CHAPTER 1: DISAPPEARING
EARTHQUAKE
One night my girlfriend asked what was wrong with me and I couldn’t explain. We lay on my black sheets between my blank white walls, on the bed that was the room’s only furniture. We had bared ourselves—we had a connection when we were naked—but Sandra wanted more than full exposure. It was three a.m. after her late shift waiting tables at The Cave, and she smelled like fry oil and strangers, and still she talked. Who was I to prefer silence? I told her how I blacked out as I watched the news, ate my microwave dinner, wrote, how I woke to find my status update a string of g’s with no likes, nothing to account for the time between. “It’s not just loneliness, I mean. I’m pretty sure I’m disappearing. People walk straight into me on the street. When I’m alone in a bathroom with ten urinals, some white guy will come in and pee right next to me.”
She twitched her mouth from side to side. This was a habit I envied. She was always doing things equally on either side of her body.
When her lips parted the smack echoed off the empty walls.
“How long you been feeling this?” she asked. “Like you’re disappearing?”
I couldn’t tell whether she was being sarcastic.
Well. These were the facts: My cat was dead. My wife and daughter had left me. At some point in the last three years I had stopped going out or having friends. After the divorce I had kept the walls blank because the echo was a kind of company.
“Just to clarify,” Sandra said, “you’ve felt like disappearing the whole time you’ve been with me?”
“Just to clarify,” I said, “what I mean is you’re all I have left. Maybe you’re the only reason I’m still here.” I felt quite smart about this line.
“Try again,” she said.
Above us the popcorn ceiling seemed about to shed its puffs. “Okay. Today I went to the butcher shop for bulgogi. I stood in line thinking about how to tell the guy to slice it, and he served everyone else inside and then every new person who came in. He didn’t even look at me.”
Sandra held her finger in front of me, showing off a new burn on her fingertip. She must have gotten it from work that day. The ceiling blurred in the background.
“Tonight,” she said, “one white boy pinched my ass and another tried to tuck his tip under my apron string. I would settle for no bulgogi.”
The room spun.
“After a while,” I said, “my daughter walked into the shop with her mom. They didn’t see me either.”
“I’m trying to tell you something—”
All around us rose the smell of raw beef, the sound of chopping and flirting—a butcher shop was a place of zero subtlety—and then there was my daughter with her lips purple and her hair spiked, in black leggings and silver boots and a camo T-shirt, like this was normal.
Sandra sighed. “You’re in a rough patch,” she said cruelly. “You’ll get out of it.”
I could tell she wanted to say something more. When she turned her head away I thought I had to look on the bright side. After all in the scheme-of-things, disappearance was literally no thing. I was thirty-six, and I was dating, and my body still functioned, even if my left foot was slightly bigger than my right. I could afford $1,600 a month to rent the first floor of a duplex in a white Boston suburb. It could be worse, etc.
“Plus,” I added, “my agent called. She couldn’t sell my novel. Plus my savings are almost gone. You were right, I shouldn’t have quit my job.”
Sandra sat up and let her hair down over her face like a ghost. “Boo,” she said. “Don’t try to blame me. You’re depressed.”
Why were other people always telling me what I was?
“Anyway”—she waved her hands in my face—“did you forget I went to city hall today to change my name? I want you to say my name correctly when we’re having sex.”
She had my full apprehension now.
“I’m done answering to two masters,” she said. “I mean languages.”
I had known of her plan to take one official name instead of one English name and one Korean—I had just lost track of what day today was.
“Yumi?” I said.
Yumi brushed back her hair, and the ghost shifted to her eyes.
“Do you feel like a single person now?” I asked.
“I never felt like two people,” Yumi said. “It was only other people who acted like I was.”
I wondered whether what was wrong with me was that I was other people.
Once Yumi left, clacking her lacquered nails against the doorframe for luck, I showered and put on the purple tracksuit that I used to wear for my daughter. She had claimed it made me look cool. I met my desk in the purple office that used to be my daughter’s bedroom. I had added as little as I could, only a desk, a chair, a computer. I felt closer to Charlotte in her old space. Regret plus writing was a little like time travel.
From my desk I texted Yumi that I would love her better, I needed to figure out how to do that. I knew “love,” I knew “better.” Somehow their combination stumped me. Before she got dressed Yumi had said I wasn’t disappearing, I was choosing not to be present. I could see how she could see it like that.
I touched the keyboard and the keys felt hot, as if someone with a lot of excess body heat had just been typing. My fingers felt hot. Maybe I felt hot. I wondered what kind of book people would buy. Two characters who hate each other fall in love? Plus the apocalypse? Plus they’re of different races? I decided to write a new novel. All I needed was three thousand words a day for a month. Ten thousand words a day for a week? I’d just make something weird happen.
I muffled my mouth with my hands and screamed for a while into them. Then I coughed until I could breathe again. My chair poked into my spine, though nothing stuck out of it. A note on my desk said buy a new chair.
In my failed novel a straight cis able Korean American guy woke, drank coffee, made toast and eggs, hacked into his company’s website, ate a grilled cheese sandwich with four lactose pills, took notes to protect his company from other hackers, microwaved his dinner, watched the news as he dined, slept dreamlessly, again and again—and desperately wanted a different life. He was at an age of dwindling options: Each choice he made limited the choices he had left. In the end he settled for what he had, and his desire vanished. He was finally everything he could be. It was a happy ending.
I was still at my desk, massaging the sore spots on my back and thinking about my options, when my computer shut down. In the apartment upstairs something crashed. The floor swayed. Gravity got confused. My photo of my ex-family danced off the desk, and when I reached out, my hand didn’t go where I intended it to go. I couldn’t make my intention action. My head seemed to float on liquid, and yet I was more aware of the ground than I had ever been. The ground was always in motion—I’d only just noticed. I hugged my knees to my chest and squeezed my eyes shut. I prayed for my daughter in her bedroom across town, yanking her blanket over her head—or was she in school by now, huddled under a desk?—when had the sun come up?—had she eaten?—either way I couldn’t reach her—
This was how I disappeared.