He took the envelope—there were five twenties inside—tucked it in his front pocket. “You didn’t have to,” he said, “but thanks.”
“I hope it helps.” She retied the sash of her robe so tightly she looked like she was trying to cut off air.
“Well,” he said, slinging his bags over his shoulders, “bye.” He opened the door and almost stepped through when something slammed so hard against the back of his knee that he dropped to the ground. He tried getting up but fell back down, his arm suddenly twisted behind his back, and Maxima’s chin pressing down hard against the top of his skull. “If this happens to you,” she said, grip tightening, “what do you do?” He tried untwisting his arm, getting to his feet, his whole body squirming and stuck. He knew this move: the Maximattack, she’d called it. There were tricks to breaking free but he could never get them right, and by now had forgotten them all.
“Let go,” he said, “now.” He heard her whisper something—an orasyon to keep him down, he assumed—until she finally released his arm and stepped away.
She offered a hand to help him up; he refused, stood on his own. “Nothing will happen to me,” he said, then walked out the door.
He hurried through the complex and out the front gate, saw Sab’s Corolla parked at the curb. He opened the door and threw his bags in the back, leaned in to kiss her when he noticed purple streaks in her brown hair; the day before, they’d been blond. He took a strand, rubbed it between his fingers. “Bad?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Even better.”
They kissed, then drove off, and at the final stoplight before getting on the freeway, Excel took out his apartment key and flicked it out the window, the morning still so early and quiet that he heard it clink against the asphalt, the sound of everything he no longer needed.
THEIR DESTINATION WAS A BLANK ON THE MAP. THE CLOSEST landmarks were a city called El Centro and a dot of a town called Whyling, near the bottom of California. Once there, they’d head east, to a place called Hello City.
Sab drove; she had the license, the car. Excel’s job was to navigate. He unfolded the California road map and spread it over his lap, then realized he’d never read an actual map before—when you go nowhere your entire life, nothing is more useless than a map. Their flip phones wouldn’t help if they got lost, so Excel tried making sense of all the grids and lines; under the dim car light, the whole state just looked like an arm bent at the elbow, the crisscrossing freeways like networks of veins. But he finally found San Francisco, then Colma, then the 280 freeway, and, finally, maybe, himself: he put a finger on what he estimated was their current position, checking back and forth between the map and the road ahead. He felt like he was tracking his own movement, a kind of out-of-body experience that made him dizzy. His first road trip ever, he didn’t want to get carsick, so he put down the map, told Sab it was a straight shot south for a few hours more and reclined his seat, looked out the window. They passed nothing scenic or memorable, not yet, but he took in every lit-up sign for every strip mall, gas station, and fast food chain they passed, like a tourist determined not to miss a single thing. How could he not: barely an hour outside Colma, Excel was farther from home than he’d ever been before.
THEY’D MET IN JUNE, THREE MONTHS BEFORE. EXCEL WAS LYING ON the grass next to Joker’s grave when a girl holding a ziplock bag filled with what looked like gray powder approached. “Want some?” she asked.
He sat up. She was wearing an army jacket, a black skirt that reached her Doc Martens. Her hair was barely held together in a loose, straggly bun, and her lipstick was gray, nearly black. He thought she was selling him drugs.
“It’s for your monkey face,” she said, shaking the bag.
“For my what?” It was an overcast Saturday, the cemetery nearly empty, which was how he wanted his day off from The Pie, the pizza place where he’d worked since high school.
“Your orchid,” she said. “It’s called a monkey-faced orchid. Look.” She picked it up by the small clay pot, held it to Excel’s face. He hadn’t known the flower was an orchid, much less a specific kind. He’d simply found it on top of the Dumpster behind the cemetery flower shop, thought it was alive enough to lay at Joker’s grave. Up close, he could see how the petals’ maroon splotches, combined with the bulbous flap in the center of the flower, might resemble the face of a monkey, but one that looked surprised, almost panicked.
“Deer eat the flowers at night,” she said. “But if you sprinkle some pepper, they stay away. So”—she offered the bag again—“want some?”
He shrugged. “Why not.”
She took a pinch, sprinkled it over the orchid. “I work at the cemetery flower shop. I put pepper on the flowers a few times a week.”
“I thought you were selling me drugs.”
She shook her head. “My drug mule is on vacation.”
It didn’t register with Excel, not until he saw the slight lift of her eyebrows, signaling the joke. Silence was his default response to any stranger who spoke to him, like he was someone who didn’t know the language. Back in school, teachers had nagged him to speak up, would call him out by name to force his class participation. He had few friends, and the guys he did hang out with, Vic and Truong, weren’t so much into conversation as they were into Grand Theft Auto, and he hadn’t spoken to either since graduation (Vic left for some college in either North or South Carolina; Truong joined a branch of the military, Excel couldn’t remember which). Staring at this girl with a bag of ground pepper in her hand, he realized he hadn’t had a real conversation with anyone in months, maybe longer.
“Well”—he took a breath—“it’s tough to find a good drug mule these days.”
She laughed. “I’m Sab,” she said. He could tell she was mixed—part Asian for sure (he guessed Japanese or Korean), maybe some white, Mexican, or African American, too. She looked like she could be everything.
“Excel,” he said. “Like the spreadsheet.”
“Excel? Excel.” She said his name like it was a word she’d never heard before.
“It’s weird, I know.”
“Totally. I like it.” She held up the ziplock bag, asked if he wouldn’t mind helping her put pepper on the rest of the flowers; the sooner she was done, the sooner she could go home.
He got to his feet. She’d looked taller when he was sitting, but standing up he saw they were about the same height. Looking her in the eye took no effort.
They walked the rows of graves. Most had no flowers, and those that did, Sab pointed out, belonged to the more recently deceased. “Nobody bothers if you’ve been dead for a long time. If my mom had been buried instead of cremated, I’d bring her flowers every day.” It caught him off guard, that a total stranger could reveal something so personal to another, and he wasn’t sure if he should just let the comment slip by, or ask a question so that she could tell him more.
“Sorry for your loss,” he said.
She sprinkled pepper on a sunflower and looked up at him. “Sorry for yours.”
They finished just after five p.m., and without realizing it, Excel walked back to the cemetery flower shop with Sab, stood outside the door as she closed up, then walked her to her car. She thanked him for his help, and before he could find something to say that would prevent them from parting, she said, “Do you like Denny’s?” then took out a two-for-one coupon from her purse. “My treat.”
They drove to the nearest Denny’s, were seated in a family-sized booth in a far corner of the near-empty dining room. Excel couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten in a restaurant with actual menus, and too many options and categories overwhelmed him (breakfast, lunch, and dinner served at the same time, Fit Fare versus Deluxe Dinners, and what were all these slams?). “I’ll just have toast,” he said. But Sab said absolutely not, that ordering toast was a disgraceful use of a two-for-one coupon. “We’re getting patty melts,” she said. The food came quickly, and Excel ate while Sab talked: she’d come to Colma two months before, to live w
ith an aunt in Colma Isles, a trailer community just off the freeway (“Even more glamourous than the press says,” she said). Her mother died when she was seven, her father was a drunk somewhere in Nevada. She had been raised by one grandmother in San Diego, then raised by the other in Sacramento, lived with aunts and uncles some years in between. She had so-so grades but no money for college, so the four-hundred-dollar-a-month bedroom in her aunt’s trailer was, at this point in her life, the best situation she could find.
“And how’s that turning out?” he asked.
“Better today than yesterday.” She reached for his plate, took a fry. He reached for hers, took an onion ring, and said, “Me too.”
After, Sab drove him home, but as they neared the front gate of La Villa Aurelia, she asked, “Would it be okay if I just kept driving?” and Excel could see how tight her grip was on the steering wheel, like fists clenched ready for a fight, but slightly shaking too. He put a hand on hers, felt the faint vibrations of the moving car coursing through her fingers into his. He didn’t know how to drive (neither Maxima nor Joker ever had a car), and to be moving like this, to be going somewhere, anywhere, felt foreign, a small and quietly thrilling risk. Here was a day, finally, that wouldn’t play out exactly as he’d predicted.
They drove to the movie theater in Daly City but stayed in the car, talked for an hour, then another, often looping back to their discontent. Sab was sick of changing cities, but couldn’t find one that felt like home. Excel thought he’d be in Colma forever, but wasn’t sure how to leave, where to go.
Later, they realized the parking garage was nearly empty. “Midnight,” Sab said, checking her watch, “maybe we should kiss?” “Maybe so,” Excel said. He leaned in, caught a glimpse of a tattoo just below her ear and behind the corner of her jaw—a tiny black lightning bolt. He traced it over with his finger, kissed it, then kissed her.
It was nearly three a.m. when he finally got home, and though Maxima was on the other side of the wall chatting online with faraway strangers, he slept better than he could remember. The next morning before work, he dropped by the cemetery and saw that Sab was right: the orchid was still at Joker’s grave, intact and untouched, the monkey’s face speckled with pepper but perfectly clear.
He saw her later that day, every day after. The first time they had sex (he was her second, she was his first) went well enough that they did it again the next night, an experience so incredible to Excel that he said out loud, “I think that changed my life,” which made them both laugh. Soon they were spending all their free time together, which required zero adjustments to other parts of their lives; they had each other, and he felt lucky for it. But Colma, Sab made clear, was temporary. At some point, she was moving on.
That point came sooner than expected. Almost three months after they met, while sitting at Joker’s grave, Sab told Excel that her aunt was moving her boyfriend, a mechanic with pet tarantulas, into the trailer. “The guy’s a creep,” she said, “so I’m moving out.” A cousin named Lucia, who owned a small organic soap company near the bottom of California, might have a job for her, a cheap place to stay. “It’s a little out of the way, near the desert. Or maybe in the desert? She said it was ‘off the grid,’ whatever that means. It’s my best option, and it would be nice not to go alone. We could get the hell out of Colma, try something new . . .” She trailed off, plucking out blades of grass, as though she feared his answer would be no, as if there might be any reason for him to stay behind.
ANOTHER HOUR SOUTH ON THE FREEWAY, SAB TURNED OFF THE radio. “So,” she said, “how’d she take it?”
Excel’s seat was reclined all the way back; the only thing he could see was the morning sky, darkness fading to light. “Fine. Good. She wished us well.”
“Liar.”
He took a few moments, then told her what he’d told Maxima.
“‘Excavation’?” Sab said. “‘Lost civilizations’? Who are you, Indiana Jones? Does she believe you?”
“She does.”
“And she thinks this is temporary. But what if a month goes by and she’s expecting you back? Then two months? Then five or six?”
“She’ll be fine.”
“What if she waits for you her whole life?”
He imagined Maxima rocking in a chair on the porch of some house in the middle of nowhere, staring at a long, empty road, waiting for Excel to appear in the distance. “She’ll get used to it,” he said. “People get used to it.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“It’s not fucked up,” he said, “it’s life.” He meant that not telling Maxima he was leaving forever was the natural order of things, the way the world sometimes worked. Maxima had left the Philippines the same way—she’d lived a life and found another, no deliberations or discussions. If instincts were hereditary, then Excel’s way of departure was coded into his DNA, a thing meant to happen sooner or later.
“It’s better this way, believe me,” he said. “If I’d told her I was leaving forever, she would’ve made it hard. Maybe impossible. You don’t know what she’s capable of.”
“Then give me an example.”
She’ll make a man fall in love with her, then take his money—that was the first thing that came to mind, and though Sab and Maxima had never met (Excel made sure of that), he felt a need to protect Maxima, a sudden loyalty; he didn’t want Sab’s sympathy for Maxima to become judgment.
He said, “She slashed a guy’s tires once.”
“Well, at least she didn’t slash the guy.”
“She made me act as lookout.”
“That’s kind of terrible. But also kind of funny.”
“I guess.” He tried smiling, like someone looking back on how silly life could be, but he was thinking of what he didn’t tell Sab—that he had been only eight years old at the time, that he was the one who’d done the slashing. It would look less suspicious, Maxima said, if a kid was caught crouching between cars, rather than a grown woman. She never explained who the man was, or why his tires had to be slashed (“He’s a bad guy,” was all she said, fingers massaging the knuckles of her other hand, like she’d just punched someone out or was about to), but she spent the day teaching Excel how to handle the knife, the right way to puncture a tire. Even Joker gave advice on the best technique (“Jab-jab! Quick-quick!” he said, demonstrating with a plastic spoon. “Like a strike to your enemy’s face!”). Excel had no idea who the enemy was or what he looked like, but he did as instructed, and imagined the moment of attack was like popping a balloon: a tire one second, a scrap of rubber the next. When the time came to finally do it, in the parking lot of Big 5 Sporting Goods, where the guy worked, Excel threw his whole body, the entire force of himself, into the knife. He slashed one rear tire, the other, then ran as fast as he could to the adjacent Burger King, where Maxima waited and watched. When he reached her, she squeezed his shoulders and said, “Mission accomplished,” then bought him a vanilla milkshake. But Excel remembered looking back at the tires as he ran, how solid they were, how perfectly intact. Despite all his strength and training, he wasn’t sure he’d made any impact at all.
He looked over at Sab, noticed a new piercing, a fourth, at the top of her ear, a tiny blue hoop. He reached out to touch it, then placed his hand on the back of her neck, and promised he’d contact Maxima when the time was right. “For now,” he said, “let’s just drive.”
NEARLY FOURTEEN HOURS LATER AND DESPITE EXCEL’S CLUMSY NAVIGATING (they missed three exits, twice went west instead of east), they entered Whyling. They passed a market, a post office, a gas station, a store with a sign that read SUPPLIES, then continued down the two-lane road until there was no road at all, just gravel, then dirt. Excel put away the map, meaningless now, and read the directions Sab had printed from an e-mail and taped to the dashboard.
-drive through Whyling until the end
-continue straight (a mile or so?), look for the boulder, turn right
-keep going, going, going—look for an Airstream
with soap on it—that’s ME!!
He looked up from the directions. Everything was dry, endlessly flat, the sky as colorless as the earth below. “It’s like Mad Max,” Sab said. He put his hand on her lap and squeezed, as if reassuring her that all was going according to plan, though he’d done no planning himself. They drove on, passed a scatter of RVs and trailers, tents clumped in groups and tents standing alone, then, about twenty yards ahead, saw a white boulder the size of a small car, the message THIS IS HELLO CITY painted across in black, blocky letters. A blond guy in pigtails, shirtless and in flip-flops, stood beside it, holding a peacock by a leash, its jewel-blue tail sweeping the dirt as it paced back and forth.
“Poor bird,” Excel said.
“It’s okay,” Sab said, making the turn. “I don’t think they can fly anyway.”
Another mile and they found the Airstream, a pink bar of soap painted on its side. In front of the trailer was a sitting area with a wicker couch and two matching chairs, a small firepit in the middle, all of it on a stretch of bright fake grass. They pulled up and parked, and a woman in a fedora and lacy tank top stepped out. She looked a little like Sab but more Japanese, was maybe about ten years older. “Lucia,” Sab said. She walked over to her but Excel stayed by the car, watched as they hugged and swayed. He’d never seen a reunion before, the actual moment when family came together after so much time apart. He felt out of place and intrusive, so he looked away, pretended that there was something in the distance that caught his eye.
He heard his name, turned and looked back. “I don’t know you,” Lucia said, still holding Sab, “but welcome home.”
“HELLO CITY WAS MEANT FOR BATTLE,” LUCIA SAID, THEN POPPED open a bottle of champagne. After World War II, the US government acquired the land to use as training ground for air combat, but the plan went nowhere and the military moved out, leaving behind four hundred acres of unwanted desert. In the mid-eighties, groups of ex-hippies and the occasional former felon began arriving, living in vans and tents on whatever bit of land they claimed for themselves. Those people were still there, but the current population—almost two hundred, the last time anyone counted—was a mix of artists and retirees, a contingent of midwestern and northeastern seniors, even a couple of legitimate tech millionaires who’d made all the money they needed, then bailed out of capitalist society to live free and be left alone. Now, the only proof of a former military presence was the few dozen helicopter landing pads dotting the land, concrete circles with a yellow H painted in the center.
The Son of Good Fortune Page 3
