by Jason Y. Ng
It seems unseemly to finish my thought, but he does it for me: “Should have carried her away? Yes.” He shrugs. “It was a long time ago. Kind of a funny story, but it’s Hong Kong. It’s not as lawless as a lot of other places, yet . . . things happen.”
“Things happen,” I repeat in agreement.
He has to leave: an appointment at a friend’s art opening at some gallery in Sheung Wan. He invites me to join him. I’m about to say yes. Then I check the messages I’ve been ignoring. There are four from Charles, all variations on the Call me, it’s an emergency theme.
Thomas’s disappointment when I decline feels like a small hand pressing gently against the center of my chest. After Adrian, I wasn’t planning to like anyone. It’s not good for them. When I propose dinner tomorrow night or Monday and even mean it, his smile—which he tries to hide—is enough to make me reconsider my emergency. What could be more urgent than having some kind of life here?
Another message from Charles comes: Where the fuck are you?
“Fuck. It really is some kind of emergency.”
Awkward goodbye. What are we supposed to do, shake hands? Hug? Kiss? We fidget our way through the first two options. I’ll text him later. We’ll sort something out.
Out on the street, where there’s no one to overhear, I call Charles.
“Finally,” he says when he picks up.
He lays it out for me: normally he and Gideon look after the family’s properties—the house on Cheung Chau, the holiday rental flats, and others. I don’t know how many there are, or where, only that there’s a lot of money involved. Gideon’s in Macau with his lady friend, though, and Charles is in Bangkok. Something’s wrong at my parents’ house. He got a call from a neighbor. How soon can I get there?
Quick calculations. If I can get a cab and traffic’s not bad, I’m ten minutes away from the ferry pier. The next boat departs in half an hour. I’ve just missed one. The crossing takes an hour. The walk up the hill to the house, ten minutes if I hurry?
“I’m in Central. Two hours, give or take?”
“Fuck. Okay. But one thing, Reuben. This is important. If you find something there, if there’s a problem with the tenant, call the number I’m going to send you. He’s a friend on the police force. Then call me back right away. Got it?”
I assure him that I do.
The number comes as I’m climbing into the back of one of Hong Kong Island’s red taxis. There’s that moment of awkward surprise, the cab driver chat I’d rather not have: “You speak good Cantonese for a white guy.” “I’m not white, my mother’s Chinese.” I think he’s from the mainland. Somewhere in nearby Guangdong province like Foshan or Zhuhai. Mercifully, he shuts up and bullets through traffic, perhaps to save face and get rid of me sooner.
This is the great disconnect of Cheung Chau: when something goes wrong, you can’t speed back home in a taxi or on the MTR. There’s only the ferry. They leave every half hour. After midnight, there are only a few sailings. The boats leave on time. You spend the hour-long trip checking your messages obsessively and muttering, Fuck fuck fuck, under your breath if the news is bad or the waves are.
I’m not in a panic just yet. I haven’t been back in Hong Kong long enough for that. There are old ties but few connections. I’d be alarmed if the house was on fire and my parents were in it, but they’re in New Zealand investing in rubble. Social media is the best anodyne, so I spin through various updates and feeds without seeing them. All I accomplish is draining the battery.
Cheung Chau at twilight is a place of shadows. Although it lacks Central’s architectural canyon walls and false sunsets, the narrow streets of the town seem to contract. Dusk comes early here too. I make my way through a couple of lanes that shouldn’t be crowded at this hour and almost miss my turn. Old cement walls the color of oyster shells and stippled with years of rain. A clan hall, ground floor open to the street, walls covered with black-and-white photos of someone’s long-dead ancestors. Redbrick road twisting up the modest hill. Darkness under the low canopy of trees. Random shapes of deep turquoise sky visible through the branches, incongruous next to the salmon-amber glow cast by the streetlights.
The house, when I get to it, is a dark monolith. It faces the sea. To go inside, you open the garden gate and head down a paved ramp. Turn the corner at the edge of the property and the view opens up, a sudden tree-framed vista: water the color of denim, the sky slightly lighter. There’s a walkway through a stand of fruit trees, and beyond that, a screened wooden deck.
There’s no need to go inside, though. I can see the problem through the living room windows. On this side of the house, a few lights are on. I believe the tenant was a professor at HKU. Irish, if I remember. It’s dark enough that I can’t see details, just the outline. A human form and the rope he used to hang himself. So much for tenure.
It was like this after things blew up with Adrian, this numbness. If I’m honest with myself, it hasn’t retreated. I have nursed it on wine and it’s thriving.
The policeman answers on the second ring. I tell him who and where I am, and why I’m calling. He listens, responds with terse instructions to wait outside, says he’ll be there in ten minutes.
I call Charles back, and when I’ve got him on the phone, I almost yell, “What the fuck?”
“It’s bad?”
“It’s a dead tenant, Charles. In my parents’ house. Yes, it’s fucking bad.”
“Did he leave a note?”
“The cop told me not to go in.”
“That’s fine. Wilson’s thorough. If the guy left one, he’ll find it.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Charles is silent for so long that I hold the phone away from my head to look at the screen. Did the call drop?
Finally: “You really don’t know?”
“No.”
“The suicides . . . they never stopped, Reuben. They were going to wreck business on the island. Remember, it got so bad that some asshole even tried to offer a one-way vacation package for people who wanted to kill themselves? A suicide theme park? Bargain rates at his rental flat and a charcoal brazier they could use?”
I mumble something about having heard of it before.
“The only reason people in Hong Kong think they stopped is because we’ve been . . . handling it. For years.”
This isn’t the time for logistics. I don’t ask how the moving parts work and he doesn’t offer to explain. Instead, he asks me to wait for the cop, who’ll tell me what to do.
“And Reuben?”
“What?”
“Don’t talk about this. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow. We’ll talk then, okay?”
Talk about it? I don’t know anyone here. Not that well, anyway. I try to imagine a Skype call to one of my friends back in London: So, guess what my family does for a living? No, that’s not going to happen.
When the cop comes, he needs my help cutting the noose. The knot’s too tight. The tenant hanged himself from a bar he’d installed in a doorway arch. He used rope, the nylon kind, and it’s cut into his throat and the sides of his neck—almost like gills. He’d put a plastic bag over his head first too. A thin sauce of blood and foam sloshes around the ligature. The reek of shit pours off him.
I rummage in the storage room off the kitchen to see if there’s a tarp or some plastic sheeting. There isn’t. But I’m relieved to find cleaning supplies. After the body’s been dealt with, I’ll mop the floor.
Back to the living room. The cop tells me I can go home. He’s talked to Charles and made a few calls. It seems there’s a network. In a way, we’ve been lucky. If this were a local Chinese man, there’d be an extended family to deceive. But with a dead expat and no ties other than his job and a couple of friends, there are options.
I’m about to ask how they’re going to move him when I realize I already know. An ambulance would draw attention. But there’s a path at the end of the garden leading down to the sea. There’s no pier, but you can
get an inflatable dinghy pretty close to the shore, drop anchor, and wade the rest of the way in.
“You’re quick,” says the cop.
“Do you need help?” I ask.
He doesn’t. People are on their way. I look out to sea. Three immense cargo ships are out there, visible only as arrays of orange lights at the horizon. A haze has rolled in, hiding the stars and the moon. Apart from the ships, all I can see in the distance is black.
4
It’s the waiting that kills you. The waiting for purpose and clarity. For a watched pot to boil. For the results of a blood test. For proof you’ve left the past behind once and for all. Like everyone else my age, I’ve lost the ability—if I ever really had it—to inhabit my own skin for more than thirty seconds at a time. I’ve heard of stillness. I’ve even seen patches of it here on Cheung Chau. Yet I check my phone every ten minutes for updates about scattered friends and grievous exes.
No one said, Welcome to the family business, made me swear a blood oath, or handed me the keys to a black ambulance. After Charles and Gideon returned from their respective trips, they talked to my parents, to whoever else made up this organization, to me. Even now, after . . . how many weeks? I still don’t know what to call it. It’s a protection racket without the extortion. Insurance without the paperwork. Business owners on the island pay Charles and Gideon a certain amount of money each month to make suicides vanish. I’m not sure how much. A lot, apparently. I’m on the payroll now. Somebody transfers a respectable five-digit figure into my account every month. Although I have questions, I won’t ask them.
First there was the tourist. Doughy Mitteleuropäisch angst even before the sea took her. German or possibly Swiss, she OD’d on kava, codeine, and Cointreau. Waded into the sea so fucked up it’s a miracle she could walk. Maybe she crawled. We found the empty bottles in her rental bedroom. No note, but she left an iPad on the bedside table, the passcode on a sticky note next to it. Gideon took a look because he does that, said, “It’s in German,” and switched the thing off. Afterward, we dropped it into the sea in the same burlap sack as its owner, weighted down with cinder blocks from one of Cheung Chau’s few construction sites. It was a grand night to dispose of a body: borderline chilly, foghorns in the night, lights from nearby ships, and islands’ surreal blurs in a filthy dense haze.
The very next day, a Korean. Just sixteen. No note, but when a jogging expat found him on the beach at Repulse Bay, where we left him, the news said he had killed himself rather than moving back to Busan with his family. Hong Kong kids have it hard; Koreans have it harder. Cram school till midnight. Teachers not shy about administering beatings. And then, at the end of it all, military service. From what I’ve heard, it’s two years of cheap kimchi, pushups in the snow, and anal molestation. I didn’t blame him.
Two weeks later, there was a group suicide. College kids, for the sweet love of god. Four of them. Two boys and two girls. They rented a room in one of Cheung Chau’s few proper hotels. Sneaked the charcoal brazier in somehow, maybe in a suitcase or in a backpack. Two boxes of cheap red wine, the budget Australian kind. I had a sip afterward. It tasted like rancid grape juice.
The night manager suspected. Four college kids, probably looking mopey and scared and relieved. You work in a hotel on Cheung Chau, you’ve seen it before. More than once. Black T-shirts, unwashed hair, no overnight bags, and at least one kid who doesn’t look convinced it’s a good idea.
Three were dead when we got there because they tend not to get on with it. A few beers first, or bad whiskey. A walk around the island. Maybe a joint if they’ve got a connection. Straight or gay, the couples want one last fuck. These are the preliminaries. In this case, they wasted no time. Finals must have been coming, or midterms. All the night staff have a number to call, not Hong Kong’s standard 999. It’s taped to every reception desk; new managers are expected to memorize it. Most of the time, Gideon answers. That time, it was Charles.
The night manager, a frump with a mop of oily hair and a mouth that wouldn’t shut all the way, unlocked the door for us. Smoke from the burned charcoal rolled out of the room. It was a slow weeknight or else there’d have been complaints, the scared kind, not on account of who might be killing themselves in the next room but on account of exposure to ghosts. No one wants that.
In the room, four bluish undergrads. The two girls were dead drunk before the party got started, if the number of empty beer cans and the bottle of convenience-store vodka was any indication. Lipstick on the mouth of the bottle, half an inch left standing inside.
“Four,” Charles said under his breath.
The word four sounds like the word for death in Chinese. Only the tone is different.
One of the boys reminded me somehow of Adrian. The cheekbones, the bristly haircut, the shape of the jaw. Unlike the other three, who’d dressed up a bit, this kid had on Nike track pants and an unseasonal windbreaker. Choosing activewear to die in: something Adrian would do.
I looked closer. “Is he still breathing?”
“Fuck,” said Charles and Gideon at the same time—Charles in English, Gideon in Cantonese.
There were things I couldn’t tell them. A flurry of e-mails from Adrian saying he needed to talk to me. Urgently. Please let him call me or Skype. The guilt I felt throughout all of this. I hadn’t looked him up when I went back to England. Passing my viva hadn’t made me feel smarter. I’ve done plenty of stupid things and am likely to keep doing them. But it was the out-of-the-blue Facebook message from my replacement, a Terrence Kong, earlier that day—that’s where my mind was.
* * *
Dear Reuben, you don’t know me. You don’t even have to trust me. But there’s something you need to know about Adrian. He’s got HIV. And I don’t think he got it from you. When I met him, I didn’t know he had a boyfriend. I must say, I understand why you beat him up when you found out about me. All I can do is apologize. But you should get tested.
* * *
In bed we used protection, but the beat-down I gave him when I learned about Terrence broke the skin. His. Mine too. The Cantonese slang term to describe my build translates as steel stick. Thin, and cabled with muscle. I don’t look like much. Then I hit you.
“Reuben? What’s up?” Charles asked.
“Just thinking,” I said. “I’m a little freaked out.”
“What do you think we should do?”
In Cantonese, Gideon said, “This can’t get out. That’s what we’re here for.”
I looked down at not-Adrian.
“Hand me a pillow,” I said.
And that brings us up to the present. I’m in a clinic in Jordan, waiting. This morning I sent Adrian an e-mail: Come to Hong Kong and let’s talk. Thomas isn’t completely out of the picture, but there’s nothing there. He’s just a rebound. We’ve been careful, and that makes him safe from me. If Adrian has to vanish, it’ll be a little more complicated. He is traceable. Plane tickets, a paper trail. But Charles and Gideon have years of experience. I don’t even know the extent of the network.
Glance down at my watch. Five more minutes and I’ll know how our story will end.
THE KAMIKAZE CAVES
by Brittani Sonnenberg
Lamma Island
They never tell a single woman to watch out for herself. It’s the men you’re supposed to keep an eye on, as if you hadn’t been doing that your whole life: trying to be irresistible, trying to wriggle away. A tiring game of tag you meant to give up when you moved to Lamma, three months ago, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Watch out for yourself, your mother should have said, not mind the length of your skirt or the look behind the look you give a man at a bar or on the street or on a bus. Watch out for yourself.
The men are mere accessories to the crimes, crimes you chose for yourself, as carefully as picking out the fabric for your wedding dress. Getting married—ah, yes. One of your greatest crimes yet, for which you are now serving this separated sentence on Lamma, an exiled penance for a
nother misdemeanor you’ve never quite managed to regret.
To be plain: an extramarital affair.
To be opaque: the last few years as a long flight of stairs, that you just kept falling down. A bump in the night. A baby bump that never appeared.
Watch out for yourself. Watch out for the self that lies in wait, the one that gave you the initial shove at the top of the landing, or was that God, or your mother, pushing you out? The Fall. The faltering glance.
* * *
Your days now: Wake up in another woman’s sublet, her second-floor, one-bedroom flat. Grind her coffee beans. Take the ferry in to Central. Watch the water churn an angry blue. Take the bus to HKU. Teach a creative writing class. Discuss structure, form, plot. Do not explain to your students that you are falling apart. They will want to know more. That’s how it works in narrative: the plot as lure, the story as hook, the reader as fish. Or fisherman? Give up on the strained metaphor and go have lunch. Then, at six, a drink with Gillian at Tai Lung Fung. Then the ferry back, the water frothing a darker blue. Close to black now. A spreading bruise.
Watch out for yourself.
* * *
Things that surface, sometimes, on your walks around Lamma, walks you take with the relief of a minute hand on the clock, inching around the hour:
1. A beaded clutch hurled at your husband’s back, in the Four Seasons hotel lobby, after one of his work events, when he wouldn’t listen to how long you’d been looking for him—Where were you?—how the contents all spilled out. How you kneeled on the floor, picking up tampons, lipstick, coins, the mother to your toddler having a tantrum, your husband out the revolving door.
2. The front seat of the double-decker bus headed to Repulse Bay, when your thigh touched the thigh of your soon-to-be-lover. Your colleague in the department. A Shakespeare expert. An expert in unraveling you further.
* * *
You consider both husband’s and lover’s brown eyes, that four-eyed beast, you banish it and them, tell yourself you’re safe now, here on Lamma, neatly islanded, just like they did with Napoleon on Elba. You pause your walk at Lion’s Rock, watch the surf pound the boulders below, watch a hawk get swallowed by a hill, watch the bougainvillea begin to shiver in the breeze. A clump of mainland tourists clot like thickening blood on the beach. Close your eyes. Watch out for yourself.