“Ah, that’s the best part,” Stuart said. He placed a nut on the pavement and split it with the heel of his boot. It made a satisfying crack. The meat inside was a glistening white. We all got into it, cracking walnut shells with our shoes, pulling the sweet white meat from inside while a crowd of our Chinese hosts eyed us with bemused perplexity. “Americans,” I imagined them saying, afterward. “The poor sons of bitches have everything in the world, but they’ve never tasted fresh walnuts.”
As we walked back toward our binguan in the quiet dark, Melissa stopped, turned suddenly to all of us, and announced, “This was the most fun day in China.”
Night in that town was heavy and black as the ocean. Caroline and I lay on our separate cots, both wide awake. “I’m having a disturbing thought,” she said. “A feeling, really.”
“I’ll lie with you,” I said, finding the floor with my feet.
“Wait,” she said. “Let me say it.”
I lay back down. There was a long silence, during which I discovered that I was afraid—physically afraid—for the first time in as long as I could remember.
“You did it,” Caroline said. “Isn’t that right?”
“Did what?” But I knew.
“Took the money. Or whatever it was.”
“Jeffrey Fox has been whispering in your ear.”
She ignored me. “I started thinking it a couple of days ago,” she said. “I don’t even know why. Tell me,” she said, and I heard her turning to face me. “I won’t blame you.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Sam. Why?”
“I don’t know.” It was the truth.
“Did you feel pressure? Financial pressure?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
I listened for some sound, some relief from any direction, but there was nothing. We were alone in the middle of nowhere. Of course, I thought—I’d dragged them to a place where they couldn’t help but see it.
“Remember that prick who ripped me off?” I said. “That friend of Harry’s who turned out not to be?”
“Yes …”
“He was—That was—It started then.”
I heard a rustle of coarse sheets, and Caroline was beside me—her warm, familiar skin, the soft shirt she slept in when we traveled. “Sam, I’m so sorry,” she said. She held me, her strong warm arms around my neck, and suddenly I was sorry, too, to see, for the first time, what I had become.
It looked like the dead of night when Stuart roused us. Loudspeakers filled the streets, blaring some awful, tinny wake-up music accompanied by saccharine female singing. The street lights were a stark, fluorescent white. We sat on an empty bus, sat and sat, waiting for it to fill. As the first light streaked the sky, we finally started to move.
Caroline and I were in opposite seats, Kylie beside me, Melissa next to her. Stuart sat directly in front of me. By now he felt like family, somehow—enough to eliminate the need for talk at this hour. At last the bus swung out of town. The sun came up. Peasants got on, some carrying chickens, one clutching a pig. Most were folded into sleep the instant they sat down. My girls slept. After a while Stuart slept, too, his head back against the window, mouth open slightly. I got a long, close look at his face in profile, studied his pores and Adam’s apple, and found myself wondering who the hell he was. He looked like anyone. I tried to remember Cameron Pierce at Harry’s party, but the vision of him that had haunted me these past two years was gone. So then, how did I know this guy was the one? I tried to put myself back in Kunming, where I’d recognized him. Eyes? Chin? But that encounter, too, was murky now. Stuart was a guy sleeping inches away, his expression not much different from my daughters’. And then I was terrified: of having put my family in the hands of a total stranger—not the man who had robbed me.
By the time we hit the wooded hills, the sun was up. The land looked unkempt, trees pushing and shoving against each other like people fighting their way through lines in China. Stuart woke and glanced at me, then turned to the window. “Almost there,” he said.
We got off near a cluster of flimsy kiosks that marked the beginning of a path into the hills. The kiosks apparently doubled as overnight shelter for their proprietors, who were just beginning to stir. I heard more wake-up music from somewhere, but a powerful wind gushed through the trees and drowned out most of it. I was filled with a sense that something was about to happen. As Stuart led the way uphill, I took Caroline’s hand. I saw Kylie reach for Stuart’s hand—she’s confused, I thought; she thinks he’s me. But Stuart took her hand, and they walked together so naturally that I was sure he had a daughter, and a wife, too. He must have all this, somewhere. My legs burned as we climbed.
At the top of the hill, we came upon the base of a towering wall of sheer cliff, red-tinted like clay, pocked with rows of small openings that had to be the caves. A scaffolding of sorts had been erected for scaling this vertical surface, and we mounted a set of stairs and began to climb, Stuart first, still holding Kylie’s hand, then Caroline and me. Melissa came last, looking tired and unsteady. I decided then to end my campaign against her.
We got off the stairs at the very top. There, beyond a series of curved openings in the rock, were the caves, their walls stained with bright, extraordinary colors, massive painted wooden Buddhas and Buddha-like attendants towering within each. “My Lord,” Caroline said. Kylie and Melissa just stared.
My wife and daughters went ahead. I let them go, stopping before three caves that had been linked to accommodate one massive Buddha lying horizontally. He was half sleeping, it seemed, his almond-shaped eyes just slightly open, his head wider than the length of me. For a long time I stared at the Buddha. Then I turned to lean over the railing and look back down the mountainside.
Stuart joined me. “Well, here it is,” he said. “As promised.”
“You outdid yourself.”
“So. What happens now?”
“Good question,” I said, and laughed. “Now I go to jail.”
There was a startled pause, then Stuart laughed, too. “Hell,” he said, “don’t do that.”
“They’ve got me.”
“I don’t think you’ll go to jail,” he said.
He was probably right—the publicity would be too damaging. Something quiet and equitable was more like it: pay up, then fuck off. But our lifestyle would suffer, no question.
“Anyway,” Stuart said, looking down the mountain, “I don’t see any SEC here.”
“The world isn’t that big.”
“It’s big enough.”
The sounds of Caroline and the girls were just scraps, tossed up by the wind, then washed away. I leaned over the railing, feeling the calm weight of the Buddha behind me. “You ripped me off,” I said. “Twenty-five grand. In San Francisco.” I was afraid, almost whispering. But I wanted him to know the world wasn’t as big as he thought.
“Wasn’t it fifty?” he said.
I stared at him, a part of me thinking, Of course. “You knew? All this time, you knew?”
“Pretty much. Once or twice I started thinking I might be nuts.”
“I don’t believe this,” I said. “Why didn’t you run?”
“From what?”
“But I mean—why help me? Why bring us all the way here?”
“Bring you!” he said, and laughed. “You begged to come. Fucking chased me to Xi’an.”
I said nothing. What a horse’s ass I’d been.
“Why?” Stuart asked, and in the silence I felt the prickle of his curiosity. He moved closer. “Why follow me? What did you want?”
“I was afraid you’d get away.”
Stuart laughed, perplexed. “I am away.”
And of course this was true, he’d got away two years ago. And ever since, I’d been filled with disgust at the waste of my life.
“It’s my daughters,” I said. “They’ve done me in. Drained me dry.”
“They’re good kids,” Stuart said quietly.
I listened for them, as I’m
always half listening for my family. But I couldn’t hear them anymore, not a wisp of their voices or laughter.
“How does it feel, doing what you do?” I asked.
Stuart laughed. “Like everything feels when it’s you,” he said. “Like nothing.”
I turned to him. He looked small—one small man, alone in the middle of China. And I thought I saw in him some diminishment or regret—as if Stuart’s fortunes, too, had slipped since our previous meeting. I thought, He has nothing but his freedom.
“Where are they?” I asked, anxious for my family.
“Gone,” he said. “You drove them away.”
I grinned, uneasy. “Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, too.”
“I believe you did.”
The wind blew away our laughter.
Stuart walked us back to the bus. Then, to our surprise, he said he wasn’t going with us.
“Why?” cried the girls, with such keen disappointment that I felt a flicker of jealousy.
“Going to hang out here a little,” he said. “Do some communing with the Buddhas.”
“Do you ever get to San Francisco?” Caroline asked.
Stuart grinned at me. “Now and then.”
Kylie clapped her hands. “Come to our house!”
“I might just do that,” Stuart said, and I saw, to my relief, that he wasn’t serious.
“Please,” Melissa said. “You can watch me skate.”
“All right, all right. Let’s get on the bus,” I said.
Stuart waited outside, then waved goodbye as we pulled away. Melissa sat alone. I moved next to her and put my arm around her small, athletic shoulders. But the gesture felt awkward. And I was struck by how long it had been—months and months—since I’d shown the slightest affection toward my oldest daughter. She seemed hardly to notice, twisting to look out the window at Stuart, whose narrow back we could barely see making its way uphill. When finally she turned back around, I stared at her, amazed that a twelve-year-old girl could hold so much sadness in her face. “He was nice,” Melissa said.
SACRED HEART
In ninth grade I was a great admirer of Jesus Christ. He was everywhere at Sacred Heart: perched over doorways and in corners, peering from calendars and felt wall hangings. I liked his woeful eyebrows and the way his thin, delicate legs crossed at the ankles. The stained-glass windows in our chapel looked like piles of wet candy to me, and from the organ came sounds that seemed to rise from another world, a world of ecstasy and violence. I longed to go there, wherever it was, and when they told us to pray for our families, I secretly prayed for the chance.
We had a new girl in class that year whose name was Amanda. She had short red hair and wore thin synthetic kneesocks tinted different colors from the wash. She wore silver bracelets embedded with chunks of turquoise, and would cross her legs and stare into space in a way that suggested she lived a dark and troubled life. We were the same, I thought, though Amanda didn’t know it.
During Mass I once saw her scrape something onto a pew with the sharp end of a pin she was wearing. Later, when the chapel was empty, I sneaked back to see what it was and found her single first initial: A. To leave one’s mark on a church pew seemed a wondrous and terrible thing, and I found myself watching Amanda more often after that. I tried talking to her once, but she twirled her pen against her cheek and fixed her gaze somewhere to my left. Close up, her eyes looked cracked and oddly lifeless, like mosaics I’d seen pictures of in our religion class.
Though we were only girls at Sacred Heart, there were boys to contend with. They came from St. Pete’s, our companion school three blocks away, and skulked relentlessly at the entrances and exits of our building. Unlike Christ, who was gentle and sad, these boys were prone to fits of hysterical laughter without cause. I was unnerved by stories I had heard of them tampering with the holy wafers and taking swigs of the sacred wines Father Damian kept in his cabinet. They reminded me of those big dogs that leap from nowhere and bark convulsively, stranding children near fences. I kept my distance from these boys, and when the girls began to vie for their attention, I avoided them, too.
Late in the fall of that ninth-grade year, I saw Amanda cutting her arm in the girls’ room. I pretended not to notice, but when I left the stall and began washing my hands, she was still there, her wrist laid out on the wood box that covered the radiator. She was jamming a bobby pin into the skin of her forearm, bunching it up.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Amanda glanced at me without expression, and I moved a step closer. She was working her arm in the fierce, quiet way you might work a splinter from your foot.
“It’s not sharp enough,” she said impatiently, indicating the bobby pin. It was straightened into a line, and the plastic nubs at its ends were gone. Amanda seemed unembarrassed by my presence, as though cutting her arm were no weirder than braiding her hair with ribbons. This intrigued me, and her urgency drew me in.
I was wearing a pin, a white goat my mother’s husband, Julius, had bought me on a trip to Switzerland. I wore it to please my mother, for though a nicer man than Julius was hard to imagine, I just couldn’t like him. It was as if my not liking him had been decided beforehand by someone else, and I were following orders. Now, as I touched this present from him, I wanted Amanda to use it—I craved it like you crave a certain taste. It was wrong and bad and exactly right. I felt a pleasant twisting in my stomach, and my hands shook as I unhooked the pin from my dress.
“Here,” I said, holding it up. “Try this.”
Amanda’s face turned softer than normal. She held me with her eyes while I looked for a match to sterilize the pin. A lot of furtive smoking went on in that bathroom, and I found a book wedged behind the mirror. I took off my goat’s head pin and held its sharp point in the flame until it turned black. I tried to give the pin to Amanda, but she shook her head.
“You,” she said.
I stood there a moment, holding the goat. Although I was frightened, there was something raw and beautiful in the sight of Amanda’s smooth white arm against the chipped paint of the radiator cover. Gently I took her wrist and touched the pin to the scratch she had already made. Then I pulled it away. “I can’t,” I said.
Her face went slack. When I tried again to give her the pin, she turned away from me, embarrassed. I felt like a coward, and knew for sure that unless I helped Amanda to cut herself, she would never be my friend.
“Wait,” I said.
I took her wrist and held it. I scraped the pin hard this time and made a thin, bleeding scratch. I kept going, not afraid anymore, and was surprised to find that the sharp point made a sound against her skin, as though I were scraping a piece of thick fabric. It was hard work, and soon my arms were shaking. Sweat gathered on my forehead. I did not look once at Amanda until I had finished an A like the one she’d carved on the pew. When finally I did look, I found her eyes squeezed shut, her lips drawn back as if she were smiling.
“It’s finished,” I told her, and let go.
When Amanda opened her eyes, tears ran from them, and she rubbed them away with her other hand. I found that I was crying, too, partly with relief at having finished, partly from some sorrow I didn’t understand. In silence we watched her arm, which looked small and feverish under its bright tattoo. I noticed the hot light overhead, smells of chalk and disinfectant, my own pounding heart. Finally Amanda smoothed her hair and pulled her sweater sleeve down. She smiled at me—a thin smile—and kissed me on the lips. For an instant I felt her weight against me, the solidness of her, then she was gone.
Alone in the bathroom, I noticed her blood on my fingers. It was reddish orange, sticky and thin like the residue of some sweet. A wave of despair made me shut my eyes and lean against the sink. Slowly I washed my hands and my goat pin, which I stuck in my pocket. Then I stood for a while and stared at the radiator, trying to remember each thing, the order of it all. But already it had faded.
From that day on, when I looked at
Amanda a warm feeling rose from my stomach to my throat. When I walked into class, the first place I looked was her desk, and if she was talking to somebody else, I felt almost sick. I knew each detail of Amanda: her soiled-looking hands with their bitten nails, the deep and fragile cleft at the base of her neck. Her skin was dry and white around the kneecaps, and this got worse as fall wore on. I adored these imperfections—each weakness made Amanda seem more tender, more desperate for my help. I was haunted by the thought that I had seen her blood, and would search her distracted eyes for some evidence of that encounter, some hint of our closeness. But her look was always vague, as if I were a girl she had met once, a long time ago, and couldn’t quite place.
At that time I lived in a tall apartment building with my mother and Julius, her husband of several months. Julius was a furrier. The previous Christmas he had given me a short fox-fur coat that still draped a padded hanger in my closet. I hadn’t worn it. Now that it was almost winter, I worried that my mother would make me put it on, saying Julius’s feelings would be hurt. His lips seemed unnaturally wet, as though he’d forgotten to swallow for too long. He urged me to call him “Dad,” which I avoided by referring to him always as “you” and looking directly at him when I spoke. I would search our apartment until I found him, rather than have to call out. Once, when I was phoning my mother from school, Julius answered. I said “Hello …” and then panicked over what to call him. I hung up and prayed he hadn’t recognized my voice. He never mentioned it.
It was getting near Christmas. Along the wind-beaten streets of downtown the windows were filled with cotton-bearded Santas and sleighs heaped high with gifts. It grew darker inside the Sacred Heart chapel, and candles on thin gold saucers made halos of light on its stone walls. During Mass I would close my eyes and imagine the infant Christ on his bale of straw, the barn animals with burrs and bits of hay caught in their soft fur. I would gaze at our thin Jesus perched above the altar and think of what violence he had suffered since his day of birth, what pity he deserved. And I found, to my confusion, that I was jealous of him.
Emerald City Page 3