Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

“Why, thank you.”

  We casually spoke of ourselves as business people. Domestic travelers. We went wherever there was a need. The urgency of that need, like much of everything else, was determined by some calculus of power and money. Political force, the fluid motion of capital. Influence on your fellow man. These basics drove our livelihood.

  In a phrase, we were spies. But the sound of that is all wrong. We weren’t the kind of figures you naturally thought of or maybe even hoped existed. Hoagland, who had recruited me, told me once that our job was simply to even things out, clear the market as it were, act as secret arbitrageurs. I pretended to believe him.

  We pledged allegiance to no government. We weren’t ourselves political creatures. We weren’t patriots. Even less, heroes. We systematically overassessed risk, made it a bad word. Guns spooked us. Jack kept a pistol in his desk but it didn’t work. We knew nothing of weaponry, torture, psychological warfare, extortion, electronics, supercomputers, explosives. Never anything like that.

  Our office motto: Cowardice is what you make of it.

  We chose instead to deal in people. Each of us engaged our own kind, more or less. Foreign workers, immigrants, first-generationals, neo-Americans. I worked with Koreans, Pete with Japanese. We split up the rest, the Chinese, Laotians, Singaporans, Filipinos, the whole transplanted Pacific Rim. Grace handled Eastern Europe; Jack, the Mediterranean and Middle East; the two Jimmys, Baptiste and Perez, Central America and Africa. There were a few others, freelancers who’d step in when we needed them. Dennis Hoagland had established the firm in the mid-seventies, when another influx of newcomers was arriving. He said he knew a growth industry when he saw one; and there were no other firms with any ethnic coverage to speak of. The same reason the CIA had such shoddy intelligence in nonwhite countries. Hoagland oversaw the operation from our modest offices in Westchester County. He was the cultural dispatcher.

  Our clients were multinational corporations, bureaus of foreign governments, individuals of resource and connection. We provided them with information about people working against their vested interests. We generated background studies, psychological assessments, daily chronologies, myriad facts and extrapolations. These in extensive reports.

  Typically the subject was a well-to-do immigrant supporting some potential insurgency in his old land, or else funding a fledgling trade union or radical student organization. Sometimes he was simply an agitator. Maybe a writer of conscience. An expatriate artist.

  We worked by contriving intricate and open-ended emotional conspiracies. We became acquaintances, casual friends. Sometimes lovers. We were social drinkers. Embracers of children. Doubles partners. We threw rice at weddings, we laid wreaths at funerals. We ate sweet pastries in the basements of churches.

  Then we wrote the tract of their lives, remote, unauthorized biographies.

  I the most prodigal and mundane of historians.

  The intrigue. Always the intrigue. That certain sequence of unrelated events. Then bang. Dennis Hoagland said that in our time there were only two or three worth talking about, for complexity, fascination, depth of involvement: JFK, Watergate, the attempt on the Pope. Modern classics. He acknowledged outright that it was a personal matter, this choosing of one’s mysteries. He said you could tell about a person not from what he believed but by what worried him. Hoagland necessarily considered everyone a world-political creature, with a heightened persona, a neurotic cultural manner.

  Of course, there were whole legions of adherents to his view. There were still, out there, handfuls of committed Pearl Harbor theorists. Devotees of the Hindenburg disaster. The UFO-Pentagon conspiracists. Amelia Earhart gurus.

  Recently I received in the mail a handwritten pamphlet outlining the spread of HIV by the FBI. They were releasing infected mosquitoes by the billions.

  This is the worry, alive and well everywhere.

  It’s people like Hoagland who call you up at odd hours of the night to tell you something you absolutely need to know, practicing on you the subtlest form of sleep deprivation. Half-conscious training. Two in the morning, three, he would ring. I’d get angry with him and he would apologize deeply but two nights later he’d start in again.

  He did this after Lelia’s return from the islands. I was spending less time up at the office in Purchase, doing whatever work I could from the apartment, mostly because I wanted to live there as much as I could, make it a home somehow, thinking this might draw Lelia back sooner than she was planning. But then Hoagland was complaining. Everyone else was out of the office and he had no one to spook or harass.

  “So what are we putting you on, Harry?” Hoagland liked to call me Harry. It made him feel like an old-timer, venerable.

  “John Kwang,” I said, seeing the time on the clock. Four-fifteen.

  “Right,” he answered. He knew everything, certainly, but he just wanted me to do the drill. He said, “John Kwang. The rising star of the east. Prince of Northern Boulevard. What goes on?”

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “We’ll be placing you soon,” he replied, typically confident. “I have a line on a position in his staff. Some public relations work. How do you like that?”

  “Fine,” I answered. “Jack asked me yesterday. What name will I use?”

  “Whatever you like, this time. Bruce Lee, for all I care.”

  “Bigot.”

  “To hell with that. I know Enter the Dragon by the frame. I’ve had these dreams. I reach into people’s hearts. I have emow-tional content. Ask me anything.”

  I knew he could recite the whole movie.

  “I’ve got to go,” I told him.

  “Fine, fine. When are you going to show up here?”

  “Not for a few days. I’ve got to work on some things.”

  “I heard,” he said, thickly. “Where’s Lelia? Grace said she finally came back.”

  I paused. “She’s around.”

  “Good. I want my people happy. I want you happy, Harry. I need you that way, for all our sake. It’s imperative.”

  “You’re right, boss, I want to be happy.”

  “Fantastic. Good dreams. And come in soon. I mean it.”

  I hung up. But after twenty minutes of tossing I got out of bed. I usually couldn’t sleep after his calls, not so much from anything he would say. It was mostly his tone that kept me awake, the lingering question of it, the brand of itch that was his voice. I could never simply ignore it, put it off, and I would rise and in half-sleep drift about the darkness of the large apartment, inexplicably checking the corners and the closets for things out of the ordinary, an unmatched shoe, a coat fallen from a hanger, a tie I didn’t recognize, those tiny marks of what can go on while you sleep. Of course it was just my drowsy madness, though it dawned on me that I had become more like Hoagland than I would have liked to admit. My years with him and the rest of them, even good Jack, had somehow colored me funny, marked me.

  But I knew Hoagland, in truth, was taking it easy on me. His phone calls were just payback for the recent cushion he had given me. For the only time in the last few months I had gone out on assignment, actually courted a live body, I had nearly blown cover.

  It was when Lelia was away. He was a Filipino psychoanalyst, a Marcos sympathizer. Emile Luzan, Ph.D. I was one of his patients. I was a successful mortgage broker, married, seemingly poised at the sweet prime of my life. But I was troubled. I was drinking three or four cocktails a day. I wasn’t making love to my wife. I couldn’t sleep at night and I had sudden fits of anger and sadness. I was eating too much. I told him that a Dr. Hoagland had referred me. Depression, first episode.

  “You’ll be fine,” Luzan said to me gently. “You’ll be yourself again, I promise.”

  In the initial period everything was going well. Our sessions were becoming increasingly intense. I was elaborating upon my “legend” consistently and Luzan accepted my patholo
gies. The legend was something each of us wrote out in preparation for any assignment. It was an extraordinarily extensive “story” of who we were, an autobiography as such, often evolving to develop even the minutiae of life experience, countless facts and figures, though it also required a truthful ontological bearing, a certain presence of character.

  In his earnestness, Dr. Luzan kept delving further into my psyche, plumbing the depths. I was developing into a model case. Of course I was switching between him and me, getting piecemeals of the doctor with projections in an almost classical mode, but for the first time I found myself at moments running short of my story, my chosen narrative. Normally I would have ceased matters temporarily, retreated to Westchester to reiterate and revise. But inexplicably I began stringing the legend back upon myself. I was no longer extrapolating; I was looping it through the core, freely talking about my life, suddenly breaching the confidences of my father and my mother and my wife. I even spoke to him about a lost dead son. I was becoming dangerously frank, inconsistently schizophrenic. I ceased listening to him altogether. Like a good doctor he let me go on and on, and in moments I felt he was the only one in the world who might comfort me. I genuinely began to like him. I looked forward to our fifty-minute sessions on Thursday mornings, enough so that we began meeting on Mondays as well. Hoagland assumed I was stepping up the operation. When I was in the chair across the desk from Luzan I completely lost myself. I was becoming a dependent, a friend. Hoagland, not hearing from me, sent in Jack Kalantzakos to retrieve my remains, my exposed bones.

  I knew Hoagland was still wondering if he had done so in time.

  He wanted me back with the program. John Kwang, the city councilman, was going to get me back to my old self. I had been vaguely following his career, out of my own interest.

  John Kwang was Korean, slightly younger than my father would have been, though he spoke a beautiful, almost formal English. He had a JD-MBA from Fordham. He was a self-made millionaire. The pundits spoke of his integrity, his intelligence. His party was pressuring him for the mayoral race. He looked impressive on television. Handsome, irreproachable. Silver around the edges. A little unbeatable. Given my last assignment, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Hoagland had given him to Pete Ichibata. But there wouldn’t be a problem, he told me, not a problem for anyone. The job would be simple, uncomplicated. A brief background study. A primer. Just a collection of some personal items, arrived at slowly, from a distance. I might not even have to speak with the councilman. Hoagland almost promised as much. He said it was going to be titty. A walk in the woods. Pie.

  But here I was, roaming the apartment again. Middle of the night. Trying knobs, the window locks. I never liked the place much. I never got over its main feature, that it really had no walls, just one built-in partition to set off the bedroom from the larger space. The one and only bathroom was by the front door, set into a corner. The place went very wrong for Lelia and me, at some point. It was one of those lofts you see in movies and at parties, the one cavernous nearly-empty room of windows and hardwood flooring, some exposed brick, steam pipes. The kind of place you see pictured in ads, where the bed lies beneath a basketball net and a Harley is parked beside the nightstand. A surprisingly dysfunctional space. It was often an inappropriate temperature. It was much too big. You felt you were living in the wrong scale. Our old cat, Boo, despised it, she was always nervous, riding the walls. To break her of this I put her dish in the center of the room. She would sneak up on it, take a few bites, shoot back. She lost too much weight so I stopped. But then I must remember how our son once loved the place: I can still see Mitt running wind sprints back and forth down the length of the room, hear the patter of his socked feet, see him sliding the last few yards, twirling to a halt, some beautiful kid.

  Lelia and I tended to dwell in the corners, along the periphery. She inherited the apartment from her uncle Steven, who loved her and lived alone and died of AIDS. At first we thought we liked the place, the obscene white expanse of it. We even got into the adolescent notion of making love on every last coordinate of the space, thinking that these personal acts of colonialism would somehow help us acclimatize. But later the expanse and room were easy excuses for not seeing one another. The apartment became a little city with naturally separate habitats, her own private boroughs, and mine.

  We did like the bath. Steven had installed an oversized waist-deep tub a few months before he died. I don’t think he used it much. We did, almost nightly, during our first two winters. We used to scrub each other with a large sponge and a wiry padded mitten for our backs. Lelia didn’t believe in bubbles. We used epsom salts if anything. We had a big block of brown soap from which we shaved slivers with an old cheese knife. We’d light six or seven candles so that there was plenty of light to see each other. We liked to squat in the hot water with me behind her and crossing my arms so that I wrapped her breasts like belts of ammunition. Sometimes she would grab the backs of my knees and lift me onto her shoulders and slowly walk me around the tub. She took pronounced, heaving steps, and hummed something low with the stammer of each step. I always feared we might fall.

  After our son, Mitt, was born we all bathed together. He loved it. He was small enough that the tub was a pool for him. He learned to swim in it. When we finally coaxed him out, after all the splashing and laughter, he would sit on the edge of the tub and twist his knuckles into his eyes, which were red from the soapy water. Once, he slipped on the wet tile while horsing around and landed hard on his head and back; when we reached him his eyes jittered in their sockets and scrolled up into his head. I thought he was dead, but Lelia and I both yelled and his eyes dropped back down and he started moaning. We took him in a cab to the emergency room and he stayed overnight for observation. The next day he was perfectly fine. One lucky, hard-headed boy.

  Now that Lelia was back in the country I wondered if we would even keep the place. Still, I kept thinking she might stop by during the daytime, key in to the apartment, peek inside. She’d find me lone and innocent, waiting for her.

  But this didn’t happen. Instead I started loitering at the café across the street from our friend Molly’s building where Lelia had been staying since her return, watching the entrance from a window table. I waited whole afternoons. Women of Lelia’s shape would approach the door, buzz an apartment, look around, slip inside. A thickly bearded photographer had his studio on the floor above Molly’s. Sometimes he would look down from his window and wave at them first, signaling something. Then they would step inside. Later in the day, handsome young men in blue-collar clothes would ring the bell. The men always came back down before the women did. Then they would all return, go upstairs, and then leave again. This sequence occurred throughout the day. I didn’t know the particular nature of the work.

  I kept wondering if Lelia had ever spoken to the photographer, or perhaps gone inside. I buzzed once and asked for her by name, but the gruff voice said I had the wrong place.

  * * *

  I drove up to the offices earlier than I’d planned. I wanted to see Jack. I loved the worn-down form of that handsome laughing Greek. To look at him was like reading a relic typeface, like the first letter-block of a book, maybe the letter Y, his frame bent a little sideways as though a mule had fought one arm, the wide shoulders set back, curiously askance, a physical assemblage that belied his uncowering nature. There was the head and brow, its mass like a forged bell, the thousand tiny pocks in his swarthy cheeks, his thick moustache, unvain and wild, the full, almost tortured lips, perennially split in the middle like he’d been punched or roughed up a little. His off-the-rack gray suits were always just a little too big for him, though he himself was a big man, six-two or -three, two-twenty but light on his feet, and the effect when he moved toward you with his jacket unbuttoned was that of a gargantuan moth, gliding, fluttering a bit, completely silent.

  His wife, Sophie, a stunning Sicilian woman whose picture on his desk I had long been in
love with, was dead nearly five years from cervical cancer. I saw her alive only a few times, the last time just before the diagnosis, when she dropped off his lunch in a brown bag and kissed him twice on top of his wiry-haired salt-and-pepper head.

  “Yakavos,” she called back to him lovingly, in her movie-star accent, moving those wide flat hips out past where I sat. “You ought to come home early tonight.”

  When I sat with him I’d pick up the brass-framed photograph of her and admire it. He seemed to like this.

  “Our anniversary would have been next week,” he said now. “The twenty-ninth of February. She wanted to get married on the leap year because she knew no other woman in her right mind would want to do it.”

  “You agreed.”

  “Of course.”

  I put the frame down, turning it back to face him. We were eating a lunch of ordered-in sandwiches at his desk, grilled Reubens, corn chips, pickles, hot coffee, fried honey cakes. The daily killing of ourselves. Jack, as always, had peeled open a tin of shriveled purple olives. We were building a pile of the pits on a file photo of one of his former subjects, a South American woman with a magnificently crooked nose. Mrs. Ochoa-Perez, an exquisite embassy wife, was very former, I knew, because Jack hadn’t been on outside assignment in several years at least. Hoagland had retired him, plain and simple, after Jack requested a quiet exit. He’d had enough of our life. Normally that meant a two-week debriefing at the firm’s house upstate in Greene County, a modest send-off here in the office (a few bottles of whiskey, some laughs) and then a good pension check every month, but Jack was an old salt if there was one, too observant, too wise—he’d taught Hoagland most everything—and he was too valuable for them to let go completely.

  While Jack was on leave taking care of Sophie, Hoagland told me how Jack had been abducted in Cyprus by a red insurgent faction in ‘sixty-four. At the time he was working piecemeal for the CIA. In Cyprus, Hoagland said, Jack’s captors decided they were going to break every bone in his body with a small hammer, from the toes up. Then they would put a bullet in his brain. They started on the job but stopped when someone crashed a donkey cart into the bottom of the house. The way Hoagland tells it, when they went down to deal with the ruckus, Jack struggled with his guard, shot and killed him, then dragged himself onto the roof and flagged down a policeman from a prone position. But then you felt everything Hoagland said was apocryphal, always questionable. If it happened at all, Jack never mentioned it. Our mode at the firm was always to resist history, at least our own.