at the end of a stranger’s cigarette. The wind bites, but I’m too embarrassed to step back inside the lobby. My hands ache. Of all things, my hands are killing me. The pain distracts me from the fact that, no matter how many vehicles come and go, Paul is still not here. It gets so late, I worry that he might be dead. I watch each gurney that passes by for a peach-fuzz mustache, for that ring finger just too long for its hand.
My hands are numb by the time Paul arrives. He apologizes over and over, but I can’t find it in me to accept or reject the words. I say nothing as Paul wraps me up in a massive embrace and a blanket that feels like skin. Halfway home, I notice a golf club—a driver with a red sock pulled over the head—sparkling in the backseat. Its titanium shaft. Its smooth-as-velvet grip. Its adjustable center of gravity, designed for players of all sizes. As the car rumbles off a freeway, rows of street lights illuminate the club. White bands curve across the head like smiles.
Paul keeps his hands steady, but his eyes are bloodshot. “Put on your seatbelt.”
“My ribs look rotted. Bruised fruit. They showed me an X-ray.”
Paul slams the brakes as a green light flicks yellow, and my bones protest. He usually risks red. “You should have called sooner.”
“I dropped my phone. It broke.”
“We’ll get you another one. A better one. So I can be there next time.”
The club grins wide in the rearview mirror. Teeth upon teeth, clenched.
#
My reflection weeps in the curve of the shower handle. A bloated face, taffy-pulled. Dried blood dots my nose, forms streaks down my neck, makes a strawberry field of my hair. Somebody must have taken me apart when I wasn’t looking and rearranged what they found—terraformed it all to resemble a corpse. Salt rivers trailing down my cheeks and purple marshes spreading across my chest, my legs. At least my eyes have been left untouched, gingerbread-brown as always. Not like my right ear, held together only by a trail of stitches. If I pulled hard enough, the flesh would tear away easy. Like butter, I bet.
My hands rest against the bathroom sink faucet until they scald. Until I’m more red than black and blue. In the living room, Paul hands me anything he can get his hands on: fresh towels, tissues, blankets his mom bought, skinned grapes. I want to give him something back, just so I’m not a thief. We try watching TV, but the commercials remind me of carnival lights, so he leads me to the bedroom and lays me down to rest.
“I’ll clean out the garage tomorrow. It’s been long enough. What’s in there again?”
“Don’t even think about going in there. I’ll take care of everything.” Paul rubs my leg in the dark. He kisses along my kneecap, up my thigh. “Do you need anything?”
I can’t remember how to answer this question. I can’t remember at all.
#
When we met three years ago, Paul was wearing a cross around his neck. He was still devout back then. My friend pointed at him across the gallery hall.
“That white boy’s been staring at you. For the past hour.”
I was too afraid to stare back.
We danced with each other, around each other. Hands behind our backs, necks craned. I pretended to look at a self-portrait while his eyes roamed an oily seascape. Marble to steel, acrylic to crayon.
My friend left early. A minute later, Paul stopped me at the entrance to the American wing, his body filling the doorway. At first, I thought he was a security guard.
“I’ve seen you somewhere before,” he said.
“People mistake me for other people all the time.”
“No, I remember you. You. You’re different from everybody here.”
I’m not like anybody here.
We picked up a carton of dumplings on the way back to my apartment. Paul ate them with his brows furrowed—total concentration. It was obvious that he wanted to impress me with some kind of worldliness. The chopsticks slipped out of his hand every other second, and when the first successful bite burned his tongue, I laughed until I cried.
He said he would leave at sunset. Then he said he would leave in the morning. The next morning, then. After the long weekend ended. Once the new year came around. Now he says that he’ll never leave, not until every star burns up and the universe explodes and there’s nothing left but photos of us crammed into a photo booth, Asian Glow turning my face into a sun.
#
For a whole week, Paul kisses my hands when he returns from the office. A peck between each knuckle. It would be fine if it wasn’t for those misty-blue eyes, which always betray his worry—his pity. And I have no choice but to take and take with nothing to give in return.
When Paul isn’t around to fret and coo and touch, I stand at the window and watch the sun. It stares at its own reflection in the lake just beyond our backyard, the occasional swarm of ducks sending ripples through its image. I try not to look at the water, but my purple legs shriek and my stomach squeezes tight like a fist.
One day, Paul hovers more than usual. He wavers before the words come. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Does it still hurt?”
I cross over to the kitchen, my bare feet sliding across tile. The refrigerator door swings open, but its contents haven’t been cleaned out since my parents visited and told me they didn’t realize that Paul was so blonde. So pale. They asked me where the tofu went, where I hid the lotus root and youtiao and dried pork. After all, they didn’t stuff money into their pockets and uproot themselves across oceans for leftover cheeseburger and ketchup packets stacked in the shape of a house.
I speak into the cold. “I don’t think he would have done it if he hadn’t seen my face.”
Paul doesn’t respond. He probably doesn’t understand.
“He said something. About my eyes.”
“Something…bad?”
“What do you think?”
Paul’s breath goes shallow. He comes from behind and wraps his arms around my waist. It isn’t fair. He whispers my name over and over, but nothing sings. I shrug off Paul’s arms, bat away his hands.
“We can still talk to the police,” he says.
I shake my head. I’ve only spoken to a police officer once in my life, a man with a caterpillar mustache and shoulders that filled the entire driver’s side window. He mentioned my eyes, too. Asked if I always squinted. Asked if I knew what cats tasted like.
“You need help. Look at you.” Paul turns me around, presses his forehead against mine. “I heard about someone. A professional. He’s supposed to be modern. That sounds good, right?”
Paul glances at my lips. I look away.
#
The office cradles me between pink carpeting and paintings of red and gold, mostly men firing cannons and women bathing at dusk. Sunlight streams through a window, falling into my lap, and I can’t think of how I’m any different from an ant burning under a magnifying glass. My fingernails dig into my thigh to keep my hands from shaking, to distract me from the thought of flames.
The man before me wears a doctor’s coat, but he calls himself a counselor. Rick isn’t like other counselors. He’s experimental. I asked over the phone if he had ever worked with Chinese patients before, and he told me that he was always ecstatic to bring his methods to as many kinds of people as possible. Paul convinced me that it was an acceptable answer.
Rick crosses his legs and looks over his glasses. He’s white, of course. “How’s your morning so far?”
I tell him the truth.
“And in general, how are you holding up?”
I lie.
Rick smiles as he explains what the next few weeks will entail. Immersion, he says. The key—the thing that makes the money worth paying—is to let yourself go completely. To shed all worldly distractions until nothing remains except you and your pain. That’s when the healing comes in. My mouth dries up as Rick talks, moisture receding until I’m left only with architecture: tongue, teeth, flesh, bone.
“Are you ready to begin?”
“So you’re just going to ask me things? And then I answer?”
“Ask what? How were your grades in high school? How did your parents treat you?” Rick’s eyes drill through me. They’re just like Paul’s: deep, enormous, and blue, blue, blue. “My methods differ from those you might see practiced by other counselors. I believe that there are much more important things for you to be doing than talking. You’ve been through a trauma, so I’m here to confront you with your obstacle—with that memory—again and again until something changes. Until we can reach an understanding.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Exactly. I’ll talk.” Rick points at his own lips before turning his finger on me. “You’ll listen. Let the feelings wash over you, like you’ve never felt them before. We’ll start things slow for your first session. Relax. Close your eyes.”
I follow Rick’s instructions, and he vanishes into dark.
“The waves sound like sighs.”
My feet submerged in freshwater.
Fen violets between my toes.
The moon isn’t quite full, and light pollution cancels out the stars. Another tide swallows up my ankles. My house is visible from here, an artery-shaped dirt path connecting the lake to my backyard.
“A stranger approaches from the left. You don’t think he means you any harm.”
The man’s baseball cap casts shadows over his eyes, his nose. With hands hidden inside white golf gloves, he swings a driver: the longest and largest of all golf clubs, the bruiser. The instrument’s blue shaft widens into a bulbous head that glides over the sand in perfect arcs. The man walks like he’s on a tightrope. Every step is confident and straight, even in the sand. Heel to toe, heel to toe.
“When he reaches you, the stranger hits you in the chest first. Once you’re down, the side of the head.”
It happens just as I remember. Worse, even. The driver travels a familiar path across my body, and my skin stains. Blood pools in my crevices, leaks from my right ear and seeps into the ground.
“He kicks sand in your eyes. You hear footsteps as the stranger departs. You didn’t scream. Not once.”
Before the man leaves, he says something about my eyes. With my face buried in the sand, a story crosses my mind—one my father used to tell whenever I broke a rule and my mother wasn’t listening. He would make me sit on the carpet before starting. Him on the couch, me on the floor. The story was about the first week he spent in this country. Somebody said something about his eyes, too. They wore a blue scarf that covered their mouth. They threw change at my father. Penny markings on his face, nickels down his shirt. For a moment, he thought he had been shot.
“And that’s all.”
When I open my eyes, Rick’s legs have uncrossed and his pen moves across a clipboard perched over his kneecaps. Red ink seeps into his fingers. I feel naked, like I’ve been dropped into one of those dreams involving missing tests and forgotten lines. When Rick isn’t looking, I wipe away a budding tear. My hands won’t stop shaking. There’s nothing to do but wait for his arm to stop moving, for the scribbling to stop.
#
Through his car’s windshield, Paul’s domed workplace looks like a football, the leather and laces traded out for plaster and glass. I shouldn’t be nervous. Paul jerks the car back and forth as he tries to fit us between the lines, and I glance into the rearview mirror.
No golf club.
“Are you sure you don’t need help clearing out the garage?” I ask.
“There’s only junk in there. Don’t worry about it.”
“But if we’re going to have your birthday party—”
“I’m serious.” Paul grins as the car shakes one last time. “Don’t worry about a thing.”
Inside, Paul’s workplace resembles a cathedral, the curved conference tables and stacked monitors presented as offerings to a technological god. The building radiates with blue light: the holy LED. I never liked it, not even when Paul paraded me through the halls like a trophy last year and his boss called me a saint for putting up with his antics. I remember spotting an Asian man in a cubicle close to Paul’s desk, but I can’t find him this time. Vietnamese, maybe? A coffee machine sputters as we stroll past the break room. I don’t recognize the brand or the symbols on the buttons.
A woman waves from behind a glass wall, a faded baseball cap covering her blonde hair. She has the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen. I try to ignore the cap.
“How’s it going, dude?”
“Better now that you’re back.” Paul takes the woman into a hug, and their cream skin tones are a perfect match. “Did you get the party invite?”
“I’ll be there. Someone has to hold your hair.”
“Remember St. Anthony Main?”
They snicker like school children passing notes behind the teacher’s back. Paul tells a joke, but they may as well be speaking in tongues, so I don’t catch the meaning. Something about the Minneapolis skyline. A work project long overdue. When the woman finally turns to me, her features deepen: her eyebrows droop, her lips purse, her hands fly to her chest like she’s clutching pearls. Or a dagger.
Paul has more pity squirreled away than I realized. Enough to share.
“It’s so wonderful to meet you. In person, finally,” the woman says. “Paul has told me so much about you.”
Clearly.
“It’s nice to meet you. We’re just stopping by since Paul forgot a couple things in his office.”
“Do you need anything? Something to snack on? I could show you around—we have this incredible lake out back.”
“I’m alright.”
Her eyes widen like she has accidentally cursed in front of a child. “Oh, right. The lake…”
On the ride home, Paul makes all kinds of excuses. Some, I’ve heard before. Some are new. He only told her about the attack because she asked, because she caught him crying into a coffee mug during lunch. She’s close—closer than a shave, they joke—and he can’t hide things. Of course not. Not from the nice white lady. And he didn’t tell her too many details, of course. Just the cruelest, most crucial pieces. Just the lake, the golf club, the blood, the therapy session that made me cry like a child. As usual, we park outside the garage, but I can’t even look at him as I storm through the front door.
Inside, we fall into each other, our belts between our legs and his tongue around my fingers, and everything else is forgotten. My name only sings when it’s spat through his teeth, like spoken ambrosia. Paul bites my ear, and his lips meet a stitch. This is how we speak. Not through words, but through strokes and moans and heaves, messages pressed straight through the skin. Paul’s features flash through my mind: hair tinged with champagne and eyes like a sea passing beneath rain. Blue, blue, blue. It’s only here, when the lights are off, that we almost look alike.
He kisses me so hard, I forget my name.
#
When Rick smiles, I can barely think. His teeth shine the way only artificial things can. He’s a walking whitening strip ad, a vehicle to sell products. He scribbles something on a clipboard before I even have a chance to greet him.
“Ready? We’ll do it just like last time,” he says.
“Will it hurt as much as last time?”
“Maybe less, maybe more. When something fractures, you have to finish the break. Then you can put things back however you like. If necessary, we’ll escalate.”
“You mean increase the number of sessions?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
It’s all the same. My hands shiver in the cold, and the moon does not react as metal flattens me. It hurts more this time, not less. Rick’s voice animates the world, and I hope that he will be kind, that he will let me live a fantasy. But it’s all the same, from the endless waves to the hot ache infesting my chest and my head.
“And that’s all.”
Pink office walls rise from the water. Plaster covers up the sky, the moon sliced and squeezed into fluorescent lights. As always before he starts the unloading process, Rick flips through every last page of his clipboard. It’s the same every time. The questions stay constant, but I’m supposed to change.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“My chest hurts. Like my lungs are full of water.”
“Why do you think that man attacked you?”
“Because I’m Chinese, and he isn’t.”
Rick tilts his head just far enough for me to notice. “You’re certain he attacked you due to your race?”
“He said something about my eyes.”
“Are you sure?”
“…I think so.”
The pen launches into action. Red ink spreads.
My legs ache, and I imagine my skeleton cracking again, the whole thing splitting like a wishbone. I try to remember what the stranger looked like. Maybe that would lead me to the words, the exact words. Anything would do: a snatch of hair, a flash of the iris, the baseball cap brand. But I’m distracted by the sight of Rick tugging two gloves over his fingers, the leather white enough to blind.
My voice cracks. “Cold hands?”
“Anemia. They’re purple half of the time.”
Rick smiles. His gloves match his teeth.
#
Ever since I started seeing Rick, my dreams have been the same.
A swinging club, a baseball cap, white gloves. Bloody ruckus across the sand. And somewhere, a pen scribbling away. I’m a film reel, dusted and slotted and rewound every night, black tape running through me until it tears. Rick and Paul usually feature, but I can’t tell apart their eyes and noses and skin like polluted snow. Two heads of a hydra, tongues tied into a vicious ribbon.
I awake from another of these beasts to the sound of someone grunting on the other side of the bedroom door. My mind is barely functional enough to recognize that there isn’t enough breath in my body, that the air stinks with my own sweat. I thank the darkness because, without it, there would be nothing stopping me from laying eyes on my own body or whatever flesh-thing replaced it when the bruises started healing.
When I crawl out of the sheets and crack open the bedroom door, Paul appears in pale television light. The screen swims with the image of two men fighting. One good and one bad, I assume. Paul hunches over something that I can’t make out until he rears back, his arms rising together toward the ceiling. My heart stops when the object reaches its peak. The golf club—a driver—shimmers as it rushes toward the ground and collides with an imaginary golf ball. Paul holds his pose when the swing is finished. An invisible crowd goes wild.
He turns and looks at me, right in the eye. “Sorry, did I wake you?”
“Where did you get that?”
“This?” Paul glances at the weapon in his hand like it’s a book he has never read. “Just bought it yesterday. Early birthday present for myself. You don’t mind, do you?”
“I saw it in the car a few weeks back.”
“No, I just bought it. But I was thinking of buying some more, like a full set. A lot of the guys at work meet up at the driving range on weekends. They don’t play golf in China, do they?”
I think about asking Paul to put the damn thing away, to think about what I’ve been through. But I can’t fathom how pathetic the words would sound. A golf club? I can’t even look at a golf club? Paul swings the monstrosity again to demonstrate his technique, his power. The club whistles, and I remind myself that it is not a weapon—it is a golf club. For some reason, my knees still begin to buckle.
#
Rick’s gloves are just as pristine as before. Not a speck of dirt has sullied them since we last met. Rick fiddles with the velcro, pulling the false skin taut around his fingers. What session is this? My fifth? Sixth? Tenth?
“Maybe we should reschedule.”
“Is something the matter?” Rick’s voice sharpens to a hilt.
The room spins, and my chest spasms. I feel wounds threatening to reopen, blood vessels fighting to split once more. “Why do you do this for a living? Do you like seeing people hurt?”
“I like seeing people heal. That’s what my research is about. People like you.”
People like you.
Rick smiles again. Sometimes, I think that’s the only thing he knows how to do.
A clock ticks away, but I can’t figure out where the damn thing is. A pink face camouflaged against the walls? A pocket watch stuffed into the folds above Rick’s heart? It might be behind me, above me. I can’t turn to locate it—not while Rick watches and clicks his pen—so I have no choice but to endure the neverending sound.
Tick. Tick.
“I feel like everybody’s hiding something from me, like everyone’s burying a body when I’m not looking. Is that normal?”
Rick’s face freezes. His joints are set in stone, knuckles bulging like mountaintops beneath the skin. “It shouldn’t be anything to worry about. Paul mentioned you haven’t been getting enough sleep.”
“You talk to Paul?”
“You introduced us, remember?”
Did I forget?
The clock strikes again, the minute hand sliding into its new position. Maybe the cursed thing is outside of this room, and the sound is piped through the vents. Maybe they can’t place a clock in this room for fear that I’ll smash the damn thing and slice myself open with the wreckage.
I’ve also noticed that Rick’s incisors only show when he asks questions, when his lips part just enough for those bloodsuckers to greet the light of day. If I tried to leave, he would throw down his clipboard and stop me. I know he would.
“Do you consider yourself an anxious person?” he asks.
“Only when people treat me like a display case. Are those golf gloves, by the way?”
“Are they?” Rick acts like he just noticed his hands for the first time in his life. Is he stifling a laugh? “I got them at a garage sale, I think. Is something wrong? Maybe we should discuss escalating again. I understand that my method is unorthodox, but it won’t work if you won’t truly immerse yourself in this, if you won’t allow yourself to feel.”
I can't think. My hands sweat so badly, they might bleed. A backpack has been thrown onto Rick’s desk on the other side of the room, but I can't tell if the black handle poking out from the largest pocket belongs to a pitching wedge or a shotgun.
#
One day, I can’t find any broccoli at the grocery store. Just chopped cauliflower and fruits that I don’t recognize, names I can’t pronounce. A clerk attempts to help me, and I am thankful until she whispers something under her breath—something about me, about squinted eyes, I think. I berate myself on the way home for imagining her toes flattened beneath shopping cart wheels. Maybe it has something to do with her freckled face, which was so close to the face of that girl I knew in elementary school who called me names when we played hide-and-seek.
Come out, Chinaboy. Come out, come out.
When a truck swerves into my lane, my hands shake until I have no choice but to pull over. License plates and side mirrors rush past in bands of light. I slam my fists against my thighs until the skin burns golf-club red.
At the front door, I am greeted by the sound of drinks, by the sight of red wine filling a glass I haven’t seen in years. There’s Paul—saliva wetting his collar—and two people I’ve never seen before, all rubbing shoulders on the couch I dragged across town last year. They could be triplets. Their mouths open so wide, I can spot tongues pushing through teeth. Is that sand on their shoes?
“Speak of the devil!” Paul leans forward, and the perfect specimens on either side of him wobble. “Did you park out front? Sorry, the garage is still—”
“Can I talk to you? Alone?”
Paul staggers after me to the kitchen. “You didn’t get dumplings again, did you?”
My voice comes out blasphemous, all sharp and hoarse and bloody raw. Paul can barely keep eye contact with me as I begin to howl. I point at the empty bottle on the kitchen counter, at the wall clock, at his mouth. He tries to tell me his friends’ names, to convince me that we’ve met before. It goes on and on. Finally, Rick’s name leaves my mouth like a slur. I tell Paul that I don’t like the man, don’t trust him with my guts and soul. There’s no understanding, just him watching me hurt. Watching, laughing, learning. Burning me just to see what my insides look like, writing it all up into a pretty little research paper. There must be other counselors. Chinese ones, even. At least Asian. But Paul interrupts me every other sentence. When I smell the whiskey-stench rolling off his tongue, old bruises hiss and send agony through my forearm. A bag of party streamers drops from my hand and spills across the floor.
I grit my teeth. “My arm’s flaring up again.”
“Ah, I’ll set up all the decorations later. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.”
“Stop fucking saying that.”
“What’s the matter?” Paul closes in. “I just don’t want you to worry. I love you. You know that, right?”
Paul’s eyes are boundless, like the sea or the sky or the curved glass of an aquarium. He’s beautiful. My mother warned against people like him—people who are gorgeous and able to hold their liquor and are so unlike me. He could belong anywhere.
“You love me like a dog.”
I’m not sure where the words came from, but they do the trick. Paul recoils. If I drove a putter through his jaw, his reaction would be no different: nostrils flared, lips curled back so far that there’s nothing to his face but bone. His pretty-boy smile collapses, and regret streams through me like sunlight through a window. I can’t bear to look him in the eye. I’m too much of a coward to witness the destruction I’ve wrought.
Paul closes the distance between us. His spit hits my face like rain. “What did that man say? About your eyes?”
“You know I don’t want to sa—”
“What’s wrong? You remember, don’t you? He must have said something, right? Go on, then. Tell me.”
I look up at the man in front of me, but I don’t recognize him. That brutalist nose, those eyes ready to burst. This can’t be the museum man who came home with me and sat cross legged on my bed, not this man who wants something from me and has no problem taking it. His gaze traces a pattern between my eyes. A bullseye?
I can’t breathe. By the time he finally rolls his eyes and turns away, I think I must be blue. His voice echoes over his shoulder.
“Fucking victim.”
A cheer sounds from the living room as the man returns to his entourage. They chatter, but the words mean nothing to me. I try to fill my thoughts with other sounds, but no matter where I go in the house, the living room hyenas won’t stop. In the bedroom, glasses clinking together. On the toilet, hideous laughter.
The walls are thickest in the garage. That’s where I can hide. And there’s so much work to be done there, anyway. There must be something light enough for a weak little creature to carry—something that makes me more than roadkill strapped to a pair of legs. More than another fucking victim.
#
At first, the garage’s contents don’t register. A lightbulb flickers to life, and I realize that I haven’t stepped in here since Paul started his decluttering project. The space is bigger than I remembered, almost mausoleum-like. And I certainly have no memory of what fills the room. Where I imagined labeled boxes and bike tires stacked to the ceiling, there are instead racks upon racks: wooden stands covering every inch of floor, their claws clutching metal shafts.
Golf clubs.
As my knees find the floor, another peal of laughter echoes from the house, and I imagine the putters and irons and drivers squealing in response. Some are modest, their heads covered by red or blue socks, but some bare it all, chrome curves exposed at my feet. They’ve been arranged with the rigor of a museum, the drivers laid closest to me and the putters farthest away, leaned against the garage door itself. Someone has cleaned this arsenal so thoroughly, it sparkles. Brand names leap out in curved fonts. Callaway. Mizuno. TaylorMade. Cobra. They’re everywhere. If I take a single step forward, I’ll drown in the black grips and notched clubheads that dominate the floor. My reflection swims in a sea of metal.
Paul and I fought so much before we started couples counseling. In the worst of it, I knocked over a glass of red wine onto the carpet. Super Bowl weekend, I think. We argued until we couldn’t speak, until I felt glass in my throat. When he fell asleep, I filled a suitcase and barreled into the street. Everything was black. Something screeched, but I couldn’t figure out where it came from, what kind of creature could produce a sound so shrill. I made it two blocks before fleeing back to my bedroom, my suitcase emptied and pants folded back into squares. My parents taught me to leave things cleaner than you found them. Without a sound, Paul’s arms slid perfectly around my torso, and his body joined mine—two streams becoming a river. In that quiet, I regretted every fight I had ever started, every evil thing I had ever done. Every lie, every nasty thought, every time I stole the blanket in my sleep and left Paul shivering in the morning light.
The golf clubs grin. My hand hovers over the garage door button—the escape button.
But I remember the night, the lonely dark.
The largest club in sight stares at me. It reminds me of howling wind, of the cold lick of metal against my face.
#
Paul’s birthday is never a mere celebration; it’s a christening. I’m so tired that I can barely stand, but I try on smiles in the mirror. Most revolt me, but one reminds me of Paul.
The sun beats down into our backyard, which overflows with wonderful things: blue and gold banners, spotted hats lined up against platters, tables smothered by plastic, a cake with wedding-dress frills. My stomach churns.
Paul grabs my arm. “Tell everyone they can eat. We want everything gone before it goes cold.”
“I have to say something. And I need you to listen—”
“I get it. The garage. Jesus, I’ll clean it out. Don’t go in there, okay?”
Paul brings his face within an inch of mine, our lips close enough to catch lightning between them. He’s taller than me. Only by an inch, but it’s enough. If I say something wrong, I’ll be punished. Not with fists, but with fury and sound. Guests have already begun to chatter outside, and they form a sea of eyes and hair and skin, brilliant blue and sandstorm blonde and coated with plaster. Every one of them could be brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters and wheat-field sons.
The afternoon passes by in flashes. Presents are dropped into my hands, and syrupy words melt into hideous laughter. Every so often, I rush to the bathroom to ensure that my earlobe hasn’t fallen off. I search for Paul’s possibly Vietnamese coworker in the crowd, but there’s no sign of him. No black hair through the strawberry blonde and pale ivory.
The sun drops and shoots orange streaks across the sky. With a stained-glass laugh, a woman who looks like she could be Paul’s sister leaps onto a table. She produces a deck of cards from a breast pocket, and her ponytail falls out from the back of a dark baseball cap. I didn’t know Paul invited a magician. If it weren’t for the cards, there would be nothing separating her from any of the other socialites here holding their champagne glasses like roses.
My gaze wanders toward the lake just beyond our backyard—the lake I used to share secrets with during my evening walks. I used to welcome the cold air, used to wade into the water and admire my dark blue features staring back at me from the water. Now, the sound of waves hitting the shore causes my lungs to collapse. My skin crawls when the beach breeze approaches. The blue becomes brown.
A figure makes its way to the water, barefoot. A woman with black hair walking across the beach, a red skirt dancing with the wind. She reminds me of someone. Not Paul or his coworkers or the party guests or the people on TV.
No, her skin is different. I want to see her face. Her gingerbread eyes.
The crowd cheers. They must be entranced by the magician. Perhaps she is producing doves from thin air or quarters from behind ears. But my gaze is still trained on the woman commanding the beach in the distance, fearless as she walks beside ravenous waves. When her feet touch the water, I understand how perfectly my skin has been tailored to my own skeleton. Every joint and ligand moves in harmony, and my body comes together with every breath—a living chorus.
To my left, a titanium flash.
#
The driver collides with my cheekbone.
A shirt full of nickels. Pennies between teeth.
#
Pain stains my vision. A red sock falls to the ground, and my assailant’s figure blots out the sun. He wields a familiar set of features: a baseball cap, a pair of white gloves, and a golf club designed by a million engineers for maximum velocity.
Rick grips the club with both hands and raises the beast above his head. His brows are furrowed, still concentrating on some invisible clipboard. He’s going to hit me, but I can’t move. I’m one of those strongman games, a lever to be struck with a mallet until the lights go wild. A scarlet pen sits behind Rick’s ear. I don’t remember inviting him.
“Paul…see…”
The golf club tears into a rib. Something snaps.
Paul grins, his birthday cap sitting askew over his skull and champagne-induced scarlet blooming in his cheeks. He turns his head, but I can’t tell if he’s looking at me. I hope he is; I hope he isn’t. A woman leaves to take a phone call. Somebody steps on my hand. Bloody shoelaces, loose change. Rick raises his arms once more, and the crowd pulses around him. Somebody murmurs an apology as they bump into his side. I choke, scream. A trio of men make eye contact with me before turning back to the magic. Blue, blue, blue.
As the golf club slams into my shoulder, the crowd parts enough for me to spot the magician reaching into her own mouth—gaping, endless—and pulling. Her lips form the edges of a new moon. Fingers emerge drenched in saliva, but a parade of cloth follows. The tied scarves that spill from her mouth represent every color I can name: green, blue, fuchsia, lavender, silver, mahogany, yellow. Are they silk? Out of everybody here, I should know. My mother wore silk—or at least scarves she said were made from worms. She must be disappointed. She taught me not to trust strangers, especially ones who take just as well as they give.
The driver comes down across my knees.
