I close my eyes and hug the soup pot against my chest as dozens of voices swoop around me, high then low.
I time travel: back to the Cloisters, back to New York City last fall. Just Dad and me, walking through a medieval museum on a hill after doing a tour of Columbia, even though we both knew my heart was set on Annapolis.
It’s like that scene in Interstellar: I’m in my wormhole, looking through time and space into the past, into my life, with my dad. I’m pushing books out of my own bookshelf, trying to get my past self’s attention. But the me in the Cloisters doesn’t see the me in the wormhole, the one who is on the other side of the wave, who knows it’s coming, who’s begging Past Me to warn them.
I watch as Dad and I walk into the cathedral-like space, drawn by the Latin chorus that had been floating down the hall. The music reminds me of the one time I went to Midnight Mass at Saint Cecilia’s with my grandmother, when the choir sang just like this and the hair on my arms stood at attention. But in this chapel, there are no singers or pews. It is an empty stone room with slightly vaulted ceilings. Raised speakers form a huge circle in the center, as though they are participants in an ancient rite. Dad silently points to a small placard, and we read how each speaker represents a different choral member’s voice. The voices of the invisible singers reach up into the ceiling, mournful and reverent, and I wish I could put this feeling into numbers, into an algorithm, because words will never explain what these notes do to me on a cellular level.
Dad and I join the visitors who stand in the middle of the circle of speakers, and we all listen together, silent. An old woman is smiling, her eyes closed as she sways along with the voices, one hand gripping her cane. A guy not much older than me is sitting on the ground, hands folded in his lap. Others stand with heads bowed as though the music is a prayer. And it is, I think. It doesn’t matter, not really, that there is no one who can answer it.
I think the asking is what matters.
Because of the music, we are no longer strangers. The words weave us all into the same tapestry, cream and brown and black and gold. Somehow, we are in four dimensions in spacetime, past and present and future all together, all at once. We are on the event horizon. I decide to add this music to my Golden Record, my own imaginary collection of things I would launch into space for life-forms forty thousand years away to find so they could learn about humanity, just like Carl Sagan did with Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in the seventies. There is a voice recording on his Golden Record of a child saying, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”
This music, it’s a kind of a hello, too. If human souls existed, they might sound like this. Or like David Bowie, maybe.
Dad takes my hand and closes his eyes. When I look over, tears are sliding down his cheeks. I have never loved him more than in this moment, this man who chose me to be his daughter. Who fought the system for me. He could have picked any other unwanted kid, but he chose me.
We let the sound waves sweep us up, up, up, toward the ceiling, gathering speed past the sky, then cresting across the atmosphere, until we’re nothing but foam among a beach of scattered stars.
Hand in hand we slide to the shore, into the silence.
Something in me breaks, and the tears finally come, a slow, thick stream. What kind of a daughter takes SEVENTY-EIGHT hours to cry after finding out her parents might be dead?
I stand there sobbing for two full songs and it is only after the second one ends and I see the title displayed that I realize I’d been listening to a requiem. A song for the dead.
I want to go back to the Cloisters and whisper in Dad’s ear to not ever go to Malaysia because if he goes I will be alone in the kitchen in the middle of the night listening to the Tallis Scholars sing his life goodbye.
Aunt Nora, Mom’s sister, flew from Boston to Malaysia yesterday. She says she’s looking for them, but I know she’s really just going to look at the pictures. Polaroids of the dead. The internet is down all along the coast and no one in the hospitals can upload them, if they’d even be allowed to. We wanted to go, too, but Nora said no and I was upset because there is finally something to do and we’re almost eighteen and have every right to go ourselves, but Nah was relieved, I think, so I let it go. I called Nora before I came into the kitchen because it’s day there. And she told me what I had already figured out for myself, when one considers the effects of exposure, infection, lack of clean water, and all the other things that might make it impossible to stay alive long enough for a rescue crew to find you:
They are not finding any more people that are alive.
There are no pictures with my parents’ faces, and no one who is in a coma matches my parents’ descriptions. They are not stuck in a tree or wearing a life vest in the middle of the ocean or waiting in the hills because they’re too hurt to walk down.
Aunt Nora began to cry and I knew, I knew.
My parents are dead.
I set down the pot and run the back of my hands across my eyes.
“I’m making soup, Mom,” I say.
She can’t hear me. I know that. I know what happens when an organism dies. I can’t help it, though. I want to talk to my mom. I want her to walk down the stairs in her old man’s plaid bathrobe that she stole from Pappoús before he died. I want her to start putting things on the counter.
But there’s just me.
I open the fridge and scan the contents. It’s still pretty full, since Mom and Dad only left a week ago. There are veggies in the drawer. Broth in the cupboard. Cans of beans and tomatoes.
What is a soup for the dead?
Mom made avgolemono—Greek chicken soup—when Yia-yia died, back in the old country, where she bought a house surrounded by olive trees. Mom cried the whole time, her tears falling into the pot as she stirred. As I juiced lemons, she’d told me how her mother had taught her to make soup when she was a little girl, just like she had taught Nah and me. Our religion: the Gospel of Soup, the salvation of the spoon. It’d be nice to make avgolemono for her, but we don’t have chicken. Dad hates lentil and Mom only likes vegetable when she’s just come back from the farmers’ market. Besides, I should use these serrano chiles. Mom hates when things go to waste.
Chili. Chili nights are always fun. I don’t know why—maybe it’s the spiciness. The last time we had chili, Dad did his impression of the dean of the physics department and Nah got video of him pretending to fall asleep halfway through a lecture on quantum mechanics. Why didn’t we take more pictures? Why didn’t we take video of everything? Dad drinking his morning coffee, Mom watering the basil plant on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. She always insisted on talking to the plants when she watered them. Said it made them grow better, which is actually true. I pull out my phone and add watering plants to the list of things to do—keeping things alive is a way to work the problem of death. I haven’t told Nah about this list because she lives in an alternate reality pretty much all the time. For example, she still doesn’t know which clothes aren’t supposed to go in the dryer.
She thinks they are coming back to water plants and get oil changes and pay the electricity bill. I don’t know how long it’s okay to let her keep thinking that.
I take out the green peppers, the cilantro, the onions, and the chiles, which add lots of heat. Mom’s mason jar of seasoning is in the pantry, and I grab that, too. I run my fingers along the antique spice jars lined up on a small shelf to the left of the stove. Little white ceramic pots with the name of the seasoning written on them in blue paint. Coriander. Paprika. Oregano. They’d been passed down from my grandmother to my mom. The jars were a present from my pappoús to my yia-yia after he got his first paycheck in America.