By Danielle Shi

Years later, it all added up to the same thing anyway. Playing chess
against herself was no fun, regardless of what airs it conveyed upon
a person. She had almost forgotten his name by the time he
remembered to call. By then, it was too late. He read of her death in
the coded way they swapped missives. Kerouac died first. Ginsberg
kept lecturing. They remember one but not both, depending on who
you asked. That crowd, the hangers-on at Vesuvius. Images passed,
fecund and literate, like misplaced facts, jumping with urgency from
one mind to another, bees in a wasp’s nest. She thought about the
secret garden in the back of the house she had been staying at, the
calla lilies she’d seen from the kitchen window. Their creamy folds.

He tried to play it safe when he picked her up from the airport,
waiting for her to approach his car and lean over the open window
to call his name, enticingly, in familiar tones. She knew him from
somewhere, but they had never met. How was that possible? He
seemed to know her, too, a critical relation, knew from the first that
she liked German and would try to crack a nihilist joke before the
end of their time together in the getaway car, and hardly listening as
she complained in a light tone of voice how it was easy to want to
move to France and become a radical.

They walked around the bookstore until closing. The used novels
were overshadowed by a shelf of employee recommendations,
contemporary novels and journalists’ personal essays with small
Post-it flags bearing explanatory summary. There was no esoterica
left because of the new regime. Instead, she pointed out all the books
she had read and recognized, and rambled about how much she
loved Joan Didion and California nature, and Harvard collegiate
autofiction, walking over to check out Herzog and Williams and
pretending not to care when he talked about divorce and his
literature-major parents as though he understood her.

These days she hardly checked her phone anymore, ignoring the cat
spam from anonymous numbers that her father had told her to filter
to her junk box, Chinese-language scams pretending to know her
personally. In China, she had heard from the family, it was even
harder to publish, since everyone was a writer in China—seated in
the student district in Wudaokou, in the nonsmoking section,
outfitted with their translations of poetry and their modern books.
“⼩说”, “xiǎoshuō”, the term for novel, word for word meant small
talk. What did it mean to have ‘big talk’? To have a voice. She tired
of giving out her voice when it no longer brought her joy to sing.
The stories she wrote these days could not reach another’s ear
without distortion and embellishment and telephony, becoming
through the process hard-edged and stony, and more or less
unrecognizable to herself. She knew they were really talking about
her—the loud voices—to try to get her to engage with them, but she
couldn’t be bothered after reading about the lab rats her work used
for experiments. The children’s stories were too sad. They made her
think of the bloodbaths at the end of Shakespeare, which were only
comedic if you were naïve. Her father, he had taken her out to the
Getty Center as a child. He liked to take her to art museums,
libraries. It was their little universe.

Her relative said she thought sanatoriums sounded interesting, too,
from the way she wrote about them. It was even solitary in the
hospital. Was it really a choice that was given? The cancer doctor,
the childhood friend who had set her up with her date, had raised
the question. She ran her finger along the spines and opened a book
about tuberculosis to a random page. Its close association with artists
meant that people pretended they were ill to make themselves seem
more romantic, she read. The oncologist had told her to get Botox,
but only if she would take him to Korea to get it together. She told
him she had learned a new word from him, oncology. Outside, her
date was already on his phone, stuck waiting for her to buy her
tuberculosis book as he commented on Reddit about her again in a
laconic and ironic way, pretending to orchestrate moments, she
thought cynically, where she would see him reveal his insecurities,
though she knew better than anyone when these things were
positioned deliberately. Her tuberculosis book was unreadable
unless you knew what the writer knew. It felt like a scheme to her,
reading about the horror, a map planned step by step, for her to
erase the markings from, a palimpsest to discover along the way.
Horror of horrors. It wasn’t that the darkness didn’t exist, but rather
that it was shaded away into contour and definition of the parts that
mattered, and the rest of it was allowed to fall away. She joined him
where he was huddled under the glimmering lamppost in the rain,
and suggested watching Solaris at the arthouse theater, at the
Tarkovsky retrospective she had been looking forward to.

They always ended up arguing about God, and whether or not she
was going to eat dinner today. She walked out on them when they
got too close. She wasn’t really sure where they came up with the
stuff about all of the repressed cult trauma affecting her. It made her
think of postmodern quandaries from the novels she had up on her
shelf, as though a thief had broken in when she forgot to lock up
after her, though the books about paranoia were for the most part
impenetrable, even though we like to say that everything is open to
interpretation. Her last therapist had made her laugh by saying that
ethically, psychologists had to be healthy in order to treat patients.

There was a great deal of rain in Tarkovsky movies, she noted when
the reel began to run. When she first started coming to the theater
after moving to the city, it rained all the time, and she often walked
through the downpour on her way back to the train with umbrella
and black platform boots, becoming through the ensemble a
mysterious stranger. Onscreen, the rain looked like it had emerged
from a garden hose, purposeful and with a directive, and clearly
unnatural. She sank into the hard back of her red chair. The
medicine label had said it took four to six weeks for the effects to
wear thin. Were people sad for effect? In Tarkovsky’s Mirror,
Margarita Terekhova plays Tarkovsky’s mother, hanging from the
ceiling and suspended in mid-air above the four-poster bed, the rain
coming down indoors in sheets. The image, which she watched at
her father’s apartment while he and her stepmother were out, stayed
with her forever. Solaris used the same actress, but she played a
hallucination, the apparition of a lost love, her skin covered in lesions.
The R.D. Laing reading on psychosis she was only able to get about
twenty pages into, while the institution turned her mother out onto
the street after she began to get into arguments with the nurses. She
thought that if only she could use her head to help herself to feel
ebullient again, she would realize the others had been there all along,
the voices merely being her friends. Though, she wasn’t sure why
she had all of them yelling different things. It did get confusing, and
she would chalk it up to taking the mental illness class back at school
before she was ready to get back to it.

Danielle Shi is a writer and photographer based in Berkeley, CA. Her work can be found at ZYZZYVA Magazine Blog, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, The Rumpus, La Piccioletta Barca, The Margins, and Common Forms. She is currently working on a novel, The Shelter, about homelessness and mental illness in Asian America. Her writing has been supported by residencies at Vermont Studio Center, the Prelinger Library, Winslow House Project, and PLAYA Summer Lake, and she has been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize and Best New Poets 2025. danielleshi.com

Kali, digital art by Tony Brinkley
Tony Brinkley’s poetry, art and translations have appeared in MISSISSIPPI REVIEW, ANOTHER CHICAGO MAGAZINE, BELOIT POETRY JOURNAL, CERISE PRESS, DRUNKEN BOAT, FOUR CENTURIES, HINCHAS DE POESIE, HUNGARIAN REVIEW, MAYDAY, NEW REVIEW OF LITERATURE, PUCKERBRUSH PRESS, POETRY SALZBURG REVIEW, OTOLITHS, SHOFAR, METAMORPHOSIS, BOMBAY LITERARY MAGAZINE, POETRY IN TRANSLATION, WORLD LITERATURE TODAY, OPEN, COLLATERAL,, TRAFIKA EUROPE, ANA, NASHVILLE REVIEW, EXCHANGES, NEOLOGISM, PICTURA JOURNAL,  THE COURTSHIP OF WINDS, ZOETIC PRESS, BLUE UNICORN, MERION WEST, REVERIE, VIRIDINE LIBRARY, RUMEN, SOUL, and MISERERE REVIEW. Before retirement, Brinkley taught literature at the University of Maine. He is co-editor (with Keith Hanley) of ROMANTIC REVISIONS (Cambridge University Press).