The Foreigner (28 page)

"But why, Atticus? You worked for him. You answered his phones. You drove his campaign truck. He was
your
candidate."

His hand plucked the coverlet, agitated. He was silent.

"I am not admitting anything," he said finally. "But with a gun, one does not always aim to kill." He hesitated. "There was a report, the night before the rally, that the party was threatening voters in Wanhua. Not so unusual, I know. But just because it is common does not mean it is acceptable. The KMT are rotten—all gangsters, you know this, all corrupt. They care nothing for the power we have built, or try to build. But after so many incidents, the KMT still have credibility somehow! You know the president, his wife?"

"She’s in a wheelchair."

"Because the KMT ordered a hit on her husband. By mistake they hit his wife instead. They ran her over with a truck."

"You don’t know that, Atticus." That had never been proved.

"I
know
. I know who did it. They can cover up. They can play dirty all they want, but I
know
." He panted painfully, his skin damp and musty with the odor of age. I had touched again that curious sorrow, the grief that ate him up at the thought of his little island country. It was patriotism at its loyal best—and what had it come to? He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

"So on the day of the rally, I did not think so much. I knew what I had to do. If the KMT is going to be dirty, I am going to be dirty too. I did not tell Li what I am going to do; I do not want him implicated if things go wrong. I thought, If the people see this good man cut down, they will think it is the KMT’s doing."

"And vote for him instead of Zhang."

"What is needed," he said again, with bitterness, "is a new order. I am only calling on their sense of right. I am only making it clear to them what the Kuomintang is doing all along. I am reminding them of the KMT’s sins. Is this what they want for their government? For their country? You see this?"

He shook a page of newsprint that had been folded beneath his book.

"From this week. It says Taiwan was refused entry into the WHO, for diplomatic reasons. Meaning, for fear of offending China."

He moved his head restlessly and threw down the paper. "There is no moral fiber in the world. This is the WHO, the World Health Organization. Not the UN. Not a military alliance. Not even an economic treaty. It is about disease, about dying. It should not be about politics. China prefers that we die rather than let us go. Other countries, they prefer that we die rather than risk offending China."

He fell back, exhausted. "I am only telling the truth."

"You said you weren’t a vigilante. And Li lost the election anyway."

"It is the
effort
to learn the truth that matters, not only the result." His hands shook with rage. "What I failed to do for those girls, I may still do for my country. I may still redeem myself."

"That’s… They’re not the same thing, Atticus."

"Sometimes things take too long on their own." He closed his eyes, shook his head. He was growing hazy, confused. "The KMT would have us return to China, eventually."

"Maybe that’s what people want."

His eyes flew open. "People want that because they are getting rich off business in Shanghai, in Beijing," he said angrily. "They just want stability to keep on making the money, money, money!" He spat out the word. "It blinds them to what is important."

"And what’s that?" I asked softly, worried, for he had turned livid and looked feverish.

"Pride," he said. "Autonomy. Memory. It didn’t work," he said hopelessly, and tears spilled down his cheeks. He turned his head away. "Everything I did, it was no help."

He uncurled a hand beseechingly.

"Maybe people haven’t forgotten them," I said. "Maybe they’ve forgiven the past. Maybe they just want to move on."

"Never." He clenched his fist and put it beneath the covers. The feverish look had passed; now he seemed only tired and spent. He closed his eyes again and didn’t open them. I thought he was asleep, and I was about to get up and go away quietly when he murmured, "Emerson?"

"I’m still here."

He looked at me, a little fuzzy. It was hard to tell what he saw, for though he was looking at me, he was focused on something quite far away.

"I am getting older," he said. "I am already old. I told you before: I always thought I would see true independence in my lifetime. But it is not so certain now. How long do I have? A year? Two years? Five? Maybe not even so much.

"I want to tell you a secret," he said. "Sometimes I think it does not matter what happens to this country, as long as there is a resolution: either we are part of China or we are not. It is the uncertainty that will kill us, you know. Never to know where we will be in fifteen years, or ten years, or five. Why should we bother to build a freedom, or love, or business, if it will just be taken away?"

He passed a hand wearily over his eyes and felt for his tea. I took the mug into the hallway and poured out the cold tea in the drinking fountain. When I came back, Atticus had dropped off; he had taken his painkillers before I’d arrived. I filled the mug with fresh water and placed it next to the bed. He was really asleep this time, not just dozing, and his face was drawn again, no longer animated by the thought of principle.

A young man came into the room. If he was surprised to see me, he made no sign of it; he was too intent on Atticus to pay me any attention. He removed the book on the coverlet and placed a plastic pitcher of water on the bedside stand, then wiped Atticus’s face with a wet cloth. Atticus muttered; his hand came up unconsciously and clutched the man’s wrist with tenderness. In a little while, he slept.

I was standing by the window and happened to be glancing down at the street when the air outside suddenly constricted, seeming to breathe in. There was a moment of silence, and then the breath was released in a slow chord that mounted steadily until it reached a note of doleful, jaded warning. I had forgotten about the air-raid drill. The siren was sounded only once a year, an annual reminder of the tenuousness of the sunlit peace in the unsentimental streets below. I peered down at the sidewalk. The desolation was eerie at noontime: no people, and no cars along the thoroughfare. The only sign of life was a lean stray cat prowling along the perimeter of the park boundary across the street. I was glad Atticus was asleep. The ghostly voice, so plaintively raised, served only to confirm his particular despair.

DAWN OUTLINED
the mountains in clear blood red the next day, the Mid-Autumn Festival at last. Poison had been shunted to the back of my mind, but with the deadline came a renewed apprehension. Another storm was gathering over the strait, and the massing front cast a queer, glossy twilight even at noon. All day I felt that I moved behind a wall of thick tinted glass.

Around four o’clock, after a desperate, fruitless search for Angel, I came home drained—too tired, in fact, to notice the little lick of fire in the bedroom, wavering hesitantly in the dark. Then the light approached. Angel’s face swam up in the flicker, like a tense, unhappy ghost.

"I didn’t know where I should go," she began.

Her nose quivered; I’d brought home takeout from the eatery down the street and had been cracking open the box when she came out. Meekly, she ate two of my dumplings with her fingers and looked over at me. "Can I stay here for a while?"

I turned away. "What’s wrong with your grandparents’ place?"

"It’s for them that I left."

Despite myself, her urgency hit its mark.

"What is it?" I asked.

She swallowed. "I went to the police. Yesterday."

"And?" The word was choked; I didn’t want to know.

"I’m… not sure."

"Are they going to arrest Uncle?"

"I don’t know."

She walked up and down the room, twisting her fingers anxiously.

"Something weird is happening," she said. "I went down to the precinct this morning to talk to the officer, but when I got there, they said there was no history of my report. The disk I left there, with the images, my statement—there’s no record of them anywhere."

"No proof?"

"There’s proof. It’s still on my memory key." She jangled the stick at me, distracted. "That’s not the problem. Last night I was home alone. I fell asleep watching TV, you know? I must’ve slept too long, because when I woke up it was already dark, and everyone else was out at dinner. I was too lazy to get up and turn on the lights, so I was just lying there when I heard something at the window. Like a scraping, or clicking, but really soft. I thought it was just an animal or something, but it went on for like a few minutes, so I got up and pulled up the shade.

"There was a face out there, Emerson. He dropped down so fast I didn’t get a good look, but he was there. He was trying to cut the outside grille. He thought I wasn’t home."

"You don’t know they were targeting you," I said. I ate a dumpling; it tasted like cardboard. "There are lots of break-ins."

"Not where I live." She stopped pacing and looked at me. "You can’t cover for him forever," she said. Her voice rose as I ignored her, dumping out the bagged soup into two chipped bowls. "I can’t just forget."

"I am not turning my brother in," I said. The statement had the ring of a carefully constructed conviction, when in fact I had not known what I believed until this moment. "You do what you want, but I won’t be a party to it."

"I thought you were my friend," she said. "I thought you were a good person."

"Well, you were wrong."

Her mouth quivered. I lowered my gaze to the table, where the spread seemed suddenly cheap and impoverished. For Little P, for my mother, I couldn’t let it go, even if I should lose all face before my best friend. She rubbed her eyes, leaving dark smudges under them. She looked very young and very tired.

"Sit down," I told her. I pushed the take-out container over to her. "Finish this. Then go take a nap. You can have the bed."

"What about—"

"We won’t talk about it now. You look exhausted."

She began eating, face still streaked with tears.

"You know I didn’t mean it, about being your friend," I said. "Of course I’m still your friend—if you still want me. But you’re a better person than I am. I can’t see past my brother. You do what you think is right." I squeezed her hand.

After dinner, she went straight to bed. I washed her dishes, then sat at the kitchen table trying to read. High winds from the approaching storm had knocked power out momentarily, though the rain hadn’t come yet, and candlelight wavered over the page like water. I went into the bedroom to check on Angel; she had thrown the covers off and was sleeping with her arms flung over her head, breathing quick and anxious. I covered her again and went back out into the dining room.

My bottle of Jim Beam was dry. The wind whistled in the rain gutters, high and lonely. I thought of the night Uncle and Poison had paid me a visit. My money was still locked safely away in my account. Angel’s disk, her report, our proof—surely it would reach the right desk somehow, surely someone would take up our tip, and when they did, when the police busted the Palace, the mah-jongg debt would be erased, and Little P would be safe, from Poison at least, if not from the harshness of the truth and the law. I clutched at the fact of his physical safety like a drowning man at a straw. It was not enough.

Outside, the front gate clanged loudly. In its wake, I became aware of a sudden soft scritching, like nails scrabbling at glass. The noise stopped, then started up again, more deliberate, accompanied by a thin metal jangling.

The only weapon I had was a rusted hammer. I picked it up and opened the door quietly.

The sounds were fainter out here, but I paused and listened very carefully. They seemed to be coming from the side yard, in the thicket of azaleas covering the bedroom window. I tightened my grip on the hammer and crept around the corner. Again, the scritching stopped.

"Come out!" I hissed. "You want your money, you come out and get it, you fucker."

The bushes tossed and waved in the wind, but no one emerged.

I was sick of feeling hunted, sick of groveling, begging, bargaining. I marched up to the thicket and ripped aside the branches, hammer tensed and ready. Then I froze.

It was an owl, a small one with deep, hooded eyes that blazed at me in the weak light from the street. One claw was caught in a length of rusted chain dangling from the branches. As I reached in to untangle it, the bird beat its wings and let out a thin, raucous cry.

Once freed, it fluttered to the top of the fence and looked back at me. Dreamily, I moved to the front gate to watch it. I had the odd feeling that the bird was leading me somewhere, that I should follow it. Its dark silhouette darted down the street, to a wall topped with broken glass. The creature reminded me oddly of my father: an impression of sternness; stillness; the silence of pride. It had been years since I’d thought of him. He had died too long ago, his mark upon his sons overlaid by the imprint of my mother. It occurred to me, following the bird’s jagged course in the dim light, that this had been his home. He had passed through these streets without any sense of strangeness: thinking of love, maybe, thinking of exams, schoolwork, what to eat for dinner. He would not have learned English yet; Little P and I were not even ideas in his mind. If—through some wrinkle in time—I were to meet that young man now, the fact of communication would stand in the way. Crude gestures, pictures drawn on the ground—those would be our common tongue, the most primitive of languages, as if we were strangers, or brutes. The owl, opening out its wings, caught a gust of wind and disappeared into the dark night sky.

Smoke drifted through the alleys as I turned back toward home. Thin and gauzy and smelling of gas—a fire in one of the eateries along the main avenue, though it didn’t smell like a grease fire. Neighbors had gathered on the sidewalks, looking up and down the block through the gathering white air. A cat wailed. An old man in his undershirt turned a sightless eye toward me; somehow I could hear the burning of his cigarette. I began to run.