A few years back when I’m twelve and old enough to be alone at home while my parents leave and stay out late, I find some cigarettes and smoke them in the house, then I take two sips each from all the liquor bottles we have in the house, and then I get hit over the head with a premonition that my mom and dad are never coming back home.
I move to the front window, the one that I can see the farthest down the road, and I stare out the glass and watch for their car. I focus on the pairs of headlights flashing by, willing them to slow down and turn into the driveway, crushing the curtains in my fist when they don’t.
I can tell by the size of the lights, or if they are too high up from the road like the ones on a truck or a van, whether they belong to my parents. I do this for minutes or even hours. I wonder how there could be so many cars in the world.
When I’ve decided the worst has happened, I hop up and turn over a wicker basket and watch various issues of Field & Stream and Popular Mechanics and Popular Science and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine go sliding across the carpet in a slick, glossy sequence. I grab the Yellow Pages from among them and flip through until I find Pearley’s Tavern. I take the phone from where it’s mounted on the wall and punch in the number listed.
Someone answers and it’s loud and I give the person on the other end the names of my mom and dad but he (she?) says they’re not there. I flip over more pages until I find St. Mary’s Hospital.
I call, and a woman answers, and I wonder if her name is Mary. I ask if my parents are there except I don’t say my parents. Instead, I tell the woman their actual legal names.
She says, “I’m sorry” like it’s a question, and I ask again if there are any car crash victims tonight and give their names again as if that will clarify.
She says there aren’t, but I don’t believe her, so I hang up and leave the house and sprint around the corner where my bike leans against an enormous tree that Dad once said was older than George Washington.
I ride my bike to the St. Mary’s emergency room, which is only two miles away, so it’s not like it’s even that extreme of a decision. I know that every second I waste is one percent more of a chance that my parents are there, dying. I don’t know how I know this except that I feel it in my spirit.
I pump harder and my quads sear, and the wind rips tears right out of my eyes so they streak over my temples and detach, trailing behind my head. I go as fast as I can until I flash right up to the emergency room entrance.
I let the bike go and it sails ahead, ghost-riding, and crashes into the brick side of the hospital building.
I head straight for the big sheet-glass doors that slide open like people are waiting for me to get there. I go right up to the woman at the desk. It’s the one I was on the phone with, Mary. I can’t prove it’s her, but I believe in my heart of hearts that it is.
She looks just like Aunt Jessie if Aunt Jessie stayed up for three nights straight and her hair turned brown. There’s a bubble of skin right at the corner of her square chin.
“Are there any car crash victims here tonight?” I say right into her face because I didn’t believe her over the phone.
She looks annoyed, as if kids like me were always asking if their parents were dead or dying and she’s over the whole thing.
“May I have a name please?” she asks.
I tell Mary their godforsaken Christian names, for the third time.
She says no and motions to something behind me. I follow her outstretched arm down to the tip of a finger that looks like it had been sawed off someone twice her size and sewn on Frankenstyle. It’s too red and puffy compared to the rest of her hand, and I imagine popping the tip with a needle so it explodes blood everywhere.
What she means with her sick, bloated finger is that I should sit in the waiting room with all the other sick people. But I’m not sick. Her finger is sick, and I think about telling her that it should take its own seat, but instead I turn around and find myself floating to an empty chair.
On either side of me are two other sickos, one who is cradling her left elbow in her right hand, hair all frizzy, and she’s trying not to moan but she’s not very good at it, and it comes out all weird and I have to snap my head away so that she doesn’t see me staring.
On the other side of me is an old man in a seat with wheels—not quite a wheelchair— just a small wiry seat with wheels on it. Next to him is his wife, I guess, because she looks just as old as he is, her hair, skeleton white, flying out in wild licks everywhere like she’s just woken up for this specific emergency. Across the waiting room is a sorry looking guy who’s just crying. He’s alone and he looks too old to cry. Like he should be a dad or something, but he’s just alone and crying. Can you come to the emergency room for just crying?
I don’t know.
Where are my parents?
I’m sitting between Cradle Arm and Old Couple wondering what I’m doing here since I’m not sick. And if Mary Fat Finger says my mom and dad aren’t here, then what am I doing?
I have this superstition about hoping for something wonderful but knowing it’ll never happen. Like a fantasy. Like, maybe at the Winter Dance, Charlotte Berns comes up to me while I’m being a lonely dork by the punch bowl and tells me that she’s glad I came and that she’s always had a crush on me, so I take her hand and leave the gym and we go under the stairs and make out. Or how maybe I wake up one morning and my dad calls me over for breakfast and he calls me something dumb like Son or something, and says that now I’m old enough to know that he’s the heir of a fortune, but they’ve kept it hidden from me and we live in this dumpy-ass neighborhood so that all of mom’s greedy, drunk brothers don’t come hounding us for cash and that someday I’ll inherit the fortune and everything is going to be all right.
Those things don’t ever happen, right? Because literally nothing ever happens exactly the way you hope for.
It works the opposite way too. It’s so simple. I just imagine every possible awful thing that I’m afraid will ever happen, so then there’s no chance that it will ever actually come true. It’s like a disaster lottery. You ever meet anyone that has won the lottery? I haven’t. You ever meet anyone who fantasizes about winning the lottery? You bet I have.
I sit here between Arm Cradle and Old Couple and imagine my parents dying in violent fiery deaths. Through the glass on the far side of the waiting room I can see where the ambulances show up and wheel all the dying people through the doors. I wait to see people that look like my mom and dad on stretchers, EMTs racing them inside.
I imagine a t-boned car where the metal spears my mom right through and my dad goes head-first into the windshield. I imagine a mass shooting in Pearly’s Tavern. A knife fight on the way to their car. I imagine sudden onset drop-dead cancer for both of them. I imagine them running off, deciding I’m too much to handle, and what’s stopping them from leaving me and their old life behind anyway? I have my greedy drunk uncles who could look after me, right?
This last thought is interrupted by two giant police officers who enter the ER waiting room from somewhere within the hospital, and right away I know they’re here for me, so I jump up and start running. They leap after me and I swear I hear one of them call me a little shit, which isn’t fair because I haven’t done anything wrong. I just came in because I’m worried my parents are dead or dying.
I pass through the ER sliding doors again and snatch up my bike which looks like a crumpled thing against the side of the building but still works just fine once I start pumping. The cops are large and have to hurdle over other people in the waiting room to even get close to me, so by the time they’re out the door, I’m way off down the dark streets back toward my house.
When I get home, I see our car in the driveway. I walk into the house and find my parents passed out in their bed, half dressed and uncovered. I think about putting a blanket over them, but I don’t because why should I? After everything they put me through tonight.
There was another night after that when my mom didn’t come home at all. I didn’t know it at the time because I was asleep when it all went down. In the morning my dad told me she was gone and that I shouldn’t expect her to ever come back, and that’s all he’s ever said about it.
Now I just wait and I play my dumb video games and I read the books they give me at school and I go out to the creek and smash lizards with a baseball bat. I try hard not to imagine Mom driving back into this dumpy neighborhood and walking through the front door and saying, “Hey, bud. Sorry I’ve been so long.”
She woke up in a classroom. Chalkboard at her head, corkboard at her feet. As she adjusted to the dusk light—was it 5 a.m. or 5 p.m.?—she discovered she wasn’t in the setting of a recurring dream she’d been having. The ‘I fell asleep at the desk and missed the most important test of a lifetime’ dream. No, she was in a hotel room. The Eaton. The card pinned to the corkboard wall held her personalized key to the rooftop gym.
As she pressed her body against the hotel room window, the humidity moved through the glass and brushed up over her skin. She was alone. She normally lived with two bulldogs and no humans. She remembered London. Cold, foggy, lonely London.
Hunger motivated her into the hallway. Brass elevator buttons reflected a Damien Hirst cow sculpture dissected with preserved butterflies and behind that a never-ending ticker tape scrolling the words: “A More Just World Where We Are All Liberated To Be Our Truest Selves” – Jenny Holzer, American, born 1950.
She remembered the mooncakes smashed into dirty water at the sidewalk’s edge and Tiger Balm in the storefront. She couldn’t remember how she got back in the hotel room. This is what jetlag will do, she thought to herself. She traveled all the time, her body in one place, her soul delayed four airports behind.
She stepped inside the glass elevator that was housed in a glass tower, the windows revealing rolling mountains of Kowloon beyond and red double-decker buses powering through the streets. Neon signs flashing Cantonese words stuck out from deteriorating buildings like brightly colored marshmallows at the end of burnt sticks. Hong Kong. She remembered Cha Chaan Teng, incense at the temple, “Shark Fin Soup Makes Your Penis Small” scratched into the wall as crude street art.
“Good evening, Miss Melinda.”
The hotel staff was gracious, their uniform hoodie sweatshirts and spiked hairstyles offering a unified vision of a curated and controlled counter-culture aesthetic. They knew her name. How long had she been here? She smiled as the porter held the door open for her but her concern at being unable to remember the details haunted her. Where was she headed? She didn’t even know and yet some memory beckoned her forward.
She stepped out onto Nathan Road, turning left at the intersection. She felt the stares of shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and street sweepers. The morning’s humidity made her arms sweat and her chest perspire. The store bell chimed as she stepped into a local pharmacy—one of those superstitious ones with jars of dried herbs and animal parts. She didn’t want anything endangered to rub on her skin. She just wanted a cold drink.
“You’re dressed in black.”
The shopkeeper’s judgmental tone made her stop and look down at what she’d put on to wear. A black boatneck shirt, black linen pants, and black trainers. It was what she always wore back home in London. She was colorblind. It took too long to coordinate an outfit.
“All the terrorists wear black.”
The way the shopkeeper was talking, she was starting to doubt she’d be able to buy a cold drink here.
“I’m not a terrorist.” She felt the need to clarify.
“That’s what they all say. They throw bricks and fire bombs and shut down our roads. All China wants to do is protect us. My family is Chinese. What’s wrong with the young people today?”
“I don’t know.” The little hairs on her neck spiked in worry. She didn’t want to have a political conversation. All she wanted was some cold jasmine tea bottled in a plastic bottle with an easy drink top.
“A cold drink?” She tried the direct route but the shopkeeper scowled and so she found herself trilling the store bell upon her urgent exit, walking down toward the water’s edge.
She passed the infamous Chungking Mansions. The streets were still empty. Where had she been last night? All she remembered was drinks at the Mandarin on the island side and then waking up in her hotel. How did she get back across the bay? She suddenly felt the need to smell her hair, pull at her clothes, sniffing them for anyone’s scent besides her own. A faint smell of smoke, though nothing else seemed out of the ordinary. They let people smoke in the Mandarin bar. It was all easy to explain.
She found herself leaning up against the edge of the Avenue of the Stars, looking out over Victoria Harbour. Wisps of smoke rose up in twisting curls above the HSBC building. The stillness around her made the unease she felt inside even more concerning. She turned and nearly crashed into a man bicycling past.
The flash of movement, his eyes obscured behind goggles, bombarded her. She fell to her knees. Gas masks, flames, bricks, running across crosswalks and through covered walkways. The heat, gunpowder, pepper spray all assaulting her senses. She’d been one of them. They’d called her a cockroach as they’d fired rubber bullets in her direction.
There had been many other freedom fighters around her. She suddenly thought back to the security cameras, to what she was wearing: all black, a gas mask, black cap. She’d been there too. It hadn’t been just a dream. She should have changed before heading out today. They’d be looking for her.
Her watch dinged. She pressed the text message even though it was from an unknown number. A picture of a cockroach appeared. The blankness of what she couldn’t remember made a tear roll down her cheek. If they questioned her, they’d think she was lying. Her mind struggled to find equal footing. What’s left to remember if the past is erased right in front of your eyes?
Passion turned thirteen in the middle of July, and when the first light of this day, this special day, woke her and sweetened the darkness like milk stirred into coffee, Passion divided like a cell, turned into two Passions, a watching Passion, a watched Passion. Passion sensed Passion, keenly and with great interest. Herself. Her self.
Passion thought, Here curls Passion on her side, under a worn sheet, her gaze turned to the paling window. The curve of her hip is slight. The arm hugging the pillow is slim. And there rises the sun. Pay attention, Passion, Passion ordered. Smell the world through the screen, the sour of the mowed grass, the wild candy of Mom’s lilies. This is your day.
Passion, so seeable. Passion, worth seeing. Thirteen, thirteen, Passion rejoiced, and threw off the sheet and raced downstairs.
All day, she enjoyed this significant otherness, this double-selfness. She sat at the kitchen table and ate the strawberries, everbearing berries her mother had gathered from the garden for her, just for her, and Passion thought, this is how Passion appears relishing small berries, this is how Passion looks with fingers reddened with juice.
When she burst outside, the wind caught her nightgown and whipped it around her. She ran under the clothesline, let a billowing skirt sweep her face, fragrantly, coolly, and marveled, Passion is thirteen. Does she look it, do I look it?
When she swam in the pond with her brother and sister, she decided, Passion swims with fierce strokes. Tadpoles, dragonflies, watch out, beware. When she heard the report of a rifle, the boom, boom from the woods, she treaded the murky water and saw herself as the sad star in a movie about a hunter who shoots too close to a clearing, the bullet that reaches a swimmer, the Passion who dies at thirteen. She made herself cry a little, moved by this movie. Then she pictured herself crying and wished she had a mirror, so she could study how she looked.
Later, she sat at the picnic table in her damp suit, her white towel wrapped around her like a wet dress, while her family sang the birthday song. Happy birthday, dear Passion, happy birthday to me! She ate her marble cake with chocolate frosting and acknowledged, Passion loves chocolate. She glanced over her shoulder toward the woods. She wondered if the hunter was still in there, hidden by the trees. Was he watching?
Not once did she relate to the hunter. Not once did she think, perhaps, Passion is a hunter, hunting herself. Not once did she suspect Passion could betray Passion and become the enemy under her skin, biding her time, armed with self-loathing, accompanied by the miserable dogs of uncertainty and shame.
Not until she was much older would she remember the time before this time, the freedom before the snare of self, the cruel captivity of consciousness. Oh, that easy before, when she didn’t think of herself as somebody out there but simply was a self, a self who simply was. When Passion didn’t care who cared, when Passion didn’t see who saw. When Passion was a cool flame in the world.