“I need to use the bathroom.”
He put his arms around her neck and held on tight as she leveraged him up from the bed. She smelled of strong soap and a citrus shampoo, with no hint of perfume to mask the tang of sweat. Once he was sitting on the bed with his feet on the ground, he hung an arm around her neck and let her pull him to his feet. Claire was the right size for him to lean on, her head rising a bit over his shoulder, his arm draping comfortably over her back. She kicked aside a bamboo mat on the floor and maneuvered him down the narrow passage between his bed and his neighbor’s. “Careful, Dad,” Claire said, steering him past a body stretched out on the floor and curled up under a sheet, head turned away from him. “You’ll be okay. You just need some rest.”
What she wanted to say, but wouldn’t, was that he should not be frightened. He was not going to die here. But he was frightened, more so than he had ever expected to be. Before Michiko and the children, he believed he would die in an airplane or behind the wheel of a very fast car, anything involving high velocity and a sudden, arresting stop. Now he knew he would probably die with panic pooling in his lungs, in a place where he was not supposed to be, on the wrong side of the world. He hung on to Claire even more tightly as she clutched him around his waist, navigating him past the first body and around another at the foot of a bed by the door. When he tripped on the body’s outstretched foot, a woman with short-cropped hair raised her head and snapped, “Troi oi, can than di!” To which Claire said, apologetically, “Xin loi, co!”
The woman must be a relative of one of the patients, or maybe a patient herself. Claire must have been sleeping on the bamboo mat by his bed. The realization burned through the fog of dizziness and fear, delivering a feeling for his daughter so strong it pained him. He remembered her infancy, when Michiko insisted on sleeping with Claire in between them, he so worried about rolling over in his sleep onto Claire that he lay awake restless until he could worry no more, whereupon he climbed down to the floor and slept on the carpet. Not so many years later, when Claire was walking but barely potty-trained, and still sleeping in their bed, she would wake up, slip off the edge and land on his chest, and when he opened one eye, demand to be taken to the bathroom. The trip alone in the dark was too frightening. He would sigh, get up, and lead her down the hall, step by careful step, her hand wrapped around one of his fingers.
“Dad,” Claire said. The bathroom door was a pale green rectangle in the blue moonlight before them. “Dad, are you crying?”
“No, baby, I’m not,” he said, even though he was.
y father’s girlfriend lived in a condo complex made to look like a village, the stucco barracks scattered around a flat lawn spotted with barbecue pits. Behind one of the barracks a leaf blower whined as I followed my father along a winding brick path, past a swimming pool that smelled of chlorine, and up an echoing stairway. We stopped on the second floor, and my father used a key linked on the chain of his Swiss Army knife to unlock a condo door. When he called out her name—Mimi—it was the first time I’d heard it.
Mimi was sitting on a white leather couch in the living room, using a remote control to dial down the volume on the television backed into one corner. She stood up, and if she was surprised to see me, she didn’t show it. Her plum velour tracksuit fitted snugly on her slender body. Photographs of my mother before she was married show that she was once slim too, but by the end of her life everything about her had thickened and sagged, except for her fading hair. When she died, she was wearing the wig I’d given to her for a birthday present, woven from real human hair. Mimi’s perm resembled the wig, except that Mimi’s hair was naturally rich and abundant, rooted to her head in auburn waves, the style of a woman in her fifties.
“I’ve been waiting to meet you for so long!” she said, clasping both my hands in hers. The skin of her face was beige and unnaturally smooth, like nylon stockings.
“Thanks,” I said. Singing on the television was a girl with crimped hair, wearing a black vinyl bodice and a red leather miniskirt. Above the television was a faded lacquer version of the Last Supper, with Jesus and the disciples framed in pink neon. My father bumped into me on his way to the couch, and I said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”