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The soft blue sky and fluffy white clouds extend in every direction possible. And some directions that aren’t possible, too. I can’t see how the architecture is supposed to work past the little area I’m in, with marble columns and enormous benches in a pretentiously smooth postmodern shape just this side of Brutalist. There’s one other person standing in the open space, maybe floating.
Shit, I think, I’m lying down on this bench. I gotta get up or I’ll look like a homeless person. As I scramble, something even more damning dawns on me: my legs are splayed apart and dangling over the edge of whatever weird statue structure, all while I’m wearing a hospital gown. Everything starts flooding back. The fall, the exorcist steps. Where the hell am I, a Charmin commercial? The Lincoln Memorial? A stupid flyover American’s vision of Heaven, maybe.
There was a toilet paper brand relevant to this, I swear. Yes, now I remember getting handed it by the Doordash guy: Angel Soft. I did a double take when I saw they switched out their Gerber style “photo of a white baby” logo for an androgynous, ambiguously brown tot, 3D rendered in the style of Cocolemon.
The figure is wearing a black blouse with gold piping and a long tan skirt. I get the feeling she should be topping it all off with a big sunhat like at the beach, if she’s going to look away from me while the fabric flutters in a nonexistent breeze. This seems to be a woman, though I have no way to pull up a Twitter bio and check.
I get up and step slowly across the surprisingly unyielding clouds. No padding across the carpet here. Tonight. This morning? Whatever. I have to see her.
“Hi, Junie,” says the Asian woman.
My eyes water as I force them to stay open, unblinking, resisting the hard turn my life (death?) is taking into the magical realism genre. But she has the huge moon shaped face, the eyelashes, the light toned lipstick she barely needs. My brain refuses to believe that this is just Diana Chu in the street again. My brain could probably use a little less morphine and a lot more antipsychotics. Maybe mood stabilizers, those interfere less in your ability to write.
“Earth to Junie?” she says. She’s making a tiny little wave with her hand that lasts exactly three seconds and is somehow completely different from every photo on her weirdly resurrected Instagram.
Wait, which her? “You’re just Candice,” I force myself to say out loud. My throat hurts like a bitch from the intubation during surgery.
“You know I’m not,” she says, scolding me with a smile, full brown lips cooing in a condescending international, no, Cosmopolitan accent. And I do know.
“Athena,” I breathe, and my inner voice adds, Liu. Before I met her, I thought it was pronounced Lyoo. I’d look back and forth between her student email and Canvas account (that’s Yale for Blackboard), expecting the Lu that it sounded like to me. Ted Lieu or whatever. It’s almost like adieu, when you abbreviate the first initial. Foreshadowing.
I point at her in desperation, force of my finger directed more at the hideous red cravat on the front of her blouse, yes really, and shout, “Chinese people don’t go to heaven!”
Athena blinks, inhaling primly. “Alright. That’s certainly a new one.”
“You know I didn’t mean Chinese people should go to hell,” I insist. “Actually, there are a lot of Asian Christians. Just, inner spiritual belief wise, it doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore, Junie,” the inexplicable woman says, her long curls swaying as she looks into my eyes. “All I know is, I’ve been watching you for ages, and now I can finally talk to you.”
My eyes narrow, which serves mostly to make Athena’s face crowd out everything else in my vision even more. A familiar sensation. So many times I tried to squint and shake away a hallucination, like a wet dog.
“Might as well spit it out then,” I snap. “Whatever you crossed the veil of life and death after two years to say.”
“Okay.” Athena Liu presses her fingertips together, smooth nails just short enough to not get in the way, and looks into my eyes – she was waiting for me to stop gawking at her hands – as she says, “I love you.”
I roll my shoulder to the side. It’s sore, must be from when I was lying down on the bench. “Great. Now I know you’re just a hallucination.”
Athena gives the tiniest frown like she’s been kicked. Not enough to send a ripple through the Botox texture of her sun-brown skin. “I know it’s a bit simple, but—June, why would you even say that?”
She seems genuinely surprised, which is rich coming from a stupid apparition. More like surprised that I doubted her explicitly now. I think about beating her up for real. Not a new thought; there are parts that would feel good. But now? Here? I’m still half drunk on pain medicine. My fists might pass through her like an actual ghost. I did somehow lose to Candice anyway, though if my goal were to actually kill, not just go after her cameras, that little bitch would have been toast.
“I love you? That’s it?! The most generic platitude in the world? Some panel of the face of god, thingie, telling me what I want to hear, that’s all that you are. The stupid stuff I said a second ago when I first saw you, that’s enough. Any little accident or mistake is enough to write me off as a garbage friend when you have enough followers on Twitter to back you up. You don’t even need to know that I’ve been getting rich off your work for two years. Because I have, and I can’t say I regret it when I can live a better life, your life! None of the time we spent together could matter after that. You people are where nuance goes to die.”
Nuance came up a lot in reviews of The Last Front, like the one by Kirkus. Substack Asians rallied to call this a euphemism for “bothsidesism catering to the sensibilities of these predominantly white publications.”
The ghost is sulking for several seconds after my tirade. Then, controlling herself to not really show her teeth, she says, “I think what you want to hear is that it isn’t possible. That I never could have cared for you no matter what you did, so you might as well not even try. Perhaps that no one from any background would care for the real you at all. I might go so far as to say, you keep telling yourself how your father was the last one who understood you. Isn’t that sad?”
Sad! To her? In her perfect eyes? Like the punchline of a joke, maybe. “You couldn’t even convincingly pull off caring about me back when you were alive and my only crime was being annoying,” I scoff.
“I was preoccupied,” Athena admits, her arms afloat gracefully. “I had other priorities, other circles to be in. I’ve no shame about that.”
“I was just some pet you took for pity walks every so often,” I spit with the p sounds catching between my pouting lips. Like a dog. I could go places with that, though I’m above it.
“And I wish I had done it more,” Athena professes in her airy voice with all sincerity, not pausing to deny she’s condescending. Maybe this bitch really is her. “When you’re dead, as I am, time becomes a priority. Spent with the people you love.”
“Who include me,” I say in a dry, level voice. “An appropriative white woman who you are now eulogized as nothing more than the best friend of.”
Athena tilts her head ever so slightly, her curls not falling out of place. “Sweetheart. There isn’t any need to flatter yourself.”
I sigh. The reckoning with Candice and her recording is coming when I wake up, if nothing else. “You’re dead. I thought taking from you couldn’t count.”
“You took from me… but you could say my mother did also. Jeff and Candice thought they could only possibly be adding, for that matter.” There was a distant bearing in Athena’s face, the angle of her nose, that made it clear she wasn’t simply equating my wrongdoings with the others and writing them off. Still, I had been so overwhelmed with my – grief, guilt, whatever you want to call it – and backpedaled so hard after that mortifying tussle with Diana Chu, that it never really occurred to me how Candice had been dressing up as Athena this whole time, in her dark and intimate moments.
“I’m not doing the steps.” I give it to her straight. “The twelve steps for reparations to the AAPI community, or… AANHPI community, whatever. Not gonna happen. That’s basically the same as not writing anymore. You never could have done that, could you? Stop stealing pain and showing it off as part of your self-harm burlesque show?”
“I can’t write anything,” Athena Liu reminds me. “I’m dead.”
She’s said it coldly, and I wonder if her skin is cold. We stand there in the stupid clouds for a minute after that. The temperature is way too perfect, too fake. Then the other woman resumes:
“I don’t love a lot of things you did. But I do love you. Coffee order copying, can’t ice skate, never gives up you. And if I can’t experience real happiness anymore, then the least I can do is sincerely wish it for you.”
I look back at her. “No, you do want me to give up,” I say, practically only realizing as I say it. “You want me to quit. No more grifting or whatever, come clean. That’s what this is all about.”
Athena holds herself back from reaching for me. She doesn’t think that’s all that this is about, but she can’t deny it’s a big part of it. “Doing something besides grifting is the opposite of giving up,” she says at last. “I know you can do it.”
“You don’t believe in me like that,” I say, and I hear my voice crack – my throat hurts so much with everything catching as I finally start to cry. White woman tears, I know. “I’m just some racist who should be grateful that it’s a strawman for canceled white people to literally die. Some of you do want it for real, you know. They would cheer if Candice really did kill me and think you wish you could have done it with your own two hands yourself.”
“At the rate you’re going,” Athena says, with her tense hands that very much do not move to wipe my face, “my advice might end up saving you from that.”
I look away and cross my arms. After a minute, I start to realize it’s more like I’m hugging myself. “I’m not saying it back,” I bluntly declare. “What you obviously want to hear, you’ve heard it enough. I’m not going to even say it.”
Athena stares at me, eyes sad and big. Her impossibly smooth shoulders are starting to sag. Like she’s given up on lifting me up with her arms, so the kicked puppy look is her only tool left.
“If you feel—that,” I add in an outburst to counter the sheer awkwardness, “wouldn’t it make me the person you miss the most? That you wanted to see again? That you saw the most when you were, I don’t know, still alive? Thought about the most? Obviously not. You’re just taking advantage of it. My near death experience. Claiming my experience all over again.”
My voice cracks, making the intubation area sore again. Athena is wistful, her subtly-colored lips in a thin line. She’s never apologized. She never will. She’s dead. She's not real. “You don’t have to be the most to matter, June Hayward. It is enough to just be you.”
Just be you… Just be you…
I wish her voice echoed in my ears as I wake up, but instead blackness gives way to reality almost as unceremoniously as after the aneaesthesia. That’s right, the hospital room is a medley of offputting whites. For easily five minutes, I want to do nothing, literally nothing, “not even reach for my water” nothing. But as is the way of hospitals, I have a little nest in my bed of necessary items, including my ice-cold phone.
The last open app is my email, and there’s that promised message from my old therapist, listing five recommended shrinks in my state. I manage to highlight the text, use default web search, and tap the top result on Psychology Today. #2 and #3 are a white woman and black woman who don’t use the term “BIPOC” in their profiles. My phone can autocomplete almost all of the intake forms with my identification info, which was never outright changed to Juniper Song. The only step left is a “Reason for seeking therapy” dropdown resolutely answered with “Prefer not to say.” This website doesn’t have dark mode. A little white screen light has already made me want to close my eyes and lay my head down on the pillow. That will have to be enough.