The Foreigner (7 page)

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Authors: Francie Lin

BOOK: The Foreigner
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"Have you notice the
maid
?" he asked softly. Then he stuffed his hat on his head and left.

Uncle’s gaze followed me as I went back inside. Little P was pushing some poker chips around on the sideboard, running them through his fingers like gold coins.

"Dinner good? You like it?" he asked.

"Dinner was fine."

"Just ’fine’? That’s the best fucking roast duck in Taipei. That place is famous."

"The duck was good. Listen. We need to finish talking." I made a vague gesture toward the closet where I’d stashed my mother.

He put out his cigarette in a bowl of ashes meant for incense.

"I have to go to work," he said. "These cocklovers"—indicating the cousins—"they won’t move until their game is done."

"I’ll go with you."

He sighed, impatient. "Emerson." Then he seemed to check himself. "Okay. Fine, come with me."

I went upstairs to use the bathroom. It was a tremendous relief to close the door and be alone for a moment. I washed my hands in the rusty water and tried to think over what Atticus had just said. Now that he was gone, my conversation with him seemed only to raise more questions. I splashed water on my face, thinking of the ashes in the downstairs closet, the dark, squat box that had come to stand in for my mother. And now I would have to give her up to Little P for burial. The thought stretched bleakly before me.

On my way back down the upstairs hall, a door flapped in a sudden draft. I paused, glancing in. A lamp shone in the far corner of the small room, among the mildewed storage boxes and old furniture. Along the rim of murky half-glow where the lamplight petered out, someone was moving.

"Hello?" I whispered, pushing open the door.

A woman, an older girl, huddled on a thin cot against the wall, half-hidden by a pillar of boxes. She drew back when she saw me in the doorway, clutching the front of a new, ill-fitting dress to her chest. Her feet were bare, her skin scrubbed clean and raw. A notch broke the line of her upper lip, an old deformity, clumsily repaired to leave a scar. She scrunched farther into her corner as I approached, and her gaze flickered anxiously around the room.

"It’s all right," I whispered. "Are you… a friend of Little P’s?"

No answer. She watched me, apprehensive.

"What’s your name?" The wild vacancy in her eyes was shocking; I just wanted to hear her say something, anything. "I’m Emerson."

"Hey!" Little P’s voice came faintly up the stairwell.

"Coming!"

The girl jumped at my shout, and her jagged lip trembled. But as I backed out of the room, she suddenly spoke in a voice husky with disuse, murmuring low and unfathomably before subsiding into a ragged sob like the end of a prayer.

 

 

 

CHAPTER   6

 

 

I
N THE NARROW
, mildewed back hall of the Sing Palace, Little P unlocked a door and flicked on the light.

"Voilà," he said—a dry joke, because the office was grim, with concrete walls and a ceiling that showed rusty metal beams, all lit by a greenish fluorescence. Discarded computer equipment littered the floor, along with empty boxes and half-packed crates of salt fish, jug wine; a clatch of mosquitoes whined in a damp corner. The shabbiness contrasted sharply with the Palace’s lobby, which had the slick veneer of put-on class, the walls gilded and the reception counter polished black, manned by a sleepy young man stuffed into a black-and-white tuxedo.

Little P threw his jacket over a group of black banquettes, which had been torn out of the walls and stood like sheep in a slaughterhouse. The room was cold; I noticed that my brother was shivering.

"Are you lonely, Little P?" I asked him suddenly.

He was rummaging around on the desk with papers. His hands paused, then continued, resolute.

"I have people around from the time I get up to piss to my last smoke at night. No, I’m not lonely," he said. "Not lonely
enough
."

I shook my head. "I don’t mean physically alone. It’s something else. The way you live? The people you’re surrounded by…" trailing off, because I couldn’t nail down what was bothering me so much.

"What about them?" Defensive now. He had always been sensitive to criticism.

"I don’t know. Uncle, Poison… I just can’t believe they would really get you."

"And who would?" An edge of bitterness to his voice, just below the light teasing note. "You?"

I lowered my eyes and didn’t say anything. After some time he realized his mistake.

"Shit, Emerson." He rubbed his stitches fretfully. "You’ve been riding my ass ever since you showed up. What do you
want
from me? What do you want me to say? Ten years. What would you understand about me after that long?"

"But that’s just it," I said. "I know nothing about you. I understand nothing. I won’t pretend I do. But I
want
to know—something, anything. You’re all I have left now."

The sentimentality of it made him nervous. He jumped up from his desk and shifted restlessly among the junk in the room. He paused beside the long window. It was dark outside, and raining again; the glass reflected the office, the disorder, the thin, baleful figure he cut in the grainy light.

"There isn’t anything to know," he said, after a while. "You’ve seen it all right here. I’m just a two-bit manager of a lousy KTV."

He drew the window shade.

"Mother’s ashes," he said, turning back to me.

I had almost forgotten them; the charge of sudden intimacy sparked by his not-quite-confession had sent her out of mind. But the dry knowledge of loss renewed itself as I took the box out of the bag and held it out to him.

"She’s in there," said Little P, hesitant, not a question but a dazed statement to himself. Slowly, he reached forward and took the box, staring down at it as if looking into a well that held an image in its deep, dark water.

"Have you thought any more about my offer for the motel?" I asked.

He frowned and set the box down.

"I’m only asking you to consider," I said, following him as he walked back to the desk and leaned against the edge. "The family home, Little P."

He lit a smoke, cupping his hand around the tip, and studied the lines of his palm.

"You talk to the lawyer and get me the papers first," he said abruptly. "Then I’ll consider it."

The papers, rightfully his, were back in my hotel room. Should I have brought them? The hardened look in Little P’s eye said no. I’d keep them to myself a little while longer. Still, conscience dictated that I compensate him somehow, some way, however inadequately. He was my brother; I couldn’t just leave him with nothing.

I took out my checkbook and filled in the amounts.

"Here"—holding it out to him.

"What for?"

"What do you mean? For you."

"Why?" He searched my face, suspicious.

"No reason." No reason but guilt. The box of ashes seemed to darken and glower:
I give your brother the motel! You cannot just ignore my wish
. "A present."

Part of me hoped that he wouldn’t take it, that some kind of pride or principle would prevent him from accepting a handout. Instead, he took the slip from my hand, glanced at the amount briefly, tucked it in his pocket.

"Thanks."

I wanted to ask him again about his face, what had happened; about Atticus; about Uncle, the knife, the girl, the red ciphers on the door. But somehow the opportunity for confidences had passed. Too much had happened, there was no way to begin. A little good-luck totem sat on a shelf above his head, a golden cat with its jointed paw weaving up and down,
tick-tock,
like the second hand of a clock.

"Well." I looked at my watch. "I have to get going."

He stood up. "I’ll take care of the ashes. Don’t worry."

"She wanted a temple burial," I said. A suffocating grief swept over me as I gestured inadequately toward my mother. "It’s all up to you."

"You’ll talk to the lawyer, right?"

"Good-bye, Little P." I put a hand on his shoulder. "I’ll be in touch."

As I left, he was dialing someone on the office phone. He had taken my check out, his thumb marking the amount.

"Wei?"
I heard him say, and then a low, urgent rumbling of Chinese. I turned at the doorway. His back was to me, the ashes forgotten, balanced precariously on a shaky stack of crates. I gritted my teeth and made myself continue out the door.

 

 

THE LITTLE
cantina in the basement of the airport was quiet when I arrived for my flight. It was very early; the lights had not even been turned on except for a few above the bar, but there was a smell of coffee and hot oil. Small heaps of eggs and sausages sat patiently in warming pans laid out along the counter while a woman in a hairnet planted thermometers in them like flags. I surveyed the unappetizing counter, took a watery instant coffee with two sugars, and carried it to an empty table.

A few other travelers were scattered around the darkened tables, looking hollow-eyed and dazed. A man in a wheelchair approached, selling pens, toys, packages of smoky incense. I shook my head at him. Adamant, he wheeled closer, laid a selection of pens stiffly on my table. I shook my head. After a few moments he moved on, but the incense lingered, insistent, dark, smelling of death and its little gods. Yesterday, just before Little P and I had left for the Palace, Uncle had searched me out, breathing laboriously with intent, and pushed three sticks of incense into my hand, nudging me toward a little shrine set up in a back corner of the room. Two framed portraits hung over a shelf laid carefully with a plate of guava and a bowl of sand in which sticks of incense burned down to filaments: my grandparents, the same pictures my mother had had in her front hall. I had never met them, but the photos were as familiar to me as my own face. How strange, and somehow terrible, to come upon them in an alien place so far from home—like a nightmare in which you come upon strangers who have your face.

"Our grandparents." Little P had translated for Uncle. "He wants you to pay your respects. Hold the sticks up with both hands. Not like that, lower. Now: bow. Three times. Repeat after him:
Wo shi Zhou Lili de erzi…"

Fumblingly, I repeated the sounds, which I guessed were a kind of prayer, and shook the joss sticks as directed. Everyone else watched me, as if the ritual were a test. Unpleasant, being observed so closely, but the ritual itself had moved me: a link, a missive, like telepathy between the living and the dead. Was it possible, through incense and prayer, to open up a channel to minds that had loved, planned, then died? The Australian girls at the next table laughed. By now the cantina had filled up with early travelers: couples; a group of monks; families weighed down by luggage and cherished grievances, bound together in close, unspoken colloquy. I was suddenly aware of how alone I was. No companion, no lover to see me off; no one to meet me at the other end.

The handicapped vendor made another slow sweep of the room. This time I stopped him and bought a package of joss sticks. A bit of incense, burned at the altar of a shrine: would it bring me back into some living connection with that old, dead love? J, with her dark promise of sex and experience; the touch of her lips on my neck, the scent of smoke and wine. My mother had deplored her because she wasn’t Chinese, but the real trouble had been more timeless than that: age, and knowledge. I remembered her lovely Nordic face, its pale, moonlit coloring—how it had looked suddenly lined and weary as she made her jaded pronouncement in the darkened bedroom: "That’s all it is, Emerson. That’s all love is." Over the years, I had replayed those memories of J so often that they had been sucked dry of comfort, like marrow from a bone. I finished my coffee quickly and got up to find my gate.

The air of exhausted holiday mingled with sweat and heat at the gate. In the crush of boarding passengers, a couple of Americans nattered on behind me, talking about their Bali vacation, the English loud as a shout in the murmurous Chinese. The familiarity jolted me as we shuffled onto the plane. For the first time since leaving the United States, I thought of my empty walk-up in San Francisco. Every meal would be eaten alone now, over the kitchen sink or in front of the TV; no visits to the motel, no weekly devotion to mark the time from here till death. Meanwhile my mother walked her dark island of the afterlife, alone. Her ashes at the Palace slid inexorably toward scattering, defilement, oblivion. Her light, tuneless humming through all the walls of the motel; her exhausted face in the flicker of the television at night as she slept, fitful over money, how to make it all work.
What means love?
The ashes tilted precariously at the edge. Little P would never catch them, never give them their proper due.

I stopped abruptly in the aisle.

"Sir? Sir?" The flight attendant’s querulous voice carried through the cabin. They were coming on, the other passengers, trapping me dumbly, without knowledge or mercy.

"Sir!"

Already the boarding ramp was being retracted, but the galley door was still open, the path clear. Faces loomed out at me as I lunged my way toward the back, swinging my carryall blindly like a bludgeon, pursued by the flight attendant’s shout: "Sir! Sir!"

The air burned above the distant runway as I spilled down the metal service stairs and knelt, dizzy, heaving. Gasoline, heat. Cries of alarm sounded above me, but then the great engines of the plane began to churn, drowning them out, faster and faster, until the blades blurred in a high, thin scream.

I must have blacked out, because when I opened my eyes, I was lying cramped on the tarmac, in perfect stillness. A couple of baggage handlers hovered over me with mute concern, but the plane was gone, my ticket home gone. I sat up.

"Taxi?" I asked faintly. "Bus?"

The workers exchanged puzzled glances and echoed: "Teksi? Ba-as?"

"Right. Never mind." I struggled to my feet and looked about the airfield, alien, desolate in its flat, parched plain. I was truly on my own now. My mother’s final fate hung in my hands. I would save her, and save the Remada as well.

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