Self-Portrait with Ghost

by Meng Jin

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

“A knockout short story collection...Each one of these 10 dizzyingly immersive stories offers up a heady and visceral portrait of what ails us, from isolation and self-doubt, to unrequited love and regret over what might have been, to what it means to be (and to be considered) an American." -- San Francisco Chronicle

Meng Jin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories.

Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming-of-age and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships and surprising moments of connection. Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly endless access to knowledge, and little actual power.

Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who “reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it” (Paris Review).

Release date: July 5, 2022

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 224

Sample

Phillip Is Dead

Poor man. I got the news as I was coming aboveground. “Phillip is dead,” the subject line said. In the body of the email were details of the memorial.

I was shocked. Not so much because Phillip was dead but because I had not thought of him in years. “Phillip is dancing,” the email might have said, or “Phillip is wearing a yellow hat.” It would have been news as much to me.

Well, these words were different. Phillip had been as good as dead to me, for no pernicious reason. Just—irrelevance. Now he’d been resurrected and killed, in one swift blow.

 

I went home and poured a shot of scotch. I waited for my lover to come. I was in love, oh yes. Not the rapturous kind that turns and thins your sleep, but a satisfying, contented love. I woke in the mornings well-rested and warm, like a loaf of risen bread. I was still learning how to manage myself in this state. For much of my adult life, I had been sustained by a vision of doomed loneliness, a tragic fate I could run away from and toward, simultaneously. Movement was something, drive was something. But the engine I’d relied on—my lover was rendering it false.

He walked in the door. I kissed him on the mouth. It was sour from the long day, and so was mine.

“You’ve ruined me,” I said.

He laughed; I said it all the time. “What did I do now?”

“You’ve made me so happy, I don’t feel the need to prove anything.”

“Is it such a bad thing?” he said. He tipped the drink down my throat.

I swallowed. “Not bad, no, I don’t think.”

 

Which is to say I was glad it was Phillip who was dead and not me. Oh, I felt a little sorry for him, sure. But mostly I felt like gloating. “How lucky I am, I’m still alive!” If Phillip were still alive, I thought, he wouldn’t begrudge me this feeling. He had believed in pursuing victory with ruthless glee. He had fancied himself a Nietzschean. All this came rushing back to me, all the dumb things he’d said and believed. Once, I’d almost forgotten, he had taken credit for me:

“I made you,” he’d said. Winking, but I could see he wanted to be serious. He cocked his head as if to ask, “Don’t you think?”

I’d humored him. “Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

 

My main quarrel with Phillip had been regarding the nature of humanity. To put it simply, I’d believed in goodness, and he in the opposite. Not exactly in evil—even Phillip was not so simple—but that morality, and its various manifestations, was a scam. It had been revealed to Phillip during an acid trip that the true nature of things lay in their dying. In the trees and in the dirt, in the flesh on his own hands, Phillip saw cells losing form and decaying, maggots and worms nibbling at the edges of things and bursting from their cores. He could not unsee this vision. Even when he was stone-cold sober, it would ambush him. Once, when we were fucking, he’d looked into my face as he was coming and saw my eyes pop out, dangling from their sockets, and the edges of my mouth rotting. Phillip always kept his eyes wide open while fucking.

Phillip’s visions played in my head like a warning reel. For years, I feared altering my sight. I accepted the tab on my tongue only much later, when I was altered already, suffering from boredom and invincibility. I braced for death. But I saw forms shimmering beyond their boundaries, every rock and plant and breath of wind vibrating with life. Colors and shapes extended their hands to make themselves known to me. Hello, I am blue. Hello, I am a line.

“Ew,” Phillip would have said. “Your feelings,” he had said often, with disdain, of my need for beauty. He had called it my great weakness. “Your moral failing,” he’d said, “as a person and as an artist.”

We were trying to be artists. We were very young and foolish. All of us were, but Phillip and I were the worst. We lived in the same two-story house in the southwest quadrant of the city, with the rest of the young Americans. Phillip was rich, and I was too, though once I had been poor. Young, American, idealistic, we had come to the island to take classes at the national university, which in every department culminated in theoretical forms of utopianism, theories the nation believed it was realizing in practice. Really we were enacting a shared adventure of poverty, living as the locals lived, but with our reserves of cash and our promised escape. At the end of term, our special visas would expire, and a plane would shuttle us back to America. The certainty of our departure transformed what should have been tedious into experiences of meaning: the thick heat, the crumbling infrastructure, the food and power shortages.

I had opted out of the special classes in English created for the Americans. Instead I populated my schedule with punishing courses in which I was the only foreigner. Because I’d been poor, and because I had not always been American, I’d believed I was there for different reasons than the rest.

To my disappointment I was not the only American in Theory and Practice of Art. I walked into the classroom and saw Phillip slumped in the back row. I had avoided him in the house and I avoided him here, easily: boys like Phillip never noticed me. I took pride in disappearing. My skin had darkened under the island sun, and a childhood of foreignness had taught me how to become invisible, picking up ways of movement and speech unfamiliar to me. I wore the local mannerisms so successfully that one day, on a teaching rampage, the professor called on me.

“What does Nietzsche say is the difference between music and other forms of art!” he bellowed.

“That music is the direct expression of primordial truth, a rip in the fabric of appearances,” I answered. I spoke slowly and deliberately. “Other art forms are merely representations of things as they are.”

The professor folded his arms and squinted at me.

“You’re a foreign student,” he said.

I nodded. Heads in the room craned to take a better look at me.

“Where are you from?”

“The United States.”

“You look Chinese! Korean? Japanese!”

“I was born in China.”

He nodded with satisfaction: “Your accent is Chinese!”

“No, it is gringo.”

“Sounds Chinese to me!” he said. He turned to another student. “Arnaldo! Is China correct, is primordial truth whatseparates Nietzsche’s music from other forms of art? Explain how that applies to Tintoretto’s Ascension of Christ!”

That day after class Phillip ran after me.

“Hey, hey!” he shouted. Phillip was unabashedly American, yellow-haired and pinking in the sun, with a loping gait that was confident and neurotic at once. “You! Wait!”

Finally he caught up to me. “So you get that class?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he fell into step beside me, speaking in loud English of his failures of comprehension at the university and generally, “in this fucking place.” He was reading the texts in English and that was hard enough. He had signed up for the class thinking it was an art class, thinking we’d actually get to practice art, that was what the course name said, right? Because, he said with aplomb, quite literally puffing out his chest, “I’m an artist!”

I must have given something away then. He stopped talking and looked at me. “What, are you an artist too?” He paused, with apprehension or with hope. “It’s okay if you aren’t.”

“Tell me about your art,” I said instead.

“Tell me about your art,” he shot back. I sniffed and kept walking. Phillip said, “You think I didn’t notice you, and you’re all tense with it, aren’t you? I’m not stupid, I’ve seen you at dinner. I thought you were probably boring, I thought you were a little nerd. I was wrong, okay? I was wrong!”

Phillip waited for me to speak.

“Sometimes I take photographs,” I offered.

“Hmm!” He looked me up and down. “Where’s your camera?”

I shrugged with haughty secrecy.

“I mostly paint,” Phillip said. “I’m a painter! I’ll show you my paintings when we get back to the house!”

His paintings were of rot. Interested in expression, but not in beauty or technique, though they were recognizable as of a piece, the palette in blues and browns with splashes of dull green and a violent, pukey yellow. The most accomplished depicted a tree growing up and down, like a rotated Rorschach, with the branches decaying and the roots flowering, the ugliest flowers one had ever seen. “Are these meant to be ugly?” I said. “Or are you just bad?”

He shrugged. “This is how I paint.” With total candor he spoke of his hallucinations: he was trying to re-create the landscape of his other consciousness. Was the concept facile or elegant, obvious or direct? Was I impressed or embarrassed for him? I didn’t know, perhaps because in spite of myself I found him handsome and sure, made in the colors and dimensions I was trained to recognize as handsome and sure: white, tall, and boyishly grinning, looking right through me.

“Derivative,” I said of his paintings. “Worst of all, they repulse the eye. I look at these and see ‘I am a tortured artist,’ and that’s it. Life has beauty too, you know, and joy.”

“Joy?” Phillip made a face of exaggerated disgust. “There is only power.

“Now show me your photographs,” he demanded.

“No.”

From then on we spent much of our time together. We disagreed about everything and Phillip liked this, liked arguing. Always I won. Because I was rigorous, relentless; I wouldn’t drop it until I won. I told myself that his arguments disgusted me, that they, like Phillip, were depraved and inhumane. I construed him as an intellectual charity case, a misguided white boy I might fix or, if he was truly as hopeless as he seemed, decommission—at least declaw. But the more I went at him, the stronger he got. He liked getting flayed. He got off on the precision of my insults. When he lost, he gave exhilarated concessions, eyes wild with contempt and satisfaction, as if he had finally gained entrance into a truth of himself he knew deep down but hadn’t until then had the evidence to prove.

 

It was okay that Phillip was dead, I thought at the memorial. Not many would miss him. I looked into the faces of the mourners and saw that I was right. To be sure, there was plenty of shock, among the young people especially, who stood slack-jawed and gaping in the unexpected face of mortality. But peel back the veil of appropriate grief and what remained was mostly novelty. “Can you believe it?” “I can’t believe it!” “Phillip is dead!” “My god, he’s fucking dead!” Phillip could have gone to the moon.

The memorial was held in a cathedral, cavernous and rippled with mottled light, the kind of place I never would have guessed could exist in New York City. The location surprised me for other reasons too. Phillip had been a rabid atheist, and everything about him indicated that this position had been inherited. He’d described his mother as a bohemian occupying a shawl-draped house in Greenwich Village, the kind of mother he spoke to openly about girlfriends and drugs and sex. In the foremost pew, I saw the woman who must have been her, with papery white hands pressed in prayer and shoulders sunk in a posture of resignation. “Well, it’s happened,” her shoulders seemed to say.

Phillip had spoken of his mother often and with adulation. Of his father he’d said only that the man was a loser and he was dead. I’d pressed him for more. I’d liked that Phillip’s father was dead; it made him more interesting. With this mote of information, I fashioned Phillip into someone I could pity and possibly save. I wound myself into a ball of his repressed suffering. I had been a very sensitive person then, my skin a tight membrane stretched thinly over gallons of fluid feeling. With just a light prod I could shape this feeling into expression. Most of the time I was too much of a coward to shape it around myself. Phillip, to my surprise, welcomed my displaced empathy. “Oh really?” he said, tantalized. He listened with interest as I described my vision of him. A boy terrified of becoming his father, whose greatest fear was dying young and nobody like the man who’d made him, whose depth of fear and grief were buried so deep they manifested as dismissal.

To my creation he’d added his mother:

“He wants to replace his dad—he wants to become the man worthy of dear Mommy’s love! He fantasizes that he is what killed his dad.”

“So overtly Freudian?” I had criticized. “Is his mother beautiful? Does he wish to sleep with her too?”

He considered my question seriously.

“Yeah, my mom’s hot. Sure, I’d sleep with her, why not.”

Phillip, it’d seemed, was totally unafraid. He’d do anything for extremities of experience that might be used for his art. “My art,” he called it always, whereas I spoke of Art with a capital A, something I fancied belonged only to history, or to God, dead or not. Phillip would die young, I thought often; he would get himself killed. Often I worried he’d get me killed too.

The praying woman in the front pew turned back and stared accusingly. I clapped my hand over a gasp. She had Phillip’s face almost exactly. It was drawn and hollow, fleshless, with eyes as round as coins. Were they looking at me?

 

I never wanted to take a photograph of Phillip. For weeks after we met I took no photographs at all. Intentionally, I’d left my camera packed in the suitcase pushed underneath my bed. Since I’d decided to “become a photographer” a year or so before, I’d carried a camera on my person wherever I went, and the motion of reaching for it had grown so reflexive that I felt naked when it wasn’t there. This was the problem: I’d begun to use it as a shield. Whenever I found myself looking at something I didn’t understand, I whipped out my camera and placed the lens between it and me.

The year before I met Phillip, I had taken a class with a famous professor. Standing before a photograph of my mother, flanked by students awaiting her judgment, she had spoken gently of my precision and technique, and of my natural formal eye. “Like the camera is an extension of her,” quipped the professor’s favorite, a broody Mark rumored to be the child of a respected sculptor. “No,” he amended, “like she’s a photographing machine.” These words burrowed into me. In the photograph, which was black and white, my mother stood drying a bowl at the kitchen sink. The shape of my mother occupied the exact center of the kitchen window, a bright white rectangle lit by the setting sun, but this focal image was set off-center, perfect and askew. I looked away from the photograph, at window, wall, shadow, ceiling, and realized I was no longer capable of looking at something without seeing its potential for capture—imposing around it a frame. Where was my eye? I had come to the photograph with the simple but sincere desire to preserve my sight of beautiful fleeting things. Endlessly beautiful things, things I wanted to see forever, but which I’d have to give up: my mother would put down the dish, breaking her symmetry, would turn with irritation to me.

I kept the camera packed away. I challenged myself to really see what I was looking at before trying to fix it in image. Oh, I was uncomfortable all the time. In a foreign land, buried in first love, I heard constantly the whisper of “you must preserve this,” which was really the cry of “you are afraid.”

Finally Phillip was the one who unpacked the camera. “Well, well,” he said, “what do we have here?” With wicked delight he climbed on top of the dresser, holding it beyond my reach. It was a small digital machine that I liked for its sweet spot of size and power; I could carry it and remain unseen. Phillip scrolled through the images stored on the memory card, and I watched his eyes nervously, searching for the realization that I was a better artist than he, better now and more promising.

“You’ve taken no photographs since we got here! Zero! Nil! Zip!”

Reluctantly I began to explain my reasoning. As I spoke my reluctance melted into eagerness. I drank his reactions thirstily—was he quizzical, intrigued, impressed?

“Well?” I said. “What do you think?”

He said nothing. He turned the dial to capture and hopped off the dresser. Head tilted, face screwed up in concentration, he aimed my camera at me. I protested, hiding. I was naked, as was he. He was aiming the camera at my untamed pubes, my pimply breasts. He pushed me onto the bed, pinning me down with his knees, stuck his fingers into me, and shot. Oh, he got hard. He pried me apart. He pressed the lens against my opening and shot into me—I protesting, shouting about ruining the equipment, about the dismal lighting—and then he put himself into me, and as he fucked me he shot and said, “Art, my little prude! This is fucking art!”

After I swore not to delete anything, he returned the camera to me. I clicked through the shots. Phillip’s breath was hot on my shoulder; idly his hand tickled my clit. The hard flash, the chaotic framing, ...