by Francie Lin
"It doesn’t piss me off," I said. "It makes me jealous," though in fact I did feel the stirrings of some resentment, too irrational for action. If a woman didn’t like you, she didn’t like you. The Bud girl was laughing, letting the boy wear her baseball cap. "Anyway, who’s cashing in on her profits?" I nodded toward the silent presence near the door. "Her boss looks rather local to me."
She frowned. "This is all about demand," she said. "He wouldn’t be doing this without demand." Suddenly she punched me. "I can’t believe you bought a beer from her."
"It’s her job."
"It’s a form of prostitution!"
I was starting to get angry. "Let’s just be clear here. Are you mad because men are exploiting women, or because the West is exploiting the East?"
"Either. Both." She looked taken aback.
My beer arrived, and the Bud girl stripped me of one hundred kuai over the quoted price plus tip, disappearing expertly with my change.
Angel went off in a huff to write up her restaurant notes in the corner, leaving me alone with my beer. I ordered another martini. I had had rather too much to drink; the bar now seemed smaller, hotter, and more cramped, the soft light from the recessed alcoves in the brick obscuring rather than intimate. More people had come in, the crowd spilling out onto the dance floor, where a mirrored ball revolved, flecks of light drifting dreamily through the air. As I looked around the room, I seemed to see it, unwillingly, as Angel did—cold transaction, trading and sales where formerly I would have thought friendship or, possibly, an awkward kind of love: a possessive hand on the elbow, a finger on the lips. A thumping, throbbing set had started up again, and the couple next to me tongued each other, pressed up passionately against the wall. I felt myself palpably aging as I stood in my suit and sipped my Bud; I thought I might prefer to be back in my room with my mother and a Hershey’s bar.
"Emer-son?"
A figure moved toward me through the thick sea of sweat and smoke: Grace, pale, luminescent—a cool spot in the hot, damp underground. For a moment I thought she had searched me out.
"How did you find me?"
"The cold light blue on glass," she said.
"What?"
"I have practice," she said, slipping her arm through mine in a best-girlfriends kind of way. "My boyfriend, he have not hear me yet. For the surprise."
Of course; she had come with her boyfriend. My heart fell as she scanned the crowd anxiously, squeezing my arm.
"I want for you meet him."
"I really don’t think that would be…"
Against my weak protests, she led me firmly toward the end of the bar and presented me. "Emerson, I like for you meet A. A, ta shi Emerson."
Late forties, maybe fifty, with short bleached hair and a dark tan. You wouldn’t call him fat, but he looked oddly overstuffed in his T-shirt and khakis, and seemed melancholy and uncomfortable, shifting on his stool. He did not smile as he shook my hand.
"Drink with us, please?" Grace, delighted, nudged me toward a seat. A moved over with ponderous effort, not speaking. His unfriendliness made me nervous.
"What are you having?" I asked, signaling the bartender.
A shrugged and made his own cryptic signal to the bartender. He had been nursing what looked like a glass of chocolate milk.
"Whey protein," he said, fishing out a couple of almonds that had drowned at the bottom of his glass before handing it back to the bartender for a refill. "I keep a jar of it here, special, for days like these."
"Oh," I said. I tried to think of something to say. "You must work out."
He perked up momentarily. "I had a killer session today. Four sets of reverse hamstring curl, four sets drag curl, four sets lat, and five sets cable crossover."
"Oh."
"Intense, I know." He popped the almonds in his mouth. "See these tie-ins? Between the delts and triceps?" He fingered his upper arms critically, as if judging a piece of fruit. "Gotta get ’em crisper. More defined." Then he lapsed back into silence, brooding. I had the sense that he hadn’t registered our presence particularly; he talked like a man speaking to himself.
He eyed my martini and beer with sudden focus. "You gonna drink both of those?"
"I was, yes."
"Mhmm." He crushed an almond in a clean ashtray and sprinkled it in his glass.
"It’s just gin. Gin and a beer."
" ’Just’ gin. You know you excrete calcium at a rate of two to one when you drink?" Reckless, he crushed another almond.
I glanced at Grace, who was resting contentedly against A’s arm.
"That’s not even the main thing, though," he continued. "The main thing is, alcohol weakens you psychologically. You lose vitamins and minerals, but even more, you lose focus, will, and the desire to succeed."
"Not much for me to lose on that count."
"Is that a joke?" he asked, not belligerent but plaintive, confused, as if he really wanted to know. I swallowed the rest of my cocktail.
"Only kidding."
"I thought so." He sipped his shake. A sudden bitterness made his voice break. "Ha ha ha. Right. You think it’s funny? It’s not funny."
"I didn’t mean anything," I said, taken aback, but he overrode this, gathering his fury.
"No one cares in this pathetic little backwater. Look at this place. The ancient wisdom of the Orient—ha! Can’t even build a proper gym. All anyone cares about here is money and clubbing and what kind of car you drive. But hey, I don’t blame you," he said, laying a heavy manicured hand on my shoulder. "I feel for you, man. Like a phoenix for the ashes. Have another one. On me."
He threw a few bills down on the counter. "Come on, Grace."
He stalked out, stiff and ponderous with muscle. Grace made an apologetic face before running after him, leaving me alone with my drinks.
"Who’s that?" asked Angel, sidling up.
"Nobody," I said, draining my martini. "I met her at Starbucks."
I SLEPT a little on the short cab ride from the Roxy to the Tenderness, and when the cab pulled up, I lay blinking up at the seams in the ceiling. I had had my dream again: the coffee, the trolley, the pink, hazy sky as I rode toward my office in the financial district. There had been something qualitatively different about it this time, though—a feeling of strangeness, as if the dream, which had also been my waking life, had separated from me and now floated authorless in the fund of half memory and invention. Distantly I recognized the office desk and the plants and the dusty computer monitor as mine but distantly, like an archaeologist coming upon artifacts of his ancestors. The dream left me desolate. I paid the fare and got out.
The hotel was chilly, a perpetual draft blowing from the vents overhead. Angel had clapped her hands in disbelief when she first discovered where I was staying, and laughed. "But that’s a love hotel!" Tired, I tried to think of Grace again, but Angel’s round face kept interfering. I had not said good-bye; she would be angry. The elevator walls were covered with small, grimy mirrors printed around the edges with advertisements.
I rolled back my sleeve and flexed my biceps tentatively. Tiny Emersons peered back.
In my room, shedding my clothes, I was too tired to turn on the light. In the darkness, I bumped hard against the chair and paused, feeling about with my toe. Something was not quite right.
I ventured farther into the room, tripping over something in the middle of the floor. My window caught the light from the street; I pulled back the blind and looked around.
The door to the closet swung loosely on its hinges. In the false white light, I saw that the mattress had been overturned and the desk drawers upended on the floor. Clothes, underwear, a notebook or two—everything was scattered where someone had pawed through my carryall. The old, derelict radio lay drunkenly on its side. The pages of my mother’s will fluttering like leaves.
I don’t know how long I stood there before the instinct for order seized me and I knelt down to pick up a few sheets of paper. They were covered with grit and a fine, stubbo
rn dust that clung to my fingers and clothes. I brushed at it, but it only ground more deeply into the fabric and skin. My mother’s box lay on its side in a far corner, and I understood that the dust was not talc or some kind of litter. It was ash, ash, ash, all over my hands.
CHAPTER 12
MY FIRST INSTINCT WAS TO CALL THE POLICE, but when the dispatcher answered, I had to hang up. Several minutes spent thumbing through my English-Chinese dictionary for the word thief yielded nothing. I’ve been robbed. The thought came very slowly, hardening like wax into the form of fact. Then: I am reading the dictionary. I tossed the book aside. Little P’s phone was off again; Atticus was not home.
"Wei?" Angel always sounded brusque on the phone. At least she wasn’t asleep.
"Angel? It’s Emerson."
"Oh." She was still angry about the Roxy, then.
"Are you… Can I trouble you to come down to the Tenderness for a minute?"
"Can I trouble you to give yourself a good cock punching for me? No. No, I’m busy right now. Tata."
"Don’t hang up! Please, please, Angel. It’s a small emergency."
"What up, boyee?"
"Just come, if you can."
She arrived shortly, her little bulldog face pushing anxiously in front of her. I had swept the ashes into a heap with a piece of paper, but otherwise things were as I had found them.
"Shit," she breathed as she came in. Then she blushed and looked away. I was still half-undressed; hurriedly I zipped up my trousers.
She called the police, and an officer arrived to take a report. Angel kept indicating me with a careless thumb, saying, "Ta," and it was strange to think of myself in the third person.
"Did you see anyone when you came in?" asked Angel.
I shook my head. The officer made notes as he walked about, lifting the derelict drawers with a toe and examining the lock.
"What’s he saying?" I asked.
"He’ll file a report." She shrugged. "But they’re not going to spend their time chasing down some teenager for stealing a few things from a foreigner in a love hotel. Besides," she said carefully. "He thinks we’re together."
"So?"
"So? So he thinks you had it coming. It looks like the other guy’s revenge."
The officer interrupted her, indicating the ash along the floor. Angel glanced at me quickly and answered in a low voice. He was a tall, stringy man with a bored expression, but at this his eyes widened. He adjusted his cap heavily and made a few more notes, then spoke to Angel.
"Are you missing anything else?"
"No. Fifty U.S. dollars, a watch, a pair of shoes. I think that’s all." Then something crossed my mind. "Wait."
I went over to the makeshift desk and sifted through the papers on the ground. "My passport. My passport is gone."
"Oh, Emerson." Angel relayed this to the officer.
When he was gone, Angel went down the hall to use the bathroom, closing the door behind her. I walked over to the pile of ashes and knelt.
Grayness and a fine particulate; a pale white powder that suggested parchment, or the color of my mother’s skin. So at last I saw her transmuted into her new form, silent, in some disarray, no less forbidding now than in her actual person. Proving, I supposed, that some kind of spirit did inhere in the basic matter of things. The thought should have been a comfort, but it filled me instead with a slow, suffocated dawning and dismay. If she had been nothing but dirt, nothing but dust and ash, how much easier it would be. I put my hand out, ran my fingers softly through the powdered grit. Not so much like ash as hard little seeds, inert but waiting.
"Can I have your purse?" I asked Angel when she returned.
"My… this?" She had a red beaded silk purse with a zippered top and a braided cord slung over her shoulder. Against her dun-colored fatigues, the pouch looked odd and migratory, like an exotic bird blown off course. She was unwilling, but these were extreme circumstances. Reluctantly, she emptied the contents and put them in her pockets.
Together, we managed to get almost the whole of my mother into the silk lining. I zipped the top and hung the bag across my chest, testing. The weight rested lightly but with heft against my side.
"It’s just temporary," I told Angel, who was smoothing her blunt-cut hair behind her ears in a studied way. "Until I find her a permanent home."
Unexpectedly, Angel’s face grew cloudy with emotion, and she seized my elbow, giving it a hard, painful squeeze.
"You can’t stay here," she said. "I never thought you should stay here. It’s not safe. What if they come back?"
"Don’t be silly. There isn’t anything to come back for," I said but without conviction, for her words raised the specter of Poison, his gray little teeth grinning at me and the smell of cherry candies as he said, "You have." He didn’t know where I lived, of course, but there were any number of ways to find out. He might have followed me; Atticus might have told him, or Little P, unaware of the debt. I would have to be careful now; perhaps I was being followed; something would have to be worked out. The late hour and the alcohol made my thoughts thick, gauzy. I pawed through them heavily to hear Angel saying, "Come back with me. At least for tonight."
I had no choice, really. Angel had ridden her bike; I clambered up precariously behind her, clutching my carryall, and off we went, she pedaling laboriously as I wobbled along.
It was the hour of the night when cities show themselves. Traffic lights blinked, off-line; street dogs wandered in the alleys, carrying away trash and scraps, shitting in the gutters. The pavements gave off steam like a long, collective breath, and the smell of open drains hung in the air. In my mother’s stories about the old country, Taipei had been a land with a single train going to and from school, a church and a priest, fresh sugarcane, candy stores, earthquakes, curfew. One more death, I thought vaguely, sleepy—death of a memory, of an image.
"Quit listing," said Angel, swerving. My head jerked up; I had fallen asleep. "Or else we’re going straight into the gutter."
When we reached Gongguan, the night market had all but died out, stalls shuttered, the second-run theater closed, only a few noodle shops doing small business, like candles in the dark. Angel propped the bike in the entryway, and we went up. She waved me into the apartment furtively, like a convict, without turning on the lights. She lived with her grandparents. We seemed to be treading down a hallway of books, scrolls, another little shrine with incense burning in the corner.
She slid a pair of paper doors open and paused. "There’s only the one bed," she whispered.
"Fine," I said, too tired to register this completely. The mattress lay directly on the tatami floor and smelled of camphor, the way my mother’s closet had, long ago. Time seemed to fold in on itself as I shed my suit and lay down gratefully: five years old again, drowsy with fever, burrowed in the warmth of my mother’s bed. Footsteps in the hall; voices (for my father had still been alive then) low and soothing outside the door, bodiless but palpable, as if to say that I would never be alone. Soon my mother would come and place her hand on my forehead, a gesture of tenderness that haunted me still, for I had never found its equivalent since. I would reach out and touch her face in the dark. My fingertips found a patch of warmth, and I traced it achingly.
Until the dream faded, and I became aware that it was Angel’s skin I was touching, soft, indeterminately white and silky. Unclear, even, what part of her I had put my finger to: an arm, a breast? She did not say anything, or move, though from her breathing she was clearly awake. A question hung in the camphored air. Rigid, awake, I could not answer it. She was my friend, but even loneliness could not conjure love where it did not exist. Quietly I withdrew my hand and rolled over, away from her, clinging to the edge of the mattress as if to a floating spar. She shifted tentatively in the bed, her leg barely grazing mine; the touch was gently baited, like a hook in my skin. Still, I couldn’t respond. It took a very long time to fall asleep again.
IN THE morning, the piece of sky out the window was a thi
n whitish blue. I rolled over, a dull memory of distress circling the bed, weighing upon me more heavily as I dragged up toward the surface of wakefulness, until I finally remembered: my passport.
Angel was gone. I swung my legs over the end of the mattress and sat up painfully. It was not just my passport; all my official documents—driver’s license, social security card—had been in the little desk at the Tenderness, and were now gone. How odd that something as dry as a government document could have such a hold over you; I felt suddenly exposed—as if all these years I had been a U.S. citizen only nominally, and now that right had been rescinded, through fate, or through the invisible hand of some central intelligence.
Voices rumbled beyond the sliding doors: Angel’s thin, strident one; and a lower one—an argument of some kind. Suddenly Angel yelped and footsteps approached, sharp and canny. I leaped up and drew Little P’s knife from my carryall, clutching the bedspread around me.
"Emerson!" Angel’s face appeared as the doors cracked apart. "I’m sorry, but he kept saying… and he wouldn’t take off the—"
The doors banged as someone behind her forced them fully open. A man in a black motorcycle helmet stood in the doorway, tense. He didn’t move, only raised his head toward me in silent, chilling recognition. I knew immediately it was Atticus. His dark, mirrored visor was still down. The effect was malevolent, anonymous, and instinctively I tightened my grip on the knife, even as I said, "It’s all right, Angel. Leave us for a minute."
She wavered, uncertain, then left with a dubious, angry look at Atticus.
I motioned him into the room, then went over and shut the doors behind him.
"What is it?" I asked. "How did you find me?"
The helmet was not just faceless but voiceless; he seemed mute. His frail frame, usually so straight and proper, sagged heavily against the back of Angel’s rattan chair. I reached out and lifted the visor.
