Excerpt: "Personal Attention Roleplay" by Helen Chau Bradley

Excerpt originally published in Personal Attention Roleplay. Creative Commons copyright 2021 by Helen Chau Bradley. Reprinted by permission of Metonymy Press.

Helen Chau Bradley. Personal Attention Roleplay. Metonymy Press, $18.95, 216 pp., ISBN: 978-1-7774852-1-4

Hello, and welcome to this video. A blonde woman with a pale poreless face leans towards you. Today we’re going to do some reiki energy healing to pull out any negative energy you may have. We’re going to help you relax … relax … relax … Her blue eyes are wide with mascara. Her teeth are bright white and well aligned. They peek out from her lips, which open and close in a mesmerizing pattern. I see that you have yellow in your aura, which means that you’re spiritually aware. She moves her hands as if she’s pulling threads from somewhere behind your ears, clicking her tongue delicately on certain words. We need to get rid of your negative energies. Her consonants are crisp and wet in your earphones. Your eyelids start to flutter. Her voice wraps around your skull. You shiver as it spreads like a swarm of tiny insects. Feel the energy of your third eye—

“What in the actual hell are you watching?”

You slam your laptop shut and twist to face your bedroom doorway. You didn’t hear Jasmine approach from down the hall. All that yoga and meditation, you think with admiration; she’s learned to move in total silence. “Hahaha,” you say. “It’s, you know, ASMR? To help me relax. I was thinking about what you said the other day, and YouTube has been recommending all these relaxation videos to me anyway, like it’s probably been listening to our conversations so frequently that it knows what I need, or it thinks it knows, and I really want to be a better roommate, like more chill, so I—”

“Justine, you’re rambling again,” she says. She used to lie in your bed all the time, curl up with you, hang out for hours, play with your hair. You would hate-watch straight dating shows together, shrieking with laughter and disdain. Lately, she just lingers in the doorway.

You want to explain about the videos, the flow, the crawling yet pleasing sensation they give you, but you find yourself saying, “Sorry sorry sorry sorry. I’ll be better.”

“Justine, stop apologizing, it’s cool. I guess. But when I said you need to find a way to relax, I didn’t mean go watch some white girl appropriating traditional Eastern health practices.”

You can feel your face drooping. She still doesn’t come in. 

“Don’t make your puppy face, please? I really can’t do this today. And listen, it’s great that you’re trying out something new. I’m heading to yoga. I’ll see you later.”

“Let’s order in for dinner?” you say, hopefully.

“I’m trying to save money, actually. I think I’ll just make some food at Anila’s after class. Don’t wait for me, okay? Have a good night!” She’s out the door, mat under her arm, before you have time to be upset. Strategic. 

You flip your laptop back open and press play on VickyWhispers, but after a few seconds of her fluttering fingers and tongue clicking, you turn her off again. Now that Jasmine’s judged her, the flow is halting, unsatisfactory. She’s just a pale-faced girl making stupid tapping noises on a tub of moisturizer; it’s no longer relaxing, it’s cringey. Another evening without Jasmine stretches before you, lonely and contemptible. You try to lie down on your bed, clattering a pile of books and old electronics to the floor. You’ve always looked to Jasmine to decide what you’d do together. You’ve been roommates for four years, existing in tandem—eating and smoking in bed, tending your growing family of plants together, gossiping in the bathroom while one of you showers and the other sits on the toilet, going out to bars and queer events with friends—her friends, admittedly, but they have become your friends too. You’re pretty sure they have. Just as you’re pretty sure things between you and Jasmine are fine, you’re just in a minor rut, having some minor issues. It happens in any close relationship after a certain amount of time.

Your brother thinks that your relationship with Jasmine is weird and overly intimate. He has said this to you over the phone multiple times. He says it again this evening, when you call him out of boredom or desperation. “You’re so obsessed with this girl,” he says, disparagingly. This is his default tone with you. “If you want a girlfriend, go find an actual girlfriend, someone who wants to date you, Justine.” You hate it when people use your name as emphasis, especially when giving you unwanted advice: Try to calm down, Justine. Go get a real girlfriend, Justine. Stop treading water, Justine. 

“You don’t know anything about queer femme intimacy, Francis,” you tell your brother. “You think you understand my life, but face it, you’re a basic mainstream gay and you need to get over yourself!”  

He can take it. He’s the successful boy child. The one who became a hotshot corporate shill, an Executive Talent Management Consultant at some soulless entertainment conglomerate. You understand the words of his title separately but when he says them together, your brain blurs. He lives in LA with his husband. Your parents are proud of him, even though you suspect they don’t understand what he does either, other than fly business class to Cross-National Strategic Retreats and collect a hefty paycheque. They practically congratulated him when he came out to them.

They are not proud of you. They rarely check in.

“Mom and Dad weren’t even that kind of Asian parents,” Francis says, when you complain. “They never pressured us to go into medicine, or software engineering, or law. They would have supported you no matter what you decided to do.” 

You grunt.

“Your problem is that you do literally nothing at all. So what are they supposed to say? That it’s admirable to waste your life living in a dumpy apartment obsessing over a girl who isn’t into you?”

“You’re such an asshole. I’m not doing absolutely nothing.” Your mind is racing. L’esprit de l’escalier, you think. But you forget what exactly that refers to. Something about snappy comebacks and staircases. “I’m making rent. I’m writing like twenty reviews a week! I’m working constantly. You don’t get to call me a failure just because I’m not a smug Married Millennial and don’t have a dumb corporate job that no one understands.”

“You’re not writing real reviews, Justine, you’re writing clickbait. And if we’re going to get all snobby about Working For The Man, who do you think owns the site you churn out all that subversive content for, huh?”

You hang up on him. He’s been a know-it-all since you were kids. A know-it-all and a perfectionist. Unlike you. You hid candy and chips under your mattress, lost bits of homework under piles of dirty laundry, never raised your hand in class, and never stuck with any extracurriculars for more than a month. Part of you wishes that your parents had been less lenient, that they had ordered you around, forced you onto a set path with no other options. You would rather die than admit this to anyone. 

“Listicles don’t just write themselves,” you mutter, and then you laugh an unimpressed laugh, because it’s the stupidest comeback you’ve ever heard. You turn back to your laptop screen. Maybe if you write a couple more articles tonight, you’ll feel like you’ve accomplished something. You scroll through the assigned topics: 10 Reasons Why Brad and Jen Should Never Have Split Up and 10 Reasons They Should Never Get Back Together. 17 Movie Adaptations That Are Way Better Than the Books. 21 TV Shows That Advance the LGBTQI Agenda. 15 Reasons Why No Matter How Many Listicles You Write You’ll Never Get a Raise or Health Benefits. You start typing.

***

You wake up past noon to the landlord’s kids scrambling around upstairs. How can such small people make so much noise, you wonder. You wade through a pile of clothing and stumble to the kitchen to see if Jasmine’s made coffee yet. You can’t smell anything, but maybe she woke up early and left you some. 

The kitchen is empty. The door of her bedroom is open and her bed is made. When did she start making her bed? Or do you just never makes yours? Another thought overrides all the others: did Jasmine sleep over at Anila’s last night? Are they dating? You thought they were just friends—friends who go to yoga together five times a week, hang out increasingly often, and post Stories together. Not as many Stories as you and Jasmine post together. But Jasmine’s never mentioned a crush, and you tell each other everything. Anyway, wouldn’t you have noticed if a romance was developing? Wouldn’t Jasmine seem different, smell different, breathe in a new rhythm, smile with a new intensity? You know her better than anyone else.

Then again: The empty room, the empty espresso pot. The neatly tucked sheets. No texts. The absence of her warm body in your bed for the last few weeks. Your mind goes blank for a bit, the way it does when your thoughts start to pile up too thick and fast. You find yourself in the kitchen, scooping chocolate cereal out of its box, cramming it past your front teeth in large fistfuls, chomping on it with a singular focus that any yogic wannabe would envy. You don’t stop until all that’s left are little broken crumbs, until all you can feel is an immovable lump in your stomach, a throbbing in your temples, and a scraped, bloody stinging in your gums. You put the empty box back on the shelf.

You pour yourself a soothing glass of water. What had Jasmine said? Five glasses a day, or is it ten? Or is it ten litres a day? How many glasses are in a litre? You abandon the water, collapse back into bed. You yank a pair of earphones from the tangle under your pillow. After clicking around on YouTube for a while, you find some Asian-looking ASMR makers. ASMRtists. No more white girls for you, no more appropriation—Jasmine’s right. Asian voices are more relaxing anyway, you say to yourself, and then you think, No wait, is that a stereotype? Does this mean that you, an Asian, have bought into the racist idea that Asians are more effeminate and therefore more soothing in demeanour and also better suited to care work? You start to sweat, but you force yourself to watch a video in which a Korean woman with perfect eyeliner and a pink mouth pretends to tweeze your unruly eyebrows. Her low voice undulates as she approaches to pluck, moves back to evaluate her work, approaches again, moves back again. You can’t understand what she’s saying, but you are mesmerized by her motions, by the metallic clicking of the tweezers which, by the end, you can’t believe are not actually pinching the tiny coarse hairs out of your face. 

You haul yourself to the bathroom, and dazedly peer into the spittle-flecked cabinet mirror under the fluorescent light. It highlights all your secret wrinkles. Your stockpile of toothbrushes winks from its jar beside the sink. A wicker basket full of half-used face creams, hand creams, serums, lotion pots, toners, cleansers, tweezers, makeup wipes, nail polish, and cuticle paste looks at you accusingly from the top of the toilet tank. It’s all yours, not Jasmine’s. “You have caterpillar eyebrows and a scarcity-oriented worldview,” you say out loud. Jasmine loves to irritate you by stroking your brows in the wrong direction with one laughing fingertip so that they caterpillar even more. “Stop it,” you like to whine at her, but you love it, her attention bathing you like a ring light; she hovers so close that you can almost imagine her face is your own.

Jasmine’s mother is from Hong Kong, like yours, but she looks like a catwalk beauty alien, all wide-set eyes and rosebud mouth, whereas you exhibit none of that intrigue. Your face is big and round, like the moon. In high school, your nickname was Fivehead. Your mother, birdlike and shrinking yearly, calls you “stocky.” She blames this on your father’s family, who are from Guangdong. “Farming people,” she shakes her head. You haven’t heard from either of them in months, which normally doesn’t bother you because Jasmine is your family. Hasn’t she said so? Or was that you? She still hasn’t texted, or even sent you any memes. Should you go for a walk, breathe in the outdoors? Instead you return to bed, where “ASMR Let Me Help You Do Your Makeup” is waiting.

Credit: Surah Field-Green

Helen Chau Bradley is a writer, musician and former bookseller living in Tiohtiá:ke / Montreal. Their stories and essays have appeared in carte blanche, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy Magazine, Maisonneuve Magazine, the Montreal Review of Books, and elsewhere. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Automatic Object Lessons (House House Press). Personal Attention Roleplay is their first book of fiction.