What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  Walking toward the car wash and seeing him standing with the men, pointing to the hood of a car, Nadine felt a wave of both desire and revulsion pass through her. Yes, she had loved Derek for this very thing, his virility, his easy lust. And here it was, more than twenty years later, still intact despite everything that had happened.

  Derek was startled when he turned to go back to the kiosk and saw her. He hurried toward her, assuming she had come to make a scene and to squelch it before she did so in front of the men. He turned a smile on her as he would a customer and made a grand embrace as the crew would expect him to behave toward his wife. The crew, today a Sri Lankan, the two old Caribbean men, and the two young Somalis, looked on appreciatively. Derek called, to one of the older man, “Roger, take over the kiosk for me. I’m going to take my wife to lunch.” Then he checked his pockets for his keys and guided Nadine to his car.

  “I want you to go get your son out of jail, Derek.”

  “Get in the car, Nadine.”

  “I mean it, Derek. I’m tired of this … tired with you now.” She sounded exhausted.

  “You see what that girl did to my car, Nadine?” He showed her the scoring around the body. She looked at him pitifully.

  “It’s nowhere near what you did.” Something in her tone told him this would not be their usual bickering.

  “Do what you have to do. I’m done,” she said before he turned the key in the ignition.

  Quy

  It’s late spring in this city. Seasons mean nothing to me. Money is my season. Korea beat Italy. You never know, they could beat Germany next. But I doubt it. That Teutonic bunch have no creativity, but they have order. I’m the opposite. Sometimes I think I haven’t the heart for another city. It’s just that I haven’t the bones to reach my hand into another set of lives, feel the sweat of stupid dreams.

  What am I doing here, anyway? Well, I lost the compass for knowing where I was long ago, I suppose. So it’s useless asking who I am. You’re more interested in how I got off of Pulau Bidong. How I got here and how grateful I am. How I know the alleyways that lead to the back doors of Chinatown in this city. What if I told you that there’s a web of people like me laying sticky strings all over the city?

  You want to know how a person like me could get into such esoteric matters. After all, what pause would I have between scuffling off a boat in the South China Sea, the eternal boat to Pulau Bidong. Get this, a person like me gets to know things. And if you were a boy like me, you’d wise up soon enough to the way things get told and what the weight of telling is.

  Well, I was rescued by monks from Pulau Bidong, and they had a good thing—begging. I shaved my head and put on a brown robe and learned to solicit alms on the mainland. We were like a gang, like any conglomerate of businessmen. We had territory, we had monopolies, we had wars, we had alliances, until a schism broke out between the monk who was my father, an ascetic with an opium habit, and a high-tech monk with a laptop computer, a Web site, and a dream of expansion into America.

  I was fed up with Loc Tuc. The other side was more promising than that black hole of an opium high. The Dong Khoi had freed me of allegiances. By this time I was a bone of a man, my body looked older than my face. My face always saves me; I’m told it has the innocence of a child’s. That face remained with me. I myself don’t recognize it when I look at it in the mirror. Who is that? I ask. That clear-eyed weepy boy, the waiting look, innocent, innocent like a banded kingfisher. I’ve managed to change everything except that face. It’s waiting for its mother and father to come back. You would fall in love with it. My body has done everything hurtful, but that face keeps hanging on.

  The new boss with the laptop had his hands on everything. I used to call him “du-ma-nhieu” behind his back. He had a mobile cellphone and partners on every continent. He would find somebody for you as far away as Alaska. But I didn’t want to find my mother and father any more. I told him that. I was finished with that long ago. You should see our crew of monks, orange-gowned and macerated, we moved like a dust cloud. But we had uzis and palm pilots. We controlled the unofficial refugee trade from Malaysia and Thailand to China and out; we hacked into offshore bank accounts. Of course, other residuals and commodities came our way. Use your imagination. We exported the I Ching for idiots and took a shared interest in pirated Thoughts of Mao Tse-tung and replicas of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. In our dim corner of the world we unravelled languages while we traded in everything from plastic hair combs to liberated Ford Broncos from New York. You may not understand this, but the world came to us and we ate.

  The monk with the laptop was a dangerous man until he fell in love with the girl sewing tongues into Brooks high tops. When he looked at her ravaged fingers, it became personal. We blew up a factory, and the girl dropped him for ruining her life. She had the police hunting us down because we made it political. It’s all right when the economic wheels are turning—theft is nothing—but turning principled is another matter. You have to know how to run your life, you have to take the highs with the lows. Never get used to an easy life—it’ll slip out from under you any time. Years, years we spent living well, under the radar, then he goes and does this thing. So I had to find another way; it was getting ideological. I didn’t want to make it into the newspapers any more. I stole the laptop and the cellular and cut out on a boat to Fushen. Hopped a freighter and ended up on the Pacific coast of Canada with some teenaged girls heading for the tenderloin district of San Fransisco. I’m doomed to boats.

  You want to know how I felt? Did I grow, did I believe, was I hopeful, was this a journey to start a new life? How could I have betrayed the new boss, how could I steal from him, am I redeemable? Did I have a moment of revelation? Can I turn my life around? You’re better at that.

  For some of us, the world is never forgiving. And anyway, we don’t believe in such things, these ideas of forgiveness, redemption—it’s useless. That high-tech monk is probably dead by now and has figured out another incarnation.

  The ship ran aground in the Juan de Fuca Strait. I bailed out. Me and some others hit land before the Coast Guard came. The laptop and the cellular were wrapped in oilskin. I knew they would be my collateral. “The danger of the sky is that we cannot climb up into it; the danger of the earth is the mountains, rivers, and hills—constant pitfalls—seek and you gain a little.”

  By now the monk was a blade of grass, but he had kept files. There were correspondences on the laptop, letters from and letters to. Some woman had been sending letters to the new boss for years, searching for a boy. There was a network of middlemen and pharmacists, payoffs and bribes that the monk had a hand in. Someone was searching for their sister, someone else for a grandfather. “For the weak at the outset, good luck is a matter of following along.” How was the monk supposed to find them? Boys would not be boys any more, this sister not a sister, this grandfather is a pile of dust. But they kept writing, and the monk kept taking, and sending hope from Klong Toey. Sometimes he may have found someone, but they had to pay too. Hitchhiking the Trans-Canada Highway, I knew the laptop was my capital.

  My body keeps moving out of wilfulness. What is physical is uncontrollable. If I didn’t have to take a piss, the Mounties would never have caught me. There’s my face again in the cameras of the world. This time I’m ducking, shielding it with my handcuffed wrists. Looking better, looking better, though. Only biding time. They gave us orange overalls. The men and the girls. I suppose it’s a blankness of another kind. I suppose it’s the same picture as at Pulau Bidong those many years ago. But I can’t complain. There’s something to anonymity, stereotype, being part of the hordes. It can be a camouflage. Let others try to escape it.

  Let them complain. I’ll slip into it and disappear. Did I tell the Amnesty people who I was? Who I’d been? No. What for? To complicate things? Let them have their picture, I say. Yes, I’m innocent of all things. Yes, I’m guilty of all things.

  When they relaxed the detention rules, I took off w
ith two girls worth eighteen thousand dollars apiece. Thirty-six thousand on delivery to Margaret Yao in Toronto. I searched quickly for the laptop, which had been confiscated. One of the girls found it, while the other one chatted up a guard. Then, waiting for early-morning changeover, we ran off.

  There were fears and figures and dates in that computer and then there were those stories which I must confess I found seductive. The transactions that the monk made in identity. Everything is mystery. As cold as those dealings were, the way he wrote those stories was poetry. I suspect he and I were brothers beyond what we told each other. But perhaps not. He was sentimental, after all. Look how he got caught up in that factory girl’s life. When I read the monk’s poetic meanderings, the laptop went soft like blood.

  He’d been taking money from that one woman for more than ten years to find a boy named Quy. He inherited this mark from the monk he deposed and destroyed with the best dose of opium since the Buddha made heaven. Every four or five letters he would give her hope and relate how he had seen her boy and the boy was now a holy man, and then he would plunge her into despair, saying no, it might not be him after all. Then he would ask her to send as much money as she had so he could go to the sacred temple in the interior, where he was convinced the holy boy had gone. Then he would berate her about how little she loved her son that she would send such a pittance. This was the monk’s most intense relationship, I could tell, until the factory girl came along. I came to believe that he was Quy himself; otherwise, why would he keep up so many letters with this one mother when with all the rest he robbed them and moved on? But then again the subject of all this could just as well have been me, for one of the names I go by is Quy and I was lost one night in a bay, or so I’ve told myself.

  The new boss never showed any particular interest in me. How would I know that he saw in me one hundred years of meditation, that I had lived several other lives?

  Innocence is important for a hero. I’m not innocent; neither was the monk. Innocence makes a story more appealing to some. It’s dangerous where I’m concerned. How many times did I have to repeat my own story to some stupid new humanitarian. My words passing like through a sieve. No amount of relating would help. It was always new to them. It got so that to amuse myself, since I was so bored with it, I made minor changes to the tale, or in the end I fantasized wildly. Either way, I was a liar or I was mad. Either way, my listeners went away as if they’d heard nothing. So much for innocence as arbiter of any situation. I never tried to find myself or who I belonged to. The thought made me weak. It paralysed me. Whenever my mind wandered there, I became a child. This Lon inside me would whimper, “Why don’t they come for me?”

  When the monk fell in love, he called this danger on himself. Maybe he was weak. I warned him. He had moments, reclusive, when we would not see him for days. Away on business or just lying on his mat. Perhaps then he longed for the woman in the letters, perhaps then he dreamed of going to her and forgiving her. He stole more from me than I care to say. I don’t blame him; I would have done the same. And I warned him.

  As I said, spring. Me and the girls sat on a train to the city for three days, and then we arrived. It wasn’t hard to convince them that I was one of the bosses, that I knew people and they owed me. I fucked them both. I missed my tape of Mallaria and the Stone Crows. Ku Yie playing guitar with Carburetor Dung would have been nice. Well, what can you do on a train for three days? I had to ditch them. They were planning to do the same to me. But they weren’t my only ticket. The laptop was a gold mine.

  TWENTY-THREE

  BINH WOULD BE just opening his store on Bloor Street. Monday. It was 10 A.M., and that was the time he generally got there.

  Tuyen tried working but could not concentrate on the signpost or the little carvings. Then she tried transposing the longings in her book to the wall but was too distracted. She still felt drunk from the weekend. She was not a good drinker. Drinking actually made her face red and swollen. So she’d spent Friday lying on the floor with cold towels on her face. She had pulled down the dried photographs as soon as she came home and put them in a pile on the table. Lying with a cold towel on her face, the photograph of the man burned her retina. Between the ache in her head from the alcohol and this image of Binh’s companion, she fell into something that wasn’t really sleep. She woke up around 1 P.M. and looked at the photos again. The red light on her answering machine blinked. Binh, she’d thought fearfully. She pressed the button, heard his voice begin a word and snapped the button off. Uncharacteristically, she washed the dishes in the sink. Called Carla across the hallway, knowing that she wasn’t there, then went to Carla’s to see if there was anything to eat. The bareness of Carla’s apartment stunned her. She looked around and had the sense of something missing. No photographs. No family. Lucky, she thought, then took it back. Carla had her own shit. Tuyen, at least, didn’t have a brother in jail. She phoned Jackie.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Nothing. What’s happening with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay.” Jackie was curious.

  “Okay, then.” Tuyen rang off. The phone rang, she hesitated, thinking it might be Binh, then grabbed it, but it was Jackie.

  “Hey, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Same old.”

  “You don’t sound ‘same old.’ ”

  “No, I’m cool. Hey, Jacks, what if we did the installation at your store?”

  “Oh, sure”—Jackie was hesitant—“but how’re you going to get that thing down the stairs?”

  “It’s changed, it’s changed, Jacks. Anyway, Oku will help. I’ll do it in pieces.”

  Jackie hesitated again. “Oku … Oh, well, fine. Fuck, come to think of it, that would be great. More people will come to the store and shit. Yeah, all right.”

  “Okay, then, check you, right?”

  “Yes, later. Hey, when—”

  Tuyen hung up before Jackie finished. She thought she might have said something to Jackie about the pictures, but she couldn’t. Jackie would have put it in perspective. Carla was too brooding. Jackie had the ability to cut things off, to truly live her life despite everything, and to dismiss what she couldn’t control. But it was still too intimate. She couldn’t get the words out of her mouth.

  Tuyen burst into the store as Binh was bringing a box from the back to the front. All her remonstrations to herself walking up Bathurst Street, to be calm, observe his moves, don’t jump to conclusions, left her. “What’re you up to, Binh?” She heard her voice sounding threatening and childish, something of their old rivalry cutting through.

  “Well, hello, and what’s up your ass?” He put the box down and started opening it.

  He looked contented, she thought. She didn’t want to say, I saw you, you’re scheming about something. Everything that came to her head sounded petulant. His look of contentment made her even more suspicious.

  “No, what’re you up to? What’s happening? Bo said the other day that you were doing something?”

  “What are you doing here, anyway? You never come to see me. I asked you to take care of the store and you fucked off on me. How come you’re here now? What? Need money?” As if she would ever come to him for money. As if. He reached into his pocket in exaggerated magnanimity.

  “I don’t want money from you. I want to know what’s going on.” Tuyen threw the pictures on the counter.

  “What are these? What the fuck?” He caught sight of himself in the photographs. “What the fuck you doing? Why you spying on me? What the fuck!”

  “Who is that?” Tuyen asked.

  “Who’s that? What the fuck you doing spying on me? When did you take these?” He saw the World Cup crowd in the background. He knew when she had taken them, and he used the word “spying” twice.

  “So, there’s something to spy on?”

  “Look, you come here, show me pictures of myself that I don’t know you’ve taken, and then accuse me of something? I don’t know what—”
<
br />   “Okay, I’m leaving, but don’t think—”

  “Wait, are you nuts or something? What are you taking pictures of me for? And I don’t even know? Are you crazy?”

  She saw her opening. “Well, who’s the guy?” Tuyen danced with him the way she used to as a child, neither of them considering what the other said. And so she stepped aside the accusation that she had done anything wrong.

  “Well, if you honoured your family and if you listened to me, you would know that I’ve been helping Mom and Dad. I always take care of them, you know. You never do. You’re off living your artist life. Don’t think I don’t know about it. I have my eyes open, you know. But I haven’t said nothing to them about you.”

  “My life is none of your business.”

  “You think you’re so different with your shitty paintings and crazy nonsense.”