5
It was fast into October and the leaves fell steadily over the parked cars, filling the beds of pickups lined outside the VFW and clogging gutters with deciduous trash. Down the road, a single leaf, the ochre of a dirtied Van Gogh star, clung to a girl’s hair as she bent to pour a stream of used cat litter into the sewer drain outside her house. In front of a row of track houses with broken down siding, a group of teenagers in hoodies selling dusters and Xannies were speaking to each other in hushed tones. A Camaro with no hubcaps was parked nearby, a faded Puerto Rican flag bandana hanging from the rearview. Down the road a stout white woman with sagging sweatpants that had juicy emblazoned on its backside was walking a chihuahua in the middle of an empty lot where a Citgo used to be.
At 16 Hubbard Hai stumbled on an old Schwinn from the seventies among the rubble in Grazina’s basement. Somehow all it needed was air in the tires. The bike was so caked with dust he didn’t realize it was silver-blue until he rode home one night in the rain and the sapphire shone under the streetlight, like a molting snake, as he let the wind know his unwashed hair and shut his eyes against the cold coming off the river, feeling almost clean.
Though it took some adjusting, he soon found his rhythm at work. A typical morning at HomeMarket looked like this: You clock in at ten a.m., leaving you an hour to prep before opening. First, you turn on the heating wells under the counter and wipe down the grease and fingerprints on the sneeze guard from the previous day. As the wells warm, you refill all the napkins and plastic utensils by the register and dining room, then make a sweep of both the men’s and women’s bathrooms. When that’s done, you start making the coffee by the soda fountain, marking the time on each metal tumbler with a Sharpie so customers know it’s fresh, after which you’d switch it out every three hours with a new batch even if the tumbler’s completely full because, as BJ said, “There’s nothing Thanksgiving about stale coffee.”
Then you take out the leftover tubs of mac and cheese or sweet potato pie, anything that was more than half full at last night’s closing, and peel off the Saran Wrap. Then you take a knife and scrape the grimy top crust away, dump what’s left into the food hoppers, give it a little stir, and after five minutes it’ll bubble and steam with a just-made glow. Then you take that white Magic Marker and write the name of an employee on the little black sign in front of each item that reads Made by hand today by:_______. At HomeMarket, “made by hand” meant heating up the contents of a bag of mushy food cooked nearly a year ago in a laboratory outside Des Moines and vacuum-sealed in industrial resin sacks. Hai wondered if anyone ever thought they’d be eating leftovers at a restaurant. Or whether they knew that the FDA allows mashed potatoes to contain up to 2 percent rat poop and up to 3.5 percent insect “fragments.” One time he spotted Maureen, out of sheer boredom, flicking a fly right onto a roasting chicken, where it sizzled and sparked before welding itself into a black nub on the crispy skin.
Next you head into the freezer, propping a milk crate behind you so you don’t get locked in, which Sony said happened to him four times his first week and Wayne had to tape a chicken thigh on the door to keep it ajar. On the freezer shelf are rows and rows of vacuum-sealed bags labeled with various dishes. You lift the bag, big as a torso, of frozen creamed spinach and place it on a pushcart. Then you do the same with all the other sacks of food. One time, toward the end of a long shift, Hai needed more apple cobbler and opened the door to find Maureen pressing a slab of mac and cheese to her knee. “It helps my arthritis,” she said, shrugging.
After you gather the sacks, you head out back to the insta-boiler, which is a huge cauldron of hot water with two hooks suspended above it. You clip a bag to each metal hook, and as they sway like concrete slabs you pull a lever to lower the bags into the boiling water, which is perfectly timed to melt the contents into “kitchen freshness.” By the time you pull them out, cut open the top, and pour the contents into a metal loaf pan, the mashed potatoes are so luscious and fragrant with garlic, bits of parsley so miraculously verdant, you’d never guess it was reheated. Same goes for the supposed “soup of the day.” One time Russia dropped his phone in the soup hopper and just looked at Hai and said, “I’ll get it when we run out.”
HomeMarket was not so much a restaurant as a giant microwave, though BJ kept telling the customers, “Look hard, folks, cause you won’t see any Chef Mikes around here, okay? You know they have one at Denny’s, right? They call themselves a sit-down restaurant but they got good ole Chef Mike fooling you. Everything you see here was made this morning by our very own Maureen.” And she’d bow to Maureen like it’s a play and Maureen would fold her little hands under her chin and do this little-old-lady smile she perfected, the one where you could barely see her eyes, they’re so full of wholesome glee. Customers loved this and usually bought extra to bring home to their families, because who wouldn’t want to support a grandmother who scooped your string beans with a shaky hand?
The one thing they do “make” is the corn bread, though the recipe is BJ’s secret. The corn bread comes in giant bags of yellow mix that you’re supposed to add water to and spoon into little loaf trays. But each Sunday, BJ stays back after the store closes and customizes her own mix, then dumps it all into a plastic drum to be used through the week.
Some people talk about how they’d never eat at a place after working there, after they see how the sausage is made, but with 60 percent off your meal, every employee ended up eating at HomeMarket. Even if you got sick of it, you find ways to switch it up. Wayne came up with a method to stuff the meat loaf full of mac and cheese, a hit with the crew for two whole weeks. Maureen combined her creamed spinach with the sweet potato pie and swore by it—though she was alone on that one. And whenever a tray came back—wrong order, mashed potatoes cold, green beans too mushy—you could take the whole thing and eat it in the walk-in fridge, standing there shoveling the slop in your mouth in under five minutes while a bulb flickers over your head.
The folks who made up the crew were just like people anywhere else in New England. Weatherworn and perennially exhausted or pissed off or both. Maureen was a retired elementary school hall monitor with the foulest mouth you’ve ever heard. She once dropped a tray of meat loaf and shouted, “Ohfuckthreedicksinabasket!” to which a man in a baby-blue turtleneck yelped and spat out his mashed potatoes. She seemed to Hai like the kind of person who puts her french fries inside her burger, which made him feel like he could trust her. She was on cashier, where she was a magician, her fingers flying over the screen faster than people could stand there, mouths agape, uhhhing through their orders.
There was also Russia, an eighteen-year-old kid who was actually born in Tajikistan. His father was a former major in the last gasps of the Red Army, and his folks arrived in the US seeking asylum after the Soviet Union fell. He was scrawny and hunched over most the time, a cuter version, Hai thought, of Gollum from Lord of the Rings. He had this Eminem buzz cut but colored anime-blue, and had a nose stud of Jack the Pumpkin King. Hai even asked him if he had a second shift at Spencer’s—but he didn’t. He worked the drive-thru, which meant he’d walk around mumbling to himself, then shout “I SAID, DO YOU WANT KETCHUP?” at the top of his lungs every half hour or so.
There was the dishwasher girl, Amanda, who was there so rarely the crew referred to her only as “dishwasher girl.” A high school junior who wore UFO pants and black eyeliner and wolf print T-shirts, she barely spoke and mostly chuckled to herself watching the mounted TV while she scrubbed away in the back. Most of the crew figured she was on some kind of downers—but the dishes were always clean.
Then there was Wayne, a barrel of a man from North Carolina who was “Chief of Rotisserie.” He had a gift for it too. Despite BJ’s claims about corn bread, the real reason this HomeMarket made so much profit was Wayne’s chicken. “The chicken just feels different here, like different in your mouth,” said one lady—a regular—who was chomping down on her half chicken right there in front of the counter. She dug into the paper bag and stood there gnawing on the side of this chicken, overcome by the power it gave her.
“Hey Sony,” Maureen shouted, “come on out here and watch this lady eat chicken. She’s a hoot.”
“I got three kids, two jobs, and I’m going nuts. So thank you for this,” the woman finally said, licking her fingers. “Y’all doing God’s work.” She tied up her hair in a ponytail, put a dab of hand sanitizer on her palms, chucked the bag full of bones into the trash, and walked out like she was striding on water.
One Saturday, just as they were lulled into a desert of a shift, three purple school buses pulled into the lot and about two hundred kids from a nearby Catholic prep school came pouring in, a sweatered sea of suppressed, unrepentant hormones. They had just come from their homecoming dance. Because it was a Catholic school, the dance took place at three p.m. in pure, sterile daylight. By the time they came in at seven thirty, the dinner rush was over and the crew was already prepping to close. The team was so slammed they didn’t have time to get mad. BJ ran into the freezer and came out carrying three slabs of side dishes on her back like they were stone tablets. Hai spotted Wayne out back, bent over the utility sink and reaching into his pocket for blood pressure tablets. Russia was next to him, patting his back and handing him a Gatorade mixed with gin, while Sony was having a full-blown panic attack out front. He just froze up in the corner while a dozen kids shouted orders at him, his hands by the side of his face, so BJ sent him to the office to watch History Channel clips on YouTube to calm down. When it was over, the store looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Everyone stayed till ten thirty that night to clean up.
Before long Hai began to know which employee was behind him by their scent alone. The Johnson & Johnson baby lotion Wayne rubbed over the grease burns on his arms, the traces of whiskey coming through the Wrigley’s Maureen chewed, the bootlegged Tom Ford (Tobacco Vanille) BJ wore cut with the strawberry Starbursts Russia was always sucking on. Sony, whose clothes, due to a faulty dryer at his group home, had the faint but consistent muskiness of damp fabric. These smells altered in intensity with each cigarette break they took. All this was mixed with the artificial flavors and aromas wafting from the vats of industrially produced food: diacetyl, acetylpropionyl, acetoin, and hydroxybenzoic acid, along with the metallic scent of colorings like Sunset Yellow FCF, tartrazine, Patent Blue V, and Green 3. Adding to this concoction was the char of chicken fat burning off the racks, releasing an endless stream of smoke not even the patented Hyper-Power HVAC could suck away. There was also the stale stench of dishwater and half-rotting food coming from the dishwasher station out back. By the third hour of any shift, a new odor—the only organic scent in the entire place—human BO, would start to emanate through the employees’ clothes. Mingling with the processed food and personal hygiene products, was the garlicky, tar-ish and vinegar scent of human work. This was all compounded into a space no larger than 950 square feet, if you count the closets and freezers. In brief moments of reprieve, when there was no customer at the counter, Hai would poke his head through Russia’s drive-thru window for a breath of air, only to inhale the car exhaust and motor oil that had pooled beneath the window.
There were times, too, when people were just people, which meant they were assholes. One day this family came in, a middle-aged father and two teen sons. You could tell right away they were in town because of the fancy tennis camp happening down the road in Glastonbury. The father looked like he’d been playing tennis since he was five years old, his resort-red face scorched save for two pale circles from his aviators, which he took off to squint at the menu, hands on his hips. While Maureen was taking the order from the dad, the taller son playfully elbowed the other one, saying, loud enough for Wayne to hear, “They would have a black dude roasting chicken.” The boys chortled into their polo collars, pulled high to hide their moose teeth. The dad raised some sort of remote control to his neck, and it became clear he was one of those smokers who had his vocal cords chopped off. “Evan, what did we say about jokes?” he said in a digitized voice while suppressing a smile.
Hai was opening a box of ketchup packets on the nearby counter and clocked Wayne’s face as he worked the rotisserie, whose eyes found the family, then flitted off them. BJ was bent over, scooping sides into their trays as if nothing happened.
“Is Uncle Ben the chicken guy or the rice guy?” the shorter kid asked his older brother.
“Hey, hey. Enough is enough,” the man’s voice said, his eyes passing over BJ to Maureen. “They’re just stressed from the tennis. It’s a pretty competitive camp.”
“You can do better with ’em, though,” Maureen said, eyeing the boys as she handed him the change.
BJ put their bags on the counter without a word.
The man snatched his dinner and pointed at Maureen. “Don’t you…Don’t you dare…tell me how to talk to my kids—” The device glitched and he had to keep pressing the button and wincing to finish his sentence. “And…wipe that st-stupid eyeliner…off. You look cheap,” he said, his sons following him out. At the door he added, in a warped drawl that verged on Auto-Tune, “I’ll be going to Arby’s from now on!”
“The fuck was that?” Hai said, looking around.
“What the hell you think it was?” BJ ripped off her gloves and tossed them, missing the trash. “Wayne,” she said real soft, her shoulders slumped.
Wayne just kept fidgeting with the rotisserie rods. “Wayne,” BJ said again. “Look, I should’ve said something. I’m the manager. It’s on me but…” She folded her arms and stared out at the passing cars. “I just got fucking thrown off by that robot voice, dude. I mean, I’ve never seen one in real life before. Felt like I was in some SNL skit or something and froze, okay?”
Wayne loaded a raw chicken on the rack, his head hung low.
“You know what, Wayne,” Maureen said, “Russia can probably do the chickens too. You don’t have to—”
“Maur.” BJ turned to her, a gash of sweat lighting across her forehead. “I appreciate you. But this is not for you right now, okay?”
Maureen bit her lip and nodded, then scooted next to Hai and started opening a box of ketchup packets.
“I can take you off the chickens if it’s easier, man,” BJ said to Wayne. “It’s not the first time I heard some shit like that and I know it’s not the first for you neither.”
Hai jumped when the chicken rod slammed through the metal eyelets.
Wayne turned to face them, breathing through his nose. “My father taught me this work.” He said this softly but his bottom lip was quivering. “And he learned it from his own dad down in Carolina. And his dad before that. They were pitmasters. Now I’m no master, but this is their work. And I get to do it.” He pointed so hard at his heart it left a greasy period on his apron. “I don’t even have a photo of my granddad but I got this, you understand?” He glanced at each of their faces. “So nobody’s getting me off this stupid-ass chicken line.” He lowered his cap over his eyes, pulled a finished rack from the oven, the skins crackling, and turned his back to them, unloaded the rod, and started carving. And that was that.
BJ wiped her brow and looked down at her shoes, her toes wiggling inside them. “Get me a fucking lemonade,” she said to Hai, who shuffled to the soda fountain as Maureen put her hand on BJ’s shoulder and Wayne set another rack into the oven, the metal clanging like he was loading artillery. Wayne didn’t laugh again for the rest of the day and they all felt it. He had a laugh that could vanquish depression in an elephant.
After clocking out, Hai went out back for some air and found Sony doing sit-ups on a piece of cardboard. Russia was perched on a milk crate by the door, his blue hair catching the sun as he bit into a sandwich he’d invented by stuffing crispy chicken skins into sliced corn bread slathered with hot sauce.
“They should put these on the menu,” Russia said, admiring his creation.
“Maybe then you’ll finally be employee of the month,” Hai smirked.
“They should make me CEO. Then I can sell this place, cash out, and fire all of you bums,” he grinned.
Sony was grunting through the sit-ups, his face scrunched up in the sun.
“How many of those you gonna do?” Hai asked.
“Fifty,” Sony said, grimacing. “I can’t try for the Marines, but I can try for the Honor Guard if I play my cards right. The Guard is much more competitive, actually.”
Russia gave Hai this Are you kidding? look.
“But didn’t you say you loved HomeMarket more than anything?” Hai asked. “You’re not gonna retire here?”
“The military pays you three thousand dollars just to sign up. If…” Sony grunted as he came up. “If I can do at least fifty-five sit-ups, I’ll be ahead of the other recruits. The National Bugle says most of them are overweight.”
“You’ll get three thousand working here, eventually,” Russia said. “The army’s a joke. You’re just food for the military-industrial complex.” Hai took another look at Russia and could imagine him listening to a lot of Green Day or Anti-Flag. “My dad was in the Red Army for just three years and my dude is hardcore fucked right now.”
“They denied my mom’s appeal, which means it’s up to me to bail her out,” Sony said on his way down.
“Wait, when the hell did that happen?” Hai untied his apron and faced his cousin.
“She called me last night.” He sat up, breathing heavily.
“The industrial prison complex. Now that’s a whole nother bitch. Everything’s actually a prison, if you think about it,” Russia said with an air of profundity. “My dad says that a lot.” Then he took out a second chicken-skin corn bread sandwich from his apron pocket and handed it to Sony.
“No thanks.” Sony continued his sit-ups.
Hai had always felt the military was a sham, even as most of his friends from high school joined, mostly skinny, pimply faced white boys from HUD housing with bad GPAs, swallowed up in fatigues and thrown into the desert, where they drank Red Bull and blasted Slipknot in their headphones while getting trigger-happy. He had overheard Wayne mention that out of every five hundred soldiers, there were most likely ten mass shooters. “What’s an army anywhere but a bunch of state-sanctioned mass shooters funded by our tax dollars?” he’d said. “Do the deed as a civilian and you get the chair, do it as a soldier and they’ll pin some tinfoil to your chest.” He thought about repeating this to his cousin but instead just said, “You’d make a great Marine, Sony. Or whatever it is. If anyone can defend this country from evildoers, it’s you, buddy.”
Russia gave Hai a look he ignored. The sky was finally clear and blue, and crisp leaves were skittering toward them from the dead apartments as they watched Sony finish his sit-ups. It seemed the light wouldn’t change for a while.
When he was younger Hai had wanted a bigger life. Instead he got the life that won’t let him go. He was born in Vietnam, fourteen years after the big war everyone loved talking about but no one understood, least of all himself. The year was 1989, a year best known for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests. George Bush Sr. had defeated Michael Dukakis to be the forty-first president, and “My Prerogative” by Bobby Brown was at the top of the charts. It was the time of the floppy disk, denim jackets, leg warmers, Cool Ranch Doritos, and pasta salad.
In Vietnam, the Americans had left the fields a ruinous wasteland with Monsanto-powered Agent Orange, not to mention the two million bodies nameless and scattered in the jungle and riverbanks waiting to be salvaged by family members hoisting woven baskets on their waists full of sun-bleached bones. On top of that the country was fighting the genocidal Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who were invading the western border. People starved, naturally, and scavenged for rats or stretched their rice rations with sawdust from lumberyards. Two years later, by miracle or mercy, Hai and his family arrived in snow-dusted Connecticut, their faces blasted and stricken, sleeping their first weeks on the floor of the Catholic church that sponsored them, between the pews, using Bibles for pillows. He was only two and remembered none of it.
He was raised by his mother, grandmother (rest her soul), and Aunt Kim, women spared by war in body but not in mind, and together they found a way to scavenge a kind of life in wind-blasted Hartford. Though he’d had his troubles, the boy couldn’t say he had a bad life. After high school, he got into college—the first in his family to do so—enrolling at Pace University in New York, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Although he intended to study international marketing, at the last minute, for reasons unknown to him, he switched to something called general ed, which sounded more like the abandoned wing of a psych ward than a degree. By then he was already going steady for half a decade with the pills and spent most days in the library’s basement, nodding off and reading literary periodicals and giant photography books. He once spent two hours out of his mind on a mix of cough syrup and oxy, staring at the Diane Arbus photo of the little boy clutching a grenade in Central Park.
By Thanksgiving, he was out of school and back in East Gladness, slumped on his mother’s couch, New York City all but a faded dream. Even now he did not understand the chain of events that led him back to this dirty old town empty-handed.
One day, during breakfast a year after he dropped out—having seen him jobless and perpetually high, languishing for months at home—his mother had enough.
“You’re on those pills again, aren’t you? I just don’t get it. What are they anyway, some kind of super Advil?” She was playing Tetris on her pink Game Boy and kept her eyes on the screen. For as long as he’d been her son, she was obsessed with Tetris. It was a hole she could crawl into anytime she wanted, right in her hand.
“They make things quieter.”
“It’s pretty quiet around here already, no? So quiet all the money’s walked out the door and never came back. Just like your dad.” She peered up at him, her fingers still jabbing the console.
“Whatever.”
“Yeah, just like whatever in New York, right? How did that go?” she said sarcastically. “If I could speak English, I’d be speaking directly to the president, not any of you bums around here.”
“Things happened that you won’t understand.” He spread cream cheese in thick gobs on his bagel, the codeine making his hands blur. “But at least I tried.”
“I’m not going to fight again, especially not when you’re high. I mean, look at you—you can barely open your eyes, Hai. I can’t do this today, okay?” She set the Game Boy down. “I have enough to do.”
“What, like level thirteen of Tetris?” he said, chewing. “You’ve been stuck on level thirteen for over a year.”
“Because I have work.” She stood, fuming. “I work for us. Just me. Alone. Remember?”
Then, in a surge of wild impulse, he removed a pamphlet from the copy of Sula he was reading and placed it in front of her.
“That a job application?” his mother said, eyeing it.
“I’m gonna go be a doctor,” he said, chewing.
“A doctor?” His mother suppressed a laugh. “What are you talking about doctor? Of what?”
He shrugged. “People.”
Her lower lip opened imperceptibly. “Please. And I mean please. Don’t play games with me, son.” She gave him a look, waiting for the joke to finish.
He opened the brochure’s centerfold, revealing the bell tower on the campus green, its four turrets grand and regal as a castle. “I got into an MD program at this university in Boston,” he told her, his chin high, expectant.
Ma held the page with both hands, as if it emitted its own light. “You’re not on drugs right now?”
“I’m just tired. Tired but happy. I—I wasn’t gonna tell you till I get my living situation all sorted, but—” He searched the floor, avoiding her eyes. “But I figured you’d like to know.”
“This is real, then?” She stared at him. When he didn’t blink, she shook her head at the pictures. “Well, look at that, there it is. God has answered my prayers. I knew it! Oh, this is such good news. Really? Hai?” She shut off the Game Boy and held his face in her sweaty hands. “Look, I know the past few years have been hard for you. It took you a while to get back on your feet after Bà ngoại died, but I always knew you would do something great. You’re not like the other bums around here.” She swept her hand across the room to indicate the whole town, knocking the bagel he was eating to the floor, cream cheese side down. “Are you sure, though? That you’re in?” She pulled back a bit and studied him at an angle, her eyes mining him for the truth. Her boy, her only son. “But you don’t have to, you know. Remember, I’m not like the other moms at the salon. You can do anything you like. You can work with me scrubbing old ladies’ feet forever if you like, okay? There’s no shame in that. As long as you can work, it’s alright.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “I don’t want you to think you gotta be a hero. Just for me.” But he knew this news had come as relief, a thread they could follow together even as they were spinning apart.
“I got in, Ma. It’s still a long way from being a real doctor but I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna heal people.” He glanced at his grandmother’s photo on the altar. “Like they should’ve done for Bà ngoại.”
“What about what happened in New York?”
“That was a fluke. And you know it.” He picked up the bagel—there were only a few flecks of dust on the cream cheese—and kept eating. “This time it’s for real.”
“You know, I did eat durian all through my pregnancy with you—and that gave you the good brains.” His mother turned to Bà ngoại’s altar. “Thank heavens, Mama. He did it. He’s going to be a doctor and make people feel better, and we’ll live in a real house. It’s a long road but we knew he wasn’t going to waste his life. Not like Kim’s son, that poor little fool.” She wiped her tears with the heel of her palms, lit an incense stick, and bowed deeply, the bead of ember trembling over her perm.
Five months later he was sitting in the same kitchen, a backpack and a suitcase tucked under his feet. The bus to Boston would leave in two hours, and the house was filled with that frenetic, fraught air that permeates when someone is about to depart for a long trip. There was nothing to do but tap the table and feel his heart pump as he waited for Ma to finish packing the coconut rice. Though it takes no more than an hour, she had woken at five, in the cold blue dawn, to steam the rice and boil down the coconut milk, which left her staring out the kitchen window for the rest of the morning until her son came down with his bags.
“You’re going to be a great doctor,” Ma said into her hands, head lowered. He stood behind her, the taste of vomit, even after mouthwash, still bitter on his inner cheek. “I’m alone here, but don’t let that worry you. I know how to take care of myself. And Bà ngoại’s spirit is with me.” She looked at him. “You know, you told so many crazy stories as a kid, I thought demons were speaking through you. But then you got more and more quiet as you grew up, and now I miss it.”
“I know, Ma.” He wanted to put his hand on her shoulder but his arm wouldn’t move. The past months had been the best he could remember. They had stopped fighting and the house was so dense with such feverish hope that he wanted to stand there long as he could, soaking it in.
She wiped her cheeks, avoiding his eyes. He knew she was anxious because she wouldn’t stop humming “Happy Birthday.” In the weeks after Bà ngoại died it was all he heard coming from behind her door as he lay awake in the next room staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling, the ones she helped him glue on for his seventh birthday.
His mother had cut out the brochure page depicting the grand bell tower and taped it to her desk at her nail salon in Bristol. Unable to pronounce the school’s name, she beamed and pointed to the photo, announcing to her clients that her son was going to college in Boston, the big city, to be a doctor.
On the sidewalk outside their tenement condo, he fought back another urge to puke. His mother had offered to drive him to the bus station, but he wouldn’t have it. There was nothing worse in the world than saying farewell at a bus station. You hug goodbye at the terminal, then sit on the bus staring at each other through the glass and feeling idiotic while the driver’s inside taking a long dump or calling his wife, and after a while you have to look away and pretend to get something out of your bag only to look back and start the whole ritual of waving and mouthing “bye-bye” excitedly as you can so the other person won’t be too sad. No, he called a cab and shelled out the twenty bucks to save them the trouble.
“I know this won’t be like last time, okay?” his mother said, wincing. “And remember to find the Chinatown right away so you can get the good ramen.” Her voice was muffled through the glass as the car pulled off. He knew she was standing in the middle of the road, growing smaller and smaller, wiping her face with her shawl, but he didn’t have the stomach to look at her. A thousand sons must have been where he was now and turned back from their horses, wagons, rickshaws, cyclos, buses, schooners, trains, even dusty, sandaled feet. They must have offered a face reacting to their mother’s shrinking form, a final enactment of separation, revealing to each other the cost this leaving imprinted on their brows. Instead, he ducked to unlace his boots, pretending to fumble with them, then tied them again, his head nearly touching the floorboard, out of sight.
Half hour later he found himself on a bench in Hartford’s Union Station staring at his boots. He had popped two codeines in the cab and his head felt warm and empty at last, the world vignetted at its edges. It was mid-August, summer still full-on and the air humid and slimy. Spilled soda, reliquefied from the heat, had stuck to his soles and made smacking sounds as he fidgeted. Most people were returning from their final day trips before summer’s close. He sat awhile trying to salvage what was left of his high. Before long the 6:45 Peter Pan to Boston pulled in. As people disembarked, the driver leaned on the bumper sucking a cigarette, sweat soaking through his shirt at the armpits. Hai checked the time on his ticket—6:45 p.m.—then laid the paper down on the bench, gently, as if it were weightless, as if it had no worth at all. Because it didn’t. It meant nothing because Boston meant nothing. Because there was no medical school—not even an application. How could there be? He didn’t even have a bachelor’s to his name. The photo of the school bell tower was from a pamphlet for the Harvard Divinity School he’d picked up from the library after a Bible study group had dispersed.
Weeks ago, while ordering the bus ticket and wasting the thirty-five dollars, he foolishly thought he could go through the motions and something would just open up, that the “universe” would notice his efforts and offer a window he could climb through. How childish, how winsomely stupid, he realized now as he watched the bus pull out from the lot, its rear lights fading down the interstate, toward Boston.
Dragging the suitcase behind him, he left the station and entered the summer dusk. The sky was a deep red and garbage cans along the row houses reeked from weeklong heat. He made his way under an overpass where a man and a woman were arguing inside a dirty-blue tent that jostled with their agitation. Somebody owed somebody money, he gathered from the voices, which was always the case.
Doused in this aimless dread, his shirt collar itchy with sweat, he sat on a curb and tried to collect himself. Across the street, a group of skateboarders were throwing themselves down a four-step flight of stairs in a drugstore parking lot. Seeing them move made him want to vomit even more. He remembered Ma’s rice cakes in his backpack, hoping they’d settle his stomach. There were four colors: purple, red, green, and yellow, all packed snug in neat squares in the Tupperware tray. On top was a garnish of salted peanuts and crushed cane sugar. He chewed quickly with shut eyes, too ashamed to see how pretty she had made it.
The rice was good, like always: not too sweet, chewy and soft, each grain plump and rich with coconut oil. He left the Tupperware on the curb and walked on, the city smoldering around him until he reached the interstate bridge and crossed it. Boats, packed with laughing families, fishing poles arcing from their decks, floated under him.
It was only when he got back to East Gladness that his stomach turned, and he leaned against a fire hydrant to puke, his mouth dripping over the pile of rainbow-colored rice on the sidewalk. In the commotion, a man whose hair and face looked like he’d just been electrocuted stopped digging through a trash bin and shuffled up to him. “Hey you gotta dollar? You gotta dollar brother. For something to eat?” He pushed the man aside by walking forward, wiping his mouth on his jacket shoulder. The man kept muttering behind him for a few steps until the sound of traffic drowned him out. He walked on, and after a while passed the old Kahoots nightclub, which was getting ready to open, the girls sitting in cars on the gravel lot doing their makeup under dash lights while glitter twinkled, like pulverized diamonds, across their faces. Crickets were singing in the cornfield to his right as evening settled over the valley. He walked another half mile until finally a brick building came into view. This was where he’d go, he decided, if only because it was getting dark and he was running out of roads to take.
The brick building had been an elementary school until an arson fire shut it down. Half the building had since been repaired and was now back in operation. A handful of cars were scattered across the lot as he neared the entrance. He peered through the window through cupped hands. Inside, a lace desk lamp glowed dimly on a wood-grain desk, giving the place a feeling of being far in the past. He pulled the door handle and an electric chime went off, the carpet suffusing the place with dense, cottony quiet.
The door behind the reception opened, revealing a woman with bleached bangs and a green cardigan. She stopped and gave him a once-over, her face softening. “You in a bad way, huh?”
“I could use some help,” he mumbled, then put his knuckles to his mouth to keep it in, realizing he’d never said those words before in his whole life. But that’s what you say when you come in here. There are entire places in this world built just so specific phrases can be said, he realized now. Phrases like “I hereby solemnly swear,” “Do you have any last words?” “I want a divorce,” “I want an abortion,” “Congratulations, class of 2006,” or “I do, I do, I do.” In this building you can say “I need help” and they know not only exactly what you mean but also exactly who you are.
The woman scratched her nose and studied him behind her horn-rimmed glasses. “It’s alright now. It’s scary, I know. Here.” She slid a clipboard and a pen under the glass divider. “Fill this out—but first go get yourself some water and settle down.” She nodded to the cooler in the corner. “Take your time. I’ll be here when you’re ready.”
He thanked her and sat down. For a scant, luminous moment he was filled with a displaced benevolence for every soul in their tiny town. That some selfless, angelic people had the good mind to turn a burnt-down school into a home for the words I need help. He took one more look at the cornfield standing in the warm, still night across the road, fireflies blinking through the dark, and filled out his intake for the New Hope Recovery Center.
The first person Hai saw OD was somebody’s dad.
He was twelve and had gone over to this girl Jennifer Knoxley’s house to do a project for history class. They were in the living room cutting construction paper when her father came in very quietly, like a ghost was wheeling him in, and sat down on the couch. After a while his head tilted back and his mouth hung open, eyes rolled into their sockets. He looked like somebody had pressed pause at the peak of him laughing at the greatest joke he’d ever heard. This was the image imprinted on Hai’s mind when he signed in at New Hope.
Every generation says this of itself, but these were indeed bewildering and unprecedented times he lived in, a time before iPhones were everywhere, and people still looked up as they walked, their heads filled with self-generated thoughts floating up from deep pits in the subconscious. A time when you still knocked on each other’s doors, and if you wanted to talk to somebody, you had to call them, listen to their mother’s breathing for a while, maybe the sound of her fixing a drink or shaving her legs, then meet up somewhere, one of you waiting about, shifting your feet and looking at clouds or trees or municipal architecture, cars passing, your dopamine levels higher for not having been depleted from blue-light screens throughout the day. A time when the drug dealer on the corner would, out of boredom, start balancing on a chain-link fence, the boy in him unable to help it, pants sagging from the effort, revealing his plaid boxers you can spot from the back window of the school bus. But then, slowly, one or two or seven of your friends will find the pills, and they will flood their young brains with artificial joy. And you will join them, running through the woods by the power plant, laughing at the immense night, your head levitating a foot above your shoulders. And their eventual deaths will not yet be used by politicians to gain traction with the base. It did not have a name, this slaughter, and yet your loved ones were being slowly erased, even teachers and lunch ladies overdosing overnight, then cremated without ceremony, their faces soon existing only in your mind. Those were the times, those who lived through it would say, years later, not knowing what it was they meant.
Though it was never his drug of choice, he was barely sixteen the first time he tried heroin. One summer night at a skate park on the outskirts of town, he sat huddled among three other skater kids in the valley of a half-pipe, the candle flame still in the humid air as the spoon sizzled over it, Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” running on a loop from a stereo in someone’s JanSport. The boys had removed their socks, turning their long, bony feet in the light, searching for a good vein. They preferred the feet because it was easier to hide the scars. Plus, they could feel the speed of the hot, acidic rush literally surging through their legs to the tip of their heads, some of them tracing the drug’s ascent with their fingers as if pointing to ruined cities on a map. But the sensation, for Hai, was more like drowning in his own blood, his neck craning to get above the tide. Soon there was laughter everywhere in the dark, hands slapping bare skin. But a half hour later, the only sound left was Fugazi playing over their gleaming, shirtless chests, mouths gasping like shored fish as fireflies flittered over them in the greenish night.
Hai’s crappy state-issued health insurance, good until he turned twenty-five, only covered three weeks in rehab—so that’s what he signed up for. On the second day, dressed in newly issued white clinic pajamas, he decided to call his mother. They had confiscated his Nokia, so he was in an all-glass room the size of a closet where a landline was set up for patients to talk to family (and family only) in twenty-minute intervals.
“Ma?” he said, straightening up in the steel chair.
“That you, son?”
“Yeah, I’m calling from the dorm phone and—”
“You’ve made it. Oh, I was so worried. I mean, not worried but—I’m sure you had a busy first night. Anyway, how is it? Did you see the bell tower?”
“It’s amazing. Tall and majestic, just like in the picture. Even on a cloudy day like this, it glows.”
“The dorms must be so nice. Did you have the sticky rice? How was it?”
He rubbed his forehead, searching. “Perfect.”
“Wasn’t too sweet, was it? My hand was shaky and I dropped a big chunk of sugar in.” She laughed and he realized how much he already missed her voice.
“Not at all. I ate it all on the bus, actually. It’s so pretty here, Ma. The lawns are greener than the lawn at our town hall, and you can see all these people everywhere—one guy was even Vietnamese—all of them future doctors, playing Frisbee in the courtyard. I never imagined doctors playing Frisbee.”
“Friss-bee,” she tried in English. “What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s uh…Sorry, it’s that game when you throw the plastic disc? You know, like in Bushnell Park, when we saw those white people throwing them at that basket made of chains?”
Through the glass, a skeletal man in dirt-caked overalls, one strap hanging off his shoulder, was being led by two nurses toward the medical office.
“I remember,” she said. “Who knew that would be such a popular pastime among doctors! See, you’re already learning new things and it’s only the first week. But—” She stopped, her exhale audible through the receiver.
“Ma, I know.”
“Really. Just don’t push yourself. Take everything slow, okay? Don’t read too fast. Pick up a book and then, after ten minutes, put it down and look out the window. Your brain is like a car, you have to let it—”
“Ma, I get it,” he said, his voice more barbed than he intended.
They were silent a moment. “I should’ve told you when you were back in New York that you didn’t have to plow through your studies. I know that’s why you quit. I’m sorry. I want to do better this time.”
“Okay, but look, I gotta go. They asked me to join them throwing the disc.”
“Oh, of course, go, go, go. Throw it far but don’t show off, you know? And no need to talk to me all the time. Just focus on yourself. I’ll be here when you need me.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, lup yoo,” she said in English. “Call me if you ever—”
He hung up before she could finish and sat staring at the laminated chart pinned to the cork wall: 7-Step Guide to Discussing Your Addiction with Loved Ones. Underneath it, taped to the wall and decorated with clip-art flowers, was a piece of paper printed with the ubiquitous Mary Oliver quote hung on nearly every spare surface in the rehab—the communal fridge, the microwave, bathroom stalls, even the broken fire alarm by the detox:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
The thing about the pills was that he felt, once their magic seeped into him, like he was finally slipping naked into a warm, dry bed with thick wool sheets after days of walking soaked to the bone in rain.
While the first three days were by no means easy, the staff mostly left him alone save for mealtimes and check-ins from the house physician. Being on the slow-release stuff, he didn’t have it so bad except for the headache and bone chills that gnawed at him the first nights, his pillow soaked through with dope drench. The meth fiends had it worst. One girl, a high school dropout from Hebron, had such hellish withdrawals, they let her sleep in an unlit room beneath a pile of blankets with cameras on her 24-7, in case she had seizures, which happened twice. Rehab, if nothing else, was a place to store yourself for a while. It was also, he quickly learned, a kingdom of boredom—but maybe that was the point, the goal even: to be with yourself, which was its own kind of hell. All the clichés about it are true. You wait around until whatever poison that’s ruining you empties into the world as time. Then you fill that emptiness with more time. Talking, walking around the rec room, talking some more, listening to people “talk it out,” painting watercolors of zoo animals, reading YA or science fiction novels (the only genres allowed). And after all that waiting you stand by the barred windows and watch the golden arches from the McDonald’s across the parking lot light up, which means it’s time for the nurses to switch shifts for the night, and an alcoholic with Down syndrome named Jordan is next to you pointing out the window, shouting, “It’s chicken tender time! It’s chicken tender time. Hey, guys, it’s tender time.”
The rooms are named after various genus of squash grown in New England, a laminated drawing of each type pasted on the doors. Hai shared the “Kabocha” room with a sex addict named Marlin, who was strapped to the bedpost with bungee cords to keep him from jerking off. He turned to Hai one night and said, quizzically, “Hey, man. I was wondering, how come I never see any Asians in rehab? I’ve been to, like, five of these joints and never seen one till now.”
“MSG,” Hai said, feeling crazy.
“What?” Marlin’s eyes widened in the blue-wet dark.
“It absorbs all the poison. Why you think the government hates the stuff? They don’t want you knowing the truth. Then all these places will be out of business. They make a big fuss about how it’s bad for you. Anytime the Feds say something’s bad for you, eat as much of it as you can.”
“Holy shit,” Marlin said, sitting up.
“It won’t work for your stuff, though.”
“Yeah, no, no, I get that. I get that. And what about you? You couldn’t absorb all your MSG or something?”
“I was adopted. Ate mostly waffles my whole life and now I’m fucked.”
“Damn, dude.” Marlin lay silent all night, this knowledge burrowing through him, his straps clinking as he tossed about.
There was a coterie of counselors at New Hope who huddled each morning in the rec room, nodding at their clipboards, then scattering like struck pool balls across the wards. Hai’s was a guy named José with a greying handlebar mustache and a nose ring. “Listen, my guy,” he said one morning during their one-on-one, “you’re what we call clinically depressed, okay? That means you’re down and out without ever needing a reason to be.”
“So the clinical part just means there’s no cause?”
José cocked his head and squinted. “Sort of. But don’t worry, we’ll get your meds worked out. While that happens, take this.” He reached into his chest pocket and gave Hai what looked like a fortune cookie fortune, grease splotching the edges. Hai read it aloud: “Victorious warriors win first, then go to war. Defeated warriors go to war, then seek to win.”
“Sun Tzu, my friend.” José leaned back and grinned. “He doesn’t miss, huh? And hey, don’t think I’m showing you this cause, you know,” he gestured at Hai. “I actually collect these.” He nodded at an old Popeye’s bucket on his desk filled with curling fortune strips.
“Thanks, but how about a brain transplant?”
“Sure, except your insurance probably won’t cover it,” he chuckled, twisting his mustache.
Besides Sun Tzu, Jesus was also at New Hope, lots and lots of Jesus, about fourteen renditions of the Holy Son, from what Hai could count, all hung in different shapes and sizes and various expressions of wounded exhaustion, staring down at him from the Cross while he ate his tapioca pudding in the mess hall, or while somebody wept or laughed—it was hard to tell after a while—in group sessions, their legs kicking, only one sock on. One time this retired math professor from the nearby community college on Suboxone had a breakdown and pissed all over the wall in the foyer, Jesus gazing forlorn at the darkened drywall as the staff dragged the screaming mathematician to Medical for tranquilizers.
Group session was, ironically, where the drugs were sold, since everybody was finally in one place at the same time. Before long the muffin-and-coffee table was transformed into a vibrant black market, though mostly for lighter fare brought in by the custodians: Zoloft and Xannies, the occasional Perc, homemade edibles.
The whole thing was no different from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, strangely enough, each patient dressed in standard-issue pajamas with a barcoded bracelet on their wrist (which the nurses scan each time they hand you a pill or when you take a tray of food at the mess hall). After all, a rehab, under God or not, was still a business. But Hai found the nurses to be good folks. Genuine, salt-of-the-earth women. No Nurse Ratched here. They all wore purple scrubs (a color purported to lower blood pressure) and were somehow always cheery, but in a depressive, sentimental way, like Midwestern moms whose children just departed for college. On the verge of tears but also quick to jab a needle in your arm without blinking, they roamed about, anticipating your needs before you could think of them. They passed you in the halls and said things like “How you kickin’ today?” or “Can you feel the Lord smiling down on us? I can,” or “Let me know if you want some hot chocolate, alright? I make ’em with the real marshmallows, not that freeze-dried crap.” Or one of Hai’s favorites, spoken by a nurse named Susan Bean (she insisted everyone call her by her full name): “Why don’t you go ahead and turn that frown into a banana split for me?” There was another named Wanda, who spoke with a Spanish accent. Every time she took his vitals, she’d slip a Werther’s Original in his chest pocket, give it a little pat, and walk away chuckling at nothing. You could go insane if they weren’t so sincere about it. Most of them started as volunteers. Most of them had lost someone—a brother or sister or a husband or a child—who never made it to a place like New Hope. Or they did but it wasn’t enough or was too late.
Inside those wide white hours, he often asked himself why he had deceived his mother in the first place. In the end, there was no good answer—only the image of her face brightening when he told her he was going to heal the sick, the cancer-riddled, the broken, the maimed, by becoming a doctor. After Bà ngoại died, his mother’s light dimmed, and seeing her shriveled in the corner of the couch, her head down and lit blue by her Game Boy, playing endless Tetris day after day, her hair thinning, he figured he had to do something. You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say in. And so he said it. And so he lied.
