The Foreigner

by Francie Lin

  I was standing by the window and happened to be glancing down at the street when the air outside suddenly constricted, seeming to breathe in. There was a moment of silence, and then the breath was released in a slow chord that mounted steadily until it reached a note of doleful, jaded warning. I had forgotten about the air-raid drill. The siren was sounded only once a year, an annual reminder of the tenuousness of the sunlit peace in the unsentimental streets below. I peered down at the sidewalk. The desolation was eerie at noontime: no people, and no cars along the thoroughfare. The only sign of life was a lean stray cat prowling along the perimeter of the park boundary across the street. I was glad Atticus was asleep. The ghostly voice, so plaintively raised, served only to confirm his particular despair.

  DAWN OUTLINED the mountains in clear blood red the next day, the Mid-Autumn Festival at last. Poison had been shunted to the back of my mind, but with the deadline came a renewed apprehension. Another storm was gathering over the strait, and the massing front cast a queer, glossy twilight even at noon. All day I felt that I moved behind a wall of thick tinted glass.

  Around four o’clock, after a desperate, fruitless search for Angel, I came home drained—too tired, in fact, to notice the little lick of fire in the bedroom, wavering hesitantly in the dark. Then the light approached. Angel’s face swam up in the flicker, like a tense, unhappy ghost.

  "I didn’t know where I should go," she began.

  Her nose quivered; I’d brought home takeout from the eatery down the street and had been cracking open the box when she came out. Meekly, she ate two of my dumplings with her fingers and looked over at me. "Can I stay here for a while?"

  I turned away. "What’s wrong with your grandparents’ place?"

  "It’s for them that I left."

  Despite myself, her urgency hit its mark.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  She swallowed. "I went to the police. Yesterday."

  "And?" The word was choked; I didn’t want to know.

  "I’m… not sure."

  "Are they going to arrest Uncle?"

  "I don’t know."

  She walked up and down the room, twisting her fingers anxiously.

  "Something weird is happening," she said. "I went down to the precinct this morning to talk to the officer, but when I got there, they said there was no history of my report. The disk I left there, with the images, my statement—there’s no record of them anywhere."

  "No proof?"

  "There’s proof. It’s still on my memory key." She jangled the stick at me, distracted. "That’s not the problem. Last night I was home alone. I fell asleep watching TV, you know? I must’ve slept too long, because when I woke up it was already dark, and everyone else was out at dinner. I was too lazy to get up and turn on the lights, so I was just lying there when I heard something at the window. Like a scraping, or clicking, but really soft. I thought it was just an animal or something, but it went on for like a few minutes, so I got up and pulled up the shade.

  "There was a face out there, Emerson. He dropped down so fast I didn’t get a good look, but he was there. He was trying to cut the outside grille. He thought I wasn’t home."

  "You don’t know they were targeting you," I said. I ate a dumpling; it tasted like cardboard. "There are lots of break-ins."

  "Not where I live." She stopped pacing and looked at me. "You can’t cover for him forever," she said. Her voice rose as I ignored her, dumping out the bagged soup into two chipped bowls. "I can’t just forget."

  "I am not turning my brother in," I said. The statement had the ring of a carefully constructed conviction, when in fact I had not known what I believed until this moment. "You do what you want, but I won’t be a party to it."

  "I thought you were my friend," she said. "I thought you were a good person."

  "Well, you were wrong."

  Her mouth quivered. I lowered my gaze to the table, where the spread seemed suddenly cheap and impoverished. For Little P, for my mother, I couldn’t let it go, even if I should lose all face before my best friend. She rubbed her eyes, leaving dark smudges under them. She looked very young and very tired.

  "Sit down," I told her. I pushed the take-out container over to her. "Finish this. Then go take a nap. You can have the bed."

  "What about—"

  "We won’t talk about it now. You look exhausted."

  She began eating, face still streaked with tears.

  "You know I didn’t mean it, about being your friend," I said. "Of course I’m still your friend—if you still want me. But you’re a better person than I am. I can’t see past my brother. You do what you think is right." I squeezed her hand.

  After dinner, she went straight to bed. I washed her dishes, then sat at the kitchen table trying to read. High winds from the approaching storm had knocked power out momentarily, though the rain hadn’t come yet, and candlelight wavered over the page like water. I went into the bedroom to check on Angel; she had thrown the covers off and was sleeping with her arms flung over her head, breathing quick and anxious. I covered her again and went back out into the dining room.

  My bottle of Jim Beam was dry. The wind whistled in the rain gutters, high and lonely. I thought of the night Uncle and Poison had paid me a visit. My money was still locked safely away in my account. Angel’s disk, her report, our proof—surely it would reach the right desk somehow, surely someone would take up our tip, and when they did, when the police busted the Palace, the mah-jongg debt would be erased, and Little P would be safe, from Poison at least, if not from the harshness of the truth and the law. I clutched at the fact of his physical safety like a drowning man at a straw. It was not enough.

  Outside, the front gate clanged loudly. In its wake, I became aware of a sudden soft scritching, like nails scrabbling at glass. The noise stopped, then started up again, more deliberate, accompanied by a thin metal jangling.

  The only weapon I had was a rusted hammer. I picked it up and opened the door quietly.

  The sounds were fainter out here, but I paused and listened very carefully. They seemed to be coming from the side yard, in the thicket of azaleas covering the bedroom window. I tightened my grip on the hammer and crept around the corner. Again, the scritching stopped.

  "Come out!" I hissed. "You want your money, you come out and get it, you fucker."

  The bushes tossed and waved in the wind, but no one emerged.

  I was sick of feeling hunted, sick of groveling, begging, bargaining. I marched up to the thicket and ripped aside the branches, hammer tensed and ready. Then I froze.

  It was an owl, a small one with deep, hooded eyes that blazed at me in the weak light from the street. One claw was caught in a length of rusted chain dangling from the branches. As I reached in to untangle it, the bird beat its wings and let out a thin, raucous cry.

  Once freed, it fluttered to the top of the fence and looked back at me. Dreamily, I moved to the front gate to watch it. I had the odd feeling that the bird was leading me somewhere, that I should follow it. Its dark silhouette darted down the street, to a wall topped with broken glass. The creature reminded me oddly of my father: an impression of sternness; stillness; the silence of pride. It had been years since I’d thought of him. He had died too long ago, his mark upon his sons overlaid by the imprint of my mother. It occurred to me, following the bird’s jagged course in the dim light, that this had been his home. He had passed through these streets without any sense of strangeness: thinking of love, maybe, thinking of exams, schoolwork, what to eat for dinner. He would not have learned English yet; Little P and I were not even ideas in his mind. If—through some wrinkle in time—I were to meet that young man now, the fact of communication would stand in the way. Crude gestures, pictures drawn on the ground—those would be our common tongue, the most primitive of languages, as if we were strangers, or brutes. The owl, opening out its wings, caught a gust of wind and disappeared into the dark night sky.

  Smoke drifted through the alleys as I turned back toward hom
e. Thin and gauzy and smelling of gas—a fire in one of the eateries along the main avenue, though it didn’t smell like a grease fire. Neighbors had gathered on the sidewalks, looking up and down the block through the gathering white air. A cat wailed. An old man in his undershirt turned a sightless eye toward me; somehow I could hear the burning of his cigarette. I began to run.

  Behind the rotting fence of my courtyard, the house was burning, a violent yellow flame in the front window, which had already been shattered by the heat. The frame stood broken and silhouetted against the blaze, and the fire was burning hard enough that it seemed viscous, the thick roiling of the flames like mercury, like oil and water. A piece of the frame broke and fell into the yard, and the hedge went up with bright, crackling alacrity while the house roared. Far off, there was a siren.

  "Angel!" I yelled through the fence. The fire cut a neat swath through the undergrowth. I ran to the gate and tore it open.

  A neighbor grabbed my arm. "Ni bu yao jinqu," he said. You can’t go in there. Wait, sir. Wait… But I pulled free and charged ahead.

  "Angel! Angel!" The flames from the window bit the edge of the roof, curling the tin back upon itself with a dreadful shrieking. Inside, glass crashed like a breaking board, the tinkling like a chime.

  The south side of the house was still quiet and dark, waiting for the coming destruction. Coughing, I ran around the side yard to the back.

  "Angel!"

  I thought I heard a weak voice calling from the kitchen, but as I rounded the corner, a hand, impossibly large, loomed up in my side vision, and the voice dropped to black as my sight inverted and fell away. Pain filled my head slowly, and I thought I heard myself say, "Where did you go?" But I couldn’t be sure, and whatever the meaning was, was lost.

  CHAPTER 23

  A LIGHT JIBBERED, GIGGLED, GLOWED, then became a silver static that jumped into focus now and then, a dull talking head with stock prices running top to bottom along the sidebar.

  "Xiuli," shouted Big One, waving his tiny paocha cup in the air. Fix it!

  "I can’t fix it! You fix it," said Poison. He punched the television. The picture jumped, then settled back into snow. He pulled off the wilted antenna and threw it to the ground. "Ni ma de!"

  One side of my face felt hot and poisoned as I raised my head from the floor. The first thing I felt for was my mother, who, miraculously, was still there, though the cord had left a rope burn on my neck and had frayed at the join. Everything else lay behind a matted screen. With some painful squinting, I made out a pair of odd white, egglike spots on the floor, an arm’s length away, and contemplated these for a while. Upon concentrated inspection, they turned into my glasses, bent and cracked beyond repair. I reached out blindly and put them on. The room jumped into semiclarity threaded with lines, like a picture in a broken frame.

  I was in some kind of basement or garage, without windows, and with white tube lights exposed and humming on the ceiling. The floor was bare concrete, and the walls were pitted and daubed with plaster. The closeness of the air made me drowsy, and there was the inevitable smell of incense and exhaust. The banquettes, pushed at random angles against the walls, told me that we were somewhere in the Palace. Big One had pulled a crate up next to him and was dousing his teapot with boiled water in a shallow stone bowl. A couple of other men sat at a card table near the door, looking bored. One of them handled his piece awkwardly, spinning it around his right index finger.

  "Put that away," said Poison, cuffing him. The man put the gun down on a crate, and I saw that an assortment of weapons had been laid out there, knives mostly, also a heavy joist with a nail. I wondered if the joist had come from my house, and if that was what they had used to knock me out.

  A faint nausea rolled up from my stomach and tightened my throat. I turned my head to the right. Angel was lying slack and bloodied next to me, her cheek pressed into the ground.

  "Angel?" I whispered. We were not tied up; I inched closer and touched her hair. "Angel?"

  She groaned quietly. I looked over at the thugs. They were still occupied with the television reception. "Are you all right?"

  Then she was awake. She raised herself painfully and gasped, lifting her left hand, which was grayish and swollen. She had been cut across the scalp; dark rivulets had dried on her skin.

  "We have to get you to a doctor," I said.

  "I’m all right," she said. She cradled her wrist and looked around the miserable little room. "The photos," she said suddenly. "The photos."

  "It’s too late to think about that now," I whispered.

  "I have them…" she began, but Poison, alerted by one of the other men, saw that we had come to and interrupted us with a bang of the joist.

  "No talk!" he shouted.

  "You can have your fucking money!" I shouted. He blinked, startled. "Tell him," I said to Angel. She relayed the message tremblingly. There was silence in the room, then a burst of laughter. Big One rubbed his feet together in amusement as he emptied the spent tea leaves into another bowl, and the man at the table began spinning the gun again. Poison smoothed his hair back and sneered.

  "He says he knows," said Angel. "He says he’ll get it from you one way or another. But this isn’t about the money."

  "Then what’s it about?"

  Poison shook his head and grinned.

  "I don’t know what he just said," said Angel.

  "I want to see my brother," I said, trying to get up. Immediately Poison hissed at me, brandishing the two-by-four.

  "Sit down."

  "I want to see my brother."

  Swiftly he crossed the room and advanced on me. The nail in the board was rusty.

  "Sit down."

  I sat. After a moment of tenseness, Poison smiled and sauntered back to the television.

  We waited. The minutes crept by, as uniform and indistinguishable as ants along a baseboard.

  "I’m thirsty." Angel had crawled over. "What’s happening?"

  "I don’t know." I looked at my cousins. Poison had managed to fix the reception so that the newscast held steady, though the screen was split between bottom and top, and he had settled back with a magazine, thumbing the pages industriously like a schoolboy. Big One was asleep. The others were eating something—it smelled like curry and rice—out of foam boxes. "If I could somehow get hold of Little P, maybe he could do something. Get us out…"

  "I have to use the bathroom."

  "Can’t you wait?"

  "I don’t think so."

  Angel stood up. Instantly the men sprang to their feet; Poison brandished his magazine.

  "Wo dei qu xishoujian," she said haughtily, even fastidiously. The thugs looked at one another; this was not a provision they had prepared for. They rubbed their necks and shuffled their feet. Poison cursed.

  Finally, they sent one of the younger, anonymous men out through the side door with her. He carried a knife, but he did not look at all certain about how to use it, and I hoped that Angel would make an escape. Minutes ticked by. The television went blank again. Poison pounded it with his fist.

  But eventually they came back in again. Angel had cleaned herself up; her face was raw and pale, and her wet hair stuck to her scalp.

  She waited until Poison had readjusted the television and the others had settled down in their former positions before she crawled over to me.

  "It’s not locked," she said in a low voice.

  "What isn’t?" I looked at the main door, which was heavily guarded by the four men.

  "The side door," she whispered. "I pushed the lock when I came in. If we can just make it over there…"

  She was distracted by sudden activity around the card table. The men were standing up, clearing the table, and collecting their knives and joists and guns. Poison had been talking on his phone, but now he snapped it shut and took up a little snub-nosed revolver. Big One turned off the TV. Startled, Angel and I froze.

  There was a long silence as the thugs stood about. They seemed to be waiting for somet
hing. Poison kept eyeing the entrance, and at last I heard a quiet step in the hall. It approached modestly, without any hurry or hesitation. When it stopped, there was a tapping at the door.

  Little P stepped inside, shutting the door quietly behind him. He gave me a long, straight look as he entered, as if nothing had ever happened between us, and I stood up, weak and relieved. He spoke to the men, who stood back; Poison made a little argument that I couldn’t hear or understand, but finally he stood back as well, muttering.

  Little P stood facing us, though he did not come any farther into the room. His injuries had healed a bit since Hong Kong; the only permanent mark would be a kind of line across his upper lip. He looked smaller somehow, more condensed, as if everything that was inessential had been boiled down since I’d last seen him, and what I saw now was my brother in full truth.

  We regarded each other silently for a while. Finally I raised my hand.

  "Hello, Little P," I said faintly.

  "Hello." It must have started raining at last; he wore a dark trench coat, and his head was sleek and wet, though his shoes were spotless. He tucked his hands into his voluminous pockets and came a few feet closer.

  "How’ve you been?" I asked after a moment.

  He considered me. "You really want to know?"

  "No. Yes. No."

  "Good," he said. "No more lies, right? No more bullshit. From here on out, just the truth between us."

  "There isn’t any more truth to tell, Little P."

  Angel had stood up next to me, holding my arm involuntarily, but Little P didn’t even glance at her. There was a deep, unfocused look in his eyes, eerily calm; the eyes seemed to flicker over me searchingly, without coming to any conclusions. He took another step.

  "You’re right," he said. "Maybe the problem is too much truth. I wish you hadn’t told me about those pictures," he said.