Page 4

From the diary of Monica Tsai, backed up on five servers spanning three continents

August 18, 2018 (2018-08-18T16:34:08.

192273)

loc: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

United States of America (42.

3721865,71.

1117091)

It’s been a difficult day.

When I got off the bus, they were waiting for me.

Two slight, hunched-over people, sitting at the food court, sharing a small

order of french fries.

He was squeezing a packet of ketchup while she wiped her mouth with a napkin.

Grandmother was in a

neat, collared shirt and long tan pants.

Grandfather, despite the heat, wore a formal shirt and vest with a tie, like always.

When grandmother saw me, her eyes crinkled and she smiled widely, perfect denture-teeth flashing.

I hugged her first.

She barely came to my shoulder and felt so frail in my arms.

I told them they didn’t have to pick me up,

even though I was pleased that they did.

“Grandfather was upset we hadn’t used our senior transit passes this month,” she explained.

While I hugged grandfather, she

pushed the fries over to the third empty seat.

I sat down in front of a freshly squeezed mound of ketchup.

The familiar sight triggered something in me.

“Oh, 寶貝 , why are you crying?” grandmother asked, stroking the hair out of my eyes.

I blinked hard.

“Was the bus ride okay?” grandfather asked.

“It’s been a long day for you,” grandmother said.

“We made Russian soup. We’ll have some when we get home.” Though they called it Russian soup, really it was a Shanghainese

adaptation of borscht.

It was the only way they could get me to eat my vegetables when I was a kid.

I managed to say I was fine and obediently brought a fry to my mouth.

“Let’s go home,” grandmother said lightly.

She poured the rest of the fries back into the bag they had come in.

Grandfather

threw the extra ketchup packets in too.

We took the train out of Boston and into Cambridge.

The sight of the sailboats on the river nearly wrecked me, such a perfect

summer sight, a reminder that I wasn’t there to take them kayaking for grandfather’s birthday or even to upgrade their computer’s

antivirus.

Grandfather noticed my mood.

He has this philosophy: the best thing to do when you’re sad is to learn something.

Or better yet, to teach something.

So he asked me to tell him about my favorite coding pattern that I had used over the summer.

I told him about the abstract

base class I implemented to work with all the different social media site integrations.

He practically purred, and I really

did feel better after that.

When we got home, grandfather heated up the soup.

Grandmother came with me to my room, insisted on helping me unpack.

I threw my bag onto my bed.

The smell of the sheets, that familiar wildflower detergent, the thought of grandmother hauling

laundry up and down the stairs just so I would have a freshly made bed to come home to—no, even thinking about it now is going

to make me tear up again.

I brought out my carefully bundled hoodie and unwrapped it, handing her the pencil that had traveled so far.

“I guess it’s just a pencil,” I said, hoping she would not be too disappointed.

To my surprise, she barely reacted.

She set it aside, then sat down on my bed.

She pulled a shirt out of my bag and began

refolding it from its crumpled mess.

“What do you think the pencil means?” I attempted.

She glanced briefly at it.

“I’m not sure yet.”

“I’m sorry it isn’t anything more.”

Then she gave me this surprised look.

It took her a moment to reply.

“Oh, no. It means the world to me.” She squeezed my hand but would not look me in the eyes.

“Really, it does. Thank you.”

And so that was the anticlimactic end to my search.

It was hard to be totally unsatisfied, since she later did take the pencil,

look it over, and bring it to her room.

Maybe it means something to her that I don’t need to know, and that’s okay, I can

live with that.

It was good to be home, to enjoy a meal with them.

The Russian soup had stewed long enough for the tomato

flavor to meld with the oxtail, and grandfather had splurged on hand-pulled noodles.

It was a perfect dinner.

“Arby’s this week, right?” I asked.

I started looking through grandmother’s coupon pile to find her favorite.

They exchanged a glance, and that’s when I should have known something was wrong.

But grandmother was so smooth in her response

that I totally bought it.

“I think ninety-one might be too old for Arby’s,” she said.

“Too much sodium, and I already had those fries today.”

I found the coupon and tacked it onto the refrigerator, right next to the picture of me from second grade Halloween.

“We’ll

have to do something else, then.”

“Another dinner of noodles. For longevity,” grandfather said, and I could not complain.

That night, full of warm soup, I lay on my childhood bed, staring at my phone.

My mind drifted to Louise again, replaying our conversation, wondering what she would think of grandmother’s reaction to Meng’s pencil.

Was there anything I could tell her now?

I suddenly remembered to check my voter registration status.

I took a breath and texted her.

confirmed voter registration!

?

Her reply came immediately.

excellent!

!

how was the trip back to boston?

I smiled.

A part of me had worried she’d brush me off, that our lives were done intersecting.

Instead she opened the conversation

up to talk about not pencils or Shanghai or grandmother or Meng, but me.

not bad!

grandparents came to the station to meet me.

felt a bit like I was back in elementary school getting picked up from

the bus stop.

but it was v cute

Again, another quick reply.

ahhh too cute!

bet they made you food too

I grinned.

and there were fresh sheets!

how’s princeton?

so you do know where i go to school!

My cheeks burned.

I almost tossed the phone away.

I forgot I had feigned not knowing.

I tried to salvage my dignity.

I noticed it in your profile today

only today?

you didnt research everything about me before we met?

I could easily lie.

Was she upset?

Had she somehow figured out I had thoroughly searched her name before meeting her?

It shouldn’t

have been possible—I knew that much about internet privacy.

Still, I panicked.

id expect more from a cs major at swat

I managed to relax, even smile.

She was teasing.

I could not avoid having my name listed on the department website, though

I like to think the rest of my internet presence is low.

As I tried to think of a reply, a light knock came from my bedroom door.

I stuffed the phone under my pillow.

I expected it

to be grandmother, the lighter sleeper.

I thought maybe I lucked out, that she wanted to talk about Meng and the pencil.

Instead, it was grandfather in his pale cotton pajamas, his hands behind his back.

His pure white hair stuck up at the end.

He had at least made a show of sleeping.

“I need to tell you something,” he said.

I sat up on my bed.

He came to sit next to me, just as grandmother had earlier in

the day.

I did not say anything.

A fear had crept into me, one I did not know he could cause.

I had heard him roar at my father and be stern with grandmother, but never had his voice reached any level of severity with me.

Grandmother scolded me more than he ever did.

His grim tone brought back the memory of that time he told me my father was leaving and from then on it would only be me, him, and grandmother.

For a moment we both stared at the opposite wall, the window with its pink shades drawn.

The bookshelf’s bottom row full of

thin Chinese books, the ones grandmother used to read to help me fall asleep.

When I was young, she would lie on a cot in

my room, holding the book above her, while I curled on my side watching her.

Back then I had a small, netted barrier that

ran along the side of my bed to prevent me from falling off in the middle of the night.

I would watch her through the mesh

netting, holding the book close to her face, her glasses lying beside her, telling me stories in the language of her home.

I already knew whatever grandfather would say was about her.

“Grandmother is sick,” he said.

He cleared his throat.

His hands were clasped together over his lap, his back hunched.

“With what?” I asked before even processing the news.

He said something, but I did not understand the phrase.

Diseases and illnesses were fortunately not part of the Chinese I

had learned while living with them.

“She is losing her memory,” he clarified.

“It will get worse.”

“Since when?”

“We first suspected in the spring. The doctor didn’t confirm until the summer, when you were gone. They can’t diagnose this

kind of thing. They can only tell you what it is not.”

“So it’s not really a confirmation, then.”

He glanced at me with sad eyes.

“Today was a good day for her. Many days are good. Some days are bad. The doctor says the progression varies. I think it was

a good day for her today because you were here.”

“You could have told me. I would have come home.”

“That’s why we didn’t tell you. Grandmother insisted. We both knew you would drop your studies to be here. 寶貝 , your life will always be more important than ours.”

“No it won’t.” I brought my knees to my chest, hugged them close.

“You should be glad you stayed at school. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have found Meng.”

My eyes blurred.

“But...” I did not have the words.

They had been so careful about maintaining their physical health.

How unfair that her

mind would betray her when it was so quick, so good at learning and adapting.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

The question surprised him.

I was grateful he didn’t brush it off and insist he was fine, grateful he seriously considered

his own well-being.

“Well. I feel a bit like how you might feel coding. You’ve felt it, haven’t you?” He was hovering somewhere between his grandfather

voice and his professor voice.

“How desperate you get when you’re refactoring and breaking the problem down into smaller pieces

and the computer still refuses to understand. How very human and small you feel then.”

I knew the feeling well.

I grabbed hold of his hand.

If I said anything, I knew I’d cry, so I held it together, for both of

us.

“Is that why no Arby’s?” I asked eventually.

He nodded.

“She says it’s too far. She’s been getting nervous whenever she is far from home.”

“But you went to the train station to get me today.”

“She insisted.”

And I felt horrible all over again.

The things she would do for me, if not for herself.

“You will see her writing,” he said.

“She is trying to write something for Meng, before she forgets. You’ve given her something

to hold on to.”

“But even if we can get her and Meng to meet, she might not remember.”

“Her family has always relied more on written words than talk.”

I could not think of anything else to say.

“Sleep for now,” he said gently.

“We can speak more tomorrow. You must be tired.”

When I was alone, I turned off the lights and fell back onto my bed, staring up at the ceiling where the glow-in-the-dark

stars grandfather had helped me arrange years ago no longer glowed.

They were just pale bumps against white paint.

I felt

like a lost network packet.

I’m on my way from one server to another carrying my little bit of precious information, then

suddenly the path is severed, perhaps by a bad internet connection, and I’m left floating, my destination once so well defined,

gone.

No one thinks about these lost network packets because it’s easy to replace them, to send another identical packet out

until the server on the other end replies, yes, Monica packet received, we’ve got her information.

I never thought about them

before either.

But that’s what I felt like now with the world continuing on as I drifted through cyberspace.

I thought about how difficult their summer must have been.

How grandfather had gone through it alone, one small human, and

how grandmother—

But I could not let myself think about what grandmother might be thinking, what she must be going through, how her world had

become suddenly, irrevocably, disoriented.

The ceiling unblurred as I finally let the tears roll away.

I was filled with a sudden aversion for myself, the kid who had

spent the past few months blissfully unaware while the most important people in her life suffered.

I pulled out my phone, more out of habit than anything else.

I blinked at the messages.

I had forgotten I had been midconversation

with Louise.

swat isnt far, maybe we can hang out again

And after a break:

hey i didnt mean to be creepy earlier!

sorry if i came off that way

I tried to recall my earlier giddiness and came up empty.

In the end, I went with the only thing on my mind.

sorry for the delay.

my grandfather just told me my grandmother has alzheimer’s

Three small circles bubbled—her typing.

I imagined the tapping of her fingers on her phone syncing with the beating of my

heart.

oh fuck

I could not think of more appropriate words.