The Foreigner (4 page)

He tented his hands again. "That may be unnecessary. If you can get a valid address for him, most of this can be accomplished through the mail."

"Of course it’s necessary!" I shouted, startling him. I retreated and composed myself.

"It is," I said bitterly, calmly, "necessary. My mother suffered over his absence. I suffered over it. All the relatives and friends we’ve asked to help him for our sake have suffered over him. Why shouldn’t he be inconvenienced, just once, even if it is too late to make amends?"

Mr. Carcinet’s eyebrows went up in a gesture that I couldn’t interpret. He placed his fingers on either side of his bony nose and smiled, his lips parting in a brief, startling glimpse of red.

"You’re anticipating me, Emerson. This brings us to the other part of the will. Your mother requested that her ashes be repatriated to Taipei, with your father’s to be disinterred and brought over at a later date. If you were to go to Taipei to find Peter, you could discharge your, ah, responsibility to her at the same time."

My mother had been cremated. I had been keeping her in a wooden box on the living room console.

"All right," I said, faltering. "I’ll take her with me."

Tears welled up in my eyes as I considered the prospect of being left behind. I was reminded of the day we had taken my father to Daly City, to be cremated. The cemetery had had a vast acreage of tombstones and crypts and mausoleums, all lined up in neat rows divided by paved avenues with signs, Avenues A, B, C, like a lost city in a book. The columbarium itself was a glassed-in summer-house with heavy drawers of ashes laddered up the walls, and a fountain covered in plastic flowers in the center of the room that bubbled with the alacrity and shallow sentiment of artificial tears. I had gone there with my mother alone. The sun had shone through a fretwork of tree branches outside the high windows, and the atrium of the dead was perfectly peaceful, perfectly still.

When I finally got home, the light in my apartment was dim and wintry. I shut the door softly behind me. Wind ruffled the pages of a magazine in the living room. I wandered over to shut the window, then sat down, still holding my keys.

The box of ashes faced me, its wooden grain dark, stern, oddly reproachful.

"Mother?" I said tentatively. The sudden transformation from flesh to dust had been too quick; I still saw her in the restaurant, in her old blue dress, saying, "Such a disappointment"; on the floor of her bedroom, the panty hose drip-drying in the bathroom. What had she seen in those moments before her head hit the floor? What had she dreamt as she lay dying in her peace-white bed, far from home? Guilt and anger suffocated each other in me; I wished her back to life again, resurrected just for a moment, so that I could accuse, deny, shout, and beg for her forgiveness and her love, one last time.

The phone rang suddenly, breaking the dry silence. When I picked up the receiver, the line was dead.

I
T WAS RAINING WHEN WE ARRIVED
at Chiang Kai-shek International, the tarmac glinting dully in the half-light as the plane taxied to the gate. Once through the crush of immigration, I hefted the box of ashes in its bag and went outside. The sky was colorless and the air warm, palpable, smelling of burnt rubber. A man in flip-flops sidled up to me and said something out of the corner of his mouth. I was in thrall to a very strange sensation, for the words he spoke sounded so familiar and so personal, and yet the meaning remained just beyond my grasp. It was like trying to name the face of someone I had once known, someone important but forgotten. The conviction that somewhere within me I harbored the key to perfect comprehension was irresistible. With some difficulty I recognized the word
bus
.

"I need to go to the Johnson." I showed him the reservation printout. "Johnson."

He nodded rapidly and herded me toward a large tour bus idling by the curb.

"I don’t want a tour. Just hotel. Hotel.
Luguan
."

He nodded impatiently and chucked my carryall into the luggage compartment before rushing off to hustle another customer. I was hobbled by my mother, who seemed to be growing heavier, as if her ashes possessed the old cumbersome spirit, characteristically asserted now at the moment of maximum inconvenience. She had always hated buses.

"Not now," I said crossly, heaving her higher up on my shoulder. At least she was easier to manage in her new form.

I climbed into the coach. After some delay, the driver leaped aboard, and we lumbered onto the highway. The interior of the bus was oddly plush and decorated like a small parlor, white doilies laid across the headrests and the large windows framed by curtains tied with grosgrain bows. A television screen flickered silently, a bootleg version of an old Schwarzenegger flick that skipped and restarted wearily each time we hit a bump. The rain began again, a warm steady downpour that seemed, in my anxious state, like a sad truth of nature. Hills loomed in the nightscape. Through a gap in the trees, a huge white stone Buddha gleamed on the crest of a hill, one gigantic finger pointed toward the lowering sky.

The city began to appear, a grim, unassuming landscape of concrete and loose wiring, grayness and metal, with massive, burnt-out apartment structures, hundreds of units cramped together like the cells of a honeycomb, encased with metal grilles along the balconies, façades covered in dirty tile or darkened by exhaust and mold. Laundry flapped like threadbare flags on the covered balconies. Whatever I had been expecting, it was not this mishmash of concrete and palm trees, billboards and 7-Elevens, a huge three-story Starbucks gleaming like a beacon. An old man pedaled a rusty bike through the storm. A sleek fashion boutique lit by dreamy incandescent lamps stood out among the derelict garages and broken sidewalks.

To my relief, the bus route ended right in front of the Johnson. The hotel was a four-star, the kind where they sold leather handbags in glass cases in the lobby. The rate was beyond my means, but I’d splurged, thinking of it as a homecoming for my mother. She would have liked the show of wealth: the room service; the crisp, monogrammed sheets; the soft lights; the marbleized floors. Riding up in the glass elevator, I felt a pang as I looked down over the broad foyer: surely my mother had deserved this in her lifetime? Raised in a poor family, she’d guarded the furnishings of the Remada with a jealousy that bordered on obsession.

My mother: she had never trafficked in empty affection, or in tenderness and kisses. Love—real love, she said—was measured out by the sacrifices one made to the future: money, history, time.

But she had left the motel to Little P.

The door opened with a smooth electronic tick, and the lights came on automatically in a soft display of rose and gold. A plate of fresh apples and oranges had been arranged on the dresser. The Remada could never compete with such amenities.

I put down my carryall and pulled the curtains open. The rain glazed the window, breaking up my faint reflection in the glass as I looked out onto the wide boulevard below. In the eatery across the street, a woman with a dish towel thrown over her shoulder stood watching traffic from her doorway, backlit by a greenish fluorescent light. All up and down the road, harsh illuminated signs full of ciphers scrabbled and gibbered for attention. A mild sense of vertigo seized me, and I stepped away from the view. My only comfort was the ashes, and the thought that somewhere out there, among the strange crowds, my brother was waiting to be found.

THE ADDRESS
was off Tongan Jie, a narrow, unassuming street that led to the river, flanked on either side by low, mildewed apartment buildings and shacks roofed with corrugated tin. It seemed unlikely that Little P would still be at his old apartment, but I had nowhere else to start.

The cabbie dropped me off at the mouth of the street. White heat shimmered like gauze over the asphalt. The neighborhood seemed hushed and waiting, and the air had a sweet, sluggish quality to it that I recognized, after a moment, as incense. The sound of a television murmured in the darkening street (it would rain again), and in the window of a bakery, a tired-looking woman sat and smoked, the skeleton furnishings within just visible: a few folding tables, plastic stools. The fluted roof of a temple rose from the gray. Inside, red lights in the smoke, and a dim golden Buddha glinting like foil in the cavernous gloom.

I found the building in a little dead-end alley. Black grilles covered the windows; tiles had fallen off the façade in patches, giving it a piebald look, and there was a kind of red graffito spray-painted on the metal door. I studied the entrance for some minutes; the Chinese characters had a look of angry incoherence about them that disturbed me. I fingered the buzzer hesitantly but did not ring it. Blood rushed in my ears. I found myself, suddenly, afraid. When he was a little boy, Little P used to marshal his toy boats together in the bath and then lift them one by one out of the water, giving each a resounding kiss, brow furrowed with the intensity of his love. Easy enough to deal with him then, when I had assumed the role of uncertain protector.

Rain began to fall, a few tentative spots, then a hard downpour, as if a faucet had been turned. I clenched my fists and went in.

The stairwell was damp. Fingers of mold stained the walls. Gloomily, I felt that I was breathing in spores. I was less afraid of death than of its corollaries—diminishment, illness, being alone. Was that why, despite the fear, my heart lifted as I climbed toward my brother’s door?

A dirty light filtered in through a frosted window. Somewhere in the building, a couple fought, the woman’s voice high and complaining, the man gruff. A shriek, a crash; the wailing of a child. As I rounded the landing to Little P’s door, I lost my footing and grabbed at the handrail. When I’d righted myself, I looked down. Water was seeping from the walls and collecting on the floor in a black pool, cascading down the lip of the stairs in a steady
drip-drip,
like the ticking of a clock.

Timidly, I knocked on Little P’s door. No answer. I knocked again.

"Little P!" I called. "Little P!"

Behind me on the stairs, a man in black, tensed and lean, eased himself around the curve of the banister. A raggy bandage covered his left cheek, the eye above it hidden in a blackened welt. The red scrawl on the door downstairs suddenly flashed into my mind: inchoate, wild, full of rage. Fear wiped my thoughts blank.

"I… we…" I whispered and took faltering steps toward the stairs, my back to the wall. He kept his raw face to me. A knife flashed in his hand, the blue point aimed at my heart.

As I circled him, he suddenly lunged forward, swinging the knife with dreadful precision. I dodged; the blade struck the concrete wall with a thin, singing quiver. I clattered down the stairs. But the floor was still wet, and halfway down I slipped, hit my chin on the railing, sprawled down the remaining steps, my leg wrenched beneath me as I hit the landing. Pain shot through my knee, up my back. I clutched at the banisters and pulled myself half up, draped helplessly over the handrail as if peering into a fenced-off pit. But it was too late. The dark, chiseled shape pressed close behind me, trapping me against the rail. One hand came up from underneath and grasped my jaw like a baseball, fingers smothering my mouth. He jerked my head back, and I felt the blade at my throat.

"Mlease," I said, muffled, shaking. He had not said a word. His one good eye gleamed like a bird’s, hard and incurious. "Mlease.
Mlease
."

But the blade didn’t cut. I looked up.

After a moment, the man said, "Emerson?"

WE REGARDED
each other sadly in the jaundiced stairwell.

"Emerson, you goddamned double-cunt." Swearwords in Chinese, at least, I understood. "What the hell are you doing here?"

He was very thin, lean, wolfish. Up close, his injuries were a fleshy patchwork, slashes and tears sewn up with metal thread. A line of coarse stitches ran across his forehead; his upper lip had been ripped open, held together with a kind of plaster. The sides of his mouth twitched now and then in an uncontrolled tic, and his nose was skewed from an older injury. All this gave him the look of a crude drawing, raw, brutal, only half-done—but I saw that the lines of the old Little P were still clear. Among the new scars was the old one on his cheek, a thin white slash from falling off his bike onto a broken bottle in the Remada parking lot. I had picked out the glass shards with a tweezers sterilized in whiskey and fire—like the cowboys, I’d told him, which had earned me a rare smile.

I followed him back up to the landing, my knee sending out little shoots of pain.

"I wrote to you," I said, faltering a little; it was not the reunion I had imagined. "And the lawyer wrote you. Didn’t you get the letter?"

"What letter?"

"About the will. About the memorial."

"What are you talking about?"

"Mother. Mother’s dead, Little P."

He’d been jimmying the door lock, impatient, but now his hand stilled briefly. Water dripped.

"Dead?" he said at last. "Dead? When?"

"In July. You didn’t get the letters?"

"No," he said. "I was… I don’t get much mail."

An irrelevance, but he seemed dazed, speaking in a monotone. His brow furrowed faintly—shades of the little boy who had named his toy boats
Tiny, Princess,
and
Cannibal George
.

He winced suddenly, touching a hand to his stitches, and opened the door. "I guess you should come in."

He did not turn on any lights. The room remained cold and colorless in the rain-light from the window. There was not much to see, in any case. His apartment had a temporary feel: a cot along one wall, a sink in the corner, a broken accordion door dividing the toilet from the rest of the room. A carton of Long Life cigarettes stood on end beneath the window, which looked out onto a concrete wall. Old magazines and newspapers lay in piles on the floor; a messy thatch of chewed betel nut stained the kitchenette counter.