Audio: Han Ong reads.
Is the boy in the window attempting telepathy with Shara? If not, why won’t he look away? His head is three floors up, a postcard. But he’s found the sun. Solo, while the other windows on all sides of him feature multiple scowlers, some holding out their cell phones to record.
As above, so below: Shara, on the sidewalk, stands amid scowlers, too. Ranters and chanters. Giving everything they have to this mass protest. On one side of her is her mother, and on the other her seven-year-old sister, Rosie.
Shara and her sister are their mother’s hostages. At least her sister is too young to be entrusted with a placard. There is no such exemption for Shara. The sign her mother carries is in Mandarin. She doesn’t understand or care that carrying those foreign characters is worse than being housed in the repurposed hotel they are gathered in front of. It marks her as even more alien and fugitive than those whose presence here she and her friends and, by extension, Shara, are protesting this afternoon in Elmhurst, where Shara lives a dozen blocks away with her mother, her father, her sister, and her grandfather.
Elmhurst is majority Chinese and Latino immigrants, head-to-the-ground people, but overnight dozens of homeless families were moved into the TransAmerica Hospitality Suites, a two-star hotel whose heyday was in the nineteen-nineties. The city skirted the expected protocols of tipping off the local councilman and the community. Soon afterward, neighborhood businesses publicized an uptick in vandals and thieves. Now drunks cavort in the medians, and their numbers only increase when the sun goes down. A group called the Good Neighbors of Elmhurst is responsible for tacking to telephone and light poles xeroxed cell-phone shots of offenders which say at the bottom “110th Precinct, Why Don’t You Do Something?”
Shara’s mother’s sign says “Kick the Devils Out of Our Neighborhood!”
Thank God it’s in Mandarin.
Shara’s own sign is in English: “Safety First for Elmhurst.” Someone leaving the picket line handed it to her when they arrived. After an hour or so, the sign lay aslant on her shoulder, and, when she was sure that her mother wasn’t looking, she turned the wording side down, but her reprieve lasted no more than ten, fifteen minutes. Eagle-eyed aunties and uncles from her mother’s church—all of them Chinese—were there to flip the sign around.
Go home to China, voices shout down from opened windows above.
The other window dwellers hoot, clap, beat their hands against the glass panes. But the boy is silent, and he doesn’t look away from Shara. Maybe he’s blind? No, he leaves and then returns with a burrito, which he eats very slowly while continuing to monitor her.
Podcast: The Writer’s Voice
Listen to Han Ong read “Elmhurst.”
Shara believes in telekinesis. She believes in the willed explosion of heads. This is per the movie that she sneak-views on her grandfather’s VCR, when nobody’s home. In the movie, you can tell when the real head has been switched for a special-effects head, just before the fake blood and brains burst through the face and the top of the skull—a satisfying spectacle. But the tape and her grandfather’s VCR are both old, so she can’t press the Rewind button as often as she’d like. Still, if the boy is trying to explode Shara’s head, he is not very good at it. She has not felt even the slightest headache.
And her? Is she trying to explode his head? She has attempted to, once or twice. Because he is the enemy, even though she hates this misguided protest by her mother and her mother’s friends. But she herself is not very good at it. And, besides, if the boy’s head burst, everyone would know that it was Shara’s doing. Her mother followed the line of Shara’s gaze yesterday, and told her to knock it off. Still, there is no thought of sexual attraction, even though Shara is fourteen years old and the boy looks to be around the same age. Everyone knows what a studious girl she is. She will be a doctor, a lawyer. She will transcend Elmhurst.
At night, she hears her mother crying. Pounding the dresser and the walls. She hears her father trying to placate his wife. He assures her that he’s stopped seeing other women. That the money he gives her at the end of each week is nearly his entire paycheck from the Chinese restaurant where he works as one of two cooks, minus the fee from the check-cashing place and fifty dollars for his expenses, mainly beer and his cell phone. And he offers her empty promises of increased church attendance, of an improved relationship to God. Her mother goes to sleep soon afterward. Or maybe she lies awake beside him until the morning.
Lately, her mother has taken to crying over the TransAmerica Hospitality, using language that Shara has not heard from her mother’s church—God only knows whom she’s parroting this time. Her talk is of how Asians will always be at the bottom of American society unless they open their mouths in protest; only then will those infringing on their rights reconsider. Because we quiet and keeping to ourselves, her mother has said, that’s why they think they can do this thing to us!
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
Chain-Smoking the Pain Away
Shara’s antipathy toward her mother has been perfectly understood without her having to utter a word, and yesterday her mother cornered her in their building’s back lot, where Shara goes to do her homework, or to get away from the household tumult. You come home from school and talk-talk about civil rights! So, this is our civil rights! We are stopping others from picking on us! If we don’t say nothing, they will keeping send people like that to our neighborhood, and we will be living for fear!
What her mother doesn’t need to say: she is talking about Black people.
Black and Latino—but the wrong kind of Latino. Not the recent immigrants from Mexico and South America, who make up the hardworking Elmhurst crowd, but Bronx Latino: job absconders, benefits abusers, drug addicts, drunks. Whose first and most enduring response to a new neighborhood is desecration, plunder.
Two nights later, her mother is crying again. She has been ambushed! She doesn’t wait for the middle of the night this time. As soon as she gets home, and before Shara’s father is back from the restaurant, she is turning on the kitchen tap, throwing even already washed dishes into the sink, to scrub and scour, and to abrade her skin under the hot current.
Outside the TransAmerica yesterday, a church with which her mother’s church has friendly relations and has co-hosted many events invited everyone to a social. But this afternoon, within an hour of the start time, new people, strange people, walked into the hall. One of them revealed that he was being put up at the resurrected hotel, and said that he wanted to present, as he called it, one face of homelessness. He was the father of three children. His downfall had started when his wife had a heart attack in the middle of an operation; he was soon in rent arrears. His name came last: Call me David, he said to the passive crowd.
He was followed by a South Asian man whom Shara remembered from outside the hotel—speaking to the protesters, though clearly apart from them. We belong to an organization—he gave a name—here in Queens, and we are trying to foster good relations among some members of the shelter population and the communities they are going to be residing alongside for a while, before hopefully moving on to a more stable life, with housing of their own. There are more Davids in the TransAmerica. Each with his or her own story of hardship and unexpected bad luck. They do not want money from you—that is not what they are asking. Like you, they want to be left in peace. It’s important to know that they do not intend to be threatening or intimidating. Their appearance that puts people off? It’s the face that struggling and sadness will give anyone. There is a Christian saying: There but for the grace of God go I.
Every single member of her mother’s church who had shown up was cowed by the young social worker’s eloquence.
Who here has had firsthand experience with the homeless families? Can you raise your hand?
Only a couple of respondents.
Were you mugged?
Both volunteers shook their heads.
Threatened?
All eyes in the room were on the two, who gave off the abashed air of letting down the team, because once more they had to respond in the negative.
So where are these stories coming from? the South Asian man asked.
The silence in the hall was ringing. No one able to look their neighbors in the eye. Could it be this easy to undo five days of chanting in unison, of rowing in the same swift current of outrage and purposefulness?
This was particularly embarrassing for Shara’s mother because she knew she had the power to stop the flow of supposed good will from the social worker. She was the mother of two vulnerable girls who had to walk to school.
But she could not speak, and her muteness was contagious.
But what about . . . was the thought bubble above each reticent head. What about . . . the graffiti? The broken beer bottles? The lewd propositioning of passing females? But to ask would be to fall into the South Asian man’s trap, because he had a refutation for every complaint and was only waiting to be given the opportunity to pounce.
Shara’s mother is mid-harangue before she realizes that she has been speaking only to herself. She soon remedies her aloneness in the kitchen. Shara is dragged in, by the hair. Her mother pulls and pulls. She doesn’t even notice her hands bleeding, from where her daughter has tried to loosen her hold by scratching and clawing. They used to have these fights every so often, but Shara’s turning fourteen had put a stop to it—so she thought. This resumption reawakens Shara’s incomprehension, shame, and—something that first emerged two short years ago—her animal instinct to fight. Shara punches her mother’s arms away. She leaves her hair dishevelled from her mother’s pulling. She won’t speak first. And she most definitely won’t cry. The two of them stand glaring at each other, both panting.
You think I’m wrong, her mother says. You don’t know nothing. I doing this for you. You and Rosie. Shara’s mother is going to have to wait an eternity for the expected rebuttal because Shara will not say anything. Only breathing. Only the telekinesis of your-head-will-be-on-fire-in-a-second. She is prepared to stand there until her mother understands that she is not going to win. For one thing, Shara is now taller than her mother. What? her mother says. You think you not going to do the things I do. Ha. You wait. Until it is your turn to have children. And God hope you do not have daughters—daughters are worst.
Only when they hear Shara’s father outside the front door does Shara’s spine relax. Her mother will recount the injustices of the early evening and how not merely has there been no support from Shara but instead secret laughter, secret hatred—not so secret, given how well her mother knows Shara. And, as expected of him, Shara’s father will take the belt from his pants and welp his daughter. Five, six, seven strokes, until he and his wife finally hear the yielding cry of pain that will bring the evening to a satisfying close for everyone, including Shara, because at least she no longer has to stand in the kitchen and stare and stare at the person she hates most in the world.
Her grandfather has been seeing the world through the milky eyes of glaucoma for five, six years. Too poor to have it remedied, and, besides, he doesn’t trust American doctors and hospitals. Also, how much longer will he have to endure? He doesn’t know his exact age, but one look at his hairless head, his toothless mouth, the slits for eyes, and you know there is no question of his going on for too long.
Before even Shara’s mother is up, he is sitting in the kitchen, in the dark. He needs only four or five hours each night, and sometimes, to send himself to sleep, he downs a bottle of beer. He eats one meal a day, and it’s Shara’s duty and pleasure to feed him. Everything has to be gummable—soft tofu, hard-boiled eggs that have been crushed with the tines of a fork, oatmeal, jook. Breakfast is usually when he does all his gumming, and, as a reward for her filial devotion, Shara receives a pat on the arm and her grandfather’s version of a smile. Also, Shara is the only one her grandfather allows to touch his ancient twelve-inch TV and his VCR. On them, she watches his collection of kung-fu and sword-fighting tapes, copies of copies made by an enterprising video-store employee who ran a movie-subscription business in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where her grandfather lived as a widower for thirty years, before failing health forced him to move in with the family of his sole child, Shara’s father. He has English-language movies, too, all of them obscure.
Her grandfather never utters a word, to her or to anyone else. And he doesn’t leave the apartment in Elmhurst, except to go to the back lot. Like the boy in the hotel, he can be counted on to find the spot of sun in their living room, which he monopolizes for the entire time it is there. It was from glancing up at him while doing her homework that the thought of telepathy first entered Shara’s mind. No words were exchanged between them—but how about thoughts? Once or twice, it seemed to work, and her grandfather interrupted his fogged appraisal of the window to nod at her. The thoughts she’d beamed to him did not require assent or approval, so the communication was imperfect at best. Still, the validation it gave her to continue these experiments was electric. The first time it happened, she went over to reward him with White Rabbit candy—a semisoft toffee with a sweetened-milk taste. He opened his mouth for her to pop the thing in, and once more he gave her a toothless smile and patted her on the shoulder, before returning his nearly blind gaze to the Elmhurst street below.
The boy is no longer at the window. The protest campaign has taken only seven days to work. A few faces are left—stragglers waiting to be reassigned. There are no more attitudinous cries of “Go home to China!” No boisterous one-upmanship with the crowd of people below, who have persisted and won. And then, suddenly, a school bus pulls up to the curb, and the disembarking passengers begin filing into the TransAmerica. Uncomprehending protesters look to Pastor Teo and a middle-aged white woman named Eileen, who fronts the Good Neighbors of Elmhurst, although there have been rumors that she doesn’t live in Elmhurst but comes in to the protests from Staten Island—and both are now on their phones.
But the crowd no longer needs outside confirmation. The windows once more fill up, and the protesters understand that their celebration was premature. Verification comes soon enough from Pastor Teo: the homeless were merely taken on an excursion.
City money funded a bus ride to and from New Jersey, where not only did some shopping take place but everyone was treated to lunch at an Olive Garden.
Shame! Shame! Shopping for free! Have you no shame!
We work hard! You should, too!
Rewarded for being lazy! The city must be crazy!
Amid the renewed vituperation, Shara’s heart makes a louder than usual sound when her frenemy appears once more at his window. There is no direct, too bright sun to obscure him. He has a Styrofoam shell of food, which he starts eating with his hands. Once again, it’s unmistakable. He has eyes for nobody but Shara.
Which one was he in the bus queue? Shara had missed her chance for a closer look because, like everyone else, she hadn’t known what was happening.
Then the boy walks off. When he returns, the Styrofoam shell is nowhere to be seen. He has on a black T-shirt, logoless, creased with recent unfolding. Shara thinks of a prison-release outfit and then bats the thought away. This is her mother’s poison, and she will be different. But not only is she not rewarded for this—fate has a laugh at her expense. The boy puts his fingers to his eyes and pulls sideways. She quickly masters her face. She has learned to do this at school, where she is part of the majority-Asian student body, neither popular nor unpopular, not much picked on but not entirely shielded, either. She doesn’t look away. She will not give him that pleasure. She tries to explode his head. Very quickly, he gets tired of the stalemate and disappears.
When he reappears, maybe an hour later, he is holding a clear plastic bag, tied at the neck. She vowed she would never look at him again, but here she is, staring and staring. Like a fucking moron. There are no Black boys in her classes, but two of her school’s most popular male students are Black, one from Cameroon and the other Senegal. They are distinguished by their soccer skills and the accompanying uniforms, whose neon plumage turns them into vivid anime heroes. The boy in the window is holding, for her to see, a goldfish inside a bag, turning and kicking. He’s pressed it right against the windowpane. Is it an apology?
Before he does it, she has a premonition, but too late for her to look away. The knot in the bag is undone, and the fish is tipped into his mouth, his face splashed. He tries to smile, but his full mouth won’t allow it. She can’t stop looking, and, thank God, because otherwise she would miss his bluff, as he spits the contents of the bag back in. Even with the bag pressed against the pane, she can’t trust her impression of a dazed goldfish turning itself around and around, making a small tornado in the water.
Another fight between her parents. Her mother doesn’t care if Shara can hear. As for her sister, nothing can rouse her from sleep. Her grandfather doesn’t even factor into the equation. What would you have me do? her father asks her mother. A question with no satisfactory answer. The restaurant where her father works is hosting a meal for the homeless families, an event instigated by Shara’s mother’s nemesis, the South Asian community organizer, and backed by Shara’s father’s boss, who is comping the evening’s costs. The protesters have been invited, too. A brokering of peace, if the protesters want it. Shara’s mother knows all about her husband’s boss, that traitor. He had turned a deaf ear to her church, being one of the few neighborhood-restaurant owners who did not provide for the protesters—the other proprietors made an occasion of their donations, transforming the otherwise grim gatherings into sidewalk festivals, with heaping portions of restaurant fare scooped out of giant aluminum trays and onto flimsy paper plates that necessitated speedy eating. These businessmen understood that their rights, too, were being fought for by the church. Meanwhile, her husband’s boss declared that his loyalty was with the TransAmerica families. During his first years as an immigrant from China, he himself had been homeless, and no one had helped him. He knew what such abandonment felt like.
Shara knows what her mother is holding back from saying to her father: Quit. The word a stone in her throat. Because how can she ask that of her husband, who plugged away at his restaurant job in Manhattan’s Chinatown for nearly ten years before Empire Chinese opened nearby and a mutual acquaintance facilitated an introduction to the owner? He received a considerable bump in pay at Empire Chinese, thanks to his Chinatown pedigree, and his taxing commute became a leisurely walk. To forsake this job, when he held nothing equivalent or better in reserve, would be to spit on the idea of good luck.
Eating bitter, chewing it every single hour. No letup even in her sleep: once, when Shara’s mother was unconscious on the couch, her jaws kept moving. Dream-speaking, listing her grudges, her grievances. Even though she was silent, Shara could tell what she was saying.
It’s not so strange that Shara’s mother has let her go out into the night. The corporal punishment by Shara’s father a few nights back exhausted not just Shara, who hides the welts and the red lines on her legs by wearing pants, but also her mother.
And it’s only eight blocks one way, and then another two once she’s made the turn.
The young female cashier knows who she is, and Shara spends a not unpleasant few minutes being grilled about school and her ambitions for college. Asked what she’s doing at Empire Chinese, she lies and says that her mother has tasked her with walking her father home. She doesn’t care about the implication of family trouble.
The dining room is packed. No one is Chinese except the waiters, with that aggrieved air they all seem to have, the unhappiness of their lives taken out on the customers. The kitchen is different. No grievance but instead grim fellowship among the two Chinese cooks, the Mexican dishwasher and general third hand, and, sometimes, the fourth hand, also Mexican. They may be just as harried as the waiters on such a frantic night, but the kitchen, as her father has explained, is a clock; each tick is money—money earned or money wasted.
Shara could go back there and whoops would go up: money can be squandered every so often. Her father’s colleagues would holler as much to tease her father as to celebrate her. She is his toil paid back. None of the other men have children; none want the burden or have the optimism. Each socks his money away for a future that is different from her father’s. Different excitements, different calamities. Because he has her and her sister, her father no longer has a future. She is her father’s future, much more so than her sister, who is understood to be the pretty one and that is enough. With Shara, fear undergirds his glances, his admonitions. Now that she’s fourteen, there is every danger of her falling off course. She is his excitement. She is his calamity.
The South Asian man can’t be missed, moving between tables for handshakes and whispered conversations, picking up food with his fingers along the way. At some point, he spots Shara and goes over to welcome her. No, the cashier tells him. She is daughter of cook. She come take her father home.
Already? He’s smiling. You can join us. There are free seats.
Shara says no, thank you.
I know you from the protests, don’t I? He doesn’t wait for a reply. Come. Join. Meet some of the families. Or are you still on the clock?
Shara repeats her no, thank you. So close to her goal, and now she’s having second thoughts. Will the boy in the window recognize her? She has on the same outfit she wears outside the TransAmerica.
The social worker tells her she’s free to change her mind, and he goes back to his people.
You know him? the cashier asks Shara.
No.
He say you part of protest? Is true?
My mother. That’s all Shara needs to say.
Do you know what I think? I agree your mother. The cashier tells Shara that, ever since the change at the TransAmerica, her boyfriend has had to pick her up from work. The reports of muggings and near-rapes prompted her mother to ask if she could quit her job at Empire Chinese. On nights when her boyfriend is unavailable, the boss or his son drives her the eight blocks to the subway stop.
And yet she seems to feel no alarm at the fact that the supposed perpetrators are massed so close to her now.
Nobody at the gathering looks like the boy in the window. This comes after a second sweep of the room. No light-brown skin and tufty hair; she doesn’t see those googly eyes and downturned mouth, whose over-all affect, from a distance, is that of a ghost, as still and just as malign.
An ugly ghost—you can tell even from far away. I am ugly, too: this is part of what she tries to say to him. Two ugly youngsters staring at each other from across a distance: no wonder there is no room for sexual speculation. Instead, there is mutual pity, mutual hatred. Stoicism beamed back and forth.
When she first noticed him, he was already looking at her. He started the conversation, but, as they say, it takes two to tango. Telepathically, she had asked him, What do you want? And she is waiting for his reply.
She dares another peek into the dining room. Putting herself in view. But he is not present. Not among the ecstatic eaters, the freeloaders with their bulging cheeks, which do not stop them from conversing, from laughing and laughing.
Shara’s mother used to patch together a second family income through her church. Members circulate news of short-term jobs, which are often first-come, first-served, and also frequently pay below minimum wage, with the understanding that it’s Christian charity. But it’s been six months since her mother last had work, and the family’s increased economies show up at the dinner table. The same rotation of vegetables, tofu, ground pork. Shara doesn’t complain. For her, eating has long been a chore—both the act of shovelling food into her mouth and the obligatory time with the family, everyone glum because of the lack of money, because of the squabbling between husband and wife. On the evenings when her father works, Shara eats a second dinner of restaurant leftovers. Though that food is much more to her liking—pork cracklings, chicken nuggets—this is also an obligation, to appease her father’s worry that she is not taking in enough nutrition to excel in school. Her grandfather sits silent, and her father drinks the first of a handful of cold beers, stolen from work, while she finishes her fifth hour of homework.
Two weeks at the TransAmerica, and neither side has yielded.
Shara is allowed to play truant from the protests. It is exam time, a sacred period, and, to honor it, her parents even stop fighting. Her sister is told not to bother her. A hush descends on the household, a collective holding of breath. It’s like standing outside a locked door with a set of keys: the question is not whether Shara can master the lock but how quickly.
The church feeds the protesters, and it’s understood that the task of providing the evening meals for the family will fall to Shara’s father for as long as the protests go on. Some nights, her mother doesn’t come home until nine. Maybe she’s hoping that the pastor will take note of her perfect attendance and help her with another short-term job.
The flush of pride at having mastered her tests is what preoccupies Shara the following week, and when she looks up her mother has been home after school for the third straight day. The protests are finally over. The families have been moved out. Her mother’s easy volubility is the first shock, and it delays Shara’s understanding of the words coming out of the woman’s mouth. Too late to keep the disappointment off her face. That boy—no longer there, her mother says. What boy? Shara says. No use pretend-pretend, her mother says. Not to me. You like that boy? You like homeless? You gonna marry homeless, so two of you can be homeless together? So why you study so hard, why good grades, if only going to throw away by going with homeless? Trust me, I know all about bad marriage. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Shara says. It’s not like her mother to leave things alone, to let such blatant lies go unchallenged, but there is more good news to reveal. Now her mother’s congregation is on to the next campaign: to block usage of the TransAmerica as a warehouse for future homeless and also drug rehabbers, domestic-abuse victims, and those just freed from prison—the very bottom of society.
Shara has to wait until the next morning to verify her mother’s claims. Each window of the TransAmerica is like her grandfather’s milky eyes: no stirring behind the surface, no acknowledging stare. It’s hard to remember which was the boy’s square. Well, she has to remind herself, didn’t she give up on him the night of the Empire Chinese dinner, anyway? If he had mind-reading talents, he would have shown up, he would have intuited the occasion’s connection to the girl on the sidewalk. But he didn’t have any. Or maybe he did and just didn’t care to see things through. She will do the same.
She gets one hundreds on all her tests, as expected. For a day or two, she is the prized offspring. Copies of her scores are brought to the attention of the Empire Chinese owner, whose three children have all graduated college, one on full scholarship, the other two nearly full. Two nights later, while Shara’s father is in the restaurant kitchen, Shara and her mother, her sister, and her reclusive grandfather are guests of honor, with a central table in the dining room and more food than they can reasonably finish piled on the red lazy Susan.
The owner comes over to shake the hand of the “future famous scholar.” He has a proposition: his nephew is coming over from Taiwan to spend the summer with him and his wife, and the boy needs English lessons. The boss knows that Shara’s summer might already be spoken for, what with the need to fill her extracurricular C.V. for a possible Ivy League future. But—for maybe fifteen dollars an hour—can she find time to tutor the nephew?
This kind of deference and fuss lets Shara know where her lane in life is. As a show of good faith, the boss writes out an advance check: two hundred and fifty dollars.
The summer comes, and the sessions with the Empire Chinese owner’s nephew start, conducted in the dining room of the restaurant between the lunch and dinner rushes, three times a week. The boy is a runt, with thick glasses that he has to take off for close reading.
Customers or maybe the waiters leave old copies of the New York Post lying around, and Shara studies them while waiting for the boy to show up, flips the pages as he completes a written assignment. The waiters, seeing her concentration, encourage her to take the papers home, and she has begun to do so, hiding them from her mother, although her mother wouldn’t know whether reading the Post is a sign that Shara is being a good or a bad Chinese. Shara, on the other hand, knows all too well the meaning of the Post: it’s for spiteful, poor people, like the Chinese waiters, but she exempts herself because she is skimming with a purpose. She is looking to read news of a tragic death—by fire, shooting, vehicular smashup. The cascade of bad luck that follows someone who is bounced from one temporary home to another, at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Of course, she is thinking of the boy in the window. Now that she has the time and the space, the boy is free to haunt her, torment her.
She thinks of what might have happened if she’d gone to the pet store on Broadway and left with a goldfish in a plastic bag. If she’d stood under his window and proved to him that his stunt was so laughable that even a girl wouldn’t think twice to spit it back at him. Never mind her mother, who would not dare hit her in public. Never mind the whipping she would have earned later, once their apartment door was closed. She shares with him, despite their mutual stillness, a mutual recklessness. She wishes she had proved it to him, in shameful defiance of her mother, right in front of her mother’s friends.
The Post, it turns out, is shocking. She doesn’t expect to find what she’s looking for in such abundance—an embarrassment of horrors. So many Black boys dead. Could this one be him, could that?
In the absence of photos, how is she to tell?
A flash of insight: that the boy in the window was a true ghost, already dead by the time of their meeting. How else to explain that nobody resembled him among the passengers disembarking from the bus and walking back to the hotel on the day of the Olive Garden excursion? Also, is it possible that the housing agency would give a room to an unparented teen-ager? This would also explain why he didn’t partake in the communal free meal at Empire Chinese. Who doesn’t want a comped Chinese banquet? Whose appetites are so spartan?
With the nephew, it’s on to words that begin with “ex,” which, for some reason, he has trouble pronouncing. His problem is lack of force, his “x”s sound like “s”s. She goes through the vocab list with him: express, exterior, excavate.
Free-form conversation rounds out their last ten minutes together, and, though it’s meant to be a back-and-forth, Shara tends to monopolize the talk. She holds forth on E.S.P., telekinesis. When it’s his turn, he surprises her. Yes, he knows all about E.S.P., because his grandfather in Taiwan communicates with the family dog by just such a method. Shara takes this in. She and the boy have something in common: significant grandfathers.
Also, a day later, this: using his grandfather’s method, the boy was not successful with the family pet, but, to his surprise, he could make the neighborhood dogs sing at will, and, more impressively, he could make them stop. All without opening his mouth.
Would the boy like to help Shara contact someone she’s lost? she asks him one afternoon. Is this a friend? the boy asks. Sure, she says.
She tells him about the people who moved into the TransAmerica. Was it only six months ago? She describes the boy in the window—the unruly hair, reedy body, and remarkable eyes, although she could not tell their color. Is he fourteen, like her? Would it be crazy to think that he could be much older? Eighteen, or even older than that? Though it’s becoming clear that this person is not really a friend, as Shara had claimed, Shara’s young student doesn’t say anything. Shara has him close his eyes. She says she will do the same, but how can he tell if she does or not? Picture the boy, she says. Again, she recites this “friend” into being: skinny figure, not so tall, light-brown complexion, crazy hair sticking out in all directions, gangly arms, calm face, never not studying you. A face poised between youth and old age. Sometimes his gaze is sorrow; other times it’s malice. Mostly, it’s like looking into a mirror and being asked what you think of yourself. Sometimes, too, it has to be said, his gaze is a dare, although it’s hard to tell what exactly he’s daring her to do. To match him in inscrutability while all the time screaming inside? And only now is another possibility occurring to her, as she talks him alive, bringing him back from the brink of an exploded skull, as per her intentions, or from the even more horrifying assaults in the New York Post. That gaze is pure exhaustion. Shunted from one hole to another, greeted outside each arrival by shrieking unwelcomers. Who wouldn’t be weary? The gaze says, “I don’t give a shit.” Just look at his hair, which it appears he has not bothered with for weeks. Is the picture clear? Does the student need more description? He shakes his head no.
After a few minutes, she asks if he is getting any vibrations, any signals. He is quiet at first, and then he gives the barest nod. Why disbelieve him now? Can you tell where he is? He shakes his head, and then a moment later says, A basketball court? You see him on a basketball court? He shrugs. His eyes are now open. He plays basketball? she asks. No, the student says. He is just standing. Just standing and what else? Just standing, and looking. O.K. She is nodding, chills. Can you close your eyes again? Since you are better than me, I want you to transmit this message to him. Do you know what transmit is? He nods. Tell him that he is very lucky. She waits. And waits some more. Did you tell him that? He nods. Tell him that he is lucky that I’m no longer around. Again she waits. Then says, Tell him that if he wants, he can come find me. Come find me and we will finish our talk. From her voice, the threat behind the words “finish” and “talk” is clear. Some “friend.” The student’s face shows the effort of messaging, of trying to please Shara. Was he still standing and looking, on the basketball court, after he got my message? This is a test. The student will probably lie and say that the boy-in-mind had finally broken his statue pose, maybe shown some emotion like fear, the better to gratify Shara. But, no, apparently there was no change in the boy-in-mind even as he received Shara’s threats. He remained standing. He remained staring in front of him. But you could tell that he was no dummy, because the eyelids moved, and there was the slightest rise and fall under his black T-shirt, just below his throat and shoulders.
The next thing she does is make good on acquiring a goldfish.
Shara and her student have not tried to repeat their telepathic transmission. She asked him if he’d felt anything since their one attempt, if the boy-in-mind had passed along a reply to Shara, and her student said no.
The afternoon she has him over to the family apartment, the only two people present are her sister and her grandfather. Both parents are at work. Her mother is cashiering at a place in Flushing that sells bolts of cloth, Indian saris.
Shara takes her goldfish out into the living room, where the boy awaits, where her grandfather sits in his usual spot, head turned toward the window. Who knows where her sister is. Lately, the girl has been locking herself in the bathroom right after school, taking long and mysterious showers. She comes out looking no different, despite copious applications of hair products.
The goldfish has learned to stay in one place in its small home, previously a pasta jar. But being transported out of its usual spot on Shara’s work desk has tipped a switch inside the creature, and now it moves up and down, over and over. It does this for a while before returning to its passive state, the only movement the opening and closing of its gills, and a periodic sweep with its dishrag tail.
She tells the boy to observe her. To keep in memory what she’s about to do. As if he were a phone, recording. Able to play back the scene.
She reduces the water in the jar by pouring more than half of it onto the soil of the potted plants by the window, and her grandfather does not move. Nothing compels his attention away from the sun on his face. Her grandfather lives in a place that none of his family can touch.
Now, she says, and then she tips the goldfish mouthward. The goldfish resists the pull of gravity and she has to fountain some water before achieving the desired result. She lets the creature sit inside her mouth for what feels like a full minute. It could be the fish flopping on her tongue or she could be simply hopped up by the energy, the electricity. Then she spits the fish back into the jar. There is not enough water for the fish to make any meaningful move, and, before its google eyes can snap back into place, it finds itself tipped over and into Shara’s mouth once again. And, once again, there are suspenseful seconds before Shara opens her mouth to release the goldfish.
The young student knows that he is not expected to say anything. E.S.P., goldfish swallowing—it’s all part of the curriculum.
She tells him to close his eyes. Time for the next transmission to the boy-in-mind. Again, she talks him through the process. She is patient, because he doesn’t see the boy as quickly, or even as fully, as before. But once he gets a tingling—maybe it’s nothing more than his fear of Shara’s impatience—she begins her calm recitation: Show the boy what I just did. Show him every little thing. You saw it, now see it again, play it back for him. She says the same thing over and over, for the next few minutes. And then: Tell him I am waiting to hear back from him. She is quiet for a long while, but he knows he mustn’t open his eyes. Tell me what to do. Say that to him: Tell me what to do. There is sorrow in her request, and she cuts this with the brusqueness of her tone.
Shara has been silent a long while, longer than usual. When the boy opens his eyes, he’s surprised to find that he no longer has Shara’s attention. He can see only the back of her head.
She and her grandfather are looking at each other.
Shara felt something behind her—more substantial than a breeze, less forceful than a prod. She turned to find her grandfather facing her squarely. It’s habitual with him, but what can he see? Or maybe the telepathy has found an unintended respondent in him, and he is telling her what to do, per her request. What is it? She wills the message to clarify. But there is only his face—slightly amused, maybe making a joke of the afternoon. Then she sees briefly, persuasively from behind his glaucoma: the sunlight in the living room had fired a blob of gold that had gone in, then out, then back in, then back out of his granddaughter’s mouth, and he had been delighted. Gold, for the Chinese, is even more golden—it is everything. His granddaughter is someone who can eat fire, money, the sun, but only halfway. She lacks the courage to fully assimilate these things and has to spit them back out. A fool, or, even worse, a coward. She must be encouraged. Maybe that is his message for her: Go all the way, go all the way. ♦
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