by Roy Kesey
Except that it does.
Late in the afternoon, a young boy asks if the fish are all right. Zhao looks down, and they are all swimming at the surface, gulping air. He asks the boy to stir the water briskly with his net. It is sufficient for now, and he rewards the child with a free fish, but knows he will either have to pay closer attention to his work or invest in a bubbler.
Last night he stopped by Shen’s store, and it was open again, but he no longer carried the films that interest Zhao. Zhao asked what had happened, and Shen said nothing. Zhao lowered his voice, asked if he should be worried, and Shen said of course not—there had been a problem, but it was resolved.
The day ends. Zhao stores his things, catches his bus, walks up the alley through the sticky heat. He stands outside her door for a time. There is music coming from her apartment, and he remembers the song, remembers every word.
When he knocks she comes quickly, opens the door, smiles and invites him in.
–Four days, she says as he sits down. More than I would have thought.
–“Returning After Target Practice.”
–Yes.
–Of all songs, why that one?
–You choose your movies carefully too.
–Yes.
–Do you find it strange that most people don’t want to remember?
–I find it stranger that anyone does.
It has been so long since he was in any apartment but his own. He kneads his hands, stands and paces back and forth, sees a row of CDs along a shelf. They are all from the old time.
–How did you find me?
As he asks, he realizes that he doesn’t care. She must sense this, and tells him the shortest possible version: three years now back in Beijing, keeping her eyes open, hoping, and one morning a woman and a young girl flagged her down, asked to be taken to Happytime, and there he was walking in.
–Did the woman sound like she was from Hong Kong?
–No, they were locals. What does it matter?
–It doesn’t. Would you like to come up for tea?
–I would love to.
When they are settled and he has served her—not his usual zhejiang mao feng but green pearls from a new shop around the corner, expensive, in a beautiful bronze-colored tin—he starts a question, then reconsiders.
–You’ve told me how, he says. Now tell me why.
–So that we can remember together.
–I haven’t forgotten anything.
–And I remember things you don’t even know, but need to, if all is to be fair.
–There’s nothing I need to know. And I do not believe that anything is fair.
–Denouncing your parents, for example.
–I had no choice, says Zhao.
–We all had choices. Even if none of them was good. And your parents were also my parents by that point, though for some reason your father wouldn’t speak to me.
–They were still collecting rents! If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have.
–They were saving that money for you.
–And for you.
–Yes, says Jiang. All right. But your sister never hurt anyone.
–She was preparing to denounce me.
–No, she wasn’t.
–You have no idea.
–The notes you found? Two pages, typewritten?
The teacup slips from his hand. The stain spreads across the carpet. Jiang kneels to pick up the cup, but Zhao catches her by the arm, pulls her up, and she sits back down.
–She came over to visit one day, saw the pages on my table, took them and ran. I should never have been so careless, but it was so very hard for me to concentrate back then.
–You were going to denounce me?
–You deserved everything you would have gotten.
–That can’t be right. My sister would have told me.
Jiang looks at him.
–Why didn’t she tell me?
–I don’t think she knew what to do. She was angry, but I doubt she would have spoken against you. She might have denounced me instead, but you didn’t give her time.
–Even so, she could have told them.
–It wouldn’t have mattered. They had her. You remember how it was.
She hands him her teacup and is gone.
A month now. Zhao has been to three different doctors, none of them able to help. He rarely sees Jiang—only when they happen to meet on the stoop, leaving for work or coming home. This happens once or twice a week, often enough that for a time he suspected she was doing it on purpose. But there is none of that.
He sits and stares at his stacks of films. So they were insufficient or unnecessary, as this was coming all along. It is nothing like what he thought it would be.
Then the phone rings, and it is Jiang. He tells her he is busy, and she says it is only one quick question, pure curiosity: Some of his comrades moved so far and so quickly ahead, politics and business, while he was left behind helping children to play with fish. How had that happened?
He says he has no idea what she is talking about and hangs up. He wonders how she got his number. Hers is now in the memory bank of his telephone. He dials it, and when she answers he does not say hello, simply starts speaking. Yes, some of them advanced, are rich or powerful or both, but far more are neither. Some of us sweep streets, he says, and some of us take care of fish—a question of bad luck or missed contacts.
She is silent at the end of the line.
–It is also possible that the others are more clever and more diligent than I am.
She says that she doesn’t believe it. He says he doesn’t care, and hangs up again.
There is a military parade on television. The camera pans from a distance, shows an army of millions. It draws closer, and closer still, and zooms to the faces of the soldiers. They are not men but children, and why had his father been so cold to Jiang? Zhao had forgotten that part of the story. Perhaps his parents had simply disagreed, and his father had felt that they should take care of family first and worry about others later. It could have been something else, anything at all. Now there is no one who can tell him.
Last night, in Jiang’s apartment, Zhao asked her what had happened after she left the hutong. The stories were long and complicated: an aunt in Suzhou, a hospital for months and months, a man who loved her and then died, a small amount of money left in her name. Her first taxi. The waiting and watching.
He walks to his goldfish, takes out the bag of food, remembers that he’s already fed them. The two fish swim just below the surface, their fins hardly moving. The Woman from Hong Kong hasn’t returned to Happytime, and Zhao can’t remember her face. He sets the fish food on the sill, grabs his keys, walks down the stairs. At the store he tells Shen that today he’s not looking for films. He goes to the music rack, finds the latest releases and chooses a CD at random.
From there it is not far to the closest pet store. As he walks, he strips the cellophane from the CD. The owner is surprised that instead of fish he wants only another bowl and a tiny ceramic temple. At home Zhao calls Jiang again, asks her to come up.
She arrives, and he hands her the music, says that someone at work was giving it away, and he thought she might like it. She looks at it, smiles, thanks him. He leads her to the pair of goldfish, and Jiang asks if he’s suggesting what she thinks he is. It takes him a moment, but then he understands—the two fish floating nearly head to head, the exact tableau of a million paintings good and bad, the pattern embroidered on the sheets and pillowcases of every newlywed couple, an image of happiness and abundance, conjugal unity and connubial bliss, the very breath of fertility. He shakes his head sharply, looks up and sees that she was only joking.
He brings out the second bowl and sets it on the table. She laughs, thanks him for the gesture, says that she doesn’t actually like goldfish. He says that he doesn’t either, and asks if she would please take one all the same. She shrugs, says that he shouldn’t expect it to survive for very long, but yes, all rig
ht, she will take it.
And that is enough. He serves tea, and tells her about the two films still missing from his collection—the sound of the reed flute in the cave, the sound of the bamboo fan. She shakes her head, says that she will ask her customers. It is only a question of patience, she says. Sooner or later she will meet someone who knows.
Cochlear
MY BROTHER-IN-LAW SITS for hours, transfixed by the sounds of the cochlear fluids in his inner ear. Then sometimes he goes for a walk and doesn’t come back for a week. Joe has described the sounds in detail, and of course his excessive sensitivities cause us certain problems. His latest walk started last Saturday and we’re hoping he’ll get back tomorrow but he probably won’t, which will be one more goddamn thing to deal with.
Our daughter Angie just turned two, and graduated from a crib to a Big Girl’s Bed, which unfortunately she can climb out of, and does, four or five times a night, to bring us things—shoes, toys, lint balls, whatever she finds on the way. Earlier tonight she smacked us awake with a sandal. We tucked her back in, and considered telling her that everything was going to be okay, and decided not to on account of back rent and overdue bills and empty cupboards and Joe’s walks and the fact that Angie will be back in an hour smacking us awake with a slipper.
All this in addition to the fact that Bonsai Pines, the business we conceived and nurtured and tended, that business has collapsed. We do not claim to be faultless but the news that we simply lopped the tops off of regular trees and stuck them in five-dollar pots and sold them for two hundred apiece at plant fairs statewide would never have gotten out if the owner of Conifer Cornucopia hadn’t bought a Doberman.
We’re hoping to get the stitches removed some time next week, and the judge was very forgiving. Court fees and tree farm restitution may have wiped out our savings, but our sentence was suspended and we don’t really mind picking up litter along the highway, or rather we wouldn’t mind except that our only daycare option is Mrs. Przybysz across the street, who on bad days has trouble keeping her clothes on, like some weird combo of strip poker and Tourette’s, and also except for the wind, which picks right up each day around five, which is delightful if you’re working a sailboat back and forth across the lake the way Sarah and I used to do in better times—say even just a pokey fourteen-foot Sunfish, Sarah on the sail and me on the tiller, little whitecaps kicking across the gray water, the far dry hills spotted like camouflage, maybe some fire scars or maybe not, depending, the sun bright off the deck and bright in Sarah’s hair and as long as the wind blows steadily and does not gust you’ll both be fine, you’ll always both be fine—but less delightful if you’re gathering trash along Highway 20. Yesterday we chased a ravioli label six hundred yards, got nearly sideswiped by a Pace Arrow doing ninety at least, and ended up face down in a ditch full of tadpoles and muck.
We lie here in bed and talk about Joe, his good heart and troubled mind. Then we talk about our empty cupboards. Sarah whispers that we’ll have to just keep on keeping on, and her belief in the redemptive power of certain sayings is one reason I will always love her. So, yes, keeping on. We start brainstorming, and the first thing that comes up, my idea, is vague blackmail letters to random rich people. We once saw on television that ninety-two percent of all married Americans have committed at least one despicable act which they have not yet confessed to their spouses, and there has to be money in that. But collection could be a problem, inescapable jail-time and such, so we dig up more ideas, chess-hustling, pet caskets, but we’re lacking the know-how or capital to quite make them work. Sarah whispers a few more, sublet scams, Vegas cahoots, except they all involve splitting the country at some point and heading for Madagascar to live like kings on forty dollars a day, which would be fine with us but Angie doesn’t travel well.
I’ve got this other half-idea, some new use for Sea-Monkeys, but can’t see my way to it just yet. Then Angie toddles in, and since we’re already awake she doesn’t have to smack us, which is just as well since she hasn’t brought a slipper. Instead she has brought a condom, the packet old and wrinkled and starting to flake, and god knows where she found it, behind the couch or in a drawer somewhere, and the sight of that condom makes us sob and sob until we have to snort back the snot just to breathe.
So it’s Tuesday already and Joe still hasn’t come back. This morning we did the whole missing-person routine, the sheriff shaking his head and scratching his armpit and biting his lip as he copied down the details one more time. Now we’re out on 101 wielding pokers with the larcenists and vandals and bid-riggers who make up the rest of our crew. Our bags and safety vests are the very same orange as the life jackets that should always be worn on the water because there’s no telling what that wind will do, it can gust at any moment and spill you and we do what we can to push that thought away as we poke and lance and spear.
An hour or so later I come across an old magazine, and it’s open to an ad for plumbing fixtures, and the Sea-Monkeys plan starts taking shape. I kick parts of it around until they more or less line up, run everything by Sarah to see what she thinks and she glows and says it’s a go. Then the parole officer yells over that if I’ve got time to gab I’ve got time to stab. I wave and say that I certainly do.
We’ve learned our lesson about taking Angie to pet stores—getting her away from the budgie cage takes two cans of mace and a crowbar—so first thing the next morning we drop her off at Mrs. Przybysz’s, who looks pretty much stable and dressed, and head for Critters Galore. The clerk is about four-foot-eight, weighs maybe a hundred and thirty, rocks back and forth as we tell him what we’ll be needing. He nods, squints at me, gets a little smile on his face.
–So, not to pry or anything, but what’s with the we business?
I step forward a little.
–Beg your pardon?
–I’m just saying, there’s nobody here but—
I step forward a little more and grab him by the throat but it’s wrong, all wrong, I’ve promised Sarah so many times that I wouldn’t. I apologize and we head out. Across town at Pet-Pourri things go better. We stand in the aisle trying to decide between the MagiQuarium and the Ghostly Galleon until we notice the price tags, at which point we remember a mostly empty gallon jar of discount olives in the fridge.
So, your basic Sea-Monkeys package, a tray of olive sandwiches, a quick rinse of the bottle, and we follow the directions as carefully as we can with Angie yelling at us to hurry and wait and sit down and stand up and us yelling at her to quit yelling. Boiled water and packet number one and gentle stirring, and now we’ve got twenty-four hours of downtime which we devote to detail work on the van, and a visit to an old buddy of mine who runs a print shop, and the trash on the Ackley Cutoff.
On Wednesday we add packet number two, stir again, and presto—nothing happens. We hold the jar up to indirect light, and it is not impossible that we see the white dots described on the back of the box. We head out to see about hard hats and test tubes, and begin our search for any and all litter on Route 53.
Thursday, and the Sea-Monkeys are just big enough to see without squinching your eyes. I throw a dart at a map and it lands on Rancho Cotati, which is more of a drive than I’d wanted but you can’t argue with a dart. We hit Office Max for a clipboard and stop by the printer’s to pick up our rush-job receipts. On the way home we promise Angie that there are people in this world who can afford butter to go with their bread, and that we will soon be among them.
Friday at dawn I’ve just got the van loaded when the sheriff’s office calls. They found Joe wandering around downtown Finley, say he’s a little disoriented. We drive over, and there he is sitting in a cell with his t-shirt on backwards and someone else’s beanie on his head, talking to a guard.
Joe tilts his head and says, Perilymph.
The guard looks at us and shrugs.
Joe tilts his head the other way and smiles.
–That there was endolymph, he says. Hear the difference?
I do the pap
erwork and we talk him into the van, fly back to Fallash and hit Mrs. Przybysz’s. Unfortunately she opens the door with one hand and yanks up her shirt with the other so we thank her all the same and back away. Joe offers to do the honors, and we tell him that just this once maybe not. He watches as I stock the van with toys and toddler foods and makeshift vomit bags, and wrestle Angie back into her car seat.
It’s two hours down to Cotati, which gives us time to perfect our patter. As we pull off onto Old Redwood Highway, Sarah whispers that I’m our savior. I grin and say no, she is, and she says no, I am, and we circle around looking for a neighborhood with dumber-than-average inhabitants.
We settle on a couple of streets around Helen Putnam Park. I put on my trash vest and my almost-matching hard hat. I clip my map to my clipboard and check for handy reference points. I get Angie and her dolls and croquet mallets and Cheeze Ums set up in back, rearrange the rack of test tubes one last time, and we head for the nearest front porch.
I knock. We wait. I knock again, and there’s puttering behind the door, and a lady maybe fifty with nice clothes and smeared eye shadow answers the door.
–Yes?
–Good morning, ma’am, I say, and nod at the new decal on the side of our van. We’re here with Forest Mountain Spring Purification Systems. There’s a ruptured sewer main over on Fehler, and the water department has contracted us to run tests on everybody within a ten-block radius to see who’s contaminated and who’s not.
The woman looks at me, rubs her face, smears the eye shadow even worse.
–I rollerbladed down Fehler an hour ago, she says. I didn’t see any mess.
–Right you are, ma’am. But this is all underground. Nothing you could see with the naked eye, ma’am, not under any circumstances at all.
She frowns. I brandish my clipboard.
–It’ll only take a minute, I say, assuming you’re not contaminated, which we certainly hope is the case.
She frowns again but shrugs and steps out of the way. We enter with the smoothest stride of which we are capable, and ask for directions to her kitchen. She leads and we follow. I request that she open the tap, and when she does I unstopper a test tube and take a sample. I turn to our rack, fiddle briefly, switch tubes. I hold the new tube up, swirl it firmly and cringe.
