China Knowles—Friday—Tidal Wave
I am China, right side in. I’m in New York City. Shane isn’t answering his phone and he didn’t meet me at Port Authority. The old me—a stomach, a colon, a rectum—might retreat now, but instead, I know I will find him if I look hard enough.
My mother has called me three times but I didn’t pick up. Then she stopped. She texted to say the police know where I am. But I’m not a criminal, so I’m not afraid as I step onto the uptown A train. I’m not afraid as I step out of the subway station and walk up Broadway. I’m not afraid when I ring Shane’s old door buzzer. I’m not even afraid when no one answers my buzz.
I buy a juice at the juice bar downstairs.
I say, “Give me something that tastes horrible.”
She hands me a fresh beet and carrot mixture with some seaweed in it. It’s disgusting. I go to Central Park and find a bench.
Next to the bench is a trash can and I can hear it ticking, so I scoot closer and put my ear to it. The carrot/beet/seaweed juice is making my stomach turn. I feel my salivary glands working hard to keep things calm.
Tick tick tick tick tick tick.
What better place to die than here?
Your Ticking Bomb Has More Self-Esteem Than I Do
For one thing
it does not
have to
look at itself
in a mirror.
Or brush its hair
or its teeth.
Or maybe
when it does
if it does
it makes the ticking
louder
because it
can’t stand itself,
either.
Maybe it’s easy
Maybe it’s easy
to self-destruct.
Maybe your ticking bomb
is just faking it
and what it really
needs
is someone
to talk to.
I gulp down the beet/carrot/seaweed juice and my body tells me to stop but I don’t stop because my hand holds the cup to my lips and I suck through the straw with no real idea of why I’m forcing something inside me that I don’t want inside me.
This is the story of my life.
China: the girl who has things inside her that she doesn’t want inside her.
As I stand, Central Park wraps around my waist and I grab both sides of the trash can, nine and three on the clock, and I stick my head in so far that the ticking bomb must be inches from my head and I vomit a dark pink mess.
It splashes up with each heave and spots of it land on my glasses as I heave again and again. I vomit an ocean of juice. It swirls in the trash can and becomes a loud, angry tidal wave, and people in Central Park start to run in the opposite direction.
There is screaming.
I’m still stuck to the can—hands at nine and three. I’m still heaving, but nothing else comes out. I feel it dripping from my chin as the wave rises above me higher than the Chrysler Building, and I have no place to hide. Either I will be washed away or I will not be washed away. The ticking is louder.
And so I jump right into the center of it. Right into the trash can, headfirst. Right into the vomit, into the bomb.
It’s as pink and pulsing as my esophagus in here.
It smells like beets and beets smell like fresh earth, and it’s all I can do to not stop and fill my mouth with dirt because it smells so like home, like playing with my sisters in the backyard and building dirt castles for the ants and the ladybugs and the spiders. I want to eat that. I want to eat childhood and become childhood and become the mound of dirt and become my little sisters, who still don’t know about anything except flannel pajamas and dolls and dumb shows like Scooby-Doo!
I travel through the red tunnel hands first, like I’m flying. I pass the bomb. It ticks like a metronome. It’s keeping time for musicians in the Kaboom Orchestra. We are all musicians in the Kaboom Orchestra, only no one knows it yet.
I see trash, then, on every side of the red tunnel within the tidal wave. Sandwich wrappers. Used gum. A math test. Fifty coffee cups. Cigarette packs. A broken snow globe. A baseball hat. A half-eaten doughnut. A condom wrapper. A love note. A plastic medicine bottle with the prescription scratched off. A boy. There is a boy here.
At the bottom of the trash can, he is clinging to a piece of paper that is plastered across his chest. The paper says Tick tick tick.
“Are you okay?”
“Are you okay?”
I open my eyes and I’m still standing at the trash can in Central Park. My hands are still at nine and three and I still have vomit dripping off my chin and speckling my glasses. The person asking me if I’m okay hands me a brown napkin and hurries on.
She probably hears the ticking.
I sit down on the bench and spit. Then I wipe my face and look down at my backpack and it has drops on it, too. So does my shirt. My sleeves. Everything I have is speckled with pink puke.
I move to another bench.
There is ticking in the trash can there, too.
So I move to another bench. And another. And another. I discover that all of the trash cans are rigged. Maybe they will explode at the same time. Maybe they won’t.
I move to the other side of the bench where the ticking is less noticeable and then I turn myself upside down and sit with my feet in the air and my head in the caked dust that gathers under park benches.
I try Shane’s phone again and it goes directly to voice mail. I haven’t left a voice mail yet because I don’t want him to think I’m needy. This time, since I’m safely upside down on a park bench in Central Park, I wait for the beep.
“Shane, it’s China. I came to New York to be with you. I think we can make it if we’re together, but I don’t know where you are. I’m in Central Park just behind your building. I’ll be upside down on a park bench and splattered in pink vomit.”
As I watch people walk by—their shoes telling a different story each time—I inch closer and closer to the trash can side of the bench. But there is still no ticking while I’m upside down.
This means something, but I’m not sure what it is.