MEIKO KO / A STORY OF A SHIRT AND A MAN
It was unfortunate: my shirt was evil. Everyone would think I was crazy if I said that. A shirt? they’d say. They would prefer anything else to be evil, a phone, a laptop, a lightbulb, a book. A shirt was too close. It was right next to the skin.
They’d tell me to go see a doctor. They’d point, how could that be? An S-size Van Heusen with blue lines in grid check, almost like a shirt of honor, how could such an ordinary-looking shirt be evil? So many other shirt contenders in the market, Arrow, Blackberrys, Ralph Lauren, the chances of being evil weren’t that high in the first place. They’d joke, did your shirt kill a man?
But my troubles began around four o’clock. My collar started tightening, and the shirt would close in like cling wrap on my flesh. I could hear the crinkling of plastic when I moved. I tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t go away. The tedium of that, you can imagine.
I’d itch. The fabric pricked. I’d take an allergy pill out of my drawer and drink it down. That didn’t work either, and I don’t think any doctor could cure me of the incessant itching that poked like a hundred needles. As the hour grew the shirt would weigh heavier and heavier. Like someone had shoved me into a metal suit and locked it. All the while Van Heusen would look like any old regular shirt, fresh as the sky, wrinkle-free in the eyes of everybody.
Van Heusen seemed to drag everyone down. My belt, my pants, my shoes and socks would weigh like I’d put on elephant skin. I stood and excused myself to go to the men’s room. Hurriedly I removed everything I was wearing in the stall. Only then could I breathe. In the gap between the stalls I could see other feet. Most zipped up, flushed, and clopped their shoes out of the stall. But once in a while a pair would stay to watch me. The shoes circled, moved forward, back, stood still, as though waiting for my bare feet to disappear. Finally they turned and clopped out too.
I did go to the department store. I told them the shirts they sold were supposed to be lightweight. That wasn’t true, the shirt weighed like a shark by six p.m., I said. The salesgirl didn’t know what to do. She took out a scale and weighed my shirt. The result shocked me. Five ounces according to their measurement. No, I insisted. The customer was always right. By nighttime I was carrying a house on my back, I said. Was there any shirt in this store less than four ounces? I said. In the end they gave me two free shirts just like Van Heusen to placate me. I wasn’t worth their trouble.
In this way I’d acquired many Van Heusens. But I always knew him, my first. To be sure none of them made any difference in the late afternoons. Their dead weight didn’t lift, their yokes would turn into lead, their buttons changed from plastic to stone. The care label would cut like a razor blade into my waist. It was unfortunate and unbearable. I was caught in an oppressive fog and began to hallucinate.
I never saw anything more stupid than a grinning sleeve. All day it just sat on my arm, refusing to properly fold. Now and then I’d tug it, but it wouldn’t stop smirking. The cuffs felt like two cans pushed through my wrists. I took a pair of scissors and pointed the tip at them. I aimed at forty-five degrees, tilted it to ninety like I was going to start a knife game.
That night I made the mistake of being in the pantry. It was late, everyone had left. I was tired and needed coffee. By the window I stood and watched the sprawl of city lights. A neon sign flashed a Chinese word I didn’t recognize. Cargo ships were drifting on the river eastwards. I put the cup to my lips but the phone rang right then. Flustered, my lips missed the cup and hot coffee dribbled down Van Heusen, staining the shirt front.
Upon hindsight I think he was really upset. Who wouldn’t be? I was a nice, ironed blue shirt one moment and in the next I was degraded into the color of shit. The shirt fumed slowly. It soaked in the anger thoroughly. I felt it tremble hotly as the coffee dribbled and spread on the pocket, penetrating the seams and fibers. I envisioned his future: an abandoned, orphaned shirt like a yellowed old map nobody would ever look at again. If it were lucky it might become a rag mopping someone’s shelf or table.
The next morning Van Heusen was lying on the floor. I’d left him there when I came back and fell asleep. He seemed odd. A heap fallen off my body, tossed aside. He wasn’t the same shirt as he was yesterday. He’d been pristine and suave and dour and now he laid in a pool of misery like a beaten man with a story to tell. He’d gotten a spill, he’d got something dark inside him now. Overnight the stain had blossomed. A patch like a piece of turd had smacked into the middle. It’d left the boundaries of the pocket, colonized several areas of grid checks dark brown, size of a child’s hand. A splat, splatter, all out of shape. Parts of the stain were wet. It might not be coffee I drank after all. It might be a substance that smelled like coffee but wasn’t coffee at all, a computer-generated coffee that tasted like coffee. The texture felt like glue. I put it close to the sunlight coming in through the window and a spark rose and the stain began to burn, which I squelched. The spot proved to stink, a burnt, pungent, rubbery odor, but it didn’t smell like shit was mixed up in this, except for the color.
The stain made me feel uneasy, it made me feel chased. I saw faces in there I thought I’d forgotten. My heart flipped like a shuffle of poker cards. I took out my cellphone and took shots of the stain. I put it on the tabletop, against the glass of the coffee table. I switched angles snapping shots and I documented it. I posted it live to watch on the stream of media, I wrote in the caption, The Stain. The next night I posted The Devil. In a few minutes someone commented, It looks like you. How so, I typed back in the chat.
You wrote them.
Are you kidding me??! I replied.
Only the devil can write his own name…
Lol!
Out of the stain…
I shut the computer. From the closet I grabbed the soap and brush. In the bathroom I caught a glimpse of my face, it was stained brown. I don’t believe it, I was made to choose between my face or my shirt. I scrubbed the shirt pocket like it was an old shoe. It didn’t look like it was coming off, and I poured bleach. I sprayed a bottle called Sunshine On The Other Side, the smell of fresh grass drifted out. I scrubbed the stain until the faces were gone, until it was white again.
Some days later the bankers began to call. For weeks they’d been calling, right up to the moment in the pantry I spilled the coffee on Van Heusen. They were famed for having no telephone manners, midnight or dawn didn’t matter to them, and it wasn’t a rumor that they might be from the telephone company. The businesses had conjoined, bankers and telephone operators became one big family. Sometimes the telephones didn’t work and they were on the road. When I didn’t pick up their calls they popped out in the alleyways and stood beside lampposts with their cigarettes glowing red. They attacked people with briefcases, and I had to take another route home. My domicile was linked to a main thoroughfare and three side streets. I bribed the security to let me in through a back gate for workers. But one night the bankers found me.
They caught me just as I was closing the gate. They jammed a briefcase in. They dragged me out into the alleyway and they pushed me to the ground and stepped on my shirt. I had to say, What do you want? You can do anything to me but don’t dirty my shirt. The shirt was a prize. That was what they went for, what they ruined first on a man. It was equivalent to skin, and the more naked one was, the dirtier a shirt, the larger their reward.
Soon they were ripping Van Heusen off. His buttons popped out. I sewed them back weeks later. The bankers wanted me naked. Only then would they be satisfied. The world loved to laugh at naked men and I was a puny fifty kilograms. One of them held Van Heusen by the neck. He had a red spray can. He was going to disfigure Van Heusen forever. But I saw it then. Van Heusen grabbed the man’s arm and twisted it. The man dropped the spray can, picked up his briefcase and ran. Van Heusen didn’t have enough. He was angry at the stain. He wrapped his arms around the banker’s neck and tightened his cuffs.
The banker looked like he wasn’t breathing. No silences in between, no tension in the nose. His friends had dumped him. He was a dead banker. I picked up Van Heusen and ran. When I looked back down the alleyway, the banker was still on the ground. Everyone would think I was the killer. Now I was done, I was wanted. In one night I’d become the man with the killer shirt.
We ran home and shut the door. We did not come out for days and together we began to work. We collaborated on the documents, on the harmony between skin and fabric. We went to work and hid under plain sight. I hardly sweated. We bribed the guard, you saw nothing, you heard nothing. The death of a banker was news, anytime it’d come now. Man tugged dead by a shirt in an alleyway. Size S Van Heuten fibers found on deceased’s neck. Any links to the case, call us.
Day after day we waited. We lived as though every day was a final one. I opened my phonebook and called everyone I knew. I could not believe that all the numbers had been disconnected. They ran into someone else’s ears, wrong number, no such person, call again and I will block you. Go see a doctor. I didn’t stop dialing. It couldn’t be that every one was no longer in use. The numbers popped up out of the cellphone and resisted my eyes. Frustrated, I went out.
I crashed out of the back of bars vomiting. Van Heusen said, You stank. His sleeves never stopped smirking. Night after night he glowed in the pink and green neon lights, buttoned low, exposing my chest. In the mornings we went to work. The sparrows went with us in the dusky gray. Van Heusen knew how to keep himself clean, I did not recall laboring for him. He was ironed and washed, fresh as mint and praised. Everything seemed fine, just that we jumped a little each time the cellphone rang. The digits on the screen saw my guilt.
The warrant never came nor did the TV say a thing and gradually we fell into a routine. Iron and wash, blow-dry and steam, I read the laundry symbols and followed the instructions. I closed the buttons before wash, washed with similar colors. There was something to celebrate each day for our freedom, after all Van Heusen deserved the best. I remember when he was a new shirt. The day I found him in the department store, sparkling under the plastic wrap, snug and clipped to the cardboard, smelling fresh. I remember running my fingers over his shirt front, smooth as a tabletop. I remember his first wear and wash. He was from S factory.
We went to cafes. I ate my cake while I fed him with a book titled Textiles at Work: Introduction to Fabric, Function and Form. I studied the picture of a chain of molecules, a hexagon of balls joined by ester linkages. At night we chatted about their polar regions and hydrogen bonding. Van Heusen was getting to know himself better, learning his ancestry. We’d exhausted all our arguments about the banker, and were tired of talking about him. I told him he didn’t do a clean job and he said I was a liar. He insisted I was the killer. The one who tugged the sleeves and strangled the banker. In the humidity of that damp night we’d never know who did it. Everyone would rather believe in a shirt than me.
Van Heusen grew brighter, he had a sheen on him. He sat like blue cream against my skin, he was getting smarter. He didn’t let himself get too heavy that I couldn’t smile when a camera whipped out of somewhere and someone took a snapshot. No one knew about the banker, no one saw the backscatter flashing off the collar in the picture. I don’t know what happened to the sum I owed the bankers, my cellphone stopped ringing. It was like money that never existed in the first place, someone counted twice the sum of the same pile. The bankers could be spooked, they knew what Van Heusen would do if he ever saw them again. The dead banker’s face was twisted. It was money green, olive gray, unsightly and wretched.
At home, I was being watched. I was the last witness. Out of the corner of my eye I’d see Van Heusen, his sleeve along the door jamb, his yoke and collar poking out. Or he’d peep out from the closet through the shifty darkness. I could not go to the toilet without seeing his shadow trailing behind me, the hem of the shirttail curving like a sand dune. Van Heusen was in the mirror, watching me brush my teeth.
I couldn’t go out. I put on a jersey for a stroll but bad weather suddenly erupted. Thunder cracked the sky and lightning flashed. Raindrops as large as marbles splattered on the ground. When the weather cleared I put on a T-shirt and a weird odor wafted up to my nose. What a foul smelling T-shirt! These bizarre incidents happened over and over: pee got all over my tank top, spraying out of the toilet, the V-necks shrank, or they were torn. I could not go to the convenience store. I was the prisoner of my shirt.
I went around in dirty clothes as the laundry piled up, shirts lying on the furniture, waiting for Van Heusen’s next command. My desk was cluttered with coffee cups, fruit peels, hazelnut shells, receipts, French curve rulers, pattern papers, fabric sample books, pincushions, Tailor’s chalk, thread clipper, seam ripper, tracing wheel, awl, a sewing machine. I was trying to make my own shirt. I thought that was the only way to get rid of Van Heusen. I was naive. I’d not even drafted the pattern pieces. A bolt of fabric lay under the desk. I’d chosen ultra-lightweight cotton seersucker. No stripes or grid checks, just plain baby blue.
Sometimes Van Heusen let me look at him. He laid passive on the couch and I could examine his seams and lock stitches. My sewing was far from perfect! The machine disobeyed me when I practiced, the cloth ran backwards. The needle broke, the presser foot jammed. Van Heusen was mocking me. He showed me what he was made of. He laid down like a regular shirt, a reminder that no other could replace him in the universe. I became discouraged. His perfection was undeniable.
In my despondency being watched all day and night, I drank. I passed the sake cup hand to hand, filled it to the brim. I splashed all over Van Heusen but I didn’t care. I picked up my phone book, a slim passport size with gilt edges and a frayed ribbon. Once more I dialed but was met with resistance, the cold electronic beats deafening in my ears. We’re sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service. We’re sorry…
But at seven forty five a woman picked up. She said hello. I sat up. For the first time someone answered, it was a breakthrough. I looked at the name and number I’d dialed and it said Minnie. Who was that? The number wasn’t dated, and Minnie didn’t have a last name. I dug into my memory and searched for a face, but I couldn’t find one. She was a name lost in a phonebook kept in the drawer for a long time. Hello, I said timidly. At first, silences hung like bubbles between the lines. Then I heard myself talking, questioning, speaking into the phone. In the end I couldn’t recall what I said. All I heard was my own voice.
The next day I was thirsty. On the bedside table was a glass of water. I drank it all. Through the back of the glass I saw Van Heusen hanging on the closet doorknob. I set down the cup and I checked the shirt pocket. Out of a corner rose the edges of a note. It said, “The Lily Restaurant, eight-thirty tonight, Minnie.” I asked Van Heusen, Are you kidding with me? The shirt seemed so quiet all of a sudden, like he had a defect. I got really scared of the cellphone. It looked like a cruel instrument that made me speak, and now this note was here. I had no memory of when it was written, but it was definitely my handwriting. And who was Minnie? What did I tell her?
For what it was worth I checked out The Lily Restaurant. It was a low building at the corner of a street. The surroundings looked sooty, cars moving lazily on the street. They did not blow their horns when I took my time to cross. Their headlights shone on Van Heusen. He was looking dapper tonight. The sake stain had vanished. I had to go see Minnie. I had to get to the bottom of this.
Minnie looked stiff. She was tucked in the corner of a booth, leaning against the brown wainscot, head lowered in a book. She said, You’re early. Two coffee cups arrived. The place was cold as ice, they’d got the air-conditioning overrunning. Minnie was small-built, athletic, jet black hair the length to her ears, two stud earrings in her lobes. She was dressed in sportswear, the Adidas Firebird tracksuit, navy blue. Her eyes were heavily lined, lashes so thick they looked like fuzzy caterpillars. I half-wondered if she could see. Finally, I asked her, Are you the seamstress of my shirt? That didn’t explain how I got her number, but it was the only thing I could ask.
Her face froze into a mask, like a mannequin’s, but soon flushed at the cheeks. She cast a sharp glance at Van Heusen, at the pocket, then me, and she said, Are we going to continue talking about that? I’ve heard you talked about it a million times on the phone last night. I already told you I’m not the seamstress of any shirt, or from the S factory, I don’t know what you want from me. We’ve decided, we’ve agreed upon our clothes as a meeting signal, that I’m Minnie.
She stared at the air, frustrated. She looked like someone I knew in high school, this rough chick I couldn’t speak to. But the one in high school must have gotten old, she wouldn’t look like Minnie. I couldn’t figure out who Minnie was. She took the note I laid on the table, folded it and slipped it into the side pocket of her track suit top like it was a precious check. She finished her coffee, the lipstick smeared on it a light, frosty pink. Then she got up without a word and as though I’d never existed she went out of The Lily Restaurant.
I chased, wanting her to tell me what was going on. Van Heusen had to be at the bottom of it. Why was he alive, what was he doing to my life? Minnie walked for a few blocks then she started running, a light jog at first but going faster. How could she leave me in this enigma, running away in her track suit? Had she planned this? She ran like she was in a marathon and I could barely keep up. The sake had made me weak. I lagged behind her, pausing to gulp air. Her receding back turned a corner and went into a building.
It turned out to be the lobby of a three-star hotel. I was almost at the elevator when a receptionist stopped me. Hurriedly I gave him my credit card, signed a form, and he handed me a key. Minnie was long gone by then. I had no clue where she was. But when I got to room 707, she was lying on the bed. Composed, her face showing no sign that she’d just ran ten miles around the blocks, no sweat. We wasted no time tearing each other’s clothes off. I bit on her skin and I got on top of her. I wanted to get inside of her. At the back of my mind I believed she knew a lot more about Van Heusen than she was telling me. He was cooperative, he gave in to her fingers unbuttoning him, slipped off my shoulders without resistance.
Yet I put it back on. I wore it unbuttoned and I became lost as to who was the shirt or who was me. Was the shirt touching Minnie, or was it me? My hands were moving. They roamed all over Minnie’s flesh. I thought about where she was from. I thought about her waxy skin, I thought about another Minnie waiting for me inside of her. In a deep dark cave, standing against a pink wall of flesh. Minnie, I said, Come out. She said she couldn’t because she was naked, and I told her the world didn’t mind. The world don’t give a shit. Come out, I said, I’ll give you clothes to wear.
All night long I searched for Minnie. She kept moving away. Van Heusen got interested, he was moving in. His cuffs were wet, his sleeves trailing her body. His collar kissed her clavicles. I did not know whose skin I was in, in the shirt’s or my own. Sometimes they felt alike, skin was fabric, then they’d part ways, polyester to polyester and skin to skin. At some point my skin vanished. The shirt and the man became the same thing. They came from the same place. I was Van Heusen, I was his fibers and molecules.
I felt my skin again when I woke up. The room was a dusky dawn and I remembered this hotel. My hand was on a mound and I soon saw that it was a breast. The texture felt different from last night’s. Harder, waxier. I was wearing Minnie’s track suit, my arm protruding out of sleeves too short for me. The bands on the leg cuffs were torn around my calves, seams bursting. I looked like I’d exploded out of the track suit, grown taller and bigger overnight.
*
Minnie was wearing Van Heusen. The plackets ran alongside her breasts down to the shirttails. I got up and tried to take Van Heusen off her, and I don’t know if it was me, my urgency to get it off her that I’d yanked too hard and with the shirt came Minnie’s arm. I sniffed sparks and burnt electric fuse, but I was expecting the smell of blood like a shark. Eventually I recognized what Minnie was. She was a sex doll.
I never knew that! As far as I could tell she was human last night, though a little stiff and waxy. There was love. Fervor, search, desire, my heart I gave Minnie. How could I have felt for Minnie what I did if she were a body of plastic and wires? Her flesh had been made of rubber after all, like my shirt and my skin. She did not have any life in her, her circuits were shot through, nothing was working. She was dead with the story of Van Heusen dead with her, her jaw stiff, hung open, the fuzzy caterpillars on her eyes not moving.
Something had gone terribly wrong with me.
I exchanged clothes with her. I put the track suit back on her and I wore Van Heusen. He said what I thought I heard, Good to be back on you. Did you put me up to this, I asked him, but he said he did not know how to use the cellphone. I scooped Minnie up, her broken arm swinging in the sleeve of the track suit, her head cradled in my elbow. I opened the door and left the room. I’d find a place for her. In a dumpster off the alleyways, there would be her grave.
Everyone stared at me. A man in a Van Heusen shirt and a woman, who looked like a human being to them, in my arms. The receptionist didn’t stop me now. The room was paid. It was early morning. Some kids were going to school, the bags heavy on their backs. People were going to work, their shoes made of leather like mine. Everyone stopped and stared at us. They parted ways to let me through, watching Minnie. They looked at me like a madman, as someone who’d killed Minnie but I didn’t stop walking. I turned into an alleyway and disappeared out of their sight with Minnie in my arms.
Meiko Ko’s works have been published by Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Literary Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Crab Orchard Review, failbetter, Juked, The Hong Kong Review, ANMLY, The Offing, the Longleaf Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Best Small Fictions 2023 Anthology, Atticus Review, Nat.Brut, Sleepingfish, Southampton Review, Inscape, A Velvet Giant, Barrelhouse, among other places. She is a Pushcart and Best Small Fictions nominee, finalist for the 2020 Puerto del Sol prose contest, and has been longlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize.