“Hey, you,” Adam says. His voice is always upbeat and warm. The time difference between Illinois and Mumbai is more extreme than the one between Illinois and Oxford, yet Adam manages to surprise me with phone calls fairly often. “Listen, I’m just calling for a minute because I was in Jaipur during the literary festival and I picked something up that I think you’ll like, but I need your mailing address.”
“Have you heard of a little thing called texting?” I tease. “Or is that too Gen Y for you?” Adam and I have this joke that although we’re both technically Millennials, neither of us fits the profile by a long shot. He has a fear of electronic communication—he’s only occasionally on Facebook or Twitter—and both of us still like to read books printed on paper. Plus, he’s living in a third-world country, on his own. That changes a person, at least in the sense that gadgetry becomes less important.
“Trust me, this surprise waits for no one. And I know how you are about responding to texts.” I laugh, but I can’t push away the pang I feel. Adam is basically saying the same exact thing I say to Charlie every time he sends me a two-line email and encourages me to be okay with it.
“Okay,” I tell him. “You ready?”
I rattle off my mailing address and give him a quick goodbye, and then Adam is gone and I’m smiling. He’s left me with a new wave of energy—kind of like after I drink peppermint tea in the winter or feel a breeze on my skin in the stifling heat of the summer. The energy of sharp contrast, I realize. Adam’s voice is a momentary reprieve, every time.
A reprieve. I don’t like to think about what it’s a reprieve from.
A second later my phone pings and there’s a message from Adam that reads, “Embracing the Y.” Underneath it is a photo of Adam with Art Spiegelman, who created the graphic novel wonder that is Maus.
“OMFG,” I type back, grinning like a lunatic. Then Adam responds with a big winky face because he knows I’m super excited but also half joking because I hate acronyms; we had a whole conversation less than a week ago about how dumb they are eighty percent of the time, again establishing ourselves as the same kind of freak.
I ride the glow of my talk with Adam right through dinnertime with my parents: burgers cooked on the grill medium rare with slices of dill pickles and potato chips under the bun instead of on the plate. It leaves me with a sweeping, contented form of happiness that’s both tingling and peaceful, so much so that I don’t notice until about seven p.m. that Charlie never called. For about two seconds, I think about breaking up with Charlie. But for what? For irrational feelings for a guy who lives on another continent and is wonderful and sweet and caring, sure, but who in all likelihood thinks of me as just a friend? Still, I think about it. And then I think about it more. And keep thinking about it.
About a week later, a battered package containing a signed copy of Maus arrives in the mail, with a printout of the photo Adam texted me. I put the photo in the frame of my mirror, where it lives for less than a day before I take it down out of (a) guilt and (b) worry that my mom will ask who Adam is. I return to work on my comic the same day and I don’t stop after the picture comes down.
I’m working on a new comic now, at an outdoor market of sorts in Bangkok. Lena’s gone in search of a bathroom and I’m eating a noodle bowl with fish balls floating around in its murky broth. Fish balls strike me as inherently weird and wrong and false—like if you tried to make goat squares or something—and yet they taste so right. They’re like the chicken nugget of Bangkok, I muse as I sketch, hoping they aren’t half nerve and bone the way actual chicken nuggets are. (Chicken nuggets, right up there with Cheez Whiz, are among my Worst Nightmare Foods. Lena is a foodie, and although her brand of picky barely exists in the Midwest, I’ve tried her kale chips on this trip, and I’m starting to think she’s on to something.) I’m sketching the outdoor food stalls, the ones meant for tourists with their fried bat wings and skewered tarantulas. I realized a few months ago that making comics keeps me calm and helps me understand what I’m seeing. It’s sort of like a natural filter when staring at everything directly feels overwhelming.
I feel a nudge to my chair and there’s Lena, looking impatient.
“Dude,” she says. “Let’s get going. Sukhumvit Road is in Nana Plaza. I think we should get over there right away, before Cara blows it and lets my parents know she booked the wrong flights.” I fight to suppress a wave of irritation. Lena’s desire to chase Charlie is borderline obsessive, and I’m wondering if it was a mistake to agree to it. We’ve been traveling for almost a week, and I’m starting to wonder what’s behind it besides grief and anger. Meanwhile, I’m tired and hungry and we have no place to stay. Yet a tiny part of me still wants to support Lena—a strange sentiment, given the circumstances—and another part, if I’m honest with myself, has enjoyed our adventure.