The Border of Paradise: A Novel (14 page)

For example.

By the eighth month in Polk Valley I could not spend too much time in the house, and would pace the hallway, the kitchen, and the living room until Daisy suggested that I go for a walk. By then it was November and colder than it had any right to be in my vision of California. I learned that in winter, in the foothills and mountains, it would snow, and there would be snow in the field behind our house, and it would pile to the top of the porch steps and whisper dangerous secrets that only I could hear. But in November it was simply cold.

She held William—who was already clever by then, and had a perpetually solemn and nearly melancholic expression on his face—up with her hands so that he hung high in the air with his feet dangling. She nipped at his naked toes, and he stared at her until he finally turned away, wriggling, and this rejection made me sick. Daisy’s response was to pull him closer, and to murmur things to him in a language that I didn’t understand.

“Please don’t do that,” I said.

“What?”

“Don’t talk to him in Chinese. I don’t understand what you’re saying, and he’ll get confused.”

“He is Chinese baby.”

“He’s an
American
baby.”

I tugged on my heavy boots, a wool sweater over long johns, an overcoat, a scarf. I put on an old hat with fur earflaps, and I opened the back door. I looked out at all the land before me, but even the sight of the field and the trees beyond the field didn’t calm me, not with the irritation climbing my throat.

“Bye-bye,” Daisy said. “Say ‘Bye-bye, Daddy.’”

I didn’t turn around.

“You think you will go where?” she asked me.

“Into the woods,” I said, “to get a bit of fresh air. I won’t be long.”

I walked out onto the back porch, where we had a rocking chair and a few label-less tin cans with my cigarette butts in them, and I walked into the field, feeling a shadowy fear put its finger to my heart.

But I’d been wrong about the possibilities of the land. The air was good. It was the sort of air that I’d come to Polk Valley for, fresh and unsullied by the smells of people and their machines, and I felt better almost immediately. In the clean air sounds rang out; the crunch of my boots pressing into the snowy field crackled for what seemed like miles. I saw a pinecone that looked like a corncob, and another one that looked like an armadillo, though there were no trees till I reached the line of the woods, and when I reached the line of the woods I saw that these tightly packed pinecones were everywhere if I only kept watch for them. I walked deeper and deeper into the woods without thinking and without concern for whether I would be able to find my way back. It was my land, wasn’t it? How pathetic it would be, to be lost on my own plot. And just when I was about to turn around and pick my way back (I had some sort of half-assed notion of following my own tracks back to the house), lost in my thoughts and the pleasure of getting to know my property, I saw a long shape lying in the dirt behind a tree a few yards away.

I steadied myself. The head of a deer—a buck? No horns. A young deer, then, or a doe. Dark, wide eyes open, frozen. I thought about the animals I’d seen at the American Museum of Natural History. Those creatures brought new meaning to the phrase “still life,” and here was an animal, dead, with guts still inside—did blood congeal?—and how had this deer or doe fallen without a predator to kill it? Illness, then. It was probably full of poisoned maggots feeding on poisoned blood. Yet I walked toward it, and when I saw its entire length spread out before me, tears pricked my eyes, and I sat on the dirt in front of the animal. I thought about touching it. Its face was so peaceful, unlike my father’s in his coffin, whose face had been twisted in unceasing agony even in death. But here was this animal that could very well be resting, and just as I sat down in front of it with all intentions to enjoy its calm presence, I blinked, and it was gone.

But what could I do with a moment such as that one, or with the hundreds of moments like it afterward? I have been to Wellbrook several times; I have been to doctors. My options have been psychoanalysis, electroshock, or medication with more side effects than treatment functions. There is no taught method of coping. What the doctors never told me is that a percentage of the crazy are also living a crazy lifestyle. Others are more fortunate.
For them, being mad is like a cold. They don’t even call it an illness. They say,
I was melancholy, I was under the weather. I was panicking in the supermarket by the grapefruits and my hands went numb, but now I’m sitting in front of the television with a glass of wine and some pills, and I’m doing all right.

I do miss my adolescence, when they simply called me a victim of neurosis.

The doctors said,
Try this, try that, try this,
never,
You’re a lunatic for life,
so that every time it came up it was a surprise in the way that a paper cut is surprising.

Maybe the key is to not be surprised.

The doctors don’t give you much in the way of options, which is why so many of us madmen choose to go full stop. As though the problem were a matter of, say, picking the right location or knife or piece of rope, and not the horror of knowing one’s own wretched selfishness. Such solipsism: a crime with a punishment worse than death. I am fully aware of the choices I’ve made.

I walked back to the house. By then it was getting dark, and with the dark came a deeper cold. I stepped onto the porch and saw, through the window, Daisy in the kitchen with William. Only the overhead kitchen light was on, and because Daisy and William were sitting beneath it, their heads were suffused with a white glow; her dark one and his slightly lighter one were both encircled by halos of light. The religious nature of this image was not lost on me. She had a book open on his lap. She was reading to him in her slow words, words that sounded incorrect to my American ear, but wasn’t it enough that she was trying? Without her, I was alone. Without me, she was alone.

I opened the screen door and then the back door, and Daisy finally looked up at me.

“American book,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “
Goodnight Moon
.”

“You take him,” she said. “I will make dinner.”

I came up behind her and put my hands on her thin shoulders, feeling the taut muscles that connected to her bones. I leaned into her and sank my nose into the crown of her head where the hair was soft and thick, and I breathed in her warm hazelnut
smell. William fidgeted. I heard his small hands slap the pages of the book, and I said, “I love you.” I waited for my heart to pound in the old way; I swear that I wanted it to so badly, but it only beat steadily enough to keep me alive.

“I love you,” she said.

“We have a nice family.”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to be all right,” I said, and then I added, “I love you.”

“Yes. Here, take him.” She closed the book and put it on the kitchen table. She handed me the baby. I sat at the table and lifted him into the air, swaying him from side to side. He kicked like a frog swimming and laughed. I thought,
How could I ever ask for more than this?

On the first visit to the Golden Lotus I was assigned to a petite creature whose limbs gyrated like she was made for sex. She was the kind of thing that I could reach out and eat like a ripe, skinned mango. I watched her wriggle her hands up and down, moving them in slow spirals around her body, and then she bent over so that her ass was in my face. How she did this in the constricting
qipao
I do not know. When I was younger I would have been embarrassed, but I was no longer, as I had conveniently forgotten my faults. The point of sex, then, is to become an amnesiac regarding the horrible parts of the self and to absorb oneself only in the friendliness of sensation—to be inhuman for once. I let her degrade herself in front of me because I’d paid money for her and this was what she was, a fleshy being swaying before me for the purpose of my arousal, the only thing that could get my mind off my self because I did not want to think of my self. I wanted to only think of warm skin wrapped around me, and I had paid enough money, hadn’t I? All I was good for was money.

After the girl danced for a while she opened the paper sliding door and called out, and then she came and sat next to me at the table on the floor. She still had that absent presence. She asked me what my name was. I told her.

“David,” she echoed.

“And your name?” I asked.

“Mei-Ling.”

We sat in silence. I didn’t touch her, and perhaps it was still leftover childishness that held me back, or a softness that came over me when I heard her gentle voice. In ten minutes there was a rap at the door, and she called out again before the door slid open. The fat girl I’d seen at the market came in with a tray with a bottle of liquor and two tumblers. She didn’t appear to recognize me.

“For you, whiskey,” Mei-Ling said. She watched as the other girl poured. They said something to each other in Mandarin or Taiwanese, the latter a pungent dialect derived from Hokkien, and the fat girl left us alone again.

Mei-Ling pushed one tumbler toward me and I touched it to my lips. She nodded, lifting her glass to her own swollen mouth. I swallowed. I grew increasingly drunk as the second girl popped in with more whiskey, and with Mei-Ling occasionally asking questions in broken English. What did I do? Did I like Taiwan? The drunker I got the more I saw her as a variety of different animals: doe, lynx, mouse, house cat. The whiskey splintered the air between us. She was only a girl, really, but with makeup on she looked older, her carmine lipstick forming a bow on her full lips, the heavy ermine-white powder on her face forming a feral apparition. Doe, deer, female deer, feline, fox. I’d succeeded in getting as far away from my old life as possible. Her hair, inky. Compact body. Small breasts hidden beneath her dress and not the heavy sway of Marianne’s, Marianne’s hair the color of the sun. Mei-Ling put her hand between my legs. The feeling of falling. Remember that I was a virgin. She grasped my hand and slid it up her leg to the softness between her legs where there were no undergarments, slipping my fingers inside her (soft as the inside of a raccoon) while she massaged my aching groin, and that was all it took—I shuddered and spasmed without meaning to, my body jolting as I ejaculated into my pants. I blushed, and then I hated her. With an inchoate and abstract desire I wanted to beat her senseless. I even saw the red handprint on her white cheek that I did not make. Red, white, black: those terribly dramatic colors. Even the room smelled violent.

Without letting any surprise at my ejaculation show, she moved so that we were separate beings again. Here was a small clean towel from out of nowhere. I undid my pants and wiped myself off like a child: disgusted, embarrassed. Meanwhile, Mei-Ling
undid and then fixed her hair. It was my underwear, and not my trousers, that bore the brunt of the damage, which was a small relief. She patted her bun, and opened the door to call outside again.

An older woman in a heavy kimono came; later I would learn that this was Daisy’s mother, the mama-san. “Mei-Ling is requested to go,” she said. “You will come back. We would like to see you tomorrow.”

I nodded, surprised by her forthrightness, but already I was thinking of coming back. After the mama-san left, I said, “Goodbye, Mei-Ling.”

“Good-bye,” she said, surprised. “Okay?” And she sounded a bit frightened. I guess I must have seemed angry, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d gotten knocked around in that place. Then she said something I hadn’t expected at all, which was “What happened?” And she pointed at my scarred hand.

“I hurt it,” I said. “I cut myself.”

She nodded. I didn’t know if she understood, so I took my grandfather’s knife out of my pocket, flipped it open, and pretended to slice the back of my hand with the blade. “Like this,” I said.

“Why?”

“Haven’t you ever gotten hurt before?”

“I gotten hurt. No…” She pretended to cut herself. “No like this. I gotten hurt…” And then she slapped herself, her head whipping to the side.

I laughed. It seemed the correct response at the time. And she laughed, too. We laughed a little hysterically, I’ll admit. I’d had a few glasses of whiskey, but she was, as far as I knew, sober, and had barely sipped her first drink.