Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  A good spy is but the secret writer of all moments imminent.

  There was a light tap at the door. The paper-and-wood screen slid open and the hostess in the formal dress stepped inside the room. Master Kwang, she said softly in Korean. Then she ushered in Sherrie Chin-Watt.

  “I should have known you’d have company,” Sherrie said to him matter-of-factly, not yet looking at me. She curled each foot back to remove her shoes.

  Kwang said, “Where’s Eddy?”

  “I told him to go home. I said he could take your car.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him to come and eat?”

  “Because quite frankly I’m sick of him,” she answered. “He’s always around. Besides, you treat him too well as it is.”

  “Too bad,” Kwang replied, carefully turning the bulgogi on the grill. “We shouldn’t send the boy home unfed. Hey, you sit down and eat.”

  Sherrie was a tall woman, certainly tall for a Chinese woman, and to her credit there was no sign of that adolescent high-back slouch in her stance. That night she wore a dark gabardine suit and a silk blouse, the top two or three buttons undone. She touched there, in the space, the skin soft-looking, faintly hued. Her hair falling lush and straight, riding just above her shoulders.

  She gave the hostess her raincoat but kept her briefcase. She sat down across from me, next to Kwang.

  “It’s not all volunteer work with us,” she said to me. “We pay the Asian way around here.”

  I just nodded. She looked oddly at me, as if surprised by my reticence. Normally I would have launched into conversation, swiftly conducted her, as it were, into the piece I should have been orchestrating, but instead I only wanted her to drink something, and I began to pour her a cup of soju. But she immediately winced, shaking me off, saying, “Oh, no, no. I despise that stuff. It tastes like rotten vodka. Just some water for now.”

  I kept myself quiet. I let the two of them talk about the coming week, plans in the schedule, minor things I already knew. Just facts, times. It would have been easier if Eduardo had come up to be a natural buffer for me, a screen, and perhaps also to provide the pretext by which I might depart. I know my compulsion was flawed. It was the perfect situation, the two of them together, in so congenial a setting. And with Kwang in the careless state he was. We could have talked all night. But I was sensing that Sherrie now wanted me to leave them alone. And I myself wanted very much to leave. I had enjoyed the time with John Kwang, but there was something about Sherrie that had from the start greatly unsettled me, even during our first interview. If I must do justice to my own apprehension then I will say it was the nature of her familiarity that drew me to a halt. She regarded me as if she were seeing me for the thousandth time but was still unconvinced. That somehow she knew better.

  I gradually wound myself out of their conversation. They didn’t appear to notice. Though I often stumble, I can be a most careful speaker when I wish. Ask Lelia. She knows my method. My sentences will dwindle, darn, steadily unravel themselves. Up and collapse. But all the while the ready manner of my face and hands and body will say, “Yes, I am here, enjoying your company, so let us go on, please.” I can be positively Edwardian. Lelia would always call me something else. Thank God, for her sake. She deserved to hurl whatever was available, to keep us moving, to speak in counterpoint to the deadening strings of my pyrrhic feet.

  I was preparing for Sherrie to try to corner me. To what end I could not have imagined. But she didn’t. After a while she didn’t breathe a word my way. I sat across from them, slowly eating. I noticed they were sitting very close to one another. Sherrie wanted to talk about the disposition of certain funds, but John kept joking with her, stalling her with odd cracks and silliness. She glanced coldly at me and he told her, “Good man.” She gave him a hard look. He asked what she wanted to drink, maybe she’d like some plum wine. She finally agreed. Then in a small voice she said the situation was getting serious now. He groaned a little. He said he would cover whatever was needed.

  “That’s not the point.”

  “It’ll have to do.”

  “It won’t do, John.”

  “Make it.”

  She seemed exasperated. I felt the moment was right to run a finesse play and leave them so they could have a full-blown talk about it, if just for the time I was off in the bathroom. Let them “release,” Jack would say, directly from your action. And leaving right then would also serve to quell any suspicions, at least at the level we were working. I figured, too—and rightly—that I’d soon learn all the significant details. John would bestow on me the whole of what I needed.

  But then he touched her. Just barely. Just the flat of his hand low on her back, slipped beneath her blazer. It looked natural at first, tender and friendly, but his hand stayed there. He wasn’t trying to lurk, steal. His face softened, as if he were trying to make up for his curtness. And though it wasn’t much, she gave away absolutely nothing. You can tell with some: she would have been the same if he’d held a lighted match to her. She just kept talking about the office, personnel and scheduling, holding up the beat. I thought of how much Hoagland would have liked to get his hands on her, for a dozen reasons. And while she continued, I thought John was working her there, inching lower, inside the band of her skirt, where maybe the blouse was riding up.

  I averted my gaze just as Sherrie looked over at me.

  I decided then to leave them for the evening. I told John that my wife would be worrying and that the dinner was very good. He said we would come back again sometime. He didn’t try to dissuade me, though I knew I could have easily stayed longer. Perhaps they would have relented. Shown me what I knew.

  In hindsight, one could view my actions as solid textbook. Inelegantly executed, perhaps, but effective. I wasn’t employing a technique so much as my own instant live burial. It’s the prerogative of moles, after all, which only certain American lifetimes can teach. I am the obedient, soft-spoken son. What other talent can Hoagland so prize? I will duly retreat to the position of the good volunteer, the invisible underling. I have always known that moment of disappearance, and the even uglier truth is that I have long treasured it. That always honorable-seeming absence. It appears I can go anywhere I wish. Is this my assimilation, so many years in the making? Is this the long-sought sweetness?

  I have tried to heed Jack. I go faithfully to the flat to write out my reports. For the first days since the beginning I can write three or four pages on my subject and then another page of breezy analysis in less than an hour. I am supposed to do it this way, precisely but fast, checking off the day hour by hour the way a bright-eyed kid might reel off what he just got for Christmas. If I pore over the events too long, Hoagland always reminded me, I might get the proportions wrong, lend an act or word a note of too much significance and weight.

  I am to be a clean writer, of the most reasonable eye, and present the subject in question like some sentient machine of transcription. In the commentary, I won’t employ anything that even smacks of theme or moral. I will know nothing of the crafts of argument or narrative or drama. Nothing of beauty or art. And I am to stay on my uncomplicated task of rendering a man’s life and ambition and leave to the unseen experts the arcana of human interpretation. The palmistry, the scriptology, the rest of their esoterica. The deep science.

  I will simply know character. Identity. This is the all. I am to follow like a starved dog the entrails of any personal affect. I will uncover and invoke inclinations and aversions. Mannerisms of mind. Tics of his life. His opinions, prejudices, insecurities, vanities. Even the piques of his palate, if they speak to anything. What I am paid to do is to observe him in a rigorous present tense, as a subject dynamically inhabiting a scene, as a phenomenon of study.

  And I will build all these up into the daily log of his life, into a secret book of personality that I care nothing for except that I necessarily remember everything in it, every voice and
detail, and then remember again all of the books before, of Luzan and the others, those inalienable texts the blocks of a cruel palace of memory in which I now live.

  But one night last week, after a full day of escorting him to district meetings and fund-raisers, I realized that Kwang presented a profound problem for me. I couldn’t write the usual about him, at least in that automatic, half-conscious way. I had trouble again. I could not picture him. It seemed I had no profile from which to work. I was prolific, however, I wrote other pieces, entire tracts on him, tones and notes of him, but nothing I could use. I transmitted what I had on hand, two or three pages of vague and aimless reporting, and on the following nights I’d have the replies waiting for me and I’d print them out, mostly blank pages typed with terse messages like: Get with it, son, and You know better than this.

  For Hoagland’s is a constant prerogative: You know better, Harry. Be the scribe. The eye. Just point and pull the trigger. You’ll hit something.

  Certainly, a strange thing is happening. My recollection and sight are focusing elsewhere now. I am seeing a different story. As I flesh out the day’s register, as I am tonight, I feel as if I am desperately prospecting for an alibi, one mine more than Kwang’s. The teller, I know, can keep his face in the shadows only so long. We want him to come out, step into the light, bare himself. This is the shape of our era.

  And what—if I recall correctly—did Dr. Luzan say to me at one of our meetings, in his wheezing singsong voice, but Who, my young friend, have you been all your life?

  The good doctor knew the story. He could immediately see. A close look into my face and he could read the insistent question. He always spoke to me of my development. I remember his asking if I had had any heroes growing up, figures actual or imagined that I cherished, admired. Besides your father, he added. I laughed. So I told him of my invisible brother with no name.

  “Why didn’t your invisible brother have a name?” Luzan asked me, sitting placidly as always behind his metal office desk.

  I told him how I didn’t know the subtle nuances or meanings of Korean names, even though I knew quite a few, that it would have been like naming someone purely by sound. And he wouldn’t want an American name, because everybody else had one, because it was all so ordinary, even if convenient. I described him for the doctor, his walking before me in the schoolyard, stamping the blacktop, announcing our presence with his swagger, his shout. He knew karate, kung fu, tae kwon do, jujitsu. He could beat up the big black kids if he wished, the tough Puerto Rican kids, anyone else who called us names or made slanty eyes. The white boys admired him for his athleticism, how far past the fence he could send a kickball. The white girls were especially fond of him. He often kissed them after school, in front of everyone. He knew all about science, about model rocketry, chemistry sets, baseball cards, about American history. He was the lead in the school play. He spoke a singing beautiful English. He made public speeches. My mother and father were so proud of him. He was better than anyone. He was perfect. In my imagination these blinding halos of terror and beauty rung him, or maybe they were the same, as though he were limited somehow by his own unbearable preeminence and in that way given over to a doom in his life. In the daytime I could feel him near me, sense not so much his friendship but his vigilance and guidance, the veil of his cover. But at night, alone in my bed, my stomach would burn, ache anxiously for his well-being. I feared he would perish in some accident wherever he was (when he didn’t need to be with me), that he was going to die tragically, drown in a lake or slip and fall off a cliff; it wouldn’t be his fault, it wouldn’t be anyone’s, just that it would happen without warning or reason. And soon I’d find myself knotted into a hard coil in the bed, the points of my knees jabbing back the stabs of worry in my stomach and chest, and I wondered if in the morning after I left the house for the long walk to school he would be there for me, at my flank again, that comely wall of him, talking his trash and his resplendence, talking me up, too, talking my story.

  Luzan always preferred that I speak to him in skeins such as this; he urged me to take up story-forms, even prepare something for our sessions. His method with me was in fact anti-associative, and he asked me to look at my life not just from a singular mode but through the crucible of a larger narrative. He said he could learn much about me from the way I saw myself working in the world. Is this what I have left of the doctor? That I no longer can simply flash a light inside a character, paint a figure like Kwang with a momentary language, but that I know the greater truths reside in our necessary fictions spanning human event and time?

  I know that on this one Hoagland would agree: to be a true spy of identity, he often said, you must be a spy of the culture.

  On what turned out to be my last meeting with Luzan I went over the appointed fifty minutes. He did not stop me. He instructed his secretary through the squawky intercom that she clear the rest of his afternoon. He calmed me, patting my hand like an old woman. He wondered why I seemed unusually agitated today, and asked if anything was wrong.

  “No,” I told him, “but next time will be my last session.”

  “Why so?” he asked, adjusting on his nose his thick, square black frames.

  “My job is being relocated,” I said. “We’re being moved upstate next week.”

  “I am sorry to hear it,” he said, obviously surprised that I hadn’t mentioned it to him. He leaned forward, his buttery dark skin wrinkleless from the great flesh of his cheeks.

  “Tell me, my friend,” he said warmly. “Are you concerned about this? Will you find someone to talk to up there? I may be able to refer you.”

  I told him no, that I hadn’t planned on going to anyone for a while. There would be house moving to do, changes at work, enough important matters to consume me for the coming weeks. I felt stronger anyway—because of his kindness and efforts I was sure—and should be of no worry to him. There I was again, being a good son, good boy, good citizen, assuring authority. But what I wanted to tell him was that he had saved my life in ways he never imagined, or ever could. He knew a hundredfold of me compared to what I had filched from him. Though that was plenty for Dennis Hoagland, who had called me the night before. You’re off, Harry, he said grimly. Don’t go in tomorrow, stay in bed, you’re relieved.

  A few weeks earlier I had revealed to Luzan the single infidelity during my marriage, a brief episode very early in my career with a Chinese woman whose importer husband I was attempting to encounter and track. The importer was extremely unpleasant, friendless, and I had no other avenue to get to him. I told Luzan what I could; for years I felt disordered by it, sickened, until I released the secret to him. The woman’s husband regularly beat her, and I used this to my advantage, terribly, as I was the retailer who would extend her warmth and tenderness on his buying visits. Of course I didn’t love her, I hardly liked her, but she was so pitiable and I so fearful and ambitious for my new career that we made love on several occasions in a washroom of their Brooklyn warehouse. But it didn’t help any, I was still shut out, and I stopped going to the display store altogether. I eventually reached her husband through his importers’ association, which would later blackball him for undercutting his fellow members.

  But the woman, his wife, somehow crept back into my thoughts. I didn’t want to meet her, even speak to her, but I drove to her store and parked across the street, to wait for her to come out. Near the end of the day she finally did, quickly turning to lock the door, and when she turned to the street I saw the large fresh bruises about the side of her face and one eye, her head color unbalanced, like a soft yellow apple that has fallen off a counter, steadily rusting under the skin. She got into her car and I followed her for a dozen blocks, watching the back of her head, her signal lights, until I accelerated beside her to get another look at her face. She glanced over and saw me. It was her good side. She didn’t slow down or speed up and it was as if we were running on side-by-side tracks. She looked at m
e as if I were already dead, and then she turned her gaze back to the avenue and where she was going, the long way home to her husband.

  In the second hour I turned the conversation back on Dr. Luzan. He asked me then if I would call him Emile. Emile. He said his great-grandfather was a French missionary who had been beaten senseless by a mob in his family’s village. His great-grandmother’s father saved him from being killed, and took him in and nursed him back to health. He spoke of his eight brothers and six sisters, how every one of them had eventually come to America, though a few had already passed away. He spoke of his beloved wife, and then of his teenage daughter, and of the new house they were building in Massapequa with a heated greenhouse in back for his wife, who wished to grow her native fruits and herbs. He was considering finally taking up golf. His practice was healthy, built up now for many years, and I could tell it was all adding up to the prime of his life, that noble time, a period that my father seemed to squeeze down to a few scant minutes around midnight, sitting with a beer in front of his projection TV, absently chuckling at wrestlers and clowns.

  Into our third hour I got up to get a drink of water. I said when I got back I would be telling something about him and about myself and the greater circumstance of our new friendship. I felt I should leave him a gift. Honor him with some fraction of the truth. He nodded and said he would wait. I had already decided that I was going to advise the doctor to be careful in his future dealings, that he should be wary of unfamiliar invitations, strange visitors to his home or office, as well as chance meetings with other Filipinos, especially when he vacationed or traveled. I was prepared to reveal whatever was required for him to take me seriously, which would have probably been significant given how tattered and desperate he thought I was. I didn’t know anything at the time; Dennis had been as cryptic and evasive as ever, Jack professing nothing. But my suspicions and fears for the doctor were keen, not so much because of his political activities but from my simple fondness for him. I never dreamed that anything could actually happen to him, though theoretically, of course—and this in Dennis’ language—many events can take place.