The 8th Sky_A Psychological Novel With An Unforgettable Twist

by Leigh Lyn

  Chapter 29

  Rain was splashing up at the same velocity it fell from the sky when Ben got out of the cab. The cabdriver loaded my suitcase into the trunk while Ben came around with an umbrella to walk me to the car. Even though the gap between the car and the canopy was only four feet, it was enough to get drenched, and I clung to him like an octopus.

  Once inside the cab, he pulled me closer and cuddled up. We traversed a wet Hong Kong, watching the torrential rain as it slowed the traffic to a sloth’s stroll. What would normally take one hour took two. When we arrived at the check-in counter it had just closed. The airline’s ground staff were packing up, but Ben sweet talked us through. They even called an electric cart to take us to the boarding gate.

  “Hop on. Gate 501 is around the corner.” The name tag on the driver’s blue shirt read ‘Ho Pak’, which means Uncle Ho in Cantonese. Underneath, his navy trousers were held up by a black belt which was by far the sturdiest thing in his skimpy being. We climbed onto the seat behind him.

  “Does this place really have five hundred one gates?” I asked as Ho Pak set the cart in motion.

  “I don’t know the logic behind the odd numbering, but we have sixty-six,” Ho Pak said. “And I’m proud to tell you Kai Tak Airport had eight. Can you believe that? For sixty years, Hong Kong only had eight gates! Now, all of a sudden...” Ho Pak paused and winked. “...we have sixty-six.” He threw a sharp corner, which nearly flung me out of my seat, and I grabbed onto Ben’s arm.

  “It’s what they call progress,” Ben said.

  “Not all progress is good, though,” Ho Pak continued. “I mean, Kai Tak was special.”

  “Definitely.” Ben nodded.

  “In my younger days, I was an aircraft marshaller, the guy who signals the pilot where to go. To land a plane in the middle of a glittering sea like on an aircraft carrier is a spectacular experience that does something to the spirit. And it really showed in the passengers’ sparkling eyes.”

  “I bet,” Ben agreed.

  “Not that this is not good with sixty-six gates. I mean, it’s a lot of experiences, not the same kind, of course. But more.”

  “Of course.”

  “Take my grand nephew. He works as an engineer for the Airport Authorities; good degree, good job, good salary, but he has no passion. Why should he? He has no real input nor any control over what he does other than to make other people’s schemes and schedules run smoothly. He’s just a number.”

  Ho Pak pulled the cart to a screeching halt in front of a gate and announced, “There you go: number 501.”

  Once settled in and buckled up, Ben bent over to kiss my forehead as my eyes wandered over the cloudscape outside the tiny window.

  “So, what are you thinking?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Isn’t that hard?” he asked. “It takes Bodhisattva’s years of meditation to think of nothing.”

  My eyes narrowed. “Alright, smarty-pants.”

  Ben raised one brow. “Do you remember I told you Yuxi and Sam are coming?”

  “Of course.”

  I dug my chin in his shoulder and looked for a comfortable spot for my head.

  “Good; we’ll be hanging out with them.”

  “I like them.”

  I eyed the slight crook in Ben’s nose, wondering what Sam and I had in common to have warranted Lao Bo’s attention.

  “Out of curiosity, how did Lao Bo hook up with Sam?”

  “How? Why do you ask?” Surprised, he looked at me.

  “Well, it’s remarkable, isn’t it? From illegal Chinese migrant’s son to a celebrated international artist.” I snapped my fingers. “Just like that.”

  “Well, Lao Bo was keen on becoming an art collector. He found Sam when roaming one of those artists’ villages, which is great. We all can use a secret benefactor with a fat bank account, but Sam actually deserves it.”

  “Secret? You mean Sam doesn’t know Lao Bo is behind his success?”

  “I’m not sure. I think he believes Lao Bo is my client and that I discovered him. It’s not easy to accredit success in art and pinpoint how it comes about. In my humble opinion, it is better if the patrons stay in the background.”

  Ben yawned, opened a paperback and started reading.

  I switched on my TV, tuning it to Phoenix, a local cable news network. The screen showed a bony, mud-yellow man in a loin cloth with strange facial features squatted next to an old woman half his height.

  “A wild man reminiscent of a ‘Yeren’ from a thousand-year-old legend has been captured by three villagers near the Three Gorges,” the anchor said. “After closer investigation established he is the seven-foot-three tall mentally handicapped son of an aged village woman, she confessed to having kept the fourteen-year-old boy hidden in a pigsty his whole life. X-rays show a peculiar skull shape and other extraordinary features such as receding jaw-line and dwindled lower dentures.”

  The camera zoomed into a hazy gray image of teeth, and Pui’s non-existent chin sprang to my mind.

  “Have this.” Ben passed me his Chardonnay. “I’ll get another glass.” He pressed the button for the air-hostess.

  “Oh, Lin?” he said, handing me a manila envelope the size of a paperback. “Would you mind putting this in your bag? I put mine up in the luggage compartment across the aisle.”

  I reached under my seat. “It’s not another Ballard novel, is it?”

  “We’ve done that already, babe.” Before I put the envelope in my bag, I saw that the label was inked over until it was illegible.

  “I love you.” Ben moved his glasses from the top of his forehead to his nose and continued reading.

  “Love you back.” I echoed and slid up the window screen to watch the plane take off. Hong Kong dwindled to a miniature city before it faded under a layer of fog, and I slid the screen down again. Monitors in the back of chairs injected ghostly spurts of ethereal blue light into the space. Sudden flickers of yellow and crimson across the aisle drew my attention, and the scene I saw on the fiery screen caused my throat to close and my heart to palpitate. I felt dizzy as the image blurred and the cabin became a haze when, suddenly, a face with two wells filled with tears flashed in front of my eye. Ashen lips shaped soundless words.

  I had no idea where it came from, nor who it belonged to, but I recognized the derangement, the terror, and panic that washed over me. I threw the blanket, which had covered my legs, off me in a single sweep while jolting upright. The laptop slipped on the floor as cold sweat dripped off my forehead.

  “Are you alright?” Startled, Ben looked at me as he bent to pick the computer up.

  “I’m fine.” I closed my eyes, reverting my eyelids into raw crimson screens on which the face reappeared. Startled, I slowly opened my eyes, careful not to alarm Ben. I had no idea where the imagery came from, but I clearly remembered myself feeling this way at some time of my life. I took a deep breath and tried to relax when suddenly the scene flooded back into my consciousness, and I relived the whole event as if it was taking place in front of my eyes.

  I was three again, running through the street in search of Niang in a recurring nightmare I used to have. Then, everything blacked out, and I saw my brother Stevie, who, with the gravest look on his ten-year-old face, told me to get up. Dazed, the meaning of his words was lost on me. It was in the middle of the night, but all the lights were on. The live-in cooks and waitresses who stayed in the apartment next to ours with a communicating door were rushing back and forth, talking frantically. Our parents weren’t there, and no one paid us any attention when we followed the grown-ups down to the street.

  As we walked into the ground-floor foyer of our apartment block, the doors were flickering yellow and spates of red. Once out the door, the blaze rose up ten, twenty feet above the single-story glass pavilion that housed our restaurant. Mercilessly, the flames gobbled up the pretty lace curtains, the silk rugs on the tables, the plants. Bit by bit, everything familiar perished. Huge panes of glass cr
acked and shattered like eggshells. The large over-sailing roof under which our regulars drank beer on summer evenings collapsed thunderously. Firemen were everywhere, tackling the fire with their water hoses, which infuriated it even more.

  In front of an entranced crowd gathered to watch the merciless blaze stood my dad. Sky-high flames were mirrored in his glasses as his pallid face looked up, his thin figure fragile and defeated. A young Niang laid a blanket over his drooping shoulders to ward off the cold winter wind. His hand clenched it tightly, and his chest caved as he sighed. “Gone… It’s all gone.”

  “We’ll get through this,” Niang said.

  The next day, a man in a truck came to collect the restaurant’s scorched equipment and machinery. We kids swarmed around in the wreckage and tried to help. The friendly scrap buyer did not mind us playing foot soldiers to him. When a charred freezer had to be pushed up planks laid over the basement stairs, we gathered around like piglets at the teats of a sow and contributed every ounce of our strength. Unfortunately, my left hand got caught somehow. My dad scolded the scrap buyer, who denied any fault as they both stared at my charred hand with a swollen middle finger twice the size of the others. I remember feeling bad for adding to my dad’s grief. His mind was not into it, and I was relieved to see him walk off.

  Like the fire had swallowed everything he had worked for, my episode devoured my soul. It ended up somewhere in the forgotten junkyard of my mind together with all the other loose bits and pieces of memories that did not fit into the reality my brain had constructed.

  The clock in the left corner of the screen said it was two in the morning Hong Kong time. I lifted the small window screen up a few inches. Gleaming a warm gold in the orange light, the plane hovered over the soft billowing blanket of clouds covering a sleeping earth. I closed the screen and continued.

  The police summoned my parents to the station where detectives told them there had been no forced entry.

  “We’ve reconstructed the scene and believe the perpetrator sprayed a flammable substance through the letterbox and threw a lit match after it.” He paused. “Have you any idea who would do such a thing?”

  “Food always good, no enemies.” My mother stared at me with narrowed eyes. She’d brought me along in case she needed an interpreter, and I translated with glowing cheeks from embarrassment. Having little to work with, the police never caught the culprits, and the local newspaper attributed the fire to vandalism directed toward society at large rather than us specifically.

  It took my parents half a year to claim the insurance money, a year to have the restaurant rebuilt and another three months for the fitting out. I remember our visit to the insurance company’s headquarters in Utrecht. I didn’t know at the time that Herman Hertzberger, a famous Dutch architect, designed it, but I knew it was special the moment I walked up to the edge of the atrium. The rooms were visible like an open dollhouse in a downward cascade. Even though the only thing approximating the size of a doll inside the enormous building was me, it opened my eyes to the world of adults in the privacy of their own offices.

  I also remember the quietude of the spectacular space. Maybe I thought it was too quiet or maybe I wanted to check if there were echoes. Whatever the case, I shouted, “Oi!”

  An appalled Niang dragged me into a conference room and sat me down in a big swivel chair, which I was not allowed to swivel. Serious-looking grown-ups sat around a formal conference table looking grave.

  It was around this period I shed my carefree childhood. It went from sunny and bright to broody and solitary, although nothing dramatic happened during the twenty-something months between the fire and the reopening of our restaurant. Nothing except for the death of Mao in ’76, which meant nothing to us kids.

  Zwolle turned out to be a sinister place, and the fire would not be the only time my parents fell victim to crime. A few months after the restaurant reopened, someone got into our apartment, hid, jumped my dad and held a twelve-inch chef knife to his throat. After the robber took all the money and jewelry, he locked my parents in a meter cabinet. The police found that the knife came from our restaurant kitchen, although the locks were intact. At the police station, the same inspector studied my parents’ faces with narrowed eyes and asked, “Who had a key and could have taken the knife?”

  “Staff and ex-staff,” my dad said, while looking into Niang’s eyes. She looked away.

  The inspector frowned as he watched my father watch my mother. “You don’t change locks when staff leave?” he asked.

  “Thieves pick locks, no need for key,” Niang said.

  “When the robber asked you to hand over the money, did he have an accent?” the inspector asked.

  My mother stared at my dad and then at me as she pressed her lips together.

  “My Dutch not good,” my father replied. “Cannot tell.”

  The inspector nodded and gave up.

  Dr. Wen once said most kids learn the concept of right and wrong from their parents with the parents at the right end of the spectrum. Regardless of age, it’s always a shock to realize this is not true. It hadn’t occurred to me before that, deep down, my parents might be a different kind of people than who I thought they were. But what if I presumed they were on the wrong side of the spectrum? Would the odd pieces of the puzzle fall into place? Would everything which was contrived before suddenly make sense? The thought of acknowledging I was the countenance or the product of perverse rearing was enough to make my chest tighten and the guilt of being unfilial to even think this swarmed over me.

  A shadow passed by. Relieved it was the air-hostess, I tapped her arm. “I have trouble sleeping. Can you bring me something stronger, brandy or a Scotch?”

  She seemed surprised by my request, but one look at my tired face and she nodded. A few minutes later, she handed me a chilled glass of ice and a sample-size bottle of Remy Martin. I poured it into the glass, gave it a swirl and let the smooth liquor seep down my throat. Feeling the heat spread inside, I closed my eyes and waited for my thoughts to slip away.

  PART THREE

  New York

  Chapter 30

  An electronic voice woke me to a cabin smelling of bacon, eggs, and coffee. The captain announced we were to land at JFK in New York in two hours. Through my lashes, I watched Ben butter toast. I stretched and reached to slide up the window screen to check the condition outside.

  Blinking at the bright sunlight, Ben said, “Hey babe, I thought you’d never wake up.”

  I nuzzled my face against his shoulder. “I was awake for hours while you were sleeping.”

  Deep wrinkles appeared on Ben’s forehead as I leaned my head back.

  “Oh no, poor thing. You’re not ill, are you?”

  “No, I’m not.” I avoided Ben’s gaze.

  “You were tossing and mumbling. You had a bad dream?”

  “I’m not sure what it was.”

  “You want to tell me about it?” Ben laid his hand on my thigh.

  I had a feeling the cabin was closing in, but I had nothing I could tell him. If anything, my state of mind had gone into a sudden freefall.

  I buried my face in his shirt. “About what?”

  Ben sighed. “When you are ready.”

  We spent the last fifteen minutes of the flight gazing out the window. We watched a little grain of rice grow in a sea of tiny, glistening diamonds, rapidly transforming into a miniature city. With my finger on the thick glass, I traced the course of the Hudson to where it drained into the Atlantic. The new World Trade Center looked remarkably like the IFC in Hong Kong. Their different topographies notwithstanding, Hong Kong, Chongqing, and Manhattan had urban fabric born out of the same DNA. With a cabin-shaking tremble, the plane touched down, the seatbelt signs went off, and everyone rose at once.

  An hour and a half later, a cab driver dropped us in front of the old walk-up tenement building on Orchard Street. The apartment owned by Ben’s gallery at the top of the damp, dark stairs was nothing like its old exterior
. When the New Museum of Contemporary Art opened shop in the derelict Lower East Side four years ago, droves of galleries followed suit and moved here, attracted by the low rent and property prices. Ben’s savvy business partner, Frances Vandenberg, invested in an old tenement building after the Credit Crunch crash and had it refurbished.

  The apartment on the top floor was a large loft space with a scaffold on wheels that allowed painters to paint canvasses of up to thirteen feet, one of which—a white-beige abstract affair—adorned the brick wall. Wooden casement windows gave access to a fire-escape through which light streamed into the tall space. Ben pulled the dusty white sheets off the big white sofas, sending dust particles flying in the sunlight as I plunged and curled up in a daybed. After opening the windows, Ben carried our suitcases up the long, wooden planks projecting from a brick wall that led to an open mezzanine where the bedroom was.

  The first time Ben brought me here, I wandered around by myself when he was working. I discovered a museum next door that showed how, a century ago, poor immigrants lived in these squalid tenement apartments and chased the American dream. The contrast between those images of congested and poor living conditions and the modern, cathedral-like serenity of the loft space was striking, and those visuals came to my mind each time I came back to this place.

  When Ben did not appear after some time, I shouted up to the mezzanine, “What are you doing?”

  “Running the taps to flush the pipes!” he shouted back. “I’m having a shower. Are you coming?”

  “In a minute,” I replied and listened to the echo of my voice in the tall space as I had done with Frances the last time I was here. She came over one evening when Ben had to be somewhere else. I had been a little jealous of her in the past, knowing she and Ben spent a lot of time together. And there she was, standing in front of me with a bottle of bourbon. We drank and talked. She told me how the history of these apartments was intertwined with that of her own family. When her great-grandfather first got off the ship from Belgium, he had lived in the basement apartment of a tenement along Orchard Street, while her young undiscerning mother lived on the top one. “This was where they’d met. Do you think they would have been proud to know their great-granddaughter would own this place?” a drunk Frances asked. She and I were sitting side by side on the floor, leaning our backs against the edge of the daybed.