by Francie Lin
Blood, the thinnest film of it glazing the glass edge. I touched it, pulled my finger away. A cat, I told myself. But as I stood in my darkening yard looking at the glass, I knew that was an evasion, like the artificial peace of the teahouse. The truth, I felt, was very near to hand.
A plastic bag full of newspapers had been left at the front door. Fearful, I approached as if it were a bomb. But the weight of the bag was organic, soft and meaty, not mechanical. A curious smell, sweetish but rotten, rose into the air as I opened it. I pulled out the newspapers, unrolled them.
A fist-size mass glistened red in the nest of wet, blood-dark papers, tentacles of gray snaking it through like veins. I dropped the bag, backed away. Not human, I thought—prayed. At least not human. Dog, bull, pig—anything else.
A stained card had fluttered to the ground and stuck in the grass. I leaned over and read the neat, childish hand. A sentence, scrawled in pencil, almost obscured by blood:
"This means cojones," it said. "maybe you speak the spanish now?"
THE NEXT day a crowd had gathered in the street outside the double doors when I arrived at the Palace. The mood was festive; they were watching with evident enjoyment as a covered flatbed truck tried to maneuver out of the narrow alley off the street.
Little P was at the wheel, apparently whole. My chest loosened, blood moving painfully again. I knocked on the window.
"Get these fuckers out of here," he shouted. The truck’s fender shrieked against the side of the building, and the crowd muttered appreciatively. "They’re blocking the whole street."
"How’d you get this thing in here anyway?"
He wiped his forehead. "Are you going to help me or what?"
"Jieguo… jieguo yixia… " I said feebly, sweeping my arms in circles. There was a shuffling, like a mild ripple on a placid lake, but otherwise no response. I went back to the window.
"Nothing doing."
"Shit."
"Little P, I need to talk to you—"
"Son of a cunt, Emerson, not now!"
"But I—"
"Get in!" he barked. "Just get in!"
I ran around to the passenger side.
"Hold on." Grimly, he set the truck in gear. We bucked backward, angled, snapping off the right mirror cleanly. The crowd cheered; a woman picked up the mirror from the ground and waved it at us like a flag.
"Where are we going?" I asked, once we were settled into the flow of traffic. Little P kept glancing in the rearview mirror.
"I got some business in Jilong."
North of the city, on the coast—a port town. I couldn’t ask why: he was wound up. The truck was government-issued, the kind they used for construction, and battered, misaligned. Little P drove fast and reckless along the highway, cutting off semis, veering onto the rutted shoulder several times. Two trucks converged ahead of us, the space between them narrowing to a slit. As we shot through it, I gripped his arm involuntarily.
"Look out, Little P! Little P!"
He pressed into the next lane and shot out safely onto the interchange.
"Take the wheel," he said.
"What?"
"Take it." Abruptly he stood up and shifted out of his seat. The truck veered to the edge of the road, clocking 130 kilometers; cars blared behind us. I lunged across him for the wheel and pulled us back onto the asphalt.
"Are you crazy?" I shouted.
"It’s just a regular clutch transmission. You’ll get the hang of it," he said, flicking ash from his sleeve. He had a cigar this time, which he lit with eerie calm as I struggled to hold the truck steady. "I’m doing you a favor."
"Go to hell." The truck wavered and barreled left.
"It’s an object lesson. You know what your problem is?" he asked.
"My problem?"
"You’re afraid to die."
Despite the lanes of traffic, I glanced over at him. He was without irony, without humor. "And you’re not, I suppose."
"No," he said simply, jaw bunched. "I’m not. Or I’m learning not to be. It’s the key to enlightenment, brother."
"Key to the insane asylum."
"Key to immortality," he shot back. "Those guys who walk through fire? They know. Nothing can touch you if you’re not afraid of death. No consequences, if you’re not afraid to lose."
He was in a weird mood; a sheen on his eyeballs made me think uppers, but I couldn’t be sure it was drugs. It was not the time to bring up Poison, or the package left on my doorstep.
For the rest of the ride he was quiet, except to give me directions. Every now and then I stole a glance at him. I hoped the talk about death was figurative, but the way he had abandoned the wheel of the truck suggested not. I don’t want to know. It would be so easy to simply get my passport and go home, forget…
JILONG WAS cramped at the edge of its wide harbor and bore signs of its port heritage in the dingy little massage parlors up and down the narrow streets near the waterfront. Though it was sunny, mist blanketed the road like a fine shroud as it skirted the harbor. The truck ground up a steep graded hill.
We pulled up to an open garage storefront that seemed vaguely abandoned, a stark light shining far back in the airless interior, though I couldn’t quite see inside. The street was dark; the rest of the block seemed uninhabited.
I cut the engine, but Little P did not get out. He sat silently, the smooth plane of his face like a thin, treacherous wall. He looked like our father; he had the long, blunt nose and high forehead, the small white teeth. Odd to think that a stranger now inhabited those features. His hands clenched unconsciously on his knees.
He got out of the cab and went into the garage. I followed. The shop was dim and full of wood shavings, and a pair of garish red lights burned on a little altar near a couple of sawhorses. At the back of the room, white, ghostly planks of cedar and oak were piled against the wall like an inert army, unattended: coffins.
"Little P?" I whispered and heard Little P Little P Little P whispering back. The altar lights flickered.
Little P came out from the back of the shop with the proprietor in tow, a rough, thick man with a kind of oily pompadour and a finger missing from his right hand. He followed my brother closely and seemed to be wheedling or whining. Their low, muttered Chinese came through, half-understood, as if filtered.
"Next week," Little P was saying. "Next week. To Hong Kong."
The man murmured.
"Yes, myself," said Little P, impatient. "At the Chungking. Wo yige ren qu."
His friend seemed skeptical, dug a finger in his ear, muttered: "Ni yige ren, queding ma?"
"I said alone, duibudui?" Little P’s voice had dropped to a quiet, pleasant register. "You wenti ma?"
The man flicked his eyes at me distrustfully.
"I’ll wait outside," I told Little P. I wanted to get out of the shop anyway; the caskets pressed in on me at gruesome angles. Half-finished coffins were balanced on sawhorses in the center of the workshop, leaned up against the side walls. I had strange, fleeting impressions of bodies in them and thought of broken glass, a torn fingernail lying in the dirt.
In the glove compartment, I found Little P’s cigarettes and lit one.
"Why is it so quiet?" I asked Little P. He had come out of the garage looking more grim and distracted.
"What?"
"This street. There’s no one on it."
"Of course not." He jabbed his thumb at the coffin maker’s. "With this shit nearby?"
"Why not?"
"No one wants to live on a street with a coffin maker."
"Bad luck?"
"Fraud, raids. Sometimes they kidnap a body for ransom."
"Then why…" The question was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t ask it; he wouldn’t tell me anyway.
"I know a guy in Taipei," said Little P briefly, as if he’d heard me. He went around to the driver’s side of the cab and got his wallet and knife. "A stonemason, does tombstones. On his own right now, but he wants to network with other vendors. I’m picki
ng up some casket samples for him."
It was a good story; I could almost believe it, except I knew that Little P was capable of telling the worst story with the unembarrassed calm of truth. No consequences, he had said, if you’re not afraid to lose.
It would take a while for all the samples to be loaded, he told me. We walked into town and had a snack at an open stall: oyster pancakes and rice, with thin soup and a bowl of little dried fish that tasted like salted crackers. Clouds had moved in. Little P ate mechanically. It struck me, as I watched him, that I had not seen him enjoy a meal since I had arrived; I had not, in fact, seen him smile or laugh except in scorn or defense.
We finished eating, paid, went out into the narrow streets to kill time. The bright tinkling of pachinko machines followed us, glimpses of a little temple courtyard full of garland vendors and incense, the white gardenias like confetti.
"You think about my offer any more?" he asked as we came to the warehouses near the docks.
"My passport, you mean."
"Mmhn."
"I’ve thought. I still don’t know."
He looked out over the gray water. "What’s to think about? You could get out of this cock-loving hellhole tomorrow and go home. Just like that."
"You don’t like it here," I said, surprised. It had never occurred to me before. "All these years I thought… I assumed… you were happy here."
He stiffened. "Maybe happiness isn’t the goal," he said. "Maybe happiness is no fucking good to me."
"What is the goal, then?" I asked. A coldness grazed my spine, like a foot across my grave. Happiness! I could hear my mother saying. If all you want is happiness! It was like coming upon your name in someone else’s correspondence—the sense of two people communing behind your back. Perhaps, in the end, Little P had been closer to my mother than I had been; perhaps he understood her better than I ever would have. A ship sounded its doleful note. We were out along the military side of the harbor now, the water choppy, fathomless.
"Knowledge," said Little P. "Experience." He stood dangerously, deliberately at the edge of the dock.
"Come away from there."
"You wouldn’t understand."
"You keep saying that. How can I understand what you won’t explain? Get away from there."
"You don’t explain something like this," he said. He walked a length of the edge, arms out for balance. "Either you know it or you don’t. I cut the cord a long time ago."
"I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Goddamn it, Little P."
Seawater sloshed his ankles. He wavered dangerously.
"I used to steal from the register," he said. "At the Remada."
"What? When?"
"When do you think? Two hundred, three hundred bucks a pop."
I stopped chasing alongside. "But… why? We always gave you money."
"Why, why." Irritated, he spat into the water. "It wasn’t for the money."
"Then for what?"
He struggled internally, his face at once contorted and beatific. Then gave up. "Fuck it. I said you wouldn’t understand."
I let him drift down the waterfront, away from me. How quickly one could go from love to murder. A few hours ago I’d thought he was doomed, castrated, bleeding somewhere and alone; now I wished… what? Not that he was dead, but that he had never been.
Later, as if he had read my thoughts: "You ever think what it’s like to die?"
It was dark; rain drummed on the hood, showed in the headlights of the truck as I drove. A sheen of reflected light off Little P’s glasses gave him an eyeless look, the road traveling up his lenses like a scroll of film. The caskets bumped in the truck bed.
"No." The question unnerved me. "Heaven and hell, I suppose. Angels and devils."
"Not death: dying. I mean the process."
"Quit it."
"A gunshot, for example. People say it’s like burning."
"Shut up, Little P!"
A set of flares showed on the shoulder of the road up ahead. In my distress, I swerved the truck too sharply; we fishtailed, brakes shrieking, before the tires regained their purchase. The purse strap was rubbing my neck raw. I tore it off and tossed it to Little P.
"What the hell is this, anyway?" he said.
I tried to think of a good phrasing. "Ashes?"
"Ashes."
"You know."
"Jesus Christ. I thought you found her a place. You carry her around?"
I didn’t answer.
"You poor fuck." He stared down at the purse. "For Christ’s sake, she’s dead. Go home. Let me take care of it."
I reached over with one hand and grabbed the purse.
"There’s something called memory," I said. "There’s something called dignity, even if she doesn’t know it anymore. It has to be considered."
"There’s something called selfishness," he said. "There’s something called pride. You don’t believe in life after death any more than me. You really think her burial makes a difference to anyone but you? It’s for your own goddamned pride you’re doing this—nobody but you."
"What would you know about love anyway?" I shouted. "What would you know about loyalty, or even decency?"
His eyes revealed a flash of murderous white.
"You sanctimonious bastard," he said harshly. "What do you know about anything? I told you, I had reasons! You think I’ve spent all these years away without giving her a thought? You don’t know shit. Give me those!" He lunged at me.
The truck veered as I fought him off, clipping him in the jaw with my shoulder. The tires rutted on the shoulder. Horns blared, headlights blinding from both directions.
"Little P!"
Suddenly he desisted. Up ahead, the red and blue lights of a police cruiser whirled. He slid down in his seat.
"What is it?" he murmured.
"What? I don’t know! A ticket?" The cruiser was pulled over to the side of the road, behind a truck rather like ours, the blue flatbed with a tarp over the top. The cop shone a flashlight over the truck’s gate, which had not been opened.
When a few kilometers had passed, Little P sat up dazedly.
"Was it a ticket?"
"I don’t know. Something. A truck pulled over."
We had come to the outskirts of the city now. Little P was quiet. His thin profile reminded me of a blade against the window. He made a half motion to touch the ashes, drew back, and I saw the glint of a tear on his face.
"I did love her," he said. "But it all got fucked up somehow. I would’ve come home if it were different. I stayed away for her sake. So don’t say I didn’t love her. Even though it doesn’t fucking matter, now."
CHAPTER 16
ATTICUS’S SCANDAL regarding the opposition candidate broke the next day. I read about it in the English dailies over a breakfast of cornflakes and watery-tasting milk. Zhang’s offense was a confusing amalgam of larceny and perversion: he had arranged to receive kickbacks from a nuclear power plant he had pushed for, and he had hired a prostitute and asked her to tie him up and urinate on him, then skipped out on the bill. It was unclear how these two bits of information were related, if at all, and I thought Atticus and his cohorts had done rather badly in this instance; the disparate charges weakened one another and made them look like a hit job. The China Post, allied with the Nationalists, angrily denounced the stories as lies. I scraped up the silt at the bottom of my bowl and thought of Atticus, of the weird, strident passion that had possessed him when he had spoken of China, and of his father. It was not beyond him to make up a story.
"It’s not a story," said Angel. We were thronging through the crowd near the Presidential Building later that day, where Zhang’s opponent, Li, was scheduled to speak. Angel had her camera; one of the dailies had hired her as a photojournalist for the event, but for some reason, instead of her usual boots she had chosen to wear a pair of shiny black pumps, which encumbered her vast feet like clams. She limped along quickly, pausing now and then to grab my arm for balance and massage the
backs of her heels. "Zhang is a scumbag. When he was running for Senate, he got his henchmen to beat up a radio personality who was bad-mouthing him on the air."
"That doesn’t make him a larcenist."
"No, but it indicates character."
"The prostitute is nobody’s business but his own."
Angel made a face. "Why are you defending him?"
"I don’t know." A man waving the red and blue fields of the Taiwan flag nearly knocked me over as we ducked under his arms. "Vilification makes me nervous. Any kind of intense communal feeling makes me nervous. This thing, for instance." I looked about at the massing faces.
Angel made her way toward the podium, where a bank of photographers waited for the motorcade to arrive. The audience was quite a bit bigger than the one in the memorial park, and more restive, its excitement felt in the tense shifting along its edges. One dry, shriveled woman gripped the handle of her umbrella like a weapon. When the Nationalist Party candidate had lost the presidential election several years ago, Angel noted, a number of old ladies had gone out and smashed the windshields of parked cars in angry response, the force of pride unstinting even now that their eyes were weakened and blue.
The start time for the rally came and went with no sign of Li. The coordinator played the same music track over and over again as the wind flagged, picked up, flagged again. The sky looked diffident, and the noisemakers ceased except in isolated bursts, which sounded, in the quiet, like sarcasm. I glanced at my watch; I had promised to meet Grace at noon. Thirty minutes, forty. I slipped up to the podium and motioned to Angel.
"I have to go," I told her.
"You’re leaving? Now?" Her face fell. She socked me in the shoulder again, slapped me about the shoulders and head. "He hasn’t even got here yet."
"Quit it." I ducked and caught her wrists. "You can tell me about it later."
She patted my cheek, hard. "Fine. Go then, Casanova. What’re you waiting for, smooches?" She planted one on my upper lip, or would have, except I was turning away; her lips brushed my ear.
