The Foreigner

by Francie Lin

  "I am not trying to trick you. Come on."

  "No way, man." He laughed again and searched my face for signs of levity. Seeing none, he sobered up a little.

  "Suppose I give you her info," he said. He didn’t go on, but the language of extortion had become familiar to me.

  "How much?" I asked.

  "It’s not money, exactly."

  "How much?"

  "I’m not trying to bribe you."

  He looked toward the back of the bar furtively. Then he made a motion for me to follow.

  We passed through the back door into a narrow corridor, then a run-down shop that had been abandoned. The long mirrors on the walls had been smashed; a red canister for money burning lay drunkenly on its side, and the ashes of a recent offering stirred among the glass shards. Rain came lashing through the broken windows. There was no electricity; a few meager candles, some high-beam flashlights were the only sources of light. A group of shadows had gathered in a corner cleared of glass and ashes. Cigarette tips burned like embers.

  A flashlight beam swung around as we approached. I shielded my eyes with a hand.

  "In or out," someone called. "Not gonna wait forever."

  "In!" A turned to me. "Spare a thousand kuai?"

  I gritted my teeth as I handed it over.

  "Grace," I reminded him, but he hushed me up vaguely, some new excitement charging the air.

  A kind of makeshift arena of loose bricks had been set up on the floor. In the center, two long, translucent scorpions skittered about grotesquely, illuminated by the beam of a flashlight. The creatures clung together in a static, vibrating effort, then were separated with the aid of tongs. After a tense moment, the handlers pushed the sharp end of a stick at each of them so that they scuttled at each other again with renewed savagery, tails arched in fury. One pinned the other, tail drawn to inject the poison, but was thrown off and pinned in turn, thin, brittle legs waving in an agony of brute will. The handlers separated them.

  "Last round!"

  The scorpions went at each other again. The smaller of the two grappled desperately with its comrade, its back bent almost double with the effort, but it was weakening. The other flipped it over, pinned it, and inserted its long poisoned sheath between the plates of its prey. The smaller body heaved and flexed; the legs guttered and went still.

  "Fuck," someone muttered, while another laughed. "Pay it right here, gentlemen!"

  "My God."

  In the flickering candlelight, A was sweating, an odd, smeared look of shock and arousal on his face. He gulped. "Every time I see it, it just fucking blows my mind. All that power. The way he just pins him, slides it in—"

  "The address."

  "What? Oh, yeah." He wandered back toward the door to the Roxy.

  As we returned to the bar, a Taiwanese woman came up to A and twined her arms around his neck. Obligingly, he ran his hand down her ass. They kissed roughly.

  Trailing the woman behind him, A found a napkin and scrawled Grace’s address. "Jinhua Street."

  The woman caressed him insistently as he wrote. Older, with a body settling to fat, thick makeup caked around her bright eyes: the kind of prostitute more common in the bars in the Zone, where the old G.I. bars left over from Korea and Vietnam still limped along. I took the napkin, but a violent surge of outrage shook me.

  "I don’t suppose I should mention your friend here," I said.

  He looked at me, genuinely puzzled. "You?"

  "Her," I said, indicating the woman with a curt nod. "I never thought much of you, but Grace worships you. She thinks you’ll marry her. She’s counting on it. She trusts you."

  He had been eating nuts from the bar again, but as I spoke, he slowly stopped chewing. A dark flush spread under his skin, and his neck tightened, almost as if he were choking.

  "Is she wrong, then? I take it you’re not… sincere."

  He didn’t speak. He seemed all at once to be suffering as he gazed at me, the dull film in his eyes dissolving into a pained clarity.

  "Don’t think I won’t tell her," I said and moved toward the door.

  I was almost to the entrance when he said, "She doesn’t love me."

  I looked back. He took a few steps toward me, half-unseeing; his face had undergone a kind of unpleasant transformation, disfigured by anger—not just anger but rage.

  "Not love she’s after." He rubbed his fingers together in a pantomime of money. "Green card. I can string her along forever as long as she thinks I’m going to take her back home with me."

  He giggled, a high, crazed sound.

  "Tell you a secret," he went on. "I’m never going back. You couldn’t pay me to go back. I’m on a mission. I’m taking back the night. My wife—my ex-wife—she fucked around. She fucked around with my best friend. They hid it from me for five whole years."

  "I’m… sorry. But that’s between you and them. Why punish Grace?"

  "You’re not listening to me!" he shouted suddenly. "My boy! My little boy! Four years old, looked nothing like me. I taught him to swim. Taught him to catch. I worked my ass off so he wouldn’t have to grow up in Meadow Park, with all the other Meadow Park scum. I can’t forget. You think you know things. Sometimes you do. Picked him up one day, and I just knew. Didn’t feel anything for him. Not anymore."

  He sagged, his voice thickened with grief. "When I sat up with him with the flu, he said, ’Daddy, what’s time?’ My little boy."

  The woman stroked his shoulders soothingly, murmuring. He jumped and pulled away from her. He wrapped his arms around himself as if embracing a phantom, feeling up and down his upper arms tenderly in a pantomime of comfort.

  "The thing about sluts is, no secrets. Everything out in the open. No one lies and says they love you. No bullshit. You could love a prostie for her truth," he said. "Except that’d ruin the whole setup."

  He wiped his face. "If you see Grace before I do, tell her I love her," he said. "Then we can just about call it even. Almost."

  He held his hand out to the woman and pushed past me, guiding her with a solicitude and adoration he must have held in reserve for whores, for I couldn’t imagine him treating Grace with even half the gentleness.

  GRACE’S DOOR was festooned with a faded red cutout of two characters that I could just barely recognize in the greenish light of the corridor: ru yi, which she had once laboriously translated for me as "everything as you wish." The brittle paper shook and fell as I banged on the door; it seemed a bad omen. It was one in the morning. The reality of the situation took hold, and my panic suddenly cooled. She would be in bed; her whole family would be in bed. Poison’s threats could wait.

  But lights had already come on. Grace opened the door, looking startled.

  "Something have happen to A?" she asked immediately.

  I bit my lip. "No, A is fine. Sorry to barge in like this. Can I come in?"

  "Dangran. Of course. But you are all wet. I make the tea, haobuhao?"

  She let me in and took my poncho, hanging it carefully in the entryway, then hurried off to the kitchen. A voice called weakly from the bedroom, and she answered back to assure them that everything was all right. It was not where I had pictured her living, this little, airless apartment full of shoes and dust and rattan furniture with broken weave. Plastic grocery bags were folded carefully on a sideboard, bits of string and rubber bands saved in a jar. A pile of clothing waiting to be hemmed, stockings drip-drying over the kitchen sink.

  She brought out a tray of salted plums and a teapot neatly arranged with a little spray of flowers. In the face of her humble economy, and her artless little gesture toward beauty, my errand seemed weak, melodramatic. To worry her without offering a solution would be cruel.

  She poured the tea and pushed out a chair for me. If she remembered our moment of romance on the river, she gave no sign of it, neither coyness nor bitterness at how I had pulled away. A didn’t deserve her. It would be a favor to her, to disabuse her of her dream. She wore a new necklace, a little jadeite
bird on a red string. I reached over and touched it. "That’s very pretty."

  "Yes." She fingered it too, looking down, and paused, considering. "A give it to me."

  I didn’t know if that was true, or if it was just a lie she told to keep up appearances. My heart plummeted.

  "Listen, Grace." I pulled my chair up closer and took her hands.

  I told her. My account was blurred, laborious. I talked in circles, stumbled, repeated myself. The scorpion fight; A; the woman; A’s little boy. I recounted a version of the history he had told me, leaving out the bitter impulse toward revenge, but the words seemed dead, disengaged from their real meaning: A; the woman; the scorpion fight; A’s little boy.

  Grace’s gentle expression remained unchanged as I spoke. She said nothing, even when I had finished and was casting about nervously for something more to say. Had she understood me?

  Slowly she poured out a cup of tea. Her cheeks had gone a shade paler. She rearranged the plums in their little dish, picked up the pot again, set it down. Picked it up.

  In the other room, the voice called again: "Xiao Ru? Xiao Ru?"

  "Excuse." She got up. "I come back."

  When she returned, she had a young man by the hand—or an old man, it was difficult to tell. The face that peered out at me was wizened, like an old man’s, but the body was young.

  "My brother," said Grace. "Xiao Xiong."

  He was obviously distressed by the disturbance in the night and plucked at her sleeve obsessively. I offered my hand, not knowing what else to do. As he took it, I noticed the fine black down on his arm, like the fur of an animal, and beneath this, withered skin flaking off, leaving sticky, translucent patches through which you could see the throb of his veins. Flesh disintegrating into dust and blood—yet the arms themselves were gawky, adolescent. Next to Grace’s peerless perfection, he was a figure of death and disjunction, time out of joint. Distantly, I felt a kind of pain in my hand. He had not let go of it; instead, his grip had tightened, crushing my knuckles like a band of steel. As I tried to pull away, he made a harsh crowing sound at the back of his throat. Grace intervened, speaking urgently, but Xiao Xiong, evidently terrified, shrank away from her, crowing again, and wrenched my wrist around. A sharp pain shot up my arm.

  "Xiao Xiong! Xiao Xiong!" Grace pried at his fingers desperately. He let go of my hand, and all at once the two of them were struggling with each other, Xiao Xiong screeching now, flailing at his sister with fear. There was a ripping sound as she broke away from him, and then suddenly the room grew very quiet as she stood, half-exposed, her right shoulder and breast revealed by a long tear in her nightshirt.

  Xiao Xiong backed himself toward the living room, like a trapped animal, wailing. With a sob, Grace turned away, clutching the edges of her shirt together.

  The shouting had brought an old, silent couple into the room—her parents, I assumed. They stood by, looking at Grace, both resentful and passive, like children.

  "Are you all right?" I asked her.

  "Excuse," she said faintly. "He is unhappy. It is very late. You wait. Lai, Baba. Mama."

  She went with all of them back to the inner rooms, leaving me to settle down shakily on the rattan couch. So this was what her tears had been about, back there in the paddleboat. She worked, I knew, at the cosmetics counter in the expensive Mitsukoshi building; she always came to our English lessons flushed from the perfumed luxury, the chic clientele, the dreamy, confected world of travel and romance made up by soft-focus ads and photos. Round and round she must go, caught between fantasy and truth. Of course she would dream of A, would dream of any path out into the world. I wished now that I had not told her about the prostitute.

  When she came back in, she had changed her top and was carrying a piece of paper, which she gave to me as she sat down. In her careful English hand, she had printed a poem:

  OSPREY

  In harmony the ospreys sing,

  On the island in the river.

  The modest, virtuous young lady,

  For the young man a good mate she.

  Here long, there short, is the watercress,

  On the left, to the right, tossed about by the current.

  The modest, virtuous young lady,

  For her he sleepless night spent.

  Sought her and found her not,

  Thought of her, awake or not.

  Missing her, oh! so pensive and anxious;

  Toss and turn until dawn.

  Here long, there short, is the watercress,

  On the left, to the right, she harvests and gathers.

  The modest, virtuous young lady,

  With lutes, small and large, the young man welcomes her.

  Here long, there short, is the watercress,

  On the left, to the right, she picks and chooses.

  The modest, virtuous young lady,

  With bells and drums, the young man rejoices in her

  all the way home.

  "From the Chinese," she said. "I use the dictionary for translate. You think?"

  "It’s beautiful."

  "I think to give to A." She fingered the pendant on her necklace. "But. You say A… not to love me."

  "No. Forget what I said, Grace."

  "No. You cannot say and then forget."

  "You’ll find someone better," I said, lamely.

  Her head dropped onto my shoulder, soft, light, tentative. It was what I had wanted, had wished for the moment I saw her. I wanted to lift her chin and kiss her, tell her I would help her, take her away. But Poison’s insidious threat had changed everything. Now she had to be protected, even if it meant a betrayal of friendship—even if she believed I was abandoning her.

  Gently, I kissed her on the forehead and put her away from me.

  "You’ll find someone else," I said again, and left.

  CHAPTER 18

  AND SO," ANGEL WAS SAYING, "Joe and Andy are sitting in the brush."

  "Mm." I pushed a bite of steak across my plate without appetite.

  She went on. "They’re patrolling the border between Ontario and Michigan, and they’re so bored they start playing Twenty Questions. They flip a coin, and Andy calls it. So he sits back and thinks for a while, thinks, thinks, thinks, and finally decides on ’moose cock.’ He goes, ’I got one. You’ll never guess.’ So Joe, he sits back and pushes back his hat and thinks for a while, thinks, thinks, thinks, and finally he says, ’Uh… can you eat it?’ And Andy thinks for a sec, bites his lip, goes, kinda dreamy-like, ’Yeaahh… ’ And right away Joe goes, ’Is it moose cock?’ "

  "Angel." I twitched. "Would you stop?"

  "It’s just a joke," she snapped.

  "I’m not in the mood."

  "Screw you. Everyone loves that joke."

  The whole day had been like this: a little vulgarity, a little irritation, recriminations, and silence. After leaving Grace’s apartment around dawn, I had slept a small, fitful sleep, broken by a dream of a little plastic vial being shaken at me. When I opened it, Little P looked up at me from the bottom, battered and bruised. I had closed the cap and thrown him into the sea.

  The shame of that dream still clung to me when Angel arrived later. Sick, sore, bleary, I had been dragged from shop to stall, forced to sample a procession of uncomplementary foods over the course of the day: unagi don in Gongguan; hot, sweetened douhua; greasy fried beef and pepper cakes cooked in an old oil drum on the street. Ruth’s Chris Steak House was the last stop on Angel’s list of places to review. It was meant to be a treat for both of us, but sadness and guilt remained with me, vestiges of the dream, and of the previous night with Grace, whom I would not see again.

  "Bread?"

  I shook my head. Vaguely I noted that Angel had dressed up in anticipation of the fancy dinner, her hair twisted into a French knot, her dress gauzy, her plump face made up with surprising skill. I had not told her about Poison’s newest threat, which seemed empty now, theatrical.

  The waiter shifted and coughed in an excess of attentive
service. The luxury of the leather chairs and good wine seemed wrong somehow. I picked up my wineglass; in the distorted surface of merlot I saw my mother looking back at me again, old and worn and haunted by her sons.

  A glow like a pilot light flickered up eerily behind the elegant paper partition. It drifted slowly out from behind the screen and floated across the murky dining room at a slow, measured pace. Between the half bottle of wine I’d consumed and the dimness, I had the brief, crazed impression that I was seeing my mother at last in her final form: light, cosmic light, warm, but with a detached, formal grace that kept me from reaching out to hold her, and burning my fingers on the flame.

  Then I saw more clearly that it was a cake, a huge white cake with piped rosettes and candles stuck unevenly all over the frosted surface. The waiter balanced it carefully to our table and placed it in front of me with a flourish as Angel began a quavery solo—"Happy birthday to you"—and sang the whole thing through in a brave, thin a cappella.

  I looked down in bewilderment. The cake, with all its crinolines and puffs of bloppy frosting, had been decorated by an amateur hand.

  "What—?"

  Angel whipped out a brown paper envelope and presented it to me across the table. Dubious, I broke the flap with a finger. A little brown booklet embossed with gold fell out. I turned it over and flipped open the front cover.

  The laminated first page showed a head shot of me in black and white. Angel had snapped the picture on the street and cropped it down to size. The face was familiar enough—me looking straight into the camera, a little windblown, mouth slightly open in protest. But the information was all wrong. Name: Jorge Santa Ana. Citizenship: Philippines. I fingered the facts dumbly, not quite understanding. Angel nudged the cake toward me.

  "But my birthday was in July."

  "No way! Let me see." She leaned over, put her finger on the page, on the birth date line: October 1, 1976. I would be twenty-eight.

  "You’re free now." Anxiety edged her voice as she scanned my face for gratitude, delight. "You can go anywhere you want again." She hesitated when I didn’t respond. "I know it’s not perfect. I couldn’t get my hands on a U.S. passport. Philippines is easier."