The Foreigner (13 page)

"You should not make accusations you cannot prove, Xiao Chang."

"We’re not in court, are we."

He muttered something in Chinese and put a hand to his chest, wearily.

"What?"

"I say I am getting too
old
for this." He looked at me, and he did seem old for once, shriveled inside his splendid robe. "I was a Catholic once, did you know?"

"Atticus."

"My father, he was very angry. He hated the Pope. He hated the liturgy. He hated the ceremony and pageant, especially then, when people were so poor. He took my cross necklace away. ’Can you eat this?’ he asked, and then he made me throw it in the trash burner. But I loved all the pageant when I was a young man. The idea of heaven. The idea of hell. I eat and shit and sleep, like the animals, but it is only for man that the eating and shitting have the grace of God. It is only for man that the life is connected to the death. What do you think, Xiao Chang?"

I shook my head. "Atticus—"

"Myself, I think it is a lovely dream. Someone, somewhere, in a very cold winter, made up the story to comfort himself and his children, the way you make a fire. Warm and pretty—before it goes out. The faith, it gave me order, and beauty. I wish I could believe still. You do not know how much I wish I could believe. But I cannot. Age has made me incapable. Order and beauty—you do not find them outside life. Only this world, only this once. You must take hold of them wherever, however you can."

"Atticus." I pounded my fist softly on the console. "Why are you telling me this?"

He put the rock down and walked nervously to the window. "I am only trying to explain myself. It is not an excuse. I am getting too old for such complications." He turned to me. "I am your friend, Emerson. I have not lied to you. I swear I have nothing to do with his disappearing, though of course you are right. I do know where Xiao P is. But if I tell you, you must give me something in exchange."

I thought of the Remada, and the mah-jongg debt, and sighed. Atticus, interpreting this correctly, said, "No, no. An exchange of
confidence
." He held up a finger. "No questions asked of me—now, or later. I cannot explain more than I have about your brother. You must not ask me to."

"But why?"

"No questions about no questions. I have already involve myself too much. Agree?"

Hopelessly, I shook his proffered hand. It would be enough to find Little P. All day the prospect of returning to the Tenderness to face my mother had dogged me.
I ask you to look after him, and what happens? He is your own brother
. The dark, familiar weight closed down on me. The effort to earn love, to deserve it—you thought it would end with the grave, but somehow it only intensified, like the pain of a phantom limb, unassailable.

"
Zhende, zhende,
I am getting too old," murmured Atticus as he gestured at me to follow. "I hope you will not judge me too harshly in the end. The final impression, the memory, that is the only kind of afterlife I can believe."

He opened the door to the small room I had slept in before and bowed me in.

Light from the living room spilled over the floor, revealing nothing. The room was empty, the coverlet on the cot pulled straight. I looked around.

"Was there something in here you wanted to show me?" I asked.

Atticus looked startled, followed me into the room.

"Ai
—
ya."
Clutching his silk robe together, he shuffled over to the tiny window and peered out. The window was open. A light, sudden gust riffled through the room like an intake of breath. Atticus reached out to fish something off the metal grille, then closed the window softly and turned on the bedside lamp.

In the small light, Little P’s knife gleamed in his hand. He laid it on the coverlet.

"He was here."

"Yes," said Atticus simply.

"But… why? What happened?" I crossed to the window, trying to see out into the darkness. "And why would he come here?"

"You must believe me, I wish he did not," said Atticus sharply. He regarded the cot with narrowed eyes for a moment, then—though it looked perfectly clean—began stripping it of its bedding, savage. Little P’s knife flew under the dresser.

"What do you think?" he hissed. "Do you think I wish to harbor the damned? To be party to the degradity of the human soul?" The seam of the undersheet ripped as he yanked it from the corner.

Abruptly he sat down, hard, his arms full of bunched linens. He seemed to be no longer speaking to me, or he was speaking to something, or someone, through me. "And yet I cannot do.
Nuoruo!
"—bitterly. "Coward! Coward and weak." Tears glittered in his eyes but did not fall. He half-turned to me.

"But why should it be coward of me to want beauty? Or comfort? Or love. When we die, it is forever. Should we not take as much as we can get, now, before death wipes it all away?"

"Atticus… ?"

He roused himself slightly, as if from sleep. "Ah,
bon,
Emerson." He looked at me—really looked this time, without the glazy half look of terror, misery. He seemed tired and small. "We are what we are; it is what it is. That’s all. Most of the time I can accept."

He put aside the linens and got down on his knees, searched until he found Little P’s knife.

"Make sure to tell Xiao P it was you at the door tonight," he said, handing the knife to me, blade turned toward himself. "Give him the knife to prove. Otherwise he may think I am lying. That I have betrayed his confidence to others. Of course he still may think I am lying." His mouth flickered wryly. "Perhaps that would be for the best."

"What you said about Little P—about harboring the damned. What—"

"We have an agreement, Emerson, yes? No questions." He reached out and took my hand firmly. Despite myself, I was grateful for him—for his odd desire to befriend me, for his tortured help. "I am still your friend, but no questions. It is very late, or very early. You must go."

Silently protesting, I went to the door, and Atticus bowed me out into the hall. The locks clicked behind me. I thought I was alone, waiting for the elevator, when suddenly I heard him call softly, "Emerson!"

I turned around. He stood in his doorway, battered. His robe had fallen open, mouth parted, and for a moment he seemed to be on the verge of revelation, all secrets to be shed from his brittle frame. Then he cinched his belt tightly.

"I neglect to say good night."

"Good night, Atticus."

"Emerson.
Bonsoir
." The door closed.

T
HE PHONE RANG AS I LAY TANGLED IN A DAMP SHEET,
sun slitting around the edges of the broken blind. I’d come back to the Tenderness in the small hours and fallen onto the bed, still clutching Little P’s knife. Fretful dreams involved my mother, something hazy and wispy, coded, like a message being tapped out from the inside of a box, so that, fumbling for my cell, I felt I was lifting the receiver of a great cosmic line.

"Wei?"

No reply. The message being tapped out faded slowly, the wires cut. The silence on the other end had a personal quality to it, a lean, hungry shape and form.

"Little P?"

Still no reply. "Little P, where are you?"

He coughed. "How’d you know?"

"I know," I said. "Of course I know." I found myself suddenly weak with relief, trembling. The body’s knowledge was greater than any rational mind; it knew the depth of devotions and connections that reason could not grasp.

"I guess you want me to explain." His voice was hoarse and low, and there was some kind of ambient noise, as if he were calling under cover of the street.

"No," I said. "I don’t. Not unless you want to."

He didn’t say anything. I could tell he was puzzled, guarded, as if this might be yet another trick in the minefield. I pushed myself up to sitting position and hung my legs over the edge of the bed.

"I have your knife. It was me at the door last night."

He waited.

"When you disappeared, I thought I’d never see you again. I thought you were dead."

He coughed again. "Better that way."

"Don’t say that."

"Why not? Anyway, death isn’t the worst of it." His voice was thick and slow, as if he were drunk, or sick. "The worst is when you die and keep on living. Your whole fucking life to live and no relief from it."

"Where are you?" There was some kind of sound in the background; I strained to identify it.

Little P was quiet for a moment. Then: "Would you believe me if I said I wanted to come home?"

"Now?"

"Not now. A long time ago."

"Then why didn’t you?"

Silence. The background noise was clearer now: water rushing, the sound of waves washing across the shore, or perhaps it was only static. I had a sudden image of a lovely, peaceful beach bathed in sunset, the kind we used to go to when we were children, up and down the Pacific shore.

"I had my reasons," he said. "I never meant to abandon her. I never wanted to stay here. But I couldn’t come home."

"Why not? You were the apple of her eye. There’s nothing you could have done that she wouldn’t forgive you."

"You can’t understand." He coughed again, sounding wretched. "It doesn’t matter anymore."

"Where are you?" I repeated.

"It’s not important. I called to ask you a favor. You said you wanted to help."

"I do. I meant it."

"Well then." Did I detect, in the slight pause, a kind of embarrassment—a kind of pride? "I need money."

"I just gave you five hundred a couple of weeks ago."

He cleared his throat. "Not enough. Not this time. I’m not asking for a handout, I’d pay you back. All I want is a little loan."

"How much?"

A pause. "Two grand. U.S.D."

"Two
thousand
?"

"You stayed behind to help me."

"I know, but—"

"Then
help me
."

The line seemed to go dead but for the sound of the sea in my ear.

"Hello?" I got up, agitated.
"Hello?"

Little P’s voice came back. "I wish I could just stop running."

"Who is it, Little P? It’s—Is it Uncle? Or—the cousins? Who are you afraid of?"

"
Who
is incidental. The question is
what
."

"What do you mean, ’what’?" I thought immediately of restive ghosts, the incubus and the succubus eating the history of the flesh, turning old regrets into night sweats, terrors. I pictured a spirit sucking out my brother’s breath.

"Help me."

"All right. All right. Where are you?"

"I can’t say. It’s okay, I’m safe for a while. But next Wednesday, midnight. Bring the money in cash. I’ll tell you where."

"All right. Listen, Little P—"

But the line was really dead this time. I threw the phone down on the bed in frustration.

The box of ashes stood upright on the nightstand and held my eye.
Death isn’t the worst of it,
Little P had said.
The worst is when you die and keep on living
. He had been right when he said I couldn’t understand. My life had been a long gray stretch dogged by fear and loneliness, a little sorrow, a little boredom. And yet if someone had held a gun to my head, I would have begged for more. I wasn’t a nihilist, not like Atticus; I thought perhaps there was another world beyond death. But it didn’t matter, for another world was not this one.

I had a sudden urge to open the box, to see once and for all what change death had wrought. Did she smell of antiseptic still? Did the bitter, herby scent of her medicines inhere in her ashes somehow? And her dreams of Princess Diana, her propriety and gossip, her impenetrable core of love, her abiding ideal—where did all of those go, in the final incineration? What was there left to remind me, not just that she had existed once but
how
she had existed?

I did not open the box. Instead, I took out my little travel iron and filled the reservoir with gray tap water, plugged it in. The dinginess of my little SRO had gotten me down temporarily but no more, not anymore. Was it not too late to turn things around? Little P had said as much with his haunted plea:
Help me
. There was something I could do. The little timer pinged, the water bubbled like a deep breath in the silent room. I hung my suit over the door and pulled the creases straight while I blasted them with steam, like cleaning armor before a battle, or repeating the rosary. From now on, I’d keep my suits clean and shirts pressed, my temper even, my thoughts calm. I would save my brother; I’d get him out of here.

"
WHERE DO
you think they
come
from?" she asked.

It was late Friday night, and we had found ourselves in a kind of underground bar, a steel-and-chrome affair that hummed and thumped with strobe lights and R & B, and a mindless bass line throbbing like a swollen vein. I had met up with Angel earlier for a restaurant review, a meal of simmered goose and blanched lettuce and beer, which she had drunk with a hard-bitten vigor that seemed premature, given her age. The geese, stripped without ceremony, had been boiling away in a drum on the sidewalk, feet sticking up above the rim of the broth. " ’A true local experience,’ " Angel pronounced, writing furiously in her little notepad. Then she crossed this out. " No. ’The food of the proletariat. The food of the people.’ "

"Hardly," I said. The bill had run up astonishingly, three times what a meal of beef noodles would have been. I watched her write. "Aren’t you patronizing your public a bit?"

"Oh, neohippie tourists eat this crap up."

She rested her chin on her pen and looked at me pityingly. "It’s called the Pennywise Pilgrim series. Neohippies always have trust funds to burn." She shook her head with some irritation. "Just eat your goose, boyo. I know what I’m about."

Afterward, I had wanted to say good night and go back to the Tenderness, but Angel had insisted on a drink. The Roxy catered to foreigners, but there were a good number of locals here on a weekend. I could see one pimpled young man trying to gaze down a Taiwanese girl’s dress. Some shoving and shifting in the crowd; the Budweiser girls approached, making their nightly rounds; a triumvirate of vice—cigarettes, beer, I forgot the third—employed girls in skimpy clothing to hawk their products independently in the bars. The Marlboro girls wore big white ten-gallons and matching high-heeled boots with tight shorts, and would let you wear their hats as part of their promotion. Angel had gone off to get a whiskey. A Bud girl insinuated herself into my little corner of the crowd and began her spiel in a high, squeaky voice.