“Maybe I’m too weird,” I say.
“You’re probably too normal. Only socially maladjusted creeps use Tindr.”
“Gee, thanks,” I complain.
She grins, flicking a bit of red bean paste at me. I lick it off of my arm. “You know what I mean. Come visit my church with me sometime, yeah? There are plenty of nice boys there.”
“The dating scene in this city depresses me,” I mutter, flicking open my Tindr app with my thumb. “I’ll pass.”
“Come on, Jen, put that away.” Aiko hesitates. “Your mom called while you were out. She wants you to move back to Flushing.”
I bark out a short, sharp laugh, my good mood evaporating. “What else is new?”
“She’s getting old,” Aiko says. “And she’s lonely.”
“I bet. All her mahjong partners are dead, pretty much.” I can imagine her in her little apartment in Flushing, huddled over her laptop, floral curtains pulled tight over the windows to shut out the rest of the world. My ma, whose apartment walls are alive with hissing, covered in the ugly, bottled remains of her paramours.
Aiko sighs, joining me at the counter and leaning back against me. For once, I don’t move away. Every muscle in my body is tense, straining. I’m afraid I might catch fire, but I don’t want her to leave. “Would it kill you to be kind to her?”
I think about my baba evaporating into thin air when I was five years old, what was left of him coiled in my ma’s stomach. “Are you telling me to go back?”
She doesn’t say anything for a bit. “No,” she says at last. “That place isn’t good for you. That house isn’t good for anyone.”
Just a few inches away, an army of jars full of black, viscous liquid wait in the fridge, their contents muttering to themselves. Aiko can’t hear them, but each slosh against the glass is a low, nasty hiss:
who does she think she is, the fucking cunt
should’ve got her when I had the chance
I can still feel Harvey, his malice and ugly joy, on my tongue. I’m already full of things my ma gave me. “I’m glad we agree.”
Over the next few weeks, I gorge myself on the pickup artists and grad students populating the St. Marks hipster bars, but nothing tastes good after Harvey. Their watery essences, squeezed from their owners with barely a whimper of protest, barely coat my stomach. Sometimes I take too much. I scrape them dry and leave them empty, shaking their forms off like rainwater when I’m done.
I tell Aiko I’ve been partying when she says I look haggard. She tells me to quit drinking so much, her face impassive, her thoughts clouded with concern. She starts coming over more often, even cooking dinner for me, and her presence both grounds me and drives me mad.
“I’m worried about you,” she says as I lie on the floor, flipping listlessly through pages of online dating profiles, looking for the emptiness, the rot, that made Harvey so appealing. She’s cooking my mom’s lo mien recipe, the oily smell making my skin itch. “You’ve lost so much weight and there’s nothing in your fridge, just a bunch of empty jam jars.”
I don’t tell her that Harvey’s lies under my bed, that I lick its remnants every night to send my nerves back into euphoria. I don’t tell her how often I dream about my ma’s place, the shelves of jars she never let me touch. “Is it really okay for you to spend so much time away from your catering business?” I say instead. “Time is money, and Jimmy gets pissy when he has to make all the desserts without you.”
Aiko sets a bowl of lo mein in front of me and joins me on the ground. “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than here,” she says, and a dangerous, luminous sweetness blooms in my chest.
But the hunger grows worse every day, and soon I can’t trust myself around her. I deadbolt the door, and when she stops by my apartment to check on me, I refuse to let her in. Texts light up my phone like a fleet of fireworks as I huddle under a blanket on the other side, my face pressed against the wood, my fingers twitching.
“Please, Jen, I don’t understand,” she says from behind the door. “Did I do something wrong?”
I can’t wait to cut her up, I think, and hate myself even more.
By the time Aiko leaves, her footsteps echoing down the hallway, I’ve dug deep gouges in the door’s paint with my nails and teeth, my mouth full of her intoxicating scent.
My ma’s apartment in Flushing still smells the same. She’s never been a clean person, and the sheer amount of junk stacked up everywhere has increased since I left home for good. Piles of newspapers, old food containers, and stuffed toys make it hard to push the door open, and the stench makes me cough. Her hoard is up to my shoulders, even higher in some places, and as I pick my way through it, the sounds that colored my childhood grow louder: the constant whine of a Taiwanese soap opera bleeding past mountains of trash, and the cruel cacophony of many familiar voices:
Touch me again and I swear I’ll kill you—
How many times have I told you not to wash the clothes like that, open your mouth—
Hope her ugly chink daughter isn’t home tonight—
Under the refuse she’s hoarded the walls are honeycombed with shelves, lined with what’s left of my ma’s lovers. She keeps them like disgusting, mouthwatering trophies, desires pickling in stomach acid and bile. I could probably call them by name if I wanted to; when I was a kid, I used to lie on the couch and watch my baba’s ghost flicker across their surfaces.
My ma’s huddled in the kitchen, the screen of her laptop casting a sickly blue glow on her face. Her thoughts cover her quietly like a blanket. “I made some niu ro mien,” she says. “It’s on the stove. Your baba’s in there.”
My stomach curls, but whether it’s from revulsion or hunger I can’t tell. “Thanks, ma,” I say. I find a bowl that’s almost clean and wash it out, ladling a generous portion of thick noodles for myself. The broth smells faintly of hongtashan tobacco, and as I force it down almost faster than I can swallow, someone else’s memories of my childhood flash before my eyes: pushing a small girl on a swing set at the park; laughing as she chases pigeons down the street; raising a hand for a second blow as her mother launches herself toward us, between us, teeth bared—
“How is it?” she says.
Foul. “Great,” I say. It settles my stomach, at least for a little while. But my baba was no Harvey, and I can already feel the hunger creeping back, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
“You ate something you shouldn’t have, didn’t you, Meimei.” My ma looks up at me for the first time since I walked in, and she looks almost as tired as I feel. “Why didn’t you learn from me? I taught you to stick to petty criminals. I taught you to stay invisible.”
She’d tried to teach me to disappear into myself, the way she’d disappeared into this apartment. “I know I messed up,” I tell her. “Nothing tastes good any more, and I’m always hungry. But I don’t know what to do.”
My ma sighs. “Once you’ve tasted a killer, there’s no turning back. You’ll crave that intensity until you die. And it can take a long time for someone like us to die, Meimei.”
It occurs to me that I don’t actually know how old my ma is. Her thoughts are old and covered in knots, stitched together from the remnants of other people’s experiences. How long has she been fighting this condition, these overwhelming, gnawing desires?