Picture Us In The Light(88)
It takes them fifteen minutes to wipe all trace of me from their walls. The driver brings the car around again, and my mom goes to sit while I make a couple trips back and forth to carry everything. On the last one, I stop one of the girls working today. “Can I ask you to look something up?”
She smiles and leans a little closer. “Sure, what?”
“Mrs. Padilla said someone bought one of my pieces, and I was wondering if you could look up who. I’m just curious.”
“Sure.” She goes to open a cabinet and comes back with a ledger. “What was the name of the piece that sold?”
“It was called Ma at Home.”
“Do you know the date it was sold?”
“It was last month sometime.” It’s hard to believe it’s only been that long.
“And you’re Danny Cheng, right?”
I won’t pretend I’m not flattered that she knows that. “Yeah.”
“I like your work. It’s deceptive. When I first saw the installation I thought, Okay, so they’re tricked-out portraits, but they made me feel so weird I couldn’t stop looking at them. I couldn’t believe it when they told me you were eighteen.” She runs her finger through the notebook. “Okay, here we go. C. Ballard.”
I feel the little flare of shock pass over my face.
“Thank you,” I manage. “You weren’t here when he bought it, were you?”
“No, I was off last week.” She straightens and smiles at me again. “Hey, good luck with everything, Danny Cheng. I’m going to keep an eye out. I think the world will be seeing a lot more of you.”
I should’ve taken pictures of everything my dad had in that file. I don’t remember enough of it. But when we get home and my mom, exhausted, passes out on the pullout bed, I look up everything—everything—I can think that might have any connection at all.
C Ballard San Francisco. C Ballard assault. C Ballard Tseng Huabo. C Ballard Danny Cheng. Nothing, nothing—either too many results, or too few. I can imagine my dad tapping out these same internet trails on these same keys. C Ballard Neighborhood. I get desperate: C Ballard art.
And I can’t say what it is that makes me click on a link from a few months ago, an academic paper from Ecology: Age-related variation in reproductive output and success in Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis) breeding at low latitudes. The paper’s behind a paywall, but there’s a list of names that begins: C. Joy Ballard. Art Gomez.
C. Joy, huh.
Searching C. Joy Ballard and then just Joy Ballard hands me pages of meaningless results; it’s the same on Facebook, too much to wade through. I go back to the bird paper again. I am my father’s son; I know the last author listed on any academic paper (in this case: Jonathan Perez) is almost always the PI. I look up Perez lab and am rewarded: a sterile-looking UC Berkeley page with grad student mug shots. C. Joy is halfway down the page: Joy Ballard, a Kim Geefay Tu Rogel Fellow, is conducting research at the Tule Field Station in Modoc County, California. She’s Asian (didn’t Harry say Clay Ballard was talking about Chinese American daughters?) and something about her face—it looks familiar. I can feel the room around me dimming, and my eyes start to burn the way they do when I get too locked into something on my screen.
When I look up Joy Ballard on Facebook again I add Berkeley this time, and this time I find her. Most of her profile is private, but a few people have tagged her in pictures that’re public. I scroll through them. I feel overheated, even though I’m pretty sure it’s cold in here. The nagging idea coursing through my head seems on the one hand ludicrous, but then what about the past months hasn’t been?
The picture I think I was subconsciously looking for is posted by a person who must be her sister (Ruth Ballard; she’s Asian too, and looks nothing like Joy). It’s a small kid sitting on a counter, eating some kind of batter off a spoon: Joy, according to Ruth’s caption. She’s young, probably three and a half or so, with short-cropped hair and wearing nothing but polka-dot shorts and a huge smile. And because every face has its share of the generic you can see what you want to in anything, in any image, any situation. I know this. I have taken advantage of it my entire life to draw the things I have. But seeing her there something in me lights up all at once, something primal and electric, like bioluminescence—the plankton my dad took me to see once in Santa Cruz during red tide, that shock of water throwing off a glow where there should’ve been nothing but dark. And I can feel bright blazing lines slicing across all the vastness of the universe between me and her and I can feel how those lines sink coordinates into the gallery, our footsteps and fingerprints there crisscrossed over each other’s, the time that separated us distilling and flattening into a single heavy point. And I am certain—I am certain—that the person who bought my picture is the same person in that picture my grandfather drew in the letter home to my parents.
I get up and leave my room before I can talk myself out of it. The apartment is wavering around me like heat rising off asphalt. My mom is lying on the couch still, and when I come in she stirs and opens her eyes.
“Ma,” I say, my voice coming out shaky. “I need to ask you something.”
With visible effort, she hoists herself up. “What is it, Daniel? What’s wrong?”
“Who is Joy Ballard?”