The Foreigner (31 page)

"Hold on." I jammed my foot on the gas. We shot past the pursuer. I thought we might lose him around the approaching bend. Then an explosion of lights, glass, pain.

"
MOTHER
?"
THE
word splintered the dark. Jigsaw angles loomed, neither up nor down. "Mother?"

Bits of glass sparkled all around me like translucent stars. I put out a hand to find the ashes, encountered nothing. A sense of suffocation encroached, drawing its hand over my face. Blindly, I kicked and fought, drowning.

"Ssh. Emerson. It’s me."

The paleness spoke urgently. As if from a great distance, I recognized her.

Angel took her hand from my mouth. "Are you all right?"

"What happened?"

"We flipped over. Are you hurt?"

I moved my head. Pain shot weakly through my neck and side, but I seemed, miraculously, whole.

"Thank God. We have to get out. Now."

Little P. The gun. Memory came back like a flood of cold water.

With difficulty, she unhooked my seat belt.

"Get out on this side," she whispered, kicking splinters of glass from the back window. "Away from the road."

We were out and halfway down the embankment when I stopped.

"The ashes! They’re still in the car!" I turned back.

"Leave them!" whispered Angel.

I ignored her.

"Emerson!"—despairing, but she did not stop me.

In the mess of shattered glass and smoke, I found the purse beneath the front seat and gathered it to me with a cold apprehension of temporary grace. If I had lost her; if I had left her there in the dark…

Headlights blazed down on the wreckage suddenly. A figure moved against the backlight; a shout went up.

"Run!" screamed Angel.

I slung the purse strap over my shoulder and hurtled after her. Another shout went up behind us.

Slipping, sliding, we went down over the lower embankment. I whipped my cheek on a branch and fell, jarring my shoulder, fell again. The brambles bit at me; I tore myself loose and looked for Angel, who was some distance ahead. The full moon was just rising above the gorge, and by its gathering light I could see her and the brushy, clay-dark terrain that went down and down, all the way to the bottom of the canyon. The brush dropped off, and I could hear the river running mightily below us in the white dark.

"There’s a bridge," gasped Angel as I caught up to her. "There’s a footbridge down here if I can find it again."

There was a crashing in the bushes above us, a faint halloo. We ran, Angel faltering, while my breath caught in my side. The sound of the river became clearer, if not louder, and all at once the path turned sharply and we were facing an old bridge, frayed rope and rough boards.

"Here!" called Angel. She flew ahead, turned. "Hurry!"

I hung back. Not an ordinary bridge; a relic from another era, made of sisal rope and wood. Some of the planks were already missing, some wearing away. Through the gaps I could see the faint white phosphorescence of the river below. The wind caught the ropes and lifted them, setting the bridge swaying over the chasm. I sank to my knees, gripping the rope rails shakily.

"Don’t think about it!" Angel yelled. "Don’t look down! Just keep going, one foot at a time! Keep going!"

I put one foot on the first plank, followed by the other. Immediately the wind tossed the bridge violently, and I sank to my knees again, whimpering.
Get up,
I ordered myself.
Get up
.

I raised myself again and continued, agonizingly slow. The rope fibers came off in my hands as I gripped them, and the rotted wood creaked and splintered underfoot. The whitecaps of the river were directly below me now; I looked down and saw them roiling. It must have been half a mile down, black as pitch, and still I could hear the roaring of it. Now there was a darkness. My legs buckled and would not move. I clutched the rope.

Angel was almost at the other end, shouting, "That’s it, Emerson, you’re almost there, keep going, keep going." I had to find a way to tell her to go on, hurry, without me.

The bridge shuddered and rocked. Someone had reached the foot of the bridge and was making his way toward me, slow but relentless. Sunk down on the rotting footboards, I froze and watched him come with a feeling of fatality. Though there was moonlight, I could not see his face; he seemed a figure of blank malice—dark, shadowed, foreign, and absolutely unknowable. I twisted my hand tightly in the ropes and moved a few inches toward the opposite shore, my breath rattling, eyes fixed on the approaching fate.

He had picked his way easily over the most treacherous parts of the bridge. Now he paused to gather himself and, with a fury and swiftness that stopped my heart, charged toward me, the faceless blank intent and savage.

A crack, and then he vanished, one of the planks split, falling away.

Angel shrieked. "Emerson!"

Huddled against the ropes, I stumbled forward, the bridge swinging tautly underfoot. I was almost there.

A scraping, a screech of wood giving way. I fell, caught at the remaining plank, and dangled there, legs suspended horribly above the roaring void.

"Emerson! Emerson!"
Angel’s face appeared above me, a face viewed from underwater as you drown.

I twisted, kicked, trying to pull myself back up. Angel shrieked anew; she seemed to be pointing at something farther down the bridge.

"Goddamn it, Angel! Help me!"

Then I saw: my pursuer. He too had caught himself before falling, and hung helpless, gripping the ropes and footboards. For a split second we stared at each other, bound together in horror at the darkness below.

I swung a leg up, hooked it over the rope railing. The other figure shouted, struggled.
Help me
—was that what he was saying?
Save me
—was that it? Strange how the words meant nothing to me, not anymore. I cared nothing about mercy, about love, about forgiveness. I only cared to live.

Without warning, the wind lifted the bridge and shook it, howling. My hands slipped. I shrieked as I swung upside down over the river, dangling by one leg. The water rushed overhead now, the patterns of white and dark like the bottom of the sea. Then my enemy—The wind had shaken him loose, and with horror I watched him fall away, spread-eagled, oddly silent. He had so far to fall that he seemed not to be falling at all but flying, released, like a soul wafted gently into the black. Coins tumbled from my pockets.

Angel was edging out onto the bridge sideways, trying to reach me. "Give me your hand!" she shouted.

But just then I felt the ashes slipping; the cord had caught and ripped on a nail. Wildly I grabbed at the purse as the cord unraveled, slipped from my neck. A couple of threads held; the purse dangled, a momentary reprieve, precarious, brief. I groped for the cord.

"Emerson! You have to give me your other hand!" Angel’s face strained above me, white and terrified.

Then the threads snapped. The purse disappeared, end over end, winking once at me before the chasm closed up behind her.

I laughed, I think—or was it crying? Angel was screaming at me, "Give me your hand!"

A great wind caught the bridge again, lifting it up and dropping it, and in the danger of being suspended over the void, there was, too, a curious sense of being free.

D
OES IT HURT
?" asked Angel. Hesitantly, her fingers traced the blue contusions on my arms and sides.

"No," I said, and it was true. The cuts and bruises, the discolored rope burn—none of it hurt, or at least the pain was distant, as if my body lay far below me while I looked on, both doctor and patient, author and man. I watched Angel’s hands remotely in the harsh fluorescent light: tenderness, and caution. Still, I felt nothing. I caught her hand.

"You’re tired," I said. "I’m all right. You sleep. It’s time to go to bed."

She dabbed the last of the peroxide on my cuts and went into the bathroom, shutting the door.

Water ran in the sink, a civilized sound. I looked around. The Catholic hostel had taken us in without question, bloodied and stunned as we were. And just like that, all traces of the trauma were beginning to fade. The room was clean, spartan: two hard twin beds, an institutional towel, a tattered copy of the Bible. I slipped under the sheets and turned the pillow. A haven for travelers—safe and warm now, but some part of me could not believe in the safety of things anymore. Images I had never seen before kept swarming me like legions of a dark army: a glass of water, shattered violently on the floor; a fire blown out; a clean bed broken by the blast and annihilation of a bomb. The figure dangling from that bridge, begging "Help me"—I had turned my back on him. I had let him die. If love could fail—if it could not protect its citizens from death and forgetting—what chance did objects have?

Angel came out of the bathroom and turned off the light. The clock ticked. Angel stirred once and then was silent. I was glad she could sleep; she had been through enough.

But as I lay awake, the darkness seemed to expand and grow colder. I turned over. I saw the body in the ravine; Little P and his gun; Atticus in his hospital gown; my mother; the white, disingenuous figure of the Buddha on the hilltop, his finger pointed enigmatically up. I turned over again: the body in the ravine; Little P and his gun; Atticus in his helmet; my mother…

"Angel?" I said, and, simultaneously, "Emerson?" came from the other bed.

I couldn’t see anything as I crossed the room and slid under the covers, but it was all right; it was enough to touch someone tenderly in the anonymous gray, to feel curiosity and compassion in the press of a lip, a mouth. She was crying. In the dark, I fumbled, touching clumsily upon her face and her breast at the same time, so that ever afterward the taste of salt and the hard, hollow sense of pleasure would be linked. Regions I could never name before came clear to me now, humid or dark or musky: the wet, dark portals of some cavern in the sea. It would have been a lie to say that I loved her—but a lie was better than nothing now. Better, perhaps, than love itself. I held her, looking down at her lovely, honest face with sadness and a new humility. In the slit of moonlight through the blinds, her eyes widened with pleasure and astonishment, and I thought,
It is what it is; this is all
. Eventually you learned to play along with the world—to play in tune, and thus make its harmonics resonate, on and on. Adapting, surviving. Living: that was the only kind of immortality there was.

But then all thoughts grew scrambled as I moved awkwardly, faster. At the bright precipice of pleasure, I felt a great heave of vertigo, suspended above the canyon again. In the moment before gravity gathered to pull me downward, something else fell away from me, small but final, flashing like a coin. Inevitably, I let it go, although at the last moment I cried out; I think I said "No!"

Then the world inverted itself, soundless, and when the vertigo cleared, there was just the ticking of the clock again, and the clean white beds. Angel’s hand was twisted in my hair. I rested my head on her shoulder and slept. When I dreamt this time, it was about nothing—about a wide, flat road.

IN THE
morning, a stripped white sun shone in through the plain blind. I awoke early. Sometime during the night, I had disengaged Angel’s arms from around me, and she had withdrawn to the other side of the bed, the sheet pulled up around her waist. Her mouth was open, and she had one hand pressed tightly against her chest, as if she had been hurt or was protecting something in the hollow of her breasts. I leaned over to touch her cheek, but my hand hesitated, passing over her shoulders and neck, and in the end I didn’t touch her at all. Was she safe, now? Was I? Little P was gone. Without him, would Poison continue to chase us? I thought of the girls in their airless rooms, trapped and sallow; I thought of the ones he had murdered. No trial for them, no justice.

Hurriedly, I got up and showered, threw on my damp clothes. The sun was almost up now, the small light outside the window strange, yellow, moody but clear. Before I put on my shoes, I went over to the bed again and covered Angel up. I sat looking at her for a moment. I wouldn’t take her with me. Better for her to think I’d abandoned her, though my heart broke a little to imagine it. But otherwise she would follow me back to the city, and the danger would begin for her all over again.

I fished the memory key out of my suit pocket, where I had buttoned it in tightly, securely, like a treasure. Indeed, it was the only treasure I had left. In its little green casing, it shone like the future.

Carefully, I put it away, buttoned it up again. It would be lonely, perhaps impossible, to topple the Palace without Angel. They would want the source of the photos, and I would never implicate her. Regardless, I would bring the Palace down: with pictures, with publicity—with a gun, if I had to. But there would be no evasion of the truth this time, no innocence. If my family’s only legacy was wrought in evil, I would tear it down.

Out on the shoulder of the road, the sun was emerging from behind the mist, brightening and darkening. I checked the sky, which moved above me with the threat of solemnity and grace. A bird sang two high notes in the black slate landscape. The road was a gray, flat plain, unwritten, like the road in my dream. Unencumbered, I felt a strange lightness of being. My mother was gone, and my father was gone, now my brother too. But somehow the terms of extinction were not what I’d thought they would be.

The bird sang its two notes again and suddenly winged west like a shot across the sky. I turned and followed it as best I could, down the road, walking slowly at first. Then I trotted. Then I began to run. Fast, hard, breathless—for a new day was breaking. I couldn’t let it get away.

My deepest gratitude to the following:

To the Taiwan National Endowment for Culture and the Arts, the Fulbright Program, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council for financial support; to Dr. Wu and the folks at the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange in Taipei; to Wendy Lesser for her encouragement and good advice; and to Jin Auh and David Rogers for their tireless enthusiasm and thoughtful editing.