"I always pictured you with an Oriental" my mother intoned while perfunctorily scraping the pimento cheese from under her finger nails. "I'm not sure why I bother telling you anything." She did not respond immediately, the pause impregnated with her self-righteous indignation. "Because I'm your mother!" Of all the tautological explanations foisted upon me in my life, this was without a doubt the worst. "Don't remind me." She huffed, less out of general offense and more out of the hypothetical hit her social status might take if her romance writers group caught wind of my irreverence. Backed into the shit-stained corner of her own making, she rose to the occasion. "Well, I'm very disappointed in you." She strutted away from our tiff. As stupid as it sounds, as much as I can overcome through force of logic how meaningless those words are, they always sting.
I returned to the couch, throne of my ennui. I hadn't been home for three days and already the expected rejuvenation of vacation was turning into stasis. My father napped on the other end of that gargantuan divan, his tray of cookies poised precariously on his gut. I watched them teeter there, the rising action of my day. Guide. Guide. Guide. Pressing the remote with greater urgency each time in the hopes of syndicated intervention. The Syfy channel was running a Star Trek movie marathon. For 2+ hours I watched as the supposedly omnipotent V'Ger probe came to the gloriously banal awareness of itself. I mused that my own life ran a trajectory counter to V'Ger, an impotent dissipation into whatever. With characteristic manic dedication to his own time table, my father woke up fifteen minutes before the end of the film and started rushing my mother and me to dinner. Yelling from every conceivable room in the house in his mad dash of preparation, we endured the elan of our familial chief of staff. Together we piled in the new brown Subaru of which my parents were so proud.
The Blue Ridge Mountains are both blue and hazy, but only in perspective. As a sort of meditation I tried to see the haze around me and through which I moved, our brown SUV rudely displacing the ancient miasma in an attempt to get to P.F. Chang's. "What do you think the F stands for?" My dad chuckled. We pulled up to some giant, faux-terracotta horses and my sister smoking on the steps, the respective guardians of the tomb of General Tso. We were greeted by her smoker's cough that sounded like it had come back from the future to warn us about something, but we weren't listening or didn't care. We trundled in and were attended to by an obviously depressed wait staff. With great consternation and no scruples whatsoever, my father demanded from our waiter the exact proportions of each dish he was interested in. Gesturing with his hands aloft as if praying to some budget deity "Like this much, or THIS much?" Not to be outdone in his own tactlessness, my father then jumped to a line of questioning about our server's ethnicity. On hearing he was Korean, my dad posed this to the man - "So, who do you like more Kim Jon Il or Kim Jong...uh the other one?" He waited on that answer as much as on his food.
The sick man of dinner was our own inability to relate to one another. Our conversation bound with inane questions, tortured with silence, and killed with under-cooked scallops. That is a bit misleading, though. It had been dead so long that we were used to the putrefied stench of the corpse. I had hunted for the killer before, but like any good crook he had long ago payed off the witnesses. Nobody would talk. "Why doesn't your generation care about the future?" Another benihana hot take from my mom. This drove my sister to the restroom for the third time that evening, leaving me to answer for the sins of my generation. Luckily, my mother was more concerned with throwing us under the bus one at a time rather than collectively. "You sister is very depressed." Who isn't? "She's talked about suicide...openly!" At least she's not thinking about it. "You should go out with her tonight." Fine.
One and a half Kirin Ichibans later I stumbled into my sister's white Lexus. The floor was covered in dog food and loose tobacco. The seats leaned back so far it felt like a trip to the dentist. Steering with her iPod wheel, my sister sped us to a bar of ill-repute. There we waited for her friend, Celeste, a "weird looking" Peruvian girl and one that just might be "my type." Between beers and smokes there were cryptic text messages from Celeste, each one placing her nearer or father from us. It felt like a ruse, which incidentally feels like getting drunk. As I built a monument to my own numbness, my sister seethed with anxiety. Where was her friend and would she have to drive her home? I thought about waxing delphic to her, but instead played the analyst. She was terse, but honest. She felt like she had no place, no hope, no future. She lived in the shadow of our parents and she hated the shade. She longed for the sun and when she couldn't find it or no longer believed it was there she got angry. I comforted her. Delusion and displacement were the currency of our generation. We were told that once we came back from college the world would have a place for us, a comfy two bedroom studio with Ikea furniture enough to barricade the doors against our parents. A utopia of solipsism rolled up in do-what-you-want fuckery. Instead, we were like that guy at far end of the bar, a forty year old acoustic guitarist prostrating himself for acknowledgement, living in his parent's basement, and hung up on an indifferent single mom who only fucked him for his average penis and his CD-WR mixtapes which she promptly rewrote with Steely Dan songs.
I hadn't been that eloquent or drunk since I was on probation college. Solemnly my sister acknowledged that she hadn't been listening to me at all. We hugged and ran out on our tab. Back in her white Lexus, I rummaged through the center console as my sister cased the town for Celeste. I found an old car phone, a gigantic black brick that could have just as easily been a kilo of heroine. My sister had unplugged the phone fearing the cops might track her moderate weed consumption. I told her I would buy her a bumper sticker that said "Proud 2 Be Paranoid" or "My conspiracy theorist is an honor student." Notwithstanding my teasing, I agreed with her logic. The text messages from Celeste started coming in rapid bursts like machine gun fire, she was nervous, lost, and refused to stay still. Blue to black as the night progressed, the mountains were screening our communications like a prison warden. We found ourselves always a step behind her friend: a broken heel on a street corner, some glitter on a park bench, the torn threads of leggings. The evidence suggested the restless soul of a hoochie mama bound to haunt the night forever in search of one last partially smoked cigarette. Still we cruised through the city, attachés to an apparition that would not forget us.
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