Mortality

My sanyi lived behind a strip mall. She was my mother’s oldest and only surviving sister, and she claimed it was because she’d achieved near-immortality thanks to her order-by-mail book series. My mother dropped me off at Sanyi’s apartment in Milpitas, mostly when she visited a man in Reno she claimed was so rich, he owned a jacuzzi for each of his limbs, one for just his feet, one for softening the suede of his elbows, and one for his private parts, which was unchlorinated and encouraged circulation. At Sanyi’s, I waited for my mother’s busted-up headlights to spotlight my face in the window, pretending to be watching for Sanyi’s books to arrive from Taiwan. Sanyi claimed she’d bribed someone so that she could receive international mail more quickly, but I never actually saw her spend any money, not even when she backed into a dumpster and dislocated the bumper of her SUV, which she duct-taped back. No one can tell unless they turn on their headlights behind me, she said.

I asked Sanyi how it was possible to be near-immortal. Wasn’t that just the same as being mortal? And Sanyi said no, it meant she would live for at least five centuries. She said I should start reading too, even though I couldn’t recognize any characters, so she read aloud to me instead. Her apartment was on the third floor, and when the lavender faux-lace curtains were cleaved open, you could see the bottom of the highway bridge, the scabbing graffiti tags that all began with RIP. The city scraped away any graffiti painted on the side of the bridge, but they didn’t care about what couldn’t be seen, so over the course of three months I watched the bottom of the bridge thicken with paint like a callous, collages of so many deaths I couldn’t guess. I stared out the window at the bottom of the bridge while Sanyi—her feet propped up on an ottoman she made by stuffing grocery bags with towels—lay back on the plastic-wrapped couch and tugged the floor lamp closer. The lamp’s bulb was busted and hadn’t been replaced, but Sanyi still jerked its chain out of habit, and we both pretended it was capable of obeying. We both pretended to be in the custody of its light. On the windowsill beside me was a Gatorade bottle of purple tulips I didn’t realize were fake until one night I elbowed the bottle onto the carpet and realized there was no water inside. After that, the tulips didn’t look the same: I used to stroke the petals against the soft skin beneath my chin, pretend someone had plucked them for me. Now they looked obscene, bruise-colored, like the time I looked out the other window and saw a woman in her apartment undressing, her breasts colliding with the light, both of her nipples scabbed and circled by flies.

Sanyi read from the sofa: The first step to achieving immortality, she recited, is to master this breathing technique. What breathing technique, I asked her, and she said, Come here and look at this diagram. I turned away from the highway bridge—the latest legible name said, RIP AND ALL OUR LOVE TO JAMIE—and leaned over the page she pried open in her lap. The diagram was of a mouth stemmed from a set of lungs, and there were veins wriggling across the page like earthworms. Those are not veins, Sanyi said, those are qi paths, and the dots here are not dead flies, even though this is my favorite book to kill flies in, they are actually meridian points. Study them and we can move on to step two.

I told Sanyi I didn’t want to achieve this form of fleshly immortality, near or otherwise. What I wanted was to be one of the names spray-painted on the underside of the highway bridge, to be a neon grief. Sanyi pretended to slap me with the book and said, Don’t say things like that! The people who paint that bridge are horrible like your cousin Richard, who got arrested! Cousin Richard, she explained, used to tag in bus tunnels, and then he went to jail. And I, Sanyi said, was the only one who got the money for his bail, because I am his sanyi after all, and we share a name, and even if you do something I am completely ashamed of, remember that.

I told Sanyi I didn’t want to achieve this form of fleshly immortality, near or otherwise.

Okay, I said, thank you. Sanyi got up to make us chicken rice soup, which she revealed to me did not contain chicken: Your Sanyi is a smart woman, she said. Rice used to be so rare, I still hide it in my pillowcase and sleep on it and wake up with grain-dents all over my face. But chicken was even rarer. We ate it once a year, and we fought over the neck, the fattiest part. Your mother always got to eat the most fat because she was the youngest and we felt bad she didn’t have any breasts and still doesn’t, and I ate the least because I’m selfless. But I invented a chicken soup that doesn’t use any chicken. It uses tofu with mold that makes it taste like chicken, the right kind of mold, and it uses jackfruit.

Sanyi showed me how to split the jackfruit skin with a machete she kept taped to the wall. When I moved in, she lowered the machete and taped it closer to the counter so that I would be able to reach it. For protection, she said, in case we’re ever invaded. Some people say, have a gun! But guns can’t wedge a watermelon. The other trick, she explained to me, was to use previous bones. They don’t have to be chicken bones, she said, make the stock with whatever bone you own. I asked her if bathwater was technically a broth, since I seeped in it for hours and I had bones too. She laughed and said I was a smart and creative girl, just like she used to be, but no, bathwater could not be used for broth, because I was disgusting. That’s not a bad thing, she said, all girls should be disgusting. You should go out more.

But when I went outside during the day, walking along the sidewalk beneath the highway bridge, there was no one there spray-painting the names, and the walls were so mangled with pigeon shit that I couldn’t read anything up close. I wanted to go out at night, but Sanyi told me I had to achieve immortality first, or else she had no guarantee of my safety, so instead I fell asleep by the window, licking at headlights, waiting to be woken up by my cousin Richard who was arrested, canisters holstered in his hands.

Sanyi’s latest book that arrived by mail was about dementia. This is part of the diseases of the brain series, she said. She’d ordered the entire illustrated set in hardcover, and when they arrived, she hacked open the foam packaging with her machete. The cover of the dementia book was TV-screen black, white characters sprawled across it like a pearl spill. The first page of the book was painted silver on both sides, shiny enough to attract moths from the closet and replace the light of our floor lamp. When I propped up the book and opened my mouth in front of the silver page, it hurtled my thirst back at me. There was a caption printed in ant-lines at the bottom of the page, and Sanyi read it aloud to me: This page is a mirror. It is showing you your face? Do you recognize it? Congratulations, you do not yet have severe dementia, but you could. We are showing you yourself to remind you: Everything ages and fades. Sanyi shut the book and said, Damn it, you can see my wrinkles in there. But she told me her health had improved overall, ever since the immortality books advised her to stop chewing betel nuts sold by the woman downstairs, and now Sanyi’s spit was no longer the color and texture of molten pennies. I may not keep all my memories, she said, but at least I’ll have molars.

Sanyi opened the book again that night, when it was too dark to delineate her face from mine, and swiped past the silver pages with her thumbs. The first spread was of a glow-in-the-dark brain, spattered with spots she said were sacred and easily scarred by the wrong diet. There was one section of the mind, which looked to me like the cross section of a fat-veined ham, that reminded me of the bridge’s underside, a neon coil like the curve of an earlobe. It says our memories are stored here, Sanyi said, flicking at it with her thumbnail. It’s called the hippopotamus. You mean hippocampus, I said, reading aloud the English transliteration. Right, she said, look how tiny it is! It’s a worm. The only thing this would ever be able to house is a single slurped noodle. Sanyi shut the book and sighed and said it was inside us, this hippopotamus, and it was probably unraveling into a watercress stem because we were born with our illness: Memories that loosen like milk teeth. We grow into forgetfulness and unfist our bones and litter them for crows.

When you go to sleep tonight, Sanyi said, remember something about your mom. Or else by the time she comes back, you’ll have scattered her face like a fistful of salt and then you’ll be sucking at my tit forever. I’m just kidding, she said, slapping my leg with the book. But try to remember.

 Memories that loosen like milk teeth.

That night, I thought about a story my mother once told me about Sanyi—My Only Surviving Sister, my mother said—you know how she got her money? She sold her eggs. Now she has none, and that’s why she doesn’t have any kids, no one to numb with our family name. She saw an advertisement in the Independence newspaper, someone seeking a YAF—that’s a Young Asian Female—and when she went to the address, they licked open her legs and needled a fine light inside her and she even lied about being a nonsmoker, she even gargled vinegar. Vinegar kills everything, bad breath, horseflies. Anyway, your Sanyi took all these hormone shots in her ass and belly and then they vacuumed the eggs right out of her. She went year after year. And you know, we’re all born with a number of eggs and when they fall out you don’t grow them back. They’re not like the living. That’s why I tell you, don’t ever sit on a cold bench because your eggs will freeze and nothing will descend. Though that’s not a bad thing, maybe you want to be alone like Sanyi, who is not like us, she has no one and no TV, someday you’ll see her walls.

When I asked Sanyi if this was true, if she sold her eggs—I imagined they were the size of her fists and that she sold them in a Styrofoam carton, a dozen at a time like skinned grapefruits, babies dressing in their pulped flesh—she told me yes, it was true, that’s how she afforded this apartment all on her own. Plus, Sanyi said, they’re so lucky to have my eggs, now that I’m nearly immortal. My daughters will live to be at least 250 years old each. Someday, when everyone we know has died, we will find each other, and we will recognize what centuries we salted and ate alive. I will recognize each of them, because they will have my pickled blood, my forever face.

In the morning, Sanyi asked me if I’d finished packaging a memory of my mother and shelved it somewhere inside myself, somewhere cool. Which memory did you choose? she asked me, and I was too ashamed to admit that every time I thought of my mother, I could only imagine her as a chicken, a story squeezing out of her mouth, slick as an egg. In my memory, she laid dozens of stories about Sanyi and the daughters that were donated, but I couldn’t remember what my mother said about herself. She was as murky to me as a yolk yawning inside a shell, and no light could loiter around her perimeter. Someday, my mother would return to this apartment for me, but all she’d find was crushed calcium, a mosaic of light on the floor, signs that something had hatched without her.

Sanyi said it didn’t matter how hollow my memory was, that it was okay if it was only the shell of something, some brittle belonging. Our job, she said, is to move all our memories out of our minds, no matter how meatless they are. The book says that our hippopotamuses will decay, but if we move our memories into other parts of the body, or, even better, if we lock them outside of ourselves, somewhere safe, in something that never rots, we will be okay. Okay, I said. It’ll be fun, Sanyi said, like moving from this apartment into a mansion, like the one your mother moved to in Reno! We just have to unmantle the memories and we refrigerate them somewhere. Disassembling is a discipline, she said.

That morning, we unboxed our memories, the ones we knew best, or the ones we’d tailored so that they’d fit us only later. Sanyi said the memory she most wanted to caramelize was about the time she and my mother cut class to take a train to Taipei with money they’d stolen from a temple donation bowl. They visited a GI bar and danced with a pair of American soldiers who grabbed their asses. With two hands, Sanyi said, the way you’d grasp a chicken so it won’t open its wings and wrestle away. That day, our asses felt like they’d grown wings, plus one of them gave us his watch! It was broken, there wasn’t even a face of glass on it, but we took turns wearing that watch for years, me for a week, her for a week, me, her, and then she moved to Milpitas and that’s how I knew I had to follow her, everyone told me not to go, it was expensive and the rivers are aluminum, but I had to go because the bitch had my watch! That’s what I told everyone, said Sanyi.

I asked Sanyi who had the watch now, and she said she didn’t remember, that eventually one of them must have lost it or broken it for real, severed its leather band with tendon-scissors, or pawned off the gold clasp. But everything else, she said, I remember. It doesn’t matter who has it anymore. I used to watch her unbuckle it and shimmy it off, and when I put it on, the band was still warm from her wrist. The leather was lathered in her sweat. Now you go, Sanyi said, pluck out your one best memory, the thickest one you own.

I sat by the window and flicked at the plastic tulip petals with my thumb, trying to remember something before Sanyi, before her gilded books and the pages we entered like lakes, but all I could remember was another story my mother told me.

It featured her mouth, that hour when she came home from working at the post office and her blue shirt was unbuttoned to her belly button and her pants were unzipped and she whispered to me as I slugged into sleep. We lay side by side on the bed, her face turned toward me. It was the most she ever looked at me. Her mouth bulged with light, a translucent membrane expanding around her head like an astronaut’s helmet. Inside the egg of her breath, she told me the story of Pangu, the first man in the entire world, who slipped out of a black egg, his face a candied yolk. His meat became the mountains, his many eyes the oceans, and when he ejaculated, he sputtered pearls into the mouths of oysters. His bones were unburied as jade. It was his job to decay so that the world would birth from his corpse, the cliffs of his ribs, his heart scooped out for the sun. I thought about Sanyi and her immortality exercises, how she sprayed vinegar on her face in the mornings to prevent wrinkles—it acidifies me, she said, so I’ll look like this forever. Pangu, my mother told me, disintegrated the day he was born. But see how we have jade in the earth now, how the cleft of his asses became our valleys, how beautiful it is to give up. I asked her if her boyfriend could ejaculate pearls, and she laughed and said she didn’t know, but if it was true, she’d be made of a million dollars by now. She’d belly all his treasure. My mother laughed so hard our bed rattled and battered the wall, and then she said, Hey, let’s trim away his meat and see if his bones are green. We can pawn off the biggest ones, the spine, the thigh bone. But not the ear bones, she said, tickling me behind the ears, because small things can’t be sold for anything.

This was my most comprehensive memory: the story of my mother recounting all of creation, our cosmic origin. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t technically mentioned in the story, that I’d have to squint to see myself in it. While the membrane of my mother’s story expanded around both our heads, bubbling us in its myth, the whole world was intimate. The earth was only as big as my child’s fist, as a chicken egg. What I loved most about this memory was the way my mother mimed Pangu’s hatching, her fist opening to show him slipping out of the dark. That night, when she fell asleep beside me, I slipped my pinky into her curled fingers, felt her fist tighten around it, sealing me into the dark. Inside her night, my pinky was a beginning, the yolk of a world, Pangu floating inside a shell, believing he would be held for all his life. But when I woke, she was already gone, and my pinky was bereft, fossilized into stone and mine alone.

Sanyi said, Now that you have your memory—in both hands, like a chicken you’ve grabbed from the grass—find the thing you want to preserve it in. Remember to choose something nonperishable. Sanyi walked over to the sink and bent over, turning on the tap with her chin. I’m going to deposit my memory into the water, she said, because it can pass through any body without getting lodged, it will never stay still enough to be stolen, it can cycle through sweat and be swallowed and pissed. In every form, it lives. My memory will be so forever that even when we’re all dead, it will still be particled in the air of something. Sanyi said, The shell of my story will be crushed and sprinkled into the soil, repelling the roots of forgetfulness. And I will say: Remember the watch, the one she gave you. The time she lent you. Sanyi held her memory hostage in her hands, then let it go, stabbing her hands into the sink water, surrendering it to some underneath sea.

Your turn, Sanyi said, and remember, find something permanent! I said I already knew where I wanted to mosaic mine: I walked outside to the highway bridge, stepping over the scattered books on the carpet, heading down toward the underbelly of the bridge where the sidewalk crackled like a book spine, where you could look up and see the wrist-veins of the road, the wings of paint where the dead were memorialized, where you didn’t have to pay for their names. My mother always said that urns were so expensive we should share one someday, but that was before she left, before I realized I was looking for her name to appear on the belly of that bridge, for someone to publicize her absence, to jewel this grief outside my body.

I waded through shadow and pressed my palms to the cement wall globbed with pigeon shit, hammering in the memory of my mother telling Pangu’s story. The corners of my mother’s mouth beat like wings as she recited the birth of the world, which seemed to me now like a sacrifice, your bones regifted into stones, your sweat surrendered into rivers, your skull hung up as the moon. Maybe she’d always been telling me a story about separation, about the parts of ourselves we dissolve into the dirt. To become the world, Pangu had to scatter his body, decay into divinity, and maybe even gods get tired of giving. I thought of Sanyi’s eggs floating above me like balloons, how she couldn’t bear the weight of their possibility. With my hands flat against the wall, I let the story from my mother’s mouth go, watching it flock all the way to the ceiling, showing it how to ride every wire of leaked light until it could perch somewhere safe and above me, nestled beneath graved paint, waiting to return to me.

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