Burning City

by Ariel Dorfman

“YOU FIRST!”

  “WHAT?”

  “COME ON, MAN!” Heller urged as the car picked up speed. “WE MAKE A GREAT TEAM!”

  “THIS IS MY FATHER’S FAVORITE CAR. LET GO!”

  “RED LIGHT!”

  The driver turned his head back to the road and shrieked.

  He slammed on the brakes with both feet.

  The car screeched to a halt.

  Heller didn’t.

  He and his bike went straight through the intersection, slicing through lower Broadway traffic, arms held wide at his sides, eyes closed. A thousand sounds enveloped him, and an instant later he was safely across, turning right, leaving the momentarily halted traffic behind.

  He bounced his front wheel onto the sidewalk. Outside the Tisch Building film students were gathered, discussing the latest Kevin Smith film.

  Heller pressed down on the pedals, drove his faithful bike forward.

  The students had less than an instant to scream, dive out of the way. Heller cut through the crowd of up-and-coming artists, a fresh grin stuck to his face so hard it brought pain to his cheeks.

  Good pain. Rewarding.

  Heller made a hard left. His bike tilted at forty-five degrees, defying gravity, then righted itself as he coursed between two cars on Waverly Place, swerved out of the path of a hot-dog stand and down the street.

  He wasn’t intending to go through the park—the address he was looking for was on Christopher Street, and going through Washington Square would take away a near thirty seconds from Heller’s schedule. But then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw them: a close-knit couple, arms locked, lips pressed together, standing in a perfect spotlight of sunshine at the park’s entrance.

  Content. Pleased. Perfect.

  Heller’s watch told him he was a full minute ahead of schedule.

  He let out another yell, cut left. The couple didn’t see him coming, didn’t see him speed past, so close Heller could have run his fingers through the girl’s hair with one slight motion of his hand. All they felt was a sudden breeze lift their hair slightly, an awareness of something happening. They opened their eyes, smiling.

  Heller sped along the bench-lined path leading to the center of the park. Sunlight made its way through the trees, and the wind rocked his face as pigeons scattered. An old man with a wrinkled suit and white scruff adorning his neck looked up from his drink and raised his hand up in the air:

  “Yeah, bike boy!” he cheered. “You show ’em what speed really means, you lunatic! GRAND TOUR!”

  “TO THE GRAND TOUR!” Heller cried over his shoulder.

  The world was coming alive, and Heller kept on. Past the statue of Garibaldi, into the wide open square of the park, where the jugglers, students, bums, preachers, families, drug dealers, and musicians made their home.

  “Bike boy!” one of the performers announced.

  “Bike boy!” came the chorus of a few of the drummers seated near the fountain, oversized T-shirts worn like robes. “Where you been?”

  “Get off the bike, asshole!”

  “Grand Tour, bike boy!”

  Laughter and salutations mixed with jeers quickly spread as Heller coasted his way over the shimmering concrete. Looking right, he saw Bruno the Bruiser with his nightstick drawn, poking and prodding a man sitting at a makeshift table, books strewn about its surface, calm expression dancing in his brown eyes.

  Heller took a deep, angry breath. He locked eyes with the book vendor and, for an instant, forgot where he was. Thought he recognized something in the man’s face, the way he stood out in the crowd, a dent resting softly in his left cheek. Caught in his stare, Heller almost felt like he wasn’t speeding on his bike at all, but standing still as the rest of the park moved about him.

  “Bike boy!” A shirtless Haitian stood up on the wall surrounding the fountain. Water cascaded from behind him. Small droplets found their way through the air and onto his back. “I heard they put you in jail, man!”

  The Haitian’s comment brought Heller back to the moment just as quickly as he’d left.

  “You been behind bars, bike boy?” the Haitian called out.

  Heller let out a defiant laugh and, as if to prove his point, doubled his speed. He shoved the entire world out of his peripheral sight and aimed for Bruno.

  Cut off Bruno in midsentence, snatched his police hat from off his head, and kept pedaling. Heard Bruno swear and start to run after him. Applause from all over the park. A Frisbee was launched, aimed at Heller’s head, missing and landing in a garbage can. Heller answered this call by sending Bruno’s hat flying into a crowd of students juggling a Hacky Sack.

  A world of noise at his back, Heller exploded out of the park, past The Arch and back onto Waverly Place. He left them all behind to love him, hate him, speak of him for days to come. Riding his bike and tearing through the concrete streets and alleyways of the city, this was where Heller felt close to the world. Through red lights and one-way streets, ignoring the sun, the sweat, polar ice caps, slaughter overseas, lost votes, Air Jordans, AIDS, and that slow countdown that everyone felt in the back of their heads, throats, hearts.

  The entire world was going to melt that summer, and it was in those moments that Heller was more than willing to melt with it.

  Right on schedule.

  chapter five

  Almost four in the afternoon—Chinatown.

  Heller’s bike slid to a halt, perfect break speed.

  He leaped off, hit the button on his watch. Numbers froze. He looked at the results, staring right back at him.

  Twelve minutes, forty-six seconds.

  “Damn it,” Heller murmured through the flower clamped between his teeth.

  Heller chained his bike to a parking meter.

  It was his seventh and final delivery of the day.

  The door opened an instant after knocking.

  It was as though Mrs. Chiang had been expecting him.

  “Mrs. Chiang?”

  She turned out to be a small, delicately featured woman. A dress decorated with flowers. Dark hair with traces of gray, done up in a bun. Strangely lucid eyes.

  It was as though she had been expecting him.

  “Is something the matter?”

  She was drying her hands with a dishrag.

  “I think you know why I’m here,” Heller said. He gently took the dishrag out of her hand and gave her the flower. She stared at it for a moment, lost herself in carnation petals.

  She looked back into his eyes and nodded.

  “Is anybody else home?” he asked.

  “I only have one son,” she answered slowly. “That’s all.”

  “Is there a place where we can both sit?”

  Mrs. Chiang walked into the apartment. Heller followed, closing the door behind him.

  The apartment was sparsely furnished, though Heller suspected that years had been spent living there staring at the same decorations, waiting. A round table in the middle of the living room, scattered chairs. No sofa. No couch. No futon. Along the few shelves and windowsills were inexpensive-looking toys and models. Miniature desks, foul-looking garden gnomes, obscenely cheerful nativity scenes, crucifixes, small porcelain frogs. The afternoon sunlight made the walls look soft, malleable.

  Mrs. Chiang motioned to the small table by the window. They sat. She played absently with a small wooden horse. Its painted eyes looked every which way at once. Outside, the city continued to weave in and out of traffic, unravel and sustain itself.

  “Are you sure?” she asked finally. “How can you be sure?”

  “This was the only information your brother gave us. . . .”

  Heller slid the card across the table. Mrs. Chiang picked it up. Read it. A bird landed on the windowsill, watched them. Flew away. Mrs. Chiang put the card down silently. Heller watched her sit, taking in all that he could.

  “There’s something in that message that your brother doesn’t say,” Heller told her. “Your son was a good man.”

  Mrs. Chiang gave
a half nod, toyed with that wooden horse for a while. “I hadn’t heard from my son in twelve years,” she managed. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “I haven’t heard from my son since you were four . . . since before you could manage a sentence with your hands.” She looked out the window. “They don’t let them write. But I knew what he was doing in there. My son and all the other prisoners in the lao gai. Do you know what lao gai means?”

  “Reeducation camps.”

  Mrs. Chiang’s face gave way to surprise.

  “My father told me . . . ,” Heller said.

  “That’s right . . . and the only connection I had with him were these. . . .”

  She stood up, still holding on to the wooden horse, swept her arms across the length of the apartment. “Do you know how much these cost?” Pointing to an ashtray shaped like a jack-o’-lantern: “One dollar.” Pointing to a cradle carved out of wood to resemble a mother’s arms: “One dollar.” Pointing to a small stuffed animal: “One dollar . . .”

  Her arms fell to her sides.

  Heller kept his eyes glued to her, never saying a word, never moving a muscle.

  “Because my son wasn’t paid . . . he was hardly fed. . . . Cheap . . . Life is cheap.”

  She pointed toward the kitchen this time. Heller looked through that open doorway over to the refrigerator. A drawing of a butterfly was pinned to its surface, scrawled in crayon. One wing red, the other totally white.

  “My son made that at the age of seven,” she said. “When his father brought in a wounded butterfly, half a wing left to its body . . . I don’t think he ever stopped thinking about it. . . .” She lowered her voice then, trying to hide something from the figurines watching from their places on the shelves. “Where do you think I found the butterfly again?”

  Heller’s eyes never left hers. “It’s carved into the bottom of the horse, Mrs. Chiang.”

  She smiled sadly. Mrs. Chiang smiled sadly and turned the horse over on the table to reveal the same asymmetrical butterfly carved into the belly of that silent, all-knowing toy.

  Heller looked up from the evidence: “I don’t think he ever stopped speaking to you. . . .”

  Mrs. Chiang sank into her chair.

  Heller watched her shoulders rise and fall with her every breath. He waited for the tears to come. Her eyes grew moist, but not a drop spilled onto the table. So they both waited there at that table, in the middle of that apartment, not sure what to expect next.

  The clock on the wall was the only thing that bothered to move.

  A calendar on an opposing wall was the only thing moving faster than that.

  chapter Six

  The door closed behind him, accompanied by the familiar ring of the bell. A few people turned their heads, looked up from books or unpublished screenplays. For the most part, Heller’s entrance into Buns ’n’ Things went unnoticed. The soft sounds of coffee cups continued, and the quiet blinking of seasonally misplaced Christmas lights accompanied Heller to his seat. He sat down, looked out the window, tapped his fingers nervously against the marble table.

  Heller didn’t like the place. Didn’t enjoy SoHo to begin with. South of Houston. Too much of it seemed to be impeccably clean. Designer stores. Expensive, mechanically superior watches, hundred-dollar jeans, thousand-dollar dresses, inflatable furniture. Sometimes the neighborhood seemed as cold as the stainless-steel construction of the bars and restaurants.

  Buns ’n’ Things had a certain warmth to it, but the world of Art Deco galleries and commissioned artists always found a way to get in through the wall of windows that covered the storefront. The coffee was certainly far too expensive for far too little; a watery house blend with only one free refill.

  And Heller didn’t enjoy coffee to begin with. Caffeine was a dehydrating agent, not good for the circulation and completely impractical for his work. Didn’t even like the taste much. Just didn’t like coffee . . .

  “Would you like to see a menu?”

  Heller turned away from the window. That Latin accent was accompanied by soft, dark eyes and black hair. Cut just past shoulder length, straight and shiny. She wore a red shirt, black pants under a black apron. A brass name tag worn close to her left breast spelled out the name in block letters. . . .

  “Silvia.”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  Heller blinked twice. “What?”

  “Would you like to see a menu?”

  It was the same question she always asked.

  “Just coffee.”

  “Coffee . . .”

  “Coffee,” Heller repeated.

  “I know,” she said. “It’ll be a minute.”

  Heller nodded, trying to think of a way to take the conversation past a simple exchange between customer and waitress. He had been trying for over six months, and today the result was no different. He was still nodding when she turned her back and left him alone at his table.

  Silvia walked over to the counter. The coffeepot was brewing, slowly filling, drop by drop. She leaned against the stereo, folded her arms, tapped a pen against her elbows, patiently watched the coffee creep to the top of the pot.

  Heller watched her out of the corner of his eye. He pretended to be engrossed in an autographed picture of Sarah Jessica Parker hanging on a nearby wall. He watched Silvia stare into that coffeepot, wondered how someone so small and frail looking could possibly be one year his senior. Watched Silvia, kept his eyes as close to her as he could. Heller knew that any moment now she would bring that pen to her lips and give it a slight nibble. It was Heller’s favorite moment of each day.

  There it was.

  She nibbled with her top set of teeth, kept her lower lip tucked over the bottom set. Concentration. Heller knew that expression by heart. Traced it every night in his mind before he went to sleep. She had the kind of eyes that made Heller want to crawl inside her soul, fall asleep there so he could catch a glimpse of her dreams before sunlight scared them away.

  “You were right, bike boy.”

  Heller tore himself away from Silvia.

  Sitting at his table was a Haitian man with close-cropped hair and a brown leather vest, smiling so widely you would have thought he’d won the lottery.

  “Two weeks later,” the Haitian told him. “Two weeks later and I’ve met the most fantastic woman. She even speaks French, man. Educated, too . . .”

  Heller looked around, thought he might find an answer at a nearby table. When nothing surfaced, he looked helplessly at his new friend, tried his best to seem understanding.

  The Haitian saw Heller was drawing a blank, laughed. “Christoph Toussaint. Remember me? You brought me the news about my woman in Haiti. I wasn’t planning on killing myself, I was just talking a lot of talk. Man talk. You know how a woman can make a man weak in the knees, especially when she is taken away, but . . . it turns out you were right. Two weeks after you told me about the death of my girlfriend, luck smiled on me again. Did I mention she speaks French?”

  Before Heller could answer, Silvia was at their table again. She placed a saucer in front of Heller, a spoon for stirring.

  “Cream or sugar?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Heller answered.

  “Both?”

  “Creamy.”

  “Cream,” Silvia said, about to turn when Christoph took hold of her arm, stopped her.

  “Yes, dear,” he said, charm radiating from his smile. “I would like just a cup of hot water, please.”

  “Just hot water?”

  “Yes,” he explained, pulling a silver case out of his pocket. “I bring my own herbs with me, specially grown by my mother. You can charge me the price of a tea—I don’t mind, darling.”

  She nodded, made a note in her pad.

  “You really are something else, girl,” he said, beaming. “Look at you. You have such fine, dark hair. . . .”

  Silvia looked embarrassed, but she smiled nonetheless, and it may have been genuine.

  “And th
ose eyes. I promise you, you must turn the head of every man in this place. Tell me I’m right.” Christoph turned to Heller. “Isn’t she something?”

  Heller couldn’t bring himself to conjure a simple nod.

  “Just water?” Silvia asked again.

  “Just water, beautiful,” Christoph said.

  Silvia walked back behind the counter. Heller kept close watch on her as she filled a cup with hot water. Some of the steam drifted into her face, left beads of precipitation resting there. Silvia picked up a napkin, wiped her cheeks free of water. Her shirt lifted slightly, exposing her belly button.

  Round stomach.

  Heller felt his own stomach turn with a painful glee.

  “She’s a beautiful girl.”

  Heller’s attention snapped back to Christoph. “What?”

  “She was a beautiful girl,” Christoph said, “but it’s amazing how fast things can make themselves better. . . . Death can be so strange. You know?”

  Heller felt a sudden pressure in his head. “I know . . .”

  “Ah, well, you’re young,” Christoph said. “There is so much left for you to discover.”

  Silvia returned with the cream and hot water. She didn’t stay any longer than she needed to, just walked over to her next table. There wasn’t much joy or enthusiasm, just something Heller couldn’t escape—her ability to continue. . . .

  “When I first started coming here, she was working in the kitchen,” Heller said, suddenly aware he was talking. “She worked in the kitchen. You’d hardly catch a glimpse of her. . . . Now she’s here. Now she’s here, and look at how great she’s doing. . . .”

  Christoph showed approval for all things with his smile.

  Heller bit his lip and reached for the cream.

  He was about to pour it in his coffee when he noticed a string hanging out of his cup. He pulled at it, lifted a tea bag up from its depths. Drops of water dripped down from the end, rhythmically. He stared at it.

  “Oh, hey, man,” Christoph said, “if I had known you were asking for tea, I would have let you have some of my herbs. Much better than anything that comes in a bag. You should come to my place sometime. My woman will cook for the both of us. First woman I’ve met in this country who can actually cook plantains . . .”