The Foreigner (11 page)

I had not told Little P about the mah-jongg game, or about Poison’s threat.
Tell him,
warned a small, nagging voice.
He knows them. He’s the only one who can help you out of this
. But something in me balked at the prospect of asking him for help; I might almost prefer seeing him whacked to groveling before him. I shook my head violently to clear it of guilt and anxiety: eight thousand; two weeks; you’ll still call the lawyer?

As I walked, the alien city seemed to make a show of its difference, its foreignness no longer just a temporary façade but a dawning fact of my new life. Everywhere I went, streets were being dug up with cranes and steam shovels, storefronts being dismantled, sledgehammers and pickaxes being wielded without sentiment or protection, buildings brought down with wrecking balls, no ceremony, broken asphalt dumped in a little area weakly fenced off. Strange faces and ciphers greeted me in block after block of shadowed, featureless high-rises. I ducked down an alley off the main avenue, but the strangeness was worse here: a little open market, tented by a dark awning, full of the smells of sweetness and decay. Chickens murmured in their crates; flies crawled over the sticky, split fruit; while somewhere nearby a hose was rinsing down a butcher’s board, the bloody water congealing at my feet. A beggar moved slowly through the crowd, beating his head against the ground.

A two-story Starbucks dawned on the horizon as I came out of the fetid little alley. I almost ran to it, hazarding across the double lanes of Xinsheng Road against traffic. It wasn’t the coffee drinks but the promise of quiet cleanliness that drew me, the familiar armchairs and soft, blurry folk with plucked bass over the stereo—a point of stillness and permanence in the wild.

The upstairs tables were nearly empty except for a few students, a group of businessmen making deals over Frappuccinos. I carried my mug to the farthest corner and sat down. After a moment, feeling conspicuous, I took out a little paperback I had brought with me from home and tried to read, but the words squiggled and swam, obscured by the churn of unkillable thoughts: eight thousand; the blade of a knife; Uncle’s frozen face like plastic, mouthing its stunted sounds.

"Xiansheng?"

A light hand on my arm dispelled the broken images. A woman peered down at me inquisitively. She had been sitting several tables away when I came in, bent over a book. Even in my distress, I had noticed her: long dark hair, taut limbs, and straight waist, elegant as a dancer. I couldn’t understand a word of her lilted Chinese, but the sound of her voice was distinctive, low and sweet.

"Sorry," I said. "
Wo bu dong
."

She paused, examined me with new interest. "You… are… forn?"

"Excuse me?"

She appeared embarrassed. "You are… foreener?"

"Oh. Yes. Foreigner.
Waiguoren
."

She smiled again, this time at my butchering of the word. She had an unusual face, delicate, doe-eyed, marked with a kind of gentleness that reminded me of both sorrow and wildness.

"You to excuse, please. I see
that
"—she pointed to my paperback—"I think you must to know the English. You know?"

"Well, enough, anyway," I said. Then, because she looked puzzled: "Yes. English, yes. From America."

She clapped her hands in evident delight and clutched my arm again. "Much better! You can to help?"

She fetched the book she had been poring over. It was a computer manual from the eighties, the pages soft and discolored from age, punctuated occasionally with a smudgy black-and-white photograph. She put a finger tentatively on the word
C-prompt
and looked to me, patient.

"C-prompt," I said.

"What, please?"

I rubbed my forehead. "Hard to explain. It’s… back when you had an MS-DOS operating system…" I struggled for the words, then flipped suddenly to the cover of the book:
Introducing PC-DOS and MS-DOS
.

I stole a look at her: that odd beauty, her slim body smooth as ivory but quickened with breath. Surely she didn’t spend her days in some cubicle as a programmer.

"Are you an engineer?" I asked. I took out my pocket dictionary and found
engineer
.

She laughed. "No. This book, I find at DV8. You know DV8?"

"No."

"Bar. Pub. Many foreign customer. They leave book, CD."

"Oh. You have an interest in computers, then?"

"No."

She paused, looked down in embarrassment. She seemed pensive, as if she could not decide what to say. Then, impulsively, she reached across the table and took my hand. "You are marry?"

Her touch was warm and searching; I had not felt anything like it in a long time.

"No."

"Too bad." She sighed and shook her head, regretful. "You look like nice man. Can I say that? ’Nice man.’ That is the good English?"

"Of course."

She smiled, satisfied. Her pleasure dimmed slightly as she remembered what we had been talking about.

"My boyfriend," she said, hesitant. "He too is the American." She tapped the PC book. "I want to learn for him."

"So he’s the engineer," I said, feeling a kind of prick in the chest at the mention of her boyfriend.

"No, no. I want to learn the
English
for him."

"Oh! But… you mean with this?"

Crestfallen, she murmured something inaudible; clearly she had put great store in this PC manual, as if it were a book of enchantments.

"It’s a good book," I said gently, backing off. "But maybe you should find another one. More useful."

She took the text back, staring down at it in confusion. I was still mindful of her hand on mine, her distinctive, lingering scent of tuberose and something sharper, salt, seaweed.

"You should keep the book," I said. "But you might study some other words too. Better if you had a regular teacher. If you want," I hazarded, "I could help you."

Her glance was so genuinely surprised, so gratified, that I felt extremely guilty, and told myself it was for her, really: she would never get anywhere with that computer manual.

I took her little notebook and pen and wrote:

light
dark
cold
clear
hard
jewel
glass
rock
flame
cave
rain
shine
burn
brush
blow

She looked over the list in silence. "I know already," she said after a moment, pushing the notebook back at me. "Too simple."

"The words are simple," I said, halting. "But you can know the meaning of a word without knowing what it means."

"
Shenma yisi?
" She furrowed her brow.

"Let’s just talk, okay? Using the words sometimes, if you want, or not using them. Or using only the words I’ve written. For fun." I put my finger on the page. "The cold flame burns dark."

She frowned. "What, please?"

"It doesn’t mean anything."

"Then why… ?"

"I don’t know. Because. Because that’s what English is. That’s the essence of it." She looked doubtful, and I thought she would probably excuse herself politely, take her book and leave.

But then she put out a tentative finger and moved it slowly, timidly across the page. "The light… glass… rain… is cold clear."

She looked up and laughed.

"Right," I said and laughed too.

"My cold rock… burn the glass rain."

"Excellent."

The lesson lasted another hour, or two; I didn’t really know. Before she left, she gave me her number, writing it down on a page and adding to it a list of characters, which she pushed at me.

"For you," she said. "For next time. You must to learn." She winked teasingly.

The characters, in their terse complexity, had a look of veiled import, like letters coded in her lovely script.

She gathered her things and leaned over, her dark hair brushing my shoulder.

"Not to drink too much," she said, indicating my coffee. "Too much coffee bad for heart. Car… cardio… vascular inflammation. My boyfriend," she said proudly, "teach me. Is very healthy. Will to see you next week?"

Her name, she had said, was Grace.

AS I
left, the streetlights were beginning to come on, and the air of day-end festivity had taken the foreign edge off the unfamiliar buildings and blocks. Still touched by the lightness of the unexpected English lesson, I had no desire to go back to my room. I was no longer staying with Atticus. His beautiful apartment, with its clean sheets and careful solicitude, made me uncomfortable—something hidden behind the display. Instead, I had installed myself at a budget hotel near the Main Station. It was called the Tenderness and was as grim a place as the term
budget hotel
could suggest: stained tiles, a stinking drain, gaps between the wall and ceiling so that heat, smoke, and voices circulated in a thick haze.

Atticus had mentioned a rally tonight on behalf of his congressional candidate, at the 2-28 Memorial Park, so I took the train to the NTU Hospital station, thinking I might try to find him. The moment I exited the subway, I heard the dull roar of a crowd like the sound of rushing water, and followed it hesitantly. The park seemed low and unassuming from the outside, but inside the gate, the grounds opened out, the memorial itself rising over the trees like an abstract temple of iron and stone, water running beneath its unfinished framework, an old memory half-destroyed. In its shadow, crowds flowed.

I thought at first that the rally was over, the movement of people was so erratic. Not until I had pushed deeper into the throngs did I understand that something was happening.

"
Duibuqi
," I said, bumping a woman with a camera. She stood a little apart, training her lens on the murmuring crowd. "
Fa… faxian shenma?
"

The woman raised her head, her doubtful look quickly turning to disbelief. It was the girl from the noodle shop, the one named Angel.

"How do you—" she began, and then came a scream. Without warning, the crowd shifted violently, and the shouts swelled into a roaring tide. Someone pushed me; I was thrown off balance, staggering forward, and grabbed helplessly for support, bringing Angel down too.

"Are you all right?" I shouted, then had to roll away as the panicked rally stumbled over us, heedless. A blow to the head blinded me briefly.

Angel, knocked to her knees, struggled up and grasped my arm, half-leading, half-dragging me to a sheltered spot below the memorial, where the water trickled on, placid, through its trough beneath the hanging eaves.

"What’s happening?" My voice echoed. Beyond the eaves, the police had moved in swiftly with their riot gear, trying to disperse the crowd. One angry old man lit a match and touched it to his own arm, shouting at a helmeted officer, who blew the flame out and moved him along, his impassiveness like an insult. "I thought this was a rally."

"It was. They whisked Li away," she said, gloomy. "Off in his little escape van. A bunch of Zhang supporters showed up." Her nostrils flared. "They should have expected this. What kind of fool picked the memorial for a political rally?"

"You know what fool."

Another familiar face swam up in the gloom: Atticus, looking flushed and oddly vibrant. He did a double take when he saw me, then smiled. "Emerson! So you did come, after all."

"You
know
him?" asked Angel.

"Family connection."

"That is a good way to say it," said Atticus, then muttered something low to Angel in Chinese.

"I don’t care," she said, in loud, pointed English. "It was stupid to have the rally here. Stupid and stubborn. You know what kind of association this place has. Why would you go and open that all up again?"

Atticus frowned, a momentary break in his show of peace. "
Je me souviens
. One needs to be reminded of the past. One needs to remember who one is."

"One needs to cut the bullshit," declared Angel. "One needs to let history die. One needs a good kick in the ass."

"Young people," he murmured. "So much potential, but
vulgaire, toujours vulgaire
."

"
Je ne regrette rien
," she said, determined. "Would you rather have that?" She gestured out beneath the overhang, where the police were cordoning off sections of the park with barbed wire, preparing the fire hoses against a small faction of defiant old men and women.

"That is nothing," said Atticus. "Already people are going home. There will be no serious fight. You need not worry about true violence here; only the old ones care. There is not enough passion to light a single fuse in this city."

"No one should be lighting fuses," snapped Angel.

"Emerson, you are contused," said Atticus, changing the subject. He indicated the angry swelling on my forehead.

"I’m all right."

"I wish you had not moved out," he said. "It makes me uneasy to think of you in the city alone, without the language. Consider also the expense of the hotel. I know your situation is not ideal."

"Thank you, Atticus, but I’m fine. Really."

He put on his newsboy cap and said to Angel, "Next week, Guo Xiaojie?"

"Don’t think I’ll forget this," she said with some disgust. "Passion isn’t progress. Inciting violence is not progress," she shouted as he disappeared.

"How do you know him?" I asked.

"I cover the DPP campaigns," she said, staring after him. "Free-lance. The Democratic Progressive Party. Atticus is a Party contact. Well, more like a friend. I guess."

We waited in silence. As Atticus had predicted, it didn’t take long for the park to clear. The aged faction dispersed without the aid of fire hoses; campaign signs lay abandoned on the grass. There was barely more than the sound of the water running through its channel when Angel and I emerged from the memorial.

"You hard up or something?" asked Angel.

"What?"

"Something Atticus said. You strapped?"

"Maybe." I bit my lip as the bitterness about the letter from Hastie and Associates, almost forgotten, refreshed itself.

"You need a job, I got a job for you." Angel slung her camera strap over her shoulder. "A share. You help me write the Pennywise Pilgrim series, we split the stipend and proceeds seventy-thirty. What do you think?"