The Foreigner (19 page)

I shook my head. "Then why did he go out with you if he wanted to bed a socially conservative Republican?"

"I think I was his Magdalene," she said without irony. "His exquisite taste of secret depravity. That’s the only thing I’m proud of in the whole thing. I hope he rots in hell because of me."

"How romantic," I said. "And there’s been no one since?"

"Not a one." She looked at me with a kind of weird intensity; I chalked it up to the whiskey.

"But you’re only twenty. When I was your age—"

I stopped; I had not thought of J in some time.

"When you were twenty?" Angel prompted.

"Nothing. I had a… relationship." The word sounded dismal and dry compared with what the thing itself had been. "I thought she loved me, but it seems she loved someone else."

"What happened?"

What had happened? Nothing. Something.

"Look, I’d rather not talk about it."

"But why? If it was twenty years ago—"

"Angel," I snapped. "Have another drink."

But after we had finished our drinks and gone home, and I was alone in my leaky house with the ashes tucked back under my pillow, I stared up in the dark and the sound of water came trickling back. The day had been hot and damp, and the tepid pond had lapped the shore. Our legs had touched; J had seemed expectant, languid. It was the most natural thing in the world to lean over, touch her waist, and kiss her. A brief, sweet, pendulous moment when she seemed to submit—and then the kiss went too far. I broke away, gasping.

"How long is this going to go on?" she called, following me up onto the bank as I retreated along the path through the woods.

She brushed aside a branch and stood at the edge of the copse regarding me. The water had dried on her skin. A kind of loneliness tore at me.

"I’m tired of it," she said. "You want me; you don’t want me. I’ve been patient, but I’m getting too old for this. You have to say the word yourself. What do you want?"

"You," I said, afraid. "But not just any old way. Not just some kind of, I don’t know, animal rooting around in the mud. The moment has never been right. Just give me some time."

"Emerson." In the muddy light, she sighed, looked at me with pity and exasperation. "Don’t you know?" She touched my cheek.

Later, I would think of her touch as a killing one—the gentle, hypnotic stroke that lulls the unsuspecting to sleep. In the end, the ashes beneath my pillow had proved more constant than J had, less duplicitous, less bound to make a point about the harshness of the world.

Z
HONG QIU JIE
APPROACHED,
relentless: three weeks, then two. Angel, who knew nothing of my money and family troubles, took me on a review circuit of teahouses all over the city: civilized, little, dark places with smoky teas and carved pots; bubble-tea stands; a minimalist tea café with industrial seating and some kind of bizarre theater troupe rehearsing behind a blank white sheet. In the garden courtyard of a rich, pensively designed teahouse, notes of the
erhu
fell like droplets in the lambent light of late afternoon.

"Do you taste the oils?" asked Angel.

"Hm?"

"Oils." She pointed at something, an imperceptible film on the surface of the tea.

"Oh." I tipped my cup and squinted, checked my cell phone.

Angel punched me in the arm. "You’ve been looking at that thing all day," she complained.

I merely shook my head.

"It’s that girl, right?"

"What girl?"

"Starbucks girl. Million bucks girl. Still waiting on her, right? That’s so quaint."

"I’m not waiting on anyone," I said, in no mood for Angel’s pokings and proddings. I had left messages for Little P all week, none of which he had returned. Though Poison had said Mid-Autumn Festival, there was no reason to trust my rat-faced cousin. The
erhu
plucked, the fountain in the courtyard plashed. The artificial quiet grated. Restless, I spilled my tea.

"Sorry."

"Go home," said Angel irritably. "Call me when the chickie dumps your ass. I’ll be laughing too hard to say I told you so."

Outside, I dialed Little P again and got no answer. I started for home, wishing too late that I could go back to the teahouse with Angel; the peace there was better than this aimlessness and worry.

The market arcade near my house was eerily deserted, awnings flapping, plastic stools stacked—too early for dinner, too late for lunch. At the mouth of my street, I paused, uneasy. Was it paranoia or fact, the feeling of being shadowed? I looked around. Of course there was nothing. I’d make myself some tea. I unlocked my gate, trod the path through the weeds.

As I shut the gate, something winked in the grass. A piece of embedded glass had been knocked from the top of the wall. I picked it up carefully, intending to throw it away, when I looked at it again.

Blood, the thinnest film of it glazing the glass edge. I touched it, pulled my finger away. A cat, I told myself. But as I stood in my darkening yard looking at the glass, I knew that was an evasion, like the artificial peace of the teahouse. The truth, I felt, was very near to hand.

A plastic bag full of newspapers had been left at the front door. Fearful, I approached as if it were a bomb. But the weight of the bag was organic, soft and meaty, not mechanical. A curious smell, sweetish but rotten, rose into the air as I opened it. I pulled out the newspapers, unrolled them.

A fist-size mass glistened red in the nest of wet, blood-dark papers, tentacles of gray snaking it through like veins. I dropped the bag, backed away. Not human, I thought—prayed. At least not human. Dog, bull, pig—anything else.

A stained card had fluttered to the ground and stuck in the grass. I leaned over and read the neat, childish hand. A sentence, scrawled in pencil, almost obscured by blood:

"This means cojones," it said. "maybe you speak the spanish now?"

THE NEXT
day a crowd had gathered in the street outside the double doors when I arrived at the Palace. The mood was festive; they were watching with evident enjoyment as a covered flatbed truck tried to maneuver out of the narrow alley off the street.

Little P was at the wheel, apparently whole. My chest loosened, blood moving painfully again. I knocked on the window.

"Get these fuckers
out
of here," he shouted. The truck’s fender shrieked against the side of the building, and the crowd muttered appreciatively. "They’re blocking the whole street."

"How’d you get this thing in here anyway?"

He wiped his forehead. "Are you going to help me or what?"

"Jieguo… jieguo yixia
…
"
I said feebly, sweeping my arms in circles. There was a shuffling, like a mild ripple on a placid lake, but otherwise no response. I went back to the window.

"Nothing doing."

"Shit."

"Little P, I need to talk to you—"

"Son of a cunt, Emerson, not now!"

"But I—"

"Get in!" he barked. "Just get in!"

I ran around to the passenger side.

"Hold on." Grimly, he set the truck in gear. We bucked backward, angled, snapping off the right mirror cleanly. The crowd cheered; a woman picked up the mirror from the ground and waved it at us like a flag.

"Where are we going?" I asked, once we were settled into the flow of traffic. Little P kept glancing in the rearview mirror.

"I got some business in Jilong."

North of the city, on the coast—a port town. I couldn’t ask why: he was wound up. The truck was government-issued, the kind they used for construction, and battered, misaligned. Little P drove fast and reckless along the highway, cutting off semis, veering onto the rutted shoulder several times. Two trucks converged ahead of us, the space between them narrowing to a slit. As we shot through it, I gripped his arm involuntarily.

"Look out, Little P!
Little P!
"

He pressed into the next lane and shot out safely onto the interchange.

"Take the wheel," he said.

"What?"

"Take it." Abruptly he stood up and shifted out of his seat. The truck veered to the edge of the road, clocking 130 kilometers; cars blared behind us. I lunged across him for the wheel and pulled us back onto the asphalt.

"Are you crazy?" I shouted.

"It’s just a regular clutch transmission. You’ll get the hang of it," he said, flicking ash from his sleeve. He had a cigar this time, which he lit with eerie calm as I struggled to hold the truck steady. "I’m doing you a favor."

"Go to hell." The truck wavered and barreled left.

"It’s an object lesson. You know what your problem is?" he asked.

"
My
problem?"

"You’re afraid to die."

Despite the lanes of traffic, I glanced over at him. He was without irony, without humor. "And you’re not, I suppose."

"No," he said simply, jaw bunched. "I’m not. Or I’m learning not to be. It’s the key to enlightenment, brother."

"Key to the insane asylum."

"Key to immortality," he shot back. "Those guys who walk through fire? They know. Nothing can touch you if you’re not afraid of death. No consequences, if you’re not afraid to lose."

He was in a weird mood; a sheen on his eyeballs made me think uppers, but I couldn’t be sure it was drugs. It was not the time to bring up Poison, or the package left on my doorstep.

For the rest of the ride he was quiet, except to give me directions. Every now and then I stole a glance at him. I hoped the talk about death was figurative, but the way he had abandoned the wheel of the truck suggested not.
I don’t want to know
. It would be so easy to simply get my passport and go home, forget…

JILONG WAS
cramped at the edge of its wide harbor and bore signs of its port heritage in the dingy little massage parlors up and down the narrow streets near the waterfront. Though it was sunny, mist blanketed the road like a fine shroud as it skirted the harbor. The truck ground up a steep graded hill.

We pulled up to an open garage storefront that seemed vaguely abandoned, a stark light shining far back in the airless interior, though I couldn’t quite see inside. The street was dark; the rest of the block seemed uninhabited.

I cut the engine, but Little P did not get out. He sat silently, the smooth plane of his face like a thin, treacherous wall. He looked like our father; he had the long, blunt nose and high forehead, the small white teeth. Odd to think that a stranger now inhabited those features. His hands clenched unconsciously on his knees.

He got out of the cab and went into the garage. I followed. The shop was dim and full of wood shavings, and a pair of garish red lights burned on a little altar near a couple of sawhorses. At the back of the room, white, ghostly planks of cedar and oak were piled against the wall like an inert army, unattended: coffins.

"Little P?" I whispered and heard
Little P Little P Little P
whispering back. The altar lights flickered.

Little P came out from the back of the shop with the proprietor in tow, a rough, thick man with a kind of oily pompadour and a finger missing from his right hand. He followed my brother closely and seemed to be wheedling or whining. Their low, muttered Chinese came through, half-understood, as if filtered.

"Next week," Little P was saying. "Next week. To Hong Kong."

The man murmured.

"Yes, myself," said Little P, impatient. "At the Chungking.
Wo yige ren qu
."

His friend seemed skeptical, dug a finger in his ear, muttered:
"Ni yige ren, queding ma?"

"I said alone,
duibudui
?" Little P’s voice had dropped to a quiet, pleasant register.
"You wenti ma?"

The man flicked his eyes at me distrustfully.

"I’ll wait outside," I told Little P. I wanted to get out of the shop anyway; the caskets pressed in on me at gruesome angles. Half-finished coffins were balanced on sawhorses in the center of the workshop, leaned up against the side walls. I had strange, fleeting impressions of bodies in them and thought of broken glass, a torn fingernail lying in the dirt.

In the glove compartment, I found Little P’s cigarettes and lit one.

"Why is it so quiet?" I asked Little P. He had come out of the garage looking more grim and distracted.

"What?"

"This street. There’s no one on it."

"Of course not." He jabbed his thumb at the coffin maker’s. "With this shit nearby?"

"Why not?"

"No one wants to live on a street with a coffin maker."

"Bad luck?"

"Fraud, raids. Sometimes they kidnap a body for ransom."

"Then why…" The question was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t ask it; he wouldn’t tell me anyway.

"I know a guy in Taipei," said Little P briefly, as if he’d heard me. He went around to the driver’s side of the cab and got his wallet and knife. "A stonemason, does tombstones. On his own right now, but he wants to network with other vendors. I’m picking up some casket samples for him."

It was a good story; I could almost believe it, except I knew that Little P was capable of telling the worst story with the unembarrassed calm of truth.
No consequences,
he had said,
if you’re not afraid to lose
.

It would take a while for all the samples to be loaded, he told me. We walked into town and had a snack at an open stall: oyster pancakes and rice, with thin soup and a bowl of little dried fish that tasted like salted crackers. Clouds had moved in. Little P ate mechanically. It struck me, as I watched him, that I had not seen him enjoy a meal since I had arrived; I had not, in fact, seen him smile or laugh except in scorn or defense.

We finished eating, paid, went out into the narrow streets to kill time. The bright tinkling of pachinko machines followed us, glimpses of a little temple courtyard full of garland vendors and incense, the white gardenias like confetti.

"You think about my offer any more?" he asked as we came to the warehouses near the docks.