What We Are (22 page)

Along the bottom of the screen: “Can you explain yourself, Trudie? Do you at least want to apologize to Littleton here who's been so faithful to you through the years? He was supportive of you through the death of your mother. He paid for your car insurance, phone bills, and breast implants. And you're making him pay now with a broken heart. How do you explain this?”

I say to myself, “This country is whacked out.”

My sister, McLaughlin, and young Toby look up at the televisions. Tali breaks the silence between us, with barely restrained excitement. “
Adulterers!
”

I take a big long drink of water.

“Oh,” she says, with barely restrained disappointment, “this is a rerun.”

“You watch this show?”

“Of course. But I know you've never seen it, Paul.”

“Nope.”

“Now how did I know that?”

“Have you seen Mom on it yet?” I ask.

Tali immediately looks at Toby, as if the words are more damaging to his system than a life of silence. “Paul,” she says. “There's a little boy at the table.”

“I guess you'll have to wait for the foreign version of the show. When they find Mom in Siberia making whoopee in a bed of whale fat.”

“Paul.”

“Some barefoot Zulu with a nose ring will bust into the wickiup trying to find a target with his spear. All with this punk-ass Gecko at his heels.”

“Paul.”

“She always did love variety. Was always, let us say, down for international cuisine.” The waiter appears with complimentary calamari, apparently a French delicacy. I take one before he's laid it on the table. “Just like us.”

“Are you ready to order?”

“Yes,” I say, digesting my fried French squid. “Our order is to change the channel on the television.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Paul. Shut your mouth.”

It was a joke. Until now. “Turn around, sir.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said turn around.”

He does. He wants a big tip at the end. On the screen Littleton, Trudie, and the cowboy are looking down on a cell phone. Suddenly furious at what he sees on the screen, which is a blurred black-and-white picture of two people fornicating, Littleton is now punching at the air, as the cowboy hitches up his britches, Trudie begs her case, and Gecko placidly observes with a slight upward tilt of his glass chin.

I say, “You see. This show is like watching someone giggle in a mutherfuckin' funeral home. It's unnerving to think about having to ingest food to this crap. Don't you have some music from the Provençal or something?”

“Where's that?” the waiter says.

“Can you just turn the television off, bro?”

That wakes him up, if only because he's never considered the possibility. “Sir?”

“The TV: can you turn it off?”

“Uh—I—” The neurotransmitter in his frontal lobe is stuck, flickering in the gray-dead recesses of matter like a bug on a bed of cold clay.

”

“Well, can we at least change the channel? We want to watch something else. Like
Sesame Street
.”

“I'll see what I can do, sir.”

“
Merci
.”

“Paul,” Tali says, “what the hell is wrong with you?”

“How hopeless for us,” I say. “We're done. Finished.”

I look up at the television one last time. At least for the day. Okay, at least for the hour. Even I, its prime-time hater, can't control it. Spurned son of the visual medium. Everywhere I go I'm surrounded by TVs. Even in jail there are TVs, or the most bankrupt of dive bars over the tap of Lucky Lager and a skeletal bartender are five TVs, TVs on watches, on phones, in dreams, in space, everywhere are the images that aren't there, people that aren't alive and that I don't know and won't ever meet anyway, in situations that aren't real, though they're called real.

So Wes Cash, the big loyal lug in overalls, is digging into a toolbox on his flatbed truck, and when I think
What the hell is this cat doing?
he whips out a thin wand five times its normal length and points it at a big brotha in a tight black T. The brotha falls at once to the ground, like he was struck down by a heart attack. It's not the index finger of Zeus issuing bolts of lightning, it ain't magic: it's a god-damned cattle prod.

Oh my God! We're mad, downright mad!

He zapped him with a fucking cattle prod.

I'm holding my crotch with two hands, remembering the short story about the civil rights kid getting jolted in the loins by the cop with white man's penis envy. The boy writhing in the fetal position on the filth of the jailhouse floor. Everything has come back around, brave James, Mr. Baldwin, to mocking pain, this thing we call our lives over which you fought, or wrote, or died, or whatever.

We await, salivating, the created spectacle.

Now there's a fight between one of the brothas and the cowboy. Wes Cash spins him around nicely and throws him against the edge of the flatbed truck. The brotha rears a yolked arm back and, swinging at Wes Cash, knocks over a Styrofoam cooler. Two long, pink, skinned heads roll out. The meat around the bovine jaw is white and red. The dead cow eyes are looking up at me in this faux-French restaurant and I'm thinking, not laughing anymore,
It's all over. Forget about it
.

Across the bottom of the screen:

GECKO
: What the hell is that?

CASH
: Mexicans like to eat 'em. It's a delicacy.

BOYFRIEND
: What kind of guy are you dating here, Trude?

(
Wes Cash and the boyfriend fight
.)

TRUDIE
: Turn those fucking cameras off! Look what you're doing!

GECKO
: No, Trudie. This is what
you're
doing. This is a result of what
you've
done.

I put my head down, finally, and opt to look at my silent nephew. Feeling the urge to apologize on behalf of mankind, I say, “Don't worry, kid. There's better stuff out there.”

Then to Tali (who's shaking her head), “I hope this Gecko guy gets stabbed the next time he goes on the adultery hunt.”

“He's already
been
stabbed, Paul,” Tali says, like, number one, you need to emerge every now and then from the cave of isolation, Paul, and, number two, this Gecko guy whose integrity you question is actually willing to be a martyr for the cause, unlike you, Paul, whatever your cause is. Other than yourself, Paul. If you claim to love irony so much, there you have it, Paul.

“Good. If he ever gets the fatal blow I'll be sure to leave a rosary at his shrine.”

“What?”

“St. Gecko, patron saint of entrepreneurial causes.”

“I can't believe what I'm hearing.”

“Death is what this guy wants, right?
Death, thou shalt die
. Okay. So let's hope he gets shot the next time, right in the gut. Guys like this cat have no reverence for anything. He doesn't even acknowledge the setup, that it's staged by his own greed. Think about it! He disclaims this circus sideshow as a medium of coincidence!”

Tali says, “Don't you believe in the sanctity of marriage?”

“I thought I already weighed in on that. I believed in it wholly while no one else around me believed in it and so I, witness of and surrounded by nonbelievers, don't believe in it anymore.” I wave my hand around. “Not in this place, anyway.”

McLaughlin says, “Gecko was on the gurney looking up at the camera, Tali.”

That took courage. Not from Gecko, from McLaughlin. Tali's not gonna like this uncalled-for instance of treachery. “You say something, bro-in-law?”

McLaughlin nods, looks over at Tali for approval.

“Well, what?” I say.

“He said, ‘This is the price I have to pay to help the faithful.'”

“Aha! You see?” Tali looks at her hubby like he's betrayed a bedtime secret between them. Oh, it's beatdowns for you tonight, McLaughlin. I look up at Gecko and over at the kid, curb my language: “What a piece of manure.”

The waiter returns and says, “I'm sorry, sir. The televisions are preset to certain programs.”

“All right, man,” I say. “Just get us some champagne, will you?”

“Is Brut Napa okay, sir?”

“Just bring something that sparkles and is high in alcohol content.”

“I can do that,” he says.

“Are we celebrating something?” asks Tali.

“Yes,” I say. “Do we have enough money?”

“
I
have enough, Paul.”

“Okay.”

He returns to our table with Brut Napa and a towel, plus some animated data about a riviera region in Southern France that he's going to fly out and visit for a
Playboy
party, and when I say, “Just pop it, bro,” either the inflated head or the bottle, he does the latter—
poooomp!
—pouring three glasses, serving Tali's first (“ma'am”), then McLaughlin's (“sir”), mine last (silence). That makes me smile. But then: Tali is a lady, McLaughlin is a gentle gentleman, and I am admittedly insignificant.

I toast. “
Al morto
.”

“What's that mean?”

“To the passed.” I say to McLaughlin, “You want the Samoan?”

He nods with death in his eyes.

“
I le oki
.”

No one repeats the toast, not even my pliable, docile, nubile brother-in-law, and I decide right there to drink only heartwarming champagne from here on out. Must avoid the dangerous mixture of drinking fire water (hard liquor), reading Patricia Highsmith, Poe, and Dostoevski (potential murderers who were curbed of the affliction by creativity), and watching anything by Quentin Tarantino (a video-store nerd who, never having been in a fistfight in his life, yearns to murder someone—anyone). With this wicked combination of liver and cerebral stimuli, my newly sprung fantasy to disembowel Johnny Gecko will no doubt come to life and though I'd no doubt get a life sentence for the act, I'm sure there's still someone out there who would know exactly why I'd done it, might pay me a visit in prison even, send me monthly stamps and nudie mags and other contraband, and that, really, when you stop and think the thing over, it was nothing short of amazing that no one had done the deed earlier.

W
HEN WE STILL HAD HOPE
, my father was working at the UPS warehouse, paying the bills so my mother could earn her doctorate. I was nine, Tali ten. Only one tale in a thousand tales counts, so this is it: Christmas, 1987, East Side San Jo. We'd been invited to a party at the house of one of my father's coworkers. My father didn't want to go for a reason I didn't understand then, but do now. My mother, in her goodness, insisted we go. She knew how hard he worked for her, and for us. What was merely duty to him was true sacrifice to her, because she'd never seen it in the American men she'd known, including her own father, my grandpa, dead before I was born.

When we got to the house, we had to drive past it and down a few blocks. The street was bumper-to-bumper with parked cars. On the porch we all kicked our slippers off in the traditional order of father down, adding to the dozens of primitive footwear already lost forever in a third-world mountain of worn leather and flimsy rubber, blessed by the lamplit porcelain shrine to St. Claire. We could hear a muffled rumble in some rear vicinity of the property, and even there on the doorstep the sour vinegar and musky soy odor of pork and chicken adobo collected under our noses like salty dew.
One by one, we wiped our bare feet on the welcome mat, which read
ELCOM
, from the left foot–right foot rubbing out of the first and last letters. Entering the house, we went from one plastic mat to another, my father in the lead, me last and watching everyone else, the mats connected like puzzle pieces throughout the living room and into the kitchen, a clear plastic walkway under which the clean, untouched bright-teal rug turned into a swampy green. It was like hiking along the cliff on the coast: you instinctively used caution. Between the wall and the edge of the mats grew thin strips of rug, like moss dividing brick and mortar. The chairs were also covered in plastic, though thinner. Over the armrests and down the legs of the recliner it also grew, over the arms and the seat of the couch.

It was a modern American nightmare, preservation prioritized before use, the postponement of time, the suspension of fashion. Even then, to a nine-year-old, it seemed something of a faulty formula, though I was to see it time and time again in the houses of other Filipino friends I grew up with: Ron Cristobal, Rubelle Bagan, Isidro Del Rosario. Yes, it was an appreciative gesture to keep the lavish furniture in tiptop shape for decades, yes, it expressed a successful campaign in crossing a hostile ocean for these American prizes, but alas, no, since I'd been trained from the womb to understand that nothing new in America is new for long. So whatever it is that gets you off you put to immediate use, even if it burns up old-world frugality and old-world story and even if it burns up your heart and your wallet. Whenever these good people would decide to actually deplasticize the house, sit down and live a bit, their protected rug would be in the same realm of cheesiness as a living room covered in plastic.

My mother was giggling at this fashion faux pas. She didn't get too far before my father said, “Shut up.”

My mother shooed my sister and me away. She was about to confront our father. She was earning her PhD in Women's Studies.

We didn't stick around to spy on their argument. It was an old story. I said, “Let's check out the back rooms.”

In a hallway we found a turquoise blind across a window, slid it open, and slipped through pretty easily. Our parents' bickering faded. We tiptoed across the porch toward a cacophony of shouting in the deep broad yard, as if both of us were on the same path in search of the same hypnotist. A fence between the two houses had been taken down and their respective yards, which were wide on their own, were combined into one. They'd left the centerboards standing, equally spaced across the property line, like the remnants of some washed-away pier. Rows of bamboo cages were stacked one upon the other, dark little UPS boxes in which darker, bright-eyed birds were hopping anxiously about, and it seemed to my virgin eyes that we were entering country on the other side of the wild world where no law existed save eat or be eaten. My hands were shaking and when I reached for Tali's hand I was comforted by how quickly she pulled her own back, tucking it into the other hand hidden inside the sweater pocket across her navel. The shouting was getting louder now, more precise.