One Story

Graduate School

In the year when Roberto Bolaño passed away, my lover, who studied in the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Iowa, read the Chilean writer aloud to me, in the original Spanish, right before bed as we lay on his twin mattress. There, he would be holding The Savage Detectives in one hand and me in the other. He had been translating it into Vietnamese for the master’s program. “How about English first?” I said, with a grin. “Someday,” he said, laughing. Most nights, then, he would read to me, in Spanish, or sometimes whatever Vietnamese he had come with, and I would be there with him, lying down with my hand on his chest, and simply listening to him speak. Just like that, we learned of Mexico City and its Visceral Realists, wishing to ourselves that we could be just like them, after which we fell asleep at some indeterminate time, well late in the night, and then, by a morning just as overdue, knew not of where we had left off on his tattered paperback before having entered into that solitary space where our dreams must have been. By the daytime, whenever we weren’t making love in his bedroom, or mine, we put ourselves to the Work. We thought about our dreams here. We sailed in the wake of where Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano had gone, were going, and would go. We were graduate students, trying to prove our parents wrong about what we had set ourselves out to do here. My lover thus worked on his translation in our mother tongue slowly, but surely, while I went to the Workshop every week to turn in chapters which no one liked, short stories which would end up having no future, at all, with any magazine in America that people knew. Still, however, my lover liked everything I was writing back in those days. He must have been the only one who did. On those rare days when I all of a sudden felt inspired to write, as if by some kind of miracle, I would find myself having gotten up early, hours before him, to pick my clothes up from his floor and then head down to Clinton Street, to the Reading Room, where I would try to write something and then later, as always, show it to him first before anyone else. “It sounds like Roberto Bolaño, if he were ever in English,” my lover would often say, with a laugh. “Maybe you should be translating him to English, then,” I would say back, grinning. Most evenings, after classes, he and I would take long, meandering walks down the lonesome, empty streets of Iowa City, discuss the movements or lack thereof to our lives before rows of empty German beer bottles piled up atop the bartops of those local dives lining Downtown, and then head back to his place, or mine, in those old dormitories meant for graduate students like us where we would oftentimes throw on a record of the Carpenters, make some kind of love, and then simply lay there afterward, naked and still ensnared with one another, to talk about how the Work was going, supposing that it had been for the either of us. We would then dream our dreams, out loud, and eventually come up with one, together, for when we would finally be done with graduate school. It was such a pathetic dream, the one we had, but it would have been enough, or so I still think. Some dreams end up being very simple ones. I loved him, and he loved me. Even when we weren’t making love, or falling asleep together, his door was only ever a floor away from mine in those two years we were in Iowa City. Whenever I needed him, I could always go up to him, and he would be there, and whenever he needed me, he could come down whenever he wanted, and I would do anything for him. Our years of graduate school thus went by in that mundane, oftentimes hapless, way—the translating, the writing, the loving and lovemaking. Barely, we graduated, and even barer, what we had to show for it. My lover never managed to sell his Vietnamese translation, and in the thick of those years when he had worked on it, everything belonging to Roberto Bolaño was slowly, but surely, finding its way into English already, without his help, and getting published everywhere, by New Directions Publishing, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, by The New Yorker, all the while my novel, the one about a Vietnamese family living in my hometown, in Orange County, was pitched for several years to dozens of publishing houses until my agent finally let me go, telling me over a phone call that it would never, ever be acquired by any publisher in America. My lover and I then separated, partly because of how the Work had gotten the better of us, partly because we didn’t really know, anymore, who we were, whether to ourselves and to each other, without it. Thus, we moved on, and took on jobs in the real world—him, at the Department of State, in Washington, and me, not too far away, at Random House, in Midtown Manhattan, both to Work on someone else’s dreams and never our own, nor the one we once had in common, the one I have never, ever told anyone about because it makes me feel pathetic. I wonder if you still remember it. It’s the one we were talking about, one of those nights, back in Iowa, where we are living in a Brooklyn apartment, with one bedroom so small that it drives us absolutely insane, even, but still, amid the gray, dreary mornings, when we can hear all of the cars racing underneath our window, we are leaning on the countertop where a phin is slowly brewing our coffee into a glass cup, and we are sitting on the couch as we try to Work on something worth selling to someone else, and we are listening to each other speak, like always, during those nights when we still have no idea who we are, or what we should be doing with our lives, or why we are burning so much of our advances to buy all of those books, Roberto Bolaño finally translated to English, just to pile them on a windowsill and never, ever crack them open to read from them even just once. O, why is it so, do you think? Is it because we are scared that we will never, ever be good enough at the Work, not even in our wildest dreams? I’m asking you a question now. You will then say something comforting to me—which I still can’t imagine the words of, whenever I try to imagine this particular dream—and then you will lie down here with me until tonight gives way to tomorrow, and then I will, like always, end up feeling better about everything, even if for just a moment: and, of course, it’s only because you are here with me, after all, or at least you would have been, in the end, supposing that everything in our lives could have just turned out a little differently.

∩

Binh Do is a writer of both Northern and Southern Vietnamese descent. They are currently based in New York City.