Molly's III.

Sunday, supper time. I hadn’t slept, eaten or bathed since Friday morning. I’d spent all my money trying to be the same place as him last term. All he'd done in the week I'd been back at school was wave once. The past weekend had been spent in suspension. No hope, no lesson.

When I knew he wanted to see me I was ready in 20 minutes. I grabbed a copy of Slaughterhouse Five, which I had finished for the second time last week, because I knew it would fit in my coat pocket. I paid for a cab and was breathless on his doorstep because he said he and his friend were going to study and I could come hang out if I wanted. I sat self-conscious, the basement room smelling like raisins. Those boys always smelled like raisins.

Us three tripped into the hall. I’d forgotten a hat. I pulled my fox tail hood over my eyes and the snow fell warm like down. I tried to tell him about Billy Pilgrim, shouting against the falling insulation in the empty street. I started to just plod along behind the boys, wet gripping at my long pants.

We climbed the stairs to the upper level. Dusty rafters, dusty kites. Peter Gabriel was on the hi-fi. A small card was on one of the thrift-store bed-stands that served as dining tables: “There is a seating fee of $2. Please spare us the embarrassment of asking.”

I stared at the same page for an hour. He got up and put his jacket on without a word. He left me with his friend. I wouldn’t allow myself to ask what was going on. I saw that it was nothing.

On the way back to my dorm, I broke into his bedroom. I left a photo of us together, as a last gesture, and slept thickly that night. When he wrote the next day to confess his infatuation, my heart sank as it does when another part of life ceases to make sense. I refused to control what happened between us in the years after. For that reason, it is all my fault.

I have a very good memory. I can remember things that happened to me I should have been too young to remember now. I remember my first step (I made it to the stairs, and I fell down them). I remember the moment I knew I did not want to drink from a bottle any more (I found the sensation of the rubber in my mouth stomach-turning. My Mom says I could not have been older than 2).

I remember my father's huge veiny hand holding a tabby kitten under a hot water tap to de-louse his fur – we were too poor to take animals to the vet, or to buy treatments. I would have been about two and a half. I don't remember the story of how he came to our house, but my father has told me.

We were driving up the Nor'west Road, almost in Sevogle. Dad looked into Buzzy's yard, and knew he had to stop.

Buzzy was about 5'2, wiry, with a big red beard and purple skin from whiskey. People called him Yosemite Sam, and this was just as much for his temper as it was for his look. Buzzy was holding a shot gun at his side. His son, Dale, 9, was holding a wooden box. Dale tossed the box into the air, somewhat miraculously without having it fall back down on his small body. Buzzy aimed and shot at the box. This looked to be the last of several attempts.

Buzzy's old cat had given birth again, and this was his inspired, drunken scheme to get rid of them. My Dad opened the box, to find one bug-eyed kitten amongst mangled and bloodied fur. He came home with us. I named him Buzzy. I remember that part, but I didn't remember why and I can't explain why. My sense of irony was simply not that well honed at age 2.

Buzzy the cat died last Spring. He'd been blind for some time, for years when you picked him up, his body had lacked that fluid, flexed sensation that most cats have, and he had stopped grooming himself or even standing when he had to void his bladder. His legs made cracking noises. He spent all his time against a heater. Brown sludge began to accumulate in the corners of his mouth, like seeping death.

I pleaded with my parents through a Southeast Asian calling card to put him out of his misery. My father was despondent, angry. We'd had that cat for almost as long as we had been a family, and to him we were desperate to kill him off.

Buzzy the cat had cheated death until he was 23. It is only appropriate that he was finally shot. Dad did it

雨

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

A typhoon does not rage outside. It endures. In China, you have to wait. It has always been like this. I will wait for the rain to stop. I will wait to learn my last day of work. I will wait to leave.

The curtains closed, the lamp left on. I tend to regard my days off as over once I reach 4 p.m., because by that time I wouldn’t be working anymore anyway. It has always been like this. I see the clock at 3:45 and feel a loss.

I was watching a pirated spring blockbuster. I heard blue-white movie choir voices climbing the trees of a spectral CGI forest and remembered nights cleaning my old apartment. Bjork slipping over the wooden floor, licking candle flames, rising to the high white ceiling. It’s not up to you, it never really was. The watermelon scent of my environmentally-friendly spray cleaner -- I was never really convinced it was helping anything. The night’s supper, a salmon filet, sweet chili, rice, pushed around on a plate, bitten at once or twice, then fermenting in the overpriced black tin trash can (it has always been like this). A rare time, back then, in which I felt whole while alone. I rarely cleaned.

We grow nostalgic for old problems; in this moment I regret that that time and place will never be mine again. I have always been like this.