WHAT ARE YOU DOING

THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?

Last September, at the end of his first baking-hot summer at Manzanar, Kate had told David that someone in the terminal ward was asking for him.

  He hated going into the med center, white and sterile with its ever-present smell of alcohol, let alone the terminal ward, which had already overflowed into nearby deserted barracks as the country asserted that real Americans had priority over death beds as well as real jobs and shipped any dying Buddhaheads to Manzanar.

  He crept past the rows of barely breathing skeletons until he got to the number Kate gave him.

  The skeleton squeezed opened its eyes and peered at him.

  "Hey, David," the old woman said, "Remember me?"

  David cursed Kate for not telling him who this was.

  "Long time, huh?"  she smiled at him like it hurt.

  But as David stood in the middle of the terminal ward, steeped in the smell of alcohol and disinfectant, staring at the frail old woman who looked no different than the other dozens of emaciated faces - sheets up to their chins, tubes and wires poking out of every orifice, doped outa their minds and waiting to die - he did not have a clue.

  Smiling blankly, his eyes were probably doing pinwheels as he zipped through the ol' long-dormant brain cells, trying to drag out a long-forgotten name to put with this face he just did not recognize, at all.

  Someone's mom?  A young Nisei about his Auntie June's age, a friend's mom, friend of his folks, family? Auntie?

  Nothing more embarrassing than not recognizing an auntie.

  "Let me see your hair," she twirled her finger weakly.

  He turned around slowly, futilely trying to connect the old face with its younger version.

  "Wow, did you keep it this long all this time?"

  All this time?  His hair hadn't been this long since college.  Only in college.  College...

  "No, sometimes it was short, sometimes long, depending,"  he rambled, surprised she couldn't see the smoke coming out his ears.

  Finally he admitted, "I'm sorry. I don't remember your name."

  "C'mon, David, don't disappoint me."

  Oh great, make him feel even worse.  "Give me a clue."

  "Okay...We met at Long Beach State in the early seventies," she began slowly,  "in Jim Matsuoka's Asian American studies class.  We hung out between classes, at Movement dances.  We run into each other about once a decade, at East West Players, the Venice carnival, Kenny's Cafe."

  "Christine Okada," he tried not to let the disbelief show on his face.

  But she probably knew.

  She always seemed to know what he was thinking.

  From the first time he saw her, the grad student active in the Asian American Movement at Long Beach State, she had that worldly, sophisticated, knowing quality that intimidated the hell out of him, especially when he was a freshman in his second semester of college, who had no idea of the Movement and all the protests that she had not only attended but organized, who knew nothing about who he was and where he stood in the world, and was still a virgin to boot.

  She was beautiful, radical.  Speaking gently in angry words, the Angela Davis of the Asian American Movement.

  On a first-name basis with the Movement leaders.

  "Warren's coming down from UCLA," she'd announce as she came into class late and out of breath.  "We're going up to S.F. State and give S.I. some shit, that fucking banana."

  "Joanne split off from Chris and she's going solo as Nobuko," she'd tell the teacher after class.

  "Bruce's got a new article in Gidra," she'd inform the class despite the fact that none of the stupid freshmen cared.

  "Tatsukawa's got a new short film," she'd say as they sat on the grass between the psych and sosh quads, when he dared speak to her and, generous and gracious as she was, she'd ask him where his next class was and walk with him.

  They had a free period between classes and he'd wait for her on the grass between liberal arts buildings up near the library. He'd see her walking toward him, firm breasts jutting through a tie-dyed halter top, tight ass squeezed into faded Levi's held together with a crazy quilt of patches, Japanese silk headband, and he couldn't believe she was coming to see him. She was older, unattainable.  She had her degree.

  As unlikely as it seemed, when he got back to school in the fall of 1972, it was Christine that he told about losing his virginity.

  In an Asian American psych/sosh class, assigned to pair off and tell each other a significant event in their life, David and Christine, who had been working together on the campaign to prevent Nixon's re-election and on Proposition 19 to decriminalize marijuana, just huddled up and continued their normal wide-ranging conversation.  The others, mere freshman and superficial sophomores, finished in minutes, while David and Christine discussed sex, which David was grateful to have actually experienced with another person by then.

  "She's hakujin?"

  "Yeah, from Vegas."

  "Ooh, sophisticated."

  "No, the opposite.  She was a virgin."

  "And you told her you were a virgin, too?"

  "Yeah."

  "Congratulations, you're a man for telling her."

  "Well, not at first.  But I was having trouble..."

  "Getting it up? Ooh, that coulda been traumatic."

  "Yeah, she coulda killed me, but she was really calm and patient, you know?  It seemed like it took forever, but I guess not 'cause we had this record on and we took almost all of side one.  Is that good?"

  "She sounds like a terrific girl."

  "She is, but it's over for now."

  "Because you're down here?"

  "Yeah, we didn't have that much in common.  Plus I was beginning to feel like a traitor."

  "To your race?"

  "Yeah."

  "Did I mention that my first was hakujin?"

  "Really? You?"

  "You see, it's more about societal standards of beauty affecting perception and self-esteem, the assignation and interrelation of power based on perception, sexual mobility of white males and Asian females based on those standards."

  "Oh yeah."  David nodded, feigning understanding.

  "So you really lucked out finding this white female who was unprejudiced enough to look beyond the cultural taboos against Asian men with white women, which is what this U.S. intervention into the civil war in Vietnam is really about."

  "So you think I should call her?"

  "No, just don't treat her like a trophy.  My first was a talker.  I was the talk of the locker room after that."  She grabbed David by the back of the neck and pulled him closer.  "If you ever do that to a woman, I'll kill you."

  "I wasn't doing that." he tried not to whine.

  "No, no this was okay.  I'm talking about speaking disrespectfully of a woman.  Don't do that," her voice was stern but her eyes were pleading.  "Okay?"

  He nodded quickly. "Okay."

  "Thanks," she kissed him lightly on the cheek, "and congratulations."

  They hugged, aware that the other members of the class, long since finished and bored, were all watching them.

  "So how did you all do?"  Professor Hank asked eagerly.

  Shrugs all around.  The usual, disappointing reaction from the vanguard of the apathetic '70's.

  "Well," Christine's deep, mature, real woman's voice filled the classroom, "David and I had a great time." She smiled.  "We talked about our sex lives."

  The children ooohed and whooped and did everything but go, "Ah-mmmmm, shame-shame."  David sat casually next to Christine and did his best to imitate her knowing smile.

  He felt like he had been knighted.

  Now, the dying queen, despite her frail condition, once again drew the knight to her, as tightly  as she was able.  David sat awkwardly on the bed next to her, bent over her sunken torso.  He could feel the bones in her ribs and chest.

  "So," David looked at the emaciated face that bore a skeletal resemblance to his ideal woman in college, "what brings you here?"

  "Well, my excuse is, as you can see, I'm dying."

  "Of what?" he asked, barely getting the words out.

  "Emphysema," she said in a whisper.  "The damn Newports.  Plus I got a touch o' liver failure and sarcoma."  She threw her unplugged hand up.  "If it ain't one thing, it's another."

  "God, I'm sorry."

  "I'm not,"  Christine said, her voice weak but determined.

  "It's a good time to leave this planet to its own destiny.  I'm tired of fighting it," then she reached for her oxygen mask and seemed to sink down into the surface of the bed.  "When I'm rested, I can actually carry on a conversation for minutes at a time."

  From that point on, David tried to be there for every one of Christine's few minutes.

  He looked in on her after breakfast, before he started scrubbing.

  Then after his shower, before he picked up Mary.

  He sat with her until dinner, usually just watching her sleep.

  Waiting for her eyes to flicker open and that painful smile that meant she still recognized him.

  A few minutes a day of conversation

  Every time he brought her another fry bread, it meant that Christine, his old long-lost friend from college, had survived another month.