Things You Should Know(2)

“I called Ken,” I say.

Ken is the one who had the chip put in. He is Susan’s brother. When Mrs. Ha was sedated for a colonoscopy, Ken had the chip implanted at the bottom of her neck, above her shoulder blades. The chip company specialist came and stood by while a plastic surgeon inserted it just under the skin. Before they let her go home, they tested it by wheeling her gurney all over the hospital while Ken sat in the waiting room tracking her on the small screen.

“Why?”

“I called him about her memory. I was wondering if we should increase her medication.”

Ken is a psychopharmacologist, a specialist in the containment of feeling. He used to be a stoner and now he is a shrink. He has no affect, no emotions.

“And?” she says.

“He asked if she seemed agitated.”

“She seems perfectly happy,” Susan says.

“I know,” I say, not telling Susan what I told Ken—Susan is the one who’s agitated.

“Does she know where she is?” Ken had asked. There had been a pause, a moment where I wondered if he was asking about Susan or his mother. “I’m not always sure,” I’d said, failing to differentiate.

“Well, what did he say?” Susan wants to know.

“He said we could try upping the dose—no harm in trying. He said it’s not unusual for old people to wander off at twilight, to forget where they are. He said there are all kinds of phenomena that no one really understands.”

“You haven’t ever called my brother before, have you?” Susan asks.

“I have not, no.”



Mrs. Ha has only been with us for three weeks. Before that, she was in her own apartment in California, slowly evaporating. It was a fall that brought her to the hospital, a phone call to Ken, a series of tests, the chip implant, and then Ken put her on a plane to us—with a pair of tracking devices packed in her suitcase. When she arrived I drove her around the neighborhood, I showed her where the stores were, the library, post office, and the train station. I don’t tell Susan that now I live in fear Mrs. Ha will find the station herself, that she’ll hop on a train—and the mother hunt will become an FBI investigation. We have only been here ourselves for five months, before that we were on 106th and Riverside, and most mornings when I wake up I still have no idea where I am.

“I don’t like coming home any more,” Susan says, turning to face me, the light from the computer an iMac aura around her head. “It scares me. I never know what to expect.” She pauses. “I can’t do it.”

“You can do it,” I say, plucking a fragment from my childhood, the memory of Shari Lewis telling Lamb Chop, “You can do anything.”

There is nothing Susan likes less than to fail. She will do anything not to fail; she will not try so as not to fail.

Susan is reading. She turns the pages of her book, neatly, tightly, they almost click as they flip. “Listen to this,” she says, quoting a passage from In Cold Blood. “‘Isn’t it wonderful, Kansas is so American.’”

When I told my family about Susan, they said, “She doesn’t sound Chinese.”

“An architect named Susan from Yale who grew up in LaJolla—that’s not Chinese,” my mother said.

“But she is Chinese,” I repeated.

And later when I told Susan the story she said angrily, “I’m not Chinese, I’m American.”

Susan is minimal, flat, like Kansas. She is physically nonexistent, a plank of wood, planed, smooth. There is nothing to curl around, nothing to hold on to. Her design signature is a thin ledge, floating on a wall, a small trough wide enough to want to rest something on, too narrow to hold anything.

I drape my arm over her, it lies across her body like dead weight. Her exhalations blow the little hairs on my arm like a warm wind.

“You’re squishing me,” she says, pushing my arm away. She turns the page—click.

“When she dies do they take the chip out?” Susan asks, hooking me with her leg, pulling me back.

“I assume they just deactivate it and you give them back the tracker—it’s leased.”

“Should we have one put in Kate?”

“Let’s see how it goes with your mother. No one knows if there are side effects, weird electromagnetic pulls toward outer space from being tracked, traced as you walk along the earth.”

“Where did you find her tonight?” she asks as we are falling asleep. We sleep like plywood, pressed together—two straight lines.

“On a swing. How can you be angry with an old woman on a swing?”

“She’s my mother.”



In the morning Mrs. Ha is in the front yard. She is playing a Jimi Hendrix tape she brought with her on our boom box: she is a tree, a rock, a cloud. She is shifting slowly between poses, holding them, and then morphing into the next.