Deceit and Other Possibilities

by Vanessa Hua

  She takes the DVD from me. “I don’t remember this.”

  I can’t remember much of the plot, or any of the lines. How vulnerable I look, my cheeks smooth, my innocent face topped by floppy bangs. The masseuse, drying off my feet with a threadbare towel, doesn’t make the connection. I force myself to laugh, hating the hollow sound, hoping the masseuse might look up, might recognize me, might tremble with excitement, but then the DVD skips.

  The shop’s phone rings, and while the masseuse takes down information in the appointment book, I squirm, staring at my pixilated face, my voice stuttering, every hidden sin surfacing. In the intervening years, my youthful promise has gnarled, stunted, and I am gutted, reminded of how much I have lost. To my relief, after she blows off the dust, the DVD won’t play further. She turns off the television and wipes my face with a hot towel, the steam loosening the tightness behind my eyes, and the practical yet soothing ritual is a hint of Hong Kong. I lean back and close my eyes.

  The fountain trickles loudly, but not enough to hide her camera clicking, a sound I can detect from yards away, like a prairie dog turning its ear to the wind. Peeking, I see her snapping pictures from her cell phone. She must have known all along. She slips it into her back pocket, unaware she’s been caught. She kneads her knuckles into the soles of my feet, strong but unskilled, each let-up sweet after a burst of pain. “Some men’s feet are ugly. Toenails black, falling off, calluses thick enough to strike a match on.”

  Not mine, regularly waxed and nails buffed. I direct her to the hollow area under my ankle that corresponds to reproduction and pleasure. In her hesitation, I sense she knows what the spot represents. She touches lightly, a dandelion on the wind, and all at once my confidence returns. I take her hand in mine and dig my thumbs into her palm. Her hands are small, a child’s, and the skin is rough. I pull her towards me. Her lips, slicked with cherry lip gloss, land on my chin, and her eyes are open and startled. Her first kiss? I recoil. Anything more, anything from me, would set her spinning far off course. She kicks over the tub, splashing us with the force of Shamu and soaking the carpet. Mopping up with towels, we knock heads hard enough to go breathless. In a screwball comedy, this encounter would have been a meet-cute, except for the soaked crotch of my pants and the ache in my groin. Except for the lump on my forehand. Except for how young and frightened the masseuse looks, huddled on the ground.

  The bell over the door jingles, and a burly man enters. With thick fingers and the stooped shoulders of a mole, he must be Master Wang, of Master Wang’s Foot Clinic. He drops his grocery bags and rushes towards us, his fists raised.

  “Mei mei!” Little daughter.

  ~~~

  Master Wang is fast, but I am faster. As twilight falls, I take off towards the park and twice his fingertips scramble for the collar of my jacket. When he grabs a fistful, cursing me and ten generations of my ancestors, I shrug off the tux and race on. I round the corner of the outdoor stage and duck behind scaffolding. He staggers past. Clawing through bushes, I stumble down a ravine and into a dry creek bed, on the run from what feels like every father, husband, boyfriend, and brother I have wronged.

  By now, Jenny would have stopped by our house. By now, my parents would know I’d gone missing. I exhale, my heart pounding, and for the first time since I’ve arrived, I turn on my phone and find hateful messages and posts, with a few supporters—very few—and nothing from Viann. All thanks to Uncle Lo.

  “Come out and fight!” Master Wang sounds like he’s on the verge of a stroke. He wants to avenge his daughter, to protect her now and always from men like me. Like Uncle Lo, who must have intended to drive me out by publishing the photos. Not for the sake of his son, I now realize, but for the sake of Viann. He loves her like a father. And hasn’t every possible suspicion a father might have had about me been confirmed in Hong Kong and made plain again just now? I can’t be trusted with decency or love.

  Master Wang taunts me. “Guaishushu.” An odd uncle, a pedophile. A pedophile! To him, his daughter will always be his little girl, but she had pressed against me. The women in Hong Kong had followed me into the bathroom, had balled their panties into my hand, calling “Kingsway, Kingsway!” They’d smiled for the camera.

  Uncle Lo has cast me as the villain, and he won’t stop until he destroys me. If he were an emperor, he’d kill off my entire clan, and I have to hit him as he hit me. I swipe through the pictures on my phone, of Viann, of me and my young fan—the son of Uncle Lo’s housekeeper, and quite possibly the son of Uncle Lo, the same watermelon seed eyes and flared nostrils. I don’t have confirmation, but I don’t need it. In my pocket, I find the reporter’s business card, the one who worked for Uncle Lo’s publishing rival. I draft a message, attaching the boy’s photo, the love child of Uncle Lo and his ayi. The reporter tracked me around the globe and she’d chase a rumor this juicy.

  Easy, to fall back into the dirty water where I thrive. Clever-clever I’d been, and clever-clever I’d always be. Footsteps approach, panting and crashing through the bushes, loud as surf. My fingers hover above the send button. I have time enough to regret all my mistakes tonight, tomorrow, and tomorrow. But not just yet.

  LOAVES AND FISHES

  Of all the signs and wonders Prophet Alex Chan had ever witnessed, none stunned him as much as the stranger coming down the aisle during final boarding. The flight attendant had begun to shut the doors when the man in a grey hoodie and sunglasses slipped past her.

  Prophet Alex prayed that the man would go by, leaving the middle seat empty on the red-eye from San Francisco to Hong Kong. On flights, the white noise hum of the engines and the stale recycled air made his mind receptive to God’s small, still voice. The window seat passenger had draped her plaid scarf over her head, trying to sleep, but the stranger most certainly would crowd the armrest and most certainly would step over Prophet Alex to sit down.

  He didn’t have a carry-on, the unencumbered sort who never handled a piece of paper or had to wait in lines. Sunglasses at night: trying hard not to be recognized, he’d turned conspicuous. When the man stood beside him, apologizing in a husky voice, Prophet Alex recognized him. Kingsway—the Hong Kong pop star, Kingsway Lee, in coach! An improbability great as a plague of frogs, great as God descending into a burning bush, great as a man walking across water.

  Which is to say, a miracle, when Prophet Alex needed one most. He tried to catch Kingsway’s eye, but the star bent his head over his phone, his thumbs pumping like pistons. The flurry of chirping replies alerted the flight attendant.

  “Sir.” A brittle blonde, with the desiccated skin of a woman bombarded by solar radiation at high altitudes. “Your phone needs to be in airplane mode.”

  With an apologetic smile—a smile that belonged in the light of a thousand paparazzi’s flashbulbs—Kingsway fiddled with the settings. Her stride faltered, and a giddy smile overcame her, as if she’d been doused with glitter. She turned her back and Kingsway resumed texting, with an intensity that suggested his fate rested upon these keystrokes.

  Rain lashed the scratched Plexiglas windows, blurring the lights of the ground crew at SFO. The late November storm had delayed the flight for forty minutes, and it was windy tonight, had been for days, strong enough to down power lines and blow apart heaps of leaves. The seatback screens, playing an introductory loop, froze and the picture pixilated, a hiccup in the in-flight entertainment system. Last year, Prophet Alex had taken a cross-country trip on which the system malfunctioned, turning the passengers restless and rude. On this thirteen-hour flight, if the system shut down, mutiny might break out. After the flight attendant flipped the latches on a wall cabinet and hit a reset button, white numbers and letters cascaded down everyone’s screens, like ancient computer code for a voyage to the moon.

  The flight attendant noticed Kingsway texting again, and told him to put his device away. He apologized and slipped the phone into the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie, but within moments, he was texting again. His hands furtive and compulsi
ve, as if he were jacking off on a park bench. Prophet Alex peeked at an incoming message in a cartoon bubble: “Not now, not ever.”

  Kingsway was an American-born singer and actor who found fame— and now infamy—in Asia. All those pictures, all those naked starlets in Hong Kong, stolen off his laptop and circulating on the web. After the summer, he’d disappeared from the headlines. In hiding, Kingsway might have tried to carve out another life, gone back to school or attempted a new line of work. Prophet Alex had contemplated the same, and Kingsway must have also realized he wasn’t fit for any other calling.

  ~~~

  Five months ago, the world had continued as usual but Prophet Alex’s life had not. For almost a year, he’d told his followers to prepare for an earthquake and tsunami on June 9th. He’d dreamt of a massive wave that swamped the Golden Gate, its cables snapping, towers collapsing as a roiling wall of water swept around the Transamerica Tower and turned San Francisco’s fourteen hills into fourteen islands. After the waters receded, neighborhoods were pulverized, strewn with crumpled cars, smashed boats, and snapped matchstick bodies.

  He preached about the coming disaster, and his followers had stockpiled water, canned food, and medical supplies. Although he didn’t have his own church, he traveled the country, staging prayer meetings and revivals at colleges and universities. He stirred people with his message of accepting and not trying to earn God’s love, about the difficulties of honoring your parents while putting the Lord first. (“You’re thinking, idolatry? The golden calf? False idols? Your parents on a pedestal are no different.”) His fans followed him on social media and downloaded his holy hip hop hits, “Liteshine” and “U Want Him.”

  On the appointed day, he and two dozen of the most faithful gathered on Mt. Tam to greet the dawn with songs. Prayer warriors clad in work boots, cargo pants, and heavy leather gloves, armed with video cameras to document the disaster and their relief efforts that would open hearts to Jesus. Hawks had wheeled and floated on the wind fragrant with the scent of eucalyptus and sage, in a blessed quiet he would never forget. Far below, June gloom had obscured much of San Francisco, smothering the city like tailpipe exhaust, which he hadn’t seen in his dream, but he wasn’t nervous, not until early afternoon, when their voices had gone hoarse and they’d run out of songs. People checked their email and surfed the web, the signal strong from a world that carried on. Then they left.

  Prophet Alex had been certain, but he must have misunderstood. The Lord meant next year, or a decade from now. After all, John the Apostle’s vision of the apocalypse—the four horsemen, the seven-headed dragon, the sun black as sackcloth, and the moon like blood—had yet to come to pass. Or maybe the earthquake had been averted through prayer; the people of Ninevah had been spared from destruction after they repented, fasted, and prayed. Perhaps he was supposed to learn that no one could predict the ways of the Lord. Another lesson: he’d flown too high, assumed too much, and God wanted him on his knees.

  No one had died, no one had been hurt, and it might have blown over except online commentators posted to a discussion board, picking him apart, calling him a false prophet, a celebrity pastor, a con man not only because of this campaign but the Happiness Project, One Thousand Hugs, Burritos-by-Bicycle to the homeless—every bit of his brand as a preacher, motivational speaker, hip hop artist, and faith healer. Sales plummeted on his Christian singles and his t-shirts, baseball caps, and mobile phone covers with his slogan “Crazy love.” Churches and campus clubs cancelled speaking engagements. Wings clipped, back living with his parents, he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. When he tried to read the Scriptures for comfort, for an explanation for his misery, the verses swarmed before him. He couldn’t catch them, anymore than he could catch cinders flying off a fire. Nothing made sense. It was said such suffering was necessary, to share the pain of Jesus on the cross. To be humbled. To be purified. To shape servants of the Kingdom. Excuses, all. Nothing true but this: God had forsaken him.

  Then, like a rainbow over a flooded world—hope. God led him to an online ad for Awaken, a youth revival in Hong Kong, the kind that used to host him as a keynote speaker.

  He booked the next available flight on the last of his airline miles, a week before Thanksgiving, though he didn’t know where he’d stay, how to get on the conference schedule, or what he’d say. He’d redeem himself in a city where born-again billionaires built scale-model replicas of Noah’s Ark in the harbor, where spectacle was a measure of faith.

  ~~~

  Kingsway gnawed on his thumbnail, and he jiggled his right leg in an electrocuted beat. Prophet Alex suspected he wasn’t returning victorious to Hong Kong—not without an entourage and not in coach. He seemed shipwrecked, lost. And Prophet Alex had found him. All at once, he realized why they’d each boarded this plane. By flight’s end, he would share how he’d been saved. By flight’s end, he’d divine secrets known only to Kingsway—and to God. By flight’s end, Kingsway would agree to appear at the revival, whose organizers would rejoice in Prophet Alex and his celebrity convert.

  Although your mistakes shaped you, you weren’t the sum of them. Judas and Peter had both denied Jesus before his death. Judas, leading the Roman soldiers to ambush Jesus in the olive grove. Peter, denying his master three times before the cock crowed. Both repented, but when Judas hung himself, his betrayal defined him. Peter lived on, served as chief of the apostles, and his failure of faith didn’t become his legacy.

  While the airplane pulled away from the gate, Kingsway jabbed at his phone. If the flight attendant spotted him texting, if he refused to stop, she’d kick him off.

  “Cabin crew, prepare for take-off,” the captain announced. Prophet Alex unbuckled his seatbelt and stood as the flight attendant approached.

  “Sir, sit down.”

  “I gotta get something—” He stretched his arms, trying to shield Kingsway from her view. “Just give me a sec.”

  She told Prophet Alex he’d have to wait until the flight reached cruising altitude. Kingsway tucked his phone into his hoodie pocket and nodded at him. Did he understand that Prophet Alex had done him a favor? He might be suspicious of Prophet Alex and his motives, on guard against endless requests for an autograph, a picture, anything that could be sold to the tabloids. Yet he might also resent Prophet Alex, if he pretended he knew nothing about the sex scandal: the photos of the topless tattooed starlet, kneeling on a toilet seat, her back arched like a mermaid’s, and the glistening pink shade of Kingsway’s erect penis, a wad of watermelon bubble gum, the yawning mouth of a sea anemone.

  The flight attendant huffily retreated down the aisle.

  “Come fly the friendly skies,” Prophet Alex said. Kingsway didn’t laugh, didn’t say a word as he inserted his ear-buds, his message clear: Shut up.

  Prophet Alex asked God to reveal how he should counsel Kingsway. Father, hear me. Help—help.

  Tinny music whined from the ear-buds as the airplane taxied, jouncing down the runway. Upon closer inspection, Kingsway’s glossy surfaces were smudged: a white smear on his black t-shirt, his fingernails ragged, and his shoulders damp with rain. Mud splashed his suede sneakers, stylish but impractical. His movements had a frenetic energy that Prophet Alex recognized—the wired buzz from sleepless nights and too much caffeine.

  The engines revved and the plane gained speed, straining, swaying against the gusts. With the shriek of a pterodactyl, the landing gear retracted, and they were aloft, steeply climbing, the world at a tilt. Kingsway had gone pale and clammy as an earthworm. He wasn’t aloof. He was afraid to fly.

  The plane broke free of the clouds, outrunning the flashes of lightning that had the look of rockets over Baghdad. Kingsway slid his sunglasses off, turned on a movie, and didn’t look up when the flight attendants took drink orders and served dinner. As the cabin lights dimmed, Prophet Alex worried that Kingsway might never rise from his movie marathon. He watched so attentively he never blinked, his eyes glassy. Didn’t he need to stretch his legs? Kingsway’s ben
t knees brushed against his tray table. Prophet Alex was built like a fighter pilot, and whatever difficulties short men had in this world, sitting in coach wasn’t one of them.

  On the flight tracker, the plane was cruising along the coast of California, bound for Alaska, crossing over the Bering Strait, Siberia and speckles of Japan and Taiwan before landing in Hong Kong. Prophet Alex got up and paced, rounding the corner past the galley and front lavatories, praying for divine inspiration.

  God. God, please. I have nothing left.

  He walked down the other aisle, before turning by the rear lavatories and completing the circuit. Kingsway hadn’t budged, and the blue light of the seatback screen flickered over his handsome face, the sort that launched hit movies, belonged on billboards, and opened hearts to the Lord.

  After Prophet Alex made three loops around the body of the plane, lapping an Indian woman in a peacock blue sari and puffy white sneakers, God answered with an idea so simple, so audacious, he almost laughed out loud. He’d reboot the entertainment system, temporarily disabling it and forcing Kingsway to look up. The system was located in a wall cabinet near the forward galley, where the blonde flight attendant bustled with trays. Prophet Alex would have to wait until she left, but the next time he came by, she was stuffing trash into a plastic sack. “Walking all the way to Hong Kong?”

  He forced a smile. His armpits and back were wet with sweat. When would she take a break? Nearing the rear lavatories, he caught an oppressive whiff of urine and floral air freshener. The toilet! He’d plug it up and tell the flight attendant, diverting her attention. After locking the door, he stuffed fistfuls of toilet paper into the bowl. He couldn’t stand airplane lavatories, the sickly glow of the overhead light, the sticky floors, wet counters, and crumpled paper towels half-in, half-out of the garbage.