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It struck me then as well as now as an odd choice for this man to favor. In fairness, he might simply have had access to fewer books in a place where each volume was a treasured survivor of war or worse, even into the 1990s. Then again, his sentimental streak could merely be wider and longer than that of any other man, possibly of any other human, I had known. Clearly anything he’d read more recently had failed to make the same impression.
I could not claim then to be surprised thatActs of Faith,the title he had so meticulously inscribed on the scrap of paper I had packed away so many years earlier, the one that fluttered unsuspecting past my eyes on the afternoon I unearthed my memories, had a similar effect. For ifActs of Faithexamines the ways in which children disappoint their parents (myriad, large and small), and parents their children (the same), it is, above all, devoted to the heartbreak of forbidden love. By the time I reached the end, I had the eerie feeling that maybe there was more to this recommendation than Nao Kao’s penchant for a tearjerker. My tears weren’t confined to the heartrending story between the covers.
I was slightly embarrassed to think how many times since that paper fluttered down I had asked myself what Nao Kao knew that he did not know he knew. Or what he knew that I, at least, did not know he knew.
I stuck a little heart on the text bubble and readied myself for another meeting over Zoom.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
In its half-awakestate, my mind wandered, dipping and diving like a plane passing through turbulence. I am a Michigander, seven generations in the making on my father’s side. Like any good Michigander, I have a thing for Lord Huron. Cruising along, high across the northern latitudes, a pair of earbuds delivering the music straight into my mind, I reflected on the lyrics. Perhaps it was more than the connection to the Mitten that spoke to me, for the good Lord Huron, I realized with a start, was waxing nostalgic about a girl who had ghosted him, for whom he had traversed the desert and the sea, the mountains and the trees trying to find her again. And if Lord Huron didn’t have the answer to what he was s’posed to do, haunted by the ghost of you, I sure didn’t. I thought back to how those five little words Nao Kao had offered me almost immediately reached into my bones.Thanks for finding me, Liss.
I cannot – would not – claim to be in Nao Kao’s every thought the way Lord Huron’s lost girl consumed his, but the rest of it I knew intuitively to be true. We might easily have inspired verse and chorus. Nothing else could account for the panic that seized me when I returned to the university and went about demanding a new uniqname and convincing human resources to scrub any trace of my middle name, refusing to rest in my crusade until I was satisfied that Melissa Claire Miller Larkin was reduced to Melissa Larkin, an anonymous administrator, untethered from her past. In hindsight I laugh to think how I fretted that Melissa Miller might be traceable. Facebook alone shows hundreds of profiles under that name today, and God knows the search algorithms at the turn of twenty-first century were not what they have become. Don’t use more than eight words. Don’t cite Wikipedia. And for heaven’s sake don’t talk to strangers online. We had only just barely survived Y2K.
“I can still picture you sitting in class,” Nao Kao wrote to me once. “I am surprised, sometimes, by the suddenness and the clarity of memory.”
“Do you still wear your pendant?” he asked me another time, and it took me a moment to realize he was speaking of the little dog that had rested in the dimple at the base of my throat for so many moons. Lost, years ago now, and fittingly on a long-haul flight. The fastener gave up the ghost while I slept, and the pendant disappeared without a trace.
“A man doesn’t remember details like that unless he cares uncommonly,” my therapist said when I finally leveled with her about where my mind was. To say she was surprised is to understate the matter. The rest of the world was out searching for toilet paper and Clorox wipes. I was searching for answers to a jigsaw puzzle with no start and no end – a mess of middle pieces, each devoid of color or pattern, the assembly of which was entirely on me.
Occasionally, I tried to get Nao Kao to bring a memory into focus for me, to see if a few more words would allow me to retrieve it from the mists of time. Periodically he would indulge me, offering up scraps I’d long since consigned to wherever memories lodge when the brain no longer wishes to retain them. So it was with the memory of Nao Kao having removed his wedding ring.
I had forgotten until he reminded me recently, and now it bothered me. He said I had roughed him up about it sometime after we went to the wave field for the first time, though he would not remind me exactly when that was. I might have told him plainly that I could not recall even many mundane details, but to do so felt like rubbing salt into a wound.
“You mean I gave you the third degree?” I asked bemusedly.
“Or the thirtieth,” came his reply, the little gray bubble popping up on my phone.
Whatever details his mind still held, and I had no doubt they were all there, he doggedly kept them to himself and would say nothing further about why he removed it – or when. If I concentrated hard enough, I could almost capture an image of myself racing up and down the moguls of the wave field, windmilling my arms in a poor impression of the skiers who soared down mountains rather than dashing across a blistered green field. I think I may have packed us a picnic – sandwiches and strawberries and chocolate chip cookies – but my mind could not be trusted not to merge, reflect, and refract so many shards from the past into even more broken pieces.
Even now, after a conversation of hundreds of hours stretching across months and into years, I still had not admitted to Nao Kao the extent to which the holes in my memory made Swiss cheese of our time together.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I told himon the night of the famous debate. I hadn’t intended to do it then. I was not entirely certain I would tell him at all. But he had poked me about the debate, suggesting I watch and provide him with updates since I was “stronger.” Unexpectedly, the word triggered something inside me that had lain buried for so many years and instantly put paid to my own, long-running, internal debate. If ever I was going to come clean with Nao Kao, this was the moment.
The rest of the world might have been consumed by the likes of “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” and “Keep yapping, man,” but I was in my own world, telling a man nine thousand miles away the meaning of the breadcrumbs I had been leaving along the trail for the past few months.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
It must havebeen sometime in the early summer of 2001 that Nao Kao started staying at my apartment. Most students scattered at the end of winter semester, but he and I plodded through our coursework and soaked in the relief of early summer, our conversations lengthening with the days. He didn’t stay over too often, just on nights he missed the last bus back to North Campus and his apartment in the aptly named Northwoods.
Nao Kao would stretch out on the tatty, brown couch, a hazard of a furnished apartment that had seen god knows what over the years. He would cover himself with a jacket if the evening was cool, or not even that if it was warm. It was only later that I considered that when you spend your early years in a refugee camp, a pillow and a blanket are far down life’s list of necessities. In class, I studied Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; with Nao Kao, I learned it.
It was totally kosher, him in the living room, me ensconced in my bedroom, though in hindsight I realized his wife might have disagreed. What she did not know would not hurt, though, and anyway, Harry and Sally were wrong. Nao Kao and I were the exception that proved the rule. Platonic friendship was utterly possible.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Nao Kao–
I was sorting through materials from our master’s program and thought I’d see if you were on LinkedIn. You look to be doing well. I hope so.
– Liss
Friday night seemed the best time to send a hesitant (on my part) – possibly even unwelcomed (on his part) – message. Only a nerd like me would check LinkedIn on the weekend. It was after eleven when I convinced myself that the world would not blow up if I hit send.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
In hindsight, thesummer of 2001 probably wasn’t as blissful as I remember. In my mind, it’s a great, shining stretch of halcyon days, though more likely it’s merely knowing that it was the end of our ownTrente Glorieusesthat made those months seem infused by a golden aura. Summer I classes slid into Summer II, broken by the fireworks for the Fourth of July, one of the few occasions I recall gathering with classmates other than Nao Kao. My mind’s eye has retained a picture of me nursing a Mike’s hard lemonade and leaning against a rickety porch banister at a big house on Division, one of those places where ten or twelve kids lived each year, the unlikely combination ofCeciliaandSlim Shadyproviding the soundtrack against which the young and carefree contested round after round of beer pong. How or why I ever came to be on the porch escapes me, and I can only assume Nao Kao had a hand – probablythehand – in convincing me to shed my anti-social ways and join him on the most American of nights.
