Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  Joanna held the envelope as if it were alive. The rough slit across the top signaled Farr’s intrusion, but at the same time her husband’s confident script promised reassurance. To her dismay, however, it was the briefest of notes—like ones he used to send her at work early in their marriage, “to keep you warm,” he would say.

  April 4, 1949

  Srinagar

  Dearest Jo,

  Just to let you know, the lead I chased up here hasn’t panned out. I’m going to try to salvage the trip with a quick detour up north—some human interest, if nothing else. In any case, I expect to be heading home day after tomorrow. Stars and Stripes will have to wait.

  Meantime, kisses to both you and Simon.

  I love you,

  Aidan

  Joanna ran her fingertip over his signature, the final line. She pictured him leaning over the paper, tips of his teeth lightly grazing his lower lip as he dashed this off… home day after tomorrow.

  She looked up, determined not to cry. Simon had quit his comic and was busily rearranging with a metal poker the cold lumps of charcoal in the brazier. The general was flipping through papers on his desk, making a show of respecting her privacy. The very ordinariness of their motions should soothe her. If Aidan were really dead, she thought, nothing would ever seem ordinary again.

  “The day after tomorrow was yesterday,” she said.

  General Farr raised his head. She lifted the letter. “That’s true,” he agreed.

  “General,” she said, “what were the violations they were investigating?”

  “If I knew that, Mrs. Shaw, then your husband wouldn’t be missing. Nor my men.”

  My men. My observers. Farr himself had a stake in this disaster. That accounted for his defensiveness, she realized. After all, he was, as Aidan would insist, an “international peacekeeper.” As Simon would say, “a good guy.” And if this plane had crashed—fatally—then he had lost more soldiers than she had husbands. Aidan was the least of his worries. No. Aidan was her worry.

  “I am sorry,” Farr said. “There’s nothing more any of us can do until we hear back from the rescue team.”

  Joanna swallowed hard. Focus. She said, “My husband was planning to interview members of the U.N. peace commission. The new head, I believe, was a Czech. Where could I reach him?”

  Farr looked puzzled. “I can’t see what good that would do, even if it were possible. Most of them flew out last week. The head man’s back in Prague by now.”

  “I see.” She stared past Simon and out through the window. The sky was veined and pale as marble. Finally she returned to the general. “You’re not married, are you?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because if you were married, I think you’d understand why I’m here.”

  He smiled warily. “I understand why you’re here, Mrs. Shaw. But journalists take chances. I didn’t ask your husband to join that flight, and I don’t think your being here is necessarily going to do him any good. However, if it makes you feel better, that’s your business.”

  “You won’t mind if I ask one more favor, then?”

  “That depends.”

  “Could you help us find a hotel room?”

  He pressed a buzzer on his desk. “Cirino,” he said when his aide appeared, “call over to the Shalimar and see about a room for Mrs. Shaw and her son.”

  Joanna detected reluctance in the Italian’s reply. “The Shalimar, sir?”

  But the general insisted. “You’ll be quite comfortable there, I’m sure, Mrs. Shaw. I’ll notify you as soon as the rescue team reports back.”

  It was nearly suppertime when the pedicab rustled up by the aide dropped them in front of the Shalimar. Immediately she understood Cirino’s reluctance. The hotel was a pockmarked tenement occupied primarily by British war widows too impoverished, alcoholic, or alienated to go anywhere else. The deskman, unctuous and beady-eyed, rubbed his stubby hands at the sight of them as if welcoming new victims. He chattered nonstop in bastardized English as he led them up three flights of warped wood stairs to a large but unheated room with a bath that consisted of a tin tub and chamber pot. The furnishings looked as if they’d been scavenged from the street, and the lock on the door gaped so wide you could pick it with a comb. Joanna tipped the man sparingly and shoved a chair beneath the knob. She knew she should find another hotel, but what real difference would it make?

  Simon, oblivious to the bleakness of their surroundings, hauled open one of the long frame windows and stepped out onto the balcony. The floorboards were rotted through in places and though the drizzle and mist obscured whatever view might exist, Simon immediately spotted three dead dogs and the carcass of a cow floating among the human bathers in the canal directly below. Joanna hauled him back inside. It was so cold and damp that their breath hung in clouds. Simon said he was hungry. Since leaving Delhi he had not once asked about his father, and for this she felt both grateful and dismayed. Still, she knew her son would sleep that night, which was more than she could say for herself.

  After washing up, they picked their way back downstairs to the dining room, where the dozen tables all were set, though Simon and Joanna appeared to be the only diners. The deskman turned waiter grinned and bowed and brought large bowls of mutton swimming in grease and some cold Kashmiri bread. Simon started to turn up his nose, but when Joanna told him it was this or nothing, he wolfed it down so fast he could not possibly have tasted it. She forced herself to eat along with him, though what she really wanted was a drink. When she asked the man if he might bring her a little whiskey or wine, he clasped his hands and wiggled his head. “I am very sorry, Madam. I am Muslim, you know, and this is being forbidden.” She cursed under her breath and doggedly continued her meal. But in the middle of this exchange an elderly woman with gray spit curls and the purple cheeks of a veteran wino had entered the dining room and seated herself at the next table. When the man was gone, she leaned across, rubbing her fingertips and thumb together. “Don’t believe a word he says, dear,” she advised. “Just slip him a few annas. That’s all it takes, and he’ll be your slave for life. He’s not such a bad sort, really, once you get used to him…” Her voice trailed off as she noticed a streak of grease on her knife and began fussily polishing her tableware with a napkin.

  Joanna followed the woman’s advice, and after supper as they were starting back up the stairs, Ali, as he called himself, beckoned to her from the shadows and slipped her a parcel wrapped in newspaper. “Sundries,” he said with an oblique nod. “I am putting the cost on your bill. Most pleasant dreams to you, madam.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, the pint of local rum in the parcel would have been more than adequate to fuel those dreams, but these were hardly ordinary circumstances. She got Simon settled in bed under four blankets and their coats and lay with him stroking his head and singing lullabies from his infancy. After his body gave its telltale twitch and his breathing softened to a snore, she pulled her coat off the pile of bedding and drew it around her, then took a chair, her glass, and the bottle over to the window. She used her sleeve to wipe the grime from the window, rubbing a large circle through which she could see that the fog had lifted and stars glittered over the mountains and lake now visible in the distance. Closer along the canal, fruit and dogwood trees blossomed in ghostly clouds. Tomorrow would be April 8. The same day on which, ten years ago, she and Aidan had met. April fools, they called themselves. She lifted the glass to her lips.

  Venice Beach, California. She’d grown up in nearby Mar Vista, and was only recently returned after graduating from Mills College up in Oakland. Aidan was en route from China to Washington, stopping in L.A. to visit friends. Those friends had brought him to the fun house on the pier, but when Joanna collided with him in the Hall of Mirrors he was alone.

  As was she…moving too fast down a tunnel that appeared to stretch forever but in fact led to a blind turn, which Aidan was approaching from the other side. Her nose struck his chin, and she stepped on his
foot. He caught her by the arms as she drew back blurting apologies and mortified laughter.

  The mirrors tilted crazily on this side of the turn, multiplying his dark hair and elongated green eyes. In one reflection he towered with shoulders broad enough to stand on, in another he shrank to the height of a midget. But the true source of these images was a tall, slender man in an immaculate gray suit.

  Mustering what dignity she could, she extended her hand. “Joanna Dillon.”

  “Aidan Shaw,” he answered evenly. Their hands touched, his grip steady and firm. He did not immediately let go—or release her from his gaze. Out of the corner of her eye, from five different angles and with growing distress, she saw what he saw. A girl barely out of school and so uncouth that she cropped her own hair, went without face paint, and wore an ex-boyfriend’s Brooks Brothers shirt tucked into an old pair of jodhpurs. She knew from experience that the flecked gold of her eyes had a certain appeal for men, and she had, she was told, “good bone structure.” But this man deserved true glamour—a woman like Merle Oberon or Dorothy Lamour. Joanna hadn’t the slightest illusion about her chances in that league.

  An overhead light flashed, startling her so that she stepped back against the mirror. Aidan Shaw ignored the clumsiness of her movement. His mouth shaped a smile as the honky-tonk music filtered in from the boardwalk. He seemed to have no inclination to leave. Instead, he said, “Say, would you like to dance?”

  She glanced over her shoulder, but none of the voices echoing through the chamber were heading toward their jog in the maze.

  Not waiting for her answer, he stepped closer and placed his arm expertly around her waist. He smelled of starch and lime cologne, and sounded British but then again not quite as he spoke into her hair. “Where are you from?”

  He moved so gracefully in this cramped, glittery space. Without thinking she said, “I live here.”

  “Here?” He pulled back to grin at her.

  And the maze suddenly seemed to widen. She breathed deeply, inhaling the closeness of the ocean and night. “Why not?” She relaxed into his lead. “All these mirrors, music, the sound of the surf. And you never know when you’ll fall into the arms of a handsome man.”

  “Ah.” He spun her. “Have there been so many?”

  She felt the blood rush to her cheeks, but the game was carrying her now. “Thousands.” She dipped her head toward the mirrors and those multitudes of carelessly thrown together girls and their elegant dancing partners. “Just look.”

  “Hmm. How’s a poor fellow to distinguish himself?”

  The white light flashed again on its arbitrary pacer, but this time she hardly noticed. “I was wondering that, myself.”

  They stopped dancing and he studied her, in his eyes a sudden confusion. “You know,” he said, “I don’t ordinarily do this. I mean—”

  She said softly, “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  He gave her a curious look and started to drop his arm from her waist. Then he changed his mind.

  They emerged from the maze holding hands and eluded their respective friends. As the moon rose, they walked for miles down the beach, talking now. Effortlessly talking. He was a journalist—foreign correspondent. Asia was his beat. She learned that he was born in New York’s Chinatown, raised in China, educated in Shanghai and Boston—all places that to Joanna sounded as distant and enticing as Shangri-la. His mother had been an Irish waitress, his father a Chinese merchant who succeeded against all odds in securing a degree in engineering at the turn of the century and returned to China with status and wealth. Aidan’s sense of always being the outsider derived initially from his mixed heritage and his childhood—as he put it, “with a foot in two continents”—but it had intensified with the Japanese occupation of China. He refused to go into detail, but she sensed that his family had suffered—perhaps more than suffered—as a result of the war in China while Aidan was studying in America.

  Then the conversation shifted to Joanna, and Aidan seemed to find her life every bit as fascinating as she found his. Certainly it was different. Her father was a carpenter at MGM studios, her mother a bookkeeper. They’d emigrated to California from Minnesota in their twenties and never budged again. If they knew who Joanna’s biological mother and father had been, they kept it to themselves, but she’d known even before her ninth birthday, when they admitted it was true, that she was adopted. She had always felt as if she belonged to an alien tribe. Her parents’ complacency bewildered her. Their absolute self-certainty, the quiet rigidity of their patriotism and moral compass continuously seemed to be testing her, finding her wanting more and different approaches to thinking and to life. If it weren’t for their similarly absolute love for her, she might have become a flagrant rebel—one of those girls who yanked up their skirts and turned down their stockings and sang throaty French songs on the boardwalk. As it was, she channeled her rebellious impulses into men’s clothing and hikes up along the John Muir Trail. She tried to imagine what it would be like to walk around the world.

  She and Aidan talked for hours that night, the only souls on the beach, the darkness above them a protective bell. He told her he believed in truth but not necessarily in God. She said she believed in love but could not decide between free will and fate. He confessed to a passion for mystery novels—Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man was his favorite. And she said she preferred Jane Austen, but could be had for Agatha Christie.

  “Do you mean to save the world?” he asked when she described her plan to go into social work.

  It was a ludicrous question. This was 1939, and the world was poised to go up in flames. “But of course,” she answered anyway. “Save it and see it both. Don’t you?”

  Instead of answering he kissed her. The ocean roared in her ears. His hands cradled her head, and she felt a sensation of stillness and speed, as if she would never move again and yet she would never stop. The kiss lasted minutes, hours perhaps. When he pulled back she wanted to cry.

  “Did anyone ever tell you you’re a hopeless idealist?” he demanded.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  He laughed and cupped her cheek in his hand. “Hardly.”

  “Then I’m afraid the answer is no,” she said.

  “Well, allow me to be the first.”

  The answer was no. No one had ever talked to her the way Aidan Shaw did, or seen in her what he seemed to, or asked the questions of her and himself that Aidan found perfectly natural. That night awakened something deep within Joanna that was the exact opposite of hopelessness.

  Three days later Aidan flew on to Washington. Three weeks later she followed him. His gift on meeting her at the airport was a large silk scarf imprinted with a map of the world. He draped it around her shoulders and used it to pull her toward him. “I don’t think I ever officially answered your question that night at the beach,” he said.

  “Which one?”

  “Do I mean to see and save the world?”

  “Well?” She leaned into him breathing his scent.

  “I do,” he said, and kissed her.

  They were married in Georgetown on Independence Day. Her parents flew all the way from California, and after the ceremony their friends hosted a party in their honor at the Hotel Willard. A party that she and Aidan forgot to attend.

  We skipped our own wedding reception, Joanna thought, recalling the desire that had seized them like a flash flood. They had gone upstairs to their room to change and not come down for two days.

  She crossed her arms now and held herself by the shoulders, remembering their haste and laughter, the delicious urgency with which they peeled off their clothes and discovered for the first time the guiltless wonder of each other’s skin. That night, lying against his chest and listening to the fireworks exploding over the Mall, she felt beautiful in a way she never could have imagined before meeting Aidan. There was not the slightest doubt in her mind that they were the luckiest couple on earth.

  She swallowed the last of her rum. Her teet
h were chattering, and her skin felt blue. It was said that you always wake up before dying in a dream, that no matter how close to death your imagination might take you, it can never cross all the way over. That was how she felt about Aidan. But how long would it take to wake up?

  4

  The next morning, under a sun so bright it seemed a personal affront, Joanna and Simon made the rounds to everyone in Srinagar who might conceivably recognize Aidan’s name. They spoke fruitlessly to the few reporters covering the cease-fire, tried without success to meet with U.N. officials, even appealed to individual soldiers as they patrolled the streets. “But, madame,” one young lieutenant told her, “in India just now we are seeing three hundred thousand Kashmiri refugees. Here in the camps outside Srinagar another two hundred thousand. And every one of them is wondering, where is my husband, where is my father, my mother, my son?”

  It was true. The cease-fire had liberated hope in Kashmir. Painters and refurbishers clambered over Srinagar’s famed but now vacant houseboats in anticipation of renewed warm weather tourism, and the bazaars boasted optimistic displays of embroidered leather, woolens, spices and dried fruit, intricate cedar and teakwood carvings, carpets and antique brass. Yet between the stalls ravaged men hunkered under greatcoats cupping cheroots in their callused palms. Women draped in threadbare head coverings tended babies in makeshift street corner encampments, and maimed boys on crude wheeled platforms propelled themselves with plaintive, demanding cries along the lakefront. Other casualties squatted, dead-eyed, their outstretched hands brushed aside by passing soldiers and foreign observers alike.

  “Tuberculosis will kill those the fighting has missed,” Dr. Ranjit Singh told her. This young Sikh doctor had ridden up on the plane with them. He had befriended Simon, leaving them with the address where he could be reached, and after exhausting all other avenues Joanna called him. They met in an open air tea shop near the bazaar. He immediately pulled out a painted wood yo-yo, which kept Simon amused.