Page 28 of Bad Words

The Paris Review: Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

In response to your story, “Who Will Know Me When I’m Gone?” published yesterday in the Daily:

Thank you for an evening’s unexpected entertainment. Imagine my surprise to find Parker Navarro writing a story with a real purpose, the kind of intent I’ve wished he would bring to the page since his first novel. That purpose may be hopelessly juvenile, and the piece does suggest total creative bankruptcy, but I’m not one to spit in a baby’s face as he takes his first tottering steps.

Warmly,

Selina Chan

Chapter SevenParker

November cartwheeled into the city, a month of record wind speeds. I buttoned my coat higher and kept walking.

After my mental health had hit its nadir in college, this had been the deal I’d made with myself: that I would walk out into the world every single day for the rest of my life. Three weeks sequestered in my dorm room, surviving on spooned-out peanut butter, Cup Noodles, and delivered mozzarella sticks, pondering nonexistence, interacting with nobody except my increasingly disgusted roommates: If this experience had taught me nothing else, it was that crossing the threshold of my front door could always make me feel more human.

When I’d moved back in with my mother in Daly City for those first years after graduation, I spent my walks listening to indie rock playlists, until my jobs at H Mart and the neighborhood karaoke bar made the quiet feel so valuable that I began to walk in silence. I’d kept that routine to this day, and it felt especially helpful on mornings like this, when I imagined my brain like an animal in a too-small enclosure, hurling itself against the walls.

The Paris Review had published my story yesterday afternoon. Selina Chan’s response had been published this morning, and I’d read it over and over, working myself into a froth of indignation. I’d expected her to react with cold fury. Instead, I got this obnoxious equanimity, as though she had distance from even the most aggressive form of ridicule I could come up with. I’d wanted her to be devastated, not mildly amused.

And the kicker: Thank you, she’d said, for a story with a real purpose.

What interdimensional chess game was she trying to play? Why had she complimented a story I’d written to insult her?

I bypassed the park and the green bulbs of the subway entrance, the distant laughs of toddlers harmonizing with sirens. As I walked beneath the elevated train line, I saw the text stamped across my vision. The kind of intent I’ve wished he would bring to the page since his first novel. I imagined her crimson-nailed fingers striking the words into a laptop keyboard in a graceful blur, like a concert pianist knocking out a chromatic run, and here, on the other end, the phrase replayed over and over in my mind, like the strain of some unshakable melody.

I drained the last of my coffee, crumpled the cup in a fist, and threw it in the nearest recycling bin. What did I care what she wished for? Surely I hadn’t wanted her to like the story—to be, in any way, impressed? You didn’t throw a punch in a boxing ring hoping your opponent would admire your form.

Did you?

When I got home, Arthur had a sloppy, overfilled grilled cheese smoking on the skillet. “Hey,” he called over the thrum of the ventilation hood. “Good walk?”

I made myself smile. “Yeah. Solid.”

“You want a grilled cheese? Mine’s burned, but I can make you one that isn’t terrible.”

“Sure. Thanks, man.”

“I’m going to take cooking classes one of these days, and then you’ll never know what hit you.”

At the counter I sifted through Arthur’s stack of mailings. “Is this before or after the driving lessons?”

“After the driving lessons, but before the Chinese lessons.” He scraped the spatula over the skillet with a sound like a sled getting dragged over asphalt. “And the personal training will go … somewhere in there, I don’t know.”

I looked through the last of his mail. He’d circled three time slots on a brochure advertising bachata dance lessons—times that I knew he was not even a little bit free—and he’d scribbled a list of canvassing dates on some literature from Ziad Bishara for Congress. Arthur still hadn’t accepted that spending ten hours a week volunteering with a Chinatown youth arts organization meant that he had ten fewer hours a week to do things for himself. Math was a cruel and inflexible thing.

“How are the ChiArts kids?” I asked. “Still writing poems about death and knives?”

“Yep. And broken glass. I’m thinking about banning the word ‘cruel.’”

“That seems pointed.”

“Not as pointed as the knives. Anyway, I wish I worked on books they had literally any interest in reading. They’re always saying, can you get us free books? And I’m like, yeah, I can hook you up with a five-hundred-page biography on Schopenhauer.”

I knocked his mail against the counter to align the corners. “When you guys publish a Schopenhauer-inspired YA fantasy, you’ll finally be cool.”

“Please, Parker, you know I’ll never be cool.” He whirled to face me so suddenly that I startled. “By the way. I read it.”