Porcelain

“Beyond Right and Wrong” by Shanmukh Gollu

The man cannot complete his tax returns. In order to finish, he needs access to personal files on the IRS website, but the IRS recently initiated a new system that requires him to make an online account. In order to make an online account, he has to verify his identity using uploaded photos of his driver’s license. He must then take a selfie and send it to the IRS identity verification system, which will determine if the images match.

He’s spent the last hour trying to verify his identity, but each attempt fails. The website now says that in order to create his account, a representative from the IRS will contact him via video conference, during which the man must hold up to the screen two forms of identifying documents, such as a passport or state I.D., close enough to the camera so that the representative can verify that the man before the screen is indeed the man trying to file his taxes. The estimated wait time for this video conference is 1 hour and 38 minutes. Until then, he remains, in the eyes of the IRS, in a limbo state of existence, as unidentifiable as he is taxable.

It’s a beautiful day, sunny and warm for the first time in weeks, so the man says to hell with the government.

He takes a walk through the neighborhood, a nice neighborhood, quiet streets lined with three-story houses and hedges finely trimmed. Eventually the houses give way to businesses and the streets fill with afternoon traffic. The man walks by a shop that sells, according to gold lettering on the window, more than one hundred varieties of tea, a number that piques his interest. It’s a small shop, just one narrow aisle with shelves on either side stocked to the ceiling with glass jars containing the various kinds of tea.

To his dismay, he’s the only customer in the store. A wiry-haired woman eyes him from behind the counter. He can’t tell if it’s a suspicious kind of stare or if she’s shocked to have a customer. He smiles her way. She doesn’t smile back. The man is someone who considers thoroughly the way carries himself — a consideration that has less to do with pride and more with stubbornness. The man is gay, but he doesn’t want to be easily identified as gay. He isn’t one of those preach-the-gay-away Bible-toters, no, quite the contrary. He likes being gay, has always liked it. But after a childhood spent in a town where being gay was something you covered up like a defect, where he wore loose-fitting jeans and kept his wrists tight, the disguise became its own kind of identity. He still prefers dressing with the ambivalence of straight men, comforted that he doesn’t reveal on the outside what he feels on the inside. He finds something liberating about existing in limbo, not having to decide to be here or there, and the man enjoys the freedom of maneuvering multiple identities rather than be tied down to one. It’s not something he’s explained out loud, not even to his boyfriend, for fear he wouldn’t understand, or worse would think of him in certain terms, perhaps as a fraud.

As the woman eyes him in silence, the man presumes she has uncovered this guise. He feels found out, caught, and he thinks of fleeing. As he moves toward the door, the woman’s face melts like ice, and she smiles at the man in a way that suggests his secrets are safe with her.

“Feel free to open the tea jars and smell anything you might like,” she says. “We have lots of options, more than a hundred. You could spend an hour in here and still not smell all of them.” 

The man, relieved, gets to sniffing. He’s always been comforted by tea. His mother used to brew him chamomile before bed. While he’s investigating a jar of Earl Grey — the nice kind with purple petals of bergamot mixed in with the dark leaves — a couple enters, teenagers, a girl and a boy dressed in private school uniforms. They come through the door laughing and holding hands. They continue giggling as they make their way through the shop. The aisle is so narrow that it requires an awkward sort of dance for the man to allow them through. They do the dance, too, still laughing, enthralled with every step like it’s the last song of the night. The woman behind the counter treats them with the same flinty surveillance, having none of their joy. The man relaxes a little.

Tucked among the jars, he finds a porcelain teapot decorated with round, little owls. They hang from a branch, the owls. Two of them appear to be holding wings. The third stares up toward the slender mouth of the pot, one wing raised in the air. The man imagines pouring tea from this teapot, and how, when the tea is pouring out, it will look as if the owl is waving goodbye.

“How much for this one?” he asks.

“Let me see here,” the woman says, turning pages in a thick three-ring binder. “That one’s $34.99, plus tax.”

The man nods and takes a few steps down the aisle to think it over. The woman puts the teapot into a box and puts the box into a plastic bag. The man notices this and realizes there’s been a miscommunication. He only nodded to be polite. He hadn’t intended to buy a teapot today, and he certainly doesn’t want to pay thirty-five bucks for one. But now that it’s already in a bag and the woman assumes he’s a paying customer, the man worries it would be deceitful if he explains the misunderstanding.

“Anything else?” the woman asks.

The man takes a moment.

“Two ounces of chamomile, please, the loose leaf,” he says, reasoning that if he’s going to buy a teapot, he’d better get some tea.

On the walk home, the man thinks about how his boyfriend will hate the teapot. It won’t match the general aesthetic of the apartment, which, according to the boyfriend, is a blend of modern and vintage. The boyfriend takes great pride in appearances and uses things like clothes and furniture as a mirror into the soul. He attended a liberal, hippie kind of high school — the anti-war folk singer Tim Hardin is among the notable alumni — where being gay was treated as a status symbol, where he could dress, was encouraged to dress, in a way that revealed himself.

As much as the man loves his boyfriend, he doesn’t care so much about the general aesthetic of the apartment. He’s much more of an in-the-moment kind of home interior buyer. When he purchases something, he considers only the thing and not how it will look with the rest of the things. The man has often wondered that if he grew up in a more progressive environment, would he have a keener eye for fashion?

But whatever, because the man likes the teapot. He’s had difficulty liking things lately, has struggled to feel much of anything beyond a dull malaise, like the dregs of a hangover. On the rare occasions he experiences the depth of human emotion, it’s only as a tourist — briefly, and with no familiarity of the terrain — so that it doesn’t seem like the emotion is really his. It was a relief to feel a spark of joy, even if what sparked it was so simple as ornamental owls on a potentially kitschy teapot.

The teapot came as a five-piece set that includes four small cups without handles, the size and shape of shot glasses. The man has never drunk tea from a mug without a handle. As he walks home, he imagines holding one of the cups, each of which has two owls on it, the same two owls from the teapot. The ones who look like lovers. Without a handle, drinking tea becomes a tactile as well as a gustatory experience. The hands must wrap around the porcelain and feel the warmth of the water. If the hands grasp too tightly, the heat will hurt. No, the hands must cradle the cup, must be gentle. The man likes the idea of this. Each time he drinks tea, feeling will be part of the process. Maybe it will become a kind of sensory therapy, and soon he will be as he once was, a proprietor of emotion’s undulating landscape, someone with a stake in the matter. Thinking of the teapot like this gives its purchase a logic, which equips the man to handle his boyfriend’s impending disapproval.

But when he arrives home, the boyfriend is too busy with work calls to notice anything beyond his sales pitches. The man feels a tinge of disappointment. He’d spent most of the walk home thinking of an elaborate argument to justify the teapot and had braced himself for combat. Now the argument could come at any time, perhaps as the man is trying to enjoy his teapot and its therapeutic potential. Yes, it will in all likelihood happen then, catching him off-guard, forcing him to fumble a defense and make him sound foolish.

The man goes into the kitchen and sets a pot of water on the stove to boil. Also on his walk, he bought a chocolate bar with a luxurious-looking wrapper, at a shop next to the tea place. The chocolate cost $9. The man had been convinced to spend what he would otherwise consider an exorbitant amount on this bar of chocolate because it contained, according to the wrapper, Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, aged for 24 months. He examines the wrapper, which has an illustration of a cow’s head, wreathed in illustrations of the chocolate’s other ingredients: golden Turkish figs and California walnuts and just a dash of pink peppercorn.

On the back of the wrapper he finds a set of instructions for “how to taste an exotic chocolate bar.” The first step is to take three deep breaths, which the man does as he unwraps the chocolate. The next step is to rub the bar in order release the aromas of the chocolate, then inhale, which he also does. He bites into the chocolate, at which point he is supposed to notice a crisp, resonant pop that indicates, according to the wrapper, a well-tempered product. There is a snap, the man notices, and it is in fact quite a pleasing snap. The final step is to taste: first the bright jolt of the peppercorn, then a crunch of walnut, giving way to a jammy morsel of fig, all cascading into a finale of salty, finely aged Parmigiano Reggiano.

Well that’s a bit of a stretch, the man thinks. He gets the walnut, has to pick some fig out of a molar, but there’s not a sense of narrative arc in the flavors, no orchestral symbiosis leading to profound climax. And where’s the parmesan? The mention of two-year-old cheese in chocolate is the only reason the man paid so much. Next to the nutrition facts, he notices a brief, italicized note: Our chocolate is infused with a 528 hz healing sound frequency to raise your vibe.

The man suspects he has been duped. Suspects further that his vibe, if indeed he has one, does not operate on the same frequency as the rest of the world. 

And what about the boyfriend? He’s been working from home all day and has closed himself off in the bedroom-slash-office space, fielding calls from potential clients. It’s strange that the boyfriend has isolated himself like this. Usually when they are home together, as they have been almost every day for the last year, they work at the table in the kitchen, a white table made of Formica, stained in places from wine and coffee. He should be here, criticizing the purchase of the teapot, perhaps also the chocolate bar, giving the man shit about his gullibility.

Earlier, the boyfriend had tried to get the man’s attention, but the man was in the middle of verifying his identity to the IRS and feeling morose about the general state of things.

What had he said, the boyfriend? Something about being stressed with work and wanting to make plans with friends for the evening so he had something to look forward to.

“I can’t right now,” the man had said, at which point the boyfriend disappeared.

This was not true, of course. The man had the linguistic capability to discuss plans, but he was too frustrated over his taxes — which, he remembers, he still has not completed. As of now, the IRS has not determined that the man truly is who he says he is, an ambiguity that does not assuage the man’s recent deficiency of human emotion. If the man is being completely honest, this lack of feeling has put into question the legitimacy of his humanity. As a boy, he pored over stories about the American Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement, accounts of strong-willed heroes with virtuous convictions who possessed whatever ineffable quality sparked their heroism. He believed himself among them, felt that same spark within and vowed never to let it die. But if that spark remains, it survives dimly and untended.

That’s fine, the man tells himself. The history books can’t fit everyone, and think of how many of those heroes also harbored wickedness. To do a few good things is not a guarantee of being good. What concerns him is not a lack of altruism, but a general lacking. A void. A hollowness. The man has spent months considering a source for this dearth, as if something malevolent and hungry were eating at him from the inside, but the more he thinks about the hollowness, the deeper the darkness goes. It's as if the man, in attempting to develop a telescope capable of reaching the bounds of the universe, finds the universe to be boundless. This possibility — that there exists no end to his inhumanity — terrifies him. It consumes, with increasing intensity, all other considerations.

A good cup of tea can fix anything. The man must have heard this in a movie, probably something British, and he hopes its wisdom holds true. He measures, according to the instructions on the bag of chamomile, two teaspoons of the dried leaves into the metal infuser. Once the water boils, he pours it over the leaves and watches as the teapot fills, sending steam into the air. He can feel it warm his cheeks, and he tries to hold on to this moment, to this small comfort.

At that moment, the boyfriend walks into the kitchen. He nods at the man but says nothing as he takes a seat at the Formica table.

The man sets the teapot down tenderly, hesitantly, as if the boyfriend’s discerning glare could break it. But the boyfriend remains silent. Seems not to have even noticed the teapot. This comes as a disappointment to the man. Any reaction, even a negative one, is better than no reaction. No reaction implies distance, disconnection — a hollowness. After two years together, the last few months of which have been spent working from the same one-bedroom apartment, it seems that the men have worn each other out, like a favorite song repeated too many times.

The instructions say to steep the leaves for five minutes. Any longer, and the tea will turn bitter.

Above the table hangs a pendant light, a bare bulb dangling from a long cord, the kind you see in gourmet coffee shops and cocktail bars but which seems, to the man, better suited for a construction site. Not that he said this when the boyfriend saw it at a store and claimed it would be perfect for the dining table. The man does not mention it now; it would be cruel to mention it now. He suspects the boyfriend is upset but cannot understand why. Maybe if he thinks of the right question, he can find out. He tries to figure out what this question might be, but nothing comes to mind.

The man takes the opposing seat at the table. He stares at the boyfriend, hoping it will draw his attention. When it doesn’t, the man fixes his gaze on the teapot, specifically on the two owls holding wings. Perhaps holding wings. The longer the man stares, the less convinced he becomes of their intimacy. They look, in the amber glow of the pendant light, not so much in love as confused, wondering perhaps when they will get off that damn branch.

When the five minutes is up, the man gets up and takes the infuser out of the teapot. Like the cups, the infuser doesn’t have a handle, and the metal, hot from sitting in the boiled water, burns his fingers.

“Fuck,” the man hisses through gritted teeth, dropping the infuser. It clangs against the kitchen floor, scattering tea leaves like a busted plate across the floor.

He looks down at the pads of his thumb and forefinger, already blushing a tender red. The pain yanks him into the present, a place he has of course been living in but scarcely noticed. It’s simpler than he remembered, plainer, which would otherwise be a source of nervous boredom but now feels like a steady hand grasping a runaway balloon. There is, in this moment, only the hot sting blooming up his arm, shooting through him like a drug — the rush of it, the shiver through his nervous system. The man suddenly has a keen awareness of the objects in the kitchen: table, cup, steam from the cup like a winter’s breath. He sees them with the newness and wonder of a child, the curious boy he used to be. It must be the adrenaline, like how survivors of long falls say time slows in the moments before impact, the brain stretching each second in search of a solution, a desperate kind of savoring.

The man feels a hand on his shoulder. It’s his boyfriend. His touch, like the burn, feels electric and new. The man marvels at their certainty, how both the touch and the pain dig to the center, reveal to him the nature of things, himself included. When he looks out on the world, it is with the eyes of someone awake. Awakened. Even the shadows have names.

About the author

Derek Maiolo received his MFA from Chatham University, where he served as the 2021-2023 Margaret L. Whitford Fellow. His writing appears in The Baltimore Review, The Denver Post, The Portland Review, High Country News, and elsewhere. He lives with his boyfriend in Pittsburgh, where the two argue over curtains, stoneware, and the culinary merit of walnuts. 

about the artist

Shanmukh Gollu is an artist and writer, residing in India. He earned a bachelor's degree from the M.S. University of Baroda in Fine Arts in 2022. He writes and draws, usually in the spectrum of screams, or spits, or cries, and sometimes laughs, reacting to his social experiences. His works reflect on the negotiations made between different identities that we assume and shed every day, tuning and adjusting in response to each other’s politics. His visuals draw from literature, films, history, social media, and from his own writings.