Signs and Wonders

by Alix Ohlin

  “Of course I don’t have to keep him,” Art said out loud. Samantha heard him—the company had an open-plan floor space—and cocked an eyebrow. He shook his head at her and typed back, Never mind. He knew Inès didn’t count on him to fix her son, or, for that matter, anything at all. Neither did Bruno. If Art said no to the high school plan, Bruno would shrug and get on the plane back to Paris. Art glanced around the office, filled with shiny, twentysomething heads. Nobody expected to stay here long, and everybody openly surfed for other jobs. The horizon of expectations was low. If he left today, he’d be replaced tomorrow. Drilling his fingers against his desk, Art thought, Enough.

  When he got back to the apartment, Bruno wasn’t home. It was a suffocating summer night and the AC units labored mightily in the windows. Art stood in front of one, lifting his shirt to expose his stomach to the cool air. Above the machine’s huffing wind he could hear the familiar sounds of his block: traffic, construction, the beagle’s harassing wail.

  He wandered into Bruno’s room, his old office now a scattershot landscape of flung T-shirts and discarded jeans. The boy’s suitcase lay open on the floor, its mouth disgorging even more clothes. The air smelled of teenage funk and dirty laundry. Art sat down at his desk. During the months of chemo, he’d spent most of his time on the futon in here, daydreaming of spectacular lives he might one day lead: he’d write a book about his ordeal; get back into political journalism; ask out Samantha, who always flirted with him even though she was so young; and soon he’d be on talk shows and in the New York Times. He’d lie on his back, cupping his groin as if he could heal it with the palm of his hand. It had been curiously peaceful, all standard concerns suspended in a liquid solution of ifs: if I get better, if I get through this … Strangely, when it all ended and he got his health back, the daydreaming and ifs evaporated. He was better but somehow lesser. He stopped imagining anything other than the life he had.

  It was eleven o’clock and Bruno wasn’t home. Although he knew the kid was sophisticated, Art was still freaked. He looked around for the notebook, hoping he might find some clue, but Bruno had evidently taken it with him. On the desk was Art’s laptop. He’d seen Bruno checking Facebook from time to time, but in general he didn’t seem to use the computer much. Now he turned it on and checked the browser history, finding it had been cleared, as if the boy had covered his tracks.

  He began to pace around the apartment, fidgeting. He made some coffee, then went through the mail and opened his bills. His mouth dropped when he saw that his credit-card balance was nearly two thousand dollars—charges for music sites, tons of iTunes, and what looked like Internet porn.

  His head throbbing, he went back into the office and checked the laptop again. In a folder labeled School he found a long list of obviously noneducational files, and when he clicked on one of the porn videos it brought up images so disturbing that he had to close his eyes, though of course he opened them again right away. “Fifteen,” he said. “Jesus.” The video concluded and prompted him to visit its home site, where he was invited to “Rate this video! Share your comments here!” Beneath this, a notice instructed him to type the following words as a security measure:

  Mice imp

  Those word pairs from Bruno’s notebook—he was collecting anti-spam phrases. Art couldn’t believe a porn site, of all places, was trying to discourage spam. On the screen, two women were gyrating around in front of a man holding a gun. Someone was moaning, someone else was shrieking, both out of sync with the video. Staring at it, Art didn’t even hear Bruno come in.

  He smelled smoke and waved it away, only belatedly realizing it meant the boy was home. He clicked off the porn, blushing violently, and turned around to see him busily stuffing the clothes on the floor into his duffel bag. There was a cut on his forehead and another on his arm, just above the wide leather cuff he wore on his wrist.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Did you miss me?” Bruno said, smirking.

  Art reached up and grabbed his arm, hard. “Where were you?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “Stop shrugging!”

  Bruno reached for his cigarettes, but Art knocked the pack out of his hand. And then Bruno burst into tears, his mouth contorted, the explanation coming out in rapid, babbling French that Art couldn’t understand.

  “Hey,” Art said. “Hey.” He tried to hug the kid but Bruno pushed him away, again grabbing for a cigarette.

  Eventually, after he smoked three of them and had a shot of bourbon, the story brokenly emerged. Bruno told it sitting at the kitchen table, his voice soft, his eyes not meeting Art’s: he’d gone to the apartment of a woman who’d advertised on Craigslist. But her husband was there, and he wanted to watch. When Bruno started for the door, the man came after him with a knife.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Art said.

  “No,” Bruno said, calmer now, though his fingers were still trembling, with some dark substance, whether dirt or blood, rimming the nails.

  “What the hell are you doing answering ads on Craigslist? You could’ve been killed.”

  Bruno looked around the room vaguely. “There is nothing else to do here.”

  “You’re in New York City and the only thing you can find to do is meet strangers for sex? Jesus Christ, who are you? What happened to taking in a goddamn Broadway show?”

  The eyes that met his were blank, dark. Unreachable. No wonder Inès wanted him out of her hair, Art thought, no wonder she was willing to send him halfway around the world to a father he hardly knew. This boy—there was something off in him, more than just teenage mischief, some wiring gone amok.

  “Like I said, Bruno, you could have been killed.”

  “Sure,” he answered. “Anyway, you don’t have to worry about it. I am leaving. My mother will buy me the ticket.”

  “No,” Art said.

  The kid looked at him, surprised—as Art himself was. But here he was, sure of what he was doing. He had one ball left: enough for whatever. Enough for this.

  “No,” he said. “You stay.”

  Fortune-Telling

  The kung pao chicken was what kept me going back night after night. That and the hot and sour soup. Otherwise the Chinese restaurant had nothing going for it. You know those places where there’re loads of Chinese people ordering from a separate menu, and you gesture that you want what they’re having and suddenly you’re eating steamed dumplings and buns with mysterious, delicious fillings and side dishes of spicy, tender broccoli? This was not one of those places. In countless visits I never saw a single Chinese customer. In fact only Mr. Lu, who cooked the food, was Chinese. His wife, Stacy, who took the orders, was blond and hailed from Plano, Texas. Mr. Lu churned out egg rolls and fried rice and kung pao chicken at an amazing pace; you didn’t often see him, but you could hear him screaming at Stacy when she went back into the kitchen with the orders. It always sounded like he was outraged by what people had selected, but Stacy told me it was just because all the years of clattering pots and pans had damaged his hearing.

  The place didn’t even have a name—neither on the door outside nor on the menu. It was just a Chinese restaurant across the street from my apartment. I started going there the week I moved in, having dropped out of college and come to the city to make my name, find fame and fortune, the whole nine yards. The very first time I had the kung pao chicken and the hot and sour soup, the next morning I got a call from a casting agent who wanted to audition me for a detergent commercial. I didn’t get the part but still decided the chicken was my lucky dish, so whenever I was feeling down, or tired, or in need of a boost, I’d go back. I felt that way a lot, so I was a regular.

  During the day I was temping at a mortgage company, a job so tedious it caused me actual physical pain—backaches, headaches, stomachaches. The money was good, though, and I’d been temping there for so long they changed my status to perma-temp. I made fifty cents more an hour than the ordinary temps, and my boss gave me a plant to put i
n my cube. All day long I sat in there and proofread people’s mortgages, which were passed from bank to bank, back and forth, like chips in a poker game. For legal reasons I had to make sure that the stamps on the front of the mortgage matched these poker-game trails documented at the back. When I was done proofreading a big stack, I filed them in a cool, dark, windowless room we called the Cave. Sometimes I lay down in the Cave and took naps. I didn’t mean to slack off, but the idiocy of the work made sleep irresistible. Nobody ever seemed to notice, anyway, just like they didn’t when I was gone for two hours in the middle of the day on an audition. They were just as bored themselves, and at times it felt like we were all in a trance, dreaming this shared tedious dream.

  After work I sometimes went to a class or an audition, or came home to check my messages to see if I’d been called back for anything, which I hardly ever was. Often, too tired to cook, I’d head across the street to the Chinese restaurant. A counter at one end served as a kind of bar, meaning Stacy would bring you a beer if you sat there long enough. When I was done eating I’d occasionally hang out there for a while. It never occurred to me that a young woman sitting alone at a bar could expect a certain amount of attention, that she could be sending out any kind of message to the world at large. I believed that a woman ought to be able to behave exactly like a man did, in any situation. This attitude often got me in trouble. I refused to flirt with male casting agents and directors; I wouldn’t wear makeup to auditions for roles where I was supposed to be the attractive ingénue. “In your heart you want to fail,” one of my actor friends told me once, a statement that, though I didn’t realize it at the time, was absolutely true.

  It was following one such failed, nonflirtatious audition that I met Simon Robbie. Whether Robbie was his last name or whether he went by two first names was unclear. He was a guy my age who sidled up to me at the counter on a Wednesday night and introduced himself. He was wearing a dirty yellow T-shirt with the name of a Little League team on it, and corduroy pants that were sliding off his skinny hips—your standard hipster look. Also, he had sideburns.

  “I’m Zoe,” I told him, which was a lie. I was into constructing false personae at this time. The world was my stage, was how I looked at it.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said, then looked around the place. “What do you recommend to eat at this place? I’m looking for something new and different, some kind of culinary adventure.”

  “I recommend you go eat somewhere else,” I said.

  Simon Robbie looked offended. “Hey, I was just making conversation. No need to be a jerk.”

  “I just meant the food here’s pretty standard,” I said. I decided that Zoe would be a kind girl from a small town, captain of the History Club in high school. She’d have a fondness for dressing up in period costumes at Halloween—Marie Antoinette, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Mao—and feel seriously disappointed if people didn’t recognize who she was. “It’s an egg-roll, chow-mein, fortune-cookies-bought-in-bulk kind of place.”

  “Gotcha,” Simon Robbie said. “Hey, did you already eat? I was thinking maybe I’d eat here at the bar with you? Would that be okay?”

  “I see no problem with that,” I-as-Zoe said, and gave him a friendly smile. I saw Stacy coming out of the kitchen and waved her over. She looked pleased. She thought that a twenty-year-old woman who ate by herself in a Chinese restaurant three or four times a week was in dire need of friends. Simon Robbie ordered three appetizers—scallion pies, wonton soup, egg rolls—and no main course.

  “Nothing else?” Stacy said.

  “Not for now,” Simon Robbie told her. “I like to keep my options open,” he said to me, and winked.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  While eating he asked me about myself, sometimes gesturing with his left hand as if to say, “More details!” while he shoveled in mouthfuls with his right. The food was greasy and a ring of oil soon appeared around his mouth, wide and shiny, like a clown’s lipstick. I told him all about Zoe’s childhood on a farm, how her father had to give up the land his family had worked for generations and moved them to a small, grimy town where he worked in a factory, assembling cell phones. I said he hated this so much that the sight of a person talking on a cell phone drove him into a blind rage and one day, when Zoe was sixteen, she came home with a cell phone of her own and he threw her out of the house and ever since then she’d been on her own.

  “That’s intense,” Simon Robbie said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what do you do now?”

  For some reason this was the only thing I didn’t want to lie about. “I’m an actress,” I said.

  “Wow, cool, excellent,” he said through a mouthful of egg roll. “What do you act?”

  “I do theater mostly,” I said. “Sometimes commercials, for the money. You know how it is.”

  Simon Robbie chewed and swallowed. “No, I meant what kind of people,” he said. “Show me.”

  I’m acting right now, I almost said, but didn’t. “I don’t know if I can do that,” I told him.

  “Oh, okay, I totally understand,” he said. “I’m in insurance myself, and when people ask me questions about it outside of work, I’m like, dude, no more, call me at the office. You know what I mean?”

  “You’re in insurance?”

  “I sell life-insurance policies door-to-door,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe I’d met someone whose job sounded worse than mine. It made me warm to him. “How do you like it?” I asked.

  He finished chewing an egg roll, wiped his mouth, and shrugged. “Life is long,” he said, “and this is just one phase.”

  I toasted this philosophy with my beer. Stacy came by and asked if we wanted anything else to drink. Simon Robbie ordered tea, and I said I’d have the same. The place was emptying out, Mr. Lu’s angry cries from the back coming less often now. With the tea Stacy brought some cookies, and I cracked mine open and read the fortune. You will never win the lottery, it said. I showed it to him.

  “Then why do they print those numbers on the other side?” he said.

  I shook my head. The fortune had put me in a bad mood. We sat for a couple of minutes in silence, Simon Robbie opening his fortune—Be kind to everyone you meet, his said, which wasn’t even a fortune in my opinion, given that it said nothing of the future—and ate our cookies. I drank some weak, bitter tea. “Well, I guess I’m off,” I finally said, and waved to Stacy for the check.

  “Wait a minute,” Simon Robbie said. “I need to ask you a favor.”

  “I’m not much for favors.”

  “Please?” he said. “It’s important, and I’ll buy you dinner. I’ll buy you dinner tonight and for the next week.”

  “That’s a lot of egg rolls.”

  “It doesn’t have to be here,” he said, nearly pleading.

  “Okay, what is it?” I asked.

  “It’s my mother. She’s always after me about a girlfriend, every time I see her. If you could just come over with me, even for ten minutes, pretend that we’re on a date, it would shut her up for a least a few weeks. Please?”

  “You want me to pretend I’m your girlfriend?” I said. I’d forgotten that I was Zoe, and my tone was incredulous and unkind.

  He nodded. Stacy put down the check and he counted out the cash, then looked at me with puppy-dog eyes.

  “I only live five minutes away,” he said.

  I wondered if he cruised the Chinese restaurants in this neighborhood each night, the pizza joints, the Greek diners, looking for a girl who seemed willing to impersonate a girlfriend, if he knew I’d made up Zoe and her cell phone traumas and could tell I was practiced in the immorality of lying. I wondered if he’d give me cash, or if I’d actually have to eat dinner with him every night. Would it be nice to have someone to eat dinner with, or horrible? I had no idea. I was staring at his yellow Little League T-shirt, seeing how it was smudged and smeared with enigmatic stains, and it suddenly occurred to me that he might not be a hipster at all, th
at it might be a T-shirt from his own long-ago team. It was the saddest thought I’d had all day.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We walked for a few minutes in silence, past a skateboard park and a theater where a movie was just letting out. Simon Robbie sauntered along with his hands in his pockets, pushing his cords even farther down his hips, his mouth pursed as he whistled some kind of tune. I almost reached into my bag for my cigarettes, but then realized Zoe wasn’t the kind of girl who smoked. It was important to stay in character no matter what events might unfold. After a few blocks he took my elbow, very gentlemanly, and tugged me down a side street packed tight with little run-down houses. There were no streetlights and the place was dark and deserted. At another time of my life, I might have been scared. But Simon Robbie didn’t look very strong; his arms were stringy and thin. I figured I could take him if I had to.

  “Here we are,” he said, guiding me up the steps of a white house. In the front windows sat three or four cats, their yellow and green eyes blinking out into the night. When he opened the door I was greeted by an overwhelming smell of detergents and ammonia and room fresheners. It was like being hit over the head with a bowl of potpourri.

  “Mom?” he called as we walked in, and the cats turned to look at us, crouching down in defensive positions. The living room, as you might expect, was exceptionally clean, with a couch and a television and a round rug made of rags, and everything except the rug was glistening. On the coffee table, magazines were stacked in neat, geometric rows.

  A woman came in, smiling. She was younger than I’d expected, with short, neat brown hair and friendly brown eyes. I’d been picturing some kind of dragon lady, and I let out a relieved breath. Simon Robbie was still holding me by my elbow, as if I were a pet he’d led home on a leash. I stepped away and clasped my arms behind my back.