where are you?
i’’m feeling like i’m ready to go home.
don’t have my passport but figuring ways around that.
be good.
I sent the e-mail and closed the browser.
Josh’s hand was around my bicep again. He pulled me out of the café and down the steps.
Going down the stairs was much faster than going up. We zipped past the shadows and grit. It was a quick three flights. Down. Pivot. Down. Pivot. Down. We exited into a busy intersection. I blinked away the darkness and found myself in a shock of light and heat and smells. Rickshaws. Cars. Riotously painted trucks belching exhaust. Mopeds, motorcycles, bikes. All tangled up together. All honking in the midday haze. The edges of the world kept peeling up and curling in this heat.
At the center of the snarl of the intersection, inserted in the chaos, three boys popped from vehicle to vehicle, clasping their hands together in routine genuflection, affecting a moment of solemnity, then darting their hands out for rupees. They were identical. Each wore small wire frames with no glasses in them, each wore a short length of cotton wrapped around him like a diaper, each was shaved bald, each had a tiny mustache drawn above his lip, and each was slathered head to toe in silver paint. Silver heads. Silver glasses. Silver dhotis. Silver sandals. Three silver boys dancing in the middle of the street in the middle of the day. Their tiny silver heads glinted as they climbed upstream through traffic like salmon.
Flowers with bloodred blossoms the size of coffee mugs bobbed in a narrow lawn in front of the house Josh and I walked up to. I don’t know what vehicle I climbed out of. I was following Josh. I don’t know if Josh had his own car or if we had jumped into a rickshaw. Or if I was straddled behind him, helmetless, on a scooter. I blinked out. Pieces of the day kept blinking out, like bad bulbs on a defective strip of Christmas lights. Between the Internet café and the bobbing flowers of this skinny strip of a front yard is a dead lightbulb in a string of memories.
The house was unremarkable other than the flowers, one in a series of concrete slab construction multistory dwellings on a narrow street. It was painted white, and the grit of the city had nestled into the tiny pockets of the cement. The house was built like every other house in the neighborhood, with a raised first floor to make an empty space underneath for the garage. A washing machine was down there, as well as lines of laundry dripping onto the hood of a white hatchback.
Josh knocked at the front door, which was so heavily lacquered that I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the grain. It startled me a bit. Pale, short, and chubby, wavering each time Josh knocked, this stranger was me.
The door opened to reveal a short woman drying her hands on a towel. She looked like she was Chinese, which confused me. I was in India. What was she doing here? I had assumed I was the only one who wasn’t like everyone else. This was going to be harder than I thought.
The woman ushered us into a spare living area. The floor was tiled in white marble that also ran halfway up the walls, which were painted white, as was the ceiling. The three pieces of furniture were teak with thin cushions and creaked loudly with even the most minimal movement. I sat on the couch, while Josh and the woman took the armchairs. The room was wide and full of echoes, and each wall had one piece of art rationed to it. The room was arctic and spare, a white cube with anemic sticks of furniture. We could have been inside an igloo, a furnished ice cube.
Within this sparse precision, there was a hip-high slash of color and smell in one corner. Three antennae of incense were stabbed into a green vase, their tips embering into smoke. The table was strewn with all sorts of tiny objects, some shiny, some familiar in shape, some mysterious remnants sitting in small dishes, and a small cardboard box tied with string. At the back of the tiny slice of anarchy were three glossy snapshots. From where I sat I could make out a smile and a thatch of hair in one of them.
“Mrs. Lee, this is Mr. David. He has been having quite the time of it.” Josh had put his hat on his knee, and it wobbled as he spoke. “I found him on the platform of the rail station. He is confused and out of sorts.”
Mrs. Lee’s eyes pierced me. “I am here to help.”
“We bring tourists like yourself who have fallen on hard times here.” Josh cleared his throat and changed topics so suddenly that I thought I might have briefly passed out. “Would you have something like tea to offer us?”
“Do you want tea? I also have water and a little Sprite.”
“Sprite, please,” I said.
Mrs. Lee left the room, and Josh leaned toward me conspiratorially and said, “She is a good woman, Mr. David. You may trust her with your trouble.”
Mrs. Lee came back with a tray. She handed Josh a brimming cup and saucer, and she gave me a tumbler filled with lukewarm Sprite. I sipped it. It was flat, so the sweetness was heightened, like drinking low-viscosity honey.
Josh blew gently on his tea and took a nibble from the top, then placed the cup down and turned to Mrs. Lee. “Please, tell him your story.”
She straightened her posture and began.
“My son was eighteen when he traveled to Singapore. He was going to visit a school friend. He was very popular in school. Handsome. His grades were not the best, but he worked hard.”
The room creaked and echoed as she spoke. The room felt empty, as neat rooms do. The emptiness could shake us off if it felt like it. My stomach flipped around inside of me.
“He was only supposed to be gone for seventeen days. Every other day he called. Then nothing. I thought at first that he was being thoughtless. I let a week go by before I began a calling campaign. I spoke to his friend’s parents, and they had not seen him. I rang up hospitals. Nothing. I rang the police. Nothing. I went to the airport on the day he was due home. Nothing. I checked with the airline, and his ticket had been refunded. A month went by. I became crazy. Ringing up everywhere. The embassy here. The embassy there. One more month goes by, and a package arrives. In it is a letter from the Singapore government explaining that some bad men had put drugs into my son and that he died. There is also a small bag in the package, containing his ashes. I am a mother with a broken heart. You have no idea what you do to your mother when you put these drugs into your body.”
Mrs. Lee then began to cry. I cried right back at her. It was people like me who had killed her son. People like me. I put my hand on hers and told her I was sorry, that I’d do better, that I was done with all of the drugs. Forever. My insides felt like they’d just fallen into an abandoned well. The gray static and fuzz from before was replaced with a black hopelessness. Mrs. Lee took a napkin, folded it three times, wiped at her black eyes, and excused herself.
Josh pulled his cap off his knee and leaned forward, his forearms settling on his thighs. “Now you see why I brought you here. She is a woman who can teach you things.” He took a sip from his tea. He smacked his legs with open palms, signaling the end of the lesson. “Is there some way to reach your parents? Do you have a phone number for them maybe?”
I thought for a second. “They definitely have a phone.”
“Do you know the number? It would be very helpful if we could contact them. We have sent an e-mail, but it would be best to speak with them directly.”
At that moment, Mrs. Lee came back into the room, the napkin still in her hands. “Let me show you where you will be staying.”
We climbed a flight of stairs and entered a small room with a bureau, a chair, a mattress on the floor, and a lamp on a small table beside the mattress. An off-balance ceiling fan spastically stirred the air. I walked directly to the window. There was a narrow balcony outside, and I yanked at the glass door to reach it.
“Here. It needs to be unlocked first.” Mrs. Lee bent down and flicked a piece of metal, and the door pulled open with a screech. On the street, a man pushed a cart loaded with stacks of paper. He rang a bell as he walked and called out to each of the houses. Four puppies rolled and snapped at one another in the gutter. A woman ironed clothes in a smal
l storefront across the street. There was a braid of wrist-thick black electrical cables coming out of a pipe not five feet from the balcony. They swayed heavily in the breeze and stretched across the street, stitching the buildings together; cinch them tight, and you’d close the open wound of the street.
There was a flutter of movement above me. Three small children chased each other around the open roof of the opposite building. On the building next door to that one, a pair of children stared straight into the sky while fiddling with their hands. I craned my neck to see what they saw. A kite. The string was nearly invisible in their hands and in the sky, but the small patch of color above was clearly leashed to them. Something whirred in my brain. I stared again at the building opposite. On the roof was a small flat.
“That’s my apartment,” I told Mrs. Lee. Excitement crackled in my throat.
I pictured pushing open the door and finding the squalid flat where Christina and I used to hole ourselves up in while we shot up with heroin and whatever else we could find. The flat was dark; even during the day it was dark. Miserable, with a laughably thin mattress where Christina and I would crash and moan between highs. Standing on Mrs. Lee’s balcony, I yearned to go over there, yank the padlock off the door, and enter into my horrible and wasted life. I could see now, though, how bad this was. I could go over there and collect the redhead and get us both some help. Mrs. Lee and Josh would help us. We’d be okay.
“You don’t live there,” Mrs. Lee corrected.
“I do. I just rented the place.”
“No one lives there. It’s abandoned.”
“Right. It was. Then I moved in.” I was sweating with conviction. Why was Mrs. Lee trying to keep me from my apartment? Suddenly, I was awash in paranoia. Mrs. Lee and Josh were the ones who’d drugged me. They were trying to keep me away from Christina, who was also named Geeta sometimes. They were trying to rob me. I wasn’t confused. They were making me confused. “That’s my apartment,” I said again, pleading with Mrs. Lee to let me go.
Mrs. Lee grasped my shoulders and said, “That is not your flat. Do you think you could move into my neighborhood and me not know about it?”
She was right. But if that wasn’t my apartment, how in the world was I remembering it so vividly? Now I couldn’t be sure of the memories that I did have. Everything was suspect. I was worse than a drug addict—I was nothing. A drug addict could cry over his wasted life. I didn’t know what life my tears were for. There was only an absence. I cried for something I didn’t know. The braid of black wires swaying in the breeze now asserted itself as a fair ending. I could jump out and grab them. End this. Sizzle away this not knowing, let the people in the street scrape me off their sandals. Send the inky fried residue to my mother in a box. Give it to her to cry over when guests come. Let me jump. Let me end this.
Please.
Mrs. Lee turned me and led me back inside. She handed me a napkin, and I wiped my eyes and blew my nose. She smoothed my hair with her palm.
“You will be fine. Come downstairs. Rajesh has an idea.”
Rajesh’s idea involved a pocket map of the United States, the telephone, and patience. It took four hours for us to figure out and locate my family’s phone number. I don’t remember much of this.
What I do remember is the phone ringing. I held the receiver, the plastic warming in my sweaty hand. A man answered.
“Dad?”
“David? How’re you doing, tiger?”
This was my father. There was something in that voice, like the smell of unmade bunk beds, of a box taken down from the attic. I was crying again.
“I’m so sorry. I’ve been a terrible person. An awful son.”
“What’s going on? Are you all right?”
“Did you get my e-mail?”
“No. I haven’t gotten anything from you since last Tuesday.”
“I’m in India, Dad. I’m at a guesthouse with the police.”
“Is that your father?” Mrs. Lee asked. “Let me speak with him.”
“She wants to speak with you,” I said. “Can I come home? I want to come home.”
“Who? What in the world is going on?” my dad asked. “Of course you can come home.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Mrs. Lee took the phone from me, and while she talked to my dad, Josh stood up and shook my hand.
“Okay, Mr. David. I must be returning to my post. You are now in capable hands.”
I wanted to hug him. I wanted him never to leave. I wanted to sketch a picture of him, to press him between the pages of a dictionary until he was flat and fix him in my diary. “Here is the man who found me,” I’d tell people and flip open the book and show them, not a picture, but Josh himself, with that goofy mustache belying any authority he had. I wanted to have him nearby for the rest of my life. Just in case.
I had woken up alone, and this stranger had been kind. What were the chances I’d ever find anyone as kind again? This stranger was the only person I knew in India, the only person I knew in the world. I had done so many things wrong, but this man looked past it all. Because of him, I wasn’t hopeless.
I didn’t want to be alone again.
Josh shook my hand, slapped his cap on his head, pulled the door shut, and I incurred the first debt of my new life.
Mrs. Lee took me upstairs and put me to bed even though the sun was still shining. She placed a new glass of warm Sprite on the small end table. The mattress was thin and emitted a crunching sound when I sat on it. She wished me a good night and closed the door.
It was at this moment that things went very bad. The room began to twist. It didn’t behave. One corner of the ceiling would be pulled down and nearly brushing my lips and the other would be stretched out miles away. Then the corners would swap distances. Floating clouds of color spun and drifted throughout the room. Sometimes one of these clouds would come and sit squarely on my chest, driving all my oxygen out. The little stool in the corner of the room clattered and moved as soon as I stopped watching it. I’d catch it doing pirouettes in my periphery.
Three birds flew onto the balcony and looked at me dismissively. I writhed on the mattress, the ends of the fitted sheets snapping toward me with a phuff as they pulled loose. I wet myself.
Things shifted.
I was in a house I knew. I was an old man in my house. The one I’d lived in for years. The one I’d raised children in. My house. And it was my birthday. My anniversary. My birthday. The kids, my friends, my wife, they all thought they were so damned smart. I’d heard them clamoring around all day. They couldn’t surprise me. I knew they were out there. I placed my hand on the hollow core door. On the other side of that door was a wide pink kitchen. Salmon really. A salmon kitchen with hickory cabinets. An island in the middle overflowing with fruit. This was all scripted. Be in a family for long enough, and every move is scripted. I was supposed to walk out of the bedroom after my nap, go into the kitchen (ignoring all of the snickering and giggles coming from the lesser hiding places and the pinwheel of halls and rooms coming off the kitchen), and reach into the top cabinet for a box of crackers. Once I had the crackers in my hand, I was supposed to say something. A line. Something famously me. Full of wit and an old man’s acceptable bile. I was responsible for saying the line, or at least the first part of it, and all of my loved ones—my family, friends, wife, dogs, rabbits, the whole menagerie—would pour out of their hiding places, and they would scoop me up into their arms and shout and finish the line for me. I stood there at the door, fresh from my nap, savoring their anticipation. The little ones, the grandkids, oblivious and chatty, aware only of the electricity of this moment, the phosphorescent infusion of concentrated love into the atmosphere. My wife—flowing brown hair and almond eyes—who, once I say my line, will give me the kiss that I get this one time a year, a kiss full of history and passion. We kiss every day, but this kiss on my anniversary, on my birthday, on my anniversary is something special. It’s a kiss that says, “You are here. You are mine. This is
ours.”
I shifted my palm from the door to the handle and realized that I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say. I chided myself. An old man’s brain. I’d forget my head if it weren’t attached. It’ll come to me. Just got too excited there for a moment. I can’t even remember how it begins. If I knew the first couple of words, the whole thing would rattle off my tongue of its own accord. I just needed to get the beginning.
I figured that what I should do is go out there, get myself to the kitchen, and open the cabinet. I creaked the door open a bit. I peeked out through the slice of dim light coming from one of the nightlights we put in around the countertop, because at this point we seem to be looking for ways to make our electricity bill higher. If I went out there and couldn’t remember what to say, how would everyone know to come out? I could’ve asked them to come out, but that’d be sticking a pin into the party. And she’d know. Christina would know. The kiss wouldn’t be what I need. It’d be shaded with her worry. An old man, a doddering fool. Can’t remember what he’s so damn famous for having said.
I opened the door and peered out, trying to see where people were hiding. Maybe someone would be close enough, and I could get her to give me a hint. Nobody needed to worry. I just needed a hint. It was like a phone number you’ve known your whole life. Get the first couple of digits, and everything else comes out like a train pulling freight. Someone moved across the hall. I banged the door shut, worried that she might have seen me. My breath caught in my throat. The metal taste of rising panic.
I needed to remember. It was stupid. Something I said all the time. I cracked the door again, but the person was right there. I didn’t know her. Some old Asian lady. I banged the door shut in her face.
I fell backward onto the mattress. Old man. Old man. Old man. I accidentally kicked a glass, and it slid across the linoleum and broke against the wall. Stupid old man. Couldn’t remember nothing. Stupid.
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me Page 2
