The Foreigner

by Francie Lin

  Silent, I flipped through the document, page after blank page.

  "Emerson, you never look at me," Angel burst out.

  The candles, unheeded, were burning down to a soft, melty mass. She had finished off her steak, but in the myopic light she still looked hungry.

  "You never look at me that way." She sniffed. "When I… the fact is, I like you. You must know that."

  "But Angel," I said, at a loss. I put down the passport. "I just… I never thought about it."

  Even as I said it, my mind worked backward over the weeks: the high heels, the makeup, the phone calls. She had come with me to the ossuary; put me up in her bed; given me money, the cake, now the passport. There was something blind at work, if I had missed all the signs, or chalked them up to mere friendship. No, not blind. I had simply not wanted to see.

  She threw down her napkin and left. The waiter’s eyes popped as I went after her, leaving the enormous bill behind. His shouts dwindled as I chased Angel down the dim, elegant stretch of Minquan.

  Hobbled by her shoes, she could not get very far. Abruptly, she veered into a side alley, ran a short length, stopped, ran, stopped. Her shoulders trembled with an effort not to cry, or perhaps she was crying already, I could not tell. A broken streetlight popped and sparked, then went out. Her face was turned to a wall. I stood some paces behind her, looking at the curve of her back.

  "I’m sorry. There’s no excuse."

  She picked at a chip of paint, which came off in her hand.

  I came closer, hesitant. "What can I do?"

  In answer, she whirled around and pressed her mouth fiercely against mine, arms wrapped around me like a vise, willing me to passion. I stirred but did not put my arms around her; I could not.

  She withdrew, hurt, humiliated.

  "I’m too old for you, Angel," I said gently—but that wasn’t it, not exactly. Her dress had slipped a little off her shoulder; the makeup had softened the shine on her nose. She looked, in the darkness, like a vision of a future self: beautiful, witty, generous; her judgments tempered by the memory of impetuousness in her youth. The revelation saddened me, for the dress was pretty, but I missed the army fatigues and combat boots, the way her jaw hardened when she was set on some preposterous idea; missed her foul mouth, her calling me "boyee."

  "You’re my best friend," I said. "My only real friend. But you deserve to be with someone who loves you from the start. Not some middle-aged sack like me."

  "Who said anything about love?" she said unexpectedly. "I’m not asking you to love me." She wiped her nose on her wrist and turned to me, defiant. "Not at the start. But maybe you would after a while? Couldn’t you? Could you really not fall in love with me?"

  "Angel," I said and put my arm around her—a mistake, because she took this to mean submission and turned her wet face against my neck. Her hand came up to cup my jaw in a clumsy motion of tenderness and affection. I pushed it away.

  "I can’t," I said. The proximity made me dizzy. That’s all it is, Emerson. That’s all it is. "Not like this. Not without it being right."

  "What’s ’right’?" she asked.

  "I don’t know!" I said, suddenly angry. "I just don’t want to do it in some shoddy, sordid little way! Not the first time!"

  She was staring at me now. "You mean…"

  I clamped my mouth shut and spoke through my teeth. "Nobody puts a premium on loyalty anymore. On promises," I said tightly. "If I won’t… go home with you… you should be grateful that I’m man enough to say no from the beginning."

  "And I’m not man enough to say no? You make me sound like some pathetic little whore!"

  "I wasn’t referring to—"

  "Screw you!" she shouted. "I don’t need your patriarchal oppression! And I don’t need your charity. Go to hell, you bastard—you and your criminal-ass brother."

  "What?" I snatched at her. "What about my brother?"

  But she had fled, tripping down the alley.

  I looked after her. Rain began to fall, little smatterings at first, then beating a steady tattoo on the tin roofs. Automatically I pulled the ashes closer, but the gesture seemed to be just that—a gesture.

  Angel’s mention of Little P had alarmed me, but for once I was too tired to consider the prospect of immediate danger. It was the older, deeper, more lasting vein of trouble she had called up that tugged at me now—not urgent but pushed down, repressed, muffled for so long that it had the force of an underground tap. Incense burned in a little shop nearby; the smell of consecration, of devotion. J, standing at the balcony of the apartment I had rented, overlooking the Charles. I had stopped sending money home to my mother just so I could afford that little, light-filled bower for the two of us. She had been happy, or so I’d believed. She hung pictures, painted the walls, tended her dusky autumn garden on the balcony, calling to me to come, help her with the late tomatoes she coaxed from the vine. Perhaps it had been only a kind of fiction to her, a return to old, innocent childhood impressions of home that, twice divorced, she already knew were not to last. I refused to share a bed, always putting her off and putting her off—that too taken from the page of childhood for her: love without sex. I never made a move, afraid to spoil the majesty of anticipation with the fact itself. My mother called, cried, said she would cut me off, but her tears and threats were like distant explosions, unable to penetrate the idyll. Eventually the calls stopped altogether.

  I could have lived like that forever, suspended in the sweetness of time and hope, but not J. I could still see clearly the gray, chipped paint of the front door that afternoon, putting my key in the lock—strange what insignificant details disillusionment would hold on to. Candles in the living room, a trail of smoke, a glass of wine. In the bedroom, a kind of domestic tableau: J in her robe, the man murmuring to her. Worse, somehow, than catching them in the act, for the scene had an intimacy about it, a closeness that stung.

  "Do you love him?" I asked when he was gone.

  "For God’s sake." Both prayerful and biting at once. "Did you hear a word I just said? Love, love." She yanked the sheet from the bed and threw it to the ground. "It’s all I ever hear from you. What does that have to do with anything? I don’t even know what you mean when you say love."

  I reached out, grabbed her arm, kissed her roughly.

  "Ow. Stop it! Not like this."

  "You said there was no right time."

  "I’m trying to help you."

  I laughed.

  "Fine." Her green eyes blazing. "All right. If this is what you want."

  Into the living room and onto the couch, stripping off my shirt. The atmosphere was bright and harsh, without any of the mystery I had always imagined. My touch betrayed me: anxious, hesitant. The shock of contact, her warmth beneath her robe. Instinctively I put out a hand, as if to ward off a blow, but she would not stop. A kiss, ungentle, with a brutishness tinged with a taste of stale wine. Her robe came off. Skin, damp, the wet-tipped push of her heavy breasts; the smell of moist soil, a shiver, the white light of the Remada bathroom, looking down at my mother’s head. Her hand pressed me, broad, flat strokes, and all at once the harshness and images and dreadful pleasure swam together, too fast.

  "Wait!" I begged, trying to push her away. But it was too late. A jolt of dark, agonized bliss—and then it was over.

  "Already?" The voice was taunting, but tears, inexplicable, ran down her cheeks.

  "You see?" Almost gently. "That’s all it is, Emerson. That’s all love is."

  Rain battened down my collar. I had reached the bright, luminous arcade of Ren Ai Road and ducked under the portico of the Citizen Hotel. As I shook water from my jacket, the passport fell out of the pocket in the lining. I picked it up.

  Brown, instead of blue. Jorge Santa Ana, from the Philippines. He would be twenty-eight years old today. I knew it was only temporary, but somehow the document had its own kind of power, quite apart from the reality. However much I knew that I was Emerson Chang, in an official capacity I was Jorge San
ta Ana, and that little bit of confirmation stole from me, made me a little less Emerson, a little more Jorge. How easy it would be, in fact, to switch nations, to switch alliances. I had, after all, cut my mother off all those years ago, without a second thought, and for what? For a fantasy of J, a false bliss, a future that was only a chimera, dissolving the moment I put my hand to it.

  I riffled through the blank, unfamiliar pages of the booklet again, the tanned, treated paper instead of solid blue laminate. I had thought I would be an American all my life, but when I looked closely, I found I had no objective reason to believe this. America was a contract, based on reason, not blood—and a contract of the will could be broken more easily. Perhaps that was why my mother had never been comfortable in America. She put great store in dynasties, in the pedigrees. She had, I realized now, a great fear of the void—of disorder and mess, of broken lines, of darkness, of individual destinies that in their wanderings destroyed the immortality of the whole. America, in its best days, smashed that immortality, cut its memory short and diluted it with the waves of new immigrants, year after year. At its shining best, it kept itself immortal not through the shadow of threat or empire but through a kind of republic of the spirit. My mother could never understand. She had not believed in heaven, not in any way that other people did. Immortality was only in me, and in Little P; it was only our fidelity to her that would keep her alive in any meaningful sense. I saw Little P in my dream, broken, beaten at the bottom of that vial, and knew that I couldn’t let him go.

  CHAPTER 19

  AFTER WANDERING UNDER THE ASHY STREETLIGHTS for a few hours, I hailed a cab to Tongan Street. The streets looked deserted, loose garbage tumbling in the gutters, the convenience stores like remote white beacons in the chaotic dark.

  I had not come here since that first visit to Little P, back in August, in the innocence of early grief and late summer. The apartment building was darkened, and the messy, angry red graffito on the doors had faded and tarnished so that it seemed to be an ancient word, a rune whose meaning had long since been forgotten. I did not ring Little P’s bell but instead went up the way I had that first time. At his door, I knocked, and the sound reverberated through the hall and the apartment beyond.

  "Little P?"

  I knocked, rested my hand on the doorknob. Somehow I knew, instinctively, that he was not there. The locks were not locked. Slowly I turned the latch and let the door swing in.

  The place was empty. The trash, the makeshift furniture, even the cracked mirror on the wall—gone, and the smell of antiseptic hung in the air, as if to erase all traces, not only of Little P but of any human touch. The light, when I flicked it on, was cold, blue, unyielding. Wind rattled the windows.

  In the kitchenette, I opened the drawers and cabinets slowly, one by one, knowing what I would find: nothing, and nothing.

  The screen door to the tiny balcony flapped. Mechanically I went outside to close it, looking down at the shadowed street whipped by the wind as I wrapped my coat around the ashes to keep them warm. The red lights of the Buddhist temple burned ghoulishly in the street below, the open entryway glowing like fire in a cave.

  The wind picked up suddenly, rustled the trash bags in the corner of the porch. Something light and hard rolled against my foot. I bent down to retrieve it.

  It was a vial, a little plastic vial identical to the one Uncle had fumbled and dropped. Fear rose again—fear, confusion. Was it drugs after all? That was too easy an answer to be right. Then I remembered Uncle’s look of lucidity and terror. No. Whatever the vials were, they were a secret beyond any conventional drug cartel.

  I tucked the vial in my pocket and left, not bothering to close the door behind me. Back down in the street, I hurried toward Roosevelt Road.

  THE PALACE beckoned, just across the busy six-lane dividing the long walled courtyard of Longshan Temple from the Wanhua district. From the outskirts, and in the buzzing light from McDonald’s and the ancient streetlamps, the neighborhood seemed more than usually dingy, the dark, craggy buildings like the walls of a canyon, the road a crevasse down which I skittered with a peculiar dread. Quiet for a Saturday night, dirt scudding along in the gutters, skinny, misshapen alley cats darting in the shadows. I stopped directly across the street from the karaoke, looking up at the poor, stained façade. Strange how deserted the Palace was, always.

  A sudden arc of light: a truck turned the corner at the end of the street, came barreling through, turned again. As it passed, I saw, suddenly, a glimpse of a shape reflected in the dark glass doors of the Palace—brief, huddled, staring out from behind a stack of Shaoxing wine boxes behind me.

  I whirled around. She tried to duck away but was not fast enough, and instead crouched like a cornered cat. The notched lip: the girl from Uncle’s—the one Little P had called Poison’s girl. Her legs were bare and scratched, her skinny frame hidden by a stiff, cheap new dress. She didn’t recognize me, of course, only stared in mute terror, holding a plastic bag to her chest as if for warmth.

  I raised my hand uncertainly in greeting. Instantly she bolted across the street, disappearing into the alley next to the Palace.

  "Wait!"

  But she was already gone.

  I stood paralyzed for a few moments, uncertain whether to follow. The doors to the KTV opened, and I had to draw back farther into the shadows, for it was Little P who stepped out. He looked carefully up and down the street, put on his sunglasses, dug in the pocket of a black overnight bag slung over his shoulder. When he lit a cigarette, I cursed inwardly; I would never find the girl again now.

  At last he ground the smoke out, wheeled his scooter into the road, left. As soon as he was out of sight, I ran around the corner where the girl had gone.

  I found myself in an alley that dead-ended in a concrete wall. She could not have gone very far; she could not have doubled back without me seeing her. I looked around, bewildered. She could be inside the Palace now, but then how could she have gotten in? There was no back exit, no fire escape, very few windows—no windows near the ground at all. I walked up and down the length of the building.

  A stack of corrugated tin rose several feet on a wooden flat. Someone extremely agile could jump from the top of it to the balconies of the adjoining apartments, and from there to a second-story window. The window did, in fact, appear to be broken.

  With difficulty, I clambered onto the flat and hopped up and down, trying unsuccessfully to gain a handhold on the nearest grille. It seemed impossible; she could not have gone this route. The tin sheets made so much noise that I was afraid someone might call the police. The ashes twisted about my waist on their thin cord, binding me. At one point I had a firm grip, but a tearing pain in my right shoulder forced me to let go, and I dropped back onto the flat, panting.

  With dreadful precision, I jumped up and caught the rails again, swinging my legs heavily forward for momentum. Again my shoulder pulled, but this time the pain was endurable. I hung there for a moment like a sack of grain, then struggled wildly, pulling myself upward until my toes gained a hold on the metal. My weight bent the rails slightly; the balcony screeched and groaned. It was not the most subtle of break-ins, especially since I was now looking full-face into various apartments as I sidled, awkward, from balcony to balcony, trying to reach the broken window. A little boy observed me stolidly from behind a screen door as I passed by. On the next balcony, a washing machine slopped warm, soapy water all over the floor. Almost there. The window was wider than I had thought, but the frame still held shards of glass like a mouthful of jagged teeth. After some hesitation, I wrapped my hand in my handkerchief and gingerly grasped the side frame. A moment of panic as I let go of the balcony grille. Then I was inside.

  It seemed to be a storage room. Cardboard file boxes and plastic tubs leaned up against the walls. There were more of the torn-out banquettes jammed in here at angles, along with a few low tables of the kind that stood in the karaoke rooms, and boxes in which mirrored balls were nested among their electri
cal wiring like large bejeweled eggs. I recognized, as my eyes adjusted, the dismantled lid of a coffin, which was propped in the far corner like the dim outline of a tomb.

  The coffin itself lay on the floor behind a row of broken TVs. The light reflecting through the window was veiled, dim. I picked my way around the furniture, banging my shins once or twice. Somebody might have heard me, but it didn’t matter. The closer I got to the heart of the matter, the less I cared for caution. I stood over the casket, assaulted by a dizzying sense of claustrophobia that surged violently and then passed.

  The interior was empty, but the coffin had been sealed and then unsealed at some point. There were holes in the top-facing surface as well as bent nails strewn about the floor. A splinter caught in my palm as I ran my hand along the top edge of the casket, trying to think: Atticus saying, "Principle!"; Officer Hu and his gun; the stonemason; Little P, his lean, wolfish face full of anger and remote misery: "You wouldn’t understand."

  My fingers had been automatically tracing a kind of Braille cut in the side of the casket, near the lid: rows of dots hammered out with the smallest of nail tips in the thick-hewn wood. The dots were the size of ants, close-set and decorative, I supposed, running the length of the coffin. I pulled my hand away.

  I went out into the hallway, checking it cautiously first, but the Palace was not open yet, and the second floor wasn’t for customer use anyway. The fluorescent tubing had gone out in all but two fixtures, which buzzed and trembled with a greenish light. There was a smell of paper and incense, and of something organic or fecal—close, sour-sweet, like a humid pasture in summer.

  I crept along, keeping close to the wall. The floor was eerily silent, and my shoes squeaked so loudly that I took them off and continued in my stocking feet. My moment of recklessness was over. I didn’t want to know about Little P’s misdeeds anymore; I just wanted to get out of the Palace uninjured and undetected. There was nothing incriminating to be seen here anyway. The doors were all closed and locked, the transom windows covered over with yellowed newspaper.