Crossing (2010)

by Andrew Xia Fukuda

  There’s a dead cat lying there. He almost stepped on it in the darkness. Because he is so focused on the cat, he doesn’t notice the dark figure climbing the stairs behind him.

  Justin stoops lower to take a closer look. The cat has bled from the head, profusely. This isn’t a natural death, not with these injuries. More like roadkill. Only…how has the cat ended up here?

  And something else. The cat wasn’t here when he crossed over just twenty minutes prior. He sniffs, doesn’t smell rot or decay.

  Shards of glass being stepped on. From behind him. He spins around.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” The face so close, Justin can see little specks of saliva on the wet, blubbering lips.

  “Well, you did, damn it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  There shouldn’t be anything to be afraid of. Not of this person anyway, a person who should be more afraid of him, really. But for some unfathomable reason, Justin is afraid.

  As if reading his mind, the person says, “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Don’t be scared.”

  “I keep telling you I’m not.”

  “Scaredy cat.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Scaredy cat. That’s what you are.”

  Justin takes a step backwards. “Look, why don’t you just—”

  “Meow. Meow. Just like this scared little cat. It went meow, meow. You’re just like this cat. Meow.”

  Justin doesn’t respond. On the football field he has faced down towering opponents, hulking masses of brute strength. He has dealt with much worse than the lithe figure in front of him. But there is something nakedly off-kilter about this person, disconcertingly askew. Justin backpedals on suddenly wobbly legs.

  “Oh,” and there is genuine pity on the face, “are you trying to get away?”

  And it is that pity, so sincere and sure of itself, that causes Justin to turn and run.

  “You can try to get away,” Justin hears from behind him, “just like this cat did.”

  For the first time in his life, Justin feels raw horror. And then he feels a blackness, a coldness, then nothing at all.

  SEPTEMBER 10

  It was Mr. Brooks, the school janitor for over three decades, who came across the frozen corpse. It was early in the morning, barely past dawn, when he noticed a mysterious, dark lump at the flagpole. He headed over. At first, he thought it was all a prank. Some jokesters had planted a mannequin; they were probably filming him from some secret spot, hoping to embarrass him on YouTube. But as he drew closer, his steps slowed first with uncertainty then with dawning horror. The body was too real, and the face was suddenly too recognizable. It was the face of Justin Dorsey, encrusted with ice, ashen and ghostlike. Within ten minutes, police cars were shrieking onto school grounds.

  Only a few students saw the body. Sensitive to the effect a corpse would have on high schoolers, police rushed their on-scene operations. What should have taken at least five hours to complete was wrapped up in under two. By the time the majority of students arrived at school, the stiffened body had long since been whisked away. Only a few police officers milled around, keeping at bay a growing mass of reporters.

  Word of what happened whipped around school in a frenzy. Students huddled in groups to gossip or gabbed away on their cell phones. A few fainted; others could be seen trembling with tear-streaked faces, inconsolable. Counselors were quickly brought in. Some parents came by to pick up their reluctant—and somewhat embarrassed—children. No one knew why the principal didn’t cancel school.

  I eavesdropped as much as possible in the hallways and corridors. Most of it was wild speculation: Dorsey was decapitated; he was strangled; there were knife wounds on him; he had committed suicide. It was impossible to separate truth from fiction. I wanted to find Naomi to see what she knew, but in the chaos of the day she was impossible to find.

  So I walked around aimlessly, meandering along the eastern wing, a secluded area of school. I was halfway down the corridor on the second floor when I made a disconcerting discovery: Trey Logan. He had just walked out of a restroom, still zipping his fly, directly in front of me. His zipper was jammed, so his attention was temporarily distracted. His bruised eye was a hazy smear of spilled ink, fainter now. Voices emanated from the restroom, leering sneers uncomfortably familiar. I froze with indecision. If I just stood perfectly stationary, maybe he wouldn’t see me, maybe I would blend into my surroundings, maybe—

  I knew better.

  I reached for a doorknob to my left, keeping my eyes trained on Logan. Through just a crack, I—ghostlike—slipped through. I closed the door quickly, quietly, ear pressed against the door, foot jammed rigid against the bottom of the door. It never occurred to me to look behind me.

  “Can I help you?” said an impatient voice from inside the classroom.

  I spun around. I was in the music room, a large, spare room entombed by the dreary faces of dead composers hung within dusty frames on all walls. A grand piano stood in the dead center of the room; next to it, stern and pale, was Mr. Theodore Matthewman, the music teacher. His demeanor was identical to the portraits around him, as if he’d just stepped out of one himself.

  “Well, speak up, boy!” His voice was a raspy collection of phlegm.

  I fidgeted, tugged at my left sleeve. “What! Lost your tongue, boy?” He glared at me. “Do you even speak English?”

  I briefly thought of easing the door open just a crack to see if Logan had moved on. But I heard voices—no more than a mere foot or two on the other side—jocular and berating. So this was my dilemma: in front of me, the cantankerous and crotchety Mr. Matthewman; behind me, the voices of gang-terrorism. I chose the lesser of two evils.

  “I…came…in…here…” I stammered, having no idea of what I was going to say next.

  He leaned forward as if on an invisible cane. His face pinched like an imploding papier-mâché. “Get out! You’re wasting my time!”

  I could still hear the voices. “I came in…to…try…try…” His eyes suddenly widened, naked with ridicule. “For the tryout? To audition?” He pushed his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose. “To audition? You?” His craggy eyes moved up and down my person, incredulous. “Well, speak up!”

  Mr. Matthewman carried with him a reputation of being a piano maestro long past his heyday, a man whose considerable gifts were never fully realized because of some scandal when he was a professor at Julliard. Now he was only a shell of the man he’d once been, full of sour spit and rancid breath.

  “Here for the audition?” His voice was still incredulous.

  “Speak up or get out of here.”

  And before I really knew what I was saying, I heard myself say, “Yes. Here for The Man from Bethlehem.”

  “Jerusalem!” he barked at me. “At least get the name straight.” His eyes seared through me as he walked slowly back to the piano, muttering. He thumbed his way through a stack of music sheets. “You know that the lead position has already been filled?”

  “Yes.” In fact, everyone knew. The name Anthony Hasbourd had become synonymous with Lead Singer in School Production. He was a mediocre singer whose parents had the misbegotten idea that he was the next Josh Groban. He flaunted and preened every year on stage, conveniently forgetting that he had “won” the lead only because his parents financed the productions. So nobody bothered to audition against him since it was simply assumed the role belonged to him.

  Matthewman squinted his eyes at me, shriveling me down. “Are you sure you want to audition?” He waited, his body hunched over.

  I didn’t say anything; he coughed into his hands, then flung his arm out. A sheet of music hung on the end of it, stiff and crinkly. I took it, staring dumbly at it.

  “Very well, then. Let’s do this.” His fingers touched the keyboard and began to play. His eyes were fixed on me. He was curious.

  It had been many years since I last sang. There was a time, back i
n my village in China, when I sang all the time. Whole days spent fishing with my father on the Chengzi River, my voice rising with the dawn sun; then through the hot afternoon, in cadence with the lazy sound of water lapping against the wood boat. Mine was a beautiful voice, so my father used to tell me, as mesmerizing as a thousand shooting stars. And my parents wanted me to sing all the time, I remember, especially in the hot summer nights when the town lost electricity and the small bedroom fan stood limp and useless. Sing us to sleep, Xing, they pleaded. Help us forget the heat. And I would sing soft lullabies in the dark until they stopped wiping sweat from their brows and kicking at invisible blankets at their feet. Sandwiched between them, feeling their body heat humming against me, I never felt safer, never felt calmer, than when I sang into the night even after they had fallen asleep. But after I arrived on the shores of America, I did not sing very much. Something seemed to lodge itself into my throat, inhibiting me. In the cacophony of foreign sounds flooding my ears, I lost my ability to speak, much less sing. I became quiet; I diminished. Over time, I sang less and less, until all those songs I’d once cherished disappeared somewhere within me. And one day I stopped singing altogether.

  Mr. Matthewman’s eyes blazed into me, as if daring me. His fingers danced gracefully across the keyboard like a separate animal.

  I stared down at the notes in my hands. They looked as foreign to me as English words once had. I stood very, very still. The stillness of the clueless.

  And when the moment came, I made as gallant an effort as I could.

  There are a number of ways to describe the noise that scraped out of my voice box. A pigeon’s beak scratched across the blackboard, a shard of glass scraped against a rusty pipe, a fork dragged hard against a car’s iced-over windscreen. Mr. Matthewman’s face said it all, a look of surprised agony.

  “What in…?”

  I held up my hand pathetically. “I’m sorry, Mr. Matthewman. I…I think I can do better.” I looked down at the music sheets. “Please, sir, I think I can do better.”

  “Is this some sick joke?” His eyes were smoldering pieces of coal. “Get out!”

  “Please, Mr. Matthewman!” It was the loudest I’d ever spoken to a teacher. “Give me just one last shot.”

  There must have been something in my voice, some look in my face, because he did just that. He gave me one last chance.

  But when I opened my mouth to sing, out came the pigeon’s beak, the glass shard, the fork. All came tumbling out.

  Trey Logan and his gang were gone by the time I walked out of the music room, not that I cared anymore. I felt strangely discombobulated. It wasn’t until I splashed water on my face in the restroom that I was able to put a label to my knotted feelings.

  I was angry at my failure.

  The audition was only a stupid thing I had to do. A cowardly way of escape in an unwelcoming burrow as I waited for predators to pass on by outside. Yet why was the crumpled paper still in my hand, why my refusal to throw it away?

  I looked down at it. The notes were still nothing more than black ink marks. My hands crushed the sheet into a ball, crinkling it, the sound filling the hollow right angles of the tiled room.

  I heard the soft piano notes in my mind. They were coming back to me, their gentle initial cadence. It was cold in the bathroom, but my insides were hot with frustration. The notes. I was hearing them now. The way I should have heard them. Not trying to match them up with the black ink on paper. I reached for the light switch and turned it off. Curtains of darkness fell all around me. Still not dark enough. I shut my eyes.

  This was how I had sung during those two awful weeks when I crossed the seas to America. In total darkness. On a cargo ship, locked in with dozens of others in a container. It had been stifling hot in that tin can, suffocating; but what I remember most was not the heat but the darkness. An endless black night without moon, without stars, the allure of America almost lost in the stench of human perspiration, desperation, urine, and worse. Tired yet unable to sleep, my parents would ask me to sing, as they had on stifling summer nights before. I was happy to oblige. Timidly at first, afraid of the darkness, of the faceless voices barking and crying in the black void, I would whisper out a few lines. But they would quiet whenever I began to sing, until—but for the occasional cough or sneeze in the hot darkness—a hush would befall us. In that hush, I sang. And it was as if cool mountain breezes came upon us; as if river waters suddenly flowed over our toes; as if the graceful dusk sun splashed down on our uplifted faces.

  “Sing ‘Autumn Moon on the Calm Lake,’” they would request of me. “Sing ‘The Glow of the Setting Sun on the Lei Fong Pagoda.’ Now sing ‘Orioles Singing in the Willows.’” Always I did. “Sing ‘Snow on the Broken Bridge.’ ‘Evening Knell on the Nan Ping.’ ‘Viewing Fish in Huagang.’” And I did. Over and over. I never sang as beautifully as I did in those two weeks.

  And now for the first time in years, I felt a trembling in me again. With one hand pressed against the cold, tiled wall, I sealed my eyes shut. I replayed the gentle cadence in my head, the prodding of piano notes. The pitch. And the cold of the restroom began to recede, the sound of notes sharpening.

  Now, I told myself. Now.

  A long-lost voice sprang out of me. The windows shook in astonishment.

  And I sang. I felt the words arch up out of me like molten ore. All these years, bottled within, germinating, now finding release. The music vibrated in me, a jaunty horse restless to be released. I felt the cadence of the song, a flowing carpet that lifted me high. I harnessed my voice, nuanced out the slightest inflections of sounds. And when at last the final note trailed out into a stillness, I was breathless.

  I opened my eyes. I saw the look of wonder on my face in the hazy mirror. I was shaking slightly from side to side. Trembling.

  The door. Sometime during my singing, it had opened and I hadn’t even noticed. There was someone standing there. He had one hand lifted in front of his gaping mouth like a shy geisha. Astonished. Bewildered. Stupefied.

  Enchanted.

  It was Mr. Matthewman.

  SEPTEMBER 12

  You’re not joking?” she asked.

  It was a couple days later on a late Friday afternoon. Naomi and I sat in the mostly vacant food court, in that gap of time after housewives had left but before the hoards of Friday night revelers arrived. I’d been biding my time to tell her about the audition. I wanted to do it where it was quiet, and with all the pandemonium at school over the last few days, this was my first opportunity.

  “You are. You are joking, right?” she said.

  “No,” I said for the second time, this time barely able to conceal my annoyance.

  “I can’t believe,” she said, pulling her eyebrows together in a soft, irritating arch, “that Mr. Matthewman thinks you can take the lead role. I mean, I’ve heard you sing, Xing. I know what you sound like.” She sent me a smile that I knew wasn’t meant to be unkind.

  “You’ve never heard me sing.”

  “My point exactly. In music class way back when, you just stood silent, you hmm hmm hmm-ed your way through class.”

  “But you’ve never really heard me sing. Mr. Matthewman thinks I’m good enough.”

  Her fingers drummed against the table. A few seconds lapsed. Then she took a deep breath. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, OK, Xing? I’m sure you did really well at the audition and everything, but…”

  I leaned back in my seat. “What? Just say it, will you?”

  “It’s no secret that Matthewman hates Anthony Hasbourd. Hates the fact that the school makes him coach Hasbourd every year for the school production. Hates the way Hasbourd’s parents think their son is too good for him.”

  “I know. So what are you saying?”

  “It’s just that…” She looked at me. “Do you think he might be using you to get back at Hasbourd?”

  I reached down and stuffed a spring roll into my mouth. I chewed slowly. “I’m not replacing Hasbourd. I’m
only going to be his understudy. I just wanted you to know of the audition, that it went well.”

  “I’m sorry, Xing,” she said, leaning forward towards me sincerely. “I didn’t mean to say anything hurtful.”

  “You weren’t there. How do you know what I sounded like?”

  “I’ve known you my whole life, practically. I know what you sound like.”

  “But you weren’t there when I auditioned. You have no idea what I can sound like.” I took the last spring roll, the one I had been planning on leaving for her, and rammed it in. I chewed hard, vigorously. “It doesn’t matter in any case,” I said through a mouthful. “Hasbourd’s still got the lead.”

  She looked at me and didn’t say anything.

  I chewed harder, swallowed. Sometimes I could just about kill her.

  “What exactly did Matthewman say?”

  “He thought I was amazing and told me so.” I could still hear the words resonating in my ears. “He said I was raw but had real talent.”

  “I’m sorry, I just can’t see it.”

  I picked up my cup and sipped through the straw, sucking up pockets of empty air. “He said he wants me to come in early every morning to practice. I don’t know if I should or not. Probably not. I don’t know.”

  The truth: I was confused. The thought that maybe it was just an aberrational fluke had crossed my mind a thousand times. Maybe it was just the acoustics of the bathroom or a once-in-a-billion, never-to-be-repeated freakish moment.

  I wanted to switch topics, and quickly. I knew exactly what to do. Deep down, past the nice-girl act, Naomi believed the world revolved around her. Talk about her, and her eyes would illuminate, her head would become just that little more animated.

  “Anyway, I was really nervous at the audition,” I said.

  “What do you usually do to calm yourself down before singing? I mean, you’re doing a duet at church tonight, right?”

  “Well,” she said, perking up. I had her. “It’s important to keep yourself warm; drink a lot of warm fluids. Look,” she said, pointing at her cup of Lipton tea, “see?” She swiped a few strands of hair that had come loose behind her ear. Two strands sashayed before her prominent cheekbones. “And the worst thing you can do is worry too much about it. Do something fun. Hang out with friends. Get your mind off it for a while. Look.” She pointed at the two of us, her index finger swiveling around like a door opening and closing between us. “See?” And she smiled in that incandescent, winning way of hers.