goddamn, my pain fits
in the palm of your freezing hand
I catalyzed a suicide attempt in my sophomore year of high school. There was a brief moment when I considered abstaining, when I tried to talk my way out of being involved in this grotesque premeditation. At the time, I taught underclassmen at the local library. Eighteen hours a week printing test samples and shadowing high achievers who constantly grapple against their peers to get my fairly low-priced tutelage so they can maintain their grades. There were only three students I welcomed for the duration of the year. A Loid Forger who lived in a foster home because his father had been killed in-between deployments, a Sasha Blouse who had a hard time complying with the librarian's strict no eating rule, and Takumi Usui. I was an agreeable quasi-teacher, prone to being subjected to confessional spirals during the time it took for them to completely grasp the material, but only as long as they managed to reach the target. During study breaks, I encouraged open communication, and only two of them voiced their concerns about reaching the set milestones in time. That Takumi sparsely joined the conversation felt more like a kindness than a slight. He was a good student, more inclined to a personal approach through text messages, which I diligently scheduled to occur after tutoring session ended and before bedtime. During our conversation, I couldn't tell if he answered out of sincerity, or if he only endured it because he had to.
———
I was not loved and I was not unloved. To invite acceptance, you first have to be seen. So the story of my obsequiousness that once emerged innocent but subsequently grew into something tumorous is also the story of the first man who saw me. The man who shared the same blood as Takumi Usui, Gerald, a businessman who was pathological in the maneuver of his schemes. He was the seventh benefactor I'd met in my grandpa's charity ball. Handsome, a definite Punnet square of dominant British genes, so clear that shattered a hundred times he still appeared indistinguishable. The first day we met, he was smoking a thick cigar on the balcony two floors down the event hall. He told me that he had a tumultuous family and that he and his brother were no longer speaking, and there was something so easy about his immediate familiarity that I told him about my mother's severe alcoholism. How I found more liquor than cosmetics in her vanity table. How our conversations always started civil and ended in extreme violence. How it had only been a week since Thanksgiving dinner and she was already hitting me with her wine bottle. This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure perfection and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of a similarly situated party. I was pretending not to be moved by the consequences of my fawning. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the neglect of my anatomical function.
———
I was happy to be included in something, even if it was a mostly one-sided conversation with a man in a different continent. We texted on my lunch breaks and he delivered a flower bouquet for my birthday. I waited by his hotel door the few times he came to settle business with my grandpa. I sat on the plush carpet and watched him read with his head low and let him run his fingers through my hair. When he asked me how bruised I was, I lied. When I told him my mother had never cooked a homemade meal, he made me a burnt omelette, and sometimes he would call and make me tell him the extent of what I had to endure. But still there were moments I felt his tolerance, a surprising straightness about the use of his free time, unsubtle inquiries about the amount of space I routinely take up as to not limit his range of motion.
———
On our fourth meeting, he plucked my hand from the table and asked if I was capable of violence, the café's irregular rotation of noir jazz a murmur against the weight of his gaze. Even as he tried to preserve the part of me that was apparently untouched, sometimes I felt he was trying to scare me. As teenagers are, I was especially responsive to this challenge, determined to level the playing field. So I hunted down Takumi's insecurities as Gerald asked, and weaponized them the way a tamer trains his starving lion, with a bleeding flesh in his fist. There was something automated about Gerald's bidding, an offhanded perpetual motion, the inevitability of blood in his hands and the unconscious priming of a similarly situated party to do what they were meant to do, his attention elsewhere as he laid the groundwork and pulled me there with him. The way he would talk without prompting or encouragement, as if all this time he had been waiting for a captive audience. But there were moments that neutralized my fear, moments he softened his voice as I was doubting my participation, and between the lines was a mutual understanding that we were both grasping for reasons to make our solitude acceptable, that we were alone despite living in a world that contained people like Takumi, a language developing between us not so much romantic as it was breathless with shared resentment. So when he asked me to pull the trigger, I took this to mean that to him, I had become irreplaceable. He had considered me and noted my competence, my quintessential performance, the possibility that even within my small, juvenile universe, I might have something to offer.
———
Except, when I watched the twenty-seven minutes of suicide note Takumi sent by mistake, I couldn't see it through. I called 911 on him, and then took the car to his house. It happened in a rush. I climbed through the bedroom window, and everything smelled like rotten eggs and almonds. His body was cold and he convulsed when he breathed. I felt my relief in the desperate staccato of his heaving. I felt my error in how little I thought it would mean. I didn't talk to him because I could not bear to face the truth. I wanted to repent. So I left his house and bled privately at home, happy to have been given the chance to absolve. I had thought it would be more painful, but I wasn't new. Each time my mother swung her bottle, there was satisfaction, and when it began to feel like I might die, I believed, like a devout Christian, that the merit of penitence correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit. And then I was hospitalized. Then Gerald came to visit, a curious look on his face. I didn't apologize for what I couldn't do and he didn't ask for the cause of my injuries. When I glanced at him again, he didn't care to reciprocate, and when I was out of the hospital, he had left the country. My mother smiled that night, and then left me alone for a week. During that week, there were more tears than necessary. There was the vague recognition that he had determined a calculation and silently decided it wasn't something he can bear to see again. And there was my grandma's videotape collection. I hadn't gone through the cellar in months, but I unearthed Elizabeth Zimmerman's Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 2 and fed it to the insertion deck. I reached for the remote control and settled on the reclining chair, and a laugh bloomed and promptly died behind my teeth. A moment in which a joyless and reflexive action of the throat gave me hope that at some point, another laugh might follow.
———
When I turn and see my father's lack of presence, a current passes through an open window and it is the perfect iteration of that stale spring—the dust and videotape, the interior of Gerald's favorite coffee shop, my trembling body on top of his brother's resuscitated one—and there is this sound in the room, a howl I recognize as my own laughter.
———
My laugh, the real one, is a robust, ugly thing that has, on occasion, became a source of embarrassment for the people around me. So full credit is due when there is only a barest inclination on Miwa's face that she has heard it. I sit there with the piano keys cold under my fingertips and I think how strange it would be to raise the dead, to acknowledge that this arrangement I am going to perform was once my mother's even as my father has taken such care to separate the past and present. It seems impossible to introduce her genius in front of this ignorant crowd standing before me, and that my name was once Margaret Zimmerman.
———
This is the conclusion to the story of my obsequiousness, a trip to the bathroom to regroup that on occasion can turn into the kind of spiral that happens after days of heavy drinking. In this particular time, I limit myself into stealing some cough syrup out the cabinet and taking a long drink. I look in the mirror and I do not like how I look, nor have I ever, even though I am usually not the ugliest person in the room. My biggest issue when I look into the mirror is that most times the face I see carries my mother's unhappiness with more pride than it perhaps deserved.
"I am happy to be here. I am happy to be here."
"What are you doing?" a voice says, and I turn around and find the boy in knitted vest drinking a flute of pepsi-cola.
"You're real."
"Obviously," he says. There are times I interact with teenagers and recall my quasi-students fondly, moments like this when I cross paths with a teenager who is clearly difficult.
"You are Rintarou's daughter."
"Obviously," I echo, screwing the cap back on the cough syrup.
"You don't look anything like him."
"What's your name?"
"Asakura Fūto."
"Do I really not look anything like him?"
"Like a different species," he says, and I catch my reflection in the mirror and feel a tightness in my chest.
"Like Ema Hinata?"
"Why do you care about what I have to say?"
"You haven't given me a reason to not care," I say, just as my father appears behind him.
"Go to your room, please," he says, and Fūto shrugs and disappears down the hall. My father waits for his door to close and then closes the distance between us, and when I look at him I receive him anew. His tightening jaw, the intensity of his eye contact, the general feeling that he is not a man who sleeps. To some extent I've had to revise him every time we've came in contact, but this feels different. This time I notice the degree of anger that hangs on his shoulders, and I realize that I cannot anticipate how this anger will manifest.
"What are you thinking playing that arrangement?"
"Congratulations on the anniversary."
"What is the matter with you?"
"Everything is the matter," I say, just as Ema appears. She pauses and looks at us.
"Does anyone have a cough syrup in hand?" she asks, and now that I look between us and consider a fair comparison, they do seem like a more similar species: Ema a docile, well-behaved herbivore, my father a vegetarian mammal with a short, panicked life.
"I just finished the last one."
"But you're not sick."
"Hypothetically speaking, I might be." I smile at my father, fish the bottle from the counter, and saunter to where she is perched on the doorway.
"You should let Masaomi take a look," Ema says.
"The thalamus is the lighthouse of the brain. The rescue ships are endorphins," I say before shutting the door and facing the angry man behind me. I watch him, count the seconds during which his eyes are closed. For a moment, the idea that no one understands this concealed violence better than I do feels relieving. Until the first blow comes. I feel it in my ears before I feel it anywhere else, the roots of my eyeballs curling, the feeling like my head is sitting on a single pivot. I bring my hand up to my cheek, almost out of expectation that the pain will be concentrated there, but in a way, it is everywhere.
"This is who we are," I tell him, and this time he does it harder.