scale sequence

Rise

I want to rise. I want to be born again.

In New York City, it rains. The girl lies in her bathtub, which is full of black ink. Her reflection gazes mournfully back upon her. The light from the mirror flattens over the surface of the ink. She coughs; a certain pain enters her body; she wonders if it is the heaviness of the liquid that drips over her limbs. She is not meant for this life, perhaps. Outside, her apartment in New York City stands watchfully over pathways of lush greenery and cobblestone, airy gold-framed windows next to original Monets. Her name is Ai, like the word for love in Chinese; this is what she renamed herself. She reminds herself to breathe; the heavy coolness of the ink, at least, forces her to stay immobile. She has an excuse for not being explosive, for not being dynamic, for not being someone. Dried tear tracks taste like salt as they carve down her cheeks and into her mouth. 

“It doesn’t seem to be working,” Jeanette says, pushing open the door to the bathroom lazily and curling up on the stool next to the bathtub. Drops of ink are splattered over the marble floor, and Jeanette avoids it, bare pink toes eager and delicate. A cigarette dangles from her mouth, and her lips are painted a brilliant blue. Twin zipper earrings hang from her earlobes, and she wears a large lavender polo she thrifted, with triangles cut out at its sides. “We can still go to a more extreme resort, you know. For you to feel better. How far are you willing to go?” 

Not that far, is what Ai, a week ago, would have retorted immediately, lashing out at her friend. But now Ai leans her head back against the dust-covered lip of the bathtub, which she has not used properly in a year. There are leaves surrounding her – the leaves from a Chinese gingko tree, leaves imported from abroad, purchased from a Chinese apothecary whose glass cases boasted the teeth of pangolins and the gilded vases of old dynasties. Crushed and padded against her forehead, they are meant to leach out the spirits that have consumed her and drenched her in this feeling of paralysis. Her breathing is shallow, and she fixes her vision upon a painting across the wall, which is an acrylic mimicry of a Kandinsky, geometric shapes and sharpened lines cutting each other up, like mouths tearing one another apart. “I have nowhere left to go,” she hears herself repeating, over and over again.

“That’s not true,” Jeanette says, and Ai can tell she is starting to grow frustrated, but this makes Ai feel giddy. Jeanette continues. “Ai, I want to be patient with you. But you have so many places left to go. You have your parents’ house. Your ex-boyfriend’s house. Just because you lost your job – ”

“Please stop talking,” Ai says, and she relishes the shadow that passes across Jeanette’s face. Ai places her hands over the drum of her stomach, which has become more and more sallow and cavernous. She knows that her refrigerator is emptying, and that Jeanette has been carting back bags and bags of strawberries and mangoes –– Ai’s favorite fruits – from the local grocery store on her own bill. The rumpled convenience-store bags sit askew on the ground, leaning breathlessly against the wood-gilded refrigerator and the abstract metal pots of ferns and the bronze lights that swing down like pendulums from Ai’s ceiling. Jeanette breathes out smoke from her cigarette and stands up.

“I don’t understand why you don’t just – ask those people for help. I can’t help you. Ai, I don’t have any more money. Why can’t you just suck up your damn pride and ask? Or else you want to try something even more extreme? You want to go to the Green Place? Ai, you know I support you, but this –– this is terrible to see. You’re letting yourself waste away.” 

“It’s my fucking body, Jeanette,” Ai says. In the mirror, she can just barely see her own face peeking out at the corner. Her black hair is tied behind her head in a bun that is so tight that the lines of her hair pull at her temples, as if they are on the verge of turning white. “My fucking body.” She never swears, but she lets these words drop like stones; she feels like a child, tearing petals mercilessly off of a flower. “Just because you always wanted to be me doesn’t mean you have any right to my life.” She thinks she is the most grotesque person she has ever seen; her cheeks bend towards her lips in a ghoulish way, as if someone unfurled a portrait of a girl and crumpled it in their hand, leaving the final product mangled beyond repair. She turns away and sinks deeper into the ink. When she raises her hand, the blackness of the liquid – the ink imported from Mongolia, supposedly with healing qualities, supposedly fermented with bees’ honey – doesn’t slide off of her; it sticks to her sweaty palms and clings to the particulates of her skin, streaking her reddened veins with shiny strips of black. She looks stained, not purified. Ai bursts out crying again. She feels her body begin to shrink. No, not truly. But the failure of her body sits around her like a calcified shell that refuses to dissolve; its tightness, its exactness, and its physicality sit there, as if a second body is in the tub, clenching her fingers and sternly raising its eyebrows at her. 

She was supposed to be a mother.

But Jeanette is deeply wounded. Ai spoke these words to cut, and they did. Jeanette stops smoking the cigarette and looks at Ai for a long moment. She doesn’t even look at the bronze sconces on the wall or the oblong shape of the mirror, purchased from an art museum, or the electric machines attached to the wall that facilitate Ai’s life in this way or that. She is barefoot, and she remembers this all of a sudden. And rather than anger, a sudden sensation of shame overcomes her. “I – that’s not what I meant. I don’t want to be you,” she whispers.

“Jeanette, please get out of my house,” Ai says. She uses the excuse of her anger to make her closest friend leave. Really, she wants to be alone. Bewildered and hurt, the smoke of embarrassment passes over Jeanette’s face, revealing the scars of her own insecurities. Jeanette takes her purse and leaves. On the floor, there are still bags of strawberries and mangoes. Hours later, Ai hauls herself from the bathroom, draining gallons and gallons of the Mongolian ink, and takes a shower that makes her feel numb. She switches the crystal knob from the bluest quadrant to the reddest quadrant, relishes the sensation of the water physically changing shape, from a cool patter on her arm to angry, insatiable hacking. When she is clean, she stands there and stares at the white porcelain underneath her feet. She rubs them against the fuzz of the towels and then goes outside. She puts the strawberries and mangoes on the counter, runs them under the water. Sits down at the stool, which is painted a pale lavender, shaped like ovals. Sets an unpeeled mango on a plate with a knife next to it. She cannot bring herself to peel it. She has no energy to peel it. She cannot fathom peeling it without peeling it perfectly, and the knife looks to her like something that would inevitably come away stained with drops of red, of the blood of her errors, rendering the mango inedible. She thinks, better to leave it untouched and beautiful than marred. She would hate for it to rot. She wraps it carefully in seran and places it in the refrigerator, and does this for each of the mangoes, tenderly.

*

Ai is more than a yoga instructor. In the mornings she instructs yoga on the top floors of penthouses in the Upper West Side of New York City; she walks around with her mats and her clothes tucked underneath her ropy braids of arms. But by the afternoons she rides the subway, the vehicle rumbling underneath her, as she tugs out her blank entry card to the Yellow Place, where she is headed. The card is a single rectangle of pale yellow; it is matte, seemingly absorbing the dim, watery lights from the subway. Nobody glances at it curiously; it is intended to look unassuming, except for its complete blankness. She tucks her tote bag of yoga supplies underneath her arm and steps off the station at the 14th Street Station. The neighborhood peels before her like a fruit, its tan sidewalks calm and lovely against its rusted fire escapes and red buildings. She swipes her card against the door to the Yellow Place, a single black rectangle sandwiched between a coffee shop and a palm-reading shop. It hums and swings open on rusted hinges. 

Before her, a long stretch of stairs cascades upwards, each step thick and high, requiring a certain strength of muscle to haul oneself up; the thinness of the passageway, the peeling yellow paint of the walls, and the single photograph hanging askew on the wall, a black-and-white headshot of Salvador Dalí, cast a yellowed light upon Ai, upon the cracks in her body, which she observes as if she is not herself walking. Upstairs she swipes once more to enter the Yellow Place, and she is astounded by the museum that it presents to her; she steps inside. She presses her hands against the inside of the doorframe, momentarily dizzied. Inside the Yellow Place, the walls are painted an intense vermillion, like the color of a flower that has been crushed to pieces and slathered across the wall; it is so bright it hurts her eyes, and yet the floor is a bright, smooth beige. The first room is small, and yet feels expansive to Ai; she prepares herself to enter, straightening her smile. Her loneliness is the most acute in the Yellow Place. 

In the central room, the furniture consists of large, smooth cubes and triangles that have holes inside of them where people are curled up, asleep, their legs dripping out of the clean, vertical lines of the shapes. Ai takes her place upon one hammock-like cube, which swings back and forth, suspended on a black tightrope. Everyone else is inside of their cubbies, asleep, and so Ai lays her head back against the edge of the cube, which is distinctly plasticky, cutting into the soft flesh of her neck, and tells herself to sleep as well. Hours later, everyone rustles to their feet as the last person arrives – Shamrock, stepping in with her leather bag swinging off of her shoulder and the electric-blonde braids reaching down to her hip. They open the door into the next room, which is completely yellow. Ai feels like she is some kind of an animal observing the actions of these people; she refuses to allow herself to look at them, but she is constantly aware of their presence, of the glittering waterfalls of silver on their ears and the bandeaus of red and purple fabric that encircle perfectly sculpted bodies. 

When Shamrock enters, she settles down with easy limbs; her hair is a shock of a yellow so bright it seems to put the rest of the room to shame. Black tattoos dance across her body, sharp koi fish and black mountains inked with stark outlines on her biceps. She is short, her stature diminutive, but her presence electrifies the room; it is as if you are not only jolted into a higher awareness of her motion, but you also grow cognizant of your own inferior movements as unnatural. She talks with a mixture of a British accent combined with something else that sounds Eastern; a spray of freckles peppers her face. She is captivating, yet in a sexless manner, which appears oxymoronic to anyone who has not encountered Shamrock before.

“Ai,” she says, settling down into a chair. Her voice is both careless and pointed. “Get me a coffee, please.”

Ai jolts upwards, a heat of embarrassment flushing through her neck and face at their unmoving, almost bored gazes. The entry room of the Yellow Place contains a kitchen off to the side, behind a door painted matte white, with fingerprints all over it – the fingerprints of the central members, inked in brilliant yellow paint. They shimmer out at Ai, oddly childish and yet immediately alluring, as she opens the door to the kitchen and steps in; the kitchen is the size of a bathroom, with ferns the size of a toddler leaning greedily from the corners of the room to compete for the sunlight that pours in through the window, and boasts a sink, several drawers full of cutlery and instruments, and cabinets full of ingredients. Next to the sink sit a coffee maker and a water kettle, along with miniaturized white cubes containing honey, sugar, and tea leaves. They don’t believe in tea bags here; the fabric used to surround the leaves preservatives that can negatively impact your antibody function. So they say. Ai makes a coffee and brings it back outward, handing it to Shamrock. The members shuffle as they sit up from their naps, which is what they do when waiting for Shamrock to arrive; the air in the room, they say, is filtered to promote skin exfoliation when you sleep. Besides, sleep is when you dream, which they say is a time to simulate escapes from threats –– a space to foresee, to plan.

Shamrock only has several days left to live, but none of them know this. For now, Shamrock is the center, the crux, and the face. The mirror they search for resolution in.

Shamrock takes a sip from the coffee. It is quiet, drowned out by the whir of the exfoliating fans. Her eyes linger on each of the ten members, with Ai as the eleventh and the newest –– Eleanor, Quiescence, Noor, and Pleiade on the left side of the room, reclined on the triangular-shaped chairs, and Sparrow, Ares, Atlanta, Never, Always, and Ignacio on the right side of the room, sprawled over the cube-shaped chairs. Many of these people come from old money; all of them are masquerading as someone they are not. Ai does not know this. She sees a measure of authenticity more real than her own everywhere she goes. Shamrock speaks again. “Never, what time is it?”

Never is the only one who is allowed to wear a watch inside of the Yellow Place. She glances down at it; it is an analog leather watch. “4:59 p.m.”

Shamrock stands up abruptly. “It’s time. Let’s go.”

Across the room from the door to the kitchen is another door –– this one painted a matte black, also with the yellow fingerprints of the central ten members on it. They are lined up next to each other neatly at the very center, like an elementary school group art project. Ai stares at it. She is not on the door yet. Shamrock opens the door and holds it for them. They walk in silently.

This is the Yellow Room. It is the heart of the Yellow Place. The entry room is merely a waiting space, a limbo; the Yellow Room makes the pulse of the Yellow Place. They sit down in a circle, all of them like sitting Buddhas against a room of clean-cut corners, of pure yellow, like they are drowning in the powder of a daffodil. Ignacio wheels in the Yellow Machine from the closet inside of the Yellow Room: painted in one shade deeper of yellow, it is designed to look like a classical telephone booth, as if plucked from the streets of England several decades ago. Its look is rusted, splintered, and faded, all of this requested specifically from the manufacturer in New York which specializes in printing nostalgic objects. Attached to the walls of the room are telephone sets identical to the one inside the telephone booth at ear-height, all their wiring bunched up inside of the walls.

“It’s 5:00 p.m.,” Never calls out.

“Ares and Quiescence,” Shamrock says. “It has to be one of you today.”

“Heads,” Ares says.

“That makes me tails,” Quiescence says.

Shamrock pulls a penny out of her pocket – a penny pressed just for the Yellow Place. The head engraving is not of a former president but of someone else, someone else who Ai does not know yet, and the back is not of a building on Capitol Hill but of another building Ai does not know yet. She flips it onto the back of her hand. It’s heads. “Heads,” Shamrock calls.

Ares stands up. With his cane, he steps into the telephone booth, where the plastic windows show a smudged, cut-up view of him – his black tortoiseshell glasses, his corduroy jacket full of pins from his time in the naval force, battered and worn. He is only in his late twenties, but he was honorably discharged from combat after a grenade during his service in Afghanistan shattered his left leg, rendering him incapable of walking without the cane. Inside the telephone booth there is a telephone set hung up on the wall with a traditional dial, each of the buttons falsely scuffed. Ai watches through the window, her heart tight, as Ares smoothly clicks the buttons on the dial 1 – 9 – 9 – 3, the year the Yellow Place was created, the initializing password. From the telephone sets attached to the walls, the members pick up the phones and place them to their ears. Ares raises his hand, signaling that it is about to begin.

From his pocket he fishes out a small container; each member is allowed to choose their own container for sentimental value. His is a repurposed box of breath mints, with colorful tape around the corners, patched from years of use in the army; inside are the translucent yellow pills. He puts one into his mouth and swallows it dry. In unison, the members of the Yellow Place do the same. Ai tugs out her pill box, which she chose carefully at her induction three months ago – it is an old ink jar that her dad used to do calligraphy with when she was a child, with all of the residual ink washed thoroughly out. The pills rattle softly, seductively. She puts one on her tongue and swallows, feels its miniature body fight its way down her system and settle inside of her, until she can’t feel it physically anymore.

She touches the drum of her stomach, again feeling its looseness, its flatness. Queasiness rolls over her.

She clutches the telephone tightly, trying not to let her fingers tremble. She does not know any more if it is out of fear or eagerness – fear of the sudden, disorienting flood of emotion that is about to overcome her, or eagerness for the feeling of being so deep in someone’s mind that it is intoxicating.

“I was twenty-four years old,” Ares begins. His voice comes through all of their telephones, staticky, as if emerging from a black-and-white film. Ai remembers the philosophy professors at Columbia who would talk about Locke and Berkeley with the same slow dramaticism. As Ares’ voice cascades through the wires that run through the inside of the walls, something else is happening. The connectome of his mind – what neuroscientists call the instantaneous map of his brain – is lighting up with activity that traverses all the white matter tracts connecting each cortex of his mind; all the nodes that travel back and forth in looped, rubbery threads of synapses are recorded and transmitted through the yellow pills and transmitted electronically to all the other yellow pills, effectively recreating the precise electrical activity in Ares’s mind. As he recalls his memories, activated by his speaking, the connectome of the past is regenerated, all the sensory cortices looped together to stitch the right images, pushing and flooding into the minds of the other members so harshly that it brought Ai to tears the first time it happened. She had held her breath, unsure what to expect when, at her first meeting, Pleiade had begun speaking in her breathless, tinny voice about her sister drowning in an accident in their summer home’s lake, that she would feel the brine knock against her throat like a warning, would hear the cry of the birds flocking above.

Under the spell of Ares’s words, Ai sees, through his eyes, his assignment to the U.S. base in Japan. Ares walks around the dusky town at evening, admires the thin roofs thatched with brown shingles, the elegant white curtains that frame the small windows, the pale Japanese children. Exhausted from his training that day, Ares wanders into a bar, orders a drink. The people around him eye him restlessly, reproachful from their barstools. Ai wonders if it is Ares’s own guilt at his occupation that makes the faces of others appear so distant. The heavy, turmoiled pressure of his past emotions – disintegrated through time, yet immediate, like rubber bands snapping back into place –presses at the back of Ai’s eyes, bringing her to tears. The lights dim; a smattering of applause rolls over the crowd, and the dark eyes of curious women blink out at Ares, framed by simple mascara and silk clothing. He looks down at his drink with shame, watches the ice clink. Above, a makeshift spotlight illuminates a figure at the front of the bar. She is dressed in a black dress that sweeps to her knees, and her face is thin and moon-shaped.

Ai does not need to see the rest of the story to know what happens.

*

At night, they throw a party in the Yellow Speakeasy, which is the underground basement of the building, where all the goblets clink yellow underneath the lights. Ai is filled with longing for another time. She drinks her honey-flavored drink, people passing by her, in awe of the gold thumbprint tattooed on her neck; in a haze, she notices herself interacting with people like a host would, kissing their leaves and leaving streaks of her own perfume wrapped around them. Across the room, her old lover comes. He never approved of her being here, and so he approaches her. She can tell he wants to berate her, but when he sees her perched on the red-leather stool, razor-sharp pieces of golden jewelry looped around her powdered limbs, surrounded by people who flit by to kiss her on the cheek and murmur her name reveringly, he knows he has lost her. It makes Ai feel separate from the version of herself who cried over the baby she lost.

Later, she will find Shamrock crouched in the bathroom, hair nested around a face of despair, vomiting into the toilet bowl that has been kept so intensely clean; she will check in on Shamrock an hour after leaving her with a cup of water and pills – only after Shamrock admonished her, in that British accent, to get the fuck out of here, and she never swore – to find her askew on the ground, skin white and ashy, with a faint pulse; she will tow Shamrock to the hospital and wait anxiously for Shamrock to wake up; she will hear the doctors talk about the drugs Shamrock has injected into her body to keep herself afloat; she will witness the busy everyday bustle of a hospital room as a patient – one of many patients, in the eyes of medical professionals – thrashes, convulses, and surrenders the fight. She wonders how much Shamrock fought. She has never seen Shamrock even give the appearance of struggling. Ai will walk out rapidly, her heart beating in her chest with the guilt-laced thrill of her own desire; she will wonder, as she is purchasing food from the vending machine, why she is not full of heartbreak. Her emotions will war inside of her, until she tells herself: Remember how little you matter. And she will return to Shamrock’s room and take Shamrock’s black leather purse, and her folded stack of clothes – the classic boxy jacket, the drapes of multicolored shawls, the gleaming purple boots – and she will change in the bathroom. Her hands tremble, and the colors swim in and out of focus; she understands the gravity of her own actions, and hesitates for hours as she sits in front of the clothes at night after she crawls back into the comfort of her own pajamas; she imagines the artifacts that once hung in Shamrock’s mahogany wardrobe must be gathering some kind of metaphorical dust. Later that night, she will step into the New York City barbershop, one that presses their clients into plush leather couches and grins brightly as they rake combs through pre-fluffed curls, and wash and bleach her black roots until they turn an unnatural blonde, which she expects will look more natural as time goes on.

But for now, she sits on that barstool in the Yellow Speakeasy, where the fishbowl of the world floods past her, the mascara-tipped eyes of people like razors cutting into her. She is frozen, each of her limbs immobilized, carving her face into a smile. The moon outside convinces her that she is still alive; its simple suspension reminds her of the terrifying inevitability and uncontrollability of her own movements, of the perception of others catching onto the motion of her body. She is an organism that exists, no matter how much she would like to become a statue, like a stone head painted with lipstick. Girls and boys float past her. She cannot move backwards, but not forwards, either. Where is she to go?

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