“No, tell us more, Charlie Chan,” the second dudebro said. “Tell us about your purple tracksuit.”
He was a hulking specimen, exactly the kind of person who would follow someone. The kind of person who prepared his body to harm another.
I looked down at my skinny limbs and frowned.
“Charlie Chan was a white person,” I tried.
“You make me want to punch you.”
Make America punch again, I thought.
The first dudebro pulled the other’s arm and said, “Come on. He’s mental.”
I stared at my hands. They rubbed each other like two newborn animals. My reflection twitched: One side of my lips lifted higher than the other.
The angry dudebro said, “Dude, this is not over.”
I never expected anything to be over though. My hands knew this. I only wanted the world to play by its stated rules. If you minded your own business, why should anyone bother you? Where was the freedom I was promised? When I stopped seeing my family, when I left my job, people called me a quitter, a coward, too proud or ungrateful. But the world could destroy itself on its own—why did it need me?
Suddenly the angry dudebro turned and spat at my feet. His friend pulled him into The Cave. Three drops of saliva fizzled on the purple velour of my pant leg. I had worn the tracksuit to feel better about myself. I waited for the spit to dry and thought about my cool air-conditioned home. Why do we leave our homes? To be with other people, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.
As they passed me people kept to the edge of the sidewalk or stepped down into the street. I was marked contagious. I rubbed the fur of my tracksuit on a lamp pole and followed the dudebros inside, pretending to be fine. Fake it until you make it to heaven.
In the desert someone else’s saliva is a shower.
My girlfriend was not at work.
The perv who owned The Cave said, “Sandra isn’t answering her phone. She didn’t ask for a night off.”
I told him that wasn’t her name anymore, her name was Yumi, and maybe that was why she wasn’t answering.
“The fuck are you talking about?” He pointed at my chest. “Don’t you know where she is? What are you even good for?”
CO-HALLUCINATION
Yumi didn’t answer my calls either, so I ordered the house red, a Merlot, and waited. It was a test: If she appeared, then she hadn’t disappeared. I thought about Charlotte in the butcher shop, in an outfit her nine-year-old self would have scorned. I picked at the shellac on the bar, and a chip lodged under one bitten nail, drawing blood. My mouth dried with the urge to suck my finger, but The Cave wasn’t the type of place to put in your mouth. Was that urge to lick your own blood about reincorporation, like gods eating their children? Was it about secret-keeping? You want to keep what is inside your body inside your body—that was clear from the moment Charlotte first wailed to get her hands on her poop. What babies know is you let one thing get away from you and then another and another, and eventually you are only what you have not yet given away.
The shellac covered alternating red and white tiles, the kind you find on a 1970s bathroom wall. I imagined an ongoing checkers game I was winning and had to find a way to lose. That had been typical with my daughter. How to love better? I was just trying to keep the people I loved from disappearing on me.
I wanted Yumi’s comforting side, the side she had shown the last time I was truly afraid. That time my cat had kept running into walls, chasing nothing that I could see, and maybe because the cat did it, I started bumping into things too. At home this made no difference, but in public people ogled my bruises, shuffled away. In the grocery store a woman who worked for a domestic abuse shelter slipped me her card. “It happens to men too,” she whispered. The humanity she gave me made me feel less human. Other people’s pity insisted I should be pitied. Other people’s fear insisted I should be feared. Someone must be trying to hurt me. My cat must be chasing something.
But Yumi had called it co-hallucination. For school she had read about a schizophrenic and his partner: The schizophrenic went off his meds and saw bugs all over the house, and instead of confronting him, his partner imagined them too. Because their stories matched, their friends didn’t know what to believe. Finally someone set up a camcorder. Together the couple pointed at nothing, sprayed chemicals at nothing. To ease the schizophrenic’s suffering, his partner had adopted his delusions. When the pain exists, but its cause does not, how do you fight it?
Yumi had said co-hallucination usually happens among people, but for a person like me maybe it could happen with a cat. It was true I never thought of myself as above the animal kingdom. At first I argued that a blank recording didn’t mean nothing was there—I had gone through puberty eating the body of Christ. Then my cat died (not from hitting a wall, from a disease possibly related) and my accidents stopped. My body healed. Once again in public people either ignored or insulted me. After a while my dead cat began meowing in the ceiling. Because of what Yumi had said, I understood that the meows were in my head. I understood that I would rather be haunted than alone.
Someone’s weeping broke through my thoughts like another co-hallucination. In the corner of The Cave a thin black woman hunched over her hamburger, her back shaking, despair strung like a spiderweb around her. The night was early—later the rich white Harvard boys would show up to drink, to make themselves less human before they went out on the prowl. The two dudebros who had followed me were overeager, pregaming. One of them ordered the woman a cocktail. She continued weeping and stuffing her face with meat.
I was panicking. I didn’t want to check the time, but it had a scientific appeal. My phone said Yumi was one hour and nineteen minutes late. In the back they were probably doing her prep work, resenting her for skipping the unprofitable part of the night. On the TV cops ran around solving a heinous murder.
“You’re into that?” one dudebro asked the other. He nodded toward the weeping woman.
“Come on, don’t act like you aren’t.”
I moved my wine to her table and sat with her, not speaking, offering my meager protection. She cried and chomped her burger and fries, her eyes turned inward, backward. The dudebros passed their meanness back and forth.
Finally the woman looked up at me and said, “The hell is wrong with you? Fuck off.”
What could I do? I picked up the cocktail and downed it in one gulp. I waited for the disappearance of the cocktail to make something else disappear. I didn’t feel the effects of any kind of roofie. I was more or less the same amount of tired.
The dudebros laughed.
I remembered what Yumi had said about The Cave, that the appeal of such a shithole was about the limited male imagination. She got paid to let men underestimate her: She waited for the moment to pull out the rug from under them. All of her tips were either amazing or terrible. When I asked her why she liked me she said I mis-estimated her, not over or under. The way I got things wrong could be charming. She said it was something we shared, that our expectations were different from other people’s.
I didn’t believe in our similarity. She had dropped out of her last year of med school to get free of her parents, but she continued to study the body. My parents had died and I had followed through with what they’d wanted for me, keeping my head down and being promoted now and then when it would have looked racist not to promote me—I only quit when I discovered that somehow I had traded my small successes for my family. Yumi was confident; I was something else. She could change her name on a certain day because the weather was nice or not nice, she didn’t care that people might have trouble correcting themselves. I had feared for my name from the moment I was adopted. All my life people had told me my face was a square; Yumi’s was a heart. I gained and lost bulk like a hibernating mammal, in seasons. Her limbs stayed so thin it was hard to know how she balanced her hair, which was thick and luxurious and hung past her waist. I wore outfits like the tracksuit that no one else seemed to like. She wore black clothes, black nail polish, black eyeliner, despite that it matched her uniform (the pervy owner made his staff dress like the staff at Foot Locker, like they would feel up your foot while serving your Mac and Grilled Cheese—consumption for other hungers).