The Surrendered

by Chang-Rae Lee

  He hadn’t seen the man since the wake, and as Hector parked in front of the large whitewashed Tudor, he wondered if Old Rudy would even recognize him now, as sick as he purportedly was.

  “This is your last chance to be my friend,” Jung said, taking a last drink. “Let’s go back and Sang-Mee will serve us food. I pay.”

  “Just give me the money now.”

  Jung took out a wad of bills from the inner pocket of his jacket and Hector immediately plucked it from his hand. While Hector counted it, Jung cried, “If I had that, I could make what I owe real quick! Easy winners coming up. How I’m going to make the other half now?”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “I’m gonna take it out of your pay.”

  “What, you’re going to lay six dollars on the Mets? Let’s go. And leave the bottle.”

  “I gotta stay here, GI. I hate seeing my money in somebody else’s hand.”

  “Suit yourself,” Hector told him, suddenly thinking that Jung should stay behind, being that there was a slight chance Old Rudy had somebody-or two-like Tick with him. “Maybe you should keep it running.”

  Jung’s face flashed with alarm, and as Hector walked up the slate path he heard behind him the muted thump of the car’s power locks. At the front door he rang the bell and a uniformed home nurse answered. Hector said his name, adding that he wasn’t expected, and when the nurse appeared again she opened the door and led him upstairs. The house was dim and chilly, the narrow Tudor windows dingy with water stains, the air musty with old carpeting and the lingering gas of reheated food. The bedroom door was wide open and even from the hall Hector could smell the antiseptic sickroom smell, then beneath it the old-flesh smell, the piss-and-half-wiped-shit-and-fungal smell of someone spoiling from within, and he almost turned around then to leave when a raspy, cold-blooded voice weakly called out: “What are you waiting for?”

  Hector stepped in the doorway. Old Rudy was sitting up in bed, dressed in a gray hospital gown, a tube for oxygen strapped about his face. Beside the bed stood an air tank in its caddy and a rolling cart topped full of medications. A plastic bag of urine lay on the floor, a line from it snaking up underneath the sheets. His bony shoulders showed through the wide neck of the gown and his once-sturdy flesh had receded, his skin stretched back onto his frame like an artificial hide. He was a menacing physical specimen, this jagged piece of Irish-German rock, and had only been known as Old Rudy because of his prematurely gray hair. But now almost all the hair was gone, leaving just the fins of his temples, the shiny, translucent skin showing through. For a moment Hector wondered what his father, Jackie, would have looked like had he lived to old age. Would his wide, ruddy cheeks have shrunken like this? Would his hand have withered even more? Would he still insist that Hector stay at his side always, to be his best buttress and squire, to sing to in his larking, fanciful tenor?

  “I figured you’d come around,” Old Rudy said, having to take a rushed extra half-breath after every fourth or fifth word. “You should make your move, before I croak.”

  “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “Oh yeah? What did you come for, then, to pay your respects? To wish me well?”

  Hector showed him the thin brick of bills, saying it was from Jung and that the rest of it was coming but would be a little while. He placed the money on the rolling cart. Old Rudy didn’t look at it, or seem at all to care, breathing out with some effort through his mouth like Hector had already begun pressing a board against his chest. Old Rudy groaned, “You think I’m worried about a few thousand bucks?”

  “Seems like two weeks ago you were.”

  “Two weeks ago I was feeling like I wasn’t going to die right away. Now even when the piss flows out of me I’m sucking wind.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Everything,” he said, but before he could elaborate he was besieged by a long fit of nasty coughing. When he finally settled down, his eyes were bloodshot and glassy, and he gestured to a large lidded styrofoam cup on the cart. Hector gave it to him and Old Rudy took some sips through the straw, the drink the same color as the liquid in his catheter bag. He said wearily to Hector, “You don’t look much different than you did.”

  “You’re not seeing my insides.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, handing back the cup to Hector. His voice was hollowed out from the coughing, and his body seemed emptied, too, husklike, its weight hardly pushing back into the pillows. “How long has it been?”

  “Maybe fifteen years.”

  “You’ve been cleaning buildings since?”

  “Other things, too. But pretty much.”

  “That’s my doing, I guess.”

  “I could have moved on, if I wanted construction work.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No,” Hector said.

  “How come?”

  “I guess cleaning suits me, after all.”

  “Do you remember what she looked like?” He meant Winnie, of course, and Hector began to realize that the old man had simply wanted to talk about her, and had thus reached out to him in the only way he knew how.

  “I do.”

  “You’re the last person who spent any real time with her,” Old Rudy said. “She and I just argued constantly. I stopped seeing her like everybody else did. Like you probably did.”

  “She was very beautiful.”

  “Was she? You’re lucky. The last time I saw her, I had to see her in the morgue. There wasn’t much left of her, above the chest. Really no face at all. You know how I identified her? She wore a ring of her mother’s, a sapphire with diamonds around. When I think of her now I just try to see her hand. It was colorless and pale but it was perfect. Maybe they washed her, but there wasn’t even any blood on it. You think they did that? You think they washed her?”

  “I don’t know,” Hector answered, recalling that it was he who most often washed the corpses in the Graves Unit, as it never much bothered him, initially with a hose and then, if necessary, with a bucket and rag. In fact it had heartened him to see them come clean, even as brutally ruined as they were, to leave them again, at least in one small way, pristine. Maybe that was mercy enough.

  The home nurse came in to take Old Rudy’s vitals, before giving him a shot. Hector made to leave but Old Rudy waved at him to hold on. The nurse turned him over and swabbed a spot on his sunken rump and stuck him with a needle. He didn’t flinch. She checked his air and refilled his drink cup and changed out his bag and told him it was time to rest.

  “Rest for what?” he said.

  “For whatever you want, honey,” she answered, and then she left.

  Old Rudy was fading fast and turned his head to Hector. “Tell your friend Jung not to bother with the rest. It doesn’t matter anymore. I won’t be around anyway.”

  “Okay,” Hector said. “What about me?”

  “What about you?”

  “I want to be left alone,” Hector said, realizing that for the first time in years he was meaning we, as in he and Dora. Which was why he would have never asked before. “That’s all.”

  “What, you think that’s up to me?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “You’re crazy,” Old Rudy said, almost smirking at him now. “Who the hell gets left alone?”

  In the car, Jung had been ecstatic with what Old Rudy let pass, but then berated Hector for not trying to claw back the money they’d brought after the dying man fell asleep.

  If anyone could glide through the flak, slip past all disturbances, it was the estimable Jung, but Hector had to wonder if he and Dora could ever do the same. Some did get left alone, didn’t they? It seemed he and Dora had just broken into the clear. They were no more or less special than anyone else (well, maybe a little less), and maybe all it would take was for them to stay here inside Hector’s little rooms, one-to-one, hidden from further view.

  Dora called out that the steaks would be ready soon and Hector strode to the bedroom holding only a ha
nd towel to cover himself. She wolf-whistled after him. He almost blushed, unaccustomed to being naked before her in the light. In the bedroom, courtesy of Dora, were freshly folded clothes on top of the rickety thrift-store bureau, his usual T-shirts, but he decided to look for something better in the closet, which she’d also organized, hanging up even his dungarees and his several shirts. He would put on a proper one for her, and maybe for himself, too. It wasn’t half bad, to button oneself up in something clean and creased that didn’t smell of the unreachable corners of a bar and his own sloughed skin. Of course he normally laundered his own clothes, but he never paid attention to which mini-box of soap he’d get from the dispenser, and he noticed that Dora slipped a small white sheet into the dryer of their commingled things and now he smelled of lilacs, or what he thought were lilacs, the same waft as from the narrow side yard of his family’s house in Ilion, where his mother tended her flowering vines that exploded each spring in densely petaled ropes of white.

  The smell of the steak and onions made his mouth water, and though Dora wouldn’t have minded his sitting down to the meal in his undershirt and shorts he decided to put on clothes he hadn’t worn in years. Maybe he would even take her out this Friday, somewhere other than Smitty’s; there was a new place on Lemoine where younger people drank colorful cocktails at the polished metallic bar, and though he’d normally steer miles clear of such a place he thought Dora might get a kick out it, and maybe he would as well. Visit the yuppie zoo. When it came to drinking, the day of the week never mattered before but now it seemed wrong somehow to do the same things over and over again, Dora herself suddenly complaining anew about the lack of a women’s room at Smitty’s, where she’d otherwise peed happily.

  In the closet he found a secondhand suit given to him some years ago when he did some custodial work at a thrift store, still in its black plastic coverall. He held the suit jacket to his nose and didn’t like what he smelled but the trousers weren’t as funky. He couldn’t find a neck-tie or a decent belt but he had black shoes and when Hector stepped out into the kitchen Dora nearly dropped the spatula, as surprised as if he were a stranger come in from the street.

  “My goodness, Hector,” she said, catching her breath. “How you clean up!”

  “You don’t like?”

  “Gosh, no, I like, I do. Come here.” She touched his shirt collar and ran her hand down the pressed crease of the sleeve. “You could be a businessman, just home from the office.”

  “Yeah, but there’s no money in these pockets.”

  “Let me see.”

  Dora put the spatula on the table and stepped around him and slipped her hands into his trouser pockets. Her fingertips raked gently at his thighs and then with one hand she massaged him in the soft parts but just when he was coming alive the smoke alarm went off in the short hallway to the bathroom. The steak in the pan. He was surprised there even was an alarm, and while he went to take out the battery, Dora hustled over and took the pan off the heat.

  “Oh, now look!” She was wincing and getting a little panicked, frantically scraping up the onions that had stuck to the pan. “This always happens in the end. Whatever I do. I ruin it.”

  “No you haven’t.”

  “I have! Look at the meat. It’s charcoal.”

  “Just one side. Anyhow, it can be good well-done.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “Not so.”

  “You are.”

  “Okay, maybe I usually like it rare.”

  “Oh damn!” She nudged him in the chest and he pulled her to him and they kissed long enough that their dinner was in danger of going cold.

  She told him to sit while she made up their plates. She had roasted some potatoes and he was glad to see that the oven worked. She served steamed sliced carrots and peas, a bowl of which was set beside a stack of dinner rolls. The table itself looked remarkably nice; she had conscripted a white bedsheet as a tablecloth, folding it in half to cover the gouged and scratched wood veneer top. He couldn’t remember, but like everything else in his apartment he’d either bought it at a charity shop or found it on the sidewalk, and he would still pick things off the street if he thought he needed them, for the sake of cost, of course, but really more because he’d long attuned himself to the aesthetic of the broken-down, the used-up, the worn.

  But now he wished the table legs weren’t so deeply scratched, that the chairs were less wobbly, that he had thought to paint the walls just once at least, rather than simply having moved in and squatted, all to match if only by half the simple, clean decency that was abounding with her presence: along with the food she’d picked a small bunch of wildflowers from the vacant lot down the street and had placed these in a glass. Paper napkins were folded in half and topped with silverware he didn’t recognize as his own, for she’d buffed out the water spots. His plates were a puke-colored earthenware but Dora now dressed these up, too, by arranging the potatoes and onions in the tuck of the steak, which she’d sliced thinly on an angle and then fanned in a semicircle. She made a quick pan gravy with butter and flour (did he really have flour in the cupboard?) and a little splash of the red wine he had picked up just for her, and as she spooned the rich dark sauce on the meat his mouth watered intensely enough that his tongue ached. He waited for her to sit and poured her a full glass of wine, and then he ate ravenously and unself-consciously, like an adolescent might, mashing the potatoes with his fork and slathering it on the meat and swirling it all in the sauce before wolfing it down.

  “Is everything okay? How are the onions?”

  “The onions are sweet,” he said.

  “They look burnt to me,” Dora said. “How do you like the steak? Do you want more?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  Dora sliced him some more, and she ate, too, but not half as exuberantly as Hector. She was enjoying the wine he’d bought her, which came in a regular-sized bottle, with a real cork; he could have spent less and gotten her four times as much of the jug wine she favored but the label was illustrated with a pen drawing of a duck nestled among reeds and it had reminded him of Dora, or at least the way she always seemed snugly reposed, even when perched on a barstool at Smitty’s. She nipped at the wine to start, as it wasn’t juice-sweet like her brand, but she was quaffing it now in deep, regular pulls, saying it was lively and tart on her tongue.

  In deference to the meal, Hector was drinking beer instead of whiskey, and he was taking it with some gusto but with a different rhythm than the usual flooding pace he’d get into with Connelly and Big Jacks at the bar when it was a warm evening like tonight; no, he was drinking instead for the good crisp sensation in his throat, for the feeling of being cleaned out and restored, he was drinking for the reason that to sit down to a home-cooked meal with a kind and reasonable woman and not want to sprint away out of fear of disappointing her or trashing her already fragile life was a thoroughly bracing kind of pleasure. Before, when he didn’t normally remain in one place for more than six months, it didn’t matter, but once he saw he would be staying around in Fort Lee he had not allowed himself to slip into the saddle of anything resembling a domestic calm.

  But now here he was, focused on finishing off the steak and gathering the peas and carrots in a pile on his fork like a man come rightly home. Was he finally getting old? His body was as ever mysteriously impervious, but his mind was, like anybody else’s, encumbered with time’s accruals, and if over the years he’d disappeared on more than a few women at this very point, excusing himself from a table at a restaurant or from a bench in the park in the middle of a conversation and never returning, never calling again, never offering a single indication that he was even still alive, he was feeling none of that weakness now. He cleaned his plate, and while Dora got him another can of beer he topped her glass with the last of the bottle, of which he was glad he’d bought two.

  “Leave room for dessert,” she said. “I have a cherry pie.”

  “You made it?”

  “Oh, goodn
ess, no. Who do you think I am, Julia Child?”

  “You’re not doing too bad from where I’m sitting.”

  Dora didn’t answer but was clearly pleased with how things were turning out. This morning when they awoke she had dressed quickly and muttered she’d see him “around” but Hector sensed she was lingering and uncharacteristically replied that they ought to have a real meal together and that’s when she offered to make them dinner. Again she was slightly testy and defensive when she appeared later with grocery bags in hand and before he could stop himself he’d kissed her for the dignity on her face and right after she put away the perishables they made love, with Dora turning her back to him while holding the creaky rusted handle of the old refrigerator, the door opening and closing a couple of times before she called out his name and he hers and they swooned to the floor. Afterward she was always sweet-mouthed and proper, and he would never have imagined how uninhibited she could be, with her language and her body and her outright aggression, her pinching and scratching at his thighs, his buttocks, even his privates. It was clearly unconscious on her part, but she was thorough, each time raising small welts and marks all over him, today just as the other days, the hot water of the shower mapping a dozen good stings.

  “Would you like coffee?” she asked him.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll make us a pot. I can do that.”

  “I prefer tea,” she said. “Coffee makes my heart race.”

  “I can make tea, then.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  But he couldn’t make tea, for he had none, and he’d run out of coffee as well. The cupboard was barren, save for a few sugar packets and take-out cups of jelly, a rusty tin of oatmeal. The oatmeal was the only thing he ever made for himself these days, and a sorry sight, but only because he wanted now to do something for her. Perhaps he’d not been exactly selfish all these years, but when was the last time he’d gone out of his well-rutted way for the sake of another? Hector knocked on the door of his neighbor, who was as unsociable as he, but the crabby fellow actually answered, and, though suspicious, eventually gave him two bags of Lipton, not waiting for Hector’s thank-you to slam shut his door. Hector put the water on and while it boiled he brought their chairs outside to the cracked patio, as the small apartment had become quite warmed from the cooking. It was balmy outside but still cooler than the kitchen, and he set a folding TV table between them and brought out their plates and tea. He opened the second bottle of wine for Dora and another beer for himself and they ate their slices of pie while watching some children playing hide-and-seek in the weedy courtyard of the complex.