“Nope. Actually, I’ve never been.”
“Well, your teeth look fine to me.” She says nothing for a moment, Zeus’s yowling filling the silence. “Excel, why are you telling me all this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I just want you to know more about me. Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
“C’mon.”
“I’m serious.”
“In junior high I was in the school production of Grease. A Pink Lady. Worst experience of my life.”
Excel has never seen Grease, but assumes it’s awful. “What else?”
“Well”—she pauses, like she’s thinking carefully of what to reveal next—“sometimes, when you thought I was running errands with Lucia, I was gone.”
“Gone. Gone where?”
It was just a few times, she says, four or five, maybe more. Instead of making deliveries to the post office, she would drive through Whyling and get on the freeway, sometimes drive to El Centro, where she’d sit in a Burger King or a random donut shop, order something that came with free refills—coffee or iced tea—so that she could stay for a couple of hours. She would take out a notebook and pen, try to pass herself off as a college student, or some kind of working professional. “Sometimes I’d pretend I was a teacher,” she said, “and that I was doing lesson plans.” Other times she’d reread the books she’d packed, the guidebook to Kyoto especially. “Sometimes I just sat and made lists.”
“Lists of what?”
“Just lists. Doesn’t matter.”
He’s troubled by this, wonders about all those times she was somewhere else, in places Excel didn’t know. “I never knew you were gone.”
“I wasn’t gone. I just left. Couple hours, here and there. I always came back, didn’t I?” Zeus’s yowling starts up again; Sab tries to calm him down. “He’s butting his head against the door,” she says. “I gotta go.”
“Fine,” he says, “but do me a favor. If you leave again, promise you’ll tell me.”
She doesn’t promise, doesn’t even respond. She just says bye, talk later, maybe soon.
He hangs up, turns back toward the door, and finds Z sitting on a crate beside the Dumpster, hunched over with his dictionary. He’s in an employee shirt two sizes too big and his Pie baseball cap flops crookedly over his ear, like a kid in a grown-up’s clothes. Gunter, Excel realizes, is putting Z to work, no doubt without pay. In a better world, Z would be in an air-conditioned RV in Hello City, playing cards with the other retirees, enjoying the day and all the years he has left.
Excel walks over, realizes Z isn’t looking at his dictionary after all, but flipping through pictures in his wallet. Even in their plastic sleeves they look decades old, the edges yellow, the images faded. “My family,” Z says, thumb pressing on a photo of himself as a young man back in Serbia, next to a woman and a teenage boy. His wife died almost thirty years before; his son, Gunter’s father, was the one who brought Z over from Serbia, but died soon after Z arrived, for reasons Excel doesn’t know and doesn’t ask. He’s buried in Colma’s Serbian cemetery; on days when Z’s energy is good, he’ll walk the mile to his son’s grave.
Z and his family stand in a line in the picture. Behind them is a tiny house, balanced on what looks like a stack of rocks rising from a lake. “Is that Serbia?” Excel asks.
Z nods, says it’s called the House on the Drina. “Very famous, very beautiful. One day, X, you visit.”
Looking at the photo, Excel realizes he doesn’t have one of Hello City, and if he did, isn’t sure what it should be of. The bus? One of the helipads? Zeus running free? “One day,” he says. “Let’s both go.”
Z puts away his wallet, flips open the dictionary to a page that begins with valence and ends with vanquish, points to a word in the middle. “Valor,” Excel reads. “Meaning ‘great courage in the face of danger, especially in battle.’ What’s a good sentence, Z?”
Z sits up, thinks for a moment. He takes a breath, ready to speak, when Gunter pokes his head through the service door. “And what the hell is this? Are we playing school? Is this what I pay you for?”
“You don’t pay me,” Z mutters, his tone as plain as a fact, and Gunter responds in what Excel assumes is Serbian, loud with k and sh sounds. They go back and forth like this, and once or twice Excel hears his name mentioned, like when he’d eavesdrop on Maxima speaking with Joker or Roxy in Tagalog; it’s strange to hear his name surrounded by a new language. “Stop,” Excel says, getting to his feet, “don’t yell at him. It’s my fault. I took a break when I wasn’t supposed to, and I wanted to test out some words with him.”
“Words, huh?” Gunter says. “Here’s some words for you: Back to the ball pit, shit-lick. And next time you guys play school, do it on your own time, not mine.” He swipes the dictionary from Z’s hands and goes back inside, door slamming behind him.
“Sorry about that,” Excel says. He opens the door and holds it for Z, who mouths the word over and over as he passes through—valor, valor, valor.
EXCEL’S SHIFT ENDS AT SEVEN BUT GUNTER MAKES HIM STAY UNTIL nine thirty, no overtime. By the end, he’s so wiped out that the twenty-minute walk to La Villa Aurelia takes closer to forty, but he won’t need to jump the fence of Old Hoy Sun Ning Yung or climb the fire escape to his bedroom window; he has keys now (Joker’s set, from Maxima) and can let himself in.
Everything is dark when he enters the apartment; Maxima, he knows, is working. But there’s no line of light beneath her door, no voices coming from the other side. “Hello?” he whispers, knocking softly. He opens her door slowly and flips on the light, finds her gone.
On her desk, next to her keyboard, he sees the fake rubber wound, the one Maxima sometimes wears to show the men how much she hurts. He picks it up, presses it against the line of his forearm. It looks real enough, and he thinks of the scar just below his shoulder, left from the wound she tried to heal herself. Most of the time, he forgets it’s there, the way people forget their tattoos—so meaningful when you get them, meaningless later in life.
Excel goes to his room—Joker’s room—crouches on the floor, pulls a large shoebox from under the bed. He removes the lid and finds about fifty comic books inside. Excel wasn’t a collector, but as a kid was a sucker for any team title—The Justice League, The Avengers, The Legion of Superheroes—DC or Marvel, didn’t matter. Maxima, forever stressed about money, refused to pay for them. “Four dollars for one Justice Avengers?” she’d say. “No thanks, I’ll buy a can of Spam instead.” But Joker, on the sly, would buy a comic book once every few months and sneak it to Excel late at night, when Maxima was asleep. “Don’t tell,” he’d say, and Excel promised he wouldn’t, the secrecy of it so thrilling he’d get giddy and laugh so hard that Joker would have to cover his mouth to shush him. This was their secret transaction for years, and even after Excel stopped reading them, he’d still laugh whenever he’d find a comic book stashed under the couch cushions, where Excel slept every night. In Hello City, the shoebox of comics was the one thing he regretted leaving behind.
He flips through the stack of comics, the slick covers bright with costumes and capes, power beams shooting out from hands and eyes. He puts the lid back on, slides the box under the bed. He doesn’t need to read them, just needs to know they’re still there.
Excel isn’t hungry, but he goes to the kitchen and searches the fridge, settles on one of Maxima’s key lime wine coolers. He takes a sip—it’s nastily sweet—and looks at the photograph of Maxima, Joker, the photoshopped version of himself. It’s real enough, and he’s simultaneously disturbed and touched that a person would invent a moment in the past, just to make the present a little easier.
He goes to the living room, lights still off. He can’t remember the last time he’d returned to find the apartment empty. Wherever he came from—school, work, Hello City—Maxima was always here.
Except once. Excel was nine or ten, asleep on the couch, and he woke to the sound of the front door unlocking. Burglar! was his firs
t thought, and he flipped on the light, reached for the hammer under the couch (Joker had kept it there, just in case), raised it high above his head, ready to strike. “Stop,” Maxima said, “it’s me.” She locked the door behind her, went to the kitchen. Excel followed, and though she was lit only by the freezer light, he could see how wrong she looked—the neckline of her dress stretched and loose, the downward smear of her lipstick, her ponytail nearly undone. “Were you gone?” he asked. “When did you leave?” She shushed him and pointed toward Joker’s door, then opened the freezer and filled a plastic bag with ice, pressed it against the side of her face, her shoulder, the knuckles of her right hand. “What happened to you?” he whispered. “Bahala na, Excel,” she said, “don’t worry. I beat him. I won.”
Joker came out of his room, entered the kitchen. Maxima told Excel to go to bed, nudged him toward the living room. He returned to the couch and pulled the sheet over his head, stayed awake to listen, their back-and-forth too low and fast for him to keep up with, but there were things he understood. Police? Maxima said. Ano ang sasabihin nila? What will they do? I call and they find us. Ano ba? They kept arguing, and at some point Excel couldn’t stay awake.
He never knew where Maxima had gone that night, never asked. Wherever she is now, he’s sure that she’s fine, her absence tonight no different, really, than her absence during his time away in Hello City, when he was the missing one.
13
There were jobs in Hello City. Low pay, low commitment. Excel had posted his own flyer on the Square’s posting board, kept the message simple. “I need work, please contact,” he wrote, then listed his e-mail address. Those first two weeks, Excel spent a day and a half cleaning out Heddy and Ned’s Airstream (thirty bucks), worked one full afternoon restringing lights in the Square (fifteen bucks), bathed someone’s cats (the owner refused to give her name) on three separate occasions, ten bucks each time.
Days later, he received an e-mail from Red. Help? Tomorrow, 12PM? was all it said, and Excel replied, Sure.
He wasn’t awkwardly early the next day, showed up just past noon. The television sets were exactly where they’d left them, and Red was staring at them, arms folded and silent. “I’m not seeing anything,” he said, “just a bunch of fucked-up TVs. You?”
Excel stepped back, unsure what exactly he should be looking for, how to see something that wasn’t there. “A bunch of fucked-up TVs?”
Red looked over at him, gave a defeated smile. “Let’s get to work.”
They went to Red’s trailer, a long and narrow space crammed with floor-to-ceiling stacks of books, piles of old newspapers and magazines, cardboard boxes spilling over with random junk—metal door hinges, shampoo bottles, endless tangles of extension cords. One box was full of plastic snow globes and, without asking, Excel picked one up and shook it, watched tiny flecks free-float around a tiny Eiffel Tower. He wondered if it really did snow in Paris, if this truly was the way it fell. He’d never seen snow before; now, for the first time, he wanted to.
Red gave instructions: Excel was to go through as many newspapers and magazines as he could, then cut out from headlines any words or phrases that, for whatever reason, held a particular significance. “What kind of significance?” Excel asked, wishing he could just lift and move TVs instead.
“Beats me,” Red said. “You’ll be the one reading, so you make the call.” He told Excel he’d be back in an hour or two, then left.
There was nowhere inside the trailer to sit; Excel couldn’t find a single chair, didn’t even see a bed. He brought an armful of newspapers outside, sat on a tarp on the ground. He started with a copy of the Los Angeles Times, dated August 17, 1977. He turned the pages slowly—they were yellow, almost brittle—read the headlines.
Carter to Name FBI Director
Pesticide Plant Sterility Still a Mystery
Presley Death Marks End of an Era
Worst of Storm Still to Come
He read them again, got nothing. He tossed the newspaper aside, flipped through the pages of a Time magazine from 1991 (Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis were on the cover), but the headlines and stories inside were meaningless, and though he understood there was nothing artful about the work he was doing—he was paid labor, nothing more—he felt unqualified to do it, incapable of finding a connection—intellectual or emotional—to the news of the world beyond. His own world, he realized, was simply too small.
He decided to make a game of it. He’d cut out a headline whose first word started with the letter A, then B, then C, and work his way through the alphabet. By the time Red returned three hours later, Excel was surrounded by little rectangles of text, a confetti of random words. Red picked up a handful and looked them over, muttered, “Interesting, interesting,” under his breath. He had Excel collect them in a large shoebox, then told him he’d need help with the television sets. “Just moving and lifting,” he said, “the easy work.”
EXCEL LEFT INFINITY INC. WITH FORTY DOLLARS IN HIS POCKET BUT no understanding of Red’s plans, much less his art. Still, he was glad to help, grateful for the money, and hoped for more work ahead.
It was just after four p.m., the day still bright but starting to cool. Excel went to the Square and bought a twenty-five cent coffee at Beans!, sat at a computer with a screen saver of goldfish swimming in the sky. He pressed the space bar to clear the screen, opened a browser to check his e-mail, in the off chance someone had responded to his flyer. He found his inbox clogged with the usual spam.
No More Viruses-EVER!!!
Want Better Sleep? Here’s How.
It’s me, ISABELLA! Can We Be Friends (Or More?)
THEFT: Your Identity May Be Compromised!
He scrolled farther down, stopped at a subject line that read, Hello.
Maxima.
He took his fingers off the keyboard and pulled away from the screen, worried he might somehow open the e-mail and instead of a message find Maxima herself, weeping for the camera, already midway into a story so sad he’d be compelled to return to Colma—another sucker in the world willing to give her what she wanted. Just like that, his new life would be gone and he’d be back in the old, to endless days of hiding and hiding.
He looked over his shoulder, made sure no one was nearby who might read the screen from behind. He opened the e-mail. She wrote:
Hello. How are you. I’m glad you arrived safe.
What is it like, the place where you are.
It’s fine here. I’m ok.
I hope we are talking soon.
He’d never received anything written from Maxima before, not an e-mail or letter, and she simply signed the prewritten messages in birthday cards she’d given. He tried to hear her in the words on the screen, to calibrate her voice to each sentence, each question; if he could, he might decode another meaning, an actual motive. But it wasn’t like those scenes in movies in which, instead of seeing an actual letter, you hear the disembodied voice of the letter writer reading it aloud as the camera fixes on the recipient’s face, eyes sliding side to side down the page, welling up at just the right moment.
Maxima’s e-mail was just words on the screen.
He logged out of his account, closed the browser. He drank his coffee slowly, the sun nearly set by the time he finished, the strings of lights above the Square twinkling. The Oracle, Excel noticed, was inside her cage and wide awake, head twisting and bobbing like she was eager for questions. He walked over and dropped a quarter in the jar, leaned toward the bars to meet the owl’s face, her eyes perfect black orbs ringed in glowing yellow. “Should I write back?” he asked.
The Oracle clawed the air with one foot, then suddenly froze, like a taxidermy version of herself. Excel reread the sign by the cage. “If she hoots, it’s a YES. If not, it’s a NO.”
Several seconds passed, a full minute. The Oracle said nothing, and Excel had his answer.
THAT NIGHT, HE USED THE PROPANE STOVE FOR THE FIRST TIME, made two bowls of instant ramen with boiled egg. He cut an app
le into thin slices, arranged them like a fan on a saucer, then set everything on the two-person table. It was the first meal he’d cooked in Hello City, and he felt pleased with himself, the whole routine of it—working all day, then coming home to make dinner for his girlfriend, who’d be on her way home soon. But Sab arrived later—and more tired—than expected. “Fifteen hours a week, maybe twenty,” Sab said, opening a bottle of Cerulean Spark. “That was Lucia’s offer when I said I’d come. But she wants to work nonstop, like she’s creating a goddamn soap empire.” She leaned back in her chair. “She’s great in a lot of ways. We’re just very . . . different. Like, she always wants to high-five. What’s that about?”
Excel covered the bowls of ramen with saucers. “I thought you were her favorite cousin.”
“I’m her only cousin.” She took a sip of beer. “Oh well. It’s not like I have anything else lined up. How was your day?”
“My day?” He considered the question, though he was fixed on the dinner on the table, suddenly anxious that it would go uneaten.
He told her about the hours cutting up newspapers and magazines, how odd that kind of work was; even odder that he’d actually been paid for it. “I guess that’s what it’s like, to work for an artist,” he said. He didn’t mention Maxima’s e-mail, or that he’d asked the Oracle if he should reply or not.
“Dinner looks nice,” Sab said. “I like the apple.”
“I saw it on a cooking show once.” He sat. “Let’s eat?”
Sab picked up her spoon, stirred it in the soup, folded the ramen noodles into themselves. “I’m not really hungry,” she said. “I’m going to sit outside for a while, try to relax. Is that okay?” She got up before he could answer.
“Sure,” he said.
She kissed the top of his head, then stepped out of the bus and walked toward the helipad, the night so dark she seemed to fade into it; from inside the bus, he couldn’t see her at all. He ate his ramen, the boiled egg, left the apple for Sab.
14
The Son of Good Fortune Page 11
