Phantom Pain

by Michael Chin

Phantom Pain

I thought autobiography might afford me immortality.

Facile as it seems now, the idea felt profound. After all, each time I immersed myself in the scene of a good book, it felt as though that moment had a sort of life to it, reanimated if only in my imagination, remembered for days to follow. So, if I wrote my life’s story, there was some hope in the notion people for generations to come might bring me back to a kind of being via the act of having written my life for them to discover.

#

Picture me on Ocean Beach. I glided side-to-side, the lateral movement I’d used on the basketball courts of my youth, but now the objective was to keep my four-year-old son Riley from waters too deep, too sudden. He didn’t know his limits. We kicked up sand, stinking of sunscreen against a soundtrack of waves crashing, seagulls calling. 

I recall this scene in photographs my wife Heather captured. Start to remember one thing, and its easy slide deeper into memory. To bring all these moments, written or not, back to life.

#

I think of my own childhood. I was a quiet kid, prone to obsession.

I grew captivated with the idea phantom pain. I imagined losing a body part—operating without a foot, an arm, a finger. I played at it—hopping, one-armed games for one. 

When I thought of phantom pain, it wasn’t so much the hurt or the ache I fixated on. More an itching sensation. A ghost itch that would never go away because I could never reach the spot. Because the spot itself was no realer than a dream, no more accessible than a home one leaves behind—decades, divorces, and deaths in between.

#

The first death to really hit me was my maternal grandmother.

Grandma Jean was the weekly fixture my sister and I whiled away Sunday afternoons with. The fairy godmother sort who gamely played the spear carrier in our adventures, who taught me how to play pinochle, who kept the fridge stocked with Mountain Dew, and gave me the Christmas presents I really wanted—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dolls, the first Spin Doctors album, VHS tapes of WWF matches—regardless of price, practicalities, or good taste.

I never knew my maternal grandfather. Neither did my mother. My grandmother told her he’d died of heart attack at a point Mom was too young to remember—the cardiac event a haunting presence, suggesting Mom should monitor her diet, her exercise, her stress levels.

However, on Grandma Jean’s deathbed, the truth came out. My parents went through her records and found a marriage certificate, but no record of her husband’s death. They put together other unlikely pieces of a timeline before my grandmother, half-lucid, revealed the marriage hadn’t lasted a year, and he wasn’t the father to either of her children. She’d worked her whole career as a secretary for a major insurance company’s office in Manhattan. Both pregnancies resulted from a years-long affair with her boss.

#

What, you’re hurt your grandmother didn’t tell you about her sex life? Who wants to hear about his grandmother having sex? It’s disgusting. And it’s ancient history. Do I have to tell you your mother and father did it too?

The ghost of my maternal grandfather haunts me. A proper specter because, whereas the ghost of Grandma Jean herself might be heartwarming, reassuring, I do not know this man. He might be anyone at all.

I tell him I know about the birds and the bees. I have a child of my own, you know.

I know.

So you’ve been watching.

That’s my great grandson, you know. That’s my legacy as much as yours.

I’m not so sure. Because my grandfather never claimed my mother, or by extension me. Because I do not know his name.

I’m the tallest person in my family—the only one I know to have ever cleared six feet. Those genetics probably came from him.

My grandmother used to joke about her cousin Wilt. A topical joke, because her last name was Chamberlain and Wilt Chamberlain, the basketball player, was one of the most famous athletes of her generation. He cultivated a reputation as a philanderer, boasting he’d slept with twenty-thousand women in his lifetime. The figure has been debunked—not necessarily impossible, but for a sense of scale, it implies he had a different lover every day of the year for over fifty years (and Wilt Chamberlain died at the age of sixty-three). Even given the benefit of the doubt of an orgy here and there, the number’s difficult to wrap one’s head around.

But exaggeration aside, Wilt the Stilt had a lot of partners. He grew up and spent the first two-thirds of his pro career in the northeast.  He stood seven-foot-one.

I’m not Wilt Chamberlain.

I didn’t think so. I can say with reasonable certainty I have no biological relationship to Wilt Chamberlain, if only because there’s no hint my mother or uncle were half-black, and I take it at face value, after over fifty years of keeping her secret, Grandma Jean didn’t lie about my grandfather working in her office. There’s no record of Wilt selling insurance.

Still my height opens a question. I’m tall by the standards of all the family I’ve known. But am I tall relative to my grandfather and his family line?

What do you care how tall I am?

I don’t care how tall you were. But I’d like to know something about you.

You know as much as anyone knows about their ancestors, don’t you? I was a man. Jean was woman. We connected.

But you didn’t stay connected.

Things were different. Fathers didn’t host make-believe tea parties. They worked.

I work. And I come home to my family.

So did I.

#

I don’t know if my maternal grandfather had another family, but it seems like a natural conclusion. The reason why, despite having two children by my grandmother in the 1950s, he never married her or had any kind of relationship my mother can remember. The reason Grandma Jean kept his identity a secret that weighed down her branch of the family tree. 

It’s hard to imagine my mother as a child. She’s a quiet woman. I’ve never even known her to have a friend, which didn’t make sense to me, my teenage years straight through to my mid-thirties when I took her to be terribly antisocial. That assessment may be on point, but since entering parenthood myself while working a rigorous job and being pretty introverted—it makes sense to me now in a way it didn’t before how old friendships fall away and new ones don’t arise to replace them.

My mother told stories of her youth now and again, though. When my brother-in-law broke out the Wii one Thanksgiving and Rock Band was novel, we cajoled Mom into taking on a verse of “Twist and Shout.” Afterward, she said she hadn’t sung like that since her teenage years, singing the John Lennon part into a hairbrush with her girlfriends.

Another time, she talked about catching the train to Long Island with friends, spending whole afternoons on the beach, adding layers of improbability because for as long as I can remember she’s been hyper-conscious of sun exposure, always seeking a spot in the shade.

#

I recall a beach trip of my own to the Outer Banks. I went because Cecile invited me. I loved her in an embarrassing way. I’d ended a four-year relationship to be with her, but me and Cecile didn’t last a month. I spent the better part of the next two years chasing after her.

I drove us three-hundred-fifty miles south from where we lived in Baltimore, unaware of a chain of infatuations awaiting us. I longed for Cecile. She’d dated Dylan, who’d been in the same law school cohort as Cecile’s best friend Natalie. Dylan dumped Cecile immediately following the barrister’s ball a year earlier. Dylan was in love with Natalie, and apparently everyone staying in our beach rental knew it.

All these dynamics grew apparent by degrees the night we arrived at the Outer Banks. The next day we swam out into the Atlantic Ocean. Cecile, Natalie, and Dylan were ahead of me when the tide hit hard, knocking me not so much back as aside from them. My confidence in four summers of elementary school swim lessons faded as I struggled to find the sea floor, gasping.

I’ve never come closer to drowning. Treading water, every limb fatiguing against the current, lungs on fire. The smell of sea salt all around me, sun beating down, reflecting blinding white off the surface of the water. The idea of signaling for help felt impossibly humiliating. So did the idea of swimming back to shore, removing myself as a point in the Cecile-Dylan-Natalie quadrangle, however symbolically. 

In a moment of clarity, I decided that to chase after Cecile then would mark a point of no return. Was I literally willing to die for her?

I bobbed, crawl-stroked, and stumbled back toward land. I made it.

At night, the four of us and the six others with whom we shared the beach rental overcrowded a glass dining room table built to seat six. Our fingertips smudged the surface. After dinner we drank Pinot noir and took out a deck of cards on the premise of playing Euchre or Texas Hold ‘Em. We swapped stories instead, the majority of them about sex or in sex’s orbit. I told an old standby. A college party. I pulled two queens, two kings from the deck and laid out the contrived circumstance friends and I had devised. I’d share an open-mouthed kiss with my gay friend Sam en route to making out with a girl named Anna. A net heterosexual experience I said, the same homophobic undertones I’d embraced in countless retellings.

This story aimed to subvert expectations, because when I first started telling it, I was chronically single, and the story implied a degree of cool and physical intimacy. As time went on, I was known as quiet and strait-laced in certain circles, and this story destabilized that understanding.

I don’t remember the precise aftermath of telling the story at the glass table, only that no one laughed or applauded. Cecile averted eye contact, focusing on her red wine. Dylan might have literally said, “Cool story, bro.”

I do remember when Natalie spoke up. Natalie, the top of the infatuation food chain who’d pitched this vacation one, maybe two levels removed from my invitation. “I don’t get it,” she said. “No one had sex?”

I understood my place in the pecking order clearer than ever before. The guy who couldn’t hang in deep waters. 

Cecile followed. She told a story about anonymous, drunk sex with a boy she brought home the weekend after dumping her long-term college boyfriend. She reddened, but had a devilish grin, positively giggling when she discussed the morning after: I couldn’t even remember his name.

#

I don’t know my maternal grandfather’s name. I did at one point, dictated from my grandmother to my mother, long after Grandma Jean had lost the dexterity to hold a pen. We searched the name online but couldn’t find him. A question lingers, twenty years later, if the Internet might yield better results now—so much more information, more services. Also, two more decades to lose someone to the sands of time.

I imagine my mother still has the name. It feels uncomfortable to ask her for it. She’s nothing if not pragmatic. When the initial search didn’t find anything, I can imagine her not forgetting, but putting the whole thing to rest, unconcerned with ancient history.

What does it matter to you what my name is? What does a name tell you? Do you want to publish it? Do you think some long-lost cousin will recognize it and connect with you?

Maybe.

I wonder if my grandfather had any hand in naming my mother.

According to the Social Security Administration, from the 1960s to 1990s my name—Michael—was the most common name given each decade. It’s a truth borne out in my lived experience. In my elementary school days, I wasn’t Mike, but Mike C., to distinguish me from the five-or-so other Mikes in any given class. In high school, I was Chin. At my own wedding, twenty-five percent of the bridal party shared the name Michael.

Was the ubiquity of my name a self-preserving cycle? Surely celebrities—Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Michael J. Fox, Michael Douglas, Michael Caine, Michael Keaton, Michael Crichton, Michael Bolton, Mike Ditka, Michael the Archangel to name a few—had something to do with it. But also, if everyone knew a Michael, it increased the chances of someone naming their son after one.

I have friends—Michaels even—who are juniors or “the thirds,” carrying a legacy forward. My parents have never offered any profound or specific reason behind my name. They liked the sound of it.

My middle name is Thomas, which at first blush makes it sound like I was middle-named after my father. His legal name is Tom, though, a simplified version my Chinese immigrant grandparents selected for the express purpose of sounding American.

My last name Chin, while incredibly common, arguably sounds un-American in a nation where hate crimes against Asian Americans have ebbed and flowed in my lifetime.

My initials are MTC. The acronym generated my college email address and led to me receiving multiple emails intended for the Musical Theatre Club throughout my undergraduate career. These initials might also seem representative of my lineage—a T for my father’s name. My mom’s Catherine with a C.

I don’t think my parents put much thought into it.

Lots of people’s names don’t mean anything. Most, probably.

#

There’s another Mike I went to elementary school with. Mike S. A chronically uncool kid who moved into town in the third grade, heavyset and smelly. His family lived two blocks from mine.

Mike S.’s mom chaperoned a field trip and pulled me aside. She said she’d heard I lived nearby, and maybe I could come over sometime. Maybe you and my Michael can be friends. 

I smiled and said, “Maybe.”

Looking back, I wonder if he’d told his mother about me. Another Mike, another kid from the neighborhood, yes, but also one who seemed nicer than the other boys. A quiet kid who had some friends and as such might be a gateway friend and we’d all play football and Super Mario Brothers together, then come back to this mom’s kitchen for orange slices.

I never went to Mike S.’s house. Instead, my defining memory of him came the following winter. I stood by while other boys picked on him during recess. Someone shoved him hard, and he slipped on ice. His head landed at my feet. I instinctively moved away, but in an uncoordinated way, and inadvertently kicked the top of his head. He winced.

Later, one of the other boys congratulated me. “I saw you get your kick in.”

I didn’t deny it. “That’s right.” I chuckled. Though I got bullied here and there, I won’t claim I took credit for the kick out of self-preservation. I did it because I was a mean, rotten kid.

Years later, in college, seated in a circle of dewy grass the groundskeepers hadn’t mowed at the edge of campus, I passed a bowl to the left. I exhaled. Someone asked everyone and no one if they could go back and change one moment in their lives, which they’d pick. I thought about Mike S.

#

I met my first girlfriend in college. Kelly had another boyfriend, too, who went to a different school, out of state.

After she’d severed our affair, but during one of our reconciliations—among the dozen or so last times we’d slept together—we lay bare chested, bottoms under the covers, breath settling over her paisley bedsheets. She talked about an old movie, Same Time, Next Year. The premise: Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn had a one-night stand. They were both married to other people. They returned to the same spot on the same date for years to follow to be a couple again in single-night installments. Kelly suggested we might live this story. Two lives, two loves for each of us. I didn’t put much stock in the proposal. After all, if Kelly hadn’t chosen me when I was the one in her daily life, what chance did I have when I became the long-distance lover?

I think back on Kelly, this first big love, this film. I think of my grandfather. Maybe he wasn’t the philandering kind. Maybe he didn’t coerce my grandmother into anything. Maybe he, like Kelly, felt torn between two loves and made his choices—imperfect, conflicted as they were.

I wonder if my grandfather ever saw Same Time, Next Year.

Of course I did. Everybody saw that one.

#

There’s a Patty Griffin song I like a great deal called “Useless Desires.” I listened to it a lot my last semester of college and think back to that time in my life whenever I hear it.

Say goodbye to the old street

that never cared much for you anyway,

the different colored doorways

you thought would let you in one day.

I hear the words and recall the development where I lived, one row of townhouses with green doors, another red, another blue. I had a sweet experience in college, in which I learned and grew, drank and danced, made friends and fell in love. It’s a sweet song but carries an undercurrent of bitterness. Listening again, I can conjure detritus from my sour grapes about the front desk job I interviewed for and didn’t get; about the philosophy professor who awarded me a C+; about Kelly picking her other boyfriend over me.

I don’t regret the way my life’s played out. My wife and son. My writing and teaching careers. The infinite choices and happenstance that led me to this point. If Kelly hadn’t chosen someone else, then what? Might we still be together? Or would she have broken my heart worse for the extra time invested, or would I have dumped her? If I had, would the bitterness have calcified at all, or would my memories all be sweet?

Was my life always headed to the same destination? 

I carry these alternate paths, these different colored doorways.

#

I had a work-friend named Lynn in Maryland. Before I left for a cross-country move to start grad school, she told me she’d come visit. She was retiring soon and had designs on hitting the open road with her huskies, driving her RV to places she’d never seen, reuniting with friends scattered across the country. I told her I liked the idea of seeing her again and meant it, though I was also conscious we didn’t know one another well, and I had no idea what it’d look like to host her as an overnight guest.

Two years passed, and I hadn’t thought much about Lynn.

I passed back through Baltimore and Lynn came up in conversation. Had I heard? She’d been killed by a drunk driver weeks post-retirement, not in her Airstream, but in her Honda Civic, within Baltimore city limits. She never got a start on her grand adventure to see America. 

I suppose there’s a lesson there. Not only to avoid living too much in the past the way I’m prone to, but not to live too far in the future either. But I hesitate to reduce someone else’s life to a lesson. There’s a particular kind of arrogance required to think another person’s experience, let alone tragedy, exists for me to learn from.

Still, I wonder if I carry Lynn’s ghost too? She meant to come see me. Maybe she has.

#

When I moved to the west coast, I had beers with a friend who’d traversed both coasts well ahead of me. We sat on a rooftop bar overlooking town. Three blocks of commercial space buffered the university—two used bookstores, three pizza parlors, five coffee shops, a thrift store, countless bars. An all-American college town with an expanse of apartment complexes, rental properties, and faculty homes stretching into the valley. He intoned a difference he’d observed. People on the west coast were nice, but they weren’t kind.

“If you’re nice, you wave and say hello to everyone.” He tipped back his pilsner so the sudsy dregs slid down the glass. “But you ask them to help you carry your couch upstairs, and they say, sorry, gotta run! Back in Philly, though, maybe they don’t say hi to you but, you don’t even have to ask. They see you struggling to get your sofa out of the moving truck and they mutter to themselves, son of a bitch, and come over to help.”

I didn’t know if his assessment were right. But I did think of weights I’d shouldered on my own and ones someone helped me carry. I thought of weights I should’ve left behind.

#

Picture my son at two. He had an affinity for action figures and stuffed animals, not so different from my own as a child. This joy melded with his ability to carry his own things—to reliably transport not only himself, but something in his hands. As is human, one achievement gave way to the next desire—in this case, to traverse the house, his little arms full of all the dolls and stuffies and little cars he could hold.

He took a step.

A car dropped.

He grunted, bent, recovered the car, straightened, stepped.

An action figure dropped.

On and on. The solution was obvious—to let something go. To come back for it if it mattered. It probably didn’t. No reason to carry so many things all at once.

The metaphor was even more obvious. If I recognized in a two-year-old the misguided desire to carry more than he could, shouldn’t I, too, recognize the need to let some things go?

Let me put it another way.

Picture us back on the beach.

Here, in this sun-kissed space, the tide receded. I felt lighter, laughing easy as our chase gave way to simpler splashing to collecting seashells to building sandcastles. It occurred to me this might be the greatest moment I’d ever live.

And in this moment, perhaps I did not carry the ghosts of Kelly or Cecile or my grandmother or the grandfather I never knew. 

Picture every grain of sand. Some rested, dull and easy. Some sparkled. Some swirled in the wind. Some got lost in the sea. Some clung to us. Some got pressed deep down in our running footprints, collective, if temporary markers we were there. What if every grain of sand were a phantom—a legion of ancestors and lost loves and friends—of people we didn’t think to yearn for amidst our summer play?

#

I thought for years about autobiography. I still come back to the idea now and again, growing older, already aching not to be forgotten.

But I think, too, of my old mentor Harvey, who eviscerated my story drafts and wrote me grad school recommendations. I suspect he recognized something of himself in me—a young writer with delusions of grandeur—when he told me, People want to publish books because they think that’s their legacy. But the only legacy you have is the people you leave behind—your children, your students, the people you’ve helped along the way. That’s all.

I carry this too. I write it down.

There’s no shortcut to a memory. One follows another, inflected by what came before. Here we are.

---

Author Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He’s the author of seven full-length books, including his novel, My Grandfather’s an Immigrant, and So is Yours (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2021) and his forthcoming short story collection, This Year’s Ghost (JackLeg Press, 2025). Find him online at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.

Artist Shelbey Leco is a New Orleanian artist who is a fiction writer, and sewer. Most of her work focuses on mixed media portraiture art. Her art was inspired by her grandmother. When Shelbey was little, she often went through art supplies, which her grandmother could not afford. Instead her grandmother would give her pens, to fill in negative space with patterns from coloring books. As an adult, Shelbey incorporated vibrant color and materials.