Andro Pang, I Love You in Every Universe, 2022
I’ve fallen in love with a gentle, towering ex-con from the Bronx who lives in a trailer and buys paper plates from Walmart. He keeps Christmas decorations up year-round and feeds the possums and raccoons in his yard scraps from the dining hall. Refusing to relocate spiders to the out-of-doors, he lives with them as pets. His office is littered with handwritten notes from students and staff members he’s helped in his decade plus working in the kitchen.
We’ve moved from the mutual admiration part of our intrigue to open conflict, and he tells me he feels more fear during our battle of wits than during knife fights of his youth. My formal and formally educated brain notes each red flag in a forest of red flags: he’s jealous, capricious, a functional alcoholic. A friend remarks that in addition to raising alarm, red flags are beautiful, and I can say that indeed for the first time in a long time I am completely enchanted by another person.
I’d forsake any pleasure to serve at the altar of health, but the archangel manager doesn’t share my religion—he partakes of every American sensual delight on offer. During one argument, he sends a photograph of a massive McDonald’s spread, writing, “I have a McFlurry left if you care.” And that’s how I’m often furious yet always laughing, realizing the extent of my snobbery but unable to overcome it. He calls me “the navy seal of properness,” which I beg you to inscribe on my tombstone.
Byung-Chul Han writes in The Agony of Eros:
“As conceived in antiquity, erotic communication is anything but contented. According to Ficino, love is the ‘most serious disease of all’; a ‘change,’ it ‘takes away from a man that which is his own and changes him into the nature of another.’ Such injury and transformation constitute its negativity. Today, through the increasing positivation and domestication of love, it is disappearing entirely. One stays the same and seeks only the confirmation of oneself in the Other.”
We work together three days a week, but our entire romance takes place in texts, which I find totally disorienting: conversations about sheet pans and overtime in the world; forceful declarations of love in my phone.
It was Monday of last week that I lost my mind, the one thing I have begged of life not to let me lose. The day began with research into the Israel/ Palestine conflict, moved through the manifold troubles of my co-workers, and bottomed out with an Uber driver who kept me a captive listener to conspiracy theories. The clouds are controlled by remote control, he claimed; all female trees have been replaced with male trees causing sinkholes in the earth; immigrants have been imported to start a civil war. I am nodding, smiling, trying to be polite, trying to find the door handle. It’s a Tesla—there is no door handle. I’m raising and lowering the window, locking and unlocking the door. He’s telling me to make my name an LLC, get an EIN, take out a business loan. He’s telling me that reciting mantras in verse will manifest my desires. I don’t know whether all his claims are false, or if some are false and some true, I’m very tired, very tired of working and also of listening. I want to go home. There is no door handle, I can’t get away from the words pouring out of everyone, all of which require a response: it’ll be okay; we’ll figure something out; thanks for the advice; I hope that works out for you. I want to say: please leave me alone; I don’t have any answers; let me out of the fucking car.
My friends, earth angels, pull me back from the brink. Our entire society is in an epistemic crisis, one wisely points out. We can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, there’s no criteria for reality testing anymore. The Shirley Jackson short story in which New York City falls apart around the narrator with increasing rapidity, a grossly escalated state of decay. I watch the Disney version of Cinderella and the voiceover explains that she is, “forced to become a servant in her own house.” I read the Grimm’s version and her father describes her as, “a little stunted kitchen wench left behind by my late wife.” The escalation, disorientation, betrayal; the tables turned, the script flipped. Dodie Bellamy writes, “Cinderella is one whose attributes are unrecognized, or one who unexpectedly achieves recognition or success after a period of obscurity and neglect.” Most of us don’t require recognition, only to be allowed to live at a normal pace of decay, and as an equal in our own houses.
This morning, my coworker R., whose skin is blistering and peeling from a reaction to the rinse agent, tells me that a young woman with a learning disability was left alone in the dishroom of another dining hall—a dining hall named after Toni Morrison—and reached into a garbage disposal after a spoon. Folks, she lost her hand. Why is a job a battlefield, strewn with the injured and maimed?
My coworker H., eighteen months clean from a seventeen year meth addiction, tells me of the amputations he witnessed at a lumberyard. My coworker J., a soft-spoken former crosscountry runner, has started coming to work drunk. My coworker S., a young mother who can see the dead, has started coming to work drunk. My coworker K. casually mentions the miscarriages they experienced over the years of being assaulted by a babysitter’s son. “Where were your parents?” I ask. “My mom was in jail; my dad is a pedophile.” These are the people who kept us flush in chocolate milk and cake and chicken marsala at college. I am at least presently without any analysis or conclusion; every hour I shut my eyes tight and mentally wrap everyone in a warm blanket. Our elected leaders are funding a genocide with money collected from these people, people whose lives, lives as measured by the time we have on earth and our bodily integrity, have been decimated.
“Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving and another kind of society.”
We hug each other, give each other rides, buy each other gas, make each other fresh coffee, pay each other compliments, listen, commiserate, exchange stories, tell jokes. Our laughter rings out through the kitchen. The archangel manager belts out a Christmas carol in October, and my face hurts from smiling. Of all the shitty jobs I might have taken in all the crummy college towns, I landed in the place where my true love lives.
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