On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Page 19

  His hand, tanned by work, was surprisingly dark on his stomach. “Yeah. I seen ’em on the nature shows. They just tumble off like a load of bricks. Right down.” He clicked his tongue in disgust but his voiced dropped off. “Idiots.”

  We were still, letting the buffaloes go on falling, hundreds of them trotting silently down the cliffs in our heads. Somewhere in the next field, a pickup pulled into a driveway, gravel under the tires, a beam swung against the barn and lighted the dust above our noses, his shut eyes—eyes that I knew, by then, were no longer grey—but Trevor. The door slammed and someone came home and low voices could be heard, the single lilt of a question as it rose, “How was it?” or “Are you hungry?” Something plain and necessary, yet extra, with care, a voice like those tiny roofs over the phone booths along the train tracks, the ones made from the same shingles used for houses, except only four rows wide—just enough to keep the phone dry. And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.

  “It’s not up to them,” Trevor said.

  “What’s not?”

  “The damn buffaloes.” He flicked the metal buckle on his belt. “It ain’t up to them where they go. It’s Mother Nature. She tells them to jump and they go on and do it. They don’t got no choice about it. It’s just the law of nature.”

  “The law,” I repeated under my breath. “Like they’re just following their loved ones, like their family’s just going forward and they go with them?”

  “Yeah, something like that,” he said with sleepiness. “Like a family. A fucked family.”

  I felt this sudden surge of tenderness for him right then, a feeling so rare in me back then it felt like I was being displaced by it. Until Trevor pulled me back.

  “Hey,” he said, half-asleep, “what were you before you met me?”

  “I think I was drowning.”

  A pause.

  “And what are you now?” he whispered, sinking.

  I thought for a second. “Water.”

  “Fuck off.” He punched me on the arm. “And go to sleep, Little Dog.” Then he grew quiet.

  Then his eyelashes. You could hear them think.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know what made me follow the hurt thing’s voice, but I was pulled, as if promised an answer to a question I had not yet possessed. They say if you want something bad enough you’ll end up making a god out of it. But what if all I ever wanted was my life, Ma?

  I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly. Like right now, how the sun is coming on, low behind the elms, and I can’t tell the difference between a sunset and a sunrise. The world, reddening, appears the same to me—and I lose track of east and west. The colors this morning have the frayed tint of something already leaving. I think of the time Trev and I sat on the toolshed roof, watching the sun sink. I wasn’t so much surprised by its effect—how, in a few crushed minutes, it changes the way things are seen, including ourselves—but that it was ever mine to see. Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

  * * *

  —

  I hear her call again, convinced now that it’s a heifer. Ranchers often sell off the calves at night, ferrying them away on truck beds while the mothers slept in their stalls so they wouldn’t wake up screaming for their babies. Some would wail so hard their throats would swell shut and a balloon had to be placed inside and inflated to expand the neck muscles.

  I get closer. The tobacco stands high. When she wails again, the sound parts the stalks and the leaves shiver. I approach the small clearing where she is. The light froths blue over the plant tips. I hear her huge lungs working for air, soft but clear as wind. I part the thick-packed plants and step forward.

  “Ma? Tell me the story again.”

  “I’m too tired, baby. Tomorrow. Back to sleep.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping.”

  It’s past ten and you’re just back from the salon. You have a towel wrapped around your hair, your skin still warm from the shower.

  “Come on, real quick. The one about the monkey.”

  You sigh, slipping under the blanket. “Alright. But get me a cigarette.”

  I take one from the carton on the nightstand, place it between your lips and light. You puff once, twice. I take it out, watch you.

  “Okay, let’s see. Once upon a time there was a Monkey King who—”

  “No, Ma. The real one. Come on. Tell the real-life story.”

  I put the cigarette back in your mouth, let you puff.

  “Okay.” Your eyes search the room. “Once upon a time—scoot closer, you wanna hear it or not? Once upon a time, in the old country, there were men who would eat the brains of monkeys.”

  “You were born in the Year of the Monkey. So you’re a monkey.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” you whisper, staring far away. “I’m a monkey.”

  The cigarette smolders between my fingers.

  Mist rises from the warm soil as I step through the crop. The sky widens, the tobacco drops off, revealing a circle no larger than god’s thumbprint.

  But nothing’s here. No cow, no sound, only the last crickets, far off now, the tobacco still in the morning air. I stand, waiting for the sound to make me true.

  Nothing.

  The heifer, the farm, the boy, the wreck, the war—had I made it all up, in a dream, only to wake up with it fused to my skin?

  Ma, I don’t know if you’ve made it this far in this letter—or if you’ve made it here at all. You always tell me it’s too late for you to read, with your poor liver, your exhausted bones, that after everything you’ve been through, you’d just like to rest now. That reading is a privilege you made possible for me with what you lost. I know you believe in reincarnation. I don’t know if I do but I hope it’s real. Because then maybe you’ll come back here next time around. Maybe you’ll be a girl and maybe your name will be Rose again, and you’ll have a room full of books with parents who will read you bedtime stories in a country not touched by war. Maybe then, in that life and in this future, you’ll find this book and you’ll know what happened to us. And you’ll remember me. Maybe.

  For no reason, I start to run, past the clearing, back into the tobacco’s stiff shade. My feet blurring into a small wind beneath me, I run. Even if no one I know is dead yet, not Trevor, not Lan, not my friends with the speed and heroin nowhere near their scarless veins. Even if the farm is not yet sold to make room for luxury condos, the barn not yet dismantled, its wood repurposed into craft furniture or to line the walls of trendy cafés in Brooklyn, I run.

  I run thinking I will outpace it all, my will to change being stronger than my fear of living. My chest wet and leaf-raked, the day smoldering up at its edges, I push through so fast I feel like I’ve finally broken out of my body, left it behind. But when I turn around to see the panting boy, to forgive him, at last, for trying and failing to be good, there’s no one there—only the full elms windless at the field’s edge. Then, for no reason, I keep going. I think of the buffaloes somewhere, maybe in North Dakota or Montana, their shoulders rippling in slow motion as they race for the cliff, their brown bodies bottlenecked at the narrow precipice. Their eyes oil-black, the velvet bones of their horns covered with dust, they run, headfirst, together—until they become moose, huge and antlered, wet nostrils braying, then dogs, with paws clawing toward the edge, their tongues lapping in the light until, finally, they become macaques, a whole troop of them. The crowns of their heads cut open, their brains hollowed out, they float, the hai
r on their limbs fine and soft as feathers. And just as the first one steps off the cliff, onto air, the forever nothing below, they ignite into the ochre-red sparks of monarchs. Thousands of monarchs pour over the edge, fan into the white air, like a bloodjet hitting water. I race through the field as if my cliff was never written into this story, as if I was no heavier than the words in my name. And like a word, I hold no weight in this world yet still carry my own life. And I throw it ahead of me until what I left behind becomes exactly what I’m running toward—like I’m part of a family.

  “Why didn’t they get you then?” I place the Marlboro back in your mouth.

  You hold my hand there for a while, breathe, then take it between your fingers. “Oh, Little Dog,” you sigh. “Little Dog, Little Dog.”

  Monkeys, moose, cows, dogs, butterflies, buffaloes. What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals.

  “Why didn’t they get me? Well, ’cause I was fast, baby. Some monkeys are so fast, they’re more like ghosts, you know? They just—poof,” you open your palm in a gesture of a small explosion, “disappear.” Without moving your head, you look at me, the way a mother looks at anything—for too long.

  Then, for no reason, you start to laugh.

  The past tense of sing is not singed.

  —Hoa Nguyen

  Acknowledgments

  On this page, the line “Freedom . . . is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey” is from Bei Dao’s poem “Accomplices” (The August Sleepwalker).

  On this page, the line “Two languages . . . beckoning a third” is paraphrased from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

  On this page, the line “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it” is influenced by Zen Buddhist theory on joy and impermanence, as echoed by Max Ritvo in his 2016 interview with Divedapper.com.

  * * *

  —

  I would like to thank a few people, in no particular order, who made me and my work possible in this world.

  I’m indebted to the masterful journalism of Tom Callahan, whose in-depth reporting for ESPN the Magazine and Golf Digest broadened, enriched, and informed my understanding of Tiger Woods and his indelible legacy in golfing and American culture. Thanks to Elaine Scarry and her book, On Beauty and Being Just, for its intelligent, rigorous, and luminous complication of the subject.

  To my teachers, for always seeing (and keeping) the road true: Roni Natov and Gerry DeLuca (Brooklyn College), Jen Bervin (Poets House), Sharon Olds (NYU), and my high school poetry teacher, Timothy Sanderson (Hartford County).

  To Ben Lerner, without whom so much of my thinking and being as a writer would not be realized. Thank you for always reminding me that rules are merely tendencies, not truths, and genre borders only as real as our imaginations small. I am indebted to your big kindness, as well as the English Department at Brooklyn College, for granting me an emergency fund when I lost my housing the winter of 2009.

  To Yusef Komunyakaa, thank you for showing me how to break the line and see the world more clearly at its brutal and inky joints. For tolerating my fanboying when, by luck, I sat down beside you one rainy night in a West Village theater, autumn 2008, and kept yapping about everything and nothing at all. I don’t remember the movie but I’ll never forget your laugh. Thank you for being my teacher.

  A deep bow to the following artists and musicians whom I leaned on, repeatedly, while writing this book: James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Charles Bradley, Thi Bui, Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Alexander Chee, Gus Dapperton, Miles Davis, Natalie Diaz, Joan Didion, Marguerite Duras, Perfume Genius, Thich Nhat Hanh, Whitney Houston, Kim Hyesoon, Etta James, Maxine Hong Kingston, King Krule, Lyoto Machida, MGMT, Qiu Miaojin, Mitski, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Frank Ocean, Jenny Offill, Frank O’Hara, Rex Orange County, Richard Siken, Nina Simone, Sufjan Stevens, and C. D. Wright.

  To every Asian American artist who came before me, thank you.

  For reading this book in manuscript form, for your gracious and lantern-like comments and insight, thanks to Peter Bienkowski, Laura Cresté, Ben Lerner (again), Sally Wen Mao, and Tanya Olson.

  For your friendship, for sharing this art and air with me: Mahogany Browne, Sivan Butler-Rotholz, Eduardo C. Corral, Shira Erlichman, Peter Gizzi, Tiffanie Hoang, Mari L’Esperance, Loma (aka Christopher Soto), Lawrence Minh-Bùi Davis, Angel Nafis, Jihyun Yun.

  To Doug Argue, your vibrant openness and courage helped me be braver with our truths and, in more ways than you know, made this book possible.

  Thanks to my superb and fearless agent, Frances Coady (Captain Coady!), for your keen eyes, tireless faith, and patience, for respecting me as an artist first and foremost. For finding and believing in me before it all began.

  Deep gratitude to my editor, Ann Godoff, for your pristine enthusiasm for this little book, for understanding it so thoroughly, so totally, and with bone-deep care. For standing behind its author’s vision in every way. And to the superb team at Penguin Press: Matt Boyd, Casey Denis, Brian Etling, Juliana Kiyan, Shina Patel, and Sona Vogel.

  I’m indebted to Dana Prescott and Diego Mencaroni of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, where, during a power outage in an Umbrian thunderstorm, this book was started, by hand. And to Leslie Williamson and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, where this book was finished. Generous support was also provided by the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

  Thank you, Peter, always, for Peter.

  Ma, cảm ơn.

  About the Author

  Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have also been featured in The Atlantic, Harper's, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel.

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