Boy Lost in Wild

by Brenda Hasiuk

  I swallow a little orange pill and sleep some more. When I wake, it is 9:11, and my stomach aches from hunger, but the beef soup tastes of nothing but salt and dead animal. The potatoes are as uniformly square as playing dice and I only manage several spoonfuls. BA, I used to have too much fat. Too much mother love, my Beijing neighbour liked to say. But I had become not a bad cook myself, and three times in this apartment, BA, I took a taxi to the Asian market, the one the others at the university orientation had recommended. I fixed myself three feasts for one, and even promised myself to invite the others next time.

  Not long ago, Albert had wrapped his fingers around my bicep and laughed. “You’re looking pretty thin there, man. Do I have to open those cans for you, too?”

  I wanted to take him down like in the movies, the small man with superior skills who easily defeats his bigger opponent. But I smiled through my anger. “Before, too fat. Now, I am slim.”

  I go to the window and look north into the night. Many evenings, after the workday is finished and the busy traffic time has died down, I have seen Albert walk first a little west, towards the university, then north until he disappears down the narrow lane that is hemmed in by a brick office building and a low-grade sushi establishment. It is the same lane of my attack. I can almost see the very spot from my window. He always returns via the same route shortly after the dusk turns to dark. I know this because I have seen him, and because he never answers his phone before then. It just rings and rings until it is time to turn on a lamp.

  I wait until 10:08.

  “Yeah, Chow,” he says. “You okay?”

  I choose my words carefully. “You come here. Please.”

  There is a silence. Then: “What do you need?”

  The phone is too difficult. Is this so hard to understand? “You come here. Please.”

  There is a silence. “Give me a minute.”

  I wait at the door, at the ready, hear his heavy footsteps as they approach. I open the deadbolt before he can knock. He is wearing what he always wears at this time—a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut away, and jeans that have been cut into shorts. His big feet are bare and his legs are as hairless as my own. He stinks like my bed sheets.

  I point at the floor. “Down there,” I say. “There is screaming.”

  He listens dutifully as if this is the first he has heard of it.

  “Not now,” I say.

  “When?”

  “The day,” I say. “The afternoon.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, I am sure,” I say. “Not loud sound, but screaming.”

  I step aside so he may come in, but he remains in the doorway. “I don’t know, Chow. There’s no other complaints.”

  “I am sure,” I say. “I here all day. I hear it.” Hear and here—two words that sound the same but are different—it is the first time I have used them correctly.

  Albert runs his meaty fingers through his sweaty hair, sighs so deep the exhale sputters through his closed lips. “Okay, Chow. I’m just wondering if you’re okay up here all by yourself. Maybe you need some help or something.”

  “I here all day,” I say again. “I hear it.”

  Albert smiles like I am a child who is insisting on a later bedtime. “Yeah, yeah, okay. I’ll look into it. Okay?”

  “Where you go, at night?” I ask.

  He laughs. “Oh, you seen me? You spying on me?”

  I don’t understand.

  “That’s my night job. I play ball with the little punks at Freight House.”

  “What kind of fight house? What is this?”

  He smiles. “No. Freight House. But it’s not a house-house. It’s an old railway warehouse or something.”

  “You make money to play basketball?”

  “Pocket change,” he says.

  I don’t understand and I am sick to death of this. The humiliation is too much. I hate the West and all its cheesy-smelling inhabitants. But I ask anyway. “What is this?”

  He pulls coins from his jeans. “Pocket change. Little bit of money.”

  “This punks,” I say, “they do this to me? You know them?”

  “Christ, I hope not,” he says. “But I promise you, I find out who did this to you, their ass is mine. They may do their time, but their ass is mine.”

  I wonder if the Aboriginals have the Christian guilt, or if they worship dead ancestors as we do. Or maybe their gods are animals, like the South Asians. But no matter what, he is being paid to manage the punks in the geh-toe and he is failing. Just like in the factories back home. The Party tries to improve the dismal conditions but it’s not enough, the workers keep heading to the roof and jumping to their death. So all they can do is put up a net around the building.

  The West has failed the visiting international student. So all Albert can do is bring me food I cannot eat. It would all be laughable if it weren’t so painful.

  I dream that the walls have come to life and are closing in on me, hugging tighter and tighter until dusty plaster thumbs are plugging my nostrils and gagging my throat. Yet I am in two places at once, for I am also watching my parents, still in Beijing, watching me dying online and taking turns screeching in horror at my plight. All their work, all their savings, all their lives, they have poured into this doomed son who will soon be squished like a helpless gnat. No fighting crickets proudly battling to the death for our family. We will rail for mercy until the end.

  When I finally wake to pass water, it is past noon and the regular afternoon screaming has already begun. Perhaps it is my parents, I think, all the way from Wangujing Street, horrified that my English has made so little progress AA. How is one to get ahead these days without the language of global commerce? There is so much work still ahead, so much catch-up for each and every one of us, scholar and peasant alike, for the waking giant that is China.

  I flush and the water in the bowl swirls and swirls, grows higher and higher, swirling ominously until it spills the banks of the seat. I wonder if I am still dreaming, if this time the flood has come and I will begin to gasp and snort beneath the rising deluge as my parents wave their hands in desperate frenzy. We don’t understand! We won’t believe it! How could this happen to our only son? But my toes are wet with actual water, my pajama bottoms growing soggy at the hems, and I am as helpless as my wailing parents. Through the centuries my ancestors have aimed to avoid this, always kowtowing to the right people at the right time—ancient scholars and court gadflies, party apparatchiks, CEOs—anything to avoid fixing their own toilets.

  I grab my bath towel and plunge into the toilet bowl as far as my armpit, shove the towel into the drain hole as far as it will go. The hissing continues but the rising stops and I go to call Albert.

  But my phone is nowhere to be found. Which is disturbing to me, perhaps more than the loss of appetite or the fear of outside or the nightmares. Because BA, I was a very organized person.

  It takes fifteen minutes to find the phone, which had fallen behind the garbage bin in the kitchen. I call Albert, let it ring, call again. I lose count of how often I do this. The screaming stops and I want to take a little orange pill but am afraid to sleep. I check Kyla’s Facebook page and there is a picture of her holding up a large scaly fish nearly three-quarters her size. There is a caption that seems to suggest she threw this giant catch back into the lake, which could not be right. I am suddenly so tired of not understanding that I almost open a message from home, but resist at the last moment. I am barely surviving as it is, and my parents’ devoted concern in Chinese characters will leave me screaming like the one downstairs.

  By the time Albert finally comes with his toolbox it is 4:44. I follow him into the bathroom, then step back into the hall, for he is a big man.

  “Holy Christ,” he says. “What’d you do here, Chow?”

  “I plug the water,” I say.

  He removes the lid from the top of the toilet and stops the hissing, then reaches in the bowl and pulls out the dripping towel. He throws it into
the bathtub and it makes a deep, satisfying thud. “You sure you’re old enough to be on your own, Chow? Maybe you need a roommate or something.”

  I talk to his broad, bent back. “I eighteen,” I say. “I have student visa.”

  He studies the inside of the tank, plays with what look like rubber hoses.

  “How you know how to do this?” I ask.

  Albert keeps fiddling inside the tank as he talks. “I took some courses at the college, but I never finished. Which was fucking stupid, because plumbers make it hand over fist these days. But I was young. I didn’t care. All I needed was enough cash to have a good time.”

  I nod like I understand, because my parents had warned me of Chinese who end up just this way. They have parents who are wealthy enough to lengthen the leash and give them freedom, and many times they grow rebellious and decadent, end up into hard drugs. Like the days the courtly rich killed themselves with opium, my mother said, and their lives are ruined. Or sometimes they stay in the West and leave their family altogether.

  Albert looks into his toolbox. He looks into the tank. He turns to me. “I don’t got the part I need. Can you not flush for tonight?”

  “You don’t fix?” I ask.

  He scratches his head, stares at his feet. For the first time, I notice that his front teeth are quite crooked. “Just for tonight. Don’t flush, okay? Just leave it. Don’t flush.”

  My bony hands are clenched into fists as he leaves. Because perhaps Albert is not just doing a bad job keeping his people from making trouble. Perhaps he is also not a good caretaker. He is a failure and so I am stuck with more stink when I have plenty of stink already.

  I am dreaming of a plunger that has come to life. It has attached itself to me, is trying to suck my face from my skull, when I hear the knocking. For a moment, I believe it’s my father, tapping my head with his knuckle. Hello? Anybody in there? Do you not see how ridiculous you are, son? Your nightmares are laughable! You think you’re the only one who’s ever suffered? For all our sakes, you must get a hold of yourself!

  But the knocking continues, louder now, stubborn. Like the ringing of the phone after Albert left, shaking the night with its persistence. I did not give in, though, for I knew it was them. They had tracked me down to finish me off. The punks were calling to invite me back to the scene of the crime. Come, Xaio. Come see. We’ve got sexy Asian ladies who like a good time and a buffet of Chinese favourites. There is kung pow duck, the very dish your mother made you upon your leaving. Come, come. They think they can seduce me back to the alley where it happened, between the walls of innocent beige brick, where before the red flashing lights arrived the ghost of a black dog came to lick my wounds as I lay bleeding. But they thought wrong. I hid the phone in a suitcase stuffed with nothing but a winter parka, the expensive down-filled immensity my mother insisted she buy for me.

  “Xaio Trang. It is the Winnipeg Police Service. We would like to speak together with you.”

  The voice is not my dialect, but it is my language. It is calm and very masculine, a voice that dutiful Chinese sons cannot resist. I am out of bed, in my sleep robe, padding barefoot to the door before my brain even knows what my broken body is doing.

  Then they are inside, just like that. The chain, the deadbolt, the lock are opened and they are here, one large moon-faced Asian man and one large yellow-haired woman in matching uniforms, sitting tight together on the small sofa.

  “We are sorry to rise you from bed, Xaio,” the man says. “We tried telephoning.”

  He has Chinese eyes, but his nose is large, his hair almost wavy, and I wonder if he is part Caucasian. Perhaps his father is a curly-haired Russian who ordered himself a submissive Asian wife from Shanghai. The woman is perhaps Northern Viking stock, with big man-like hands and doll-like features.

  “How are you, Xaio?” she asks. Her voice is deep and silky. If we danced, my head would become buried in her big womanly breasts.

  I tighten the robe around myself. “I good,” I say, and can hear my father laughing. Already telling the women what they want to hear. See, you can be a man.

  The man smiles and his teeth look too big and white for his face. “School initiates soon, yes? It is excellent to sleep now, to look after your well-being, before study time begins.”

  I nod, yes. His Mandarin is almost less intelligible than Kyla’s. What poor, backward province could his mother have come from?

  He leans forward, as if to reach for my hand, but does not. “But we are here to tell you about the investigation is proceeding. We some persons in for questioning right now.”

  “You have caught the punks?” I ask.

  Officer Blondie smiles, looks at me as if I am her son, and I must stop myself from diving into her bosom.

  “Well, we are making progressive,” Officer Half-Breed says. “We have recovered your telephone, and it seems the persons who did this to you are feuding. We are hearing a multitude of things. But the persons are talking, and this is good.”

  I nod. I want him to shut up and leave me be with Officer Blondie. I want to rest my head in her bosom and ask her about these gangbangers, the ones Kyla said are neglected by their parents so band together like posses in Hollywood’s American West. I want to ask her how those pledged as blood brothers, who commit atrocious acts in league together, could betray each other. What more do they have than loyalty to each other? Was this not the true shame of Mao’s revolution, forcing children to turn on parents, or brother on brother? What is left once we’ve begun to betray those closest to us?

  “You sure you’re okay?” Officer Blondie asks. “Do you understand?”

  I nod. I want both of them gone now, for there is no way Officer Blondie has the answers I seek. Allowing myself to be consumed by her ample white flesh would solve nothing.

  “Yes, I fine,” I say. “I understand. Thank you. Thank you for your good work.”

  This seems to satisfy them, because Officer Half-Breed and Officer Blondie both rise up from the small sofa, laughing a little as they jostle together. Perhaps they are like in the movies, partners who are friends and maybe more.

  When they are gone, I feel strangely awake, more awake than in many days. I get the laptop and sit on the sofa where it’s still warm from the ample white bum. My ribs don’t ache as much as they once did, but my heart is strong. The lies pour out as easily as the toilet had overflowed. It’s like I’m writing a story, and as I write, I begin to believe.

  Hi Mother, hi Father. You must be wondering what happened to your son! But there was no real need to worry. I had electronic difficulties that turned out to be serious (the systems are different here in Canada!), and I have had to replace my phone and computer. This does mean I’ve had to spend some money, but again, no need to worry. Food and accommodation here are more affordable than we thought and I shouldn’t run out. As I told you before, I am just one street from the university, so can walk for free! I miss Mother’s kung pow shrimp very much. So much food here is processed … you wouldn’t recognize me I’ve become so slim!

  Still, perhaps it is a good thing I have no gift for languages. My friend An may have mastered English right there in Beijing, but I believe this stay in Canada may be the experience of a lifetime.

  I promise your faith in me will not be wasted. X

  By the time I’m done, my heart is thumping like a jackhammer on an early Beijing morning, telling all it’s time to get up and build the nation. I begin to wonder if it is possible for a heart to explode from adrenalin when it suddenly strikes me that I am starving.

  I fish the phone from its parka cocoon and call Albert.

  “It Xaio,” I say. “I give money, you go to Asian Market for me. Okay?”

  He does not respond. It took many tries before he answered, and I think I hear a lady’s voice in the background, not deep and smooth like Blondie’s, but sweet and teasing.

  “Come on, Chow,” he says. “You been before, haven’t you? You need to get out.”

  Albert ha
s never turned me down before. I’m not prepared for this. “I see, yes. But I no want to.”

  “How am I supposed to know what to buy?” he asks.

  “I write in Chinese,” I say. “You take to them.”

  “Anyone ever tell you that you make it hard to feel sorry for you, Chow?”

  Thump, thump, thump, goes my heart. I don’t understand and I don’t care. “So you go?” I ask.

  There is a sigh. I can see him running his hand through his hair, hear the sweet voice murmuring. “I don’t know, Chow. I got a lot on my plate right now.”

  But I am a desperate, starving man. I don’t give up. “There is still screaming,” I say. “In afternoon.”

  There is another sigh. Sweetie sighs, too, or perhaps it is more of a groan.

  “Where is this Asian market?” Albert asks.

  Then I know that I am victorious, that his guilt is more powerful than his lust. “It far,” I say. “I give you cab fare.”

  I wait all that night and all the next morning for him to come, but my family can be very patient when we must be. For really, I would say it is the patient, and the pliable, more than the brave, who survive adversity. I pace the worn wooden floors like a soldier on guard. I strip my bed of its smelly sheets and lie robe-less against the cool, naked mattress. I ignore all the messages from home that I have been ignoring for weeks. I read only one, one that is brand new and flies forth from the screen like a dove taking flight.

  “How is the knee, Xaio?” KylaSmyla G

  Four simple English words that somehow change everything, bring a new dawn into my blind-darkened world.

  How is it, Kyla? It hurts! Very much, thank you! Thank you, my angel!