Transparency by Frances Hwang

Author:Frances Hwang
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780316085243
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-09-25T21:00:00+00:00

TRANSPARENCY

Henry Liu lost his voice halfway through the trip, coughing so violently that he thought he pulled a muscle on his left side. Whenever he felt pain, he put his hand across his chest to reassure himself that his heart was still beating. He looked at the view as his wife drove, at the broken edges of mountains covered in snow and the turquoise lake where not a single fish lived because of its cold waters. The mountains held a stillness that silenced him. It moved him to think how many thousands of years they had stood, worn silently away by wind and ice, and he felt regret as the lake slipped past his window. When it disappeared from view, Henry felt as if he had been given a last glimpse of the world. He knew that he would be dead before the trip was over.

His sixteen-year-old son, James, slouched in his seat, playing his Game Boy. Alice leaned her head against the window, reading a Russian novel for college—it was a thousand pages at the very least—by an author whose name Henry couldn’t pronounce. His wife kept exclaiming at the scenery—look out-side, isn’t it beautiful?—and when neither of their children looked, she became angry, saying what a waste it had been to bring them, until their daughter put the novel down on her knee and gazed through the window. His wife drove the car in fits and starts, pressing down hard on the accelerator and just as suddenly releasing it so that the car kept lurching forward and then slowing down. “Mom,” James yelled, “you’re making me sick! Stop it!”

“What?” she said.

“Your driving! It sucks! I’m a better driver, right, Alice?”

Alice picked up her novel and flipped a page.

“Mom, stop the car and let me drive!”

“You shut up,” Henry’s wife said. “I don’t want all of us to end up dead at the bottom of the cliff.”

James gave a heavy sigh as he collapsed back into his seat. He glanced out the window. “Everything looks the same,” he complained. He picked up his Game Boy and pushed his glasses back with the edge of a finger.

Henry rolled down his window, but his wife turned to look at him. She didn’t like the wind hitting her face because the lady who sold her makeup said that moving air wasn’t good for her complexion. So he closed the window, and they drove like that for another hour or so, the rented car smelling of vinyl, the way new cars smell, and lukewarm air blowing in softly through the vents. Through the glass, Henry stared at the mountains taking up the sky, massive fissured surfaces that from a distance became faint blue outlines. He wanted to remember them, but it seemed impossible for his mind to remember anything so beautiful and vast. On previous vacations, he had bought a postcard or two to remind him of the places they had seen, but this attempt at memory now seemed like wasted effort.

A tickle crept into his throat, and Henry held his breath.

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