Be Ready for the Lightning, page 13
“Pinna cues,” I said, mostly to myself, and my mother said, “What?”
“Pinna cues. That’s what it does, the pinna. Helps you situate where sound is coming from, in front and behind. I’m going to have trouble, even if there isn’t internal damage.” Seeing her confusion, I said, “Pinna means ear. This part, the part on your head, not the inner ear.” I grabbed my remaining one, demonstrating. With the cartilage still pinched in my fingers, I said, “Air conduction will be affected, of course. Bone conduction won’t—” I probed the swell of skull behind my missing ear and breathed in sharply at the pain. It stopped my babbling. “Mom,” I said. “I’m leaving. I’m leaving Vancouver.”
I expected her to say something like Don’t be rash or We’ll talk when you’re feeling better. But instead she said, “I think that might be a good idea.”
—
Where will you go?
I don’t know.
Come to San Francisco!
I was thinking east.
Like Toronto? Or how about New York? You could stay with Al, until you get settled. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. If you could figure out the visa stuff.
I’m sure Al would love you volunteering his place. And Marie would love it too.
Pfft, Marie.
New York could be good, actually. I want to go somewhere big. Really big.
You sure you won’t come here?
Sorry. I don’t think I’m the California type. But maybe I will ask Al, if you really think he won’t mind. It would just be for a little while.
Al doesn’t mind anything. He’ll be a perfect host, because he’s perfect.
It seems like a big favour to ask. Especially of a couple.
You’re showing up with one ear and a scar on your face the size of Russia. No offence. But if he doesn’t take pity on you, then…well, to be honest, I’d almost be proud of him. But seriously, he’ll love it.
I’ve never been to New York.
Don’t worry, it’s like Disneyland now. There are more tourists than people who actually live there.
There are people who actually live in Disneyland?
Ha, very ha. You know what I mean. I just mean it’s not like people are going to try to sell you crack on the street—it’s not the ’80s.
Crack is not what I’m worried about.
What are you worried about?
Everything.
Everything except crack, apparently.
—
Having never really left before, I found the amount of stuff I had to do before moving daunting. I rented a storage locker and bought giant Rubbermaid containers, which I filled with more possessions than I ever had imagined I had, even after going through the requisite cycle of tossing and donating bags and bags of things. Then there was every bit of food in my cupboards, my freezer. My bank accounts. I’d been making good money since finishing my master’s four years ago, so I could float on savings for awhile. I had to give notice at work and figure out the legality of being in the States without a green card and how long I could stay. Was I visiting? Moving? Running away from home?
I worked through my long checklist of tasks, carefully thinking not at all of these bigger questions.
My cat, Kit, was the toughest part. Finally it was Conrad who took him, cradling him in one arm in a manner Kit usually only let me get away with.
“He likes you already,” I said, relieved and betrayed.
“What’s not to like?” said Conrad.
Conrad threw a little going-away party for me the night before I left. The only other guests were our parents, and the four of us had dinner at Conrad’s, followed by grocery store cake. But when I started slicing the cake, my parents pushed their chairs back.
“We’ll pass on dessert,” said my father. “That stuff’s for you young, slim people.”
“We’re going on a cruise in April,” said my mother, patting her stomach. “I don’t want to frighten the other passengers.”
“As if you ever could,” said my father. To me he said, “If we leave for the airport by nine, we should be fine. Connie, you’ll bring her home later?”
They looked smaller now, as if they were shrinking. They were, a little—they’d hit that age. But every time I saw them, I was still shocked by it, how small and old they looked to me.
They stood up, and my mother kissed my hair, right on top of my head to avoid bumping my ear. It had been over a month since I got home from the hospital, and the ear was healing well. I hadn’t made a decision yet about reconstruction—which was serious surgery—or a prosthetic. My mother pressed bottles of vitamin E oil on me faster than I could possibly go through them. The scars on my face and hand were still puffy, but they had faded from bright red to white-ish pink and were no longer painful. I’d floated through the worst of it on painkillers, realizing how people got addicted to that stuff. The ear still throbbed sometimes, and I kept it taped with gauze, even though the doctor had said it was fine to uncover it now. I still had to sleep on my left side.
“Don’t stay up too late,” said my mother. Without saying anything else to either of us, they headed to the elevator.
I served a slice of cake to Conrad and one to myself and sliced off a bite with the edge of my fork.
“I have a theory,” said Conrad, his own loaded fork hovering in the air, the artificial icing a bright white buzz. “That people either want to be free or be safe. And pretty much everything they do boils down to that wanting.”
I looked at him. “Your theories are getting more ambitious,” I said. In response to his statement, I added, “Maybe you’re right.”
Was it such a simple division? I thought of Annie. Free, once. After Howard, I wasn’t sure. And Ted? Free, though maybe he was swinging toward safe too, a little, as he got older. Al, who’d run from Vancouver, was trickier. For me, there was no question, no hesitation at all.
“How about you?” I said. “Which one do you want?”
“Oh, that’s my problem,” said Conrad. “I don’t want anything. That’s why I’m nuts.”
“Everybody wants something.”
“Sure,” said Conrad. “I want a little sister who’s super cool. But we all have our crosses to bear.” He sighed dramatically. Then the smile faded from his face. “Listen,” he said. “I’m really sorry about what happened.”
“You’ve apologized already. It wasn’t your fault.”
“If I wasn’t—If I hadn’t gotten into it with that girl’s boyfriend, you’d still have two ears. And you wouldn’t be leaving town.”
“Connie,” I said. “It’s fine. There are a lot of reasons why I need to leave. At least for awhile. Besides. It’s only fair to other women that I have some sort of aesthetic handicap.” I knocked my shoulder into his, offering permission to get back to joking.
“I don’t know why I’m like this.” His voice was low and quiet.
I shrugged helplessly.
“I fucked up, and you got hurt,” he said. “I should have protected you.”
“You don’t have to protect me,” I said. “I’m not in danger. Just protect yourself. Just stop it. Connie. Stop.” I said it as if he were fighting right that moment.
“I remember that time at school, when I found you with your arm cut up. You were—” Conrad cleared his throat. “You were so scared.”
“Connie,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
I had, over time, succeeded in forgetting about that day altogether, the day the boy who liked me held me down in the woods, and I’d lied, and Conrad had known. When Conrad had beaten that boy to a pulp. Like I’d forgotten the flying dream. The only thing that remained was a vague feeling of guilt, a hazy worry that Conrad’s troubles were partially rooted in me, in something I’d done.
“You don’t remember?”
I looked at him, baffled.
“When I got expelled, the first time? That kid, that little—” He broke off. The disbelief etched on his face almost made him look angry. “In your gym class, you told the teacher you fell. You told me you fell.”
Something was wriggling in my guts, and I said, “Connie, don’t.” I wanted him to stop talking. But then he said the boy’s name, and something melted away. It was like my body was remembering, rather than my brain. The fug of preteen sweat mixed with wet leaves, the taste of his fingers in my mouth, the feel of his spit going cold on my face, the heaviness of him. The silence. It was incomplete, disjointed. I couldn’t remember the before or after, the time of year, the context. But the flashes were enough. There was Annie, escorting me to the bathroom. There I was curled up on the ground. There was Conrad under the plaid comforter, saying, Promise me.
“You really didn’t remember.”
“No. I really didn’t.”
Conrad put his face in his hands and breathed out one long exhalation. Lifting his face again, he said, “I just keep making things worse, don’t I?”
“Maybe it’s better,” I said.
“Better to remember?”
“Better to know.” I could taste the cake coming back up in my throat, and I wanted to throw it up, to throw up until I was completely empty. But maybe it was better to know, as sick as I felt just then. Maybe the wiping away made things bigger than they had to be. Maybe that was our problem; maybe our compulsions were overblown, comically magnified. The compulsion to forget. The compulsion to fight.
“Connie—?”
He looked at me. He was still slouched over.
“—can you take me to Mom and Dad’s now?”
We didn’t talk much, while we drove. He asked me a bit about Al’s apartment, his real estate work. When I was getting out, he said, “I’m glad you’re going. I’ll miss you, obviously. But I’m glad you’re going.”
I let myself into the house quietly, so I wouldn’t wake my parents. My dad had insisted on driving me to the airport in the morning, even though Conrad had offered. I suspected my mother had told Dad to, but I was touched by the gesture anyway. Leaving town was making me irrationally emotional and nostalgic, as if my trip were going to culminate in euthanasia instead of sleeping on Al’s couch. It was good to be back in my parents’ house one last time before I left. It still felt safe to me, frozen in time.
I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of water. It was strange to think of leaving the city I’d spent my whole life in.
I looked out the window over the backyard. A neighbour’s cat, bigger than Kit, slunk across the porch, its glossy fur gleaming in the moonlight. I wondered what the world sounded like to the cat—how the strange shape of its ear, its fur, would transfer sound. Certainly its hearing would have evolved for optimal hunting—for catching, devouring. Food. Safety. Freedom.
FIFTEEN
Once the shooter has stopped screaming, there is silence. There has never been so much silence on 5th Avenue. The negotiator does not speak again.
The shooter is talking, though. He is talking again about how unhappy people are. I’m listening, and a part of me agrees. Standing behind me on the bus are Annie, her broken heart visible in her chest, and Ted, clutching his guitar and a bottle of whisky. And Conrad, his face split open, his blood mingling with the blood of the moustache man and the bald man who tried to save everyone and the driver who tried to talk the shooter into going home. And if there really was a paradise, an island beyond morning, full of adventure and happiness and peace and love, wouldn’t they want to go? Wouldn’t I want them to?
“He doesn’t understand. That man outside. But you people,” the shooter says. “You can make it there. It’s not even so much owing to my guidance. The island is looking for you. It is only that way that anyone can sight those magic shores. You know that. You know that.”
He points to the teenage girl with the urine-stained pants. “A million golden arrows pointing,” he says. “You can’t miss it. You won’t. Come stand with me. It’s time to start.”
The only movement is from the hands of the people on either side of the girl, who grip her. Her boyfriend has been separated from her, is back a few rows and off to the side. It doesn’t matter. The girl looks from side to side at the people holding her, a young man with a skinny striped tie and an older man with beautiful white hair combed straight back. The three of them stand there, linked.
“Come down here,” says the shooter, again. His melodic voice has gone flat. For the first time, he sounds angry.
The girl moves forward, and the young man beside her does too. He takes her hand and holds it against his chest, crumpling his sharp-looking tie. His dark skin shines with sweat. She looks at him, astonished. They move between the others together, down the steps. When they are about eight feet away, the shooter holds up his hand. He cocks his head and opens his mouth to speak. But before he says anything, there is another voice.
“Wait. Peter. I understand. I can hear.”
It’s not until he looks at me and says “Come here” that I realize I’m the one who spoke.
Without looking at her, he waves the teenage girl away from him. She and the young man who had walked with her are back in the crowd immediately, as if without moving.
“I can hear,” I say again, my body moving forward, not in a smooth way but jerky and unstable, like when you’re walking to the washroom after excellent, exhausting sex. Why? goes the wail in my head, long and high, my body divided against itself. Why why why? I have no answer, I have no mind at all, just a wagging tongue anchored to a body that is all sweat and tremble, stink and pain. It feels like when I dropped the plates in Ted’s apartment, times a thousand. Times a million.
“You will float without knowing how to float,” says Peter. His voice is intimate, as if he is promising me something.
“I’m like you. I can hear too,” I say. “Can I tell you a story?”
A visible shiver passes over the shooter. “I don’t know any stories,” he says. “None of the lost boys know any stories.” He stands, his chest going up and down, his breathing audible. “Tell me. Please tell me.”
SIXTEEN
The night before I caught the M1 bus down 5th Avenue, Al and Marie insisted on taking me out to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. I’d been in the city for three weeks, and my ear, my lack of ear, had mostly healed. The chunk of my hair that had been shaved off at the hospital hadn’t fully grown back, but I could brush it so my ear didn’t show. I’d stopped taping the gauze over it, though my hand went to it often, nervously. I had bought a strap for my sunglasses that tightened around the back of my head. The scar on my forehead was fading nicely, and I obsessively rubbed Bio-Oil into it every day after washing my face. It was almost perfectly sideways, and on good days I told myself it looked more like an indent from a too-tight hat than a grisly conversation piece.
I’d been testing my hearing obsessively, mostly using unreliable free online tools to reassure myself that distorted pinna cues on one side of my head weren’t going to affect my hearing. Rationally, I knew I was all right, but every time my phone beeped somewhere in the room and I couldn’t immediately find it, my heart sank.
Al and Marie took me to a bar not far from their beautiful apartment, where they drank flights of beer made up of little glasses balanced in wooden troughs. An amber, a lager, a stout, something fruity, some kind of cider, then something nutty, and then just beer, and more beer.
“I have to pee,” Marie announced after the third flight, getting up, clutching the cane chair’s back. She wobbled off a few steps before thundering back and declaring, “Did you know that you make your best decisions when you have to piss?” Then she doubled over with laughter. “Oh God, I’m going to pee my pants. But yeah, I had to tell you that, I read it somewhere the other day, it kicks your brain into high efficiency or something.” She trotted off again, toward the washrooms.
“Think that’s true?” said Al.
I shrugged. “There’s something there, sure. Like if you’re ordering in a restaurant, and you have to pee, you’d probably be more decisive, faster. I don’t know if it would be a better decision, though.”
“Me, I only make good decisions. I am infallible.”
“No, you’re drunk. It’s slightly different.”
“Wrong. Wrong. Dead wrong. I’m infallible and invincible and all the good in-things. Inevitable?”
“Intolerable?”
“In…” Al floundered and then finished with drunken pride. “In-shut up.”
I punched Al in the shoulder. It was amazing to me how easy it had been to fall back in with him. Still, I worried if the two of them were sicker of my presence in their apartment than they would admit. Their life seemed charmed to me. Marie’s New York family members had gotten them into a great apartment, and Al had become a real estate agent. He was successful, and so was Marie, who worked in public relations and wore a lot of draped, expensive-looking clothes. I was looking for a place and a proper job, not wanting to overstay my welcome and also uncomfortably aware of my utter lack of direction compared to their established, confident patterns.
Finding work was proving to be a headache. I missed my work in Vancouver, and if I couldn’t convince a clinic to sponsor me, it would be ages of paperwork, before I could work in my field in the States. I couldn’t help wondering how people would take to have their hearing tested by someone with a mangled ear. There are bald barbers, though, I reasoned. In the meantime, I was tutoring high school students in science and finding clients online, getting paid in cash by anxious, rich parents impressed by my master’s degree. It wasn’t much of a living, but it was better than nothing.
When I met with prospective parents, I made sure to allude to “growing up with an Asian parent”—the Tiger Mom thing had come into vogue and eager parents who initially assumed I was white suddenly became convinced that I carried the promise of secret Asian success strategies. I didn’t say which parent. I didn’t say Korean specifically, because I knew they would prefer Chinese or Japanese. But it was enough, a tick in my column, good enough to cancel out my Canadian-ness, which was considered weird, slightly off-brand. To hire me was the best of both worlds—as responsible as hiring a proper Asian tutor, as comfortable as hiring a white girl.
