The Foreigner (9 page)

" ’Role’ is right," I said, with a note of bitterness.

Atticus raised his eyebrows. "I do not understand. You are not genuine in your feeling toward Xiao P?"

"I am, of course I am." A fly buzzed along the invisible boundary of the window, struggled, lay still. "But it’s not so simple. I can’t say if I came back for him, or for myself." I looked at Atticus. "I miss my mother. It’s like… the world has fallen apart since she died. Those dreams you have, when your parents have died, and you wake up and realize that they’re still alive—now it’s like the logic of all that has been reversed. I dream she’s living. And then I wake up into the nightmare that she’s gone. I have no family, no place to anchor anymore. I rent my furniture," I explained lamely. "I have no pictures on the walls. Little P is my only other point of connection in the world now. I can’t just let him go again."

Atticus sipped his beer. "So you are hoping for a—what? Armistice? Rapprochement?"

"Something," I said. "I don’t know if
armistice
is the word—we never really fought."

"And what form do you think this rapprochement will take?" said Atticus gently. "You expect you will become the best of friends?"

"No. Nothing like that. I just want… I want…"

Atticus didn’t prod me.

"Mi Mama Caminitas," I said after a moment. "Do you know Mi Mama Caminitas? It was a brand of Mexican toothpaste we used a lot when we were little. My mother shopped at a grocery outlet because the brands were cheaper, and they dumped a lot of Mi Mama Caminitas there. You’ve never heard of it?"

Atticus shook his head.

"You see?" I looked down at the dregs of my beer. "All these things, all these memories are disappearing now that my mother is gone. Little P is the only one who would understand. Not that I want to sit around discussing the past with him all the time, but I just want a sign, I guess, that he remembers. He’s the only one who can… justify my memories. Make them true." I blinked, feeling naked. "I need some kind of witness. The problem is…"

The waitress set down a platter of steamed fish and doled out rice, soup.

"The problem is?" Atticus prompted.

Something had occurred to me, half-formed, nonverbal—a feeling of uneasiness that found its way into words.

"Who is that woman?" I asked.

"That woman?"

"That girl. The one you called the maid. I saw her upstairs at Uncle’s, after you left."

"Oh yes?" A kind of shadow passed over his face, a darkness I could not interpret. All at once he seemed nervous behind the placid exterior.

"Who is she?"

He looked out the window. The street below was coming alive with evening commuters, the dusk deepening in the park across the way.

"One of Xiao P’s ’principles,’ " he said, forgetting me in a blind moment of derision, upper lip curled in contempt. "You wonder why he has not come home in so long, why he does not call? Ha. Principle is a good reason. Principle has its shame!" His mouth wobbled with outrage.

Then, as if coming out of a trance, he seemed to see me, and the outrage was replaced by fear.

"Emerson." For once there was no gentle good humor radiating from him. He looked straight at me, clear, urgent. "You will not mind me being so blunt, I hope, but as your friend, I must say it. Get out. Get out now, and go home."

"But why?" I asked, taken aback.

He shook his head with some agitation. "It is not for me to tell you. I am bound by certain obligation."

"What obligation? To Uncle?" I thought of Uncle’s stroke-damaged face. What was it about him that I could not nail down? The missing clue seemed all at once the key to everything, to the girl, the knife on the stairs, my own brother.

"It does not matter to whom. My job, shall we say, depends on discretion. There is no obligation to keep an old man on at a job for which he is not qualified, especially now that my father has been dead for some years. One can only push one’s luck so far. So forgive me my obscurantness, Emerson. I only thought I would point out the woman to you; perhaps that too was a wrong idea. But as regards Xiao P—" He stopped and frowned. "Stay away from him. The knife cuts deeper than the blood."

"But he’s my
brother
."

He waved this away with a small hand. "Life is short," he said, indifferent. He tucked a bit of fish in his mouth. "You care for such things more when you are younger. Your mother, she trained you as a good Confucian son. Myself, I have never liked the Confucian tradition too much. Loyalty to a tribe—
unconditional
loyalty—is dangerous. As bad as religion, I would say. Why should we treat a blood relation differently than we treat others? Are they more valuable than other people somehow? More important?"

He wiped his mouth fastidiously. "If you must stay, I can help you find your way around. But you will think about my warning, no?"

"The knife," I said. "You said something about his knife."

"A figure of speech only." He shrugged. "The manner of weapon is unimportant. A gun, a knife, a poison to the ear. Death is death, do you see what I mean, Xiao Chang?" He wiped his mouth again, as if the conversation were distasteful to him. "Once you are dead, your good intentions die with you. Better to leave it alone."

D
ESPITE ATTICUS’S MISGIVINGS, I HAILED A CAB
and went directly to the Palace after dinner in search of Little P. Someone there would have an idea of where he was, at least, and I was determined to see him again before I lost my nerve. But I could not shake the sense of foreboding that Atticus had stirred up. It was dark; the bright backlit signboards cast a dystopic light on the streets, and the battalions of scooters—people muffled up in their motorcycle helmets—seemed menacing too. I felt for the documents, which I had folded and stashed in my jacket pocket. They belonged to Little P; the motel was his. The sting would not go away. Let tonight be the night I would divest myself of my lie. I would give the papers to Little P and live quietly with the loss, like a monk, or a priest, or some other holy man. The cabbie farted richly and yawned.

It was Friday, which should have been good for business, but there was nobody in the lobby of the Palace except a faintly mustachioed clerk at the front desk. He eyed me lazily when I asked for Little P and said he didn’t know where my brother was.

"Well, can I at least leave a message? Message. Message. Uh…
liu
…"—I consulted my pocket dictionary—
"yan."

He shook his head, irritable. He had been watching some kind of soap opera on a mini-TV behind the counter. Upstairs, a hollow bass beat boomed like cannons, shaking the walls; a little plaster powder fell down on his head. He had a punkish pageboy cut, very ragged and fey, and he kept sweeping greasy strands of hair back from his forehead, glaring at me.

"Poison?" I said suddenly. "Poison
zai ma
?"

Again the lazy look, this time slightly animated by doubt. He didn’t have to agonize too long, because at that moment a door flew open off the foyer and Poison himself came out, shouting and guffawing with someone in the room behind him. When he saw me, he stopped dead.

"Hello," I said.

"You!" He pointed. "You hear about the game? Come back to take it in the balls,
shibushi?
A little risky-risky?"

"I need to talk to Little P," I said.

"Oh?" A glance over his shoulder, vaguely, as if Little P might be standing there. Then he crooked his finger at me. "You come."

I followed him into the room. There had been a methodical sound of clacking up and down the corridor, like stones or marbles being rolled around, and I saw now that Big One was presiding over a session of mah-jongg, pushing the carved tiles to the center of an open table as a crowd looked on. The clacking stopped when I came in.

"The Xiao P, he busy," said Poison. He was wearing a poker visor, which made his sallow face look even thinner and more rodent-like.

"Busy with what? It’s Friday night."

He shrugged and sat down at the table.

"Xiao P have big plan," he said scornfully. "Too big for tell us. You ask Shu-Shu"—meaning his father, Uncle—"he tell you what Xiao P do. Xiao P tell Shu-Shu every-ting,
shibushi, Da Yi
? Like little baby." He laughed and slapped the table in front of Big One, who merely grunted and adjusted his wall of tiles minutely, not looking at me. Poison tapped his cigarette into a cut-glass dish. He had a slim silver case for his smokes, a fine affectation, and his black linen shirt showed expensive stitching on the pocket and hems. If he resented Little P’s closeness with Uncle, he also seemed to live high off the proceeds of my brother’s labor. His little rat nose twitched. I hated his skinny swagger, and the way he spoke of my brother as if Little P were nothing—Uncle’s lapdog.

"You now want play?" Poison inclined his head toward the table.

"Fine," I said. I took off my jacket. "I’m in."

There was a half-beat of silence in the room as Poison looked up, surprised. Then he grinned unpleasantly and jerked his chin at the man sitting across from him. The man got up and moved to the sidelines. Poison placed four tiles in the center of the table, and we drew: East Wind, North Wind, South, West. Some reshuffling of the seats, a throw of the dice, and then the game began.

Thick, stale cigarette smoke hung over the table like a storm front, tempering the white light with a dirty yellow cast. My hand was scattered: a mixing of winds and dragons, with a head of bamboo ones and a few copper tiles, several shy of a short straight. I wasn’t a novice; my mother had taught me how to play so that I could fill in on afternoons when she and her two friends from the local commerce association had their game. In the past, my strategy had always been to play my hand purely, as if in isolation, without too much attention to what the others were doing. It had been easy enough to guess the old ladies’ hands from the way they licked their lips when they were nervous, and anyway, we played for Luden’s honey lemon cough drops. This was not the same. No talk, no pleasantry, only a hard, diamondlike concentration broken at intervals by a tense
"Peng!"
Tiles were thrown down recklessly, no time to think or plot: nine of bamboo, North Wind, a run of coppers broken and mismatched on the green baize. White Dragon, green. Big One discarded a South Wind.

"Kong."
I snatched his tile and displayed my set. Poison scowled, deprived of his turn. A lucky draw gave me a three of coppers; Big One threw out an eight of coppers.

"Chi!"
I knocked back my straight.

Gradually I felt the attention in the room turn toward me, and a sweet, heady fire filled my veins. A ready hand, wanting only a two of coppers, a White or Red Dragon. I put down a South Wind.

"Peng,"
called Poison, grabbing it. Big One was studying his tiles without interest, his heavy eyes dull and unblinking like those of a limp, bloated fish, but I caught him exchanging a look with Poison, a bright, enigmatic look almost of joy. Red Dragon on the green baize.

"Peng!"
I shouted, reaching for it, but I didn’t have the pair anymore, I’d broken it up and not remembered the play: penalty.

Afterward, I could never remember at what point the reality of my position dawned upon me. It might have been after Poison’s third
peng
off my discards; or when I looked over at Big One and saw sweat shining on his beetled brow. A pair of eight bamboo, double birds, mixed straights. Big One took the first round. Dice were thrown; the game began again. Time shrouded itself in a feverish haze. Each time I looked up at Poison, he seemed to be getting farther and farther away. And then suddenly he would loom up in my sight, his gray-capped teeth bared, jeering. The others pressed up like phantoms around us, soundless and intent.

"Mah-jongg!"
Tiles were knocked back on the felt: three
pengs
of North, South, West; a head of East, a trio of birds in stark simplicity.

"I thank you," said Poison, gloating. The thin metallic taste of blood glazed my lip. I looked at his hand wonderingly as the others murmured, low and distorted, stretching and lighting their cigarettes: he had won off a tile I had discarded. There would be penalties against me for that play. Poison’s face shone as Big One totted up the score, and in it I saw naked appetite.

"Eight-oh-oh-oh," said Poison comfortably. He and Big One whooped wildly.

"Eight-oh-oh-oh what?" I felt suddenly cold and bewildered. "What does that mean?"

"You-ess dollar," said Big One, his English suddenly very loud and clear.

"I don’t have it," I said. My cousins only laughed. Big One stretched luxuriously as he got up, the smile of a fat, satisfied cat widening his face. They had not understood.

"Zhende, zhende,"
I said. Truly, truly.
"Wo bu neng fuqian."

They stopped laughing rather quickly.

"Shenma yisi?"
asked Poison—rhetorically, I hoped.

"I mean I don’t have that money. No one explained…" I trailed off; it was plain that no one understood.

Poison took a step forward. "What mean? You have money," he stated, as if it were a fact. "Of course you have."

"I don’t."

He straightened his visor. The air in the room had changed. The others surveyed us with great attention.

"You
have,
" repeated Poison.

"I just said I don’t.
Wo meiyou
."

"Means, you not have money
here
."

The others gathered closer, forming a tight enclave, and I suddenly understood that they were not disinterested parties.

"You not have money here," repeated Poison. He rubbed his sharp, ferretlike chin and smiled disingenuously. "It okay." He patted me on the shoulder. "We wait for you to bring."

"And if I don’t?"

A shadow passed briefly by the open door: Little P, who did not look in but continued down the corridor to the main office. Poison’s glance followed mine.

"Your
didi,
he… to my father, very important," said Poison. "Like son. Better than son. He think."