by Dionne Brand
“Well, how do you want to do it?” He tried to keep his exasperation out of his voice, but she could hear it.
“I think that we should go in first. Tell them. You know …”
“Okay, fine.”
“So it’s not a shock … totally … or …”
“Fine,” he said again.
He was humouring her, she felt it. He’d made the big catch, and she could play with the small details if she wanted. Silence fell again. She could hear Quy’s breathing. Why couldn’t she ask, So what was your life like? So where were you? So anything?
“This is the highway,” Binh said, as if he was a tour guide and as if Quy had never seen a highway before. Quiet again.
“I mean, I think that’s best,” Tuyen started up.
“I said okay!” he warned.
“Okay.” Her body was tense and prickly. The man looked straight ahead. Maybe he was tense too, she thought. What would she say to Bo and Ma? Binh was in control, but his control always felt chaotic to her. She would have to make up for him, to anchor them for disappointment. This man was disappointing, she knew.
There was a sunny haze on the buildings seen from the highway. The traffic felt slippery. As if they were gliding unencumbered through a slick, silvery air.
When the Beamer pulled into Ridgeway Heights Crescent, Tuyen noticed irritatingly the incongruity of its name. There was no ridge, there was no hill; these had existed only in the imagination of the developer. Yes, they had driven the scythed asphalt of the street, but that was all that was true about the words on the street sign.
She had not spoken to Quy the whole way. Repentant now, or perhaps only to keep down her rising anxiety, she heard her voice bellow in his ear, “Won’t be long now. That’s where we’re going.” She pointed over his shoulder to the rounding white porch of her parents’ house. “Stop, stop here, Binh.” Her voice was so high pitched that Binh stepped heavily on the brake.
“What is your problem?” he asked, putting the Beamer in park.
“I—we should park here. Don’t go into the garage yet.”
“Stop telling me what to do.” They were five hundred metres from the house.
“No fighting,” Quy suddenly spoke, silencing them both. “It’s fine. Everything. I stay here. You go first. Everything is fine now.”
“Okay, big brother.” Binh smiled. “Everything is fine.”
Tuyen grunted assent and opened the door, climbing out of the Beamer. Binh followed. They walked in silence for a few steps. Tuyen began to say something, but Binh’s resolute face dissuaded her. It reminded her of when they were children. At night in the restaurant, after all the customers had left, he would sit on a table playing his Pacman, which she was not allowed to touch, his brow furrowed, his mouth pursed; she would sit on the cash register stool, both of them waiting while their sisters and Bo and Ma cleaned the restaurant around them. Then, much to his annoyance, she would burst into loud renditions of “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” her arms waving like a choir master, building the song with more and more gusto until he screamed for her to shut up. Either Ai or Lam would slap them both to quieten them down. But it didn’t, it only made them wail louder to bring Ma or Bo to their rescue.
Rescue. Were they now on some mission of rescue? Who was being rescued? she thought. Ma, Bo, her sisters, her brother, this one, or the man they’d left in the car? Quy, the eldest? She must stop annoying Binh; she must help him rescue Ma and Bo. They must, she and he, translate now the years between that man and their parents. They must stand between them to decode the secret writing of loss and hurt.
She put her arm on Binh’s to slow him. He turned to her at first brusquely, then, seeing the understanding of their mission in her face, slowed himself, as if to savour their mutual intuition. This is what they’d done all their lives, she thought. She felt comforted by their commonality, the same commonality that had made her so uneasy most of her life; it had made her long to be unexceptional. Yet, here was their specialness now carried between them to the door of the house, the recognitive gaze of an exception cherished through all this time. Wasn’t that what her art was all about in the end? She had a vision of the cloth on the wall in her apartment, the scores of scribbled longings, then she felt for the photographs of Quy still stuffed in her bag. She would make tiny copies of the image, yes, and insert them among the records of longing in her installation. She would take photographs of the people of the city too, and sprinkle them throughout. She would need a larger space for the installation, three rooms really, very high ceilings. In the middle of each room a diaphanous cylindrical curtain, hung from the ceiling, that the audience could enter. At the centre of one cylinder would be the lubaio with all the old longings of another generation. She would do something with the floor here too, perhaps rubble, perhaps sand, water. In another cylinder there would be twelve video projections, constantly changing, of images and texts of contemporary longing. This one would be celebratory, even with the horrible. Again here the floor, the path, what material? The last cylinder would be empty, the room silent. What for? She still wasn’t quite certain what she was making; she knew she would find out only once the installation was done. Then, some grain, some element she had been circling, but had been unable to pin down, would emerge.
Quy
There are times when I’ve said to myself, Who the hell are you? That’s a dangerous question. And this is a dangerous city. You could be anybody here. That is what first took me when I walked among people on the streets. Then one morning I sat on the subway train and I heard a laughter and it reminded me of when I was little, and right away I knew it would be easy to disappear here. Who would know? The man living across the street from you could have fought in the Angolan war, he could’ve killed many people, and there he is sitting in a deck chair with his wife as if nothing happened, and one day he will mention the simple fact to you with a look of triumph as he remembers it only as a youthful adventure. That woman whose ass you love when she walks down the street, she could’ve been tortured in Argentina and the last thing she wants anyone to love is her ass, her genitals were wired with electrodes, once. And the taxi driver you strike up a pleasant conversation with could’ve been her torturer or a torturer of a similar woman in Burma with similar equipment. So if this guy from Angola can sit there in his shorts and tan himself and remember killing people like a youthful prank, like a necessary job, and if the taxi driver can devote himself to sharing pleasantries and directions, thinking of the electrodes he put in a woman’s cunt as routine, just trying to get the job done, like driving a cab, well, who am I really? Who the hell am I?
So I’m sitting here thinking, Margaret Yao turns out to be the girlfriend of one Alex Turgenov, who happens to have been a sports doctor from the old Soviet Union and who is now a mechanic but more importantly runs a whorehouse; the girls turn out to be only three thousand dollars apiece. Alex is going to store them in a whorehouse called a spa, above a retail shoe place that used to be called the Elephant. One day the cops will find them and they’ll be on TV and Alex will disappear and Margaret will walk across the screen looking sour, but that’s another story. By some coincidence, if you believe that kind of thing, I come to the name of a guy, Vu Binh, in the monk’s e-mails. Young guy, M.B.A., all the money he wants, all the pussy he needs. And by some stranger coincidence, this one perhaps love, he’s looking for a man who was a boy named Quy. Well, see for yourself. I already put two and two together. I appear. The guy is either very cunning or a lo dit. I arrive; he’s convinced. I’m convinced. He turns out to be my brother. Isn’t my name Quy? Wasn’t I lost so he could come to me in his expensive shoes, in his silk shirt, his mouth slow and vulgar on his mother tongue, with his silver Beamer? He knows everything, he’s a swift man, he looks at me like Picasso devouring an African mask—how can he use it, how can he change it, which part of his belly can he put it in? So I say to myself, Fine, let it play.
But I’m so full of rage, a kind I’ve never felt before, and I
want to take a swing at him and I want to hug him as my brother. But I know that I’m going to take him for everything he’s got. It’s the things that were mine, and he got them double. He’s got my mother and my father and my two sisters. He’s got the world in front of him. He’s got the store, and we’re in the store when the World Cup match between Korea and Italy is playing. And he’s got happiness like the people outside in the street when the Korean redhead scores the goal that beats Italy. He’s got everything.
I look at the crowd outside and I say to myself, How come, how come this can’t be me? And I say to myself, Quy, it is you.
We have another sister, and she’s harder to convince. The minute I hear her voice, I know she’s no pussy. So I listen close to what she says, and I decide there’s no need to play her, the rest of them will work it out fine. She wants them to be happy, she wants me to be happy. So I make her know I’m standing in the room, watching her, waiting for her to decide whether to kill everything again. And it is as if I’m standing in the bay, about to follow someone onto the Dong Khoi. And suddenly she turns around, recognizes me, and says she’s sorry, and I feel lifted up by my father or my mother. The crowd is outside the store window again. This time the Koreans are playing the machine, Germany. They won’t win, but they’re there. They’re on the pitch in the semi-final. Everything comes together. “Du-ma-may!” I scream, “Du-ma-may!”
So now I’m here in the car, waiting to go meet them. Little brother will come to get me. He and my little sister are preparing them for the shock, and I’m sitting here in the Beamer, and I’m thinking, People disappear all the time into cities. Why not me, eh? Why not me? I could run a store like Binh. What do people need? Movies, video games, yes, I could do that, sell videos, I could become close with my little sister, me and my older sisters will remember games we played. My brother and I will go to the strip clubs together. My mother will cry and my father too. They’ll forgive themselves now. I’ll marry someone, I’ll have a kid or two, and just like that man I’ll sit outside, I’ll find someone to tell this story to, and I’ll laugh because all my predictions and interpretations were wrong. So I’m waiting, I’m going to rest my head here and wait.
TWENTY-FIVE
CARLA DIDN’T RIDE into the Amazon. She rode through the city, now feeling free. Free of Jamal, free of Derek and Nadine. She would never be free of Angie. She didn’t want to be free of her. She only wanted the memory to lose its pain, not its intensity. Derek had bailed Jamal out. Jamal was going to live with him. Whether that lasted or not now was up to them. She wasn’t free of Jamal, really, and she didn’t want to be—she only wanted to be free of his pain. And of her protectiveness toward him. This was a step then, that it wasn’t she who had bailed him out, that Derek had taken the responsibility, and however that had come about she didn’t need to know, nor did she care.
She rode up the Bathurst Street hill just for the taste of lactic acid in her thighs, then down under the bridge and back, then along St. Clair Avenue. She stopped in Little Italy, secured her bike, and sat down at the Eden Trattoria and ordered an espresso. Carla imagined Angie growing up just off this avenue when times were different and when Angie was a rebel.
There used to be a black club above Chiarelli’s Espresso Bar on this street. Angie used to work downstairs nights serving espresso to old men from Calabria playing cards and talking, while people dressed to the nines went upstairs on the weekends to dance. It was on the sidewalk outside the espresso bar that she’d met Derek. After weeks of listening to the pumping disco music upstairs and feeling a deep thrill from the cool hip bodies laughing and wheeling by the window, Angie had volunteered to close up that night. She wanted to go upstairs, to be enveloped in the smell of perfume and the taste of Southern Comfort, the heat and dark of the dance floor, and that laughing that seemed somehow to her not light at all but knowledgeable and dangerous. She didn’t listen to the gnarled old men talk, over their cigarettes and espressos, about the “monkeys” upstairs. She didn’t hear the absolute proscription laid down there in those curses plain and ugly as anything. She only saw the easy way Derek smiled and the way that smile said she was gorgeous and young and sexy and that they both of them together would be incendiary. She didn’t hear Derek joke with his friends that she was fresh meat, or if she heard it, she’d already decided that she could take that lascivious name tinged with something racial and envious, something special. Angie didn’t want to be anyone ordinary in Little Italy. She was scared of the Saturday shopping and the Sunday churching and the Sunday dinners where her brothers’ wives and her mother and she would busy themselves with cooking while her brothers and her father drank wine and scowled at the television or insulted each other about not knowing what real work was. She was scared of the screaming nieces and nephews and the inane talk about babies and wedding showers and houses in the new suburbs of Toronto. So Angie cut all that off with one flight into the most forbidden place on her family’s earth.
I’ll never know quite what that was like, Carla thought. She heard around her the language of her own childhood, a language she didn’t speak or understand now, but whose tones she felt comforted by. “To Angela Chiarelli,” she said aloud, raising her coffee. She made a new vow to remember Angie, not with the same frantic effort at preservation, at loyalty. She had held on as if she could lose loyalty. Now she knew she couldn’t. And she couldn’t hold the baby any more either. She knew all this when Jamal came by in the black Audi. She knew Derek hadn’t lent it to him. Derek would never lend anyone his car.
She’ll go back to her apartment and live her life. She’ll have parties with Tuyen, she’ll go to the Roxy Blu, she’ll go to jazz concerts, she’ll wait in line to hear U2, she’ll go with Tuyen to Pope Joan, to Afrodeasia. They’ll dance together. She’ll check out the open-mike spoken word at Caliban with Oku. She’ll cut her hair, she’ll go to Jackie’s Ab und Zu and get a new wardrobe. She’ll be seduced by someone. She can’t hold the baby any longer.
It won’t matter that Jamal left Carla’s place, cruised up Weston Road, turned into a small street with an apartment building, waited outside until a friend came down, who then sat in the passenger seat; a friend who greeted Jamal with, “Hey, J-man. Shit, it’s great to see you,” clasped his hand, and hugged him. Jamal put the car in gear with a flourish and first drove through the growing neighbourhood of ex–West Indians, ex-Eritreans, ex-Somalis, ex-Vietnamese, and ex–South Asians. His friend Bashir, the son of an ex-Somali, was born right here when you could still smell the beef terminal from the Junction; when they hadn’t yet turned the abattoir south of here into town houses.
“Fuck, this is a sweet ride,” Bashir said. “You’re living very large, J-man.”
Jamal grinned at the compliment and turned left onto the main drag, with its brief mix of used-car dealerships, dollar stores, cheap, ugly furniture stores, food stores, banks, and panicky “stop and cash” booths. He nosed the Audi through the sluggish traffic up toward the highway.
If it means anything, the conversation they had was about how smooth the ride was, how sleek this Audi looked, how it was his father’s, the fucker—“the vain old fuck-head,” Jamal said. “But I wouldn’t buy no Audi like him. I know this guy with this X5, sweet, man.”
“Beamer X5? Whoa! Put some Pioneer speakers in there …”
“Pioneer! Are you crazy, man! No way. Some Anaconda with subwoofers, like twelves, right … real bass, built-in equalizer …”
That conversation was punctuated by drags on a spliff and chuckling. And then his friend Bashir said, “Let’s roll, man.” And then Jamal said, “No doubt, man, I’m ready.”
Carla has already decided on the new course of her life when Jamal drives the Audi to Richmond Hill because there are rich motherfuckers there and they got great cars to boost, in garages off roadways called crescents and drives. They got monster houses and monster rides and his friend is the garage-door specialist and a strong man and he’s the driver. And really it should be three
of them, but they are two. They spot the silver Beamer X5 outside near a stop sign, and there’s an Asian guy in the passenger seat. The guy looks middle-aged to them. His head is laid back on the headrest, and his eyes are closed; the windows are open because it’s a nice evening, not so hot as earlier in the day. And maybe the middle-aged Asian guy is waiting to meet someone; maybe he’s resting for the first time in a long time, and is waiting until someone comes out of the house not far away to get him. The Beamer’s silver skin burns like a fish in the dark pond of the evening.
They circle him once, twice. And Jamal wants to take this one, so he gets out and gives his friend the wheel of the Audi. He has a small black object in his waist, and he slides up stealthily on the resting man. He practised two or three times in his head, Get out, motherfucker, as he’s heard in the movies. So when he gets to the car, he says these words and presses the gun to the man’s face. And the man seems insulted and stunned—how could he have been caught in this way?
Adrenaline makes Jamal wrench the door of the Beamer open violently, grabbing the man and dragging him out of the car, flinging him to the pavement and kicking him in the ribs. But the man, surprised and suddenly charged himself, hangs on to Jamal’s left leg.
The gun falls, clatters against the pavement, and slips under the car. Then the friend in the Audi jumps out and comes running, kicking the man loose of Jamal. The man is stupidly fighting as if he has a life that’s precious. He realizes that they want the car, and he says, “Take the fucking car” in Vietnamese, but no one understands him. So they beat him and kick him beyond recognition and Jamal jumps in the silver Beamer X5 and his friend takes the Audi and they drive away, leaving the man half-dead by the road.
And the man lies there thinking, Not Bidong, not Klong Toey, not in any of those places had he let himself down like this. His mouth is full of the brittle, rusty taste of blood, and the sky looks like the sea that first morning on the Dong Khoi. And he leans his head as he had over the side of the boat, longingly, and Bo and Ma are finally running out of a doorway, running toward him, and the road between them is like water, and they both grab him as they should have and his mouth splits open and all the water spills out.