The Foreigner (20 page)

"My passport, you mean."

"Mmhn."

"I’ve thought. I still don’t know."

He looked out over the gray water. "What’s to think about? You could get out of this cock-loving hellhole tomorrow and go home. Just like that."

"You don’t like it here," I said, surprised. It had never occurred to me before. "All these years I thought… I assumed… you were happy here."

He stiffened. "Maybe happiness isn’t the goal," he said. "Maybe happiness is no fucking good to me."

"What is the goal, then?" I asked. A coldness grazed my spine, like a foot across my grave.
Happiness!
I could hear my mother saying.
If all you want is happiness!
It was like coming upon your name in someone else’s correspondence—the sense of two people communing behind your back. Perhaps, in the end, Little P had been closer to my mother than I had been; perhaps he understood her better than I ever would have. A ship sounded its doleful note. We were out along the military side of the harbor now, the water choppy, fathomless.

"Knowledge,"
said Little P. "Experience." He stood dangerously, deliberately at the edge of the dock.

"Come away from there."

"You wouldn’t understand."

"You keep saying that. How can I understand what you won’t explain? Get
away
from there."

"You don’t explain something like this," he said. He walked a length of the edge, arms out for balance. "Either you know it or you don’t. I cut the cord a long time ago."

"I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Goddamn it, Little P."

Seawater sloshed his ankles. He wavered dangerously.

"I used to steal from the register," he said. "At the Remada."

"What? When?"

"When do you think? Two hundred, three hundred bucks a pop."

I stopped chasing alongside. "But… why? We always gave you money."

"Why, why." Irritated, he spat into the water. "It wasn’t for the money."

"Then for what?"

He struggled internally, his face at once contorted and beatific. Then gave up. "Fuck it. I said you wouldn’t understand."

I let him drift down the waterfront, away from me. How quickly one could go from love to murder. A few hours ago I’d thought he was doomed, castrated, bleeding somewhere and alone; now I wished… what? Not that he was dead, but that he had never been.

Later, as if he had read my thoughts: "You ever think what it’s like to die?"

It was dark; rain drummed on the hood, showed in the headlights of the truck as I drove. A sheen of reflected light off Little P’s glasses gave him an eyeless look, the road traveling up his lenses like a scroll of film. The caskets bumped in the truck bed.

"No." The question unnerved me. "Heaven and hell, I suppose. Angels and devils."

"Not death: dying. I mean the process."

"Quit it."

"A gunshot, for example. People say it’s like burning."

"Shut
up,
Little P!"

A set of flares showed on the shoulder of the road up ahead. In my distress, I swerved the truck too sharply; we fishtailed, brakes shrieking, before the tires regained their purchase. The purse strap was rubbing my neck raw. I tore it off and tossed it to Little P.

"What the hell is this, anyway?" he said.

I tried to think of a good phrasing. "Ashes?"

"Ashes."

"You know."

"Jesus Christ. I thought you found her a place. You carry her
around
?"

I didn’t answer.

"You poor fuck." He stared down at the purse. "For Christ’s sake, she’s
dead
. Go home. Let me take care of it."

I reached over with one hand and grabbed the purse.

"There’s something called memory," I said. "There’s something called dignity, even if she doesn’t know it anymore. It has to be considered."

"There’s something called selfishness," he said. "There’s something called pride. You don’t believe in life after death any more than me. You really think her burial makes a difference to anyone but you? It’s for your own goddamned pride you’re doing this—nobody but you."

"What would you know about love anyway?" I shouted. "What would you know about loyalty, or even decency?"

His eyes revealed a flash of murderous white.

"You sanctimonious bastard," he said harshly. "What do you know about anything? I told you, I had reasons! You think I’ve spent all these years away without giving her a thought? You don’t know shit. Give me those!" He lunged at me.

The truck veered as I fought him off, clipping him in the jaw with my shoulder. The tires rutted on the shoulder. Horns blared, headlights blinding from both directions.

"Little P!"

Suddenly he desisted. Up ahead, the red and blue lights of a police cruiser whirled. He slid down in his seat.

"What is it?" he murmured.

"What? I don’t know! A ticket?" The cruiser was pulled over to the side of the road, behind a truck rather like ours, the blue flatbed with a tarp over the top. The cop shone a flashlight over the truck’s gate, which had not been opened.

When a few kilometers had passed, Little P sat up dazedly.

"Was it a ticket?"

"I don’t know. Something. A truck pulled over."

We had come to the outskirts of the city now. Little P was quiet. His thin profile reminded me of a blade against the window. He made a half motion to touch the ashes, drew back, and I saw the glint of a tear on his face.

"I did love her," he said. "But it all got fucked up somehow. I would’ve come home if it were different. I stayed away for her sake. So don’t say I didn’t love her. Even though it doesn’t fucking matter, now."

A
TTICUS’S SCANDAL
regarding the opposition candidate broke the next day. I read about it in the English dailies over a breakfast of cornflakes and watery-tasting milk. Zhang’s offense was a confusing amalgam of larceny and perversion: he had arranged to receive kickbacks from a nuclear power plant he had pushed for, and he had hired a prostitute and asked her to tie him up and urinate on him, then skipped out on the bill. It was unclear how these two bits of information were related, if at all, and I thought Atticus and his cohorts had done rather badly in this instance; the disparate charges weakened one another and made them look like a hit job.
The China Post,
allied with the Nationalists, angrily denounced the stories as lies. I scraped up the silt at the bottom of my bowl and thought of Atticus, of the weird, strident passion that had possessed him when he had spoken of China, and of his father. It was not beyond him to make up a story.

"It’s not a story," said Angel. We were thronging through the crowd near the Presidential Building later that day, where Zhang’s opponent, Li, was scheduled to speak. Angel had her camera; one of the dailies had hired her as a photojournalist for the event, but for some reason, instead of her usual boots she had chosen to wear a pair of shiny black pumps, which encumbered her vast feet like clams. She limped along quickly, pausing now and then to grab my arm for balance and massage the backs of her heels. "Zhang is a scumbag. When he was running for Senate, he got his henchmen to beat up a radio personality who was bad-mouthing him on the air."

"That doesn’t make him a larcenist."

"No, but it indicates character."

"The prostitute is nobody’s business but his own."

Angel made a face. "Why are you defending him?"

"I don’t know." A man waving the red and blue fields of the Taiwan flag nearly knocked me over as we ducked under his arms. "Vilification makes me nervous. Any kind of intense communal feeling makes me nervous. This thing, for instance." I looked about at the massing faces.

Angel made her way toward the podium, where a bank of photographers waited for the motorcade to arrive. The audience was quite a bit bigger than the one in the memorial park, and more restive, its excitement felt in the tense shifting along its edges. One dry, shriveled woman gripped the handle of her umbrella like a weapon. When the Nationalist Party candidate had lost the presidential election several years ago, Angel noted, a number of old ladies had gone out and smashed the windshields of parked cars in angry response, the force of pride unstinting even now that their eyes were weakened and blue.

The start time for the rally came and went with no sign of Li. The coordinator played the same music track over and over again as the wind flagged, picked up, flagged again. The sky looked diffident, and the noisemakers ceased except in isolated bursts, which sounded, in the quiet, like sarcasm. I glanced at my watch; I had promised to meet Grace at noon. Thirty minutes, forty. I slipped up to the podium and motioned to Angel.

"I have to go," I told her.

"You’re
leav
ing?
Now?
" Her face fell. She socked me in the shoulder again, slapped me about the shoulders and head. "He hasn’t even
got
here yet."

"Quit it." I ducked and caught her wrists. "You can tell me about it later."

She patted my cheek, hard. "Fine. Go then, Casanova. What’re you waiting for, smooches?" She planted one on my upper lip, or would have, except I was turning away; her lips brushed my ear.

As I left the grounds, I heard a low rumbling like the first intimations of an earthquake. I stopped, turned. The sound swelled, a river rushing up through the registers, wild, inexorable, erupting in a roar and shout. Chants; the loud gunshot crackle of a microphone being swung around. Hundreds of heads turned in new attention. A young woman hanging off a barricade screamed, wept. Li had arrived at last.

"RABBIT, YOU
see?" Grace pointed up at the sky, tracing the billow of a cloud.

"Don’t see it," I murmured, eyes half-closed.

"Ear
neibian
. Nose
neibian
."

We drifted slowly on the current, the tepid water washing gently against our paddleboat. The day was warm, with an underlying crispness—too lovely for an English lesson. Grace had suggested lunch and paddleboats at Xindian. The river was wide, its steep embankments glutted with colorful restaurants and cafés. Children’s voices floated across the water, the tinkling of bells—sounds of safety, innocence. The anxieties of the last few weeks faded, evaporating in the sun.

"A do not like come here," Grace was saying. "I think he do not like the children."

I opened my eyes with a sigh, idyll broken. "But you said he works as a kindergarten teacher."

"Yes." Grace nodded. "Is very strange.
Tade xin hen shen
."

I dipped my hand in the water. I doubted A’s heart was particularly deep. Muscular, perhaps.

"Do you love him?" It sounded too blunt. I had vowed to keep my envy in check.

She smiled, modest, continuing to look up at the piled clouds, but the smile appeared distressed. "I hope," she murmured.

"You aren’t sure?"

"No, no. My meaning is, I hope
he
to love
me
."

"That wasn’t my question." I struggled to sit up in my seat.

She glanced back toward shore, uneasy. "We must to go back soon."

"We have the boat for another hour."

She wouldn’t look at me.

"Come on, Grace. Is it so hard to know?"

"Please," she said, suddenly on the verge of tears.

"You have the right to want something yourself too." Perhaps she couldn’t understand me. "You know what I mean by ’right’?"

"The right. The right." A flash of sudden fury showed in her gentle face, shocking me. It disappeared instantly, but the vestiges of it remained in her voice. "A too, he say ’the right’ many times also. ’I have right to go here.’ ’I have right to do this.’ I know what means ’the right.’ But I have not the right. You do not know."

Tears spilled down her cheeks; she turned away from me. The curve of her neck trembled, proud, miserable. I felt worse than if she had slapped me.

"I’m sorry, Grace."

The tremble dissolved into hard, silent sobbing that shook her like a brutal hand. Bewildered, I slid over and put my arms around her. She put her hands to her temples, digging her nails in a little, as if to wipe out a memory, or a vision, but she would not say what this private image was.

Gradually she calmed down, leaning into me. I looked down at her, the soft, dark hair, the surprising flash of strength despite her pale beauty, and thought,
Could I?
To venture out again into the possibility of love, which I’d thought was gone forever—hope and desolation made the sunlight suddenly cold. Even as I shivered, Grace turned her face upward, cheeks still wet. Her eyes darkened as we looked at each other—a glimpse of uncertainty, of surprise perhaps, but not of repugnance or doubt. We were drifting close to shore, but the sounds of voices and bells receded as I wiped her tears away with my thumb, close and tender.

Then, before our lips touched, the paddleboat drifted from under the footbridge, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dark figure on the arcade above the waterfront, framed by bright awnings, staring down at us. Instantly I pulled away from Grace.

"Emerson?"

The man moved to the wide suspended footbridge and leaned on the rail, spitting into the water.

"He
wants
me to see," I said. "God. Dear God."

Grace shook my arm. "What happen?"

"Poison."

"Duyao?"
She scanned the bridge anxiously. "
Shenma yisi?
What poison?"

"Nothing. Let’s get back to shore." The lovely peace of the afternoon had been shattered; the voices from the riverbank now sounded isolated, separate and forlorn. I pedaled grimly. "Don’t look at the bridge."

But I looked back myself. Poison lifted a finger in recognition—pointing, wordless, at Grace.

"THEY SHOT
him," said Angel. We had arranged for tea at a
pao mo cha
house later that evening, at an open-air café, with carved tables and railings, and an arched wooden doorway framing an unspectacular view of the Zhong Xiao subway station. The ubiquitous television was running another news broadcast, and she watched it distractedly, chewing her thumbnail. She held her camera close in her lap, like an animal, and I thought she was referring to the photographers at the rally.