* * *

—

    When I thought it was over, that I’d done my unloading, you said, pushing your coffee aside, “Now I have something to tell you.”

My jaw clenched. This was not supposed to be an equal exchange, not a trade. I nodded as you spoke, feigning willingness.

“You have an older brother.” You swept your hair out of your eyes, unblinking. “But he’s dead.”

The children were still there but I no longer heard their small, perishable voices.

We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another.

“Look at me. You have to know this.” You wore a face. Your lips a violet line.

You went on. You once had a son growing inside you, a son you had named, a name you won’t repeat. The son inside you started to move, his limbs running the circumference of your belly. And you sang and spoke to him, like you did to me, told him secrets not even your husband knew. You were seventeen and back in Vietnam, the same age I was sitting across from you.

Your hands cupped now like binoculars, as if the past was something that needed to be hunted down. The table wet beneath you. You wiped it with a napkin, then kept going, telling of 1986, the year my brother, your son, appeared. How, four months into your pregnancy, when a child’s face becomes a face, your husband, my father, pressured by his family, forced you to abort him.

“There was nothing to eat,” you went on, your chin still cupped over the table. A man on his way to the restroom asked to get by. Without looking up, you scooted over. “People were putting sawdust in the rice to stretch it. You were lucky if you had rats to eat.”

You spoke carefully, as if the story was a flame in your hands in the wind. The children were finally gone—only an elderly couple was left, two puffs of white hair behind their newspapers.

“Unlike your brother,” you said, “you were not born until we knew you’d live.”

* * *

—

Weeks after Gramoz handed me the pizza bagel, you bought me my first bicycle: a hot-pink Schwinn with training wheels and white streamers on the handgrips that rattled, like tiny pom-poms, even when I rode, as I often did, at walking speed. It was pink because that was the cheapest bike in the shop.

That afternoon, while riding in the tenement parking lot, the bike jammed to a stop. When I looked down a pair of hands were gripped on the handlebar. They belonged to a boy, maybe ten, his fat wet face wedged atop a towering, meaty torso. Before I could make out what was happening, the bike flipped backward and I landed on my butt on the pavement. You had gone upstairs to check on Lan. Stepping out from behind the boy was a smaller boy with the face of a weasel. The weasel shouted, a spray of spit rainbowed in front of him in the slanted sunlight.

The large boy took out a key chain and started scraping the paint off my bike. It came off so easily, in rosy sparks. I sat there, watching the concrete fleck with bits of pink as he gashed the key against the bike’s bones. I wanted to cry but did not yet know how to in English. So I did nothing.

That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.

That night, in the bare-bulb kitchen, I knelt beside you and watched as you painted, in long strokes that swooped, with expert precision, over the cobalt scars along the bike, the bottle of pink nail polish steady and sure in your hand.

* * *

—

“At the hospital, they gave me a bottle of pills. I took them for a month. To be sure. After a month, I was supposed to release it—him, I mean.”

I wanted to leave, to say stop. But the price of confessing, I learned, was that you get an answer.

A month into the pills, when he should have already been gone, you felt a jab inside you. They rushed you back to the hospital, this time to the ER. “I felt him kick as they whirled me through the grey rooms, the chipped paint on the walls. The hospital still smelled of smoke and gasoline from the war.”

With only Novocain injected between your thighs, the nurses went in with a long metal instrument, and just “scraped my baby out of me, like seeds from a papaya.”

It was that image, its practical mundanity, the preparation of fruit I have seen you do a thousand times, the spoon gliding along the papaya’s flesh-orange core, a slush of black seeds plopping into the steel sink, that made it unbearable. I pulled the hood of my white sweater over my head.

“I saw him, Little Dog. I saw my baby, just a glimpse. A brownish blur on its way to the bin.”

I reached across the table and touched the side of your arm.

Just then, a Justin Timberlake song came on through the speakers, his frail falsettos woven through coffee orders, used grounds thumped against rubber trash bins. You eyed me, then past me.

When your eyes came back you said, “It was in Saigon where I heard Chopin for the first time. Did you know that?” Your Vietnamese abruptly lighter, hovering. “I must’ve been six or seven. The man across the street was a concert pianist trained in Paris. He would set the Steinway in his courtyard and play it in the evenings with his gate open. And his dog, this little black dog, maybe this high, would stand up and start to dance. Its little twig legs padded the dust in circles but the man would never look at the dog, but kept his eyes closed as he played. That was his power. He didn’t care for the miracle he made with his hands. I sat there in the road and watched what I thought was magic: music turning an animal into a person. I looked at that dog, its ribs showing, dancing to French music and thought anything could happen. Anything.” You folded your hands on the table, a mixture of sadness and agitation in the gesture. “Even when the man stopped, walked over to the dog wagging its tail, and placed the treat in the dog’s open mouth, proving again that it was hunger, only hunger, not music that gave the dog its human skill, I still believed it. That anything could happen.”

The rain, obedient, picked up again. I leaned back and watched it warp the windows.

* * *

—

    Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living thing.

A few months before our talk at Dunkin’ Donuts, a fourteen-year-old boy in rural Vietnam had acid thrown in his face after he slipped a love letter into another boy’s locker. Last summer, twenty-eight-year-old Florida native Omar Mateen walked into an Orlando nightclub, raised his automatic rifle, and opened fire. Forty-nine people were killed. It was a gay club and the boys, because that’s who they were—sons, teenagers—looked like me: a colored thing born of one mother, rummaging the dark, each other, for happiness.

Sometimes, when I’m careless, I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been?

Where have we been, Ma?

* * *

—

The weight of the average placenta is roughly one and a half pounds. A disposable organ where nutrients, hormones, and waste are passed between mother and fetus. In this way, the placenta is a kind of language—perhaps our first one, our true mother tongue. At four or five months, my brother’s placenta was already fully developed. You two were speaking—in blood utterances.

“He came to me, you know.”

The rain outside had stopped. The sky an emptied bowl.

“He came to you?”

“My boy, he came to me in a dream, about a week after the hospital. He was sitting on my doorstep. We watched each other for a while, then he just turned and walked away, down the alley. I think he just wanted to see what I looked like, what his mom looked like. I was a girl. Oh god . . . Oh god, I was seventeen.”

* * *

—

In college a professor once insisted, during a digression from a lecture on Othello, that, to him, gay men are inherently narcissistic, and that overt narcissism might even be a sign of homosexuality in men who have not yet accepted their “tendencies.” Even as I fumed in my seat, the thought wouldn’t stop burrowing into me. Could it be that, all those years ago, I had followed Gramoz in the schoolyard simply because he was a boy, and therefore a mirror of myself?