"Hi, sweetie," called one of the rowdy guys.
I turned to look. The little girl had been peeking out of the kitchen. She started to duck back, but her father came out with several pieces of sausage and eggs and she had to dart forward, to hide among the tables and chairs.
I sipped my tea. It was hard to believe I had been a janitor for two years, but in the beginning it had been hard to believe I was going to do it at all. Well, so much for deep reflective self-analysis.
"Say 'hi,' kid."
The little girl cowered against a chair, but she didn't run. One of the guys rose and picked her up. She stared at him, wide-eyed, without making any noise.
"What's your name?" Still holding her, the guy returned to the booth. Some of his friends started talking to her, but she was too scared to respond. They meant to be nice, actually, but they were strangers to her and loud and rough.
I looked at the kitchen door. Her mother and father were talking inside as they prepared the orders of other patrons. "Uh . . . wait a minute." My voice was not loud enough, and wavered uncertainly.
I didn't do things like this. Solitude and isolation defined my life.
"Hi, honey. Say 'hi.' " The guy holding her laughed and held her up to a friend, who tried to tickle her. All of them guffawed and petted her on the top of her head, or on her cheeks and shoulders. She started to sniffle.
I glanced back at the kitchen again, but Smiley and his wife were still busy back there. With a deep breath, I got up and walked slowly over to the table, hoping they would put the kid clown before I got there.
They didn't, though.
They looked up at me, expectantly.
"Could I, uh, have her? We're, uh, old friends."
"Aw, we aren't hurtin' her." One of them laughed, showing multicolored teeth, all shades of brown and green.
"Yeah, she likes me," said the one holding her. He lifted her up and nuzzled her with a day's growth of beard.
She sniffled harder. They weren't going to hurt her, but they weren't too sensitive, either. On the other hand, I had no clear idea of what I was doing.
"I'll take her," I said firmly.
"Oh, yeah?" The one in front of me laughed, stood up, and gave me a casual shove on the chest. I batted his hand away, folded my stomach over his fists, and then rammed the side of my head onto a metal teapot lifted, no doubt ceremoniously, by one of the others.
This was not the direction I was looking for.
I grabbed all six of them by the shirt front and yanked them down on top of me on the floor, which bounced twice against the back of my head. I heard the kid screaming, and a lot of people shouting, as I drifted off to sleep.
The screams woke me up. I bolted upright in the darkness, still screaming, panicked by the noise. The screams echoed in my skull and scorched my throat. I threw myself shoulder-first off the narrow bunk and fell screaming through the shaft of moonlight from a window crisscrossed by heavy wire.
The impact shut me up. I gathered my wits and myself off the floor and returned to my bunk just before the men in blue came running in. They flashed lights around the dorm, muttered to themselves, and walked away reluctantly. When dawn arrived, I woke up like everyone else.
Dormitory Two was just a big room in the one-story building, as opposed to Dormitory One, which was another room in the same building. From our regimented walks down the hall at prescribed times, the only difference I could see was in the signs. Dormitory One had a sign saying "1." Dormitory Two had a sign saying "No Smoking in Hallway."
The room had five rows of beds, fifteen deep, made of molded plastic with little walls separating the beds and thin little mattresses.
A big tv, turned off, sat bolted to a high shelf at the front of the room. A trustee, wearing white, swept patiently around the room, rarely looking up. After a while, the men in blue trooped down the hall toward us, visible through the solid glass on the upper half of the interior wall. The outside walls had no windows. They unlocked the door and led us out to breakfast at the mess hall.
I tried to lose myself in the middle of the crowd, straightening my new two-piece suit of institutional green as I went. It fit like a pillowcase on a rabbit. We went up the hall past the guard station, the showers, and Dormitory One to the door of the building. Outside, I squinted in the sunny April afternoon. I had seen very few sunny afternoons since taking over the graveyard shift.
Breakfast in the mess hall was much like my own cooking, gray and tasteless. Just as I turned my used tray in at the window, one of the men in blue came up and motioned for me to go with him.
"Hong," was all he said.
I followed him, outside and up a little sidewalk to the main building. The man in blue walked with his hands in his pockets and just glanced over his shoulder occasionally to make sure I was still behind him.
And he considered himself a lawman.
All around us, guys in green were working on the grounds. One was driving a small tractor with a wide mower hitched to the back. Two guys with rakes ran around chasing the clippings. I could hear the banging of hammers and the rhythmic buzzing of a hand saw, but I didn't see them anywhere. This was a minimum security place. The inmates kept the County Farm functioning; in a sense, we were all trustees.
I followed the man in blue into the back of the main building, giving one curious glance toward the women's building before I went in. None of them was in sight. That was no surprise.
The main building was mostly offices, but it also housed the medical facilities. They were completely sealed off from the rest of the building, accessible only through a heavy metal door. Inside, everything was different.
The man in blue turned me over to a nurse and then left.
"Mr. Hong?" She smiled pleasantly. "I'm Marian. I received your card, volunteering your services."
"Hi," I said cautiously. She was about forty and extremely pretty. Her most notable feature was lavender eye shadow. She was tall and big-boned, with a solid, efficient look. I had been looking exclusively at men in blue and men in green or white for some time.
"Come into the office." She turned, and I followed her into a small room, studying her snug nurse's uniform.
The room had been set up as a neat and clean little office, though it was extremely cramped. It smelled like a bottle of cologne had been broken in there recently. A guy with a pointy face and baggy clothes was writing at a desk. He looked like a rat in a zoot suit.
"Andy," said Marian. "This is Mr. Hong. Jack, this is Mr. Sand."
"All right," said the guy, looking up. "You'll be with us fourteen days, correct?"
"Yes." I'd been given thirty, with credit for the fifteen I had done at the County Jail before anyone had given me any.
"Well, we only have one study to put you on right now. A malaria study began yesterday. Can you read?"
"Yeah. I also go to the bathroom alone and cut my own toenails." That, or something like it, was from a movie I had seen once.
Marian laughed, but Sand ignored me.
"Here," he said. "This is the contract."
He handed me a single sheet of paper. If I signed it, they would inject me with malaria and then keep me in the infirmary until they cured it. I would get one hundred fifty dollars from them, in addition to malaria, the money payable when I was released less any purchases I made at the commissary. They had three strains of malaria, of varying strengths and several cures. Also, if I developed malaria any time in the rest of my life, I could enter a hospital anywhere in this country to be cured at the expense of this natty rodent.
"My name's cheap; I'll sign." I took the pen the guy held out and wrote my name. They were confident they could cure me; most likely, they were testing their cures for side effects, like to see if curing malaria made my feet jettison my toes or something.
I spent the rest of the day getting acquainted with my new surroundings. Outside the rat's office, Marian led me down another long rectangular room to the far end. The near half was the regular i
nfirmary of twelve beds, where they kept inmates who were contagious but not sick enough for a hospital. It was empty now, and the overhead lights were out.
The far half was the research unit. One portion of it was also empty of people, though the beds were full of strange elaborate contraptions made of clear plastic tubes and cubes and swirly shapes. The area against the far wall was lit up.
This section had four beds facing the wall so the occupants could see a small black and white tv. Another two beds were placed alongside the tv. To the left stood a desk with an old manual typewriter and a telephone. Marian pointed out my bed, against one of the far walls, and left.
I sat down and looked around. The three other beds in my row were full, and all three guys were asleep. One, however—despite being asleep or maybe delirious—kept rolling around and sitting up. He was in his thirties and glistened with a layer of sweat, like a roasting duck. Every time he rolled my way, he gave out a stare that clearly saw nothing this side of dreamland. The guy in the middle was black and lay face down on the mattress as motionless as the bed itself. The bed next to me held another white guy who seemed to be sleeping normally.
I didn't have much to do. After a moment, I got up and turned on the tv, and spent the morning watching game shows. Marian came in and gave me a shot as I observed a young blonde housewife decide whether to accept three hundred dollars and go home, or risk it all by continuing to play. As Marian eased any number of tiny malaria bugs into my bloodstream, the contestant won another seventy-five dollars by agreeing to have two live frogs dropped into her halter top. Between the two of us, I suspected she had the better deal.
Marian brought me lunch on one of the metal trays and I watched an old black-and-white horror movie. None of my companions in experimentation woke up.
Marian glanced at the movie on tv as she breezed through to collect my lunch tray. "Looks like the malaria unit, here."
I watched her go, then looked back at the movie.
On the screen, a German doctor in a long white coat was giving injections to a bunch of people strapped down on narrow cots, all in a row. Except for the straps, they looked very much like my snoozing partners and I. As I watched, one of them raised his palm and started screaming in horror when he saw fur growing on it.
I looked at my own palm. It was sweaty, but not hirsute.
Yet.
The movie was dull, and my eyes kept closing. So, I had awakened screaming again last night. That kept happening. I didn't remember my dreams—nightmares, really—but I knew what they were about. After all, what was I doing in jail, anyhow? Then again, it was easier than sweeping grocery stores, a position from which I had no doubt been cashiered.
I drifted off to sleep once again, with the sound of muffled shrieks and whimpers emanating from the little tv. One guy had stolen a straight razor, either to escape or to shave his palms. This room was homey, and better than a dormitory full of men talking.
I woke up to the sensation of a cool thermometer sliding between my teeth. I squinted my eyes open and gazed at Marian as she also held my wrist and studied her watch. Painfully bright streaks of sunlight slanted severely through the windows, set high on the walls. Apparently dinner time was approaching. I could feel that I had a fever, but it didn't seem too bad. Yet.
When Marian began shaking down the mercury, I asked, "What'd it say?"
"I'll get you some aspirin."
I tried to make a joke about a talking thermometer, but she turned away too soon.
Marian gave me the aspirin, brought me dinner, and went off duty. A smaller, younger nurse with dirty-blonde hair came on, but I floated back to sleep before I heard her speak. The dream was a vision:
A hand gripped the sword handle, and hard muscles tensed along the forearm.
I.
I.
I am.
I am.
I am the law.
The law is mine.
I am the law.
The clash of steel in the night, the swirl of robes, and the screaming of horses faded away in spinning moonbeams.
I awakened suddenly, comfortably cool in the darkened infirmary. My diseased comrades were all still breathing, from what I could tell. I supposed one or two of them had awakened occasionally when I was sleeping. For their sake, I hoped so. I turned to one side, where the gentle moonlight streaked in through the windows. A heavy-set elderly man sat fused with the light, up on the high windowsill of yellow cinder blocks.
Discounting the sight, I closed my eyes to go back to sleep. Though the aspirin had taken my fever down, I was still sick and needed rest. Yet . . .
I looked again. The strange shape was still there, a kind of shade against the moonlight, translucent but sharply defined. It was an old man, Chinese by race and heritage, wearing a rumpled baggy black suit and a battered brown felt hat with a broad brim. It might have been a '20s snapbrim, back when it still had some firmness.
"You see me, eh, Chinaman?" His voice was gentle, hoarse, and accented. The outline of his hat and head had changed; he had turned to face me.
Delirious, I thought to myself, and closed my eyes again.
Then again . . .
I looked once more. He was still there, an old man perched up high, with moonlight glowing through his form.
"Why are you here, Chinaman?"
No one else was awake here. If I talked to a window for a little while, no one else would know.
"Judge gave me a little time." I cleared my throat, which was hoarse from disuse. "Disturbing the peace, vandalism, assault . . . I forget exactly what."
"You do it?"
"No! I mean, I did, but I didn't do anything wrong. I was trying to help. Only, the owners of this place—this little restaurant—called the cops and had me thrown in jail. Not the guys who were pestering their kid."
"Why they do that?"
"I . . . I'm not sure."
"You don't know why they do that?"
"I said no," I answered with anger, but was too tired to project my voice any. Besides, getting mad at a hallucination was silly. I was just sick enough not to care if he was real or not.
"You good boy; that's good." He nodded to himself. "Who you?"
"I'm Jack Hong. Who are you?"
He smiled, slowly and wearily. "Nobody care me. You call me, ah, Lo Man Gong. Okay?"
Lo Man Gong, the slang term for the old men of Chinatown in earlier times. A general term he was taking for a name.
"Okay," I said aloud.
"You like me."
"Huh? I guess so."
"No, no. You like me."
"Sure. I like you."
He shook his head. "No, I mean, you and me, alla same."
"Mm—oh. We're alike?"
"Yah, we alike." He nodded sharply, his hat exaggerating the movement. "We Tong yun."
Tong yun, people of Tang. It was an old slang term for people from Guangdong Province, who still spoke the language of the Golden Age of China under the Tang Dynasty. I knew just a little about that sort of thing, stuff I had picked up here and there.
He confirmed it for me. "Tong yun, yah. We are Guangdong yun. Not the effete Song, or the slaves of Yan, or the hidebound Ming. Not the weaklings under Qing. We are people of Tang, the glory of China, masters of our world."
I was surprised. In English, he shifted dialects, and used Mandarin names, not the See Yup dialect he used with Chinese phrases. "I'm no master of anything."
"Your life is your world, same as anyone else. You Tong yun, you make your own life. Your own laws."
I shook my head. "I'm no criminal. I'm a law-abiding citizen. We can't all go making our own laws; then there wouldn't be any law at all." I sounded like a schoolmarm.
He lowered his head and shook it. "Not outlaw, not lawless. Your own law. You live by the laws you make. Your principles, your life, your law to live by."
So I got it, finally. He meant a way of life, and I did need something like that.
"You like me. I was like you.
I come over here as teacher, many year ago. Work laundry, gamble some. Work restaurant, sweep floor. Now longtime Californ', dead many year. Back' then, Chinaman don't teach much; they don't allow." He raised his head slightly. "Nobody teach you, eh?"
"I went to college . . ."
"Goo' boy, goo' boy. You go college, okay. But nobody teach you, eh?"
I didn't say anything. First, I wasn't sure what he meant, and second, I wasn't sure he was there at all. I was sleepy and ill with malaria. With no more than a closing of my eyes, I shut him out and went to sleep.
The malaria really took hold the next day. I slept until the room was bright with sunshine, and awakened only long enough for Marian to give me more aspirin. At some point, she would start giving me the cure, whatever it was. Until then, I would sleep, take aspirin, and feel my fever go up and down. Sometimes, I was just barely aware of shots and thermometers.
The fever broke just before mealtimes, and I ate some lunch and dinner. After each one, I stared unthinkingly at the black and white tv until I eased back to sleep again. I thrashed a lot, trying to avoid the heat I was generating, but if I dreamed again, I never remembered it.
Directionless, I had been directionless for years. That dream about the hand on the sword, I recognized that in one of my half-waking fevered states: it was the written character for "I," the personal pronoun, in Chinese. I.
To become an "I," I needed my hand on my sword—needed my own laws to live by.
That's what I had done in the restaurant, of course. Of course.
My fever broke again in the dead of night. This time I really did feel better, and suspected that Marian had been giving me doses of their experimental cure during the previous day. If so, it had worked well. Since they knew I only had two weeks here, they had probably given me the weakest strain of malaria and the most effective cure. Now, they would continue checking my vital signs and skin pigmentation for side effects as my recovery progressed.
The moonlight was still strong, and Lo Man Gong still sat up on the overhead window, where few people and no old men could ever get.
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