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  No, I said.

  She looked relieved. “You never know when you’re asleep. It’s so embarrassing, all the noise you make, your mouth hanging open. People tell me I snore, but I can’t believe it. I don’t think I’m the type of person to snore.”

  Yet my aunt could never hold anything in. Even buttons popped off her clothes. She would be pumping gas for her car, and her skirt would burst open at the waist and fall to the ground.

  Today my aunt sits beside me because it is no use sleeping. She blinks at the sun’s glare, her face and hands bloated and pale, as if she were drowned. I drive in silence, without turning on the radio. The road stretches before us like a monotonous dream. The windshield vibrates with light, burning my eyes. I forget that I am turning the wheel, my hands following the shape of the road.

  “Last night, I took thirteen sleeping pills,” my aunt says. Her voice quavers, rising from inhuman depths. I’m afraid to look at her. If I look at her, I will be pulled under, unable to breathe.

  “The doctor told me to take one, and if I was still awake to take another in twenty minutes. But I kept taking them. I was so miserable. My hand kept reaching out for them, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I walked up and down the stairs, I sat on the floor making strange noises, I was like a monkey—a monkey!” She pauses. “It’s so sad to me.”

  What is, Auntie? I say.

  “I was thinking of your grandma. You know, she was addicted to sleeping pills. When she couldn’t go to sleep, she would hit her head against the wall and cry, asking for her mother. A forty-year-old woman still asking for her mother! She didn’t want any of us, even though we were living. When I was a child, I loved her more than anyone in the world. Just the thought of her dying would make me go crazy. Now I know how hopeless she felt. Every day trying to get better.”

  She looks at me. “I feel closest now to your mother. It’s because we share the same blood, the blood of our parents mixed together. Our blood is closer to each other’s than anyone else’s.”

  I remember visiting my aunt when we first learned about her cancer, how she came down the stairs to greet us, looking only at my mother and smiling. My mother smiled as well. When they stood in front of each other, my mother took my aunt’s arms, clutching her by the elbows. They stood like that for a while, holding each other by the elbows. Then my aunt rubbed my mother’s back gently, and said, “With you here, I feel secure.” I had brought roses for my aunt, and she seemed genuinely pleased by the sight of them. After learning her news, I had rushed out to the backyard, where our rosebushes stood, and in the dark I had cut every red, yellow, and pink bloom I could find. The roses were overblown, already dropping petals, but my aunt smiled as she gazed at them, lifting the bouquet to her nose.

  But don’t you feel closer to your children? I ask her.

  “Not as strong,” she says. “They have only half my blood. Even though they came out of my body.” My aunt sighs. “I know now what my life is. My daughter is a doctor but would rather treat her patients than her sick mother. My son has no emotions and shuts himself up in his room all day and ignores me. I would have been at their side to comfort and take care of them, but they don’t do that for me. I am sure they love me, but not that much. Even though they have only one mother. Only one.”

  At the hospital, my aunt hesitates, wandering down the wrong hallway. She walks slowly, bumping into people, an open door, the water fountain.

  Mrs. Yu, the nurse says. It’s this way.

  My aunt ignores her, studying the physicians’ names listed on the directory. When she hears a doctor talking on the phone, she moves toward him and waits expectantly. The doctor glances up at her.

  Mrs. Yu, the nurse repeats as she takes my aunt’s arm.

  “My son is a quadriplegic,” my aunt says. “The doctors said he couldn’t live when he was seven, but now he’s twenty-eight. We won a lawsuit a few years ago, so now he’s rich, and I’m going to find a wife who he can have sex with. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  The nurse tells her how happy she is for him. She squeezes my aunt’s hand. Now you sit right there, Mrs. Yu.

  I sit beside my aunt, pretending to read a book. My aunt sighs loudly, stirring in her chair. She is waiting for me to look up. I stare mercilessly at the page, the words tunneling into my mind, then dropping away. My aunt is silent, but I feel her presence burning, insisting, without touching my skin. Her personality is submerged, or maybe it is magnified, I can’t tell which. Somehow, though, she has become inseparable from her disease. She reminds me of an insect scurrying along a slippery edge, trying to keep abreast of water. I can’t bear to see her frantic motions.

  My aunt stands up and slowly paces to the other side of the room, her arms pressed against her stomach. She moves toward an older woman sitting quietly with folded hands. My aunt smiles at her. “What are you here for?”

  Oh, the woman says, gazing at her for the first time. She did not notice my aunt creeping toward her with such fateful intention. It’s not me, it’s my husband.

  My aunt looks at her blankly.

  He’s getting his radiation now, the woman says. It’s near his throat.

  “Me, colon cancer.”

  Oh, the woman murmurs.

  “Yes. They took a large piece of my colon out two years ago.” My aunt nods as if she is trying to understand all this herself. “They stapled me together and said I was completely cured. No need to worry, they said.” My aunt nods again. “Now it’s come back, growing in my spine. The size of a grapefruit. But this time, it’s inoperable, they say.”

  Oh, I am so sorry, the woman says.

  “Yes. They don’t seem to understand this is the only life you have.”

  No, they don’t.

  “That is my niece over there. She just finished her first year of college.” The woman looks over at me and we both exchange a weak flutter of smiles. “She’s always reading books.”

  Uh-huh.

  “She’s so good, driving me here each day.”

  That is nice of her, the woman says.

  I wrote my aunt a few times after I returned to my university in the fall. In one letter, I told her I had always imagined we would have lunch together someday when I was older and could pick up the check. She wrote back that she liked that idea and wondered what I would be like when I was older. I remember the person I was in college. I was naive and had a keen sense of my own importance. When I wrote her that letter, I couldn’t quite believe our conversation would ever come to an end.

  I looked through her old photographs not so long ago. My uncle allowed me into his library and invited me to sit down in his chair. There was an unusual softening in him. He had little patience for people of my generation and often said we were spoiled and didn’t appreciate everything our parents had given us.

  There was one photograph of my aunt and uncle sitting on a bench in Washington Square in New York City. My aunt’s face is as round as an apple, and she is bundled up in a soft brown coat with a fur-lined collar, her shoulder resting against my uncle’s. My uncle wears a dark winter coat and tie, and they look like a happy, elegant couple, sitting close beside each other, with their hands in their laps, and smiling.

  You both look so young, I told my uncle.

  We took a lot of pictures then, he said. Not so much later. He picked up the photograph and gazed at it for a moment before he shook his head and put it down again. When you’re young, you have the energy to take pictures, he said.

  I wake up, and it is four in the morning, the windows still dark. I have just met my aunt for the first time in several years, and my mind is still tingling from her presence. I had felt such hope seeing her again.

  In my dream, I am walking along a sloping field toward a group of strangers, and I see my aunt talking and laughing with a glass in her hand. She is wearing the beautiful rose dress that we buried her in. The grass glows unnaturally against the darkening sky, and I walk toward my aunt with an expanding sense of unreality, my lungs f
illing with cold, fragrant air. When I look down, there is the pink shimmer of her dress, which I am now wearing, her pearl necklace looped around my wrists.

  The last time I spoke to my aunt, it was near Christmas. It was snowing, and the whiteness outside seemed symbolic. Everyone said that if there was a miracle, it would be today. But you don’t believe in God, Philip said to me. So there can be no miracles.

  My aunt was asleep from the morphine, and when she woke up she was surprised to see all of us standing around her bed. “All of you are here because I am going to die,” she said. She told us that she had been dreaming of Grandpa. “We were playing mahjong together, and I was two tiles away from winning.” All of us looked at my grandfather, who seemed bewildered. He didn’t understand what she was saying. “I was dreaming, and I felt no pain,” my aunt said to him in Chinese. “No pain. It’s nice to dream like that.” She closed her eyes to go back to sleep. “I don’t mind dying,” she said, “if death is like a dream.”

  If death is like a dream. I’m afraid it’s a more absolute disconnection. The closest knowledge I get is when I wake up at three or four o’clock in the morning. Or maybe that time I was unconscious and they pulled out my wisdom teeth. It was a snipping of the wires, no images at all, no sensation of time passing. One moment, they were covering my mouth with a mask and I felt my body growing heavy. The next moment, a nurse was touching my arm and I realized that my mouth was full of cotton. No memory of the space in between.

  But four o’clock passes. The sky begins to lighten, and I feel my blood rushing inside me.

  On July Fourth, my aunt hosted a celebration on her deck. She wore a green silk Japanese robe embroidered with gold-red chrysanthemums. There was something ceremonial about her presence as she sat quietly in her chair. Her face seemed to radiate the peculiar glow of the dying. People circled and brushed clumsily against her like huge, errant moths. She smiled at them, yet remained calm and untouched. During the fireworks, everyone’s gaze wandered toward her. I lit a fuse, dodged quickly away. The deck brightened, a lurid fluorescence, and I looked at all the illuminated faces. An agony of wonder. What secret things passed in the dark between us? Streaming colors, the crackle and hiss, and then darkness as everyone stared at the spent fuse. In all the pictures we took of that day, my aunt is the focal point. Her presence quietly overwhelms the others. She gazes at the camera with clear, shining eyes as if she is staring into her future.

  BLUE HOUR

  It was New Year’s Eve, and the train to New York was crowded. Paul had been late meeting them at the station, and now he and Jeremy had rushed off to look for seats. Iris couldn’t help but feel animated, as if she’d drunk a glass of wine. She wondered what the two men thought of each other. The train began to move, and she stepped quickly down the aisle. It was a feeling of anticipation, really. She sensed it in the other passengers, even though they tried not to show it, keeping their faces straight. But every time they glanced at their watches, they would be counting down the hours. Like Iris, they would be thinking of the night ahead and who they would be seeing once they got off the train.

  The automatic doors of the compartment slid back, and Iris was treading on rattling metal, feeling the cold wind. Through a crack, she could see the ground hurtling beneath her feet. She felt light-headed, aware of the piece of metal on which she stood, her body separate from the rush of earth below. Then she stepped into the next car, as if entering a dark red womb,and the doors slid shut behind her, sealing off the train’s roar. Bare symmetrical trees floated by along the windows.

  “Iris!” Jeremy called out. He had found seats facing each other. Iris sat down beside him, even though it occurred to her that Paul might be annoyed. But she didn’t want Jeremy to think that she and Paul were one of those couples whose bodies were fused together. As if they shared a leg or an organ and couldn’t breathe or take a step without the other person.

  The doors parted, cold air blowing in. “All tickets please!” the conductor shouted.

  “When will we get there?” Paul asked as he came by.

  The conductor did not look up, punching frenetic holes into their tickets. “We’re like the atmosphere,” he muttered. “Before you know it, we dissipate.” None of them said anything, and the conductor glanced up, eyeing them for the first time. “We’ll be there in two hours.” He slid their tickets into the slots above their heads and walked on.

  Paul gave a half laugh. He leaned over, his elbows on his knees as he studied the floor. He puffed one cheek out, then the other, tapping his fingertips together. He had a narrow face and deep blue eyes, and Iris had mistaken him for a teenager when he first came into the bookstore where she worked. She liked to look at him when he was most oblivious to her, when he was reading a book, or in the mornings when he was still asleep and there was a sweetness in the warm spaces of his skin. They had been together for five months now.

  She took his present out of her bag and quickly placed it on his lap. “Happy birthday!” she exclaimed.

  Paul reached over and put his arm around her neck. Iris had to bend forward out of her seat for a kiss. She smiled, though she felt a little awkward with Jeremy watching.

  “I was born two hours before midnight,” Paul explained to Jeremy. He stuck a thumb into a crevice of the paper, and the wrapping split open easily. “My doctor was at a party when he got the call and arrived at the hospital in a tuxedo. He wasn’t very pleased to see me.”

  “Do you like it?” Iris asked.

  It was an oval black lacquer box that she had found at an antique store on Pine Street. “It’s hand-painted from Russia,” she told him. On the lid was a night scene of three horses, all different colors—red, white, and brown—gaily pulling a sled. There was a driver holding a gold whip in the air, and two lovers seated in the back of the troika. They were passing through the snow, but the way the ground was painted with its swirls of blue, it seemed to Iris that they were racing magically across the sea. Tiny gold stars shone in the blue-black sky.

  “It’s very nice,” Paul said, lifting the lid to look at the bright red interior. He then picked up the book that she had added at the very last minute.

  “Herbert Marcuse,” Paul said.

  “I’m afraid that was my idea,” Jeremy said.

  “It’s about Freud,” Iris said hopefully. She didn’t mention that it was a critique of Freud. It had been kind of a joke. She had told Jeremy that Paul was a Freudian, and Jeremy had said, “Maybe we can change that.”

  “Fantastic,” Paul said, but the way he said it slowly, almost ironically, made her feel that she had made a mistake. He turned to Jeremy. “You’re going to graduate school for sociology, right?”

  “I am,” Jeremy replied.

  “Where?”

  “In California.”

  “Like it there?”

  Jeremy paused. “I do.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I didn’t expect to ever live in California.”

  “I thought you wanted to study philosophy,” Iris said.

  “Too impractical,” Jeremy said. “It doesn’t have any real-world applications. You end up feeling isolated.”

  “You want to be connected to the world,” Iris said, smiling at him. She had not seen Jeremy in two years. He had arrived at her doorstep in Philadelphia the previous night, flushed from the cold. Maybe it was the color in his cheeks, the fact that he had come from outside yet looked so warm in his thick wool sweater, but she thought there was a glow about him that she hadn’t seen before. He was different from the way he’d been in high school, when he wore braces and talked slowly, sometimes with a mild stutter. In college, he grew out his hair, wore flannel shirts, and strode around in combat boots with slightly hunched shoulders. He had short hair now, a finely clipped beard, and there was something in the way that he held himself that made him seem more at ease with his own body.

  “Has Laura told you?” she said. “She’s absolutely in love.”

  “I’
ve heard,” Jeremy replied.

  “They met in Chicago.” She didn’t say anything more, and Paul began to prod Jeremy about Marcuse. Iris thought about Laura as she watched the landscape stream past her window. If she narrowed her eyes, it almost seemed to turn to water. The trees and bracken were the color of dead, wet leaves. They passed the backyards of people’s homes, and Iris glimpsed a line of crows sitting on an electric wire, a rusted car without its tires, an orange bicycle left in the snow. She thought about Laura and Erik waiting for them at the station and wondered what kind of man Laura would have fallen in love with, if he would be anything like Paul. Iris had always liked the idea of her and Laura being similar, secretly pleased whenever anyone remarked on their resemblance. Strangers sometimes came up to them, asking if they were sisters. But Laura didn’t think they looked at all alike. “People are always confusing one Asian for another,” she said.

  Over the phone, Laura had told Iris that ever since meeting Erik and moving to New York City she no longer felt as if she were in a state of limbo. Iris wondered about that. The last time she saw Laura was April. They had walked around Laura’s neighborhood in Chicago, they had eaten German pancakes sprinkled with lemon juice and powdered sugar, they had gone to the Art Institute to look at photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron. Iris had liked the work, and Laura had found it cloying, and this reaction struck Iris as peculiar, as Laura had always been the idealistic, fanciful one. It was surprisingly cold that day, and after the museum, both of them had felt listless. They wandered around the streets in Lincoln Park, looking inside closed antique stores, at chandeliers and striped settees, mannequins in slightly shabby furs or discolored lace dresses. At one point, Iris stopped and pressed her face against a window, fascinated by a still life with exquisite anatomical flowers. The moribund perfection of the painting disturbed her, especially when she realized that the fly sitting on the tablecloth wasn’t real. When she looked up, she saw Laura gazing at the empty street, a blankness in her expression which made Iris want to touch her arm, say something to bring her back, yet she felt exactly as if she were watching Laura behind a pane of glass, and she couldn’t speak.