Rachel said, “She probably wasn’t planning to tell anyone, but Euge just happened to be there. So, she left that night?”
Eugene nodded. “The next morning she was gone.”
Jake tried to absorb this. He stared at his brother, whose cheeks were flushed, his expression glassy. Jake said, “Have you ever tried to find her?”
He said, “Once.”
“When?”
“I didn’t know this,” Rachel said.
Eugene shook his head. “In college. My roommate’s uncle was a private detective. I thought I’d try.”
“And?”
“Nothing. They never legally divorced, she wasn’t dead, and there was absolutely no paper trail. She might have gone back to Korea.”
“Hell,” Jake said. “How come you never told me?”
“What’s the point? It didn’t work.”
“Why didn’t she say anything to me?”
“You were too young.”
Rachel asked Eugene, “Have you ever thought of trying again?”
“Sometimes.”
“Really?” Jake said.
Eugene sighed. “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I need to learn more.”
“Well, this doesn’t change anything,” Jake said. “She left us hanging.”
Eugene didn’t reply.
“You just don’t do that,” Jake said. “Leave us alone with him. What the hell was she thinking? Pretty damn cold.”
Eugene looked down at his empty glass.
“Whatever.” Jake stood up. “I’m going to get some dinner. You guys want anything?”
“It’s kind of late,” Rachel said. “We have some Chinese in the fridge.”
“I’ll find something.” He left the apartment and heard Rachel murmur to Eugene as he shut the door. Jake wanted to lose this restless feeling, and watching his brother get drunk wasn’t going to do it. He took the stairs down, his thighs weak from the earlier workout. He liked the faint pain. His footsteps echoed around him.
31
Bobby Null realized the sour smell was coming from the mound of diapers that wasn’t in any bags, and he began cursing people who didn’t bag and tie their garbage. He was knee deep in shit, and kept muttering, “Goddamn fucking Jake.” He was in the second dumpster; he didn’t find anything of Jake’s in the first one, but judging from the newspapers and the smell of the garbage, the first dumpster was more recent. This second one was disgusting and putrid, and he gagged as he lifted bags that crumbled apart—unrecognizable, disintegrating chunks of moldy, slimy food fell everywhere. He imagined worms and slithering things moving near his feet. He climbed out every few minutes to make sure nothing was crawling up his legs.
When he found a clump of Safeway bags at the bottom, he opened one up and saw ripped up papers and receipts. The other bags had clothing, magazines, newspapers, and piles of junk mail. Bobby took the bag of receipts and scrambled out of the dumpster. Ignoring the black liquid all over the bag, he tore it open and emptied the contents onto the ground. More junk mail. But Bobby saw the name Jacob Ahn on a label, and he went through the pile more carefully. Jake was trying to tear up all this, but didn’t have time to do a complete job. The junk mail had his name and address, and he had even left a bank statement only partially torn in half. Four thousand in a checking account. Then, Bobby found a pay stub, a half of a paycheck receipt, with Jake’s name, social security number, and a list of taxes withheld. At the top was “Molino Restaurant” with an address and phone number. He saved this and continued searching through the papers. Nothing personal in here.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing?” someone called to him.
Bobby looked up. It was the same guy he had seen here a few hours ago. Jeez, was he here for that long? “I lost something,” Bobby said.
“I hope you’re going to clean that shit up.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I live here. You’re making a goddamn mess.”
Bobby stood up slowly, taking the guy in. He said, “I’ll clean it up. Keep your pants on.”
The man walked away, and Bobby re-read the pay stub. All right. Jake worked here. There must be someone there who’d know where to find him. Bobby looked down at his sneakers—brown mush was oozing around the shoelaces. First he had to clean himself up. Then he’d visit this restaurant. He was getting closer.
He left the garbage as it was, torn and dripping bags on the ground. He was staying in a cheap motel in Pioneer Square, paying weekly, and wondered when the hell he was going to get out of this place. The smell of baby shit followed him down the street.
32
Jake had left the apartment and had gone straight to a small dive on Van Ness. He ordered a beer, though he had no desire to drink, and sat at the bar. He ate some peanuts. He listened to the conversations around him. He tried to think about Franklin & Sons Jewelry, but his brother’s revelation bothered him.
The images of his mother’s departure that had formed and hardened in Jake’s mind were ones of ghostly disappearances, magical acts of invisibility. A blink and his mother was gone. Smoke swirled up where she had once stood. He had imagined her walking out of the house as a zombie, stiff-legged, shuffling, arms rigid and extended, her body slowly blending into the night. She had taken very little of her clothes and belongings—so little that his father hadn’t realized she had run off until that evening. And even then he had seemed certain that she would return.
Eugene’s revelation required a shift in Jake’s memory. He couldn’t even recall what she looked like. His father had destroyed all the photos of her shortly after her desertion. He had raged all night, burning her clothes, breaking—tearing apart, really—anything of hers she had left behind. Jake and his brother were in the basement when this was happening, the thumps and crashes upstairs confusing them, since their mother wasn’t the target.
As Jake grew older he entertained more possibilities of what had happened to his mother: his father had murdered and buried her; she had been kidnapped; she had amnesia; she committed suicide. But with all these scenarios, she, in his mind, was shell-shocked, mute, blank. Definitely not aware or fully conscious of her decisions.
So he had been wrong. It caught him off guard. His mother really had abandoned them, leaving them exposed to their father; she really hadn’t wanted to take them with her. It was a calculated act, a mathematical equation of options, and in the end Eugene and Jake simply didn’t have a high enough value. Maybe she was living right now with a new family. New sons.
Sometimes his mother used to hide in his and Eugene’s room when their father started drinking. Jake remembered Eugene holding a pair of homemade nunchucks by his pillow as they went to sleep, as if he would actually use them on their father. But if their father came storming in, the brothers would get sent to the basement, and Eugene would leave his nunchucks under his pillow.
Jeez. Nunchucks. He hadn’t thought of that in years. His brother used to be really into kung-fu. Not tae kwon do, which is Korean karate and which his brother probably avoided because their father knew it, but kung-fu, the Chinese art form. Eugene practiced in the back yard and would sometimes show off for their mother. This is the Crane style, he would tell her, and do some sweeping, arching movements that actually did remind Jake of a crane. Their mother would clap lightly with her fingers, and say, Very good.
Once when they were in the basement, naked, the fighting going on upstairs, it was so cold that Jake couldn’t stop shivering. Their parents were screaming at each other in the kitchen, right next to the basement door, and Eugene backed down the steps as the fight grew closer. Their mother was trying to get to the door, it seemed, and their father was pushing her away. A few times someone would crash against the door, and their mother would scream out in pain. Jake stayed crouched near the furnace. He heard the familiar spitting Korean curses filtering through. He didn’t know what shang meant, but knew it only came up during the fights.
Then he heard his brother near t
he middle of the room, breathing hard, with the sounds of his bare feet sliding over the cement. In the darkness, Jake could only make out shadowy images of his brother moving across the floor. Jake saw the goblins creeping along the wall suddenly stop and watch his brother as well.
What’re you doing? Jake whispered.
Dragon meets Tiger, his brother said in a normal voice, which sounded too loud. The goblins scurried away.
Upstairs, their mother was crying, begging, and a few loud slaps silenced her.
Eugene exhaled slowly; the sound of his steady breath calmed the goblins. His feet stepped, skipped, then brushed against the ground. Jake heard the air around his brother whoosh. It was too cold to move, so Jake remained crouched, hugging his knees.
For an instant he saw through the darkness. His brother was balanced on one leg, his arms stretched out and sweeping around him in graceful circles. He then lowered himself, still on one leg, his hands becoming claws, his extended leg transforming into a sweeping tail. Before blinking back into complete darkness, his brother arched his back and strained his head towards the ceiling, opening his mouth and baring his teeth as if to breathe fire.
33
Jake found Rachel dozing off in front of the TV. The champagne bottle stood next to four crumpled beer cans, an open bag of potato chips, crumbs and wet spots on the coffee table. Rachel stirred and sat up. “Hello,” she said, rubbing her eyes.
“Where’s Eugene?”
“Sleeping it off.”
“You’re okay?”
“Waiting up for you.”
This stopped him. “For me?”
“You seemed upset.”
“No. I’m fine.” He glanced at the TV. Business news with the closed captioning on. He watched the words jerk across the screen.
“Are you angry?”
“No.”
“I checked the newspapers for more articles,” she said, pointing to her laptop. “There wasn’t anything.”
He thought, Articles? Then he realized she was talking about Seattle. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to say anything—”
“I know.”
He sat down in the recliner; everything smelled of stale beer. “How is Eugene holding up?”
“He needed to blow off steam,” she said. “Does he always drink like this?”
“Lately, more.”
“Why?”
“He might seriously lose his job.” She made a circling motion with her hand. “His ordered life is screwed up.”
“He can always get another job.”
She nodded. “True, but from what I understand, the CEO has been badmouthing him and his supervisor, who’s a board member, to make the selling-out look more justified.”
“Badmouthing?”
“Quietly, of course, but his reputation might be tainted. He’s not sure.”
“Sounds like a nice business to be in.”
She shrugged.
Jake had nothing else to say, so he moved towards his bedroom. She stopped him with: “Can I ask you something?”
He sat back down. “Okay.”
“How did you start doing it? I mean, what happened?”
“Doing what?”
“You know, burglarizing places.”
He smiled.
“Tell me about the first time.”
“The first time?”
“Did you just decide to do it?”
Jake leaned back, sighed. Rachel was still a little drunk, and it was loosening her up. He said, “The first time, I think I was stoned and broke, and had just lost a job. I walked by a house and decided to break in.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. It was stupid, and I’m amazed I wasn’t caught, but it suddenly seemed like a new career path.”
“How old were you?”
“Around nineteen, twenty. I was living in L.A.”
“Where was Euge?”
“Working, I think. When he was still with that telephone company.”
“And you were never caught?”
“No. But if I had continued using the same method, I would’ve been caught. Most break-ins are druggies looking for a quick sell for cash. I got smarter.”
“How?” She leaned forward, her forehead creased. Jake sat back. “You don’t want to hear this.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
She said, “I don’t know.”
He thought about this, and said, “It started with lockpicking.”
She waited.
“There was this guy at the department store I was working in. He was a locksmith apprentice before getting fired. He taught me how to pick locks.” His name was Michael, and they used to smoke outside on their breaks. Michael was only a few years older than Jake, but had already spent a couple years in juvie and a year in Folsom for drug possession and burglary. Before Michael was fired from the locksmith’s, he had learned the basics of raking, snapping, and picking, and after a few months of working together in the stockrooms, he showed Jake.
The idea was simple: picking locks was the act of imitating a key. Practicing was difficult. Jake’s first tools were a bent screwdriver and a heavy-duty paper clip. The clip was straightened with a curved tip at one end, and wrapped with electrician’s tape as a small handle on the other. The screwdriver was his tension wrench, which was heavier and bulkier than actual tension wrenches locksmiths used; he had to be gentler, and use more of a twisting than a pushing motion. Following Michael’s advice, Jake had practiced on his own locks, studying his keys as a guide on how high to push the pins inside, but even with this learning aid, he had struggled with the locks for almost four months before he began to get a feel for the technique. That had been the hardest part. He conditioned his hands by tying knots with sewing thread, by touching his radio and turning the volume down lower and lower until he could feel more than he could hear. He disassembled and reassembled old locks, taking out springs and loosening shear lines to make his practice picking easier. Later he would learn that his crude tools had hampered his picking, making the fragile process more difficult. He hadn’t minded because when he made himself his first set of real picks (from grinding down hacksaw blades to the right size and shape), opening locks became startlingly easy.
Once Jake had learned how to pick pin-tumbler locks, he began concentrating on other kinds: wafer tumblers, double wafers, the easier warded and lever locks, and finally the more complicated tubular-cylinder locks. He hadn’t actually picked any locks for his burglaries at that point, since he hadn’t been confident enough. He had only just begun his attempts at small burglaries. Here, Michael helped him out again, introducing him to his fence, and showing Jake what items to steal. But Michael wasn’t very careful and he was eventually caught breaking into an expensive home in Newport Beach. He spent two years in prison and Jake never saw him again.
“I liked how it became a puzzle: find the best way into a house, usually through a lock,” he told Rachel. “It wasn’t just about breaking in. It was about breaking in cleanly.”
Rachel smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say this much about anything.”
He was startled, and shut up. She was right. He had kept quiet about this for so long that it had come out too suddenly, unrestrained. He wondered if the two beers at the bar had lowered his guard. He said, “I should get some rest. I’m beat.”
“What are you going to do with the jewels you have now?”
“Why?”
“I want to know.”
“Hold on to most of it. Sell some slowly.”
“Where?”
He shook his head. “Here and there.” He needed to get her off this. He asked, “So I guess you and Eugene are okay?”
She hesitated. “Why do you say that?”
“You just got drunk with him.”
“But that means nothing.”
“Oh.”
“We were commiserating. That’s not a
good foundation for a marriage, but that’s all we seem to do.”
“So what’s going to happen to you two?”
Her face slackened.
He said, “Never mind. It’s none of my business.”
She looked up at him. “Honestly? I have no idea what’s going to happen.”
Jake stood up and said he was going to get ready for bed. She nodded and tried to pull herself out of the sofa, but fell back. She touched her temple and winced. Jake held out his hand, which she took, and pulled her up. He didn’t let go, and said, “I hope you don’t mention any of what I said—”
“No. I won’t.”
He moved closer to her, said quietly, “You know more about me than anyone else in the world.”
Her eyelids fluttered as she tried to focus on him. They were inches apart. He let go of her hand, and he remembered massaging her leg at the gym, how he was tempted to move further up her thighs. He wanted to touch her now, reach out and run his finger over her cheek, her throat. He moved away. “Goodnight, Rachel,” he said, and went to the guest room.
34
Late, late night. Jake moving in and out of sleep. His back and arms sore from working out, his stomach acidic from the beer. Blinking awake at sounds from the living room. Rachel still awake. Reading her books? A dim line of light underneath his door. Rolling over and feeling his erection ache. Thinking, She is right out there. Right out there and all he has to do is go out and walk up to her and touch her like at the gym, massaging her leg and moving slowly up until he’d push his hand underneath her shorts. Stop. Not an idiot and knows what’s wrong and why. Knows his brother is in the room down the hall and that even thinking this is wrong. Knows that. Knows it and tells himself and repeats it in his sleep. Sitting up and stretching, everything hurting. Bed creaking. Strange shadows on the ceiling from the light outside. Night eyes adjusted and sharp. Remembering his night eyes as a kid, looking out in the dark basement and seeing, really seeing everything. Superhero powers. Night boy. See everything in the dark. Darkness his friend. Shrouded, protected. Swimming through blackness. Watching the ghosts move across the floor, ignoring him and his brother, but stopping when they saw him seeing. He saw them all. The goblins passing through his basement while their father kicked their mother across the floor, their ceiling, and everyone pretending they heard nothing and Eugene practicing kung-fu naked. His mother knew. Knew she was leaving, knew she was abandoning her kids and said nothing to him, didn’t even say good night if he remembered but wasn’t sure. Shouldn’t let it bother him. Take care of your brother, she said to Eugene. Yeah. Right. Take care of yourself and run off in the middle of the night. Stop. Stop. Doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Think of the dead. Bobby dead and buried under tons of garbage, sea gulls poking out his eyes and pulling on his tongue. Bobby going to haunt him. Should call Chih. Find out what to do, maybe save some of the stuff for him, find out what happened. Got to find a new place, new gig, miss the restaurant but don’t want to do that right now. Loaded. Am loaded with cash and rocks and don’t have to work, but can’t just sit around and do nothing, what about that Franklin place? Whoa. Stop. But that padlock’s a fucking joke. Got to check out the alarm system. Stop it, shithead. Eugene was a millionaire. Goddamn million dollars. What to do with a million dollars? No idea. Buy a house, buy a car. Then what? Get a nice TV. Satellite TV. Buy books. Catch up. Then what? What a sorry piece of crap can’t you think of anything? Help Eugene. Help Rachel. Rachel. What’s the point? The point is to survive. She knows too much. He blabbed like a fucking school kid. Just like in high school and got nailed for it. Mistake, mistake, mistake. Hell with it. Going to have to trust—
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