Vi Khi Nao’s most recent memoir, Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche, arrived for me as a mathematical task. It was January of this year. I was in an airport in Finland on an eleven-hour layover en route to see Yehui, my partner, who had been in China for the past six months to see family and to film a documentary.
The manuscript was scheduled for release with 11:11 Press on the approaching Pi day, March 14, 2023. Vi had asked if I could help count the sentences in each of its passages, ensuring a perfect alignment with the digits of Pi. That meant I needed to both count the sentences and ensure the digits were sequenced without inadvertent omissions or repetitions. Zeros were to be expressed as photographs too.
There would be no departures from Vi’s self-imposed numerical constraint(s).
Vi had indicated that she would have performed this task on her own, but was distracted by all the required preparations for her chest getting split open again for another open-heart surgery.
I had been collaborating closely with Vi in shaping the next issue of 128 LIT, for which she has been the Guest Editor. To work with Vi is to be reminded of her tenacious capacity to find poetry in the world beyond our email inboxes. At some point, when chatting about what her surgery would entail and what to expect and the composition of pieces that we had compiled, she interrupted the discussion to say that she finds her doctor’s medical writing poetic and thought I would like his writing too. She shared a couple links and told me to read them. I did just that and found them poetic too.
In another discussion a few weeks before her surgery, Vi said something like, “Andrew, there is a 10% chance that I die during the surgery.”
Thanks to my instincts for orienting calculations, my response pivoted this interaction toward a 90% chance of survival.
I also offered whatever help she needed. And days later, there was a task for me, rooted in arithmetic.
It was approaching midnight in Finland. Helsinki Airport was nearly empty. I had already uploaded proof of my negative COVID test, digitally stamped by an approved testing center. I received the needed Health Code on my WeChat app. A clock ticked down, displaying the window inside which it was feasible to enter China: 24 hours and counting.
My laptop was open, screen split into two. On the left side was a PDF of Vi’s manuscript. On the right was a downloaded word document with thousands of digits of Pi.
One by one, left and right, I read and re-read, compared and double-checked, striking through passages and numbers that realized the overarching constraint of Vi’s memoir.
One of the numbers inevitably was a 4 condemned to exist between a 5 and a 9.
There was, as expected, a sequence of these four sentences that I want to share, where Vi recounts the aftermath of her previous heart surgery:
One of the reasons I agreed to having an open-heart surgery was because I thought it would bestow on me a higher chance of dying. 1 out of 10 heart surgeries lead to death. The nurse who cared for me in the ICU, post-surgery apprised me, “Twenty years ago, it used to be 1 out of 4.” I thought, my god, why didn’t I have surgery twenty years ago. And, then I realized with obvious irony, for the past twenty years, I have been running away from this surgery.
Not only does this passage reveal Vi’s devastating logic, an insatiable yearning to abandon a lifetime of pain, her deadpan humor, and a wonderful balance of levity and brutality that’s demanded in a work of this scale, but this reading of “1 out of 10” resonated with me. It conjured up our discussion in which she shared that there is a 10% probability her existence will expire during the upcoming surgery.
When I think of 90%, I think of Stephen Curry at the free throw line. Throughout Curry’s illustrious NBA career he has made just over 90% of his foul shots. Regardless, every now and then, Stephen Curry (most likely the best shooter to ever touch a basketball in this world) misses, an indicator of his humanity.
While reading Vi’s manuscript, I sense mathematics, the scope of that 90%, her humanity.
Stephen Curry misses = Vi dies during heart surgery.
Over the past year, Vi and I have collaborated enough to know the instincts for numbers that’s needed to recognize, curate, arrange, and edit effective literature. After all, 128 LIT is a platform that has, since its formation, been motivated by a desire to make a place that responds to, and confronts, the exponential, the socio-linguistic-aesthetic-psychological-compound interest of life.
And while reading Vi’s versatile navigation of the physics of pain and its exponentialities, I find a highly legible roadmap of Vi’s argument that she is “pro-suicide because she is anti-pain.”
Propelled by a highway of rage, dotted here and there by occasional gas stations of empathy, and en route to the enigmatic empire of insurmountable bodily and socio-economic pain(s), suicide for Vi becomes a natural response to the disquieting burdens latched to existence, a reliable period extracted from a sea of precarious or retreating commas. What interferes with this pain-annihilating statement from Vi is the desire to avoid imposing more pain on those who care (her mother, Ali Raz, her partner, friends, and publishers).
In consequence, an irreconcilable circularity arrives for us. Vi unfolds the many manifestations of maintaining a desire to be in control of her fate in order to force pain into oblivion, all while compelled to avoid furthering the pain of others. This multi-dimensional, paradoxical conundrum is contained in, “What I was most grateful for was that my continued existence had spared my mother the pain of losing her oldest child. And, in that sense, some of my dreams were coming true.”
Still in Finland, I was reading Vi’s manuscript for a second time. It was cold and dark. The artificial sound of birds chirping came to me through implacable airport speakers.
My flight was in five hours.
There is a 9 between two 3s into which Vi writes among other sentences, “… then there is the unforbidden wealth of knowledge called compound. And, when we place social anxiety in the bank account of our psyche, what will happen then? To this compound interest on compound and compound anxiety.” One element that drew me about Vi’s composition is her ability to appropriate economic terms and concepts such as “compound interest” (which is complicit in sustaining the pulse of unearned privilege). We witness Vi folding these terms into her bodily and socio-economic experience, dragging the overarching system, and its conceptual absurdities, into her pain-addled life. Vi gives the incisive conclusion: “Nobody wants to be a trillionaire of pain.”
I love how Vi has a penchant for becoming a poet and theorist at once, subverting normalized economic expressions as a means to evoke the confrontation between body, mind, and experience in a society where accumulations, and their embedded violence, make it logically impossible to live. Similarly, Vi evokes economic concepts by juxtaposing “stimulus” (a term associated often with financial bailouts) with how friendship has kept her alive: “She has become the primary stimulus for my continual existence. Had it not been for Ali, I would have died in that Brooklyn apartment in 2019.”
Vi’s poetic and philosophical juxtapositions, of course, climb far beyond the purely economic and confront the normalization of senseless violence in our world. When Vi details the materiality of her procedure, there is a collapsing of that violence (again, a masterful balance of levity and brutality) within 7 that happens between 2 and 0:
To access my mitral valve, my surgeon cut my sternum in halves with a medical saw. After mending it and to reduce post-operative infections, he applied sternal plating and wires to hold my breastbone together while it heals. The sternal plating is made of titanium and it lives under my skin like a new tenant. Because part of me is made out of titanium, it means that my sternum is bulletproof. If a shooter were to go on a rampage, I might survive because the bullet would bounce off my chest. I wish my nipples were bulletproof though. My clitoris bulletproof too.
When I think of Vi’s perhaps most vulnerable book yet, I see Vi as a literary surgeon armed with a kaleidoscopic scalpel. There is a rearrangement of the arteries and organs of pain, the intestines of socio-economic brutalities, the ligaments of pop culture, the exponential armpit hair of violence, the skin of digital apparatuses, and the bones of duty and generational love and care. Each element exists relative to another. The whole is both tangible and inconceivable at the same time.
Vi even writes, among other sentences, between 2 and 4 into 9: “This manuscript. What is it? What is it?”
Like the countless digits of Pi, there are exponential reasons to admire Vi’s memoir. To emphasize one element or administer a want to converge on a singular theme deprives us from every other necessary and boundless element (Vi’s attachment to her brother, Uber, tedious insurance applications, wandering abysmally through the desert, C. D. Wright’s kindness, a desire to be a coach in the NFL, chickens massacred by teenagers armed with golf clubs, the appeal of Connecticut as a place to die in, and so much more) that hold this magnificent work in place.
If anything can be taken from this reading of Vi’s Suicide, I want it to be a slight opening, a pathway among pathways into the expanding landscape of Vi Khi Nao’s literature and its intoxicating mathematics.
Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche, by Vi Khi Nao. Minneapolis, Minnesota: 11:11 Press, March 2023. 158 pages. $30.00, full color.
Andrew Felsher is a writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in Fiction Writers Review, São Paulo Review, and Action, Spectacle, among other publications. His fiction has been translated into Portuguese. He is the Editor of 128 LIT, Winner of CLMP’s Firecracker Award for Best Debut Magazine.
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