You Might Hesitate by Eva Dunsky

Sometimes, you abscond to a monastery in China for all the wrong reasons.  You are running from your life and you think you hear a voice, way off in the distance, imploring you to drop what you are doing before the world implodes with you stuck at your desk in a windowless room, artificially lit to give you a headache, listening to a podcast and spot-checking expense reports.

You mistake your own laziness, the result of five years of pent-up job frustration, as the architecture of a cruel and maleficent god.  A real asshole of a god with a personal vendetta against you, though you did nothing to warrant his anger.  But no, you think, though he is certainly spiteful and sadistic, he is also not particularly nitpicky—he doesn’t tend to single people out of the vast sea of festering humanity for special treatment.

You picture the God of your childhood—nebulous and nameless, conjured into being only around Easter on the odd years that your grandmother came to visit.  You did not picture him beholden to others, but rather only to you, contained in the pastoral paraphernalia your mother would drag out of the basement—pious Marys, weeping Jesuses, plush-looking lambs that you weren’t allowed to touch.

It felt personal, the way he created you in his image.

§

It is another morning of walking around midtown.  Today, the man who sits huffing paint outside of your old office has passed out on the corner of 38th and 5th near the CVS.  His grip on the paint can is loose, but even unconscious, he manages not to drop it.  His fingernails are clean and his shoes look relatively new, which means someone must love him enough to remember his name and let him take the occasional hot shower in their apartment.  Women in pencil skirts maneuver around him, and the clacking of their heels on the sidewalk does not wake him up.

You do a quick calculation of the degrees of separation between you and this passed-out, gently snoring paint-huffer, which is when you realize that wandering around midtown with your soul in your throat and your nerves on fire is not a viable life plan.

Though you killed a woman, you did so indirectly, and the justice system has acquitted you in the cursory way that it does.

Still, her name was Wen.

They shipped her body back to China.

The paint-huffer twitches violently and resumes his snoring.  Which is when you go inside the CVS, heading towards the home goods section to buy a Sharpie and a can of keyboard cleaner.  You leave it next to the man, who does not wake up.  Sorry this isn’t paint, you write on the side of the can.  It was the best I could do.  You put the Sharpie back in your pocket, but on second thought, you leave it next to the can.

You decide it would be best for everyone if you went to Guangzhou to find Wen’s sons, the two boys mentioned in the papers as her only living family.

So you do—you throw out the already rotting vegetables in your fridge and book a flight.  On the way to the airport, the driver asks whether you are going to China for business or pleasure.  You don’t know how to respond, so you smile thinly and pretend you haven’t heard.

Though it is a red eye flight, the man next to you keeps his overhead light on the entire time.  He is reviewing a stack of papers, his eyes watery and exhausted, dried out from the recycled air, tears slipping down his puffy cheeks.  You order a small blue bottle of gin, and though the forces at work have decided that it’s night on this plane, a stewardess tiptoes down the aisle and hands it to you anyway.

Sometimes you wish that you hadn’t gone to law school, that the law could remain some amorphous thing half-referenced in arguments with an unsure voice.  You wish you hadn’t specialized in abdicating responsibility, though if you are being honest, malpractice law has served you well—your mother used to say you could find the loophole in a mobius strip.

Sometimes you wish you hadn’t been acquitted.  But then you think of prison, of men with pockmarked faces coughing late at night.  You consider your own insomnia, present before the accident, bad enough to warrant the heavy stuff now—triazolam, eszopiclone, the ironically-named restoril.  You swallow them dry, mixing and matching, though they offer no restoration.

When the plane lands, it is early morning, so you head for the hotel.  It is still dark and the lobby is deserted, though the concierge is made up with red lipstick and red nails, her cheeks dusted in a powder the color of sawdust, lighter than the rest of her skin.

You take the keycard that she gives you and go upstairs to get settled in your room, lying awake for hours as the sun seeps through the curtains.  The clipped sounds of Cantonese from the maids in the hall signal that the coming day can no longer be ignored. They knock on your door, ready to turn the sheets on a bed you have barely used, so you figure it is time to get going.

§

On the street, the sun is relentlessly bright, though at the bar next to the hotel, it is so dim you can barely see your hands as you hold them to your face, much less the bloody cuticles or streaks of new pink skin where you have ripped off your hangnails.  You are confident you will find her children in this city of millions, if only through the name of the travel agency that she had booked with, pilfered from the same court documents that explain why you are not guilty.  That the bracket was defective; no one could but the manufacturer could have prevented such a senseless tragedy.

It is the opinion of the court.

Nothing could have been done.

The remains shipped back home to her family.

Senseless. Random.

Unfortunate.  An understatement so vast that when you hear it pass the judge’s lips, it shocks you with its apathy, though no one else seems to notice.

§

After a few beers, you wander out into the blinding sunlight and somehow manage to flag down a car.  You show the driver a smudged address on a folded and creased sheet of paper, and expressionless, he pulls out into traffic.

The travel agency is tucked between a pharmacy and a supermarket, and the air outside reeks of fish.  The door rings as you open it.

“Can I help you with something?” The woman at the counter wears a blazer and a silk shirt—though it is 100 degrees outside, inside it is freezing, the air conditioner on full blast.  Her English is accentless and pristine, as frigid as the room itself.

“I came to see about a woman . . .?”  You phrase it as a question, and both of you pause, locked in the awkwardness of your paltry explanation.  Just as she opens her mouth to speak again, you save her the effort, spitting out what you have traveled eight thousand miles to say.

“Her name was Wen.”  The woman’s eyes widen, and she looks behind her into the back room, assuring herself that she has backup against the freely-sweating American who has come to ask about a dead woman.

“Very sad,” the woman says.  She does not feign ignorance, for which you are grateful.  “She came on trips with us many times.”  Again, she looks to the back room.

“I’ve come all this way.”  It is true, though it also isn’t her problem, your desperate guilt that sucks the last vestiges of breathable air from the room.  Another woman comes out from the back, and in a voice that is hardly above a whisper, she gives you the promise of surnames and a province.

“But then you must leave,” she says.  When you again step outside into the baking heat, you are armed with the knowledge that her sons are Keung and Chongan, surname Qiang, and that they came from Panyu.

§

Back at the hotel, though you are supposed to be searching for the sons, you fall down the rabbit hole of news articles about Wen’s death.  Despite your best efforts and a promise to your therapist never to seek it out again, you spend intolerably long minutes starting at the photo from the New York Post: her body on the street, foot peeking out from below a white canvass sheet, toes painted deep purple.

When you search for the boys separately, brushing the cobwebs off the corners of the archived internet, a graduation notice from the local Panyu school pops up.  About two thirds of the way down the list of honor roll students, there is a boy named Keung with her same last name. When you google him separately, a local interest piece about a scholarship comes up—the website translates it into broken English, but it is the photo that causes a wave of nervous nausea:  Wen, very much alive, her arm around a chubby, sullen looking boy of thirteen or fourteen.  In the photo, her hair overcomes her barrette and the strap of her bra is twisted into the sleeve of her shirt.  On her other side stands a younger boy in an orange top and sneakers, his edges blurry with motion.

From there, like dominoes — the firm where he works, preceded by the M.B.A. program from which he graduated, preceded by the High School he attended with help from the scholarship he received when he was just thirteen or fourteen, chubby and sullen and unmistakably angry, even then.  You track him backwards through life until there are no more leads to follow.

That night, you sleep uninterrupted for five entire hours, waking up around dawn with no idea where you are.

After taking a shower, you dress in your blue button down shirt.  It clings to your still-wet body, patches of dark blue fabric rising against the contours of your skin.  You throw a suit jacket over the ensemble and grab your bag. You will fit in better at the son’s firm if you are dressed to look the part.

You don’t fit in.  People stare at you in the airy glass lobby, enhancing the feeling that you are in a large terrarium.  You head to the reception desk, though before you can get to it, the receptionist is out of her seat and leading you to a couch near a wall of windows.

“Wait,” she says, holding up her hand like a traffic controller.  The panic of sitting and waiting causes you to spiral, and you unbutton your collar, sacrificing presentability for the ability to continue breathing.  After fifteen minutes, the receptionist leads you in the elevator to the fortieth floor, to an office at the end of the hall. She knocks on the door and you both wait for a response.  Inside, you hear the shuffling of papers, and then there is a man opening the door, looking at you with the kind of concentrated anger that one might expect from the son of a woman murdered by your negligence.

Then he turns that concentrated vitriol on the receptionist, and you realize that his anger is not reserved for you.

Surely this can’t be the same chubby kid from the photo.  This man is lean with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, with muscles that strain at the arms of his suit.  His hair is wet-looking and slicked back, and tiny glasses are perched at the tip of his nose.

But it is the same nose.  And the same broad forehead, and the same slash of a mouth.

The receptionist leaves and you follow him inside, where he beckons to a seat in front of his desk.  Once you are both seated, he leans back in his swivel chair and waits patiently for you to speak.

“Thank you for—” but he cuts you off, clasping his hands in front of him and leaning forward suddenly.

“She was not the best mother, if that’s what you wanted to know.”  You are so surprised by his reaction that you choke on the spit in your throat and begin to cough.  He leans back again, watching.

“She was fine on paper but selfish in a way that mothers should not be.”  Now your eyes are watering, and you’d ask for a glass of water if you weren’t so taken aback by the man’s bald aggression.

“She left us, you know.  For three years, our aunt took care of us in Zhongshan while she traveled the world.”  He cocks his head towards the window, looking down at the shimmering asphalt forty stories below.

“My brother Chongan suffered most,” he admits.  “When she died, we were no longer in contact, but they spoke every week.”

Tears roll down your cheeks, and though they have been generated by your coughing fit, Keung looks away.

Wiping your eyes, you look around the room: diplomas on the walls; a desk that is shiny and bare; no photos.

“Thank you for meeting with me,” you say, reduced to the conversational pleasantries that had been left unsaid.  The stupid futility of your words hangs heavy in the air. Keung sighs.

“I imagine you are here because you feel guilty,” he says, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes.  “Though there was no guilty verdict.”

You wonder how to describe it, the constant low-grade fever of guilt, the quick pulse, the sweat that drips along the center of your back.

You wonder if an explanation of the facts would make it better, or if this constant repetition of events is only helpful to you.

For the millionth time in the six months since it happened, you think of how to explain it in a way that places the responsibility squarely and solely on your shoulders, allowing you to feel the desperation of remorse that everyone was so insistent on protecting you from.

The facts, as they stand:

You installed the bracket yourself because the super was on vacation in the Dominican Republic.  You resented having to do his work and you did a half-assed job, guessing at where the screws should go and giving up when they wouldn’t screw into the concrete ledge.  You closed the window on the air conditioner and it seemed secure enough, so you threw the rest of the screws in the junk drawer of your desk.

Your colleague opened the window three weeks later and screamed as the air conditioner tipped backwards into freefall, screaming again as it made contact with a woman on the street.

You did not hear the crunch.  There is no way you could’ve picked it out from the milieu of midtown traffic.

But you could swear that you did hear it.  Clear as day.

Then the sirens, those same sirens that always used to penetrate the sleepiness of your afternoons.

You kept working, even as the people in your office tripped over each other to get downstairs and help.  If you continued to work, you figured, the situation would recede into the background in the same way the myriad tragedies of New York always do.

Your apathy, your faint remove, would keep you safe.

“Would you like to know how it happened?”

Keung’s phone goes off, and he looks at it out of the corner of his eye.

“Would you like to tell me?”  His impatience is hard to escape, and it is clear that he knows, perhaps from his training in business negotiations, that you are desperate to offer him something.

“I just thought it might be helpful.  To know, you know.  For your grieving process, it might be helpful to understand…” you trail off as he picks up his phone and pecks at the keys, their loud clacking italicized in the pristinely quiet office.

Then he sighs again and puts his face into his hands.

“I am not immune,” he tells you, just as you were beginning to think he might be.  You imagine you can hear the faint break in his voice as he admits to his suffering.  “It hurts me too.”

It feels like your whole life is a collection of agitated silences, strung together with twine.

“But if you want to speak with someone, you should find my brother, Chongan.  He might like to hear from you.  He might be in a better position to give you what you need.”

There it is—the acknowledgement that you are asking for something.  Even in your most humble apology, the story you are telling is still about you, despite your desire to disappear, to float out of your life and hover above, impassive and impartial.

“But you should know,” Keung continues, “that he is different from me, and from you.  He is more like our mother.”

“Where is he?”

Keung lets out a curt laugh, harsh and cruel, but then he checks himself.

“He’s in training to be a monk.”

§

When you return to your hotel, faced with the expectation of sleep, you instead pull up the photo online: her foot.  Her foot.  Toenails painted purple.  You stare at it until the edges fuzz out, until your vision creates doubles and your computer slips out of night mode, the shock of brightened colors jolting you into another day.

Again, the chipper sounds of Cantonese outside of your door.

Today, you will look for answers from Chongan.

On the ferry to Hoi Tong Monastery, tourists jostle for a position towards the front, then retreat to the back when the bow is hit by a wall of spray.  When the boat arrives, you immediately scan the eyes of the men that guide it into the dock, their brown robes billowing in the wind.  Inside, as the others are lead on a tour of the shrines, you approach a young man that lingers in the corner, perched against the wall.  His cheeks are spattered with peach fuzz, and his head appears small and disembodied, floating in a sea of fabric.

He knows you are coming, but still he looks nervous, caught off-guard.  In the courtyard, he leads you to a stone bench, pressings his hands against his thighs and staring straight ahead, blinking against the bright sun.

Then he tells you about his mother, a renegade woman who you have reduced to a statistic.

You see what you can give him—unlike his brother, Chongan is eager to speak, and you can listen.  He tells you about how she raised them on her own, escaping a husband who was alternately distant or abusive and moving in with her sister, giving them the gift of a sprawling, dysfunctional extended family.  How she got a job and saved money, earning enough to send both her sons to the best schools, posting their marks on the refrigerator in their aunt’s home.

“In some ways,” Chongan says, “she was a very average mother.  She did everything you would expect a mother to do for her sons.”

You think about your own mother, how the dementia blunted her razor-sharp stare into something softer, less easily-defined.

“It’s rarely that simple though, right?”

“She left us.  I’m sure my brother already told you.  She met a man . . .”

He tells you how a lot of his meditation has been about forgiveness—forgiving her for her shortcomings, for leaving them alone, for forcing him to see her as selfish and flawed before he was old enough to understand. How he never doubted that she loved him, even when she left.  How she understood him and his restlessness better than anyone else, how that made it hurt even more.

You tell him how you killed her.

“I should have waited for the super to come back.  I shouldn’t have assumed that it would work itself out, or that I knew better than the directions, or that I didn’t need those little screws.”  You try to think of ways to say in simple English, unequivocally and without an attempt to justify or even explain, that you are sorry, but it is clear that Chongan isn’t listening closely, that he has already said his piece and now he is far away.  Once you understand this, it becomes easier to speak.

“When the rules don’t apply to you for so long, you start to think you can bend everything to your will, even physics, and directions start to feel like red tape, like the red tape I’ve spent my life cutting through.”

You start to cry, for real this time, sobs choked with mortification.

“There’s this guy,” you tell him, “a homeless man who sits outside my old office.  He takes a lot of drugs, and half the time he’s unconscious, but when he’s awake, he radiates this really strong sense of before and after, and you know that some catastrophe has crippled him.  Like everything about him is paralyzed.”

You pause to catch your breath.  Softly, in a voice laden with gravel, you admit your worst fear, the one that works in tandem with your guilt.

“I feel like I’ll be stuck in this unfathomable ‘after’ period for the rest of my life, like one day I’ll wake up and have no idea where I am.”

You pull your t-shirt up to wipe your eyes, exposing the pale pouch of your belly.

“But you came to Guangzhou,” Chongan says.  “You are trying.  Now you just have to wait.”

Before you can wonder what he means by waiting, he asks how long you are planning to stay. You pause, thinking about how to answer.

“The boat for visitors is leaving soon.”  He tells you that you can stay with him if you’d like, that he has cleared it with his superiors.  That night, in the pitch black, the silence feels physical, the gentle lapping of the waves against stone like the vacuous noise of a black hole.

The return flight comes and goes.  Calling it a return flight seems disingenuous, as you have nothing to return to.  Instead, you stay where you are safe, where wallowing in a feverish place can be written off as meditation.

It feels duplicitous, but then again, you have carved a life for yourself out of duplicity — out of cutting corners, doing things fast and quick, getting results when possible and talking yourself out of the inevitable failures with a voice as smooth as sand.

You might hesitate to do this, to run away instead of facing your life.  You are falling into old patterns of avoidance, but the alternatives have always been too painful or annoying or inconvenient or time-consuming to handle.

Her name was Wen, though in America she went by Wendy.  She had come to New York with a group of other Chinese women, all in their fifties, all untethered enough for no one to worry when they announced they were finally going to see the world.  She had split off from the group, eager to see the view from the top of the Empire State Building.

It fell from the ninth story.  She did not die right away, but when she did, there was no one there that spoke her language.

Eva Dunsky is originally from Venice, CA, though she currently lives in NYC. Her work has appeared in Fiction Southeast, Juked Magazine, and The Drum, and others, and you can read her writing at https://evaduns.ky/.