I can remember a time before the sun was this bright. Every shard felt manageable as it filtered through the window, gleaming with equanimity. Like everyone, I used to wait until daytime to do my daytime things. I drank my morning espresso at the Turkish café, and then I went to the converted airfield to roller skate and listen to music. When I entered a dark room, I ran my hands over the walls, feeling for a light switch, and I kissed people at parties, not irked by seeing their pores so close to mine. Like everything, it began with a single instance: one all-nighter in December, when the hours were already scarce in Berlin. When I finally closed my computer and my eyes, the sky was paling at its edges. I had no idea if it was a.m. or p.m. the next time I glanced at the clock. Nobody had called or texted to ask where I was or what I was doing. I looked at the lit blue square in my hand and tried to decide if the ambivalence was liberating or disconcerting.
After that night, I began eating and sleeping at irregular times. Light gives me migraines, I said, which was a lie, but the next time I went outside, I felt the sun pierce me through my black turtleneck. Anything can come true if you say it with enough sincerity. The lockdown measures had constituted a sphere around our lives, and nobody could see what was happening inside anyone else’s sphere. In the absence of society’s ritual atonement, people did things they never would have done before. My friends in California baked elaborate cakes and set police cars on fire. I, nine time zones away, dyed my curtains black and came up with a new worldview to justify my nocturnal lifestyle: it’s not simply that light illuminates and darkness obfuscates—the truth is equally comprised of what we say and what we don’t say.
There are only certain things available during the hours I am awake. I order a cheeseburger at the Pakistani deli across from my flat, where the stereo plays the soundtracks of Lollywood classics. The interior of the restaurant is cordoned off with yellow caution tape to limit germ exposure. I knock on the window and peer through the slit to signal I am there, and every tile is sanitized after I reach my arm across the counter to receive my kimchi burger and fries.
“Insomnia?” the deli owner asks.
I always come to him at 3 AM, my equivalent of lunchtime.
“Like a teenage boy on summer vacation,” I say.
“Too much cortisol in your bloodstream.”
It makes me want to fight.
I punch the air a few times. I can see only the upper half of his face through the window slit, his two eyebrows conspiring in the middle.
“Do you give blood?” he asks.
“Do I give blood?”
“I mean, do you donate in the blood drive?”
I shake my head.
“You should. It can improve your circulation and overall health. It can give your body a chance to make new blood.”
He gives me my change, which is always the same amount.
“Do you need blood?” I ask. “I would give my blood to you.” I roll my sleeves up and hold my arms out, making my veins available.
“No, no,” he says. “I donate in the blood drive every month. Every three seconds, someone uses someone else’s blood. It’s good to contribute, especially in these times.”
“Every month?” I say incredulously.
“You don’t have to do it every month. I’m saying that’s what I do.”
The window opens wider and spits out a paper bag spotted with grease stains, which I cradle gingerly in my arms for warmth.
“It’s good for your health,” he says. “And it’s good for society.”
The other place I like is a whiskey bar in a repurposed pharmacy, lit by soapy votive candles in medicine bottles. I sit at the counter with my kimchi burger and think about our conversation. Did he mean that a patient requires a blood transfusion from someone else every three seconds, or did he mean that, out of the total blood that’s in circulation, a drop that once belonged to someone else passes through a new person’s heart every three seconds? I make a metronome in my head. One, two, three. One, two, three. If I had a surplus of blood I feel like I would know. I would be able to feel the plasma coursing through my veins.
I wipe the kimchi from my mouth and look around. Everyone is with their lover tonight. In the stool next to mine, a woman inspects a man’s palm lines, squinting at his outstretched hand under the red mood lighting.
“You will live for a very long time,” she says.
“How long?” he asks.
“It doesn’t say exactly. The line extends off of the border of your hand.”
The man and woman are not exactly beautiful individually, but together they have a soft androgyny that makes me wonder if they found each other like this or if one of them slowly morphed to complement the other. The man pulls a comb from his leather backpack and picks at his mullet, and then the woman takes the comb from his hand and runs it through her identical mullet. When she holds a silver spoon to his nose, he leans back to gauge the distance his nostril must travel toward the key, and then his nostril travels toward it at the speed of light.
Suddenly, the woman turns to face me. She must have sensed me looking at them. I’ve always thought there should be a word for this, when you accidentally make eye contact with someone and have to pretend like it was nothing, you just had to put your eyes somewhere.
“What is your name?” she asks me.
“Laiyla,” I say.
“Laiyla,” the man says. “That’s a beautiful name.”
“What are your names?”
I never try to remember someone’s name the first time I meet them. It usually takes six or seven meetings before an embarrassing situation arises.
“Laiyla, do you have a twin?” he asks. “I feel like I’ve met someone who looks like you.”
“I was born by myself,” I say, looking directly into his eyes.
I wonder if he thinks East Asian women look just like each other when we lock arms on the subway. I want to tell him that everyone in Berlin looks the same to me too, with their sleek leather jackets, platinum-tinted eyebrows, and barbed wire tattoos slithered around their pale wrists.
“Do you like to come here alone?” he asks.
“Sometimes,” I say, which is not exactly a lie, because I always come here alone, and sometimes I like it and other times I don’t.
“You’re an American,” the woman says, hearing my accent.
“So are you,” I say, and this creates an immediate camaraderie between us.
Soon the woman is holding the silver spoon to my nose. The bitter crystals vaporize in my throat. After each bump, the woman uses the front-facing camera on her iPhone to check her lip gloss and wipe her nose. I look outside and realize the sky is beginning to lighten.
It’s getting late, I say.
After I leave, I glance through the window and see the two of them holding hands. Their two hands are resting on my empty chair. One, two, three. I zip my parka up and walk home along the canal.
Something about this couple makes me remember a dream I had recently. In the dream, I am wading through a room full of strangers who want to kiss me. I’m so sorry, I kept saying, deflecting with my cheek. I can’t kiss you because I don’t love you. By the end, I am swapping spit with reckless abandon, the microbiome on my tongue becoming theirs. When I get to the final person, I kiss them with such force it splits their bottom lip open.
I came to Berlin because I was writing my final dissertation chapter on the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a Korean American experimental filmmaker who died in the 80s. Her 35mm films and Risographs were all available in Berkeley, much closer to where I lived, but the museum said they were closed indefinitely for site visits, and my funding would run out by the end of the academic year. Two weeks after my plane touched the ground, the film archives in Berlin closed too. The ex-pats fled the city. This was their third lockdown, and they knew it could take anywhere between weeks to months for infections to slow. I took a sublet from a distant acquaintance and waited for either the archives or borders to reopen, whichever came first. I knew that being trapped here indefinitely was not only within the realm of possibility but entirely likely. Secretly, I willed it to happen. I had moved back in with my parents at the beginning of the pandemic and emotionally regressed into a teenage version of myself. When the protests erupted downtown, they barred me from going out past dusk. You should appreciate the freedom you have, they said. In China, they won’t let you leave your building.
After I moved out, I imagined myself doing crazy things with my new autonomy. In reality, I eat the same foods every day and spend my nights watching Cha’s black-and-white films online. Sometimes I have revelations about her work that become obvious as soon as I transcribe them. That night, when I come home from the bar in a neurochemical haze, I realize I left Mouth to Mouth looping on the projector. I’ve watched her films so many times that they’ve faded into the background ambiance of my flat. This one begins with a dictation exercise of eight Hangul vowels unfolding across the screen. Cha was born in Busan during the Korean War, but she was forbidden to speak her native tongue while seeking asylum in Japan-occupied Manchuria. Her pixelated mouth sounds each vowel, but the voice is muffled by the sound of bubbling water, bird song, footsteps, and a ticking clock. What might have been clear at the point of transmission comes to me as a snowy apparition.
When I close the blinds just before the sun comes over Tempelhofer Feld, I notice the snow is falling. It’s the first snow of the new year, and the first snowfall I’ve witnessed in many years. I knew I had to exit California’s tropical monotony, where every day was exactly the same. Only through difference can we see ourselves, a therapist once told me. I stare at the whiteness and wonder what my blood is like. It must be very pure and dark from all of the cheeseburgers I consume.
The lights in the retirement home on my street are always on. It’s a known fact that the older you become, the less you sleep. My grandma used to say it’s because you are practicing a different way of being. In the weeks before her death, she hardly slept a blink, treating the dark with grim permissibility. She called on WeChat from Shanghai, positioning her iPad so that I could only see the top half of her face. The lights from the Bund sparkled on the Huangpu River behind her. She was awake at every hour. When I asked what she was doing, she said she was listening to the sounds of the room.
At night, every room emits its own sound. What the daytime people believe to be silence is actually not silence at all. At best, it’s the world acquiescing to them, tempering itself into a digestible form. Only at night can you hear the full spectrum of quiet inside a building. The refrigerator cooling its coils, a dog’s toenails scraping against the wood floor, the birds singing feverishly right before daybreak.
The next time I go to the pharmacy bar, I feel surprised by how loud the quiet is. It’s as if all the sound is being absorbed in one corner, and then I see my couple sitting in that corner. I can tell from their body language they are in the midst of an explosive fight.
“What would you have done?” the woman says loudly, not caring if anyone hears.
“If I were you, or if I were myself?” he says.
“Either.”
“If I were you, I would have a completely different kind of approach to the world. It’s almost tautological to ask what I would do if I were you. It’s like asking, if you were a completely different person, with a completely different kind of life, what would you do differently?”
“And if you were yourself?” she asks.
“If I were myself, I wouldn’t find myself in this kind of situation.”
The woman downs her drink and looks away.
It doesn’t take long to figure out what they are fighting over. The woman is upset because she wants him to be more emotionally attuned to her, to stop diverting the conversation until it’s about himself. The man claims that isn’t what he intended. He was only trying to empathize by giving examples from his life.
“Your empathy is so limited,” she says. “You can’t think beyond your limited moral framework.”
“Of course I can’t,” he says. “How can I stop having a subjective experience? It’s not possible. It’s like asking a pig to be more mindful of the sky.”
She licks the salt from the rim of her glass, trying to not be confused by his invocation of metaphor. When the fight escalates in volume, the other patrons shift uncomfortably in their chairs. The man has his greying hair tousled boyishly over his clear-rimmed glasses, the international sign for a certain kind of man. He enjoys cold glasses of milk before bed and the cinematography of Agnes Varda. He owns an air fryer so he can enjoy the taste without the calories.
“You can still ask me questions about how I feel,” she says quietly.
“I did ask you,” he says.
“You didn’t.”
“Fine. How do you feel.”
She wants to quit the project they’ve been working on, but she doesn’t feel like she can. She’s been working on it for almost seven years now. All of her cells have regenerated since she made the first model of the building, and now the project has imprinted itself on every one of those cells. I thought it sounded messy. Living together, working together.
“You never think about it,” she says, “but your skin is a living document.”
“I think you mean organism,” the man says.
“Laiyla,” the woman says, suddenly noticing me. “There you are.”
I lick the ketchup from my fingers and wipe them on my jeans.
“We were just thinking about you,” she says.
“Oh,” I say, knowing this is a lie.
Suddenly it’s like there was no fight at all, a room straightened out before a guest comes over. They lean into each other, drunk and slanted, softening their features until one. The woman wears a heavy soot-colored coat contoured to the shape of her body, tied it around her waist with a thin satin band.
“We have to go soon,” the woman says. “We are trying a new polyphasic sleep schedule.”
“What is that?” I ask.
“Laiyla,” the man says in a low, gravelly voice. “Do you have a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend?”
I shake my head. I feel like a child when they look at me. When I first immigrated to America in elementary school, I resisted all attempts to be inoculated with English. During recess, I sat in the sand and drew a circle around me. Nobody was allowed in my circle—it was my private space. But as soon as I drew the line, the other children started wetly piling in, provoked by such a shining opportunity for trespass.
The woman stands up and tightens her sash. “Would you like to come with us?”
Most people do not imagine Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, but when they do, they usually imagine her sister Bernadette, who is more beautiful than her. Even the book that serves as a monograph of her work has Bernadette’s face on the cover. Bernadette’s face is perfectly symmetrical, with slightly upturned lips and a less piercing gaze, mouth open in subtle acknowledgment of the camera. But I’ve always been more enticed by Cha’s face, her expressionless brows, the pockmarks on her skin. In the few photos that exist, her gaze is averted. Her recorded performances feature her with a white cloth wrapped around her eyes. In this piece, she said before a performance, I want to become the dream of the audience.
The woman and the man have to close their eyes for twenty minutes now. Their polyphasic sleep schedule allows them to sleep for only three hours total a day instead of the usual eight. The phases occur in seven even intervals dispersed throughout the day. It disturbs their circadian rhythm if they miss even one. Since their architecture studio is in the Pacific Time Zone, they already have to log online in the middle of the night when a deadline looms. This schedule gives them five extra hours to work on their renders. The only inconvenience is when it comes to making new friends because it can be strange to rush away militantly for the sake of a nap.
“It's cool,” I say. I take my phone out and try to look busy doing my own thing.
I watch the man and woman unlace their platform leather boots and unpeel their winter socks. They enter their REM cycles the second they close their eyes. I realize they never have to experience the space between sleep and awake, when you are still inside the dream and have the power to invent the next segment for fun, a practice that feels a little faithless because the purpose of dreams is to give yourself over to another force. The woman’s eyes twitch, roving beneath her sparkly-matte lids. They look so angelic, lying in bed in their outside clothes, that I feel disappointed that two people sleeping next to each other can’t enter the same dream.
I look outside the window. We are in the blue dark part of the night now[WA1] . I’ve come up with different phases of dark because ‘the dark’ is not a unilateral description of what it’s like. There is the almost dark, the soft dark, the bright dark, the dark dark. A part of me wants to slip out while they are still asleep, but I don’t want to disturb them by opening the big metal door. I decide it’s too late for another plot to transpire. I have to see this one through.
I regret my decision as soon as they sit up to look at me.
“Sorry about that,” the woman says in a customer service voice, like she just put me on a brief hold.
Mysteriously, they don’t look disheveled the way I do after sleep. The woman’s turquoise eyeshadow isn’t smudged, and the man’s hair emits a suspicious sheen. In the kitchen, she pours ashwagandha into a cold brew coffee, and I wonder if she has to do this seven times a day.
“You were telling me about architecture,” I say, trying to continue the conversation like there was no lapse. “What kind of buildings do you make?”
“All kinds,” the man yawns. He tells me about a yoga studio in the Berkshires, a cypress-paneled orchestra pit in Montreal, and a gymnasium at a liberal arts college.
“Which one was your favorite?” I ask.
“I don’t know if I have a favorite,” he says. “They were different. The orchestra pit was fun. We got to learn a lot about acoustics. Their in-house conductor loved the new decibel level. The gym turned out nice too, better than I thought.”
When someone describes things as ‘fun’ and ‘nice,’ I assume they have the ability to exit their experiences unscathed, and this makes them less trustworthy to me overall.
But these days we mostly make custom houses for rich people, the woman says.
“Oh,” I say. “That sucks.”
The woman clinks her spoon against the ceramic cup and glares at the man, who lets out a controlled sigh.
“Sorry,” I say. “I mean, that sounds interesting.”
“No,” the woman says. “It does suck. I hate it.”
As the woman complains about the projects she is working on, I look at her mouth, trying to decide how real she is. I feel like I have to infer her existence the way I infer the existence of imaginary numbers.
“I don’t think it’s that bad,” the man says. “We are lucky to have jobs, especially in a pandemic economy.”
I can’t remember the last time I heard someone talk about ‘the economy’ unironically. The radiator emits a coughing sound without warming the room.
“What about you?” she asks.
“What about me?”
“What do you like to do, besides eat food in the dark?”
“Do you think of yourself as a dark person?” the man says.
I can tell they are flirting with me by being mean. It’s soft dark now, which means I have to escalate this very suddenly if I want to get home before sunrise. I take my top off and the three of us look at each other, terrified. When the man reaches for me, I notice the white-studded specks on his eyelids. Calcium deposits from the milk he drinks.
Now that I am basically dating not one person, but two people, I wish I had friends in Berlin so I could have someone to discuss this with, the ramifications of being in a throuple. Three is an auspicious sign, a thesis and antithesis coalescing into one. Love is two people coinciding only to eclipse each other, and in the overlap is where I exist. We are practicing the kind of dialectical thinking that’s supposed to bring us closer to the truth.
At the Pakistani deli, I use my knuckles to do three quick light taps, the secret code I use to announce myself, though I’m not sure he’s aware of this. The window to my confessional booth slides open.
“Little Miss Needs Her Blood,” he says.
“Would you rather be in love with two people or nobody?” I ask.
He takes his headphones off and pauses the YouTube video on his phone.
“I would rather be in love with nobody,” he says with certainty.
“You aren’t afraid of being lonely?” I ask.
“Pfft! Lonely! If only I had time to be lonely!”
He says it’s better to love nobody because when you love someone you have to be worried for them in moments when you are supposed to be worried for yourself. Behind him, I hear the deli owner’s son shrieking in Punjabi, a boy with the same gap tooth and bewildered eyes.
“But I’m not an envious person,” I say. “I don’t care what other people do when I’m not there.”
“One day, if you have a child, you will feel differently.”
I’ve heard this cliché before, that having a child is like having your heart outside of you. Your heart goes running around, kicking balls, picking dandelions, and eating bugs. It’s a situation you have limited control over, and instead of relinquishing control altogether, you find yourself doubling down on forms of surveillance.
The phone rings. The owner goes to answer it, and his face is replaced with his son’s, who stands on a stool to lean out the window. The orange light from the restaurant gives his head a religious glow. His smile takes up most of his face—not in a psychotic way, but in the way children don’t know how to smile properly without looking overly affected.
“How do I say, in German, I would like to have a kimchi cheeseburger with fries?” I ask.
The boy looks shy when he tells me.
“Ich liebe es, Schwänze zu lutschen,” he says.
When the deli owner comes back, I enunciate every syllable.
“Ich liebe es, Schwänze zu lutschen!”
“What did you say?”
“Ich liebe es, Schwänze zu lutschen!” I repeat, this time yelling.
The owner frowns before going to chase after his son, who laughs hysterically while running upstairs.
When the deli owner comes back, he tells me what I’ve just said.
“Wow,” I say. “How does he know what ‘cock’ is?”
He shakes his head.
“Would you like your usual?”
I flip my hair defiantly. “I would like to try something else today.”
I want him to know I can experience the world newly too, that I’m not just a one-trick pony, but after he gives me a Bratwurst fried with Sauerkraut, I feel regretful.
Instead of going home to watch videos on my projector, I walk to the converted airfield with my sad sausage crinkling in the Styrofoam box. They close the park at night, so I have to duck under the chain-link fence, stretched open by partygoers attending illegal raves in the cargo warehouses, shielded from the Polizei deployed to enforce the lockdown measures. Converted feels like a strong word. I’ve barely left Neukölln since coming to Berlin, but I wonder if the rest of the city feels like it’s been under construction since the war. The public spaces look like they were extracted directly from Nazi detention and given to us. Come as you are, the present says to the past. Even the moon looks like a low-fi glitch, as if someone forgot to light up the crescent’s missing half.
In the summer of 1980, Cha and her brother visited Seoul for the first time since she left as a refugee. She received a grant to film her first feature-length film, White Dust From Mongolia. Mass demonstrations had erupted that July following a presidential assassination. KNP officers harassed them everywhere they went, threatening to confiscate their cameras. Once martial law was declared, they were forced to leave South Korea altogether. All that remains is some unedited stills of Busan: a train station, the urban skyline, laundry swaying in the breeze. In her proposal, Cha wrote that she was making a film about a Korean expat living in China. The woman suffers from sudden bouts of amnesia, and her forgetting spreads until she loses all speech function. She travels to Korea to search for a cure, hoping that being immersed in her native land will spark the memory of her alphabet and identity. Without language, her life is reduced to a landscape of pure phenomenological experience. Lights, colors, sounds, textures.
When I was a child, the immigration office rejected my grandma’s citizenship application because she failed to provide a document titled Proof of Birth. She had been living with us for years by then, driving me to school and making me braised oxtail soup when I had a cold. Over the phone, my parents explained that my grandma was born in a village where it was not customary to document your arrival in the world. She never knew her birth parents—they gave her up for adoption because they wanted a boy. She didn’t know her precise date of birth, but she said it was December because her neighbors nicknamed her Meihua, a flower that blooms only in winter. The officer listened intently, asking questions and taking notes. You’ll hear from us in four to six weeks, he said. I don’t remember the letter, but I remember the waiting room—bright, antiseptic. The deportation hearing was scheduled for my tenth birthday. Here I am, my grandma said to the tribunal.“Proof that I was born.
I stand in the clearing and look upon the dark estate. Like certain species of fish, I wish I had light organs inside me so that I could see all of myself upon contact with a reflective surface. I don’t believe the deli owner when he says I will feel differently after I have a child. I’ve always felt like there are parts of me that are outside myself, and when I touch those parts, I don’t know if what I feel is a beginning or an end.
My phone vibrates with a WhatsApp message. I’ve been added to a group chat with two LA numbers I don’t have saved.
hey, we had a nice time with you last nite
I can tell it’s the man because of his invocation of the word ‘nice.’ My phone vibrates again with a message from the other number.
we are wondering, is it spelled like laila or layla?
I walk down the runway where planes once touched, looking at the spit marks on the concrete. I keep putting my hand in my pocket to rub my phone as if it were an amulet. The wild grasses are frozen in long, icy braids. Without the children playing Hupfspiel and their parents drinking Pilsners and chatting on summer blankets, there is nothing to indicate how the space is supposed to be used.
my name is spelled like laiyla, I write to the couple. the i is silent
A bubble forms to indicate someone is typing.
what are you doing now, laiyla?
I send them a photo of the airfield, zooming in on the single patch of light where the moon blends with the runway.
Delivered quietly, my phone says.
I can’t remember the last time I was touched by another person. It doesn’t feel good. All over is cold except for the points where our bodies come into contact. We take off our own clothes and go under the covers immediately. Now I know what it’s like to be touched by four hands at once, each hand with its own goal in mind, working at cross-purposes. I mistake my hand for one of theirs until I realize I am kissing myself. If our sex was a movie, I don’t think it would be erotic, or even pornographic. It would be an art film without plot development or narrative coalescence, the kind of film that bores me to tears, but I must feign enjoyment because beauty requires discipline to understand.
I feel like we have sex just so we can get to the part that comes afterward, the part where we are disarmed by each other. When I close my eyes, I can’t tell the difference between us. It could be him, or it could be her, or it could be myself flattened by the night, where 5 a.m. is an equalizing force that subdues our irreconcilability. For example, I actually find the man very annoying, someone I would never spend time with. Why am I sleeping with someone I wouldn’t even hang out with? I ask myself this, and then I realize that to believe otherwise is to assume sex exists on a higher plane than friendship, which isn’t true. They are just different ways of knowing someone.
“Do you feel like we know you?” the man asks.
“I feel like you know things about me,” I say.
“What would you say is the difference?”
“If you know enough things about me, then I would consider it knowing me.”
“We have to cross over a certain threshold?”
“How close are we to getting there?” the woman asks.
I ask if they’ve ever seen a mirage lake during a heat wave. Even when you are driving at eighty miles per hour, the pool dries up as you get close, replenishing itself further down the road, closer to the vanishing point.
“That’s not nice,” the woman says.
All they have in their refrigerator is sparkling water because they are from Los Angeles, a city where nobody eats food, but they always come with me when I need to. It takes a long time to walk to the Pakistani deli. When we come back, I zap my burger in their microwave while they pull the levers on their shiny, complicated espresso machine.
“We really like you,” the woman says. “We want you to be our girlfriend.”
I get up to leave.
“Oh, you’re not ready for this conversation,” the woman says. “That’s fine. Tell the darkness we said hi.”
Sometimes I feel their fight lessening as soon as I open the door, like I am the ceasefire between them.
“Laiyla,” they say, sitting up straighter. “There you are.”
I lay awake between them while they sleep. I am the glue that welds them to each other. Whatever happens, happens again. It occurs. It takes place. ‘It’ being the look of ambiguity on their faces, their hands twitching at their sides. The shadows dilute against the wall, and the woman grinds her teeth, clamping down on her retainer. She gnashes away with such intensity that I wonder what she’s dreaming about. I ask if her dreams are polyphasic too, if she enters the same dream fragmented over time.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“When you go back to sleep, does your dream keep going where you left off?”
She looks at me. “You mean like a sitcom?”
The man puts his clothes on to take a Zoom call with the studio, turning the camera away to conceal our nudity.
“You should sleep more,” the woman says, patting my hands. “If you don’t sleep, you can never dream.”
“I do sleep,” I say, “and I have dreams.”
“What do you dream about?” she asks.
She runs her fingers through my hair, which is knotted at the ends. The lockdowns have made our hair long. The woman’s mullet is the result of a botched haircut that she had to remedy by cutting it shorter and shorter.
“I have a dream that belongs to someone else,” I say.
I tell her about a recurring dream my grandma used to have. Towards the end of her life, there was little else happening to her—“Baobao, dying is so boring,” she complained. I couldn’t be beside her because the lockdowns in China were several degrees more serious than the lockdowns anywhere else. Visitors were forbidden from the retirement homes, even when my grandma entered hospice care. Calling me on WeChat became her main event of the day. When I held my phone at a downward angle, she said I was too skinny. When I held my phone below my chin, she said I was too fat. Sometimes she thought my face on her screen was a static image and she began gossiping about me to the hospice nurse while I waved my arms to prove my aliveness. Once I got her attention, the conversation was grueling. “Baobao, what did you eat today?” she asked, and I would tell her what I ate that day. “Nainai, what did you eat today?” And she would tell me. It seemed we had nothing else to say to each other beyond this script until I finally thought to ask about her dreams.
When my grandma was eight years old, the daughter of farmworkers in Anhui, she watched as Japanese soldiers captured her village, burning crops and ransacking silos. When I asked about this period of siege, she shrugged and said that it was fine. I asked her what happened, and she said nothing happened. After the soldiers set her shack on fire, they slaughtered her pig, her prized possession, and roasted it on skewers while she sat in the courtyard with her hands tied behind her back. Decades passed where she didn’t mention the pig at all, but after dementia seized her, it became her new fixation. She remembered its beady eyes and russet grey torso, its deafening screech upon capture. After she died I began seeing the pig in my own dreams. The pig pokes me with its snout, leaving a trail of drool on my hand.
“I love pigs!” the woman says. “What was its name?”
“Chinese people don’t name their pets,” I say, just to see if she will believe me.
She asks what the pig does when it sees me.
“It looks at me, even though pigs have too much blubber on their necks to look at the sky.”
“That’s a myth,” she says. “They can still look at the sky by glancing sideways or lying on their backs.”
“Like this?”
I tilt my body sideways to look outside. It’s barely dark outside, a new category I’ve made because the days are getting longer now, sometimes deceptively warm for early March. The leaves of their monstera plant are growing toward the window now that there is finally something for them to grow toward.
“What do you think it means?” the woman asks.
I laugh. People always revert to this question after they are forced to listen to someone recount a boring, complicated dream.
“I’m not bored,” she says defensively. “I’m listening.”
“It could mean different things,” I say, but it could also mean nothing.
“That can’t be true. Everything means something.”
The woman pinches the dimples on my waist, her signal that it’s time to play.
“I think the pig is trying to tell me that it once belonged to my grandma, but now it belongs to me.”
She puckers her mouth to one side in contemplation.
“Okay,” she says. “I can vibe with that.”
When she leaves to squirt more adaptogens into her coffee, I reach for my copy of Dictee under the pillow. I’ve been rereading it while the couple is asleep, pretending like it’s not dog-eared and waterlogged. I want to be someone coming across it for the first time. Strangely, the passages I once underlined no longer seemed notable to me, reading only as the foreground to a deeper revelation. I thought Dictee was a book about national belonging, tracing a woman’s pilgrimage to her mother’s homeland to resuscitate her past self, but the poems become increasingly fragmented and frenetic by the end, abandoning its premise. I roll over onto the man’s side of the bed, leaving indents on the sheets where my hip bones were.
I know the pig is my inheritance and it’s my task to keep it alive. I don’t know what that entails, and maybe I don’t have to. I reread the final pages of Dictee, which are filled with potent images of reincarnation—the audience lingers after a performance, a child revives her mother with the tinctures of a shaman, and flowers sprout from a slain branch. After the extinction event, Cha gives us a different creation myth with the same elements. Water, pigment, saliva, blood, light, and ink, primed to be reassembled into new forms.
Everyone inside the retirement home is awake. I look at the clock mounted on the institutional beige wall. It’s only seven o’clock in the morning. The residents pace in metal walkers, greeting each other in distinctly German guttural drones. They have the monthly blood drive here because they want you to see the recipients, the deli owner speculates. They want you to see directly who will benefit from the cause. The deli owner is much shorter than I expected him to be. It’s strange to see the bulk of his body for the first time, the way he uses his limbs. The deli gives him such a commanding energy over a space, a sense of ownership that translates into his stature.
The nurse reads our names from a sheet of paper even though we are the only ones there. I talk to my veins before we go inside.
“Don’t be shy,” I whisper to them.
I look away when they slide the needle in. It’s not painful, but the feeling of being siphoned is strange. It’s only when someone subtracts something from you do you realize that there was actually a composite, that you could be made discontinuous. I imagine my blood rushing in to fill the whitespace, the cells swirling in my veins and coming into contact with other cells they’ve never met before like an animation of crowd behavior. One, two, three.
“Are you sure I am eligible?” I ask the nurse.
“Entschuldigung?”
I realize she doesn’t speak very much English. I point at the needle inside me.
“Transfusion,” she says, explaining what my blood will be used for.
I shake my head, but then decide it’s too much effort to ask the question in another way. The deli owner waves his hand and says something to her in German, likely telling her to ignore me, that I’m just another ex-pat drifting through.
One, two, three. My pouch of blood is nearly filled to the brim. I look at the ruby fluid and mouth the word transfusion to myself. It’s such a beautiful word. Other words that begin with this prefix: transcend as in experience. Translucent as in light. Transgress as in boundaries. Transient as in life. Transport as in commodities. Translate as in language. Transfix as in experience. Trans is the Latin root for change, movement across, beyond the threshold until we reach the other side.
These days, everything is changing. The days are becoming longer. The spring solstice passed a month ago. On one unseasonably warm, fifty-five degree Fahrenheit day, people hula hooped and sucked on popsicles on the tarmac at Tempelhofer Feld. The couple and I sat on a park bench, a wooden crate that smelled faintly of animal pee. We leaned against each other and watched the frost thaw over the lilies while the older men sunbathed in their Speedos, cruising in the shrubbery, their paleness somehow blinding me more than the sunlight.
“You remain dismembered with the belief that magnolia blooms on seemingly dead branches and you wait,” I said, quoting Cha.
“What did you just say?” the man asked.
“It’s from a poem I like about spring.”
“Oh,” he said. “It sounded nice.”
I paused, giving him space to ask who wrote the poem or what it is about. The moment passed, and he didn’t. He was not that kind of man. It was not that kind of poem.
One, two, three.
