Tombu and I met on Feeld, in June, three weeks after my sister’s funeral. Her body had been burned to ash and bone, funneled into a marble urn, placed inside a rose-gold box, lowered into the ground, covered with dirt. Time passed, one day and then the next. But where was she? No one could tell me where she’d gone. A weird side effect of her death: I became so horny it was almost embarrassing. Masturbating didn’t cut it, my body aflame with desire for sex with strangers, sex that didn’t mean anything. It was easy to get it, too. By LA standards I’d never been small enough, not for an Asian girl. After my sister died, I lost ten pounds in a flash, from unwittingly starving myself—I couldn’t taste food at all. It was like eating paper.
On the app I went by “K,” but when we met up IRL I told him to call me Kiki. We had a drink at El Prado, conducted a vibe check. Tombu wasn’t his real name. He was half Japanese and half Jewish. Shaved head, amber eyes, velvet voice. In his late thirties, a couple of years younger than me, with a few grays sprinkling his beard. He seemed non-murdery, safe to fuck. We walked down the block to his place on Alvarado and Sunset, a gentrified development situated between a hand car wash and a botánica.
He made us a couple of rye Manhattans and we drank them while he told me about his wife and their setup—ethical non-monogamous and playing separately. On Tuesdays she slept at her photography studio in Culver City, and on those evenings Tombu had his dates, or a night alone with his video games. This was their routine.
His dog sat on the couch between us and we both petted her, our fingers touching occasionally through her soft yellow fur. Her name, he said, was Oni. Short for Onigiri. After a while he picked her up and put her on the ground, gently. Then he scooted next to me. We kissed. He put his hands inside my shirt, squeezed my breasts, and I laughed.
“What’s so funny?” he asked. “Is it because I’m Asian?”
“No,” I said. “Why?”
“You usually go out with white guys, right?”
“You’re the one married to a white woman.” I remembered a picture of his wife from his profile—dark blond curls, gummy smile.
“That’s different,” he said.
“I grew up in Missouri,” I said. “So, yeah. I’ve dated white guys.”
“Where?”
“Versailles,” I said.
I told him my parents used to drive two hours to shop at the Chinese supermarket in Kansas City, me and my sister in the backseat of the Oldsmobile.
“Older?” he asked. “Younger?”
“Twins. She—she’s—”
“Identical?”
I nodded.
A glint came into his eyes. He wasn’t the first man to get turned on by the idea of my being a twin.
“Versailles,” he repeated. “I’m from Paris, Maine.”
Things quieted between us again.
“I wasn’t laughing at you,” I said.
We kissed some more, sitting on the sofa. He lifted my shirt—I wasn’t wearing a bra—and sucked on my nipples gently, one then the other. I’ve been here before; a man I barely knew touching me, my body responding to his hands: anticipation, curiosity. I pulled the shirt off over my head, and he put both his hands on my waist, pushed me down on my back. His knee was pressed between my legs; I pressed back. He took a long time kissing my breasts, his mouth soft and warm, teasing delicately at first then increasing the intensity until I moaned, my hands clutching the back of his neck. I reached down and touched the bulge in his jeans. He asked if I wanted to move things to the bedroom.
“Show me,” I said.
He took my hand and led me up the stairs, into the loft. Framed black-and-white photos adorned the walls, all by his wife, I assumed. A squat rack stood in the corner, an imposing metal contraption dramatically framed by the floor-to-ceiling window. We undressed each other. I looked at him for a moment, imagined him lifting the barbell bar high above his head. He had the puffed-up pectoral muscles of someone who drank protein shakes for breakfast. A green cartoon bullfrog sat on the left side of his chest, a sweet maneki-neko with a lifted paw on the right side. A red dragon relaxed next to a blue phoenix on his stomach. His arms were covered in koi fish, kanji, flora and fauna. In the half-dark room, an impenetrable shield seemed to surround him. Maybe it was all the tattoos that gave me that feeling. A thought arrived about how I would describe him later to friends, that I slept with a human Ed Hardy shirt.
Another thought surfaced: he wasn’t wrong about me only ever dating white guys. Mostly. But how did he know? What gave me away?
I know what you’re thinking. She’s one of those self-hating Asians who grew up wanting to be like the Tiffanis and Kayleighs, ashamed of her weird-smelling lunches. Sure, I wanted to fit in, to be seen as a normal person like everyone else. But the person I hated most wasn’t me. It was my sister. The fact that she existed meant that I could never look away from myself: I wasn’t the “only one” in the lily-white landscape of our childhood years. She was always there.
And now, she wasn’t. I was finally alone.
I slept with Tombu that night, and I kept seeing him after that. Every Tuesday, he punished me with a surgeon’s precision. We had a safe word but I never used it. I wanted more, always more. I wanted him to make me forget myself and everything I was outside of that room. The woman with a dead sister didn’t exist. Here, I was someone else.
In July, I booked a psychic reading over the phone with a woman named Carolyn, who lived in New York. She was Black and very beautiful—at least she appeared so in the headshot on her website. I couldn’t decide if this made me trust in her clairvoyant abilities more, or less.
I wanted to talk about my sister, but I also didn’t want her to say any old thing to pander to my grief, so I asked her about my love life. She told me that marriage wasn’t necessarily in the cards for me, but she saw clearly that I would have a daughter in the future, and that she would be a musician. A rocker, a wild child. With each generation of your family, she said, there would be an explosion of creativity. Your mother wasn’t allowed to be creative; she had to follow the straight and narrow, as the first generation to immigrate. She asked if I had any siblings, and I said yes, then no, I used to, but she died. “By suicide,” I added. “She was the creative one . . .”
Carolyn took a sharp breath, and I imagined her closing her eyes. “So that’s who’s talking to me,” she said after a moment. “She’s with your ancestors and spirit guides. There’s gold light around you. You’re protected.”
“My mother was a twin,” I heard myself saying.
“Yes, I see that,” Carolyn replied. “And this daughter, there’s a possibility of twin energy there too.”
I thought of Tombu as the father, that he’d teach the girls to play the guitar. I didn’t hate the idea, but I didn’t like it, either. It wasn’t real. It was an extension of the psychic’s vision, a way that my mind was connecting the dots between one fantasy and another, like when a beloved character from a sitcom visits another sitcom universe. Part of me understood that when I started to do this, it was a signal that I was entering—or was already in—one of my episodes. This time of year, I always get depressed. By the time the clocks fall back, I’m fine again.
But I should have already known that I was in a bad way, what with my sister’s death, obviously. For some reason I thought . . . well, I thought that perhaps one grief canceled out the other. Like how financial institutions bundled and sold off debt. I had no idea where they sent these packages of negative integers, but I imagined that in some abstract mathematical plane, created by consultants with MBAs, my two competing depressions—sister-related and seasonal—lived in peace, holding hands.
“Show me something.” I put my hands on his belt buckle.
“Kiki,” he murmured. “You want this—”
“Bad,” I said.
“Whose—”
“You know whose it is.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“Yours,” I said. “It’s yours.”
“What’s mine?”
“My pussy.”
“Beg for it.”
“My pussy wants you,” I said. “Please . . . give it—”
“How do you want it? Like this?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
“And this?”
“Yes . . .”
And so on. I listened; I responded. My body moved this way and that way. I made certain expressions of pain, then of pleasure, and some indescribable sensation beyond it. I felt my mind float above the bed, through the ceiling, into the sky, way up above everyone and everything. I soared and dipped there, where breathing felt easy. I heard the noises I was making. Squeaks, shouts, strangled gasping, slap of skin against skin. Such exquisite sounds.
My father hasn’t spoken to me since my sister’s death. Nor did he come to her funeral. He blames me, of course. It happened on my watch.
The anger is what keeps him alive. My father is seventy-nine. He wants to die, just counting down the days. My mother died five years ago. She was his reason for living, his soul mate, his best friend. They loved me and my sister, but we weren’t their center, not even close. We always knew that about our parents.
And now, this.
Refusing to communicate is his way of saying: I love you, I don’t want to lose you, I can’t let go of you, you’re the one I have left here. His silence ties us together. I understand him, and I forgive him.
My father used to hit me—only me, not my sister. I never knew why it was me he chose. When my sister and I both did something wrong, I alone received the punishments. It made me resent my sister in my private heart, but I never told her. Our mother knew about it all, but she didn’t intervene. Every family has a scapegoat, someone who was the receptacle for everyone’s woes. I took on the role so that everyone else could be happy; I wasn’t a victim but a martyr for us. I suffered so that they could thrive, especially my sister, the bright star she was—I was a part of creating that beautiful luminescence. It was only after my mother died and my father told me the story about her sister that I began to consider the possibility that I’d been wrong about the four of us.
“Tell me a story,” I said.
“I feel put on the spot,” Tombu said. “What kind of story?”
“A story about you.”
My eyes were closed. I wanted to touch him; I wanted him to inch closer, to touch me back. But I liked it, too, that we weren’t touching. There was something sexy about it. I was undressed, beneath the covers. He was on top of them, in his clothes: a white cotton T-shirt and black sweatpants. I couldn’t smell him; he was too far away for that. I’d have to be on top of him, my nose buried in his neck. But I caught his scent in the pillowcase, on the sheets. His musk made me feel things; sometimes it helped me remember my dreams from the night before, or it showed me a version of who I could become if I just tried harder to change.
“Did I ever tell you about how I got Oni?” he said.
“No.” I was trying so hard to be still, to just listen to him talk. I wanted to reach over and touch his fingers, his hands, the tattoos that were inked from his wrist to his shoulder.
“It was at the Petco in El Segundo,” he said. I imagined the parking lot, airplanes flying into LAX, the roar of jet engines and coursing freeway traffic. “She had just come off the plane from Korea. It was this white woman and her daughter; they started a foundation to rescue Jindos so they don’t get eaten—”
“Are you serious?”
“They’re both named Karen, the mom and daughter,” he said, laughing, then he hesitated for a moment. “Let me finish telling you what happened. Something really weird—I saw my ex. My high school girlfriend. She was sitting in a car with someone in that Petco parking lot.”
“She was picking up a Jindo too?”
“No, she was just there. I’m not totally sure how I—I know it was her, though. I saw her.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“No.”
“Because your wife was with you?”
“No,” he said. “I was alone.”
My eyes were still closed. The feeling I had, wanting his hands on me, was gone. I knew he was going to tell me that she was dead.
“Thing is,” he said slowly. “She’s dead.”
“Oh,” I said, or at least I meant to; my lips parted to form an O, but no sound came out.