by Roy Kesey
Zhao sets down his keys, runs his hands through his hair. The note could mean so many things, and all of them are bad. It has not been pleasant, this business of making lists in his head. Nearly all of his acquaintances have reasons, and that is only to speak of the present.
The pet store employees stand in formation on the sidewalk, shouting in unison about how hard they will work today—a common enough scene on the early-morning streets, but still it gives Zhao a small shiver. When they have finished shouting and are sent to their posts, Zhao greets the owner quietly.
–Not many for you today, says Li.
–That’s all right. I’m in good shape this week. And I’d like to buy a healthy one as well.
–Since when do orphans need perfect fish?
Zhao nods, rubs his face, watches the man’s eyes.
–This one will be a gift for a friend.
–Yes? And what’s her name?
Zhao smiles, mumbles the first name that occurs to him, follows Li into the store and down the dark center aisle. He pretends not to hear the man’s questions about how old his friend is and what she does for a living. They stop at a series of small tanks, and Li points out the fish Zhao can have. He nets them into his large plastic bucket, and points to another, small and white with black and orange spots.
–A special friend like Yunhua deserves something a little more interesting, says Li. How about a crown pearl scale or one of these orandas? And how long have the two of you been together?
–She’s only a friend, and this little one will be fine.
–Are you sure? I’ve got the most beautiful panda butterfly—
–I’m sure. But let’s make it a pair.
The two identical goldfish go into a small bag of their own. Zhao pays, fits the lid onto the bucket and heads for work. The traffic is loud, and the air is fat with smog. His arms are strong, but the bucket is heavy. His hands begin to ache as he walks the final block.
The purples and greens and oranges of the jungle gym have always been overly bright, but today they seem almost to throb beneath the fluorescent lights. He puts the healthy fish aside, hopes they will still be alive the next time he sees the Woman from Hong Kong. Already he feels ridiculous for having bought them. He wonders if she thinks of him as the old man who scoops dead goldfish out of an inflatable pool, or as the middle-aged man who provides toddlers and preschoolers with joy. He wonders if it matters at all.
Instead of heading to the storeroom, he tucks his lunch bag beneath his stool, glances at it each time he stands to help retrieve a dropped net. All morning he watches his co-workers, the way he was once taught to watch. None of them act any differently than usual.
He waits for a moment when there are no children at the pool, and lays a piece of cardboard over the top. He fetches his shoes and steps out into the muggy day, walks around the corner of Happytime and down the side to the back. Generators and air extractors grind and sigh around him, but no one will come to bother him. He has shade, and a brick to sit on. It is all he needs.
He lights a cigarette, and thinks again of the two films still missing from his collection. He was only a child when he saw them and does not remember the titles, the directors or actors. He is not even sure of the stories. The only things he remembers for sure are sounds, one from each film: a reed flute echoing in a cave; a bamboo fan waved sharply through the air, bringing coals to life at some woman’s roadside stand. These are not things he has dreamed, he is sure of it. But none of the DVD store owners has any idea what he is talking about.
He takes out two plastic dishes, one filled with steamed buns, the other with stir-fried tomatoes and cauliflower. He removes the lids, and opens his Thermos, recently refilled—the leaves have lost most of their flavor, but at least the tea is warm. He eats slowly, observes traffic through the chain-link fence. Not long ago he found a DVD that was actually called A Woman from Hong Kong. It wasn’t a proper movie, just a few episodes from some old Japanese television series, but it might still be worth a try, once he has earned it.
After another cigarette, he puts his dishes in the bag and heads back to work. There is a scrap of paper resting on the cardboard that covers the pool. He picks it up and unfolds it. It holds a single word: Yes.
Closing time, the last children borne away, the scrap of paper warm in his shirt pocket. Zhao stores his things and mops hurriedly, doesn’t hear the supervisor come up behind him. He nods to her as she chatters, and goes for his shoes. Again the bus, but this time out one stop early, and across the avenue to the mouth of an alley. At the corner he steps into a hardware store and buys a fifth lock for his door; it is a useless gesture, but the only one he can think to make. Then he heads up the alley to his favorite DVD shop.
The entrance is locked. There is no sign, no note. He looks in through the window. The shelves are empty. He walks back down the alley to another DVD shop. This one rarely has anything except recent releases and foreign television series, but he drops by from time to time just in case. The owner remembers him, nods, asks what he’s looking for.
–Has Shen moved his store?
The man looks around at the few customers who are browsing, takes Zhao by the elbow, leads him outside.
–They took him.
–Who?
–The police.
–For selling pirated copies? But every store around, all of them, even you—
–Exactly. So it was something else.
–What?
–I have no idea.
The man stares at him. Zhao looks away, shakes his head. Perhaps Shen was selling more than DVDs. Perhaps it was a random warning shot fired at counterfeiters. Or perhaps it was the man’s particular stock, the films that Zhao himself often comes to buy. Many of them are illegal to sell or own, but it’s awfully late in history for people to be arrested over that sort of thing. Still, the police would not have taken him without first watching for a time. They would know who came regularly and what was bought.
Zhao walks toward his house, pausing at each corner to pretend to tie his shoes, listening for footsteps behind him. Up the street and the alley, around the corner, and he is nearly run down by a woman on a bicycle. She shouts at him but does not stop. The window of the first-floor apartment is cleaner than it’s ever been. Up the stairs, in through his door. He goes to his bedroom and stands staring at the loaded shelves. He hurries to the kitchen for plastic bags, comes back and starts shoving DVDs into them as fast as he can.
Ten minutes of this, and then he stops. If the police have him under observation, any attempt to dispose of these films will be seen as proof of his guilt. He pulls them back out of the bags, restocks his shelves. When he is done he returns to the kitchen, puts away the bags, looks through the refrigerator and realizes he is not hungry.
He roots through the stacks looking for something he hasn’t seen yet. At last he puts The Blue Kite on to watch for the twentieth time. He stops it when the landlady is questioned, isn’t sure he can watch anymore, and starts it again. He stops it when Shalong is sent to the labor camp, and starts it, and the tree falls, it always falls. He stops it again as Tietou tells of denouncing his teacher and cutting off her hair, and again, the stepfather denounced and dying of heart disease, and a stretcher is brought, carried not by hospital orderlies but by the screaming mob.
Zhao’s supervisor meets him at the door as he comes in from lunch. As she begins to speak he interrupts.
–You have beautiful handwriting, he says.
–What?
–Your handwriting. It’s very graceful.
She stares at him, her mouth slightly open.
–There is nothing special about the way I write. Do you need to go home for the day?
This is a trick or it is not. He considers telling her how much he truly makes, how much he would owe in taxes if forced to declare his full income. But surely she wouldn’t do it this way if she knew for sure. She would instead bring in the NICMB, would point him out to the gray-uniformed offi
cers and stand back.
–I am fine, he says.
–You look very tired.
–I will be fine. What were you going to say?
–Why were you late this morning?
–I was late?
–Eighteen minutes.
–I’m sorry.
–Many parents were angry to see your stand closed. If it happens again you will be fined.
So she has no idea. Zhao smiles. He promises that he will be more careful from now on, and tells her that what he said before about her handwriting was the honest truth: her instructions on the chalkboard in the storeroom, they are always beautifully printed.
His back aches, and his knees. Perhaps it is time to see a doctor, but the one he has been visiting for years retired a month ago and he does not have the energy to find someone new. He heats water for tea and lights a cigarette, goes to his bedroom, and as he sits down his elbow brushes the nearest stack. The films scatter. He stares at them, gathers them up, takes the top four and sets them beside the DVD player. Together they will last until morning.
He falls asleep halfway through Devils on the Doorstep, snaps awake, relaxes. He gets up for a glass of water, and hears what sounds like a small animal out on his landing. Most likely a cat. He glances at his door, and a slip of paper comes under it.
For half a second his mind hangs on the idea of the cat, and the piece of paper makes no sense. Then he strides forward, works the inside locks and slings the door open, sees someone hurrying down the dark stairs. He follows as quickly as his body will allow. The figure below is not getting any farther away, is in fact descending more slowly than he is.
From the second-floor landing he sees that it is a woman, old from the way she moves—as old as he is, or older. He grabs the back of her shirt as she reaches the bottom floor, drags her to the wall, but there is not enough light, and he holds her there, tries to catch his breath, but it lunges and barbs inside him. She too is straining to breathe, does not try to pull away, stands and gasps and coughs. Finally he gets out one sentence:
–Who are you?
The woman doesn’t answer, though now she is breathing more easily. Zhao holds on to her with one hand, feels around for the light switch, finds it, but the bulb has burned out. He takes her by the shoulders, brings her face up close, shakes her.
–Who are you and what do you want?
–Let go of me, she says.
It is a voice he has not heard in thirty-five years.
He releases her, steps back. She unlocks the nearest door, opens it, turns on the light, and yes, it is Jiang Chen, his childhood neighbor, from the hutong north of Tiyuguan. She is a few years older than he is, must be sixty but looks closer to seventy. She is heavier than he would have guessed, gray at the temples, and there’s a scar on her chin that he doesn’t remember.
She walks into her apartment, turns on another light. Zhao stays at the threshold. The unease he felt a few days ago now makes sense to him: the wooden chair that his mother gave her, its scrolled back, one armrest broken and repaired, he’d surely seen but not noticed it in the back of the moving truck, and here it is, at a writing desk below the window.
–The note you just left upstairs—what does it say?
–It says, I hope you have not forgotten.
–I have forgotten nothing. I have forgotten everything. I live among the million nothings I forget every night.
–So you’re a poet.
–And you’re still insane.
She turns, and her arm arcs back. He ducks as she throws. A small plate shatters against the wall a few feet away. He straightens. Her face is perfectly calm.
–If you come near me again, he says, or leave me any more notes—
–You’ll do what? Call the police?
–I mean it. Leave me alone.
–But I have come here to be near you.
He turns and walks up the staircase, loses track of the number of landings he has passed, knocks his shoulder against the wall as he makes a turn, nearly falls. He is so very tired. In through his door. He picks up the note, and it is as she said. He tapes it beside the other two, then pulls down all three and throws them away. The film is still running.
For two weeks there are no more notes. She never opens her door as he enters or exits the building, never comes to bother him at Happytime. He sometimes sees her face in the window as he arrives in the evening, but her eyes do not appear to be following him. He will simply have to put up with the knowledge that she is near.
In the empty hours at work he thinks about her, about that time. He’d been very young when her parents were killed. The fire … but no, that came later. Her parents died when something collapsed. Not their house. The roof of a factory? Something like that. And then she had no one. Her older brother was already dead, killed by the Americans in Korea. Zhao’s parents took it upon themselves to provide for her. They protected her even after the fire that destroyed half the houses around the courtyard, claiming that she hadn’t started it, though everyone knew it couldn’t have been anyone else.
And there had been problems even before the accident. He remembers screaming that went on for hours and silences that lasted days. And he certainly remembers his own resentment later on—the toys his parents wouldn’t buy for him, the money going instead to someone who talked gibberish to cats, to parked bicycles, to the swept dirt of the courtyard. His mother had lectured him on generosity and solidarity, and so had his sister. A few years later the other time came, when it wasn’t just Jiang, when they were all insane, everyone, the entire country. She had disappeared at some point. That was all he remembered.
He should be sleeping better now, but the pain in his hands has gotten worse. Shen’s store has not reopened, and no signs have appeared, but there are rumors that he has been seen, that he is simply resting at home, that he will open the store again soon. The Woman from Hong Kong has not returned to Happytime. Zhao asked his colleagues about her, and no one had any idea who he was talking about. The two fish are still healthy and live in a small bowl on his windowsill.
Zhao comes slowly up the stairs carrying a bag of colored gravel and a plastic plant. As he opens the door, a scrap of paper lifts off the ground. He picks it up. The size and color are familiar but there is nothing written on either side. He strides down to the first floor and bangs on Jiang’s door until she opens it.
–I told you. No more notes.
–That isn’t a note. It’s just a piece of paper.
–What do you want?
–I want you to invite me to your apartment for a visit. Tea or water or beer. Whatever you drink.
There is no other way to end it. He nods, and she steps past him, closes and locks her door. They climb the stairs, remove their shoes as they enter his apartment. There is an odd, anxious deliberateness to her motions.
He waves her to the one chair in the sitting room, but she does not sit down. Instead she stares at the shelves full of DVDs, steps closer, reads the titles. He starts the water boiling, can hear her walking through his apartment, knows that she is in his bedroom staring at the massive television, at the films on the nearest shelves.
When the tea is ready he calls to her, and she comes.
–So that is how, she says as she sits down.
–How what?
She smiles.
Zhao serves her, and then himself. He lifts the lid on the teacup, blows across the surface.
–And how are your parents? she asks.
–My father passed away two years ago, my mother a few months later.
–I’m sorry. Are they interred here in Beijing?
–No. We—
–Harbin, yes, I know. And how is your sister?
He stares at her. She nods, sets her cup down on the armrest, speaks again:
–So each year the day comes, and you have no tombs to sweep.
He gets up, sits back down. He looks at the floor, the walls, at her again, and she shakes her head.
–
Not any more, she says. I take pills. They give them to me for free, and most days are all right. The nights are hard, but not as hard as yours.
He takes a sip, replaces the lid.
–I drive a taxi, she says. Doesn’t that seem like a good job for me?
–It’s a good job for anyone.
–Yes, but for me in particular, at least for another year or two. I now have one of the new ones, orange and blue. It’s so nice not to have that metal grate surrounding me anymore. Though sometimes I miss it. And have you seen the price of gasoline recently? Terrifying.
He frowns and nods. She stares past him, stands, thanks him for the tea, puts on her shoes and departs.
–Sir?
Zhao looks up, sees the Woman from Hong Kong staring at him.
–Would you mind?
He looks where she is pointing. A fish is floating dead in the center of the pool. She frowns and points to a second one floating near the edge. He apologizes and nets them out. He smiles at the woman, says that it’s been so long since they’ve visited.
Instead of answering, she takes her daughter’s hand, and the two of them hurry away. It doesn’t matter. The fish on his windowsill aren’t any trouble. He nods to his supervisor as she passes by. So Jiang is no longer insane, or at least not like she once was. He has taken the trouble to scout around their building, and sure enough, a new taxi is parked each night near the mouth of the alley, her picture on the license taped to the dashboard.
Four days since her visit to his apartment, and he hasn’t seen her, not even through the window. He has no idea how she knows so much about what happened with his parents and his sister. And it makes no difference.
