Peter Liu - Watering Heaven

How to convince her to stay? he wondered. Tell her he discovered a way to provide interminable supplies of energy to the world? Tell her he’d make the sun obsolete by understanding that electrons were as whimsical as fireflies? Then again, it wasn’t like he would tell anyone his solution. SolTech Industries had the nasty habit of canning people who made important discoveries. Liabilities, the lawyers said. Basically, they didn’t want anyone to receive credit or financial compensation. Better to draw them out, take baby steps so he’d keep his job, mislead them just enough.

Part of his cynicism came from the fact that all his bosses cared about was promoting themselves to more grandiose titles, executive of this and president of that. They lived off the achievements of past years, eliciting grants like vultures, their hypocrisies more manifold than wavelengths of sound. Not that Amanda cared. She just wanted her chocolate tapioca dipped in caramel and red bean.

He remembered that on their eighteenth date together, he explained how superstrings were reverberations in other dimensions that caused the physical manifestations in our universe. Marriage gurus said it was reverberations in our desires that caused attraction. Amanda had a confused look. Why was it so hard for him to simply say I love you ?

Maybe because his nerves were fused together, like hydrogen particles that combined until they exploded and caused a catastrophic detonation. He wanted to hold Amanda that much.

“I’ve already bought the ticket,” she said.

“I’ve discovered the solution to cold fusion,” Frank sputtered out.

She looked at him and said, “That’s nice…” She lowered her head. “Maybe next time, you can just find out how to say, Don’t go .”

After Amanda left, Frank watched manta rays chase hammerhead sharks, and tropical fish slither through corals. His fingers were interlaced. He bought a slice of cheesecake and took a bite. It tasted bitter.

For three minutes, the whole world is green, a throbbing pulse of underwater grass. Then my depth perception dissolves into a flat canvas, and my co-workers look like 2D animation drawn by minimum-wage artists in Korea. I can smell scientific theories the way I smell my memories: relativity is sugar mixed with a dissolving chocolate soufflé, and all the lovers I’ve disappointed remind me of overcooked salmon simmering in burnt coffee and impossible expectations. I experience four cyclical deaths every day: lavatory, office politics, televised Internet, and dreamless sleep. I can’t even drive myself; it’s my wife who has to explain that cars aren’t computerized seeds of death holding together the infrastructure of a faulty CPU. Partitions are real; social divides are inseparable; no one in the world sees what I do. And what do I see? The doctors told me that brain imaging had revealed a colony of tapeworms in my brain. Seventy of them, a whole family, feeding on the folds of tissues that weave the tapestry of my CPU. They must have been starving before they used some unknown enzyme to break through my blood-brain barrier. I’ve been advised to have them killed. There are drugs to decimate them. But I feel guilty. They have a right to live, even if it’s at my expense. My wife insists parasites don’t have souls. But I have to believe they do, because if they didn’t, what would it mean for me? I suck bliss and inject sorrow into the earthy hues of my deaf wife who insists she loves me with her lips. They’re dry with strips of flesh peeling off and she licks them intermittently. I can sometimes hear the worms describe her as a cosmic irregularity that disappears with the swells of gravity. They want to eat my cochlea to re-establish balance. Since their arrival, I’ve experienced emotions as sound: depression is cathartically cacophonous; love is ominously quiescent. Regret drums lightly until the ululations become frustrating and drown everything else out. I sometimes spot old friends who tell me about their unlived lives, and we play chess with our unfulfilled ambitions until my wife asks who I’m talking to. Everyone, I tell her, as though air molecules had ears. I wish I could converse with electrons so they’d act as translators to the tapeworms. I’d experience their fear at the impending apocalypse, Armageddon being my eventual death, a neurological explosion that translates to darkness and inactivity. There’s no way to save them. They have no future hope. Yet they cling. So I cling. And the universe is a flat and green frying pan where I cook the omelet of my life at an old café that serves brunch sunny side up.

An autopsy of time would expose midnight at this LA rave as a buildup of greedy seconds poisoned by impatience. I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to split my brain open, unraveling my memories like noodles that’d squirm because I’d boiled them too long. Melancholy weaves her way around my noodle and I split into a million different versions of myself.

I’m attending the event because an old colleague is catering and I’m assisting. The theme is Locust, or hunger, a charitable masquerade pretending to empathize with the impoverished and destitute. There’s thousands who’ve starved the whole week to gather at this factory on the outskirts of town and smoke exotic herbs to alter their perceptions. Many of the women resemble spirits with all the smoke around us, rippling into thin, meandering mirages. What would a lifetime with any of them be like? I spot a Chinese girl who’s statuesque enough to fit into Roman porn if she had chipped breasts and an ivory ass. She notices my glance, approaches and introduces herself as, “Ella. I combined the Spanish words for the feminine and masculine the .”

“I’m Will,” I reply.

She shakes my hand. “Tell me a secret.”

“Why don’t you go first?” I suggest.

She simpers. “I’ve lost my reflection.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me show you.”

She pulls me into the girls’ bathroom and points at the mirror. I see my ugly self and twenty girls behind, but no Ella.

“I thought I was dead at first,” she says. “But I still had to eat and shit, so I figured I was alive.” I stare to make sure she’s real. She is, and I’m hypnotized by her skimpy dress and lean legs. For a second, I wonder what it’d be like to bite them — frail, fragile, like a gaunt strip of quail. She asks me, “Do you think I’m beautiful?”

“How long’s it been since you’ve seen yourself?”

“A year?” she shrugs. “I don’t remember how I look anymore.” Her skin is pale and the veins in her neck are vulnerably bulbous, throbbing with platelets and plasma. The excess plasma makes her ponder, “Do you have parts of yourself you hate seeing? I remember when I was a kid, a swarm of bees stung my arm till it was a bloody strip of bumps.”

“I kill bees whenever I can,” I reply.

“Why?”

“Because the taste of honey makes me sick.”

She asks me eight more questions, but she doesn’t really care for answers, more in love with the questions themselves than her token boy of the moment. We spit through vodka shots; she wants to dance, tells me she picked me as her date for the night. “Impress me,” she says. “Or make me weep.”

The confused expression on my face makes her laugh and she confesses she used to be a runway model traveling the globe, shuffling through French, Turkish, and Japanese lovers. “I dated a guy with the biggest knife collection in the world.” She twirls her wrist in a slashing motion. “I made sure he was miserable while I was with him.”

“Why?”

“I do it to every guy I love. It’s their punishment since I know it can’t last. What’s your passion?”