The Collective (33 page)

Both Jimmy and Noklek pled not guilty, and Margolies and Grace, representing them in court, arranged for their release, Jimmy on $500 cash bail, Noklek on personal recognizance, pending a hearing in one month. After the arraignment, however, Grace told us that the INS had been alerted to Noklek’s immigration status, and she might be deported before her case ever reached trial, green-card marriage or not.

“That’s fascist crap,” Joshua said. “Cambridge is a sanctuary city. The police aren’t supposed to cooperate with the INS.”

“She gave them a fake name. She had a fake ID,” Grace said. “That’s what set everything in motion. The line gets fuzzy if they learn someone’s illegal while in custody. Even then, they normally wouldn’t bother doing anything, especially for a minor offense. But this isn’t normal. Not with so much about you guys in the press. You know, you could have given the rest of us a little warning you were going to file the complaint against Barboza. Or maybe even have let us weigh in on it. But what did I really expect from you three prima donnas?”

Joshua and I waited for Noklek and Jimmy to be released from holding. “This is total bullshit,” Joshua said. “Since when is it acceptable for cops to get their pugs yanked, not once but twice, on the city’s dime for an investigation? This is all retaliatory, you know. It’s because we’re Asian.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said. “You did this, Joshua. This is all your fault. The massages were your idea. You knew how this would turn out. It was entirely predictable. The whole green-card scam, did you and Jimmy cook it up to get Noklek to prostitute herself?”

“No, man. That was sincere.”

I thought of all the trouble he had caused over the years, all the preening and disquisitions and rebukes, all the bad decisions that he had suckered me into, all those moments of anxiety and queasy discomfort I had had to endure as he harassed and manipulated and bullied me into servitude. How much better, I wondered, would my life have been if I’d never met Joshua?

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “Nothing you do is sincere. It was just a whim. You were never serious about it. You get these impulses and you go on these crusades, but you never stop to think how people will be affected. You keep fucking up everyone’s lives, Joshua. You realize that? I think you do, but you keep doing it anyway. Why is that? Is it entertaining to you? Amusing? Are you getting writing material out of it? Let me tell you something. The world doesn’t owe you anything because you’re Asian, because you were abandoned. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take this shit. I’m done. I’m done with you.”

Noklek came out first, hugging her arms around her chest. She was still wearing her tube top and hot pants and a pair of strappy shoes with ludicrously high stilettos. I touched her on the shoulder, and she yelled, “Yaa ma jap chan!” and ran away from us, clacking down the hall.

“I need a drink,” Jimmy said when he emerged. “Is it too early for a drink?”

I took the T from Kendall to Harvard Square and then rode the bus to the Palaver office. I spent the rest of the day calling the General Mail Facility about our permit and searching for documentation in our files to prove that we had, in fact, sent out three mailings in the past year. After hours of faxing and being put on hold, I was able to get the permit reinstated.

Drained, I went home early, splurging on a cab. I walked into the kitchen, and through the sliding glass door I saw Jessica in her white silk robe, kneeling on the deck outside.

But it wasn’t Jessica. It was Noklek in Jessica’s robe, and she was soaking wet, from water, I assumed, reenacting the Songkran festival rituals. She had the shrine before her, the three small Buddhas, the flowers, candles, incense, and framed photographs of her mother, father, and sister. Rice grains were scattered on the redwood boards of the deck, and white string was wrapped around her ankles. Somehow she had tied her wrists together with the string, too, and between her palms she held two flowers, two lit candles, and a twenty-dollar bill.

I stood at the glass door, looking down at her, and, sensing my presence, she slowly turned to me. Instead of white chalk, it looked as if candle wax was smeared over her lips and eyelids. She stared at me, emotionless, for a moment, then faced the shrine again, the photos of her family.

I noticed the red plastic can beside her, the depressions of an X on its side, and I realized then that it was the spare canister for the lawn mower. She had drenched herself in gasoline, not water. That was when she closed her eyes, tipped the candles against the left breast of the robe, and set herself aflame.

At what point is it acceptable to give up? The years go by, and there might be some validations, a few encouraging signs, a small triumph here and there, but more often than not, failure follows upon failure. You get into your thirties, and every day you wonder if it’s worth it to keep going. How long can you continue being a starving artist? Will it ever happen for you? Very possibly, it will not. Then where will you be? Sometime or another, you have to decide.

The oblique questions and snipes from civilians and your family become a babel in your head, insisting that you grow up, be practical, find a real job, give up on this fruitless dream, because, really, it’s become kind of pathetic. You tried, but it came to naught. It might have been due to a lack of providence, yet more likely, although no one will ever say so outright, it was probably due to a lack of talent. Even among ourselves, there are doubts and judgments. We still go to one another’s shows and exhibitions and readings and performances, rare as they may be now, and afterward we dole out all the appropriate accolades, but secretly we wonder if, perhaps, our friends never quite lived up to their promise—if we believed they had promise to begin with—and if, perhaps, it’s time for them to give up.

We love our friends. We hate them, too. It’s easy to feign support and sympathy for them when they’re failing. It’s much harder to affect elation when they start to succeed. It’s a terrible feeling—a sterling reminder of your underachievement and inertia. This is when the schadenfreude begins, the invidious whispers that maybe your friend’s success is undeserved, when you revel in the publication of an unkind review or the unexpected exclusion of your friend’s work from that year’s major awards. You detest this about yourself. You’ve become exactly the type of person you’ve always despised. It eats away at you. You promise to reform, to be more generous, to focus on your own work with renewed vigor and diligence. Yet it seems that there’s never enough time, or that when you finally do find the time and embark on a new project, you falter right away, feeling dispirited and desperate, knowing that it’s all wrong, that it’d be pointless to continue because the whole thing is misconceived, and even if it isn’t, you know you could never pull it off, anyway.

The thought of giving up gains appeal. People might not change, but situations do. You’ve acquired different priorities, and inevitably some things must be left behind. Your parents always told you that life is about money, and you refused to believe them, but as you’ve gotten older, you’ve begun to reconsider. You wouldn’t mind a few bourgeois creature comforts, a new car, vacations, actually owning property instead of living in rented shitholes, and you start to admit that there is something to having money.

Would it be so shameful to give up? Of course you’d never admit to giving up. You’d say you’re continuing to toil, you’re making great progress, you’re almost finished. One by one, your friends begin dropping out. If they haven’t compromised themselves already, in their hearts they want to, because being true to one’s art, keeping the dream alive, is utterly exhausting.

What stops you is fear—fear that you’ll always see yourself as someone who couldn’t hack it, fear that you’ll become even more bitter than you already are, that you’ll always wonder what could have, should have, and would have happened if you’d kept at it a bit longer. Mainly, you’re afraid of abandoning the sole thing that makes you distinctive, your identity as a bohemian artist, that allows to you be blasé and condescending about your mindless service job or your soul-sapping position as an admin assistant in an office where everyone talks in acronyms.

I hung on for about five more years, until I was thirty-four, although I never finished my novella, never got a story published, never assembled enough material for a book manuscript. I withdrew my story, “The Unrequited,” from Palaver’s Fiction Discoveries issue at the last minute, when the issue was already in final galleys. I told Paviromo that I wanted to earn my first publication, not weasel my way into print through favoritism, and that he should publish Esther Xing’s story in its stead. I will confess that, at the time, I was pretty certain I could get “The Unrequited” taken elsewhere, but I was never able to. A pity, since it really was, as Jessica said, the only good story, the only honest story, I ever wrote. It was about my parents’ courtship, the months that my father went to the post office in Monterey Park to woo my mother, mailing blank letters to phantom recipients.

I stayed at Palaver for another year and a half to finish out the Lila Wallace program, then worked a series of freelance and temp jobs, doing everything from copyediting business articles to writing newsletters for a trade association of bus operators. Finally, in 2004, I accepted a full-time job in downtown Boston at Gilroy Prunier, a boutique marketing firm that catered to investment banks and financial services companies. My primary area of responsibility was direct marketing, i.e., direct mail. I wrote and edited the copy that went on letters, envelopes, slip-sheets, forms, brochures, and postcards.

Joshua told me I was squandering my talent. I was betraying our vow to be artists. I was no longer a believer. I had sold out.

In truth, I felt relieved.

We all moved out of the Walker Street house after Noklek immolated herself. How could we stay there, with the scorched wood on the deck, the soot whispers on the clapboards, the singed patches of grass? And the smell—the smell that could not have possibly lingered, yet that we imagined did.

When skin burns, the blood vessels below begin to dilate and weep. The skin bubbles and blisters. It chars and blackens. As flames eat through the flesh, raw tissue starts to appear. Fat is exposed, and it sizzles. There’s an awful odor. It’s like charcoal at first, not unpleasant, then quickly becomes putrid and vinegary, almost metallic, like copper liquefying. The hair is the worst—sulfurous—but then, mixed in there, there’s a queerly sweet scent, the searing of fat and tissue blossoming into a thick, greasy perfume.

Unlike the monk Thích Quang ?uc, who had remained silent and still while he burned, Noklek began screaming at once. She tried to stand, but her ankles and wrists were tied by the string, and she tumbled, knocking over the shrine and crashing against the side of the house and keeling back onto the deck. I grabbed her and rolled her on the grass in the backyard, using my own body to smother the flames, then, as she shrieked and writhed, I sprayed her with the garden hose until she passed out, steam rising from her flesh and what was left of the white silk robe.

I was burned on my hands, forearms, and chest, the dim scars of which I carry to this day, but of course they’re nothing compared to what Noklek had to endure. She spent over a year in Bigelow 13, the burn unit at Mass General, and in a rehabilitation center. She suffered second-and third-degree burns on sixty-five percent of her body and required agonized procedures of debridement and grafting. More than once it was questionable whether she would survive, in danger of sepsis, renal failure, and infection. I had saved her life, but what kind of life did I leave her? I sometimes wondered, in the brutal light of her pain and disfigurement, if it would have been more merciful to have let her die.

I never told anyone about my conversation with Barboza, which undoubtedly had provoked the police investigation into Pink Whistle. For once, instead of waffling in indecision, I had done something, just as Joshua had always exhorted me to do, and it had been the wrong thing. The guilt I feel over this will never abate, it cannot be absolved.

I couldn’t bring myself to visit Noklek in the hospital very much, as opposed to Joshua, who went to see her every day. He put the house on the market, rented an apartment in Beacon Hill, and paid for the entire cost of Noklek’s hospitalization. He still wanted to marry her (the assistant district attorney had dropped the prostitution charge, and the INS chose not to pursue her), but she said no, and as soon as she could, she left the U.S. for Thailand, where Joshua sent her international money orders for two years, until the envelopes started to get returned, forwarding address unknown.

The Walker Street house was sold at the height of the real estate boom. Joshua, however, did not invest the proceeds very wisely, putting a lot of it in tech stocks, which took a dive during the dot-com bust. He became an itinerant, going from one artists’ colony to another for extended residencies or accepting short-term visiting writer gigs at colleges, only reappearing in Boston for sojourns of one to six months. I missed him. Regardless of what I’d told him that horrible day, I was never really done with Joshua. We would remain friends, though it would be a changed friendship, less urgent, less pervasive, with an unspoken falseness that would stiffen with time, neither one of us able to overcome a niggling discomfort with each other.

He got the attention he wanted from the Fiction Discoveries issue—calls from several literary agents. He signed up with the most prominent one, and the agent sent out his novel for auction when he finished it, but puzzlingly there were no takers. In the end, just before his thirtieth birthday, they were able to sell the book to a small press, a prestigious house as far as noncommercial publishers went, but nonetheless it was a disappointment to him.

Upon the Shore was about the inhabitants of Cheju Island during the rebellion that began there in 1948 and resulted in the massacre of tens of thousands of people by the (U.S.-backed) Korean government. Almost universally, the novel engendered stellar reviews, even getting a half-page rave in the New York Times Book Review, yet not much else happened. No bestseller lists, no book prizes, no esteemed fellowships. Joshua complained that it was because he had been marginalized, dismissed, as an ethnic writer. There might have been some truth in this. One midwestern newspaper presumed he was a South Korean writer, that his book had been translated from Korean into English.