Five Questions for the Snake Charmer


At some point on my way to the nephew's birthday without a present, somewhere between swigging Gatorade and weaving around piss puddles and clamping my lips against vomit or provocative statements (as my dear sister puts it), I feel a hand grab mine. A shock of warmth, then the hard shove of a box.

I watch enough news to know: I’m holding a bomb. In a few seconds the wet red jelly of me, still smelling of last night’s mint and Campari, will scatter the city streets like confetti.

I wait for emotion to fill me. All that emerges is an acid burp. My heartbeat persists and I realize that this waiting (Therapy Intake Form, Question 1. Are you prone to disastrous thoughts?) has gone on for more than a few seconds. I realize the pedestrians swerving around me are shooting dirty looks. I realize I remain disappointingly unchanged: hungover, dehydrated, inconvenient, unexploded. I realize that half a block ago I dropped a five on the blanket of a homeless man who sat surrounded by piles of gray boxes like this one. Sagging boxes whose sad color tickled chemicals in my blood, fired neurons that caused me to open my wallet. The man wasn’t homeless (Question 2. Do you project disaster onto people around you?) but an entrepreneur. I flip the box over. On its bottom side, in painstakingly hand-lettered Sharpie:

YOUR OWN PERFECT WORLD!!! SAFE FOR CHILDREN!!!
1 LOCALLY SOURCED GROW-YOUR-OWN ANT FARM

*

You’re not truly late to a party if there’s cake left. Buttercream mixes violently with the last of the booze in my stomach as I watch the nephew upend his box.

A clear plastic dome. A pamphlet. A pill bottle of eggs that rattle like dry rice as the nephew shakes them. On one of my recent wild nights (as my dear sister calls them), I lay alone reading up on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and wept into my glass despite the facts of having no fetus, no boyfriend, not even a casual dick. I swallow opinions on ant encephalopathy, ant autism (Question 3. Do you fear that your thoughts unnerve others?) and release, instead, a burp. My dear sister glares. The nephew studies the eggs with his tiny brow furrowed. So damn serious. He’s beginning to take after you, my dear sister accused last week. When we invite you over, you can at least try to behave appropriately. I don’t want you to, to, lure him into this lifestyle. And me: I don’t know what you’re suggesting, Virginia, but we all saw him come out of your vagina.

My dear sister’s head swivels as if she heard me thinking. As kids, our old-country relatives called her Mouse (for her quiet) and me Snake (for my slyness and eyes), but lately this dynamic seems flipped. I stand to go just as the nephew’s filling the dome with dirt, so that I’m forced to wait awkwardly for his stiff little hug. I love him but I make him uncomfortable, or he makes me uncomfortable, and it’s a bit of a relief, as always, to leave them to their dinner, to enter the city street as it’s darkening, expanding, twitching inside its larval shell, full of possibility.

Of course the possibility I choose is a drink, alone at home, just to fortify me, and then another, and one week and one missed therapy appointment and too many empty bottles to count later, I’m due once again to visit the nephew. I squint into my vibrating phone. I understand that your compulsion is to cancel, my dear sister intones solemnly through my voicemail. I wonder which book she got that from. Certainly it didn’t advise her to call back and leave a second, hissing message, Don’t you dare!

The need to prove her wrong gets me up. She greets me at her door with slit-eyed, snakeish intent. I flinch from her rising hand, remembering the surprising punch she threw the night she turned sixteen and I, twenty-two, vomited Bud Light all over her cake.

Bud Light! And she says I haven’t grown up.

Anaconda-like she wraps my ribs. My eyes bulge. I was right: explosion is how I’ll go. But it’s a hug (Question 4. Do you seek confirmation of negative worldviews?) and she’s calling the Perfect World brilliant. On the mantle, in the place of honor usually reserved for family photos that don’t include me, the white dome glows. Within, the ants bunch and spread in Rorschach patterns. It’s thriving, my dear sister says as she leads me by the waist to the dining room. I just manage not to jerk away from the strangeness of her touch. The nephew is sure to get a medal at this year’s science fair, she tells me. Pinned under that false gold, he’ll look as much the good Chinese boy as I am the bad Chinese girl, the kind who makes a public spectacle out of alcoholism as if she’s white and blonde and carefree and doesn’t drag a whole race’s reputation behind her. Even our good-for-nothing dad knew better than that—he only ever hit us indoors. But tonight? My nephew slides his chubby hand into mine. Tonight he and I are golden together.

I’m invited to stay for dinner and—a twitch of my brother-in-law’s brow—given a glass of wine. Wine is an old, gentle friend. I mellow. I loosen. I construct with bread and pasta sauce new roads, new ant-sized buildings for the Perfect World, retrieving ideas I thought I’d lost along with a few million brain cells and a half-finished master’s in urban planning, making such fine points that the nephew’s eyes widen, then narrow, as if he sees me in a blinding new light. Me as an adult with opinions that make other adults go quiet. Not the sad aunt whose play dates were recommended by the therapist her brother-in-law pays for. Not the bad influence. Muscles move in my dear sister’s watching face. I interpret them as a smile.

More movement: forks to mouths, glasses to the sink, cork to the bottle, approving nod from my dear sister to my brother-in-law when she thinks I can’t see, my nephew to his bed, me to the couch. And later, movement from the master bedroom that might be the makings of another nephew, movement of corks from new bottles and wine into a mug I quietly fill because who wants to hear that? Who wants a soundtrack to their own alone-ness? And later, much later, I wake up or fall asleep, anyhow I’ve entered a different state of being because the couch is shifting like a raft, and across the swaying storm-tossed floor the Perfect World rises like a pale moon. It’s so beautiful my eyes sting. Beautiful like him and his small serious brow, like her, like me, we’re related after all and their beauty mine, so beautiful that I need to touch. I consider the closed bedroom doors, the cocooned forms behind, consider the blessed softness of foreheads under my fingers, the one moment of joy before the waking and the recriminations and the light switched on. I start to cry. Don’t ever say, as my sister says to her husband when she thinks I can’t hear, that I’m too dumb to know what I do or what I’ve lost, I got a perfect score on my SAT and even made the old man smile. I know. I know. I know I don’t want the switch of this night to flip. So I do not set out across that floor, however much I ache to, I do not enter the rooms of my kin to stroke their faces so like my own. Tenderly I tuck my bottles under the couch with this house’s other shames: dust bunnies, my dear sister’s diet pills, the report card the nephew hid with the teacher’s question about bad influences in his home life an ugly snake across the page. When my shaking hands are empty again (Question 5. Can you list any rational evidence for your fears?), I reach for the moon. Beneath my fingers I watch, inside that Perfect World, the stirrings of creatures so small I cannot hope to see their imperfections. But I am always clumsier than I intend and the world slides away from me. The ground tilts. I hold my breath and wait to see if there will come a crash, a fall.

–C. Pam Zhang (from American Short Fiction)

***