The Foreigner

by Francie Lin

  "For you," I said.

  " ’For you,’ " he repeated. He spat again and rubbed his mouth. "Meaning?"

  "I mean I want you to come back with me."

  He made a tsking sound, the show of patience of these last few days wearing thin. "Emerson. Fucking A." His pack of cigarettes was empty; from the desk he took a stale-looking cigarillo. "What, you think you can just bust in here and order me home? Like I’m some kind of juvie? We’re not kids anymore."

  "All the more reason."

  "Don’t patronize me, brother."

  "Then be straight with me," I said. "What happened to your face?"

  "I told you." Becoming agitated. His lighter wouldn’t work; he rasped the flint angrily, tossed it aside. "Nothing. A little run-in at a bar."

  "Little P…" If the threat hanging over his head hadn’t been so present, I would have pressed him, but Poison’s voice lingered like a specter, draining me of any rights to honesty. If Xiao P go, is too bad, shibushi?

  I put my hand on my breast pocket, feeling for Pierre Carcinet’s papers. To hand them over would be a truce of sorts, a show of trust; perhaps, in exchange for property, I might get the truth of his life.

  But as I started to take the papers out, something caught my eye. Smashed in on a high shelf among some empty boxes and a crate of rice wine: my mother, tilted drunkenly on her side.

  "What the hell?" I slammed my hand down on the desk.

  Little P looked, quickly stabbed out his smoke. "I’m taking care of it."

  "I ask you to look after her, and you put her with the garbage?"

  "Take it easy."

  "Fuck you."

  Little P blocked me as I tried to drag a chair over to the shelves and retrieve her. A feint to the right, to the left, but he was too quick, suddenly snarling in my face like a dog, jaw set. Blindly I swung at him. Memories of my mother shuffling up and down the plastic runners in her office at night, face drawn, sleepless over this piece of trash, my brother; the care packages she’d sent; the inheritance.

  My fist hit its mark with a blunt crack. I felt a shock of pain like a firecracker in my jaw—but that was his only attempt at defense; otherwise passive, he submitted like a rag doll. A blow to his face, to his face, to his face again.

  At last Little P dodged me, grabbed my arm, wrenching it painfully around my back.

  "You worthless son of a bitch," I gasped.

  He let go. I hobbled away from him, holding my jaw, and lowered myself onto a vinyl banquette.

  Little P walked back to his desk and leaned on it, not facing me.

  "Bet that felt good," he said presently. "You got some balls after all." He wiped his face with a tissue. His hands were trembling a bit. "Hard to tell under that prissy little front. Tell me, do the ladies really like that ironed polyester suit look? Does that pocket handkerchief make them swoon on the streets?" He paused, wiped his face again. "Who irons those things for you now that Mother’s gone, anyway?"

  "I suppose you iron your own suits," I said, feeling my jaw.

  I guess it hadn’t occurred to him until then that we were both wearing suits: mine gray, his black, but both neat, tucked, spotless except for the bits of blood on my cuff, on his shirt lapels. His mouth twitched, tightened.

  "It’s the reason for things that matters," he said fiercely. "Not the appearance. Not the outcome. Maybe we look the same from the outside, big brother, but we are not fucking the same."

  He smoothed his jacket. "This is invention. This is will. This is self-determination. That"—he flicked a finger at my sleeve—"is fear. Habit. Castration." He brushed his cuffs. He was trembling all over now.

  "All right. All right, you made your point. Calm down."

  The corner of my mouth bled a little. I dabbed at it with the tip of my finger. Despite everything, I felt suddenly tired and at peace, as if all that was poison had been purged from me. As I sat looking at my brother, pity and guilt twinged lightly in my chest.

  "Okay," I said. "Forget it. Let’s just forget this. If you won’t come home with me, then I’ll stay in Taipei. We could, I don’t know, start over again. Maybe I can help you."

  He turned bleakly. "Help how?"

  "I don’t know. With the Palace. With Uncle." He twisted his lip. "At the very least we could get to know each other again. Mother’s gone, Little P. You are the only one left."

  "If you want to help me, you’ll get me the will."

  Silence. Red and blue lights from a patrol car flashed in through a narrow window, soundlessly.

  Little P dragged the chair over to the shelf and brought the box of ashes down. He carried it to the desk and stood indecisively, fingering it for a moment.

  "If you stay here, you’ll still call the lawyer?" he asked.

  "Monday."

  "How long, you think?"

  "A few weeks. I don’t know. It depends on him."

  His hands were gripping the ashes firmly, and his eyes met mine, searching. For a long minute, a war of inscrutability was waged, Little P’s face as thick and smooth as wax. A tiny filament of resolve took iron root in my heart: he would never undersell the Remada for a quick buck. Not while I had a say in things.

  He pushed the box imperceptibly toward me.

  "Start over, you say. You say you want to get to know me." He laughed, and for the first time I heard something sort of wild and lonely in him, like a hint of autumn before a long, cold winter. "You don’t want to know."

  "Why not?"

  He sat down in his chair again and swiveled away from me. His disembodied voice came gruffly from behind the chair back.

  "You take her."

  I picked up the ashes, put them down, picked them up.

  "Little P…"

  "I want the will, Emerson."

  "I heard you. It’ll just… take a little time."

  OUT IN the lobby, I collided with Big One, who was trolling the grounds with ponderous aplomb. He poked a finger at the box.

  "What means?" he demanded.

  "None of your business." I jerked away, drawing my mother protectively to my side. His little, sunken eyes sank further. I should have played it differently—laughed, cringed, flipped the box casually in the air, anything—for he had seen a sign of weakness, of love and need. I could feel Poison watching me from behind the reception desk as I left.

  CHAPTER 9

  A FEW DAYS LATER, in a dismal little Internet place near Shi Da, I received an e-mail from my boss at Hastie and Associates:

  From: James Tillock

  To: Emerson X. Chang

  Cc: Emerson Chang

  Date: August 20, 2004 6:14 P.M.

  Subject: your request and leave

  Dear Mr Chang:

  We were of course very sorry to hear of your loss Death is the great equalizer and reminds us to cherish each and every moment spent with loved ones.

  Regarding your request for extended leave, we are happy to grant it. In fact your situation dovetails nicely with a situation of our own, namely the retrenchment of our biotech teams in the wake of some recent events (litchfield & Johnson, Lunentech, etc. If asked, please refrain from offering any comments on the situation until it has resolved without further rancors. You know what I mean) We have no desire to offend or betray a loyal employee of almost twenty years. Instead, we have put you on official FREE AGENT status until such time as our biotech operations might resume. You are a model team member, Mr. Charng, and we believe you deserve some time for yourself. Consider it a much deserved vacation (though of course indefinite and unpaid).

  If therne is anything else we can do for you in your time of grief, please do not hesitate to ask

  Warmest regards,

  James E. Tillock

  I had to read this over several times before I grasped the actual implications behind the cheery-leery tone. A fly buzzed laconically on my arm. All around me, the world continued, oblivious, pimple-faced boys smoki
ng, playing EverQuest, or napping, heads down on their sticky console keyboards while the only remaining anchor of my former life dissolved in a weak platitude about death, some veiled threats, an empty offer of assistance. I looked around for help as I drowned, quietly, in waters of shame and rage. Work had always been a refuge from the failures of my life. Hastie had been dull, perhaps, but I’d taken pride in the neat marshaling of reports; the formulas applied to recalcitrant numbers; even the clean, efficient desktop in my office, wiped down at the end of the day, pens color-coded and arrayed like soldiers in formation—it had all given me a sense of completion, even transcendence. Now, somehow, I had failed, been ejected from that dry, beloved Eden. Without warning, without even the decency to say it straight out. I put a hand to my chest, suffocating in the smoky little room, and went blindly out into the sunshine.

  Pride was only the more painful half of it. Without the job, there was no hope of buying Little P out. Some dim aural memory flickered in my ear: Pierre Carcinet and his mention of my inheritance, the property in Taipei. Perhaps the sale of it would offset a down payment on the Remada? But that property—it was my mother’s childhood home. Could you sell one ancestral home to pay for the other? Gold for silver, blood for tears. A bank loan was possible—but my mother, in her lifetime, had paid off the Remada in its entirety. The thought of paying interest on it now was a bitter pill. There had to be another way.

  I had not told Little P about the mah-jongg game, or about Poison’s threat. Tell him, warned a small, nagging voice. He knows them. He’s the only one who can help you out of this. But something in me balked at the prospect of asking him for help; I might almost prefer seeing him whacked to groveling before him. I shook my head violently to clear it of guilt and anxiety: eight thousand; two weeks; you’ll still call the lawyer?

  As I walked, the alien city seemed to make a show of its difference, its foreignness no longer just a temporary façade but a dawning fact of my new life. Everywhere I went, streets were being dug up with cranes and steam shovels, storefronts being dismantled, sledgehammers and pickaxes being wielded without sentiment or protection, buildings brought down with wrecking balls, no ceremony, broken asphalt dumped in a little area weakly fenced off. Strange faces and ciphers greeted me in block after block of shadowed, featureless high-rises. I ducked down an alley off the main avenue, but the strangeness was worse here: a little open market, tented by a dark awning, full of the smells of sweetness and decay. Chickens murmured in their crates; flies crawled over the sticky, split fruit; while somewhere nearby a hose was rinsing down a butcher’s board, the bloody water congealing at my feet. A beggar moved slowly through the crowd, beating his head against the ground.

  A two-story Starbucks dawned on the horizon as I came out of the fetid little alley. I almost ran to it, hazarding across the double lanes of Xinsheng Road against traffic. It wasn’t the coffee drinks but the promise of quiet cleanliness that drew me, the familiar armchairs and soft, blurry folk with plucked bass over the stereo—a point of stillness and permanence in the wild.

  The upstairs tables were nearly empty except for a few students, a group of businessmen making deals over Frappuccinos. I carried my mug to the farthest corner and sat down. After a moment, feeling conspicuous, I took out a little paperback I had brought with me from home and tried to read, but the words squiggled and swam, obscured by the churn of unkillable thoughts: eight thousand; the blade of a knife; Uncle’s frozen face like plastic, mouthing its stunted sounds.

  "Xiansheng?"

  A light hand on my arm dispelled the broken images. A woman peered down at me inquisitively. She had been sitting several tables away when I came in, bent over a book. Even in my distress, I had noticed her: long dark hair, taut limbs, and straight waist, elegant as a dancer. I couldn’t understand a word of her lilted Chinese, but the sound of her voice was distinctive, low and sweet.

  "Sorry," I said. "Wo bu dong."

  She paused, examined me with new interest. "You… are… forn?"

  "Excuse me?"

  She appeared embarrassed. "You are… foreener?"

  "Oh. Yes. Foreigner. Waiguoren."

  She smiled again, this time at my butchering of the word. She had an unusual face, delicate, doe-eyed, marked with a kind of gentleness that reminded me of both sorrow and wildness.

  "You to excuse, please. I see that"—she pointed to my paperback—"I think you must to know the English. You know?"

  "Well, enough, anyway," I said. Then, because she looked puzzled: "Yes. English, yes. From America."

  She clapped her hands in evident delight and clutched my arm again. "Much better! You can to help?"

  She fetched the book she had been poring over. It was a computer manual from the eighties, the pages soft and discolored from age, punctuated occasionally with a smudgy black-and-white photograph. She put a finger tentatively on the word C-prompt and looked to me, patient.

  "C-prompt," I said.

  "What, please?"

  I rubbed my forehead. "Hard to explain. It’s… back when you had an MS-DOS operating system…" I struggled for the words, then flipped suddenly to the cover of the book: Introducing PC-DOS and MS-DOS.

  I stole a look at her: that odd beauty, her slim body smooth as ivory but quickened with breath. Surely she didn’t spend her days in some cubicle as a programmer.

  "Are you an engineer?" I asked. I took out my pocket dictionary and found engineer.

  She laughed. "No. This book, I find at DV8. You know DV8?"

  "No."

  "Bar. Pub. Many foreign customer. They leave book, CD."

  "Oh. You have an interest in computers, then?"

  "No."

  She paused, looked down in embarrassment. She seemed pensive, as if she could not decide what to say. Then, impulsively, she reached across the table and took my hand. "You are marry?"

  Her touch was warm and searching; I had not felt anything like it in a long time.

  "No."

  "Too bad." She sighed and shook her head, regretful. "You look like nice man. Can I say that? ’Nice man.’ That is the good English?"

  "Of course."

  She smiled, satisfied. Her pleasure dimmed slightly as she remembered what we had been talking about.

  "My boyfriend," she said, hesitant. "He too is the American." She tapped the PC book. "I want to learn for him."

  "So he’s the engineer," I said, feeling a kind of prick in the chest at the mention of her boyfriend.

  "No, no. I want to learn the English for him."

  "Oh! But… you mean with this?"

  Crestfallen, she murmured something inaudible; clearly she had put great store in this PC manual, as if it were a book of enchantments.

  "It’s a good book," I said gently, backing off. "But maybe you should find another one. More useful."

  She took the text back, staring down at it in confusion. I was still mindful of her hand on mine, her distinctive, lingering scent of tuberose and something sharper, salt, seaweed.

  "You should keep the book," I said. "But you might study some other words too. Better if you had a regular teacher. If you want," I hazarded, "I could help you."

  Her glance was so genuinely surprised, so gratified, that I felt extremely guilty, and told myself it was for her, really: she would never get anywhere with that computer manual.

  I took her little notebook and pen and wrote:

  light

  dark

  cold

  clear

  hard

  jewel

  glass

  rock

  flame

  cave

  rain

  shine

  burn

  brush

  blow

  She looked over the list in silence. "I know already," she said after a moment, pushing the notebook back at me. "Too simple."

  "The words are simple," I said, halting. "But you can know the meaning of a word without knowing what it means."

  "Shenma yisi?" She f
urrowed her brow.

  "Let’s just talk, okay? Using the words sometimes, if you want, or not using them. Or using only the words I’ve written. For fun." I put my finger on the page. "The cold flame burns dark."

  She frowned. "What, please?"

  "It doesn’t mean anything."

  "Then why… ?"

  "I don’t know. Because. Because that’s what English is. That’s the essence of it." She looked doubtful, and I thought she would probably excuse herself politely, take her book and leave.

  But then she put out a tentative finger and moved it slowly, timidly across the page. "The light… glass… rain… is cold clear."

  She looked up and laughed.

  "Right," I said and laughed too.

  "My cold rock… burn the glass rain."

  "Excellent."

  The lesson lasted another hour, or two; I didn’t really know. Before she left, she gave me her number, writing it down on a page and adding to it a list of characters, which she pushed at me.

  "For you," she said. "For next time. You must to learn." She winked teasingly.

  The characters, in their terse complexity, had a look of veiled import, like letters coded in her lovely script.

  She gathered her things and leaned over, her dark hair brushing my shoulder.

  "Not to drink too much," she said, indicating my coffee. "Too much coffee bad for heart. Car… cardio… vascular inflammation. My boyfriend," she said proudly, "teach me. Is very healthy. Will to see you next week?"

  Her name, she had said, was Grace.

  AS I left, the streetlights were beginning to come on, and the air of day-end festivity had taken the foreign edge off the unfamiliar buildings and blocks. Still touched by the lightness of the unexpected English lesson, I had no desire to go back to my room. I was no longer staying with Atticus. His beautiful apartment, with its clean sheets and careful solicitude, made me uncomfortable—something hidden behind the display. Instead, I had installed myself at a budget hotel near the Main Station. It was called the Tenderness and was as grim a place as the term budget hotel could suggest: stained tiles, a stinking drain, gaps between the wall and ceiling so that heat, smoke, and voices circulated in a thick haze.