by Jarret Keene
When we made love, she’d whimper, a childlike thing a lot of Asian women do, only her whimper sounded more like a wounded animal’s, so that eventually it was just another way of making me feel like a stranger in her presence. An intruder.
I suppose our marriage became a typical one: petty arguments, silent treatments, no sex for months, both of us spending our free time more with friends than with each other. And still we kept at it, God knows why, until I came to believe, in an accepting kind of way, that she was both naïve and practical about love, that she’d only ever loved me because I was a cop, because that was supposed to mean that I’d never hurt her.
The night I hit her was a rainy night. I’d just come home from a shooting in West Oakland, where a guy had tried robbing someone’s seventy-year-old grandmother and, when she fought back, shot her in the head. I was too spent to care about tracking mud on Suzy’s spotless kitchen floor, or to listen to her when she saw the mess and began yelling at me. Couldn’t she understand that brains on a sidewalk is a world worse than mud on a tile floor? Shouldn’t she, coming from where she came, appreciate something like that? I told her to fuck off—which I rarely throw at anyone. She glared at me, and then she started with something she’d been doing for the last few years every time we argued: She began speaking in Vietnamese. Not loudly or irrationally like she was venting her anger at me, but calmly and deliberately, as if I actually understood her, as if she was daring me to understand her, flaunting all the nasty things she could be saying to me and knowing full well that it could have been fucking gibberish for all I knew and that I could do nothing of the sort to her. I usually just ignored her or walked away. But this time, after a minute of staring her down as she delivered whatever the hell she was saying, I backhanded her across the face as hard as I could. It shut her up, sent her bumping into a dining chair.
I had never before raised my hand at her. I’d arrested men who’d done worse to their girlfriends and wives, and I always remembered how pathetic and weak those guys looked when I confronted them. But when I felt the sting in my fingernails, saw the blood curling down Suzy’s busted lip and her just standing there in a kind of angry stubborn silence, I hit her again. She yelped this time, holding that side of her face and still staring at me, though now with a look of recognition that told me she’d never been as tough as I thought, which somehow annoyed me more. Would I have stopped if she had hit me back, as I’d expected? Her nose began bleeding. Her eyes teared up. But her hand fell from her face and she stood her ground. So I hit her a third time. She stumbled back a few steps, covering her mouth with one hand and steadying herself on the dining table with the other, until she finally went down on one knee, her head bowed, like she was about to vomit. She spat blood two or three times. As I walked upstairs, I heard the TV from the living room and the rain pummeling the gutters outside and then the kitchen faucet running, and everything had the sound of finality to it.
In the divorce, she was true to her word and I was left with a house full of eggshell paintings and crucifixes and rattan furniture. Months later, someone told me she had moved to Vegas. I sold the house and everything in it and tried my best to forget I had ever married anyone. I also went on a strict diet of hamburgers and spaghetti.
But then a month ago I bumped into Happy at the grocery store. To my shock, instead of ignoring me or telling me off, she treated me like an old friend. She had always lived up to her name in that way, and actually she looked a lot like Suzy, a taller and more carefree version of her—and, in truth, a version I’d always been attracted to. I asked her out to dinner that night. Afterwards, we went home together. We drank wine and went to bed and it wasn’t until we finished that I realized my other reason for doing all this. With her blissfully drunk and more talkative than ever, I finally asked about Suzy. She told me everything: how Suzy had become a card dealer in Vegas and met up with this rich, cocky Vietnamese poker player who owned a fancy restaurant and a big house and apparently had some shady dealings in town, and how they got married and she quit her job, and how everything had been good for more than a year.
“Until he begin losing,” Happy declared soberly, sitting back on the headboard. She said nothing more and I had to tell her several times to get on with it. She glanced at me impatiently, like I should already know. “He hit her,” she said. “She hit him back, but he very strong and he drink a lot. Last month, he throw her down the stairs and broke her arm. I saw her two week ago with a sling, her cheek purple. But he too rich for her to leave. And he always say he need her, he need her.”
I stood from the bed, a bit tipsy. I knocked the lamp off the nightstand.
Happy flinched. After a moment, she said, “Why you still love her?” There was no envy or bitterness in her voice. She was simply curious.
“Who said I did?”
She checked me with her eyes as though I didn’t understand my own emotions.
I tried to soften my voice, but it still came out in a growl: “Is it just the money? What—is he handsome?”
“Not really. But you not either.” She patted my arm and laughed.
“You know what? I’m gonna go to Vegas and I’m gonna find this fucker. And then I’m gonna hit him a little bit before I break his arm.”
This time she laughed hard, covering her mouth and looking at me with drunken pity.
“You such a silly, stupid man,” she said.
I returned to Fuji West at 7:30 that evening, just as the sun was setting. I drove this time. The parking lot was half full, mostly fancy cars, and I immediately spotted the silver Porsche in the back row. Sure enough, those were the tags. I rechecked the five-shot in my ankle holster. My hands felt bruised from the hot, dry air.
Inside, the restaurant was cool and dark and very Zen. Piano music drifted along the ceiling beams overhead. Booth tables with high wooden seats, lighted by small suspended lanterns, lined the walls like confessionals. Candlelit tables filled in the space between the booths and the circular sushi bar, which stood in the center of the restaurant like an island, manned by three sushi chefs in white who with their hats resembled sailors. Flanking the bar were two enormous aquariums, filled with exotic-looking fish that were staring out calmly at the twenty or so patrons in the restaurant, most of whom easily out-dressed me.
I asked for a table near the bar and ordered a Japanese beer and told the hostess I was waiting for a friend. I’d barely wet my lips before Sonny’s young doberman appeared and sat himself across from me, just as casually as if I’d invited him.
He was now dressed in a black pinstripe suit, set off by another beautiful pink tie, looking very ready to be anyone’s best man. He waved at a waitress, who swiftly brought him a bottle of Perrier and a glass with a straw. Pouring the Perrier into the glass, he said to me, “So you did not like my advice.” His voice was gentle but humorless.
“I appreciate the wisdom—but my business with Sonny is important.”
“I know it is,” he said, nodding agreeably. “Except my father has no business with you.” He sipped his Perrier with the straw like a child. In the aquarium directly behind him, a long brown eel swam slowly through his head.
“Your father, huh? Well, I guess that makes some sense.” I downed half my beer, wiped my mouth with two fingers. “So how do you know who I am?”
“Your friend Happy is also a friend of mine. She visits here often. She came to me last week and told me what you have been planning to do. She told me for your sake. She likes you, Mr. Robert, and she knows you can be a foolish man. She did not tell Suzy, of course, or my father. So only I know that you are here. And that, Mr. Robert, is a good thing.”
“Because your father is a dangerous man?”
He eyed me sternly, drawing together his dark handsome eyebrows. “Because my father does not have my patience.”
A waiter came by and whispered something into his ear, and Sonny Jr. looked to the front doors where two large parties of customers had just appeared. He stood from the table an
d gestured at the hostess, who walked quickly over to our table, and he gave her and the waiter rapid orders in Vietnamese. He glanced at me, a bit distractedly, then turned again to them and went on with his instructions. He watched them walk away and continued watching as they saw to the parties. His father might have been a poker-playing gangster or maybe a gangster-playing poker player, but I was getting the feeling that Junior was nothing more than what he appeared: the young manager of a restaurant.
He appeared to sigh and finally turned back to me, adjusting his tie, his face once again as calm as the fish. “You are a police officer, so I should not show you this. But I know you are here with other, less official concerns, however silly they might be. Please come with me then.”
“And where are we going?”
“As I said, you are the police officer here. It should be me who is nervous.”
I offered him a smile, which he did not return. I stood and followed him to the kitchen.
We passed two private tatami rooms, each being prepared by the staff for the new parties. Foolishly or not, the presence of so many people eased my mind a bit.
The kitchen was staffed by Mexicans and Asians, all in white uniforms. No one paid us any attention as we walked to the back, toward a door marked Office. Junior unlocked it, and once we stepped inside he relocked it and approached a huge, life-size oil painting of a geisha walking up a dark flight of stairs. There was a clock on the wall beside it, which he set to midnight, then he turned the minute hand three revolutions clockwise and two revolutions counter-clockwise. The painting slowly swung open from the wall like a door, revealing a passageway and a dark descending staircase. He walked down and without looking back at me said, “It will close again in five seconds.”
We reached a long dim hallway and passed six closed doors, each with a keypad over the knob. At the end we stopped at a door that was set much further away from the others. He punched a series of numbers on the keypad and something clicked. He pushed the door open completely before moving inside.
I heard soft Oriental music. The room glowed bluish and shimmered. It was no more than a thousand square feet, but felt cavernous, with walls of glass surrounding us—behind them water and fish. I had entered a gigantic aquarium. Each wall showed the flushed faces of four separate tanks, framed in quadrants like enormous television monitors, their blue waters filled with stingrays and sharks and what appeared to be piranha and other odd-looking fish, all swimming around beds of corral and white gravel. Against the brick wall behind me were three aisles of smaller aquariums, with smaller fish, stacked on two rows of iron shelves. On a large Oriental rug in the center of the room stood a black leather couch, two dolphin chairs, and a glass coffee table.
Sonny Jr. went to the table and took a cigarette from the pack lying there, lit it, and approached the tank of stingrays. I felt a movement behind me and turned to see, at last, the seven-foot Mexican standing in the hall just outside the doorway, his forehead out of view. God knows where he’d come from. His white apron looked like an oversized bib, and he still wore that heavy, dull-eyed Frankenstein expression. Junior spoke Vietnamese to him and he stepped inside the room, bowing to do so, and closed the door. So that was at least three languages the Mexican understood.
“Is Dad making an appearance too?” I asked.
“He is not here, Mr. Robert,” Junior replied calmly, and ashed into an ashtray he held in his other hand—yet another annoyingly formal mannerism. He gestured at the entire room and said, “But I have brought you to meet his fish. These are all illegal, you see. And all very expensive. This one here,” and he pointed at a foot-long fish with a huge chin and an elongated, undulating body, “is a silver Asian arowana, also called a dragonfish, as you can see why. Our clients will pay over ten thousand dollars for one.”
“I can sell you my car for half that.”
He turned his back to me, ignoring the comment, and continued, “We installed a couch and a stereo because my father likes to come here and relax. The fish, the lights, and the music give him peace. For all his flaws, he is a man who values peace.”
I took a step toward him and heard the Mexican shuffle his feet behind me. I spoke to Junior’s back: “I’ve met your fish. Why else have you brought me here?”
He turned around and expelled smoke through his nostrils, dragon-like. “I have brought you here to tell you a story.” He licked his lips and brushed ash from his breast. “You see, my father appreciates these fish because they are beautiful and bring him a lot of money. But he also appreciates them because they remind him of home—they bring home to him. It is the irony, you see, that is valuable: a tiny tropical ocean here in the middle of the desert; all these fish swimming beneath sand. The casinos in this city sell you a similar kind of irony, but what we have here is genuine and real, because it also keeps us who we are.”
“Who you are? No irony, you think, in you and your father owning a Japanese restaurant?”
“Shut up, Mr. Robert, and listen.” He put out his cigarette and walked over to take a seat in one of the dolphin chairs. He unbuttoned his jacket and crossed his legs elegantly. He offered me the face of a boy, but sounded like an old man. “More than twenty years ago, my parents and I escaped Vietnam by boat. Two hundred people in a little fishing boat made for no more than twenty, headed for Malaysia. On our second night at sea we hit a terrible storm and my mother fell overboard. It was too dark and stormy for anyone to see her or hear her cry out, and the waters were too rough to save her anyway. She drowned. I was seven at the time. I will not bore you with a tragedy. I will only say that her death hardened my father, made him more fearless than he already was.
“In any case, after sixteen days, our boat finally made it to the refugee camp in Malaysia, on the island of Pulau Bidong. The first day my father and I were there, the ruffians in the camp made themselves known and threatened us. My father was once in a gang back in Vietnam, so he was not afraid. He ignored them. A week later, one of them stole my rice ration. The thief slapped me across the face, pushed me to the ground, ripped the sack out of my hand. To scare me even more, he grabbed my wrist and ran a knife across it, barely cutting the skin. I ran to my father, bawling, and he shut me up with a slap of his own.”
Junior stared at his hands for a moment, like he was studying his nails. Then he went on.
“He took me by the arm and dragged me to the part of the camp where the ruffians hung out. He made me stand under a palm tree and ordered me to watch him. There were many people there, minding their business. A few shacks away, the man who had attacked me was kneeling and playing dice with two friends. On a tree stump nearby, someone butchering an animal had left his bloody cleaver and my father grabbed it and marched up behind the man and kicked him hard in the back of the head. The man fell forward and his two friends pounced at my father, but he was already brandishing the cleaver at them. They backed off. My father then grabbed the man by the back of his shirt and dragged him to the tree stump. In one swift motion, never once hesitating, he placed the man’s hand on the stump and threw down the cleaver and hacked off his hand at the wrist.
“Blood spurted and the man screamed. I do not remember how horrified the people around me looked, but I remember hearing a few women shriek. My father dropped the cleaver, bent down, and muttered something in the man’s ear as he writhed on the ground, moaning and clasping his bloody forearm to his chest. His severed hand still lay on the tree stump. My father wiped his own hand on his pants and held mine as we walked back to our shack. We stayed in that camp for two more months before we came to the States, and those ruffians never once bothered us again.”
Sonny Jr. stood from the chair and walked over again to the stingrays. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the glass where his finger had pointed at the arowana. He turned to me thoughtfully.
“I still occasionally have dreams about that afternoon. But I have not told you this story so that you will pity me, or anyone for that matter. I have told you so that you
will understand what kind of man my father is—and in a way respect it. Think of this conversation—this situation—as an exchange of trust. Remember that I have brought you, a police officer, here to see my father’s illegal business. I am trusting that you will forget your plans in this city, go home, and not say a word of what you have seen. In exchange, since I have made this rather foolish gesture for you, you will trust that I am trying to help you, and you will do all those things. A man of your sentiments should appreciate the sincerity of this offer.”
I watched him neatly fold his handkerchief and place it back in the breast pocket of his suit. His logic was giving me a headache. I walked over to the couch and sat down, facing him. I hadn’t smoked since Suzy left me—another part of my detox plan, since smoking together was one of the few things we never stopped doing. But now I took a cigarette from the pack and lit up. It was my turn to talk.
“Why do you want so badly to help me?” I said. “Why do you care what happens to me? Is it really me you’re protecting? Or is it your father? Because somehow I feel he’s no longer—maybe never was—the hard man you say he is. And I’m guessing maybe you made up that dramatic little story just to scare me. But even if it’s true, I’ve dealt with scarier people. Now why you’ve chosen to show me all this fish stuff is still a mystery to me—though I’d wager you just like getting off on your own smarts and impressing people. You’ve either read too many books or listened to people who’ve read too many books. Either way, it’s not my fault that I can’t understand half the things you say. But what I do understand is this …” I leaned forward on the couch and looked at him squarely. “Your father is a thug. Not only that, he’s an asshole, and a coward too. He threw a woman down the stairs and broke her arm. Who knows what else he did, could have done, or might do in the future, but men like him only have the guts to do that to a woman. And the fact that you haven’t blinked yet tells me all of this is true. You’re a smart boy, and you seem to be a good enough son to want to protect him. That’s fine. It’s even admirable. But my business with him has nothing to do with you. So fuck off.”