Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  “The Mao lover’s Mao,” Lelia answers.

  “Exactly,” I reply. “So I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of the class. So my report was about the threat of Communism, the Chinese Army, how MacArthur was a visionary, that Truman should have listened to him. How lucky all of us Koreans were.”

  “You really felt that way?”

  “More or less, when I was little. Sometimes, even now. You know, it’s being with old guys like Stew that diminishes you.”

  “But I thought he never said anything to you. You didn’t even know.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I tell her loudly, holding her close. The boat is powering up to speed, throwing its wake. “It’s that coloring those old guys have about the face and body, all pale and pink and silver, those veins pumping in purple heart. It says, ‘I saved your skinny gook ass, and your momma’s, too.’”

  “I never understood that word,” she shouts into the wind. “Gook. I sometimes hear it from the students. I thought it was meant for Southeast Asians. I don’t get it.”

  “Everyone’s got a theory. Mine is, when the American GIs came to a place they’d be met by all the Korean villagers, who’d be hungry and excited, all shouting and screaming. The villagers would be yelling, Mee-gook! Mee-gook! and so that’s what they were to the GIs, just gooks, that’s what they seemed to be calling themselves, but that wasn’t it at all.”

  “What were they saying?”

  “‘Americans! Americans!’ Mee-gook means America.”

  “That’s perfect,” Lelia says, shaking her head. “I better ask Stew.”

  “Don’t harass your father,” I tell her. “He won’t know anything. It’s funny, I used to almost feel good that there was a word for me, even if it was a slur. I thought, I know I’m not a chink or a jap, which they would wrongly call me all the time, so maybe I’m a gook. The logic of a wounded eight-year-old.”

  “It stinks,” she utters, turning to the waters. Her hands are white on the rail. “If I had heard that one redheaded kid say even one funny word to Mitt! God! I would have punched his fucking lights out! I would have made him scream!” Her chest bucks, and she almost starts to cry, strangely, as if she’s frightened herself with a memory that isn’t true.

  The redheaded boy lived in my father’s neighborhood. He was older than Mitt, maybe nine or ten when Mitt was six, and we often saw him at the town pool. Mitt would always step behind us when he approached. He used to tell us how the kid, named Dylan or Dean, had “the hugest muscles,” and when I see that kid now I understand the proportion Mitt’s eyes must have been measuring, I can see the creamy flesh of a nine-year-old bully, the brutish, magical pall he must have cast. Of course, he was also a kind of friend. Dylan or Dean would teach Mitt and the other kids the run of bad words; he’d teach them how to trash-talk Mitt and then teach Mitt how to trash-talk them back. It was our boy’s first formal education. But the other kids would have more ammo against Mitt, they were all just Westchester white boys, some of them Jews. Maybe Mitt could say “kike” (which he did once in the house, until Lelia cracked him hard on the ass) or else pretty much nothing, maybe something lame like “paleface” or “ghost,” unless the kid had big ears or was plainly slow. Because there isn’t anything good to say to an average white boy to make him feel small. The talk somehow works in their favor, there’s shield in the language, there’s no fair way for us to fight.

  We’re nearing the dock. Lelia suddenly wants to get off the boat. She wants to stay on Staten Island tonight. I tell her it’s haunted, spooked, that it’s the isle of brutes and bigots.

  “Who’s the spook?” she says, though gently.

  She knows it will only be a few more weeks with Kwang. This is the promise that hangs between us. She’ll go back to the school district, and I’ll stay at home for a while, keep my head low.

  When the boat docks we step off the gangway and ask a cabdriver to take us to any nearby motel. He drops us off at the Grey Island Inn, a long rectangular three-decker with a view of the ship docks and the Jersey shoreline. We order in hamburgers and beer from the Greek diner next door and pay for the in-room movie, though we can’t watch much of it. It’s a new technothriller stocked with laser-guided weapons, gunboats, all flavors of machismo. Muscular agents. Give us The Third Man, we decide, give us The Manchurian Candidate and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

  Lelia switches the wall heater to high and we take off our clothes and slip into bed. We try to take a bath but the water doesn’t clear of its rust; the shower is the same. The pay movie is finally ending. We first muted the sound, but there’s no remote so we let it go on, silent. Now, the flickering lights of the finale wash over us, spectacular explosions, muzzle flashes, the steady glow of reactor fires. Only a movie can color your lovemaking like a movie’s.

  We know the hero won’t die. He can’t. There’s too much blood on his face, he’s too pummeled and wrecked to perish, his bedragglement is the sign to us that he is safe, actually immortal. The gunmen who sport $200 haircuts and Italian suits take bullets to the head. Lelia winces each time they fall. I imagine Jack in Cyprus, both knees broken, blood gluing his teeth, taking aim and shooting his young captor in the eye while lying on the ground. In our fictions, a lucky shot saves your life.

  Lelia sits up to go to the bathroom, waits for a second, then runs through the dark. I hear her pee and then flush. The creak of the mirror. Then she’s still for a moment.

  She calls out.

  “Henry,” she says, sounding worried. “I think I’m getting old. Fast.”

  “Not so fast,” I say.

  “That’s not the right answer,” she calls, singing the last word.

  She creeps out, runs back. After certain movies we rent, a sniper waits somewhere in the room, a strangler or rapist lurks. She used to check on Mitt during the credits, making sure he hadn’t been stolen. She still insists on renting slasher films, demon movies. She wants to get stuck in her imagination. I saw her carry a marble paperweight through our apartment after we watched Jaws.

  But I think the rest of her is becoming dauntless, even with our years and troubles. Mitt. Her trip of escape, the brief love affair. My treacheries. None of these are written on her face, none of these can be read on her body. History, it turns out, is not a human expression. Age is, time is. And she’s right; the oldness is now just appearing about her lip, her temples, in the tide of her voice, which is steadily deepening, broadening. In fact she is beginning to sound a little like her old man, but without all the heady blow and bellow. These days, I notice, she likes to hum her songs, prefers this, when once she would only sing pristine notes, ring them out like clarions around the apartment.

  “Try to find the weather for tomorrow,” she says to me, nodding toward the television. “If it’s nice, maybe we should stay another day.”

  I get up and flip around until I find the local news station. Another cabbie is dead, shot in the back of the head, this time a Cuban driver in the Bronx. They show the blood-soaked seat, the shattered windshield, a dashboard scent infuser tagged with a religious inscription in Spanish.

  “Christ,” Lelia whispers.

  The man is the fifth or sixth driver murdered in the last two months. The cabbies are threatening a one-day strike of all New York. They want something done, more police protection, swift justice, but no one has any good idea of how to get it done. The news shows Mayor De Roos venerably bowing his head at a press conference. The reporter speaks to several drivers at the company garages, and though all of them are concerned and scared there’s nobody who can speak for the drivers as a group, who even wants to, they’re too different from one another, they’re recently arrived Latvians and Jamaicans, Pakistanis, Hmong.

  What they have in common are the trinkets from their homelands swaying from the rearview mirror, the strings of beads, shells, the brass letters, the blurry s
napshots of their small children, the night-worn eyes. I wonder if the Cuban could even beg for his life so that the killer might understand. What could he do? Have mercy, should be the first lesson in this city, how to say the phrase instantly in forty signs and tongues.

  The next story is about a small freighter that runs aground off Far Rockaway in the middle of the night. The boat carries around fifty Chinese men who have paid $20,000 each to smugglers to ship them to America. Men are leaping from the sides of the boat, clinging to ropes dangling down into the water. Rescue boats bob in the rough surf, plucking the treaders with looped gaffs. The drowned are lined up on the dock beneath canvas tarps. The ones who make it, dazed, soaked, unspeaking, are led off in a line into police vans.

  The last big story is a fire. It is burning even now. A two-alarm blaze at the main offices of City Councilman John Kwang, and the building next door. The cause is suspicious. Witnesses say there was a small explosion around 9 P.M. There are no official reports as yet of injuries or fatalities. It happened too late, authorities think, for anyone to be inside. The witnesses saw two men in ski masks running from the alley. Then the windows blew out. The pictures show the street in chaos, the burning frame of a car parked out front. The back part of the building is ferociously spewing smoke and a girl on the street is crying and pointing at something and covering her mouth. I know Kwang was in Washington, D.C., this afternoon, and we now see him stepping from the shuttle gate at La Guardia, rushing out to his car, Jenkins rushing with him, and then Sherrie Chin-Watt. None of them will comment.

  We stop watching and lie back and wait for the weather forecast but we don’t hear it. There is a perfect calm in the bed, and then Lelia gets up and shuts off the television. When she comes back she is looking up at the plastered ceiling, her arms folded, pinning the sheet tight against her chest. I turn off my light. Then she clicks off her side. It’s pitch dark. We’ve made love just a little before but now I notice how conscious I am of touching her. She is perfectly still. I can’t even hear her breathing.

  “God,” she says, the awe quieting her voice. “Good god. You could have been there.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  She rolls into me, nearly on top of me. She whispers close, “He’s safe.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who did this?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say, the possibilities firing in my head, though most of them involve Dennis, and now even Jack, the two of them watching the blaze from the periphery.

  “Do we need to go back now?”

  “No,” I tell her. “We’ll go in the morning.”

  “I feel ill,” she says, getting up. She stumbles to the bathroom. I follow her and hold her shoulders as she gets sick into the toilet.

  “I’m sorry, Henry,” she says, turning on the tap. “I’m all right now.”

  I don’t say any more. I can’t. I walk her back through the dark room to the bed. We lie down and in a few minutes she’s so quiet that for a second I think she’s dead. I put my fingers near her mouth to check. She’s just breathing faintly, not yet asleep.

  Now I’m scarcely breathing myself. This is wont with my training in the face of sudden turns or shifts in events. But I’m square in the fear. If you’re skilled you don’t try to steel yourself, you actually do the opposite, you let yourself go, completely, Hoagland told me once, like you are sitting on the toilet, you loosen a certain muscle. It’s a classic NKVD trick, and if you’re careful and practiced it works without disaster. Old Soviets know. You are serene as Siberia.

  Once, I do it perfectly. Maybe for years. A child of mine is somehow dead. He is no longer inhabiting our life. I watch my wife go out every morning to wander about the grounds of my father’s house, poking in the bushes and the trees for hours at a time, as if to follow his last tracks. One morning she returns with objects in her hands, pretty rocks and twigs and big oak leaves, and she sits down silently at the small table in our garage apartment to construct a little house. She works slowly. I watch her from the corner, where I often read. Eventually, the rocks show a path, she raises walls with the twigs, and the canopy of leaves she blows gently with her breath, to make sure its utility. She peers inside, expressionless. She blows harder and then leaves it. Then she crawls back into bed.

  The twig house sits there for days. Lelia cries on and off. She seems to live in the bed. I don’t speak to her then. I try my best to ignore her. This, I think at the time, is best for us both. I will attempt to eat at the table, or read the newspaper there, but it’s so small and rickety that any wrong movement endangers the house. Finally one day I find it outside, at the far end of my father’s lawn, perfectly intact right down to the rocks. I look back to the garage, to the big house. I don’t see anyone in the windows, including the small oval of the secret room, but I think she is watching me, to witness what I might do. I kneel down before it. Pick it apart, leaf by twig, stone by rock, until I have orderly piles of the material. I stand up and shout out his name. I shout it again, as loud as my meager voice can. Then I fling it all in the woods, dismantled piece by piece. I turn back, ready for her, but even with all of my hope she still isn’t there.

  Now I cannot see her face and she cannot see mine. Though I think even if it were light I would not effect my oft-drilled calm, which I have done for her a hundred times but will not do now. I will not rid my expression of the sudden worry and weight. I will not hush or so handle my heart. I will put my hand in her hair. Kiss her ear. Now whisper a speech with my smallest voice. She whispers back, this blessing we share. Now I think we will both dream of fire.

  The front windows are blown out. A large crowd is already formed behind the barricade. The fire marshals and bomb squad pick through the burned-out section in the back that serves as an annex for the office, where we keep voting registration and contributor records. Minor devices, one of them says. I hear Janice Pawlowsky cursing, but from where I can’t see. Her wails and epithets carry out from the broken windows, down the fire stairs.

  The staff is allowed to go inside in shifts to retrieve records and personal items. John Kwang hasn’t arrived yet, but he’s expected and the media are thick on the ground. They wait outside the yellow police tape, stopping everyone and interrogating them. All of them want to know if we personally knew the dead. I pretend I don’t speak English.

  But these are ours: an office janitor, an older, always cheery woman named Helda Brandeis, and the college student, Eduardo Fermin. Both were working after hours; they were found in the back war room, huddled together, trapped, overcome by fumes. They weren’t burned. Nothing in that room burned. Janice didn’t see them but heard they were covered in a film of ash, as if they’d slept through a gentle, black snow.

  Eduardo’s family has been holding a vigil in front of the office since last night, his mother and father, his grandmother, his two sisters and his baby brother. The coroner removed the bodies hours ago for autopsy, but Eduardo’s family still remains, unable to leave, as if waiting for his ghost to return to the place he was last alive.

  When it’s my turn to go in, I gather the things in his desk next to mine and place them in a file box. I fill it with everything I can find, but I keep for myself an embossed 3×5 note card he had printed with the phrase John Kwang always said: “Honor your family.”

  I leave my own things alone. There is nothing I wish to salvage. Better that it’s thrown away. I come back out and place the box of Eduardo’s things near them. His mother gasps something in Spanish, she’s short of breath, and Eduardo’s young brother immediately pulls off the cardboard lid. It smells of smoke. On top of his papers and framed photographs is Eduardo’s gold-tone ballpoint pen, obviously a family gift, maybe from high school graduation, and here’s the little boy taking it, writing slowly in the air. Now they gather up his things and finally go home.

  Sherrie walks the site with the authorities. She has me follow them and take notes. Appare
ntly, there are two accelerants: the first, the lethal one, is meant for fire, hurled through the windows in front and back in the alley. Probably just Molotovs. The other is a device, timed and set inside the front reception room of the office. Maybe it was wrapped as a package. Now they’re piecing together how the fire spread through the offices full of paper fuel, pinning in Eduardo and the woman. The explosion is nothing to speak of, nothing special, they believe no plastique was used, no deep electronics, just a stick or two of dynamite, a model airplane battery for detonation, a few rounds of duct tape. Common materials.

  “So it could be anybody who works on a construction site,” Sherrie says to the group of men. “Or has access to one.” They stare at her. She wearily asks them, “What are you going to tell the press?”

  “Crude explosive,” one of them says. “I wouldn’t let it get in your hair, lady. Just because it’s a bomb doesn’t mean we’re dealing with a terrorist. It’s probably just some crank who’s sore at Kwang.”

  Everyone mostly agrees. Nobody wants a situation. The tabloids are already screaming for one, they’re suddenly calling the start of a terrorist race war, American-style. I realize that the men and Sherrie want to quell the notion. But no one is acknowledging what at least is clear, that someone took a little trouble with this one, that it’s not a drive-by situation, it’s not the work of vandals or addicts.

  When we finish with the investigators I slip away and call Jack from a deli down the block. He isn’t at home or at work. I call his house again and leave a message saying it’s just me needing some wisdom. That I’ll try again. Then I call the office and the phone picks up.

  It’s Dennis.

  “Good to hear your voice, Harry,” he says. “You say hello in the nicest way.”

  “Where’s Jack?”

  “Out to lunch.”

  “Bullshit. He eats later.”