White Tiger on Snow Mountain (7 page)

But isn’t this always the case with writing, even the most supposedly personal? Nothing ever turns out as I intend. Nothing I wrote yesterday looks familiar. I can hardly believe it’s my handwriting in the morning or unscramble what I scribbled when I dreamed that big idea the night before. And like dream
work, fiction takes the bits of real life and its concerns, both grand and petty, recent and ancient, remakes them, and presents the results as a clueless puzzle that only leads us deeper into the dark.

Shortly after I penned those gems, my wife left me for someone who she said better understood her needs. I moved to New York, quit smoking, burned through several aborted careers, and produced a pile of fiction that I called by my name but that seemed as inscrutable as Romanian porn. What the hell was I talking about anyway? But that night, for the first time in a long, long time, perusing “Confessions of a Bi-Babysitter” and “Yanna: Milkmaid at the Stud Farm,” I actually found my own work sort of compelling.

It seemed I wasn’t the only one. As I pored through the evidence, I detected a second set of fingerprints. Someone named, or screen-named, “delayeddelights” had repeatedly searched for, posted about, and responded to “me.” Like a towered princess in a distant galaxy, delayeddelights had even sent a number of distress calls out into the universe, wondering where I, or he, was. Finally, past midnight, and years out of date, MFA sent back a hello. I stood guard over the dark screen for a while, watching the far horizon for a response, then had cookies and iced mint tea. I was busy flossing when her light flickered on and she asked, with a parenthetical, side-ways smile, if I’d like to chat.

As it turned out, delayeddelights was a 20s F living in Wburg, where she was a student and a part-time dog-walker. She’d been in high school when she first discovered my work, a middle-class kid lost in the vast suburban reaches of Long Island, struggling
with some sticky young feelings and ancient pitch-black urges she couldn’t talk about with her off-line, real-time peers. Angelic in the photo she sent—blond, slender, freckled, laughing in the sunshine with a puppy—she apparently had the mind of a middle-aged pervert, as she visited and revisited my most far-flung creations, declaring “brilliant” and “so fucking hot” the sterile fantasies I had composed one-handed while gobbling my tuna sandwich.

“I thought I was crazy,” she told me on the phone. “I thought I was the only person in the world who had these feelings. I’d give my math teacher what I thought were like smoldering looks—he was fat and ugly, but the pool of older men was really limited—and he just looked at me like I was nuts.” Her voice was bright and clear and somehow more troubling for being so straightforward. “I’d drop hints to my friends, like did you ever hear about people doing this or that, but when they got grossed out, I’d pretend to be kidding and be like, yeah, isn’t that weird, while inside I was dying. Then I saw your stories. They were exactly like my fantasies, but better even, things I’d never imagined. I got so excited it was like I had a fever. Then later I’d feel guilty. I’d think, who does this guy think he is, and get mad and report you and demand you be taken down. Then I’d go read it again. I got older and I moved to Brooklyn and went to college and met some guys, but I was always comparing them to you. Or like I imagined you. You were like my secret. And now here you are. The dirtiest man ever.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I think.” I told her what my ex-wife and Leticia had thought.

“They didn’t understand you,” she assured me.

“They didn’t? I was afraid that they did.”

“Or maybe they’re really reading them right now. I bet there’s hundreds of women, all over, who read your words in secret.” She said she’d found Leticia’s previous articles online and emailed me the link to a six-month-old academic journal. There was a photo of me, with the caption “Personaje ficticio difunta”: Dead Fictional Person.

“But I love the beard,” delayeddelights told me. “I like you scruffy.” She hesitated. A puppy yelped in the background. “Do you think, maybe, we should finally meet? Talk or whatever? Have a drink? We can do whatever you want.”

Should I go? It was late. I was already in my pajamas. How would a guy like MFA dress, anyway? In a mask and cape? I was tempted to ask her to wait and then call Rivka, but there wasn’t time. “I don’t even know what I want,” I told her truthfully.

“That’s all right,” she said. “I do.”

I could hear the excitement quivering in her voice. I imagined her body pressed against mine, fierce little heart beating like a bird. The one thing I knew for sure was that I would ruin it somehow. I would lose it all. I agreed.

“Hurry,” she said. “I love your writing! Take a cab. I’ll split it.”

“No problem,” I declared, counting my singles, “I got it.” I told her about my experimental
Psoriasis
and offered to bring the manuscript.

She thought about it. “That’s OK. Maybe another time.”

O dirty love! O dawn! O darkness! The heartbreak of this world is that it could be so perfect, if not for me. And then, like a phantom, like a dark master of the finest arts, like a ghostwriter from the invisible world, I set out to cross that river and touch the unknown shore.

Su Li-Zhen

On a rainy day in April, my ex-girlfriend Nina called me for help.

“What kind of help?” I assumed it would be money or lifting things.

“Research,” she said. “I need to look up something and you’re the biggest brainiac I know.”

“Am not.”

“Are so. You’re all quotey and everything.” She was teasing me for the bookish references that compulsively peppered my speech. Frankly, it hadn’t to do with brains so much as a lack of outside stimuli. I’ve spent my life in a room, reading. All I had to report at dinner is what Genet or Nabokov said that day. Nina’s own favorite authors were a heady brew: Ayn Rand, Rumi, and Aleister Crowley.

“What’s this about anyway?” I asked.

“I have to track down my ex-lover.”

“What?” I was a bit incredulous.

“Don’t be jealous. He’s my lover from a former life.”

Nina was an odd girl. I won’t go into our whole relationship; I’ll just say that we fascinated each other in a way only possible for those with absolutely nothing in common, like an anteater and a flamingo meeting at the waterhole. I remember the one Christmas Eve we shared. She dragged me to church with the rest of her brightly blond clan, sang about Jesus with unnerving gusto, then gave me a framed nude photo of herself as a gift. She was a ballad-singing, break-dancing, DJ-ing actress-model-dancer whose great ambition was to be a pop star or appear in a sitcom. She got by on the occasional overseas toothpaste ad while moonlighting at a midtown massage parlor where, dressed in a bikini, she oiled up and rubbed down tense businessmen for $250 a pop, as it were, plus tip. I pictured a kind of human car wash where tiny elven girls pumped and polished the hoary carcasses of old husbands, detailing them like the fat, sleek vehicles they drove home. Although a dozen years her senior, I was still the youngest and poorest boyfriend Nina had ever had.

Early on she complained that I didn’t treat her with the “reverence” and “worshipful attitude” she’d come to expect. Apparently, other reviewers had praised her lavishly as “a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” Letting her so much as touch her wallet when accompanying her in a shop was “a major faux pas,” which, frankly, made her feel embarrassed for me. I could only laugh. She fell pretty short in the old-fashioned girlfriend department herself: When I was sick in bed for a week, she didn’t bring me soup or even visit. She admitted it hadn’t so much as crossed her mind. She’d never risk losing her voice. Maybe we were both no good.

Still, like I said, I sit in a room reading, and to see her DJ before a crowd of jumping kids or performing her Qi Gong exercises in the morning, swinging her arms and bouncing up and down in her underwear—well, it was like a breath of life. What she saw in me, who knows? The truth is, in the end, she even started cooking for me, awful concoctions that I wolfed gamely while, suspicious but happy, she slopped seconds onto my plate.

Nina had once lived in Taipei, years before. She’d been recruited as the white member of a multicolored girl-pop group, recorded one minor hit, and been the lover of a Chinese gangster. Or maybe not a gangster. A guy who owned bars and lent money but supposedly didn’t involve himself with drugs or violence, the line between businessman and criminal being perhaps a bit blurrier there than here. Perhaps. Anyway, we visited together, and I fell in love with the place. It was like the dream where you don’t know if it’s the future or the past: Streets full of thousands of scooters, and everyone in those facemasks and helmets. Alleys crammed with stands selling dumplings and papaya milk and candied tomatoes. Girls with umbrellas hiding from the sun. Old men in pajamas chewing
bing-lang
and spitting red juice. Sweet teenagers on dates lining up for tripe.

It was ghost month. The day we arrived, the news showed the opening of the gates to hell. People put out offerings of incense and flowers for their ancestors, but also instant ramen noodles and Oreos and Cokes. They came out of office buildings with bundles of ghost money, red and gold, and set it on fire in the street. We took afternoon naps while it poured and wore things that I at least would never wear at home: red robes, sleeveless undershirts, slippers in the street. At dinner, blindly, we felt for each other beneath the table. We raced back to our
tiny rooftop room, with the laundry dripping from the one barred window and neon fish swimming through the drowned streets below. Dressed like a princess in imitation silk, hair pinned high with lacquered sticks, she stepped out into the hall and then reentered our room, where I lay in the dark, pretending to be one of her clients, waving a fat wad of New Taiwan dollars and waiting for the robe to fall.

We returned to New York, and that autumn, things began to change between Nina and me, as if the spell had been broken, although who had cast it on whom, I don’t know.

Maybe it was because we were so obviously ill suited that our breakup, while not without sadness, was bloodless, even friendly, and we kept in touch. Or she did, always being the one to call and suggest a meeting. But I always agreed. After all, she was extremely attractive, with big shiny eyes and the light bones of a dancer, small waist, compact torso, long arms and legs. Whenever we got together for coffee or a movie, I ended up trying to squeeze her and she usually acceded.

I’d agreed to meet Nina and discuss her research project, and was waiting in front of the Hungarian, my usual coffee shop, when she popped out of a Porsche SUV (I didn’t know they existed either) driven by a sleeveless muscleman in a ponytail.

“New bodyguard?” I asked.

“Music producer,” she said. “He likes my stuff.”

“I’ll bet.” I noticed that she didn’t mind kissing me on the mouth while he could see. “Hey,” I said as we went inside, “that’s my sweatshirt.” It was a gray hoodie, much too big, that made her look like a monk.

“I found it.” She sat cross-legged on the chair and shook her
light hair from the hood. “Anyway, I can’t give it back right now. I’m not wearing anything underneath.”

This was enough to fill my mind with possible squeezings, so I let it go for the moment. We ordered and I asked, “Now what’s this about ex-lovers and a former life?”

It had all begun at her acting school. Of course. It turns out one of her teachers was a channeler on the side.

“Channeler? Like a medium or something?”

“It’s kind of like that,” she said. “She’s amazing. This girl in the school was auditioning for the Usher movie. So my teacher went into the future and cleaned the room where the auditions were going to be, and she got the part.”

“What’s Usher?”

“He’s only like the hugest pop star, but of course you wouldn’t know.”

Actually, it sounded familiar. The movie had tanked, and I’d seen it on sale at the video store.

“This lady is amazing,” Nina went on. “She’s really just one of those spiritually enlightened souls you meet sometimes.”

“I’ve never met any,” I said.

“That’s because you’re not open. If you’re open, they find you.”

“If she’s got such powers, how come she doesn’t just spend all day helping cancer kids or spreading world peace? How could she charge money? Or waste her talent helping some actress get a part in a crappy movie? Why is it more spiritual for her to get the part than another girl? Spiritual to me is Gandhi or Martin Luther King or something. Everything else is just a magic trick.”

She looked at me pityingly. “You’re such a hater,” she said.
Then, spooning up hot cocoa, she told me about the weekend workshop this channeling teacher gave. It involved rolling on the floor to various kinds of music, African drumming, Balinese gamelan gonging, Sufi chanting, each associated with a different chakra. Also they would “call in” colors. I asked what that meant.

“You know, like you call in blue. Or you call in red.”

“Like you try to feel blueness or something?”

“Kind of.”

“Was this naked?” The whole thing sounded both ridiculous and perverse, but not in a good way, and I knew her acting classes occasionally involved running around naked and crying.

“No, of course not. It figures you would ask that.” She shook her head sadly. “It was transformative. And after the workshop, Betsy—that’s the teacher—said I had a lot of spirits around me, a lot of energy emanating.”

“Of course,” I said. “That’s how they sucker you in.”

Nina ignored me. “Then she said that the images she was getting were Chinese. That I had been Chinese in a past life and that’s why I was drawn back to Taiwan. And she even mentioned this.” She reached into her collar and pulled a necklace out from under my sweatshirt. It was a small jade dragon curled on itself, with a yin-yang symbol in the center and little holes for eyes. “She said it was something I wore in my previous incarnation.”

“But I bought you that,” I pointed out.

“I know. I always said you should develop your psychic abilities. You have a lot of spiritual energy around you too. I bet you could see spirits if you were open to them. You’re just so closed off.”