Jennifer S. Cheng
I.
The equator divides the world in half; the prime meridian and the international date line into fourths. Latitude and longitude lines, the world in hundreds of pieces.
Story of the stars: there once was a man who was more than a man, and when he breathed the air was so cold, and the darkness so dark that the mist from his lungs crystallized into a thousand tiny splinters that carried within their glass-like walls sections of his body to hold and own.
I stare away from the earth, unclearly.
From the northern hemisphere at this time of the year, one can see Ursa Minor, Draco, Hercules, Libra. Near the equator, however, Pegasus and Pisces are central, Taurus and Orion are visible, and the planet Mars is an enlarged dot. Can you list all the planets in order? We find our way back from the seaside with flashlights we have packed. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. I peer into the sky and think that there should be more stars on this side of the world, but the night is cloudy and they are difficult to see.
The children are not faded, I am careful to note. They are diseased and underweight and perhaps hungry, but they do not tell me the extent to which the brain adapts to one’s environment: if our pleasures are equal, our aching the same, our wisdom alike. All over the world, in every story, silver-haired women smile with their teeth missing and their eyes crinkling.
I get onto the bus where everyone is waiting, and I sit by the window and think to myself: I don’t belong here. I don’t belong here, but when I imagine returning home my body tingles and cringes; it creeps.
The bus runs with the door open and the passengers covering their faces with handkerchiefs and surgeon masks.
They sing in the back, in a language that means nothing.
Fields of yellow grass. A woman at a well. Small enclosures made of thick uneven branches—roosters will cry in the morning. Goats that eat the yellow grass by the side of the road. Cotton trees with no cotton, papaya trees with green fruit, dried and brittle limbs reach out in a tangled turmoil. Three tall leaves stretching in a field of dry earth. Stick houses and planted rows two meters wide. Men and children that ride on top of trucks and buses, waving as they pass—strangers in the sky. Women selling bottles of liquid, women fanning themselves. Black hogs. Wooden bridges: no water underneath. Hills in the background that are overlapping shadows. Families that wait at the door. An open market: fish and fruit and kong xin cai—she squints in the reflecting light. Selamat datang. A woman that balances buckets, a child that follows and shouts. Bare feet, dirty feet, hardened feet, dirt-encrusted toes. The evening red behind the trees—watch me watching, quietly. Dogs that wander with their ribcages, two cows in someone’s yard, and the same face at every corner.
Every morning the sun rises and every evening it sets: Asia, but not mine. The people more Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, a hazy mixture of histories and stories I cannot own.
II.
She said her name was Eliza. I turned to look at the gathering of children standing in the dust under the tree. The dust rises when the children run.
My name is Eliza. A girl in a faded dress with a braid down her back.
My name is Jenny. How did you learn English?
She took my hand and led me into the crowd of children singing together with the local workers. They smiled and I smiled and I wanted her to like me. She introduced me to her friends, I let her take my hand, I let them put their arms around me in front of the camera, their wide-eyed smiles; the happiness of being included; and when we got onto the bus to leave, I cleaned my hands, roughly and violently; see these child-like hands and the way they open and close.
Sun: We sit on little stumps and break the vegetable leafs with our fingers. The same motions I have made before. A constant, pressing verb, rather than background noise. Body: Our guide rides his moped into town with his pregnant wife and knocks on doors to ask for shelter. The doctor we are traveling with sweats slowly, carefully. A month later, I wear oversized blue glasses in an air-conditioned room to see the moon’s layers on a large white screen. In grayscale: the man falls over and you can almost make out the particles.
The building smelled of urine and unbathed bodies. We climbed the steps, ignoring dark corners. This village had a building. The people pushed and crowded and refused to stand in line. Story: they threatened to turn them all away if they continued to shove their way into the “doctor’s office,” which was merely an adjoining room at the top of the stairs separated by a spare cloth. Story: the doctor saw a twelve-year-old girl who was cold and ashy. Story: a one-year-old girl who weighed eight pounds, like a healthy newborn baby.
We stepped outside to get some fresh air, away from the urine, the bodies. A street vendor was selling tofu—he had heard the noise. American bubbles and children gathering, laughing, jumping, like children. Standing in the village square, an empty lot of more yellow dust. A glance, and then an absence, at the local volunteer who held the smaller children in her lap and combed their hair. We followed the children under the sun, across the dirt, around homes made of straw and sticks into an area shaded by a tree, near a well with two plastic containers. This village had a well. They spread out a mat. I sat on a bench. We took pictures. We sang songs. The afternoon drifted. I smiled. Imaginary or real, who knows the difference.
Day 1. Spicy noodles for breakfast.
Day 2. Rice and kong xin cai in my own language.
Day 3. Sweet egg omelet cake, the way mothers make them.
Day 4. Rice and vegetable soup.
Day 5. Dole’s canned peaches from Bob’s magic backpack.
Note: The packet I received at the health office tells me I should refrain from eating fruit, uncooked vegetables, dairy products, or food bought from vendors; that I should close my mouth when showering, use bottled water instead of tap to brush my teeth; that I should avoid contact with the ocean; and that all possible parts of my body should be covered at all times.
Egg flowers are named so because they are a delicate white with a soft yellow center.
The doctor wears a straw hat and a fanny pack.
This is a peanut tree, grows nuts. Yes, ripe when red, open outside. Oh, a cashew tree.
Anto will go back to school when his contract ends. Rudy will leave because there is no long-term plan for these villages.
It was still dark, but we thought it was morning.
Far away is the sound of the ocean on an empty shore. Four women sharing one mat; there is no breeze in this faint and muted room.
Don’t fall, and I regret not knowing him better.
Over-powering the space of the room: meskipun badai silih berganti dalam hidupku…
And the people asked for prayer, but I am not a healer. I have no magic in my hands.
God opened his hand, and inside was a grain of sand and the earth spinning on its axis. God blew on the stars and descended to the world where Adam and Eve called forth their children. Together, they swam in the waters, but when the children returned to the garden, dripping, they lost themselves and each looked to his own with uncertainty. They had forgotten whether the voice spoke to the hills or the valleys, the cities or the desert, the dirt or the trees. They had forgotten the tilt of the earth.
III.
Number of continents. Number of countries.
Numbers upon numbers of balls of gas that burn in nothing, everything.
Number of hours to fly half-way across the globe.
(It is always night.)
Number of minutes and number of seconds on a hallway clock.
(She carves the tick marks; they will outrun her.)
Number of square miles of something.
Number of worlds that hang by colorless thread.
Astronauts who landed on the moon remember every step, every sight, every breath they took as they glided alone in their suits. Alone in their suits, they felt the moon’s surface through large heavy gloves; unable to bend their knees, they walked awkwardly. Their bodies felt the same as they did on earth—hands and arms and feet—and yet there they were, in suits that obscured their limbs so that they could breathe. These feel like questions to me.
From the television screen of the local motel the men aboard see the earth from the window of their spacecraft, and it is the size of his thumbnail. You can see the curve of the world from over 200,000 miles away, and the spiral of clouds and blue underneath. Six and one-half billion fates unwinding simultaneously on a half-inch circle. It is vibrant and clear against the black of the universe: the white of the clouds, the blue of the sea. Such boldness of clarity.
If a village is given rice and vegetables for one meal of one day of one year, what is the distance between lands? When the village sleeps, does the belly ache from the weight of the grains, or does the heart mourn for what it really needs?
I came because I cannot help and my legs are tired. I came because the world was really made with billions of sides and only the appearance of a smooth sphere.
I am here because sometimes even the stars seem closer.
But there are billions of them, and they are light years apart, and when an hour passes it is gone for good.
Five o’clock: When we got to the beach the next morning, the light had just begun to slip, and I stood on the rock several feet away from the untouched waves. We took off our shoes. I let the water swirl against my discomfort.
Three Wishes: Sometimes the world turns because I wake up staring at the ceiling, waiting for my roommate to come out of the shower. I close my lips tightly so the water doesn’t poison my body. I hop and skip and jump onto the bus with the windows open, I stare, I refuse to ingest liquids.
On the moon, says the narrator as the screen fades out, you are even more alone.
IV.
My pictures do not come out. They are only ambiguous blobs, shadows and shapes of people and places. I want to take a clean cloth and wipe away the gray to see the colors underneath, but I know there will only be a white blank staring back at me.
Seven continents: If an infant were born in a world two miles wide with metal instead of wood, fog instead of rain, uncertainty instead of apathy, the world might continue to expand or it might stand motionless in a silence that has straight edges.
Seven continents: I will be sitting in my backyard alongside the concrete of the pool with my toes half-way in the lukewarm water. The green of the grass will follow a neat curved outline, the patio table will be washed with rain, and the trees will line the pavement. I will have decided not to walk to the park; I am afraid to cross the road by myself.
Seven continents: The scattered path upward from the sea is deepened by many footsteps; it twists with rocks and sharp edges, and one has to be careful of the droppings left by animals. At the bottom, there is a vast openness and a weight, but whether this weight exists where the ocean meets the shore or at the base of the cliff or across the water near the horizon, one does not know. Two hours from the villages, in the house that has no glass in its windows: without dread or apprehension because there is no future and no one to measure the years.
There are no stories, I think to myself as I lie awake in a dusty room where women are ready to sleep. Somewhere outside, underneath the silence, is the muffled sound of cymbals crashing, but I do not know what it is.
The world began in a conflation of extremes: bonding and division, construction and destruction, heaviness and empty space. I do not belong here, I cannot return home.
At midnight we sleep.
On the morning of the third day, a voice spoke again, and a mass of land spread across the expanse of the earth. Outlines of trees and plants with thick tips emerged upward. As the sun rose higher, the forms passed across the plains. Murky oceans rested. And then the voice that hovered faded into the darkness. The people could only watch helplessly, desperately as the bodies of land broke off and floated away.
Interview at midday:
Who created the stars? A body in the desert eating locusts and dust.
What are you doing here? It heard the beating of a thousand tiny wings.
Where are you going? A field of milkweed, a pile of hollow-stems.
Girls who are straining to see across the street eat shiny pink candies from their mother’s china.
They wander barefoot on cold kitchen tiles, opening and closing doors.
They sit at the dinner table, tangled in each other’s mess.
They forget, as they vacuum, where plastic floor lamps go. Into the corner? Behind the back door?
Most of the time, the world keeps rolling, the universe keeps growing. When I hold my breath and make the effort, I can almost remember the open air, the darkness, the mosquito net keeping me safe from a world of desire and unbroken sleep.
It stops for only a moment, unclear, uncertain of where it is going.