The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (16 page)

“Ancient astronauts.”

“Man, fuck you,” you say, “Just shut up.” You grab your backpack and
move out the door.

“Don’t tell me to shut up,” Luke says, suddenly angry.

You hate your brother! Yes you do, right now!You become even more furious when, turning back to Luke, you spy a glob of spit on the floor by the couch. He could stop himself from spitting in the house, but he just doesn’t. The sight of it grosses you out but even more so it makes you feel existentially depressed and low
and lonesome, all for your brother.

For there are times when you are near-friends, when you sit and watch
The Simpsons
reruns together and he forgets to spit on the floor and act crazy, or times when you ask him polite questions about his conspiracy theories and try to listen quietly, or times when he delivers unto you tiny kindnesses such as a new pair of ugly black socks from the department
store where he works, but that’s just not enough, it’s not. The one time it’s vital for you to get downtown very quickly and it takes about an hour to get there on the bus and the bus smells like poisonous buttmushrooms when it rains (which it did last night), Luke completely shuts you down?

FUCK this STUPID family. You sail out the door; your brother gets up to lock it behind you; you kick the
door; he opens it and
yells at you again; you run away as the screen door squeaks shut and the door-door slams; and then, you assume, your brother lapses back into his History Channel stupor, because there’s really nothing else to do.

You, as well as I, have had those times where you don’t feel like trying anymore. You’ve thrown your SAT study books across the room. Big, flimsy blocks – they
don’t make much noise when they hit. You’ve laughed at your own words in the application essay: wah wah, please take me. I’m ethnic enough for you. But not ethnic in all the wrong ways. I’m poor enough for you. But not so poor I can’t pay (let them find the truth out later).

You’ve made your blood go hot and speedy at the thought of what these colleges have done to you without their knowing it,
making you bow and scrape, making you rewrite and redo your life, until you want to cursive your anger across the skies, or better yet, hack those .edus to scrawl in crude MS Paint on the home page banners I WOULDN’T GO TO YOUR FUCKING SCHOOL IF YOU PAID ME A MILLION DOLLARS TIMES A BILLION DOLLARS SO YOU CAN EAT MY ASS KTHXBYE. ALL BEST, GRACE CHO.

And yet, and yet. Every time, you picked the
books up and brushed them off. You read each sentence in your essay aloud, searching for the perfect words, tamping down the parts of your brain that cringed at your asshattery, your mendaciousness.

Because:

Remember your brother. Remember your father, remember your mother.

Remember the Asian imposters at Stanford. Two recent news stories made you laugh, they scared you so much: an eighteen-year-old
girl named Azia Kim (Azia? Seriously?) posed as a Stanford University freshman for almost a whole year. She lived in the dorms! She joined the ROTC! Just a week after, a woman named Elizabeth Okazaki was discovered to be posing as a visiting scholar in the physics department at – yes! – Stanford again, hanging out at Varian Physics Laboratory and accomplishing the heroic feat of being even
weirder and creepier than a pack of physics grad students. Azia and Elizabeth were both kicked off campus.

To a certain extent, you had to admire them. They were too dumb or unlucky or crazy or poor to realize this one stupid dream of theirs, but that didn’t stop them.

To a much greater extent, you had to separate yourself from any identification with them, because you were getting into college
in a legit way (or, rather, your cheating would be so technologically advanced and devious that no one would ever find out), and they had ruined Stanford for you – you imagined campus police looking out for girls
just like you
, chasing you across the moist green lawns and under the Spanish tiles and demanding ID, except you were already late to class, and everyone was staring, and, and …

You
didn’t apply to Stanford.

Your father’s shelter is on the outskirts of downtown, in an emptied neighborhood scattered with unsuccessful coffee shops, corner stores, dead brick businesses, and bus stops. The shelter is unobtrusive and looks like a tax office from the outside, except for a faded sign that reads FRANCIS-HOLT HOUSE. The buzzer is broken, so you wait outside the door, peering in through
the glass until a resident spots you and lets you in. You’ve never seen him before – a middle-aged black man wearing a maroon t-shirt with a stretched-out neck.

After opening the door, he smiles kindly and says, “Would you like some money?” He opens his hands and three or four mashed together dollar bills fall to the ground. You help him pick them up, and then go down the hallway to the elevator.
When you pass the main office, you wave at the girl inside and tell her you’re there to see your father. Of course you don’t tell her why you’re here and what you might do, so she smiles and says that he’s up in his room.

Everyone in this house has got something weird with their heads. Which should go without saying, but every time you come here it’s as if you’ve stepped onto a stage, into a
company of committed improv actors who incorporate you into skits with Oulipo-type parameters of which no one has informed you; you’re just playing but they are utterly serious.

You take the elevator up to the fourth floor. The hallway is stuffy. It smells of madness, which is something like the smell of
people who don’t have the right soap and products to get fully clean in the shower, and who
wear clothes that come in huge batches from churches. You knock on your father’s door. He answers right away.

You say hello, leaning to give him a careful hug.

He smiles. You haven’t seen him in a few months, so every time you visit you fear that he’ll look like just another bum, just another crazy on the street. Always, he looks okay. His hair is neatly parted, and he is clad in clean-as-is-possible
slacks and button-down shirts. The thing about yellow trash that you remember is that yellow trash can be visually deceptive.

“Grace,” he says. “대황 [
you
] 대황 [
messy
] 대황
very tired-looking
].”

Every time you see him you are relieved that he looks so good but he gets upset at how awful you look.

“How are you doing?” you say.

“Ah,” he says, like ten light bulbs have exploded above his head. “대황.
대황 [
Come in].”

Your father has mellowed out extremely. There’s a night you remember, a long time ago, when he left home. You and your mother and your brother went to retrieve him and had a huge shouting fight in a motel courtyard. People were smiling as they watched. The same people that liked watching your family fight probably liked watching that show
COPS
. Why would they smile?

His place
now looks like a motel room, everything petite and self-contained, an answer to the question,
How little do you need in order to feel like a respectable human being in today’s America?
You stand by the round table next to his bed. Your father is on medication that makes his feet dance forward and back in a shuffling samba. You looked it up; it’s called tardive dyskinesia, and it is the result
of an evil White Elephant party in which one gives up psychosis in order to win a case of pseudo-Parkinson’s. All the way home from the library you chanted “tardive dyskinesia, tardive dyskinesia” until it turned into “retarded synesthesia,” which could have been yet another mental ailment lying in wait for your father.

“Come on, Dad, let’s sit down.” You put your hand on his elbow and help him
down into the chair. He doesn’t need the help, but it makes you feel better and maybe him too. He used to
harsh you out every time you saw him, especially back when he still had money and his illness still seemed more like an overabundance of cruelty and suspicion than anything else.

These days, during the good visits, you two can walk arm-inarm down the street to get tacos; this never, ever
would have been manageable before. So you have hope, now. Which is a terrible thing, Grace. I feel sorry for you.

“Dad,” you say, “Luke saw you get some of the mail from our box.”

He nods, and grins so widely you can see the spaces where teeth are missing.

“Was there anything for me?”

He opens his black satchel, which he keeps clean and polished, and pulls out a big flat envelope. On that
envelope are the colors of a school you’ve dreamed about. Inside that envelope must be a Yes, or at the very least a strong Maybe. Around that envelope are your father’s fingers.

He says, “I am very proud of you,” a sentence that you can understand in English or in Korean. You bask in it, you do, his pride and the fact that you finally understood something completely. Everything’s so tenuous.
Everything’s about to be undone.

“Thanks, Dad,” you say. You and your father smile at each other, and he reaches over to pat you on the shoulder. “Can I see it?” you say.

“No,” he says loudly, “대황 대황 [
keep safe
] 대황 Information Center. 대황

He slides the envelope back into the satchel and rests his arm over it. “대황 [
this
is] 대황 [
very
good school
]
. 대황 대황 but you careful. 대황 대황 Information Center
대황 대황 대황 [yowr
mother
] 대황 대황 대황 대황 Catholic Church 대황 대황 대황 대황 대황 lawyer 대황 대황 대황 대황 대황 [
money
] 대황 대황 대황 대황 대황 대황 Luke 대황 대황 대황 [
millions
] 대황 대황 [
television news anchors
] 대황 대황 대황 대황 sometimes you are not smart 대황 대황 대황 대황 [
I
need to make you study
] 대황 대황 대황 대황 I will call school 대황 대황. I’m coming with you. We go together.”

You know that’s not true and he can’t, he just can’t. It’s all crazy
talk. How’s this guy going to get on a plane and follow you
anywhere? He couldn’t even ride the bus if he didn’t get a pass from the shelter.

But at the same time everything he is saying is so true that your heart and your head want to explode. You feel like crying, but your body is set up to not-cry; it’s set up to shunt that impulse into thinking about crying, all the crying you will have to
do later, in your room at home. But by then it will be all gone. That’s the problem with saving it up.

“OK? OK?” he is saying.

Heliumed with despair – because despair can make one oddly light, isn’t that right? Everything lost, and what remains is so stupid and pointless it’s lighter than popcorn – you rise up and stand over your father. He is small and thin in his paper-bagcinched slacks and
you feel huge. You’re taller than both of your parents because you were bred on meat and white bread and hateful, indigestible milk. This can happen to guys who are afflicted with Bad Dads. They take it until they’re fifteen, sixteen, until they discover that they’re big enough to start hitting back. You’re a girl, but over the years you’ve been getting angry and big too. Slowly. So slowly that
you had no idea it was happening.

He looks up at you. The reds of his eyes are showing, the skin underneath them lymphy and bagged. “Why you are so bad to me,” he says.

“I’m not bad,” you say.

“You know what happen 대황 대황,” he says, “You don’t help stop. You blame me. 대황.’’

“I don’t know what I did. I don’t know what that is.” You’re sinking again. You sink lower, catching your head in your
arms, entirely exhausted.

There are things you’ve got to do now. You’re too tired to do them. You’ve got to call the school and ask them for another packet, have them send it to your high school or your mom’s workplace. They’ll say, “Why?” maybe, and you will tell them a lie. Or maybe you’ll say, “None of your fucking business!” and slam the phone down and then they’ll un-admit you. Maybe it’s
all your father’s fault that you are yellow trash and you will stay that way forever, but there must have been some way things could have been better. A way that is lost now. Plenty of people deal with plenty of things and they don’t turn out trash.

He reaches into the briefcase and takes out the envelope again. This time he opens it and pulls out the letter to show you. He hands you the letter.
It’s nice. A seal’s been punched into the paper, and someone is congratulating you. You barely read it.

“That’s fine,” you say, and slide it back to him.

The letter’s not the thing. I told you, Grace. This story ends well, so never you worry; you don’t need the fucking letter anyway. You’re in, you’re in, and no one can tell you that you’re not. Don’t cry please.

He says, “You study law, or
medicine. If you study law you can do English too in undergrad 대황 대황.’’

“Uh huh.” A wailing rises up in your head.

Your father talks about getting an apartment – or, hey, even a house, because he’ll have money to burn – near the campus, where he can visit you every day. And there comes a moment when you almost wish it could be true, all these delusions of his – houses and money and college degrees
for anyone who wants those things so badly that they’ve dreamed themselves onto the streets and into homeless shelters.

“We can get cat or dog,” he says. “[
which do you want?
] 대황 대황 cat is cleaner.”

“I hate cats,” you say. This is the worst. A pet. Something he could very nearly have. But he will never, ever have a pet.

“대황 [
What?
]
”
he says.

“Okay, I’ll have a cat. We can have one.”

“Ca-li-co,”
he says, “대황 [
those are the prettiest
]
.”
How does he know that word?

Forget a wife, and kids, and a life to keep warm and solvent – I can’t even imagine this man taking care of a pet. Suddenly I laugh. It surprises even me, but you get pissed off. You shake your head.
Tha’s enough
, you think,
no more looking
. No more judging. Suddenly you lift a fist and punch the side of your head with a loud,
inorganic-sounding thock. Inside your skull clangs and aches. It surprises even me
. Get out, get out, get out
, you think. Go away.

Doing something crazy in front of someone crazy is interesting; you wonder, how will they explain this? Your father is staring at you with wide eyes, and you know he’s not getting up to help you. He’s figuring out how this all fits into the connected flow
charts and
diagrams and blueprints and toppling spires in his constructed world. Someone’s gotten to his daughter. Someone’s put poison into her drinking water and made her go crazy. His daughter is not his daughter.