He puts the card down, tells Maxima that if he can get his job back, he’ll try to help out with rent. “Bahala na,” she says, punching The Bod, “I can manage.”
5
It’s a twenty-minute walk from the apartment to The Pie Who Loved Me, a spy-themed kiddie pizza parlor with games, rides, and animatronic animal characters dressed in trench coats and fedoras. An online reviewer called The Pie Who Loved Me “the Chuck E. Cheese of the damned, where pizza goes to die” and in high school, being voted “Most Likely to Work at The Pie” wasn’t so much funny as it was cruel: it meant that your classmates thought you were doomed, that whatever qualities you displayed, none was more apparent than your lack of ambition, your zero potential. Excel doesn’t know who won it the year he graduated, was just relieved it wasn’t him—an upside of nobody knowing you, he thought.
A new sign hangs above the entrance—the red lettering is bright and cheery, the o in Who and Loved is a pepperoni pizza—but the rest of the storefront is as grim as before: gray stucco wall, cracking red-tile roof with missing tiles all over, the one window a small dark square on the door. It’s almost business hours, but when Excel enters, half the lights are off, no kiddie music plays, the cash registers sit unmanned. But a familiar stink of industrial mozzarella and oven cleaner is in the air; someone is prepping for the day. He goes to the dining room, notices the Spy Ring Hip Hop Players is missing a member—Ivanka Iguana on bass—and the ones remaining look maimed or dead, heads hanging to the side with half-closed eyes and half-open mouths, like someone tried decapitating them but gave up halfway. Sloth the Sleuth is in especially bad shape, both arms dangling from their sockets by wires and tubes, his gray, shaggy fur matted and crusty. In Hello City, there were artists who could take a broken animatronic body and repurpose it into furniture or make it part of a sculpture. Something functional and new.
Somebody says, “X?”
Excel turns around, sees an elderly man in a floppy baseball cap alone in a booth, a small dictionary on the table. He walks over, sits across from him. “It’s good to see you, Z,” Excel says. For the first time in days, he smiles.
“You return,” Z says.
Excel nods. “I return.”
“But you leave forever.”
“That was the plan.”
“Something wrong happens?”
Excel understands that Z’s English—always clipped, always in bites—renders everything he says in the present tense. But the way he says it—something wrong happens—makes life sound like an endless loop of mistakes, never what it’s meant to be. Z arrived from Serbia a few years before, at the age of seventy, brought here by his son. The plan was to collect Social Security, an extra income to help other family back home. He knew almost no English, and had trouble pronouncing Excel’s name, so settled for X instead. In return, Excel calls him Z, short for Zivko.
Excel taps the dictionary. “What’s a new word?”
Without missing a beat, Z closes his eyes and waves a finger in the air, drops it on a random word in the middle of the page. “This one,” Z says.
Excel leans over, tries reading the word upside down, but it’s so unfamiliar he has to turn the dictionary toward him. “‘Planet stricken,’” he says, the word as foreign to him as it must be to Z. “‘Adjective. Affected by the supposedly harmful influence of the planets.’” He turns the book back toward Z, suggests picking another word, one he can actually use in real life.
Z shakes his head. “Any word. I can use.” He rereads the definition, concentrates. “Today I wake, maybe sick”—he checks the word again—“but not sick. Only planet stricken.” He looks up from the page, the face of someone who doesn’t know if he’s right or wrong.
“Perfect,” Excel says.
“When you leave. I have few words. Now, many.” He closes the book. “X. Why are you back?”
“Things didn’t quite work out as planned.”
Z sighs, nods slowly. “Yes, I know.”
“I need a job. Is Gunter here?”
Z leans forward, all the lines on his old face pulling together with worry. He says something in what Excel guesses is Serbian, then pats Excel’s wrist. “Okay,” he says, “my grandson, over there.” He points to the game room. Excel slides out of the booth, stands up straight, takes a breath. “Wish me luck,” he says, and Z looks at him blankly like there’s no such thing, then moves on to learn another word.
GUNTER STANDS ON THE TOP RUNG OF A METAL LADDER, SCRAPING a web of pink chewing gum from the ceiling with a butter knife. How this keeps happening, nobody knows, but Excel once caught a kid standing atop the mini-carousel, stretching out his chewed-up bubblegum like it was pizza dough, then coiling it around a low-hanging light fixture. The kid’s parents merely watched, as if witnessing an artistic genius in the making.
Gunter reaches, scrapes off the last strand of gum, lets it fall to the floor. “Bastard fucks,” he says, and when he looks down to descend the ladder Excel accidentally makes direct eye contact. Before he bought The Pie, Gunter was a bouncer for a string of San Francisco strip clubs, and he looks more like a brawler than ever before; his neck is thicker, his chest bulges, and his T-shirt sleeves are so short they show new tattoos, a ring of blazing skulls around each bicep.
Excel takes a breath, steps forward, says hello.
Gunter looks down, squints at him, and tilts his head. “Well, son of a shit”—he gives a half laugh—“look who’s back.”
It’s a warmer response than Excel expects. “The place looks nice.”
“Then you got anuses for eyes.” Gunter folds his arms, feet still firm on the top rung, unafraid to fall. “That gum down there? Been on the ceiling for three months. And nobody here does shit about it, so I’m the one that’s gotta climb the goddamn ladder and clean it up. Is that how a CEO should start a business day?”
Excel shakes his head.
“We agree. So this makes me wonder: Are you here to scrape shit off the ceiling?” Excel takes that as his cue and nods, is about to ask for his job back, but before he can speak, Gunter wants to know where Excel gets the nerve to show his “jackass asshole face” after all the “bullshit toxic slander” he said the day he quit. Excel tries to answer but Gunter says, “No dickweed, I ain’t done yet,” and he lets out more profanity and names, some of which might almost be funny (“shit-wipe” is a new one), except for the fact that Z sits just one room away, trying to learn the language. Excel imagines walking out and taking Z with him, to a place where he can read his dictionary in peace.
“I’m sorry,” Excel says.
Gunter folds his arms, biceps flexing. “For?”
“All of it. For everything I said.”
“And?”
“And”—Excel gives himself a moment, a last chance to walk away, but knows he can’t—“I’d like my job back.”
“No.”
“You’re understaffed. You’ve got no cashiers. Maybe I can help.”
Gunter puts a finger—his middle—on his chin, makes an exaggerated thinking face, says no again.
“You have a right to be angry with me,” Excel says. “I was out of line.”
“‘Out of line.’ Hm. Tell me specifically what was out of line.”
“Everything. All of it.”
“You want a job? Then climb up here”—he gives the top of the ladder a quick pound of the fist—“and you tell me to my face what you said.”
The ladder is two-sided, sturdy enough, Excel hopes, to bear both their weight; if not, at least they’ll come crashing down together. He climbs up slowly, and when he’s one step away from being face-to-face with Gunter, he looks at the toes of his sneakers and imagines that the ground twelve feet beneath them isn’t the red industrial rug of The Pie but actual earth instead—rocks and pebbles, burnt-orange dirt, the terrain of Hello City. He pauses for a moment, then ascends the final rung and looks at Gunter, tells him again what he’d told him nine months before—that he’d found a way out of Colma, a real op
portunity, so no longer needed this dead-end, dumbass job, that three miserable years working for a prick like Gunter were finally—hallelujah! (it was the first time Excel had ever said the word)—over and done with. “What else?” Gunter says, and Excel looks down again, the ground seemingly farther than before. “And then I called you”—Excel takes a breath—“a man without a future.” That was the line meant not merely to sting but to outright hurt, like the kick you give to someone already down: Gunter was forever lamenting his life, all the opportunities the universe denied him. “Here I am,” he had once said, “surrounded by booms. Internet boom. Dot-com boom. Even this bullshit slow food boom. But what about me? Where’s the Gunter boom, huh? What is it with people like us?” He’d said this at the start of a staff meeting, and by the time he finished, everything he said was a weepy blather. “I have no future,” he said, his last coherent words. The entire staff was silent, unsure whether to comfort a boss they feared or get back to work and laugh behind his back later. Excel just stared at him and thought, Don’t let that be me.
“And I guess that’s it,” Excel says. “That’s what I remember. And I’m a shitty person for saying all those things. But I need my job back. So I’m sorry. Really.”
Gunter looks up at the ceiling, licks his thumb, and wipes away a smudge of dirt, and the skulls on his arm seem to stare down at Excel. Below, two small boys enter the game room, divvying up a handful of gold tokens.
“You can have your job back,” Gunter finally says. “Same pay as before.”
Excel squeezes the sides of the ladder, a mix of relief and a sudden fear of heights. “Really?”
“Yeah. But it’s like probation.”
“Understood.”
“And no overtime.”
“Not a problem.”
“And any tips, you split with me.”
“Will do.”
“You’re gonna work weekends.”
“Of course.”
“And I get to hit you.”
There’s no smile on Gunter’s face, just a look that says take it or leave it.
“Just one time,” Gunter says. “In the gut. That shit you said the day you left, nobody ever talked like that to me. Nobody. Kinda knocked the wind out of me, tell you the truth. Seems like justice that I get to knock the wind out of you.” He moves three rungs down, skips the rest and jumps to the ground, the thud of his landing reverberating through the ladder.
“Come on down,” Gunter says. “Let’s get this over with.” He cracks his knuckles, and Excel thinks of his $10,000 debt to Hello City, figures this is the start of paying them back.
He begins his descent. Below, the two boys each drop a token into the Skee-Ball game. One looks Excel’s way quickly, then gets back to the game. Excel has been hit before—he thinks of Maxima’s spankings when he was growing up, the occasional smack to the head the times he got mouthy. But a punch to the gut, the fast full force of it—Excel has no idea what could happen. Maybe his breath—one single body-filling breath—will gush out, leaving him hollow, full of nothing but pain. Or maybe Gunter’s fist goes so deep that Excel’s organs—just for a moment—collide and squish together, all that cushioning blood and air between lost. Maybe he’ll puke or bleed or both, hurt so much he’ll weep. But all those scenarios are in the future; for now, Gunter has him against the wall as he pulls back his arm, making a fist, and there’s nothing Excel can do besides stand there and take it, so he repeats to himself a thing he used to say in a moment such as this, a sad truth of life that might, for the time being, mean an escape from it. “Not here,” he says, so softly he can barely hear himself. “I’m not here. I’m not really here.”
6
Excel’s tenth birthday began as all the ones before it: he blinked awake and found Maxima standing over him. “You’re older,” she said.
He knew the celebration ahead: A picnic by the sphinxes at Evergreen Lawn Cemetery. Subway sandwiches and Doritos. A single candle sunk halfway into a Hostess cupcake. He got up from the couch. “What time are we going to the cemetery?” he asked.
“No cemetery. Not this year.”
He thought he was in trouble, that he’d done something wrong. “Then where?”
“San Francisco,” she said.
Just ten miles from Colma, and Excel had been there only once. He must have been five or six, and despite a promise to ride the cable car, he ended up sitting all morning by a watercooler in the waiting room of some downtown office, while Maxima and Joker met with someone—they didn’t say who or why—in another room. When the meeting ended, they went straight to the BART station and went back home, Maxima’s face like a stone the whole ride over, and for days after that.
“Eat breakfast,” she said, “then get dressed. Wear nice clothes, okay?” She patted his head, then walked over to the window, stared out.
He toasted a pan de sal and ate it with margarine and sugar, then went to Maxima’s room and changed into a white polo shirt and blue corduroys, the best clothes he owned. He went to the bathroom and as he brushed his teeth he heard what sounded like Joker scolding Maxima in Tagalog so fast that Excel could follow only one phrase, which Joker said over and over. Ang bata, ang bata. The child, the child.
They stopped talking when Excel returned to the living room. Maxima was by the door, dressed in a black sweater and jeans, hair up in a small, tight bun, the red strap of her purse like a line across her body. She looked serious, like today was about business, but Joker was still in his pajamas and slippers. “You’re not coming, Grandmaster?” Excel asked. Joker shook his head, then handed him a ten-dollar bill and a dollar coin, his usual birthday gift. Before Excel could thank him, Joker took hold of his shoulders, squeezed hard, and pulled up slightly, like he was trying to make Excel taller. He said something in Tagalog, looked at Maxima, then let him go.
They took BART to San Francisco and got off at the Powell Street station, took a long escalator up to street level, where dozens of tourists were already lined up for the cable car. “Can we?” Excel asked, pointing to the ticket booth, and Maxima said, “It’s your birthday. Of course.” They bought the tickets, waited in line for nearly an hour, then finally boarded a cable car so packed there was room for only Excel to sit; Maxima held on to a pole and stood on the edge.
The ride began slowly, flatly, but Maxima looked anxious, her lips moving, just barely; Excel guessed she was whispering an orasyon to herself, which made him think there was some kind of trouble ahead. Stop looking like that, he thought, and nearly said it, until the cable car suddenly jolted, and Excel could see how steep and high they were; if the brakes gave out, they would all slide backward downhill to their deaths.
The cable car climbed on, the whole city tilting and askew behind the straight line of Maxima. “Don’t let go,” he told her, holding the red strap of her purse, and she gave him a look that said, Me? Let go? Puwede ba?
THE END OF THE LINE WAS FISHERMAN’S WHARF, AND THEY WERE the first to step off. The main drag was monotonous with souvenir shops and seafood restaurants, and Excel stopped only to look at the outdoor tanks crammed with lobsters and crabs, their claws bound in thick yellow rubber bands. For his birthday lunch, Maxima bought them two clam chowders served in bowls made of actual bread, a thing Excel had never seen. They ate on the curb, watched a man disguised as a bush reach out to scare unwitting passersby, as tourists laughed and took pictures. “Idiots,” Maxima said. “You can see his feet under the leaves. How can anybody fall for that?” But Excel laughed at all the people who did, and Maxima even let him drop a quarter into the man’s tip jar.
The chowder was fine but the bread bowls were soggy; they tossed them in the trash and moved on to Pier 39, pushed through crowds to get to the center, where a double-decker carousel started up, organ music loud and lights blinking. Excel noticed some of the horses had fish tails from the waist down. “I want to ride,” he said.
“Later,” she said, “first, we need to talk.”
The feeling return
ed, that he’d done something wrong. “It’s my birthday,” he said, “I don’t want to talk,” but she took his wrist and led him to the other side of the pier, to an empty spot on the far end, overlooking floating platforms packed with sleeping sea lions.
They stood side by side against the metal rail. “You’re ten years old now, so I’m going to tell you something,” Maxima said. “And I don’t want you to complain or whine or cry. Understand?”
“I don’t cry,” he said.
She looked over both shoulders, making certain no one was nearby, then back at Excel. “We’re not really here,” she said.
“Who’s not really here?”
“You. Me. Us. We’re not supposed to be here.”
“Be where?”
She paused, like she couldn’t name the place. “America,” she finally said. “You and me”—she bent down to meet his face—“are TNT.”
He pictured a stick of dynamite, the lit fuse, the explosion to come.
“It’s what you call a Filipino who’s not supposed to be here,” she said. “TNT. It stands for ‘tago ng tago.’”
“I don’t understand you,” he said.
“‘Tago’ means ‘hiding’; ‘ng’ means ‘and.’ Tago ng tago. Hiding and hiding.”
“We’re not hiding.”
“We are. Always.”
“From who?”
She sighed, as though there were too many ways to answer. “Police. Government. Immigration.”
“But I was born here,” he said.
She shook her head.
“I was born there?” He meant the Philippines. She shook her head again.
Not here and not there meant nowhere. “But we have”—he searched for the term—“green cards. Inside your desk.” He’d seen his before. A thumb-size photograph of his face, the numbers with endless digits, the Statue of Liberty, faded like a ghost.
“Peke,” she said.
Another Tagalog word he didn’t know. “‘Peke’?”
The Son of Good Fortune Page 5