Don Lee - The Collective

“I don’t know who I am,” he said finally. “I don’t know my real name, my real birthday. Other people, they have photos of themselves as babies, family albums. I have nothing. There’s no record of my existence. I’m nobody. I’m nothing. I’m worthless.”

He stopped again. “I don’t know what to do. What will I do? No matter what I do, I can’t get anyone to love me. I’ve had my chances, but I always fuck it up. It never fails. Why do I keep doing that? It mystifies me. My parents, though, they knew. They could tell when I was born, they could tell I was a lost cause. They saw the truth right away. The truth is, I’m unlovable. That’s why they abandoned me.”

He began to cry. He stayed up there, helpless, and a number of people in the audience, including Mirielle, cried with him.

“I’m sorry. I’m awfully sorry,” he managed to say, and walked back to his seat. The audience applauded. People patted Joshua on the back as he sidestepped to the chair next to me. Tim asked us to stand and hold hands, and we bowed our heads and recited the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.” I squeezed Joshua’s hand as he continued to whimper.

When the prayer was finished, everyone shouted the standard coda to AA meetings—“Keep coming back! It works!”—and clapped.

Mirielle hugged Joshua. Others did, too, and shook his hand benevolently. “You’ll always have a home with us,” they said. “You’ll always have a family here.”

Outside, while we waited for Mirielle, Joshua lit a cigarette and shivered in the cold. “Man, that was fucking nerve-wracking, making that story up on the spot like that,” he said. “I was, like, Okay, push it, push it, keep going, let’s create a Dickensian epic here, then I’d feel I was losing them and I’d have to tell myself, Come on, think of something, you weenie, reel them back in. I couldn’t figure out a way to explain how I got to be Jewish.”

“Joshua—”

“Story time for the wretched and woebegone. Not bad, huh?”

“I want to tell you,” I said, “I was really… moved by that.”

“ ‘Moved’? ” He cackled. “Come on, you didn’t buy a word of that shit, did you?”

“The last part…”

“The last part was no different than the rest. I needed an arc — an ending of contrition, of implied redemption — to round the fucker out. The whole thing was a crock.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Don’t okay me like you know something,” he told me. “Believe me, there wasn’t a shred of sincerity to anything I said up there.”

Everything changed the following week. Paviromo accepted an excerpt from Joshua’s novel-in-progress for the special Fiction Discoveries issue of Palaver , which he was now planning to publish in June. Then he shocked me by finally, after three years of toying intimations and broken pledges, taking my story “The Unrequited” for the issue as well. I didn’t know what to make of the offer at first. I was, in fact, initially torn about it.

“Did you have something to do with this?” I asked Joshua.

“I might have impressed upon him the obvious grandeur of your story, which he’s been a blinkered arse and bloody ninny to overlook all this time.”

“I can’t have a story in a magazine where I’m the managing editor,” I said. “Everyone will say the only reason I got in was nepotism. No one would count it as a real publication.”

“Look, you and I both know the story stands up, that it’s had to undergo quadruple the scrutiny of anything that’s ever come over the transom at Palaver . Am I right?”

“It didn’t pass the scrutiny of all those other journals I sent it to.”

“Mandarins and halfwits, those editors.”

“Maybe I should withdraw it,” I said.

“Are you fucking kidding me? So what if a few curmudgeons chirp about it? Fuck ’em! You deserve this, man. More than anyone else, you deserve this. I’ll never forgive you if you withdraw it. It’d be such a fucking loony act of career self-sabotage to pull it right when you’re on the cusp. I’m telling you, once people actually read the goddamn story, there’ll be no question that you belong.”

I deliberated for a few days, and even though I still had reservations, I signed the publication contract (which I had had to draw up myself), and let Joshua take Jessica and me out for a congratulatory dinner at Rialto in the Charles Hotel — a threefold celebration, since Jessica had received some good news herself. Her application to the Cambridge Arts Council for an exhibition had been approved.

“This is going to be our year, man,” Joshua said. “1999 will be when everything comes together for us.”

I believed everything just might. I began dreaming. Dreaming that our stories would be selected for prize anthologies, and agents and editors would come clamoring. That we’d get book contracts and fulfill our vow to each publish a book before we turned thirty. That Jessica’s exhibition would be a smash and lead to her signing with a dealer in Boston and another in New York. That Vanity Fair would ask to do a two-page photo spread of the 3AC, but only of the three of us, Joshua, Jessica, and me, because we were the founders, the core, the real fin de siècle noisemakers who were heralding the arrival of Asian American artists in the new millennium, the ones who had everything before them, a future that promised to be bright and glamorous and extraordinary.

I began writing again — not just revising old stuff but embarking on something brand-new, a novella to round out the collection, about a third-generation Korean American from Mission Viejo who moves to Boston to work for a management consulting firm and encounters the bamboo ceiling. I even yielded to Jessica and several 3AC members’ supplications to form a writers’ group after the holidays.

For the next week and a half, I wrote every minute I wasn’t at Palaver or with Mirielle. She was getting stronger — and more affectionate toward me — with each day. “I feel good around you,” she said.

By the time we boarded the plane to Tortola, my spirits were at their highest since college, and Mirielle was giddy as well, excited about the trip. “How long till we’re there?” she kept asking me during the flight. “Can I wear your watch?” I handed her my black digital chronometer. A flight attendant, serving drinks, said to Mirielle, “And what would your husband like?” and throughout the rest of the journey, Mirielle referred to me as her “ husband ,” and I referred to her as my “ wife ,” and with each reference, we chortled.

Joshua met us at the airport on Beef Island. He had been in the BVIs a week already, and he was tanned and relaxed. He wore a white captain’s hat with a black bill, cocked on his head at a jaunty angle. “Just call me Commander!” he said.

He led us down a dock at the end of the runway to a seventeen-foot Boston Whaler. “You sure you know how to drive this thing?” I asked.

“You’ll be impressed by what I’ve learned here,” he said, and bragged that he’d been taking sailing and diving lessons.

Joshua maneuvered the workboat slowly out of the bay, and once we were in open water, he pushed down on the throttle, and we roared out to sea. Mirielle and I unwound, enjoying the sun, the wind, the panorama of boats and islands and ocean.

“I’m so glad we’re here,” she said to me, and I put my arm around her.

It was a ten-minute ride to Great Camanoe. “Pull those fenders out,” Joshua said as we entered a marina, and then he adroitly piloted the boat alongside a concrete pier. He secured the Whaler to cleats and posts, showing off various knots: bowline, sheet bend, clove hitch, daisy chain. For a second I pictured Joshua being tied to the railing on the Southie pier, but the mise-en-scène didn’t seem to hold any residual trauma for him.