Vanessa Hu

We know Javi is up to something, since he employs defense as offense from the start. “I wasn’t trying to play victim,” he begins, “until the world taught me what a powerful grift it is.” Thus embarks our descent into Andrew Boryga’s debut novel 

: the satirical story of Bronx native Javier “Javi" Perez, who learns to craft – and sell – narratives around his identity in pursuit of recognition as a writer.

Initially, Javi’s self-commodification is amusingly innocent: he is baffled when his guidance counselor suggests he write his college essay about being “poor” and his friend Gio’s incarceration. However, Javi starts rooting his ethos as a writer in increasingly fabricated tales of racial injustice, until he is inextricable from a self-constructed, Twitter-validated web of lies.

Boryga doesn’t shy away from this hunger driving his protagonist, which arose over 

. Javi was inspired by Boryga’s life, but he only started to 

 once Boryga divorced Javi from himself, letting his character take on unsavory hues: like learning about structural oppression to get into a girl’s pants. Javi is no saint, but his humorous dishonesty compels us to keep listening until the ultimate implosion of his farce.

 is its nonstop caricature of racial discourse. We laugh when Mr. Martin calls Javi’s mom “kind of an immigrant” for coming from Puerto Rico via plane and not boat; we laugh when Javi tries proselytizing her about internalized racism for dating a white man. We laugh, until Boryga catches us red-handed in our own laughably paltry attempts at racial justice: whether we’re Javi’s girlfriend Anais insisting “we’re not gentrifiers. We’re brown” about a shiny Brooklyn apartment, or his white editor, emphatically agreeing to “do better.” And in case we look away, Boryga gazes at us directly in quiet, lucid beats – from noting “yet another murder of a young man” by the police, to Javi’s hope to grow beyond someone “used for trauma clicks” into “someone with a voice.”

Satirical callouts of identity literature aren’t new. The Oscar-nominated film 

and others explore our vulturine consumption of “diverse” stories. The protagonists of those stories vary from the high-and-mighty intellectual, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, to the opportunistic June Hayward. But like Javi, they both are renditions of the literary scammer, falsely appropriating a narrative that they do not own.

These scams aren’t too far outside the realm of possibility. Javi’s work echoes how 

 made up anecdotes on racism in his comedy specials. Like Minhaj claiming his “emotional truths,” Javi defends the “core truth” of his work, and Boryga toys with such complexities of truth through the irony saturating 

Was Javi’s calm encounter with a policeman neutral, an instance of racial profiling (as his article dramatizes), or somehow both? The novel challenges us to consider the implications of electing one – or all – to believe in.

These novels end exactly as they begin – with another grift. 

 concludes with a soliloquy of sorts where Javi informs us that he wrote 

where we discover that Monk is adapting his story of writing a stereotypical Black novel into the film itself. 

 similarly concludes with June, a white woman who plagiarized a Chinese-American writer’s work, planning to write another book depicting herself as a victim to the “rotten foundations” of the writing industry.

These recursions critically embody the cannibalistic state of the identity narrative. Society is “woke” enough for diversity to be a market demand, so we produce stories about identity, then stories about stories about identity: and we – across creeds – consume it all and ask for seconds. What could be an easier way to offer moral gratification than dishing up commentary on injustice, or better yet, commentary on that commentary? With readers eager to tut about society’s woes and appraise them for moral returns, no wonder we’d enhance and auction off narratives of inequity we genuinely hoped to share.

Still, these U-turn endings feel like an easy escape. “You created me,” Javi claims. “You’re not innocent either.” An apt callout, but how do we repent? Is it possible to consume stories like 

 without a tinge of complicity? Or do we concede that reading while being complicit is better than not reading at all? Without a clear direction or foray to sever this cycle of identity commodification, Javi’s accusation rings hollow.

To be fair, Javi’s (ostensibly) honest writing of 

 may be such an attempt: to simply share his story without grandstanding about identity. But his ending – a mostly anonymous life with his mom and Gio – still feels like a retreat. In 

 Willis Wu similarly sheds stereotypical, Asian male roles to focus on his family, and people do deserve lives beyond their marginalized identity. But is Boryga’s answer to racial pigeonholing this unsatisfactory binary: either being subsumed by identity politics, or quietly plodding along with “the hand [you’re] dealt”?

Perhaps this nods to the opposite poles Boryga has experienced: from feeling like a tokenized writer early in his career, as the editor’s note for 

 mentions; to now encouraging others to “

’” and focus on their craft. The very conceit of 

may be this pendulum-like trap between the political and personal: and how difficult it is for marginalized people to value one without sacrificing – or being denounced by – the other.

With such unresolvable loops and ironies, 

 shrewdly reflects our era of superficial diversity discourse and how we cannibalize minoritized stories (This review is no different, as yet another iteration of a snake swallowing its own tail). And we keep repeating the cycle: maybe because we want justice, or because we want the dividends from engendering that justice. Who knows? As Javi puts it, “The quest for truth is the furthest thing from simple.”

This book was provided as a review copy from Doubleday.

Fall / Winter 2023

Notes

The Cannibalism of Identity: A Review of Andrew Boryga’s Victim

I am hungry to throw myself into the shoe-scratched darkness of a dance floor. Call it the thrill of a greenhorn: as the air thickens with salt and bodies, I wait, as a follow-dancer often does, in a dance before the dance. A lead dancer walks in my vicinity, I flick my eyes up. If their irises catch in the light and they extend a hand, they desire to share this moment with me.

I started to learn Latin social dancing after a brief spell on a ballroom dance team. There, my ankles wobbled during the lengthy, punitive steps of the waltz and the tango – but after going to a Latin dance club for the first time, I discovered bachata, its flowy movements rooted in one locale beneath my feet. And so, the summer before my senior year of college, I decided to further entertain my curiosities in the dance form.

I was in Seattle for a nine-to-five summer internship at a tech company, where my day-to-day had two core responsibilities: one, encouraging seasoned engineers that my blueprints for a digital platform were to be trusted; and two, lobbing back defenses of my hypothesized solutions, heart pumping with cold brew. As excitable interns flocked to dinner spots and dorm hangouts every night, I would make my commute home: jaw tense, eyes glazed. I’d swallow a rudimentary dinner in my studio apartment, stuff my smelly dance heels in a bag, and make my way across the sleepy city.

I discovered various haunts for Latin dance fiends in the Puget Sound area, and my first night dancing was in early June, at Salsa con Todo: its door frame pulsing with music on a street spotted with bars.

The bachata room was already lively: the mirror-covered back wall throbbing with the steady pulse of the stereo, couples undulating below the disco lights.

Nervous, I strapped on my tan dance heels. My shoes signaled expertise I did not have – I had only attended two lessons prior – and so, with each song the DJ queued, a lead asked me to dance. Each instance thrilled and disquieted me: forcing me to divulge my internal rhythm through our pressed fingers. I’d apologize for my beginner level, and it distressed me further when I’d pull us off-beat –

 Are they tossing my hand somewhere? Oh, I’m behind them now! 

But we’d exchange smiles, and that’s all we needed. Soon, my hips began to settle into the basic sways of the bachata.

An hour later, I was standing to the side in brief repose when a man in a polka-dot shirt extended a hand to me. “Would you like to dance?”

I’d met people who echoed my dance language before. The first time was with a beginner ballroom classmate: our frames slotting together smoothly with each turn, our acceleration into the next figure synchronized, our bodies’ muscular tension meeting in natural equilibrium. Still, I often felt exposed by my jolting missteps on the competition floor. Here, I was cloaked in a darkness brimming with body heat, strobe lights casting us in ethereal green as we met each note at the exact moment of its sounding. I had no name, no duty to remedy myself – and it was glorious.

As the song entered the chorus, our grammars clicked together. Everything was where it needed to be: my limbs warm, a perfect density of close but not-too-close dancers on the floor. I didn’t think, just intuited the way he guided my shoulder. It was magic of a balance struck, like a radio frequency: a partner dialing into how you shift your weight, grooving between beats the same way you do.  I remember the culmination: catching our grins in the mirror before I was whisked into a triple turn. The song faded, both of us caught in the coda of a shared breath.

I danced, hoping for an escape. On those nights, I could extricate myself from demands for my presence, my need to elaborate on it. I needed this release – from work, yes, but also from explaining to my sister why I didn’t tell her I went to the emergency room when she lives in Seattle – didn’t I trust her? Or from text check-ins with a college friend, who cried over me prioritizing others over them – was she not a best friend too? It was taxing to feel as though, whatever I did, I would be evaluated for my performance – professionally and personally.

But on the dance floor, there was no defense I had to construct – in fact, a genuine dance depended on not having one at all. I’d gaze at a stranger, in an unspoken promise to accept each other precisely in that juncture of space and time. We’d be forced to craft a lingua franca, because keeping each other afloat superseded our own selfish desires: from them hoping to do complex moves I did not know, to me wishing for a clearer lead. Even with the few regulars I began to recognize, there was a memoryless intimacy to each encounter, a rocky dance soon forgotten in the streams of guitar music carrying us through the night. A few weeks in, I stopped warning each dance partner of my beginner level, slipping into the folds of this liberating estrangement.

In late June, I was taken to the University of Washington Medical Center emergency room with intense chest and abdominal pains. My consciousness floated outside myself, unable to form words out of sensation, as my boyfriend, who was visiting for the week, asked me if the Tums felt effective or if we needed to escalate. The ER doctor politely defused my panic of a premature heart attack. A follow-up urgent care visit explained that the weeks of ibuprofen from my wisdom teeth surgery, as well as my increasing caffeine intake, had scrubbed my stomach raw, its acid clawing towards my esophagus.

My older sister took a day off to accompany me to my visit: her purposeful walk slowed to meet my pace. Her explanation of my medical insurance slid into upsetness over my reluctance to seek counsel from her: choosing classes, relationship developments, going to the ER. I had suspected that she’d grow upset over me seeming to trust my boyfriend more than her, or that she’d start worry-ranting – as was family custom – about how I should have told her, the Seattle resident who knew the lay of the land; how I could have asked for more thorough tests or medical advice; or how we otherwise could have handled the situation better. I just wanted to move on. Her reaction to the truth of my hospitalization – which came out since I asked my mom about urgent care – only confirmed my predictions. And so, I decided to conclude that she viewed me as obstinately independent, or crazy in love, or otherwise lacking some essential quality of a younger sister.

Sometime in July, she invited me to a social dancing event at Alki Beach with her friends, who all had done a bit of salsa dancing before. “You can carpool with them, but I’ll meet you there,” she told me over brunch.

On the car ride, a friend mentioned that bachata looked so sensual – chests pressed, knees between thighs – and everyone agreed it would be odd to get that close to a stranger.

Once we arrived at the beach, they pulled out a picnic blanket and some bottles of soju from the trunk of the car. We settled down on a hilly patch of grass, a stone’s throw away from where dancers had already begun to cluster: a concrete promenade gazing over the Puget Sound, overlaid with a makeshift dance floor. My temporary companions chatted about their love lives, unrushed to join the crowd as we awaited my sister. I sat in the corner to offer occasional interjections, masking my self-conscious dissociation with my go-to veneer of solitary self-assurance.

Over the past few months, I’d been eagerly delving into bachata’s sensual cadence – picking up body rolls after a dance or two, whipping my hair back in dips – but it sounded like the desire, 

 desire to dance with strangers appeared illicit, even pitiful to them. A cruel anxiety twisted in me, and I shot off a 

where are you? i can’t dance since you’re not here yet 

message to my sister. She arrived five minutes later, apologetic. I felt vindicated, and entirely guilty.

In clinging to bachata, I was clinging to the notion of appearing unconditionally alive: a life form rife with possibility. There was no pressure to sustain any responsibility to satisfy, or impress, or some other social function, when all I had to do was take a stranger’s hand and sink into the rhythm – or, that’s what I told myself. I believed that without a primed idea of me, they could grasp amorphous parts of myself more than others could – my bashful exuberance, my newfound sensuality –  even if just for a three-minute song.

 my sister said later, her friends nodding emphatically, but I didn’t believe her. My perception was slanted the entire evening: my turns off-center, my ankles wobbly. Maybe it was the bumpy concrete, or the mud that clung to my heels and wouldn’t let go, or the dusk that coated everyone in soft tangerine, faces blurry against the blinding light.

My most recurring dreams are encounters with those to whom I have made myself a ghost.

My lack of responses to them started harmlessly enough: with a prom date who was acting weird, an elementary school friend. Then, an online friend who had comforted me through my family trauma, a high school friend who had helped me peel my feelings open for the first time. From there, I couldn’t stop my untethering: classmates I hoped to befriend, my sister and my mother when I was at school, and even close friends from college, most of whom had already graduated that spring.

In the dreams, I often saw those from whom I severed myself in rapid succession: awkward chance encounters in which I had to explain my disappearance; or glances of their silhouettes from afar, their silent presences rebuke enough. I’d try writing to them too: imagining heartfelt renewals of our relations, composing apologies, even believing I’d sent them, only to find them as drafts in my notes or simply nonexistent. And I couldn’t bring myself to deliver them, not with the threat of reproach and loss: 

You want to schedule a monthly call and not biweekly? You respond to your friends in seconds but not your mother? Hi, just wanted to check in one last time. 

I did not withdraw from everyone’s lives, but it was a high enough number to hover over me constantly, a rubber band to snap against my wrist whenever I wanted a sting.

On some days, between my bachata classes, pill ingestions, bus commutes across the Puget Sound, intern hangouts for which I mustered the little social charm I had, and TV binge-watching to unravel the adamance I adopted for work, I’d try to call a friend.

It’s hard to talk beyond just our updates, I’d prefer a regular time where we also can do an activity. Would every two weeks or every month work? 

A call with another friend, a worry they’d extrapolate a friend-stack-ranking because they’d learn of the communication cadences I had with others. A call with another, a worry they’d ask for less because they know I’m also asked for more.

I felt consumed by demand, demand I felt guilty for not coveting. Upon waking, I’d let new messages sink noiselessly into my inbox, even losing track of a few post-graduation job leads in the process. Severing myself from expectations felt like the safest choice. To sink into artificial familiarity instead, hands stretched only when it seemed someone was bound to take it in theirs.

One night in July, I took the 1-Line towards Angle Lake to Century Ballroom, its wood-paneled dance floor bordered by velvety curtains. There, a man asked me to dance: a tilt of the head, a palm facing up. His face, a blur of indigo memory under the dusk-lit ballroom.  In a slower cascade of the song, he asked where I was from. “I’ve never seen you here before,” he said.

I explained I was here for the summer and that I was from New Jersey. He asked me to guess his origin. “A Spanish-speaking country,” he hinted, “It starts with a G.” An eight-count later, I landed on Guatemala.

He nodded in approval, and we resumed dancing. He was close to my five feet of height, and there was a comfort in his smaller yet sturdy stature, which sheltered me through our circlings of a joint axis. Toward the end of the song, he confessed.

“You remind me of someone back home.”

Something cracked in me, eggshell-like. There was a finality to 

 a sheepish tinge of justification, maybe for why our dancing had settled into itself without much resistance. My skin prickled in caution at its potential romantic implication – but I sensed no change in his lead, which was neither domineering nor prescriptive in expectation of me. Just an open presence steadied by nostalgia, inviting my symmetry: a toss of the wrist, a tilt of the chest. Patterns haunting a body once familiar to someone.

I wasn’t sure if he hoped for a response. “What’s her name?” I asked, and his lips moved, with a funny little smile. But above the stereo’s croons of lost love, I didn’t catch what he said. When the song ended, I asked him again for his name, but that slipped away too, after a few other dances.

I had re-crystallized her: a ghost of a ghost, of someone being missed. To surmise as if I had known this stranger, I’d say we reached for proximate intimacies for differing reasons, mine the more selfish one: for him, to revive someone he lost; me, to be the one not found.

I hadn’t expected my boyfriend to be concerned about me dancing with others, as a ballroom dancer himself. And he wasn’t – but during one of our calls, he tentatively expressed a worry that I’d begin to enjoy dancing with others more than him since he did not know bachata as well. There was an uneasiness in his voice, likely exacerbated by our temporary separation.

I steeled, readied for battle to defend the Independent Woman. I shot back, 

and grew resentful of the separation anxiety that still simmered beneath his insistent encouragement of my dancing. Soon, I opted for stealth, avoiding discussing my Seattle dance escapades during our virtual catch-ups.

One of our go-to online activities was a game, 

 – a partnered game in which advancement relied on the coordination of both players’ timings and actions, a routine of its own. My job was to smash two buttons, running an L-shaped curve between them within a few seconds. But no matter how furiously I toggled my controller, I failed for the next twenty-four minutes as he completed his task; we achieved the same result when we swapped roles. Thereafter, I made a spiraled descent into self-deprecation: about how I was not an easygoing companion unbothered by winning or losing, about how he should seek other puzzle-minded people to play his games with.

I tried to express the same sentiment back to him. 

We might need some rules, routines; but setting our rhythms loose, letting them mingle is what makes a dance singularly ours to cherish. 

But his worry about measuring up to my bachata experiences inverted into my own unease: what if I cannot fulfill some expectancy to keep up with his unique tempo; and he for mine?

We danced — once in Seattle, and in Boston before and after my time there.

We’d swing, loop, duck and jive; extend our arms to each other, eager to co-invent. Our twin orbits buffered a margin of precious quiet around us on the bustling dance floor. Others gazed, curious at how his coiling of the hips catalyzed my spinning undulations. We threaded through the bachata beat, but on our own time signature — and 

Still, I’d occasionally slip from his grasp or twist my wrist, feel the anvil of self-judgment, and dually wonder and fear if I should slide into the crowd, releasing my anxiety about construing that delicate sort of chemistry which endures.

My last week in Seattle was clouded with obligations: packing up my apartment, presenting a slidedeck on my accomplishments in hopes of re-employment at my company, and preparing my goals for my last year of college.

So, I went dancing for a few nights straight. I had already prepared for my departure, an odd hollowing in my stomach that had grown more painful as I exchanged social media handles with a few regulars, mentioning that I would be leaving soon. On my last Thursday at Century Ballroom, I approached those I’d danced with prior, asking a stranger to film my last dances with them. There, I also encountered a man from Norway, whom I encountered at another studio a few days prior.

We danced together twice, a routine occurrence for a long night. But when I sat down to rest, he asked to converse about dance, work, and miscellaneous life topics. Other dancers, who’d often invite me off the tables to dance, saw his figure occupying mine and stayed away. Resentment began to fester: I didn’t promise anything to him. Yet there I was, tied to him, inhibited.

“Seems like no one is approaching because I’m here.” He chuckled awkwardly. I hardened after that: giving one-word answers to his remarks until he acknowledged my withdrawal and walked away.

At the end of the night, I sat down to peel my shoes off my callused feet. He approached, his gentle-giant frame downcast in front of me. “Thank you for the dances,” was all he said, softly. “I really enjoyed it.” I echoed his sentiment with a feeble 

, a dissonance thrumming in my chest as I watched him exit into the blue of the night.

I don’t think it was wrong for me to be wary of unwanted male attention – but his lone silhouette felt kin to my own, another chaser of unadulterated acceptance. I wished to remain memoryless, but any momentum I enacted or withheld from someone engendered encounters, collisions. Something new that neither of us could keep alive on our own.

A few weeks before I left, my sister apologized, reflecting that her gruff demeanor didn’t always create a safe space for me to share things with her. I crumpled a little, stammered about wanting to reciprocate, an ethos I fiercely, theoretically protected. In high school, I read a book about sisterhoods, Deborah Tannen’s 

Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives

. It revealed that conversations between sisters were often one-sided, the older supporting the younger much more. At the time, my sixteen-year-old self had resolved to counter that imbalance, to reserve what I could as a solitary burden. Perhaps I looked past how we could fill in for each other. Or even, how we desired to.

The day before I flew back home, she helped me pack up my studio. We jointly bemoaned the lack of news on my return offer, wolfed down dinner at a vibey Mediterranean restaurant, and lugged my two huge suitcases to her place to stay the night, since she was closer to the airport. She grabbed both, leaving me with my pastel-checkered carry-on and a pair of colorful stools I’d borrowed from her, in case I had company. My dance heels were in my backpack for easy access – carefully placed, since I knew Century Ballroom was just a block or two away. 

That night, I tucked my toes into borrowed slippers and sunk into my sister’s blue couch, my hips pressed next to hers – everything warm, and breathing, and still.

On my flight home, I revisited the dance videos I took. Floral shirt man’s funky footwork; and his cheers during my tentative moments. Marathon dude’s explosive energy that spun me like a roller-coaster; and his tempering of force to balance our weights. Bicycle man, whose disjointed, determined limbs I invited back into tempo. And myself, who ostensibly had smooth, airy turns; and perhaps other tendencies only others can know. Our faces emerging from the indigo darkness: flushed, excited, alive.

I listen as the song ends, and pairs on the dance floor enter a last spin under an arm raised like a makeshift roof, a last back-arch supported with a forearm. Thank-you’s, high-fives, shy embraces. And it begins again: the DJ queues another bachata song, a new heartrending succession of guitar strums, the same nostalgic pulse running through. I remind myself of the pattern at the core of every step: one, two, three, tap; one, two, three, tap. Flowing left and right to regain any loss of momentum, looking with pure recognition into the eyes of someone I know or will soon know. If all else fails, I think, return to this.

Spring 2024

Features

Afterlives

"All the Difference" is the 2024 winner of the Louis Begley Prize judged by R. F. Kuang.

Tess recognized the post-vomit face: green and trembling like a watery leaf. She was in the waiting room, scribbling out to-do’s from her gynecologist appointment – follow-up on birth control, buy iron supplements – when a retching sound began to emerge from the one-stall bathroom nearby. The two other patients in the room looked away. Tess stood, foot poised to nudge the door shut for the dignity of both agent and witness.

But at the foot of the door, she saw a tote bag, guts spilling like its owner: a pack of oil-blot wipes, a foil panel of allergy pills, a plump tube of anti-wrinkle concealer, an open notebook with cursive boldly stretching across the page. On the bag was an illustration of a tangerine sun, waggling in front of a camera with the label, “sundance team.”

Tess hesitated, then angled her foot out instead of in. A woman was bent over the toilet, dark hair sticking to the seat. A small clip by her ear clung to a shred of silver.

“Hey, you okay? Let me pull your hair back.” The woman bobbed her head, which Tess took as a yes: gathering her hair into a ponytail with the elastic around her wrist. After a few rubs of the woman’s back, her heaving stopped. She raised her head, eyes fluttering to Tess.

“I can’t believe you’re seeing me like this. I’m sorry, I’m a mess.” Rana stumbled up, swiping at the yellowy dampness on her mouth. They embraced, awkwardly, as if staging their own encounter.

Tess hadn’t seen Rana in five years – since their college’s ten-year reunion, at which everyone began to tire of recalling the ego battles and brash optimisms of years past. But, Tess had kept an eye out for her, searching her up online when her own work felt uninspired. First, the occasional social media post; then, a screen credit at an indie theater; then, articles about Rana being an entertainment executive-turned writer-director with a passion for the screen, ever since she took some film classes in college. Which Tess credited herself for, but that was no matter, mostly. It wasn’t envy that she felt, seeing such news. It was more like how she felt walking to her old home twenty minutes away from her parents’ new condo, wistfully curious about how a new, nameless family had refilled its rooms.

They settled in the waiting room to let Rana calm her breath, though both were on their way out. Next to them was an empty umbrella stand and a coat rack, which dangled with unbuttoned coats in shades of auburn and olive, the sort one wore to feel privy to the closing of autumn. Rana filled a paper cup from the water dispenser, pulling her coat from the rack to wrap around herself, her face still ashen.

Rana folded her own leather jacket into her lap as they traded factual niceties. Both of them were back to stay with their family in the Jersey suburbs: Rana, to spend her pregnancy with her child-crazy parents; and Tess, to be near the city until she found a nice one-bedroom in Hoboken.

“I was in Portland for ten years before coming back a few months ago.” Tess explained.

“What were you up to again, in Portland?”

“LAIKA Studios. You know I was obsessed with Coraline.” They let out nose-breath chuckles. Tess used to declare that if she didn’t have to straggle through her mechanical engineering degree, she’d write a thesis on horror in children’s films. “I picked up computer-generated animation because, you know, the times, and I learned so much from my team.” Tess smiled, bittersweet. “Visionary. It was hard to leave that, but I wanted to work on my own things.” She paused. Here is where they used to detect each others’ emotional breadcrumbs, encourage each other to articulate their murkiness.

Instead, Rana just offered a heartfelt, “That’s great, really.” Their voices trickled off, nostalgia percolating into the artificially dry air. Rana folded the paper cup in half. Tess pretended not to notice.

“I remember my first time here, with Dr. Park. I did not want my mom in there. The things she didn’t know,” she laughed.

“I guess that’s why they have that, in case you need someone.” Rana smiled curtly and pointed at a sign on the wall. Its rounded font encouraged patients to consent to a medical chaperone during their visits. 

“I mean, I can be your chaperone if you’re mine next time.” Tess joked, hoping to elicit a playful retort. But Rana just nodded, biting her lip as if she asked her to elope. 

“Unless your partner is here. Sorry, that was weird.”

“I don’t have one.” Rana cleared her throat. “I used a donor.” She stood to toss out the cup, which had crumpled into itself. Tess flushed, unaware of this crucial intimacy. She pivoted, asking about the pregnancy, nodding as Rana laid out the timeline. Tess thought of all the times she’d held Rana’s hair back when they’d puke up their giddy naiveté, post-college party, throats flushed like sparrows. She thought of Rana, who now did everything on her own, including making a baby. As Rana described her upcoming first-trimester checkpoint, Tess jutted in. “Let me come with you.”

“Your next check-up. In two weeks, you said?”

“Well, yes, but that’s not necessary – ”

“I don’t have much going on anyway. Just preparing to move and all.”

To both of their surprise, or perhaps to no one’s surprise at all, Rana nodded. They exchanged numbers, which hadn’t changed in the past two decades, and made vague promises to text each other, wondering how things ended up like this.

Rana remembered how pathetic she felt, the winter during her junior year of college. The same office, an anxious mother in the waiting room; her, getting her first pap smear whose mechanics she regrettably looked up, until she was using a mirror under the covers to stare in horror at what was going to happen between her legs. But that wasn’t why she felt pathetic, exactly. No, after running through generic questions about birth control and self-breast exams, Dr. Joshi asked if there was anything else.

She lamely said her period was late, but she wasn’t sure. She was worried about being you-know-what. Dr. Joshi suggested they do a urine test. Rana asked if it’d show up on the insurance record, which she affirmed, to which Rana declined the test and lived in fear for the next two weeks, until she returned to school and could visit a pharmacy without her parents becoming suspicious.  She couldn’t forget the glimmer of sympathy in Dr. Joshi’s eyes. 

Another foolish girl, even the smart ones

. Perhaps that utter aloneness, which never really left her since then, is how she wound up allowing an estranged friend to accompany her to a prenatal appointment.

After pondering, it still appeared like Tess was doing her a favor, rather than the other way around. So, Rana messaged her to treat her to coffee, thirty minutes before the appointment. That afternoon, Rana pulled into the lot of her local cafe, whose patio nested under a cherry-red awning. It overlooked a modest field of green, bordered by crisping trees. It had been a day like this, where she saw a family with two parents, two children, and a dog, breaking in the blueish snow of a new year on that field. Stumbling through a creative block over a cappucino, she had then decided to draw up plans for a baby instead. But this day, Tess was the one seated alone: back towards her, her neck craned upwards.

Rana squinted up. Clumps of dried grass and straw wrappers stuck out from behind the cafe sign pasted to the wall. The tufts trembled, and out squeezed an umber-streaked sparrow, then another. They chirped at each other, not angrily, before flittering away. Tess turned, easily smiling as if she knew she was there. “That’s a cute story idea, isn’t it?” Rana nodded, chest tight. She had already visited the cafe five times since coming home; yet, she had never noticed the nest was there.

Tess insisted on paying for her and also sharing a chocolate croissant. Rana didn’t like flaky things, bits of flimsy butter and flour that clung to her fingers. But she nodded again, slotting back into the worn groove of her softer, younger self, despite her hardening resilience over the past two decades. That early Rana, still amorphous and sticky, first bonded with Tess in the nascent weeks of college over their shared origins of suburban North Jersey. It was the sort of friendship where others rarely witnessed or mentioned one without the other. Rana didn’t mind then. She knew that it was some linguistic tendency that made people say 

not the other way around. Or, she tried not to think much of it in her weaker moments – even now, when the barista called their names, and they transferred foaming cups to their table in one collective breath.

Back then, their intimacy had neatly contained their loneliness. They were default companions whenever they did not fit in at social events, which happened often. Tess was the one who initiated their counter-revolutions: clubs to join that one else did, cafes to frequent on the outskirts of town. Rana felt safe in their little havens, pliable and grateful. They plucked sidewalk patches on the way to class and sold pressed bookmarks made of leaves and petals until a 

 sign was put up. They danced – sometimes with strangers, always with each other – in skirts at dim bars, in pajamas to childhood sing-alongs. It was hard to resist Tess and her ideas.

Cup in hand, Tess leaned forward. “You used a donor? Tell me more,” she ventured, legs swinging on her chair.

Rana shifted, cinnamon lighting her temples.

She had prepared a sales-pitch response for telling people about her pregnancy, after the first trimester. This was her first time, aside from her parents. Anxious, she stumbled through some version of, 

I wanted a kid to love, it didn’t require a partner, now or never, easier to control life schedule and film projects, not sure if you remember.

“Makes sense. Oh, remind me again. You’re still doing…”

“Just writing for now. I also do programming for Sundance. I like directing, but curation is fun these days. And easier to do, once I start considering maternity leave. If you're –”

Tess laughed, a tone of nervous solidarity. “Yep, I get it. The plight of the modern woman. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

“Are you saying I’m damned?” Rana shook her head. 

Tess nodded, eyes coaxing and incisive. “Not at all.”

Rana knew that gaze, the kindly vulturine sort. In junior year, Tess had begged her to take a film class together, with the loose theme of 

 For some, it was a brilliant survey of human viscerality, of the usurpation of the female body; for others, it was an excuse to consume porn-adjacent media. Their final project was the only film they had made together. The only requirement: no identifiable sexual noises or visuals, unless sampled from the syllabus. Thirteen minutes, screened in Hightower Hall to their classmates. Tess had taken point as lead director and writer, leaving Rana to be the main actor. The camera was shaky, the idea kitschy. It had four parts. First, breakfast: a double-yolk egg cracks, slipping into grease, golden and squirmy. Afternoon date: balloons burst red as they fly into some naked birch trees. Dinner: a mouth slurps broth until a pile of thick, wet udon noodles sits in the bowl. And movie night, Tess’ imagining: a stop-motion close-up shot, where a popcorn kernel is placed on a tongue, evolving into its popped form, then burnt ash. The lipstick smears, kisses and aftershave postmarking a left cheek. Roll credits.

“Here, take. Then we can go.” Tess tore a clump of croissant from the plate and reached towards Rana, her knuckles oily and speckled in brown.

They drove separately to the OB-GYN office.  Tucked on a single-lane street, it was a sepia-colored, two-story building converted from a family residence. They parked on each side of a red Toyota in the lot and reconvened in the waiting room, a new set of tweed coats draped on the rack like shadows. A graying husband smiled dutifully at them before returning to his magazine.

Until her recent visit, Tess hadn’t been here since she was twenty-two. The walls were refreshed to an electric blue, and a perky, plastic fern greeted entrants instead of a hunched fig. But besides that, the room’s dimensions, its sterile odor, and the ambiance of womanly agency and futility easily reformed from the recesses of her memory.  As Rana checked in with the receptionist, Tess sat across from the husband. A white shirt poked out of his navy jacket. All ironed and neat. But he was missing a cufflink,

she realized. An age-old story, the muddling of details. For her, it had been a random sock in the dryer, a mysterious earring on his pillow, her thirtieth birthday forgotten. That is, no one stuck over the years, not even when Tess was young and patient enough to make compliments rhyme, and even to fold origami doves for those lovers, thrice. The men sought to devour, with or without her.

In contrast, and maybe in her favor, Rana had always seemed determinedly prudish and single. She reported rejections of wispy suitors to Tess during their late-night dorm confessionals, tutting at the failed relationships amongst their peers. As a perhaps-natural result, Tess never mentioned how deeply her own romantic unsuccesses struck her, besides a flippant, 

I wish he used less tongue. Or just hugged me sometimes, 

she’d quietly add, when she’d slip back into the twin bed across from a drowsy Rana.

Rana’s face now was paler than usual, wobbling towards Tess. She pressed a hand to her left chest, a simulative calming force. Just a finger brushed her collarbone, and the husband’s cuffless wrist twitched. Tess stood, quickly. Asked if she was feeling nauseous. Rana shook her head, taking out a 

 checklist from her bag, scratching at it with her pen. Tess doodled on a pamphlet she found nearby, finches swooping amongst diagrams of breasts. A remnant of their old, communal silences held them in place, brittle enough such that it felt hard to break.

Soon, a nurse appeared by the doorway to the examination rooms. She called 

 whose eyes darted back to Tess. A chance to leave, maybe. Tess ignored that too, and followed her in.

“Good job, mamma.” The nurse – Sandra, a leathery brunette – cooed, unwrapping the blood pressure cuff from Rana’s arm. “You do business and you make movies? Your baby is lucky. How did you get into it? What have you made? I’ll be right there, in the front row.” She waved the cuff with a dramatic flair before swiveling to type notes into the computer. Rana laughed and thanked her politely. Her thighs stuck to the thin, scratchy paper on the examination table. Tess echoed the chortle from her seat in the corner of the room.

As Rana had ascended the corporate ranks, she formalized her film interests in tandem through coffee chats and local university classes. Once she’d saved enough to travel, she spent paid time off going to film festivals – as an attendee, then as a friend to filmmakers and organizers, soon sheepishly asking them to let her experiment with those roles herself. She avoided Sandra’s complicated question of origins. “They’re not well-known, but maybe you’ve heard of these?” Sandra gasped upon realizing she’d watched one of the earlier films Rana had assistant-directed on.

“I have so much to learn still, really.” Rana deflected.

“Oh, don’t give me that. You’re doing it all.” Sandra insisted.

Tess emitted another tinny laugh. “I wonder if we have to.”

“I guess we don’t have to. But here she is.” Sandra winked at Rana and slipped out of the room, promising the prompt arrival of Dr. Joshi.

This expectant composition of her struck Rana’s breastbone, made her want to expel it from any orifice she had. Tears, perhaps; vomit; the baby, even, so at least she knew it – they – existed, instead of just another thing she faked her way through. She wished for naive self-assurance, a hallmark of youth she simply never had. Rana felt that lack especially when watching films in the eighteen-and-under category, at the festivals that had it. The film components were sometimes discordant: an overexposed light, a muted voice, cardboard props. But the story was always there. Simple, brave, collaged together with bits of sensation like color, depth, sound. Somehow, it all coagulated naturally.

Upon researching in vitro fertilization, Rana had mused at the careful configuration of her own baby, a form soon to experience those assembled dimensions of human perception. But the difficulty she had inseminating herself manually, forcing her to use in vitro; and even not finding a partner all these years, felt like ultimate confirmation that she was made to be alone. The skimming of genetic profiles, the plucking of eggs like apples from a tree, the adjoining of cells like dolls forced to kiss in a playhouse – it had all felt like a simulacrum, never the real thing: for parenthood, film, anything. Even though she was what others called “good” at directing films or working a boardroom of navy suits, her accolades abounding in turn. But years in, Rana knew that she had never, and never would, demonstrate the singular brilliance Tess had in her projects when they were twenty: puppets in chiaroscuro lighting, racking focus on paper planes. Her ideas always worked, even when Tess didn’t believe it herself.

In the film class Tess had persuaded her to take, after showing their film to their fellow students, a baseball cap had drawled a question. 

Oh. Well just from the mise-en-scene, you know, it looks familiar –

A directing decision. Don’t sell the screenshots online. Thank you. 

Voice steely, Rana had sat down, mouth oily and hot. Tess’ eyes had followed her, hardening with a friend’s instinctive empathy, but tinged with an artistic obstinance. Rana had been able to tell, from the way she stayed standing.

From the less-lit corner of the room, Rana heard a delayed echo of what Sandra had said. 

– too soft to decipher. She looked over, and there Tess was, the progenitor of it all, an uneven smile on her face.

The examination room was windowless, muffling time and its sounds as they awaited Dr. Joshi. A woman yelped next door, and a toilet flushed across the hall. A kettle in the breakroom started to whistle. Tess almost felt subsumed by the grayness of her corner, but Rana had suddenly turned her gaze onto her.

Tess rolled her chair into a triangle of light. “Well, it’s nice she saw it. Your film.”

“Thanks.” Rana’s consternated brows barely distracted from her tiny smile. Tess recognized that expression, desirous of inferiority and recognition, from whenever Rana had earned a good grade or other praise.  “The director overwrote my ideas, the whole team’s to be honest, so I think the whole film fell a bit flat. I kinda wish she saw the first film I made on my own instead. 

 I think that’s when I started to get into the rhythm of things. You know how the only writing I did before was for the newspaper in school? I really started to get into fictional works with 

“Yeah, it was harder than expected. I’m not sure if you saw it.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize. What did you think?”

“A ‘refreshing twist on the crowded restaurant genre, with the bittersweet pains of growing together, then apart.’ What one review, said. I think.” Tess clamped her lips together, but she still felt her bitterness leaking from between. Rana drew her forearms close to her abdomen. “I don’t mean anything, of course, but it reminded me a little of 

“I know. It’s not uncommon to see stories like mine. I also read the reviews.” Rana exhaled like she was readying herself. Tess rolled her chair forward again, into the room’s dome of artificial fluorescence.

“All those stories about two girls: a successful one and a plebeian one who never made it. I just thought it was… ironic, this ‘gorgeously real story of alliance versus ambition’ when, you know.” She felt like a child stomping their foot over a spilled sweetness, whining, 

 She couldn’t bring herself to articulate blame for something as traceless as drifting.

Rana shifted, crinkling the paper beneath her. “I wish you had told me you saw it.” Not anger, but drenched in something.

 A decade after graduation, Rana had mass-emailed the members of her old film class, inviting them to the premiere of her first short film, which she’d spent a few years making in secret. 

for twenty-five percent off. Hope to see you there!

At that point, Tess had been at LAIKA for a few years, her engineering degree and creative bents surprisingly useful for the fluidity and mechanics of animation. She’d driven the three hours up from Oregon into Seattle, eyes clouding as Mount Rainier emerged, stoic and lavender in an empty sky. She slipped into the theater once the lights dimmed. A first film didn’t often strike gold at a film festival of this scale. 

She probably had connections from her entertainment job, 

But for forty minutes, she witnessed a tapestry only an inexperienced prodigy could make, pieces barely strung together by film continuity norms but connected deliciously, in an associative sort of way. It was a story of two friends in culinary school. They race through farmer's markets collecting the wackiest ingredients for the other to use, julienne their traumas into cake batter. A splinter starts the end. A knife is dull, a palm is cut, a line cook is promoted. They go on until they don’t anymore: two chefs in cities thousands of miles away. Only one is a Michelin-star holder, though both are bereft of the novice palates that used to make any two flavors sing. Still, for them, farmer’s markets are a bloodline pulsing through urban stench, sustaining their tradition of locally farmed eggs. The final scene is a close-up: two yolks slipping into hot oil, bubbling into chunks of rubber. Overcooked, an amateur can even tell. A plastic lid thuds offscreen.

And it was about her. Them. Throat tight, Tess scanned the credits, searching for a flimsy word like 

She fled the theater before the post-screening interview began, which she later watched online. In the interview, Rana reflected that one of her inspirations was a horror film she watched in college, a film Tess had taken her to. In it, the characters’ doppelgangers materialize from their most concentrated insecurities, hoping to replace the original. 

I wanted to explore what happens when we treat ourselves as others, others as ourselves. And when we stop, 

Back in the room where no one had yet left, Rana repeated, dumbly. “I wish you’d told me.”

“I wish I could’ve been a part of it.”

Tess shrugged. “I did. I drove up to Seattle. I watched the interview too.”

 “Oh, Tess.” A small crack, with an almost-apology.

A gentle knock, a pointed pause as the whispers hushed themselves, only betrayed by a quivering eye, as Dr. Joshi pushed the door open. It was a power she didn’t expect to acquire in her profession, being able to summon quiet in a tangle of human nerves.

She was surprised to see another woman, an auburn tumble of hair and a wrinkled smile, sitting next to Rana. A quick peek at the notes from the nurse read, 

which was unexpected, since her longtime patient had come alone every year for the past two decades, flying in from Los Angeles for her annual visits during the holidays. Though, she had to tell Rana that she was retiring soon. Her hands were not as quick as they used to be, and she had already started transferring her patients to Dr. Park, her younger counterpart at the office.

Dr. Joshi went through her customary pre-natal checks for someone on the cusp of the second trimester, where things started to feel more real. Rana was measured, as always. Offered summaries of her diet and nausea, asked questions about mineral supplements and classes she’d suggest for expecting parents. It was just about twelve weeks, so Dr. Joshi suggested they look for a heartbeat, calling in the ultrasound technician. This was a moment she dually loved and feared, and a moment that the parents always remembered. Rana’s eyes were wide. Dr. Joshi remembered that same split-open expression on Rana as a girl, who had feared what she now hoped for. Rana had returned the year after, alone; and here she was, now. Dr. Joshi resolved to wait to retire until after Rana’s child arrived.

The technician entered, ultrasound machine in tow, and the friend held up her phone as a little drum heralded itself in the static. Smiling, Dr. Joshi asked if Rana wanted to hold the probe to her abdomen, as she explained what to expect in the upcoming weeks. Rana nodded, fingers reaching. The friend knew what she was doing: a steady hand, slowly zooming in towards Rana’s face, panning around the room. Dr. Joshi gave a friendly nod before the camera turned back to Rana. 

It sounds like a pulse on the train tracks, coming my way. Here, come closer, so you get a close-up of everything. 

The two of them gathered around her belly, anchored to a steady, finite beat.

Even though they had long diverged by then, Rana had messaged Tess shortly after the ten-year reunion, requesting the file for their first film together. Her last line was a lie. 

Vanessa Hu

Vanessa Hu

Notes

Notes

The Cannibalism of Identity: A Review of Andrew Boryga’s Victim

Features

Spring 2024

Afterlives

Fiction

Summer 2024

All the Difference