Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Author:Elaine Hsieh Chou [Hsieh Chou, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

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Ingrid felt impotent and useless, but fortunately, a cure existed: magical little pale blue pills. At the drugstore, she chucked three bottles of Lucidax into her basket, and as she waited in line, added six candy bars and a supersized bottle of electrolyte water to the party (even while drugged out, she’d never forget to hydrate; she wasn’t that irresponsible). She looked forward to numbing herself into oblivion while zoning out before the TV. Goodbye problems, hello infinite void!

Then at the last minute, much to the cashier’s frustration, Ingrid ditched her full basket and returned to her car empty-handed. Gurti had said she had integrity. Well, she hadn’t addressed her directly—but still, she had used the word integrity. And here she was trying to take the easy, chemically enhanced way out. Gurti would be appalled.

Ingrid had set into motion events she couldn’t control—a scientist whose invention surpasses what she’d thought possible. She couldn’t twiddle her thumbs as it lumbered around, wreaking havoc. And she couldn’t formulate a plan to stop it if she was half-sentient.

She passed her apartment, where too many temptations to mope lurked. She wound aimlessly through Wittlebury, cutting haphazard corners and U-turns, crisscrossing the small town’s arteries until she found herself flowing into the freeway’s bloodstream. As she flew past a picturesque cow pasture, she thought back to her old self, molting in the archive while tracking the clock’s second hand rotation. To think, the only source of her panic then was over a document three people in the universe would read before it collected mold on a basement shelf. What did that matter now? How could it, in light of everything that had happened? She exited the freeway and knew: the days of footnotes and bibliographies were over.

Ingrid turned right at the light, zipped down an empty avenue, left, left again. When she hit the brakes, it was nearly six o’clock and she was outside her parents’ house. The setting sun softened even the rough edges of Putterville. She stood outside the door for a while, acclimating to the peculiar sensation that always accompanied revisiting her childhood home: smothering nostalgia. She hadn’t come alone in a long time, not since she’d hunted for her lucky rabbit’s foot. And in tandem, it had been a long time since her parents had treated her normally, the way they did when Stephen—no, when anyone who wasn’t their immediate family—wasn’t around.

Her mother opened the door and not twenty minutes later, Ingrid was ingesting a half dozen elaborate dishes her parents insisted had just been sitting in the fridge.

“How is your research?” Jean asked, heaping a pile of shrimp and walnuts into her bowl.

Ingrid frowned. From her last visit with Stephen, she had unconsciously prepared for another round of CSL lessons. Why are you speaking to me in English? she wanted to ask. When her parents spoke to each other, it was always in Mandarin or Hokkien. But that was a silly question. It was she, age twelve, who forbade her parents from speaking to her in their native languages.

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