Son of The Tank Man

by Winfred Wong

  So, without protest, I went in after her, and she flipped open a light switch in an unlady-like manner after passing through a ten-feet long, straight hallway into a moderately furnished living room, which seemed fit to be put into any houses, and it was one that no one would like or dislike particularly. The bright light exuding from an unappreciated lamp seemingly whitened the yellowish wallpapers when she flipped the switch, and the feeling of warmth imparted by it made me feel like it was home. It's the reason why it was called House Heaven, I guessed.

  “Guys, it's six o'clock now. We will set off at half past seven, so get some rest now while you still can. I promise you this will be a long, long night,” she said while I was exploring the place with my eyes, stretching my head up and down until the dangerously almost caved-in part of the roof, which appeared to be more flimsy observing from inside, right above my head heightened my awareness.

  By merely judging from the degree of deformation it manifested, I believed I was ostensibly capable of punching through it with just one single mighty blow with my fist, but I guessed I would better keep it that way, for this could be one of the next most remarkable world heritages, perhaps The Falling Roof of Heaven.

  Then when she finished and hurried away, “What's the plan for tonight? How are we getting out of this country?” I asked, my voice kept bouncing back from the walls around, so I told myself to lower down my voice, peering at her, who was then tiptoeing up a spiral staircase twirling around like a tornado situated on the left corner of the house to the upper floors with a lightness that dumbfounded me.

  And just right before she disappeared into the upper floors, “Why don't you get some rest first? I will let you know about everything when we are in the park,” she said, not even throwing me a look, not even a flippant remark.

  I can feel the resolution in her voice, and I reckoned either she was so running out of patience with me – the reason why she was so capricious had puzzled me since the first time she cried and the way she treated me made me feel like she held a grudge against me but I just couldn't think of what was that made her so frustrated with me – that she had to hide upstairs, or she was up to something she tended not to confide in me. That said, I couldn't care less about what she was up to as long as they were really able to smuggle me out of the country, and that's all I was really concerned with.

  Then, as an unidentifiable hollow feeling swelled, knowing my stay would be short, I nonetheless decided to sidetrack myself by taking my time to examine this place as I didn't feel like taking a nap at that moment, perhaps I was anxious, and I moved forward and plopped down on a linen sofa I found right next to the staircase, sitting right between a skinny lady with a plump nose leaning against the arm of the sofa and a reliable-looking, blue-eyed gentleman with an anticlimactic hairy mole on his protruding square chin that was seemingly even longer than his nose.

  It seemed to me they were both pondering over something serious enough to give them a meditating look when I became the third men sitting. I knew I shouldn't disturb, but there was something about this lady with this familiar plump nose. And soon it occurred to me that I might have met her before but my memory was blurred. And for that, I just can't help gazing at her like a retarded.

  “Are you ok?” the gentleman on my left gave me a strong poke at my arm and asked, in a low gruff voice that imperfectly blended in with his cold tone.

  I had never expected him to notice my peculiar behavior, hence I could only call forth an astounded face with interestingly broadened eyes to deal with his sulky facial expressions. “Yeah, I'm fine.”

  “Would you please stop staring at her like that?” he demanded, stressing the word ‘please’.

  But before I could even move my tongue, “”(Hey, it's okay, darling.) the lady, who quited thinking at the right time, said. “我識佢架。” (I know him.)

  I was baffled. I bet she was telling him to chill out, and so I scrutinized her face again and spoke out my mind. “Lady, have we met before?”

  “Yes,” the man said quickly, the same old cold tone, giving her no room to speak.

  “The mask?” I continued without averting my eyes despite the slight surprise I got from his quickness, making two open C-shapes with my forefingers and thumbs, bringing my forefingers close to my nose and placing my thumbs exactly on my chin.

  And then they conferred about something in their language again, though I felt like they were just slurring non-stop.

  “The mask,” the man repeated.

  “The mask!?”

  “The mask.”

  “I remember now, you were wearing glasses back in the hotel! Thank you for your help. The mask you gave me helped me a lot. And I'm honestly sorry for what I've done to you. Please forgive me,” I said, as a thought that extinguished my urge to apologize dawned on me. “But wait. Wait a minute. You're the hotel staff. And so I suppose you are from around here. And that means you are not a foreigner. So, why are you here? You are one of – them?”

  “Won't be here if we are not,” the man responded as quickly as he just did.

  I turned round to face the man. “What do you mean? Aren't most of us here foreigners trying to escape?”

  “Yeah, I am...pretty sure...they are,” he drawled hesitantly while blinking like there was a gritty grain of sand in his eyes and pointed to the two men on the other side of the house standing and chit-chatting by a closed window overlooking the front.

  One of them had his elbow rested upon an iron bar extended from the bottom corner of the window. He was of the height of an average man and was observably a beach-goer. Tanned and fit, wearing jean shorts and a tight plain black T-shirt that highlighted his muscles, I wouldn't be too surprised if he told me he had fought a lion before.

  “That's Ryson you are looking at,” the man continued. “By the way, I am Frederick.”

  “Nice to meet you. I'm Ashton.”

  “She is Ciara. My fiancée.”

  And I got to my feet immediately like the sofa was made of lava and remembered the feeling I had when Aaron looked at Oli. With my glance fixated upon him, “Sorry, I didn't know,” I apologized, feeling embarrassed, probably because I could somehow comprehend what it's like when some stranger was staring at my fiancée.

  Then I remember I saw him suddenly began biting his lower lip quickly like he was waiting for his wife to deliver, with all his fingers interlocked at the tips, left thumb covering over right, and “don't be,” he said, gazing at somewhere blankly, with a terribly flat tone that failed to tuck away whatever that was going on inside his mind, and pulled out a thoughtful grin as though he was facing a dilemma so that there was a strange atmosphere that hadn't been there before springing up.

  And I could tell from his distraught look he was really thinking over something very serious and heavy as he had bitten his lip so hard that I had actually worried he would hurt himself, and even at the moments which he wasn't biting, he would shrink slightly and flinch. And after all the little movements, he finally looked at me and said, “Can I have a private moment with my fiancée?”

  “Well. Why not?”

  Of course, the whole conversation we had back then wasn't quite a happy one and I was perplexed by his sudden nervousness. So, when I had bumped into him somewhere around a kitchen in the house on that same day I met Alvin, I immediately asked him about this. He didn't remember what I was referring to at first, but after I had waylaid him for about an hour, he did say this, “Tell me, Ashton. Have you ever had that feeling? That feeling when you try to cover up the truth after telling someone something you're not supposed to tell?” I didn't say anything regarding this and kept on chatting about something trivial with him on that day until he had to go, and I have never seen him since then. And although I would love to know what had happened to him after he had been abducted, I was never able to ask.

  Anyway at that time, I had once thought that whatever that was going on in his mind must have something to do with me. But however onerous I tried
to dig deep into my memory and look for clues, I just couldn't come up with anything. Therefore I simply walked away.

  And I strolled toward the two men. The man talking to Ryson was so much shorter and thinner than him that he actually looked like a trunk of a young maple tree from behind. I couldn't see his face as he was facing Ryson, but I could picture him being a handsome man as he had brownish curly hair that I had always dreamed of owning.

  When I was close enough to speak, “Hi,” I said.

  The shorter guy then turned to me in a way like he was performing ballet, partly ostentatiously, partly enthusiastically. “Hi,” he, who turned out to be an Asian with dyed hair, said, with a smile that was as amiable as Kaylen's but looked a little bit more like smirking, dimpling his cheeks.

  “Nervous?” I asked.

  Shortly after they exchanged a strange look, Ryson replied, “Hmm. A little. You? Are you nervous?”

  And I noticed that when he spoke, he tended to pull the corners of his mouth down with some jaw movements and there were some sounds going through his nose.

  “You guys are from Mexico?” I asked.

  “Good try, but wrong guess,” Ryson said.

  I had expected him to go on to explain more and so never made a second attempt, but they seemed shy, fidgeting with red faces and hands in trousers pockets, and I figured maybe they just didn't want me here.

  “Oh, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to,” I said.

  And they laughed at the same time perfunctorily, giving each other another strange look, throwing me some hasty glances occasionally, and kept on laughing for quite a relatively lengthy moment until I found it incomprehensible and rather annoying.

  I bet they had found my presence unpleasant but was somehow just too disinclined to say it out. Feeling like being swathed in an expanding vexatious atmosphere, I was forced to move away. I didn't know what I should do then, but one thing was clear. I couldn't get along with no one in this place. Realized all of them, all four of them, didn't want me here, my desire to get out of this place then prodded me to go up the stairs to where Kriss had gone because at least, she was willing to talk to me.

  But as I was inching like a turtle toward the staircase, I heard a heavy tread of someone bouncing down the stairs so urgently that I could tell there was a change of plan just by hearing that.

  When she came into our sight on the staircase, she gasped, rushing down, with a mobile phone grasped in her hand, “Guys! Guys!” she said when she reached level ground, with her hands on bent knees, breathing unrhythmically. “Change of plan! They are in trouble. I just got a message from Jack saying they are now under attack and that we should act before they are captured. We have to go now, before they find out about us. Agree?”

  “They are under attack!? Shouldn't we go to help them?” Frederick suggested, and it startled me as I didn't know he was suddenly somewhere close behind me.

  Then as I sidestepped to avoid standing in his way, I saw him bridging up his eyes with his left hand, his right hand holding Ciara's tighter than before, and continued, giving a grimace of pain, “Forget about what I said. I say we should just go without them. We have to finish what we have started.”

  “Well, Ryson? What do you two think?” Kriss questioned with stabilizing breaths.

  “You're the boss, Kriss,” Ryson answered.

  “Mack?” Kriss shifted her focus onto the Asian.

  “You're the boss.”

  “Good. Ready to go now?” Kriss said.

  The fact that she didn't ask my opinion like I wasn't part of the team was slightly upsetting, but anyway, even if she had asked, I wouldn't have objected, so that's fine to me.

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  The five of us then calmly walked out of House Heaven. And when I was about to shut the door close behind me, I happened to catch a glimpse of a black silhouette scurrying rapidly past through in between my feet, skidding into the house.

  When it became clearer in my eyes, “A rat in the heaven,” I flinched a bit and muttered, and regretted for not closing the door faster as two more of its fellows then slipped into the house quickly, same speed, same route, but of course, unlike that house, there are no rats here in this house I'm living in.

  “Hurry up,” Ryson whispered to me from a distance as though his voice would expose his identity as a freedom-pursuer even though we were alone on that quiet pavement, and I closed the door and hastened over.

  With Kriss leading the way, we veered left and continued trudging up in the same direction as before until the steep slope winding right ended at the edge of a flat plateau. From there, where I was sure I could have feasted my eyes on the impressive view of almost half of the city if not for the veils of poor air – the closer to the ground, the poorer the air was – hugging the ground, I squinted and had my eyes swept through everything I could distinguish, like the hissing streams of billowing dark smoke that was escaping the hotel from every openings it could find, making it look like a giant chimney with leaking holes.

  “There, at the fountain. The park is over there,” Kriss said, pointing, presumably, to the prominent fountain I had once seen, distracting me, and I was then stunned by the keenness of her eyesight because I literally couldn't see anything that was shorter than the hotel.

  “Why is it so important for us to get to the park?” I asked.

  “Because there lies the only entrance of the tunnel,” she said and walked off. “Let's not waste another minute standing.”

  And I hurried up until I walked at her side, then she picked up her pace again, but I wasn't going to let her win this time because I wanted to make sure she really had a feasible plan. So I tried my best to catch up with her constantly changing pace. “Where does that tunnel lead?”

  “It's an underground tunnel connecting the border areas and the center of the country. It's the only possible way to smuggle you out safely.”

  She seemed annoyed by my persistence as she stopped altering her walking speed soon. “What about after we reach the border areas? We can't just walk past the borderline assuming the border patrols won't spot us.”

  She raised one corner of her mouth, making a half smirk. “Yes, we can't.”

  “Well then, what?”

  Raised another side of the corner of her mouth, she made a subdued but extended full smirk. “We can't walk past it on land, but there will be nothing stopping us if we are in a boat,” she said.

  She sounded like she had underestimated the difficulty of getting past the coastal defense forces without being noticed.

  So I frowned. “What about the coastal defense forces? Won't they be able to detect us?”

  “Don't worry. The small armed patrol vessels that have the greatest access to the shallow shoreline areas have all been sent out on a mission to defend an outlying island. They are not going to be a threat to us as long as we sail with care and avoid bumping into one of those big ships with big guns mounted on it.”

  “How do you know they have all been sent out? Aren't you – “

  She broke in. “As I've told you, there are many of us.”

  It sounded like a plan if her intel was reliable. So, after thinking it over and over again in my head, “Sounds like a plan,” I agreed, with an unusual deep-set tone that I rarely adopted, though there was an unknown uneasiness developing within. “But there is one thing truly perplexing. Why are you helping us? I mean I appreciate everything you guys have done for me and I know I might have already been dead without your help, but why? I just don't understand.”

  Then, an embarrassingly thorny moment of unwanted silence emerged. I thought she would eventually say something. I was wrong. No one spoke a word like I'd asked the most difficult question in the world and I guessed maybe they just wanted to help without a particular reason – this is not true as she has explained later that she'd only remained silent because my question seemed daft. And that awkwardness wasn't torn apart until we heard some whining engine sounds of
some kind of a large group of bulky vehicles. It was like there were thousands of racing cars speeding up at the same time and was so deafening that it was like the continental itself was drifting. At that time, I had no idea what we were facing, but it was beyond doubt something unimaginably bad.

  “What is happening?” I said, frantically. “An earthquake?”

  “It isn't an earthquake,” Kriss replied coldly, with placid eyes and deep breaths, and I remember she had intuitively ceased blinking for a minute or two before she continued. “It's much worse.”

  “What could have been worse – ” I kept my lips sealed when Kriss motioned me to look in her direction she was gazing at.

  So I turned away from her and immediately saw the barrel of a tank attached to the front of the turret of a tank covered with urban camouflage paintings. It was climbing up a steep road on the other side of the plateau, where the street began sloping down back to the boulevard. And I was sheerly astonished, didn't know what to say or what to do, feeling like the world had abandoned me.

  As the tanks were still climbing up with their upper front plates skyward, Kriss jolted me out of my panic, just like what she had done to me at the airport, and said, as I lurched forward, “I need you to walk. Walk behind Ciara and Frederick. They will be walking in front of you. Bear in mind that you have to pretend you don't know them. Walk like you haven't noticed anything out of ordinary. Walk like a local. Do you still remember how indifferent the locals are? Do not draw any attention. Do not show fear, and most importantly, do not interfere no matter what happens. Can you do that for me? Can you?”

  Gaping at her, I had a hard time processing what she just said.