The Foreigner

by Francie Lin

  "Atticus…"

  His bruised, bloodied face looked back at me, eyes bright with tears, or fever. I pulled the helmet off quickly. He had a lump on his forehead, and his scalp bled. I found a Kleenex and a bottle of water in my carryall and dabbed at the blood trickling down his temple.

  "I did not wish to implicate Guo Xiaojie," he said. "So I keep my helmet on. It is bad enough without suspicions. I went to the hotel, but you are gone. I suspect you may be here."

  "What happened?"

  He took the tissue from me and held it to his head. His gray fingers trembled.

  "I was at home," he said wearily. "Drinking coffee and eating my toast. Planning for the day. Two men come to my door, they say they are from Zhang’s campaign, they want to talk." Zhang was the Nationalist candidate in the upcoming election, a short, bad-tempered man with a strident voice who had twice evaded charges of bribery. Earlier in the month a radio host supporting his rival had been attacked outside the station, but there was no proof that Zhang had ordered the hit. "Of course I don’t want to talk. I think I know what they want. I have evidence, you know, Xiao Chang."

  "Evidence of what?"

  For a minute a smile seemed to flicker on his face, far away. "Scandal," he breathed, conspiratorial. "Sexual scandal implicating Zhang. This time with proof. Pictures. Witness."

  "I’d rather not know, Atticus." For some reason he was making me nervous.

  "Oh, it doesn’t matter," he said. "In a week, two weeks, everyone will know."

  "They didn’t come about the proof, then?"

  He shook his head. "Let me finish. I let them in. I thought, if they are actually from Li’s campaign, and intend to harm me, they are acting very funny. Why would they announce themselves? Not very politic, non? Even Zhang is not so graceless. So I open the door." He looked at me. "Stupid, I admit."

  "And then?"

  He dabbed his head more vehemently, not speaking. I imagined that he was replaying the event in his mind.

  "Xiao P has asked you for money, has he not?" said Atticus slowly. There was an odd, mechanical note in his voice, as if the words were being drawn from him unwillingly.

  "Yes," I said. It was not a question I had expected.

  His fingers moved over his bruise and pressed, hard, as if he wished to intensify the pain. Beads of sweat stood out on his face.

  "There are people," he said, "who have an interest in these monies. Who are not willing to let it rest simply with Xiao P."

  "But Little P said I didn’t need to bring it till Wednesday."

  "You have the money, Xiao Chang?"

  "Yes. Some, anyway. Enough for this."

  He straightened up. A shadow slid over his eyes, and he pursed his lips. "But this is, as they say, only the tip of the ice glacier. Xiao P is very much in debt. If he should need more, will he come to you, do you think?"

  My cell phone beeped suddenly.

  "Probably. I guess." I sat down on the bed, all at once nauseated by the conversation. "I don’t know that it’ll do much good. He’s the wealthy one, now—almost. The motel is his, or will be." A twinge of guilt as I thought of the papers in my carryall. "My mother left me a parcel of property here in town. Somewhere in Songshan. I was planning to go see it next week. But she grew up there. It has sentimental value. I don’t want to sell it if I don’t have to."

  Atticus walked agitatedly over the tatami, a strand of bloodied hair like a gash across his forehead.

  "Property," he echoed, incredulous. "In the city? Here?"

  "Yes."

  His frail chest heaved up and down lightly now, like a bird’s.

  "Why?"

  "I wish you had not told me this," he said, his voice rising, no longer the bleak, robotic monotone. He crossed quickly to the sliding doors, as if to check that they were secure, and then he came over to me.

  "Xiao Chang, you must listen," he whispered. "I will keep my mouth shut, but do not tell anyone else that you have a property to liquidate."

  I drew back, startled. "But… why? It’s too late, anyway. Angel already knows. She had to help me locate the real estate agent."

  He sighed. "How can you be from the San Francisco city and not understand property worth? Do you not see how valuable this would be in a city like Taipei? They have to build to the sky as it is. Guo Xiaojie is no problem, I think; you may trust her. But nobody else, do you understand?"

  We both blinked. I pulled away from him.

  "No, I don’t understand." I stood up and pointed Little P’s knife at Atticus. "I’m tired of being scared without any explanation from you! Any proof! You hint at things, you deliver these pronouncements, but it’s like you’re… daring me or something! Like a game. Play detective. Connect the dots."

  Atticus blanched. "Believe me," he said, "I am never more serious in my life, Xiao Chang. It is no game. And I would not risk it if you were not a friend."

  He was sincere; I believed what he said; and yet, there was something not quite honest in him when he called me his friend, said he risked everything for friendship. He picked up his helmet and put it on.

  "Get out of here while the time is still good," he said softly at the door. He flipped the visor down. "Going," he said and was gone.

  My cell phone beeped again. Distracted, I looked down at the little glowing message.

  $8000? it said. Then, YOU NEVER TO FORGET.

  I FOUND Poison in a little back room of the Palace, watching The Sopranos on a busted television. He was alone, for once, and subdued, sprawled on a banquette in his undershirt and flip-flops, eating a bowl of pork and rice. I did not knock; he sensed someone in the doorway. Slowly he stopped chewing. I could see the back of his neck tense. Then, in one swift movement, he whirled around to face me, back to the wall.

  "Your brother not home," he said and waved the remote; I suppose he meant to defend himself with it.

  "I’m not here for Little P."

  "Uncle go with him."

  "Not here for Uncle either."

  "So?"

  In his boxers, he looked like a white spider, cunning, sickly, and thin. Without Big One and his entourage, he seemed diminished, and unexpectedly, I felt a kind of pity. I looked around at the stained ceiling, the broken TV, the shop light that swung dangerously low and precarious from a wire. Even the Remada in its earliest years had been better than this. A cheap Impressionist print hung incongruously beside the television—Monet’s Water Lilies. Someone had bought the print and put it there; the fact seemed to speak of a dreaminess somewhere in the Palace, an ill-defined longing for water.

  "You like this business you’re in?" I asked.

  He blinked, thrown off. "What mean?"

  "This KTV. The karaoke."

  "Wo xihuan." But he didn’t sound convinced. He darted a narrow glance at me, wary. "Like or not, what matters?"

  "Your English is very good," I said. "Surely you didn’t learn it just to run a second-rate karaoke den."

  I don’t think he knew the term second-rate; he seemed uncertain whether or not to take umbrage.

  "Architect," he muttered. "I like to be the architect. Pei Ieoh Ming."

  "So why didn’t you?"

  "Have not the school." He looked at me directly this time, eyes blazing. "Must to the U.S. for the school. No money to go. The architect is also no money, say my father. Is right. Is no money."

  He kicked a take-out carton halfheartedly out of his way and wiped his greasy mouth on his shoulder. A dilapidated fan sputtered in the corner.

  I removed an envelope from my breast pocket and placed it on the table.

  "What is?"

  "One thousand U.S.," I said. "In tai bi."

  First he looked startled; then he grabbed for the envelope with both hands. I drew it back a little.

  "This is conditional." He made another swipe; again, I pulled the envelope away. "Leave Little P out of it. This is between you and me."

  He grabbed the envelope without concession and counted out the money. It took a
while; I chewed a hangnail. The Taiwan dollar was one of the weaker currencies, with many zeros after its conversion.

  When he was satisfied, he gave the bills an approving pat and turned to me. "I say eight thousand, not one."

  A bastard, when one really came down to it. All pity shriveled and died by the light of the shit-eating grin he gave me.

  I leaned in close. "You touch my brother, you get nothing."

  He blinked and dug a nail into one of his little rat ears, flicking his waxy fingers to the floor. Then he laughed expansively and held up his hands in a gesture of good-natured surrender.

  "Okays, okays," he said. "I said I am the nice guy. We say, you give me eight-oh-oh-oh by zhong qiu jie." His eyes narrowed. "You know what means zhong qiu jie?"

  "No."

  "Ai-ya!" In one explosive movement he upended the makeshift bar. "Gan ni ma! Fuck your mother!" Vodka and corrosive whiskey leaked out onto the floor. "What do you understand? Nothing! Nothing. Son of a turtle’s egg! You are not the fucking Chinese. You are not the fucking anything! Talk, speak, but understanding nothing! Maybe you understand this?"

  He grabbed a bottle of vodka and smashed it, then backed me to the wall, the jagged end of the bottle to my crotch.

  "Zhong qiu jie," he said, suddenly calm. "Mid-Autumn Holi-day. Very nice. Moon very big, very bright. Look up to the sky, see the Princess Chang-e waiting for lover. Maybe have barbecue. Very nice." He dug the bottle in slightly, grinding it against my zipper. "This year zhong qiu jie is October. One month. Little more than one month, I give you. Very"—he searched his vocabulary list—"big heart, no?"

  "Just leave Little P alone," I said through my teeth.

  He let me go, pushing me roughly toward the door.

  "You not to worry about Xiao P," he said, soothing. "We leave his finger alone. Finger is not good, not special. I work in the outdoors market, I know. Finger is bone. No meat, worth nothing. But the cojones"—he smiled and cupped his groin tenderly—"the cojones worth big buck. Eight-oh-oh-oh, maybe?"

  "I don’t speak Spanish." I cradled the purse of ashes against my chest and backed away. "Seven thousand," I said. "And you don’t touch him. Fingers or balls."

  CHAPTER 13

  MY INHERITANCE LAY IN THE SHADOW of two flanking apartment buildings, down a narrow lane. It was low and dank, made of a kind of stucco, with a roof of leaking corrugated tin.

  "Here," said Angel, pushing at the gate. A rusted padlock scraped and fell into the weedy overgrowth. The yard was sealed off, broken glass embedded along the top of the walls to keep intruders out. Inside lay a private Eden lush with neglect. Grass, sumac, a splash of overgrown ragweed in the corner. Mosquitoes swarmed up from the weeds leaning high against the house and bit at my hands.

  The real estate agent trampled a path to the front door and let us in. It was an odd thing, to see the place where you had begun: you imagined mystics and incense, a wizened old sage, and got instead packing boxes, water damage, mold climbing the walls. Maybe it was only neglect, but it seemed to speak of a more basic meanness. The agent chattered as we moved through the small rooms, as if I were a buyer, not a seller, but it barely registered. I was thinking of my mother, who had never been at home among the grizzled, dopefied tenants of the Remada. She had always longed for one of those huge tract homes with its naked aspirations and ugly symmetry, a three-car garage, respectability. Her first and last actions of the business day had always been to check her appearance in the cracked glass over the register, for she would not be seen without her hair combed and her harsh white makeup applied.

  "Aiii-eeeek!"

  Angel shrieked from a back bedroom. I dropped a box of musty linens and ran to her.

  "Look out!"

  Something soft and winged strafed my head as I charged into the room. Soft-bodied bump; scrabbling, scritching in the eaves. Dirt rained down into my collar.

  "Kill it!" shouted Angel.

  The agent screamed like she was being stabbed. "Kill it!"

  I picked up a ceramic pot that was near to hand and threw it. The bat redoubled its frantic efforts, wings blurred, clattering like a pack of cards. A battery of glasses and cups hurtled through the air—Angel, blindly picking up and throwing whatever she could.

  "Quit it!" I shouted. "Just calm down!"

  A length of heavy pipe did it at last. The bat peeled suckingly off the wall, impaled on the pipe’s joint end.

  "God, what a mess," said Angel, looking around at all the smashed pottery and glinting shards as if surprised.

  I sighed and tossed the pipe away. It smashed against a shelf with a tinkle of glass. The agent, recovered from her fit, patted her hair and began her bright, chirping spiel again, though her smile had slipped a little.

  "She wants to know what your timeline is," said Angel. "She thinks, with a little work, it’d be worth at least five hundred thousand… certainly an optimist"—lowly, under her breath. Then, "Hey! Are you listening to me?"

  I had approached the dark corner where the pipe had fallen. Something in the configuration of the shelf and the dirt-filmed mirrors made me move closer.

  It was, I saw, a shrine—an altar exactly like the little shelf reserved for the garlanded portraits in my mother’s apartment at the Remada. The two frames were not mirrors but photographs of my grandparents, the glass overlaid with dirt. The shelf held an arrangement of candles, wicks burnt out; a vase; a little bowl of blackened fruit. The chiming grew stronger, two bells sounding off each other, the tones threatening to resonate together in a single note. I had already seen the shrine at Uncle’s house, of course, but this was different; something about it would not let go. Not the portraits, which after all Uncle had had too.

  Then it came to me. It wasn’t just the objects themselves; it was the arrangement of them that showed so clearly the imprint of my mother’s hand. The candles laid in threes, the swag of the garlands, the brittle plastic flowers carefully fanned out and centered between the portraits. In them I could see the little altar in the motel, as if peering through a rent in the curtain of years. A signature, a message read aloud after the source was gone.

  The agent prattled on. I turned to Angel. "Tell her to get out of here, will you?"

  "Huh?"

  "I said I’m not selling."

  Her mouth fell open slightly. She looked at the smudge the bat had left. "Then… what are you going to do?"

  For the first time since arriving, I felt a flint of happiness strike in my heart. "Live here."

  THE PLACE Little P had asked me to meet him was around the corner from the Palace, a bilevel xifan eatery full of steam from the huge vats of congee, and the tiny jewel-like colors of the little side dishes lined up along the buffet. Though it was midnight, the place was busy: tech men just off work in their bland white oxfords, scanning the newspaper for the Taiwan Index; students; a crowd of old men gumming their food, shouting at one another. I had put on the better of my two suits as a kind of ceremonial costume for this exchange. The great wad of cash lay in my breast pocket, loud as a shout; I crossed and recrossed my arms to hide it.

  Half an hour passed without any sign of my brother. Finally I got up and walked down the street to the Palace.

  One of the clerks dozed at the reception desk, a cigarette burning in the ashtray, pinned possessively by a greasy, nicotined finger, even in sleep. The lobby was deserted, although I could hear both the nasal strains of an old Shanghainese pop song and the boom-and-bust bass line of some hip-hoppy track coming from the upstairs karaoke rooms. My mother had liked those pop songs from the mainland herself, the old, plaintive ghost of Shanghai glamour singing sadly about the age of blossom, islands in the graveyard. A strange underwater atmosphere prevailed as I moved toward the office, the thin melody distorted, echoing. I opened the office door.

  "I hope—" I began, then stopped.

  Little P was on his knees, facing the far wall with hands on head, his back to me. A gun, a hand, a black uniform. All these things registered discret
ely as I stood dumb at the door.

  The man in black grabbed Little P by the collar and spun around, catching my brother in a headlock and pressing the gun to his temple in defense as he turned to glare at me. Tall, sallow, he was familiar: the man at the spa, the long-faced man with the slow eye.

  He hissed something at me, finger on the trigger.

  "Please," I said, quavering. The words fell weakly in the dreadful silence. "Anything. But not him. Take me."

  This seemed to enrage him, though he could hardly have understood the English. The cop—for his uniform was that of an officer—tightened his choke hold on Little P and grunted through his teeth.

  Little P clawed at the man’s arm.

  "Ta," he said, his voice rasping, choking. "Ta you." He has it.

  The officer looked at me with new interest.

  Trembling, I withdrew the envelope of cash and held it out to him. He motioned me closer with a jerk of the head. When I was close enough, he snatched for the envelope. I clutched it to my chest.

  "Ta," I said, shaky, pointing at Little P, making clear this was a trade.

  He released Little P, pushing him roughly back against the wall. Little P coughed and choked. I handed over the envelope, and the cop directed me toward the wall with the nose of his gun.

  As he counted, I bent over my brother, whose rasping breaths were getting easier. I put my hand on his back, but he swatted me away violently, as if I’d burned him.

  The cop pocketed the money. I expected him to leave, but instead he went to the office door and closed it. A panicky feeling made my heart race, as it used to when the lights went down in theaters. There was to be a second act.

  He strolled deliberately over to the desk and picked up a book, thumbing through it at leisure. Every so often he ticked his ring against his nightstick, slow, calculated—tick tick, like chips of gathering tinder. He put the book down and made a slow circle around the perimeter of the desk. A toothpick dangled from the corner of his mouth. Someone—the water lilies person, I assumed—had hung a poster of Nude Descending a Staircase on the wall, and he studied this for a long moment, shifting his toothpick from one side to the other.