Waxwings

by Unknown

Talking with Tom, she continued her tour of virtual Belltown, turning right on First. On the west side of the street, two FOR SALE signs flashed on the map. She clicked on the first one, and a caption came up: “Just another condo block. So what did you expect?” Lame.

  Into the phone, she said, “I should get home before six . . . You, too. Bye.” When she clicked again, the transition from the GetaShack site into the Belgrave Realty site was seamless. She’d show Steve this one: it was a model for how things ought to work, but so rarely did. Usually one got a crumby Web page, probably designed by the realtor himself, with a jumble of typefaces and some amateur flourishes courtesy of the Windows Paint program. But Belgrave’s home page was so glitzy that it was like opening a door on wino-strewn First Avenue and finding yourself inside a palace.

  You stood in a tall pillared lobby, with a marble waterfall as its centerpiece and a chamber orchestra playing in the background. Mozart or Haydn? Tom would know, but she didn’t. Superimposed on the sound of the music was the sound of splashing water. The words “Welcome to Belgrave Realty” were posted in admirably small type over a reception desk in the upper-right-hand corner, where an animated virtual realtor pointed to the Enter button.

  It was the coolest fucking home page she’d ever seen. “Hey, Robert,” she called over the Sheetrock partition. “Come over for a sec. I want you to see this.”

  In khaki cargo pants and a Polo polo-shirt, he came sloping round the corner. He still walked with his entire body, as Finn did; and sometimes, like Finn, he fell off chairs.

  “Look.” Beth clicked back into the GetaShack site. “We’re in Belltown. On First Avenue.”

  Robert instinctively looked out the window, at a white rectangle between the buildings that was possibly the top story of the Belgrave Realty condo block, but that was not the point.

  “No, look at the screen . . .” She clicked the FOR SALE sign, and this time the what-did-you-expect line worked a lot better, given the sumptuous surprise of what was to come. The music played. The water trickled. The little animated realtor even had a striped bow-tie.

  “Cool,” Robert said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  She clicked Enter.

  Three days in America, and he had a name.

  At Hoi Sun, Mr. Han paid him $2.50 an hour to mop floors, scrub the long tables in the kitchen, wash pans and dishes, and clean the car of Madame Han.

  I am being kind. I treat you like family. This is very good pay for a man with no ID.

  He slept overnight on the fire-escape, wrapped in an old coat lent to him by the friendly cook.

  Then, early the next morning, Mr. Han came to the restaurant. You go. Now. You must go away.

  Government officials had raided three restaurants on Jackson Street the previous evening, checking papers, looking for illegals. “Eye-enness!” Mr. Han kept repeating. “Eye-enness!”

  You must not come back. Ever.

  He opened the till and handed him two bills. Forty dollars, U.S.! Big money.

  I am too kind. Madame Han must not hear about this. Now go. Out the back.

  That afternoon, he got American clothes: jeans, shirts, socks, underwear, even two bedsheets and a torn towel. He found them in a dryer at a Laundromat. The man who’d left them there—and he’d measured him carefully by eye, from behind a newspaper he couldn’t read—was just his size, and the linen bag he’d left atop the machine was good quality, too.

  Keeping his distance, he trailed the poor people—not villagers or lepers, he’d learned, but a wandering tribe instantly recognizable by their wild hair and ruinous teeth and skin. They were thickest in the parks and around the street-market, where they drank from bottles, shouted, scuffled, and openly clamored for money from passers-by. Instinct told him to stay nearby these rowdy beggars: if the police left them alone, why would they bother him?

  From across the street, he watched the shabby building, a kind of clinic, which people entered through one door and came out through another, carrying food in their hands. He would have liked to join the line, but feared that officials inside would demand of him a name, papers, maybe a government license.

  He let his bag of laundry rest on a sidewalk. Rich Americans were striding past, their faces pink as shrimp, stinking of cologne, looking straight through him with no suggestion in their eyes that they saw a man in the space where he was standing. He felt mysteriously gifted. The thought crossed his mind that if he were to look into a mirror, there might be no answering reflection in the glass.

  His invisibility excited him. He knew there must be power in this ability to remain unseen in broad daylight on a crowded street. Putting his new discovery to the test, he selected an old woman who was walking alone with a stick. He stared her in the eye, grinning fiercely at her, ready to run if need be; but her gaze traveled clean through the middle of his face. To her, he wasn’t even a ghost. So that was why he had been able to walk unchallenged down the long road from the terminal. He hugged his secret to himself, moving boldly now, a sighted person in a city of the blind.

  From the poor tribe, he learned how to climb into Dumpsters and find things to eat. In the early evening, when the street-market closed, there was plenty for everyone. He was amazed that people threw away stuff so green, so fresh, so new, and loaded his bag with bananas, apples, cooked meats, pastries, bread. No one paid him any attention. He was, it seemed, invisible even to the poor.

  He spent his first night on the streets walking and dozing, walking and dozing, always careful to stay in the footsteps of other burdened shadows. He did not dare to do what many of them did and curl up in a doorway; by dawn he was shivering in a park overlooking the sea, where a drunken man was being sick into a bush.

  Later that day, he found a place to live. For much of the morning, he’d kept his eyes on two men and a woman. Younger and cleaner than the rest of the foragers, they had about them an air of easy competence that he admired. He watched rich Americans give the woman money, which she later shared with the men. They had no bedrolls strapped to their backs, and didn’t push a wire cart. They were high-class beggars, clever and quick on their feet. When they wandered away from the street-market, he hung far behind, but kept them just in view as they wandered past the waterfront beneath the aerial highway along a winding ribbon of wooded parkland. The moist, gauzy air, not quite rain and not quite mist, softened their outlines and made their bodies wreathe and taper like spirals of smoke.

  Past a ship dock, they came to an industrial zone of railroad marshalling yards flanked by warehouses, sheds, and factory workshops, but the place was muffled in that eerie American silence—no hammers, no whining saws, no voices. There were rows of new cars parked outside the buildings, but the only man in sight was the driver of a single empty forklift, and the loudest noise the rustling of great polythene tarpaulins in which these people sheathed their dirt-piles.

  It was like the Dumpsters. What things Americans abandoned! Rusting machinery, old boats, and cars that would need only a little fixing to make them run, or good wood, all left out in the open for anyone to carry away in the night. Wherever he looked, he saw neglected valuables, half-buried in grass: tires with plenty of life left in them; a car battery; a long metal step-ladder; a whole family of refrigerators; wooden pallets; a child’s car-seat; a pair of gas cylinders; a baby tractor, its seat gone to pieces but its engine still intact. He reflected that the only thing a man would truly need in this country was a pick-up truck.

  Ahead, the walkers were crossing a patch of waste ground under the overhead tangle of a highway interchange. Beyond them lay a dense thicket of masts and radar-scanners, and a bridge, clogged with traffic, reaching out over what he took to be a wide stretch of water. From five hundred meters he watched the three cross a one-track railroad, scramble up an earth embankment, and disappear into the shadows under the bridge.

  He waited, then followed them slowly through the brambles and gorse, his head filling with the drumming thunder of the traffic up abo
ve. He could see the harbor below him now—maybe one thousand big fishing boats packed hull-to-hull like seeds in a box. At the top of the embankment, he peered cautiously through the bushes and saw tents pitched on the soft, dry, crumbly soil underneath the bridge, perfectly hidden from the outside. He counted seven altogether, thinly scattered over a low-ceilinged space almost as large as a soccer field. A fire smoked in the far corner, against a concrete pillar. The people he’d been following were there, and two other men.

  He put his laundry bag down and walked toward them open-handed, eyes lowered, smiling, and very scared. They stared at him, but seemed, he thought, more curious than hostile. “Okay?” he said. “To make sleep?” He pointed back at his bag, more than twenty meters away from the nearest tent.

  One of the men shrugged. “I guess.”

  “You got a reservation?” said another.

  “Please?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Thank you.” He went back to his bag. Opening it, he saw them watching his every movement. The reverberation of the bridge was quieter here—a continuous deep rumble that muffled the people’s voices, but not their sudden, barking laughter. He spread a sheet on the ground and laid out on it his food and new clothes. With the other bed-sheet, he, too, would make a tent. Trusting his possessions to the people beside the fire, he went outside to hunt for a stick to prop up his tent with, and when he came back, everything was as he’d left it. The watchers watched.

  When they saw what he was trying to do—and he had no experience of tents—the woman and one of the men came over to help. They found him a better stick, rooted it deep into the dirt, and the woman produced string with which to tie the sheet to it. Then they pegged out the edges of the tent with rocks.

  “L.L. Bean,” the woman said.

  He grinned at her. He could tell from the man’s face that what she’d said was funny, not unkind.

  “Po-lice?” he asked. “Po-lice come?”

  “Don’t trouble us none here,” the man said.

  He pointed at the clump of bananas on the sheet, their skins barely flecked with brown. “You want?”

  They shook their heads. The man said, “Know where the washroom is?”

  He smiled uncertainly.

  The man pointed down at the harbor. “Right there. In the terminal. They got showers.”

  Later, after dark, when flames from the fire played against the concrete and he saw the people as cut-out silhouettes, he heard them calling him: “Hey, you! Chink!”

  Chink!

  They were cooking sausages, holding them to the fire with forks. They offered him one, and he squatted on his haunches on the outskirts of the group. When he bit into his sausage, it tasted unexpectedly of fish.

  A growling voice said: “How’d you get over here, Chink? In a container?”

  “Please?” Wanting to spit out the rancid mouthful, he forced himself to swallow it. Then he said, “San Francisco.” He gestured to the yards behind him. “Railroad.”

  “San Flancisco,” the growling man said, and honked. “Wailwoad.”

  A bottle came to him. By the light of the flames, he spelled out the name on the label . . . Thunderbird . . . and passed it on without drinking.

  Back in his tent, he slept in fits and starts, woken by the violence of his dreams. The laughter stopped and the fire died out. In his waking moments, he lay on the oil-smelling earth, and listened to the furious caterwauling of the police sirens over the roof of the encampment. Each one had an urgent appointment, but not—tonight—with him.

  “Tell me a Mister Wicked story.”

  Finn’s dad was great at telling stories, and most of them were about Mister Wicked, who wore a black hat, with a broken top like a lid, a black jacket, black silk underwear, black pants, and pointed black shoes with tassels on them. His rainbow-striped bow-tie spun like a propeller when he turned the hidden switch in his pocket. He lived in a penthouse on Pioneer Square. Finn wasn’t sure what a penthouse was, but from its high windows Mister Wicked could see everyone in Seattle. With his extra-powerful binoculars, he could see right into Finn’s bedroom on Queen Anne Hill. Mister Wicked’s one great friend was a witch named Moira, who lived with her cat in a houseboat on Lake Union and could fly unseen across the city on her magic vacuum cleaner.

  “As was his wont,” Finn began.

  “As was his wont, Mister Wicked was still in bed at noon on Saturday, wearing his black pyjamas—”

  “—drinking champagne—”

  “—and smoking a fat cheroot with a gold band.”

  Finn’s mom’s stories were about a little Indian boy called Laughing Water, but he much preferred Mister Wicked.

  “And, as was his wont, he was reading the classified ads in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. With his red ballpoint pen, he drew a neat circle around a particularly interesting advertisement, which said—”

  “Old Boeing jets for sale?”

  “No. This time it said, ‘Super Glue Powder. Wholesale, by the truck-load. Fifteen dollars a ton.’ And Mister Wicked began to ponder on the many, many wicked things that might be done with a truckload of Super Glue Powder.”

  Finn excavated a knotty booger deep inside his left nostril. His dad never seemed to notice when he picked his nose at bedtime.

  “An idea—a rather wonderful idea—took shape inside Mister Wicked’s wickedly inventive head.”

  “What was his idea, Daddy?” Rolling the booger between forefinger and thumb under the covers, he snuggled up against Squashy Bear.

  “Patience! Hang in there, Finbow. He picked up the black cordless phone at his bedside—”

  “He’s going to call Moira—”

  “Correct. And on the second trill, Moira answered. ‘Ambrose?’ she said—”

  “She knows it’s him by magic.”

  “No, she has caller ID.”

  “She never had it before.”

  “Well, she has it now. It came in the mail on Thursday, in a cardboard box. It’s her new toy. She surprises everybody with it by telling them who they are. ‘You’re drinking champagne in the morning again,’ she said. ‘I can tell. I’ve got caller ID.’ And Mister Wicked, chinking his champagne glass against the phone, said, ‘Toodle-oo, bottoms up!’ At the other end of the line, in her houseboat on Lake Union, Moira pulled a face. Like this. ‘It’s Bollinger ’79,’ she said, ‘but I hate champagne. It tastes like cat pee.’ ”

  Finn giggled. “How can she tell?”

  “I told you, she’s got caller ID. Anyway, back to Mister Wicked’s wonderful idea. ‘Moira,’ he said, ‘isn’t there a big sailboat race on Lake Union this afternoon?’ ‘Yes,’ Moira said, ‘it starts at three, and we’re having a dock-party here to watch it. I’m baking toad-entrail cookies for it right now.’ And Mister Wicked said, ‘No time to lose, then. I’m off to buy some glue.’ And he leaped straight from his bed into his black silk underwear.”

  “I know what’s going to happen. He’s going to put the glue into the lake. He’ll turn the whole lake into glue.”

  “Right on the money, Finbow. But with stories, it’s not the what, it’s the how. So Mister Wicked . . .”

  Finn closed his eyes. Lulled by wickedness, he was asleep within the minute.

  Socially. What Steve Litvinof meant by that was made plain when, at 6:45 A.M., Beth found waiting for her on her keyboard a stiff cream-colored envelope addressed to her in the extravagantly seriffed handwriting of Steve’s assistant, Lisa Mayo. Inside was a card headed “Northwest Festival of Early Music,” and, inside the card, an invitation, printed on opaque rice-paper, to a dinner at the Juergensen Home and “featuring” the Madrona Dowland Consort. The hosts were Soraya and Bill Juergensen, and Joyce and Stephen Litvinof. At the top, Lisa had written “Elizabeth Rourke and Partner,” beside which was scrawled “Hope you can make it!”—Steve.

  At nine, she broke off work to call the RSVP number. “This is Soraya?” Mrs. Juergensen said, and then, when Beth told her that she and her husband—
whose full name she had to spell twice—would love to come, she issued driving directions from I-5, adding that “you can give whatever you like, of course, but most people are sending a thousand dollars each. It’s going to be wonderful, and we’re so glad you can come. You can send the check here, made out to the Northwest Festival of Early Music. See you both on the twentieth!”

  For several minutes, Beth sat nauseated at her work-station, then she fished out her checkbook from her bag. She hated herself, it was so fucking obvious: Lisa must keep Steve regularly supplied with the dates on which every senior employee’s options vested, and then, whenever someone cashed out, he’d hit them up for a fund-raiser. And she thought he’d meant sex.

  At seven-thirty, Chink was prowling along a potholed street beside the wide canal, looking for Dumpsters he might revisit after dark, walking past cranes, timber-yards, ships and boats in and out of the water, and— for the first time in America—workers. This place was alive with men in dirty dungarees, and he felt comfortable here, where the sound of hammers rang from sheds, and the air was tinctured with sawn wood, paint, and creosote. Every waterside business had its own sign, and he read each one carefully, practising his English.