The Surrendered

by Chang-Rae Lee

  She offered him the desk chair. June herself sat down on the low bed. “I want you to know, Mr. Clines, that I live here because it’s simplest for me, at this moment. This was my place of business.”

  “I’m not worried,” he said, setting down his briefcase. He didn’t remove his light overcoat. “I know you’re more than solvent. I know that you’ve been liquidating your inventory. That you sold your apartment. I have to look into these things.”

  “I understand.”

  He nodded. “Now to why I’m here.”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Before we start, I have to ask you whether you’re set on wanting to find this person.”

  “He’s my son,” she replied, disliking his use of “this person.”

  “But are you sure you want to find him?” he said again. “I have to ask. Sometimes people think they want something when in fact they don’t. We can stop now and all you’ll be responsible to me for is a few hours.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes.”

  But June had in fact wondered, when she first contacted Clines, if she was indeed sure. It had been so long. The last time she had seen Nicholas in person was eight years ago, on the day of his high school graduation. He left that very night, for his own self-styled “grand tour.” June was naturally under the impression that he was going to call her regularly from wherever he was. As he stuffed the last clothes and books into his backpack that evening, Nicholas couldn’t tell her his itinerary because he said he didn’t know it himself. He would fly the red-eye to London, as that was the cheapest flight, but then cross the Channel as soon as he could and roam through Europe on his way to Italy, where he would stay, he told her, until his money ran out. What she never imagined was that his tour would be continuous, that it would turn out to be a perpetual series of departures that would never quite lead him back home. For the first year he sent monthly postcards, addressed, oddly, not to the apartment but to the shop, the briefest scrawls about what he was seeing, a job he’d just taken, sometimes the only indication of place being the postmark. He never left an address where she could write him back. The monthlies became bimonthlies, and then seasonal, and by the time they appeared twice a year she had somehow quelled most of the confusion and hurt and rage their arrival brought on in her heart.

  Eventually, at least during the waking hours, she rarely thought of him, and it was only in her dreams that she encountered him. He would appear to her as gaunt, even skinnier than he always was, wearing the same faded Led Zeppelin concert T-shirt and blue jeans he’d departed in, walking through the anonymous gray terminal of a train station or airport with nothing on his back. He wasn’t hungry or lonely or lost, and for a brief, calming moment before she awoke, June could rest easy in how self-sufficient he appeared, how perfectly needless (if not perfectly contented), which she knew, even inside her dream, was a mirror of her own difficult character.

  “Please show me what you have, Mr. Clines.”

  He opened his briefcase and removed a thick manila folder and handed it to her. Inside were faxes, copies of bureaucratic-looking documents with official seals on the letterheads, and then other handwritten or typed pages. Clines described what they were as she went through them; most of them were lists made out for local police, each page in a different language: Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian. The only one in English was from a prominent antiquities dealer in London, whose firm was well known to the New York trade; here again was a list of stolen items, a few small oil paintings, silverware, coins, jewelry, various objets d’art.

  As he spoke she scanned the pages for mention of her son, but the name Nicholas Han (Han was her family surname) did not appear. The names on the pages rang familiar to her, like people she’d never known but might have read about, or had heard of through others, names varied on themes and notations that she alone could collate and make sense of. There were Stephan Lombardia, Leo Stevens, Leo De Nicole, among others, aliases that clearly came from things she’d once said to him. To know the derivations was almost heartbreaking; Leo had been his pet guinea pig who’d died a week after they brought him home; Stephan was what she’d blurted when Nicholas was old enough to ask about his father, having just noticed the name in the paper that morning. Naturally, he had asked other questions about his father, where he was from, what he had looked like, how he had died, and to all these she’d answer with whatever vague, half-true description or reason she could come up with, careful that they could never lead to an actual man.

  “How can you be sure it’s my son who’s been doing this?” she said to Clines anyway, wishing none of it were true. There were no images on the faxes, including the cover from an Interpol office in Madrid, where a case agent, according to Clines, had just a few weeks earlier begun collecting and cross-referencing the materials. It was this file that he had received through a contact in Europe.

  “One of the pages there indicates that the box number you gave me in Rome was rented by Stephan DiNicola.”

  “Who?”

  “Stephan DiNicola. The person you last wired money to.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. That’s probably right.” She’d been increasingly forgetful of late, at least of the recent past. She had indeed wired money, having received a typed letter from Nicholas, admittedly brief but marked by a renewed warmth, a casual intimacy that seemed to suggest he would soon be coming home. At the end, in a postscript, he asked if she could wire a thousand dollars to an S. DiNicola, a friend who would hold the funds for him until he reached Rome. It was the most he had ever asked for. Yet she had practically run to the nearest Western Union office, sending two thousand instead. She expected a quick reply, or even a phone call, but for a month now there had been nothing. Nothing at all.

  “And are you obligated to tell any authorities what you know?”

  “I’m working for you, Mrs. Singer.”

  “And if at some point you weren’t?”

  “I’m always working for someone. And I don’t keep any records after I’m done.”

  She nodded. “What do you recommend we do?”

  Clines cleared his throat. “I advise that we find him as soon as possible, before anyone else does. I can get a ticket to Rome for next week. So far he’s committed just petty theft, if on a wide, serial scale. He hasn’t stolen anything big yet. He hasn’t physically assaulted anyone. If he did nothing else from this point on it’s unlikely Interpol or anyone else would pursue him.”

  “Then we’ll leave next week.”

  Clines shifted uncomfortably in the seat. He drew in his rough cheeks, eyeing her gravely. “I don’t generally work with my clients, Mrs. Singer. It’s not done.”

  “Then this will be different.”

  “He may have left Italy by now. He could have gone anywhere. To Eastern Europe, to Asia. I may have to move around very quickly.”

  “You’ll move around as quickly as you need. If for some reason I can’t keep up with you, I’ll follow when I can. I don’t want to be more than a half-day behind. It’s not possible any other way. I’m sorry.”

  Clines scratched at his face. It was a sight she had seen countless times in the shop from buyers and consigners: the tight set of the mouth, the stare cast askance, and finally the yielding to her position, which was what made her business consistently, if never tremendously, profitable. Her talent, her gift, was an instantly patent resolve, so that both longtime acquaintances and strangers like Clines encountered an equally intransigent edifice, this deep-rooted stone. David had simply gone around, rather than attempt to dislodge her; for example, he was uncomfortable with her closing the shop herself, particularly in wintertime, when it was dark by five, and in the end he had simply hired a man to watch her from across the street to make sure she wasn’t mugged. Had Nicholas done the same? Had he gone around her as well, but to an epic degree? He never appeared to be cowed by her, or demoralized. He always seemed happy enough. Aside f
rom his scholarly ability, his teachers always told her in conferences that he was one of the more popular boys. But perhaps in the face of her, the sheer steep wall, he had receded like any child would, measure by imperceptible measure, until one day he must have seen the distance to be startling, and acceptable.

  “Whenever we do catch up with him,” Clines finally said, “you shouldn’t expect he’ll be pleased to see you.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Or that he’ll even agree to meet you. In fact, your being there might undo everything. There’s a reason you’ve hired a third party like me. It’s not only to find him. Sometimes you need an intermediary to settle someone down. Otherwise, he might just run faster.”

  “He’s not running away from me, Mr. Clines.”

  Clines nodded severely. “As long as you understand what we’re doing here.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay,” he said, though clearly he was not satisfied. “Now, about your son.”

  She brought out the pictures of him Clines had asked her for, as well as the postcards, so he could have examples of Nicholas’s handwriting. She actually didn’t have very many of either. Over the years she had kept the small handful of postcards but had long ago discarded his old schoolwork, including most of the art projects he had made, the paintings and sketchbooks, for which she felt sharply regretful now. But what was shocking was the pathetically small collection of photographs she had of Nicholas. Most of them were the official yearly school portraits, the others being the few snapshots she’d taken through the years. She was never one to take pictures, and owned only the least expensive pocket camera. As Clines looked through the meager stack, she felt compelled to explain herself, to tell him about all the other things she had been doing instead, but she kept silent. Not taking pictures of Nicholas was neither a conscious nor an unconscious choice; it signified nothing, revealing only the fact that she rarely had much time back then for anything but the most basic parenting. She was a young single mother with a fledging shop during a period in New York when the economy was dismal. She worked all the time, and rarely had the energy or inclination to cook or help him with his homework. She was always behind in doing the laundry and cleaning the apartment, which by his middle school years he did for them. For his efforts he got a very large allowance (for a preteen), which he was thrilled with, but they both knew he had to do it, as the basic chores would not otherwise get done. Toward his studies she took the attitude that since he was attending a good private school, on scholarship, his teachers would give him enough challenge and attention, and that as a single parent whose small business was their only means and lifeline she ought to trust their judgment and goodwill. Nicholas was naturally bright and was self-motivated enough, it seemed to June, that she could let him direct his own education. Little by little, though, he had chosen his own way in just about everything, things a boy probably shouldn’t have to be responsible for, like buying his own clothes and ordering takeout. He had even neatly painted his bedroom one weekend while she was away for an auction in Philadelphia, though he chose a too-dark purple that seemed to suck all the light out of their small apartment, leaving everything gothically dimmed and crepuscular.

  June didn’t worry that she might be somehow depriving him. Like other mothers and sons, they had plenty of good times, for example when she brought him along on a furniture-buying trip when he was eleven and they stopped in Colonial Williamsburg. They churned butter together and made a long swath of rainbow-striped fabric on an old-fashioned loom, and one of the photographs in Clines’s hands was of the two of them locked up in the stocks, both of them beaming with goofy grins, and that evening instead of driving home she decided to spend money she shouldn’t have to stay at a decent motel with an indoor pool, so Nicholas could enjoy a swim before they ate their takeout dinner of burgers and fries. The next spring his class took a trip to Washington, D.C., and he had made her cry when he brought home a large vegetable-and-dip platter with seven interlocking porcelain trays illustrated with famous monuments. He’d bought it with the spending money she had given him, rather than buying his own souvenirs or snacks.

  “But we don’t throw parties,” she said, her heart rent in her chest.

  “Now we can!” he said.

  She used the platter for his next few birthday parties, filling the trays with hard candies and chocolates and bubble gum. Every holiday saw it on their kitchen table. One by one the trays got broken, eventually only the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument remaining intact, and he finally told her he wouldn’t be upset if she threw the platter away, as it looked silly with most of its trays missing.

  Though she couldn’t recall now, at some point she did.

  “It seems your son liked the Roman times,” Clines said, flipping through some pictures from various Halloweens.

  “Yes, he always did,” she said. “But he was drawn to Italy in general.”

  Clines showed her what he was looking at: there were shots of Nicholas, second grade, costumed in a centurion’s outfit, complete with a plastic bronze breastplate and broom-top helmet. Another shot, a year older, had him as a gladiator, with a dirty, ripped shirt and a sword. Though there weren’t pictures, she remembered him dressing up in middle school as a senator, in toga and sandals, a laurel on his head, and then one year in a beret and the loose, swarthy garb of a nineteenth-century bohemian. She’d asked him who he was and he told her, quite proudly, that he was Camille Corot. In her shop there was a shelf of old art books and one was full of color plates of the artist’s Italian landscape paintings, which Nicholas often leafed through after school. He simply said he liked the soft colors of the houses and trees, so different from the city, but she wondered if it was because she had once falsely and stupidly suggested, after one of his random, out-of-the-blue queries, that she met and briefly lived with his father in Italy.

  “Where exactly?” Nicholas asked. He was perhaps ten at the time.

  “In the northern part.”

  “Show me,” he said, quickly retrieving a large world atlas she also had on the shelf, and which he was always poring over. He certainly knew all of the national capitals, and most of the major cities.

  “Here,” she said, her finger tapping on a spot, with conviction. “Here, near Mantova.”

  She found that concrete facts would put him off for a while, even as she knew that such loose improvisations could only lead to trouble. So why had she persisted? She had wanted to keep their world as small as possible, for them to be simply a mother and son, as well as to circumscribe time, make only the present the time that was real. But of course Nicholas, an imaginative and artistic young boy, had begun to reconstruct what he wanted from whatever she said, to build up his own mythologies, until an irresistible mystery had naturally emerged.

  During his senior year Nicholas told her that he would like to defer his college acceptance and go traveling, and at that point June had no objections, if that’s what he desired. He had savings from his summer jobs and, of course, his household chores, and she didn’t mind in the least offering him an extra thousand dollars so he could extend his travels. He said he didn’t need it, that he preferred to work odd jobs wherever he was so he could actually live in the place, but she ended up stuffing an envelope of cash into his hand before he left. He thanked and kissed her-he had never minded kissing her, even in front of his friends-and scooted into the taxicab and then, to her disappointment, sat back without rolling down the window as the car roared off.

  June did have worries, as any mother would, about his well-being, though her concern was less about the usual dangers of such a journey than it was about him. His sense of independence should have been reassuring to her, and yet she couldn’t help but wonder if it was a quality of his that was already too evolved. Perhaps he didn’t need to keep going it alone. As his teachers and others often said, he was well liked, and anyone could see he had plenty of friends, but she noticed that he never seemed interested in having a best frie
nd, or even two or three buddies he would get together with regularly. He dated several girls in his junior and senior years, but June never would have said that he appeared to be in love with them, or even to be infatuated. He was enthusiastic with all of them, reliably available to anyone who called or invited him to a party, but June would have to say that he moved on too easily from one friend or set of friends to the next, sailing through the forest of them, from vine to vine like his hero Tarzan in the old movie series he loved to watch on Sunday mornings.

  Over the years of his travels, the postcards he sent to the shop grew briefer in their messages, the ones he wrote out in pen somehow as cold as typescript, and then even more impersonal in nature, given the messages:

  Doing fine. N.

  Okay here. N.

  Still kicking. N.

  Later he would simply type out his name, with no message at all. Once he’d neglected to do even that, compelling her to examine her own name and the address of the shop with the focus of a detective, trying to glean some significance in the press of the key strike, the freshness of the ink ribbon. The city or country postmark rarely matched the pictured site, and she thought he might well have bought a variety pack at an airport kiosk the very first day and posted them back to her whenever the idea struck him that his mother might think he was no longer alive.