After my mother died, Dr. Rostrow called to ask me if I wanted anything out of her brain. I almost hung up, but her green eyes were so intense, even on camera, that I let her talk. There were studies, she said. Ways that my mother could give something to a future she wouldn’t see. The doctor gave a brief summary of the options, and I asked for some time to think. Then I hung up, put my head on my desk, and cried for a long time.

When that was over, I called Suleiman. He did not pick up at first, and I used the moment to wonder what he was doing.

When his lean and perfect face finally appeared, my eyes filled with tears again.

“My love, what’s happened now?” His voice, a type of music. It was what first drew me to him. “Kevin, please, speak to me.”

“It’s Má,” I sobbed, and told him that my mother’s brain, the repository of her many secrets, could be used to contribute to a databank for smoother, better-constructed artificial intelligences. My husband’s face grew softer and softer through my tears as the details unfurled.

I also told him that once the procedure was done, we would have access to her memories. Not all of them, and not in detail, but a few strong sensory impressions from her very last moments of consciousness could be retrieved. They would be my property when all was said and done.

When I finished explaining all of this and was patting my hands blindly around my desk looking for tissues, he asked, quietly, “Do you think she would want you to do this?”

“Probably not.” I tried to laugh, and it came out as a waterlogged snort. “But I want to, anyway, I always wanted to know more about her, and now I never—maybe this is the only way I can.”

He stared at me through the screen. “Call the doctor back, then.”

“But what if … ?”

“But, what? What if, what? What if your mother had secrets? We already know that, I think.”

“No. What if—well, do you think I’ll understand what we get?”

Sule sighed. “Oh, my love. This isn’t about you, but it’s about you, isn’t it? Listen. Your Má was complicated, but she loved you. Call the doctor back.”

Consider the brain, Henry said, when I called him from a park bench in the Manhattan Skyway half an hour later. He and I had been friends since the roaring twenties, back when we both lived in dormitories, stress-eating after theory and composition, carrying cellos in giant plastic cases on our backs through the crowded Boston subways to get to subsistence gigs, wearing heavy boots to protect us from the rising brown water in the stations before it finally rose so high and stayed so long that they had to shut the whole shitty system down.

So many weddings and bar mitzvahs. Our first date—sort of—was eating more oysters than we could actually afford in some hole-in-the-wall in the North End, right after the best man at the reception tipped us each three hundred dollars, cash. It wasn’t because he was happy or wanted us to be. He’d seen us watching him, shadowed in a corner with a little too much longing in his round Irish face while the new bride and groom danced together. I’d wanted to take our bribe to East Boston for Colombian food, but Henry had never had it and didn’t want to try. When we were old, Henry told me, the taste of oysters would only be a memory, and so we should eat our fill now. A server lined them up in their shells in front of us, and I took too many shots of whiskey neat in between to get the slimy, briny feel of them out of my mouth. Then I went home with Henry.

The last time I’d slept with Henry was just before I moved to New York City, years before my award nominations and conductorship, but only a month to the day before I met another son of a climate refugee and somehow, impossibly, married him after only six weeks of hurried, intense courtship.

Henry, on the other hand, had been more traditional in his choices of vocation and lovers. He’d given up music and gone across the country to California to study neurobiology and was still there, teaching. He had a partner too; someone he’d met on the apps just before they fell out of vogue for good. The partner was a Korean national who studied in the same university department that Henry taught in. Ethics aside, my old friend seemed happy. When our paths had crossed in Chicago two or three years ago, we’d met up for a few too many drinks and Henry let drop that Ed, his partner, reminded him of me. I didn’t hold it against him. Henry had always been fascinated when my mother called, looking politely away from her stilted English greeting, then back, wide-eyed, when her voice unfurled into Vietnamese. He’d often ask me later what she’d said, and I would lie, ashamed to admit that I couldn’t understand most of it.

Henry had always been kind, curious, and self-assured in the way that Midwestern white guys could afford to be. I felt I owed him, even now.

So, when he told me to consider the brain and paused expectantly, I tried my best. He went on about prefrontal cortexes, neurones, and the angular gyrus, and I did my best not to blink too fast and let my mind wander away to the charts for the concerto I was drafting for the Philharmonic. They say that physicians make good musicians and vice versa. I never found that crossover aptitude in myself, although Henry had it in abundance. He had a good bedside manner, too, because he sensed my lethargy and abruptly shifted to a layman’s vocabulary.

In short, my mother, or rather her brain, was a good candidate for memory mapping. The brain is not a machine, Henry explained. Old science fiction was wrong. The brain is just that—a brain, a chunk of evolved meat singularly possessed of its own alchemical ways of filing and processing all of the stimuli that make a life. We understood almost none of what it actually stored sensorily, or how it did so. While early efforts at creating artificial intelligence relied on entirely algorithmic models of data, retrieval, and connection, it had quickly become clear in recent years that such models were too limited to achieve the sort of self-awareness and self-maintenance that a sustainable AI industry needed. Even neural networks, which modeled the organization of the brain, were lacking. If artificial intelligence was to live up to its name, it needed to be even more like its genuine counterpart. It needed memories that were also composed of stored and interpreted stimuli rather than endless datasets to make the information it acquired of any real connective use in the future. The pattern recognition that formed the basis of the technology needed to go to the next level, and my mother’s brain could help it.

There had already been the usual studies on animal brains, but they were no good. We didn’t understand enough of their modes of perception for the data to be of any use to researchers. So, human brains were being mapped, neuron by synapse, in an attempt to isolate and understand what made human thought so special, what made our methods of memory so unique. For me, the important thing was that the mapping lent itself neatly to a procedure that retrieved the lingering data of memories from recently living brain tissue. Turning the mapped data into real information was still highly experimental, but had yielded some good results rather quickly, as it turned out. They’d been able to retrieve images of faces, snippets of sentences, and something that might have been a smell.

My mother had only died yesterday. Her body was still in a morgue in South Philadelphia. I needed to make the decision today.

There were different types of output I could receive, Henry explained, so much more clearly than Dr. Rostrow had. In exchange for allowing my mother’s brain to be mapped, I could choose to receive a file containing her memories in one of two formats: language, or sensory impressions. Either would be snippets, incomplete. Both could offer me insight into who my mother was, insight that I’d lost the chance to gain from her myself.

No, he couldn’t tell me which one would yield the best results. The procedure was experimental, so it wasn’t one hundred percent certain that either would yield anything at all.

No, it wouldn’t deform or otherwise desecrate the body of my mother. She could still be cremated after, then her remains flown back to Cà Mau and buried in a narrow strip of whatever land remained there after the last typhoon, per her wishes. I could afford it. She deserved it.

No, he didn’t think the procedure was offensive to Buddhists, but Henry was an atheist Jew anyway, so what would he know about that? I wasn’t actually sure how much of a Buddhist my mother had been, come to think of it, so I let the question lie.

I thanked him and disconnected the call, staring off across the well-tended lawn of the Skyway and out over the Manhattan skyline. A fat squirrel ran into view, stopping to nibble at something hidden in the turf, and I watched it for a minute. The rhinos were all gone, the tigers nearly so. Every fruit bat was a potential endling, but squirrels were still going strong. Down below at ground level, their cousins the rats were also doing a brisk business.

The squirrel pawed at the grass, its gray-and-tan coat stretched tight against its round healthy body. Whatever it was eating, it was eating well. I wondered how I could find out, and then suddenly I thought, the squirrels are still alive but my mother is not. My eyes blurred with tears, and I tapped the display on my watch, pulled up the consent form that Dr. Rostrow had sent earlier, and quickly signed and sent it.

Then I went home.

Suleiman was not there when I arrived, and I busied myself cooking an enormous meal of pasta and salad and garlic bread, sipping a glass of Shiraz while stirring, chopping away with Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 playing on the immersive speakers integrated into the walls of every room of our apartment. Wine grapes were nearly as rare as fruit bats, these days. The bottle I was drinking had been one of several in a gift bag I received backstage at the Grammys, the year I was nominated. The year that I presented, the gift bag had had real chocolate in it. Suleiman would still sometimes bring up the memory of the taste.

My husband is a quiet man, always in a room five minutes before you know he’s there. I looked up from chopping mushrooms and he was still in his jacket, watching me fondly.

I smiled and poured him a glass of wine while he went to hang up his coat.

We sipped and chatted about this and that, and I dished up penne and scooped salad onto both plates, using a pair of wedding-gift tongs that we both loved to hate. They were shaped like cartoon hands and clashed horribly with our Christofle flatware. We ate quietly, and finally Suleiman cleared his mouth with his tongue and asked.

“Have you decided what to do?”

I nodded, a little too quickly. “It’s all done. I’ll get a file in a few days.”

He frowned. “I meant about the funeral. I’ll need to let the firm know. We should go to Philadelphia tonight, or tomorrow morning early.”

I hadn’t been able to think about that. How long can you wait before burying your only mother?

Sule saw the confusion in my face and shook his head. “Wait, what did you mean? What file?”

I explained again, this time using all of the words that I could remember that Henry had, and Sule leaned back as far as he could on the faux-leather-topped barstools we used as dining chairs.

“So, what were the choices again? Language, and … sensory impressions? You mean sounds, pictures, that sort of thing?”

“Yes. I’m hoping there will be sounds.”

“Why didn’t you pick language? Isn’t that sound?” In his bafflement, Sule sounded a little bit British. He’d picked it up in his years guiding soldiers around refugee camps in his native Sudan before he and his parents were brought to America on a special visa, much like my mother had been. He’d spent a while in London, too, first on an externship right after he’d passed the bar, then working at a foreign legal consultancy. Occasionally it resurfaced.

I tried not to glare at him and failed. “I don’t speak much Viet, and Má’s English was never that great. I don’t want to get back some … garble, something nobody can understand. Something I can’t understand, anyway.”

“But what if all you get back is a picture of her favorite color, or something? What does ‘sensory impressions’ even mean? What if it’s the taste of chocolate or the way her favorite sweater felt? How will you even be able to perceive that?”

I shrugged. “The doctor seemed to know what she was doing.”

“I don’t doubt that she did. I just think maybe having words would be easier.”

Instead of speaking, I stood up, gathered as many dishes as I could in one go, and turned my back to stack them in the dishwasher.

I heard Suleiman sigh, then mutter, “Never mind, then.”

I let a plate slip a little too carelessly and it clattered into the rack. “Where were you today? I thought you’d be home earlier.”

When I turned to ask again, my husband had left the room.

He texted me from wherever he’d gone to, later. Buy the tickets, my love. We’ll go see about your mother together, tonight.

I ignored it.

I learned that style of argument from my mother, although she wielded it differently. We never could talk easily, Má and me. She’d come to America without ever really wanting to, in her early forties. Learning English had never been a priority for her. Neither had motherhood.

What had been a priority was staying ahead of the water that steadily rose up over and past the coastlines of South Vietnam, drowning first the fields, then villages, and finally threatening entire cities. Má stayed for as long as she could, protesting the bioagricultural companies who swept into the country with some new variety of shrimp that could supposedly thrive in the deeper, warmer waters caused by the slow heating of the planet. They could only be cloned, not bred, so a new batch of shrimplets had to be bought every season to keep the drowning economy afloat.

My mother protested when the company gained a monopoly on seafood farming, and again when another company tore down the mangrove trees that tourists had once flocked to, under the pretense of banking their seeds and DNA in a lab somewhere. When peaceful protests went ignored, she joined a group of saboteurs, destroying farming equipment and shrimper tanks, becoming so good at it that her fellows looked to her for guidance and the company put a covert bounty out on her head. She was shot at once. She wasn’t hurt, but someone else was, someone she wouldn’t talk about. That was when she’d run, coming to Texas with absolutely no command of or interest in the language or culture she’d be immersed in for the rest of her life. She started in Arlington, where the Vietnamese community was still big enough that she didn’t really need to speak English. My mother was contrary, though. When I was a toddler, she moved us into a neighborhood that hugged the border between DeSoto and Glenn Heights, where almost everyone was Black.

I’d learned none of this from my mother. She never talked about herself, and when I tried to ask her, she deflected the way the biotech had when asked to account for the mangroves.

“What’s Vietnam like, Má?”

“Like me.”

“What do my grandma and grandpa look like?”

“Same, like me.”

“What’s the best thing about America, Má?”

A pause, then a rare smile. She’d never answer this question at all. Always, this conversation. The rhythm of it became our household liturgy.

Most of what I knew about my mother had been passed on to me by her best friend, my Auntie Ai, who’d come to Texas in her twenties. She was sweet and soft, nothing like my mother. Once, Má and I had one of our usual misunderstandings and she’d banged out of the house in an old-lady temper, leaving Ai and I behind, me wet-eyed, Auntie waving the end of her cigarette through the air in smoky little patterns. I was thirteen, Má fifty-eight. I had told her I wanted to go to baseball camp instead of music camp that summer. It wasn’t because I didn’t love music, I tried to explain. It was because I wasn’t yet sure if I loved baseball, too.

Anyway, we argued, Má made threats, and I stood over her, bigger already. We got louder and louder until she ran off, slamming the door, leaving me behind to be engulfed by Auntie’s secondhand smoke and stories. I think Auntie wanted to help me understand my mother. All she did was confuse me even more. She told me about exploding shrimper tanks, about a mysterious stranger with a bullet in their chest, about my mother’s flight to the US, by boat, by plane, who knew? She wouldn’t say.

At the end of it all, Auntie looked me in the eye and said, “I’m Chinese, you know.”

I shook my head. “But you speak Viet.”

She tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette. “Ever wonder why?”

I shrugged and she shook her head at me, shrugged back. “You should be more curious.”

It was also Auntie Ai who’d told me that my father was Black. I’d known, of course. I’d seen myself. I did my best to fit in with the other Black kids at school, even if it widened the distance between my mother and me. But it was Ai who told me that the reason I’d never met the man was that he’d been twenty-one to my mother’s forty-five, a summer bartender in the restaurant she’d been hired to clean. I’m sure she never expected to get pregnant, and so she hadn’t tried very hard not to. Ai had never been able to get the whole story out of Má, but she thought he must have been a nice local boy whose parents could afford to get him into a school far away from oceans, where he’d probably learned a trade, met a woman his own age, and had a real home and family somewhere safe.

When I finally worked up the courage to ask, years later, my mother refused to say anything about my father, except that he might have done something stupid and wound up in FDC Houston like so many other people like him had. I needed to be careful not to turn out like that story, she said, and more like the first one.

My mother was old, a relic from another age, the same age as some of my friends’ grandmothers. She’d been born in the 1970s. Her racism, her anti-Blackness horrified my peers in the same way that her eco-liberationist past thrilled them. All of it horrified me, what I understood of it.

But that was my mother. If nothing else, she was complicated. When she insisted on leaving Texas at last, right after Auntie Ai died of lung cancer, I flew down on the spoils from my first real royalty check to help her pack. The double bed in the apartment they had shared held a mountain of pillows at its head and the shape of two small, soft bodies pressed together in its sagging center. Two pairs of cheap slippers were tucked under its foot. My mother made me wrap them up and throw them both away, then spent too long choosing a new pair when I took her shopping for her new home in Philadelphia’s Little Saigon. It had a single bed.

We hadn’t really spoken since then. I’d sent money, but never called. And now, she’d died.

The question of my mother’s brain, of her memories, intruded on my late-night work. The symphony I was trying to draft became a concerto, then a sonata, then degenerated fully into a cacophony. I pulled out my phone, scrolled through plane tickets. Air travel had been curtailed in the past year as some sort of last-ditch effort to slow the rising waters down. Ironic, when bigger, dirtier machines were being used to build the cities higher and higher, above the new and deadly tides. The richer cities, anyway. The rationale was that the machines and materials were longer lasting and used less fuel than airplanes, so their pollution mattered less. That rationale was a lie.

So was my belief that I could take my time going to see about my mother’s body. I was lucky to be rich, to be able to afford to travel by air and pay the penalty taxes for it. Still, I lingered over prices, telling myself it made no sense to make plans until I knew what her memories said. While I waited, the screen refreshed and the price of the flight my finger had been hovering over went up another six hundred dollars.

I thumbed the window shut and called Henry.

“What will her memories be like? Like, will it be a picture, a sound, a smell, what?”

He only paused for a moment before telling me he wasn’t sure. “Didn’t Doctor Rostrow explain all of that? If she hasn’t, you should call her and ask.”

“She hasn’t. And if I call her, she’ll explain, or she’ll send over a document and it will all be words that I don’t understand, and listen, I just need your help, Henry. That’s all.”

He hesitated long enough that I knew what he would say. “I don’t know. This isn’t really something I do. I’m familiar with the broad strokes, but I can’t say for certain what the memories retrieved will be like.”

“Will it be something I can understand?”

“I can’t really tell you that. Listen, Kevin. Isn’t this a little drastic? You don’t need to poke into your mom’s brain to find out about her. Why not just, I don’t know, go through her things? Talk to her friends? Maybe she kept a journal? Can you go through her phone? Maybe when you take her ash—uh, her back to her hometown, people there will remember her? I mean, I’m sure she has some old classmates or somebody you can talk to. You need something more solid, I think.”

“My mother didn’t keep anything, you know that.” Now that I said it, I wasn’t sure he did. He hadn’t really known her. My mother was rabidly anti-consumer, owning as little as possible and keeping only a few very important things. As far as I know, she didn’t keep a single relic of her life in Vietnam, not even a picture saved on her phone. I never had any idea what my grandparents looked like, and when I asked my mother, her only answer was the liturgy: “Like me.” I only had a handful of pictures of her.

“Anyway, Henry, I can do both. I want as much information as I can get.”

Henry tapped his lower lip before saying, “If that’s the case, have you given any thought to finding your father? He knew her, and he’s probably still living. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you even bring him up. Maybe it’s a good time to try to find him, now? You can afford a DNA test.”

I had no real response to that. We exchanged pleasantries, and when I hung up, I realized I wouldn’t be calling Henry again for a long while.

One of the reasons I fell in love with Suleiman was because he was the first person I met who wasn’t weird about my relationship with music or my mother. People often assumed that there was some sort of cultural trick or trauma behind my talent and drive, even now, in these years when America had thoroughly browned over like a well-cooked steak and people were beginning to speak about race factually rather than pejoratively.

There had been an interview, back when there had been rumors that I would be Oscar-nominated for a film score I’d composed. The film had been about the early days of the Silk Road, so I’d gone with Central Asian instrumentation, all dutors and tanburs. I was not nominated for the Oscar.

But there had been a feature on a pop culture site, a profile of me, the handsome Afro-Asian composer-conductor married to the chic Sudanese-American lawyer, living in the top levels of one of the most historically famous cities in the world after growing up in the Texas Mid-Cities. They’d conducted the interview in person, even inviting me into an office in a part of Harlem that had been upscale for a while but was considered unsightly when my mother was a girl.

That had been a long time ago.

The journalist had asked me if my upbringing had contributed to my music at all, and I, not understanding what she really meant, gave an answer about how I’d taken piano lessons since first grade in Texas, gone to a high school for the arts, went to conservatory in Boston, then landed a fellowship that eventually got me a seat in the New York Philharmonic, and so on.

She’d smiled wider and asked me if my immigrant mother had been a catalyst, or perhaps the driver of my ambition.

I blinked and stuttered and gave half of an answer that really was no answer at all, because I’d never considered it.

Then she asked me if it was hard to write classical music that was “steeped in the African-American tradition,” and I asked for the interview to end. My publicist told me when the article was published, but I never read it.

When I was six years old, I’d come home from school and asked my mother for piano lessons. She shrugged and held a rapid-fire conversation over my head with Auntie, and for my seventh birthday, an aging digital keyboard appeared in my bedroom. The next day, a high school kid named Richard appeared as well, to drill me in scales and chords and endless repetitions of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It wasn’t long before I was asking him for harder pieces, different chords. Richard began bringing sheet music from his high school band practices to our lessons, and I’d copy them over painstakingly on my tablet screen, memorizing the patterns that make a score, drinking them down digitally. I adored Richard. He had curly blond hair and told me that his great-great-grandfathers had been cowboys, and that one day he was going to become a composer. Best of all, we could understand each other perfectly. He spoke English, like my teachers and friends and after-school carers and the social worker who had visited once, murmuring at me in low conspiratorial tones while my mother sat frowning in a corner. After eating his way through the food Auntie Ai left out for our afternoon snack—reheated cha gio, salt-dried slices of melon, a surprisingly good cornbread she’d learned from one of my friends’ mothers—Richard would lope off to stay cool, and I’d sit and play for hours. We didn’t have the space or the budget for a bench, so the keyboard lived at the end of my bed, where I’d stack a few blankets to lift me up the extra inch or so that let me play comfortably.

I’d know it was bedtime when my mother’s slight shape darkened the door to my room in our trailer. She’d lean against the jamb, still wearing her blue uniform vest, her heavy gloves tossed on the floor beside her. Driving a forklift was hard work. Ai had gotten her the job. The company had just invested in sustainably powered lifts and a climate ethics agreement, otherwise my mother would not have worked there.

There was an evening when I looked up into the dark doorway and was surprised to see Má smiling. My fingers boldened, and I began the movement I was playing over again, sitting up straighter, rolling my body into it.

My mother—my angry, displaced, formerly notorious old lady of a mother—began to dance. Her smile widened, her arms lifted, and she closed her eyes and twirled, slowly, carefully, spinning in the narrow doorway to my bedroom.

I played and played until I ran out of notes, and she came and sat on the end of my little twin bed and asked me what I was playing.

I shrugged. “I dunno. Just something I made up.”

Her mouth opened wide. She reached out and tangled her fingers in the curls over my eyes that I had brushed there, like Richard’s. “Really? That’s good. So good.”

She smiled and I looked at the floor, grinning. When I looked back up, my mother’s face was serious, her eyes sad.

“Show me something. I want to play.” Now she sounded angry, and I was confused. Her hands were large for someone her size. I took them in my own small ones and placed them on the keyboard. I pressed the pad of my first finger into the space between the first two knuckles of my mother’s, and together, we played a middle C.

Her body relaxed a little, and she smiled. I pressed on her second finger, and together we played a D. Then an E, an F, and all the way upwards through the C major scale and back down.

My mother lifted her other hand to the bass clef notes and nudged me aside. She carefully splayed her thumb and pinky finger apart, played a G major chord, closed her fingers to play a C, then rolled her fingers, one by one, across the notes of the chord.

I don’t remember what I said. Surely it was something positive. I was only seven, and my mother was my world, necessary and incomprehensible. It must have been something adoring and naïve, something a seven-year-old says when he discovers his mother can do a little of what is, to him, the most amazing thing in the world.

Whatever it was, was wrong. My mother’s hands faltered, tried for another chord, missed it, tried again. The softness in her eyes turned brittle. Her hands raised and lowered, beating a ruckus out of my cheap little instrument’s keys and I covered my ears and squealed because for a split second I thought that my mother was going to destroy my most precious thing. She didn’t. Instead, her face drew into furrows. Her short hair was still a little sweaty, stuck to her head in a band over her ears from the pressure of the safety goggles she wore at work. She snapped something at me in Viet that I didn’t understand and stormed out of the room. After a moment I could hear the fridge open and slam shut, and seconds later, the noise of her talking to Auntie Ai on the phone.

That softness followed by a sharp snap became my memory’s strongest vision of my mother. Even now when I thought of her, I thought of a pleased expression followed by a sudden twist into a fury I could never understand or predict. At my first piano recital, plink-plonking through a country western tune that I had begged Richard to choose for me, my mother was there, sitting in the back row, her arms crossed tightly, still wearing her work gloves. When the audience began to applaud, she smiled and raised her gloved hands to join them, and then—the twist. Ten years later at prom, my date and I dressed in matching rented shiny tuxedos. I asked my mother to take a picture of us standing hand in hand in front of the trailer. She softened at the sight, then ruined it by suddenly sneering and roughly thrusting the phone at me without even glancing at the photo she’d taken. When I graduated, the same. Even at my wedding, this crept in. I wasn’t able to talk her into a dance at the reception so instead we sat together chummily on stools at the bar for a moment while the photographer tried to take touching candids.

My mother wasn’t a drinker. A glass of Perrier sat on the bar top with the half-full green bottle beside it, untouched. She kept glancing around at all of the cheap, destructive consumption of the wedding—the flimsy paper decorations, the endless ice at the bar, the dead, expensive flowers on every table—keeping her face carefully blank, except for her wrinkled eyebrows.

I nudged her a bit with the side of my arm. “Are you proud of me?”

She looked back at me, baffled. “Your husband is a nice man. Not like that Henry.”

Henry was there, across the dance floor, trying to charm Suleiman’s mother into joining him for a round of the chicken dance. Nobody at our wedding knew the chicken dance but Henry. He’d probably learned it from his grandparents. The dance floor was as empty as a bass drum.

I turned to look at Henry, then said to my mother, “Yeah. He is. But … are you proud of me?”

“You have a good life. Your husband is nice. You play the piano so beautiful.”

That wasn’t enough. I knew what she meant, but it wasn’t enough.

I regressed. “What is Vietnam like, Má?”

Her eyebrows rose even further, but she answered, “Like me.”

“What about my grandparents? Aunts? Uncles?”

She was shaking her head. “Same, like me.”

“What does America look like to you?”

She stood up. “You,” she announced. “Are grown up.” She sighed something else in Viet and moved away. Her eyes found Auntie Ai, over at the buffet, and it was as though I didn’t exist, at my own wedding.

I called after her, and she looked back with a fleeting softness that quickly fell into sour, pointed lines that lanced their way into my heart. When she walked away to speak to Ai, I ordered a drink for myself.

The flight to Philadelphia was quick. They all were, now. I went straight from the airport to the crematorium, dialing up Suleiman on my watch so he could be present virtually.

There was someone moving around behind him, in the bedroom. I didn’t mention it but when I stepped over the threshold into the waiting room, the little holographic display on my wrist suddenly blinked out, muted. When it reappeared, Sule was sitting, neatly dressed, in front of a nondescript white wall that could have been almost anywhere.

There were no white walls in our home. I preferred muted pastels.

He stayed with me while the operators did their work, until the flames began and I was so overwhelmed that I hung up on him, stammering out an excuse before I began to cry.

It wasn’t until they handed over her ashes, neatly tucked into a temporary urn made of recycled plastic, that my phone chirped again. I shifted uncomfortably, fighting the urge to snatch it out of my pocket and take a look, squeezing the heavy box of my mother’s remains tightly in both hands. I took a peek at my watch instead. The message was from Dr. Rostrow.

I sped back to the hotel in my rented car, put my mother’s urn in the center of the rented bed, and dialed Suleiman’s number. I hung up as soon as it rang, then switched the phone to do not disturb.

The doctor’s message was too long—some cursory text about the files, how they were auditory impressions and not to take them entirely at face value, blah, blah, blah.

I stared at the blue-trimmed white box on the bed as I opened the file, my shaky thumb leaving a greasy print on the screen.

A note—a middle C, tinny and a little sharp, filtered through the technology of memory. It sounded alarmingly like my little trailer keyboard from many years ago. Then strings—slow, pensive, ethereal. A slow tap began, and while it lacked the resonance of reality, I recognized the rhythms of orchestral percussion. A few moments later, horns began, reedy but so clear, so intentional. I recognized the tune immediately—I’d played it first, many years ago when I was a small boy sitting on the end of a cheap narrow bed.

The purity of the music, the easy complexity of the arrangement caught in my chest. An entire orchestra’s worth of arrangements, better than any I could have come up with. Had this been trapped behind my mother’s sudden souring, all this time?

The arrangement swelled to a crescendo, and then died away, leaving a space for a slow series of piano notes, hanging alone in the air one by one.

There were no words, but I recognized the rhythm of our liturgy, could almost hear the words in the simple, metered notes.

“What’s Vietnam like, Má?”

“Like me.”

“What do my grandma and grandpa look like?”

“Same, like me.”

“What’s the best thing about America, Má?”

The arrangement suddenly swelled again into a stunning, layered harmony that reminded me of my own name.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Belicia Rhea

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors