Peter Liu - Watering Heaven

The room comfortably fit ten people. It had a big television with gigantic speakers. A strobe light illuminated the room in iridescence. After a toast, we took shots. The three were too nervous to grab the mike so I started by singing “Hotel California.” Jenna took a shot and sang “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Desdemona had her arms crossed with a stern look. “They don’t even have Justin Timberlake,” she said glumly. Flipped through a few pages, sitting in a foul mood.

“I’ll pick a song for you guys.” I selected a Spice Girls song, another by Cyndi Lauper. Desdemona got into it, suddenly setting up a queue. I was relieved, realized Jenna and Jacob were quiet. I turned and saw the two were making out in the corner. Something stabbed me inside. I tried to ignore it by singing. After three songs, I looked back and noticed she was watching me to make sure I was watching her. In some strange way, I realized she was paying me back for what she’d earlier perceived as a rejection.

“I can’t believe the selection is so small,” Desdemona complained again. “In San Francisco, they had so many more.” As she complained and hogged all the singing time, I saw Jenna and Jacob sneak away.

“We’re gonna use the restroom,” Jenna explained.

They returned thirty minutes later, Jenna’s hair a disheveled mess.

“Will you stop singing so goddamn loud?” I barked at Desdemona.

She glared at me. “Excuse me?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“What went and crawled up your ass?”

Jenna was giggling with Jacob.

I grabbed the side of my chair. I felt dizzy while Desdemona sang a Mandy Moore song about true love. I wished I could turn the camera on myself, take a shot, capture my jealousy and longing. But I knew it wasn’t possible and I felt bitter that my emotions couldn’t be documented, airbrushed, then categorized comfortably away.

It was 4 a.m. when we got out. Jenna left with Jacob. Desdemona drove off on her own. I got home an hour later, couldn’t sleep. Went to my computer, stared at the images of Jane and Lane. I felt pain coursing through my veins, unadulterated pain. It wasn’t Jenna; it wasn’t Jane. It was me. And I cried, I wept: I felt so alone. As the tears poured out, it occurred to me that this sensation of wanting to rip my innards out, this raw feeling of agony I wanted to eradicate, this was what I’d been hiding from. I wept, but I laughed. Without anywhere to hide, I felt like I’d been released from the grip of fabricating lies to make things prettier than they were. I selected all the images of Jane and Lane, dropped them in the trash bin, hit delete. Something shook inside me and it felt good not to have to worry about framing, to relish the moment, to be exposed and nude — to be real.

V.

In the following weeks, I prepared for another shoot. I wanted to cover a gamut of smaller urban legends: a woman bitten by a cobra at a supermarket, a cactus exploding with an army of tarantulas, an AIDS Mary who infected hapless men and sent them letters welcoming them to ‘the world of HIV.’ I hired eleven models, including Rick’s friend Tara. I had the usual crew at hand, took over ten thousand photos, and knew I was going to discard 9900 of them. As I clicked away, I wondered, if a person could discard 99 % of their life and experience only the best 1 %, would they think life a grand and beautiful thing?

On the fourth night of the shoot, I went to grab some Italian food with Tara. Tara was cute, lithe, tanned with a nimble figure. She was nineteen, with the face of a ten-year-old and the body of a blossoming twenty-year-old. She was Greek, though she wielded a British accent, and she’d spent half her life in Japan training as a kendo artist. I was apologizing about turning down her idea of photographing her performing martial arts in the nude.

She laughed it off. “Don’t worry about it.” We chatted about some other topics. “I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“What’s up?”

“Where do you get your ideas for your shoots?”

I thought about it. “I do research online and there’s a bunch of books I go through. I focus a lot on phobias and I pick ones I think work on film.” I thought of something from long ago and laughed to myself.

“What?”

“When I was eight, my piano teacher told me if you leave a chair out while you’re sleeping, a ghost’ll come and sit in it, watching while you sleep. Ever since then, I haven’t been able to sleep with a chair pulled out.”

“You’re kidding?”

“No. I still have to put chairs in before I sleep.”

She put her hand on my shoulder and laughed. “You poor thing,” she said.

“You know what’s even weirder?”

“What?”

“A lot of things you’ll swear aren’t urban legends are actually urban legends. And sometimes, you hear about something so ridiculous, you know it can’t be real, it’s gotta be an urban legend — but it isn’t.”

“How do you tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not?”

I was struck by the question, so simple and yet hitting at the core of the issue that had plagued me so long. “Do you know when you’re having a dream, it feels real, like it’s really happening? And you fight and get pissed off and you’re like, why is this happening? Or if you’re having a good dream, you’re like, this is too good to be true.”

“Uh huh.”

“I think the only way for you to tell it was a dream is to wake up,” I said. Before I could explain further, the waiter came by. “We better order before it gets too late,” I suggested.

She nodded. “I’m really hungry.”

“So am I.”

Then thought to myself, I’m awake now. I am awake .

Frank Guo, engineer for SolTech Industries, figured out the solution to cold fusion while visiting the aquarium with his wife, Amanda. The grail of endless supplies of energy produced in a tiny box with water electrolyzed on top of palladium had been deemed ‘pseudo-science’ in many corners. He realized the problem hadn’t been with the particles. Not even the math. It was relationships.

It triggered when Amanda told him about an experiment where small sharks and fish were placed in a tank together. A transparent glass partition separated the two. Whenever the sharks instinctively moved to devour the fish, they banged their heads against the wall. A month of this and scientists removed the partition. The sharks had it so ingrained that the fish couldn’t be eaten, they’d leave them alone, even if they were floating right next to them.

Fish became atoms, and Frank realized electrons weren’t all that different from humans. Negative, positive energy, fission, anomalous heat production, mysterious reactions. Quarks were feisty sons of bitches and the Heisenberg uncertainty was just another name for someone who was moody.

Normally, the discovery would have been a moment of joy. But Amanda also had an announcement. “I’m leaving for China next week.”

“For how long?” he asked.

“Permanently.”

“Why?”

She sighed. “Things haven’t been the same since…”

And he knew she meant the moment she’d been diagnosed with diabetes. “I hate that I can’t have sugar whenever I want,” she said. “What’s the point of the American dream if I can’t have sweets?”

Or the freedom to be fat. He barely recognized himself in the mirror anymore because the two gorged on desserts so much. His belly was more like a mountain and hers was no different. Pang fuqi , she joked. The fat couple.

Frank worked in a huge lab with a fusion generator that looked like it was from Star Trek . Unfortunately, his job was clerical. Administrative. Boring. Even if it involved explosions that could rip the planet in two.