The Foreigner (3 page)

"Such a disappointment," I repeated. "Such a disappointment."

I tossed the whiskey bottle away, grabbed my trousers, and flung open the door. Some kind of conviction or decision had taken root, so deep that even I didn’t know what it was. But it would begin with an accounting; it would begin with a confrontation of facts.

I stormed down the stairs to the parking lot and unlocked the front office, slamming the door behind me.

"Mother!"

Somehow, the night had passed into early morning, and the lucent predawn light showed weakly at the blinds. The back room was dark and studded about with glass jars full of her medicinal herbs. On the far windowsill, a large, warty piece of galangal hung suspended in its matrix like an embryo, while a ceramic
plat
on the sideboard labored under ten tiers of lucky bamboo. The wooden sofa, the carpets, the love seat—she had draped everything in plastic; she had covered the floor with protective vinyl sheets.

Raggedly, I ripped the plastic sheeting off the armchair and struggled to tear it to bits, knocking into the bamboo and stumbling over the coffee table. A jar of dried rose hips fell and shattered on the floor. Panting, I drew up short and wrenched open the connecting door to her apartment. "Mother!"

The narrow hallway was clean but dark, and the garlanded portraits of her parents hung at the end, stern, impassive, the candles on the shelf beneath them blown out.

"Mother!"

In the kitchen, a plate of sliced apple sprinkled with salt browned on the counter. The bathroom was freshly scrubbed, and her false teeth kept silent counsel in a dish of mineral water. She had mended and washed a pair of panty hose and hung them to drip-dry on a makeshift line across the tub.

In the bedroom, a hand—bluish, cold, fingers curled toward the baseboard. She had been putting a handful of fake flowers in a vase, the stems now scattered violently across the floor.

"Mother?"

I walked over to her, stooping down to gather up the broken bouquet. Carefully I placed it back in her hand and closed the fingers around it.

Sirens approached. The noise grew louder and louder, until it seemed to be right inside my head. On and on it went, the snarling, the horns, the high-pitched wailing, and then, just at the point of pain, it passed. Perspiration ran like tears down my face. I got up and found the phone in the front office.

"Nine-one-one," said the dispatcher. A pause. "This is 911. Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?"

I opened my mouth to give her the address of the Remada Inn. But instead I heard a flat voice issuing a strange, fragmentary bulletin.

"My mother is dead," it said. "My mother is dead."

O
F COURSE SHE WAS NOT DEAD,
not exactly, or—rather—not yet. The paramedics arrived in a welter of lights and noise that drew all our customers out of their rooms; they milled around the parking lot in varying states of undress. As they watched, the attendants wrapped her up, lifting her into the ambulance with a professional efficiency that stunned me, for it seemed to make light of the pale transformation lying silent on the gurney. One paramedic even hummed as we sped to the hospital.

The diagnosis was heart failure, a stopping of the heart that left her comatose, her body curled into a faint fetal position in the hospital bed. I stayed with her, dozing on the couch, watching the brisk rotation of nurses come through.

At work, the annual reports swam before my eyes. A week, two weeks passed, and she didn’t wake up, although sometimes she spoke, a broken Chinese word here or there that I couldn’t understand. I checked in on the motel, where her rooms and mine remained exactly as we had left them: the scattered flowers on her floor, my empty whiskey bottle and unmade bed.

This white period of waiting might have gone on forever, except one evening the doctor came in and closed the door deliberately behind him. I had just arrived at the hospital after a long, hazy day of meetings and could not quite register what the man was saying as he put a piece of X-ray film in my hands.

"What’s this?" I asked.

Again he spoke, urgent, directing the film toward the overhead light and moving a pencil across it. The image was indecipherable to me, tissues of white on black, like galaxies.

"Her pelvic bone," said the doctor. "Eaten away. There. And there."

I stared, could not make sense of it. "And?"

" ’And?’" The doctor withdrew the film, blew out a breath. "Mr. Chang, why hasn’t she come in before? With a cancer this advanced, we don’t know where to start."

"I didn’t know," I whispered. "She never said a word."

"No pain?" He sounded skeptical. "No fatigue?"

"She wouldn’t have said." I thought of her trembling hand around the teacup the night of my birthday dinner. "She was taking herbs. Chinese medicines. I suppose she was treating herself."

"Herbs?" He looked like he was going to kill me.

His pager went off. He glanced down at it briefly, moved toward the door. Then relented, slightly. "I’m very sorry, Mr. Chang. I’ll be in tomorrow morning to go over her course of treatment with you."

"Wait!"

He paused, half out in the corridor.

"You said… Is she… in pain?" I asked. The idea had bothered me since the night she had been admitted.

"Maybe," he said. Then, reluctant: "Well, yes. Probably." He ran a hand over his thinning hair, came forward, patted my arm reassuringly with a big paw. "But she’s too far along to know it."

When he was gone, I drew my chair up to the bedside and took her hand. The nurses came and went, their footsteps sharp and echoing in the halls.

I don’t know how long I sat there. At dusk, I thought I felt her stir a little. She made a small sound in the back of her throat.

"Mother?"

But it was nothing, only a catch of her breath. She lay there, sleeping deeply in her bed, beneath the surface of consciousness, like a person floating just below the waterline in a river. I felt, suddenly and very surely, that I could wake her up if I wanted to; I could call her up out of that subterranean world of dreams. But then whatever pain she was suffering would become real to her, reclaimed along with her motel and her account books and her pride and sorrows. Already, perhaps, she had suffered for months without saying so.

The room had gotten colder; shadows drew close around me. In retrospect it seems that a hand other than mine had grasped the tubing and loosed the clamp enough to allow the morphine drip to accelerate—1.00, 1.50, 1.75 milliliters. The evening sky had darkened the room enough that objects appeared gray and impersonal. I have no recollection of intent. I remember carefully removing my shoes and then lying down on the bed next to my mother, trying to warm her thin, curled body.

And when, in the morning, I awoke, she was staring at me, head fallen to one side, looking into my face with uncharacteristic fondness, a soft, cloudy expression. Her lips were parted as if to speak, but whatever she meant to say to me I would never know. Years ago, in the motel parking lot, I’d come across an injured gypsy moth, hand-size; ants had swarmed around it, industriously breaking down the feathered body and fins while the great laboring creature flexed its wings mightily, like the slow blink of an eye, or the beat of a heart, failing. Each day there was a little less of it. Like the death of an emperor, or the slow passing of a legend into nothing—a thready skeleton, its splendor now gone.

"EMERSON CHANG?"

The receptionist looked up crossly from her desk, a cigarette in hand.

"Yes?"

She puffed at me. "You can go in. Mr. Carcinet is ready for you."

I was at the lawyer’s, a week or two after the memorial service. My mother had named Pierre Carcinet the executor of her will. The man had been a friend of my father’s when my father was alive, and although my mother had never liked Mr. Carcinet personally, I suppose she had named him executor because he was a lawyer, and she had always liked the propriety of doing things through official channels. I had met him at the service. A tall, cadaverous man with a voice that rasped like a twig. The receptionist directed me toward an inner door.

Mr. Carcinet sat behind a massive ebony desk, smoothing his tie as if it were a pet. He was long and sallow and angular, bald as a skull, with something fastidious about his ashy-looking mouth.

"Ah, Mr. Chang." He stood up and indicated a chair, moving an enormous pile of papers to one side of his desk in order to look more directly at me. As I sat down, he put his fingertips together and regarded me silently over their tented peaks, once in a while putting the tip of a gray tongue to his top lip, as if perplexed. His huge bony elbows jutted out on the arms of his chair as he rocked back and forth minutely.

"Well," he said at last. "I’d like to say I’m sorry once again for your loss. I understand that you and your mother were quite close, and this must be very hard for you."

"I suppose so," I said, resenting the sympathy. His vast, shiny black desk was out of proportion to the tiny airless room. I could see my face distorted and reflected in the glossy finish. I hadn’t shaved since the service—had not been out of my apartment at all, in fact. A sparse, erratic beard stuck out in strands from my chin, and my suit was rumpled; my hair was too long and matted like a thatch.

"As it involves the motel," Pierre Carcinet was saying. "The"—a shuffling of papers—"the… Remada? Inn? The will must be probated in order for any transfer of property to take place. This can take a while, I warn you, so the sooner we get the process started, the better, yes?"

He paused for a moment. Then for some reason he lowered his voice.

"You have a brother, correct, Mr. Chang? But I understand he hasn’t been, shall we say, very
close
in some time?"

"I haven’t seen my brother in almost ten years."

I felt suddenly cold at the mention of Little P. It had been so long since I’d discussed him with anybody that, without quite knowing it, I had come to feel proprietary about his existence. It had never occurred to me that my mother would discuss him with anyone else. I saw his dark face fleetingly, almost Russian in its long proportions. The memory gave me an unexpected wrench.

"…tied up in property," Pierre Carcinet pronounced, looking at me expectantly. When I didn’t say anything, he put his hands on the desk and leaned forward.

"This
means,
" he said, enunciating, "that you and your brother have quite a responsibility on your shoulders. If you should decide to sell the motel, I hope you will confer with me from time to time in order to make sure there are no complications."

"I haven’t thought about selling the motel at all," I said, offended. "It’s the family home."

Mr. Carcinet gave me a long, penetrating look and rubbed his chin reflectively for a while.

"Well, this brings me to the, shall we say, unpleasantness," he said at last. "I don’t mean to be blunt, Emerson, but I’m afraid the decision about the motel will not be yours to make."

His thin face behind the desk wavered a little, then stabilized.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," he said steadily, "that in her will, your mother left the Remada Inn to your brother, Peter Chang. You will receive some of her stock holdings and a smaller property she owns in Taiwan, but the motel goes to Peter."

Mr. Carcinet seemed to be fading into the distance; each time I looked up, he appeared farther and farther away, sad and puzzled across an expanding lake of glossy desktop. He stood up and bent toward me.

"Are you all right?" came his voice distantly. "Emerson? Water," he said, conferring with someone else, and then a buzz of voices like bees on a screen door.

Slowly he came back into view, along with a flowered Dixie cup full of tepid water.

"I’m all right," I said, straightening up. The water tasted like chlorophyll, and I choked a little as I drank it.

Mr. Carcinet put his hands in his pockets and sat down again. "I’m sorry, Emerson," he said. "I’m sure this is a shock." He sighed. "It might console you somewhat to know that the property in Taiwan is already in your name, at least. Your mother was a detail-minded soul. If you like, I can check into the value of your equity. I’m sure it’s—you could say—substantial."

I shook my head, mute. "It’s not the
money,
" I managed to say, inadequately. And it really wasn’t the money. It was driving my mother to the grocery store each week; to the bank every other week; repairing her sinks; preparing her tea; presiding over her monthly mah-jongg game; washing her hair in the kitchen sink every third Friday. Vacations spent squiring her around Niagara Falls, New York City, Yosemite. The Statue of Liberty. The pale veined parchment of her arm against the hospital bed, trailing clear tubes.

Mr. Carcinet offered me a hard fruit candy from a tin, but I wasn’t hungry. He picked one out himself with his long, flat fingertips.

"Now part of the reason I called you in here, Emerson, is to ask if you have any idea where your brother is. I sent him a letter a couple of weeks ago at the Taipei address your, ah, mother provided, but I have not received a reply, and there is no phone number or e-mail."

"I don’t know where he is," I said dully. "I got a postcard from him last Christmas, but there wasn’t a return address. I think he’s still in Taipei. The address my mother gave you should be current. I don’t have a number for him."

"And there is no other way of contacting him? Relatives? Friends?"

I thought about this. There was my mother’s brother, of course, whom I had never met. After my mother died, I had called him at the number in her address book, but my Chinese was so poor that the person on the other end had hung up on me. I didn’t know any of Little P’s friends.

An idea, only half-articulate, took shape in the dull recess of my mind.

"I could go," I said.

Mr. Carcinet rolled the candy from one cheek to another.

"Go where?"

"To Taipei. I can arrange time off from work next month. I’ll track him down. Maybe I can get him to come back with me. At least long enough to settle the estate."