Surfacing

Sarah Feng

Surfacing
Michael Gancz

Lilia Chatalbasheva

I was a math tutor at an afterschool center. We had daily worksheets we would give them, and they would work on them for the afternoon and sometimes into the night. Some kids finished quickly, and then it was my job to correct them. I would go into the teacher’s lounge and mark with red pen while other girls loitered around, holding Dixie cups of water and talking to my coworker. The only sound in that poorly decorated room was the constant glug of air bubbles rising to the surface of the water tank. One time I saw a girl cry while doing long division, but I didn’t say anything. The students’ faces blurred before me like the sea.

I was putting smiley-face stickers on the front page of a packet with a full score when one of my coworkers closed her laptop and asked me how I was doing. I didn’t know what to say so I said that I was fine. She stood up and opened a drawer and lifted out a blue tin box of biscuits and opened them in front of me. The biscuits were an old beige color with visible chunks of sugar on top. Some of the biscuits had threads of chocolate marking the surface. Some were coated entirely in chocolate. I didn’t want to talk to her; I didn’t know her name. When I left for home I knew I would forget. She continued to stand there, so I asked where she was from.

Los Angeles, she said.

Los Angeles?

I imagined her standing by the beach, wind blowing through her hair. I could barely do it.

Where are you from? she asked me.

I live a few miles away from here, but my parents used to live in Turkey.

Why?

My dad used to work there.

She was looking at me harder. Probably making the same calculation I had just made about her. I imagined the moving lines of my face’s flesh.

Turkey?

Yeah, I said.

How many years?

I was moving down the list of questions on the sheet and making checkmarks without really reading the questions. The pen was one that moved smoothly in and through the paper. The words blurred. Four or five, I said.

Then you came to California?

Yeah, I said. Something like that. The biscuits were just sitting there and it was starting to make me angry. I felt like the air was going to dehydrate the cookies and ruin them, parch them.

I like your necklace, she said.

My necklace?

Yeah.

I traced it instinctively. Sometimes I forgot I was wearing it. It was a piece of a broken tile from a teapot my father had made. Oh, I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything else. There was a little bit of a design on it, a flower painted in coral and malachite, with glaze on top that made it look malted. She was looking at it and I felt the urge to hide it. It was naked and sitting cold on me. All of a sudden I was speaking like a lever was scraping it up my throat.

My dad made it. It was for a teapot for my sister, a long time ago.

She moved closer. Suddenly I saw the pink veins raised along the grey surface of her eyes. Her gaze shifted towards the necklace. He made it?

He’s a potter.

She tilted her head at me. Then another coworker came in and he sat down without realizing that something uncommon had passed between us. The girl was wearing a necklace too, a small, rusted silver locket. I was suddenly humiliated by my words, which had unintentionally been shaped to snare her curiosity. I stood up suddenly and left; she called my name, but I couldn’t bear to see the trembling shine of her eyes, or see the grit on her locket.

*

I was cooking dinner when my dad came in. He sometimes didn’t come home until much later. I had already cleaned and started the rice in the cooker and I was cutting the tomatoes and softening the bok choy in the pot with the beef broth. The large bone was sitting there, wet and crescent-shaped. It’ll be another hour, I said. Food’s not ready yet. These days we didn’t look at each other – not since the teapot fell. I picked up the pieces and turned one into my necklace. He stopped making pottery.

Okay, he said. I heard him rustling around and then I saw him watering the plants in our house, the big central orchid we got as a New Years’ gift from the neighbors, the basil, thyme, and scallion we grew on the windowsill. When he finished he started arranging the papers on the table so they were more orderly. That meant he had something to say.

Where’s Mom? I said.

Getting the car fixed. She’s got Adam with her. He passed.

What’s wrong with the car?

Something’s wrong with the lights. His voice got farther. He was in the foyer now, putting the shoes in colored order. Then he came back in and took off his leather jacket and sat down at the dinner table. I waited to hear more movement but he seemed to be just sitting there, unmoving. The bok choy was becoming limp and slippery, wrapping itself around my wooden spatula. I added the tomatoes. I imagined him sitting there behind me, hunched.

Okay, I said, without turning around. What’s wrong?

Nothing’s wrong. His voice was faint.

I stirred the tomatoes and cracked a few cold eggs into a bowl and tossed them listlessly with a pair of metal chopsticks. Look, I said. The rice will take another hour to be ready. I’ll finish making the noodles and then let’s take a walk.

Okay. He sounded like a child.

I added the egg and when it hit the boiling soup it solidified into a flower. I scissored open a plastic bag of wet noodles and put them into the soup. The hard sticks softened into bundled lumps. I put the lid on. Then when everything turned smooth and soft I turned off the flame and washed my hands. I untied the apron from my waist. My dad was still sitting there, not moving.

Come on, I said. Let’s take a walk. Put down your book.

We both put on our jackets and shoes and walked outside. The weather was warm even though it was winter; the sun was faint but present, which was normal for California. There was some wind so I zipped up my jacket. I watched his eyes wander up and down the pathway.

It’s windy, I said.

Yeah, said my dad. Sometimes I miss the snow.

I wish I could remember it better. In Turkey.

We’ll go back sometime, he said. But we wouldn’t.

We kept walking around the neighborhood until we saw the brown-shingled house with the crabapple tree. Here you had to decide if you wanted to stay in the neighborhood or enter the forest. We both walked towards the old wooden signpost where the dirt path began. As we started on the uneven, unpaved road, I had a faint recollection of reading The Sound and the Fury in seventh grade, how I used to spend those long afternoons hiding away with those books. I dismissed the thought. Thinking about the text felt far away to me now, like putting a piece of saran-wrapped food in one’s mouth.

My dad and I walked deeper into the forested path. There were trees all around that sprouted upwards and bent sideways so it felt like we were enveloped in some kind of an elastic, resounding green sphere. Roots crept out from the side of the pathway. Some old leaves littered the ground like paper tickets. There were faint sounds of birds calling, but we never saw any birds. We heard the rushing of water, but never came across a creek. I grew to love the sensation of the wind biting at my cheeks, like icy pricks. We came across a clearing with a low wooden fence surrounding it that was falling apart. Tall, knee-high grasses grew, swaying, and in the distance, a wooden farmhouse. The sun, setting, washed the sky with a patient pink. The path grew elevated, and I realized we were going up a mountain. We had not continued down this pathway before. There was something that bound us, some coldness that annealed our joints, so that we kept our hands deep and snug in our pockets and continued to walk.

What about that girl today? What was in her locket?

Why were you afraid to get to know her?

We approached a thicket of trees and navigated the roots. Each one was scaly, as if covered in old skin. Then we saw a small creek running through a crevice of earth, the water barely moving over the stones, rippling glassily over smoothed, greened rocks, eroded by time, golden and amber and grey in the light. I took a deep breath in: the beauty hurt my eyes to see. But from far away enough I could admire it.

Then above that, on the dry, graveled banks, was an overturned train.

I couldn’t really understand the train. It was a single car from a train lying on its side, like some kind of dead animal, and it had clearly crashed. The bottom stomach of it was creased like rubber and blackened, and shards of glass were arrayed around it. The whole thing, which reached the height of the canopy of leaves, barely reflected any light.

I stood there for a very long time, gazing at its long, smooth flanks, its lack of an engine. It was tactile and opaque; the material looked correct. The peeled flakes of its body from its wreck pittered on the ground, stirred by the wind’s ladle. It was hard not to animate it all of a sudden, think of the train as a small ecosystem that was alive. I wondered if nature had grown inside before I suddenly realized the impossibility of such a sight. I was hallucinating, I reasoned, but then my dad spoke.

How did this get up here? he said. He had begun to crouch down in the water, splashing it onto his face.

I waded through the creek, wetting my socks and ankles in the process, and my dad followed. The two of us stood in the water. The air rustled and prickled like leaves against our skin. We heard the water move around us, icy, the sky a pale, morning-light bowl. The sight settled in my eyes like a mirage.

Maybe it’s some kind of modern art, I said. Even as I said it I recognized the impossibility of such a feat. No plaques, no inscriptions. It was as if a railroad had cut through the forest, with a stop at its heart. When the train stopped at the station, the rest of it disappeared, and the train tilted on its side. I inspected the ground for railtracks, but there were none.

Where’s the rest of it?

There were a few windows but they were tinted black so that we couldn’t see. The doors were wide open, but they were facing up, the flaps resting open like wings, which meant we would need to climb up to see inside. There was a faintly corrosive but clean smell of acid. It barely cast a shadow.

I don’t know, I said.

We stood there for a long time and I had a distinct sensation of shock tingling up and down my skin like the feet of small bugs.  

Then my dad began to climb on the slanted side of the train. It was corrugated, and his feet left dents in the weak metal. The sound of each footstep creaked. I almost expected him to fall through, for the train to collapse like paper or saran. His body moved towards the top. When I began to follow him I was surprised by the strength of the metal. It was shiny, so shiny it was blindingly bright, under my hands and feet. At the top I surveyed our surroundings. I felt like some kind of bird; the water looked different from here. But the trees were still infinitely high above.

We came towards the doors and peered in. It was dark inside, so I used the flashlight of my phone. I thought inside would have been empty, perhaps populated with some small sculptures left behind by an artist, but I was wrong. Inside I saw bodies splayed over seats. Death rose up like a stench. The sight was disquieting.

I turned off my flashlight, let my sight rest in the dark cave, not believing. Then I turned my flashlight back on. Once again, the bodies preserved in death – some sitting in the seats, blackened with ash and dried blood, some toppled over, like statues. The skin had peeled back to reveal the cool glint of bone. I heard the husky whisper of the water from the creek, like sandpaper moving over corn. My voice caught in my throat like a square of metal.

What is this? I said. I couldn’t’ take my eyes off of it, but I made myself look at my dad.

This is a burial site, he said.

Is this real?

It’s whatever we want it to be.

My dad leaned closer and reached his hand forwards, as if to test the threshold of the door. His fingers moved forward, the clay residue on them like contact with rubble. Then he brought his legs to the edge and began to lower himself down. I heard him strike the floor with a loud clamor. I touched the darkness, feeling it leave a cold trace on my fingers, feeling it spread up my wrist and forearm. I closed my eyes. An emotion I had not felt in a long time – fear – cracked through me like a whip, a numbing lash. I wondered how it would feel to land on something that was once human – to hear the crunch. I couldn’t bear to imagine it.

Na-ying, my dad called.

He had not used my Mandarin name in years.

Come down here.

It was like something cold was moving me. I let myself drop. My body thrashed for a moment as I fell and split open the liquid darkness and then a flash of pain juddering through me as I hit the floor. My wrist tore through a cobweb. I fumbled for my phone flashlight. The light opened the train car. My dad was looking at the bodies, the loosened strands of hair, at the sternum that had been opened by a moving pole. He saw an old green purse and a coffee cup on its side, a brown stain on the fabric of the chair. He saw a stuffed animal eaten by ants, but the ants were no longer present – just a pale pink bear with its stuffing emerging. Then he saw a mother bent over, arms tight around her stomach, the bone of the neck sheathed in crumpled, grey skin. She was wearing a red sweater coming loose at the seams. Next to her, a baby bottle, a small, orange rattle.

I looked at my dad. His mouth began to tremble.

I was making something for her, in the studio, he said. It was this big. He made a gesture with his hands, pinching his fingers. The size of a baby’s fist. I was making her a little baby cup to drink milk out of.

I think we need to get out of here. I –

Then it dropped on the floor, he said. This wind came through and – I shivered, and it completely broke it in half. No matter how hard I tried to put the pieces back together. I wanted to make a whole set. With –

Stop, Dad. Something was pounding in my head, some hot yellow gauze thundering and vibrating in my eyes, choking me up. Suddenly I was sitting in a sunlit study with my mother, who was eating almonds out of a tin, and I was sitting there with a copy of The Sound and the Fury, reading to the baby, the text turning into something gold in the air, drumming a beat, flowing into my mother’s body. My heart was beating so loud it hurt me and I looked at my dad with fear. He was looking at the desk still hanging by a hinge, in front of the mother’s teenage daughter, where there was something metal connected to a power bank that was, miraculously, still blinking blue. It was a phone.

My dad picked it up. It was a phone, and it flickered to dusty, exhausted life. It was connected to a pair of tangled wire earbuds. He opened it. There was no passcode. The screen was on the voicemail inbox. There was one dated two weeks ago. I watched him press play.

A voice came out, filling the train carriage. It was the voice of a young man and in the background there was the sound of rushing traffic and rain, every noise magnified by the silence. His voice was low and slow.

Look, Madeleine, the voicemail began. I know you’re on the road right now, so call me back when you get the chance. I just… I don’t know. I can’t get you off my mind.

His voice was something warm, now, like silt from a dream.

I know we just met. I know this is going to sound crazy.

A scuffle as he exited the car; the hullabaloo of pedestrians around him.

Sorry. I was getting out of the taxi. Look. I just want to know –– can I see you again? I can fly back to California. I think you’re the one.

My dad looked at the remnants of the hand. Dark blood lay there, matted. No ring, he said.

She never listened to the voicemail.  

There were strands of light hair like old, dirty glass against the blue fabric of her sweater. My breath trembled.  

I didn’t want to leave, suddenly. A deep pull like a whirlpool at the bottom of a river dragged at me, crystal-cold, caressing me. I could remain here, purified and lightheaded and dizzied, until I fell in love with the darkness, and became one with the train. My dad’s breath, behind me, sounded like someone much younger, on the brink of maturity. I waited for him to become calm again. I heard it still, his breath tripping, like rain in a gutter, and I moved forward to give him space. Where the light grew out into dark I saw an arm against the floor. It was pale, distended, its fingers papery against the bone, like a snakeskin; I avoided looking towards the rest of the body. On it there was a tattoo of a musical note and silver rings. They looked odd there. The light hairs of the finger were gone. I crouched before it. Somehow I felt its stillness, like a wax statue. Next to it I saw the gleam of a zipper.

I sat down on the now-dusty patterned seat, where this woman once sat, and unzipped her backpack. The sound was familiar and sweet. My dad took a seat across from me, and the light of the flashlight grew, concentrated harshly into the mouth of the backpack. The two of us put our elbows on the beige table between us and took the objects out of her backpack. A small camera, an alligator-skin wallet that shone dimly in the light, a pack of chips, a small notebook with flowers on its cover. In the padded inner pocket, a laptop. When I flipped it open, a soft light filtered out, asking for a password. There were a few battery percentages left. I opened the first few pages of her notebook, and she had written, in cursive, access information for all her accounts. Smart woman.

I keyed it in, the pads of my fingers brushing the intimate keys of her laptop – charlie3827, it was – and the laptop opened into what I assumed was a photograph of Charlie, a border collie sitting on the beach. I imagined her crouching to snap the photo, editing it to bring out Charlie’s stillness. Two tabs were open, pinned to the screen – a video recording, of her, frozen, violin under chin, another a digital sticky note, bright yellow.

Do we press play?

I’m scared, I said. My voice sounded dim, like we were underwater.

 My dad pressed play. I saw his eyes shining, like he was watching someone else’s child being born. It was shot from a laptop balanced unstably on something on a desk; she was in an old college dorm room. The quality was grainy and there were sounds of shouting from outside, and sirens. She picked up her violin, tucked it underneath her chin, paused. I heard her swallow her saliva. She placed the bow to the strings and began to play – a slowness that crescendoed into a passion which animated her entire body, moving to fill the angles of the screen. She had brown hair and a round face; I couldn’t see her eyes. Her music, dry, crackled through our air.

On the Post-it note:

I guess I just keep thinking of you and that first night we spent together in high school at that piano, riffing back and forth.

I have so many questions I’d want to ask you – music, life, how you’re doing, in general, and how you want to be doing – but I can’t. I’m not letting myself reach out to you anymore. I just picked up the violin again, and it makes me think of you.  

My dad pressed pause on her laptop. We shut it before it could die. Today someone asked me about this, I said, my hand instinctively touching the necklace. I felt like my voice was swallowed by water.

My dad’s face was suddenly sharp, sharp with a kind of hairy pain, and I saw that contortion, and it put a needle into my heart, and I felt that pinch shoot through me. Tears began to wet his eyes. Why did she have to go, he said. Why did she have to go.

I minced my lips. Only one of us could cry. I cleared my throat but I felt nothing come out, like coughing out a mothball. I don’t know, I said. I thought of the last time I saw her in the hospital. She was already too large for me to hold her. I was much shorter then. When I looked at her on the bed I saw her face, her little face, her little, unknowable face, and her words, which had already become unintelligible to me. The red string around the soft folds of her neck lay there; the jade ring I had picked out for her in China, once, on a trip to see our grandparents, moved as she moved, lying cold on her chest. Her bib was a soft blue. Tubes wreathed around her. On the television an old cartoon played. In that moment in my hilarity I thought suddenly of Benjy – those lines of text in that book I read for school, his howling, how nobody could hear him, how he would lie scattered across the page, roaring into the void. I wanted to destroy that book and burn it. I could feel my own heartbeat crashing and stuttering, words were not enough to fill the void that cracked through me like a whip in that moment, I was silenced, I never wanted to open a book again, how could they be enough, how could they ever be enough – and the night we all sat around the study, motionless, and my mother poured us tea in that teapot my father had made the day she was born, and in our recklessness and exhaustion we swept it onto the ground, and it broke, and the tea stain stayed there on the rug no matter how hard we tried to scrub it out – and my dad didn’t speak for a week –

One day, my dad said, we’ll die too. And we’ll see her on the other side of the road, waving to us through the snow. And we’ll all sit together and eat.

I turned my face and held my breath. Then I stood up and walked away. I looked up at the square of afternoon above us, as bright as rain. It was entirely clear. I heard the call of a blackbird in the distance. I saw the round bulbs of bone near me, the old swatches of hair crushed against surfaces. They looked motionless, like they were props in a musical. My dad’s reflection was visible to me down the chain of windows, stretched out, and I saw him as a little boy, head in his hands.

This place, he said. Look at this place. You can feel it.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I wanted to leave him there, let him sleep in that dream of a vinyl seat, tuck him in with an old blanket, let him listen to old violin music. I wondered if he would feel safe here under the yellowed light of the laptop. The light burned my eyes, made me feel scraped.

I don’t know what to say, I said. I just keep thinking, over and over again, how fast it was. I can’t – I can’t leave it behind. We did everything. Sold our house. Moved to America. And still every night I think about her.

My dad’s eyes were reddened now. I placed my feet on the footholds of the wall, hearing the wall throb beneath me, and gripped the cold ledges of the open top. I heaved myself up and landed on the surface with a grunt. My breath caught in my throat. Everything was slowed around me. I focused on the sounds of nature so that I wouldn’t hear him cry. The sound of the water made me think of her whistle, and of the unintelligibility of her final weeks, her garbled, sweet speech, how her eyes moved beneath the holsters of her lids, wanting. I could never understand her, and I never would.

When my dad surfaced, we were both weakened and loosened, something having moved through us and popped sockets within us, crinkled the rusted joints in our bodies. We waded back through the river, and I felt the cold for the first time.

*

Back at the house I took the soup ladle and spooned broth into each bowl, which were old ceramic bowls my dad had made, chipped. But the spoon clinking against the ceramic made some noise which made me feel like time was newly separated into pieces, like windchimes. I set them on the table and the light was on. We all gathered around the table and I looked at everyone’s faces, which were a little bit blue, and papery, and the browns of their eyes moved around like marbles. Adam poured his rice into his soup and stirred it and the wet grains slid around, his spoon clinking against the inside wall of the bowl.

At night my dad returned from the art store, placing a plastic bag of materials on the table with a thunk. I peered in and saw chunks of clay, sponges, and shaping materials, dim slabs that were rosy with life, filled with a kind of crooning harmony before us. My dad’s adept fingers sliced the clay into thin strips that he placed on a rolling board before me. He liked to play with it before he began to formulate an idea. I had an idea, all of a sudden; I took the necklace off of my neck and laid it before him. He nodded, curling his lip with thoughtfulness and ambition. As he began to shape, I took a chunk and felt the weight of the clay in my hands – earthen, loose, and porous, with a kind of dull heartbeat to it. I started to work with it.