Arthur watched Louis for any sign of irony, but the small frown on Louis’s face indicated he was serious. “Tell me about her,” Arthur said. “Or was there more than one?”
“It’s all in the past, Arthur.” Louis gestured over his shoulder dismissively. “And I never think about the past. Every morning that I wake up I’m a new man.”
Arthur had tried to get Louis to talk about himself before, never with any success, and so he changed the subject. “Thanks for letting me sleep over,” Arthur said. “I appreciate it.”
“You’re my friend,” Louis replied.
Arthur interpreted the statement to mean that he was Louis’s only friend, for Louis never mentioned anyone else. “You’re my friend, too,” Arthur said, putting as much feeling as he could into his words. For a moment, the two of them maintained eye contact and smiled at each other. Then, before the situation became more emotionally complicated, Arthur excused himself to go take a shower.
The first inkling Arthur had the next morning of a less than auspicious day was the office computer crashing, taking with it into oblivion the last week’s worth of record keeping. Despite Arthur’s tinkering, the computer was still frozen at the end of the day, and it was a frustrated Arthur who climbed into his Chevy Nova, turned the ignition, and heard nothing but a mechanical screech, leaving him to ask for a jump start from Rubén, the Arellano & Sons landscaper who worked on Martín’s house and who had once confessed to Arthur that he was indocumentado, which Arthur knew was true for more than one of Martín’s gardeners. By the time Arthur stopped off at home to pick up fresh underwear and his razor before he went to Louis’s, he was wondering what more could happen. Norma was in the kitchen, microwaving a TV dinner, and when she saw him, she gestured at the notepad by the phone, saying, “Someone called for you.”
Arthur was relieved at having something to do besides scurrying furtively around his own home. The caller’s name was Minh Vu, and as Arthur dialed the number, he wondered if this person was one of the many he had called months ago. While Arthur had not recognized the accents he had heard then as being of Vietnamese origin, he could now hear that accent quite clearly when Minh Vu answered the phone, even if his English was perfectly understandable as he said, “I think you know my father.”
“I do?”
“His name is Men Vu.”
“Oh, so you must be Louis’s brother!” Arthur said. “He didn’t tell me he had a brother named Minh.”
During the brief pause on the phone, Arthur could hear a woman cooing to a crying child. Then Minh Vu said, “Who’s Louis?”
The remaining conversation took six minutes. After Arthur hung up the phone with a shaking hand, he informed Norma that Men Vu had eight children, not four, none of whom was named Louis. One of them—Minh—had received the apology from the hospital after it had accidentally revealed their father’s identity to the recipients of his organs. Seven strangers had inherited not just his liver but also his skin, his corneas, his ligaments, his pancreas, his lungs, and his heart, and these seven strangers now knew their father’s name. For the past few months since the hospital’s apology, the Vu clan had been arguing about whether or not to contact these seven strangers, and only now had they agreed to do so. At first, Arthur hadn’t known whether to believe Louis or Minh Vu, who was outraged when Arthur said, “How do I know you are who you say you are?” But Arthur began to be convinced when, without hesitation, Minh Vu had provided him with a phone number, an address, and an invitation to visit his father’s house in Stanton, where, he said, Arthur would find photographs, hospital records, X-rays, and ashes. Having kept himself calm for the time required to tell Norma the story, Arthur suddenly discovered himself in need of a drink. He found the last bottle of Wild Turkey he had ever bought stashed beneath the kitchen sink, half-full and untouched since the diagnosis.
“Oh, my God.” The first sip brought tears to his eyes. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“We’ve got to go over there, Art,” Norma said, her dinner forgotten in the microwave. “Louis’s got to tell us what’s going on.”
“No, this is up to me and him.” The whiskey had burned off the fringes of his panic, and Arthur swallowed some more straight from the bottle. “Just the two of us.”
“You are an idiot.” Norma enunciated each word, as fierce as she was during the year of waiting. “What if he gets violent? We don’t even know what he’s capable of—he’s been lying to us all this time. We don’t know what he wants from us. We don’t even know who he is.”
But Arthur was not listening, the third shot of whiskey having run an electric wire from his throat to his gut and down to his toes, bringing him to his feet and out the door to the Chevy Nova despite Norma’s entreaties. He was about to turn on the engine when the liver throbbed inside him, the size of a first-trimester fetus, forever expectant but never to be born, calling for his acknowledgment, gratitude, and love the way it constantly had done in the weeks after the operation, rendering him so breathless with its demand that he had to roll down the window and gasp for air. Overhead the moon was shining through a tear in a curtain of clouds, a perfect round bulb of white light reminding Arthur of the first thing he had seen upon awakening from his operation, a luminous orb floating in the darkness that he dimly understood to be heaven’s beacon, telling him that he had crossed over to God’s side. The orb grew steadily, its edges becoming hazy until it was a whiteness that filled his vision, a screen from behind which something metallic rattled and indistinct words were murmured. Someone was saying his name, a person, and not, as he had first thought, God, for Arthur was alive, a fact he knew both from the spear of pain thrust through his side, pinning his body to the bed, and from the voice he recognized as Norma’s, calling him back to where he belonged.
On hearing of the conversation with Minh Vu from a breathless Arthur, Louis did not open the doors to any number of alternative futures and parallel universes where he was the son of the man who had saved Arthur’s life. Instead, Louis merely sighed and shrugged. He was on his knees, sorting through a new shipment of goods, the boxes shoved up against the walls of the living room and labeled Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Vera Wang. While Arthur sank into the couch, Louis got up and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I suppose it had to come out eventually, didn’t it?” he said. “I’m sorry, Arthur. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Arthur closed his eyes and massaged his temples. In addition to the corkscrew of pain in his guts, a headache was chiseling out a groove in his skull. It made sense now why Louis had always been evasive about visiting Men Vu’s grave. While Louis had attributed this to the bad blood that had run between him and his father, the real reason was that there was no blood at all.
“If you’re not Louis Vu,” said Arthur, “then who are you?”
“Who says I’m not Louis Vu?”
“You just made it up when I called you,” Arthur said. “Louis Vuitton is your idol. And Vu is a very common Vietnamese name.”
“Louis Vu is really my name,” Louis said. “And I’m Chinese.”
“Oh!” Arthur gasped. “I knew it! I knew you were Chinese!”
“But I was born in Vietnam, and I’ve never been to China.” Louis sat down beside Arthur on the couch. “I can barely speak Chinese. So what does that make me? Chinese or Vietnamese? Both? Neither?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care.” Arthur groaned and rubbed his temples. “Why? Why did you do it?”
“Put yourself in my shoes, Arthur.” Louis leaned back and crossed his legs, the feet capped in fake Fendi wingtips. “I get a phone call asking me if I am related to another man who shares my last name. Most people in my situation would say no. But I don’t get your kind of phone call every day, and when I get it, I have to see where it takes me. So I played along. It’s how I’ve gotten ahead.”
“I want you to get your things out of my garage.
” The pressure in Arthur’s head and the spike in his gut were excruciating. “Tonight.”
Louis shook his head mournfully. “I’m afraid not, Arthur.”
“What do you mean, you’re afraid not?”
“Don’t get me wrong, Arthur. This is business, not personal, okay? Otherwise, I like you a lot. We’ve had fun, haven’t we? We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“We are not friends,” Arthur said, his voice cracking because he really had considered Louis to be a friend.
“We’re not friends?” Louis appeared genuinely hurt, his lower lip quivering. “Over something like this? Come on, Arthur!”
“Just get your things out of my garage tonight.”
“But where would I put them?” Louis’s lip stopped quivering, and an expression of gloom slowly descended on his face, dragging down the corners of his lips and eyebrows. “No, I’m afraid those things will have to stay. And please don’t think of calling the cops. It might be hard to explain why you have a garage full of fake Miu Miu and Burberry.”
“Then I’m going to take your things out of the garage myself,” Arthur cried. “I’ll take them out to the desert and leave them there.”
“If I were you, Arthur, I’d think very carefully about touching my things.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“You’ve got something on me.” Louis inspected his fingertips. “But I’ve got something on your brother, don’t I?”
“What?”
“Come on, Arthur!” Louis’s shout startled Arthur, who had never heard Louis raise his voice or seen him lean forward, as he did now, and snap his fingers an inch from Arthur’s face. “Wake up! Who’s your brother underpaying to clip his lawns and trim his hedges?”
The weight of Arthur’s naïveté pressed him deeper into the couch as he recalled Rubén, Gustavo, Vicente, Alberto, and all those other employees of Arellano & Sons of whom his brother asked no questions, so long as they produced Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, either real or faked well enough to be mistaken for real. Those phantom identities were easy to obtain, as Louis had shown Arthur one day, fanning out on the coffee table five driver’s licenses, each one with Louis’s picture but a different name. Arthur buried his face in his hands as he imagined a raid on Arellano & Sons, leading to arrests and deportations, with disgrace for Martín and defamation of Big Art’s good name.
“I think it’s time for you to go home, Arthur,” Louis said, leaning back into his corner of the couch. His voice was tired, and his face was pale. “Why don’t you just go home?”
The light in the bedroom was on when Arthur pulled into the driveway, although the rest of the house was dark. He was afraid of what Norma would say, so he bought some time by opening the garage door, in case the miracle he had prayed for on the drive home had actually happened. It hadn’t. The boxes were still there, flaxen in the moonlight and stacked to the ceiling and the walls, right up to the edge of the driveway. Louis had conquered every square foot of storage for his fountain pens with their plastic barrels, his sunglasses without ultraviolet protection, his watches that kept perfect time for a day, his designer jackets without linings, his pants with hems that unraveled easily, his discs of pirated movies filmed surreptitiously in theaters, his reproductions of Microsoft software so perfect as to come with the bugs infesting the genuine item, his pseudopills that might or might not help, might or might not harm—a garage crammed with things fashioned by people whom he would never know but to whom Arthur felt bound in some way, especially when he imagined the obscure places from where they might hail.
Greeting Arthur at eye level were the names of Gucci, Jimmy Choo, and Hedi Slimane, beautiful and exotic appellations written on the boxes with a blue marker. Arthur and Norma had yearned for such names upon encountering them in Bloomingdale’s and window-shopping at the boutiques on Rodeo Drive, but when the clerks had ignored them, they understood that they themselves were unwanted.
“Arthur Arellano!”
Arthur turned. Norma stood at the back door in a frayed bathrobe, her feet bare. “I can explain,” Arthur said, extending his arms hopefully. But when Norma folded her own arms over her chest and raised an eyebrow, he saw himself as she saw him then, offering nothing but empty hands.
he first time the professor called Mrs. Khanh by the wrong name was at a wedding banquet, the kind of crowded affair they attended often, usually out of obligation. As the bride and groom approached their table, Mrs. Khanh noticed the professor reading his palms, where he’d jotted down his toast and the names of the newlyweds, whom they had never met. Leaning close to be heard over the chatter of four hundred guests and the din of the band, she found her husband redolent of well-worn paperbacks and threadbare carpet. It was a comforting mustiness, one that she associated with secondhand bookstores.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ve done this a thousand times.”
“Have I?” The professor rubbed his hands on his pants. “I can’t seem to recall.” His fair skin was thin as paper and lined with blue veins. From the precise part of his silver hair to the gleam on his brown oxfords, he appeared to be the same man who’d taught so many students he could no longer count them. During the two minutes the newlyweds visited their table, he didn’t miss a beat, calling the couple by their correct names and bestowing the good wishes expected of him as the eldest among the ten guests. But while the groom tugged at the collar of his Nehru jacket and the bride plucked at the skirt of her empire-waist gown, Mrs. Khanh could think only of the night of the diagnosis, when the professor had frightened her by weeping for the first time in their four decades together. Only after the young couple left could she relax, sighing as deeply as she could in the strict confines of her velvet ao dai.
“The girl’s mother tells me they’re honeymooning for the first week in Paris.” She spooned a lobster claw onto the professor’s plate. “The second week they’ll be on the French Riviera.”
“Is that so?” Cracked lobster in tamarind sauce was Professor Khanh’s favorite, but tonight he stared with doubt at the claw pointing toward him. “What did the French call Vung Tau?”
“Cap Saint Jacques.”
“We had a very good time there. Didn’t we?”
“That’s when you finally started talking to me.”
“Who wouldn’t be shy around you,” the professor murmured. Forty years ago, when she was nineteen and he was thirty-three, they had honeymooned at a beachside hotel on the cape. It was on their balcony, under a full, bright moon, listening to the French singing and shouting on their side of the beach, that the professor had suddenly started talking. “Imagine!” he said, voice filled with wonder as he began speaking about how the volume of the Pacific equaled the moon’s. When he was finished, he went on to talk about the strange fish of deep sea canyons and then the inexplicability of rogue waves. If after a while she lost track of what he said, it hardly mattered, for by then the sound of his voice had seduced her, as reassuring in its measured tones as the first time she’d heard it, eavesdropping from her family’s kitchen as he explained to her father his dissertation on the Kuroshio current’s thermodynamics.
Now the professor’s memories were gradually stealing away from him, and along with them the long sentences he once favored. When the band swung into “I’d Love You to Want Me,” he loosened the fat Windsor knot of his tie and said, “Remember this song?”
“What about it?”
“We listened to it all the time. Before the children were born.”
The song hadn’t been released yet during her first pregnancy, but Mrs. Khanh said, “That’s right.”
“Let’s dance.” The professor leaned closer, draping one arm over the back of her chair. A fingerprint smudged one lens of his glasses. “You always insisted we dance when you heard this song, Yen.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Khanh took a slow sip from her glass of w
ater, hiding her surprise at being called by someone else’s name. “When did we ever dance?”
The professor didn’t answer, for the swelling chorus of the song had brought him to his feet. As he stepped toward the parquet dance floor, Mrs. Khanh seized the tail of his gray pinstripe jacket. “Stop it!” she said, pulling hard. “Sit down!”
Giving her a wounded look, the professor obeyed. Mrs. Khanh was aware of the other guests at their table staring at them. She held herself very still, unable to account for any woman named Yen. Perhaps Yen was an old acquaintance whom the professor never saw fit to mention, or the maternal grandmother whom Mrs. Khanh had never met and whose name she couldn’t now recall, or a grade school teacher with whom he’d once been infatuated. Mrs. Khanh had begun preparing for many things, but she wasn’t prepared for unknown people emerging from the professor’s mind.
“The song’s almost over,” the professor said.
“We’ll dance when we get home. I promise.”
Despite his condition, or perhaps because of it, the professor insisted on driving them back. Mrs. Khanh was tense as she watched him handling the car, but he drove in his usual slow and cautious manner. He was quiet until he took a left at Golden West instead of a right, his wrong turn taking them by the community college from where he’d retired last spring. After coming to America, he’d been unable to find work in oceanography, and had settled for teaching Vietnamese. For the last twenty years, he’d lectured under fluorescent lighting to bored students. When Mrs. Khanh wondered if one of those students might be Yen, she felt a jab of pain that she mistook at first for heartburn. Only upon second thought did she recognize it as jealousy.
The professor suddenly braked to a stop. Mrs. Khanh braced herself with one hand against the dashboard and waited to be called by that name again, but the professor made no mention of Yen. He swung the car into a U-turn instead, and as they headed toward home, he asked in a tone of great reproach, “Why didn’t you tell me we were going in the wrong direction?” Watching all the traffic lights on the street ahead of them turn green as if on cue, Mrs. Khanh realized that his was a question for which she had no good answer.
The Refugees Page 8
