When the song was perhaps halfway over the bus stopped again and leaned down to admit a group of passengers. At the front of the group was a short, older man in dark blue clothes and a matching cap—Lucy’s phantom. He had Hui’s face, I saw. He winked at me and then found a seat, crossed his ankle over his knee, and closed his eyes. Behind him were the two soldiers and their guide, their clothes still torn, still dirty. Their rifles banged against the metal poles and handholds as they came down the aisle. The soldiers found seats, settled their rifle butts on the floor, and closed their eyes. Hui pulled a small red book from his jacket and offered it to the guide, who accepted it with a smile and a deep bow of his head. He opened it and began to read, his lips moving slightly. Behind him were four women, Chinese, all of them identical, wearing matching cheongsams, their hands stained with black ink. They sat in a row, shoulder to shoulder, and folded their hands into their laps. The bus began to move again. The song swelled.
Zhang boarded at the next stop. He came into the back, sat down, and studied the musician’s hands as he worked at the strings. Mae came aboard next, walking slowly, painfully on her bound feet, helped along by two of her maids. They were followed by Bing, who looked frail, dried out, the shell of a man. They sat down in the first open seats, ahead of the mahjong players. Li-Yu and Rose came next, walking hand in hand. They sat down near Zhang and joined him in listening to the music.
At the next stop my dad climbed aboard. He dropped his coins into the fare box and tottered down the aisle, leaning heavily on the bus’s poles, his breathing laborious. He looked exactly as I remembered him in those final days of his life.
He took the seat next to me. The music diminished to a whisper.
“Hello, Peregrine,” he said.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“Give me a minute,” he said, “and then we can talk.”
“Sure,” I said.
The bus continued to plunge through the city. Faint changes of light and color were all I could see through the windows. After a few blocks his breath came back to him.
“So you’ve been okay?” he said.
“I guess so,” I said. “You?”
“I can’t complain,” he said. “But listen. I hear you found out about that swimming pool thing.”
I nodded.
“I’m sure sorry about that,” he said. He looked sad. “It won’t happen again.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m all right.”
He shrugged. “Maybe so. Still, though.”
“It’s okay,” I said again.
We stopped at a light. The musician ended his song and began another, something a little faster. Dad looked up. “Crowded bus today,” he said.
I nodded. Our fellow passengers all wore expressions of peace, their eyes closed or half-closed as they listened to the music, or read. In this shared state of repose they were the embodiment of patience, of contentment; it seemed as though they could abide a bus ride of ten thousand miles, so long as they had the music to listen to, and the book to pass around, and the warmth of the bus’s heaters, and the purr of its engine, which seemed now to be coming across a very great distance. We drifted another block or two before my dad spoke again.
“Listen, I’ve been wondering something,” he said. His brow rippled with thought and he was chewing on the corner of his bottom lip, a habit of his I hadn’t thought of in a decade.
“Yeah?” I said.
“I’ve been wondering how you did it,” he said.
“How I did what?”
“How you went back,” he said. He scratched his head, right fingertips to left temple, another long-forgotten but instantly recognizable tic of his. “My experiences here haven’t shed much light on the question.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember anything.”
“Of course, of course,” he said, almost looking embarrassed he’d asked. When it came to other people his curiosity had always been minimal. He was a man who had only posed questions to his computers, to the potential of the intellectual frontiers he’d explored. “And of course, the circumstances were entirely different. About as different as they could have been.”
I nodded. The erhu’s song continued, slower again. Our fellow passengers were still silent, motionless; those who had their eyes open were not looking at one another but into space. My dad pointed at the fogged window, and behind it the nebulous shapes of the city filing past. “Strange,” he said. “You can hardly see a thing. We could be anywhere.” We rode together in silence for a few more blocks, and then he leaned forward. “This is my stop,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
He paused. “You take care of yourself,” he said, “and your sister.” He worked his way back up the aisle as the bus slowed and pulled over, and then he was gone. At the next stop Li-Yu and Rose climbed down, and then Bing and Mae at the next. Zhang exited next, followed by the mahjong players and the soldiers and Lucy’s phantom. The musician finished his song, packed up his erhu, and climbed down at the following stop. A group of teenage girls boarded, shopping bags dangling from their arms. They took seats, chatting noisily. The engines grew loud again; knots of stiffness arose in my hips, my back. I shifted in my seat and wiped away the fog on the window. We were not far from my neighborhood, heading up Van Ness, whose shops and restaurants were lit and bright and busy despite the rain. The bus turned and climbed back up Russian Hill. A block short of my building I reached down and groped for my laptop bag. My hand closed on empty air. I shifted my legs and looked under my seat, and under the seat next to mine, and the one in front of me and the one in front of that. It was gone.
***
“Where the hell have you been?” Lucy asked. She was sitting on the couch next to Eva, holding a beer. The red book sat on the table.
“Have you been writing?” Eva asked. “You took your computer.”
“On the bus,” I said. “And no.”
“What bus?” Lucy said. “Where did you go?”
“Muni,” I said. “Nowhere.”
“What do you mean, ‘nowhere’? You’ve been gone all day.”
“Why? What time is it?”
“Almost five.”
“That doesn’t seem right,” I said.
“Okay,” Lucy said, “you’re right. I just made that up, because I enjoy being wrong about easily verifiable facts.” She took a swallow of her beer. “What do you mean, ‘nowhere’?”
“Nowhere,” I said. “My car doesn’t work.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“I was hoping maybe you might have been writing,” Eva said.
“I’m aware of that,” I said. I sat down at my desk and started rubbing my temples. The parade of characters still filled my mind; I’d never had a dream so organized, so literal. Even the bus’s advertising placards had been accurate—local tax lawyers, the MOMA, Giants season tickets.
“What did you find out about that book?” I asked Lucy.
“It’s a cookbook,” she said.
“A cookbook?”
“Yes,” she said. “Tofu recipes.”
“I thought they were poems.”
“They are,” Eva said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Tofu recipes, every page,” Lucy said.
“Says who?” I said.
“Says Chinatown,” she said.
“A tofu cookbook in verse?” I said.
“Maybe we still need your girlfriend,” Lucy said. “Have you called her yet?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, you should.”
“I can’t,” I said. “My phone got stolen.”
“You’re that scared of her? She seemed pretty friendly to me.”
“It really did get stolen. On the bus. Along with my computer.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes.” I turned to Eva. “So no, no writing.”
Lucy sat forward, her eyes bright. I was reminded of her enthusiasm for theft. �
��You got mugged? Someone stuck you up? Gun? Knife?”
“I think I fell asleep,” I said.
She sat back, clearly disappointed. “You fell asleep and someone swiped your bag? That’s lame.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try to do a better job of getting robbed next time.”
“Good,” she said. “You missed a great opportunity.”
During our exchange, Eva had been making small movements, and now I saw that she’d been gathering her things together. She rose to her feet and pulled on her coat. And then I saw her face. She looked stricken.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Where are you going?”
She didn’t answer.
Lucy looked up and understood something in Eva’s face or in her movements and with an almost audible snap her entire demeanor changed. She leapt from the couch. “Eva, wait!” she said. “It’s just a coincidence! Give it some more time. You’ll see!”
Eva ignored her. She buttoned up her coat, shouldered her bag, and headed toward the door.
“Eva, please!” Lucy said. “You’ve got to believe me!”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “She’ll see what?”
“Fuck, fuck,” Lucy muttered. She took a few lunging steps toward Eva, but she turned her foot on the edge of one of her suitcases, stumbled, and would have fallen had she not been able to catch herself on another stack of luggage. Eva yanked the door open, stepped through, and slammed it closed. “Eva!” Lucy yelled again. We listened to her footfalls recede, and then we listened to the machinery of the elevator carry her away.
***
In the quiet that followed her departure I came to understand that I was on the verge of completely abandoning all attempts to make sense of my life that month. I’d just been robbed and I’d just had a chat with my father, either of which should have been enough to leave me reeling. In the context of these last few weeks, though, they seemed almost mundane. Lucy had come to know things, somehow, and maybe I should have been alight with curiosity about what, and how, and why Eva had just stormed out, and maybe a half-dozen other things somebody with a more level head might have seen fit to question. But fatigue had come over me, and it filled all the spaces that curiosity and ambition might have occupied otherwise. In that thin slice of my life I once considered professional, there were other pressures mounting—all my progress reports would be due in just over forty-eight hours, and I knew I hadn’t heard the end of my decision to send one of my students on an errand that had almost killed him. It was now the first of February; I was sure there were January bills still waiting to be paid.
“She’s gone,” Lucy said, “and she’s not coming back.”
“Maybe that’s okay,” I said. “It would be nice if things could get a little simpler around here.”
“That’s what you’re concerned about right now?” she said. “Simplicity? Are you really that incurious?”
“No,” I said. “I’m plenty curious. But I’m sort of habituated to strangeness at this point. When something normal and explicable happens, that will get my attention.”
“I’m glad you think this is a good time for sarcasm. That’s helpful.” She reached for her coat. “Get your shit,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“I need to tell you some things. But first I need to get the hell out of this apartment.”
We made our way down to Polk Street and found a table at a café. She ordered a burger and a beer; I ordered an omelet and coffee.
“Bring him a beer, too,” she told our waitress. She turned to me. “You’re going to need it,” she said. “Are you ready?”
“For what?”
“What would you say if I told you that several times Eva told me what you were going to write?”
The hair on my arms stood up. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, she did,” Lucy said. “Several times. Specifics.”
“Like what?”
“Like a lot of things. Like how long they would be in China, and how they got away, down the river. So tell me: How is that possible?”
I shook my head. The lights in the café seemed too bright. I closed my eyes and pressed my palms into them until I saw fireworks.
“Well, unlike you, Eva was actually trying to figure out what was going on here. She had some theories. Do you want to hear them?”
“Enlighten me,” I said.
Two open bottles of beer arrived, along with a cup of coffee. I reached for the beer.
“You know the Theory of the Thieving Historian,” Lucy said, grabbing her own bottle. “She gave that up after about two days and replaced it with the Theory of the Unwitting Psychic Channeler. The names are mine, by the way, thank you very much.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m neither of those things.”
“Unwitting,” Lucy said. “It means you wouldn’t know if you were.”
I took a long gulp and my beer crackled and fizzed in my throat. I suppressed a cough.
“But then, because your stories matched hers so closely, she sharpened that one until it was the Theory of Henry Incarnate.”
“Meaning?”
“You’re Henry.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“Compared to what?” she said.
Our food arrived, sending plumes of steam up into the space between us. She smacked out a blob of ketchup and plunged a bundle of fries into it. I didn’t feel like eating. I sucked down more beer and watched my coffee cool.
“At the same time,” she said, chewing now, “she was wondering about herself. So she developed the Alternate Theory of Amnesia and Suggestibility. In that one, she is an amnesiac who remembers nothing about her real past, and somehow she has become convinced that your story is hers, and she’s letting you dictate her memories to her.”
“That’s crazy, too,” I said.
“You can stop saying that,” Lucy said. “It’s all crazy. Especially that one. Because, as I told you, she knew what you were going to write before you wrote it.”
“I don’t know about that. So why did she leave?”
“Because your stories ended at the same time,” she said.
“Who said mine ended?”
“Henry disappeared from Angel Island in the summer of 1929,” she said, “and that was the last thing anybody knew about him.”
“Who said mine ended?”
She chewed off a hunk of her burger. “You couldn’t write last night,” she said, through a full mouth, while smearing a rivulet of beef juice across her chin with the back of her wrist. “You crossed out all those things in your notebook. And then your laptop vanished.”
“It didn’t vanish. It got stolen.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s gone. And that was enough to convince her of the truth of her final theory.”
“Which was?”
“The Theory of Utter Delusion.” She washed down her bite with half her beer bottle. “You’re a delusion. So am I. You, me, your apartment, your story, The Barbary Quarterly. We’re all hallucinations, and she’s really dead and in purgatory, or in a coma at SF General, or caught in some CIA mind-fuck experiment. So you’re really an embodiment of some part of her mind, and since she doesn’t know anything in the story beyond Angel Island, you can’t either. Sounds crazy as everything else, but I have to admit, she had some pretty compelling arguments.” She hoisted her burger again. “Still feeling habituated?” she said.
Maybe there was an explanation for Eva’s predictions about my story. Either she or Lucy had the chronology wrong, and Eva wasn’t foretelling the story, but repeating what she’d read, and somewhere in the process the events had been reversed. Or maybe I really wasn’t inventing my story after all, but echoing something I’d heard or read too long ago to remember, something that had stayed in some deep part of me and was now resurfacing in disguise. I’d rejected this explanation the first time it came up, but now that the hidden messages in my mazes had appeared, I had to reconsider the possib
ility.
I finished my beer and as the alcohol worked its way through me the problem turned over in my mind. I saw it not for all its complexity but as a simple pair of options—a pair of options that would keep me up all night. Either Eva wasn’t crazy, and there really was some invisible link between my story and Henry’s, which would mean I had to accept the orchestrations of forces well beyond my understanding. Or perhaps she was crazy—which would mean I was so entwined in her craziness as to be inseparable from it.
SIXTEEN
It was immediately after the first bell the next morning when the endmost fifty feet of Russian Hill Elementary School’s oblong concrete foundation broke clean off, with a sound like thunder, and slid down a newly created cliffside, carrying upon its back Annabel’s disintegrating kindergarten classroom, which it deposited directly beneath a cataract of mud and water.
I had arrived that morning and adjusted my route to pass by the cafeteria, where I hoped to see Annabel and to find out if we were quarreling, but the folding tables and chairs that had served as her temporary classroom furnishings had all been put away and the room was its usual dark echoing space.
A Paper Son Page 24