The Foreigner

by Francie Lin

  As I rounded the next corner, the elevator suddenly came to life. The doors slid open on my floor. A soft voice, a man’s, muttered lowly, and then the brisk sound of footsteps approached. I fled noiselessly down the corridor. The voice grew louder.

  It was Big One; he seemed to be hectoring someone, alternately coaxing and demanding. He kept saying, very pointedly, "Ni," meaning "you," and I supposed he was on the phone. I had no time to consider, however, because he kept approaching. I tried the doorknobs desperately: locked, locked. One was unlocked. I slipped into the room and shut the door just as he rounded the corner.

  In the dark, I pressed myself up against the wall and listened. His tone was a queer mix of coyness and threat.

  I waited until the footsteps disappeared. The unwashed smell I had noticed in the hallway was stronger in here, and gradually I became aware that I was not alone. The air was too warm; it had a quality of breath. Something bumped softly against the back wall. My hand found the light switch; the overhead bulb flickered on.

  They stared back at me, four or five of them: girls of about fourteen or sixteen, huddled together on a cot in the corner. They were dark and skinny, and stared dumbly at me, blinking in the sudden exposure. Bare-legged, they pulled their skirts down instinctively, veins showing like contusions on their skin. One of them had been tatting in the dark, a length of dirty lace across her lap. The harsh gray-green light revealed the stark room without mercy: two cots, some boxes for clothing; that was all. The floor was bare, and the walls hadn’t been finished. Peels of paint came off the surface like sores. The girl with the tatting spoke up.

  "I don’t understand," I whispered. She was speaking some kind of dialect. I think I spoke in English; I was so shocked that I didn’t know. She repeated herself and then, in a terrible, primitive gesture, pointed into her mouth to signify food.

  I turned out the light again; it didn’t seem callous, it seemed the only thing to do. Darkness resettled; I went back out into the hallway, closing the door softly behind me. Dazed, I wandered down the hall, not caring that I was in plain view.

  Bits of song rang intermittently through the corridor. Big One had occupied a room at the end of the hall, leaving the door ajar, like a boast. He had turned on the disco ball so that the room was full of points of lights in soft, dreamy rotation and was seated on the black banquette, holding a microphone in one hand and singing along with the lyric prompts in a lusty tenor.

  The girl I had followed in from the street was draped across his lap limply. Big One’s fingers made little wet circles along her inner thigh. Her thin dress had been torn off; her body was like a child’s, thin and flexible, and her face was flat and unemotional as she lay humiliatingly sprawled against Big One’s bulk.

  The song ended. Big One sighed, momentarily sated, then grasped the girl by the arm. She began to struggle, her face still silent and affectless. Big One slapped her and grunted in slippery, intimate Hokkien. He stood up and pinned her to the banquette, one fat thigh between her legs. He fumbled with his zipper. Again, he spoke, the harsh sound of threat and seduction together.

  She made a hard, bitter sound. Big One laughed, twisted his hand in her hair, and pulled it hard. She cried out, flailing. He stroked her throat tenderly with both thumbs and muttered some kind of expletive, gasping as he rubbed himself against her. Suddenly he pushed her roughly onto her side and barked a command: Roll over. "Bie jiao." Don’t scream.

  Obedient, she put her head down on the banquette and rolled over. She saw me in the doorway over Big One’s shoulder, I think. Her expression did not change. The disco ball made its soft, mitigating rounds as the next song began. Strains of the melody followed me down the hall, back out the window.

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 20

  NEXT WEEK, Little P had said. Hong Kong. Chungking. These three facts, dimly recalled from that eerie trip to Jilong, took slow root in my mind. Next week. Hong Kong. Next week.

  I arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday evening, blinking in the sudden dazzle of Chek Lap Kok, the white, glassed-in hangar filled with late orange sun. Kowloon Bay glistened, a sheet of wrinkled silk, as the Airport Express sped toward the metropolis. The sky looked like fire.

  I closed my eyes, but the impression of flames remained. Flames, prayers, money for ghosts. Longshan Temple, where I had gone to burn an offering for my mother only a week ago. The darkened portals of the temple had led directly into the cavernous apse, the idols of the deities arrayed, smoke-lidded and pensive, on a dais before rows and rows of tables. The murmurous quiet of supplication, the punctuating clatter of wooden bones being thrown. In the back: a fire in an enormous kiln, banked on all sides by mountains of gray ash, while behind the temple, a pyre cordoned by a low stone wall burned duskily with paper prayers submitted for the dead.

  My eyes flew open. The Airport Express shuddered along its track, and the numbness that had gripped me ever since the discovery at last dissolved. Disgust welled up; I put a handkerchief to my mouth, retching. The purse of ashes sagged beside my carryall. I kicked it under the seat, suddenly enraged. My mother—her blind loyalty to Little P was worth nothing, would change nothing. I had been prepared to accept anything: drugs; embezzlement; arms smuggling; even, perhaps, murder. But this—it wasn’t even mere prostitution. I knew instinctively that the girls I’d seen were just the surface of it; a malevolent shadow moved behind them, and I was afraid.

  As I sat, a cold rill of sweat ringing my neck, an old beggar with a tray came shuffling down the aisle. He touched my shoulder, spilling his pathetic wares into my lap: a single pen, a package of nuts, a dirty silk scarf. I shook my head. He insisted, pawing at my arm. I got up, gathered my things, and moved to a seat in the next car. I felt horrible doing it, but I couldn’t bear his presence. It wasn’t his dirt that was repellent, or his rank smell. It was the importunate, half-formed sounds he made as he pushed his merchandise. They reminded me of that hoarse voice in the back room, asking for food, for help. I had no idea what to say.

  LITTLE P had not mentioned a time for his arrival at Chungking Mansions, which meant that I would have to position myself in the lobby and wait for him to appear. This plan, conceived in innocence, was immediately crushed as I stood in the garish neon-lit maw of the Chungking entrance that evening and watched helplessly while throngs of foreigners pushed through the open arcade. Not a hotel so much as a marketplace, a mall, and a city of itinerants. Money changers sat resolute and forbidding behind their bulletproof glass and cages; a Sikh with a rifle dozed catlike and watchful. I waited for an hour, studying the restless crush of residents intently. Indians, Pakistanis—men of the subcontinent shuffling around in pairs, mostly, and some strung-out backpackers, a crush of indistinct locals buying pirated software. The Sikh was getting suspicious. His eyes flicked at me from time to time, and he held his clips more prominently in view. I stood my ground. Another half hour passed. I would never find Little P this way.

  But as I was about to leave, I caught a flash of metal rounding the corner to the elevators. Keeping an eye warily on the rifle, I edged toward it. I don’t know how I knew it was Little P; something in the heart recognizes its own.

  I’d hesitated for only a moment, but it was enough for him to slip into the elevators, for the sallow doors to slide shut and the ancient cables and cogs to churn upward, slowly. Eighth floor. I skirted a group of nuns and darted into the other car.

  The burnt-out corridor smelled of cardamom and rot. A pipe had burst somewhere, and wet footprints ran in all directions across the tiles. Odd voices from behind an apartment door, which swung open in a burst of chatter to reveal a full restaurant with brocaded tablecloths and wine and candles, like a mirage in the desert. Then the door fell to, and in the restored dimness, I saw again the flash of metal, down at the end of the long hall.

  Slipping a little, I followed it, footsteps squeaking. He did not look back, but he began, imperceptibly, to walk faster, with a hunted gait. I hazarded after him without trying to conc
eal myself. I was through with that. Atticus was right. Caution, fear—they diminished you, shriveled you. If there was a darkness to behold, I wanted to know it; I wanted to look into my brother’s face and see it fully once and for all. Perhaps then I could begin to build the bond again: banish the darkness, take him home. I slipped in a puddle and fell heavily against the wall. Still without turning, he broke into a swift, silent run, darting through an exit and down the stairs. I struggled up. I could not lose him.

  "Little P!" I shouted. The cry redounded senselessly in the piss-smelling stairwell. He did not look up, only flew down the steps. "It’s me! It’s Emerson!"

  He might have gotten away, but the door on the ground floor was locked. I could hear him jimmying the knob frantically as I limped down the last flight. Cornered, perhaps at last he would talk.

  "I only want to know…" I said. Then stopped, for the man cowering against the door was not my brother. He was older, more devolved, more debased; his eyes shone with an addict’s dreadful misery and desire, and he whimpered as I stood before him.

  The stairwell door suddenly opened from the other side, and the junkie fled past a couple of Indian men, who brushed by me without looking; they did not want to involve themselves. The door closed.

  In the stillness, a great exhaustion came over me. Even if the man had been Little P, what would I have done? I could not even imagine anymore. Somehow my brother had made the future into something blank and terrible, resistant to all efforts at love, or thoughts of possibility.

  I caught a sound above me on the concrete stair—not loud but stealthy, deliberate. Quickly I flattened myself against the door, mind whirling. Only Atticus knew where I had gone. A soft muffle of footsteps trying to conceal themselves in the bare chamber.

  A silhouette appeared at the top of the stairs, dark, plain, oddly retiring.

  "Who is it?" I whispered.

  Silence.

  "Who are you?"

  She came forward, a shadow separating out from shadows.

  My legs began to tremble. I sank down on the urine-stained floor and pressed my fist to my breastbone, trying to breathe.

  "Angel."

  "Don’t get mad," she began, standing over me.

  "How the hell… ?"

  She blushed.

  "You followed one me."

  "The whole way."

  Her mouth primmed up in silent defense. Planting her heel on the ground, she cocked her head skeptically and stared me down. "So. Are you going to buy me a drink or what?"

  I HAD not seen her since that dismal steak dinner, and it was clear, from her pointed silence, that she had not yet forgiven me.

  "So what did you come for, anyway, if you’re so pissed?" I asked finally. We were in Lan Kwai Fong, the cobblestone walks packed with revelers and colored lights, the clinking of ice in highballs.

  Angel forged ahead, tight-lipped, her steps clipped and angry as I trotted after her. "What makes you think—" but then the rest of her words were swallowed up by a burst of laughter from the open windows of a pub.

  "What?"

  She whirled around. "I know!"

  "Know what?"

  "About your brother!"

  I grabbed her arm as she turned away. "What do you know?"

  She twisted out of my grasp and fled down the street.

  Stumbling, I followed her into a dark churchyard surrounded by a thick hedge. Water trickled somewhere; white statuary peered eyelessly from the hushed steeple.

  "Angel!" I hissed.

  She was scrunched in a nook of the hedge, sitting on a wooden bench. One boot was off, and she was rubbing a twisted ankle. I planted my foot at the end of the bench. The seat jumped violently, jarring her.

  "Just what do you know about Little P?"

  She sniffed. "That he should be in jail."

  "Prostitution is legal in Taipei," I said, defensive.

  "Yeah, but smuggling’s not."

  When I didn’t say anything, she looked up again. "Human smuggling, Emerson. Those girls… they’re not local. They look like they’re from the mainland. Sold, most likely. Or else someone lied to them to get them to come."

  I sat down on the edge of the bench.

  "I thought you knew," she said, suddenly frightened.

  I pressed my hand to my breastbone, wanting to loosen the bond about my chest. "I didn’t know the girls were illegal."

  "What did you think?" said Angel skeptically. "That they were just staying in those horrible little rooms for fun?"

  "I don’t know what I thought," I said. "I didn’t think." Rather, I didn’t want to know. I thought of my brother: when he was little, he had gone through a phase in which he could not sleep unless his pillows were arranged in a certain way. I would look in on him after closing up the office and find him in his hot, close room, sleeping hard and serious in that little-boy way, arms flung up over his head in an expression of trust. "Will you fix it?" he would ask, coming to my room with his broken transistor and hopping up on the bed. There was the way he always sat too close as I took the radio apart, curious and rapt. How could I connect those memories with the degradation in the back rooms of the Palace?

  "How do you know about this, anyway?" I asked Angel.

  She chewed a nail.

  "Good God, have you done anything but follow me in the last week?"

  "I wasn’t spying," she said. "I was… You pissed me off, you bastard."

  She calmed down. "It’s not important. Anyway." She pulled her camera out of her bag. "I followed you to the Palace. There’s an easier way to get in, you know. Through the basement of the building next door." She fiddled with the camera, which blinked on with the sound of chimes. Then she handed it to me.

  The shots had been taken at night, from outside the Palace, under the sodium-looking lights of the alley. The exposure was bad, but you could see clearly enough the Palace signage, and the outline of two men. From that distance I couldn’t tell who they were; they might have been Poison and Big One, or they might have been Uncle or Little P or any of the clerks they kept at the desk. They carried a large block between them.

  "Coffins," said Angel. "They’ve been transporting them in coffins from Jilong down to Taipei. They bring them across the strait at night, I think."

  The shots of the Palace disappeared; the next was a close-up of the coffin I had seen dismantled in the upstairs room. The tiny Braille markings I had felt in the wood were holes, airholes. Why had she documented it so thoroughly? I fast-forwarded through the rest of the frames unthinkingly.

  "Why haven’t you gone to the police?" I said, suddenly hoarse.

  She frowned and tucked a lanky piece of hair behind her ear.

  "I don’t know." She glanced at me, then away. "Because he’s your brother. I thought… if you wanted me to hide these… just until you can get him out of it."

  Angel, I don’t love you, I wanted to say—just so she would remember, and perhaps protect herself. Pity and gratitude throbbed in equal amounts, giving me a headache that seemed to encompass more than just anxiety for Little P. I shook my head to clear it.

  "I have to talk to him," I said. "I can’t understand how he got mixed up in all this." I plucked at the grass. Shame swelled in me. "If it’s just money, he has an out. My mother left him the motel."

  "Is your uncle threatening him?"

  The old man, with his menacing bulk; the shuffling; the asphyxiated breath; the snorting and labor it took to keep him alive. No, perhaps he didn’t do the threatening himself, but he had Poison and Big One and his other minions to do it for him. Then I remembered his visit to my house, the strange flash of fear, the little plastic vial, which still rattled hollowly around in my pocket. It made no sense. But if Little P was under pressure, we would get him out somehow. I would get him out.

  "It was brave of you to come," I said suddenly, looking down at Angel. She didn’t look up. I put my hand over hers and squeezed it once. She waited. When nothing happened, she gently pulled her hand away.r />
  ANGEL, IT turned out, had done a good amount of snooping. Along with the pictures, she had managed to trunk-track Little P’s phone calls with a CTEK cable pilfered from the electronics market. Through the static, she had heard him murmuring about a meeting—seven o’clock, Friday—though the place was not clear, nor was she certain whether it was 7:00 A.M. or 7:00 P.M. I would have to stake out the Mansions at both times.

  No sign of Little P in the lobby on Friday morning, though I arrived two hours early and stayed until almost ten o’clock. The room I had rented in Wan Chai was bleak and stuffy when I returned, discouraged; I called Angel, but she was nowhere to be found.

  That evening, however, I had not made it halfway to the Wan Chai station when I noticed her hanging back behind me, trying, I suppose, to follow. I ignored her; she knew everything already. Shadowing me through a transfer at Central, she nearly stepped on my heel, but I allowed her to think she was doing relatively well, until I boarded a car that was almost unoccupied. She drew up short. Then, coolly, she walked to the opposite end of the car and sat down. The absurdity lasted three stations.

  "You might as well come over here and sit," I said finally. "You’re not fooling anyone."

  Shamefaced, she got up and walked over to me. We rode in silence for another stop.

  As we approached the Mansions, I began to lag.

  "What are you doing?" asked Angel, frowning.

  "I don’t know what to say to him," I said. My palms were sweating. "He’s not a little boy anymore."

  "Look, boyo. First, you’re going to tell him you know about the girls. Then, you’re going to tell him we have proof. You don’t have to blame him; tell him we know he’s just Uncle’s henchman, and that he won’t be implicated if he gets out now and leaves—goes back to the U.S. or somewhere, doesn’t matter where. It’s the goddamn timing that’s important. Give him, I don’t know, a week. A month."