Equal Love

by Peter Ho Davies

  But that afternoon he found a slightly loose baby tooth and asked me if I wanted him to take it out or if I wanted just to let it work free. “It’s up to you. But it’ll mean an injection.”

  I swallowed my spit and told him to take it out anyway. I didn’t know when he’d get another chance, and I didn’t like the idea of another dentist doing it.

  “Okay,” he said. “If you’re sure you’re sure?”

  I’d never had an injection before, but I watched coolly as he showed the needle to me and told me it would just pinch. “I know,” I said. I watched it get closer until I couldn’t keep it in focus any longer. Just for a second I thought about changing my mind, and then the needle was gone, out of sight, into my mouth.

  Later, on the way home in the car, I couldn’t stop touching my slack face. It felt different, I told my father—smoother, softer.

  “Because you’re feeling your face through your fingers. What’s missing is the feel of your fingers on your face.”

  I turned that over for a long moment. “So this is how I feel to other people when they touch me?”

  He nodded. I had been rubbing my face, trying to overcome the numbness, but now I stopped and touched myself, my lips, my chin, more gently.

  It made me shiver. I blew my cheeks out and slapped them as hard as I could in time to the song on the radio. Then I folded down the vanity mirror and admired how rosy they were. I couldn’t feel a thing. After the needle went in, I lost all sensation in my jaw, except at the last second I felt a sharp stabbing pain. For a moment, when it hurt, I thought something was wrong with me. I thought it was my fault. I was less brave than I should have been. And then it came to me: you couldn’t be brave without being scared. Sergeant Steele knew it. “I’m no ’ero,” he’d growl gruffly, turning down medals. “I’ve just got nuffin’ to lose . . .”

  But it also occurred to me in that moment of wincing pain that my father was a liar, that he lied every day of his life. And I was suddenly, enormously relieved.

  …

  At dinner he tried to say how much he’d miss me. I was drinking my milk through a straw and was distracted by the idea that the straw had a hole in it. When I realized it was lying in the new gap in my teeth, resting against the gum, I set the drink down quickly. “We’ll still see each other on weekends and holidays,” he was saying, and I nodded vigorously.

  Afterward, I washed the tooth—an incisor, my father told me—under the kitchen tap and looked at it in my hand. It was funny to think it had been part of me. He asked me if I’d like to leave it under my pillow for the tooth fairy, but I told him I was too old for that, and he tried to smile. I didn’t say, but I thought I’d show the tooth to my mother. I put it in a jam jar and shook it to hear the tiny sound of it beating on the glass. I decided to keep all my teeth.

  But when my father came up to tuck me in, I told him I’d changed my mind. I gave him the tooth and told him I’d like to put it under my pillow. For a second it lay like a tiny bone in his hand, and then he folded it in his hankie and slid it under my head. He bent down to kiss me goodnight and then he was gone, pulling the door to within an inch of closing, the way I liked it. He smelled of tears.

  I lay awake a long time after he left. In the bathroom, before bed, I had run my tongue, tangy with toothpaste, over the hole where the tooth had been, flicking the tip back and forth, not wanting to keep it there too long. There was something thrilling about the tingling feeling I got from that raw, tender spot. I looked at it in the mirror, and it looked very pink and shiny with saliva. I touched my finger to the gap, and it felt moist, slick. Now I lay there and thought of my new incisor pushing up into place, and I couldn’t wait. I started checking the rest of my teeth, grabbing them one by one between two fingers, tugging, testing to see how firm they were.

  The Next Life

  THE MOURNERS were playing poker around the rosewood table the night before his father’s funeral, and Lim was winning.

  They had begun the game to help themselves stay awake during the vigil. Pang had produced the new deck from a pocket of his white mourning suit and asked Lim’s permission earlier in the evening. “It’ll amuse the ghost,” he said, indicating the casket. “Being able to see all our cards.”

  Now it was almost dawn, and Lim had been winning for an hour or more. It was uncomfortable. Where before they had talked softly among themselves, now they played in silence. Lim wished he could get up and leave, but it seemed improper to end the game ahead. Every time he told himself to fold he would look at his cards and find a pair of aces, a wild card, four cards to a flush—something too good to turn down. He bet heavily on mediocre hands, hoping to have his bluff called, but the others were afraid of his good fortune now. When one of them did stay in, Lim made a hand with his last card and still took the pot.

  He fanned his cards to study them and thought of the coffin over his shoulder.

  …

  Lim had been determined to give his father the finest possible funeral. Old Lim had been the proprietor of the oldest Chinese newspaper on the West Coast. The day after his death of a second stroke, Lim had driven his prized Cadillac gingerly into Chinatown, to the corner of Jackson and Powell and the shop of Mr. Pang, the maker of grave goods.

  The shop was on the second floor of a brick warehouse opposite the old Kong Chow Temple. At the top of the stairs a lighted glass cabinet was bright with spirit money, bricks of red-and-gold notes in neat, squat stacks. Beside them, through the narrow open door, Lim could see white paper furniture, and further back life-size paper suits hanging on the wall. He would need to buy all these items to burn at the funeral. Their smoke and ash would rise to heaven, where his father would be well provided for, as wealthy in the next life as in this.

  Inside, he found Pang himself, seated at a long work table, fitting thin canes together to make the frame of a model house. Behind him a bundle of bamboo rested in a pan of boiling water, softening until it could be bent and shaped. Sheets of rice paper hung on wire racks above, fluttering gently in the breeze from the door. It was warm in the shop. Pang wore only shorts and an undershirt, and his shaved head above his half-moon glasses shone under the bright silver work lights. As Lim came forward, he stood and dried his hands on a rag, apologizing for the heat. “Air con dries the paper,” he said, rubbing his thumb against his fingertips. “Makes it hard to work.”

  He led Lim into the back room of the shop, which doubled as a showroom and storage space. It was filled with paper houses and cars and, further back, whole rooms of ghost furniture. Everything was white, but the different items were made to mismatched scales. The furniture would not fit in the houses; the cars reached as high as the rooftops. There was something toy-like about the items on display, which reminded Lim of childhood, and yet he walked among them like a giant. So this, he thought, is what the afterlife looks like.

  With Pang’s help he chose the best house in stock, with a balcony and a veranda, and an almost life-size paper sedan with the three-pointed Mercedes star fashioned in straw on its hood. Pang nodded his approval and went to the stairs and called his assistant to come and move the pieces to the back of the shop. A door opened, the sound of a television—the stuttered blows and grunts of a martial arts movie—floated down to them, and a stocky, muscular young man appeared. Pang gestured to him impatiently, pointing out with his chin the pieces Lim had chosen and whistling angrily when the youth stooped over the wrong one. Lim watched as he lifted the house and then the car high overhead and carried them away. At the door a breeze filled the paper shells with a snap, and the boy had to steady himself to steer them through the opening while Pang hissed with displeasure.

  They moved on to the furniture and Lim chose the best tables and chairs, even a paper TV and VCR. By the time Pang left him to write up the order, he had bought up almost half the stock. Alone in the showroom, Lim paced back and forth between the houses of the dead. Over the rooftops he saw the youth—a young man really, he decided—lighting a cigarette. H
e held the match in his hand, watched it burn down slowly till the yellow flame touched his fingertips, let it fall. When he noticed Lim watching, he stared back blankly, pantomimed the offer of a cigarette, but Lim shook his head. He heard Pang’s footsteps returning and went to meet him.

  “You make all the pieces yourself?” he asked, looking down the list the old man presented to him. “Or does your assistant build some?”

  “They’re all my own work,” Pang told him. “My son runs the press. To print the hell notes.” Lim had bought several million dollars in the best gold-leaf spirit money.

  He complimented the workmanship while Pang calculated the bill on an abacus. In the whiteness of the shop, the dark beads clacked back and forth. There was something soothing to Lim about the transaction and the other man’s quiet business manner. “Isn’t it hard to see your work burn?” he asked, and Pang nodded without looking up. He checked his figures twice and then named a price. It was a large sum, but Lim reached for his wallet and counted the bills out, one by one, with no word of bargaining. Pang blinked as each note was laid down, then shuffled them into a neat pile and put them in his pocket.

  “My condolences,” he said. “Your father was a great man.”

  Lim gave instructions for delivery to the cemetery and thanked him for his time. He made to leave, but paused and turned back. “Tell me,” he said, “do you know where I might hire professional mourners?”

  Pang looked doubtful. “It is the old custom.”

  Lim watched him tip the abacus slightly, the beads sliding silently to one side, erasing the last calculation.

  “I would be very grateful . . .” he began.

  “My own family, in fact, were once mourners,” Pang said slowly. “I could perhaps find some to attend you.”

  Lim thanked him for his kindness.

  …

  The day before the funeral, with the casket lying behind screens in the house on Diamond Hill, friends and family members came to pay their respects. The casket was closed, but Lim’s mother placed a gold-framed photograph of the deceased on the lid. It was an old studio pose of an intense young man in a dark suit and narrow tie, his hair shining like a movie star’s. The photograph had been taken before Lim was born, and he hardly recognized his father. He complained to his mother, “He looks like a stranger.”

  “Such talk!” she cried. “How can he be a stranger? He looks like you in this picture.”

  Mr. Pang arrived early with three others. Two were old men, one a retired grocer, the other a former butcher, cousins of Pang’s. The third was his brawny son. The son helped move the deceased’s favorite chair beside the casket, while the old men laid out a table with Old Lim’s glasses, Luckies, his preferred brand of cigarettes, and a bottle of Corvoisier. Pang poured a glass of brandy, lit a cigarette, and set it in a jade ashtray for the spirit to enjoy. Lim showed them where the bottles of liquor and the cartons of cigarettes his father used to bring back from his business trips to Taiwan were kept. “Duty-free,” he told Pang’s son, who whistled softly when he saw the hoard. The mourners would ensure that fresh cigarettes were lit every half-hour or so.

  Dishes of Old Lim’s favorite foods had already been prepared by the cook, and these were brought out now and set beside the coffin. The ginger bass, Lim saw, was a fish his father had caught himself and frozen. Fishing had become the old man’s passion at the end of his life. Lim remembered one afternoon off Duxbury Reef. They were out for striped bass, but his father could reel in nothing but rockfish. He kept throwing one back and hooking another. The weather had begun to worsen and the fog to roll in, but he refused to turn back without a bass. And all the time he kept hooking rockfish. Finally, in frustration, he had started to use his pocket knife to blind the fish, gouging their eyes before tossing them, still thrashing, back into the water. “Teach them to take my bait.” Lim had turned away but said nothing. He hung over the side, staring into the dark water, and feigned seasickness all the way in. Even as a grown man, he found, he was afraid of his father.

  Pang sniffed appreciatively over the dish. “The spirit will smell the delicious aroma and come closer.” Lim thought of the blind fish swimming in the darkness.

  As the first guests came up the drive, Pang’s son began to wail and the older men bent their heads. When they looked up, they had tears in their eyes. Lim was impressed. He had begun to worry about the expense of hiring mourners, but now, as he went to greet his visitors, he felt a deep satisfaction. These men would help the family shoulder the burden of grief. He was gratified when his father’s business partners and his older relatives complimented him on finding such skillful mourners. He noticed a change in the way these people treated him. Some of the journalists and editors were his own age, but previously, at his father’s office or the golf club, they had merely nodded to him or smiled politely while they addressed his father. Now they caught his eye and drew him aside to express their sympathy. His father had been a giant. He was a dutiful son. They were sure the newspaper would prosper. They had always known how proud his father was of him. Lim nodded. The old man had made a point of taking his partners past his son’s desk, testing him on figures or summoning him with a snap of his fingers to bring new copy to his office while they sat and sipped tea. His father liked to boast about Lim’s education—Berkeley, his M.B.A.—but also to joke about what they didn’t teach you in college: greed, luck, how to cut throats. Lim supposed he had resented it, but abstractly. Whatever he felt toward his father had always come second to what his father thought of him.

  Every so often Lim excused himself to see that the flow of refreshments from the kitchen was running smoothly. The faces of Mr. Pang and the older mourners, he noticed, were still wet with tears. He could not imagine how the dried-up old men could cry so long. Pang’s son did not cry, but he was still wailing lustily, and Lim thought it had been a wise choice on Pang’s part to bring a young man with such strong lungs. Some of his guests had told him that the wailing could be heard from the street. Even his mother, who had been concerned about the cost, was moved. She had scolded him that his father, who had always been careful with money, would not have appreciated such excess. But she took one look at the mourners and her own tears began to flow so swiftly she was surprised and tried to cup them in her hands.

  …

  In the evening, as the last guests departed, there was a small commotion. The wails of Pang’s son suddenly ceased, and at the door, saying goodbye, Lim and his guests fell silent for a moment. When he had seen them off, he came back into the house and Pang’s son approached him with a carton of cigarettes, almost crushed, gripped in his hand.

  He held them out to Lim without a word.

  “He means to apologize,” Pang said in a pinched voice. “He was taking these.”

  Lim took the small box and stared at it dumbly. It felt so light in his hands. The young man stood before him, his head bowed, shoulders raised, hands behind his back, as if expecting a blow. Pang was waiting for him, he knew, but in his confusion Lim could only thank the youth.

  “It’s nothing,” Lim said. “It’s not important.” He almost pressed the box back into the young man’s hands, but he could see the flush on Pang’s face and bald head, and he could not meet his eyes. He felt as if the old man was angry with him, but he did not know what to say, and he excused himself to lead his mother to bed.

  She leaned heavily on the arm he offered her. “If you had done anything like that, your father would have whipped you,” she whispered on the stairs. Lim nodded. He wondered if he had done the right thing, but he was glad he had stayed calm. He didn’t want to be angry at the funeral. It would be unseemly.

  At her door, his mother turned. “You have honored Bar-Bar today,” she said. “He was always such a superstitious man. You remember? When you were a small boy, he used to call you names. Little pig. Ugly dog. He made you cry.” She smiled ruefully. “You didn’t understand. He was so proud of you. He thought if he praised you, demons would know how va
luable you were and take you.”

  “I know,” Lim told her. “I do understand. It’s the custom.”

  “All this,” she said, squeezing his hand. “I never knew you loved him so much.”

  Afterward, he stood at the door to his own room, turning the idea over in his mind like a bright coin. Perhaps he had loved his father, he told himself. Next to respect and obedience, love had always been an extravagance in their relationship. But the more he thought it, the more he believed it, until it seemed to him a sharp point of truth.

  He stared at his bed, but for the first time that day he felt relaxed, not tired. He decided to go down again to where the mourners were sitting up beside the casket to keep the spirit company.

  Lim found them playing cards. Earlier he had wondered briefly if it was proper, but he trusted Pang not to suggest any impropriety. He was a professional, after all. He had even asked for their fee in advance so they could divide it up and have something to gamble with. Now he formally complimented Lim on the success of the day and, after a moment of awkwardness, invited him to join them and make a fifth.

  “I haven’t played since I was a student,” Lim told them, but he pulled up a stool and Pang dealt him in. He had thought himself a skillful player in college, betting quarters, but he felt out of his depth with stakes of ten or twenty dollars. He. watched the other players carefully, but they betrayed little. Pang’s son never looked up from his cards, and the faces of the older mourners were perfectly still, resting. Lim lost hand after hand.