A Long Stay in a Distant Land Page 8

  "Stop pedaling."

  He stopped.

  "I wanted you to study for this test because I wanted you to learn to think rationally, to look for logical solutions to problems instead of reacting like a caveman."

  "I was compensating him," Sonny said. "I was making things equal, giving him my hair for Teresa's."

  "You didn't burn Teresa's hair on purpose. It was an accident. And you didn't even do anything to Mr. Ribisi. It wasn't his hair and Teresa didn't want yours. The logical response would have been an apology and a refusal to shave your head."

  "Okay."

  She glanced at the top of his head.

  "It'll grow back," he said.

  "You'll never shave it off again?"

  "No. And both my grandfathers had full, healthy hair, so I probably won't bald early."

  "I'll give you a good shampoo."

  "Thanks," he said.

  "And you'll never make any other major changes to your body without asking me first?" she asked.

  "Like what?"

  "Earrings," she said. "Tattoos."

  He nodded.

  "You don't have to do this anymore," she said.

  "I thought you liked watching me ride."

  "I wanted you to ride just for me."

  "I did," he said.

  "You rode to make my father happy, too. I'm tired of sharing your efforts with someone else."

  She once calculated the wattage he produced by taping a piece of paper to a rear spoke and counting the number of times it hit the chainstay per minute. "At your peak," she'd said, "you generate enough energy to power a two-hundred-fifty-watt bulb."

  He'd always thought of the riding as a necessary means of production. There wouldn't have been the warmth of her tongue without his sweat. No sweat without the bike. No sweetness without the pain.

  In the past year he'd powered enough bulbs to light up all of Orange County in the dead of night. Thousands of watts of pure white light that shone for her.

  He got off the bike and she kissed him on the lips. "Come on," she said.

  "Where are we going?" he asked.

  "To shower."

  "Us?"

  "Yes."

  "Together?"

  "You studied hard for me. I'm rewarding you." She turned toward the house and a charge sparked in the pit of his stomach and radiated outward until his fingertips and toes tingled, as he imagined what her body looked like, what he would see for the first time in just a minute. Her lower back. The insides of her thighs.

  Thank god, he thought as he ran to catch up. Thank sweet Jesus!

  He never believed in religion, but years later, shortly after they married, a friend invited Mirla to church and she came home talking about God, Heaven, and other things that no one alive had ever seen, heard, or felt. "How can I believe in something I can't see?" he asked.

  She spoke of a life after the physical one, a life of spirits and everlasting joy. She began attending regularly and was angry he wouldn't join her Sunday mornings. She learned to classify their youthful fornication as condemnable. "I'm not saying we're bad people," she said, "but our actions were sinful. Me French-kissing the side of your face. All that premarital sex."

  Hell yes, all that premarital sex, he thought.

  "We shouldn't have done it," she said.

  "Do you even remember what we did?" he asked.

  "Unfortunately."

  It was the unfortunately that always bothered him. He never understood how she could have felt guilty about something that had felt so good. He never understood how she could have remembered such a wonderful part of their past as sinful, how she could have placed so much faith in beings and places that never existed.

  One night on the living room couch, six months pregnant and her belly swollen, Mirla introduced Pascal's wager and recounted how the philosopher-mathematician had believed faith in a Roman Catholic/Judeo-Christian/Western God was a win-win situation.

  She pulled out a sheet of notebook paper, set it on the coffee table, and wrote two formulas (where p was the probability of God existing and x was some finite value Sonny didn't exactly understand):

  Belief in God = 8*p + x1*(1 - p) = 8

  Disbelief in God = x2*p + x 3 * ( 1 - p ) =A finite number nowhere near as good as 8

  "See?" Mirla said. "Belief in God gets you infinite happiness. Disbelief and you go to Hell. So based solely on the probability that He does exist, your best option would be to believe."

  "I don't see Hell as the other option. You wrote, 'a finite number.'"

  "I know what I wrote. I didn't want to write Hell because I wanted to be encouraging."

  "But you just said Hell."

  "Because you weren't encouraged."

  Sonny looked at the formulas again. He stared at them hard, more for Mirla's sake than his own, before letting out a breath and saying, "You're right."

  "So you'll come with me to church?"

  "No. But you're right." Then he got up, walked out the front door and down the steps of his apartment building, and stood on the sidewalk. A cool November breeze was blowing. He looked up at the dark sky and the glittering stars and thought, Infinity's just an eight knocked over on its side.

  He turned around and saw Mirla above him on the second-floor landing. She stood in front of their open doorway, her beautiful oval form in sihoulette against the yellow living room lights behind her.

  I am happy, Sonny thought. Here. Now. This is what I know. Soon I'll have a son or daughter, and I'll never force that child to go to church. Sunday mornings, that child can sleep in with me and we can watch reruns of The Three Stooges in the afternoon. I'm a good man and if God exists, and if He is good, then He will not condemn me to Hell. He will know the love I've shown my family, He will forgive me my ignorance, and He will allow me a long, happy life with my child to come and my fanatic wife.

  Hard Times an Fairview

  (1978-1982)

  Thea partment Sanny and Mirla shared after their marriage sat near the corner of Fairview and Maywood in a grungy, rundown part of Santa Ana. The building had a flat roof and the stucco exterior was cracked from a combination of a weak, shifting foundation, earthquakes, and age.

  The walls of the Fairview apartment complex were covered with graffiti, bubbly red and black letters that said things like WILD BOYZ HERE, JOSE RODRIGUEZ SUCKS COCK, and YOU SUCK COCK.

  Notable among the graffiti was a crudely painted portrait of Chewbacca that looked like a brown popsicle with black eyes, with bold green letters underneath that proclaimed, VIVA CHU-BAKA!

  Sonny and Mirla's one-bedroom apartment, with brown shag carpeting that used to be red and which covered the entire six hundred square feet of floor (with the exception of the kitchen­ette), was known to both the Lum and Ho Families simply as Fairview.

  "No, I can't come down to Fairview," and "We heard of a nice vacant apartment somewhere else" became the familial refrains. Even Bo grew concerned and organized a "Fairview Clean-Up" drive at his high school. One Sunday morning, Bo and seven other classmates showed up at Sonny's front door with brushes and canisters of primer and paint. Sonny and Mirla were so surprised by the company that they sat speechless on lawn chairs outside the apartment complex and watched as the teenagers covered the multicolored graffiti sprawl with beige paint.

  Though Sonny didn't mind his relations not visiting, it bothered Mirla. In the living room, which doubled as the dining room, she would sit at the Formica table and say over a cup of tea, "If we had guests, I would really enjoy this tea." In bed, she would refuse his advances and sulk, saying, "Why bother? I don't want to get pregnant and raise a child here. She could get sick from the roaches, rats, and ants."

  Mirla was a high school math teacher and Sonny worked as a teller at the local Wells Fargo. Though neither of them made a sizable salary, they made enough to move to a better neighborhood. It was Sonny's reluctance to move that upset Mirla even more than the home she wanted to move away from.

  "Why are you so atta
ched to this place?" she'd ask every night, and he'd do his best to change the subject.

  What Sonny felt he knew was illogical, but felt nonetheless. This was his first apartment, his first home as a single adult out of college, and he loved it.

  Yes, the apartment had been burglarized twice with the last incident resulting in blood streaking across the wall and carpet, the burglar having cut himself on the windowsill. Yes, the roar of traffic from the main street outside his bedroom window kept up throughout the night. Yes, their neighbor Vu Tran played loud jazz music upstairs.

  But Sonny enjoyed jazz, too, not so much for the music itself as for the atmosphere it generated, the scratchy quality of the records, the trumpets and percussion, these sounds that reminded him of what it was like to be on his own for the first time, listening to Thelonious Monk and Coltrane with Vu after a long day at work.

  And no fancy new technology—no cassettes and definitely not one of those boxy Sony tape decks that Bo enjoyed—could replace the sweet, nostalgic feeling produced by a turntable spinning a disc of vinyl.

  Sonny was still in his twenties and felt, living in this wild, untamed neighborhood, like a cowboy leading a wagon party out to the prairie West, braving harsh terrain and the assaults of bandits and thieves. Every young man should live through a period of hardship. It built character and besides, word had gotten out around the neighborhood. It'd been months since the last burglary, and since Sonny hid his record player and records in the back of his non-attached garage, there was nothing left in the apartment for a burglar to steal.

  "We're safe here," Sonny said to Mirla one night as she pushed his hand off her breast. "The burglars won't come back. They've given up on this place."

  "So have I," she said.

  Sonny had promised a move immediately after the marriage. Immediately stretched into a month. One month stretched into two, and now, in the third month of their marriage, Sonny faced a choice between a new apartment and celibacy, and that, ultimately, wasn't much of a choice.

  Sonny sent a letter to Oregon to notify his landlord of his imminent departure. Mirla had been looking at available apartments since before their marriage, and soon signed a lease on a two-bedroom, second-floor apartment in Garden Grove near her parents' home.

  Within weeks they were ready to move in. The atmosphere was festive and both families came by to see the new home the day of the move, bringing with them beer, cake, and chips. "How clean," Mirla's father said. "Wow, no vermin," Sonny's mother, Esther, said.

  Mirla stood outside the front door on the landing, surveying the quiet surroundings below.

  "There's a neighborhood patrol," she said as Sonny and Larry lugged the sofa up the stairs. "A police car drives by once a week. Isn't that nice?"

  He grunted and then said, "Move. Please," as he and Larry carried the sofa in through the front door.

  That night she started to make advances toward him, pulling his shirt up over his stomach, but he resisted.

  "I don't believe this," she said. "You're not in the mood."

  "I'm thirsty." He got out of bed and left the room.

  He poured himself a glass of water and sat at the kitchen table, sipping from his glass until she came out.

  She watched him for a moment. "Most people would be happy not to have a burglar's blood streaking down the walls of their home."

  "It wasn't that much blood," he said.

  She shook her head in disbelief. "I'm going back to bed."

  He followed her back into their room and picked out from the closet A Love Supreme. He placed it on the record player at the foot of the bed.

  As Coltrane's golden sax lit up "Acknowledgement," Mirla motioned for him to come near.

  Normally he would be very happy to see his wife motioning for him to come near, but this time images of clean sidewalks and perfectly trimmed hedges came to mind, and the music didn't sound as good inside this apartment situated in a neighborhood patrolled regularly by the cops.

  She kissed him, then asked, "Why are you frowning?"

  "It's nothing," he said.

  "What are you thinking about?"

  "That some graffiti would really liven up our block."

  The bass from Vu's speakers shook the walls. Four years had passed since Sonny's move into the sanitized confines of Garden Grove, and this night in Vu's apartment, Sonny was listening to something that blew his mind.

  Grandmaster Flash &: the Furious Five's "The Message" was playing on the record player in the living room. Vu and Sonny drank malt liquor on the sofa and looked at the record player, which occupied the central space normally reserved for a TV. Vu often said, "With so much music in the world, who needs a TV?"

  Sonny nodded his head to the song.

  "This is rap," Vu said. "It'll change the world."

  The bass pumped and the beat sounded good to Sonny. Despite the fact they were fairly buzzed, both he and Vu soon began tapping the carpeted floor with their bare feet, in synch.

  Every Thursday Sonny spent a couple of hours after work with Vu before returning home. He invited Mirla, but she always chose to stay home with Louis, now three.

  "This is great," Sonny said.

  "You can borrow it if you want," Vu said.

  After putting Louis to bed, Sonny placed the Grandmaster Flash album on the player and then approached Mirla, who looked at the record warily. As the track played, Sonny began kissing Mirla's neck. Her arms stiffened to his touch, but he persisted, hoping to ease the stress out of her body. He caressed the back of her neck, her shoulders.

  After a few moments she said, "Time out," and backed away from him. "What is this?"

  "A revolutionary kind of music," Sonny said. "It'll change the world."

  She listened to the entire track while Sonny sat across from her on their bed, waiting for the signal to recommence the night of romance.

  When the track finished, she said, "Turn that off. Please."

  Sonny got up. He took the needle off the record and turned the player off.

  She looked concerned.

  "When Grandmaster Flash raps about rats and roaches being in the front room, he's making an important comment on the times we live in," Sonny said.

  "The times certain disenfranchised people live in," Mirla said. "People living in poverty with few options. We're not in that situation." She paused. "When that Mixmaster—"

  "Grandmaster," Sonny said.

  "When he talked about the world being a jungle and how he doesn't know if he's going to make it . . . what?"

  Sonny's mouth was open.

  "What?" Mirla asked again.

  "You remembered that line."

  "Well, you just played it," she said.

  "But you were actually listening."

  "Right. What I was saying is that when we're making love, I don't want to think about the world being a jungle and how I'm struggling to survive, because one, I'm not a disenfranchised black man, and two, I don't like to think about social inequality when I'm making love to my husband."

  "I can't believe you remembered that line," Sonny said.

  Mirla sighed.

  "Can I put this on? Just this time?"

  Mirla hesitated, then said, "Just this time."

  He turned the player back on.

  It was a new era in his life, a fortunate time with revolutionary music to accompany it. The needle hit the vinyl, and there was again that comforting scratch and the breathtaking pause before the track began.

  The bass pumped, the beat quickened his heart, and he eased toward his wife, pretending her frown was really just intense romantic concentration. As Grandmaster Flash &c the Furious Five serenaded the two of them, he caressed her shoulders and slipped off her sky blue nightie, whispering, "Thank you."

  What Sonny Did for a Living

  (1979-1993)

  Louis didn't know.

  Calling the Ghosts

  (2002)

  Louis's father, Sonny, wanted to stop by an Albertson's on the way to Gr
andma Esther's house. "We can't go empty-handed," he said as Louis pulled into the parking lot.

  Inside, his father picked up a case of forty-ounce malt liquor. "For the family," he said, slinging it into the basket. The only people in attendance would be Grandma, Mick, Aunt Helen, his father, and himself. The only person who drank was his father, who also threw in, for the family, a package of doughnuts and beef jerky.

  Back in the car, Louis's father popped the cap off a bottle, sniffed the contents, and took a sip. They were still in the parking lot, the key in the ignition, the engine off.

  "It's Saturday morning," Louis said. "You want to start drinking now?"

  His father motioned for him to start the car.

  "You've been watching too many rap videos," Louis said.

  "The black ghosts didn't invent malt liquor." His father took another sip. He used the Cantonese phrase "black ghosts" to refer to black people and "white ghosts" to refer to white people. He referred to the Japanese by the Cantonese phrase "turnip heads." The Filipinos were Flips and the Mexicans were Amigos, the only Spanish word he knew. "It's not insulting," he'd explained once. "Amigo means friend. How is that insulting? Don't look at me like that. You think I'm an ignorant old man who doesn't know jack about other cultures."

  "What do you have against black people?" Louis asked.

  "I have nothing against them," his father said. "I appreciate their contributions to this country."

  "Such as?"

  "Hip-hop. And Malcolm X."

  "Then why don't you just call them black people?" Louis asked.

  "Because that's what the Cantonese-speaking people in this world call them. It's standard slang. Most people call a telephone a phone. That's standard. No one argues with that." His father reached over and turned the key, starting the car.

  "Just because a lot of people use this slang, and it's outdated slang as well, doesn't mean you need to use it," Louis said.

  "You're not as fluent in Cantonese as I am. You don't know the subtleties of the vernacular."

  "You've been to Hong Kong twice," Louis said. "You learned your Cantonese from Grandma, the same person I learned it from."