A Paper Son (16 page)

“Wow,” I said. “That's insane.” It wasn't, though, not really. Not for her. She was good for a couple scenes like that each year.

“Goddamn right,” she said.

We arrived at the car and somehow I managed to pack all of her suitcases into it. There was a bag wedged behind my seat and I was uncomfortably close to the steering wheel but I figured I'd manage. I paid the parking attendant and drove out into the rain, and with the wipers on high I joined the cautious procession heading into the city.

Lucy cracked open her window just enough to let in the cool air. “That smell,” she said, more to herself than to me. Some of the sharpness had come out of her voice. “It's been too long since I've seen this city,” she said.

“Almost two years,” I said.

“Has it really been that long?” She sniffed at the air again. “I wonder why I didn't miss it more,” she said. She opened her window another fraction of an inch. “I should have. Hell of a storm, though,” she said.

“Seventeen days straight,” I said. “One of my students is keeping track.”

“You know what I would love?” she said. “Some tacos. In New York all the Hispanics want to make you sandwiches.”

I guided the Corolla into the Mission District. We found a parking spot on Valencia, ducked into the nearest taquería, and placed our orders.

“So what about you?” she said, once we'd taken seats. On the table between us sat a basket of chips, a small stone dish of tomatillo salsa, bottles of beer. “The other day you said things were weird.”

“I said they were hectic,” I said.

“But first you said weird,” she said. “You changed it to hectic because you didn't want to explain ‘weird' to me. But now here I am, and I'm calling you on it. Start with our old lady roommate, why don't you?”

The food came. Lucy dove in as if she hadn't eaten in a month. “Damn, you fuckers are good,” she told her tacos.

“Her name is Eva Wong, and she thinks I know where her uncle is,” I said.

Lucy raised an eyebrow. My own tacos went neglected as I talked about
The Barbary Quarterly
and Eva's arrival at my door. I told her an installment had appeared in print before I'd submitted it. I told her about my futile expedition to Pier 23, and my encounter with the quadruplets. She grew more and more rapt. She stopped eating. At one point she stopped me with uncharacteristic politeness, returned to the counter, and bought two more beers. I told her about Annabel, and how I'd learned that the quadruplets could not have existed. But I couldn't bring myself to tell her about the pool at the Y, or the music of that strange violin.

When I finished she took a long swallow of beer. “You're right,” she said, her voice not much more than a whisper. “That is weird.” She took a bite of her last taco, chewing without interest, and dropped the rest back onto her plate.

“So I guess that's pretty much everything so far,” I said. “But we're about to head back to see Eva, so who knows what might happen next.”

“No,” Lucy said, wiping her hands on her napkin. She drained the last of her beer and stood up. “It's not everything. I only told you half the story of why I left New York.”

We walked back out into the rain. Next door there was an abandoned storefront; Lucy stopped just beneath its rotting awning. Its plate glass windows were covered in graffiti and old handbills and patched with duct tape. Deep inside the entrance, in front of the recessed door, lay a pair of sleeping lumps, stretched out on cardboard. She fumbled around inside her purse, eventually producing and lighting a cigarette.

“You smoke?” I asked. “Since when?”

She shook her head. “Almost never,” she said. “Only when I need to.” She took two or three long drags and then flicked it away just before climbing into the car. It hit the side of the nearest building, sparked, and died on the wet sidewalk.

“So what's the other half, then?” I said, pulling out onto Valencia.

She turned and stuffed her purse into the back seat with the rest of her luggage. “About a month ago I was on the subway,” she said. “It's crowded, like usual. People are packed in everywhere, but a ways down I notice this old Chinese guy, dressed in the full Mao Tse-tung blue worker outfit, with that little hat, and he's looking at me. He gives me this big smile, and then this big wink, like he's some Asian leprechaun or something. And then he goes back to staring into space, like everybody else.”

I could picture this man and his hat and his wink without effort. Maybe I was remembering an image from a picture, or maybe I was imagining him sitting in the shadows somewhere in Mae's vast house—an uncle, perhaps, silently watching Li-Yu and her children. Or perhaps his was one of the faces out on the road somewhere between Xinhui and Jianghai. I thought of the soldier's guide and his gifts of poems.

“I didn't think much of him at the time,” Lucy said. “He's just a friendly old guy. Fine. Maybe I look like his granddaughter or something. No big deal. But then I see him again the next day, on the subway, in a totally different part of the city, at a totally different time. Exact same guy; I knew it because of this big mole he had on his cheek. And either he doesn't see me or he doesn't recognize me, but he makes no acknowledgement that I'm there.”

I slid over to Franklin Street and stopped at a light. The raindrops on the windshield collected points of red light and held them a moment before the wipers slapped them away.

“And then, a couple of days later, I see him again. And then again. And then all of a sudden, this guy's everywhere. For the next couple of weeks, I swear to God, he was all over the place, this old Chinese guy, always wearing the same thing. On the trains, walking down the street, standing on the sidewalk. He's never with anybody, never really doing anything, just sort of staring, like he's lost. And he never sees me again.”

I kept at the speed limit and made all the timed lights. The street grew steeper as we climbed Russian Hill.

“So it started to get pretty creepy, but coincidences happen, right? But then, Perry, I see him at a fucking Knicks game. Inside the goddamn Garden, Perry, by himself, just staring.”

There was an open parking place on my block, just a couple of doors down from the building, and I gratefully angled the car into it. I killed the engine and the sound of the rain took over. Lucy took a deep breath. “So then I start to think that maybe this guy wasn't even real,” she said. “Maybe I'm going nuts, and maybe he's not even real. Does that sound crazy?”

“You already heard my story,” I said. I opened the door and plunged into the rain, pulling the first of her bags from the back seat.

“I felt like I was losing it, Perry,” she called, shouting over the concussions of the rain on my car's roof. I unlocked the lobby door and we tossed her things into the entryway where they'd prop it open. We went back for more. “You've heard me mention my friend Angie, right?” she said, panting from the exertion. “Well, I told her about everything, and she decided she'd help me by getting me out of the city for the day.” We finished emptying the back seat and went to work freeing her giant suitcases from the trunk. “So we took the train down to New Jersey and headed for the beach. We ended up in this little town that was all closed down for the winter. It was eerie. Nobody on the boardwalk, nobody anywhere. But it was great to be out of the city, and in the silence and clean air.”

We were soaked by the time we'd herded her bags into the lobby. We dragged them to the elevator and I hit the button. The machinery rumbled to life. I wondered if it could handle us and our cargo.

“So we went for a walk along the water, and it was nice. I'd forgotten how the sea tasted and sounded. I started to feel sane again. And there was nobody, nobody at all around,” Lucy said. “So Angie and I went walking up this beach, and we walked for probably a good couple of miles.” The elevator door slid open and we piled her things inside. Her bags filled the floor space, so we climbed on top of them and sat. The car groaned and shuddered but lifted off and rose steadily. “So eventually I spot a guy up ahead of us, sitting on a bench by himself, wearing blue, staring at the sea,” she said, “and I knew it was going to be that fucking guy, Perry. I just knew it, and I was right. I freaked out. But Angie saw him, too, so at least I knew he was real.”

The elevator jolted and stopped, and when the doors slid open I remembered the image of the hat I'd seen on my reflection in that puddle the day the storm had started. As we hauled her luggage down the hallway I tried to recall the details of that image, of me looking up at myself. Had that really been me? Was there some connection between Lucy's story and mine? I thought about the genes we shared, and our parents and our upbringing. I was going to have to tell her about the pool. The pool and the violin.

Lucy was quiet while we worked, and when we'd piled everything outside the door she leaned against the wall, breathing heavily, and watched me as I fumbled for my key in the hallway's dim light.

“And you know what? That's not even the end of it,” she said.

We pushed through the door, dragging the first of the suitcases. Eva had been resting on the couch, but now she stirred and arose as we came through the door. I introduced them to each other and Eva sank back into the corner of the couch, her legs curled up beneath her, watching us with half-closed eyes. We dragged the luggage through the door, leaving her suitcases wherever we could find floor space. There was barely enough room to walk when we were finished.

Lucy dug into a suitcase, searching for dry clothes, while I went to the closet for towels. “So we went back to the city,” she continued, with a little waver in her voice, “and by the time I got to my apartment I had almost succeeded in calming myself down. I guess I shouldn't have bothered, because I had to freak out all over again. Somebody had been there, Perry. Somebody had broken in while I'd been gone. But listen to this—nothing was missing. Nothing at all, not one thing.” She sighed and straightened up, a set of blue flannel pajamas dangling from her clenched hand. Strands of wet black hair stuck to her cheeks and jaw but she made no attempt to brush them away. “Instead, the burglar, if you want to call him that, left me things. He rearranged my fucking furniture, and he hung up mirrors,” she said. “He hung up these little round mirrors all over my apartment. Eight of them, in various corners in different rooms.” She pointed at another suitcase. “I brought them,” she said. “I'll show them to you later.” She dropped her pajamas, reached for the towel I'd tossed onto one of her suitcases, and buried her face in it. “So that was it,” she said, when she emerged, her face red. “That was last week. I packed my shit up, tied up a few loose ends, and here I am.”

Eva stirred on the couch. “It's
feng shui
,” she said.

Lucy pulled her face from the towel. “What? What is?”

“Someone broke in to adjust your
xi
flow. Mirrors represent the water element,” Eva said.

“Who the hell would do that?”

Eva shrugged. “Maybe you had a water deficiency.”

As I watched this exchange a numbing warmth swept up through me. I couldn't feel my damp clothes against my skin. My hands began to feel hot. I couldn't feel the weight of the wet towel in my hands. Before she'd even had a chance to dry off, Lucy had plummeted directly into the center of our mystery here, bringing with her events from thousands of miles away. She was a meteorite filled with metal from a distant but related galaxy; around her was the cratered wreckage of suitcases and bags and backpacks. Eva seemed to be thinking the same thing. She was looking intently at us, back and forth between me and Lucy, back and forth, back and forth.

Lucy glanced at the rain-covered glass doors that led out to my small patio. She forced a smile and repeated what Eva had said about having a water deficiency. She looked pale. Pale and weary and older than I remembered.

Three days after discovering the old man's junk shop, Li-Yu decides on a plan. She thinks it through for another three days, rehearsing it in her mind, observing, and on the following night she lies in bed, breathless, her eyes wide. It seems to take longer than usual for the house to quiet down. Finally the servants finish their tasks and depart. She listens to their feet recede across the gravel as they cross over to their quarters. Still she waits. Somewhere in the house a roof joint emits a loud crack and she twitches atop her covers. There is a hitch in Henry's breathing and he shifts in his bed, but then he sinks back into deep sleep. She waits as long as she can bear it. Perhaps an hour elapses, perhaps two; her heightened senses distort the passing time. And then from beneath her blanket she pulls a burlap sack she found in the shed. She creeps to the kitchen, holding her breath, and without a wasted motion she makes her way to the cabinets where the dishware is kept. She opens the doors but does not immediately reach inside—instead she drops to one knee, rests her hands and the sack across her upraised thigh, and closes her eyes. She listens to the stillness of the house, and, hearing nothing but her blood in her temples, she reaches inside. She takes one plate from each of the stacks inside—four in all. They disappear into the burlap sack. She presses the bundle tightly against her chest to keep the dishes from rattling together and hurries toward the front door. She pauses there, listening again, not only to the stillness of the sleeping house, but also for any movement outside. Hearing nothing, she releases the latch and swings the door open.