The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE

CASE STUDY 1: MOO

It was unfortunate that they didn’t make new science anymore. I could only imagine how thrilling it must have been to discover heliocentrism, or DNA, or orgasms. Galileo, I realized, died so that one day Moo could fart on the great man’s picture in my textbook.

“Here you go,” he sighed, passing it back to me like a handkerchief.

Moo was so insufferably thick I once had to read three books to recuperate from a single conversation. He wasn’t popular enough to be a proper bully but he was far too powerful to go unnoticed, much like Mussolini in his early years. My analysis of Moo was as follows: He compensated for a turbulent home life by being a tyrant elsewhere. Meanwhile, being a level-headed person myself, I chose to compensate for mine by analyzing others and occasionally stealing Mars bars from Rite Aid. I also believed he secretly could not read. My evidence being: He never fully closed his mouth, his real name was something of an urban legend, and even his cleverest jokes were all about foreskin. Given the choice between complete social alienation and befriending Moo, I would have gladly retired to a hermitage.

To the untrained eye, I could also be considered a delinquent. Evidence being: I occasionally wandered the halls, I was not particularly kind to teachers, and my clothes were several sizes too small. Nonetheless, this claim would be completely false, because, unlike many delinquents, I enjoyed reading a good book and had an extensive vocabulary. For instance, I often referred to our school trips as academic excursions. One such excursion was to the planetarium, although it was December and the only things people should do in December are sit in bed and think about how they’re going to stop sitting in bed next year. Nearly the entire sophomore class went, with the exception of Teresa, who stayed home to look after her sad, wealthy mother. My grandmother was disgusted by this; she said people like us couldn’t afford to be sad. I had news for her.

The ride on the charter bus—during which we were all poisoned by Moo’s flatulence—was exhausting enough, but the flashing blue lights inside of the planetarium were enough to knock me out. I looked around at my classmates, all drooling at the sight of a supernova. I thought about how easily we could be entertained by flashing lights and moving shapes; I made a note to record Jeopardy! later. Under the guise of going to the restroom, I squeezed through the aisle and made my way out of the theater entirely.

Outside, it had stopped snowing but I could still see my own breath. The planetarium was built on a large field of grass, which was now a large field of white. I stomped around for a few paces and ran into Moo perched atop a boulder. I stood in front of his throne.

“What are you doing here?” we both asked. Then silence.

He moved to make room on the boulder and I climbed over, oddly flattered. He simply said, “Planetariums are stupid.” I concurred. I sighed and the vapor was enough to cloud my whole face.

“The snow makes me think,” he said. “I get real thoughtfullike.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Everybody we know’s sitting in that building right now watching the stars on some slab of wall,” he said. “When there’s real stars all around us, for free. We’re just getting dumber and dumber.”

I concurred.

“Where are you always going,” he asked. “When you leave class?”

I said, “Around.” He kept looking at me, so I added, “Bathroom, vending machine. Sometimes I watch the swim team.”

“That actually sounds nice.”

“It is.”

He grabbed a stick and pointed it at the snow, moving it around elegantly until it formed a mushy penis.

 

CASE STUDY 2: ANDREA

I’d woken up in cold sweats, nearly in tears from a series of unbelievably vivid nightmares, which my grandmother later told me was a side effect of my obsessive cheese-eating before bed. I was wiping off the remainder of the morning’s cheese sweats when my bedroom door flew open.

“Can I borrow a dollar?” Andrea asked, blocking the doorway with her skinny little arms.

“Are you actually going to give it back?” I asked.

“Can I have a dollar?” she asked. I shoved my way into the hall. Andrea was nine years old and already on her way to becoming a master word-manipulator. Sometimes I could tell that people felt sorry for us because we didn’t look alike and because our grandmother smoked. I felt sorry for us because we’d run out of milk. The three of us lived together in a milkless little house. Every night, the walls and stairs would creak at the smallest of movements. The wood was shrinking now that it had begun to snow, and just walking to the fridge would make the entire house erupt into a Vesuvius of groans. If you listened closely, you could make out actual words—words like caterwaul and wordsearch and (my favorite) senile. We couldn’t reach a consensus on what—or indeed who—was behind the talking house. I suspected faulty wood and paranoid delusions. Andrea thought we might be living with angels, a notion my grandmother refused to entertain. She had taken us to church a few times but it didn’t stick. She said she was glad we didn’t take to it, because neither did she. She didn’t like to pray; she liked to make demands.

Our grandmother—she was our shared mother’s mother—took blue pills for her hip. Once, I swallowed a couple to feel something different. Nothing happened, but my hip felt brand new. She was much more skilled at hiding her medicine now.

After I’d recovered from the previous night’s dreams, I joined them at the breakfast table with a cup of black coffee. I’d recently begun forcing myself to enjoy the more odious things in life, such as starting my day with a few sips of molten sludge. I was an intellectual, that much was certain. But now I got to be a tortured one. With a smile on her face, Andrea ripped into her plate of fried eggs. She ate full meals, she sang her sentences, and she always danced on the tips of her toes. Given the evidence, I’d deduced that Andrea was a surprisingly happy child for someone living with the two of us. I didn’t want this to change; we had enough tortured people for one household.

My grandmother blew smoke toward the ceiling and told us some antiquated story about how she’d once known a girl who had gone so long without moisturizing, they’d used her elbows when they ran out of chalk. She gave me a pointed, smiling look—of course. Now we were running late. Of course. My grandmother got up to clear the dishes, and slipped a clementine into my hand. She rubbed my back in a way that said please don’t get scurvy and please do something about those ashy knees and I love you.

Andrea and I walked out the front door and the porch’s wooden steps let out a groan that said anus.

 

CASE STUDY 3: TERESA

My commute to Teresa’s house involved a bus, an alleyway colonized by stray dogs, then a short sprint to avoid her neighbors, who were Russian and also racist. The houses were massive. The mailboxes were painted bright pastel colors that reminded me of antibiotics—Teresa’s was seafoam green, the Russians’ was baby pink. The grand foyer was an abyss of framed family photos and embroidered pillows. They were great fans of the inspirational quote. Her father had once given me a card that said: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Happy 14th birthday from the Goodwins! Like her mother, Teresa was tall and beautiful in a cold, regal sort of way. She was my best friend.

Teresa’s parents were not just rich, they were wealthy. I was beginning to suspect that being born into money gave you some sort of advantage in life. Last year, during lunchtime, we had to discuss our career goals with a counselor. When it was my turn, I walked into a room that smelled like tuna and sat in front of a woman who looked like Humphrey Bogart. When she suggested I consider vocational school, I told her I was interested in something a bit more enlightened and she looked at me in a way that said you are going to be poor forever. I walked out with a paper stamped TEACHER. It seemed fitting: a job where I could be enlightened and poor. Teresa’s evaluation said she would be a lawyer, which made hardly any sense at all.

“It makes perfect sense,” she said.

“No, it doesn’t.” I shook my head. “You don’t know the first thing about law.”

“Well I object to that,” she said, then laughed in surprise. “Look, it’s happening already!”

I was so miserable I could hardly finish my pasta salad, but I did.

We sought career guidance elsewhere. The Woman, whose gender and position were as her name suggested, ran a covert palm-reading operation out of a parking garage facing the river. The first time I paid for her services, I was told that my estranged father, a used-car salesman, had been worshiped by thousands in a past life. I was also warned that my heartline was broken. The bill was what my grandmother would call highway robbery.

We went to see the Woman after school. Surrounded by a legion of Honda Civics, Teresa wrung her hands and tapped her feet.

“Just give it to me straight,” she said. “Am I gonna have money?”

The Woman kept her eyes closed. “Patience.”

Teresa paused for a second and started opening and closing her mouth like a fish. “So is that a no?”

“Just shut up, will you?”

Without looking at her palms, I analyzed Teresa right then and there. Even if having loaded parents didn’t work out for her, that nose was definitely going to get her far in life. She glanced over at me, nervous, in the bright red glow of the taillights. I pinched her arm and she pinched mine.

We both left the garage disappointed. The Woman had told Teresa she would become a wealthy housewife like her mother, and told me that I emitted a deeply bitter energy. We’d been conned. I could have told us all that for free.

CASE STUDY 4: ELIJAH

Elijah’s house was at the top of a steep hill, so visiting him always left me sore. His bedroom smelled like American Spirits and the ocean breeze air freshener he used to try to cover it up. He always acted as if he was being watched. I think he liked having me around.

 

CASE STUDY 5: MR. MULLINS

We had a school assembly at the beginning of the new semester about how we’re all supposed to stop calling each other gay. In all fairness, the whole gay thing had lost its novelty after a while anyway. Our principal delivered this stirring speech—her name was Mrs. O’Reilly, a woman whose face was like a big beige wall and whose car was always breaking down in the faculty parking lot. Mr. Mullins, whose sexuality had been the subject of great speculation, scratched his knee and checked his watch the entire time. Moo traced the letters G-A-Y on someone’s back.

“And don’t go trying to use any of that fancy slang either,” O’Reilly said, wiping her arm across that wall of face. “Because we will catch you. And there will be hell to pay.”

I raised my hand, genuinely inquisitive. “Would you care to demonstrate some of those words for us today, Mrs. O’Reilly?” I scratched my chin as if I wanted nothing more than to get to the bottom of this. I was let off with a warning but had to spend the next week eating lunch in Mr. Mullins’s room.

It all felt a bit like being left alone with a distant relative; he asked me about my friends and my grades, and his breath smelled deeply of coffee. His eyes were sunken in, so I knew the coffee wasn’t doing its job. He seemed like the kind of man you’d invent if you’d never met a man before, like a child’s drawing of their father. I conducted a silent probe of his classroom. A sky-blue poster with the words I’m an English teacher, YOU do the math! Oh I was doing the math all right. A bowl of candy, presumably for his students; a whiteboard with the objective of the day being please read; a notebook on his desk with a doodle of a man who looked a lot like himself, shouting I QUIT! What I gathered about Mr. Mullins: He seemed to enjoy his job a fair amount. The jury was still out on whether or not he was gay.

On day three, he asked if I wanted to watch a movie. We watched something French, even though I told Mr. Mullins that if I wanted to do so much reading, I’d pick up a book. He loaded the VHS player and wheeled the TV cart closer to where we sat. The tape he chose didn’t come from the stack on his shelf but rather from his own satchel, which made me feel embarrassingly special. Antoine, misunderstood and a Parisian (I commiserated with him on both matters), finds himself alienated by his teachers and his family. It was all achingly shot in various shades of gray. At the end of the film, he goes sprinting away from school until he reaches the beach. He stands in the water and looks miserably into the camera.

I wasn’t sure what Mr. Mullins was trying to tell me with this film. He handed me the VHS to keep and I chose not to tell him that we didn’t have a tape player at home. We lived off of basic cable. The bell rang before I could say anything anyway.

I walked into his classroom the next day and saw that the TV cart was still there.

“Got another one for you,” Mr. Mullins said with a smile. “And it’s in English!” He’d become less of a distant relative—a kind uncle, maybe. The objective of the day was: study for quiz tomorrow!

“English,” I said. “My favorite.” I sat down in my usual seat, a chair right across from his desk. The film was about a young man and an old spinster who disgust everyone around them by falling in love. The young man pushes his car off a cliff and plays some Cat Stevens. I liked this ending a lot more than the last one. I was still in a post-movie daze long after the credits were over, and on my walk home later that day, I found myself humming. I began arriving early to our lunch meetings and leaving late. Years ago, my third-grade teacher handed me back my poem about the misery of growing old with the word thoughtful! written at the top in red. Until I met Mr. Mullins, that was about as close as I’d gotten to teacherly bonding. Or critical acclaim.

At our last lunch meeting he gave me half of his pastrami sandwich, which I understood as a token of great respect. He held up his half and said, “Bad for the heart, good for the soul.” I imagined us on a pamphlet advertising the school: Where great friendships are made. I imagined him as the president of a polite, soft-spoken country. I asked him what his slogan might be.

He swallowed and thought for a second. “Um, probably, uh, a vote for me . . . is a vote for me for president.” I imagined it on a T-shirt. We ate in a pleasant silence.

“You should keep doing all that reading,” he said when I got up to leave. “I imagine it’s probably good for you.”

 

CASE STUDY 6: ELIJAH, AGAIN

Elijah had dark hair, which meant he was ruggedly handsome. And he was left-handed, which meant he had a feminine side. He wasn’t afraid to use big words. I met him on one of my expeditions around the school grounds, when I loitered by the pool watching muscular boys bob up and down like muscular ducks. He appeared out of the water like my own little surprise. Standing by the glass doors, I puffed air into my cheeks and motioned for him to hold his breath. I didn’t get to see him again for another five minutes.

He occasionally read the classics, which meant he was sensitive. Once, Elijah and I fell asleep on the floor after a long day of doing nothing and I got carpet marks all over my cheek. Or really, only I had fallen asleep—I woke up to find him on his bed, reading Kafka’s journal. He was under the impression that he’d never experienced anything Kafka hadn’t. I found this highly irritating. That night, after we kissed for the first time, he was turning those pages furiously, looking to find out if Kafka ever made out with some girl after watching Attack of the Mutant Toddlers. Then, a week later, he wanted to know if Kafka had ever spent several hours in the dark with some girl and a flashlight, analyzing a Playboy. Amazingly enough, Elijah teased, he had.

We gave up on the magazine. We’d flipped through what felt like an endless lineup of images—cowgirls and chefs and maids and firewomen and teachers and doctors and painters bent over and looking, jaded, into the camera. I suggested they unionize. Elijah pointed the flashlight at me and my eyes began to sting. I smiled when they watered. I turned the spotlight on him and began making shadow puppets on his face. Turning my fingers into a barracuda proved tricky but it got him to laugh. I conjured up a little dove next, right between Elijah’s eyes.

He walked me home. Each time the light went red and we had to linger a minute longer, my heart melted into my shoes. I willed the red hand to go up; I didn’t pray, I made demands. But the light switched and a glowing white man appeared—motionless, yet he seemed in a great hurry. Elijah bent down to tie his shoelaces and I pretended not to notice they were already done. Flakes of snow landed on my eyebrows. We walked about two steps a minute, like little tokens in a game of Monopoly; he was marching me straight to jail.

The street lights created Ferris wheels in his enormous eyes. Elijah was the kind of person to let himself be interrupted, which worked out perfectly because I was the kind of person to interrupt. Sometimes, like when he walked me home that night, we didn’t speak at all. Only in his company did I have nothing to say, and I was relieved. The little white man returned and we started moving again. The arms of our coats were touching; the friction produced tiny flares and sparks. Here we were, creating new science.

 

CASE STUDY 7: GREG

Greg lived right across the street. Greg had some sort of mental illness that made him develop a British accent two months ago and my grandmother said I was not allowed to question it. It wasn’t a fancy accent either; it was deeply Northern.

I was also not allowed to laugh at anything Greg said, so I was never sure how to react to his jokes. I figured the best thing to do was stare at him until he walked away. He was about fifty years old and lived alone, so I deduced that he was a divorcé, and a recent one at that. Greg was my favorite person to analyze because I knew next to nothing about him. For instance, I assumed his last name was adventurous and European, like De La Fontaine. Gregory De La Fontaine. I could only imagine the ex-Mrs. De La Fontaine was a suburban socialite, the kind of person who owned a vanity plate; they weren’t married long enough to have children; he was only in the throes of this separation for a matter of days before consummating his wild affair with his caregiver; she wore a small nurse costume and they fed each other strawberries. I’d read somewhere once that strawberries were a powerful aphrodisiac.

My grandmother began to grow weak. She held my hand while the doctor told us some words I was embarrassed not to understand. At first, I spent my evenings looking after her, then I eventually threw in my afternoons and—while I was at it—my mornings. She started talking as if something bad might happen, like a fallen soldier in a movie.

We spent an entire night watching Jeopardy! until she noticed a little yolk of sun through the window and turned the TV off. I had gotten the Final Jeopardy twice: Adolf Hitler and Dijon mustard. I began to ask what she thought of my budding brilliance when I noticed my grandmother’s eyes were closed.

“I wish I gave you a better mother,” she laughed. I wasn’t sure what to say. I wasn’t sure what Andrea and I would do. I patted her hand and began to clear up all the used tissues and empty teacups. I wished she would stop looking at me. I wasn’t sure what Andrea and I would do.

I took time off from school, though I hoped they would manage without me, and stopped answering Elijah’s calls. On the wooden steps of our porch, I sat on my hands and watched Gregory De La Fontaine smoke a cigarette. His skin and hair looked even whiter in the cold. The road between us was a miserable puddle of gray, now that all the snow had started to melt. His nurse had arrived an hour before so I assumed the cigarette was post-coital.

“Those aren’t good for you,” I shouted weakly.

With the flat vowels of his new accent, he said, “Right then.”

I watched him drink it in until he reached the filter. He flicked the stub onto the puddle-street and strode away, presumably to catch his lover in time for round two. It was refreshing to see, really.

My vocabulary, extensive as it was, had its limits. I confused words like narcoleptic and apoplectic. They all sounded made-up to me. If only I’d been a walking thesaurus like Elijah. The word for someone like that was sesquipedalian, that much I knew. Analyzing people was fun, but learning felt like survival; I began finding new ways to describe all the little horrors. Elijah was an ignoramus cockalorum for leaving me. My parents were introuvable; Teresa’s were lugubrious. My infelicitous grandmother became bedrid. In time, Gregory became a boon companion. I watched him smoke and roam the streets nearly every day, piecing together new parts of his backstory each time. He was a retired intelligence agent; his diet consisted of little more than cigarettes and strawberries, but more than anything, he craved justice; he wished he could see that vanity-plated car drive past him one last time; he wished he had children. My grandmother could hardly keep her soup down. I once caught Gregory sleeping on a park bench.

Narcoleptic—that’s when you’re always dozing off.

Teresa made her way over to my neck of the woods to check up on me and drop off some missing assignments. I was abashed to have her sit on my twin bed. She asked me if my grandmother was getting any better and I said, “Boy, this chemistry homework is exigent.” She nodded as if she might secretly be analyzing me. From the pocket of her coat, she produced a Mars bar.

“The staff at Rite Aid missed you,” she said. Though I’d only gone two weeks without seeing her, I couldn’t help but look at her like she was an interloper from my past. Just the thought of it made me feel guilty. Then she said, “How’s your imaginary friend doing lately?”

“Okay well—” I scoffed. “You’re making it sound like I’m some sort of nutcase.” I scoffed again. “He lives in 238.”

“Gregory De La Fontaine does?” she laughed. The sound made my mouth taste like pool water.

“No, Greg does.”

Apoplectic—that’s when you’re really angry.

I left for the kitchen and grabbed the Mars bar on my way out.

 

Pat Sajak narrated my chores. I disposed of the empty water bottles on my grandmother’s bedside table. Andrea sat on the floor, holding her hand and reading out the clues. “No, you don’t have to answer it with a question,” Andrea whispered to her. “I think that’s the other game.”

I looked out the window, across the street. He’d gone for a stroll the previous afternoon and I hadn’t seen him since.

Back in my bedroom, Andrea stood eagerly before me. I remembered when she used to do ballet. Now, like some sort of sadist, she wanted to be a dentist. For a second, I let myself think about how I was going to have to raise her right. She smiled at me and her teeth were perfect, though some were still too large for her head.

“Ice cream truck’s here,” she said, extending a sweaty little hand. “But there’s a moving truck blocking it. U-Haul. You Hall. Yoo Hull.”

I handed her a dollar. “Give me back any change. Who’s moving?”

“Mr. Nelson—U-Ball. U-Stall. U-Wall.”

So there was someone in the neighborhood I never knew. I was surprised. “Who’s Mr. Nelson?”

“From 238,” Andrea said. She bolted out the door, toward the fading, tinny song of the ice cream truck. “U-Small, U-Tall, U-Called . . .”

I sat on the porch and waited for something to happen. The home across the street was vacant. A family of silverfish traced the shape of my shoe, back from a winter of hibernation. The trees had turned green again, just for them. I swayed side to side on the wooden steps, hoping the house would tell me what to do. If this were a film, it might groan out something like joy. Or a Cat Stevens song would start playing. Instead, the wood just squeaked under my weight. I rocked back and forth, waiting. The house had nothing to say.

 

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem LOVE AND BEAUTY

My mother loved my breasts, comparing them
to those of Aphrodite
in the painting The Birth of Venus.
She loved them so much we traveled
to the Uffizi,
where I wore a gray cardigan over a white cotton blouse,
in the stifling summer heat,
to conceal my twelve-year-old chest
that had recently gone rogue,
from fat to full, from nipple to breast,
about which I felt nothing but disgust.
We didn’t actually travel to Florence
because of my breasts.

But because—
because peeling beets and potatoes
in a knotty pine kitchen in a Dutch Colonial house
inevitably gave my mother wanderlust.
Still, it wasn’t until years later that I thought to ask,
Why did you insist
we share a bath, despite my protests?
Her response,
To save water
for the other guests,
might have been honest. This is something
I think about from time to time, the way that one thinks
the unthinkable.

LOVE LANGUAGES

When I tell him my love language is Physical Touch he smiles.

“Most women say Words of Affirmation or Quality Time.”

“I like those, too.”

We talk for so long that my nervous sweat dries. I take a sip of my drink and so does he. The waitress is smirky-charmed. First date. How cute. I had dressed up/not dressed up and was wearing red lipstick.

We have already done most of the preliminaries. We FaceTimed each other twice. Once to discuss how we approach conflict, the next to discuss the number-one love song of all time. We mailed each other our nightshirts to see if we liked each other’s scent. Pheromones. There was all this talk of pheromones.

His smell: Clean-cut male raised by open-minded parents. Rumpled cotton sheets.

I ask him what I smelled like.

“Spoiled honey,” he says.

“Honey doesn’t spoil,” I tell him. A useless fact that may or may not help me survive the apocalypse.

Our next date is outdoors. We bike the flat, sandy path along the river, stopping only to drink artificially flavored electrolyte water. We are different in the natural world, awkward in the sunshine. There’s a cramp in my calf. His stamina doesn’t impress me. His ability to ride for hours, so focused on the trail that he barely has time to glance to see if I am still huffing beside him.

In between dates we talk on the phone. We discuss books and our childhood loves. Attachment styles. One night he calls and, out of the blue, asks what’s my number-one fantasy.

“My number-one fantasy?” I think for a second. “Falling through the ice on a lake and having someone pull me out just in time.”

We participate in a polar bear plunge that’s raising money for some rare childhood cancer. Everything seems safe and controlled; the ocean is appropriately chilly. Sand and seawater cling to his eyelashes. Then a wave breaks over my head and when I surface I see I’ve been swept out farther than everyone else. For a panicked minute I wonder if this is an undiscovered love language: lost at sea. My limbs start to go numb and I paddle back right before I lose all feeling in them.

“There you are.” He smiles.

In the car we keep our eyes averted as we fumble into dry clothes. We stop at a quaint roadside diner to eat pie and drink cup after cup of coffee.

The next date we have sex because the restaurant we were both dying to try unexpectedly closed. He suggests his place because he is proud to live in a neighborhood that has moved beyond up-and-coming, a neighborhood that has, in fact, arrived. Yes, I say. I wonder how close he is to the subway. I want to see his houseplants and skylight.

In bed we are chatty and kindly instructive. His sheets are rumpled cotton. My orgasm is subdued, almost polite. That’s okay. The bar should be set low the first time.

Afterward we hold hands on top of the covers. I resist the urge to curl and burrow. I’m tempted to conjure up a crying baby or unpaid bill to gauge his reaction to this vision of shared domesticity. I look around. The skylight above us is small—its darkness broken by flashes of neon lights from the nearby bar. His houseplants are fine, if not overly green and thriving. It’s five blocks from his apartment to the subway. I can make it there in no time.

THE HONEYWAGONS

Give me an eternity of this:
huddled close to you
at a small town parade
as shivering cheerleaders
lob suckers at us
from flatbed trailers.
The wrapper says
MYSTERY FLAVOR
and the mystery is how
it all turned out so well.
My cheek pouched out
with hard sugar,
I suspect blue raspberry,
as impossible as Santa
waving from the backseat
of a Cutlass convertible.
I know I don’t deserve
this—not the rain of candy,
not your love reflected
in the slow rotation
of chrome spokes,
but I am happy to roll
the sweetness of each
on my tongue. We are made
clean here, as clean
as the honeywagons
coming down the street—
their tanks scrubbed
for grand procession,
their cabins waxed
to gleam in the low sun,
a wreath and velvet ribbon
wired to each pristine grill.
Here they come! Sweetheart,
I know I am full of it,
but something redeeming
is almost here. Here it comes.

THE LUCKY BUDDHA

The Lucky Buddha is neither fortuitous nor spiritual, as the name would suggest. It is just a restaurant, and not a very nice one. Although it’s not a not nice one either. It is newly opened, at least—an oasis of cheap green tea and pickled ginger in a sea of dying Subways and froyo. Like the suburb that surrounds its strip mall, the decor demures into its own corners, whispering its class aspirations to no one in particular. It is where the townsfolk of East Waterloo can come for lunchtime gossip, the smell of bamboo chopsticks lingering on their fingers like a naughty vacation. It’s where sushi goes to die and where General Tso marches as if still at war.

Because the restaurant is named Lucky Buddha, the manager placed me in the front window. He purchased me from the internet, and I was dropped off at the restaurant in a cardboard box. I came with a receipt that read HAPPY BUDDHA STATUE – LUCKY AND PROSPEROUS – FENG SHUI FOR HOME OR BUSSINESS – NONTOXIC PAINT. 6.5” x 8” 0.6 lbs. ALL SALES FINAL. Under my happy, fat bottom are the words MADE IN TAIWAN.

Bob, the manager, is a forty-something-year-old bag of sweat and ego who directs everyone to call him “Uncle Bob.” Uncle Bob claims to be Italian, which he says is the reason for his excellent taste. He explains that excellent taste is what led him to a vacation in Tokyo with his ex-wife fifteen years ago. When she finally left him last year, he realized he never stopped looking for Magical Asia, so he quit his job managing a Wendy’s and applied to manage Lucky Buddha. He got the job, one of two applicants, and considered it a huge promotion, a win for both him and his uncultured hometown. Finally something sophisticated, run by someone cosmopolitan. Plus, it was a big fuck you to Janie, who loves California rolls but will be too proud to come.

A week after I’m propped in the window, business is PROSPEROUS, as promised. It’s still mostly takeout with Celso on the line and Ricky on the sushi rolls. They each salute me when they arrive—an inside joke. They clock in and clock out, eat lunch together behind the restaurant—rice and cigarettes. They like to add an egg or make a quick fried rice with ham from the grocery store across the strip. Bob won’t let them cook much else for themselves. He would measure the soy sauce in pipettes if he could read millimeters. I can tell he feels a little jealous when they salute me. I’m not sure if it’s because he wants to be saluted, too, or if it’s because he can’t understand when they speak in Spanish.

How do I see all this, feel all this, if I’m stuck facing out the window? How can I hear, with my bulbous, plastic ears, Celso muttering “chinga tu madre,” as Bob steps over him during a spicy mayo spill? Why is my consciousness split and roaming? To be honest, I’m not sure. I’m not sure how I know anything, or what knowing even means. I’m just a little plastic Buddha. I’m not a real god. I’m not a real anything, but I know every time someone touches me, grazes me with their thumb or looks at me for a couple extra blinks, it leaves a little bit of them behind. A taste of memory, a lick of personality. Maybe, without a real mind I cannot meditate, so I absorb everyone else’s thoughts instead. They recycle and are reborn, a pit stop before dissipating back into the universe. Amituofo, Amitabha Buddha, infinite light, if you will.

 

A month later, Bob decides it’s time to expand the dine-in business, so he hires Lucy Lin-Carmichael. She’s a high schooler looking to save up money for college. The only Asian girl in town, she gets the job easily. Her application interview takes five minutes. Bob asks her two questions: “Are you eighteen?” and “Do you want Direct Deposit?” She says no and yes, then seeing the look on Bob’s face, switches the order of her answers. She starts the next day.

“This place is more cultural,” Bob tells Lucy at her training. Then with a tilt of his head, adds, “You’d get it.” She doesn’t seem to, nor want to, but Bob smiles and nods anyway. He tells her to come every evening at four, to start by wiping down the tables. He hands Lucy a waiter pad and motions her toward the counter, where he shows her how to use the touchscreen register, then pulls her by the elbow to the soup station.

“You know this stuff—egg drop, miso, and beef broth. Standard. But we’re not running a soup kitchen here, so no free refills. Someone will ask you. Tell them no and get them to upgrade for two dollars.” He’s still holding on to Lucy’s elbow, so she pushes her waiter pad into her back pocket, deftly maneuvering out of Bob’s grasp in a way he doesn’t notice.

“Sorry, what are the different soups again?” Lucy asks.

Bob points to each pot as if chastising a dog. He’s irritated at having to repeat himself, even though he mixes up the soups himself three times a week.

“Eggdrop. Miso. Beef broth.”

“Oh, is that why they have different color tape on the lids?”

Bob’s irritation turns to pride. Someone has noticed his ingenious system. He pats Lucy on the back and her torso quakes.

“I knew you would be smart,” Bob says, his hand lingering on Lucy’s shoulder. “Asians really are sharper, aren’t they? And hard workers, too, especially the women—just like Mexicans, am I right?” He laughs and throws a thumb toward the kitchen, where Ricky and Celso are prepping. A pause in chopping is barely audible, then the rhythm returns to a staccato. Lucy shifts her shoulder free with a weak chuckle. Bob runs through her opening and closing routine and passes Lucy her apron. Training concluded.

“Pat the little Buddha as you leave. It’s good luck!”

Lucy smiles instinctively, a habit she realizes will serve her well in the industry.

That’s when she touches me for the first time. I smiled at her during the interview, but she didn’t notice. After all, I am always smiling. She brushes a thumb along my earlobe, gently, hesitantly (I am rarely sanitized), then she’s gone, waiter pad in her pocket and apron wadded in her fist.

It’s such a gentle caress. Most people palm me like a doorknob or chip at my peeling gold paint with their fingernails. Lucy’s touch is not like that. It reminds me of when I was packed away at the factory in Changhua, Taiwan, enveloped in a dark box amongst layers and layers of tissue paper. It feels almost like home, if I ever had one. That must be how she touches everything: the flimsy napkins, the sticky soy sauce bottles, even the fake, dead-eyed orchids at the checkout counter. All will be blessed during her time at Lucky Buddha. A touch like that is so rare in this town.

And it lingers. Lucy’s worries and dreams flow into the empty chambers of my head and body, pushing everything else out. She’s excited to make money, but worried. Worried about Bob’s heavy hand. Worried about whether she’ll do a good job. Whether she’ll get good tips, and whether she’ll be able to keep on top of her homework and college applications. Then, beneath all the worry, genuine care. She’s ready to make people happy with a secret soup refill. She’s ready to save up enough cash to support herself, to get out of this town and its suffocating strip malls. To find a place to breathe.

I am not a real Buddha, not a real anything, really, but I felt at that moment, with Lucy’s finger on my ear and her thoughts in my mind, perhaps I do have a mind. Perhaps I really am a being, maybe even a lucky one. Perhaps I, too, can think—and not think—my way to nirvana.

 

So that’s our team, at least for a while. Me and Lucy, Celso and Ricky, and Bob. The days start to have a rhythm, even if they never rhyme. Bob pets me on the head, saying, “Let’s see how lucky you make me, little buddy.” Then he laughs and sees if anyone notices his joke this time. It makes me feel greasy for hours, his touch penetrating my existence, filling my plastic soul with his desperation and arrogance. Then there’s Lucy, with her gentle touch and quiet eyes that seem to open, layer by layer, when she looks at you, like a lotus coming into bloom. Her quiet voice is a prayer, even as she reads the specials. Sometimes she reads them out to me, just to me, to practice.

On her meager “lunch” breaks (taken around four thirty before service starts), Lucy talks to me. It started as phrases at first, like “hello, little guy!” or even the occasional line from a stale fortune cookie. Then she really started talking. Musings about her family, mutterings about Bob, mild complaints about the kids at school, and how she can’t seem to relate to anyone. Perhaps she’s really talking to herself, but I listen intently. Lucy speaks softly, as if afraid to be heard, or afraid Uncle Bob will take it as a chance to conquer the conversation. Other times, she doesn’t say anything at all, just speaks to me through her mind, our psychic connection filling the silence. I can never really answer her, but I sense she understands me.

From our chats, I learn that Lucy’s father is white and that she has a cousin on that side named Kaylee. Kaylee has red curls and works at Hardee Joe’s, a diner-themed diner across the plaza. Through the window, Lucy can see Kaylee greeting guests and pulling menus out of her uniform—a yellow gingham dress with a frilled white apron. Sometimes they’ll wave to each other, a quick spasm before rushing back to work. I learn that Lucy had tried to apply for a job at Hardee Joe’s, but was told she “wasn’t what they were looking for,” so Kaylee suggested the Lucky Buddha instead. She told Lucy they would have to hire her there. And she was right. She was exactly what Bob was looking for.

He was lucky to have her too. It had taken Lucy about twenty minutes to memorize Lucky Buddha’s menu. Kung Pao Chicken. Spring Rolls. California Rolls. Dumplings: veggie or pork. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Some of the items even reminded her, like a caricature, of the dishes she had eaten with her mom in Taiwan, back when she used to request summer visits after the divorce. But then her mother remarried, and so did her father, and Lucy started spending fewer summers in Taiwan and more summers riding in the back of Kaylee’s different boyfriends’ different cars. The Kyles. The Joeys. The Jacobs. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

 

Lucy’s here an hour early, and she’s irritated. As usual, she stops by my window for a lucky pat, but this time she picks me up. She holds me in her hands, passing me between her hot fingers. I hope the rhythm calms her down.

Before work, Kaylee convinced Lucy to come along in another one of her boyfriend’s cars—this time a truck—to ride around with her gaggle of modelesque nicotine addicts. She said something about Lucy always hiding herself away, slugging away at her homework or always working, so Lucy relented. It was a Saturday, and she had nothing against flavored cigarillos blowing in her face. But Kaylee’s boyfriend Jojo brought along a foreign exchange student from Taichung, who he’d been leading around school and town, showing off like a new pet he could feed Sour Patch Kids and Bud.

“Konichiwa!” Jojo announced. “Here’s Avery. You two should talk foreign together.” Avery smiled politely, mostly because of limited English, and clearly had no idea what was going on. Lucy tried to start up a conversation, using her broken Mandarin, but it was too tiresome, and they both eventually fell into grateful silence, sliding into each other as Jojo swerved with his hand on Kaylee’s thigh. Lucy then asked to be dropped off, saying she had work and ended up here an hour early for her shift.

Her emotions bleed into me as she shuffles me around. She wants to get out of East Waterloo. Maybe she can move to Beijing, live with her mom and new husband, the one who calls her “your mixed kid” and talks about her as if she doesn’t understand Chinese. It would be better than staying here with her “white privilege doesn’t exist” father and his “boys love something exotic” girlfriend Leann. Or maybe she could get into a college somewhere, a city. But would they even accept her? What could she write in her application essay? Who was she anyway? Maybe all she knew of her Asian self was pieced together through The Joy Luck Club and the international aisle. She would come off as a whiny, clueless wannabe, like her Taiwan cousins said she was. A confused mongrel that didn’t belong anywhere. Half-and-half and somehow never whole. Never quite enough of anything but different.

She places me back in the window.

“Wherever I go, it’ll be better than this, right?” she asks, and I wish I could answer her. Truth is, I don’t know the answer. I’m just a plastic Buddha, molded in the shape of something that was once real, or at least believed to be real, thousands of years ago. I’m MADE IN TAIWAN, and like Lucy, my only memories of the motherland are fuzzy: the steel walls of a manufacturing plant, the wrinkle-fingered woman who painted my frozen smile from cheek to cheek, her mind drifting to the bento box she would have for lunch. Then I awoke here, at Lucky Buddha, where I came back to consciousness with the touch of hungry American fingers. Now I speak the language they speak and hear the thoughts they think, even as they sicken and confuse me. It’s like a missed step on the stairs, over and over. But still, it’s the only consciousness I have. I’m as Asian as you are, Lucy. I guess I’m as not-Asian as you are too.

 

Celso and Ricky make lunch for Lucy, their usual fried rice with rotating ingredients. They can cook with extra rice today, since Uncle Bob’s at his usual spot, the Subway next door. His frugal eyes are focused on a Meatball Marinara Footlong, not whether his employees are sneaking sixty-five cents worth of food.

Lucy loves the fried rice, so Celso and Ricky make her a bowl every time. Celso amps up the restaurant’s recipe, while Ricky whips up the Peruvian chaufa his mother used to make. Lucy usually eats at the server’s station. They would ask Lucy to join them out back, but they’re worried about the secondhand smoke from their cigarettes, which they desperately need. Lucy doesn’t mind. She likes the alone time.

Since it’s not really lunch and more of a pre-shift dinner, Lucy starts bringing iced coffees for Celso and Ricky. She’s only there in the evenings after school, but Celso and Ricky are there all day, even during the slow, takeout-only lunch hours. She feels it’s the least she can do.

One day, Lucy brings spam and eggs for the fried rice. Then another day, she brings canned corn. Green peppers. Even Hot Cheetos from the school vending machine. It quickly becomes a game of “Will It Fried Rice?” and somehow, Celso and Ricky produce a delicious meal every time. They start to compete against each other, asking Lucy to rank their rices.

The same day that the Subway closes for inspection, Lucy comes in with pineapple and shrimp. Bob, pouting at an empty table, makes a face as Celso whips the ingredients around in the wok. He looks so pathetic they give him a bowl anyway.

Bob actually likes it and adds the dish to the menu.

Some days are like this. Something reverberates, like a Tibetan prayer bell, and it all makes sense, or at least moves like it does, and I can feel it all from my window. Tomorrow, Bob will sneer something about immigration papers to Ricky. He’ll go back to Subway, reopened with a slightly lower sanitation grade. Tomorrow, an elderly customer will tell Lucy “this is pretty clean for an ethnic place,” then complain about using chopsticks.

But today, everyone enjoys pineapple and shrimp fried rice: Bob in his pouty corner, Celso and Ricky with their cigarettes, and Lucy at her server’s station. Rating: 11/10.

 

Guests sometimes inquire if Lucy is Chinese, Japanese, or somehow related to the owner. She tells them that the owner is Global Food Experience, Inc., but that no, she is not related to any of the staff. They compliment her English (her native language). She smiles and nods politely. They tip okay, except when they don’t. She still smiles and nods politely. They always love the food and look Lucy pointedly in the eyes when they say, “So glad there’s finally something authentic in town!” And in spite of herself, Lucy nods and tells them, “Well, the manager is Italian,” then buses away their dishes before they can react, smiling and nodding all the while.

Uncle Bob does consider himself to be a cosmopolitan contribution to the town. His latest cultural enhancement to the restaurant is the East Waterloo Roll: cream cheese, imitation crab, and avocado, battered and deep-fried. He has Lucy draw up a flier for it—a sketch using green, pink, and orange highlighters—which he sticks on a placard right next to me. What makes the roll representative of East Waterloo is the little paw print of wasabi stamped on to every plate. The local high school mascot is the Tigers. That’s where Lucy goes, where her cousin Kaylee went until she dropped out, and where Uncle Bob went before he was anyone’s uncle anything. Sometimes, when Lucy sees the sign, she laughs, in a way that sounds like a cough. I laugh along with her.

 

Like the Lucky Buddha, Lucy herself is not fortuitous, nor is she spiritual, something that perplexes her father’s girlfriend Leann and her Bible study group. Leann believes Christ and sullen youths make a wonderful pairing, as divine as yum yum sauce on Teriyaki Chicken, and that Lucy is being stubborn. If only she had raised Lucy, she could have saved her from a life of heathenism. When Leann runs the Bible study, she holds the meeting at Lucky Buddha, so she doesn’t have to tip. She even hands out flyers: COME MEET JESUS AT THE LUCKY BUDDHA.

Lucy will say, “It’s not that I hate Leann . . .” but I do. I hate Leann and her Bible group. I hate how her face is too tan for her neck. I hate how she tells Lucy she’s so skinny—and how her little Chinese momma must be skinny, too, right? I hate her stupid food blog that no one reads, that’s 85 percent mayonnaise anyway. How everything she cooks makes Lucy feel ill. I hate how, when she gets drunk, she starts talking about Lucy’s mother, about how she honeypotted her father for a green card and an anchor baby. How she used her exotic body to get what she wanted, pulling a good American man, her blameless Timothy, from the path of Jesus our Lord and Savior.

 

Unlike the Lucky Buddha, which belongs perfectly in East Waterloo, Lucy knows she doesn’t. Sometimes she feels more like Avery, the foreign exchange student from Taichung. Not because they share a last name, and Taiwanese descent, but because from the second Avery arrived, his countdown to leave began. Avery was there for an exchange, and Lucy feels the same (except that her exchange has lasted a lifetime). Ever since she can remember, East Waterloo has been where her house is, where her father is, but has never felt like home. Ever since she can remember understanding what college is, she knew she would go away for it.

And now she’s just waiting, hoping to hear back from UC Berkeley, or that small liberal arts college on the East Coast, highly ranked, with full funding in grants, and an Asian student population of 15.6 percent. Lucy reads the stats on her phone, which Uncle Bob reads over her shoulder. Uncle Bob is not good with personal space.

“Never heard of it. You should go to State,” Bob says. Then, patting his glossy forehead with a kitchen towel, “If you can get in, of course. I almost went, but my ex-wife—Janie—she made a fuss. Didn’t want me falling for an out-of-state city girl.” He hands Lucy the dish towel, and she holds it away with two fingers. “Speaking of which, prep the cocktail glasses for the Old-Fashioned Geisha. It’s on the specials tonight. Fancy. Real bourbon and everything.”

Lucy nods, smiles, and does as she’s told. For now, she still needs East Waterloo. Still needs Lucky Buddha and Uncle Bob’s sweat-stained envelopes of cash. She will need these paychecks, these tips, for college, so she won’t have to come back. So she’ll never need us again. Or at least so she hopes. She won’t find out until April. For now, she clutches her warm, fake wasabi-stained salary, and imagines the feel of an acceptance letter: cool to the touch, thick, paper-permanent.

 

It’s a Wednesday, and Lucy’s prepping for her shift when an article pops up on her phone. She reads it, and I read it through her. I can feel her spine tense, her breath captive in her chest. They’re calling it the Asian Spa Shooting. Two dead, suspect at large. The phrase “hate crime” is dropped, but meekly, more of a suggestion. As she reads, something happens, something new. I’m not just in Lucy’s mind. I’m in the minds that Lucy enters too.

I’m there and it’s a Tuesday. Yesterday. I’m at work lighting a candle. Sandalwood and vanilla, one of my favorites. I’ve bought new shades for the lamps, and they cast a therapeutic amber around the massage parlor, the kind with a special room in the back. People don’t like my work. They call it names, associate it with the streets and with the dark, as if hours have morality. They call it sinful and debased, but I take care of people, give them a moment of peace. How is that different from any other service? How is that different from working at a laundromat? A restaurant? It wasn’t what I wanted when I left home, but a job’s a job, so I do it well.

A boy comes into my shop. He is young, and for a moment, even adorable. His eyes are hazel, and I see them before I see the gun. It doesn’t register, it feels like a joke, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen a white boy with a gun. Once, it was at the Apple store, hanging from a hip holster like forbidden fruit. I don’t have time to fear because I’m already dead. He’s so young, I could be his mother. Who is his mother? I smell sandalwood and vanilla, until I don’t.

Now I’m across the room, and I do have time to fear. I’m younger now, one of the newest hires. Just a girl, really. I don’t know what happens in the back room and I don’t ask. I spend most of the workday at the desk, where I manage check-ins and the playlist. I miss my family terribly, but the money I send is making a difference. I’m changing the song, looking down when he comes in. I choose Tibetan prayer bells: the sound of careful, human touch.

A bullet is not a touch. It’s a twitch of the fingers, a snap, then something happens on your behalf. It’s a demand, directed at those in the dirt, those beneath you. A demand for your life. I hear the first bullet. I feel the second. It’s not the pain that’s shocking, but the force.

It doesn’t kill me instantly, so I have the privilege of terror. I look up and my coworker has a gaping, shredded hole where her cheek used to be, and I think, irrationally, urgently, oh, but she has such beautiful skin, she takes such good care of it, and that’s why she gives the best facials. I watch her fall, and panic starts to click. Then he turns to me and click, click, click, except it’s three blasts, and I’m on the floor. From here, the gun looks like a toy, like its barrel should shoot bubbles. It does not. Click-blast, once again. Such nice skin. Tibetan prayer bells in a long, vibrating chime, a sonic balm, to help stretch consciousness from this realm to the next. Hazel eyes meet mine. Warm yellow lamps. My thoughts splinter into light.

Now I am not afraid. I am righteous. I am rage. I am vindication. I’ve conquered temptation from the oriental whores. Executed my lust. These foreign Jezebels in pools of righteous blood. Their Babylon eyes can no longer trick me, cause me to stray. They’re with the Devil now, and I am with God. I can hear Him beneath the bells of the heathen song from the heathen world, so far east the angels cannot reach. I can hear him beneath the righteous beating of my heart in my ears.

Now I’m free from temptation. Now I’m free from judgment. Now I’m in America. Now I’m dead, and I used to have such nice skin. Now I’m wondering, should I have chosen another song? Now I’m wondering, how do they see me, when I give them what they want? When I serve them miso soup? How do they see me through the barrel of their hate, their suspicion, the warm gauze of otherness covering their eyes? How many Asian girls does it take to save a good, Christian boy? How many sex sacrifices to save a wayward soul? How long until we all forget, because they didn’t really matter anyway?

Lucy shoves her phone back into her pocket. She rubs at her face. She’s late on her prep. No one at work will mention the article, and she will not talk to her parents about it, or Kaylee either. They won’t ask anyway. They might scroll past it, or they won’t see it. It happened in a different city, in a different region. It has nothing to do with them at all.

 

In between tables, Lucy plunges her hands into the giant bag of fortune cookies by the register. Her applications have been submitted, and with each plunge Lucy’s face stitches together, pleading, “Let this be a lucky one.” When she pulls out a cookie, she crushes it whole in her hand, leaving the plaster-like dough in its wrapper. She slides the fortune out like a tongue, fingers it gently while the restaurant buzzes. If it’s bad news, she frowns and throws the whole thing away. If it’s a good fortune, or vague enough, she nods, smiles, and eats the cookie, dumping the sharp edges down her throat, before making a round of water runs.

 

Dear Lucy Lin-Carmichael,

Congratulations! We are ecstatic to inform you that you have been accepted to Anderson Gill College. The admissions committee was impressed by your academic achievements and application materials. Your financial aid package and official letter of acceptance were mailed today. Please call us if you have not received this package by April 11.

Our congratulations once again. We look forward to fostering your unique talents.

Sincerely,
Chastity Zhang
Dean of Admissions

 

Uncle Bob does not like the new server, but he doesn’t have a choice because this kid is his actual nephew. I don’t much care for him, either, but I like how he bothers Uncle Bob. His name is Xander, and he is a musician. He brings his saxophone to work—late—and serenades a table if there’s a birthday. He is always asking if there is a birthday. Uncle Bob tells him the saxophone doesn’t fit the restaurant’s aesthetic, but Nephew Xander brushes him off with a, “Dude—everyone loves the sax.”

Lucy has done her best to train Xander, but while Lucy picked things up quickly, Xander prefers to just make things up, including menu items. Ricky even had to come up with an impromptu “red chicken” to serve. Xander doesn’t care. According to him, it’s all MSG anyway, and will rot everyone’s brains. In fact, Xander never seems to eat, instead popping white pills with technicolor energy drinks. Xander clearly doesn’t want the job as much as Uncle Bob doesn’t want him to have the job, but based on the unrequested saxophone performances, Xander’s musical gigs are probably in short demand.

And Lucy, as you know, is leaving. The response was sent immediately, an enthusiastic yes, before she even told her father. Even before she told us at the restaurant, we knew. Her smile told us she’d be gone by summer. So Bob needs a replacement.

Of course, Lucy doesn’t seem to mind that Xander can’t remember that the red tops are regular soy sauce and the green tops are low sodium, or that he never refills the table water. She is often in a daze these last couple months. Ever since she was accepted, she has carried her letter around everywhere, pulling it out of her apron to read it again and again, whispering to it like a monk with a mantra. It’s her first-choice school. Her tuition isn’t fully covered, but enough. She already put in her two week’s notice, but Uncle Bob convinced her to stay through June.

“The textbooks will be expensive,” he had said, and Lucy agreed.

 

Xander’s mind is chaos. It’s not my favorite mind to inhabit, but he flings his psyche at anything and anyone in his path. He’s creative, sure, but he’s inherited Bob’s arrogance, which he can pull off as confidence since his hair isn’t thinning. Sometimes, when Xander looks at me, straight at me and into my eyes, he’s not even thinking about me, and that puts me in a weird space where I’m not sure if I even exist, forget on a metaphysical level, but on an atomic level—on a plastic and paint level. It stresses me out.

Xander stresses everyone out. Bob wonders if he’s tripping at work, on another plane of existence, but he’s actually most bearable when he’s blazed. Otherwise he can be erratic, prone to long sentences that lose their muffins in the sock. Sorry, I mean train of thought.

I don’t dislike Xander, but I don’t blame anyone who does. Xander takes for granted that he can be obnoxious and people will call it personality. He takes for granted that he can show up late, that he can talk over women at his community college, that somehow he always ends up with a job, his mini-fridge waiting for him in his parents’ basement.

Shakyamuni Buddha left a life of luxury to meditate under the bodhi tree. Xander’s the kind of person who brings jewels to the temple, embedded in his skin, clanging on his arms in heavy bracelets, while proclaiming what a pleasure it is to eat nothing but rice, water, and ayahuasca. That’s not a very good metaphor, but it’s a very Xander metaphor.

Since he can’t fire him, Bob mostly avoids him. Celso and Ricky pretend they don’t understand him. He’ll bother someone who “comprende English” instead. Customers ask if there’s anyone else who can serve them. Lucy, of course, is the most patient, and she’s the one who gets the largest dose of Xander. Even when Lucy’s drowning in orders or when she’s trying to train him, Xander will tell Lucy to slow down and chill out, that it’s all whatever, babe. She smiles, but because she knows she’s out of here soon.

 

Lucy leaves the Lucky Buddha today. Before that, she takes a Sharpie and labels the pot lids. She hugs Ricky and Celso, and gives Xander a pound. When she gives Uncle Bob her apron, he shakes her hand, a little too hard, and for a little too long.

“We’ll miss you, girl,” he tells her. “Don’t hesitate to come back if school doesn’t work out. And don’t forget to clock out. I’m not paying for your textbooks.”

She laughs and taps the register for the last time.

As she walks out the door, she touches my ear. She rubs it like a worry stone that has outlived its crisis. I rest in her touch.

Then she’s gone.

 

Xander, hungover from something, picks a fight with Celso and Ricky. This is after he’s been forcing himself into their cigarette breaks—smoking weed instead. He’s been going on about some crazy job he did in Panama, one that sounds either made-up, illegal, or a bit of both. Today, he says something about ICE, because Ricky asks him to please put the soup lids back on their pots, properly. This eventually leads to a lot of shouting, which eventually leads to a pot of soup on the floor. When Uncle Bob asks Xander to wipe it up, he says that’s not part of his seven twenty-five an hour. Celso and Ricky can’t believe Xander’s being paid seven twenty-five—two dollars more than they are. Then, because Xander won’t, and Bob won’t, and service starts in half an hour, Celso and Ricky mop up the soup.

Tomorrow, they’ll be gone. I see it in their eyes as they leave, saluting me for the last time. They’re starting their own business. They’ve been planning it for months and were waiting for the opportune moment to leave. Xander helped expedite that.

It’s going to be a food truck, a fried rice joint, which they’ll drive out to the nearest city. Ricky will add arroz chaufa de mariscos, pollo, and camarones to the menu. Celso will name the pineapple and shrimp fried rice “The Lucy.” Their truck’s specialty: bring them anything, and they’ll “fried rice it.” It will be a social media phenomenon. Thanks to Bob, they’ll know exactly what not to do in managing a restaurant. Thanks to Xander, they’ll have a good idea of who not to hire. The Chaufa Truck, and Ricky and Celso, will do just fine.

Uncle Bob, shorthanded with service starting in ten minutes, picks up a spatula and curses.

 

What Leann wants to hear are the lunch specials, but what Xander wants to talk about is his stint with Hare Krishna. He also wants to show her his pentacle tattoo, a proud relic from his heavy metal days, before he rekindled his love of ska. This was all in response to her Bible study, which he says she can’t hold at Lucky Buddha anymore.

Leann does not want to hear this. She’s a chef for Christ’s sake (a food blogger) and a respected local writer (an unknown food blogger). She wants to speak with the manager, but Bob is out today, desperately trying to find a new set of cooks. Xander tells her he is the manager, which they both know is untrue, and then tells her to take her Karen-ass elsewhere.

The next day, there is a damning Google review. Anonymous. One star. Terrible service! New waiter was Rude and Misogynistic. Angry emoji. Angry emoji. Angry emoji. Food is Disgusting. The Lucky Buddha has gone downhill!!!! Plus, they charge for green tea refills and are stingy on ginger dressing. Won’t be coming back . . . and just so everyone knows . . . Satanic!!

 

The Lucky Buddha is just doing takeout for a while.

 

Now that Lucy’s left, I sleep most of the day, only roused from my slumber when a toddler snatches me from my platform. The mothers tell them I’m dirty, then put me back, wiping the dust on their denimed butt cheeks. Without Lucy, I am tired. I am tired of Uncle Bob’s relentless talking, his inability to talk without painting himself as Person Number One. I am tired of the smells, of vinegared rice and pink sauces where the eggs have split. I am tired of the New Age music that Xander belts along to, the words mixed and tangled like seaweed salad. I am so tired it makes me sleep, and I dream of when Lucy was still here, when she would touch my bald head so softly. Or sometimes, I dream of the factory in Taiwan: the smell of plastic fresh on my skin, the heat of the furnaces, and flimsy packing material like pillows in my shipping box. I slept often then as well, between the murmur of machines and the shouts of foremen. I even dream of a former life, maybe as petroleum in the earth’s crust, as a water buffalo, or as an all-knowing deity, meditating under a bodhi tree.

 

Lucy comes back.

When I see her, I feel like I can breathe again, even though I don’t have lungs and have never breathed before. She sees me and smiles, but she doesn’t stop to say hello. I don’t care, just being near her is enough. It’s Lucy! And she’s back, at least for a bit.

Bob is surprised to see her again, and she says her flight isn’t until tomorrow. She knows she’s already said goodbye, but there’s something else she has to do. He asks if she’s sure she doesn’t want to take a gap year—it’s not too late! He pretends he’s joking, but he’s not. Things are better, but they’re not quite there.

“How’s it going?” Lucy asks.

“Not great, but not bad.” Part of the improvement came when Bob banished Xander to the back of house. He needed someone to cook anyway and figured Xander could handle the simple stir-fry and pre-made sauces. Surprisingly, the straightforward menu balances Xander’s chaos. He’s got an okay palate too. His Satan tattoos even look pretty cool against the flames. He misses the saxophone solos, but seems to find solace in the sounds of the kitchen.

“I’m interviewing some new servers,” Bob continues. “Another high schooler named Kimberly. She’s only sixteen but says she knows how to make bubble tea. You know her? She’s always wearing those cutesy anime shirts.”

“No, I don’t think so. But bubble tea will be good for business.”

“At least the kids will stop bugging us for it.”

Lucy hands Bob a gift bag.

“I’ve brought you something. I saw it online and thought of you. And this place.”

Bob shoves his hand into the bag and out comes a new buddha statue. He’s bigger, and he’s resin poured. He’s also bright gold with giant black sunglasses. Unlike me, he’s not sitting in meditation, but lying on his side with one leg propped up. His hand is in a hang ten.

It’s love at first sight for Bob. Xander, who has emerged from the kitchen, says it’s sick. He grabs it out of Bob’s hands and kisses New Buddha’s bald, shiny head.

“I thought this would make a good going-away present.”

“Thanks, Lucy.” Bob yanks the statue back from Xander’s grasp. “It’s perfect. You want the old one? He hasn’t been so lucky lately.”

Lucy picks me up before he’s finished asking. She says goodbye and slips out, while Bob yells something at Xander about his greasy fingerprints.

Lucy holds me firmly, but in her usual, gentle way, and in Lucy’s hands, I’m overcome with a sense of belonging, just as I know New Buddha will belong with Bob, with the new chapter of the restaurant, hopefully more funky than fetish. I know Lucy will belong somewhere too.

“Hey, little buddy,” she says, and I know she came back for me. The gift was just an excuse. As she holds me close to her heart, my consciousness begins to fade. My mind dissolves, and I welcome it. Something is falling into place in the universe, and I no longer need to be here to see it.

I hope I will not be back to this cycle of birth and rebirth. Of passing thoughts and feelings. Of the illusion of the self. I hope I leave samsara behind with the restaurant and with East Waterloo. Lucy is my nirvana, and I am not afraid. I do not have time to fear anyway. I smell vanilla and sandalwood, soy sauce, and the ink of American dollars. I hear Tibetan bells and the hum of a Saturday shift in flow. I hear a gunshot, but it cannot touch me.

I am lucky and fortuitous.

 

bruhh welcome to lucky buddha feat. yours truly the luckiest buddha in east waterloo. reach enlightenment with our killer lunch specials with free soup. we’ve got my man xander on the grill with the spiciest kung pow chicken you’ve ever tasted msg free & extra saucy. it’ll make you say ommmmm . . . my god. we’ve got my girl kimberly aka kimbo aka the bodhisattva of boba. she’s got melon, she’s got taro, she’s got all the flavors, babe. now a round of applause for the man behind it all, uncle bob himself. he’s the eightfold path, he’s got the four noble truths—one of which is fuck his ex-wife janie, cause we make a mean california roll. as you can tell from my full physique, the food is divine. tasty, tasty karma. we’re making good money, good food, and good vibes. it’s peace and love forever at lucky buddha, babes. take a fortune cookie on the way out, give me a rub, and don’t forget to tip. shaka shaka.

The Amon Liner Poetry Prize Poem THE BRIDGE IN SUMMER

I come to watch the warpaint shiners swim—
             minnows with red-tinged fins tunnel

through a biting current. Downstream, children
             swing off a rope, trusting the river

to break their fall. It’s hard to have so much faith—
             I pause before the cable-bridge, wondering

if I should cross this chasm of stones.
             I can feel the weight of my body—

humidity lingers on my skin, a reminder
             of days when school was out

and I spent hours in my room, brushing rough canvas
             while the house filled with whispers.

I had few expectations then—only that I might rupture
             like a dam. I painted my dreams

in watercolor, closed my eyes, listened to my breath,
             at first unsteady. I understand the balance

underwater, where the fish must know
             how to get home, to safety.

At the suspension bridge, my hands scrape wire—
             I find my footing on wood that trembles.

I am learning to carry my heaviness—
             knowing, somehow, the bridge will hold.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THE FAIRY SWAP

We found the fairy after a three-day thunderstorm.

We were rock hunting at the time. During the summer construction workers had scooped out one of the trails that wound up the ridge behind our house. Dad complained endlessly about the pulled-up trees, but the yellow Cat diggers did shake a lot of pretty things loose from the dirt: clay-smeared chunks of amethyst and rocks with black garnet chips and sheets of mica as big as your head. Once my sister Sadie found a fist-sized golden lump that was called pyrite. Whenever I stared at it glittering on our dresser, I wished more than anything that it was mine.

At first we both thought the fairy was a clump of muck broken off the carved-out mountainside by the wind and rain. I was the one who found it, as I poked a stick into the mud under one of the crouching diggers and hit something that didn’t give. Sadie was the one who noticed the yellow eyes. Sometimes the lids would slide over them, as gray and crusty as rock, but no other part of it moved. A sticky blackness oozed down the side of its head.

I was bigger than Sadie, but she was older, so she was the one who took off her red rain slicker and grabbed the thing through the cloth. Up in her stick arms, it was about as big as a good-sized cat. A gray foot hung out of the coat, each little toenail yellow and hooked. Without knowing why, I started to cry.

“Shut up, Omie,” Sadie said. “It’s okay, but just shut up.”

She carried it all the way back down through the steep wet woods to our house. Twice I thought I heard something behind us, just a touch different from the rhythm of the dripping trees. But as Sadie often pointed out, I was always noticing things that turned out to be nothing.

Back home we put the fairy in Ghost’s crate, in the soft spider- webby hollow of her empty bed. Ghost had been a Great Pyrenees Dad was sure would keep coyotes away from our chickens and would watch over me and Sadie when he was gone. Only she’d snarled and snapped at the chickens and trembled in the corner of the crate whenever we approached her with a bone. She’d crashed through the screen door one day and when it became clear she wasn’t coming back, Dad moved her crate down to the basement. He had not gone down there since.

“Do you think it will get out?” I asked.

The fairy hadn’t moved since Sadie set it down. The ratty edges of the bed seemed to creep up around it, like sand sucking down a stone.

 

Dad was at a gig that night, so we were able to make as many trips to the basement as we wanted. We pushed bits of our dinner sandwiches through the bars, my peanut butter and banana and Sadie’s dry turkey, along with some old dog food and a carton of blueberries, because who knew for sure what fairies ate. We edged around the crate with a flashlight, examining what parts of it we could see. It had no hair. The shadowy lack between its legs made us suspect it was a girl.

We were no strangers to fairies and their various races. In fact, we were probably as close as any two girls could be to experts. In the stories Dad told to tourists at the Folk Art Center on Friday nights, the root people—as yellow and hairy and creased as old carrots—lived in tunnels beneath the mountains and hunted chipmunks with arrows the size of hairpins. In Mom’s gold-gilded English books, the fairies were shy and dainty, but would steal babies or pretty ladies and swap them for a Changeling, a mean-tempered fairy version of the person, if they had a mind to. I imagined we might count as an exotic pet to them, like a peacock or a tiger.

We weren’t sure what sort of fairy we had. Not a particularly exciting one, anyway.

We tossed around a few names, like Moonlight, Fern Gully, and Mountain Dew (which I thought was the most beautiful pairing of words there ever was). Nothing seemed to fit, though, so we just sat there on the concrete with the damp seeping through our jeans, watching its outline waver in the dark until it almost seemed to shimmer.

That night I climbed into the top bunk with Sadie, dragging Fat Jamie, my favorite Cabbage Patch doll, up with me. My bed was level with the window and the patter on the porch outside our room sounded like footsteps, soft soled and creeping. Sadie whined and dug her elbow into my belly, but not very hard.

“I think we should tell Dad about the fairy,” I said. Dad knew all about strange things in the mountains: big cats that walked on their hind legs and glowing will-o’-wisps that lured hunters into swamps.

“No way. What about Peter?”

Peter had been a tiny shut-eyed squirrel we’d found at the base of a pine. We’d dreamed of raising him to ride on our shoulders like a parrot, and Dad promised we could keep him. Only we’d come home from school to find that he’d taken Peter to the Nature Center in Asheville, without even letting us say goodbye.

“Fairies are different than squirrels.”

“We’re not telling him. I saved your life, remember?”

This was true: Sadie had saved my life back when the fairy Changeling wrecked the car we were all in. When I was little I used to think she owned my life: a yellow flicker she kept in a jar, like Tinkerbell from Peter Pan. Either way, it meant I had to do whatever she said.

“I guess we could just keep it to play with, then.” I imagined the fairy and me walking hand in hand through a glittery green wood, flowers crowning our heads.

Sadie drew a sharp breath and rolled over. Her eyes were an inch from mine, black and sparking.

“I bet it could bring Mom back.” Her voice was low and hungry. “I bet we could make it.”

I looked away, like I always did when she got that hard, sparkly look. The rain from the window cast funny shadows on the opposite wall, slithering down like worms.

 

Mom had been taken by the fairies two years ago, when I was six and Sadie was nine. She was just the kind of human they wanted for themselves: dainty and beautiful, more like a girl than a mother.

I couldn’t remember her well, but Sadie could. Sometimes when we were in bed at night, she’d start talking out of the blue: Mom this and Mom that, the words tumbling down from the top bunk and piling all higgledy-piggledy around my head. Even though I never cared much for stories I couldn’t see myself in, I always let her talk.

Mom and Dad met in college and it was Love at First Sight, according to Sadie. He had been playing fiddle at the Friday night contra dance; she had been dancing with other girls from her Advanced Folk Dance class. She could leap higher and spin faster than any of them, and Dad kept noticing her floating up and down in the crowd, a ball of bouncing light.

Afterward, she complimented his fiddling and he complimented her dancing, and they went for a walk. Dad was majoring in Appalachian Studies; Mom was an English Major with a double minor in Sustainable Agriculture and Dance. Dad had traveled all over the state begging old folks in their trailers or dusky retirement homes to tell him stories and knew hundreds by heart at only nineteen years old; Mom could quote whole pages of Shakespeare and Tennyson, so beautifully that it almost made you hurt. They were amazed by each other.

Then Mom fell pregnant with Sadie. Her grandparents had a summer house in the mountains, and because they loved Mom, they gave it to her. When Dad was away at gigs, Mom and Sadie would do all sorts of things together: make cake out of the puckery persimmons growing in the woods, catch grasshoppers and pull open their rainbow wings, drag Dad’s old-fashioned record player out on the porch and dance through the long grass. After I came along, Mom strapped me to her back and kept dancing. Sometimes I wished I could remember what it felt like to be leaping and spinning along with her, hidden under the silky sweep of her hair.

There was just one memory of Mom I could see clearly, all on my own. She and Dad were sitting on the porch with their gasoline-smelling whiskey drinks after supper, swatting the no-see-ums out of their eyes. Dad had told me broccoli would make me invisible, which had the desired result of me eating the stuff like it was Cheetos. He exclaimed in fear at the unseen footsteps thundering along the porch, the ghostly hand ruffling his beard, as Mom laughed so hard that she hunched over in her chair, yipping like a coyote. That was still the Mom I saw in my head whenever Sadie talked about her: mouth gaped and drooling, unable to catch her breath.

Although I knew it wasn’t true about the broccoli, I still couldn’t help examining myself every time I ate it, as if I’d be able to see the grain of the table through my fading bones.

 

The Changeling showed up suddenly, Sadie remembered. The fairies had snuck it into Mom’s side of the bed during the deepest part of the night. The evening before Mom had been cuddled up in the top bunk as usual, soothing us to sleep with her sing-song English Major stories, and the next day she—or rather, the thing that looked like her—wouldn’t get out of bed. When Sadie went to tug its hand, it snatched it away and called her a mean name. Its eyes were black except for a bit of blue left around the rim. A strange smell, like snake musk, crept out from the blankets. When it finally stood up to go to the bathroom it walked like it was just learning how, banging into corners and hissing through its yellow teeth.

The Changeling stopped brushing its long hair, greasy clumps hanging over its face. One day it got into such a scary fight with Dad that it took a butcher knife and stabbed the kitchen table, not even stopping when the blade slipped on the hard wood and cut its palm. Dad asked why it was doing that and it screamed, “Because you fucking made me.” (I hadn’t wanted to believe that part, but the gouges were still there, each as long and crooked as a claw mark.)

The last day Sadie saw the Changeling—that we both saw it— was when Dad was away and it was just the three of us at home. The Changeling had gotten out of bed early and put on a pretty dress, looking almost as sweet and happy as our mother had. It told us we were driving down to Sweet Dreams, our favorite ice cream shop in the city, and that we could get whatever we wanted. Sadie and I had been giggling in the backseat as we slid into each other around the curves in the road, when all of a sudden the car leapt and crunched and we were all sucked down into something black and wet.

That’s when Sadie saved my life. She’d climbed out of the car window, but when I tried to go after her, the Changeling grabbed me by the back of my overalls and wouldn’t let go. So Sadie scratched its arms until it did.

The car wreck was what made Sadie certain Mom had been swapped for a Changeling. Fairies didn’t think like humans did. They had devilish sides, drinking dewdrops from acorns one moment and dragging sobbing babies out of their cribs the next. Probably that was why the Changeling had wrecked the car: it had just felt like it.

The Changeling went away after that and we never saw it again. The only good thing about it all was that it meant Mom was still out there somewhere, wherever the fairies lived: in a glittering cave, or some tucked-away grove dripping with flowers. Probably she was dancing and reciting Shakespeare, all dolled up in gauzy skirts and leafy crowns. Probably, the fairies loved her as much as they were able.

 

“How can we make the fairy bring Mom back?” I asked Sadie, still watching the wormy shadows. “We can’t even talk to it.”

She squirmed around onto her back, sucking at her teeth.

“We need to show the other fairies we’ve got one of them.”

I wanted to leave a note that explained the nuances of the situation, but Sadie pointed out that this type of fairy probably couldn’t read. After all, our fairy seemed about as dumb as the rock it resembled. Dad didn’t let us have brain-rotting cell phones and we didn’t have a printer anyway, so taking a picture was out. It was Sadie who thought up cutting off a piece of it—its pinky toe or its shrivelly ear, whatever was easiest to clip with gardening shears—to set out in the woods. “It’s the only way to show them we mean business, so don’t you start whining,” she warned when my mouth began to jump. Sadie would do the actual cutting since she had to do everything, anyway.

For a while after the Changeling went away, I had been sure the fairies would come for Sadie next. She was just like Mom with her honey skin and flossy hair, a perfect target. I used to stand up on my bed and look over her every morning before she woke, certain I’d find something different: a wild rotten smell, a dark gleam under her white eyelashes.

But I hadn’t needed to worry. Sadie never acted sadder or more devilish than usual. There was something about her the fairies just didn’t want.

“So they’ll give us Mom and we’ll give them our fairy.”

Sadie huffed. “They’ll know what we mean. That’s how fairies think, in swaps.”

I looked out the window, down at our dripping porch, at the dark droopy couch Sadie liked to sit on when I was bugging her too much. I tried to picture Mom there instead, her mouth a drooling hole.

 

In the morning, I half hoped to find the fairy had vanished; surely that was the sort of thing fairies could do. But it was still curled up on the dog bed, blinking its yellow eyes at us.

I wanted breakfast before we did anything gross to it, so Sadie fried me an egg and paced around while I ate, staring out the windows. “Look,” she said. Even though it was still February, the grass was scattered with dewy red flowers, like the ground had been pricked all over with a needle.

Sadie refused to make me any more eggs because I was too fat anyway, so I followed her back down to the basement. She handed me a softball bat and a butterfly net and told me to stand behind her (when I whined and hesitated, she had to remind me again that she saved my life).

She crawled into the crate, garden clippers in one hand. Her spine curled up against her T-shirt like a lizard’s. Then she took a good, hard look over the fairy and pulled its ear away from its skull. It looked so much like a spongy lichen that I was sure she could just pluck it off.

But as soon as the clippers clacked the fairy started screaming. It was like the yap of foxes and Mom’s coyote-laugh and the screech of broken-necked chickens all at once.

“Shut up,” shouted Sadie. “Shut UP!”

She flung back the hand that held the shears and hit it on the side of its round head, so hard that when she drew her fist back it was trembling. It just kept on screaming. Being the baby I was, I started to scream too.

Sadie had only managed to cut off the lobe of the ear, which was sitting in a mess of blackish blood and squashed blueberries. She fumbled around for it and grabbed me by the arm and we both scrambled back up the stairs. We could still hear the fairy screaming after we slammed the basement door.

“It made me do it,” she said, staring at her swollen knuckles.

It took a while for me to calm down. I was sure that the muffled screaming was coming from a hundred different places: Dad’s empty bedroom, the carved-out ridge, from deep under the long, dead grass. Finally, Sadie pushed Fat Jamie into my arms and said she’d let me pick out the dish we’d put the ear in, if I’d just quit bawling.

I chose a china saucer rimmed in faded violets. Ringed by the flowers, the earlobe looked like a bit of spat-up mushroom.

Because I was still blubbering and in no shape for a potentially dangerous mission, Sadie told me to wait inside—lock the door behind her, just in case—while she went up to the construction site to set out the plate. The fairies were sure to find it there.

I pressed my nose against the window as she marched off into the rhododendrons at the edge of the yard, her white hair and red rain slicker bright among their dull curled leaves. The fairy was quieting down below me, and I thought about what I’d do if she didn’t come back. Eat all the eggs I wanted, for one thing. Not cut off any ears. Have my life all to myself. But none of those things seemed worth being alone for.

 

When a knock came on the door I had a notion I’d find a whole crowd of yellow-eyed fairies on the porch. Or even Mom, back from fairyland, still red-faced and howling. But it was just Sadie. When I asked her if she saw any fairies, she said no. Probably we should give them a couple hours to find the plate.

But we couldn’t go back to check that day, because that afternoon Dad banged into the house with his fiddle case. He said hello and kissed us both on our heads, like we were normal girls and not ones who had put a fairy in the basement and its ear up on the mountainside.

The older we got, the less Dad came home. Sometimes I got startled if I opened the bathroom door in the morning to find him shaving his beard hairs off into the sink. It was how I might feel if a raccoon broke in: pleasantly surprised but knowing it didn’t really belong.

All he said to us was to be sure to take baths that night, because the Aunts were coming tomorrow.

The Aunts came to see us every other Sunday. This was never much fun, because they didn’t like Dad. They didn’t like that he’d named me and Sadie after murdered girls from Doc Watson songs, they didn’t like that he made a living as a fiddler and storyteller, and most of all, they didn’t like that our house was his and not theirs.

The Aunts were Mom’s sisters. They both lived two hours away, in big square houses with square-headed husbands. Aunt Evie had two thick-necked sons who were off at college. Aunt Katelyn didn’t have children but had been talking for ages about how God had called her to adopt a baby from a starving place. She would make us look at the online ads for the sad orphans, our possible cousins, touching their cheeks through the phone screen with a sighing wet-eyed look.

Every time the Aunts visited they acted like the house was theirs, walking from room to room, clicking their tongues at the Virginia creeper curling against the windows, the dusty piles of ladybugs crawling over each other in the corners. Sadie said none of that stuff had been there before Mom was taken, but I couldn’t imagine living in a house without ladybugs.

“Good Lord, it smells like a cave in here, Alex.” Aunt Evie flared her powdery nose. “Do you have mold?”

Dad didn’t answer right away—like me, he was probably wondering how Aunt Evie knew what a cave smelled like. She was right, though: there was a new smell in the house, something dark and mossy.

“Maybe a bit in the basement,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of rain this month.”

Aunt Evie snorted. Then we all had to sit around our knife-clawed table and talk. Dad told them he was interviewing for a substitute teacher job at the district high school (this was not true; Dad hated the public school system). Sadie said she had gotten all As on her last report card (also not true; she’d failed her English oral report because she’d tried to do it on Flowers in the Attic). I’d gotten two Snickers for the price of one from the cafeteria vending machine last week (this was true, but only because I was still too riled by the fairy business to think of a good lie).

There were some things we never told them, of course. They didn’t know that me and Sadie looked after ourselves when Dad had a gig. They didn’t know I’d had a bubbly rash on my chest for most of the winter that had gotten worse when Sadie drenched it with peroxide. And they didn’t know that when the weather was warm we skipped school to pick blackberries; that for supper we’d eat a pailful each, drowned in sugar, and leave red fingerprints on the walls for days.

“I talked to Meg the other day,” Aunt Katelyn said, once the question-asking was over. “She misses you girls so much and told me to give you both a big hug.”

She delivered the hugs with that wet-eyed look. The Changeling was in some place in Arizona. Sometimes Aunt Katelyn told us what it was doing out there—taking yoga classes and talking with other crazy people, mostly—but none of us much cared.

“I brought you girls a little something.” Aunt Katelyn was forever bringing us little somethings. This time it was a Breyer Horse for me (never mind that I was scared of horses) and a strappy dress for Sadie, the same silky blue as her eyes.

“My, aren’t you lucky girls,” Aunt Evie remarked disapprovingly. “Now go put those things away so we can chat.”

What she didn’t know was that we could easily hear the chat from our bedroom. It was always the same: Meg’s treatment bills were draining Mama and Daddy’s retirement; when was the last time Omie had a haircut because she was looking mangy; was Sadie eating enough, because she was awfully thin.

Dad usually laughed and mumbled during the chat. This time, he was dead quiet.

In their clipped cheery voices, the Aunts said that Wildwood Homes, the same people who were going to build houses up on the ridge, had made an offer on the house and property. The title was in Meg’s name, of course, but the Aunts wanted to be respectful, talk it over with Dad. They’d give him some of the money, as long as he promised to use it properly, put it into college funds. The girls could stay with Katelyn for a time, give him a chance to get things in order.

Dad didn’t say anything for a good while. One of the Aunts was jigging her heel against the floor. Tap-tap-tap.

Then, so soft we could barely hear him: “Over my dead fucking body.” It was a bad word and the Aunts gasped, but there was a limpness to the way he said it. In my head, bare-headed vultures swooped down on his corpse, picking at a string of flesh.

Before anyone could say anything else, Aunt Evie started coughing. She coughed and coughed and coughed. We peered through the crack in our door; Aunt Katelyn was trying to help her stand up. But she kept coughing and something pink splattered on the floor in long ropes. For a second I thought her insides were coming out, until I realized it was just the pasta salad she’d brought us all for lunch.

“You do something about that mold,” she rasped. “Or I’m calling CPS, don’t think I won’t.”

“Evie,” said Aunt Katelyn.

“You need to leave.” Dad followed them to the door and watched until they drove away.

Then he went to the kitchen window and wrenched it open. Paint flakes fluttered up and the creeper coils spilled inside. He went to all the other windows and opened them, even stomping into our bedroom like he didn’t even see us there. Then he went and lay down on the couch with his arm over his eyes.

If anything, the mossy smell was stronger with the opened windows. I imagined it spreading up into the squiggly crevices of my brain, green and furred.

Dad came into our room and told us a story that night. He usually only told stories when he felt bad about something (after the Changeling first went away, we got one every night for weeks).

Tonight’s was a particularly good one. Two girls named Omie and Sadie found a magic ring in a tree hollow. They took turns trying it on. The ring made Omie sprout snowy wings and fly between the mountain peaks. Then it made Sadie talk to animals and they both got invited to the Deer King’s Winter Ball. Dad did all the animals’ different voices and swooped around our bedroom, peering down at treetops the size of broccoli heads.

“Is our house really getting sold?” I asked Sadie, after he shuffled off to his own room (I knew better than to ask Dad, who tended to answer questions with sighs or, if he had the wind for it, more stories).

“It’s Mom’s house.” Her voice was low and hungry again. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to hold onto the picture of the two girls from the story: glowing with magic, lighter than air.

 

Dad hung around for three days, so we couldn’t check the ear plate or feed the fairy. He slept on the couch during the day, shivering and twitching beside the open window. When I tried to wake him up to make supper he just blinked his cruddy eyes at me. “I was dreaming,” he said, but wouldn’t say what about. At night he kept us up with his coughing and pacing. He went from the living room to the kitchen and back in long, slow circles. A few times we heard his feet stop right by the basement door, but he never went down.

 

Then he was gone again, leaving behind a note for Sadie that Burlington Old Time Music Festival was on and that there was lasagna in the freezer. The first thing we did was hike up the ridge to look for our plate. Behind Sadie, I dragged my heels into the wet leaves, dreading what I was sure to see: a white ear, dainty and curled as a seashell, or maybe a long strand of hair attached to a bloody tag of skin.

But there was nothing there. We looked all around, kicking over rocks and clumps of leaves—even climbed up into the empty cab of the Cat digger and rustled through the water-wrinkled underwear magazines someone had left on its floor—but the plate was gone. I speculated that the fairies may have just wanted to keep it for their fairy parties, since it was so pretty. Sadie told me to shut up.

The house looked different when we walked out of the woods. It took me a minute to figure out why. Had the rhododendrons always been leaning so close to the windows? Had those weird red flowers always been poking up through the cracks in the porch? But then I saw it: a violet-rimmed plate, waiting right in front of the door. There was nothing on it, but my insides still shriveled.

Sadie wasn’t scared at all. She just looked at it and laughed. She laughed so hard that she started to cry, dribbling snot all over the painted flowers.

 

I felt all mossy-headed after we found the plate, but Sadie was excited. She leapt and spun around the house like a much littler girl, her white hair tangling around her. She pranced down the basement steps and laughed at the blood-crusted fairy and dashed back up. She jumped on the couch, in the greasy hollow Dad had left, and the creeper vines bounced like they were excited too. She twirled over to me and squished my cheeks between her cold hands.

“We’re getting Mom back, dummy.” Her eyes had that sparking look. “Why aren’t you happy? I order you to be happy!”

I let her spin me around and laughed too. It was easier just to do what she said.

 

Sadie wanted to take the fairy up the mountain and swap it for Mom right away, but I was too tired to hike all the way back up there. So we decided to wait until morning.

After Sadie started to snore, I went down to the basement alone, Fat Jamie’s best silk dress balled under my arm. The wood steps were slimy under my bare feet and I had a notion that I was walking over faces, mushy and sucking. I grappled in the dark and pulled the lightbulb chain. The fairy was slumped against the side of the crate, its head black and crusty. I wondered if it missed the other fairies. I wondered if it had helped take Mom, years ago. If it had ever thought of letting her go.

I opened the crate. Its eyes turned toward me but didn’t move. I reached out and ran a hand down one of its legs. I thought it might feel cold and rough, but its skin was hotter than mine.

It didn’t do anything as I pulled each of its thin arms through the dress sleeves, tied the ribbon at its throat. I wondered if Mom had a hard time dressing me when I was a baby, if she’d struggled to stuff my limp arms through the sleeves, or worried that my fingers would snap when they snagged in the gaps of the lace.

I usually talked to my dolls when I dressed them up—told them I’d make them beautiful, that they’d feel much better now that they had something decent to wear—but all the things I wanted to say to the fairy dried up in my throat. After I was done, I rocked back on my heels and we stared at each other for a good while.

It looked like a wet rock someone had stuffed into a cheap princess outfit. I took the dress off again, not sure why I’d expected to see anything different.

 

When morning came, we both got dressed in the dark. Sadie put on her new blue dress from Aunt Katelyn. She told me to wear my red Christmas jumper and pinched me, hard, when I said I wanted jeans: “Do you want Mom to see you looking all raggedy?” Then she combed out my hair, tugging the snarls until my eyes stung.

In the basement, Sadie fastened the fairy’s wrists and ankles with some rubber bands she found in the junk drawer, even though it was limper and duller than ever. She picked it up like a baby, its yellow eyes turned into her bony chest. Then she carried it up the stairs and out into the pale, shivery light. Her hair ran down the blue dress like creek froth.

“You look like a butthole in that dress,” I told her. She ignored me. It was a lie: she looked so grown-up and beautiful, I hardly knew it was her.

Mist snaked out of the rhododendrons and into the grass. Sadie told me to pick some of the red flowers to give to Mom. When I yanked them up the roots hung on, sprinkling dirt all down my jumper.

Sadie climbed the ridge like a deer, slipping around the briars and tree trunks. I stumbled and panted, trying to keep up. Part of me—the same silly part that used to think she kept my life in a jar—was sure that if I let her out of my sight, I wouldn’t see her again.

The mist was still thick when we got to the construction site, the crumbling red walls and ditches veiled and silvery. Sadie set the fairy down. She grabbed me by the hand and dragged me up next to her.

“Okay,” she said, breathing deep. “Okay.”

The fog stirred around, but nothing else happened. The fairy lay curled on its side, eyes closed except for a yellow sliver. My heart quieted a little and my head started wandering toward breakfast, to our kitchen and Fat Jamie and the buzzing ladybugs, a million miles from here.

Then, I saw it.

It didn’t appear out of nowhere or float out of the trees, just walked out of the mist and stood there. It was like our fairy, the muddled color of dirt and rocks and naked trees. Another walked up beside it, bowlegged and staring.

Sadie’s hand was jolting in mine. The mossy feeling spread from my brain down into the well of my belly, because I knew Mom was going to come out of the mist next—like Sadie but older, taller, stranger—and that she’d walk up and take the flowers from me, maybe give me a big hug, and I’d have to just stand there and soak up whatever cold, musky magic she brought back with her.

We shivered together for a long time, watching. But nothing else came. There were just the two fairies, standing there with their toes squishing into the red clay. One lifted a hand and scratched its lumpy gray butt cheek.

“Where is she?” Sadie’s voice was high and thin. “Where is she?”

She started screaming things I couldn’t make out. The fairies jumped and the bare trees rattled but she just kept on screaming, pulling at her hair until shimmery white clumps tangled in her fingers. I tried to stop her and she pushed me so hard I fell in the mud. She kicked our fairy, again and again. It rolled over and its head lolled up at the white sky.

Sadie crumpled and dropped to the ground, clay smearing over her wet cheeks. The other fairies started to come forward, knobby hands reaching for the still gray form at her feet.

“No.” I scrambled up and stamped, like I was trying to scare a dog. I scooped up our fairy and turned my back to the others so they couldn’t see how its eyes had stopped moving.

I told Sadie let’s go and reached for her hand. Curled inside the dirty folds of her dress, she looked tiny: a little kid hiding under the covers. I thought it might be hard to pull her down through the woods while carrying the fairy, but they both felt like nothing.

When we got back to the house, I glanced over my shoulder. Something was crouched at the edge of the yard, glaring yellow-eyed through the raspy grass. I knew it couldn’t do much more than that.

In the basement, I sat Sadie down on the concrete and put the fairy in the crate.

“It’s okay,” I said, petting her torn-up hair. We both looked through the bars. The crisscrossed shadows seemed to cut the fairy into pieces.

MEN OF ZEN

Congratulations on your new role.

Whether you have just joined the Company or been with us for some time, we are confident you will find the Company a dynamic and rewarding place in which to work, and we look forward to a successful association.

Welcome, says our new Employee Handbook. Not two years after Todd and I launch Zensor 1.0, the Company is experiencing a period of fast growth. Our corporate advisor, Michael Allen, informs us we should hire a bunch of new people, then take a week of vacation in order to enter Q3 with the strongest synergy yet. Since we’re hiring total strangers now, having run out of shared connections, we had to pay our lawyer to write an Employee Handbook about the “perks, amenities, and other miscellaneous joys of being an employee of the Company,” but it turns out anyway to just be stuff employees can and can’t do legally. “Not that people are going to defect.” Our lawyer always looks at me when she says this. “Not that you should expect defection. You just want to cover your bases, is all.”

Well, I fully agree with her. I love to cover my bases.

I expressed the desire to adjust the legalese of the Employee Handbook toward a friendlier tone, but according to our lawyer, “there are legal implications for doing that.” Now, Todd and I are writing an Introduction which skews good vibes, in order to increase the net good vibes of the document as a whole.

Todd is my cofounder. He does the business and I do the tech. Would I call our association successful thus far? Michael Allen advised us in the beginning that we should each get a therapist. Two therapists from two different clinics. Yes, I tell my therapist, at present I am successfully related to Todd. I love Todd like a brother. Todd and I bring out each other’s authentic selves, which is excellent, because a creative and constructive company culture depends on employees bringing their authentic selves to work, each and every day.

“Add that,” I say, and knock back my third Vitamin of the evening.

“I guess.” Todd types up my authenticity statement. “Don’t OD.”

Vitamin, noun proper, being a popular wellness pill containing a vigorous potpourri of B vitamins, D vitamins, chamomile, L-theanine extract from green tea, and lion’s mane mushroom powder. “You can’t,” I say. “It says so on their website.”

“They can say whatever they want; they’re not FDA-approved. No one’s checking for legitimacy. There’s no legitimacy with these kinds of things.”

“Explain, then, how I’m down to two cups of coffee a day,” I say. “How my Zensor has stopped buzzing to suggest memory-boosting brain games. How my skin now emits the radiant glow,” I say, “of someone who spends all day cavorting around in nature under the light of a moderate sun.” I say, “Please do explain to me—”

“Either finish the Introduction,” says Todd, “or accept that it already looks great and let me send it to the printer.”

“Almost,” I say. “It’s almost there, but not quite yet. Here, let me copy over the About Zen section from the Organization’s website.” Organization referring to the mindfulness acceleration collective located on the ground floor of our flexible shared workspace, along with a gym and cycling studio. I have been attending the Organization’s group meditations six to eight times per week since the day we moved the Company into the building. “There,” I say. “Look at that. Now it’s perfect.”

“Isn’t that plagiarism?” says Todd. “Couldn’t we get sued for that?” Todd has been sued before and won’t take any chances.

“This is about spirituality,” I say. “The Organization doesn’t have a patent on spirituality. Do we have a patent on authenticity?”

“Those Vitamins are screwing up your brain,” says Todd.

There’s a faint meow from somewhere beyond the wall. I make a shushing gesture. “Listen.”

“What?” says Todd.

I stand up. Then I sit down again. I think I catch some purring, but it’s too soft to know for sure. “Cat,” I say.

“That’s my cue.” Todd leans in and, before I can react, confiscates my laptop. “I’m not letting you hold me past eight one more night, especially on a Friday. I have a friend to meet and you have a vacation to start.”

We have to stagger our vacations, and my week’s up first. “So leave without me.”

“Can’t. I’ve been told by Allen to make sure you actually take the week off. I think I’ll hold on to your office key.”

What I find is, people who act decent most of the time can let slip some alarming flashes of cruelty. Todd is entirely aware, for instance, that I would rather chop off my left arm than take a week off. All these years getting the minimum optimal level of sleep—waking up before everyone else, going to bed after everyone else—in order to get ahead of the curve, only to plunder it all via seven days of doing nothing except falling behind. In my less logical moments, I toy with the possibility that “burnout” was invented by Michael Allen, who didn’t make it to Forbes until he was forty, to sabotage Company operations. Which is to say, more logically, that sometimes, the young should be wary of the envy of the old.

I dry-swallow another Vitamin. Todd is gazing at me with questioning intent; I reply by closing my eyes and nodding with flowing grace.

“Hey,” he says. “Calendar notification. You’re supposed to be at group meditation in three minutes.”

“I’d like my computer back, please, so I can finish the Introduction.”

“You’re joking me,” says Todd. “You’re playing hooky on meditation? For this?”

“A pagan,” I say, “ought not complain about a Christian skipping church.”

“Take yourself a little more seriously,” says Todd, “I dare you. And since when does this Christian skip church?”

Since last Friday’s group meditation, when that new girl showed up. Her name is Ana K. According to Ana K, five years ago Ana K survived a car crash that killed her entire family, causing her to quit her phenomenal job, sell her many material possessions, and go live in a nunnery in Lhasa. Ana K says that for five years she spent the entire day, from four in the morning to ten at night, silently meditating or tending to the garden.

Everyone else at the Organization is in love with her, might as well marry her. I have my suspicions. For instance, Ana K claims that, living at the nunnery, she only ate rice and steamed broccoli, sometimes carrots, some of which, she confided to us, were purple, which she had never seen before. A person doesn’t live on carbs and steamed vegetables for five years and come out of it looking like she does. Besides, she’s only twenty-seven years old, as stated by her driver’s license, which I saw by accident in her cubby when I was retrieving my shoes and wallet from my own cubby.

Ana K, everyone is saying, has seen the Truth.

Who is she? I don’t know. What is she here to do? Nothing good. Group meditation is all about the harmony of the group. It’s delicate. It requires trust. How I feel about it is, I could definitely use a group meditation right now, but I couldn’t use walking into the Organization and seeing Ana K. That’s how I’ve felt about it all week.

“My friend,” says Todd. “It’s official. I think I’m actually worried about you.”

“Sounds like a you problem,” I say.

“Get up,” says Todd, “and go look at yourself in a mirror.”

“Let’s do dinner,” I say, “and then you can go. I’ll drop my office key in your mailbox on my way home.” At the thought of dinner, I observe that my Zensor has not buzzed a suggestion all day, even though I skipped lunch. This is promising; I’ve heard rumors at the Organization that some members, thanks to sustained meditative practice, can metabolize efficiently enough to thrive on only one meal a day, liberating time for other, more valuable activities.

“I could do dinner,” says Todd.

Together, we leave the office and walk down the hall. Even this late, the shared workspace remains occupied with hundreds of startup founders hunched at their desks, squatting on their chairs, walking and talking at a steady pace on their desk- treadmill hybrids. Each office is lit with the same single frame of fluorescent light. I have the notion I’m traveling through a space zoo, with every exhibit flicking up its unfamiliar eyes to scope out my threat level as I pass.

I’ll admit that, years ago, when I first started the Company, I too was starved for a slot in history’s credits. Then I attended my first Organization event, a weeklong silent meditation. One could say that my life is enriched by spiritual development. To put it lightly.

In the microkitchen, Todd retrieves two plant-based health drinks, each of which contains all the nutrition per meal a person on the standard two-thousand calorie diet needs. We tap them together like they’re flutes of champagne. “Cheers,” he says. Then he goes to the pantry and selects a bag of cheese puffs which, despite being vegan, are still, at the end of the day, cheese puffs.

People like Todd, they can’t fully comprehend what they’ve been given. The gift of existence is limited by a fixed number of years. We call this a constraint, in data science. And the optimization equation is what allows one to make decisions so that the ultimate desirable quantity, such as profit, or perhaps happiness, is maximized—within the given constraints.

I’m not saying anything new here. I just look at Todd munching on his cheese puffs, with his rumpled clothes and Friday-night plans to go bar-hopping with some friend who’s getting a divorce, and I feel truly sad for him. Out of brotherly love. I have seen his Zensor buzzing him to spend more time in idle contemplation, among other things, but what does the man do? Hits Snooze on his own Company’s Product.

I suppose there is only so much an outside influence can do. Like the About Zen section states, the only way to achieve complete synchronization with the Truth is self-awareness. And that must necessarily originate from within.

Back in the conference room, I think I hear another meow. But when I switch on the lights, the place is empty, and what appears to be cat hairs at the far end of the table turns out to be a few wilted microgreens from my breakfast bowl.

“Tough luck,” says Todd. “I saw the tabby just a few days ago.”

“Me too,” I say, even though, as a rule, I prefer not to lie unless the situation is dire.

 

That night, I dream that I’m delivering a sermon. “Life,” I say.“The eternal question. For what is human experience but gems of meaningless emotions, strung together by the thread of a soul to form what feels like meaning, only to turn out ultimately to be a bracelet of a life that is but an accessory to the planet we call Earth?”

Too late, I realize I’m reciting the latest advertisement for Zensor. The white speck of light by my webcam winks in the darkness, signaling the live broadcast of my face to zillions of people across the dream world. “Can you all hear me?” I say.

We can all hear you, replies God, a woman.

I’m not sure I’m enjoying this dream. I feel deeply, abstractly unwell, which is wrong, because I know for sure that I am living my very best life.

Through sheer curtains, I see tiny cats with tiny wings flying through the sky. Having no idea what I just said, and being unsure how to proceed, I start spit-balling phrases from books I’ve read in the past year. “Success,” I say, “like happiness, cannot be pursued.” I say, “If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled.” The white speck winks at me in Morse. “Virtuous deeds make up the light of our lives.”

As I speak, I’m clicking through my open tabs, and in slow, wading motion, I notice a calendar notification for 5:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. I check my watch. It’s 5:37 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Apparently, I’m not dreaming.

I’m giving a virtual keynote on discovering joy in entrepreneurship for the Stanford University Alumni Association’s “Putting the I’m in Impossible” conference in Singapore, where it’s not 5:37 a.m., but 8:37 p.m. As a matter of fact, I spent half of Thursday working with our content team to generate a five-page speech for this very event.

The woman’s voice says, “Wallace? I think you’re frozen.”

The chat box says the event host is Kylie Wakita, the head of the Stanford Alumni Association. The toolbar says 781 participants are present.

I turn off my camera.

“Now we can’t see you at all,” says Kylie Wakita.

“One moment, please,” I say. “Just hold on for one moment.”

I conduct Deep Breathing Exercise 3 from the Organization’s corporate breathing class and start scrolling through my recently opened documents. In-breath. PDF of blood test results. Out-breath. More blood test results. In-breath. Cat adoption certificates. Out-breath. Vision tests, hearing tests. In-breath. Blood tests; I get them once a week, just because.

And it hits me like a chunk of ice: the script is on my work laptop, which is in my office, which is not only a fifteen-minute drive away, but also locked with a key currently locked by Todd’s key in Todd’s house with Todd locked inside it too, probably deep in the most productive phase of REM sleep.

“Wallace?” says Kylie Wakita. Her microphone produces a slight reverberation around my name. “Wallace, are you there?”

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “My sincerest apologies. I believe my internet may be faltering.” I say, “Two moments, please.” Then I shut the lid of my laptop.

Outside, the early birds, not tiny cats after all, are flying back and forth between telephone wires in a peachy predawn light.

I am at a loss. If I were still susceptible to the shallow and unproductive emotion that is hate, I would hate myself for this. Wimping out is hardly a regular occurrence in my playbook.

I spend some time staring at the backs of my hands. Then I realize that I’m barely breathing, which is odd, because my Zensor isn’t buzzing me. In fact, my Zensor hasn’t buzzed me this entire time. No Spend fifteen more minutes in bed. No Drink a glass of water. Nothing at all. I tap it to check on its battery—

And receive my second shock of the morning.

I can’t remember exactly how Company protocol goes, but a Product bug like what I’m seeing must be Code Red. I look closer. It’s not just a bug—it’s a potential PR crisis. I dial Todd, put him on speaker, and start pacing the room to get my heart rate up, in case the issue’s in the hardware. “Good morning, sunshine,” I say, “where did you hide my office key?”

Todd says, “Jesus Christ.”

“This is an emergency,” I say. “Company protocol. Code Red.”

“What Company protocol? What the hell,” says Todd, “is Code Red? I thought you didn’t do drugs?”

“Okay, forget that. My Zensor isn’t working. I need to access the code to see if this is related to the features we’re beta testing, or if valued customers across America are actually experiencing this problem real-time. Can you imagine? Right after we broke into Silicon Valley?”

“What do you mean, not working?”

“Right, don’t panic, but now I’m realizing we might have been hacked.”

“Hacked?”

“There’s this new girl at group meditation, her name is Ana K, she has green eyes, maybe you’ve seen her around the building; she presents as, well, I don’t know, all I know is she’s not who she claims she is. I suspect we may be under attack from some competing—”

“My Zensor’s completely fine. It’s actually buzzing me to get the hell back to sleep.”

“My Zensor says I’m dead.”

For a few beats, the line is quiet.

“Well, you’re not,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m aware.”

“I didn’t even realize we had this as a feature.”

“Release 9.3.2,” I say. “I wanted to demonstrate how death and life are harmoniously intertwined, like the heads and tails of a coin.”

“Oh,” says Todd. “God.”

“It’s probably the beta,” I say. “Which is why it’s still in beta. Is my office key still in your mailbox, by any chance?”

“Buddy,” says Todd, “just relax. It’s definitely the beta.” He says, “If I put a ticket in on Monday, I’m sure the dev team will have a look by Friday.” He says, “Hello?”

“How about,” I say, “the dev team has it fixed by Wednesday?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” he says. “We’re way ahead of schedule.”

“Sure,” I say. “Sure, we have loads of time. Time here, time there. All we have is time.”

“Hey,” he says, “that’s the idea.” He says, “I’m going back to bed.”

“Wait,” I say. “Wait just a minute, here.”

“Have a good vacation,” he says. “Hope the keynote went well.”

Which reminds me: I haven’t checked my Zensor in a while.

I stop my speedy pacing and tap the wristband. Even with my intensified pulse, the display hasn’t changed. “Yeah,” I say. “The keynote. Of course. The keynote went well beyond comparison. I’ve never met such an insightful crowd.” If Todd finds out what happened, he’ll sic Michael Allen on me, and I just know Michael Allen is going to call burnout and put me on another vacation. “Todd?” I say. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry about me at all.”

“All right, then,” says Todd. “If you say so.”

“I said it,” I say. “You go back to bed, now.”

“Wow,” he says, “thanks, pal,” and the line goes cold.

For an emergency breakfast, I consume a twelve-ounce smoothie that contains 110 percent of my daily servings of fruit. It’s somewhat lacking in vegetables, so I compensate with a multivitamin gummy, a biotin supplement, an iron supplement, and two Vitamins. As I’m parsing through my stash, I notice that the cap to the sleep-aid melatonin is screwed on crooked. I must’ve taken too much last night. I chew twelve edible mini-espressos to negate the residual drowsiness and, since I will be reviewing thousands of lines of code when I get to the office, swallow another three in quick succession. Anticipating jitters, I empty the contents of a lavender honey tea bag into a bowl, crush it into powder using a rolling pin, wet my fingers, and rub it gently into my gums. I overheard Julian F and Reynold R talking about this at group meditation; I trust it, because they both went to well-ranked med schools. I didn’t stick around to hear how much of the effect is due to placebo.

I dash to the door with my keys. Hand on the knob, I’m struck by the possibility that my Zensor is glitching because I skipped my group meditations last week. I dash back to the kitchen. Cross-legged on my yoga mat, I open the Organization’s mobile app and hit Start on a random guided track.

A male voice says, in a British accent, “You’re standing in an elevator.”

I get inside my elevator.

“You’ve been wobbling at the fiftieth floor, unstable, like you’re at the top of a ladder. Let the elevator take you slowly to the forty-ninth floor. Breathe in—that’s right, slowly, very slowly, descend another floor. Yes, you’ve reached the forty-eighth floor now.

Breathe out. Forty-seven. There’s a window in your elevator— what do you see? Now, breathe in, slow, tracing the breath all the way into your stomach, feeling the sensation of lowering closer to gravity, to gravitas . . .”

The edible espressos have achieved their full effect. My gentle British narrator is still on the thirty-ninth floor when I hit the lobby. Which, yes, I understand is not how the guided meditation is designed to work, but I’m operating in Code Red, over here. I open my eyes and tap my Zensor. No luck.

At Todd’s, I find his key under a rock in the rock garden and enter with ease. I jog up the hall on my tiptoes. I slow down outside his bedroom, for stealth reasons, and then I speed silently into the living room. My office keys are on the end table, all jumbled up with Todd’s wallet and keys. Crumpled napkins. Two plastic forks. Mustard packet. Bottle of aspirin. Superimposed over this scene is an image of Todd from a few hours ago, drunk, knocking back an aspirin, watching fake life play out on television as his real life falls away at constant velocity into the irretrievable past. Man is given a brain and he poisons it with alcohol; given body, and he fills it with chemicals. And—he is given time.

Todd used to invite me over every Friday, but I have trouble getting along with his friends. They slouch around on Todd’s three couches and drink beers; gossip, play cards. I myself own just one couch. I enjoy it with great care, knowing that my future self will thank me for preserving my posture.

I am proud to confess: I certainly haven’t always been this way.

I give a little laugh, thinking of how far I have come.

 

When I first started attending group meditations, I was in a bad state. My group leader recommended adopting a dog or cat— taking care of a life, she said, is a sure way to find happiness and fulfillment in one’s own life. Stroking a pet’s fur, or even seeing your pet, she said, is enough to generate a rush of happy chemicals. So I went straight to the shelter and signed the papers for Lovely, a slender black cat with white paws. I took her back to the office and let her wander as I set up two ceramic bowls and a litter box. She was curious about me in the beginning—if I called to her, nicely, fairly in a whisper, she would come and sniff my fingers. But every time I tried to touch her, she scooted just out of reach.

After that day, I never saw her again.

When I couldn’t get ahold of Lovely is when I adopted the tabby. Then, when I couldn’t get ahold of either of them, I adopted a third. Everyone else at the office has sighted a cat at one point or another. The litter boxes fill up. The food and water disappear. Once in a while, I find hairs on my chair or a trail of barely perceptible litter-smelling pawprints on the surface of my desk.

And I have to say: I don’t understand.

Nor does anyone I’ve talked to. They say to keep trying. This is just the way cats are, they say. It’s nothing personal; next time, rescue a dog or something. Or try harder.

What am I doing, then, if I’m not trying?

Now, in the conference room, I clean out the litter box, then straighten up Todd’s and my chairs from last night. I go to my personal office and I boot up my work computer. My hands are shaking, likely from the edible espressos, so I eat a chamomile stress-relief gummy as I start to check the code for errors.

After some time, I think I hear lapping at the ceramic bowl in the conference room. And maybe the cats are wandering around in there, playing under the cover of the table, just rollicking about, all fluff and delight, but when I stand up, a can of cat food in my hand, I realize that somehow, despite everything, I don’t have the heart to go after them and check.

 

It turns out that no one has hacked into our system.

No one has reported a bug, either. The parts of the code I worried about are clean. Now, it’s a matter of exporting the data out of my Zensor into a spreadsheet for analysis, which, judging by the rate of the USB transfer, means three or four hours of waiting, if not five.

The Organization is down three flights of stairs from our office. Exiting onto ground level, one first passes the gym, then the cycling studio, before finally arriving at its double glass doors.

Lately, I have been submitting weekly complaints to building management about the cycling studio. The cyclers possess two large speakers, which they leverage to play today’s pop hits at blast decibels. When asked, they claim the volume is kept on the lowest notch. I can’t say I believe them. People who indoor-cycle for sport parade about like they are fitness kings and queens, but judging by their taste in music, can be nothing more than hacks. I imagine it is difficult for them to cycle peacefully with the idea that right on the other side of the wall sit people who are truly integrated with their inner selves. The brain-dead pop music that bleeds through the walls and into the Organization’s group meditations, I have written to building management, could, at worst, be a ploy to even out the playing field. Which I don’t find particularly conducive to the safe, inclusive working environment this building declares itself to have.

Upon entrance to the Organization, the visitor is faced with an employee at a white desk who, backed by a glowing pine-green infinity logo, emits a peculiar luminescence of her own, the way the moon emits the sun. Plants and T-shirts for sale line the windows. Turn left after checking in at the reception, and there extends the long, dim corridor lined with multicolored doors. Beside each door stands a cubby shelf for personal belongings. Each shelf is outfitted with an essential-oil diffuser, so puffs of steam roil all along the walk, alternating left and right. An otherworldly catwalk for an audience of none.

Usually, on Saturdays, I attend the afternoon session. But here I am, Saturday morning, with a few hours to spare, having gone a whole week without meditating. I see some people gathered outside the blue door, making small talk—Blue Room must be where the morning session takes place. I fade in to the circle, looking forward to meeting new faces. Instead, I see Julian F, Reynold R, Allison S, and Frankie M, all of whom I know from the afternoon session. Which means they have been meditating twice a day on Saturdays, whereas I, heretofore unaware, have only been meditating once.

Of course, like a punchline, Ana K is present too. I consider leaving, but everyone has already given me a warm, welcoming nod. If I don’t return the greeting, I could be passively excommunicated, and many of the Organization’s members are industry leaders or influential venture capitalists.

“So, where are you living?” says Allison S to Ana K. She might as well jump in front of a train for Ana K, if she plans to keep looking at her like that. “Now that you’re back in the States?”

“I’m waitressing at a small family-owned restaurant in exchange for free room and board,” says Ana K, smiling ambiently. “The kindness I’ve encountered is absolutely incredible.”

“Do you find time to meditate?” Julian F is desperate to know.

“The way I think about it,” says Ana K, “if you can’t meditate while you’re washing dishes, you can’t meditate at all.”

“Sublime,” says Allison S. “Truly sublime.”

“You can only say that because you’re advanced,” says Reynold R. “Me, I still have to put myself into a trance state in order to have a meditation that really fulfills me.”

“That’s funny,” says Ana K, “you must be far more advanced than I am; I don’t even know what a trance state is.”

A trance state is Reynold R hyperventilating into a paper bag for five minutes, and then, more likely than not, supplementing with a microdose of psychedelic. “It’s like,” says Reynold R, “it’s like, I kind of like to wander the streets of the city after dark,” he says, “on account of night-walking being, in my mind, the best manner in which to reflect upon the self and self’s relation to the greater world.”

“If that’s what you mean by trance state,” says Frankie M, “I’ve gotten into the habit lately of fasting until noon while taking longer in-breaths than out-breaths, which I find puts me into a prolonged meditative state, not to mention a rather wonderful mood.”

“That’s all great,” says Allison S, “but really, isn’t the whole point to connect with other living creatures, not only the self? I’ve started doubling up on group meditations and I find that I feel a more tangible connection between myself and my peers, and our conjoining fabric in general, than I have in my entire life.”

She turns to Ana K for confirmation.

“You know what,” says Julian F, “I started loving-kindness meditation last year, and you all won’t believe this, but I’ll smile at a crying baby and it’ll stop crying. Just like that.”

No one has anything to say to this. “Well,” I say, “I’m going to go get a warm-up session in.”

“Snaps for Wallace B,” says Allison S.

There’s nothing I want less in the world than Allison S’s snaps, but I fill myself with loving-kindness and float myself straight through the circle and into Blue Room. Which is progress. If my life weren’t enriched by spiritual development, I would have departed in a fit of fury the moment Reynold R plagiarized what I said last month about night-walking. The moment he plagiarized it practically word for word, hands in his pockets, not even glancing in my direction.

Reynold R might as well patronize the cycling studio. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Reynold R turned out to be a spy for the cycling studio.

I sit facing the back of the room, because in the front, there’s the air vent. The air vent has always made me nervous for no specific reason. It’s larger than average, but other than that, it’s exactly like any other vent, and normally, I have no trouble at all looking at vents.

I shut my eyes.

I am clean.

I am lush.

I am a mountain with clouds drifting past my peak, representing my thoughts, which I allow to enter my awareness but not stay, representing that impermanence is the root of all truth. On my peak, shrouded in mist, is a powerful white tiger. What the tiger represents, I’m not sure. But it’s been there since Frankie M said she had a white tiger on her mountain, which made me want to get one for my mountain too.

The white tiger purrs and the vibration courses through me, making the clouds release cool veils of rain which soak me in pure ecstasy.

The tiger opens its muscular jaw and goes, “Take it easy.”

The fact that the tiger has Todd’s voice unsettles me. I choose to ignore him and sink myself deeply into the sensation of bliss.

“It’s time for vacation,” says the tiger, in Todd’s voice. And he begins to purr so loudly that I feel my entire body quiver atop the mat.

After a few more breaths, it hits me that my heart’s going mad and there’s bile in my throat. I swallow it down and that makes my eyes water; I have the sudden, devastating urge to stand up and start jumping rope, though I have not touched, or even seen, a jump rope in many years. “Focus,” I say out loud. “Breathe. Transcend.”

The tiger is choked out of sight by a thick mass of clouds. The jackass, I think. He’s supposed to protect me. “Focus.” I start yelling. “Breathe.” I yell so loud I run out of breath. “Transcend.”

My eyes fly open. The door is open and Ana K is peering around it. “What exactly is it,” she says, “that you’re hoping to transcend?”

“My vacation,” I say, without thinking.

And—she laughs.

Via that easy laugh I see that, despite her being only twenty-seven, she already has smile wrinkles around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes. And maybe it’s this laugh, in juxtaposition to everything I know about her, that causes me to go, “So your whole family really died in that car crash, huh?”

“To be completely honest,” says Ana K, “I find it hard to believe too. Still.”

“Five years in Tibet,” I say, “and you can still speak perfect English.”

“Oh, there was another American at the nunnery. And an Irish woman.”

“You didn’t eat any meat at all?”

“I ate a lot of beans.”

“Scurvy?”

“We had oranges.”

“You didn’t share any of this with the group.”

“Wallace, right?”

I hesitate.

“That’s okay,” she says, “you don’t have to tell me. I’m just curious, why transcend vacation? I mean, before I went to the nunnery, I loved my job, but still, I always looked forward to vacation.”

“I can’t stand being on vacation,” I say, “because there are certain things I wish to achieve every day in order to make the most of my life. I have to work. I have to do a kindness. I have to exercise and meditate. Every day,” I say, “I want to be the best that I can be, and make a dynamic and rewarding experience out of my very limited time here.” I say, “We’re only visitors on this planet, after all. That’s what the Dalai Lama said.”

“He did say that,” says Ana K. “Hold on, I promise I’ve been listening to you, but do you hear that?”

“What?” I say.

Ana K walks over to the air vent I’ve been trying not to look at and, crouching, pries the cover right off. She executes eachmovement with the confidence of a thief, a con man. Someone totally dishonest. I look around. Naturally, I’m the only one here to witness it.

Something inside the vent enthralls her, because she gets on her knees, bends over, and wriggles her entire torso inside. “Jesus Christ,” I say. Whatever this woman is trying to prove, she’s proving it to the wrong guy.

But then her shirt slides and I see the scar. “You won’t believe this,” says Ana K.

She shimmies out and turns to me, expectant. And I have no clue what to say to her.

No idea whatsoever.

Seeing that scar, I have nothing.

“You won’t believe it,” says Ana K, “but there are cats in here. A beautiful white one and a tabby,” she says. “And I think,” she says, “from the meowing, there might even be a third.”

A tectonic shift occurs in my head. “Cats?”

“Yes.” She’s laughing again. “You think I’m crazy.”

“No,” I say, and it comes out in a whisper. “Do—do they seem happy? Healthy?”

“Come see for yourself.”

At first, I worry I won’t fit, but then there I am, inside the vent.

My shoulders are wider than Ana K’s. They block out all the light; only a few thin rays get through.

Ana K’s voice is muffled. “Do you see them?”

I can’t really see my hands, even.

Distant music from the cycling studio buzzes through the walls of the vent and I feel it in the tips of my fingers: this vague, joyful melody, right where my pulse flits against the metal. And out of nowhere, maybe because of the strange, musty darkness, I’m suddenly a kid again, six or seven, in some school friend’s barn for a game of hide-and-seek. I’m hiding on my belly in the crack between two stacks of hay that have tipped against each other. And this sensation fills me. This big sensation. The sensation of lying there, propped up on my elbows, with specks of silver dust drifting through the slanted rays of light.

“Wallace?”

Instantly the haystacks vanish, and I’m kneeling on a hard floor with my torso in a vent, palms pressed against the cold walls. And I find that I am crying. But not in a bad way. Not in a way that I have ever cried before.

I grip the walls hard and start to pull myself deeper, but a hand grabs onto my ankle. Two hands. The huge, invincible hands of Reynold R, or maybe Julian F. Whoever is out there blocks out all the light; the thin rays disappear. Somewhere, an infinite distance away, someone is talking to somebody else. The hands on my ankles begin to tug.

And what I do is, I pull this trick of going completely slack, because I have heard somewhere that dead weight is harder to move. Sure enough, the hands come off of me. I keep lying there, though. I lie there all slack in this vent. The walls tremble. The air conditioning might rush forth at any second.

I say, “I’ve got my eye on you.”

My neck is wet. My own voice sounds unfamiliar. All around me is the buzzing of the music, the darkness where things could be.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem LOVING A MAN AND HIS KIDS AND HIS HOUSE

The parade-roller-coaster-hijinks-
high-kicks-slapstick-show of kids—
your kids, becoming
something like mine, as well.

How close should I hold
them? What will stay?
What will be taken
away? The kids
are never still.
Neither am I.
Neither are we.

Snare drum of dryer and tickle
of zipper going ’round.
I sit seeing if I can
become all house,
can reach peace
with the plumbing, vents, and lofty
operations of this whole rigmarole.

I am becoming woman
of the dishrag, the countertop, the shower.
I am wife-ing the damn house:
tending to her, giving
each careful ministration like a nurse
over a sick bed. I pledge:
We will keep each other safe and clean.
We will keep proper functioning.

If this were a cave,
I would festoon it with honeysuckle
and thick garlands of magnolia blossoms.

If this were the belly of a whale,
I would light candles and read the shadows.

If this were a cockpit,
I’d learn fast how to fly.

This is a house.
I am a woman grown harder
through toil and dedication. Making
it work. Sweating my equity
into every floor board, skinned
knee, illness, frustration, dishes, stitches,
and fits almost blowing the house down.

Under the weight
(an anvil shoved
into the ribcage)
of loving too hard,
I must remember:
Do not confuse Eden
with a really nice rest stop
off I-40, though the space
it offers away
from them all
(the man, the kids, the house)
might beckon and beseech me,
by how green the grass grows.

SHAKESPEARE ON MARS

To be the first to play a Martian Hamlet,
To blow red dust off Yorick’s ancient skull,
Exclaim to steadfast Opportunity, 
Over Ophelia drowned in Lowell’s canal—

I dreamed this future vividly enough
It’s a memory. It will not come to pass. 
I am a booster stage, a corner crier
Beckoning groundlings to the Marscrete O.

As I hand you the playbill, look into my eyes
And there will be an ocean uncrossed and a life
Raft empty except its unused flare gun.

Inside this helmet of my skull, I hear rain, 
Though nothing’s fallen for months. It’s only
Dry earth and imaginary tragedies.