Like snow covering the particulars of the city, they will say we never happened, that our survival was a myth. But they’re wrong. You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips.

* * *

Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.

* * *

As a rule, be more.

* * *

As a rule, I miss you.

* * *

As a rule, “little” is always smaller than “small.” Don’t ask me why.

* * *

I’m sorry I don’t call enough.

* * *

Green Apple.

* * *

I’m sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?

* * *

If you find yourself trapped inside a dimming world, remember it was always this dark inside the body. Where the heart, like any law, stops only for the living.

* * *

If you find yourself, then congratulations, your hands are yours to keep.

* * *

Take a right on Risley. If you forget me, then you’ve gone too far. Turn back.

* * *

Good luck.

* * *

Good night.

* * *

Good lord, Green Apple.

The room is silent as a photograph. Lan is stretched out on the floor on a mattress. Her daughters—you and Mai—and I are by her side. Wrapped around her head and neck is a sweat-soaked towel, making a hood that frames her skeletal face. Her skin had stopped trying, the eyes fallen into her skull, as if peering from inside the brain itself. She resembles a wood carving, shriveled and striated with deep lines. The only indication that she’s alive is her favorite yellow blanket, now grey, rising and falling on her chest.

You say her name for the fourth time and her eyes open, searching each of our faces. On the nearby table, a pot of tea we forget to drink. And it was that floral, sweet jasmine scent that makes me aware, by contrast, of the caustic, acrid odor undercutting the air.

Lan has been lying in the same spot for two weeks. With the slightest movement shooting pain through her thin frame, she developed bedsores under her thighs and back that got infected. She has lost control over her bowels and the bedpan beneath her is perpetually half-full, her insides literally letting go of themselves. My stomach grabs as I sit, fanning her, her remaining strands of hair fluttering at her temples. She peers at each of us, again and again, as if waiting for us to change.

“I’m burning,” she says, when she finally speaks. “I’m burning like a hut inside.” Your voice, in reply, is the softest I’ve ever heard it. “We’ll put water on it, Ma, okay? We’re gonna put out the fire.”

* * *

—

The day Lan was diagnosed, I stood in the doctor’s nothing-white office as he spoke, his voice sounding underwater, pointing to various sections of my grandmother, her skeleton pinned against the backlit screen.

But what I saw was emptiness.

On the X-ray, I stared at the space between her leg and hip where the cancer had eaten a third of her upper femur and part of the socket, the ball completely gone, the right hip porous and mottled. It reminded me of a sheet of metal, rusted and corroded thin in a junkyard. There was no evidence as to where that part of her disappeared to. I looked closer. Where was the translucent cartilage, the marrow, the minerals, the salt and sinew, the calcium that once formed her bones?

I felt then, as the nurses droned on around me, a new and singular anger. My jaw and fists tensed. I wanted to know who did this. I needed this act to have an author, a consciousness held in a defined and culpable space. For once, I wanted, needed, an enemy.

Stage four bone cancer was the official diagnosis. While you waited in the hall with Lan in the wheelchair, the doctor handed me the manila envelope with the X-rays inside, and simply said, avoiding my gaze, to take your grandma home and give her whatever she wanted to eat. She had two weeks, maybe three.

We brought her home, laid her back on a mat on the tile floor where it was cool, placed pillows along her length to keep her legs in place. What made it worse, you remember, was that Lan had never once believed, even to the end, that she had a terminal illness. We explained her diagnosis to her, about the tumors, the cells, metastasis, nouns so abstract that we might as well have been describing witchcraft.

We told her that she was dying, that it would be two weeks, then one week, any day now. “Be ready. Be ready. What do you want? What do you need? What would you like to say?” we urged. But she wouldn’t have it. She said we were just children, that we didn’t know everything yet, and that when we grow up, we’d know how the world really works. And because denial, fabrication—storytelling—was her way of staying one step ahead of her life, how could any of us tell her she was wrong?

Pain, however, is no story in itself. And these last few days, while you were out making funeral arrangements, picking out the coffin, Lan would howl and cry out in long, piercing bursts. “What have I done?” she’d say, looking at the ceiling. “God, what have I done to have you step on me like this?” We would give her the synthetic Vicodin and OxyContin prescribed by the doctor, then the morphine, then more morphine.

I fanned her with a paper plate as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Mai, who had driven all night from Florida, shuffled through the rooms, cooking food and making tea in a zombie-like daze. Because Lan was too weak to chew, Mai would spoon oatmeal into her barely opened mouth. I kept fanning as Mai fed her, the two women, mother’s and daughter’s black hair fluttering in unison, their foreheads almost touching. A few hours later, you and Mai rolled Lan on her side and, with a rubber-gloved hand, removed the feces from your mother’s body—too wasted to expel its own waste. I kept fanning her face, jeweled with sweat, her eyes shut as you worked. When it was over, she just lay there blinking.

I asked her what she was thinking. As if waking from a sleepless dream, she answered in a gutted monotone. “I used to be a girl, Little Dog. You know?”

“Okay, Grandma, I know—” But she wasn’t listening.

“I used to put a flower in my hair and walk in the sun. After big rain, I walk in the sun. The flower I put on my ear. So wet, so cool.” Her eyes drifted from me. “It’s a stupid thing.” She shook her head. “Stupid thing. To be a girl.” After a while, she turned back to me as if remembering I was there. “You eat yet?”

* * *

—

We try to preserve life—even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.

I’m thinking now of Duchamp, his infamous “sculpture.” How by turning a urinal, an object of stable and permanent utility, upside down, he radicalized its reception. By further naming it Fountain, he divested the object of its intended identity, rendering it with an unrecognizable new form.

I hate him for this.

I hate how he proved that the entire existence of a thing could be changed simply by flipping it over, revealing a new angle to its name, an act completed by nothing else but gravity, the very force that traps us on this earth.

Mostly, I hate him because he was right.

Because that’s what was happening to Lan. The cancer had refigured not only her features, but the trajectory of her being. Lan, turned over, would be dust the way even the word dying is nothing like the word dead. Before Lan’s illness, I found this act of malleability to be beautiful, that an object or person, once upturned, becomes more than its once-singular self. This agency for evolution, which once made me proud to be the queer yellow faggot that I was and am, now betrays me.

* * *

—

Sitting with Lan, my mind slides, unexpectedly, to Trevor. Trevor who by then had been dead just seven months. I think of the first time we had sex, not with his cock in my palm like we usually did, but for real. It was the September after my second season on the farm.