Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  “What about love?”

  His eyes burned into her. “I love the Party. I love the State. I love the Revolution.”

  She dug her thumbnail into her palm. One minute she was sure this was all a ruse. In the next, his ruthlessness seemed so genuine that she could not recognize him. The two old comrades smiled, apparently also persuaded.

  “You sound like a windup doll,” Joanna said softly.

  “And you ask why I didn’t want you in Beijing.” He shook his head. “Jealousy does not become you, Joanna.”

  “Why didn’t you simply write and ask for a divorce?”

  “Because I know you. I was trying to avoid this.”

  “That insurance policy. You wanted me to declare you dead.”

  His jaw tightened. “I told you. It seemed the kindest—”

  She leaned forward and hit him with such force that her palm and his cheek turned the same flaming pink. It was a desperate measure. And it failed.

  Aidan didn’t even flinch. He glanced at the others, as if to put them at their ease. “Think what you want. You always have.”

  She began to shake. “I loved you so much, Aidan. Why do you spit in my face?”

  But he was rising, pulling away from her. “I don’t think there’s anything more to say. If you want me to sign something, I will.”

  “You’re prepared to never see Simon again?”

  He halted and looked to Chou as if remembering something, then reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a small red book. The picture on the bound cover showed a Chinese boy wearing a red and white checked shirt and red bandanna, carrying a rifle over one shoulder. The title was printed in Chinese. “It’s called The Youngest Pioneer,” Aidan said. “Tell him I hope when he’s older and the world is a different place we will see each other again. In the meantime, tell him this is how I think of him. As a young pioneer.”

  She restrained the impulse to throw the book in his face. “What exactly do I tell him you mean by that?”

  His expression stiffened. “You never knew your parents, Joanna. And the imperialist assassins killed mine. I suppose in a way everything I’m doing is to avenge my family’s death. It seems to me, by comparison, Simon is lucky.”

  “Lucky.”

  “Marry Lawrence, Joanna. He’ll take care of you and Simon both.”

  “I don’t need anyone to take care of me!”

  “That’s what I thought.” He spoke so flatly the words seemed blunted. For an instant Joanna thought she detected genuine regret beneath the mask. But Aidan refused to look at her. Instead he turned to Chou and nodded. The others stood.

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and pushed herself to her feet.

  Aidan extended his hand. She remembered the touch of his fingers on her cheek, the soft pressure of his voice the morning he left her. I love you. You know that. The wedding band that had pressed against her fingertip that morning was now gone.

  She searched his eyes one last time. They were green and cloudy as a stagnant pool. She couldn’t begin to penetrate them.

  She turned and walked away. Only when she reached Chou standing at the door did she stop to collect herself. Chou didn’t say anything, but his silence was gentle, patient. Like Lawrence, he had done everything she asked. She had no one to blame but herself.

  “If I bring you the divorce papers…” she said.

  “I will see that they reach him,” Chou promised. “Take care of yourself, Mrs. Shaw.”

  Without looking back she retraced her steps down the corridor past the thin-faced guard and somehow got her car started, maneuvered it back onto the street. But she covered only a block or two before she had to pull over. Her head was reeling. She had chills. She rolled down the window and let the warm air pour in.

  Around her the evening descended like war. Voices plucked at her out of the blackened eyes of decaying buildings. Naked bulbs powered by chattering generators fired light over sidewalk displays of tribal artifacts and dirty fruit. Bullock carts dragged past, and men with their heads wrapped in dingy shawls rode three or four to a bicycle. A snake charmer sitting cross-legged next to the car lifted the hat off his basket and laughed.

  3

  Lawrence waited until eleven-thirty, then left his flat and walked over to Connaught Place. Beneath a cuticle moon a half-dozen cycle rickshaw drivers stood smoking and rolling paan as they waited for night trade. He bypassed those who knew him and chose instead a fellow he’d never seen before. He kept his face averted. As he named his destination and dropped the oilcloth barrier between them, he could feel the man grin.

  Less than five minutes later they entered the roundabout where Simon said he would find her. He leaned forward and pushed back the rickshaw’s oilcloth siding. The driver stopped pedaling, snapped on his headlamp, and they glided forward, freeze-framing girls in the usual burlesque of seduction. Lawrence swallowed the scents of coconut oil and frangipani they’d laced into their hair, the musk with which they’d oiled their skin, the dung smoke that enveloped them. They wore parrot blues and greens, flamingo pinks, and canary orange. They chewed paan and flicked cigarettes. They wore makeup like grotesque dolls. He searched each face, each figure. They circled the roundabout twice.

  “You like I stop?” the driver asked.

  “No. No, I don’t—” But then the hedges by the statue parted. He spotted the red dress. He’d last seen it on Joanna in another life, at a reception he’d attended with her and Aidan shortly after his arrival in Delhi. The same crimson color and mandarin collar…now it hung on its wearer like an overcoat.

  The driver, detecting Lawrence’s sudden interest, slowed to a stop as the girl came forward. She stooped to see inside the cab and abruptly looked away. But not fast enough.

  “Get in,” he said in a voice so foreign that she had to glance back, and then he had her, his hand wrapping her slender arm like an iron cuff.

  He barked out his address to the driver, and they rode without speaking, she erect, almost haughty, balancing herself with hands by her sides on the patched leather seat. When they rounded a corner or hit a rut, he could sense her body tensing, compensating to avoid contact. He could see just enough through the enclosed darkness to know she’d made a mess of her paint. Her face looked submerged, eyes and mouth drawn in loose waves. The carnation smell of Jo’s cologne on her skin sickened him.

  When they reached his building he paid the driver, adding the usual surcharge. Then he led her up the rickety stairs to his apartment through a darkness so absolute that he was forced to take her hand. She misunderstood—or miscalculated—and began rubbing the tip of her thumb against the center of his palm. The motion unleashed a sensation like rage but not rage that rippled up his arm and radiated through the core of his body. He flung her hand aside and let her find her own way. When he had gotten the door open and they stood beneath that brutal overhead light, his heart was flailing.

  He poured out a shot of whiskey, ignoring the reproach in Kamla’s eyes, and swallowed it quickly.

  “All right,” he said at last and pointed to the tattered armchair. “Sit there.” Meanwhile he continued to stand, shambling around the room with his arms folded across his chest until at last he ducked into the bathroom and came out with a damp towel. “Get rid of that stuff. Then maybe I can talk to you.”

  She sighed heavily and put her face in the towel. When she removed it the effect was worse. He knew she was contriving now to make him touch her. He took the towel and scrubbed hard enough that by rights he should at the same time punish her and feel nothing himself. But even through the coarse wet weave he was aware of the smallness of her nose, the shallowness of those wide eyes in their sockets, the height and breadth of her cheekbones. When the cloth fell away those eyes blazed up at him, and she was a child again. A child dressed in her mother’s clothing.

  He rummaged in his packing crate wardrobe for a clean kurta-pyjama, then sent her to the bathroom to wash herself and change. When she emerged, her hair
was down, black sheets of it pouring over her shoulders, and her body seemed even slighter in the drooping mannish white garment. She handed him Jo’s red dress folded. It reeked of stale onion, tobacco, whiskey, and the ocean bottom stench of sex all teased through with Jo’s astringent perfume. He took it onto the balcony, dropped it into the metal brazier, and set it alight, watched as the flames died to ash.

  “How long?” he said coming back in, then abruptly, “No. No, we’ll get to that. You’d better tell me why, first.”

  So she told him about Surie and the rickshaw boy, and her debt to her old gharwali. “I speak English. I have schooling.” She gestured toward the balcony. “In this dress I attract high-paying customers. In two, three nights I earn what the others make in seven.”

  Her voice was high and clear and struck a note of defiance not unlike Joanna’s. Numb, he asked if she was hungry. She shook her head and folded herself into the chair, pulling one knee up and clasping hands around her naked ankle. She stared at him, daring him. He looked away.

  “What do you owe?” he said finally.

  She named a figure at once obscenely low and high. If he’d been here…

  “Why didn’t you ask Mem for help?”

  “Why did you not return me to her just now?”

  They glared at each other, forty to thirteen, light to dark, male to female and all bets off. He peeled away his cotton jacket and plunged his fists into his trouser pockets. He wanted another drink but stopped himself. If he had another drink he might not stop himself.

  “I don’t know,” he lied.

  “I know,” she said.

  He looked at her sharply. She didn’t move, only looked right back at him with those somber aquamarine eyes framed by straight black lashes. She had scrubbed her body as he’d scrubbed her face, so hard that the skin was inflamed, so deeply that the scent of all others was expunged and only her own remained. She smelled warm and pungent, aromatic and sweet, a smell like that of some essential oil, treasured spice, a commodity over which men killed each other along the fabled Silk Road.

  “I know,” she repeated. “You do not trust her.”

  His mouth was dry. He sat down so hard that the wooden frame of the charpoy bruised the back of his legs. A sudden eruption of cicadas drowned out the murmuring night.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “She does not tell the truth.” She folded her arms. Her jaw tightened.

  “To you?”

  “She says the American Ambassador will not allow me in America, but this is not true. I have seen the forms. He has signed them already—Approved, they say. And she hides them in her desk. Since October, Lawrence. We might have gone to America last year. Then none of this would have happened.”

  “Now, Kammy. There are other considerations—” But even as he began the apology, he thought of Joanna’s lies to him. About Kamla. About her own bullheaded actions. He wanted to protect her, was trying to, but the girl was right.

  Kamla said, “I know. Her husband.

  Careful. “Has she been talking about him?”

  “Not to us. She says nothing to us. But her silence is all about him.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Lately she is like—” She looked around the room for inspiration, and her eyes fixed on the photograph of Davey, which he’d set on the bedside table that evening. She didn’t directly acknowledge the picture, but her voice softened. She nodded. “She is like a ghost. We speak and she does not hear us. We ask a question. She does not reply. She enters a door, then turns and walks out again. Before, she would get angry with me. Now she does not even see me. I think she would not notice if I disappeared. She would not care.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I think she does not even care about you anymore, Lawrence.” Kamla knelt on the floor in front of him, placed her palms on his knees. The intensity of her gaze made him feel as if he were unraveling.

  “You say she’s been like this lately,” he said. “How long do you mean?”

  “It has been ever since you left. But worse these past few days. And tonight…”

  “Tonight?”

  She dropped her hands to her sides. “She returned home after dark and went straight to her room. I went in to her at about eight o’clock. Simon had been eating candy all evening—so much he was vomiting in the bathroom. I thought she should know.” She swallowed. “The truth is, I was afraid he would not be able to sleep, and then I could not go out. I hoped she would take him into her room to sleep with her. But she lay on the bed just staring at the ceiling. Her face was white as the pillow. I asked if she was ill. She didn’t answer. I told her about Simon, but she did not even lift her head, and when she finally did speak I hardly recognized her voice. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said, and it was as if she were talking to herself. ‘I destroy everything I touch.’ These were her very words.”

  Kamla sat back on her ankles. A question hung in the silence. Lawrence knew then, Joanna had no idea. The Americans must have had the date wrong. Only one thing could knock Jo down that far.

  He hadn’t gotten here in time.

  Kamla stood up and turned off the harsh overhead light. Lawrence didn’t stop her. He was only dimly aware of her returning to his side, drawing her legs up under her. She moved behind him and touched his shoulder. He shook his head, but her touch became more insistent. She placed her fingertips against his chest, lifted the hem of his shirtsleeve to kiss the roughened skin of an elbow. Through the kurta’s thin muslin, he felt the barely formed curvature of her breast brush against him as she strung her arms around his neck. She had the fraudulent delicacy of a strand of steel. The persistence of a shadow.

  For an instant he wanted to throw her across the room. Then he caught her hands and, turning, held her palms together.

  He looked again at the child beside him and curled her into his arms.

  “Oh, Kammy,” he said, rocking backward. “What in God’s name have we done?”

  4

  The sound was like fleas trapped inside her skull. Or the firing of a distant cap gun. Rat-tat-rat-tat. The pill she’d taken made her brain feel swollen, her lids too heavy to lift. Rat-tat-a-tat-rat-tat. A dog barked in the street.

  She rolled over, cracked her eyes. Darkness covered the room like a wool blanket. The clock by her bed read one-thirty. Rat-tat-rat-tat. The scratch-knocking continued, ricocheting through the sleeping house. Insistent. Bewildering. An image of Aidan’s hardened face spun across her mind. She should never have gone after him. No. She should never have married him. But it was over now.

  She pushed her legs to the edge of the mattress, got herself upright, her robe haphazardly wrapped around her, and threw back the mosquito net. She was too numb to care. She just wanted that sound to stop.

  She walked barefoot down the unlit stairs. Before she reached the bottom it occurred to her to wonder where Nagu was. How the caller could reach the front door without raising Musai to unlock the gate. Why the children hadn’t heard it first. A sliver of anxiety shot through her as the knocking stopped.

  She inched open the door. A tall man in shirtsleeves stood listening, face averted. The low outside light glinted off the pale hair on the back of his raised hand. Then he turned to her. Douglas Freeman.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “How did you get in the gate?”

  “It was unlocked.”

  “Oh.” She stood mutely staring at him.

  “Could I come in?”

  She nodded her head. Then she swung the door wider. As he stepped past her, she noticed her own bare feet, the crisscross of her sandals ghost-printed over the tops. They looked so white against the dark slate floor.

  When she raised her head Freeman was standing in the entrance to the dining room fumbling for a light. She went on in, located the table with her hands, and sat down. He found the switch and the room leapt painfully into view. “Please don’t,” she said. “There’s a lamp in the corner. It’s
not so bright.” He put that on instead, and the low oily glow puddled across the lower half of the room.

  He sat down to her left, catty-corner. Since they last met the cadaver had been replaced by a long spare man wearing khaki pants and rolled-up shirtsleeves. He carried a brown leather briefcase. His blue eyes were almost as vivid as Kamla’s.

  He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said again, “to disturb you like this. We just learned of your meeting with Aidan. We didn’t expect it so soon. They caught us off guard.”

  He stopped, searching her for a reaction. But she didn’t have one. At least not one that connected to any recognizable emotion. Aidan had drained her of emotion. Only her mind was waking up.

  “Did you follow me?” she asked.

  “No. We had an inside source.”

  There was that exaggerated we again. As if he were reading from a cue card. “Chou,” she said.

  He hesitated. “I can’t tell you who it was. But we didn’t need to follow you… We didn’t think we did.”

  “When did you think it would happen?”

  “The end of the month. That’s what Aidan was told.”

  “How do you know what he was told?”

  Freeman narrowed his eyes, examining her.

  A clump of her hair swung forward. She yanked it back behind her ear. So hard her eyes watered. “What did you come here to tell me?”

  “He played through, then.” He reached out with a pitying look, and for a third time said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Get out of here,” she said.

  “Please, Joanna.”

  “Get out!”

  But she didn’t have the strength to stand and force him. Without taking his eyes off her he reached down and unclasped his briefcase.

  He slid a small beaten-up envelope across, then he got up and moved the little lamp from the sideboard onto the table. “Before you say anything else,” he said, “please read this.” On the envelope were written her name and the Ratendone Road address in Aidan’s straight, angular hand.