But she does not dream of this. Instead she dreams of her and Casey as children. There she is, ridiculously grown-up nose and lips in an eight-year-old face, running through the back lane behind Rain’s house, where they used to play hide-and-go-seek with other neighbourhood kids. Casey has found her and is chasing her as fast as he can with his little paper-white legs, his close-cropped helmet of orange barely moving in the breeze. She’s faster but he doesn’t let up, just keeps coming until she throws herself onto a patch of green, green grass that appears from nowhere in the middle of the pebbly, skin-shredding concrete. He flops down on top of her, face flaming as his hair, panting like a puppy. “You’re it,” he says. “You’re it.”
So she finds herself once again walking through the hideous big-box parking lot, what Rain calls the planet-killing suburban plague. As she passes an ancient, gas-guzzling pickup, a mangy black dog watches her from his perch in the truck bed. He looks so expectant that she stops for a moment and stares back, and then he is bounding towards her, up and over the side of the truck, and she is scrambling back to avoid his flying, filthy bulk. He lands on the unforgiving concrete like a drunk jungle cat, and she backs away slowly, careful not to make more eye contact, rifling through her mental notes of the animal behaviour unit of last year’s biology class. But there is no tail wagging, no ear bending, no back arching that gives her a clue. He makes no attempt to follow her, simply watches her go with the same curious, expectant look.
Once again, she finds herself back under those hideous fluorescents, behind that counter/cage one last time, because whatever that dog might think, she is not one to walk away. Her ugly grandmother was also known for not suffering fools gladly.
It’s Friday night, but the end of cottage season is nigh. Though it’s still sticky hot outside, preparations have begun to close things up, or shut things down, for another long, dead winter. Casey and Dorri must make sandwiches alongside each other as silently as they did that very first shift. She must wait until the bitter end, until the closing in ten minutes blah blah blah announcement has been made.
“I thought we were friends.”
Heard out loud, just like that, it suddenly seems true enough. But it’s too late, because Casey is done with that shit. Last year, he’d known from the beginning that Rowan was the one who’d posted the image, the one that featured Casey the Puppet and “Casey Jr.,” side by side. Only Rowan had access to that photo of Casey in the morning, his bright hair plastered to his forehead, his stick arms hanging limply at his sides. Only Rowan would think it was okay to use his obsessive Photoshop skills to burn a friend.
“Hey, you have to laugh at yourself, cut them off at the knees,” Rowan had said. “You have to express how you royally don’t give a shit.”
And only a nobody pussy like Casey would let it go, would decide it was too much trouble to kick Rowan to the curb.
“It just happened,” Casey says to her. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
Dorri can’t help it. Such unexpected, uncharacteristic scorn makes her laugh. “Wow. Stress makes you feisty.”
Casey stares. He is either going to hit her or start to cry. “My mom’s hair is falling out again. She says it’s stress.”
Dorri can’t stop laughing. She imagines his mother giving new meaning to the phrase pulling your hair out.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
She takes him by the bony elbow, leads him behind the drink cooler. She unties the knot behind her neck, lifts the creamy silk scarf from her head, holds it up like a flag of surrender.
Her hair is not long, like he imagined. It’s all one length and it hugs her sharp jawline. Suddenly free, a few strands fall over her right eye. He brushes it aside and she lets him.
“There,” she says. “Okay? No big deal. It’s hair.”
Once, a long, long time ago, before he met Rowan, Casey found a small stone at the beach near his grandparents’ hobby farm. On a sunny day it seemed so black it was almost blue, and for the whole summer he carried it in his pocket so he could rub that impossibly smooth, shiny darkness whenever he felt like it. Then it was run through the washer, and his mom thoughtlessly tossed it, and he forgot about it.
“Okay,” he says.
Dorri expertly reties the scarf and goes to count twenties. “Okay then. We’re good.”
Casey doesn’t move, wonders if maybe he was right to hope all along, maybe life is full of surprises.
Little Emperor
Four Facts and Some Speculation
1. The world’s two most populated countries—China and India—together constitute nearly 40% of the world’s population.
2. Toilet paper was invented in China in the late 1300s. It was for emperors only.
3. The Three Gorges Hydroelectric Dam spans the Yangtze River and is the largest dam in the world. It is also the most controversial, its construction having been marred by corruption charges, human rights violations, technological difficulties, and the dramatic environmental changes it has caused.
4. China’s “one child” policy has contributed to female infanticide and has created a significant gender imbalance. There are currently 32 million more boys than girls in China. In the future, tens of millions of men will be unable to find wives, prompting some scholars to suggest that this imbalance could lead to a threat to world security.
Historians speculate that as the Chinese population grew, people had to conserve cooking fuel by chopping food into small pieces so that it could cook faster. These bite-sized foods eliminated the need for knives and, hence, chopsticks were invented.
* * *
I have been inside many days, so many I’ve lost count, when the screaming begins. I am in the kitchen, staring at the mountain of soiled dishes, so many I’ve lost count of them as well. It is a faint scream, if there can be such a thing—a scream from far away. But it is coming from below, so is really quite close, one floor or ceiling away, depending how you look at it.
I have heard nothing, not one thing, from inside this apartment until the screaming. This is what they call them here—the individual spaces are “apartments” and the entire buildings are “apartment blocks.” This block, constructed many decades ago, probably when China still had an emperor and who knows who ran things here, is built of brick and is oddly silent—soundproof, they call it. One night, not long after I arrived, before the attack, the people next to me, my neighbours, they had many, many people over, played music at high volumes, and I heard nothing until I stepped out to go buy some tea. This is how I think of my time here now—before the attack (BA) and after the attack (AA), like Christians measure time based on the birth and death of their crucified saviour.
It’s hard to believe someone can scream so long without taking a breath. It is really quite astonishing. She must have fine lungs, must have spent her life in the crisp, healthy air of Canada. In China, they throw buildings up out of cardboard and the air is sick. My parents, they laughed and laughed at the name of this place—WI-NEE-PEG—but not too hard, because it is my ticket to success. They would stand in awe at the luxurious space I have in this one apartment, this completely soundproof space, except for the faint screaming. They would not believe the metres and metres of real estate devoted to parked cars. They would not believe a city could have so many trees, so many you think you see a forest from the tenth floor. But they don’t ask about such things. Instead they go on about problems at work, gossip about my old schoolmates. They make demands: “Speak to us. Show us your English.”
If they only knew! They go on and on and I tell them nothing. For how can I explain to them what I cannot explain to myself? Like how many days has it been since I have left this apartment? How long have I been taking the candy-coloured pills to manage the pain? The doctor, not the first one, who did the surgery, but the second, who did what he called “follow-up,” uttered that precious phrase—manage the pain. But it was Kyla who helped me to understand. It was Kyla who appeared at the bedside like a guard
ian spirit, a Christian angel with a gift for languages whose sole purpose was to ease the pain.
Her lips were a little thin and her shoulders a little broad, but she was there and she was mine, and she seemed the perfect woman. “My Chinese is spotty,” she’d said. “But I’m just a volunteer and I’m better than nothing.”
My mother, had she known, would have clucked her tongue at Kyla’s peasant stock, an unwanted second girl abandoned amongst the sweet potatoes at some market in Guangzhou province. But neither of them, not my ancestor-obsessed mother nor my businessman father, would scarcely believe the privilege that those plucked from the orphanages by Western parents now know: the pretty Chinese-speaking nannies and trips overseas, the houses with backyard pools and children’s playrooms, the designer clothes and private piano lessons. They would not believe it, have not asked. And I could not explain to them how Kyla’s spotty, accented Chinese was like birdsong to me in my time of need.
Now, I listen with great concentration. The screaming has stopped. There is a knock. For a brief moment, I think it is my father, rapping his knuckle against my skull. Xaio, get a hold of yourself. We are practical people. We are talking about your future.
But there is another voice, through the door. “Chow? You there, man?”
It’s Albert, who calls me Chow, and I have not corrected him. “Yes,” I shout from the kitchen. “I’m here.”
He opens the door with his caretaker’s key and walks in without removing his shoes. “Chow?”
“I’m here,” I say, and he follows my voice, puts a plastic bag full of food and my change from the twenty dollars on the counter. Without looking, I know the bag is full of frozen dinners, instant noodles, and instant soup, things I imagine he eats himself. Each of them could be eaten directly from the container, but I do not do this, because my mother’s voice also haunts me. Food is meant to be eaten from porcelain, not paper. You don’t live on the street. But either way, it makes no difference, because I have no appetite. I heat, I dump into a dish, I pick, I dump into the garbage, I add to the foul mountain.
“You look like shit,” Albert says.
Other than the murmuring, owl-faced nurse who came twice to change my dressing, he is the only person I have seen since leaving the hospital AA. He was here when the cab arrived with my bag full of pain managers. He walked me up the stairs, handed me a new key. “I changed the lock. They’ll probably watch the pawn shops for your electronics.”
I had stared dumbly, and he had gestured so I might understand—hand to his ear like a phone, fingers typing on an invisible laptop.
Still, I could not manage a response to the large man beside me, skin dark as a Mongolian mountain herder’s, black hair long and loose as the ones who pounded me into the pavement, over and over, until everything was black and dark.
Gangbangers, Kyla had named them. Most likely a rite of initiation, an act of violence to move up the ranks of their organization. They were Aboriginal people, she’d said, Native Canadians. She knew about this because her father had written some kind of history book on their plight. Their land had been taken and they lived poorly. That’s why so many of them were in hospital and in trouble.
On that awful morning, as I stood there without friend or family by my side, Albert must have thought I had become half-witted, forgotten every word of English I had ever known. He took the newly cut key back from my limp hand and let me in. “The little fuckers really roughed you up, eh.”
Now, he puts his hand on my shoulder and I feel I might collapse under the weight of that milk-fattened arm. I try not to notice the mysterious blue-green Roman letters—K.A.T.—across his wrist, not unlike the lightning bolt I’d seen on the fat one’s calf, the one who’d pulled me up only to smash me down again.
This is another thing my mother and father would never believe—the many, many numbers of tattoos in this place. They are everywhere: on nameless gangbangers, on caretakers named Albert, on perfect women named Kyla. I swear I can hear my mother’s snort. The Chinese symbol for peace? I don’t care what it is. It’s tawdry.
Albert squeezes a little and I try not to wince. “It’s been more than two weeks,” he says. “You got those crutches there, you got to get out of this place. Go take a walk, go buy yourself some stir-fry or something. They have a wok place in the mall there.”
I fear I might begin to tremble uncontrollably, and so I will him to leave. Go. Go now. Your business is done here. Can’t you see that once I begin trembling I may never stop?
“It’s not bad,” he says. “You get a free egg roll when you buy a drink.”
Then I remember. “I must ask you. Do you hear? The yelling?”
He releases my shoulder, stands quietly. He listens. “Yelling?”
“There is yelling,” I say, but even as the words come out I know they are wrong. There was screaming.
He listens for another moment, smiles. “I don’t hear anything.”
“No,” I say. “Before. Yelling.”
“Probably kids outside,” he says.
I shake my head, no, no, no, but really, I nod, smile a little, because it is no use, I am alone here with no family or friends in WI-NEE-PEG and it is no laughing matter. I let him go, lock the door behind him, check the deadbolt, let him leave me with my terror, and my mountain of dried-on stink, and my phantom screams.
The ache in my ribs makes it hard to breathe, but it is the pain in the knee that makes sleep so unpleasant I count the minutes until I will be able to take the next little orange pill, and then let it drag me away into nightmares. The things that sneak up from behind and then pounce have expanded to the absurd. Little yellow-haired girls in braids who turn out to have wolf teeth; fast-food teriyaki cooks with cleavers; tremendous, roaring tsunamis that somehow reach my land-locked hell. My sleep is drugged, false, fitful, and when I wake, the distant screaming has returned.
The clock’s gleaming red numbers read 2:20. It is past midday and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing but a dream of being stalked by an old lady with claws for fingers.
Be a man. It’s again my father’s voice. And this makes me want to scream myself, to laugh like one gone mad, because he is one to talk. Who is he to judge that I want to shit my pants like an infant? I am not cut out for this. Just ask my mother, the historian. During the Imperial days, my ancestors hid behind royalty, held their silk hems, wiped their royal asses. Then later, when the revolution came for them, they ran to the collective farms, asked how high they should jump, how many friends they should denounce. Yes, I come from a long line of soft, sickly cowards.
The screaming starts and stops, starts and stops, then carries on for what seems like one whole minute. I reach for the phone Kyla brought to me when she was still my angel—an extra lying around, she’d said, pay as you go. I call Albert on this precious get-well gift but it rings and rings until I throw it across the room.
I slide out from beneath the sweat-stained sheets, drag myself awkwardly from the bed, pad stiff and flat-footed across the wooden floor, almost faint as I bend myself in two, pick up the still ringing phone. My ancestors were also not cut out for such outbursts. We are calm and practical people.
The screaming continues until 3:06 sharp. I spend the rest of the day waiting. I call Albert twice more and the phone rings and rings, but I do not lose my temper. I do nothing, don’t dare venture out the south door, where you can almost see the university from the sidewalk. Nor out the east door into the shadow of office buildings, where the businessmen ignore you on the way to the gym, where the shopping mall right in the middle of the city has more empty real estate to lease than all of Beijing. My father would not believe the empty space to be had. He would not believe that not far outside the north door, one street corner from the businessmen and their high-priced sneakers, one could be robbed of one’s belongings, health, peace of mind. Kyla said there is no Chinese word for geh-toe and that you don’t just find them in American rap music. Because that is what one thinks when one thinks
of gangsters, big black men in big American cities, with big black guns in big American cars. Kyla called the people of the geh-toe, here and everywhere, the dis-en-fran-chised, but I did not exactly get her meaning.
The bruised ribs make it painful to sit for any period, so I stand at the kitchen counter and go to Kyla’s Facebook page. Perhaps two weeks ago, after I’d given him detailed instructions, Albert had come to the door with my credit card and the new laptop.
“I bought myself one, too,” he’d said. “Hope you don’t mind.”
I had not noticed his smile, so relieved I was to regain my connection to the world. “With this same card?” I asked.
He’d laughed, ruining some of my relief. “I shouldn’t joke. You’re in rough shape, man.”
But the very next day, Kyla graciously agreed to be my Facebook friend and this has become the one ray of sunshine in my dreary existence. I now know her favourite style of shoe, her favourite song from the 1990s, her favourite brand of body lotion. I have seen pictures of her friends, some Chinese adoptees like herself, and some even more attractive. I find very little new information, except two picture of her at the lake, which she explained to me in the hospital. In WI-NEE-PEG, many people have summer homes near the region’s many lakes, and when they go on holiday they simply say I am going to the lake, as if they sleep floating on water. In one picture, Kyla is raising a glass of what looks like tomato juice at the camera and in the other, she is jumping off a wooden pier, arms and legs spread wide as a star. At least I think this is her, because it is a rear view.
There is also a message from my mother, which I choose to ignore. She would think Kyla’s behind looks too large, and would refuse to believe that ordinary office workers might own summer homes. For my parents have no interest in the West other than how it might enhance my future. They are proud Chinese. They would be truly outraged about my situation, about how the university could be located so near the geh-toe, an innocent foreign student attacked one block from his front door, and just two weeks before term begins! They would wring their hands and then send for me without delay. And yet I do not let them. I sit here alone, without friends or family, waiting.
Boy Lost in Wild Page 10