Chapter Four #2
The horses snuffled and pawed the dirt.
The men with the flags started to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Two of the cops in front of me were splitting a mini packet of Cool Ranch Doritos.
My hands were getting colder and colder, and I was quite hungry.
Apple said we could eat later.
I said that I would be right back, and left to get a breakfast sandwich from Dunkin’ Donuts.
I ordered a hot coffee to warm my hands, but the cup was Styrofoam and no heat came through.
I listened to my favorite podcast, The Age of Napoleon , and checked my phone as I ate.
There was an email from Dr. Bae, confirming our meeting.
On WeChat, my father had posted a picture of some ugly purplish shoes, captioned with the crocodile emoji.
By the time I returned to the demonstration, maybe twenty-five minutes later, everyone was dispersing.
One of the anarchists had gotten too close to the police line, and a cop had grabbed him by the collar and hurled him to the ground.
The guy’s friends had jumped in to try and drag him away before he was arrested, and more cops swarmed in, and so more protesters followed.
The men with the flags had paused their rendition of the national anthem to watch the drama unfold.
“Pigs,” Gus spat. He pointed to the road at our feet. Blood speckled the asphalt.
“So what now?” I said.
“Not everyone got away. There’s jail support later if you want to help out.”
“She has a meeting. But I’ll be there,” Apple said, and touched his shoulder. I wasn’t used to seeing her express physical affection, or, for that matter, sincere investment in political causes beyond electioneering, and I found the novelties both unsettling and sweet.
I left, calculating that if I walked to the museum via a slightly meandering route, I would reach it just in time for my appointment with Dr. Bae.
I walked up Race Street so I could take a topical route past the Roundhouse, the pleasingly globular building where the police were headquartered.
The architects who created it had come in second place in the competition to design the Sydney Opera House.
Had they won, Sydney Harbour would feature a lopsided concrete accordion instead of those lovely expressionist shark fins.
The Roundhouse had soft curves and wide stairs leading to its entryway, and I watched it undulate as I walked.
Thin black windows were set in the concrete like sprocket holes on a roll of film.
It wasn’t far from my apartment, and I sometimes walked over to see it, because I liked the way it looked, but now, recalling the blood on the road, admiring it felt strange.
I’d read somewhere that the architects gave the building features that embodied certain positive ideals, believing it was possible for the design to transmit these ideals, somehow, to the Philadelphia police.
I also knew that the Philadelphia police were world-famous for decades for being one of the most brutal police forces in the country, so the design of the Roundhouse had evidently had no effect.
But I thought I did believe that buildings influenced people’s moods and even their behavior, like the old and new Penn Stations.
Was this the same, or was it different? Surely it was different. But how?
On Eighth Street, I spotted some of the men from the rally, holding their rolled-up flags and trying to hail taxis.
I wondered where their buses had gone.
The anarchists were there too, jeering from the other side of the road.
A few cops stood near the men with the flags.
They had swapped their bicycle helmets for black patrol caps; their arms remained crossed.
Taxis kept passing, sometimes slowing down, but every time the drivers saw the two groups on each side of the road, they drove away.
One taxi driver slowed his car to a crawl, rolled down his window, and flipped off the cops.
The anarchists cheered.
I continued walking, turning onto Vine Street so I could see the cars speeding along the expressway and the Mormon temple, which always reminded me of a bank building, though no bank had spires like those.
The street signs on that section of the road were my favorite.
In Chinatown, all the streets had two names: Vine Street wasn’t just Vine Street, it was 萬安街 in red underneath the green, a secret second geography.
Ahead of me there was a massive gingko tree, curry-powder yellow, its shedded leaves making an aureole on the ground.
When I stepped over the leaves, they were soft, nothing like treading on the crackly sloughed fronds of oak, maple, or ash.
And that woodsy musk, another of those maligned scents, like durian, like stinky tofu, like certain French cheeses, that was nothing nearly as bad as people made it out to be; that was, in its own way, enticing.
I reached the river.
Sparrows were hopping around in front of me, bouncing from the pavement to the railing and back, over and over, like they were playing a game.
A man wearing layered sweatshirts and pushing a shopping trolley came past, singing.
I got a voodoo princess, her dark beauty can’t be beat. He wore an Eagles beanie, and his trolley was full of empty Sprite bottles.
I realized, belatedly, the difference between what I thought about Penn Station and what the architects thought about the Roundhouse.
You could believe a beautiful building made people happy and a depressing one made them sad without thinking it was possible to design your way out of social problems.
The architects who came up with the Roundhouse created a building with no edges or sharp corners, so that people would look at it and associate its gentle benevolence with the police, and think that cops must be gentle and benevolent too.
The wide stairs were supposed to be welcoming to the public.
Every feature was cast as a manifestation of progressive ideals.
The architects didn’t just want to make a beautiful building; they wanted the building to be modern, open, and progressive, in the belief that the cops might absorb these qualities and the public would associate them with the police.
But what had happened to the Roundhouse was the opposite of what its creators intended.
The design had not influenced the course of events; it had been influenced.
Now the building was a visual shorthand for violence, brutality, and pain.
For a while I watched the sparrows playing their game, and then I walked along the river so I could cross it by the Market Street Bridge.
Dr. Bartholomew Bae had a beautiful high-ceilinged office with arched windows that overlooked the pond of koi, which I petted as I made my way into the museum.
It was too early in the winter for ice to have sheeted over them, but the fish were sluggish, nothing like their peppy summer selves.
I hazarded a nonstandard topic for our preliminary small talk, telling Dr.
Bae about my encounters with the koi and the trouble I had gotten into in the past.
I didn’t know him well enough to predict his response, but he smiled, and told me he had once spent several weeks conducting a research project at the National Archives outside of London, where he formed the habit of leaving the archives building several times a day to sit on a bench and observe the waterfowl—swans and ducks, mostly—that wandered the grounds.
He always liked, he said, how comfortably they mingled with one another, even allowing pigeons to join their ranks; he also liked that they did not scatter when humans came near.
“Every day I ate my Tesco sandwich and watched them,” he said.
“Do you know about those sandwiches? They cut them into triangles.
That’s what everyone eats for lunch over there.”
Dr. Bae had a handsome crinkling smile, broad cheekbones, and brief, dense brows, like expressive ink splashes.
I couldn’t confidently estimate his age.
Because of his good looks and his last name, he made me think of Juwon Bae, the boy all the girls had been in love with in high school.
Part of Juwon’s charm had been his aloof friendliness, and the fact that he never spoke at length.
A hot boy who didn’t talk much was like catnip for teenage girls, because it meant we could project onto him whatever we wanted, draw thought bubbles over his head and fill them, in our girlish script, with hidden longings, enlightened beliefs, and sensitive, poetic thoughts.
On the weekends we would congregate in Wangjing, the zone of Beijing where all the Koreans lived, and spend hours singing in a strobe-lit KTV chamber at the top of a labyrinthine mall, and then we would go for dinner at our favorite fried chicken restaurant in the basement of a dingy building called Korea World Food City and order a tower of beer.
Juwon only came sometimes, which added to his allure, even though we all knew that if he wasn’t there, it was because he had tutoring.
“Some of the leadership were a little skeptical about putting you in charge of the exhibition, given your relative inexperience, but I’ve been struck by the work you’ve done cataloging the shoes, and I advocated for you,” Dr.
Bae was saying.
“I also thought it would be a great way to expand on our underserved campaign.
We’d be remiss not to give these objects a public showcase, just as we’d be remiss to deny someone with such a personal family connection the opportunity to helm it.”
“Family connection?”
“You were telling me before about your poor grandmother and her bound feet?”
“No, no, I was saying she didn’t have bound feet.”
Dr. Bae faltered. “She didn’t?”
“She ran away to escape from it happening.”
“Ah, yes! So it was definitely going to happen?”
“Definitely.”
“That’s perfect. You must make a note of it in the exhibition. You can mention your father’s work at the same time if you’d like.”
“My father’s work?”
“Your father is Yukon Zhang, correct?”
“Correct.”
“I wondered, if I may ask, why your surname is different from his?”
“It’s my mother’s name. They were trying to be progressive or something.”
In fact, my mother’s last name was Williams, the name of my grandparents, the people who adopted and raised her. Lin was aspirational, a name she said might have been hers in her pre-adoptee life in rural Guangxi, and insisted her daughter bear. But I wasn’t about to explain any of this to my boss.
Instead, I told Dr. Bae how I felt the first time I held a pair of the shoes in my hands, and how it had transformed the objects, whisking them out of musty history and instilling in them a startling, physical immediacy. I told him I didn’t think it was enough for museum visitors to see the shoes on display; they needed to be able to hold them, to experience what I had experienced. Dr. Bae said he liked my unconventional thinking but that it would not be possible, given the necessities of preservation, for the public to touch any of the artifacts.
“Are you ready to take this on, Penelope?” he said. “Do you understand this means that you will be the one with whom the buck stops?”
“Yes,” I said, “I’m ready.”
After the meeting, I dawdled at the front desk, talking to Carol, who had finally strong-armed everyone into calling her Carol, not the Water Goddess, which did not affect me since I had never referred to her as such, in part because anything related to the maternal made me uncomfortable. Carol was in a bad mood because her son had come home the day before with a timber rattlesnake in a plastic container.
“He tells me some kid in his class is moving to Maryland, and they don’t allow rattlesnakes as pets there, so this boy’s parents say he’s gotta give it away to one of his friends. He brings it into school and guess who volunteers to take it? My son.” Carol sighed, and the stream of air whistled through the gap in her teeth. “Now. Would you let him keep the snake?”
“No,” I said, sensing that this was the answer she sought. “Never.”
“Exactly! What kind of parents does this boy have? Who is letting their twelve-year-old play around with a serpent ? You know they shoot venom? And eat other snakes? I’m sitting here talking to you and back home a cannibal snake is slithering around my house, probably biting the hell out of my dog.”
Carol shuddered. I had the Wikipedia page for the timber rattlesnake open on my phone, and I started reading out the highlights. “One of the most dangerous snakes in North America. Three types of venom. ‘Neurotoxic,’ that doesn’t sound very good.”
“I know, I read all that too. Look at the Latin name. Read that out to me and tell me that isn’t a warning.”
“ Crotalus horridus ?”
“Horridus! Hor-rid-us!”
I commiserated with her. My father had a brief snake phase, and I had watched many a mouse swallowed by his scaly pets. I never grew to love or even tolerate the snakes, and worried at my father’s insouciance, at his total lack of what I experienced as a bone-deep, species-memory revulsion to the things he brought into our home. I told Carol this, and added that he once dropped a snake onto my head as I slept, as a joke.
“He did what?”
“It wasn’t venomous,” I assured her. “He thought it would be funny.”
“Did you think it was funny?”
“No, no, I was very upset.” I was smiling, but Carol looked like she was wavering between disapproval and concern. I added, “But I was very young, so. I got upset easily.”
Apparently this made it sound worse, not better. She stared. “How young?”
“Where’s the Sheriff?” I said, to change the subject.
Carol sighed and rolled her eyes. “World’s longest smoke break.”
Soon after, I was on my way to meet Apple and Inno at Apple’s favorite margarita place.
I was the cause of their rare détente: they wanted to celebrate my appointment to the exhibition.
It was sunset, and the gloom of earlier in the day had been swept off by the wind, replaced by a patchwork of soft cloud that pulsated pinkly in the sky.
My head was full of the Army of Italy and Juwon’s diffident smile and the Pantheon-esque rotunda where the exhibition would be set, and I charged alone through the cold streets.
The present, the future, the Napoleonic past and my own felt interlaced with a significance that was hard to define, though it seemed to hinge on the very fact that I could think of them all at once—that the past was made alive by my remembering it, and the present enriched by the deliberate invocation of history.
At the back of my mind was an insecure thought: Dr.
Bae had only chosen me because he hoped my father might stop by and shower fame on the museum.
But it didn’t add up; anthropologists didn’t care about contemporary art.
Apple was already at the table when I walked into the restaurant.
I was brimming with everything I had been thinking about on the walk over, but outwardly this just manifested as a good mood, since these were not impressions I could share without spoiling them in some way.
I asked her how her day had been, and she said it had been stressful.
She said that after I left, they had gone to the jail to wait for the people who had been arrested.
I’d completely forgotten about the protest, forgotten I’d even been there.
They’d purchased food and water and cigarettes and some first aid supplies, and waited for several hours.
Apple, on unfamiliar ground, had felt uncharacteristically shy, and wanted to ask if anyone knew how long they might be there, because she knew she was meeting me for drinks in the evening.
But everyone had seemed kind of hostile, and even though she was sure they were all perfectly nice, and just preoccupied, she hated the idea, which she had put into her own mind, that they saw her as some spoiled hanger-on girlfriend, and were they wrong? I made a mental note of her use of the word “girlfriend” to revisit at a more appropriate time.
“But wasn’t Gus there?”
“He was, but he had to go to work. You know they separate the men and the women? They take them to different jails. All the women go to the Roundhouse, that’s where I ended up. We were ordering pizzas for when they got out, and the cops were arguing with us about it, saying we couldn’t collect the pizzas?”
“I was at the Roundhouse too,” I said. “Well, I walked past. I was thinking that architecture is kind of stupid. And I saw those guys outside, from the rally, they couldn’t get any taxis to stop for them.”
“You missed everything. Even at the protest, when you went to get food, you missed all the violence.”
“Why didn’t you just leave when Gus left?”
Apple ignored me and kept talking, first at her usual clip, then rapidly, each sentence coming out shakier than the last and slathered with her sarcastic overtone, which increased in proportion to her distress, so that even though its purpose was to mask her feeling, its effect was the opposite.
“Everything was fine when you left, and we walked back because the protesters were all returning to the rally, and then suddenly there was all this pushing and shouting.
I literally saw one of the cops shove a girl to the ground, like an eleven-year-old girl.
And this old woman went to go help her and they started hitting her too, like, beating her up.
Doesn’t this sound insane to you? It sounds so crazy to me, it sounds fake, doesn’t it? A little kid and a grandma? Oh yeah, it was her actual grandmother.
They were both at the jail later, they were the women we were waiting for.
Everybody else they arrested went to the other jail.
They had really weird names.
The girl and the old lady.
Like Hawthorn and Rosehip or something, I have no idea.
Are those flowers? Now that I’m saying it out loud, do you think those were even their real names? But it was so fucked up.
The cops were the worst.
Like apart from everything I’ve been telling you.
I tried to go find a bathroom, I don’t know if that was dumb, and I ended up going outside for some fresh air, and this cop was out there, and he gave me the scariest look I’ve ever seen in my life.
Like I’ve never been more certain that someone wanted to kill me, wanted me dead.
And this will sound so stupid but I just kind of smiled? I didn’t know what to do, it was instinctive.
And he was like, ‘Fuck you, bitch.’ And then he walked back inside.
But anyway, they finally came out and the old woman had dried blood on her head, and the girl was crying, but her face wasn’t moving, it was just blank, with tears running down her face, and they were holding hands, and the woman looked so out of it, it was literally like the blind leading the blind, like you couldn’t tell who was taking care of who.
I don’t know if it was worse to see a child getting hit or an old woman getting hit.
They were kind of differently bad.
But both so bad. Do you know what I mean? Oh, Innocent is here.”
She sank into her chair, staring ahead for a moment. Then she sat up and began scrabbling in her bag.
“Hello, hello, hello,” Inno said, taking a seat. “How is everyone? How is our star curator? Did you get a raise? You didn’t even ask for one, did you? Oh, no, what are you up to, Miss Apple?”
Apple was unwrapping a single-serving packet of frosted blueberry Pop-Tarts.
“What?” she said in a low warning tone that Inno failed to pick up on.
“I am alarmed.”
“I thought you loved it when people brought their own food to restaurants.”
“Don’t you worry about all the chemicals you’re shoveling into your body?”
“You mean the chemicals they designed specifically for me to ingest and enjoy?”
Inno snatched the Pop-Tart wrapping and began to read aloud the list of ingredients.
“Xanthan gum, dextrose, baking soda, mm, blue one and blue two! Corn syrup, corn starch, high fructose corn syrup—”
“Corn” was the trigger word.
I flailed at the waitress and started calling out for alcohol before Inno could begin his corn tirade; Apple was in a delicate state, and even if she had not been, it would not be a prudent conversational route to travel.
She loved to complain about America, but if a non-American did it she flipped, becoming defensive and acquiring a knee-jerk patriotism.
She also had an aversion to snobbery, and Inno, after all, was an international snob.
They had already sparred about corn once, many years earlier, in Inno’s pre-frugal days, when he returned from a trip to San Sebastián and Apple had interrupted his extolling of the Txuleton steak at a Michelin-starred bistro to say that she had been to France once with her family and the steak had tasted “weird” and that Europe in general was overrated.
Inno had immediately replied that Apple was accustomed to “chowing down” on corn-fed cattle, whose flesh yielded sickeningly sweet meat, as if doused in caramel, and so of course she had not enjoyed her first taste of “the authentic.” He had added that Apple’s sampling and dismissal of “real” beef made her, spiritually speaking, like a person who lived their whole life in a cave and one day was released from the cave and let outside, like in Plato’s allegory, only to return soon afterward of their own accord, complaining that the sun up there was too bright, the breeze too caressing, and the grass too green.
The waitress did not notice me. I asked Inno to fetch us a pitcher of water and he obliged, since this was the only thing he was going to be drinking.
“I can’t stand him,” Apple said.
“I know,” I said. “Are you okay?”
Apple tossed the last corner of pastry into her mouth and crushed the plastic packet in her fist. “I’m good. Let’s order.”
On the walk home I tried to bring up our earlier conversation, but Apple dismissed me.
“I was just a little freaked out. I’m fine now. By the way, I met Hoang today.”
I forced myself to keep walking.
“You did?”
“Yeah, I went to the Rivebelle after jail support, I wanted to tell Gus everything that happened after he left. And Hoang was there. In the flesh. It was like a celebrity sighting.”
“You didn’t—”
“Come on, of course not. But he asked about you.”
“He did?”
“I mean, Gus introduced me to him, and I guess he already knew I’d met Gus at the bar with you.
He still has no idea we were there to stalk him, by the way, you’re welcome.
I would praise Gus for being discreet, but I think he was just too stoned to remember that you wrote your email on a napkin and gave it to him and then insanely demanded it back.
But yeah, Hoang was like, ‘Oh you’re friends with Penelope, she’s really cool.’ And I very innocently asked when he last saw you, and he said like a month ago, and asked me how you were, and I said she’s doing great.”
We walked on. I maintained a deliberate silence, laying it out for Apple like bait.
“I liked him,” she said. “And he’s cute.”
“But?” I said. I sensed demurral.
“I don’t know, he just seems very nice and normal. Which was actually a relief, because all that stuff you told me about the lab rats was so disturbing. But he’s nice!”
“You already said nice. Isn’t nice good?”
“I guess I was just expecting someone crazier. Not crazier, but someone, I don’t know, more intense? Given that, you know.”
“What?”
“He just seems very different from your previous paramour,” Apple said, giving a derisive inflection to the last phrase, which she did whenever she employed an unusual or formal word in conversation, because she didn’t want people to think her pretentious, and wanted to indicate that she was aware of the register in which she sometimes spoke. “Don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I said, “very.” Internally, I was gaming out a way to respond without acknowledging her allusion to Paul.
It had taken a long time for Apple to get past the way I behaved when I was with him. When I followed Paul back to France and very nearly dropped out of university in order to stay with him, Apple was the one who flew over to talk to me, and convinced me that I needed to come back. I had squandered the reputation I’d constructed of being a reliable, risk-averse person, a reputation I believed was an accurate reflection of my inner self.
“Is that why you lost interest?” Apple said. “In Hoang? Because he’s different from him?”
I shook my head, knowing that she would be able to register it in her peripheral.
“I haven’t lost interest.”
“Then what?”
I remembered sitting with Apple in a café in the Latin Quarter as she told me how many thousands of dollars less I would earn than my degreed counterparts if I did not return to university, how I would regret it for the rest of my life, that if it was meant to be, then long-distance would work, and if it wasn’t, then staying wouldn’t help; and the way she looked at me when I told her I didn’t care.
You’re scaring me , she had said, and I could see that I really was.
It was that look on her face, not any of her arguments, that made me start to waver.
These days I agreed with everything Apple had been trying to tell me.
Everything was good now because I had convinced Apple, and myself, that Paul had been an anomaly, a blip.
I saw how stupid it would have been to drop out, and how inconsequential.
But I knew then, too, how much I might lose, the things I’d miss.
At the time they’d just seemed worthless.
I’d been willing to do anything to avoid losing him, even something unnecessary, something that would have damaged me more than it helped. That was my experience of love: a warped risk calculus, a distorted perception.
“It started to feel real,” I said.
“With Hoang.
It was scary.
I’m not sure I would know how to act.
Like, what to do.”
“It’s easy!”
“I don’t want to push too hard.”
“You won’t.”
“I might,” I said. “I always do.”
I sensed that Apple was putting in a great amount of effort not to immediately speak, and I felt a warm rush of gratitude.
“I meant different in a good way, you know,” she said. I didn’t respond to this last comment, and we kept walking, without hostility, until our paths separated.
In the downstairs vestibule of my building, I withdrew the small key to the mailbox and fitted it into the lock. There was no incense burning, no passing neighbor for whom I felt compelled to put on a show; I was checking the mail. The door swung open. Inside was a single postcard, message-side down in the dull silver box, and a sheet of coupons for a kitchen appliance emporium in South Philadelphia. The postcard showed two swans in green water, one with its long neck held aloft, the other with its head submerged, seeking fish. I turned it over.
Penelope,
They were selling these at the arboretum, have you been? I don’t know why I thought everything would be green, most of the trees are already bare. Still beautiful though.
Hoang