by Jason Y. Ng
"If I was having an affair, I guarantee you would never know about it."
"That's ridiculous. I know you were. I heard you whispering into the phone. I saw the lingerie receipts. I followed you to the Omni."
"Trust me." He gives me a patronizing look.
I press my fingers to my temples.
He smiles a creepy smile, like he's pulled one over on me. "I was just giving you permission."
I shake my head to try to clear it. This is making no sense. "Permission? For what? You wanted me to see Leon?"
"Want? No," he says, and if I didn't know better, I would think he was about to cry. But no, he's already icy again. "I would have been pleased if you didn't fall for it, or act on it, but I know how the world works."
Pleased. He would have been pleased if I didn't cheat on him. Even when he thinks I'm sleeping with another man, he can't seem to get worked up about it.
It takes me another beat, but I finally figure it out. "You wanted an excuse to leave me for her." I feel tears behind my eyes and hate that I'm so jealous of this woman when the prize is obviously such a prick. He wasn't always like this, though. Was he? Back before he started drowning his problems with work, back when we bought the four-bedroom house with the big yard and the perfect climbing tree?
He gives me a look of absolute disgust. "You're still not getting it. Let me say it more slowly. There is no her. I'm not as fucking needy as you. And it's not all about you, Rebecca. Some things are bigger than you."
And now I'm shouting—"What in the hell are you talking about? Why are you always so patronizing?"
He looks at me like he's considering telling me more. Or maybe that he's already told me too much.
My sense of dread is so strong that I no longer care how I come across. I say firmly, "What happened to Leon?"
"It's about time you know the truth about him. He'd sell out every person on this island to consolidate the Party's power, his family's power." Paul starts to get energized. "You can't expect me to do nothing about it. Or to actually let him fuck my wife."
I close my eyes and try to block out his words.
"Besides, if you could only see how much of a pussy he was."
Was. Past tense.
"Where is he?"
Paul says nothing.
"When did you see him?"
"When you invited him up to your room."
"I didn't."
"Yes," he says. "You did."
"No. I'm telling you I didn't." As if it matters at this point, but I will not be called a liar.
"Yeah, babe. You did." He nods at the computer. At first I think he's implying he read my e-mails or texts, but I really didn't invite Leon up. Did Paul hack my phone? Did he invite Leon up? I open my purse to check my texts for I don't know what, but in my nervousness, I fumble and drop my phone.
This isn't possible. I try to remember how I first discovered his affair, when he started whispering and laughing into the phone late at night, turning his screens away from me, lying about his whereabouts. It was about the same time he started nonchalantly asking about my time in Hong Kong, which of course made me think of Leon. As Paul knew it would.
I feel cold. I'm suddenly envisioning masked men throwing a hood over Leon and secreting him away. It seems impossible. Seventeen years together and I've never known Paul to be violent. He may not be in love with me, but he's always been courteous and thoughtful, docile. He's a freaking Eagle Scout, the kind of guy who says ma'am and sir, and stops to help people push broken-down cars.
He moves toward me. I step back.
"Stop being so dramatic." He gives me a look like, Come on, I'm not going to hurt you.
I lunge past him for the phone or computer, to try to figure out what the hell he has on Leon.
He stops me. Pushes me just a little. I push him harder.
I reach for the computer, but he snaps it closed and it pinches my finger.
"Don't take it personally. It's national security."
I can't bear to hear that it's not even about me at all. It's about work. If he killed Leon in a fit of jealous rage, I could almost understand, but this? This is too much.
"Pack your shit," he says, turning and motioning to our suitcases.
While his back is turned, I reach past him and grab his closed laptop, ripping it free of its cords. Before I even realize what I'm doing, I heave it into the air and whack him on the head. The crack is louder than I could have imagined. My fingers are numb from the impact.
He looks at me with surprise; it's almost as if he's proud of me. But only for a second. He reaches for me roughly but misses and stumbles. Then he looks up and stares in my direction, but it's like he doesn't see me.
I feel like I'm going to throw up.
"What the fuck, Rebecca?" His voice sounds funny. He touches his head. Blinks.
What have I done? I should run, but he's between me and the door.
I put my entire body weight behind me this time like I'm swinging a bat. My right foot wobbles, and I nearly twist my ankle in the process, but I manage to hit him again. When his knees buckle, I whack him yet again. He falls to the ground with a thud.
I drop the computer and squat down next to him. There is blood on the floor, a lot of blood.
I want to panic, to run or scream. I need to think. I check for a pulse, already knowing I won't feel one.
I'm suddenly aware of the quiet in this room far above the chaos of Hong Kong.
I should be focused on the man I've spent almost my entire adult life with, but all that I can think of now is what will happen if I get caught. In the window, imposed over the sparkling skyline of a city where anything can happen, I see the faint reflection of a middle-aged white woman who will spend the rest of her life in a foreign prison. Decidedly not the new life I've been imagining.
I look down at the cracked computer, over to the burl-wood desk and Paul's papers, Leon's phone. I stand up in my ridiculous heels and walk around Paul to the desk. I pick up Leon's phone.
His people will know how to make a body disappear.
PHOENIX MOON
by James Tam
Mong Kok
I watch his penis swallowed by the phlegmatic vortex, leaving behind a faint shade of pink in the stained toilet bowl. Ha, I can picture it cruising down the sewer with other turds from the neighborhood. I close the wooden seat cover and sit down on its worn surface. It feels coolish and slippery against my sweaty skin. I’m exhausted, yet calm and relieved. My head has stopped pounding. The noise is gone. In its place is an uncanny clarity, a detached awareness of the surroundings, of my life, the here and now, and why I’m holding a pair of bloody scissors. I can recall every detail of what happened a moment ago, and fully understand the consequences without the slightest concern. How weird, this inner peace immediately after the horrific crime and the tumultuous reaction of my victim.
I wonder if this is sudden enlightenment. Alice said many Zen masters have attained enlightenment under wacky circumstances such as getting shit on the head by a pigeon or falling into a cesspool. Hey, what if de-sexing Kit has somehow elevated my insight to new heights? I must ask Alice when I have a chance, now that she’s given up prostitution to be a Buddhist nun.
I throw the scissors into the bathtub. They make a sharp loud clank, shattering the unusual silence.
It’s about nine in the morning, very early for us lot, late for normal people. The howling wind and gushing rain have quieted down, consolidating into a dense grayish mass. Maybe Hong Kong, like me, is trapped in the eye of a big bad storm?
This section of Portland Street, three stories below, is rarely so quiet. Running between the snazzy facade of Nathan Road, a main artery of Kowloon, and the fatalistic bustle of Shanghai Street where real people live, it’s a murky transition in which day and night change shift without color or drama, as if tired and underpaid security guards. In this neighborhood, a ten-minute walk from the heart of Temple Street, is a full spectrum of human activities and commod
ities at knockdown prices. One block away is a busy wet market. Chickens with gleaming feathers squawk in crowded cages weaved from bamboo strips. The sight of their ex-cage-mates, necks slit in one quick cut, flapping inside a bucket right next to the cage, doesn’t seems to bother them. They crane their necks majestically high, gently nudging against each other, like proud aristocrats queuing for the guillotine. Next to the chickens is a long linoleum-lined table covered with ice. On top of the ice bed are skillfully dissected sections of fresh fish. Half their bodies are gone, exposing their air bladders for market assessment, yet they continue to twitch. Sometimes they make me wonder if I’d also grope for life with my last breath, or just let go, if someone cut me into halves.
After the market, toward the center of Temple Street, is a row of dai pai dong food stalls. Like the wet market, the ground is always wet there, even during the drought. They serve fragrant coffee sweetened with condensed milk, inch-thick toast with a crispy crust and fluffy heart, a hundred kinds of fried noodles, steamy hot-pot rice, snake soup when in season, and my favorite congee with pig chitterlings and miscellaneous guts. During their busy hours, the apartment gets impregnated with their mixed aroma if I keep the windows open. They occupy half the road, leaving barely enough space for trucks to pass. Trespassing private cars will be inadvertently scratched, guaranteed. Behind their tin-box stalls is the pedestrian pavement, occupied by boxes of goods spilled over from dusty boutiques, hardware and kitchenware stores, Chinese medicine herbal shops, more established eateries, and a few mahjong schools. Nobody will teach you anything about mahjong there. But if you don’t play according to their strict gambling rules, you’ll be dealt with by the bouncers rather than a mahjong tutor. Pedestrians walk in the middle of the road, or navigate between stalls.
Of course there’s sex and entertainment. This is the real world. On the floors above the shops are residential units used for various purposes. Some are occupied by hardworking families with hopeful kids studying to become doctors and engineers. Others have their windows painted permanently black, isolated from the outside, oblivious to the passage of time by design. They display signs of massage parlors, nightclubs, cabarets, personal barbers, intimate private tutors, and movie-screening studios on the outside, giving the neighborhood a unique cultural air. Then there’re girls like me. We are the most honest and straightforward, leaving no ambiguity as to what our business is. Yet other apartments are used as urban churches, operated by religious brethren trying to fit in, or dreaming of taking over.
On a normal day, life starts at about four in the morning, as final vestiges of the previous night get reabsorbed by predawn darkness. Garbage and delivery trucks rev idling engines while workers bang buckets and holler friendly abuse to each other, as if to avenge those who can afford to sleep while the mess they have created is being cleaned up. I’m not one of them, though. I would have just finished work, eating my early-morning meal before going to bed. As I climb into bed, the indistinct hubbub of hawkers and vehicles and shoppers and tourists is my lullaby. By the time I wake in the early afternoon, they have usually gathered in full force, energetically sustaining the reputation of our district—Mong Kok, the brisk corner.
Most days I start to receive customers in the late afternoon, mainly warm-ups—good family men needing a quick fix before going home to their good wives and innocent children. Prime time starts after dinner, when customers emerge from the dark, lured by the cheap glow of neon signs, like phantom moths. Neon signs are always red. Ours at the main entrance of the building—Horny Miu Miu and Sexy School Girl 3D—costs us fifteen bucks a month. Miu Miu is horny for sure, but I’m no schoolgirl by any stretch of the imagination. My “stage name” has always been kind of academic because I did go to college for nearly a whole year. That’s rare in our business. Being the only functional literate in my class, my dumb high school actually offered me a scholarship to attend college. Nice of them, wasn’t it? So I did it, went to Teacher’s College, out of uncertainty, curiosity, vanity, a wicked sense of irony, and a hidden soft spot for the schoolmaster, Miss Yeung. That old lady sincerely thought she saw a glimmer of hope in me because I could read, bless her virgin soul. I also wanted to spite my mother who was confident that I’d continue the family tradition of whoring. Oh well, I eventually did, though only part-timing at the nightclub at first. The scholarship was barely enough for tuition fees, and I couldn’t wait any longer to run away from my mom. Anyways, a stage name’s obviously only for marketing. No customer’s stupid enough to expect it to match the person who opens the door half-naked.
For most of the night, our flat, 3D, is enlivened by the happy rhythm of beds creaking and theatrical moaning. Miu Miu can drink beer, chew gum, burp, fart, and moan ecstatically at the same time. The night finally nods off when the men disperse. Before long, it’s jolted out of a brief snooze by bawling drunks, piercing sirens, or gang warriors threatening each other with their own lives.
* * *
The bathroom window, panes translucent with grime, hinges frozen by rust, is half-open. One of these days, a typhoon will take it down, then we’ll get a new one. I can hear birds twittering nervously outside. Miu mentioned some time ago that birds had nested behind the leaky pipes barely attached to the building wall, adjacent to our window, but I had not noticed them before. What kind of bird would leave the forest to hang around this slum? Is that fate? Insanity? Stupidity? Birds have small brains. But do they have fate? Another question for Alice.
I wipe my hands on my naked body. Broken streaks of blood trail from breasts to thighs, like a calligrapher’s exhausted brushstrokes. My thirty-three-year-old body is well past school age, seriously overused. I still trust it like a cabbie trusts his old taxi. Not perfect all right, but will do the trick at least one more night, then one more night. My sunless flaccidity still looks good in dim light, good enough. Most men like pale skin, and are incapable of noticing its subtle defects once I’ve got them by the quivering dick. Occasionally, a jerk may make a few smart-ass comments too many. I’ll tell him to go fuck his own mother instead. If he freaks out, well, he’ll have to talk to Ah Bill or one of his buddies. The girls in this building are protected by the 14K triads. Ah Bill is our resident da dun security manager, invisible unless there’s trouble.
Ah Miu—once my best friend, roommate, and coworker—taps tentatively on the door, calling my name softly: “Feng Yue. Feng Yue. You okay?”
Her feigned concern gives me the creeps. The two-faced bitch will flee at the slightest hint of me making a move. I heard her opening the front door as soon as she came out of her room. Very wise, Ah Miu—first thing first, get the escape route ready. Ah Bill promptly came over to inquire. I wonder why he was still around this time of the day. Must be the new girl in flat 1A. Anyways, he took off before Miu could finish her incoherent account. He doesn’t deal with this kind of shit, especially when a cop is involved. The neighbors are dead quiet. In this building, the first response to a scream for help is to bolt the door and stay put.
Miu then called 999. We never call the police for help. We settle everything our way, without government interference. I suppose this is an extraordinary situation. “Yes, yes. The crazy woman’s still in here. She’s locked herself in the bathroom. She’s got a knife,” she said breathlessly, unnecessarily loud. “He’s fainting, bleeding a lot. Maybe dying. Hurry, lah, Ah Sir!” To support her claim, Kit Zai groaned in the background like a pig in the slaughterhouse.
Well, she was wrong. I don’t have a knife. I have a pair of scissors, brand new, German made, top quality, used only once so far to fantastic effect. His dick offered less resistance than blanched pig chitterlings, my favorite bedtime snack. She may be right about me being a lunatic, though. I’ve been suspecting that for years. But hey, look around, who isn’t? Only that I know and they don’t. They’re crazier!
* * *
Miu has stopped pretending to want to talk to me. She’s mumbling urgently to Kit Zai, who’s gone quiet. I wonder if he’
s dead. Nobody’s supposed to die from a severed cock. He’s probably looking for his gun, dripping blood all over. I hid it under the bed before the operation, darling. I may be crazy, but I ain’t stupid, huh?
In the past few weeks, since I found out about this treacherous pair, a noise in my head has been helping me plan my revenge, working out details. It’s the noise that insisted on investing in a pair of good pinking shears. That way, the damage will be irreparable.
They can’t repair a cutoff dick anyways! I told myself, or the voice. The woman who was sharing my table at the congee stall kept her head way down and spooned scalding-hot congee into her face at double speed, pretending not to hear anything.
Remember the guy who got his dong sliced off by his girl a few years back? The doctor sewed it back on. One of the girls even saw him use it again a year later!
I find that hard to believe, but you never know these days. Technology seems capable of any voodoo. But good pinking shears are grossly overpriced, so I settled for a pair of strong scissors instead. A good idea had dawned on me at the store: flush it down the toilet. Much cheaper that way.
This morning, the noise issued a simple command: Now!
All right! I got out of bed, temples throbbing with excitement. He was snoring like the thunder god.
He had come in around two, unexpectedly. I had switched the neon sign off earlier than usual. Miu was still out, probably singing at a Temple Street cabaret. It had been a quiet night except for the weather. I should have taken the night off as well.
After the condom incident, he had stayed away for a few days but called to say he was busy, missing me. Ah Miu had kept up an outrageously innocent face, more vacuously jolly than usual, assessing me through sideways glances.
Not that easy, bitch. Nothing happened.
Had he disappeared, would I have let go of him and focused on Miu after the episode had dimmed in her tenuous memory? I don’t know. The voice assured me he would come back, though.