We are creatures of habit, and my habit when I get home is to go out on the deck in front of my living room and look at the best view in Southern California. I was anticipating a placid vista of pale mist and dark mountains. What I saw made me swear out loud and brought Bravo out to stand next to me and stare down through the darkness at 1321, on fire for the second time in four years.
PART II
MIGRATING STARLINGS
G. Kramer of the Max Planck Institute in Germany noted that when migration time arrived, starlings tended to take off at a certain angle with respect to the position of the sun. If the apparent position of the sun was changed by mirrors, the migrating starlings tended to take off in a direction which had the same angle relative to the sun's position in the mirror. . . .
—Geza Szamosi
The Twin Dimensions: Inventing Time and Space
6 - Guardian Angels
She finally emerged from the bar a little after two-thirty in the morning, looking smaller and chubbier than she had inside. I waited in the shadow of a van and watched her come, dressed in pressed jeans, white sneakers, a T-shirt, and a white unzipped windbreaker, the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms. Her shoulder-length hair looked like she'd wet it and then combed it with her fingers. She'd turned the collar up against the drizzle. She was humming.
The name of the bar, according to the scrawl of darkened neon tubing across its front window, was Behind the Fan. I'd missed that last time I was here. It shared a tiny mall with a Korean liquor store and a laundry. Both were closed and dark. At this hour, there was virtually no traffic behind me on Western Avenue. Being there again brought Uncle Lo to mind, and I found that I couldn't really remember his face as a whole. It had disintegrated in my memory into a collection of Identikit options: a mass of downward-sloping wrinkles set off by a black eye, high, sloping cheekbones, a mouthful of gold teeth.
I let her get well past me before I stepped into the light and called her.
“Lek,” I said.
She wheeled immediately, the heel of her sneaker making a faint squeal against the asphalt, and her hand came up out of her little purse with a white canister in it. She extended her arm to its full length and pointed the can at my face. Bracelets jingled on her wrist. “Stop there,” she said.
I stopped. “Mace?”
“You bet,” she said. “Put you away good, too. What's your problem?” Her English in the bar had been heavily accented. She'd left most of the accent inside.
“I was here on Saturday night,” I said. “With two Chinese guys, one young and one old, remember?”
“So what?” The hand with the mace didn't shake at all. I hadn't paid much attention to her in the bar, but now I was struck by the size of her eyes. They seemed to take up half her face, and their whites were as clear as porcelain under the streetlight. “I didn't ask you who you were, I asked what your problem was.”
I slowly held my hands up, palms toward her, two feet apart. Gave her my Harmless Smile, just a big Boy Scout looking for a good deed. “Nothing up my sleeve,” I said. “I want to talk for a minute.”
“I get paid to talk,” she said tersely.
“And you sound different when you do.”
She made a small raspberry sound. “Oh, shooah,” she said, “everybody like pidgin, na? Make everybody feel same-same Rambo, got too-big gun.”
I couldn't help it. I laughed. Her face darkened, but then her Thai good nature carried the moment and her teeth gleamed, sudden and white in her face.
“Well, it's the truth,” she said. “You think the guy wants to know that his little piece of sweet-and-sour has a day job translating English news for the local Thai paper? Will he tip her more if he knows she went to school longer than he did?”
“You have a degree?”
“I have two from Thailand, in English. Ning's a nurse, three-quarter time.” She turned her head slightly to one side, regarding me. “I remember you now. You're the one who was no fun.”
“You can put down the mace, then,” I said.
“No way,” she said, “but I'll change hands and lean on my car. My arm's getting tired and my feet hurt.” She backed up against a gleaming little white Toyota that was parked facing out. The mace went from the right to the left hand. Her chin lifted a quarter of an inch, a prompt for me to talk. “So?”
“I want to ask you about the old man.”
“Lo,” she said.
I nodded, faintly surprised that she remembered him.
“Funny old guy. Still likes the girls, maybe too much. Like a dog sniffing, but funny about it. Some old guys never seem to run out, you know?”
“Lucky him,” I said. “Some of us run out almost immediately. You were with him when he made his phone call.”
“No.” She raked damp hair back from her forehead with her right hand, and her eyes suddenly seemed even larger. “I was in the toilet, trying to look younger.”
“Could you hear him?”
I got the sidelong gaze again. “I liked him,” she said.
I spread my hands in what I hoped was an international gesture of reason. “I don't want to do him any harm. I just want to know who he called.”
“Why?” It was thick with skepticism.
“I can't tell you.”
“Go away.” She started to back around the Toyota, mace still pointed at my face. “Go to the end of the parking lot and stay there until I've driven away.”
“Wait,” I said. “Um, wait, look here, I'll put my driver's license and my business card and whatever else you want right here on the hood, and then I'll back off and you come and check it out. Would I do that if I was going to hurt him?” I slipped my wallet out of my shirt pocket and started to pull pieces out of it. “Oh, hell, look at the whole thing.”
The wallet landed with a hollow thump on the Toyota's hood as I backed away, my hands in plain view again. Lek waited until I was a good ten feet off before she came and flipped through it one-handed.
“Okay,” she said at last. She'd read everything in it and compared my face under the lamplight with the photo on my driver's license twice. “I'd take your check.”
“Anything happens to Lo, the cops talk to you and you can send them straight to me.”
“I said I liked him. I said I thought he was a funny old man. I didn't say I thought he was a good old man.”
“No,” I said, “he's not a good old man.”
She pushed her lower lip out and then drew it back in again. Then she lowered the mace and dropped it into her purse. “In fact, I think he's probably a pretty terrible old man. I don't think he told the truth once all evening. And he was jumpy, always looking at his watch like he heard it ticking all the time.”
“Did he speak English or Chinese on the phone?”
“I still don't know why you're asking.”
“He did something to someone I love.”
She weighed it. “A girl?”
“The people I love are mostly girls.”
Her teeth caught the light again, and she chuckled. “I didn't think you were a lady-boy.”
“As you said, he's a pretty terrible old man.”
“Fun, though.” Lek sighed at the injustice of it all, and then made up her mind or, more likely, her heart. “Spoke mostly English, a little Cantonese when he ran out of words. Only talked a few seconds. He called a lady, said he'd come for his things the next day. 'Dim sum time,' he said.”
Sure. Dim sum time made sense. The rest of it didn't.
“His things? Are you sure?” Eleanor had said he'd brought a canvas suitcase.
She did the thing with the lip again, dropped the long eyelids briefly and then shook her head. “No,” she said. “The rest of his things.”
“Do you think she was a Chinese lady?”
She fished in her purse while she considered the question, and pulled out a ring of keys that would have slipped easily over her ankle. “Don't know. If she's Chinese, she didn't speak his dialect and she's married to
an Anglo. He called her Mrs. Summerson.”
A bubble of air forced its way through my lips, surprising both of us.
“You know her?” Lek asked, looking startled at the sound.
“I know her,” I said. And I did, and there was no way in the world I could talk to her without Eleanor's permission. If Lo was the Chan family's guardian angel, Esther Summerson was their household god.
I even knew where she lived. I'd been there twice, most recently after the twins' hundred-day party. Mrs. Esther Summerson occupied a perfectly restored 1918 Craftsman's Bungalow, set back at least fifty feet from the sidewalk on an idyllic one-way lane called Jacaranda Street. The house was dark now, sleeping under ivy and dormant climbing roses, just visible beneath arbors that had dangled sweet, dusky clusters of grapes only two months before. By daylight, the whole thing looked like the scenes they'd painted on the labels of orange crates in the twenties.
With Alice parked two streets to the west, I toted a large Styrofoam container of coffee up Jacaranda Street and found myself a dark little piece of curb between two parked cars almost directly across from Mrs. Summerson's. I couldn't talk to her, but nobody had said I couldn't look at her house.
My watch said 3:20 when I sat down to look at Mrs. Summerson's house. The Styrofoam quart of coffee said Donut Deelite. I needed the coffee more than I needed the watch; I'd gone to bed for a couple of hours after the firemen finished putting out 1321 and then gotten up to go meet Lek, and every time I closed my eyes I saw little bitty fireworks.
The coffee was so extraordinarily awful that it held my attention for almost an hour. Since nothing whatsoever was happening in front of me, I had ample time and attention to devote to analyzing the components of its taste. Foremost among them seemed to be wet dog hair, softened and modulated by a hint of aluminum and a reedy note of newsprint, the entire rich and complex bouquet culminating in a strong finish of industrial-strength benzine. In mitigation, it had enough caffeine to set an army of water buffalo doing the hokey-pokey.
Lek, I thought. Thai. Lek and Ning and Lala, all of them thousands of miles from rice paddies and gilded temple spires and easy smiles. The Chans, Chinese. The tongs. The Vietnamese kids. All of them here now, part of a city that has more Koreans than anyplace outside Korea, more Cambodians and Thais than anyplace outside Cambodia and Thailand, more Japanese than anyplace outside Japan. Hell, we have more Canadians than Vancouver. A hundred languages, literally, are spoken in the public schools. All these people, Filipinos and Armenians, Turks and Guatemalans and Salvadorans, migrating over the lines and the empty blue spaces on the maps to create whole communities in a big ugly basin where the dominant gas is carbon monoxide and the dominant currency is disappointment. Mass movements, mass migrations, to get here.
And what was here?
Immigration, Im-migration. In my caffeine-saturated state, the word broke apart easily. I was composing an ode to immigration and my knees were taking turns jiggling up and down by the time the day was born rosy-fingered through the haze in the eastern sky, and a light went on upstairs in Mrs. Summerson's house.
The light beckoned to me. I looked around. No one in the street. No one watching from the windows of the other houses, or at least no one I could see. I got up and stretched and ambled across the street, just your average wired guy out strolling at the crack of dawn, and then I ducked under the arbors and ran, half bent over, to the wall of the house that faced the street, positioning myself against a section of clapboard between two large windows.
I heard singing, and the window to my left lit up. Growing in front of it was some sort of bush that someone who knew something about bushes could probably have identified. With the low arbors behind me I felt secure from the street, so I sidled like a good moth toward the light and waited behind the bush, peering through the gossamer or crinoline or whatever it was for all to be revealed.
What was revealed, eventually, was a woman in her late seventies having tea with her breakfast. I learned a new way to break and eat a soft-boiled egg, and I learned that Mrs. Summerson used linen napkins even when she ate alone and that she refolded them neatly to present a clean surface each time she touched one to her lips, which was often, and in general I learned that my standards of gentility were precariously low. Abandoning the light, I left her to her protein and checked every window I could see through and found the rooms on the other side empty. No lamps came on anywhere else in the house. If Mrs. Summerson was secretly playing host to Uncle Lo or to several thousand tong members, they were apparently breakfasting in the rooms upstairs. In the dark.
The orange rim of the sun was barging its way over the horizon by the time I arrived at the Chan apartment and found all the lights blazing away. I went up the stairs two at a time to try to burn off a little of the caffeine and walked into bedlam.
Pansy was on her knees in the corner, directly below the cross that Mrs. Chan, who took no chances where religion was concerned, had hung next to the family's Taoist shrine. Horace was pacing the rug around the dining-room table in precise rectangles, changing direction every time he reached the chair at the head of the table. He was holding his wristwatch in his hand. Eleanor was pouring coffee onto her wrist, missing a cup on top of the television set by inches, staring at me.
“How—but how did you know?” she sputtered.
“Know what?”
The coffee hit her foot, and she looked down. “Lord,” she said, without force, “look at that. He's called, Simeon. He called about twenty minutes ago.”
“What did he say?”
“Just said hold tight, he'd call back.” She picked up the cup and poured into it, rattling it badly against the spout of the coffeepot, and extended it to me.
“Thanks anyway,” I said, feeling something hot rise in the back of my throat.
She nodded absently and started to look at her watch. She was holding the cup in the hand that had the watch on it, so I reached out and took the cup before she dumped coffee all over her stomach. Since I had it, I drank some.
“What time, what time?” Pansy demanded, getting up from her place of worship. Her pillow had pressed her hair flat on the left side of her head, and her cheeks were flaming red. She'd buttoned her blouse crooked.
“Five-eighteen,” Horace said, reversing direction around the table. He looked like one of the wooden soldiers in The Nutcracker. “Five-nineteen,” he corrected himself, staring at the watch in his hand as he marched. He walked into a chair and knocked it over.
The phone rang.
Everybody stopped dead.
“Simeon,” Eleanor said. “The extension in the bedroom. Horace, you take this one. Pick up, both of you, at the end of the third ring.” Pansy stood absolutely still in the middle of the room, hands clasped in front of her stomach like an old-fashioned opera singer about to embark on the big aria.
The bedroom was a mess, blankets thrown to the floor and clothes spilling out of the closet. I unplugged the cord leading into the handset, lifted the handset, and plugged the cord back in at the end of the third ring.
“Hello,” Horace said.
“I'm Lo,” Uncle Lo said. Then he said something in Chinese.
Horace responded. Since I couldn't follow the words, I listened to the other sounds coming through the earpiece: a horn, something that might have been a motorcycle, birds. A pay phone, then.
“—okay?” Uncle Lo said at the end of a long string of tonal monosyllables.
“MacArthur Park,” Horace said, sounding like he was about to have a coughing fit. “Alvarado entrance.”
“Walk two hundred steps,” Uncle Lo said in English.
“Okay,” Horace said. “Two hundred.”
“Look left.” Then Uncle Lo asked a question in Cantonese.
“All of us,” Horace said, “and Simeon, Eleanor's boyfriend. You met—”
“I remember. Okay, okay. No problem. Come now.” He hung up.
Ninety seconds later we were at the bottom of the stairs, pilin
g into Alice. Pansy rocked back and forth in the backseat, repeating something under her breath.
“What is it?” I asked. “What did he say?”
“Says he wants to show us he's serious,” Horace said. He was sallow and there were circles under his eyes as definite as the rings left by a wet glass. His hair stuck up wildly on the back of his head.
“Whatever that means,” Eleanor murmured. She had her arms wrapped tightly around herself as though she were very cold.
“It means, it means, that he's going to ask us for, for whatever he wants, and he wants to prove, you know,” Horace said a little feverishly. He peered through the windshield at the brightening sky as we cruised east toward the park. “Prove he means it,” he finished. He swallowed with a sound like someone pulling a cork.
“What did he say the first time he called?”
“He say, good morning,” Pansy said unexpectedly.
“She answered the phone,” Horace said. “She's answered every single phone call since . . .”
“He say, can we go somewhere,” Pansy continued. “I say, sure. He say, call back.” She subsided. A moment later I heard her say it all again, very quietly. Then she said it again.
“Left,” Horace said. “Left.”
“He knows, Horace,” Eleanor said.
“Then he can just do it.” Horace's voice went up. “You don't have to correct me.”
“Sorry,” Eleanor said, and everyone fell silent.
“He say, call back,” Pansy repeated for the fourth time, and then she began to weep, a little stifled sound that went put-put-put, like a child's imitation of an engine. With Pansy's sobs powering us, we arrived at MacArthur Park.
The sun was still slipping up, but a low ridge of cloud had eased its way east, cutting off the top of the bright circle. With the circle's bottom edge still below the horizon, the day was momentarily lighted by a deep orange strip. The trees had that peculiar luminescent lividity they sometimes assume before heavy rain.
The light revealed the park as brown and dirty. Bums slumbered beneath newspaper blankets at its edge, too smart to risk being caught farther inside. The dead grass was littered with bottles and crumpled paper.
The Man With No Time Page 7