Chapter Three #2
We turned the corner, and I realized we were about to arrive. To distract myself from my nerves, I fed Apple more historical trivia.
“Can you guess what the deadliest conflict of the nineteenth century was?”
“Is it the Civil War?”
“It’s a civil war.”
Apple groaned. “Just tell me the answer, I know you’re itching to info-dump.”
“The Taiping Rebellion. Twenty million people, and that’s the low estimate. It might have been like a hundred million. The Civil War didn’t even hit a million. What’s crazy,” I continued, rushing to catch up with Apple, who had started to walk at a faster pace, “is that they were coterminous.”
We reached the designated house. A five-step stoop led to a green door, the paint peeling off the corners, showing the wood. I could hear music playing inside, filtering out to the street through the walls, muffled, softened at the edges, the bass pronounced and the human voice indistinct, an auditory experience that induced the intoxicating feelings of anticipation and restlessness that preceded one’s entrance into a party.
There were more people inside than I was expecting, and nobody really looked up when we walked in. The living room was unremarkable, except for an unusual amount of koala-related objects: there were posters of koalas on the walls, koala figurines on the coffee table, a limp koala cushion on the sofa, and, balanced on the sill of an open window, surrounded by people lighting cigarettes and leaning out to blow smoke in cursory attempts to keep it from thickening the atmosphere of the room, a small koala bowl, the ceramic animal on its back, arms and legs outstretched, stomach hollowed into a depository for ash.
“So which one is he?” Apple said.
I said I didn’t think he was there, and then watched her scan the room with narrowed eyes, as if she thought I might be lying and was searching herself for a face she had never seen, confident she would be able to recognize him by some other mechanism.
“Well,” Apple said. “Drink?”
We found beers in the kitchen and lingered there, not quite sure what to do with ourselves. Apple started going through the cabinets and commenting on everything she found inside, ignoring me when I begged her to stop. There were koala magnets on the fridge.
Apple shook a box of Cap’n Crunch in my face.
“Do you think they’d be mad if I ate some of this?”
“Yes.”
“Hm. Almond butter. What if he’s a vegan?”
“He’s not. And this isn’t his house.”
“Yes, it is.”
“You said Gus lived here.”
“I said Gus invited me.” Apple tipped her head back and threw a handful of cereal kernels into her mouth. “This is Hoang’s house.”
I looked at the mother and child koala embracing on the fridge magnet. They had suddenly gained a sinister aspect.
“Maybe we should leave.”
“Why would we do that?”
“You don’t want to leave?”
“Who’s leaving?”
It was Gus. He had switched his stud earrings for small gold hoops. Apple placed the cereal box on the kitchen counter and smiled. “No one. Hi.”
I left them in the kitchen and returned to the people and the koalas, scanning the room to decide which conversation to crash. I could hear the man next to me telling a story about a fight he had started on the playground when he was a child. He laughed as he told the story, and spoke of his younger self in a tone of fondness, as if he were talking about his own son. Americans, I had noticed, loved telling stories about themselves as children. The stories often illustrated positive aspects of their personality—in this man’s, he had started the fight after the other boy yanked some girl’s ponytail—and the idea, I guessed, was that the actions of the younger self were evidence of the older self’s positive qualities. I often wondered if I should be doing this too, telling stories of myself as a child, but these people seemed to remember much more about their childhoods than I did, and by inference thought much more about that period of their lives. It was like Apple and her incredibly detailed story about Mrs. Healy. How had she remembered all that? I had had what I considered a fine enough childhood, and I never felt the desire to bring up its happinesses in conversation. The parts of my early life that were not happy, for example certain episodes with my mother, lay similarly dormant in my mind, and of course I would never bring those up. I remembered images, people, events, but I had no arsenal of stories to tell, and I felt no kinship with the four- or six- or twelve-year-old versions of myself, as these people seemed to feel. If I thought about painful memories, I felt pity for the child who experienced them, but I no longer felt like that child was me. Was it that other people dwelled more on their early lives than I did, or did they integrate these stories into their present identities in a way I had never thought to do? Or was it that I was incapable of doing so? Either way, I had no interest in this guy’s childhood. I could hear Apple in the kitchen, asking Gus if he knew how many people died in the Taiping Rebellion. I wandered over to the window, where a black guy and a white girl were smoking cigarettes over the ceramic koala.
“I don’t see why I should do it,” the guy was saying.
“But that’s what they want you to think, that’s what they want you to do,” the girl said.
“Seems like they want me to think that, but they also want me to think I have to. No matter what I do I’m doing what they want me to do, so, might as well do what I want, no?”
I searched for the alcohol-by-volume number on the bottle of beer in my hand, wondering if I was already drunk, so confounding was the exchange into which I had just walked.
“Don’t you think it’s better to do the thing that might make a tiny difference than the one that might do harm?” the girl said.
“Harm?” He repeated the word, sounding incredulous. “Harm? Who am I harming?”
“ You know what I’m talking about, right?”
I realized she meant me.
“Sorry, I think I missed the start of the argument.”
“We’re not arguing,” the girl said. “Mohd thinks it’s useless to vote and I’m trying to tell him that it’s not. Are you registered yet?”
“For what?”
“The midterms.”
“When are those?”
Mohd laughed. “See?” he said to the girl. I began to wish I had joined the conversation about the guy’s childhood instead. There was a lull as they drew on their cigarettes and tapped ash into the stomach of the koala.
“Do you guys know what’s up with all this koala stuff?”
“It’s the guy I live with,” Mohd said. “He loves koalas.”
“The midterms are in November,” said the girl. “It’s not too late to register.”
I was reminded of a conversation with Apple, years earlier, when we were in college and some kind of state or national election was coming up that Apple was getting into a frenzy about, stationing herself on the main thoroughfares of the campus, thrusting flyers at pedestrians and threatening them with public humiliation if they did not comply with her urgings, like the religious doomsdayers who sometimes lurked outside the university buildings, telling us we were going to go to hell for “onanism” and “homo sex.” In Apple’s head I was Chinese, so I was spared her assaults, but then she saw my navy blue American passport on my dresser one day and froze.
“Wait, Pee. Are you a U.S. citizen?”
With a growing sense of dread I mumbled, “Maybe?” Apple accused me of lying to her and reneging on my patriotic duty, but calmed down after whoever she was supporting won the election.
She thought I had deceived her, but the truth was it had never occurred to me to vote, no matter her exhortations.
I’d lived much longer in China than I had in the U.S.; back in college, I’d only just arrived, and participating in elections had seemed like something “real” Americans did.
Over the years I started to feel more American, but it took time, like breaking in a new pair of shoes, clenching your teeth through the pinch of stiff and unfamiliar leather.
“But did you vote in 2016? Please tell me you voted in 2016,” the girl was asking me. I was barely listening, because I was realizing that “the guy I live with” had to be Hoang. So Hoang was the author of the koala situation?
“Let her live,” Mohd said. “Maybe she voted for somebody you didn’t want. What are you gonna say then?”
“I’m . . . Chinese,” I said, so they would stop trying to make me participate. I was pleased with this non-lie. It was a factual statement, after all, made no less so by the fact that I was also, technically, American.
“You’re Chinese? From China?” the girl said.
“Yes. Chinese from China.”
“And you live here?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have an accent,” she said. “How come?” It was one of my favorite Americanisms—they said “you don’t have an accent” when they meant “you have an American accent,” as if their country’s mode of speech was the default setting of every English speaker in the world.
“Oh, you know,” I said vaguely, “TV shows.”
“I was a political science major in college. It must be crazy for you to live in America and experience democratic elections.”
“Abby, you don’t even experience democratic elections,” Mohd said. “You know in China they got trains, and free healthcare. Nobody’s dying because they took dog insulin.”
“I’d rather have no trains than live under an authoritarian dictatorship,” Abby said.
“I’d rather live in their authoritarian dictatorship than this one.”
“You know we’re entering a new phase of the Cold War. Capitalism versus communism.”
“What’s so bad about communism?”
“You don’t think it’s important to defend human rights? America needs to counter China, I mean, we have a democratic duty.”
“So you want World War Three?”
“I think we should be prepared for it.”
“Some people argue that the Seven Years’ War was the real ‘first world war,’ ” I said.
Abby glared at me. “So?”
“So in that case, the next one would actually be World War Four.”
“It would only happen if America made it happen,” Mohd said.
“But don’t you value freedom?” Abby said.
“Who said I don’t value freedom?”
“You, when you said communism isn’t so bad.”
“Maybe I just don’t value the kind of freedom you’re talking about.”
“Freedom of speech? Freedom of religion?”
“Yeah, and the freedom to starve to death on the street. In the richest country in the world.”
Abby whipped around to me. “Which do you like more? China or America?”
I could tell they both wanted me to back them up, because my approval would lend one argument a knockout blow of authenticity against the other. I agreed with aspects of what each had said, and yet I had the feeling they were both wrong in other, more fundamental ways. Which did I like more, China or America? It was the question a thousand Beijing taxi drivers had posed to me before, and I gave Abby and Mohd the same answer I gave them.
“They’re different. There’s good and bad parts to each,” I said, reveling, as I always did, in the platitude. They looked dissatisfied.
“That’s it?” Abby said.
I shrugged.
“I’m not really into politics.”
Mohd laughed. “See? She knows.”
“Listen,” I said, “the koalas. Why does your roommate like koalas so much?”
“Ask her,” Mohd said. “She’s his girlfriend.”
“I’d rather not say,” Abby said. “It’s very personal.”
“Oh,” I said. Surely, surely not—Hoang had a girlfriend? And it was this girl?
Mohd turned back to Abby. “If you can get my boss to give me the day off I’ll go vote for whoever you want.”
“Would you actually?”
“Nah.”
“But why not?”
“Told you. Doesn’t make a difference.”
“You think Obama didn’t make a difference?”
“Fuck Obama.”
The conversation went on like this, so I walked outside, back to the empty street, and sat down on the stoop. The koalas had made me despondent. They were a baffling aesthetic choice, and not one I would have ever associated with Hoang. I worried that I had invented him, that the connection I felt and hoped might be mutual was a figment of my delusion, that our interactions had been meaningless and commonplace, that he lacked the alluring qualities with which I had endowed him, that he would forever be a stranger with an unintelligible passion for marsupial-themed interiors. That he had a girlfriend, and that it was Abby.
Just then, a door opened across the street, creating a bright rectangular panel in the dark line of houses, and a figure emerged, first in shadow, and then beginning to assume more features as the door closed and my eyes adjusted to the sudden change, until I could see his expression and the reflected glare of light that danced in his glasses, and realized it was Hoang.
I stood up to meet him, remembering as I did that I had no idea whether he’d known I was going to be there.
“Forest!”
“Hi! Where have you been?”
“In my house?”
“That’s your house? The koalas aren’t yours?”
Hoang laughed. “My friend Mohd lives with a guy who loves koalas. We’re neighbors. Is it neighbors when you’re across the street, or does it have to be side by side?”
I was elated. “I don’t know. Apple said you lived there. I was so worried.”
“Worried? Who’s Apple?”
“Oh, my friend. She’s in there. Do you want to go for a walk?”
We walked until we reached the river, and then followed its course southward. Because I had mentioned Apple, we talked about fruit. Hoang said his favorite apples were the tart green ones, Granny Smiths. I said I liked pears, but only the Asian variety, which were floral and crisp, and not even shaped like pears.
“That’s so weird to think about, that there’s a canonical pear, to the point where you can talk about a non-pear-shaped pear,” Hoang said. I agreed that it was weird. Then we talked about which shapes we liked the best. I said I loved the word “trapezoid” but was always disappointed when I saw a picture of one, because I didn’t think it lived up to its name. Hoang said he liked hexagons, because they fit together so well, and formed honeycombs. “And circles, we gotta include circles,” he said. “That one doesn’t even need an explanation.” I asked him if he’d heard of Flatland , the Victorian social satire in which shapes are people and live in a two-dimensional world. He said he hadn’t, and asked me if I read a lot of books, and I said yes, but mostly history. He said, “Tell me a history book I should read.” I gave him the name of one I’d just finished, an account of horses in the nineteenth century and their subsequent disappearance from public life, and he repeated the title to himself. “I want to make sure I remember,” he said.
We passed a huge construction lot, empty except for a series of concrete pillars like obelisks, each equidistant from the next. As we walked, the pillars seemed to move without moving, perhaps the effect of the construction site floodlights, which gave them long shifting shadows. Hoang pointed out a big banner that said luxury condominiums were being built on the site.
We reached the railway tracks. We could see a long freight train, sitting still and large in the dark. We walked to the front of the train, the noise of it getting louder as we approached. By the time we were close enough to see the cab lit up and the engineer inside, a man with a white beard and a dark coat and one arm draped over the open window, the noise had grown to a magnificent blare. He didn’t seem surprised to see us.
“Where’s this train going?” Hoang shouted over the sound.
“New York,” the engineer shouted back.
“What are you hauling?”
“What?”
“What are you hauling?”
“Nothing, we’re just bringing the cars up.”
He said he was heading off soon: all that noise was the train getting ready to move. We said goodbye to him and walked up to the bridge so we could watch him set off.
“I love how the lights are all piled up like that,” Hoang said, pointing at the lampposts. I realized we were on the Market Street Bridge. In the distance, the date and time ran across the top of the PECO building in red letters. It was September 30, 2018, and it was almost midnight. The numbers disappeared, replaced by an ad for the PECO Primate Pen at the Philadelphia Zoo. There was a strong breeze, heralding the change in weather. I hadn’t realized until then that it would be October so soon. We leaned over the side of the bridge. We could see the boxcars of the train that was about to leave and the open-topped wagons of the train beside it, which were filled with curls of silver metal that sparkled in the darkness.
Hoang told me that in high school they used to converge under the bridge and drink beer or vodka in plastic bottles by the river and get into fights with kids from other schools. He said one night he climbed onto a train from the side of the tracks and waited for it to move. He waited for half an hour, but nothing happened, so he climbed off again.
“Do you think I could jump from here?” Hoang said suddenly.
“Onto the train?”
“Yeah.”
I leaned over the bridge, trying to judge the distance.
“For sure.”
“I’m gonna do it.”
“Seriously?”
“Can you hold this?”
He handed me his keys, and I put them in my pocket. He vaulted over the side of the bridge, landing lightly, grinning boyishly, his fingers clasping the edge. I stepped closer to see his feet; they were perched on a thin outcrop of ledge, heels hanging off. He twisted around to look at the train. It was about a fifteen-foot drop.
“I think I can make it.”
“Are you sure?”
I worried that he might slip, and injure himself, or somehow die. I would be alone in the middle of the night with the dead body of someone I did not know much about. His family would find out I existed at the same moment they found out that he was dead, and that he had died by doing something I could have stopped him from doing. It would not be a good first impression.
“What if we both jumped?” Hoang said. “Since we know he’s leaving soon.”
“And then what?”
“We could go to New York. We could lie in the car and watch the sunrise.”
“He might get mad at us.”
“I don’t think he would. I think he’d be chill about it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He was a good guy. I liked him.”
“Me too,” I said. I liked to think of the three of us sharing some strange experience that none of us had planned for. Hoang was too optimistic, the engineer would definitely be mad. But I wanted to do it. I wanted to jump on the train with him and ride out to New York. I looked at Hoang’s hands, gripping the pale stone of the bridge. I wondered if what drew me in was that he was not afraid of life, not in the way I was, whether it was fear of the people who populated it, fear of departing from the script, or just fear of too much of it at once. Hoang did not seem to have such hang-ups. He seemed to understand instinctively that the world was, in fact, full of people waiting to be talked to, full of places to head toward, full of things to see.
I decided if he asked again I would say yes. I waited, pressing my palms against the cool stone, feeling its weight. Or maybe I would say it first, beat him to it, call his bluff. But he swung back over while I was still working myself up to speak. I gave him his keys, and he thanked me, and said he’d already forgotten about them.
The train cars started to move. They moved for a long time. There were so many of them. We stood there for five or ten minutes, and they were still passing underneath the bridge. The train seemed to go on forever, like if we stayed all night we would still not see the end. I looked over at the PECO Building. The clock said it was October now.
When I got home I lingered for a while on the fire escape, feeling the cool air on my face and arms and listening to the wind rustle the leaves, which had already begun to drop from the branches. I felt nervous. I was developing a crush, a real one. I realized I had embarked on the evening hoping, on some level, that Hoang would disappoint me, but I’d enjoyed the time so much that I’d forgotten my conversation with Annalisa, and the memories of Paul it had resurfaced. Now I was remembering again. I went back into the kitchen and filled a glass with water from the sink, and drank it slowly, leaning against the wall, churning over the day in my mind. There was a scratching noise, and then something darted out of the gas burner of the oven. I yelped. It was a small brown mouse.