1.
My brother releases the ant and it makes a quick descent into a plastic bottle cap topped off with Elmer’s Glue. The ant struggles in the viscosity of it. It’s a test he’s designed, in the name of science, maybe, or justice. Don’t overstep your bounds and you may live. The glue’s sweet perfume coats my nose and I believe in the possibility of the ant. It might kick to the surface, crawl out of the cap, nothing but exoskeleton and willpower, and shake itself off before returning to its comrades, the single black beady file that marches on outside. My imagination is dispelled when nothing happens, the last limb submerged. Yet I continue to peer into the bottle cap. As if an image from the future might ripple onto the surface and reveal itself to me. I imagine I can rewrite this story. I’m eight or nine and I still worship narratives about resilience like the ones I see on tv; bruises on my knees from a summer of rowdy play still fade easily. The ants outside labor on as they’re programmed to, unaware they’ve lost one of their own.
I call him Dai Dai, younger brother in Toisanese, but he is two years older than me. He was born after our older brother and before me, but the nickname endured as nicknames do, resisting age and reason. Dai Dai sounds like die in English repeated twice quickly, and so, when I speak of my brother, I’m reminded how it sounds like I am calling forth death. I’m normally locked out of my brother’s room. Little sisters often are, exterminated from their brothers’ ecosystems like an invasive species. But it’s summer, the season of public laundry. His room opens through a metal storm door to the yard, a square of concrete whose only utility is the space it provides to hang wet clothes when my mother stops running the dryer in the summer to save on our electric bill. Laundry requires tending all hours of the day. Washing in the morning, hanging in the afternoon, retrieving in the evening or sometimes the next morning if my mother passes out on the sofa. Then the folding, which never ends. The pile, which she deposits on one side of the sofa, grows and shrinks but never evaporates completely, like waves of a plague. This cycle requires unfettered access to the yard and thus, my brother’s bedroom door is unlocked all season. I can walk in as I please under the virtuous guise of helping with the laundry. But today, I’m invited, sort of.
I stroll in with my hands folded behind my back like the Chinese grandpas in the park, all nonchalant, my cover ready. Here to bring in the laundry, yes. My brother’s room is a tourist destination. So many hidden gems begging for my discovery. I find him on his stomach by the crack underneath the storm door. Our clothes are clipped to the line outside, swaying with the breeze and casting intermittent shade. He’s in the middle of an important project and waves me over to join him. He pats the space on the floor next to him, and I get down on my stomach too.
Look, he says, pointing with his chin, fascination like a light cast underneath his face. Through the crack, I can see a trail of ants busy at work on the other side of the door. Ambiguous crumbs float in their pincers as they amble to some secret underground base. Wait, my brother instructs. This is the game—we are guards tasked with protecting the fortress that is our home.
When our first intruder appears, my brother glances at me and smiles. I’m quick to smile back. He pinches the ant between his thumb and index finger and brings it so close to my face I think I might inhale it. His grip looks just short of fatal. Any more pressure and the ant would surely burst and splatter unspeakable ant juices everywhere. He’s teaching me something about observation, though I’m not sure what. I count six legs drumming against his fingerprints and two antennas twirling madly as if broadcasting a distress signal. The bottle cap, salvaged from a two-liter soda, gleams with glue, a cool, milky pool. I don’t remember if my brother tells me the next step, but no matter. I’ve already put the context clues together.
A pattern: when an ant breaks from the formation and crosses over into our home, it’s usually one that’s empty-handed, with nothing to bring home to the queen anyway. This makes the job easier, not that success of the colony was criteria for preservation. My brother pardoned no ants.
There’s no saying how many ants we mummified in glue that summer. Perhaps that was the point. The glue obscured what we feared most, the sight of death and our complicity in it. Though it’s unlikely that occurred to me at the time. If it did, it was a mere suggestion, a drop of water in the shadow of a clothesline, evaporating as soon as it touched noon-warmed concrete. We went about our day as usual, the trajectory of our lives unchanged. My brother kept a collection of those bottle cap graves on his windowsill in a neat row, where they stiffened into solid pucks, the evidence of our crimes concealed forever.
In the summers, my brothers spend hours outside glistening underneath a basketball hoop, their shirts pickled with sweat. From the outside looking in, basketball seems like a pillar in their lives, their lurching bodies a language, the court a page onto which they compose destinies. Sometimes I tag along. My brothers don’t mind their little sister when she stays out of the way, so I linger on the sidelines, disappearing myself as much as possible. I like to watch. Witnessing the other boys saunter around playing streetball is a marvel. It’s easy to get swept up in the complex dance of crossovers, pump fakes, alley-oops, rebounds. Bodies twist and tauten with splendid precision. One need only look to know the heroism of a body in complete control on a basketball court.
Off the court, he was merely Dai Dai. A smaller replica of our older brother, who was effortlessly likable, who knew the right things to say and when, could make someone the butt end of a joke while also making them feel loved and part of the group. That was our older brother’s gift. People congregated around him and sought his approval. He was everyone’s older brother. Dai Dai, instead, could be brash. He vied for attention like a hungry fledgling. His way of joking was calling you a fuck face. He sought his place in the world. We all did, but he was squarely in the middle—not the eldest, the natural leader, and not the youngest, who was doted on for simply existing. On the court, he transformed, became intensely focused and sure of himself as a comet careening through the atmosphere. The minutes of a game were a world he claimed, his teammates and opponents his citizens. A sneaky layup, a savage charge, an effortless flourish from behind the three-point line, the satisfying shush of a swish after his shoulder collided into his opponent’s torso, knocking them back and sometimes onto the concrete. This didn’t count as a foul in the version of streetball they played. After he scored, opponents rested their hands on their hips, chests heaving, their faces wiped with a mix of defeat and respect. Players on the other courts, older kids in the neighborhood, would pause their games to watch. He had a role to play and he killed it.
At home, the brine of teenage athleticism gives way to the botanical aroma of Tide Original, that magic sapphire liquid my mother pours into the washer’s secret drawer and that purges the dirt from our lives. One day, passing through my brother’s room to help bring in the laundry, or otherwise casually snooping, I notice the bottle cap graveyard has vanished. If I once knew what happened to my brother’s labors, I don’t remember now, the memory dissolved like a tissue in a washing machine. Maybe he grew bored and tossed them, or maybe my mother discovered them during one of her routine cleanings and she tossed them, confused at the sight of the strange artifacts and briefly guessing at their imperceptible utility before the certainty of their valuelessness clicked. She must have viewed them the way she viewed the neon gummy worms we begged for at the pharmacy, or the plastic toys we worshiped that liquified developing minds. She scoffed at our juvenile desires, told us it was a waste, lhai tein. This was not what she had come to America for. A common refrain of hers in Toisanese: waste money, no house. This was always the lesson—how flimsy the boundary was between surviving and perishing. The pronunciation for the words waste and wash are the same in Toisanese. For years, I misunderstood her. I thought she meant we’d be washing money, cleansing it of its impurities.
Over a decade later, at the height of my brother’s addiction, he would lock himself in his room for hours, sometimes days. Through the walls, I might hear the mutterings of a long rant, one of many soliloquies that became so frequent they began to fade into background noise. Or, from the other side of the house, the vibration of him crashing into a wall, sparring with something only he could see. This too I grew accustomed to. He still played basketball with anyone who was down at the courts, the scheduling never quite working out with old teammates from childhood. His arms and neck were perpetually stained from the sun like an expensive wood. He was stronger and bigger than anyone I knew, and when he was high, I was terrified about where he might direct his power. He disappeared in the evenings and returned before sunrise, sometimes ninjalike, sometimes belligerent, reeking of stale cologne, sweat, and liquor. My mother, anguished, inspected his laundry for clues, sniffing for the answers until she found them. When she confronted him, in blistering Toisanese, a language he shed in pieces like clothes he outgrew from childhood, he’d say, speak English, this is America, and would pummel the house instead of her, installing craters in the drywall. I absorbed it quietly from the sidelines, a basketball pounding into the concrete of me, hardening into my role as baby sister, not yet capable of separating the addict from the person. Resentment was an easy mode to slip into, a cold, impenetrable armor I never took off. At my lowest, I hoped his death would come as mercilessly as it did for the ants we drowned in glue.
2.
Like a good Chinese family, an ant colony is a strong unit. Individual ants are born into roles, or castes. Attendants live inside the colony their entire lives, their chief purpose being to keep the nest and queen clean and care for the brood. Foragers are tasked with venturing outside and bringing back food for the colony. Soldiers, with their outsized bodies and mandibles, protect the nest from predators. Each caste serves a vital function for the greater good of the colony.
In a good Chinese family, the eldest son wins the filial honor of taking care of the parents and rising to head the family; the youngest daughter is adored, but no one expects anything from her—after all, daughters were not long ago unwelcome additions to a good Chinese family; the second son apprentices under the first, and no one expects anything from him, either. If all goes according to plan, everyone contributes as if they are the first son anyway, and wealth and prosperity grace the family.
Ant colonies, unlike families and unlike countries, have evolved to manage contagion. In a 2012 study published by The Public Library of Science, researchers exposed an ant to deadly fungal spores and observed as it ambled into its colony. Healthy individuals began licking the spores off the infected’s body right away. The ants regurgitated most of the spores but ingested some in the process. The infection spread thinly, effectively vaccinating the colony. Left untreated, the parasitic spores would have sprouted into the infected ant’s exoskeleton, killed it from the inside out, then devastated the colony.
Humans don’t have the evolutionary hardwiring needed to enable us to jump to protect those around us. We have to choose to do it. Sacrifice was the word my mother used, one of a handful of English words she knew, her careful enunciation lending it an extra syllable. It’s what she did to come here. A kind of extermination of an old life so a new one could take root.
I thought about death the way most people my age did, which is to say, usually never. I was twenty-two, a new graduate devoted to my first job writing ad copy for clients. After a successful internship, the agency offered me a full-time position. I was enchanted by the prospect of millions reading my words. It was promotional material for discounts on jeans and cruise adventures, but still. I was good at it, plus it bought my independence. It was the most money I’d ever seen, and I shortly discovered a new superpower. For the first time, I could buy whatever I wanted. I filled my closet with a new wardrobe for my bright future as an office employee. I bought a five-pound bag of Smarties that I consumed until I was sick, citric acid searing the insides of my cheeks. I decided I had succeeded in the project of the American Dream. Once a month, I thickened an envelope with cash for my mother, not unconventional for a good Chinese kid, but I treated it as a kind of severance.
I found a mover online and paid them a flat fee in cash after the job was done. My mother toured the apartment with her arms crossed and judged the paint job before saying how much better it’d be for me to come back home. I could save money on rent, indulge in her superior cooking, use the laundry machine at home instead of schlepping it to the laundromat down the street.
Impossible, I said, imagining my brother deteriorating there. At that point, he no longer tried hiding it and used in the house.
Family together, better, my mother said. We would have the same conversation for years. I handed her an envelope fattened with bills and said good night.
My mother called me once a week and we’d trade updates if I remembered to pick up my phone. Sometimes she’d tell me about my brother. In a hushed tone, she’d ask me to help him. I refused to believe I could do anything. While it’s true I did not know how to begin, here is another truth: I was afraid to try, to consume some of the poison in the process.
3.
My wisdom tooth was not unlike the outsized mandible of a soldier ant, though it was useless. It was emerging from the damp corner of my mouth. A bright crag spearing toward my reflection in the mirror. A panoramic x-ray of my jaw was projected onto the wall in the oral surgeon’s office. My wisdom tooth was impacted, I’d learn. The x-ray revealed what my gums concealed, that it was erupting at a forty-five-degree angle, not unlike a readied cannon, threatening the neighboring molar. If I did not have it extracted, the surgeon said, the tooth would continue to invade its neighbor, eroding it and creating a breeding ground for gum disease. In fact, this was already happening. It was the cause behind the shooting pain in my head.
Due to the angle of the impacted tooth, the surgeon explained, it would have to be shattered and the individual pieces extracted from my gums. To make room to do this, he’d first have to make an incision in the gum tissue to remove some bone. He must have seen the look on my face, because he reassured me this was not an uncommon practice. The extraction would be my first major procedure on my own insurance, and for the first time, I felt the weight of taking care of myself.
Take one if you feel any pain is what I remember hearing through half-consciousness. When I came to, my tongue felt like a heavy slug in the shell of my head. I raised my hand to my face to discover it stuffed with gauze. Drool slithered out one corner of my mouth. The attending dental hygienist looked at me with pity, like I was some forgotten mold-crested thing in the back of a fridge. The evidence that what I came for had actually happened was laid on a silver tray in a nest of bloodied gauze. I wondered how they would discard those shards of me, if it would be as simple as chucking them into a bin to be dumped with the regular garbage or as effortless as scribbling me a prescription for Percocet before sending me on my hazy way.
At home, I stood in front of the mirror and opened my mouth, dislodging the smell of rot. I changed the gauze every hour or so, each time inspecting the stitched crater where my tooth used to be. I was desperate to tongue it. The discomfort I felt was at best an inconvenience and at worst intolerable. The swelling made it difficult to sleep. My head throbbed like an egg in a boiling pot. I believed I would surely split open. The pain was a black hole I caved into.
The first pill was transcendent. I’d done as instructed and the relief was immediate. I transformed into a happy cloud floating in a crystal sky, my edges soft and feathery, and like a cloud, I dissipated into the hemisphere above my body. When I woke up, hours later and sobered, I felt grief for something I could not name. I wiped the drool from my chin and changed the gauze. The second pill was as stunning as the first. I found myself anticipating the pain so I could treat it.
Worried about missing more days at work, I threw on a new blazer and took the train to the office. The swelling from the surgery had reduced significantly, but the purple bruising on the side of my jaw was still visible. I sipped on soup for lunch and swallowed a pill after to cull the dull ache inside my head. At a meeting later in the afternoon, I sat at the end of a conference table, which began to expand before me into a blurry stretch of white, an ascent up a ski hill.
What are we talking about again? I heard myself say.
My coworkers’ gazes bulldozed through me. I heard laughter, which sounded like distant echoes in a cave. My manager mercifully suggested I go home and sleep it off.
I said I was fine. I took a Percocet. My coworkers laughed again.
The following day, one confided in me. He still craved Percocet, he said. He’d once been prescribed it after a surgery, and he sometimes bought loose pills from a friend who sold them. At first, it seemed like a warning. Stern advice from an older, wiser professional to a younger one. Then, he sighed, said, I wish I could have some right now, and glanced at me like he expected me to offer him something. I could feel his words sloshing inside my ear, waterlogged with saliva, a spin cycle I could not escape. I wish I could have some right now.
Yes, it’s great, I agreed, forcing a laugh before returning to my emails.
I researched the drug when I got home. The generic name for Percocet is oxycodone, a powerful opioid intended to treat moderate to severe short-term pain. A quick Google search reveals its legal classification as a Schedule II narcotic, which the United States Drug Enforcement Administration defines as “drugs with a high potential for abuse, with use potentially leading to severe psychological or physical dependence.” Its neighbors in this category include cocaine, meth, and fentanyl, among others. The majority of those who abuse opioids were first introduced to them as prescription drugs, I learn. As I read more about opioid dependence, I grew wary of the pills, wary of the version of me that could succumb to their call. I tossed the rest of them. Regret shadowed me for a few days, a little creature in my mind with long nails clawing into my daydreams.
By the time the craving receded, the pain in my head did, too. The stitches dissolved. I tongued the crater in the back of my mouth, sampling the metallic taste of a closing wound.
4.
Of all my research into treatment for my brother’s addiction, I keep returning to online recovery forums. I lurk in threads where the anonymous detail their experiences with ketamine. Typically used in veterinary medicine to subdue animals, recent studies suggest ketamine, in low doses, to be a promising treatment for depression and anxiety in humans. A k-hole is the apex of a ketamine trip, a hallucinatory state where the user dissociates from their body. In one post, a user who injected ketamine regularly lists their “bizarre and extreme” experiences with it: the feeling of communing with aliens, becoming a wave of energy, arriving in a new spacetime. Another user describes melting into their surroundings, entering an abyss, then becoming the abyss. An extermination of the self. Another equates the sensation to godliness. Another, a near-death experience.
It’s the latest thing my brother is on. It’s been two days since he locked himself inside his room. He didn’t come out to eat or shower and he didn’t answer our calls. It wasn’t clear whether he refused to do so or if he was so far gone that he really couldn’t hear us. My mother and I took turns standing outside his door, quietly testing the knob, listening for the sound of his breathing.
When we least expect it, he erupts from his room, dispersing the fetor of Modelo and dirty laundry, his face hollow from whatever is eating him from the inside. When his gaze catches mine, I can’t tell if he knows I am really there.
Free yourself, he says, tossing a dime bag at me. It’s full of shimmering white granules. A shadow consumes his face as if he’s just remembered something important he’s been meaning to address. He charges out of the house barefoot.
My mother swipes the dime bag and tosses it into the wet choke of a toilet. When I check on her, she waves me away. Go find your brother.
I find him right outside, gesturing to the neighbor’s children across the street, his arms above his head, pants sagging off his waist. I take my brother by the arm and gently lead him back inside before coming back out to apologize to the neighbor family. I don’t know what he said, but he clearly upset everyone. I say to find me if this happens again next time and am told the next time would be the last time. I say I understand, even though I don’t understand at all.
When he comes down later that evening, he searches his room for the dime bag he forgot he threw at me. Am I out, I’m out, I’m out, am I out, he mutters as he tosses up piles of dirty laundry and flips the mattress over. I have to leave, I have to leave now, he says as he pops open a new can of Modelo.
Okay, I say, practiced in my restraint. Where are you going?
I have to leave. When he isn’t looking, I take the can from him, hoping he forgets about it, and he does. In a few months, I will finally move into my own apartment. I think to myself, I’ll leave first.
After my brother died of an overdose, I found myself lurking on recovery forums again. If caught, I might have said I was on a scientific quest to understand how drugs altered the mind and body. That would’ve been a partial truth. I felt a closeness to these strangers, like I’d grown up with them. They wrote sophisticated sentences about their pain, passions, and dreams. They organized their thoughts into narrative. They were disappointed. They were angry. They were funny. Some said they were determined to quit. They wrote about all the things they’d do when they got clean. They hoped someone would read them.
5.
The sound of a drawer ripping open. Inside, a pile of unsheathed knives, cooking utensils, and miscellaneous objects that don’t have a home elsewhere, the system clear to its creator, my mother, only. Separated from their context, the items possess an ambiguous, ghostly quality, more reminders of what they were rather than what they could be. A vegetable cleaver she uses to prepare every meal I can remember after her long days working at a garment factory. Long cooking chopsticks, the ends dulled from stirring ingredients in hot oil. Shears, not the kitchen kind, but the sewing kind my mother uses to snip loose threads off our clean shirts after doing laundry. Loose thick purple rubber bands that once bound bunches of produce together, saved for some later, just-in-case purpose. A lead pencil without its eraser.
A knife in my mother’s hands. It’s a western-style chef’s knife, the blade an eight-inch silver sliver.
My mother wraps her fist around his wrist. Or maybe it’s the other way around—he grips her, holding her in place.
A moment ago, my brother’s eyes were fogged over. Somehow, they are clear now.
I’ll do it, my mother warns. I can’t live like this.
At least that’s what I think she says. I can’t conjure the equivalent in Toisanese. I’ve shed the language, too.
This is the part where I try to remember what role I played in the whole thing. I only know that it felt like sinking in a pool of glue, that no one looked to me for answers, and that no one expected me to have them. It’s my nature to idle into the background, to exterminate myself from the scene.
I don’t know how the knife ended up in my hands, only that I have been successful in retrieving it somehow.
My mother sits at the dining table, a short distance from where she was earlier, sparring with her son in the kitchen. She doesn’t seem shaken, only smaller, like a starved bird. She sifts through the mail. Bank statements. Utility and insurance bills. Due dates in red. I wasn’t really going to do it, she says. I don’t ask her if she means him, or her.
6.
K2 is a mountain split between Pakistan and China. At 28,251 feet above sea level, it’s the second-highest mountain in the world following Everest but is considered the deadliest for climbers. K2 is also a nickname for synthetic cannabinoids, also called spice or fake weed, which can be laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. I can’t find anything that confirms the relationship between K2 the street drug and K2 the mountain, but it makes sense to me. A peak, far removed from others, a vision of a life of conquering.
This, among others, was on the list of substances my brother was suspected to have been taking before he died. Also methadone, prescribed to a friend and borrowed, to treat an opioid addiction. In his life, my brother worked physical jobs that relied on his strength and stamina. He hauled garbage bags, catered events, moved boxes. When he worked, he was usually clean, and he’d text me about his plans to support the whole family, about financing houses for everyone. I would tell him I believed him.
He used to keep an old basketball in the corner of his room. I recognized it from my idle summers on the periphery of the courts, where I kept time by the sun’s position in the sky alone. The grip was shaved down by friction generated by slamming concrete and patinaed by the grease of hands. It deflated as soon as air was pumped into it. I imagine he treated it as a relic, proof of some simpler time. A year after I moved out, he tore his ACL. The impact from years of clever maneuvers had accumulated and the ligament in the center of his knee responsible for stability tore. He was out of the game. While he recovered from reconstructive surgery, he was also out of work. Alone and haunted by needling thoughts, he looked for ways to disappear and succeeded.
7.
I enter my brother’s room like a museum. It smells like the rest of the house, where incense has been burning all day, mixed with Lysol. My mother swept the room before I arrived. She threw away his old clothes, the mattress, bed linens—an important part of a ritual that cleansed the stagnant chi left behind by the deceased. I notice the basketball is gone. I can’t remember if it’s been gone for a while or if it fell victim to the ritual purge. I realize I am noticing a lot of things for the first time.
I’m looking for something to remember him by, but to an outsider, it probably looks like I’m snooping. There are books, including one he borrowed from me years ago but never returned, an exposé on the horrors of factory farming that inspired him to entertain vegetarianism before changing his mind, citing the lack of protein required for his workout regimen. Cards from a role-playing game we used to play as kids, when our imaginations were enough to sustain us for hours. A pair of Baoding balls I bought him as a birthday present, because green was his favorite color and, back then, I still believed in the curative properties of resilience and willpower. I step toward them and notice something else. A dull glimmer from the top of a shelf. It’s the crinkly cap from a bottle of beer, lying on its flat side like an empty dish. My mother must have missed it during her cleaning. I pick it up and feel the weight of it, then wrap my fingers around it and let its teeth sink into my palm.
8.
Four years after his death, I returned from a trip and discovered the ants. I recalled disinfecting every surface before leaving. I sprayed away the greasy buildup on the stovetop, locked all the windows, took out the garbage, vacuumed twice, and so on. I inherited my obsessive standards for cleanliness from my mother, so when the ants appeared in my apartment, I retraced my steps in my mind, searching for clues as to what I did or didn’t do to deserve this punishment.
I found them even in the water. They were not-quite-dead, wading in the aquarium of my Brita pitcher. I discovered some concealed inside the kettle, too, when I peered underneath the lid to check the water level before clicking the on button to boil. I wondered how they got in there and deduced it must have been through the spout. Tilting the kettle over the kitchen sink, I counted as four ants streamed into the throat of the drain.
When an ant finds a food source, it secretes a pheromone trail to communicate the bounty to other ants. Then each ant that follows that trail reinforces it by secreting pheromones of their own. Ants require clean water to survive and will go to great lengths to acquire it, like desert nomads en route to an oasis. I accepted this as the explanation for why they were in the Brita and kettle, but I couldn’t understand how they didn’t know they would end up trapped. Once the ants dropped in, they could drink as much water as they wanted, but the surface tension would hold them captive. The idea of a famished body piloting itself past its mortal bounds, of the thin edge between desperation and desire, haunted me.
I couldn’t tell you where they were coming from, or why they chose my apartment. There was no discernible pattern to their appearances and I found them everywhere: on my desk, traversing the edge of my window sill, scaling my walls.
That first day I was back, I went on a killing spree. I spotted one on the dining table and crushed it in the fist of a balled-up tissue, checking the smear of its body before sending it to the garbage bin, a necessary audit to ensure I succeeded. I vacuumed them off the floor, where they suffocated in the dustbin. I flattened them under my palms. The population was resilient. I stalked them, seeking the secret entryway they used. I never found it. I wondered how I could have missed the signs.
Days passed and I became desensitized to them. I surprised myself when I began to let them live, deciding that perhaps we could coexist. Someone once told me you could get used to anything, given enough time and exposure. But then, the ants disappeared. Abruptly, all of them, and I was alone again. Yet I would continue to check the kettle before boiling, feverishly pulling off the lid and swirling its contents, looking for shadows dappling the kettle’s floor. My reflection would ripple back to me in the stainless steel and I would imagine peering twenty years into the past at my younger self, the girl who hoped for a different outcome.