This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Ishaan Barrett
1 mile. The treadmill was this old rickety thing that screamed—high-pitched but still coarse—as it whirred beneath me. My father stood behind me, arms-crossed.
2 miles. We had this beautiful marble kitchen island, the kind you see in Architectural Digest videos. I think about that marble kitchen island a lot—sometimes about playing tag around it with playdate-kids. But in one memory, my father is chasing me around that island, in the same way those kids did—clutching at the sides of the countertop, shimmying, anticipating the other’s movement—but unlike those kids, he is holding a brown belt in his hand. Where did this belt come from? This densely-creased, strangely-limp belt? He never wore it, that’s for sure.
3 miles. Another marble kitchen island memory: as a family activity, we would make a stir fry of hot peppers, bean curd, and pork. It was the only time I was allowed to hold a knife. Baba really likes hot peppers, especially the long green kind. He would say to us, “Oh wow, these peppers are really very spicy. Be careful, make sure to avoid them.” Then, he would eat every last pepper. He still does this—don’t eat the spicy, not for women and children, only big strong baba.
4 miles. These days though, baba gets horrendous diarrhea if he eats too many peppers, so my mother commands him to leave them. I went to visit not long ago and during dinner, my mother kept swatting at his hand, ever inching towards a pepper. “Just eat the bean curd and tofu!” Afterwards, my mother left to pee. We looked to the plate of leftover peppers resting on the marble. He looked at me and I at him and slowly he shoveled the peppers into his mouth, picking up speed until he was red and sweating. I looked at him, hunched over, chewing furiously, eyes fixed on the closed bathroom door. He closed his eyes to convey his pepper-induced orgasm. I looked away. The toilet flushed. He froze and swallowed quickly, big-eyed, and was still scraping the remaining peppers into the trash, when my mother came out, squinting at the two of us.
“Did he eat the peppers?” my mother asked, looking at me, but she was already elbow-deep in the trash and wrestling with baba.
Big explosive farts later that night and my mother knocking on the door, yelling “You good?”
Baba yelling back, “Leave me alone!” BRRRAP! POW! POW! Baba always had the most phenomenal poops, like a zipper being zipped, like fireworks.
5 miles. Fuck you, I’ll run forever.
6 miles. I cannot remember why he chased me around that marble kitchen island, why he was so adamant about this violence. Did I misbehave at dinner? Was I very mean to my mother? And where was my mother? If I know anything about her, that incurable insomniac, she was not asleep. So what was she up to?
7 miles. Eventually, we got out of that this-way and that-way twist. I bolted into the living room—a foolish mistake. We did that little back-alley shuffle and then the belt lunged, shattering the glass behind me. Again, and this time, I ducked too-slow and the buckle clipped my cheekbone. I could not see him, not in this heavy darkness with only the microwave clock and the blinking red from the DVD player, so the next lunge really got me, belt wrapping around my abdomen like a lasso, a silent pause until the buckle caught my tummy.
8 miles. When the belt untangled, he made to hit me again, wrapping the belt around his hands to shorten its length. I think about this movement a lot, that deliberate redoubling of the belt, the calmness with which he did it. “Baba, baba, stop!” I yelled, cowering face down on the couch with my hands around my skull, but there was the belt again.
9 miles. There was nothing left to do but lie. “You got my eye! ” I yelled, clutching my face. At this, he dropped the belt, tearing away my hands to examine my eyes. For the first time that night, I could see his face clearly and it was red with fear.
10 miles. I could see only the STOP button—ugly and red and swollen.
11 miles. Looking up at his face, I thought about killing him. I really did. I imagined him on the floor with a big hole in his chest. Another memory: holding a knife, but this time in the dark, and shivering.
12 miles. My eyes, that’s what he cared about. So now, the treadmill.
13 miles. I called him recently, standing on the grass in Bryant Park, looking at the backside of the library. “When will you be back in New York? I miss you.”
14 miles. These days, I love him so much. I want to hold him all the time. I want to hold him and I want him to cry.
15 miles. My vision started to blur. I looked back and looked back. The treadmill felt impossibly far beneath me, low, dark, regular, forever.
16 miles. “Soon” he said. “Will you get WeChat so we can have a family group chat? I’ve been telling you.”
17 miles.
18 miles. I lost him in the dark. Where did he go? Was he still there?
“Baba?” I asked, speaking for the first time. And then I faltered. My knee twisted in some awful way and I fell back, flailing, legs kicking. As my head hit the ground, dull and soundless, I thought not of the pain, but of whether I could have kept going.
Afterwards, I lay there for a while, stinging, listening to the treadmill—still on—and his steady footsteps, walking away.
A rustling. Had mother been hiding at the foot of the stairs this whole time? Run away, run away, the birds sang. Leave before the sky can blue.
But where was baba? Where did he go?
Renny Gong is a senior at Columbia College. He loves to take things off the street.