The Foreigner (17 page)

"You owe me," I said, sopping up blood with a handful of tissues. "You owe me an explanation at least."

"Simple," said Little P. "Hu wants his protection money."

"Protection money for what?"

"For
protection,
" said Little P impatiently.

"I mean, from whom?"

"Everybody," he said. "From our competitors, from the local toughs. From the police too."

"What would the police do to you?"

"Shut us down," he said.

"On what grounds? Fire code?"

"There’s no fire code." This was true. The building across from the Palace had no windows, only little bread box–size holes for air-conditioning units in the summer.

"Well, then."

He put down his beer. "Emerson, do you have any fucking idea what the Palace does?"

I flushed. "Why… KTV," I said, faltering. "Karaoke and snacks and beer."

He snorted. "If we were counting on the karaoke for cash, we’d be screwed ten times over by now."

"Drugs," I said. My heart seemed to push up through a funnel. "A front for the international drug cartel."

"Don’t be an asshole," he said, irritated. "Do we look sophisticated enough for that?"

I thought of the clerk sleeping at the reception desk and concurred.

"Well, what then? Gambling? Theft?" I threw out all the vices I could think of.

"Maybe it’s just as well." He lit a cigarette; he was in a reflective mood. Knowledge and ignorance; my heart seemed poised evenly between the desire to know and the desire to remain oblivious, just a little longer.

"The cash," I said. "That satisfied Hu, no?"

"For now."

"How about the check I wrote you earlier? Did that help?"

"Would’ve."

"You already spent it?"

He examined the end of his fag.

"For God’s sake, Little P."

He flicked ash at me. "If you want your money back, just take it out of the motel account."

"I’m not asking for my money back." I shook my head, frustrated. "Even if I did pay myself from the motel, so what? So then you would owe the Remada. What’s the difference?"

"What’s the difference?" His face flushed, the first display of emotion I’d seen all night, and he lunged across the table in a sudden rage.

"The difference is the Remada is
mine,
" he hissed. He had my collar, and I could see the line of scarring that the stitches would leave in his forehead. "Mother left it to me! You have no right to keep stalling. Who’s the lawyer? Give me his name!"

"No," I said faintly.

I suppose he didn’t deal with defiance very often; his expression was cold, stonelike—underlaid by desperation. But for once I didn’t care. I was chilled by the faint prickings of knowledge—something I’d seen in the back room there at the Palace.

"You didn’t make a move," I said.

He coughed, rubbing a red angry mark on his neck. "Move for what?"

"That whole time he was beating me up, you didn’t say a word. The guy would’ve
killed
me, and you just sat there like it was—TV."

"Oh, fuck me," he said, grinding out another cigarette in disgust. "A guy shoots a gun at you less than half an hour ago and all you can think of is this Army brothers, Knights of the Round Table shit? No wonder you never got it on."

"I want my money back." I got up suddenly and prepared to take away my tray. "The two thousand I gave to Hu and the check I gave you. No more handouts."

He sighed. "Don’t go, Emerson."

I picked up my tray and moved toward the trash bins.

"I’m sorry."

I was almost to the stairs when he finally stood up and called across the room.

"That was an act of fucking
preservation
."

I turned to look at him. The other diners stopped talking, looked too.

In the dim, golden light and sudden silence, he seemed the very image of humility, battered, bloodied, with a thin, sharp wariness—a kind of liar’s Christ.

He spoke again. "He was testing me."

"Sit down, Little P." I went back to the table, ignored the stares.

"He wanted to see what kind of currency you were. If I begged or screamed or showed any sign, he’d have his eye on you. He wasn’t going to kill you, brother."

"Well, he does a very convincing psychopath." I touched my nose. The blood had thickened, slowed. "I don’t understand."

We sat without speaking. The other patrons buzzed quietly. The proprietress came by with a damp rag, wiping down the tables, smelling of cheap perfume and disinfectant.

"Does it have to do with the woman?" I asked suddenly.

He stared. "What woman?"

"The woman upstairs in Uncle’s apartment."

His eyes flickered. "You’re crazy."

"I saw her," I said warningly.

He didn’t have any cigarettes left; his fingers found a corner of napkin and shredded it mechanically.

At length, he looked up and said, "That’s Poison’s girl."

"Don’t treat me like an idiot. Poison’s as gay as a summer afternoon."

"Bullshit," he said, looking shaken. I hadn’t even known I knew until now; it was merely something about the man that fit, suddenly, like a key in a lock.

"She’s Poison’s girl," repeated Little P.

He got up and walked out. I had to grab my things—jacket, ashes—quickly and trail him out to the street.

"Why won’t you tell me anything?" I had to hurry to keep up.

"Emerson."

He wheeled abruptly. For a moment I thought he was going to hit me, and then I thought he was going to hug me. The red glow of the paper lanterns made it difficult to tell; the light was no more than an illuminated shadow in which I could see Little P only darkly.

"Don’t stay here," he said. A note of urgency made his voice harsh and low. "If you want to help me, give me the lawyer’s number and go home."

"I can’t go home," I said doggedly. "Even if I wanted to, I really can’t, now." I told him about my passport, about the wallet with my IDs.

He planted his feet and didn’t say anything at first; he seemed to be thinking, formulating, calculating.

"I can get you a passport," he said slowly.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I can get you a passport. From any country that’s got an embassy in KL. Be anyone you want to be," he said. He took off his glasses, and the light of commerce shone in his eyes like candles. He leaned closer. "I’ll make you a deal, brother. I get you the passport, you give me the lawyer’s info. And then you get the hell out of here.
Haobuhao?
"

I searched his face. There was no false enthusiasm there, no particular guile; he really meant it. He didn’t understand, then—not at all. He had sized me up, taken the measure of my needs and desires, and then tried to bargain with me: my brother, and the Remada, for some stupid government document, a laminate book with some meager, artificial facts typed in. How could he believe that such a trade was fair, or even close? Perhaps he thought I had some attachment to the bare fact of home itself. California—America—with its great coasts and sun-filled reprieves; its mythologies and corruptions; its short flame of history; its violence, shame, ambition.

But wasn’t Little P too a kind of home? Whatever he was involved in, my mother and her boundless ideal lived in him too: in bone structure, in memory, in the common language of the blood that distance, even time, could not quite erase.

Belatedly, I remembered Little P’s knife. I drew it out of my pocket, hesitated. Then handed it to him: a kind of penance, a kind of letting go.

"I have to think about it," I said.

He put his sunglasses back on. "Don’t think too long."

T
HE NEXT DAY I OCCUPIED MYSELF
with cleaning out the new house and moving in. Angel, who gave me some cast-off furniture belonging to her grandparents, was dubious, but despite the bats and creeping mold, the little, low shack felt safe in its bower of subtropical green and mosquitoes; no one would find me here. Debt loomed: Poison and his broken bottle; the cop with his schizoid walleye, giggling as he pointed his gun; Little P. All this I tried to sweep up into trash bags, to incinerate when the garbage truck came by in the evening, playing its tinny, mournful rendition of "Für Elise." By candlelight (there was no electricity), I scrubbed, dusted, washed my shirts, read through my Chinese phrase books, and, dozing, dreamt the old dream of coffee and office buildings, riding the trolley to work. But now the dream diverged: there was no more office building, only a crater in the earth, and when I peered down into it, there was my mother in her hospital bed, dying, wordless, looking up at me with pain and dark recrimination in her eyes.

"Mother," I said aloud. A scrambled moment as the last vestiges of dream lingered. Then I was awake, and my voice hung awkward in the silent house.

I had held the ashes all night. Warmed, supple, through the silk they felt almost alive—almost. Sun had made its way into a corner of the tangled garden outside: the promise of a clear day for once. Why then did it seem so haunted, so bittersweet?

Then I remembered. Today was the last day of my stewardship. Atticus had found a temple for my mother in Beitou, north of the city proper, and we were scheduled to meet with the director this afternoon. In a basket by the door, I had piled my offerings: a bag of oranges, a pear wrapped in its own soft pillow and cellophane. Atticus had explained that I could bring an offering for her.

"An offering? Like a sacrifice?"

He smiled patiently. "It’s not so primitive as you think. It can be fruit or drinks or crackers. Did your mother like something in particular?"

"Snelgrove’s ice cream," I said. "And XO chili sauce."

We were sitting in his apartment, his lofty, skyward windows a shifting palette of sun and gray. He had bought a bright orange orchid from the weekend flower market and was trying to decide where to place it permanently in the spartan expanse of the living room. The walls had been newly painted in a sandy color, and the floor had been scrubbed and oiled.

"Maybe just some oranges," he murmured. "That will be easiest."

He sat down opposite me. "You have seen Xiao P lately?"

"Yes."

"Ah," he said carefully. "And how does he seem?"

"He’s okay. I guess." I watched him fiddle with the foliage. Abruptly, I asked, "Is the Palace a money-laundering operation?"

He looked startled. "Did Xiao P say that?"

"No. He said your main revenues are not from karaoke customers."

He turned the orchid a little on its tile, so that the showy bloom faced the window. "He is mistaken in that. As the bookkeeper, I should know." He pursed his lips as he said this, however, preoccupied. "What else did he say?"

"He wouldn’t tell me anything."

Atticus stroked the luminous petals pensively, checking the underside of a leaf for signs of blight. After a moment, he looked up.

"You will forgive me, Emerson, but I have a friend coming in a half hour."

"Oh." Frustrated, I stood up.

"No, no, no. Stay until he arrives. He is an old friend of mine. We lived in New York together. We are organizing a rally for a legislative candidate put up by the DPP. You know the DPP?"

"Democratic Progressive Party."

"Yes. Nationalists, with a small
n
. Pro-independence." He clenched a fist and his mouth hardened. He took a small pair of clippers from his pants pocket and began clipping the strings that held the orchid’s stem to a stake.

"Was your mother pro-independence?" he asked.

"I don’t know." My father had been blacklisted after graduate school for holding dinner parties at which they sang Taiwanese songs. "She was against the Nationalists, I suppose, but I never heard her say anything directly about current politics, Taiwanese or American. She liked Reagan because he was in the movies."

I watched him clip a few more strings.

"Why…" I hesitated, curious. "Why do you want independence?"

Atticus looked sharply at me.

"I mean," I stammered. "I just want to understand. I’ve never heard anyone—here—say anything against reunification. They already do a lot of their business on the mainland anyway. They have family there. The push for independence, it just seems like it runs on—I don’t know. Dreams, theories. Ideas, maybe. But only that."

Atticus’s face had darkened.
"Only,"
he repeated.
"Only?"
He tilted his head. "Why so little respect for ideas, Xiao Chang?"

He looked down and adjusted the pot on its tile, turning it infinitesimally to catch some elusive angle of light.

"Do you know what happened when the Nationalists landed here after the war?" he asked softly.

"An incident." I tried to remember what Angel had told me. "A shooting over taxes in a public square. Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers killing local merchants."

"The shooting was just the end result. I mean before that."

"No, I don’t know."

"There was a betrayal. Taiwan, it has never been autonomous. It is too strategic, speaking of geography, for people to let it alone. Holland, Spain, and Portugal, all of them had settlements here. The Manchu took it over a few centuries ago, and immigrants from the mainland have settled the island for over two hundred years. It was… an outlier, a prefecture of the Chinese kingdom—they neglect it sometimes, but still, Taiwan was part of the empire.

"Now Taiwan was given to Japan at the end of the Sino-Japanese War. A big dishonor for China; you cannot imagine the shame. You must understand: China considers—still considers—Japan the inferior force. A barbaric country. To be defeated by Japan would be a terrible humiliation, as deep as the humiliation America would feel if it was defeated by China, maybe."

He smiled mischievously. I waited for him to go on.

"And the Japanese occupation was not kind. The island resources, they diverted them to benefit Japan only. Only Japanese could be spoken. Naturalization of all Taiwanese was enforced. Meaning, partly, that your Chinese name was wiped from public record and they gave you a Japanese name instead. To me, that is a special kind of insult, the worst kind. To take somebody’s name away! You know that story, what is it called? About the dwarf and the hay?"