by Ed Lin
Just missed it.
I exhaled and my breath was hot and wet on my sticky arms.
I shook my head to clear my mind. I’m going to reach out, grab that nail and get back to Nancy, in that order. I felt my heart swell and I trembled as adrenaline streamed through my body.
I grunted and whipped my right arm out like I was throwing the last pitch of my life. Which it could be.
This time I managed to slide my index finger against the nail. I nudged it back until I held it in the palm of my hand.
I inched myself off the floor into a crawling position. My knees and my arms shook as I stood up and walked. I grabbed the padlock and turned it over. The nail fit easily in the keyhole.
I had never picked a lock before. I put the nail in my mouth to wet it with my saliva. You know, for luck. As I sucked on the nail, I glanced to the left and saw a small pile of the same nails only a few steps away. I was already so relieved to have gotten my one nail, the sight only made me grin. Well, if I broke this one, I had plenty of backups.
I spat the nail into my right hand and jammed the sharp end into the lock. I poked the nail around. Something rattled inside, but I couldn’t turn the cylinder of the lock. I made like a dentist scraping the plaque off molars. I thought I heard something snap, but the padlock still held.
I pulled the nail to one side, trying to break the cylinder, but instead the nail got stuck. I picked up another nail and stuck it into the other side of the keyhole. I grabbed both nail heads and twisted them. To my surprise, the cylinder popped out and the padlock came away from its shackle.
I was free.
As I gathered the loose chain in my hands, I thought about that Velvet Underground song, “I’m Set Free,” and Lou Reed’s bitter lyric about being set free only to find you’ve been tricked again.
I wasn’t sure what my next step was, but man, this chain was five pounds of weight I didn’t need on my left wrist. I stuck a nail in the handcuff keyhole and rattled it around. When nothing came out of it, I stuck in another. The handcuffs hadn’t looked as well-made as the padlock, but it held better. I’d bet the key was probably a cheap piece of crap stamped out of a metal sheet.
The key! It must be in Li-min’s pocket!
As I made my way over to his prone figure, the burning smell grew progressively worse. It went from smelling like electric piss to charred chicken thighs. Nothing smelled worse to my nose than overcooked food.
Maybe it was Li-min’s thighs that were overcooked. I stood at a healthy distance from his body. If he were breathing, it was too shallow to be visible. His shirt seemed to be tighter than before. I squatted and rubbed my fingers against my palms and tried to discern what was in the scene before me. I didn’t worry about losing my balance and tumbling forward. My squat was rock-solid. I’m from Taipei and I work in a night market.
His body lay on its back in a pool of water so thin even the most playful toddler would barely get a splash out of it. His clothes were essentially dry, apart from a big wet patch around his crotch. Li-min’s eyes were wide open in shock. Some saliva bubbles had formed between his lips, which looked bluish and very dead.
Was there a live current running through his body? If I touched him and felt a shock, would I be able to retreat, or would I be unable to break away from the dance of death?
I returned to the area of my former captivity and came back with a handful of nails. I stood on a dry section of the floor and threw a nail that glanced off his shoulder. I didn’t see any sparks.
I’ve been pretty lucky so far, and if the ancestors were indeed supporting me, I didn’t think my streak was about to end here. I held my breath and quickly jabbed Li-min’s arm. It was as stiff as a statue, and luckily it didn’t electrocute me. I pressed my entire hand flat against it. Nothing.
Li-min was definitely dead. I began to feel a little creeped out that I had touched a dead body. I had never done that. “Sorry, Li-min,” I whispered. He might have done a lot of bad in his life, but he was kind to me. Well, he did still owe me from knocking me out.
Newly galvanized, I slid my hand down his chest, aiming for his right front pocket. The second I felt anything like a tingle or even a static shock, I was going to leap back and roll away. Lessons learned in grade-school calisthenics would serve me well.
My fingers crossed the belt and entered the pocket, encountering something bulky. I pulled out a thin wallet without much fuss, impressing myself. I could have been an accomplished pickpocket.
I flipped open the wallet. Li-min had about NT$300 and an MRT card. His government ID was made out to Liu Li-min. Was he Ju-lan’s brother, or another relative? That would account for her contempt for him and his ability to absorb the blows without reaction.
My sleeping shorts had one pocket and I shoved the wallet into it.
I crouched down and sent my fingers into his pocket again. I encountered a second object—his phone!
I was so excited that my hand and then my entire arm began trembling. Wait, that wasn’t my nerves. Or rather, it was my nerves, but it was a live current making my arm jerk uncontrollably.
I think my hand was clamped tightly around the phone, making my fist a little too large to pull out of the pocket. I felt my heart speed up.
With all my strength, I pushed off my legs. My hand tore free and the phone went flying. As I crashed hard on my left shoulder, I watched the phone smash against the fake wall that concealed the exit. I heard it hit the ground and the faint echo of a piece of plastic breaking off and coming loose.
I stood up and looked at the body. The key was probably in his other pocket or a back pocket, but there was no way to check them safely. I walked slowly to the phone, delaying disappointment.
It was worse than I thought. The entire plastic backplate of the phone lay about a foot away from the unit itself. I picked up the partially exposed phone gingerly in case it had a residual charge. Then I pressed the power button.
The screen lit up to the game that Li-min had been playing. He didn’t have a password lock on it. I exited the game. He didn’t have a browser on this stupid thing but at least a text-messaging app was here.
It was no surprise there wasn’t phone reception. My only hope was getting on WiFi. I recalled that Li-min wasn’t a tech-savvy guy. I opened up the phone’s settings and it asked if I wanted to set up email on the device. Instead, I went to the WiFi option and connected to the Taipei 101 Parking network I had discovered earlier.
When I had that connection secured I opened the messenger app. The phone emitted a doorbell—Li-min’s alert sound—and a message popped up. Battery at 5%.
Gan!
I opened the chat window and punched in Nancy’s number. Shit, were her last two digits 89 or 98? I hadn’t had to type them because my phone knew them, freeing extra brain cells to store more music. I paused for a moment. I had entered her phone number in my contacts on our first date. I hadn’t punched them in since.
I wrote, nancy its jing-nan i am being held in an underground garage near taipei 101 not sure where but track the signal in this text love you and sent it to both numbers.
I then sent a second message, i was kidnapped by that woman ju-lan the b&b woman!
A message popped back from the 89 number as the power level ticked down to 1 percent: we saw the video, frankie is helping them look for you.
Then the phone died.
Going through the dead man’s bundle of belongings gave me a ghoulish thrill. I found the phone AC adaptor in the right pocket of his jacket and separate bags of baby carrots and peanuts in the left.
Charging the phone was a necessity but I lost my mind a little bit when I saw the food.
I ate the warm and slimy carrots first. A piece got stuck in my windpipe and I coughed until I managed to spit out the phlegm-covered offending bit. Then I resumed eating, even though my throat was sore, because I was so fam
ished. Carrots never tasted so sweet and yet when I broke into the peanuts, I found that I was much more hungry for protein. Peanuts were something I had banned from my kitchen years ago. Tourists have all kinds of allergies and the peanut ones were the worst. Consequently, I haven’t eaten peanuts in ages. Wow, they were good!
I was a little thirsty after so I sucked out the last drops of moisture from the carrot bag.
I took the charging cord from the jacket and tried to match the plug to the port in the phone. There didn’t seem to be a port. I had a thought and picked up the phone’s backplate. The port was attached to its bottom panel.
I put the phone back together and squeezed. I felt it snap together in one section but as I opened my hand, it came apart and a fingernail-sized curved wire fell out into my palm. I hoped it wasn’t important.
There were plenty of four-cluster outlets around the garage. I wasn’t really sure why. Did they expect people to charge things as they stood by their parked cars? Or maybe the construction company owed an electronics supplier a favor and overbought. I held the phone together in one hand and plugged in the prongs with the other.
Either the phone couldn’t be charged, which was entirely possible, or the outlets were dead, also entirely possible. I moved on to the second and third clusters. Maybe they were all dead.
Just to exhaust all possibilities, I unplugged the cord from the phone port and cautiously touched it to my tongue while the other end was plugged into the wall. Another shock to my system wouldn’t mean anything at this point.
Nothing. No spark, no shock. What could I do at this point? It was not like I could pull the fake wall open.
Or could I?
I walked up to the wall and quickly found the seam of the moving door. I pressed against it and I swore I could feel it give just the slightest. I managed to get a fingerhold in. I wedged in one hand and pulled like I wanted to tear my arm off. It squeaked open an inch more. I stuck in my other hand and encouraged it to open another inch. Now a small but thick metal tab stuck out from the sliding wall. I peeked in and saw that it was connected with the mechanism within the door itself.
I wound my chain around the tab and grabbed the ends like reins. I thought about the long arc of my short life so far. It wasn’t going to end now. I was going to pull this fucking door open all the way. I pulled the ends of the chain as if I were endowed with the strength of every water buffalo that strained to pull a plow to feed all my ancestors in Taiwan.
The wall inched along until I heard something inside it crack like a metal bone. I stumbled as everything came to a halt. I resumed the stance and pulled until the chain links burned angry red Olympics logos into my hands but I made no progress. A little more than a foot was all I was going to get. Actually less, when you took into account the random tabs of metal that stuck out from both the sliding door and its sheath.
Was there anything I should grab before attempting to leave the room for good? My eye went to Li-min’s jacket. Why not? I could always ditch it if I didn’t need it.
I tossed it through the gap in the door. I also passed through the tarp I had slept on. I wanted to push out the inflatable mattress as well, but reconsidered. I’d have to deflate it to get it through and there was no way I was going to waste my breath reinflating the whole thing again.
I looked through the gap at the jacket and the tarp. The gap itself was probably only two feet long. Shit, what if I couldn’t get through it? I cracked my knuckles. No. I would make it out.
I gathered up the chain and tossed it underhand through the gap and began to slide out my body, leading with my left side.
Something sharp drew across my abdomen and my calves. This was just the beginning of my passage and I could only hope that minor superficial pains would be all I experienced. I pushed on and I got to an area that opened up slightly. I began to breathe easier. Then I encountered similar obstructions in my midsection and legs. Then my left leg stepped through to the other side.
I heard something from above. Was that a car? It could be anybody, not just Ju-lan. Then again, this garage didn’t seem to get much traffic.
I became frantic and pushed my body against the pain. The car was getting louder. I was almost entirely free when my shirt got caught above my right shoulder blade. It hurt more when I tried to go down so I stood on my toes and tried to cartwheel out. My shirt began to tear. I got both arms out on the other side and pulled myself through. My shirt tore.
The car sounded like it was right on top of me. It was relatively dim and this room was twice as big as the one I had left. Two vehicles were parked here. One was a hatchback and a delivery truck was parked directly in front of it. I gathered up the jacket and the tarp and decided to head for the hatchback.
Wait! The sliding wall was still a little open! I didn’t want Ju-lan to know right away that I had escaped. I shoved the door back but it wouldn’t budge. Then I slammed my body against it and the wall snapped shut. I bolted for the hatchback as I heard the car make that final turn.
Chapter 17
I crouched behind the hatchback. The area was greasy with motor fluids. I lay down the jacket and tarp to prepare for another night on the floor.
Ju-lan’s car pulled up and stopped at the door. I saw her reach up and press something above the shade.
The door made a loud clanking sound but to my relief it still opened smoothly all the way. She drove in and killed the engine before the door shut.
Maybe I should run up and out of the garage. But the time it took the sliding door to open might not give me enough of a lead to reach the ground level. I also might not be able to reach an exit.
I heard a dull thud as she closed the driver’s door. I heard her shout, followed a few seconds later by a scream. Maybe she would touch Li-min’s body and get electrocuted herself.
Maybe I should run down, not up. She’d never look for me on a lower level. As I prepared to make a move, I heard footsteps and clanking on my side of the barrier. Two men were chatting in the spirited way that men do when work is over.
Ju-lan screamed again. “Li-min! Li-min!” I could make out her words clearly through the wall.
Damn, I hadn’t even considered yelling for help when I had managed to pick my lock. Someone could’ve given me a hand with that sliding wall.
A mechanical motor fired up and I crouched even lower behind the hatchback. The wall slid open and Ju-lan stepped through.
“Jing-nan! What did you do to Li-min!” she cried. The men I’d heard approaching came into view as they ran up to Ju-lan. They were uniformed delivery guys and the clanking sound I’d heard was from their two hand trucks.
They approached Ju-lan without caution.
“Is there something we can help you with, madam?” one of them asked.
“Oh, fuck!” said the other. “This is the kidnapper who put out that video threatening Tong-tong! I saw it on my fucking phone!”
“What! She kidnapped someone?”
Ju-lan responded by sticking her gun in their faces. “Did you see anyone coming out of here?” she demanded.
“No, no.”
“We didn’t see nothing!”
“Then get the fuck out of here!” She jerked her head toward the up ramp. The men jogged away with their machines. They jumped into their truck and lurched out. I was glad I had chosen the hatchback to hide behind.
But why was Ju-lan letting them go? Why not hold them hostage, too? She leaned against the wall and stared at the ceiling. I know the feeling of when your plans have been completely demolished. Evil plans, to be sure, but plans nonetheless.
I hoped she thought that I was long gone. Maybe I was back home by now. She shouldn’t stay here now because it made no sense for either of us. Staying here was taking a risk; the cops were on their way, and I couldn’t leave until she did go. Ju-lan remained stuck to the wall. How long could she keep this up?
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Suddenly she shook her head. I thought she looked directly at me. I gasped silently. Had she guessed my hiding space? She took a few steps toward my position but then paused.
We both heard something coming. A few cars that were already in the garage were roaring their way down to our level, sounding like rain clouds moving in.
I was being rescued! It sure sounded like a rescue! Maybe the guys who took off in the truck called the cops or maybe Frankie helped find me!
Ju-lan retreated through the sliding door, although she didn’t close it. Headlights streamed across the walls like ghosts and the vehicles stopped short, out of my view. I heard a number of doors open and close. And heavy boots! A bullhorn cracked and Tong-tong’s voice, thick with phlegm and drenched with irritation, barked out.
“Liu Ju-lan! Are you still here?”
“Yes, I am!” was her defiant reply.
“Is Jing-nan here?”
“No!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“Well, where is he?”
“I don’t know!” Her voice cracked as she added, “He killed my husband!”
My legs jerked in surprise, rattling my chain. I’d had no idea, but when I looked back at the apparent enmity between them, of course they had to be closer than mere blood relatives. And she had had to pay him to do this work.
I thought about Nancy and wondered if we’d ever be close enough to kidnap someone to help secure our future.
“How did he kill your husband?” Tong-tong demanded to know.
“He electrocuted him!” she sobbed.
“Ma de!” The bullhorn broke off with a squawk. “Listen, Ju-lan. I have a proposal for you. How about you stay here in Taiwan and we go into business together, forty-nine fifty-one, and we make your goddamned chip? I won’t press any charges against you!”
Still sniffling, Ju-lan asked, “Won’t Jing-nan accuse me of kidnapping him?”
