She was the only other Lao Baby I’d met, both of us having ended up in New York adopted by do-gooder types, me a middle-aged ethical culturalist on the Upper West Side, Maggie a family of blue-collar Baptists in Queens. As soon as we knew each other, we became friends, different as we were, finding comfort in the thought that We both know what it’s like. We understand each other. No one else does.
She hugged me when we met. She said later that she’s never been the huggy-smoochy type, but she just had to. We’re here, the two of us, our bodies said, two mountain ranges embracing. No, not mountains, not something solid and still; Maggie was more like wind, or flame. Or maybe both at once. She never stopped moving, had to do everything, didn’t fear anything. Ultimately we were disappointments to each other, thinking we’d each found a kindred spirit and instead found, in her view, someone determined to stay locked up in her own self-made prison; in mine, someone who seemed, for no good reason, determined to squander her freedom.
But Maggie was like that even before she knew she was a Lao Baby, just as I had been like this before I knew. Finding out only made each of us more us. It made me more fearful, more withdrawn. It made her go skydiving. She’d enjoyed hang-gliding tremendously, so why not?
Maggie of course embraced the serial killer rumor with her usual perverse enthusiasm. She would hang out in bars sizing up potential Rippers. She made it into another game — There, that one in the corner with the briefcase. Bet he’s got the hacksaw in there. It’s your turn; ask him if he knows a good place for dim sum in the neighborhood. She’d hoped the legend was real, wanted to grapple with him. When reports about the mythical slasher no longer seemed to place him in New York, she followed the legend on out of town. She turned it into an excuse to hitchhike across the country that summer, yet another something she’d always wanted to do. Meanwhile I started another online teaching job and repainted my apartment walls. Eggshell.
Maggie sent me a postcard from the Redwood Forest that July. I looked at the picture for about an hour without blinking or moving, barely breathing. I never did read what she’d written on the other side, since it was usually something along the lines of wish you were here smoked some bad shit the other day almost got raped but it’s all so beautiful you know? I kept looking at the trees. They had lived hundreds of years. They stretched into the sky like something pushing up into the future, while down under the earth they reached back into the past. They were quiet and still, with none of the buzz and boil of emotion. I wanted that.
Most people would call that quantity, not quality. I don’t know how many times people have said that to me: it’s not the quantity of life, it’s the quality. I would always nod my head politely, of course, but in the back of my mind I think — I know — that this is simply their hopeless, angry rationalization. If you have limited quantity, of course you’re going to value quality. What choice do you have? Apparently people don’t like thinking this, though. Some of them want to make sure no one else thinks it either, not even those of us who will outlive them and their children. It isn’t just the one lone nut trying to blast the Lao Babies into oblivion. Others have been hunting for us. They want us back in a lab, so they can find out how it was done, so they can ruin our quality to get their quantity.
No one knows how it was done.
“No one except Lindstrom,” Jimmy corrected me.
“No one knows where Lindstrom is. His head is worth more than even mine.”
Jimmy kissed the top of my head. “Not to me.”
“Aw.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“Aaaaaaaaaaawwwww.”
“Better.”
Such sweet nothings. Meanwhile ghosts surrounded us: Maggie and the Lao Babies, Lindstrom and the other scientists, the killer and the desperate masses who prized quality over quantity until they saw that other people might have both.
“I’m sorry about Maggie.”
“She would laugh at you for saying that. And not in a nice way. She never wanted anyone sorry for her.”
“OK, then I’m not sorry. No, I’m sorry you had to see it.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to remember that. I busied myself looking in my backpack, though what I could possibly need at that moment contained in a backpack I had no idea.
Jimmy tactfully busied himself with something on his nightstand as well. “So nobody really has any clue where Lindstrom is?” he asked, and then his face changed as he looked up. I tensed. I already knew that look of his.
“That’s a very good question,” the man in the doorway said.