by Paul Yoon
There were more fights. Other fighters. She stayed in that spot the whole time. All the rest of the night. Until all the fighting stopped and the crowd dispersed. She waited for everyone to go. The people from the truck walked by, one of them slipping his bow tie over her neck. It smelled of cigars.
She found the man from the bus stop later, off to the side, beyond the rim of the lightbulbs. He was lying in the dirt with his eyes closed. He had fallen asleep. She almost couldn’t recognize him. One of his eyes was bloated and there were cuts on his lips and the skin over the bridge of his nose had split. She knelt down. Sat with him. She lifted his head as gently as she could and settled it on her lap.
The sky was lightening. There was the blue. The last stars. She began to shiver again. She felt the cold air on her back as she held him, feeling his warmth. His blood. She combed his hair with her hands.
He woke and looked up from her lap. He smiled.
Those are mine, he said, and tried to lift his hand toward the sunglasses on her head. He winced. He almost cried. His right hand was broken. It lay there dead on his chest. He was still looking at her.
You don’t look well, he said.
She laughed. No?
He smiled again.
This is nice, he said, and shut his eyes, settling into her.
Is this what you do? she said.
No, he said. Not really. No. I bring people here. For this. The fights.
She was trying to understand. He was drifting, losing the thread. He opened his eyes again, or tried to, and searched for his cigarettes. She lit one for him and they shared it.
I just wanted, he said. I just wanted to know. What it was like. To be in there.
He faced the empty ring. He looked across at it for a while, as though some part of him was still there, as though he were pulling that part back into him.
So you bring people like that, she said. And you bring people like me.
People like you, he repeated, as though holding those words in his mouth.
You never told me your name.
Tad, he said. I’m Tad.
Faye and Tad, she said. That sounds like a song.
A bad song, he said.
He lifted his other hand and tapped the bow tie around her neck.
What did you mean? Faye said. When we met. At the bus stop. When you said to come back home?
He frowned. He didn’t remember saying that. He switched to Shanghainese.
Welcome home, he said.
Thank you, she said, and laughed again.
They were alone. She wasn’t used to laughing. As he fell asleep on her lap she watched the light spread in the trees. The rope sway in the wind. She wrapped the bow tie around his hand. She slipped off the sunglasses and put them on him.
•
That day he stayed with her. She helped him to his scooter and she drove back down the river road. She left the scooter near the playground and brought him up. There were remnants of the party. Hanging lights. Some doors open. They stepped over someone asleep in the corridor. She brought Tad to her room, settled him down, and she rushed back down, took the scooter, and drove to the factory.
She was late for her shift. The others had been working for an hour by the time she entered the production floor. The pain had returned in her side and she hurried, ignoring it.
The manager spotted her and yelled. He had never spoken to her before. He leaned in close and jabbed her in the chest. He did it in a way that didn’t hurt but was insistent and soft, as though he were studying that small part of her near her breast.
Perhaps it was this or her exhaustion, or something else. She was unaware she was holding one of the pins that was supposed to go into a chamber. Every day a pin into a chamber. A blue bin. A small star of heat under her rib. In her mind she stepped back and pushed his hand away. She witnessed his eyes widen. His surprise.
She looked down and saw her hand gripping the pin and the pin deep in the manager’s hand. She heard a scream. It wasn’t him and it wasn’t her. It was Yonha behind, who had come to help and Yonha saw the manager’s hand and screamed. She called the manager by his name, the way she did whenever he came to visit her at the complex. She called his name and reached for him.
And this would always surprise Faye: the man hit Yonha first. For screaming. For calling him by his name. He struck her with his other hand and over the sound of the assembly lines she could hear the impact and Yonha stumbled to the floor. And as Faye turned the man hit her, too. He hit Faye a second time when she was on the floor and she felt the cold shock of her tooth entering the side of her mouth. She tasted her own blood.
Another manager rushed in. Some workers were watching but they returned to their lines. She looked up at the manager standing over them both and he ripped the pin out of his hand and dropped it. She heard the music of it hitting the floor and followed the line of blood flowing down his arm.
Lying there, still hearing the ringing of the pin, she waited for what would happen next. He could hit her again. He could call the police or other supervisors. She could be sent away. It occurred to her that she didn’t care. If he hit her again. If she were sent away. Tomorrow she could get back on a boat and go. She could go anywhere. To that part of the sea she remembered. Somewhere else.
But the man wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Yonha. He sucked on the wound and kicked the pin toward them. He said, Put it back in the bin, and walked away.
•
She left early that day, alone, left the locker door open, and drove Tad’s scooter back down the river road. At the complex she climbed up to the sixth floor as fast as she could. Yonha’s daughter was in the corridor, roller-skating. The girl stopped, staring at her bruised face as Faye hurried into her room.
She thought at first he was there, in the pile of blankets. She tried to touch her jaw and then pressed her forehead against the wall. She held her stomach and vomited. She waited for the nausea to pass, her body still sore, her jaw tender and raw. She spat. Wiping her mouth, she noticed the girl standing by the open door.
You live here? Yonha’s daughter said.
She was holding a Styrofoam cup and wearing a dress. It was a nice dress. Faye looked away, ashamed at the mess she made.
You should see a doctor, the girl said. You don’t look so good.
I’ve been told that, Faye said.
It was the first time she had heard Yonha’s daughter speak. She was speaking a dialect Faye hadn’t heard since she was a child. Faye’s mother’s dialect. Yonha had never said where the girl was born. Who the father had been.
You know my mother? the girl said.
Yes, Faye said.
The man here said to tell you he had to go away for a while, the girl said. On business. He said you would know what he meant. He said to come tell you that. When you came.
The girl lifted her finger and tapped her own cheek.
He looked like that, too, she said.
Faye lowered her hands. She couldn’t say why but she didn’t mind Yonha’s daughter staring at her bruised face but she didn’t want the girl to see her touching her side. She wiped her mouth again. She asked if there was any water in that cup. The girl reached across and gave her the rest.
He said he would come back, the girl said. But not with people like you. Or, he said with people like you. I’m sorry. I can’t remember anymore.
It’s all right, Faye said.
Can I go? the girl said, tapping her skates on the wall.
You can go. Wait. Did you take my bag?
What?
Never mind. Tell me your name.
No, the girl said.
It hurt Faye to smile. She wasn’t sure if she did.
Yonha’s daughter skated down the corridor. Faye lay down. The door was still open. She thought the girl would pass by again but she didn’t. There was just her shadow by the door and the sound of the wheels moving back and forth.
IV.
She stayed on at the factory.
They didn’t fire her or report her. They didn’t report Yonha either. They kept working there together, though they no longer spoke often to each other. Through the days the bruising on Yonha’s face faded. Faye’s diminished but it didn’t entirely go away, even after her jaw healed. The bruise looked like a small ink stain on her cheek. In the locker room she changed as fast as she could and kept to herself most days.
One night before taking the bus, Yonha opened a compact and dabbed a sponge into it. She told Faye to hold still and powdered her cheek, masking the bruise. From then on, Yonha left the compact in their locker.
Summer was ending but the heat lingered for a little while longer. The smog in the air, too, which occurred once in a while, depending on the wind. It was heaviest on that Saturday. It started before the morning and came down low and it was impossible to see the top of the apartment complex. Faye had never seen it like this before. She walked out onto the corridor and saw nothing.
She hadn’t heard from Tad but she still had his scooter. She had gotten good at driving it and once, when she was feeling better, she had gone to the landfill but he wasn’t there. She went over to the wooden sign on the riverbank and sat on an old tree trunk, facing the high mountain, trying to remember. Twelve years ago. She wondered if that was a long time or not. She couldn’t say. She was no longer sure what a long time meant, only that there were things she remembered and things she had forgotten and she didn’t know why that happened.
The day of the heavy smog she drove into the city. She followed the road until it turned into a freeway. As soon as she entered the border she knew it was a different city then. There had been more space in the sky. But still she knew some of the roads. Those she remembered. And the districts. She drove until she reached the coast, skirting the downtown, winding around the skyscrapers that were hidden in the smog.
She arrived at a beach, parking near the boardwalk. It was worse here. There was no one. There was rope blocking the entrances, warning of the smog. A new hotel was nearby. Through a long window she could see the travelers and the tourists gathered in a restaurant. Some wore the kind of masks she wore at the factory.
Faye ducked under the rope. She headed down. She picked up a shell, holding it in her palm. She walked up the beach toward the hotel. Some people from the restaurant began to notice her. She turned and walked back. She couldn’t see the city anymore. She approached the water. Took off her shoes. The water was warm and heavy. Slow. It slipped over her feet and the hem of her jeans. It retreated. She stepped in farther. She breathed. She clenched her hands and let go. She felt the water rise and retreat.
A man stepped out from the hotel. He was wearing a uniform and a mask. He approached her from the beach, swinging his arms, shouting at her to go back.
Faye left before he arrived.
•
She knew the roads and she knew the neighborhood but she couldn’t remember the house. The one she was born in and the one she lived in before she moved closer to the chemical plant. She knew only that it was a lane house and they lived for five years on the third floor. Her mother was there for the first two. They had a small television. A brown corduroy couch. A painting above that her father had found in the alley trash container. Faye had gone with him. They pretended they had bought it together as a gift for Faye’s mother. A birthday gift.
It was a painting of a mountain though where the mountain was they never knew. She never knew either whether her mother had believed them, that they had bought it at the market. She had no memory of her mother ever looking at it. Or what made her father lie. What made Faye join him in the story.
Faye’s mother had been a maid. A hotel maid. She came home every day and microwaved ramen, watched dubbed movies on the television, and smoked.
Most days Faye sat on the balcony, behind the houseplant and the hanging laundry. There were other families on the floors below. Sometimes the neighbors would appear and Faye watched from above. The lane. The cats. The old woman who sat in front of the café and sold flowers. She was the oldest woman Faye knew and all day she sat in the same space as people passed through the lane and entered and left the café. On occasion they saw each other though they never acknowledged it. The old woman sold very few flowers and Faye wondered where all the others went. She wondered what else the woman did, if she did anything else at all. Where she got the flowers.
And then there was the day the old woman wasn’t there, and she wasn’t there the next day either, and Faye asked her mother but her mother didn’t understand what Faye was trying to say. What woman? her mother said.
Now, as Faye drove into the neighborhood, she grew confused: the lanes folded one into another, appearing identical to each other. Or identical to the specific one she was searching for. They were all long and narrow with row houses and telephone lines and clothes drying in the air. But the market was there and she parked and browsed the stalls: the vendors selling herbs, jewelry, postcards of the Pudong skyline, masks for the smog. A man was crouched on the ground, weaving baskets. As she watched him she thought about what she would like to do in another life.
What did she do in this one? She watched her father die. She left. She worked in a motel. She picked apples. She lived in barns that had been converted into dorms. She lived for over a decade in a country where she was never sure of the language. She was robbed, beaten, had her shirts torn off, and six times she was pinned to the ground while she frantically searched for her knife.
Probably she stabbed someone in that dark once. She didn’t know. She never saw. She ran. She never cried but she cried over lost buttons on her shirt. Her coat.
She walked down the lanes. The sky had yet to clear. Some rooftops were hidden. She kept searching the balconies. The shape of clothes suspended in the air, those sudden colors fighting against the smog. She found a café. She didn’t know if it was the one but she stopped and looked up at the row house beside it, up to the third floor where there was a young man on the balcony. He was wearing a mask and a baseball cap.
Faye waved. He stood and went inside. Perhaps she scared him. She looked into the café, trying to remember some detail, some corner. Her father had lost the apartment and they had never returned, spending the rest of the years in the countryside.
The row-house door opened and the young man was there.
You’re the caretaker? he asked.
She didn’t answer. A child ran into the café. The brief smell of baking bread. Tea.
Why are your jeans wet? the man said.
I was by the sea, Faye said.
He considered this. He was her age. Perhaps a few years older. The baseball cap was blue and had an orange sign on it she didn’t know.
Shanghai is sinking, he said. He pointed up at the smog. Warm weather, he said. Rising water. Water goes high. We sink.
You know things, Faye said.
I know nothing, he said. Come on. You’re late.
He left the door open. She stepped inside. She followed him up the stairs to the third floor, past the landings and a hallway window. He was faster than she was. He was already in the apartment by the time she came up. He took her hand and brought her into a short corridor where there were slippers and coats on a rack. She kept her hand in his, hearing a television.
The kitchen would be on the left, she thought, and on the right would be the main room where there was the balcony. The last would be where they all slept.
They ended in the main room. The man was leading her to someone on the couch when Faye noticed a painting on the wall. She caught the colors of it, the slopes and the ridge, and she would never be certain if it was the one that had been theirs and someone else’s before that but she froze, stilled by it. And as she began to cry she covered her mouth and looked away, waiting for it to pass.
The man brought her to the couch. A much older man was sitting on one end. He hadn’t moved. She thought he had been watching the television but when she calmed she saw the gray blur in his eyes.
Cataracts, the young man said. I don’t know what that is but he has it. That’s my grandfather. He doesn’t speak. You can take care of him now. Father will be home in four hours.
He raised four fingers. He hadn’t taken off his mask or his baseball cap. Faye wiped her eyes. The grandfather lifted his hands and waited. She leaned forward and he pressed his hands against her face, studying her features.
He’ll do that all day if you don’t stop him, the man said. He’s weird.
She didn’t mind. She couldn’t explain but it wasn’t like being touched by hands. It felt like leaves.
She asked if the café below still sold flowers.
The man didn’t know.
Lady, he said. You’re weird.
I’m tired, Faye said. And I’m sick.
He sighed. He entered the bedroom. On the television there was a news report on the smog affecting cameras, so many of them crashing or getting lost. She looked out at the balcony, at the corner near the rail, imagining herself there as a child. The man came back out and waved her in.
He had attempted to make the bed inside. The blinds were drawn; she had trouble seeing into the room. She made out the mattress. A blanket and a mattress.
I’ll do the first shift, he said. You rest. You get better.
He slipped off his mask and his baseball cap. He didn’t look the way she had guessed. She rose from the couch and he sat down by his grandfather and switched the channel to a music video. He reached over the coffee table and picked up a cup with soda. She listened to the suck of the straw. The grandfather was watching her. Or it felt as though he was. The young man nodded and waved.
Go in, he said.
V.
In the days that followed she visited them. She spent whatever money she had on food she had never eaten herself in years and gave it to them and they ate together watching a movie on the television. She met the father, too. He was shy and ate faster than any of them. If the caretaker ever showed they never mentioned it. It was always just them. She sat in the middle with these three men on the couch or on the floor, spending an hour or two when she could.
