Secondhand World Read online

  “We can't,” I'd whisper.

  “She's asleep,” he would say.

  “She'll wake up.”

  “We'll be vewy vewy qwiet,” he would say, using his Elmer Fudd voice.

  “No, Hero,” I'd say, pushing his hand away gently. “Shhh.”

  It was Rachel who brought it up one morning. “Hey if you guys want to get it on,” she said, “it's all right with me. I mean“— she shrugged—“somebody should be getting laid.”

  Hero shot me a look.

  “Thanks, Rachel,” I said, flushing, “but I think it would be kind of weird with you there.”

  “I could go out somewhere,” she said. “I'll go to a coffee shop for an hour. Or is an hour enough?” She smiled slyly.

  Hero nodded. “If you're sure you wouldn't mind,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Rachel shouldn't have to leave just so we can have sex,” I said. “It's not right!”

  They both stared at me. I couldn't help it—the idea of Rachel sitting in a coffee shop all by herself, watching the clock until the time she could come back to the room, depressed me. Rachel was my best friend and I didn't want her to feel excluded. I wanted to make love with Hero, too, and except for once with our hands under our jackets on the bus and one quickie while Rachel was in the shower, we had been largely celibate. Now that we were together, though, I felt patient. There was all the time in the world for that, I thought, in the brave new world toward which we were headed. I imagined encounters on the beach, Hero and I coupling in the warm ocean while the waves lapped against our naked bodies, afterward lying spent on wet rocks like basking seals.

  “Let's just get there,” I said now. “There's plenty of time. Rachel gave up Nick for us, Hero. We should be able to survive a few more days.”

  “No, really, I don't mind,” Rachel said, looking from one to the other of us.

  Hero shrugged. “If she doesn't want to, she doesn't want to,” he said.

  It was two nights later in a motel in Utah that I woke up from a vivid dream in which I'd been riding on a bus. Bright bluish moonlight came in through the curtains, and it took a moment to remember where I was. I don't think I entirely managed it, either, except to recognize that I was in another of a series of strange and inappropriate places far from home. It seemed we'd been gone for ages, but it had only been eight days.

  I was settling back to sleep when I felt Hero's hand on me. I shuddered with the unexpected pleasure of it, his fingers brushing the surface of my skin with light, feathered strokes.

  “Hero, no,” I whispered, but he didn't stop. His fingers were dipping now inside me, first the fingertip, then the first joint, and the second, until three of his fingers slid in and back out, so slowly that I thought I would die from impatience. The sliding rhythm grew faster and rougher, until I felt the outward ripples that marked the edge of my orgasm.

  I moaned quietly and grabbed Hero's hand from the back, twisting to face him. Only it wasn't Hero; it was Rachel. She smiled and kissed me on the mouth.

  I closed my eyes, imagining it was a dream so I would not have to do anything to stop it. I felt Rachel's tongue against my breasts now, her hands having cleverly pulled the T-shirt over my head. The whole of my body was tipping to ecstasy like an overflowing of liquid. Rachel's lips and teeth surrounded my nipples, her fingers moved between my legs. I had to bite my tongue to keep from screaming.

  I didn't dare open my eyes, but I knew now I wasn't dreaming. There were more hands on me, cupping my buttocks and caressing between my legs. I felt fingers joining fingers, stretching and slipping, pushing in counterrhythms. It was like being caressed by an octopus, all sucking tentacles, slippery, sliding, pulling me toward and against one side and the other. I felt no will, no distinct and separate self. I was part of this organism, this writhing, swimming thing, and there was nothing but texture and sensation and undulating fluid motion.

  At some point I felt Hero's hands reach across my body toward Rachel. I felt a softness of flesh, a curve of breast, and I realized that my hands were on her, too. There was lovely thick hair along her legs and on the inner sides of her thighs. I remember thinking that she felt different from me down there, fleshier, more substantial.

  Someone pushed me stomach-down onto the bed, and I shuddered as I felt Hero's penis press into me. It seemed larger than I remembered. He pushed hard, bouncing my pubic bone against the mattress, opening me up, thrusting deeper. I felt the labored sound of his breathing on my neck, rising in intensity, heightening my own excitement.

  I heard a woman moaning and wondered if it was me, but it seemed far away, and my mouth was pressed against the pillow. I opened one eye and saw Hero's hand between Rachel's legs. I buried my head and screamed, the ripples pushing up to the surface now, bucking in waves of almost unbearable sensation— then there was the almost desperate letting go of Hero's climax, his belly tight up against my ass, the throbbing of his penis inside me, pulsing in spurts I could feel distinctly.

  We fell asleep entwined, our juices stiffening the sheets, bedcovers twisted and tossed, the shipwreck of the bed coming to rest on a tranquil sea.

  The next morning as we were checking out of the motel, two Utah state troopers picked us up and took us to a juvenile detention center in a small town outside Salt Lake.

  Locked Up

  At the detention center, they went through our things. Any-. thing sharp or potentially threatening was confiscated, including Rachel's skull ring, my ballpoint pen, and Hero's belt. We had smoked the last of our pot in Colorado the day before, and the worst things they found were a roach clip and a packet of Trojans. Hero was sent to the boys’ ward, and Rachel and I were placed in separate but adjacent cells in the girls’.

  No one wanted to tell us anything, not the bored woman who took our stuff, not the fat guard who locked and unlocked our cells. I called my mother and our conversation was terse. She said they were sending us plane tickets home the next day and we were to stay right there until they arrived. As if we had a choice.

  My cell was cement-block gray, with room for a narrow cot and a toilet. Someone had written CARLY LOVES SAMinside a heart on the wall above my bed. How long it had been there was impossible to determine, and if Carly still loved Sam, ditto. I was scared, but honestly a little relieved to be delivered into the hands of the authorities. After what had happened the night before, I didn't know what things would have been like between Rachel, Hero, and me. Had the rules changed, or had it just been a onetime experience? I knew what we had done was not normal, was in fact considered by most of society to be sick and wrong, but I also knew that, in the moment, it had felt loving, warm, and generous. I didn't know how to face them, though, after that—my boyfriend and my best friend merging into one person. Every look, every word had to be reexamined in light of this new development. Was Rachel gay? Was I? Did Hero really want Rachel? Is that what all the tension had been about? It would make perfect sense to me—Rachel with her large breasts and straight fall of hair, her big eyes that were now brown, now green, speckled with yellow light. Against Hero's skin, my own body seemed sallow, a sickly color next to his pale, pearly translucence. Rachel and Hero were perfect together. They shared the same sulky confidence, moving boldly in the world, moving largely, as though striding across a doll's landscape.

  That night I couldn't sleep. A million thoughts went through my head, oscillating between numb detachment and a terror close to clawing panic. I felt the walls of my cell collapse in on themselves, the air growing dense and fevered. I was sweating and shivering at the same time, rigid as a board on my narrow cot, as though by not moving, by not occupying much space, I could will myself to become calm.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night, a girl in the cell across the hall started screaming and banging against the metal door. “Open the fucking door! I need my fucking cigarettes, you goddamn bastards! Open the fucking door! I need a smoke, you cunts, you sons of bitches! I got rights, you motherfuckers! Open the fucking door!” If he
r voice had been more melodic, she would have sounded like Janis Joplin.

  I heard Rachel's voice from next door. “Give her a fucking cigarette and let us get to sleep!”

  “Rachel?” I called.

  There was a pause. “Yeah?”

  “How're you doing?”

  “—fucking cigarette—”

  “Just ducky. You?”

  “I'm fine.”

  “—motherfucking sons of bitches, give me my smokes—”

  “You believe this girl?” Rachel said.

  “I believe she wants her cigarettes.”

  “Why don't they just give them to her?”

  “I guess they figure she might try to immolate herself,” I said.

  “Immolate?”

  “Burn up, you know.”

  “Immolate,” repeated Rachel. “You crack me up, Isa.”

  I spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling, at a brownish stain that looked like it had once been wet, and a crack that ran its crooked length. The girl across the corridor screamed herself hoarse, hacking like the addict smoker she must have been, hurling herself at the door as though she would smash through it.

  Looking up at the crack in the ceiling reminded me of the night my father had hit me and I lay on the floor waiting for the blood to stop. It seemed ages ago. The crack on our living-room ceiling had been straighter, finer than the one I was looking at now, and I remembered the sense I'd had of a tiny flaw, like a hairline fracture, sunk deep into the heart of the world. My father once told me that Korean potters purposely put a small crack or flaw in their pots to demonstrate their imperfection before God. It seemed to me an unnecessary gesture.

  When I closed my eyes I continued to see the crack widening, overriding the light fixture, splintering the plaster, creeping along the walls and through the floor, burrowing down and down beneath the Utah municipal waterways and underground cables, wrapping around the girth of the world, surfacing for a moment on my living-room ceiling in upstate New York, before plunging to the dark earths core. It would all split apart, I saw, along this narrow fissure, this tenuous line.

  Sometime the next day they let us out, drove us in a squad car to the airport, and escorted us onto a plane. Our seats were not adjacent to one another for some reason, and we did not attempt to trade. Hero, behind his dark glasses, nodded to me as we got on. I nodded back and swallowed hard. So this is how it's going to be, I thought.

  Rachel had been crying; her eyes were puffy and swollen and there was a red streak in the corner of one eye. She put up a hand as I walked by her seat, either in greeting or to ward me off. I couldn't tell.

  When we got to Albany Airport, a police officer got on the plane to escort us off. I could see my parents and Hero's and Jerry by himself standing in the arrival area behind the glass.

  “Guess my mom couldn't find anyone to sub,” Rachel said, her voice cracking a little.

  “This is not going to be fun,” I said as we got closer. I could see my father's arms folded across his chest, his feet planted firmly apart.

  Hero said nothing. He just loped toward the arrival area, his long legs carrying him far ahead of us.

  Exit Hero

  Back in school, we were celebrities. Underclassmen perched on tables in the cafeteria to hear our stories about the detention center: the girl rasping for cigarettes in profane language that Rachel would have to whisper in the hearing of the lunchroom monitors; a stain on the floor of Rachel's cell that she swore was blood; the manila envelope in which they stashed any possessions that could be deemed harmful.

  “Why your rings?” one kid asked.

  Rachel shrugged, looking down at her silver skull ring. “I guess you could swallow them and choke,” she said. For in truth, it was mostly Rachel who held forth. I would sit beside her and confirm details, offering myself as witness should her veracity be challenged.

  She liked to tell the story of Nick, the cowboy skier, with whom she had almost absconded to Colorado and a life of wedeling boyfriends and large tips. She embellished this particular story quite a bit, culminating in a marriage proposal in the back of the bus to Denver and a tearful (on Nicks part) farewell amid the thin blue air of the Rocky Mountains. I never said anything— what would be the point? There was something aggressive in the way she told the story that made it clear she felt she'd sacrificed something meaningful out of deepest loyalty to friendship.

  Our parents forbade Hero, Rachel, and me from seeing one another outside of school. My mother cried. “How could you do this to us, Isa?” she said. “We didn't even know where you were!” But my father had been unpredictably calm. He'd hugged me at the airport, stiffly, but a real embrace, and later in the car he'd said, in a gruff, inconclusive voice, that he knew he was sometimes too hard on me.

  “You're unhappy,” he said, “you tell us, Myung Hee.”

  Audrey had stuck to our story about going south to Florida for as long as she could under the intense interrogation of all parents involved. She was just about to break, apparently, weighed down by guilt, her father's anger, and the anguish of missing Rachel, when the traveler's checks Hero used to pay for our bus tickets were found.

  “That dumb shit,” Rachel said when Audrey relayed this information to her. “I knew we should have taken care of the money. Traveler's checks! What a fucking idiot! His signature was like a fucking trail of bread crumbs.”

  I had noticed since our return that Rachel had adopted the speech patterns of the unseen girl in the cell across from ours, punctuating every few words with “fucking” or “asshole.” I still loved Hero, though I was no longer certain of his feelings for me, and I could not blame him for doing what he thought was best just because it had turned out badly. And who was I to say it had? Personally, I was relieved to be home. I felt like something had changed in me. Perhaps I was suitably humbled by freedom, having glimpsed its vertiginous edge.

  “It's over,” I said. “You don't need to blame anyone. It's just the way it happened, that's all.”

  Rachel stared at me. She opened her mouth, then shut it. “I can't believe you, Isa,” she said. “That asshole fucking raped me!”

  Hero avoided me. He was never present during our cafeteria bull sessions, and in the classes we had together he would come in late and sit down without looking around. In any case, his dark glasses would have made it impossible to read his expression.

  One day I touched his arm as we were leaving English. “Hero,” I said, “can we talk?”

  He pulled away as though I'd burned him.

  We had been reading Edgar Allan Poe in class, and I suddenly felt sealed up, gasping for breath, like Fortunato in “The Cask of Amontillado.” Poe captured the spirit of isolation I felt that day—which has, I believe, never fully left me. The pit and the pendulum, the House of Usher—a world of treachery, danger, and decay. The permeating smell of ash.

  About two weeks later, Hero sought me out. I was in the library, the stuff for my senior research paper spread out all across the table. I was scribbling notes onto three-by-five cards—Jean-Paul Marat, killed by Charlotte Corday in 1793. Had severe eczema, lung problems. Constant pain. Wrote in bathtub on wooden board. Received visitors in bath.

  I looked up because I felt a whoosh of air, and he was sitting across from me, dark glasses, as usual, blocking his eyes. I was startled by the delicacy of his features, the transparency of his skin, the shell of his ears, the painterly blue-white gloss of his hands.

  I looked back down, continuing my notes. Corday was tried and killed four days later. Executed by guillotine.

  “I'm going away,” Hero said, so softly that at first I thought he'd said, I'm gay. “That school in Pittsburgh. I thought you should know.”

  My heart sank. It felt precisely like that. A fallen souffle in the rib cage. An elevator dropping ten stories. I couldn't hide my shock.

  “My God, Hero. When?”

  He shrugged. “The Unit's shipping me off next week.”

  “Next we
ek!”

  “Yeah, they're ‘finding it hard to deal with me.’” Hero gave the phrase a sardonic weight. Even behind his glasses, I knew he wasn't looking at me. He seemed to be staring at my note cards. La guillotine—a more efficient method of mass execution, invented by French physician]. I. Guillotinjustin time for the revolution.

  “They've always found you hard to deal with,” I said, trying to spark a memory of prior intimacy.

  Hero said nothing. He played with the end of a bookbinding, running his index fingers along its edge in opposite directions, then bringing them back together. I tried not to think about his fingers. Long, white, and deft.

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “I just thought you should know.” He started to get up.

  “Hero!”

  He stopped.

  “Hero, what happened?” I said. Without warning, tears. “I thought… I don't know what happened … I …” I hiccuped the words between sobs.

  He came around the table and leaned down to give me an awkward hug. He patted my back, and even in the midst of my distress, I noted the forbearance of the gesture, the attitude of vague detachment.

  “It was a dumb idea,” he said finally, straightening up. “What would we have done out there anyway?” He shrugged. “Don't cry, Isa. It just wasn't in the cards, that's all.” He patted me on the shoulder one last time before turning to leave.

  I sat there for a moment, the tears falling idiotically, though I no longer knew what for. I considered that he had not answered the question I'd been asking, and that he knew it, but what I judged him for most harshly was the terrible cliche he'd left me with— “It just wasn't in the cards.” That of all the beautiful, funny, and tender things he'd said to me, these were the last words I would hear him speak.

  Shadow Time

  Without Rachel or Hero, I was set adrift amid the purgatory that was high school, without clique or definable group. I tried drama club for a while but found that I was not a particularly good actor, and that I in fact despised the overdramatic students who formed the core of the acting group. The girls seemed attracted to acting by vanity, the opportunity to strut and primp in front of a larger audience; the boys were drawn by ego, stroking nascent beards and arguing over motivation.