Surface Tension
I’m at work when my baby sister loses her grip on a bouldering wall, crumples the wrong way, and breaks her arm, cleanly, in two places. None of that sentence makes sense to me. She will later describe her arm as ‘wavy,’ the two bones fracturing in opposite directions, jutting out of her skin. She has just turned twenty-one. Earlier this year, in a bid to save money, she’d downgraded her insurance plan, and so when her friends call the ambulance, they bring her to the wrong kind of hospital, and she has to be warded, discharged, and bundled to another hospital across town, all the while cradling the arm that she looks at and thinks of as wavy.
No one tells me because of the nature of my work. I’m a host and a bad liar. I made a living for years by just being a more dramatic version of myself. I have no poker face. A producer on a show I cameoed in once very generously described me as ‘mildly directable,’ but I watched her face when she was saying it. She’s a bad liar too. The day my sister falls, I’m filming an advertisement for a Japanese skincare line, something that resides in the gray area between acting and hosting. They only tell me four hours later, when my shoot was scheduled to have ended. But we were running over, and after I hear about my sister’s broken arm, I blink, blink, blink, and have to wash and re-wash my face four times because I can’t get that calm, relaxed expression right. My skin barrier is scrubbed right off. The director calls cut and scratches her head.
We move on to the final scene, which is an over-the-shoulder shot, where I scoop night cream out of the jar with a little spatula and smear it on the back of my hand. No facial expressions needed, so I let mine melt into a frown. My sister is an experienced climber. During the lockdown, her body quivered with restlessness, and in a spurt of genius, she spread white chalk across our dining table and clambered all over it. I came out of the bedroom one afternoon to see her hanging off the corner of our kitchen sink, upside-down, like some kind of muscular sloth, her core trembling with sweat. When the mall down the street announced plans for a rock wall parenthesized with a chronologically vague ‘coming soon’, she called, emailed, and DM-ed the mall’s management for a precise date to count down to. Walls, strongholds, heel hooks, and crimps dominate her conversation. But somehow, the rocks did not hold. Or perhaps, she did not.
Alright, the cameraman says, we got it. That’s a wrap.
The pandemic has imposed new rules over everything. They only allow two visitors in the hospital ward, so my parents have to tap out before I can go in. I’m asked to complete a health declaration, sanitize myself, take my temperature, walk past a second thermal scanner, register my visit with the government’s contact-tracing app, and get a pass from a different desk before even reaching the elevator. I want to be the kind of person these measures are designed to comfort, but as I clear these hurdles in small, precise steps, a wildness rises in me, like a sneeze. I pause in front of the thermal scanner, my presence blotching blue and green on the screen, and imagine myself breaking into a run. My heels clacking down the hospital lobby as I spin circles. As I smudge teal fingerprints all over the glass doors. The nurse, gatekeeper of the elevator lobby, hands me a perfectly laminated visitor pass. It’s so clean, it shines. I pin it to my dress and she waves me forward.
I need to calm down. On the elevator floor, there are four neat squares, measured out with masking tape. I fold myself into one of them and rehearse lines of encouragement. Platitudes that I don’t quite believe. The entire lockdown, everyone has been lobbying the same hollow At Leasts around - At Least you’re healthy, At Least you’re with family, At Least At Least At Least. I am so sick and tired of At Least. But confronted with calamity I reach for the same crutches. I have not yet stepped off the elevator and already I am a disappointment. Don’t say any of that, I tell myself. I strike all my lines out and come up blank.
The elevator bell dings. The next morning, they will slice my sister’s forearm open, locate the splits in her ulna and radial bones, and scaffold them with plates and screws. I will go online and clunkily WebMD my way around home care for broken arms, all of which seem obvious and none of which is helpful. I will find that the most effective care is emotional care, and will sneak her sugar behind my mother’s back, in the form of cake, boba, and kewpie mayo on burnt toast. She will start, but not finish, any of these offerings of helpless commiseration. I will watch the cream-colored liquid swirl as I pour it down the kitchen sink, and dig out the apple jellies that have gotten caught, choking in the sink strainer.
But for now, in the moment before the bones are snapped back into place, before they begin the slow and painful work of healing, before they are set back on the right path, I walk into the hospital ward, and our eyes meet for the first time since the break. Later on people will ask me why, and I won’t have an answer, but all down the hospital hallways, and for a good two-and-a-half minutes, you can hear it: laughter, stark and relieved, powerless, and slightly deranged.
