by Francie Lin
"Our grandparents." Little P had translated for Uncle. "He wants you to pay your respects. Hold the sticks up with both hands. Not like that, lower. Now: bow. Three times. Repeat after him: Wo shi Zhou Lili de erzi…"
Fumblingly, I repeated the sounds, which I guessed were a kind of prayer, and shook the joss sticks as directed. Everyone else watched me, as if the ritual were a test. Unpleasant, being observed so closely, but the ritual itself had moved me: a link, a missive, like telepathy between the living and the dead. Was it possible, through incense and prayer, to open up a channel to minds that had loved, planned, then died? The Australian girls at the next table laughed. By now the cantina had filled up with early travelers: couples; a group of monks; families weighed down by luggage and cherished grievances, bound together in close, unspoken colloquy. I was suddenly aware of how alone I was. No companion, no lover to see me off; no one to meet me at the other end.
The handicapped vendor made another slow sweep of the room. This time I stopped him and bought a package of joss sticks. A bit of incense, burned at the altar of a shrine: would it bring me back into some living connection with that old, dead love? J, with her dark promise of sex and experience; the touch of her lips on my neck, the scent of smoke and wine. My mother had deplored her because she wasn’t Chinese, but the real trouble had been more timeless than that: age, and knowledge. I remembered her lovely Nordic face, its pale, moonlit coloring—how it had looked suddenly lined and weary as she made her jaded pronouncement in the darkened bedroom: "That’s all it is, Emerson. That’s all love is." Over the years, I had replayed those memories of J so often that they had been sucked dry of comfort, like marrow from a bone. I finished my coffee quickly and got up to find my gate.
The air of exhausted holiday mingled with sweat and heat at the gate. In the crush of boarding passengers, a couple of Americans nattered on behind me, talking about their Bali vacation, the English loud as a shout in the murmurous Chinese. The familiarity jolted me as we shuffled onto the plane. For the first time since leaving the United States, I thought of my empty walk-up in San Francisco. Every meal would be eaten alone now, over the kitchen sink or in front of the TV; no visits to the motel, no weekly devotion to mark the time from here till death. Meanwhile my mother walked her dark island of the afterlife, alone. Her ashes at the Palace slid inexorably toward scattering, defilement, oblivion. Her light, tuneless humming through all the walls of the motel; her exhausted face in the flicker of the television at night as she slept, fitful over money, how to make it all work. What means love? The ashes tilted precariously at the edge. Little P would never catch them, never give them their proper due.
I stopped abruptly in the aisle.
"Sir? Sir?" The flight attendant’s querulous voice carried through the cabin. They were coming on, the other passengers, trapping me dumbly, without knowledge or mercy.
"Sir!"
Already the boarding ramp was being retracted, but the galley door was still open, the path clear. Faces loomed out at me as I lunged my way toward the back, swinging my carryall blindly like a bludgeon, pursued by the flight attendant’s shout: "Sir! Sir!"
The air burned above the distant runway as I spilled down the metal service stairs and knelt, dizzy, heaving. Gasoline, heat. Cries of alarm sounded above me, but then the great engines of the plane began to churn, drowning them out, faster and faster, until the blades blurred in a high, thin scream.
I must have blacked out, because when I opened my eyes, I was lying cramped on the tarmac, in perfect stillness. A couple of baggage handlers hovered over me with mute concern, but the plane was gone, my ticket home gone. I sat up.
"Taxi?" I asked faintly. "Bus?"
The workers exchanged puzzled glances and echoed: "Teksi? Ba-as?"
"Right. Never mind." I struggled to my feet and looked about the airfield, alien, desolate in its flat, parched plain. I was truly on my own now. My mother’s final fate hung in my hands. I would save her, and save the Remada as well.
PART 2
CHAPTER 7
LITTLE P’S CELL PHONE WAS OUT OF SERVICE when I dialed him from a pay phone. Cursing, I hung up the receiver and looked around. I had gotten out of the cab at random and did not know where I was. I had tried to direct the cabbie to the Sing Palace, but my sense of direction has never been very good, and we had ended up in this ancient part of town, on a narrow, dark street that was almost a crevasse. Was it only a paranoid fantasy, or did the faces here seem different—more hostile somehow, or suspicious? I had walked a full block along the narrow, gray sidewalk looking for a phone. A man had been dozing in the alcove of what looked to be a dingy apothecary, huge pieces of galangal dried in jars lined up on the counter. His wife watched me from the doorway, fanning herself with a magazine.
"You dianhua ma?" I asked, desperate. The magazine stopped. She looked me up and down uncertainly before turning to her husband.
"Nali you dianhua?" she asked. "For the foreigner."
The man shrugged. The woman turned back to me and pointed down the road. As I walked off, I could see her in the shadow of an overhanging sign, peering curiously in my direction.
It was noon; the smell of salt and meat and frying oil came from the little stalls up and down the street, and my stomach pinched. I took out a fistful of change and bills. I had carefully changed all my currency back to U.S. dollars before getting on the plane; George Washington eyed me disapprovingly from the back of a crumpled bill.
A vat of dark beef broth roiled over an oil drum on the sidewalk, sending out clouds of anise-smelling steam.
"U.S. dollar?" I asked the woman tending the fire, holding up my bill. She wiped her shiny face and frowned at the money.
"Sanshi kuai," she said stubbornly.
"But I only have U.S. dollar. No kuai."
"San-shi," she repeated, louder, more slowly, and huffed with frustration.
"Laoban niang." A woman—more like a girl—sitting at one of the makeshift tables inside the dingy eatery spoke up. "Ta meiyou taibi. Wo bang ta fu haobuhao?"
Then she turned to me. "Whaddya want?" she asked me. "One bowl? With noodles or just soup?"
"You speak English," I said, dazed, as the girl fished some coins out of her rucksack.
"New Hampshire born and bred." She wore big, shapeless cargo pants and black combat boots, one of which she propped smartly on the stool beside her as I sat down. The proprietress brought over the bowl of soup, which was thick with beef and tomato. I felt I hadn’t eaten in years.
"Well," I said, through a mouthful of stew beef. "Thank you for rescuing me."
The girl cocked her head like a bright, squat little bird. She was small and compact, with dark, intelligent eyes and a square chin, which she raised inquiringly as she fixed her glasses more firmly on her nose.
"No wife?" she asked.
"What?"
"Sorry. That was rude." She frowned. "No offense, but aren’t you kind of old?"
"For… ?"
"I don’t know. Travel. Don’t get offended," she said quickly. "It’s just, most of the hua qiao I see around here, they’re college age, high school age. Root-seeking, you know?" She spoke with rapid-fire delivery, rat-a-tat-tat.
"I know. I’m not a root seeker," I said. The term had an unpleasantly swinelike ring.
"So then…" She spread her hands frankly. "What’re you doing here? Work?"
I felt hoary, aged, my carryall balanced on a stool like a monument to folly.
"It’s complicated," I said vaguely. "How about you? Where’d you learn your Chinese?"
"Oh…" Surprisingly, she blushed. She hadn’t seemed shy. "I’ve always spoken. My dad sent me to weekend Chinese school. I used to hate it. Like, what’s the point? But it got me this job, that’s something at least. I’m doing this travel series? For Pennywise Pilgrim? I go around and sample all the local food and festivals."
She looked at me defiantly, as if she expected a fight. "It’s not like Pulitzer Prize–winning work, you know?
But I do get paid."
"I’m sure it’s a very good job."
I must have sounded insincere, for she suddenly looked down at the tabletop and twisted a scrap of napkin in her hands.
"And when you do win the Pulitzer Prize," I hastened to add, "I’ll be able to say I was once saved in the middle of wherever it is we are, by you, Ms.…?"
"Angel. Angel Sheng-Sheng Guo," she said, brightening. Her nose crinkled as she handed me her card ("Angel Sheng-Sheng Guo, Writer"), and she had a pretty smile—not so masculine after all, despite her clothes.
Out in the street, she asked, "Where you going now?"
"Well—" I coughed and gagged. The air was full of strange ashy particles, gritty, gray snowflakes that melted and burned on my skin.
"Goddamned ghost money," said Angel, coughing. "It always makes my asthma worse."
"What’s ghost money?"
"For ghost month."
"What’s ghost month?"
"Ghost month!"—louder, as if this would illuminate. She looked at me narrowly. "You don’t know? The gates of the underworld and yada yada yada?"
I shook my head.
"It’s a religious festival. Like, the gates of hell or whatever open once a year, the dead come out and roam the earth for thirty days, bitching and moaning. So you have to appease them while they’re wandering and hungry. You have to buy good luck for next year by showing them some respect. So that old man there?" She indicated an old couple crouched on the sidewalk, tending a fire in a red metal canister. "He’s burning paper money. For his ancestors. You’ll see it all around. Businesses’ll do it too—they put out tables with fruit and incense and soda and stuff.
"Superstitious crapola!" she bellowed suddenly, swinging her rucksack like a weapon. "Opium for the conscience! Narcotic for the soul! And shit for the environment too, you know? Down with tradition!" She shook her fist at the old couple, who regarded her mildly, unconcerned, before turning back to their fire. "Up with the earth!"
But I didn’t think it was superstitious. When she was gone, I walked back up to the main road. As I passed by the couple, the old woman accidentally knocked the money burner over, spilling ash into the gutter—the gray saltpeter of communion. Some of the cinders rolled into my path. I stepped over them carefully. Ash, too, could live.
IN THE end, it was Atticus who finally came and got me, on his silver Vespa.
"Climb up, please," he said, placing one elegantly shod foot on the curb. I stared, for he looked different in his riding gear: less gentle, more taut. His helmet was black with a mirrored visor, which he did not lift, and there was something unnerving about it, a kind of menace, or void, that erased Atticus completely, though his lilting voice still came softly from behind this facelessness: "Climb up, Emerson."
He lived in a rather swanky part of the city, in the northern district, in a large, airy, two-level apartment with stone floors that felt cool and dry after the noonday heat. Woodcuts of dragons and other animals hung in a row above a low couch, and a moody, patterned light fell on a single orchid blooming near the windows. Long shelves of English and Chinese volumes were carefully arrayed along the walls; even the bathroom had a bookshelf: Dickens, Tolstoy, an anthology of Chekhov plays. A collection of helmets brooded on a long console—not motorcycle helmets but old combat helmets, German-style and Japanese, even a kind of medieval armored piece with a feather and rusting slots. A kabuto helmet with its masked mouthpiece snarled up at me, ringed about by a few black smooth rocks.
"You look very tired, no?" Atticus asked, removing his helmet and stashing it precisely on a rack behind the door. "Through there"—he nodded toward a small door below the stairs—"is a bedroom. No, no," he said, holding up a hand as I tried to protest. "Is no use arguing. I cannot talk to a man who has not slept well. When you get up, you can tell me everything, but for now, you will sleep." It was a command.
So I carried my bag into the room and lay down on the clean sheets and slept, fitfully at first, then more deeply, sinking into a little cocooned space where the confusion of the day was walled off by anonymity and strangeness. Not my mother, not even my worries about Little P could find me here. A moonscape opened out, stars shooting across the horizon. Weightlessness and moon rock. A figure spiraling off into darkness, lonely and remote.
When I awoke, a gray light had settled over everything. There was a strange quiet in the apartment, like a high-pitched hum. I sat up, mouth tasting of dirt and anxiety. There had been a girl somewhere in my sleep, but I could not remember her, and it seemed, confusingly, that the forgetting was the source of my sorrow. I reached for my suit jacket.
Atticus was standing at the console cabinet when I came out.
"Sorry, Atticus. How long have I been asleep?"
He didn’t respond. His back was to me, his head bent intently over something, so that I was nearly behind him when he finally noticed.
"Emerson!" Swiftly, he dropped something in the console drawer and closed up the cabinet with a smooth, decisive click.
"Oh, now." He chuckled at my expression. "Don’t be alarm, just an old man getting a good cry over old photographs. Excuse me if I am a little embarrass; I am so used to being alone, and you startle me." He patted my shoulder and checked his watch. "Now, let me wash up and then we will go and have some dinner, no? You have slept all afternoon. Good!"
His fingers were smeared with some kind of grease.
Shower water ran in the bathroom. It’s none of your business, I told myself. He’s the only friend you have here. But Atticus had been a little too smooth, a little too rapid in his excuse.
The water ran. Quietly, ear cocked toward the bathroom, I opened the cabinet and pulled out the narrow drawer.
Inside, a pistol lay on a tray of blue felt, like an offering, its snub nose gleaming and velvety with oil. Bullets had been lined up in a corked test tube and tucked into a fold of felt, half-hidden by a blackened chamois; he must have been polishing the gun when I came up behind him. I touched the barrel, briefly—cold, mechanical, with no human report. I remembered Little P’s knife, and my scalp tightened. It was nothing, I thought. Perhaps Atticus was a collector.
The water in the bathroom stopped. Hastily, I pushed the drawer back in and shut the cabinet.
Atticus reappeared some minutes later, looking refreshed and cheerful in a clean shirt and vest.
"In your honor, tonight," he said, "we will have a little seafood dinner. My treat, if you will."
"That’s not necessary, Atticus."
"Of course it is not necessary! That is precisely what makes it a treat." He purred a little at his own joke, fussing around with his keys and pocketing his wallet. Then he became serious. "But you must not do only what is necessary in life, Emerson. You must have your extravagance too. It is the only way to stay alive. Otherwise, there is nothing but eating and shitting, no?"
He laughed and went downstairs to pull the scooter around, tossing me the key so that I could turn out the lights and lock up. He seemed so happy, and so calm.
ATTICUS, I was to discover later, had a serious political life that occupied him whenever his work at the Palace did not. During the few nights I spent on his couch, he did not come home until quite late, and when he did, he looked simultaneously beatific and spent, his face shining in a rare display of enthusiasm as he said good night and went to bed, humming. On that first evening, he stopped to peer in the windows of the Géant store, where dozens of white flat-screen televisions illuminated the sleek interior with pictures of a protest outside the Presidential Building: banners and crowds, tears and shouting.
"These are exciting times," Atticus said, observing the video feed. "Very exciting times. You do not know much about the history of this island, do you, Xiao Chang?"
"No."
"A shame." He glowed. "We are a democracy, you know. It does not mean so much to you, I understand, but for us, for us it was forty years with the martial law, and before that a few centuries with the foreign occupation. You un
derstand what that means, Xiao Chang? No independence." He lifted a finger pensively. "No identity. Or a double identity: one for the rulers, the other hidden away. A half-life. A non-life. A killing of the soul. It goes on still, you know; we have not liberate ourselves entirely. But we have done some things, no? In just seventeen years we have made ourselves a democracy. No bloodshed," he said proudly. "No guns. Only reason." He clenched both hands. "Il faut tenir."
I only vaguely understood what he was talking about. The television news, incomprehensible to me, saturated the city—the noodle shops, the auto shops, the convenience stores, even some of the taxis—but it seemed not to implicate me in its grainy, discolored events. Perhaps I felt the way my mother had felt when watching Doctor Zhivago: that these tragedies were present but unaffecting, because they were happening to foreigners—Caucasians in her case, Chinese in mine.
The restaurant was a small cheerful mom-and-pop on Xinsheng Road, with tiny bare bulbs strung around the entrance and tanks of pomfret by the street where one could pick out a fish and have it prepared three ways: meat, head, and soup made from the bones after the rest had been eaten. The waitress seated us at an upstairs table by the open window and left us with a jug of Taiwan Sheng.
"Now," said Atticus, pouring out two glasses of beer. "You have come back."
It wasn’t a question, but the statement was offered up like the beginning of a story, which I was compelled to end.
