The call came after midnight. With the rain coming down so hard outside, it took me a moment to recognize Jaz’s voice, which still had that sweet, girlish inflection that she used to work so hard to conceal in her attempts to get them to take her seriously. Hello, she said. Hello, Ed, are you there?  

I put down my pencil atop the half-completed page I’d been working on all that night. It must’ve been two, three years since we’d last spoken.  

Who’s this? I said, though I knew.  

She laughed, seeing right through me just like she used to. It’s me, she said, and then she said, Look, something crazy’s happened. Can I come over?  

Jesus. What time’s it. But I was already pushing my chair back from the desk. My feet flinched from the icy, damp floor.  

It had been raining for weeks, maybe months. My bathtub flooded twice, and my landlord locked our basement because the pipes down there burst. My boxers, jeans and undershirts, which I spread on racks propped near the heating vent, never dried.  

Where are you these days? she said.  

For a moment I thought of saying I’d moved out of the city, maybe even clear across the country.  

I’m at the same place, I said.  

Okay. I’ll be there soon. She hung up.  

Jaz had a special way with direction. She knew where everything was, and she could get there faster than anyone else. She had a knack for showing up in the right place at the right time, too, and there were countless instances when I saw her beguile some photographers into snapping pictures of her with a crew of all the right people, or charm a producer simply by appearing in his pathway at a party.   

I was eating microwaved congee with pork floss from a chipped bowl in my slippers when the buzzer rang, thirty minutes later. I hadn’t changed. I couldn’t be bothered. The slippers were cruddy dollar-store slippers, striped white and blue, the white gone grey with wear. I went towards the ringing, which hadn’t stopped, still eating, my slippers slapping. When I opened the door, I didn’t move aside immediately. Hi Jaz, I said, around a mouthful of porridge.  

It was still the same. She never looked like she belonged anywhere where I was comfortable, and certainly not on the darkened, sodden porch of the peeling apartment I rented from an Indian couple who lived upstairs. Even leaned out over the banister, shaking off the rain from her umbrella over the muddy lawn, she made everything around her look cheap. Tonight she was in a tiny black dress sewn with gold rosettes at the hem and around the neckline, six-inch heels that thrust her height above mine, and over all this a stiff, boxy coat whose architecture put me in mind of a modernist building.  

Hi Ed, darling, she said, turning now towards me, stepping into the light, still shaking the umbrella. All at once the sight of her hit me like a rejoinder to my isolated, rain-dampened life. Her lipstick was bright as a painted rose, and when she smiled, her lips split off her slightly oversized front teeth.  

Without waiting for an invitation — maybe she sensed there was none forthcoming — she dodged inside, edging by me. It’s raining, she said, pointedly, childishly. 

I don’t know what I was expecting, but even with her dishevelment, her rudeness, the late and exhausted hour, she still had that face, the one that she carried slightly in front of her, like a clean, shining plate. When she grinned, forgiving me for my hostility, I felt the old surge of mixed emotion, hot resentment, deep affection, a longing that was also a sadness, rise up in me, summiting towards her.  

Annoyed, I turned and slapped back inside, towards the kitchen.  

Well, I said, over my shoulder. Come in.  

In the kitchen, with a sigh, she dropped down into one of the chairs at the dining table. Fiddling with her earrings, she took them off and tossed them on the table, next to a cleaned-out tofu carton which I had repurposed as a repository for stubs of pencils and pastels. 

Did I wake you? she said. The first thing she had said all evening, typically scant, that indicated she cared at all about me and my schedule.  

No, I said. I was up. Drawing.  

Oh, I’m glad, she said, but in a distracted way, and this, her self-centeredness, her inability to spare attention to anything but herself, irritated me again.  

It’s just like how it used to be, she said, glancing around.  

The kitchen was a little dark because one of my lights had burned out. I didn’t know when that had happened. Sometimes I got into this fugue state while drawing, when the hours ran away from me. That was the time when all sorts of strange things happened, bills that I’d sworn I’d already paid stacked only higher, lights burned out without me noticing, one time the heat even shut off. Now I turned on the stovetop light to try to help things, though it didn’t, much. The sound of the rain filled the long, empty space between us.  

Well, I said, still standing. What happened?  

At my question, she brought her fingers up to her lips, and even in the dark, the bare line of her arm made me think of a brush drawn in one stroke down clean paper.  

I got a role, she said. A big one.  

I waited for her to say more, but she said nothing.  

Well, I said. Congratulations. Isn’t that what you wanted?  

Of course, she said.   

There was more to it. I could always feel what was below what she said, the shadow and depth under her bright look, her arch commentary. But before I could say more, she said, I want to ask you something.  

What?  

How did your parents come here?  

I was struck silent. It was not what I expected.  

You already know, I said.  

I just want to hear it again, she said, and for the first time, I heard a note of pleading in her voice. It provoked such a strange feeling in me I just started talking, trying to get ahead of the confusion, the continuing resentment, I felt.  

My dad came from Taiwan. He was in semiconductor manufacturing. He was skilled. He had a master’s degree. So he was one of those educated immigrants who was let in for his brains. He brought Ma with him. He only had basic English and Ma none at all. So when he got here they had to start over again. They always told me I was born after the hardest years. They told me they timed it so I wouldn’t have any memory of what they went through. They wanted me to have an easy life, easier than theirs.  

I stopped. The strange feeling in my chest had gotten thicker.   

She said, Ask me how my dad came here. 

Her face was hard to look at. In the half-light, it looked classical, like it belonged in a still from a film.  

How did your dad come over? I said, reluctantly, and even as I did, I dreaded the answer.  

You know he was from the mainland, she said. He swam to get to Hong Kong. He told me he used to practice. The camps prohibited it so he had to sneak out to do it. He tried two times and didn’t make it. There were people he knew, friends of his, who drowned. They washed up later and were hung in public as traitors. Their families were marched up to look and beaten if they tried to cover their eyes. He got scared and turned back. Then, the third time, he did it. He swam at night to avoid getting spotted. It took him six hours to get to Hong Kong. From there he flew here. Here is where he met my mom. Here is where they had me.  

It was easier to get in here, she said. Hong Kong didn’t want him but here did.  

The rain was like the bottom edge of a wall that was continuously falling down, trying to seal off the world.  

I didn’t know that, I said, slowly.  

She touched my arm. I looked down at her long, oval fingernails, then up at her keen expression, and I don’t know why, I just got this sense that she was going to ask me something important, a question that might require an answer that would split her life into before and after.   

She started to speak, but stopped, and a conflicted look passed over her face.  

Jaz, I said, but before I could finish what I was going to ask, she said, quickly and with a winsome smile:  

I’m hungry. Do you have something I could eat?  

I gave it a moment, but she had made her choice; her gaze didn’t waver.  

I have congee, I said, finally.  

Okay.  

It surprised me. I didn’t know if she was still not doing much of that — eating, that is. When we lived together, I threw together so many one-pot meals that she only picked at. Still, after I put the porridge in the microwave, I got out all the jars of the good stuff, the sour pickled mustard, the spicy bamboo shoots, the cubes of pungent, fermented bean curd, bought from the corner market where they sold pounds of raw chicken liver in tied-off plastic baggies and dried bouquets of medicinal ginseng. There were frozen pork-and-cabbage buns in the freezer too, so I put those in the toaster oven. I set the bowls out, scraped the congee into them, handed her spoons, one to use for her congee and another for us to share, for the jars.  

The buns started to give off a good, warm smell that filled the kitchen. When the timer dinged, I pulled them out and shook them onto a plate. Not speaking, I put the plate in front of her. She didn’t wait for me. She grabbed one of the buns and ate it in three bites.  

I knew it wasn’t the same as three years ago, though it felt like it. To remind myself, I ate standing, and at a distance from her, wondering what it was she had been about to ask me. She ate too, with an appetite I’d never seen before, her chin lowered to her bowl. Like she hadn’t had a meal all day, which was probably the case. She was so intent on it she didn’t speak.  

She seemed easier now, less agitated, sitting in the dark eating, among the rumpled, never-drying belongings of my life, and not for the first time I thought maybe that was what she had liked about me, that I was her ease, the one place where she could allow herself to soften.  

The smell, the warmth of the food reminded me of eating with my grandparents whenever we traveled back to Taiwan to visit when I was a kid. I wondered if she had similar memories, of eating fried youtiao and bowls of congee in dim, heat-fogged apartments, hunched on plastic stools arranged around a small dining table with laughing, chiding relatives, and whether she still thought of where she came from, the longer she lived here in this country where no one knew how she had first made it here or why.  

I left her to it, and went to use the bathroom. But in the bathroom mirror I saw the bags under my eyes, my oily face cramped from its long hours of concentration, and the sight of myself filled me with loathing. I took a shower, the water turned as hot as it could go.  

When I came back out she had relocated to the sofa in the living room. She was asleep, huddled under her enormous, expensive coat like a child. Her bare, skinny, raw feet stuck out kinda funny, like a penguin’s.  

She didn’t look so glamorous now. It was a relief. Like some illusion had let me go.  

Trying to be quiet about it, I went around emptying out the pots and plastic bins which were catching all the drippings from the rain. I was wide awake, thinking about our families, thinking about our relationship.  

Even when I went to bed, I was thinking about it all. I thought about my parents, and my work, not the part-time IT job that paid my bills, but my real work. How could I tell them, in a language they understood, how my one-strip comics which I drew and re-drew, my illustrations which I sold a few pages at a time to my contacts in the industry, were the best and truest parts of me, the parts that I worked for hours, breaking pencils, ignoring the flooding in the bathroom, to bring forward? That I knew how poor this thanks was, compared to what they wanted for me, what they had imagined for me when they’d left everything behind, but the truth was, at the height of what I did, I could see something that was beyond all of that, and sometimes, if I was lucky, I could even succeed at breaking off a whole piece of that shining, enormous something, to bring back to light some small part of this dull, difficult world.  

Jaz understood all of that. That was what I had loved about her.  

What had she wanted to ask me? I turned this over in my mind, lying in the dark, thinking through the possibilities, all the confusion and guilt and agitation she had induced roiling inside me, until eventually, all my thoughts led to a single one: There was something I had to ask her too, not about our parents, but about us. If she would just tell me the answer, it would end all of this, and then I could lay myself down and be at peace. I would ask her tomorrow morning, I resolved, right before I fell asleep.  

But in the morning, I came out to find that she was gone. The only thing marking her presence from the night before were the unwashed bowls in the sink. She had put the jars back into the fridge.  

The funniest thing was that she still knew where they were supposed to go. When I saw that I felt punched.  

I went back to my bedroom, where my prints were, and I stood among them, the stacked boxes of everything I had ever drawn piled in the closet, the illustrations tacked up on the bare walls. I looked down at the table at the page I had been working on when she had called.  

The rain had stopped. The quiet, warm sunlight came in through the window.  

It was only after I emptied the pots and bins, which were full again, that I remembered I hadn’t asked her what the movie was about.  

I called her and got her voicemail, but it was full. The only way to get through to her these days was through her agent, a mutual friend told me, much later, after I’d gotten over being pissed at her, again. I gave up after that. For good, I told myself. I blocked her number on my phone. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t done it years ago.  

She sent me an email about a month later, out of the blue. It read:  

Hey. Thanks for hosting a while back. It’s been so nuts lately. The production schedule they’ve got me on’s crazy — I’m in Vancouver for nine weeks right now then Chiang Mai for six after that. Timezones mean nothing. Everyday I’m sweating in the sun with my makeup sliding off like hot cake batter. I keep looking for hand-pulled noodles to eat. 

I guess I just wanted to see someone who knew me before all this.  

I blocked her email too.  

Her visit still bothered me, though. It reminded me of the end of our time together, when she stopped answering my messages for days at a time, when she would come back from her all-night raves, turning up at four, five in the morning, pulling off her clothes in the dark, crawling into bed, and as I pulled her into my arms, still only half-conscious, pressing my face into her hot bare neck to feel her live pulse beat against my mouth, she’d tell me about stealing a wallet off a woman passed out in the toilet, about driving down the highway at ninety miles an hour with the headlights off. About slapping someone hard at a party, in some kind of drunken, rowdy game, where for every hit she landed, blindfolded, she was rewarded with the roared approval of the gathered spectators.   

She went to so many auditions, worked so many different jobs. She was a waitress and a hostess and a warehouse clerk and a line-order cook and a graphic designer and a make-up counter sales girl. She practiced her lines in her car, or in empty cubbies or supply closets at work. She was always rehearsing. She was always on her phone. She wasn’t ever home.  

The way she treated herself when we were together, it was like her body was a line she was trying, over and over again, to cross.  

Then the movie came out. I resisted that too. All of our old friends went together to the theater, then hosted a watch party at someone’s house. They invited me but I said I needed to work. They only tried once to get me to come out, then they got the hint and left me alone.  

The reviews were mixed, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the movie’s popularity, its sensational success at the box office.  

Trying to avoid the images of her that started to appear on ads and billboards, I spent a lot of time at the gym. Sweating, grinding out reps, made me feel stronger. I worked the weight machines relentlessly, until the mat underneath grew slippery with sweat and I had to put down towels.    

But then the monitors in the weight room started to play her interviews. Sometimes, browsing on my phone, I heard her laughing voice if I didn’t click away fast enough. And when I was working on my illustrations late at night, I would suddenly see, in what I’d just drawn, the angle of her nose, or the tilt of her curious eyes.  

It made my chest hurt. It was just like the months after we broke up, three years ago. I saw her everywhere.   

* 

She was always too driven. In the end, that was why we split. I once saw her keep up a role for three weeks, even when she was with me, even when we were eating breakfast, or in bed together. It was like eerie, like living with a complete stranger. Another time, during an argument, she snatched the keys to my car out of my hand and slammed out onto the street. This was the night she got death threats over email, the night they posted her phone number and her address — our address — everywhere online. For what offense? It didn’t matter. She was starting to get too visible, she was the only one who looked like her. I stood arguing with her on the driveway. Both of us yelled. She wanted to go out. She wouldn’t be imprisoned. She would go out, and drink, and dance, and see her friends, and live her life. I remember her face, the defiance alive in it. Come with me, she said, if you’re so scared. You can keep watch. You can keep me safe. But I was too angry. I didn’t go.  

* 

Weeks later, I went to see the movie by myself. I picked a rainy night in the middle of the workweek. I wanted to be as alone as I could be. I wanted to see it but it was also the very last thing I wanted to see. I told myself if I could make myself sit through it, I would be able to expel her from my head, my heart, my life.  

I got there twenty minutes early. The previews played. Then the movie started.  

She appeared within the first five minutes. Seeing her for the first time in such a long time on a gigantic screen the height of a two story building made my vision blur. Her forehead was the span of a row of theater seats, her eyelashes hard and well-lighted and curved as swords.  

When I could focus again I tried to follow the story. She made it hard to, since she kept appearing. She had that undefinable quality — the force of presence that reduced everything around her to background.  

But the flashes of that fit badly with the role. In the story, she was an elusive widow, a double agent, fatally exposed by her love for an American soldier. First ruthlessly cunning and seductive, then whimpering and pathetic, begging for her life to be spared, vowing atonement for her betrayals. In one scene she was carried out over the soldier’s shoulder, lifeless as a doll, while her hometown burned in the background. Her thin, dirty shirt was ripped right down her chest, exposing her hanging breasts and dark nipples.  

They tied her wrists and arranged her unconscious, half-naked body in the back of the truck next to sacks of rations. One of the soldiers stood and posed for a photo while pressing his boot down on her head, like it was an egg he could crack with one hard stamp. He was grinning, holding out an upturned thumb, like a hitchhiker. He was the one who she had loved.  

Watching this, I had the sickening sensation that something was alive and moving between my eyes and the images of her that were playing out on the screen — something that was there, which I could see right through, but only sometimes and in flashes, a force that distorted and bent how I saw her, a story overlaid atop another story, that fused together into an impersonation of reality.  

Her last sequence seemed to last and last. She woke up in the middle of the night, in a tent, shoved in beside the supplies. The loudness of the jungle rang around her. She struggled at her binds in an animal panic. The whites of her eyes were blue in the dark. Her panting filled the theater to the ceiling. She bit the ties for what felt like hours, until I could taste the blood in my mouth. In a final jerk, she tore them loose. Then she was shoving through the tent flaps, careening down a dirt path into the jungle, drawing shouts behind her.  

The trees, the underbrush, tripped her, tore at her bare limbs. Gunshots cannoned around her in the pitch dark. She ran, leaping over roots, tearing through brush, until she stumbled and fell, knee-deep into water. She had fallen into a fast-moving river, wide as the horizon. The water was dark and rapid and muscled with undercurrent. The river was so deep I couldn’t see to the shore on the other side.  

More shouting sounded behind her. Dogs howled. Without hesitation she dove in.  

Now the camera was with her, yawing and tossing underwater. The gloom of the water was dotted by silver bubbles, fluorescing upwards. For a moment I was convinced that she would sink. Something in me went hard and dull and dead at the idea. I would’ve stood and screamed at the screen if they’d showed me that, her death like a ghastly worm-eaten pearl, the fish pecking shyly at her bubbling eyes. But no: She was kicking her legs. The rasp of her gulping breath filled the space between my ears. The camera’s frame stabilized.  

She was swimming now, squaring her shoulders, kicking straight out with her legs, cupping the water the way her father must’ve taught her to.  

The sounds of the gunshots, the howling dogs, faded. They couldn’t follow her here. The water lapped at the camera’s lens, trying to enter. Her wet cheeks, her mouth sucking in breath, her upthrust chin, filled the whole length of the screen. She spat brackish water and kicked with her strong legs. She was aiming for the horizon, for the shore it might conceal.  

The frame cut away.  

* 

I thought about her father at sea, swimming through those unending hours, not knowing if he would ever touch land again, if he would live or die. What did he think about? Or did he think about nothing at all?  

* 

I sat through the end, waiting for a conclusion. But the movie didn’t tell what happened to her. It didn’t have time. It was a wartime epic, it had many other characters to tell of, many others it was due to see. I think it implied that she drowned. But I didn’t believe that. I knew what she was made of.  

* 

Out on the street after the movie’s end, I stood with my hands shoved in my coat pockets, unmoored. Even though it was cold out, I was sweating like I’d just run a marathon.   

The rain was still coming down. The sound of it was hard and discordant, like someone was striking all the notes for a particular song on a piano at the same time. The lights and lettering of the marquees reflected upside down and backward in the pooled cracks and puddles in the street.  

You’re going to make it, I said, out loud, and even as I did, even as I felt the relief of her escape, I felt the loss of her too, again. This time I would lose her when she became the world’s, became whatever it was the world would make of her, whatever it was she agreed to be made into. Or would it be my gain, that I would be able to see her everywhere now, even at the touch of my finger on a screen.