Synopsis

Chapter One: The Red Balloon.

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There’s a red balloon I push around the city.

Most days, it’s the size of a beach ball. Other days, it expands to the size of one designed for full-body exercises, the sort of ordinary sphere populating a women’s gymnasium, made for resilience with a little bounce.

It floats before me as I push it with my belly or fingers, nudging it along in the air while my moods swirl inside like drops of food coloring in water, a dream in the shape of a melon growing on a vine. What does a melon dream about as it bathes in tendrils of rainwater, wishing to be invisible? Floating downstream on a mountain river into the arms of a gardener who will carve it open with a cleaver, the flesh heavy with juice inside its rind? The ripe melon of the moon in a night sky, ripening over constellations of gourds and squashes, sinking into the loamy dark of interstellar space? Or does it dream about its fate as a cubit of flesh wrapped by a thin slice of prosciutto?

No one else can see this ball, of course.

As tranquil as a sheep or starfish, the ball drifts by my shoulder without a sound. I can’t recall a time when this ball wasn’t my companion. When I was a girl, it floated beside me when I walked to school. It sat on my lap or drifted over my desk in class, barely touching the space above my forehead or nose while I worked on math problems. The square root of one is one. The square root of negative one is an irrational number, and so forth. In college, the ball slid around my folding table and waited patiently as I ate cheese sandwiches with a mug of tomato soup while I studied for an exam or read a book. Afterwards, when I landed a full-time job in the city as a phobia specialist, the ball followed me to work, bobbing along the crosswalks and traffic intersections as I walked briskly, hoping that I looked smart in my pressed blouse and skirt.

On rare occasions, the ball does bump into strangers, or comes to rest momentarily by the face of a child, eye to eye, so to speak. The ball doesn’t have eyes, but it appears to look around carefully, as if spying. Who are you, and where are you going?

To my eye, at least, the ball also mimics the type of work I do at the clinic, particularly in my role as a specialist. It amuses me to see how the ball adopts the odd quirks in my behaviors as an innocuous form of play, or perhaps a shy expression of affinity. The nodding of my head, the well-timed silences in lapses of conversation.

Is the ball a friend of mine? No, I wouldn’t call the ball a friend in an anthropocentric manner of the term, as we understand our camaraderie in person-to-person relations. The ball, however, isn’t a domestic pet or service animal.

The balloon is a sphere of private weather, a globe or atlas of my obscure inner microclimes. We currently live, after all, in an age of burnout culture and panic attacks in the heat of day, when we don’t invest time in unpacking our internal states or stay in tune with our desires in a constructive manner. The balloon is a satellite of my heart as a seat of emotions, a glass half-full when I’m empty, running on fumes after a long day of work.

By four o’clock, time to close up the clinic, I’d glance at my balloon, which has settled in the air over my head without complaint for nine hours, watching my attention shift in the quiet spaces of my pod as I listen to patients who describe feeling haunted by irrational fears of little dogs falling out of the sky, fireballs exploding out of nowhere, mold flowering in the darkness of a fridge, and spiders, spiders, spiders crawling on the skin, up their calves and thighs, and especially on the neck and between the shoulder blades where fingers can’t quite reach.

I’ve only ever held two jobs, by the way. One was at a dumpling den, a hole-in-the-wall famous for spicy wontons and soup dumplings with chili oil and black vinegar. My task was simply to tuck and fold the dumpling skins. At this den, they were boiled to perfection, neither mushy nor too undercooked. A dash of chili oil, a pinch of pepper flakes, and no monosodium glutamate. When business was slow, I peeled mounds of shrimp and chopped ginger or scallions with a dull cleaver while the balloon hovered at my forehead, softly backlit like an angel of red paper lanterns.

The other job – to pay rent in the city, I worked a second job – was my role as a specialist, a part-time position I held before I was furloughed from the clinic during the quarantine of silence. For years, I folded soup dumplings at the den through the lunch shift, then worked at the clinic in the afternoon for several hours to support the work of the analysts, especially in the evenings when people were off work. Although facilitating the treatment was tedious at times with the painstaking documentation and record-keeping required for each session, I did it because I cared about the patients. It was rewarding to see the lightbulbs go on inside their heads, and over time, the analysts entrusted more of their cases to me, reserving the most challenging or outlier ones for their groundbreaking case studies. In my last year at the clinic, I noticed an increase in patients. I didn’t know it then, but this uptick was due to an overall increase of fear in the city, a harbinger of the panic; it wasn’t because the phobias were over-diagnosed, as commonly thought.

I loved serving as a specialist for the analysts. The method was straightforward, no frills. We used the ball in a box method. We drew circles around our fears, and we asked each other questions about them. How large is the ball today, and why? How is the ball this afternoon? Did it shrink much today? Why does it seem to expand around this time last month? The patients held up their hand-drawn pictures of balls in boxes. Did the ball hit the panic button inside the box? It is because today is the anniversary of your mother’s death, and so forth? For the majority of my patients, this treatment would be a lifelong process. I would only have a window onto this iteration of their illness, the harbinger of a more pervasive fear. For instance, there was the woman who believed that if she so much as brushed her hair the wrong way in the morning – and the algorithm for wrongness in her bird’s nest of hair followed a peculiar logic known only to her – then the butterfly effect would cause an extinction of the species of birds, such as he common house wren, who pulled hair out of her lint trap for their own nests.

There was a boy who was afraid that indecipherable codes from some cosmic entity appeared underneath his desk at school, inscribing some epic narrative that only he could decipher, if only he could read the cedar shavings from his pencils. He collected the cedar shavings in a pencil box without pencils, only the shavings. The teacher discovered he had an elaborate plan, written meticulously in his large penmanship, to occupy the school using a little puppet squadron of none other than paper bags filled with air. He drew a circle around paper bag puppets. So, his ball in a box had puppets in it, a puppet box.

There was a teenage girl who was concerned about her wisdom teeth, still buds in the bone. Her wisdom teeth would develop enlarged cysts while the teeth were developing, the largest teeth in her mouth without adequate space in her jaw to erupt properly, and the cysts would dissolve the bone in her mouth, hollowing out her jaw to the point of the thinness of eggshells. I have hollow bones, she would say. You could strike my jaw and it would shatter. Then I’d have to see the osteopathic surgeon, and he’d have to reconstruct my face. My jaw would be wired shut for at least a month. The pencil-drawn circle around her fear was small, no larger than an enlarged cyst around a budding wisdom tooth, in other words, the size of a dime.

Past the spring of youth and into my silvering years of middle age, teetering on the verge of menopause with the waxing and waning tide of fertility, I got a little tired of this omnipresent balloon, a bout of balloon fatigue, yes —its blend of perpetual surveillance and benevolent solicitude—and shut it in a room. I’d experienced this nagging sense of fatigue before, or perhaps it’s better characterized as a desire for autonomy, as a girl whose shadow always seemed to hold hands with a red balloon.

I locked the door with an old key I’d kept in a manila envelope since the purchase of this house. When I was a girl, I thought the word, manila, was pronounced, vanilla. I never wondered why the envelopes and their flaps, tasting nothing like the ice cream flavor, were named vanilla until I was older and learned about the hemp that was initially harvested for the paper. Manila, an archipelago city on the other side of the world. So, the world was filled with vanilla envelopes, and the red balloon was my best friend. I outlined the ghost of its presence with my finger on the door of distressed wood, robin’s egg blue weathered with sandpaper and steel wool, then gazed at the mirror at the space in the air where it had floated before me.

After an hour of separation from the balloon, I opened the door.

The balloon floated out without a sour look or sharp word. I fancy it almost winked as if to say, you can try to keep me away or pretend I don’t exist, but never for long.

When you forgot me at the bus stop, I followed you, my love. When you left me in an underground train station, I found my way back into your presence. When you tussled with paper in the bathroom stall at the airport, I calmly looked down at you, dear friend and companion, absorbing a surge in your emotions as you unceremoniously flushed tissue down an anonymous porcelain gullet in a bathroom stall.

The balloon whispers, I’m not a drone or a spy bot, yet there’s no thought or gesture you’ve made since your day of birth unregistered on my global positioning sphere.

It continues in a transcendent voice of white noise machines: I am a map of roses entangled with lilies of the valley, erupting volcanoes with their glowing calderas of ash, a cartography of rolling plains and pine forests.

It’s an atlas of my red skin, a flaming olive tree with a multitude of invisible pits burned to the core, the hiddenness of astringent fruit charbroiled in its torso and limbs.

I am a red hawthorn berry with the cyanide-laced seed cored out with a fruit knife, leaving a star-shaped hole in my wintering heart.

I’m a red cabinet of hairpins adorned with azaleas, a well-kept secret garden. Hairpins of jade, hairpins of copper like the rain gutters of mansions and old pennies.

The histories of those women who lost their glands thanks to the human-fabricated forever chemicals are indelibly inscribed on the face of this balloon, that is to say, if a red ball like mine is even said to hold a face. The chemicals will last longer than the people who concocted them.

Yes, I say to the balloon.

Yes and yes, my love, always.

I’ve resigned to keeping this balloon as a part of my existence, a forever atlas to the afterlife, yes, unto the day of my death, when I might hug it like a zeppelin and let it rise up and up into the sky, engulfed in light like one of the ancient prophets. The balloon, if it could, would lead me away from the fiery gates of the abyss, thanks to love.