Everyday People Page 8
The Doppelhanger we never saved. Nor did he ever fall. He hung from our roof for forty days and forty nights, alive though not well.
“Well,” said passersby, stopping to look up at the living gargoyle gracing the side of our brownstone, “I’ll be goddamned.” Some occasionally knocked on our door, convinced that they could talk the Doppelhanger into coming down from his perch. No one succeeded, and no one failed.
Failure would be to ignore the important function the Doppelhanger served in a community locked in the daily lucha of survival. We fed him. We clothed him in bad weather. The staff even built a tarp shelter for him. And soon our carrier pigeons began to return. As if paying their respects, each alighted on his shoulders before flying past him to fill our empty coops again. Whatever message they carried, they delivered only to his ear. And the only words he had been heard to utter were “I . . . am.”
I’m much softer now. The staff was surprised to see me laughing with them when Tomás’s twelve-year-old niece and new member of the household, Irma the Apprentice, said, “I want Doppel to hang out forever so I’ll have me a wishing star.” It was Irma the Apprentice who begged to sleep in the attic, suggesting that each Sunday at dawn, on the anniversary of Doppelhanger’s coming to “die-live” in our household, the staff have coffee hour on the roof under a double sunrise.
Dawn wake-up, a tall order for our hardworking staff, but many were hungry for a new tradition.
Traditionally, Tomás and I had refrained from staff get-togethers. Nevertheless, we began to join the congregation for this unlikely Sunday Mass on the roof, presided over by the silent fingers at the ledge. A group of about twenty would sit on blankets, sharing coffee and donuts and telling stories that might keep the Doppelhanger’s spirit alive and well. He never uttered anything besides his “I am”s.
I’m not sure why, but on what would be our last Sunday with the Doppelhanger, after much prodding from the staff, Tomás agreed to tell a story about his younger days for the first time ever at coffee hour. “When we were in medical school,” he began, “a mule kicked us in the head and took away hearing from our left ear. It left us half-deaf but twice-hearing—”
Hearing a voice mid-story, Tomás stopped speaking and craned his neck in the direction of the ledge.
“Story is one . . .” croaked the voice from the western end of the roof. Tomás walked over to touch the fingers on the ledge as if to surrender his story. “I am . . . a thousand and one lives . . . in one man . . .
“One woman,” continued the Doppelhanger, louder, as if drawing strength from the touch of the twenty people now also gathered around the ledge. With great labor, he began to tell us of the woman he’d once been. A learned woman who walked on foot all over the country, giving lectures on mathematics, literature, philosophy—on anything the people needed to hear.
Heard: On one of these trips, this learned woman falls terribly ill. Somehow she manages to get herself to a nearby bed-and-breakfast. She wants to check in, but when the owner asks for payment, the learned woman turns her pockets inside out and lowers her fevered head. The owner invites the learned woman to stay the night, putting her in the best room available. Days pass, and the learned woman’s health takes a turn for the worse. The owner calls in a doctor, who charges the equivalent of two nights’ stay, only to deliver a grim diagnosis. For a week, doctors and healers come and go, all delivering the same prognosis. The owner cares for the learned woman between shifts at the front desk. Certain that she will not make it through the month, the learned woman calls the owner. No, she does not want a doctor. She does not want water. She does not want pity. She asks for a wooden board, a brush, and ink. As the owner runs out to fulfill this wish, the learned woman has a last vision of a yellow pumpkin flower, perfect from petals to root. And when the owner returns with the wooden board, brush, and ink, the woman who has been learned in the School of Pythagoras draws a pentagram inside a circle. Her dying wish is for the owner to hang the wooden board out front, where all eyes can see it. And the owner is to pay special attention to the owners of the eyes that can read this sign. Those seers, she vows, will repay the owner the cost of the learned woman’s care and thank the owner for the kindness. The owner promises to do as asked. Then the learned woman opens her eyes and dies. The owner pays for a small funeral attended by no one.
Days pass. Business grows slow. On the last day of the month, a traveler stops at the bed-and-breakfast and, while checking in, asks about the meaning of the sign out front. The owner has forgotten about the wooden board, whose symbol has faded under a heavy rain. The owner merely smiles and assigns the traveler the same room where the learned woman stayed. The traveler plans to stay the night, but during the first hour complains about the worn sheets and sudsless soap and cold coffee. The traveler leaves without so much as a tip for the many other services demanded. Days later, another traveler arrives at the bed-and-breakfast. The traveler inquires about the sign out front. The owner merely smiles and offers the traveler the best room. The traveler politely declines any room at all for the night, but does have one request: Would the owner care to repaint the sign so that the true eye can better read it? The owner agrees to do so. And, asks the traveler, how had the sign found its way to this godforsaken place in the first place? In great detail, the owner relates the story of the learned woman. The traveler thanks the owner for the kindness and pays the owner five and twelve times over the cost incurred by the learned woman.
• • •
A woman’s scream. Negra the Pharmacist was leaning over the ledge, her fingers gripping Doppelhanger’s forearms. Shouting erupted. “Clear the sidewalk! Get a mattress!” someone yelled to the pedestrians below, while others begged Doppelhanger to hang on, for heaven’s sake, because the torso of Negra the Pharmacist was beginning to disappear from view. Pedro the Janitor grabbed onto her thick waist, clamping his teeth into the material bunched at the small of her back. Then Berta the Nurse latched onto Pedro the Janitor’s heavy leather tool belt, while Irma the Apprentice held tight to Berta the Nurse’s knees, impelling Tomás to grip his niece by her small shoulders as I circled the breadth of my husband’s chest with every inch of my arms, and so on, until our team of twenty, including one patient, had formed a chain anchored only by the door to the roof, which had just been replaced by Pedro the Janitor days earlier, after a windstorm had blown the old door off its hinges.
Unhinged, however, was Negra the Pharmacist when she lost her grip on Doppelhanger. Gravity inverted. Our collective heart rose in our throats. Doppelhanger shot up to the sky in a vacuum of sound broken a second later by a peal of thunder. The roar scattered us apart, our bodies strewn across the tar as the first drops of rain stung our faces.
Facing me was Tomás, in whose eyes I saw a learned woman, in whose eyes he saw a learned man. Centuries passed in the minute it took for the two learned souls to help the other stand back up. We wrung out each other’s white coats. We triaged the others. We helped fold blankets and collect coffee mugs. We opened the coops and freed the pigeons. We led the staff back inside, grateful that Doppelhanger’s work with us had been done and that ours was just beginning.
MINE
Alexander Chee
I WAS VISITING my mom in the southern Maine town she lives in now, Saco, three towns over from where I grew up. We had gone to my father’s grave, cleaned it, and had our version of the traditional Korean offering there, enduring the stares of the other visitors, and then she sent me on an errand to the local Hannaford grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner, including kimchi, and we’d disagreed about whether I could buy kimchi there. “It’s not the same state you remember,” she said when she insisted. Now as I stood in line for the checkout, holding the kimchi in my hand, knowing she had won, and amazed at being able to buy kimchi in this place I’d left behind so long ago, I noticed the man who came to stand behind me.
He looked familiar, though he was like all the kids I’d gone to school with—sunburned, blond, confid
ent, or, if not confident, still capable of a good bluff. Things hadn’t turned out quite the way he’d wanted, that was clear. He was like a slightly hurt version of who he used to be, but it was also clear he still believed things would go his way eventually. I suppose I was the same. In that one way, we were the closest we’d ever be to being like each other. And then I understood that I actually did know him.
He was from my high school—had been arrested for being a coke dealer, though I didn’t know if he’d done time. I knew his sister better. She’d posed for her senior yearbook photo with her baby, which was more of a scandal for some reason than his arrest, or her actual pregnancy, as if the yearbook were something sacred you could spoil.
I figured, Let’s just begin what happens next, and asked, “How’s your sister?”
He blinked. “You knew my sister?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know your sister.”
It sounded a little dirtier than I meant it—and, truth be told, it wasn’t entirely innocent. His sister and I were not the most likely of friends at our high school, but we really had been friends, and had even drunkenly hooked up, exactly once. It was nothing I was prepared to tell her brother about, but it meant a lot to me. She was the one woman I’d ever had sex with before admitting to her, and then eventually to the rest of the world, that I was gay.
At the time, his sister Katie was well-liked, if not quite popular. She was never trying to get the approval of anyone. She seemed like a sweet baby-faced blonde who still wore her brother’s boy jeans to school under pink knitted ponchos—jeans he’d long outgrown—but then she’d turn every so often, and her eyes let off a coolness, like she was older than most of us somehow. Even in that poncho. Do you know how hard it is to be cool in a pink poncho? She always looked like she’d just seen the makings of a very good joke walk by. That was the look she gave me when I walked in that first day and presented myself for training.
“Stanley Yu,” she said as I walked behind the counter, clocked in, and pulled a name tag from my pocket. “Seriously.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You’re the one I’m training today.”
“Yes, that is correct.”
She bent over laughing, a sharp laugh that also somehow wasn’t completely humiliating. “You won’t last a week,” she said as she stood up. “But we’ll see if we can get you to Friday.”
• • •
I had taken the job because a month previous I’d driven my mother’s car through a stone wall while playing Assassin up at the school. This may have been why she laughed. It resulted in the game being banned from the school forever; my eternal humiliation, for being labeled the guy who took the game too far; and now this job, as I also needed to pay my mother back for the car damage, and the wall repair. As for the disgrace of being her only child, who had embarrassed her in front of the town, I could never pay that back.
I was a pariah back then anyway, a little too smart and unfriendly for my own good, and convinced that not only was I better than these people, I would always be better than them. And by “these people” I meant my whole town. We were the only Korean family—the only non-white family, for that matter; everyone else was white. Each time the kids at school called me a “chink” I would reply, contemptuously, “I’m not Chinese, I’m Korean,” like I was telling them something that could matter to them. My arrogance was my fortress, built to keep me safe from even wanting these kids to like me. I think I still believed I was better than them, though I liked to think back then that I was just being fair when I hated them. But this was not the sort of position you launched a successful high school social life from—it was not even the plausible position of anyone who really was an intellectual superior. It was only a defense, the plan of someone with no intention of ever coming back.
On the morning of the accident, I walked outside of my house on my way to school just as the boy rumored to be winning Assassin pulled up in front. If you don’t know the rules of the game, they are approximately as follows: everyone in the group—in this case, the senior class—is an assassin, and everyone has the name of one other person in the game. Once you “kill” the other person, you get the name of the person they were supposed to kill, and go on to your next target. In our game, the presence of two or more witnesses meant no kill was possible, and all classrooms were safe zones. He had a water gun—we all did—for the “shooting,” and so, as a precaution, I jumped in my car for what quickly turned into a frantic car chase, and drove away.
I drove first at the top of the speed limit as we cruised past the school and were headed on our way out of town, but was soon doing about 65 in a 30; and as we turned the corner of a stretch of road called Devil’s Elbow, because it had caused so many accidents, I could feel my mother’s blue Oldsmobile station wagon slide into the oncoming lane. There I saw the headlights of a semi turning the corner and heading right for me.
I somehow remembered my driver’s ed instructions—“When losing control, turn the wheel into the turn, not against it, because you can’t fight the car”—and so I did. It worked. I went out of the lane and onto the shoulder, and then off it again, until I crashed through a stone wall and came to a direct stop a few feet from an ancient and very solid oak tree in the front yard of someone’s beautiful home.
I stepped out of the car in total shock, which at that point felt like nothing, as if the fear of dying had seared all my nerve endings shut. I walked over and leaned on the very hard tree. From there I saw the boy I was trying to escape, Gerald Meany, pull up in his little Dodge Dart. He stood out of the car and pointed his water gun at me, and—to my stunned surprise—the jet of water he shot hit me in the forehead. I was done, out of the game.
“Alex Rule,” I said to him. The name of my target, now his. He nodded. And then he drove away.
The owner of the house turned out to be the very pregnant ex-secretary of my mom’s, someone I hadn’t seen in years and who I certainly didn’t want to frighten so badly, say, by smashing our Oldsmobile wagon through her old stone wall. The car itself was in pretty good shape, somehow—keep this in mind if you ever need to drive a car through a stone wall—but I was not. I wasn’t injured, but I knew something terrible had happened, something unforgivable. I just didn’t know what exactly. I managed to tell her the story of what had happened, and to my surprise she laughed as I described the water hitting my face. And soon everyone would laugh when I told the story, except my mother.
My mother had been on a boat off the coast of Portland when this happened, at a cocktail party, having what she thought of as a beautiful summer day. By the time I saw her, she was not so much cool to me as calm—a calm supplied, I think, by the knowledge of just how much punishment she was about to bring to bear.
Years later I would remember that my mom had taken a call about a car accident three years before this one, the one that took my father’s life. I’d managed to replicate a call that had changed her life forever. History repeating, as they say, first as tragedy and then as comedy. For our purposes in the story, see me years afterward, knowing I had done a terrible, terrible thing, a thing I wished I could undo and also felt I could never undo, and that right then I didn’t even understand enough to know what it was. In the meantime, I could go to the CVS and get this job, and I could do what I could to try and keep it.
• • •
My duties were not strenuous to the eye. I had to ring people up, sweep the floors, restock items and price them. Count out my register at the beginning and end of my shift. I got a discount and used it on a soda during my break. It was easy enough, but it was incredibly boring. The most strenuous part of the job was that you had to be there. That was what Katie meant about lasting, I understood, after some weeks had gone by. You had to withstand the boredom of it. And it was easier than enduring my mother’s alternating silence and lectures back home.
And, to be honest, I lacked stamina. She wasn’t wrong to think that. I had tried to get a job exactly once before this—a
job I had for less than one day, at Burger King. I filled out the application, the manager interviewed me, he left me to watch the BKU (Burger King University, for the uninitiated) video, and then he gave me my uniform to try on in the bathroom. There, amid the thick scent of urinal cake, when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, in the brown and orange polyester, only then did I realize, with horror, not just what I looked like but what my future looked like. Yes, my hair, of which I was inordinately proud, with its Sun In sun streaks and waves, covered by the horrible visor, its brown polyester washing out my skin to a sallow color, my few freckles suddenly my only distinguishing factor except for my eyes, which were wide with fear. But the collar, the short sleeves, the sad weight of the shirt and the pants—I had a vision of myself behind the counter, the air slick with hamburger and fry grease slowly mixing into the fabric and from there into my being, until I became some new kind of fossil the world had never seen, there behind the counter. There would be exhibits of me, the amazing Korean kid who had turned into a single piece of hamburger-grease-soaked polyester.
I walked out of the bathroom that day, left the uniform hanging on the stall, and drove home. I never went back and they never called the house to find me. In my conversations with my mother about jobs I could get to pay her back, I never mentioned Burger King. When I got to the CVS and was handed the vest and pin, that seemed like very little to bear by comparison. The air-conditioning was a nice break from the damp summer, and the fluorescent light made it seem as if I’d died and woken up in an afterlife where I was forced to do things like count out cash register drawers.