Don't Disappoint (Ch. 16)
by Martin van Cooper
Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next four weeks, we’ll continue serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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On her shirt was written ENERGY LOVE LIGHT and Jessica is trying to read it as a sentence and searching for some missed alliteration. She has Uggs and yellow, pink and red yoga pants and smirks at Jessica picking up her drink. He sends a gif of a girl humping a balance ball and she sends a meme of Tom Hanks in Castaway that looks like a dude whacking off and some other guy sends a meme of a robot with huge breasts that says ‘big tiddies’ and he sends a meme of a girl doing a hula hoop and the other guy sends a meme of the guy with the girl looking over his shoulder at the other girl that’s just walked by only with text over their heads talking something about fast food and she sends a gif of a chihuahua humping a Trump doll and he sends a meme of Hillary wiping a server like you mean with a cloth? The barista walks up to the counter and says, you can’t make this up, I have a mobile order of cake pops for Chad.
It was the year that the wide-eyed stares turned from envy and admiration and deference to suspicion and annoyance and just plain contempt. It turns out that the longing to be accepted and viewed as equal, once these things are nearly achieved, turns overnight not into self-satisfied air of accomplishment and a plateau of sanguine ease but instead to an immediate sense of entitlement and superiority. The Chinese word for ‘tea’ sounds like cha as in I’m dancing the cha-cha, but if you pronounce it like that you aren’t saying it exactly right. The conference was in a five-star tourist hotel in the Shatin region of Hong Kong that is connected to the mainland and Jessica’s first unpleasant surprise upon landing was that the shopping and people watching were on the other side of town in the Kowloon or Tsim Sha Tsui where one would catch a ferry to the island. For six days it rained and the temperature never dipped below 90, even at midnight. Nearby the hotel were several grade schools, Hong Kong University and several dozen churches of various Christian denominations. Crew teams plowed the river shortly after dawn as she looked down from her 25th floor window, unable to sleep past two in the morning and thus already being awake for four hours when the sun rose. The overcast week gave the city a washed-out monotony—gone was any mystery of ancient culture or untouched civilization. This was Western culture, decoded, reverse engineered and thoroughly exhausted. Karaoke to Taylor Swift and Outkast. Everyone speaking English, even the cab drivers. Ferraris and Teslas double parked next to a hipster bar serving cold pig ear, four different seasonal ciders, air conditioned and clean, with the Germans reading and the Americans writing in journals and some local college aged kids drinking and arm wrestling while the girls scroll WeChat. The Chinese word for beer sounds like pee jew, but if you pronounce it like that. you’re not saying it exactly right.
The strength of this organization is the strict reliance on scientific objectivity, democratic governance, tolerance of debate and a willingness to share unpublished results, with the understanding that this is a closed, safe environment where the ideas you present will be respected and you will be given credit. There are no pictures allowed during the conference. We have a zero-tolerance policy on harassment. Those violating the policy may be subject to dismissal from the meeting, a bar from future meetings, requirement for public and/or private apologies, or referral to local law enforcement. Or some combination of the above. The voting on future meeting locations will commence shortly, in the meantime let’s check the real time online voting and message board which is now projected and which you can access via this safe url. We have here in Hong Kong again, we have Tuscany, we have outside of Barcelona by the coast, of course that’s in Spain, we have Banff, which is Canada. And now let me just say this should be a democratic vote and you should vote how you want but let me just, how do I say, the local Hong Kong government gave a lot of money to support this and there’s a lot of fundraising that goes into these meetings and these decisions have to be democratic but they really want an increased foothold in Asia, the organizers do, and Hong Kong is an easy or easier one for a lot of people and I’m just saying on behalf of the next chairs who have to raise money, what’s the name for the thing that has to grow exponentially to survive?
Jessica is talking with one of the attendees at the hotel bar after the sessions. When my parents immigrated from China to Hong Kong in 1985, I followed them a year later and tried to enroll in university. They said your scores are too low, you don’t have the right coursework and so have to repeat 10th grade. Then they said you do not have the right middle school classes and so you would have to repeat middle school and then you don’t have the right elementary school classes and so I would have had to repeat everything and so I worked for a year in a biotech company and studied for the GRE and TOEFL to enroll at the University of Pittsburgh and finished my bachelors in America. I came to USA with ten dollars in my pocket. They wouldn’t let me into Hong Kong, but I came to America and here I am 20 years later and now I’m back here giving a lecture. You visit here ten years ago, Hong Kong University doing much better training best people in Asia, in the world, now today it’s the other way around, they’re just trying to survive, it’s PKU, Zhejiang, Fudan, USTC, the best students want to stay on the mainland. Doe sow che means how much is it and it’s pronounced like you read those words in your head. So, it turns out that it takes almost no time at all to change the default psychological proclivities of an entire nation of 1.5 billion people when you have perfect control of information.
Gone are the deferential nods, the baseline subservient smiles, the accommodating shows of admiration and—albeit always somewhat quite vacuous—goodwill, replaced in a few months, Fall 2018 until Spring 2019, by distrust, disdain, grimace and undisguised condescension. You could blame him, but there must have been movement before Xi and he just accelerated it. All signs indicate things are going to get much more painful before they improve. Several people intimate this to Jessica because the Party assumes 5 more years of Trump after which a new more capable (read: pliable) diplomat leads the USA, but this is only half of the Party’s bet on the current strategy of confrontation. Do you realize that where the West is with China right now is already decades longer into the confrontation than we ever got with Nazi Germany? Which really was only in power for a decade? The confrontation, even more ideologically cataclysmic, with China, is already much longer in duration. Basically, we have been fighting a cold war with China since 1946. Or at least since they got the bomb.
Collaborating with the Chinese was a protracted episode of blue balls, her advisor told Jessica before their first trip years earlier. As example, imagine you are an electrician and you happen to make a new acquaintance on this basis of this fact who, after getting to know you and your area of expertise, invites you over to dinner. You arrive and are greeted by his lovely, demure wife and introduced to his precocious, nubile daughter and given a tour of his lavish new home, during which he makes a point in each room to intercourse on some exotic aspect of bespoke electrical design with you, soliciting your opinion and praising your judgment and acknowledging your credentials, track LEDs in the game room say, reworking the laundry area to accommodate another stacked washer/dryer, a total redo of the kitchen, some tasteful and low profile and durable lighting throughout the backyard and around the pool. You then eat a multi-course truly magnificent dinner of strange species of flora and fauna, some identifiable and some not, with him and his wife and his daughter and your wife and have an after dinner nightcap and another relaxing stroll around the garden, all the while him yammering on like a madman about the total redo he wants to do on the electrical in his house and then suddenly you are departing and he sends you off with a handshake and a bow and a small gift, some tea and biscuits and maybe a scarf for your wife and you and your wife are driving home on some type of majorly pleasing saccharine buzz off the night and the implicit and explicit acknowledgement of your skills and their desirability. And then you never hear from him. Until about a year later, when he’s in a new house and the process repeats itself.
People seemed to intuitively recognize she could take the emotional neglect and so they emotionally neglected her, because there is an intoxication to be had from neglecting someone, denying them, especially someone you are ostensibly supposed to care for. And the high to be had from this is never greater than in the dispensation of scorn for those closest to you—her mother taught her this by example, though Jessica could never bring herself to feel scorn for anyone, family or otherwise. Neglect was not scorn—she was just not tuned into the frequency where anyone broadcast their emotions. This was not the reason why she always traveled alone, never took Jason to meetings, but it was not unrelated.
The other hope, the more substantive and opportunistic hope is that any subsequent American president, because of the West’s self-righteous indignation and obsessive image consciousness, would be required to attempt détente from a position of weakness, in clear acquiescence to a new global norm and indeed a new global leader. In the afternoon on June 4, 2019, the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre—which has been completely expunged from the official history in China and referred to even within the Politburo as a minor put down of a minor uprising by counterrevolutionary traitors inspired by a meddling West—CNN stopped loading over on her phone. All morning they had been running stories about the massacre, vigils worldwide, highlighting the Party’s incomplete erasure of this event from the internet. Amazing it took them until noon to give CNN the hatchet. Meanwhile when the page was loading earlier in the day, as one scrolled down, there were headlines from America about Menstrual cycle tracking added to iWatch and meet the drag queens and kings with Down syndrome. Regime change in China will not look anything like the USSR, Iraq or anything else in recorded history, no matter what factors precipitate it, she’s telling Jessica. It will be nothing short of a complete reset of the rules governing the modern world. Ee sure are nyow means kill two birds with one stone and I can fucking promise you are not pronouncing it right.
On the way home, the woman across the aisle from Jessica wore a black dress, knee length, with white cartoon spray painted looking smiling human skulls, interspersed with what were either roses or raspberries, she can’t be sure, and hoop earrings and sandals with 4 inches of black foam and large faux crystals encrusted on the straps (the sandals’ straps), a monstrous—for all accounts real—diamond on her finger and burgundy nails (fingers and toes) and her hair is held in a low bleached blond bun by one of those scrunchies that were ubiquitous in the 1990’s and are recently making a comeback and large white noise cancelling Bose headphones plugged in, through adaptor, to an enormous iPhone where she was watching The Sound of Music. Someone taps her shoulder and it’s a short bald man of either Latin American or Subcontinental origin and points to the middle seat and then seems intent to dive across her legs before she begs him off and stands up. It’s the scene where the Von Trap children are making a puppet show for the tough, patriotic, brooding, taciturn widower father with perfect hair and impossible cheekbones and chin and his tough, ribald, buxom slightly scheming would-be second old lady and virginal, doe-eyed, rosy-cheeked sister Maria, and she (the lady across the aisle) is bouncing, literally side to side bouncing in the seat and the passengers continue to board, singing along (blessedly, silently…or maybe not, she may have a voice like Callas).
Jessica’s grandfather had moved her father, uncle and grandmother to California in 1957. Just up and packed the car and drove out. There may have been a dog as well, her father was five at the time and it is always sketchy about whether they had the dog beforehand, picked him up somewhere in the middle of the country or whether her grandfather just brought him home one day after work. He was working, her father’s father, in welding at the time and got a job in Long Beach repairing container ships in the port. They bought in Playa del Rey in 1958 for $63,500 (with just a grand put down), a three story home with detached garage a block from the beach, with a view of the ocean over the neighbors’ roofs. When Jessica started medical school in 2005, the house was worth $2.8 million.
She’s shaking her head slowly now, with great apparent consternation and disapproval as the scene plays out where the elder Von Trap girl’s teenage love interest, who we met and came to find quite charming in an early duet number in some ridiculously ornate Viennese garden in the first act, is revealed to be closeted member of the Hitler Youth. The scene when this young private, disarmed literally by the father with the great cheek bones played by a much younger but still somehow wise looking and angular Christopher Plummer, is disarmed also figuratively, the audience and the woman across from Jessica surmises, and in his shame alerts the more senior members of his party, the music hating Austrian Nazi collaborator does, to their, the Von Trap family’s, presence there in the dimly lit convent courtyard, blowing his literal and figurative whistle as they run away and she, the woman with the headphones and foam elevator shoes, shakes her head in knowing dismay and brings a slow pensive fist to rest on her chin. The Viennese garden scene Jessica remembers from her childhood as a first example to young women about the dangers of falling in love with a man just based on his olive oil voice and terrific dancing abilities. He might be a confused closeted member of the Hitler Youth that will try to kill your whole family. These are the sorts of things men do.
This was possible 50 years ago: uprooting your family to leave a stable blue-collar job, relocated across the country to a city where no one knew you, only to find a stable, blue-collar job waiting for you.
Jessica falls asleep for a few minutes during takeoff and when she wakes up, the woman across from her is now watching some sort of superhero movie of the kind that is released almost monthly, Jessica feels, with scenes of A-list actor dialogue and intense facial close ups, plus an endless stream of CGI shots of battle prep, battle, superpower brandishing, saving of normal non-super people, building and automobile destruction. She looks over her shoulder with the clairvoyance of the watched and Jessica narrowly avoids the faux pas watching someone else’s personal entertainment device. The inflight magazine promises UK Estates, Renee Zellweger, Shark Diving and 7 Perfect Days in Los Angeles. Jessica closes the magazine: the things they want you to do in LA would take 4 hours a day in traffic, hundreds of dollars in parking and offer a tour of the newest and most substantial urban homeless encampments that have in the past couple years moved out of Skid Row and the freeway on-ramps and closer to the firmament, physical and spiritual, of the city.
