When the floor returned to normal I rubbed the soles of my bare feet over the hardwood. I stomped, paused, stomped a few times more. For the first time the blankness of the walls looked wrong, like something on them had been shaken down. I stomped again, then shuffled out to the TV to hear another human voice.
The living room was the same—what used to be typical was now strange. On one side was my cheap TV, on the other side the red couch my ex-family hadn’t wanted. Beside the TV stood the electric keyboard. Behind the couch a cardboard shipping box.
The whole room looked very haphazard. Only the keyboard seemed intentional. I had bought it after the divorce.
The news didn’t mention an earthquake. Even the local news covered a presidential candidate who kept refusing to denounce the KKK. One pundit said he never condoned the KKK either. How could you tell a person’s stance? My phone got no emergency alert. The movement of the earth went unacknowledged. I googled “earthquake Boston” and learned that tremors in the greater metropolitan area are more frequent than people think. Usually they’re too small to be felt. Once I saw a show about people who vacation wherever they think the next “big one” will hit: Either they hoped the earth would swallow them or they hoped to discover a new earth.
I cracked the front door, and the same old earth eked through the opening. Disappointing. No Minotaur slammed its horns into the house. No hand descended from the sky. No wolf huffed. The world held the same unremarkable terror as ever. The older white straight couple across the street caressed each other on their porch with their terrier barking at their feet. I called out to see whether they had felt anything, and they ignored me. They were your typical neighbors.
In the kitchen I corkscrewed a bottle of Chardonnay, and I drank a quarter, and then another quarter, and then another quarter, until I felt less tired. I tried to keep myself awake, aware. I shook the bottle, and the liquid inside it shook. With each sip the bottle lightened, its weight proportionate to the wine I hadn’t drunk. Consumption was lightness.
I took the wine back to my office and lifted the photo of my ex-family back onto my desk. This time action matched intention—what was different? As always, in the photo, Charlotte wore a purple sundress and chewed her brown hair and clung to her mother’s sunburned leg. As always I wiped my thumbprints off the glass with my thumb. The next time I would have to do it again. I drank the last quarter of wine and then wrote three thousand words about the earth shaking a person’s sense of the earth.
It wasn’t until I returned to the living room, with the empty bottle in hand and the cardboard box behind the sofa staring back at me, that I realized why I was pacing. It was the box: There was something off about it. In that box were toys my daughter had wanted that I never got the chance to give her. I had bought them, one by one, over my last three years alone. It occurred to me now that the line earthquakes make between the past and the present is called a fault.
I knelt, and the flat wood dug into my knees, which were still indented from the many pews I’d knelt at after my parents died. My adoptive parents had not been the kind of Irish Catholics who went to mass out of faith: They had based their devotion on an hour per week of corrective behavior. I had based mine on wanting to be loved. They had adopted me, and then they taught me how to be adopted—and how to be Catholic and how to be white—and then I left for college, and then they stopped talking to me, and then I got married, and then Jennifer and I had a child, and then I was afraid of myself, and then I could never tell what my family wanted from me, and then the divorce happened, and then my wife and daughter moved to another house and asked me to leave them alone.
Soon I am going to disappear.
How to explain? Maybe it started one Saturday six years ago when I woke Charlotte early and we drove out to farmland to stargaze. As the moon set and the sun rose she said the stars made her sad and she didn’t know why. “Stop taking me here,” she said. “I need to sleep. I’m not five anymore.” She was six. She pulled her hood down over her face, and I thought the reason the stars make us sad must be that some have already burned out and we don’t know which. Since light takes time to reach us, the stars we see are those stars as they shone years earlier. The sun we see is the sun as it shone eight minutes and twenty seconds earlier. No matter how close I got to Charlotte, she would always see me as I used to be. Vision is an impression of the past.
That was the intuition I had as I opened the box and found that inside . . . was nothing. All of the toys were gone. And yet, at first, I still thought I’d been robbed. Why take the toys, I wondered. Why not the TV or electric keyboard or computer? I pressed my palm to the cardboard bottom. The cardboard felt hot as if someone had just been inside. My hand left a faint sweat print. It looked like the back of a throat. The longer the box yawned open and empty the more I wanted to step into its mouth.
WHAT I DID
When my family left me (two years, 296 days earlier) I had to figure out how to spend all that time alone. In order to pay child support I went freelance in IT security. I achieved some success hacking into companies and recording my path so that it could be closed behind me. I did this for about six hours a day. I had the rest of the day to do something else.
At first I tried cooking, but I hated how it made me shop—planning ahead ingredients for an entire week. I would end up cooking for only the first few days and then panicking and eating everything that looked like it might spoil. Also I had no talent. Recipes never revealed themselves to me as code did. Jennifer, my ex-wife, had never liked me to cook, and I realized finally that this wasn’t because she had liked cooking. Eventually I bought a lot of frozen food, which only left more time to kill.
What could I do? I didn’t like movies, and people frowned when I went alone. I hated the mall. I hated organized sports. I had quit going to church. I kept a goldfish alive for eleven months and twenty-nine days. I learned to watch the news.
I bought an electric keyboard and retaught myself what I had known as a boy. My parents had sent me to lessons they couldn’t afford, and after their deaths I had stopped going. My adoptive parents wouldn’t pay for lessons that wouldn’t turn into a career. It was their life philosophy to treat everything as an investment. Either on earth or in heaven. I was a failed venture. Now I went back to spending an hour a day practicing a skill I used only in practice. I imagined my mother’s scowl inside me. This relaxed me.
When I started dating Yumi that filled one or two nights a week. It also made the other nights feel worse. I spent fifteen minutes a day looking through my phone contacts for someone to call. Somehow I didn’t have any friends left? I had cut them off when I got married, though Jennifer had kept hers? I must not have been close to mine? I looked up old classmates on the internet and direct messaged a couple of them. One said he didn’t remember a Matt Kim and I must be trying to scam him.
From time to time I had to restock the freezer. I taught myself to appreciate wine. After a month I went to the nearest animal shelter and bought a cat. It was an older tabby, a domestic American shorthair. I thought an older cat would help me understand how my adoptive parents had felt, taking me on at twelve. But later I found out the cat was something like seventy in human years.
The only place I felt like myself was the toy shop. Once a week I went to the Curious George store in Harvard Square and everyone assumed I was a generous parent. That was how I made sense there, and how you make sense to people is how they treat you.