1What the Actual F***, Man?Waking up is an easy thing to do. To be asleep, then not. To be a mind out there in the dark with no ground underneath, no legs or arms, no chest, no blood pumping in rhythmic bursts up my neck, no body at all, no hands, no hair or eyes, no ass or dick. Yes, sir, just your eyeless, handless, assless, dickless self just hanging out there in space for forever until suddenly, you’re not. Because suddenly is in fact the best word I can think of to describe it. Suddenly, SUDDENLY, with all the absolute cosmic consequence in the universe, a strange and terrifying surprise takes place and a thing that was not ever supposed to happen—happens. So quietly that nothing about it feels extraordinary at all. You wake up. You being me. Me being somebody, just some guy who in a singular moment has found himself all at once awake and sore in the neck. Clenching my fists shut, opening my eyes, two of them on my face exactly where I remembered them to be. Seeing another someone sitting there in front of me, composed of bold lines as though drawn on fresh white printer paper with a king-size Sharpie. Giant blue eyes—two of them—staring back at me. Like a tether, a spark from him to me, into my face, my neck, down my chest and arms, to the bottoms of my toes buried under warm, scratchy fibers. I hear a thought click slowly into place, my first thought in a very, very long time: that in the beginning, there was me, and also him.
“Ren?”
I didn’t hear my own voice but felt my throat vibrate. His eyes were fixed on me and had been all this time. He didn’t move. Maybe he hadn’t heard me. I tried to arrange my perception of him; parts—the eyes, the shoulders, the chest—were swimming around, jagged and refracted as if underwater. I noticed then that he was covered, head to toe, in crisp blue fabric. A cap over his hair, a surgical mask over his face. There was a cord of neck muscle pushing against his skin. Ren looked upset. I tried to tell him everything was fine, to calm down, since I had a lot to ask him: Where was I? Why did my entire body feel like vibrating air? Like Jell-O? Like it was broken in every conceivable place and hastily put back together again by someone with only a loose understanding of the human body and which of its parts fit into each other? He looked really, really upset, more so by the second.
“Ren—” I tried to say again, opening my mouth, making the shape of his name with my lips. I said my husband’s name a lot, punctuating my existence with it as though I had a nervous tic. I felt safe when I said his name. He always appeared, full and warm, when I said it, moved ever so slightly in his sleep when I whispered it to him in our bed. I was in the middle of saying it again when I felt my throat strain against something sharp and hard. It occurred to me that there were not—as I’d assumed—just us two things within this new universe I’d woken up in. Among the great many things that were now making their presence known—a harsh overhead light, a dull warmth gathered at the small of my back—was the grip end of a canoe oar or a golf club that, for reasons unknown, I’d been deep-throating in my sleep. I made a soft choking noise, testing it out again—“Ren?”—and felt the canoe oar strain against the right side of my esophagus, scraping soft tissue. I brought my hand up toward my neck, continuing to choke. I tried to stay calm. I didn’t want to freak him out. But Ren’s eyes had gone as wide as plates.
“Oh f***—” he said loudly, in a rough and booming voice that took me a second—two—to realize I did not recognize. “Oh holy mother***king f***!”
A pause, while I continued to choke. Then, gathering his breath, the person sitting in front of me, who was not in fact my husband, said this: “This really isn’t supposed to happen.”
I tried to say something along the lines of “What a f***ing weird thing to say” but gagged before my lips could form the words. Not-Ren’s voice was deep and flat, clear like audio recorded on an expensive podcasting microphone and filtered straight into my ears through noise-canceling headphones. I’d never heard a voice so sharp and high-def in my entire life; his was a knife that had cut away all the fuzz around the world, making it new and whole. He had a wonderful voice. There was a lot to admire about a voice like that, despite its obvious distress, despite its not being my husband’s and currently not trying very hard to tell me where my husband even was. The broomstick in my throat was starting to make me tear up. Weakly, I pointed at it, asking him for help.
“Jack—” He was suddenly a lot closer than before, one hand steady around my neck. I caught a glimpse of dark, curly hair poking up over the collar of his shirt while he reached for something above my head. “Just stay calm. Can you do that, Jack? It’s a breathing tube. You’ve been intubated—”
I remembered that Jack was my name. Jack, plus a big, obnoxious Jr. that has been appended since birth, not only on my birth certificate, but also within normal conversation. Jack Jr., Jack Jr. Hey, look over there, it’s Jack Jr. just f***ing around minding his own business and being an exemplary citizen and shit. Hey, Jack Jr.! Why’s the sky blue, Jack Jr.? Oh, that’s easy, it has something to do with the refractory properties of the atmosphere, which scatters blue wavelengths of light more than any other on the spectrum of visible radiation. Happy? Need anything else? Not a thing, Jack Jr., you’re a real stand-up guy, Jack Jr.
The existence of a Jack Jr., naturally, implies the existence of a Jack Sr., himself the face that bloomed inside my head when my thoughts came to rest on my family, an act that itself was as infrequent an occurrence as humanly possible. Umma used to call me Jack Jr. for convenience, I could only assume. It seemed that between myself and Appa, there were simply too many variables, too many arcs of potent, chaos-making destructive interference she would be entertaining by calling either of us Just Jack. The solution, of course, was to label us Jack Jr. and Jack Sr. Which stuck at birth and would forevermore. So, it was cute. Every guy I’d ever dated had commented at some point or another on just how cute it was—Ren included—and I found myself agreeing at least half the time, depending on how well the relationship seemed to be going and just how much I was going to forgive said guy—Ren included—for mentioning my family. I didn’t like when people mentioned my family. I hadn’t thought of my parents in a long time.
“Jr.,” I tried to say, but only managed to gag some more.
He was holding my head up at an angle, angling my face up at the ceiling while sticking his thick fingers into my mouth. He was telling me something, either to keep breathing or to stop breathing, and I couldn’t completely tell so I tried to do both. After another few seconds, I felt a heaving, gurgling scrape in the back of my throat, far deeper than I’ve ever been aware of in my lifetime (even in college), then made a noise halfway between a burp and a cough as the offending probe exited my larynx. The flexible plastic tube, fixed at the end with a fun little yellow inflatable cuff that—I don’t know—kept it secure inside me, trailed spit across my face while he pulled it out of my mouth. I was gasping for air, realizing now that I hadn’t been breathing much this entire time. The room was coming into sharper view: a window spanning almost the entire wall, through which a black city was silhouetted faintly against orange and green moonlight. There was noise off to my right; he was ducking his head out the door and yelling. I tried to ignore him. I felt small. The universe, as it turned out, was a lot bigger than I’d been led to believe thus far, and it was stressing me out. I turned my head as far as it would go, trying to bury my face in something, a pillow maybe, but the light was too bright.
“Please, please just stop yelling,” I said, a hoarse sound from the back of my throat, screwing my eyes shut.
He turned around, and I noticed for the first time that on top of the surgical mask over his face and skullcap over his head, he was wearing a plastic shield that looked like half of a dog cone pointed down over his forehead. His clothes were pale blue and looked like paper.
“What are you doing?”
“What am I doing?” I said. “I’m lying here trying to sleep. Not to mention almost choking to death on whatever it is you just pulled out of me. What the f*** even was that?”
“A tube, endotracheal tube, it’s a breathing tube,” he said, chopping his words up, staring at me, apparently terrified to find I could speak words.
“Okay. Well, thank you for that. Can you find my husband? Do you know where he is?”
“I’m trying to get you a doctor,” he said, his big booming voice beginning to waver more as something—it couldn’t have been me, since I was just existing here in front of him—continued to freak him the f*** out. “This . . . this is just—holy f***. You’re really—you’re really not supposed to be—”
“Doctor,” I repeated slowly. I sat up and saw that I was lying in one of those motor beds with plastic handles on all sides. It looked like the luxury kind that could curl into a ball with you in it. “Why are you looking for a doctor?”
Copyright © 2025 by Jinwoo Chong. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
