“You had no feelings for him?”
Lam shrugged. “Make noise. Run run. Break stereo. Always cry. No food. No toy. Little whore baby. Ruby no care. You think Simon become doctor? Maybe lawyer, like you? Better dead.”
In the medical examiner’s photographs, Simon’s entire body—all two feet, thirty pounds of him—had been covered with welts and bruises and cuts, only the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet spared.
Hank watched Lam brush a stray cigarette ash from his shirtsleeve.
A few days ago, Hank had found a pregnancy book in Molly’s loft, hidden in a cupboard. He had read a passage in the book that she had underlined. At twelve weeks, the fetus would be fully formed. It would have eyelids, thirty-two tooth buds, finger- and toenails. It would be able to swallow, press its lips together, frown, clench its fists. It would be, at that point, two and a half inches long.
“It sickens me to think I might let you walk,” he told Lam.
“Too bad. You have job.”
“I find myself asking what would happen if I slipped a little, made a mistake here and there.”
“No choice. You have job. You do best.”
“Maybe I already fucked up on purpose. You were right about the medical examiner. I’m usually smarter than that.”
“No, you too much goodie-goodie. You never do that.”
“No?”
“Naw.”
“The funny thing is, you wouldn’t be able to tell. No one would. If I’m not blatantly incompetent, no one would ever know.”
Lam giggled, then slowly quieted down, growing uncertain. “Better not,” he said. “Better not, you fuck.”
“Who would it hurt?”
They got their drinks at the bar and snagged a table near the front window. The restaurant was crowded—a popular hangout for those who worked at the courthouse.
“This place is a pit,” Allison said.
“There’s not much else around here,” Hank said.
“I hate San Vicente.”
Hank had checked the dockets and had found his ex-wife upstairs, representing a consulting firm that was being sued for breach of contract.
“The details would put you to sleep,” she told Hank. She was still hoping to settle.
They caught up a little. It had been about a year since they’d run into each other. Allison looked good, crisp in her starched white blouse and silk suit. Her hair was longer, chin-length now, parted in the middle and tucked behind her ears. She’d had a short blunt cut before, which had pronounced her sucked-in cheeks and skinny frame, making her seem even more acerbic and severe than she was.
They had been divorced for three years, almost as long as they had been married. They had been mismatched from the beginning, always getting into fights about politics and money (“kuppie,” he would call her—Korean yuppie), trading indictments about his moronic crusades and her nauseating self-absorption, epitomized, he felt, by her refusal to have children. They had mistaken their hostility for passion and stayed together longer than they should have.
She was now living in San Francisco with a wealthy developer named Jason Chu, an A.B.C., American-born Chinese, who, coincidentally, had been trying for the last decade to build a $50 million monstrosity in Rosarita Bay: two hundred houses around a golf course, a shopping mall, a hotel and conference center, and a fake lighthouse.
“Is he still trying to get that passed?” Hank asked. “He’ll never get it to fly. Not in Rosarita Bay.”
“How can you live there?”
“It’s nice.”
“It’s hicksville. You might as well be in the Farm Belt,” Allison told him. “Jason says it’s racism, the reason why he can’t get zoning. In your former life, he might’ve been a client of yours. Get this. I read him the article about your trial, your lovely Mr. Lam, and Jason said, ‘That can’t be right. Chinese don’t do drugs.’ ”
“Ha.”
“How’s your diver friend? Martha?”
“Molly. Don’t try to be cute. You know her name.”
“So, how are things going?”
“She’s pregnant.”
“Well,” Allison said expansively. “Congratulations. You’re finally going to be a papa.”
“Maybe not,” Hank said.
“What do you mean? You knocked her up by accident?”
“I don’t know how it happened.”
“I’m guessing it was a Freudian spurt. It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? Do you love her?”
Hank lit a cigarette.
“I thought you quit,” Allison said.
“I did.”
“Well, do you? Love her?”
Hank nodded.
“Enough to marry her one of these days?”
He nodded again.
“What gives, then?”
Hank tried to flag down the waitress for another drink, but she didn’t notice him. He hesitated, then asked Allison, “Why didn’t you want a child with me?”
“I thought it was because I’m a selfish bitch. Because I’m—”
“Don’t start.”
“I always hated that about you. Your moral superiority. What made you think you were so much better than everyone else? Now look at you, with this scumbag Lam. That’d be quite a precedent if you win. Negate culpability for anyone on drugs. Some way to save the world.”
“Do we have to do this?”
“No, I suppose not,” Allison said. “But you could’ve let me enjoy myself a bit longer.” She reapplied lipstick to her mouth.
Hank fiddled with his empty drink glass. “Did you think I wouldn’t be a good father?”
She turned to him. “No, I never thought that,” she said, softening. “What’s going on with you? What are you afraid of?”
“These days, everything.”
“I don’t like seeing you like this. It’s fun beating you up once in a while, but only if you fight back.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Hank said. “I used to think not wanting a child was selfish. Now I think wanting one is.”
His defense took four days. He had a narcotics detective testify that, contrary to Boudreau’s suggestions, Lam was not a dealer of any consequence. The paraphernalia found in his apartment was used for freebasing, a somewhat antiquated method of smoking coke, reserved for connoisseurs and hard-core addicts. Instead of heating cocaine hydrochloride powder with baking soda, which would yield crack, Lam separated the base with ether and a propane torch. Freebase was purer than crack, but no dealer today went through the trouble of producing it. It took too long, and it was dangerous. And although crack houses had precision scales and surveillance equipment like Lam’s, most dealers did not have any reason to monitor the inside of the house. There was also no currency found in the apartment, no vials or plastic pouches that were the usual receptacles for distribution.
Three of Lam’s friends corroborated Ruby’s testimony about Lam’s bingeing habits, paranoia, and snake fixation, but all three, when cross-examined by Boudreau, were impeached rather comically. Each claimed he had never bought any drugs from Lam, never saw him sell drugs to anyone else, didn’t know where he got them, didn’t smoke with him, simply went to the apartment to watch TV.
A neighbor recalled seeing Lam scamper out to the street one evening in his underwear, bleeding profusely, screaming. She called the police, who took him to the hospital. Lam told the admitting nurse he’d run through a sliding glass door, trying to get away from the snakes. He was transferred to the county mental health clinic, where he’d been held five previous times for acute cocaine intoxication.
The Chinese officer who had booked Lam on June 23 recounted their conversation in the police station. Lam spoke to him in Cantonese and insisted he had not known it was Simon he was hitting, he’d seen snakes, that he would have never done anything to hurt the kid.
Finally, Hank brought Dr. Jeffrey Winnick to the stand. Winnick, a psychopharmacologist, studied the effects of cocaine on human behavior. He wa
s a frequent consultant to the F.B.I. and the D.E.A., and he had testified in over five hundred trials, mostly—Hank emphasized—for the prosecution. By chance, Winnick had been doing research at Cabrillo State Hospital when Lam was taken there to test his competency. Over the course of four months, he interviewed Lam three times a week for a total of seventy hours.
“Did you arrive at an opinion about Mr. Lam?” Hank asked.
“In my opinion, Mr. Lam was psychotic on June twenty-third and could not appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions. In my opinion, he did not know it was Simon he was beating.”
He explained to the jury the psychopathology of freebasing. Because the surface area of the lungs was equivalent to a tennis court, smoking cocaine allowed the drug to enter the bloodstream almost instantaneously, affecting the brain within eight to twelve seconds. The initial effect was as a stimulant, creating a feeling of confidence and euphoria. As one’s tolerance increased, however, dysphoria occurred, prompting more frequent usage, which led to paranoia.
“People often begin to have hallucinations at this point,” Winnick said, “the most common of which is cocaine bugs. Their brains are firing so fast, these bursts of light—snow lights, they’re called—flash in the corners of their eyes, and they think they’re seeing things that aren’t there, that keep escaping when they turn to look. At the same time, their skin feels like it’s prickling, because cocaine constricts the blood vessels, and the combination leads them to believe there are things crawling on them—bugs or worms, or, as in Mr. Lam’s case, snakes—and they’ll scrape their skin or try to catch them. Since they’re wide awake, they’ll be absolutely convinced these hallucinations are real, and they’ll have delusions beyond the period of intoxication. This stage is referred to as cocaine paranoid psychosis, and it can be latent for months or even years after the last use of cocaine.”
“Did Mr. Lam’s cocaine habit progress to this stage?”
“Yes. His entire world revolved around trying to prove the existence of these snakes and trying to capture and kill them. He was terrified of them.”
“Is cocaine paranoid psychosis caused by an organic disturbance to the brain?”
“Yes.”
“So you would say that this is a mental defect?”
“Absolutely.”
“Was Mr. Lam suffering from this mental defect on June twenty-third?”
“I am certain that he was.”
The jury took two days to reach a verdict, and in the end, they did what was right. Legally, they felt obliged to acquit Lam of child abuse, but they could not absolve him completely of killing Simon. Nor could they find him insane and send him to the relative comfort of a state institution. They convicted him of voluntary manslaughter. Gutierrez sentenced Lam immediately to the maximum term—eleven years.
Hank went to Molly’s loft and told her the news. “I should resign,” he said.
“Why?”
“I did a great job. On the evidence alone, the jury should’ve found him not guilty. But they didn’t, and I’m relieved. What does that say about me as a public defender?”
“It says you’re human. It says Lam got a fair trial.”
“With early release, he could be out in six years. He killed a three-year-old kid. Is that fair?”
They went to Banzai Pipeline for sushi, and then stopped by the Moonside Trading Post to rent a couple of videos before returning to the loft. Between movies—two mindless comedies Molly hoped would distract him—Hank popped in the videotape of Molly competing in the N.C.A.A. diving championships fifteen years ago.
“Why are you watching that again?” Molly asked, coming out of the bathroom.
The first time Hank had seen the tape, it had been a revelation, the image of her then. She had saved her best dive for last—a backward one and a half with three and a half twists, ripping the entry, barely bruising the surface. As the crowd erupted, Molly had pulled herself out of the pool. She had knocked the side of her head with the heel of her hand, trying to get the water out of her ear, allowing herself only a small, victorious smile.
“Can you believe I was ever that young?” Molly said. She moved over to the couch, straddled Hank’s thighs, and sat on his lap. She locked her arms around his neck. “I have something to tell you,” she said. “I decided this a while ago, but I wanted to wait until after the trial. I’ve decided to have this baby no matter what. With you, without you, regardless of how you feel.”
“I suspected as much.”
“But I’m hoping you’ll be there with me. Do you think you will?”
Hank looked at Molly—her large blue eyes, the freckles across her cheeks, the blond down of eyebrows and lashes. “I don’t know,” he said. He thought of her standing on the ten-meter platform, not a single tremor or twitch, taut and immortal in her bathing suit. “Our worlds are so different,” he said. “You deal with human beings at their highest potential. I see them at their worst.”
“What does that mean?”
“How can I say I’ll be able to protect this child, when I’m putting people like Lam back on the streets?”
“You can’t. But that’s the risk we’d have to take. Don’t you think it’d be worth the risk?”
They watched the second movie, then fell asleep together. For how long, he did not know. A black, dreamless sleep. Then he awoke to the bed shaking. An earthquake, he thought, as he lay on his back, opening his eyes to the ceiling, scared.
But it was Molly, standing over him at the foot of the bed. “Don’t move,” she said. He saw her body toppling, breaking the plane of inertia, then falling toward him, gathering speed as she brought her hands together, arms rigid, palms flat. An inch before his face, she split her hands apart, and he felt a rush of air as they brushed past his ears. “You ever do this as a kid?” she asked, holding herself over him. “Admit it. You want this baby.”
“What are you doing?”
She stood up and fell again. “Confess.”
“I can’t be coerced,” he said.
“You sure?” She got off the bed. “Don’t move.”
She walked to the middle of the floor, then turned around. She took two steps, ran toward the trampoline, and bounded into the air. Her back was arched, arms swept out in a swan dive. She was coming right at him. He watched her, staying still. She was going to crush him, he knew. Eventually, she would crush him.
NO BRUCE LEE
Russell Charles Leong
In the heat of a Los Angeles afternoon a Latino with a torn satchel and a Filipino nurse in a rumpled white uniform wait for the bus. Empty-handed, I stand a few feet behind them. Sundays mean those hours I reserve on the Day of Rest for those spare, routine actions that serve to tide me through the coming week.
Number 376, the downtown bus, stops. I get on, picking a side seat in the rear. The brown plastic seat facing me is impervious to knives, most scratches, and even to the L.A. aerosol-paint graffiti. It’s made to last. The bus speeds through Santa Monica and West Los Angeles, stopping occasionally for passengers, mostly Salvadoran or Mexican or Black. The same mix. I note my own strong round kneecaps, not thin and pointed like a white man’s, but sturdy, attached to muscle, to the punch and gravity of the bus, the street, the earth. Another time I might have felt like kicking my feet out, or dancing with them, but not today.
I am sweating. The cool, camphor smell of the Tiger Balm salve that I had dabbed on a fleabite under my ear before leaving my room vibrates in my nostrils. The Chinese medicine was an orange paste, but for me its smell was green.
RUSSELL CHARLES LEONG is the editor of UCLA’s Amerasia Journal and an adjunct professor of English at UCLA. Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories received the American Book Award, and The Country of Dreams and Dust received an Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Literature Award. Leong’s stories and poems on Buddhism, sexualities, and migration have been translated in Nan jing, Taipei, and Shanghai. He was born in San Francisco in 1950.
I reflect on this anomaly. Color and smell
can deceive me, can make my senses palpitate after things foreign and imaginary. Which is worse, I cannot decide, warm color or cool odor.
The bus, I know, will carry me past the rich greenbelt of Beverly Hills, then southward to the Jewish section with its seedy rest homes and bakeries. Eventually it will reach the flat expanse of Olympic Boulevard lined with Korean signs and shops. The Korean alphabet is not sinuous and cursive like Chinese or Japanese, but stolid, rather no-nonsense, like Korean food—meat, fish, and hot pickles. The bus will speed on. Korean signs will transform themselves into svelte Spanish syllables for burrito and taco stands replacing the Korean cafes and bars. The giant 76 gas station sign on Figueroa Street will loom in my face, an orange and blue eye surveying all traffic to the inner city. Thus, a Sunday afternoon will be a third spent by the time I reach downtown.
In the aisle, a man camouflaged in green army fatigues weaves in and out between the standing passengers. His hair is the color of rust and he holds a red transistor radio in his hand. Muttering “chrissakes” to no one in particular, his voice becomes louder at the lack of attention. His eyes appear gray and as opaque as smoke. He sports a plastic hospital wristband, probably from the county hospital. He looks at each passenger intently but they look through him. The man snorts, turning to the Latina woman next to him, who presses her child closer to her body and uses her grocery bag as a shield. The man repeats himself. “If you don’t understand English—go back to where you came from. Christ. To where you belong. Chrissakes.”
The bus driver turns his head once but does not say a word.
I am most honest with myself on Sundays, when I make the lone bus ride downtown, have a coffee and lemon creme pie at Lipton’s, and then return on the same bus going the opposite direction. At one time, I could afford bar hopping, Sunday Chinese tea brunches, real woolen slacks, and two pairs of shoes per year. Under the dim lights of any bar, I would pass for an eternal thirty. But as the summers came and went, the sunlit days seemed longer. The happy hours that began at four or five o’clock in most places grew interminable. The brightness of L.A. summers began to hurt my eyes. I squinted more. Vanity did not permit me to wear either clear or tinted glasses. Finally, I had to curtail my bar hopping. I found myself bringing home bottles of gin purchased at the discount liquor store near my apartment. I began to get careless. Even the expensive cologne could not hide the liquor that slackened my skin and soured my breath. With each emptied bottle my countenance and authority had gone. The length of time I could hold on to any job became shorter and shorter.
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