Page 20 of Bad Words

“Speak English.”

“Fuck off,” Maricel said reflexively, and like every one of these encounters I’d ever had, it was over with a surprising abruptness, the faceless guy and his friends already turning the corner, Julian and Xiangyu making annoyed sounds, Tyler cracking a joke about how clearly Julian’s Tagalog sounded good enough for dickface over there. Loud sighs and “anyway”s. We laughed, hugged, broke apart.

I wandered toward the train and heard the man’s voice echo twice, three times. I thought of the woman who’d once snapped her fingers at me outside a concert hall and said, with a mysterious urgency, “You Korean? You Chinese? No, you Korean?” Remembered the guy leaving a college party who, on his way out, had grabbed the back of my T-shirt and crowed, “Maaade in Vietnam!” Why was I always so curious about these people, where they came from, where they were going? Curiosity seemed like the wrong emotion to have. Occasionally these encounters walked out of my fingers when I was writing, but usually upside-down, backward, like I was those people, looking in at myself, finally able to control how other people saw me, or at least able to explore the implications in a way that would mean something. From this side the interactions felt so meaningless.

Weaving through a college-aged throng outside a dollar-slice joint, I felt remote and lightheaded. I’d drunk too much again, which didn’t help whatever this disconnected feeling was. When I checked my phone, I was grateful to find new messages to latch on to.

I opened my mother’s text thread first.

Mom

8:58 PM

Hi sweetheart How r u?

Parker

9:16 PM

Hi Mom—everything’s great over here

Mom

9:17 PM

Everything settling down with the critic?

Parker

9:19 PM

Yep, nothing to stress about. How about you, how are you?

Mom

9:19 PM

Doing OK

Parker

9:20 PM

Just okay?

I descended into the warm stink of the subway, hip-checked my way through the turnstile, head beginning to ache, and then:

Mom

9:25 PM

Took the car to the mechanic, it’s having suspension problems

The train roared down the track toward me. Car opened. I stepped in, crumpled down, rubbed my forehead with the flat of my palm.

Parker

9:25 PM