Spring 2009 Issue

Ira Sukrungruang - "Constellations"

And – I’m just realizing this – memory is what people are made out of. After skin and bone, I mean.
And if memory is what people are made out of, then people are made out of lost.
– Bill Roorbach

1.
I used to connect my mother’s freckles with my fingers. Sometimes, I traced
stars. Sometimes, a smiley face. Despite her reprimands – “It sin to touch mom
head” – she did not pull away, but allowed my finger to travel at will. I marveled
at the smoothness of her skin. For every dot, I expected my finger to glide over a
bump, an imperfection, like my father’s large mole that looked like a fattened tick
on his chin. I often asked why other Thai moms didn’t have freckles. I asked her
where mine were. I don’t recall what she said. What I do remember, as my finger
went from dot to dot, was her asking, “What are you drawing today?”

2.
It comes at peculiar times, the smell. During a stroll to the mailbox or in the park-
ing lot behind the Chinese buffet. But when it comes, it lingers and spreads and
awakes every sense. It is not a pleasant smell, not like the ones my grade school
teachers put on my homework – their candy-scented markers, their scratch-n-sniff
stickers. It is the smell of artificiality, of chemicals, of lost things.

3.
These are the things that stick:
…chopsticks, black rubber hose, Aunty Sue’s gun, Michael Jackson, boxing glove,
dead mouse, Kangol caps, forged signatures, golf ball, upstairs Buddha, Hulk
Hogan, Chinese stars, Michigan apples, envelope full of twenties, salt water,
microwaved hot dogs, the arrow of light…

4.
“Ask Buddha for success. Ask Buddha for everything.”

5.
I can’t help but feel I’ve forgotten something. It was important, too. It was some-
thing that would have made me smile. The more I think about it, the more I feel it
slipping away – that picture, that moment. It might come back. Someday. Recalled
through some image. The space between tree branches. The whistling of the teapot.
The zig-zagging rabbit. The scent of mothballs. I hope it will make it back. I don’t
want to lose anymore.

6.
The morning I woke up and found she was gone I wandered all over the house and
called out for her. My aunt said I sounded like a sheep. She said I repeated mother
in Thai over and over.
  “Mae,” I said. “Mae.”
  I even gathered my courage and went into the crawl space, a room I never ven-
tured into without her. We kept the things we no longer needed down there – gar-
bage bags full of toys, toasters, clothes. It was a dark and cold place. Pipes ran
above my head. The uneven pavement made my knees hurt. The shadows in the
back moved.
 “Mae,” I said. “Mae.”
  The back of the crawl space frightened me. That was where my mother hung
coats along a water pipe. They moved, those coats. They swayed in some draft. The
plastic around them made noises.
 “Mae,” I said. “Mae.”
  But that day I did go back, despite my fear. I pushed on. I spoke louder, hoping
my voice would quiet my fright, so loud I began screaming at nothing but coats
from many winters ago. Suddenly, the smell of mothballs rose around me.

7.
But I like it, the smell. Like I enjoy salt water on canker sores or endlessly picking
at scabs or plucking nose hairs. I enjoy it because at the exact moment I smell it,
my imagination smells something else, something far away. And in that instant,
the world and its infinite possibilities open up again.

8.
There’s more:
…holy incense, spring rolls, duck heads, boxed mashed potatoes, bitter melon,
Kevin’s divot chest, Nintendo, watermelon rind, Alyssa Milano, sex manual under
parents’ bed, maple leaf in book, family portrait taken at Sears, dildo…

9.
This was our game: Hold your breath until we pass the cemetery, OK? my mother said.
Do not wake the dead. There was one traffic light along that stretch on Ridgeland
Avenue and other variables that made the game difficult – rush hour, accidents,
police waiting with the radar to catch speeders. Without any of these, the cem-
etery already stretched for thirty seconds. With any of these, it could go beyond
a minute, sometimes two.
  Once, we hit all the variables plus a red light. I held my breath. I held it until I
turned red then blue then purple. I watched my face change color in the ghostly
reflection of the car window. My mother held her breath, too, beside me in the back
seat. Pain never entered her face. She did not change color. Her eyes were closed.
Her chest was still. She looked peaceful, like a corpse. That was the reason I let my
breath out. I thought she had actually died. I thought I had lost her. When I gasped
for air, her eyes popped open and she smiled and said, They will come for you.

10.
No matter what I’ve told you so far, every attempt to get back has failed.

11.
She came back, and for the next week, I did not stray far from her. Wherever
she moved, I followed close behind. I feared losing her again, losing her forever.
Something about her had changed. She moved gingerly, her hand always at her
mid-section, her back slightly hunched over. She did not sleep in the bedroom
upstairs, but on the pull-out bed on the first floor. When I tried to hug her, my
aunt said to take it easy, to be gentle.
  The first night she was back, I asked, “Where did you go?”
  “Hospital.”
  “Are you dying?”
  “No,” she said
  “Why did you go?”
  She lifted her shirt to show me the bottom half of her belly. It was the largest
scab I had ever seen, a narrow one that went from one end of her stomach to the
other. There were uneven stitches in it. It looked like the sizzled millipede on the
concrete in Bangkok. I wanted to run my finger along her stitches just so I’d know
what it felt like.
  She told me I couldn’t. Infection.
  “Does it hurt?”
  She shook her head and lowered her shirt. During the rest of the month, when-
ever I asked, she always showed me.

12.
Buddha does not answer prayers. He offers suggestions. All of them will lead you
far from here.

13.
I drew a Beetle, with my finger, on her face. Not the insect but the car. We had a
light blue one that we traded for a station wagon the color of dirt. I liked the new
car because I could sit in the back and make faces at people in traffic, but I found
I missed the Beetle and the puttering muffler. I missed it even though I fell out of
it once, while my aunt pulled out of the Dunkin’ Doughnut parking lot – powder
on my face, blood on my cheek. I missed the Beetle so much I traced it in her
freckles.
  When I was done, I made it move. The Beetle sped across the bridge of her
nose, down the steep slope of her chin, and then wound back around to rest on
her earlobe.
  “Nowhere to go?” My mother, on the pull-out, kept her eyes on a Thai soap opera
magazine. “Car stuck?”
  “Just resting,” I said.

14.
There are wounds that heal slower than others, and sometimes not at all. Some-
times they leave marks. The black fly bites, the pencil-stab scar, the laceration on
the big toe after the fall. Memories etched into the body. Marks that won’t allow
forgetting.

15.
And there was the time I was riding my bike, a junky speedster bought at the flea
market. It was red, I think, a delicious red like the stripes on a candy cane. I pedaled
hard home, my legs pumping faster and faster, and I thought this was what it felt like
to fly. When I made the turn into my driveway, one of the cracks that had gotten
larger and larger over the years, caught the front wheel of the tire. I was truly flying
then. I put my arms out in front of me. I imagine I looked like Superman, my hero,
but I didn’t feel like him. I felt out of control. In the seconds to come, even then, I
knew that when I hit the ground it would hurt. The strange thing, however, in my
memory, I don’t remember what happened after I landed. I don’t remember the
impact. I don’t remember whether my mother came out of the front door. I don’t
remember what she said to soothe my crying. I don’t remember how she tended
to my wounds. The memory – the true memory – is of sudden flight.

16.
There were boxes of them in every corner of the house, like little white edible
marbles. They were placed in drawers, in closets, even in the fireplace. Everywhere
you turned, if you looked carefully, you would be able to see them. I never thought
this strange.
  Once when a friend drove me home after a party, he said, “It is weird, Ira, not to
see any moths around your house in the summer. Not even around the lights.”

17.
This is someone else’s story.
  Once he said there was a moth that was a foot wide, wings like a bat, and it flapped
and hovered around the front porch light. The wings were transparent. When it
flapped, it made wind. How the thought of burning it entered his head, I do not
know. But that was what he did. He threw some lighter fluid on it. Watched it flap
on the concrete and then lit it. He said it took off one more time before disappear-
ing into smoke. There was nothing left of it, but the outline of its charred body on
the concrete – its wings like the ears of Buddha.

18.
I wonder what has left already, disappearing in the folds and cracks of the brain.

19.
….salted fish, plastic X-mas tree, matchbox cars, sewing machine, whistling teapot,
downstairs Buddha, ninja shoes, fish heads, family portrait taken in Thailand,
blue Bic pen….

20.
I wasn’t a loud crier. I had long since learned that crying sometimes did more harm
than good. But the fall hurt. The shock of hitting the ground stole my breath for
a few seconds, and when I gasped for my first lungful of air, tears started spilling
off the sides of my face. I didn’t move. I kept silent. I stared through the branches
of my neighbor’s apple tree, at the patches of blue above me. In my hands, I still
held the tree limb that used to hold my weight. It was thick like a fat water pipe. I
used to pull myself up and into the tree by that limb, into the cradling trunk. A few
apples dropped to the ground beside me, and maybe that alerted my mother – their
solid thunks on the grass.
  When she came out, she was in her pajamas, a red gown that was cool to the
touch and went to her ankles. She didn’t see me at first. She said my name over
and over. Another apple fell. On my forehead.
  She was quick then to scoop me up. She touched every part of my body, asking
me what hurt. I told her nothing hurt, but the place where the apple hit. She asked
me to wiggle my fingers. Wiggle my toes. She asked me to walk.
  Pleased that I was all right, she held me close and told me I was too big to climb
trees. She told me, in time, I would forget all of this.