Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  “So you caught me.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Gone,” he says.

  “Come on,” I say.

  “Okay, Harry.”

  “What?”

  “He’s dead.”

  All stop.

  “I’m kidding,” Dennis says. Not even a laugh. “Jesus, I’m kidding.”

  “Fuck you forever.”

  “Okay,” he then says, “have it your way, sore-sport, I’m passing the phone.”

  Jack gets on. He sounds all out of breath. I ask him what’s going on. He says the elevator’s out. But now I want to know what he knows.

  “The fire?” he asks.

  “The two guys in ski masks.”

  “Who can say? I will look into it, if you wish. But I think it is nothing.”

  “People are dead.”

  “I am sorry,” he says. “The Spanish boy, and a woman.”

  “Does it matter to you?” I ask him.

  “I guess not,” he answers.

  “Then tell me you don’t know anything,” I say. “Tell me you just saw the news. Otherwise don’t say a word. Say goodbye and hang up.”

  “Don’t worry, Parky. It’s nothing. Nothing. I would know.”

  “Would you?” I say. “There’s the bomb to consider.”

  He’s quiet. “What kind was it?”

  “Something simple. Sticks of dynamite.”

  “See? Proof. This is nothing. Nothing. Nobody uses dynamite.”

  “I wish I could believe you.”

  “Damnit, you should,” he says, almost finally. “But be crazy if you like. Crazy! This is not what we do. I know. Tell me, Parky, tell a stupid old man. What would be our interest?”

  “I don’t see any,” I answer. “He was just a kid. He didn’t know anything.”

  “Then it is just another act. You are losing it, boy. You must be forgetting this is New York City. Random murder and violence.”

  “What does Dennis have to say?” I ask. “He must be listening to us. I’m talking to you, Dennis.”

  “He does not have to listen,” Jack cries. “I will tell him everything anyway. You know this. I will say you are concerned. That is enough. Not crazy, like you are.”

  “Thanks so much, Jack.”

  “Let me say something before I go, Parky. Sometimes you should look closer to home. If something is funny then look there. This is my advice to you. And I will tell you one more thing. If you cannot trust me there is nobody.”

  “God bless me then, Jack.”

  “Bless you then,” he says.

  I walk quickly back to the ruined building. “Hey, Henry,” Sherrie says, calling me over to her car. “I need you to write a summary of this for John. Not right now, just give it to him by tonight. We need everyone now to move the essentials over to his house in Woodside. We’re going to work out of the basement. I’ve sent Janice over already. You know where the house is?”

  I shouldn’t know, but I do.

  “Good,” she says. “You know, I’m sorry. I know you worked with Eduardo. I liked him a lot.”

  I nod.

  “Here,” she says, reaching into her bag. She hands me a thick white envelope bound with a red sash. “John wants you to give this to his family. This is important to him. He trusts you with doing this.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Thanks,” she says. “John wants to bring it himself, but the papers might take it the wrong way if they found out, you know what I mean?”

  “I understand,” I say.

  “Good,” she says, squeezing my arm. “I appreciate this. It’s good to work with other Asians, you know? You don’t have to explain yourself.”

  “Right.”

  “Right,” she says. “Oh, and you better call home, too. I know it’s Saturday, but we’re probably going to work all night. Help pack up here and then ride over with Jenkins in the van. I’ll see you there later.”

  Sherrie smiles and handles my arm again, the ball of my shoulder. I put the money away inside my jacket. She goes back to directing the mess, managing the people traffic. They all listen to her, heed her. The whole office likes her. But I find the touching strange. From someone else, for instance Janice, the contact would simply be casual, friendly, just a kind of parlance, formless, easy talk. But from Sherrie the touch is different. It’s not sexual and not sisterly. It calls on that very minor power we can have over each other, that exercise of influence and duty which we know from our families, our fathers. Our cousin blood. That age-old weakness of brethren you always root out and you always use.

  * * *

  The Fermins are caretakers of their tenement building. They live on the ground floor next to the elevator, and even inside their apartment you can hear the tired heave of cables running in the shaft, the up and down shouts of little kids who need to pee. Mrs. Fermin recognizes me immediately and opens the steel door. I tell her my name, who I am. She cups my hand and tries to smile. She leads me through a dim half-corridor and gestures to the sofa. She says cerveza and I say yes. Her husband sits on one end of the frilly sofa, half asleep from the long night, half mourning. He’s too weak to acknowledge my presence. He’s not crying, he’s not doing anything. I sit down on the other end. They’ve drawn the blinds and it’s almost completely dark. Mrs. Fermin comes back from the kitchen and hands me a can of Budweiser and sits in a dining chair with a can for herself. We drink in silence. The other children aren’t here, even the young boy, but the grandmother is. She’s chopping in the kitchen and the apartment air is oniony, sharp, and she’s speaking to herself over and over in a rhythm that sounds like the Lord’s prayer.

  The whole room is set up with pictures of Eduardo. Seeing his parents, I realize he was a very handsome young man. Sometimes you have to meet the parents to figure out what someone really looks like. In their many pictures Eduardo is a baby, he’s a black bear for Halloween, he’s a bristling Golden Glover, he’s in a suit that’s too big. He sports a downy prideful adolescent moustache. He stands arm in arm with John Kwang. And what I see is that most of the pictures are already hung, part of a permanent collection, that this room has always been a kind of family chapel to their son.

  Mrs. Fermin smiles at me and says very softly, very gently, “What d’you wan, Mr. Park?”

  I say I’ve come on behalf of John Kwang, that I’ve brought something for her family from him. I tell her that he doesn’t want his gift to be publicly recognized, that she should accept it and use it for her family, but then Mrs. Fermin waves her hands and shakes her head saying, “Slow, slow.” She tries to say something to me, but she’s being too careful and nothing can come out. She speaks quickly to her husband in Spanish but he just responds, “Ay, Carmelina,” and buries his head in the crook of his arm.

  I stop talking and take out the envelope. I give it to her, for some reason, in the formal Korean way, with my eyes down and my free hand guiding my extended wrist. Maybe I think Kwang would do it like this, want it done like this.

  She steadies her can of beer on the carpet and places the envelope in her wide lap. I get up to go but she wants me to stay. The grandmother comes out to look at the package. Mrs. Fermin slowly unties the red ribbon, lifting the folds of the heavy paper until they petal out to show the bright color of the neatly stacked money. Mrs. Fermin can’t touch the money. She lifts up the bundle by the paper and carries it to me. She can’t speak, she doesn’t know what to do. I count it for her. There are a hundred $100 notes in the stack, and the bills are brand new, they rustle on touch and stick to one another.

  The grandmother rushes up and snatches the money away from me and disappears to the back end of the apartment. We can hear her madly opening closet doors, drawers, boxes. She’s hiding all the money. Mrs. Fermin starts weeping in her chair. Her husband still hasn’t moved.

  �
�You know, he helpin Eduardo always,” she now says, wiping her eyes with her sleeve, rocking. “Mr. John Kwang. He helpin Eduardo go law school. Before Mr. Kwang, Eduardo doin too many jobs, this and that, this and that. Now, me Eduardo, he gon make everyone happy. Jus like Mr. Kwang. Eduardo gon make everyone happy and rich. He’s a beautiful boy.”

  She brings me an album of pictures. We look at pictures together, and she keeps talking about him. I know what she means, despite her tenses. She’s not acting out, acting crazy. I know this Mrs. Fermin. Half the people in Queens talk like her. Half the people I knew when I was a child. And I think she’s saying it perfectly, just like she should. When you’re too careful you can’t say anything. You can’t imagine the play of the words in your head. You can’t hear them, and they all sound like they belong to somebody else.

  Mrs. Fermin gestures for me to follow her to the back of the apartment, to his bedroom. We pass a closed door, behind which the grandmother waits for me to leave. Eduardo shared a small one-window room with his little brother, Stevie. They each have a twin bed with matching bedspreads that Stevie picked out, full of space shuttles and star stations. There are two of the same chipboard desk, the size too small for Eduardo and maybe too big for Stevie; Eduardo’s boxing trophies, a line of aluminum baseball bats, posters of Latin pop groups and singers. Mrs. Fermin shows me a picture frame inset with Eduardo’s ninth-grade report card. Straight A’s.

  “After some more times, we don’ do agayn,” she says. “No more frames.”

  She shows me pictures of his girlfriend, Arabel, who likes the color pink and carnations and who said she was going to be his wife. She shows me his ribbons and medals from Lucky Meier’s Gym of Champions, and she shows me three shoe boxes stuffed with commendations, certificates of merit, honorable mentions, a plaque from the Latino League of New York’s Father-Son Day, for what I can’t tell, she shows me a dozen other mementos of her three men, whom she has all known as boys and will forever love that way, their first charm and vulnerability, and she shows me a yellow silken bird of the islands, the one that augurs mercy and good tidings, which now falls off its perch on the post of Stevie’s tidy bed.

  Mr. Fermin calls out for her from the living room. He calls her name, and then in a voice drunk with sadness he calls for his sons, his daughters, he doesn’t want to be left alone.

  “I go now,” she says to me politely.

  She leads me out. Mr. Fermin is stretched out on the sofa. His slack arm covers his face. She says to him in Spanish, The man is leaving.

  He grumbles. She repeats herself.

  And so he answers, trying hard, “Goodbye, Mr. Kwang.”

  Sherrie and Janice have called the entire office in, all the volunteers, the part-time canvassers, even the high school kids who station the sidewalk kiosks. His large row house is trafficked by us rushing in and out, depositing papers, carrying file cabinets, computers, lamps, makeshift desks. Sherrie says he wants everybody together today. This is important. He wants everyone near. He doesn’t need to see us or hear us. Just have us close.

  When something bad happens, you gather the family and count heads.

  He hasn’t slept, Sherrie tells us. He’s hurting badly. He has been weeping all night for his friend Eduardo, and then Helda Brandeis, praying for them with old Reverend Cho from the Flushing Korean Church. He hasn’t come down from his office on the third floor of the house since he returned from D.C., now a few days. His wife and his boys go up and visit with him for a while and then leave him alone, and only the minister has been allowed up. Every hour Mrs. Kwang gives Sherrie a new message of what he wants said or done.

  For the last few hours the communiques have ceased coming down. It’s nearing five o’clock and the stations need something new for their first evening broadcasts. The reporters have begun clamoring for him, shouting their questions up to the third-floor window. There are enough reporters and cameramen on the narrow sidewalk that the police have set up barricades to keep them from flowing out into the street and obstructing traffic. The neighbors have been complaining about some of them, who want to use their upstairs to look in on Kwang’s house, some even asking if the basements might be connected. His immediate neighbors, though, are loyal, the whole block stays vigilant over Kwang, and they have started hurling garbage and buckets of water at those trying to sneak up the sides and back of the property. Sherrie and Janice instruct us again and again not to speak to the press as we move things inside.

  But as we work all the talk is about who did this to us. Everyone is exchanging rumors, theories.

  It’s the Black Muslims. They can’t accept Yellow Power. No, someone else says, they’d never do something like this. Who is it, then? The Man, stupid, it’s always the Man. No shit, but who’s that? De Roos. Who else?

  I hear the talk from all his people. They offer each other the spectrum of notions; the bombers are North Korean terrorists, or the growing white-separatist cell based on eastern Long Island, or even the worldwide agents of the Mossad—you can always lay blame on them—who will never forget Kwang’s verbal support of the children of the Intifada. The late money says it’s the Indians, who so despise Korean competition, it’s the Jews envious of new Korean money, Chinese hateful of Korean communality, blacks who want something, anything of justice, it’s the uneasy coalition of our colors, that oldest strife of city and alley and schoolyard.

  If you beat your brother with his stick, I heard Kwang once say to a crowd, he’ll come back around and beat you with yours.

  The customary lessons, the historical formulas.

  But now I hear a low whisper: It was Eduardo they wanted.

  I look toward the stair but there are too many bodies trundling through the house, too many unknown faces to pick one out. And the idea is one I’ve been turning over in my mind. Aside from his family and blood, if you wanted to take someone away from John Kwang, if you simply desired to hurt him, exercise true malice, Eduardo would figure near the top of the list. But how did they know he’d be working that late? Or were he and the cleaning woman just caught in the smoke and the flames?

  Near the kitchen Sherrie spots me and eyes me to come over. She’s talking with May. Sherrie towers over her. They’re holding each other’s hands like schoolgirls. May is glassy-eyed. They’ve been talking about Helda.

  Besides the office, Helda also cleaned the Kwangs’ house once a week since she started about a year ago. She left her family back in what was the old East Germany to make enough money to send for her husband and three grown children. She was planning to bring them over one at a time. Helda was living with another German family in the Bronx, sharing a bedroom with two other boarders five nights a week. The other nights the boarders had to stay elsewhere because of an after-hours club the owners ran on the weekends. For the first month or so, Helda would shuttle back and forth between all-night diners, drinking coffee to stay awake. Jenkins found her asleep one night during her cleaning shift at the office and wanted to fire her, but John learned what was going on—Eduardo, who often worked at night, told him—and he invited Helda to sleep in his family’s guest bedroom on the weekends. She could look after the boys if he and May went out. If guests came, she chose to sleep on the floor in the boys’ room.

  “The boys liked it,” May says. “They said she was nice and pretty and old.”

  “They’re good boys,” Sherrie tells her.

  “They’ve been crying with their father. I don’t think they really understand but they see him and do the same.”

  “Did you go and see the Fermins, Henry?” asks Sherrie.

  I tell her yes and look at May, her face as yet wrinkleless, so round, her full cheek pinching her narrow eyes, the color and curve so durably Korean. I now notice, too, the faintest patch of redness high on her cheek, between her left eye and ear, like she’d been sunburned just there, or was slapped once, very hard.

  “They accepted your gif
t,” I say to her.

  “It’s from all of us,” May answers. “I hope you told her that. John wanted to present something on all of our behalf. My family as well as our office.”

  “I think Mrs. Fermin understood.” Then I say, “She seemed a little overwhelmed by the amount.”

  “Funerals are expensive,” Sherrie says.

  May lowers her eyes. She’s from yangban stock, her people are the Korean landed gentry, and she finds this open talk of figures awkward, unnecessary. The money, her eyes tell me, is simply an acknowledgment of our dead. I understand this. Even a poor cabbage farmer’s son like my father knows the custom. But I wonder who in our office delivered Helda’s honor, if there was one at all, whether it was air-posted to Germany in a handsomely twined bundle of vellum and silk.

  May says, “My husband wants to speak with you, actually. Not today. Tomorrow, maybe. He wanted to ask you about how Eduardo’s family is doing. He said he hasn’t seen you in a few weeks.”

  After May goes upstairs Sherrie pulls me aside. We stand in the arch of a small powder room beneath the riser.

  “I might not be around tomorrow so I’ll tell you right now. Don’t take too much of his time.”

  “Sure,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

  “He’s just not responding well to this and we’ve got to come out and make an appearance. He’s got to come out strong. We’re starting to suffer, people are starting to think he doesn’t care. The damn papers aren’t helping either.”

  This is true; the late edition headline of one of the tabloids reads, Wherrrre’s Johnny?

  “I don’t want you to slow the process,” she warns me. “He’s vulnerable. You’ll see that. Help him get his act together so he can get his face out there. He’s looking like a coward.”

  “To some.”

  “He’s not to me,” she says harshly. “But the situation is getting critical. You can be a lifelong saint, but in politics you’ve only got a few days of disaster. Any more of this and we could be finished. He likes you and I think you can help him.”