Chapter Five
Chapter Five
After the night of the koalas, I had entered the address of the party on Google Maps and dropped into Street View to see the number of the house out of which Hoang had appeared. I wrote a short letter giving him the details of the book we had discussed on our walk, and which, unable to recall the name of the author, I had promised to share later on. Two weeks passed before I received a reply. He had tried to read the book, he wrote—it was Farewell to the Horse , by Ulrich Raulff—but found it hard to focus, and gave up. I was dejected, because in the same conversation that night by the train tracks he had told me how much he loved Frank O’Hara, and the next day I bought Frank O’Hara’s collected works and stayed up all night to finish the volume. Inno was horrified when I described the manner in which I had consumed the poems, telling me it was like listening to a sonata on double speed and thinking you would “get the gist,” though he grudgingly retracted the analogy when I brought up Glenn Gould’s two recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations . Hoang’s casual admission of defeat worried me. The obvious unconcern that what he was saying might impact what I thought of him signaled to me that he was not approaching our relationship in the same way. With Paul I had been the pursuer: I was the one who had gone up to him at the party, I was the one who followed him back to France, who decided to stay there with him, at least for a while. When we broke up the first time—he called it a pause, he said the distance was too much to bear—I took it upon myself to make sure it was temporary and flew back to him again the day after graduation, betting on a grand gesture. It worked, we started dating again, he even came back to Philadelphia and lived with me for a time, but I never knew for sure if it was what he really wanted, or if he had only agreed because there I was outside the door, pleading. This time around, I had to enforce my passivity, and make sure I wasn’t pursuing someone disinclined to be with me, even if I wanted them very much; I was afraid, in the first place, of wanting them too much. After receiving Hoang’s reply, I became fearful of misinterpretation, and decided to relegate our interactions to the epistolary realm. So now we were pen pals.
I found an old postcard in the office to send to Hoang. It showed the original design for the museum, drawn up in the 1880s, in the form of a watercolor sketch. There had been plans for three rotundas with Romanesque facades, stacked roofs like Buddhist pavilions, and pencil pines standing sentry at each gate. Instead of the sprawling hospital, the multistory parking garages, and the clots of construction cranes, round-canopied trees stretched to the horizon. I flipped it over and affixed a stamp adorned with a yellow flower, from a roll I found in the office. They were non profit stamps, because of the museum; I hoped I was not committing mail fraud. In blue ballpoint ink I wrote his name, added the comma, and paused while I thought of what to say. After the stamp and his address there was not much space left for the message itself. If I omitted his name and my own, there would be room for a longer message, but I liked that we had adopted the letter-writing convention of naming the recipient and ourselves, which had mostly vanished from digital correspondence, being superfluous and quaint.
Hoang,
I’ve never been to the arboretum. This morning I found a possum sleeping in the garbage can outside my house. It was so cute. Did you know they’re marsupials? How are you?
Penelope
As I walked to the mailbox, I flapped the postcard against my palm, wishing I’d thought of something better to write. It was one of my weakest efforts yet. I always made sure to include a question, to increase the chances of a reply, but the two questions I’d included were, in the first case, rhetorical, and in the second, so generic it might be interpreted as rhetorical. Often, since Hoang and I had started corresponding, I caught myself talking to him in my head, telling him about interesting things I came across at work or in a book, describing my feelings about something and soliciting his. I slipped the card into the post box. It was eleven in the morning, and I had nothing to do, because the museum had given us the day off to vote in the midterm election. Dr. Bae sent a staff-wide email encouraging us to “go vote” in order to “make our voices heard, no matter who you’re choosing.” The CR-V he drove to work had, on its rear, a hillary 2016 bumper sticker and a decal of the word trump in black lettering overlaid with a red circle and diagonal slash, the universal sign for no. I thought that if I supported one political party I wouldn’t encourage a random sampling of people to “go vote” when there was a chance that group would include at least one person who would vote for my opponent rather than my chosen candidate. I told this to Apple and she said I should be commending Dr. Bae for encouraging civic participation instead of mocking him, especially when I myself hadn’t bothered to register. I didn’t think I’d been mocking him, and I was curious why it was only Democrats who so strenuously encouraged the general population to vote. You never heard a Republican talking like that, those guys played to win. But Apple always got a little fragile in the run-up to an election, so I didn’t press her. I checked Instagram, and she had already posted a story of herself, sporting an i voted ! sticker on her jacket lapel. I wondered if Hoang was voting, but I wasn’t worried, because he didn’t seem like the type of person to think less of someone for not doing something he did, even if it was something he thought other people should do. I clicked to the next item in Apple’s story, and it was a video of Bloody Marys on a bar top, captioned: “toasting to democracy!!” followed by a string of emojis: a ballot box, a rainbow flag, a blue heart.
Apple was zooming wildly in and out on the drinks, and I could hear Gus saying, “It’s a distraction, it’s performative, but I do like going in that little booth with the curtain.” Apple started to make an exclamation of protest as the video cut off. I loved that she never muted the sound before posting, because people usually didn’t realize she was filming, and so did not alter or cease their speech for presentation on social media, which meant she recorded snippets of conversation much more evocative than the usual staged photos and front-camera monologues. And then there was the voyeur’s thrill of knowing the speaker had been captured unaware, the squirmy tension of whether they might say something personal or incriminating. Of course, I hated to be documented in this way, and remained vigilant when I saw Apple wielding her phone, but it was fun to be a member of the audience.
I decided to treat myself to an early lunch and headed for my favorite Lanzhou hand-pulled noodle restaurant, just down the street from my apartment, next to a little shop that sold Chinese bric-a-brac: embroidered peony wall hangings, rainbow-jeweled KTV microphones, paper calendars, chopsticks in lacquer cases, zodiac animal charms dangling from lengths of red string. There was a new holographic portrait of Communist Party leaders in the glass display of the store. First you saw an old Deng against a crimson backdrop with the five yellow stars winking behind him. Quickly he morphed into a middle-aged Mao, the chairman in the prime of his life, flanked by stone lions, both male, and, half-faded into his right shoulder, Tiananmen, the gate where his portrait now hung. Finally, Mao became Xi, oil-slick hair and Annalisa smile, fireworks exploding in the red sky above his head. I stepped back and forth in front of the shop, watching the faces change. Next to the triplicate was a holographic picture of Zhou Enlai, but he didn’t turn into anyone else.
I ordered noodles with brisket, tendon, and extra tripe, and a can of Jia Duo Bao, a drink that had the double effect of making me feel homesick and at home. Since I was alone, I sat at a round communal table beside an old couple eating their noodles in silence, a spiky-haired guy in a Temple T-shirt who propped his phone against a bottle of Sriracha to watch basketball, and a young mother cooing to her toddler as she directed spoonfuls of braised radish into the child’s mouth. We poured free tea for ourselves into small white cups from the metal teapot at the center of the table.
When I first moved to Philadelphia, I felt out of place in Chinatown, initially dismissing it as poky and inauthentic, and then later, during my brief phase of trying to identify as Asian American, worrying that I didn’t fit in with any of its dominant groups—the teenagers who huddled together in the matcha café and held fervent discussions about manga and anime, the grumpy octogenarians who spoke Chinese dialects I could barely identify, the entire Vietnamese population. Finally I discovered a third, happy state, the one in which I currently resided and from which I hopefully would not stray, a mode of existence made peaceful by my abandonment of both motherland superiority and diasporic insecurity.
I checked Instagram again as I bit into the chewy noodles. Another story from Apple, who was still at the bar. How did she not have to be at work? There was no way her law firm operated by the same liberal instincts as the museum. It was a picture of Gus, and in the background, I realized, was Hoang. I almost dropped my phone into my beef soup. It hit the table with a clang. The spoons and chopsticks clattered in their separate compartments, and the baby froze midway through a bite of mashed radish, gaping at me. I gave him a reassuring grin and picked up my phone. In the picture, Hoang was smiling in a disarmed manner, as if Apple had yelled his name and snapped the photo as he looked up. Susan Sontag was right, photography was soft murder, except in this case, I was the one being murdered. I wished I could jam my arm into the mailbox and retrieve the postcard I had addressed to him, with its ridiculous message saying nothing. I tortured myself with minuscule but excruciating scenarios, like Apple showing Hoang that I had seen the picture of him just seconds after she shared it. There was something about posting a picture of someone who didn’t have social media that felt exploitative, as if you were exposing them to dark forces with which they had declined to engage, and violating the con ditions they had set for themselves. I felt ill. How was it that Apple was in the same room as Hoang, talking to him, learning what he was like, and I was alone, watching it happen? What was I doing? I bought envelopes at the holographic portrait store and went home and deactivated my Instagram account on my computer and then, on the back of a sheet of Chinese writing exercises from the Saturday class Xinwei taught in the neighborhood, wrote a brief, declarative message, sealed and stamped it, and walked again to the mailbox where my wretched postcard most likely still lay. I would ask Hoang to go for a drink with me, like a normal person.
By the time I reached the mailbox, though, I had lost my nerve. I coaxed myself off the ledge of decisive action, taking slow steps away from the squat blue receptacle like it was an armed bomb. There was no need, I told myself, to be rash, to expose one’s vulnerabilities. If he wanted to see me, he would try. I found a trash can and stood over it while I tore the enveloped letter into squares, and then released the shreds into the maw of the bin, watching the scraps flutter like snow.
After the morning’s excitement I was restless and preoccupied, so I joined Inno and Louisa on a stroll through Fairmount Park. They were both graduate students, so they were always free on weekdays, and neither was American, so the events of that particular Tuesday meant nothing to them. We discussed our favorite parks as we made our way to the Japanese garden. I said Zizhuyuan in Beijing, Inno said Hyde Park in London, and Louisa said Gardens by the Bay in Singapore, “because of the electric trees.” I told Inno and Louisa that Fairmount was Philadelphia’s first public park, which meant it was probably the first public park in the whole country. Inno said I was wrong, it was in Boston. I didn’t respond. Boston annoyed me because it was always competing with Philadelphia when it came to matters of historical significance, and I always wanted Philadelphia to win.
The grass on the slopes was still green, but fading. Inno asked me how my father was doing, and I told him about the retrospective at the Whitney, and the new large-scale installation.
“I’ll probably go to New York to see him when it opens,” I said.
“BTS performed in New York last month. They’re the first Korean artists in the history of the world to headline an American stadium show, did you guys know that?” Louisa said. Louisa was in the third year of her PhD, studying the global proliferation of Korean popular culture, and she found a way to bring K-pop into every conversation.
We reached Shofuso, the traditional Japanese house and garden located within the larger park. The house was built in the 1950s and exhibited in New York, a postwar gift from the Japanese people to the American people now that they were friends again. When the exhibition was over, they disassembled the house and moved it to Philadelphia, which for some reason already had a Japanese garden.
“Wouldn’t it have been nice,” Louisa said, after I told her and Inno about the origin of Shofuso, “if they’d given all of us peace houses too? Or maybe apology houses?”
“That would have been a lot of houses,” I said.
Louisa walked around the pond while Inno and I moved through the rooms of the house, admiring the woven mats, the sliding wooden doors with mulberry paper screens, and the tidy columns of bamboo that lined the outside walls. Inno stayed in the tearoom and I moved on to the kitchen, where there was a traditional stove with pots and pans, inside one of which lay a large silvery fish that for a moment I mistook for a live specimen. Inno walked up beside me.
“Look,” I said, pointing at the fish, “a fake fish. Isn’t it so realistic?”
Inno looked at the fish. “I’m quitting my program.”
“What?”
“I’ve become concerned that I’m leading a small life,” he said. “I’ve been drifting without rhyme or reason in the inland sea of academia like, like . . . driftwood.”
Inno paused to usher me into the garden. He looked around at the trees, and then down at the koi pond, and then back at the trees. “You should come back here in the spring, for the cherry blossoms. I’ll be gone by then. But where was I?”
“Drifting like driftwood.”
“Yes. The parameters of my life have shrunk. My routine is set, my path is unchallenging, the stakes are low, the rewards are guaranteed. I am rejecting it all. The world does not need another doctorate traipsing around, attending conferences, flinging little research papers into the abyss of academic publishing. I’ve gazed into it, it’s gazed back, and I’ve decreed I want no part of it.”
“You love what you do,” I said cheerily. Inno made such pronouncements every few months, and there was a reliable script to defuse the situation.
“Yes, I do, but what I am doing with the majority of my waking hours contributes nothing to the world. Do you know how many people read the last paper I wrote, which I worked very hard on and believed—still believe—contains valuable insight into the cultural role of ornamental crops in rural Nigeria? Whatever number you want to guess, it’s lower than that. Two people read it, and one of them was contractually obligated to, and the other one was me.”
“But you know that won’t always be the case.”
“I’m flying to Peru at the end of the month.”
“Wait, what?”
“I booked my ticket last night.”
From the green gloom of the pond, a koi materialized, its bulbous lips agape, begging for snacks. I was so disoriented I didn’t even point it out as Inno, in a wild deviation from the reliable script, told me that he was going to a place called the Parque de la Papa in the Cusco Valley to work with indigenous farmers and learn about agrobiodiversity and traditional subsistence farming. He said that at the Potato Park, which was the English name, he could remain immersed in his core intellectual passion, crop yields, while also doing something meaningful and learning things that he would be able to apply elsewhere when his time in Peru came to an end. The Potato Park had agreed to take him on as a kind of hybrid research-assistant-farmhand. He would learn about the 2,300 varieties of potato they grew there, and, in order to experience the complete cycle, would stay for at least a year. He would improve his Spanish, which was already decent, and pick up as much Quechua as he could.
“I don’t want to live a small life,” he kept saying. I nodded and tried to look supportive, but Louisa returned before I could adjust to the new script.
The walk back was quiet, though not literally so, since Louisa, animated by our visit, provided us with a steady stream of information about the royal gardens of Gyeongbokgung, which had been destroyed by the Japanese in 1592 and then again in 1910. Rather, it was a quiet that existed between Inno and me, the kind of quiet that forms when, although there might be more to say, and it will probably be said when the obstacle preventing further conversation (in this case, Louisa, since she was in the dark about Inno’s imminent departure; he preferred to tell her later when Femi was there) has removed itself, a matter has been settled, and each person is adjusting to the implications of that settlement. I was imagining my life without Inno, imagining receiving pictures of him squinting in the sunlight of the Cusco Valley, brawny and fulfilled; I was preemptively missing having him around, and, latterly, pondering the machinations behind such a decision, whether it was something he had been mulling over for a long time or something that had arrived without warning, and whether I might have predicted it. At the same time as I was having these thoughts, Inno, or so I guessed, was thinking about the way I had reacted and comparing it to how he had imagined I would react (I was the first person he’d told), but, I imagined, was thinking mostly of his trip, of what he had to pack, the phone plan to cancel and the acetazolamide to purchase. He was thinking of what awaited him: the people he hadn’t met who within months would become those he knew best, the fresh landscapes, the texture of the soil, the smell of unfamiliar earth, the upside down constellations. He was thinking of the knowledge that would present itself to him once and only once as something glittering and alive, composed entirely of newness, and thereafter would just be something he knew. He was thinking also of everything he was leaving behind, because he knew dimly that he was not coming back to live in the one-bedroom in Philadelphia. It was, after all, his life as he knew it, his happy constructed life, that he was abandoning, that he would lose and not be able to recover in its current form, but this thought filled him with exhilaration, not sadness: it was the whole reason he was going away.
At home in my room, I lay on my bed and watched the enervated sunset leak in through the window. The light was weak, like the grass in the park, like it always seemed to be after the end of daylight savings, a temporal practice I had not grown up with, did not adjust to for years, and of which I remained suspicious. I was thinking of my old house in West Philly, with the porch and the stray cat and the squirrelly eaves; in particular I was thinking of the small panel of stained glass above the two casement win dows of my bedroom. No other room in the house had such a panel, and no one knew why it was there. I spent a large portion of the days back then lying on my bed and looking at the stained-glass pattern, watching hexagons of light forming and unforming on the walls in synchrony with the movement of the sun and the strength of the wind, which dictated the motion of the shadows of the trees outside. Every morning I sat against the pillows and drank a coffee that Paul carried up for me, which he made using the espresso machine that he installed in the kitchen soon after moving in. That was the second of our two attempts at being in a relationship, and, while it had been better than the first in important ways—less volatile, more mature—it contained a certain quality that proved impossible to be rid of: the quiet melancholy of the doomed second chance, or, when I wanted to be harsh to myself, the stench of failure. Paul always woke up before me, and he always drank his own coffee first, alone, downstairs, while making mine. I did not feel sad when I recalled these memories. I found a soft but visceral pleasure in the specific textures of the days of that time as if they were surfaces I could touch—a period during which I went to sleep every night excited for the morning, excited precisely because I knew exactly what was going to happen, knew it would be a perfect repetition of the morning before and the hundred mornings before that. Had that been a small life? Was I living a small life now?
I was yanked from my reverie by a soft knock on my bedroom door. Xinwei was asking me if I wanted some pu’er tea. Xinwei was very particular about her tea consumption, and would not consume this kind of tea until after a certain date in the Chinese agricultural calendar. We had just come upon the start of winter, which for Xinwei meant it was time to brew warming beverages like pu’er, incidentally one of my favorite types of tea, but one that I could not have in the summer if Xinwei was around unless I was ready for a world of reproach. She was bemused by my enthusiasm for pu’er, because, she said, it was a very masculine tea, and I was not a very masculine person. I crept outside and joined her at the standing table, taking sips from a tiny porcelain cup and listening as she gave me a breakdown of the lunisolar phases of the calendar. There was a feng shui master she insisted I follow on Instagram, so I reactivated my account and followed him. She was appalled that I’d never consulted one. I enjoyed Xinwei’s good-natured incredulousness whenever I revealed some knowledge gap in something Chinese, which at first she had not understood but, after I told her my mother was an American adoptee and my father was an artist, had comprehended more. I knew the important dates, like Qingming and the solstices and equinoxes, and by now I knew all the rest, but I let her run through them anyway, because I liked the way she rattled off the names, which brought to mind an age when people marked time by the weather, having nothing else to go by, and because the weather was the most important thing in their lives: small snow, big snow, small cold, big cold, small heat, big heat, white dew, frost.
Apple was unfazed when I FaceTimed her and recounted my conversation with Inno in the Japanese garden. All she said was, “It’s like he says. He’s a dilettante.”
“What should I do?”
“Just tell him it sounds fun and say goodbye, it’s not that hard.”
“No, like, myself, in life. What if I joined the Peace Corps?”
Apple frowned. “That still exists?”
We checked. It did.
“I can’t actually join the Peace Corps,” I said, after we read the website. “Two and a half years is way too long. I just want someone to send me to a remote island for a while.”
“You’re only saying this because of Innocent. This is a copycat crime.”
“I’m not. It’s not.”
“I can see it in your eyes.”
“What if we did it together?”
“Did what?”
“We could save up over the next few months and then we could leave, travel, dig some wells somewhere.”
“You really think you have the upper body strength for that?”
“We could go to Beijing, how fun would that be? And then we could go to Mongolia!”
“I can’t go to Mongolia, Pee. I have a ten-year plan.”
“But imagine you didn’t, and we just went to Mongolia instead. Wouldn’t that be so cool? You know Genghis Khan and his soldiers used to cut their horses’ veins and drink their blood when they were on the march, if they were running low on food and water?”
“Ew.”
“You don’t think it’s cool? I think it’s kind of beautiful. It’s so intimate.”
Apple sighed through her nose, and said she didn’t know if she was in the “headspace”—a word she had injected into her vocabulary of late—for this conversation. At moments like these, I worried that one day she would tire of me on a permanent, rather than temporary, basis, would no longer find me amusing, and would begin to lengthen the intervals between replies to my texts until we barely spoke.
“You scare me sometimes,” she said. “On the outside you’re like, chill, and eat the same thing for lunch every day, but then you’re like, oh, what if I moved to Mongolia.”
“I don’t eat the same thing for lunch every day. Just like, a lot of the time.”
“And don’t tell me it was just a joke because I remember very clearly talking to you, like I am now, to convince you not to drop out of college. This better not be like that.”
“It’s not,” I said. I avoided making eye contact with myself in the little rectangle contained within the larger rectangle that displayed Apple’s face on the screen of my phone.
“You should take this energy you’re feeling and channel it into something you can do here, in Philly,” Apple said. “I was talking to Gus and he was telling me how frustrated he felt that so many people put so much effort into voting, and then the moment the election ends they go back to doing nothing, when it’s not like the issues they voted for stop needing attention.”
“Isn’t that what you do?” I said. She ignored me.
“Remember when he was telling us about the union? They need volunteers to hand out flyers and stuff. We should do it together. I think it would be healthy for us to redirect our neuroses.”
“You want to hand out flyers? Like on the street?” I felt slightly put off by the “us” and the “our,” because I didn’t think of myself as a neurotic person; maybe in relation to Hoang I was neurotic, but certainly nothing like Apple, who raced through thoughts and hypotheses at terrifying, incomprehensible speeds, and who was constantly introducing problems that had literally never occurred to me before, like the research showing that women with gender-neutral names received more job offers because hiring managers assumed they were men, or the concept of “elbow fat”—things I felt infected by after she shared them, little glimpses into her mind, a haunted, hyperactive space full of objects both ghastly and admirable.
“Yes, seriously, we should volunteer. I think it’ll be good for combating your toska. I can see Peru for Innocent, but not for you. You might be a dilettante too, but he’s a free agent, you’re just unmoored. Do you know what I mean? There’s a difference.”
“I’m not unmoored.”
“Sure, but wouldn’t you like to be more moored? Volunteering for the union could moor you.”
“They’re already a union?”
“They’re like, preparing to start trying to do it. It’s kind of complicated. Hoang could explain it to you. He’s involved as well.”
“Are you trying to bait me?” I said, trying to sound affronted. In fact, the moment she mentioned him, I had decided I would do it, whatever it was she was saying I should do.
“Of course I am. This is the closest you’ve gotten to having sex in like five thousand years.”
“Please don’t feel that you have to be invested in my—” I had to pause to compose myself to be able to say the phrase—“sex life.”
“ ‘Life’? I’m trying to encourage a resurrection!”
Apple and I, perhaps unsurprisingly, had different attitudes toward sex. After I broke up with Paul, she advised me to download dating apps and pursue one-night stands, which she said would accelerate the process of “getting over it.” She said if she were in my position, she would have been scheduling several dates a week and setting up a “roster.” “Don’t you want to get him out of your system?” I recoiled at the premise itself—that by having sex with people who did not matter to me, I could expel my feelings for someone who had. I had no moral objection, it just did not seem plausible. I said I would rather forgo the elusive reward that Apple claimed could only be accessed through anonymous sex than risk searching for it and finding nothing. When you had sex with people you were in love with, at least so it seemed to me, the experience had to be meaningful. It was when I said things like this that Apple joked there was no way I wasn’t still a virgin. But I couldn’t see why my preferences should be considered repressive and hers not. Didn’t mine indicate an aversion to pretense, while Apple shied away from vulnerability? Apple said she didn’t have sex to be vulnerable, she had sex for the orgasms.
Sometimes I imagined telling Paul about these discussions. I loved to hear him talk. I used to ask him questions I already knew the answers to, because I knew he would put my ideas into language better than I could myself. I got so used to it that when it was over, it was like I had lost a part of my own brain, and thinking felt a little lonelier than it had before.
Inno loved talking to him too. The three of us would sit for hours in conversation, and I was often content just to listen while they argued about Ortega y Gasset or econometrics or foreign aid. If the topic was the French Revolution or where to eat for lunch, then we all had something to say. But it was almost irrelevant what we discussed; the garrulousness, and the pleasure we found in conversing with one another, was the point. I was moved when I discovered that Inno, so particular about the nature of his interactions and the people he allowed into his personal life, had invited Paul to dinner at his house. Apple was never as enamored of Paul and his intellect as Inno and I were; though she allowed that he was the smartest person in their bioethics class (besides her), she held a grudge against him because he once dismissed her favorite place in the world, King of Prussia mall, as a “petit bourgeois playground for the dead souls of America.” I was there when he said it; she had simply turned to me and said, “This is why I hate Europeans.”
I was happy with Paul a lot of the time, but my happiness was entirely dependent on him. I still remembered the furtive and almost overwhelming thrill of domesticity the first time I saw him toss his shirt into my laundry basket. But I could also recall the occasions he interrupted me in the middle of a sentence to say that he needed to be alone, that I was a distraction, that I was being too “manic” (a word that made me wince, because of its associations with my mother, and that he had to have selected on purpose to wound me), and how I complied with his requests, and left the room so he could “think.” Sometimes he seemed to just shut down, and when he was like that, I could try as much as I wanted to get him to react in some way—with affection, or interest, or jealous shock—to something I said or did, but nothing worked. He closed the door on me and I just had to wait until it opened again. But the bad days had made me more loyal, and made the good days sweeter, like they were a surfeit I had earned. When I thought of this, the image that came to mind was of objects falling into a black hole. If Paul was a black hole, then it made sense that Apple’s “get him out of your system” approach was never going to work for me, because black holes weren’t objects that you could move. Satellites, asteroids, even planets you could shift if you really wanted to. Black holes stayed where they were, and everything else moved around them. But why had I been so devoted to a black hole?