The Rest is Weight (UQP Short Fiction) (2 page)

Aperture

The underside of the fish was the colour of the sky: an off-smog. It was not a good day for breathing. Jeff prodded the floating corpse with a chopstick. ‘Sorry, Confucius,’ he said, though he was glad it was dead. Jeff inhaled the sweet vegetable scent of the gunk in the water, detected a slight chemical tang. Goldfish eyes were two capped lenses. Probably he forgot to adjust the Ph. Or Helen overfed it. She wasn’t up yet. He wouldn’t say anything just yet. He laid the chopstick on the kitchen counter, slipped out the front door, and went to work.

‘W
hat the fuck am I supposed to do with a goddamn fish in a bag?’ Jeff had said. He dropped the plastic on the kitchen counter and threw himself on the couch. His knees were sore. He could feel his mother still in the house and had an urge to rearrange the furniture. His parents had finally left, and in the midst of those confused embraces in the plugged traffic, horns honking from behind, bicycle bells ringing, scooters beeping, his mother had handed him the goldfish. He had taken it almost without noticing, the stupidity of the thing only hitting him after their taxi had disappeared into the mass shambles of Beijing streets.

Helen picked up the plastic bag and held it to the light. ‘It’s fat,’ she said. She set her soapstone eyes on him. ‘They are good luck, you know.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘She could have given us something we could use.’

‘
Yu
means wealth,’ Helen said.

Jeff rolled his eyes.
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But my mother doesn’t speak Chinese.’

She managed to buy the fish, though. Must have been from the sinewy man on a tricycle who hung around the end of their street. It was one of the many creaky cargo trikes that hawked goods and services to the neighbourhood: knife sharpeners, cardboard collectors, sellers of cabbages and, yes, pets. The pet man unstacked his tanks and buckets to make a stall. Guppies, tiny turtles, snails, sometimes small white rabbits. A glut of fish.

Of course his mother was too short-sighted to buy them a tank, so for the first few days Confucius – the name was Helen’s idea – lived in temporary digs, a plastic juice bottle with the top cut off with scissors, until Jeff finally acquiesced to its persistence and bought a glass fishbowl, a squat sphere that sat like a model planet on the counter, in the place where he usually dropped his keys. For weeks Confucius did laps around its planet, glowering at him.
Reminding
him. He hated it. Its eyes took everything in and gave nothing away.

‘Wow, look at all those fish!’ his mother had said. Jeff watched her lean over the stone bridge without actually putting her weight on it, because you can’t trust the buildings here, they’re not like American buildings.

‘Yeah,’ said Helen, ‘that really is a lot of fish.’

Jeff tried to catch his girlfriend’s eye to transmit an apologetic expression, but his mother’s round face was in the way, smiling at him. It was the third day of their visit and she was still excited, she was proud of herself, making an effort. He smiled vigilantly back. Helen didn’t look up. She leaned her whole weight on the bridge, bent over the fish; a wing of straight hair closed around the single eye of the camera. A hand came up to adjust something. When she rose, Jeff’s mother had moved across the courtyard to admire a stone dragon. It was ordinary, but she couldn’t know that.

‘I love this lion,’ she said.

‘Let’s go see if the arhat hall is open,’ Jeff said. The arhat hall was his favourite part of the temple. All those smiling statues, like a wax museum, and their hands full of symbols, animals and instruments. Something Disney about it, he’d planned on saying. Disneyesque.

He headed off, leaving Helen to round up his parents. It was hot in the sun and sweat was pooling in his lower back, under the polo shirt. He could hear Helen in conversation with his father, her kindness frothing out of her like over-boiled milk.

‘It’s a very nice camera,’ she said.

‘Actually, this model looks impressive, but it’s not all that expensive,’ his father was saying. It was a lie. The digital
slr
he’d bought himself last year was top-of-the-line, a ridiculous thing that required its own backpack.

‘See this setting? You know macro?’

Jeff cringed. Helen could have been a professional photographer, she was that good. He wished she’d risk more, believe in herself. But you can’t make someone else courageous.

The arhat hall was closed for repairs, and he found he had to wait for them by the entrance, standing with his hands in his pants pockets in the hot sun, the concrete car park stretching inauthentically in front of him, and his parents and Helen approaching with their cameras held up, like aliens with probes.

On the way out his mother wanted to buy slices of melon on skewers from a stall, and he told her not to buy from those guys, they only cheat you, but Helen didn’t hear him. She bought four of the sticks herself and handed them around. Too sweet, he thought, and twice what you would pay away from the temple.

The day Confucius died, Helen came home first, and when he arrived she was already sprawled on the couch, her shoes off, rubbing a toe that had been bothering her.

Jeff kissed her cheek, gave the foot a perfunctory pat, which excused him from a massage later, then got up to put his keys on the counter and check on the fish. She hadn’t said anything and he was ready to pretend to notice for the first time that it was dead. He’d been preparing expressions of surprise on the subway. Confucius was still floating on the surface, suspended there, staring at nothing.

She hasn’t noticed it, he thought. For weeks he had been cursing the fish, willing it to die, but he couldn’t actually take the step of killing it – it seemed too brutal, to poison his own mother’s gift, and he knew she would ask about it when he went home for Thanksgiving. Now he almost felt sorry for the fucking thing.

‘Helen,’ he said.

She had her feet up on the armrest and was unrolling her socks, straightening her toes. ‘Hmm?’

He wondered how long it would be before she noticed.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. He made a move to sit down again but she made no room for him on the couch. She just looked at him, totally self-contained, and then bent in half to touch her toes. She could reach right past them.

He had made a little calendar on the back of a cereal box so that they could cross off the ten-day visit, thought it would amuse her, but after four of the longest days of his life it seemed like the calendar was only helping slow time down. He wished his folks had stumped up the extra cash and stayed in a hotel. He took long showers to avoid them, he let the water run cold. When he turned off the tap he heard his mother’s nasal voice, asking Helen the stupidest questions about China, her horrifying attempts to pronounce a few basic phrases in Mandarin. Helen, softly spoken, had a voice that didn’t tunnel through walls. He could only hear his mother’s half of the conversation, which went like this:

‘I’ll never forget all those fish.’

Pause.

‘Do you eat those? Goldfish?’

Pause.

‘Wow.’

Pause.

He managed to get his parents to go out on their own for a couple of hours on a Sunday, promising to meet them for dinner at the gate of the Forbidden City, and when he had closed the door on them he cozied up to Helen on the couch, but she shrank away from his body.

‘It’s my parents, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re actually quite nice.’

‘Americans are so fake sometimes.’ He sat forward to untie his shoes.

‘I guess,’ she said.

When he thought of it after they had gone to bed, the fish floating there in its bowl, he should have flushed it but the plumbing here was so bad, he remembered they hadn’t had sex since before his parents had arrived, maybe even a couple of weeks before that, and he tried to put his arm around Helen but it slumped over her like a seal flipper and she flipped it back off.

‘It’s too hot,’ she said. ‘I’m not comfortable.’ And he waited for her to go to sleep instead.

They used to have great communication, he thought, it wasn’t as if there was much of a language barrier, her English was perfect, but since his parents had visited it was like they had used up their conversation at the end of the day, used up all their nice.

In the morning he found her drinking green tea and fidgeting with camera lenses, her busy hands right next to the fish. He pulled up the opposite stool and sat down.

‘Everything okay?’ he prompted. He glanced down at Confucius floating in his bowl.

She stared at him. Her eyes were a closed black aperture. He wondered how long she was going to go on like this.

‘I’m going to work,’ he said.

‘I’m just going to finish something,’ she replied, her head down, her hands mucking with the camera.

Alone in the crush of the subway he thought of something else his mother had said, when they were at dinner. A local Taiwanese place, Helen ordering food for them from an English menu, his own attempts to be breezy disappearing into the noise of the restaurant. A confusing moment when Helen translated his order to the waiter, from his Mandarin into hers. His father looking through the day’s photos, peering into the view screen of the ridiculous camera. His mother passing paper napkins around, even though they could all reach them.

‘You’re very brave, you two,’ she said. ‘Having a cross-cultural relationship.’

‘I think they all are,’ Helen said.

When he came home the apartment was empty. He dropped his keys beside the fishbowl. On top of the water, there was something floating: a piece of card. He fished out a glossy colour photograph. In the photograph, Confucius was still alive. Its expression was so blank that it could have been a rubber replica. He shook the drips off and flipped it over. Nothing written on the back.

He tapped the counter, thinking what he’d tell them at Thanksgiving. He’d sit down with his mother and tell her that she shouldn’t be so naive. You can’t buy pets from those street guys, he’d say. They always cheat you.

The jungle will swallow anything

With her calves pressed against the warm concrete step, Mia listens to her mother’s voice. It would be close enough to understand if her voice wasn’t being tuned in and out by the roar of the highway like an old radio. Even so, Mia knows what is being said.
Thank you gentlemen – yes, of course, anything for you, my darlings
, and so on. Mia picks at a scab on her ankle and stares into the jungle across the road.
Fake, fake, fake
, she mouths, making only the tiniest of sounds like the child of an insect. A baby ant. She glances through the plastic sheeting into the shop to see if she’s been heard, but her mother hasn’t turned from the men, and the men never turn from her.

Her mother brings Cokes out to three of the drivers
seated around a table under the Virgin. The round Coke
bottles hugged under a breast, the drivers’ round middles balanced on plastic stools like those topple-toys you push and push and can’t knock over. All of it made from circles and spheres except her mother, thin and pretty, like a needle threading into the pattern. Like the spikes shooting out around the Virgin, which are as sharp as pins and make Mia think of the saguaro she saw when they went to visit her aunt in Chihuahua. That was the last holiday they had and it was before she was in school, so five, six years ago. Her mother hasn’t got time for holidays. She hasn’t even got time to complain about it.

The sun is going down behind the tangle of vines across the highway and the mosquitos come out to sing their tiny songs into the sweaty air. Mia stands and shuts the screen door and goes to her room. She folds her clothes, packs her books for tomorrow. She knows her mother works too hard. Seven days a week and late most nights. Instead, she is possessed by work. There are other kids whose mothers don’t work at all. She’s never met one but from books and television she knows they exist. They are big, smiling women with enormous breasts. Not like her mother, still so skinny, still so much like a teenager that the truck drivers all call her
muchacha
. Up all night and sometimes she even dances with them. It’s embarrassing.

On the weekends her mother sends Mia out to the highway to wave down the men with soft drinks and packages of fruit. Pretty little Mia, big eyes like her mother, a polystyrene box strapped around her neck, the weight supported by her hands. The trucks loom over her like moving buildings, shiny and noisy. Her shoulders get tired but the more she sells the lighter the burden. Her mother won’t let her work after school, only the weekends. Her mother says,
School is more important, with school you can get out of here.

The money she makes on the weekends goes into a jar just for her. It pays for schoolbooks, shoes and socks, a pink plastic lunchbox. Other kids spend their pay on junk but she can take anything she wants from the shop. Her mother always says that Mia is good to help pull her weight because it’s just the two of them, they’re in it together. When her mother sees the drivers slip Mia an extra coin, she doesn’t take it away. There’s no reason to hide her tips from her mother, but sometimes Mia doesn’t say anything. Sometimes the drivers give her twenty-, fifty-peso notes. There is a small pile of these notes under the jewellery box covered in pink satin, which was a gift from her aunt. When she lifts it up to look at the colourful money she has a tired feeling in her stomach as if she has eaten too much candy.

Many of the drivers stop and come into the shop to eat and drink, and most of them buy the little packets of powder to stir into their coffee. Everyone drinks the coffee, there are jars of it on every plastic-covered table. But the powder is hidden away. Once a month the tall man comes to see her mother. Her mother closes the shop and Mia stays in her room listening to them talk in whispers. There is nothing between her mother’s room and her own but a thin wall. There are plastic sounds and tearing sounds and the smell of money. Her mother says,
Mia, we are in this together, we have no secrets from each other.
No secrets but the tall man.

The tall man will be back soon. Her mother is always anxious for a day or so before he comes. She moves faster, her voice gets higher, she turns into a whirlwind and then crashes and sleeps for hours.

Mia peers out her window into the dark where the insects are singing in a choir now, the sound as thick and tangled as the jungle.

She has been told it’s dangerous outside after dark, and she knows her mother means the highway, but Mia thinks also of the men in the jungle. Some nights she sees their shadows coming out of the bushes, hears the sounds of sucking and tearing, the zippers and belts. From her window she sees the men climb back into their trucks. She sees the lights of their trucks come on and hears them roar away. They are always gone before dawn.

Mia’s mama gives it to them
, the boys at school say. Once or twice she has asked her mother if someone is there in the house with them.
Mia, there is no one, it’s all in your imagination,
her mother says.
It’s just you and me, remember that
.

The pact between Mia and her mother is as complicated as the spiders’ webs that stretch between vines and tree limbs in the jungle, which move in the wind and with the swing of the branches. Strong and delicate at the same time. Stringy and see-through and sticky as sugar.

After Mia goes to bed her mother doesn’t close the shop for hours, not until the last customer is fed, and sometimes the men sit around all night smoking cheap cigars and drinking beer, or pull up their trucks in the dark to order more little packets to stir into their instant coffee. They scratch their feet at the table, fart and belch, sing and grab her mother’s thigh as she twists by. The stink of cigars floats into Mia’s room and she can’t sleep. Even though the house is a separate building to the shop they are too close.Sometimes she gets up and peers through the plastic sheets into the shop. It’s always the same. Her mother cleans dishes, brings drinks, laughs at the jokes. Removes a meaty hand from her waist, wipes her own hands on her apron. She is always the same, giving everything until she closes and falls asleep in her clothes. Unless the tall man has come. On those nights everything is different.

The tall man is also very thin and he is the only man Mia has ever seen in a suit. He has come for as long as Mia can remember. When she was little, she once asked if he was her father. Her mother crouched down and made her face go old, with eyes hollowed out and skin grey. The way her pupils darted suddenly from side to side made Mia feel cold.

Your father has gone away
, her mother said.
He’s not coming back.

Mia didn’t like the old face of her mother so she didn’t ask again. Sometimes she thinks that the tall man is her father anyway. And sometimes she thinks that her father is dead.

Mia first hears about the vampires from a boy at school named Álvaro, who is fat and often in trouble. On this day he is in trouble for skipping class and coming back from the jungle with leaves in his hair, claiming to have discovered some secret Mayan ruin. It is a day after a long night at the shop and Mia has gotten in trouble for falling asleep at her desk. They are both in detention at lunchtime, shut together in a small hot classroom to write I Must Nots. After ten minutes the teacher leaves the room to smoke, and the fat boy slides over to sit beside her. He comes so close that the whole side of her is warmed by his body heat.

They say your mother gives it to them
, he says.

Mia taps her pencil against the desk.

They say this, but it isn’t true
,
he says.

She looks at him then. His brown eyes are full and shining like the back of a beetle.

I know it isn’t true
, he says. His bottom lip twists slightly and he glances at the door and back.
It’s vampires
, he says.
She is protecting the vampires
.

You’re crazy
, says Mia.
Everyone knows it
. She wriggles away from him, hunches over her lines and presses the pencil so hard into the paper that the point clicks off. She brushes the tiny pile of broken lead onto the floor and it leaves streaks across her work like the claws of an animal.

I’m telling the truth
, he says, catching up to her on her walk home. He is puffing and toad-ish in his oversized t-shirt and in the sun he squints so his eyes no longer shine.

Everyone knows there are no vampires
, she says.
Not in Quintana Roo.

There are
, he says.
I will show you.

You’re crazy
, she says again, and runs from him, her feet light over the asphalt of the highway. By the time she is home she is so breathless that her chest hurts.

She doesn’t see Álvaro again for three weeks. His family takes him out of the school for a while. Everyone says it’s because he’s crazy and has gone to a hospital to have his head examined, but when he comes back he claims to have been at the beach. He claims there is a cousin who works in a hotel in Cancún. She got them a cheap room. For evidence he produces his sunburn, a small collection of seashells and a postcard of some flamingos standing around in grey mud. The other boys take the postcard from him, pass it around, and then tear it into tiny pieces and throw it on the floor.

The day after Álvaro reappears, so does the tall man. When Mia comes home from school the shop is shut and she goes straight to her room to begin her homework. She looks out the window from time to time, but all the trucks roar past and the jungle is quiet. She listens to the whispers from her mother’s room but can’t hear the words. She can never hear the words.

After a couple of hours it is dark and her homework is finished. Her mother knocks and brings her supper, which she eats in her room. Her mother doesn’t say anything and backs out of the doorway with one finger against her lips. When Mia finishes eating she climbs into bed. She stares at the wall and thinks about the money under her jewellery box. She gets up to look at it but turns to the window instead. And there is the boy.

His eyes are big again. She moves closer to the window. She slides it open and looks at him.

Come on
, he says.
I’ll prove it to you
.

You’re really crazy
, she says. But she slips on her shoes and climbs out the window to stand beside him. The night is quiet except for the insects which are so constant that Mia doesn’t really hear them any more.

The boy walks into the shadow side of the house, to her mother’s window. He hisses at Mia.

Mia knows that this will be like walking through the spider web that she and her mother have made, so she hesitates. But then she reflects that when she walks through a spider’s web at night it has been rebuilt by morning. So she follows the boy into the shadow.

The boy has placed a brick under the window and he gestures with his fat arm for Mia to stand on it. Even though she has the same sugar-sick feeling she has when she looks at her money, she does as he says. The boy puts a finger to his lips, and Mia is again reminded of her mother. She peers through the window. The curtains are closed but there is a tiny space where they do not meet.

The tall man is there. He sits on a chair and her mother on the bed. To Mia’s relief they are both fully clothed and talking over something like friends, like she has seen girls at school huddled over notes, charms, secrets. A packet of paper or white plastic lies open on her mother’s lap. The tall man is the opposite of the truck drivers. Calm and pale in his suit. All quiet and no cigars. Of all the men in the world he alone seems to give her mother the attention she deserves.

It’s nothing
, Mia whispers.
It’s just Mama and the tall man talking
.

But the boy pushes the back of her head until her eye is turned once more to the window and she sees. The tall man bent over her mother like a stick insect. The needle he holds to her mother’s arm. The package sitting open on the bed, full of smaller packets, the same as the ones she gives the truck drivers. The blood sucking into the needle and the tall man’s face hardening. Her mother drops one end of a belt. Mia steps down.

They take the blood
, Álvaro whispers. He pulls Mia away from the window by her arm. She stumbles after him towards the edge of the jungle. The edge of the jungle is just an idea. It must be driven back year after year with a machete. Her mother usually does this, but the truck drivers sometimes help. Mia can see where the stems were severed last year. It is almost time to begin again.

Vampires
, she says.

The boy may have won but instead of looking triumphant he nods sadly.
My brother
, he says.
They took my brother last year. He became one of them. Skinny like that and pale and cold. He and my father had an argument and he ran away to Cancún. They found him in a gutter behind a nightclub. They cut his throat.

It’s your imagination
, she wants to say. But instead she says nothing. She puts a hand on his shoulder and is glad for once of the boy’s unhealthy warmth.

He looks into her eyes.
Where is your papa?
he says.

She shakes her head. A mosquito hovers in her ear. The awful humming sounds nothing like a song any more. It is more like when someone has thumped you hard on the side of the head.

You can go now
, says Mia.
I’ll see you at school.

He fumbles in his pocket and she thinks it is like the truck drivers with their pants coming out of the bushes snorting but he pulls out something shiny.

Here, have this. You will need it.
He hands her a small tin crucifix on a chain. Then he walks off down the edge of the highway. She watches his round shape diminish in the moonlight. She should have told him it was dangerous. But fear of the dark road seems childish to her now.