by Ed Lin
I returned to the boneless chair and put my hands tentatively on the edge of my side of the desk. “Actually, Peggy, I am here on rather depressing business.”
“Julia,” she said, looking down at her open palms.
“You know.”
“Of course I do. It was all over our school Facebook page. This was like two days ago.”
“I’m not on Facebook.”
“You’re not, eh?” she said, crossing her arms. “I thought you were just blocking me.”
“I wouldn’t know how to do that.”
Peggy turned her chair, leaned under the table and shrugged. She came up with a bottle of Yamazaki Single Malt and two glasses. “So, you wanted to come here to talk about your old girlfriend? You didn’t really want to see me, after all.” She poured and made two amber slits dance in the glasses.
“I still don’t feel up for a drink,” I said.
“They’re both for me,” she snapped.
I spoke as she took a long sip. “Peggy, you went to NYU with Julia. What can you tell me about her time in school?”
“Well, what do you think?” Peggy eased her chair back and banged a drawer shut. “With a face and a body like that, what do you think? She was popular. Everybody liked her. Guys wanted to take her out—even the Americans. Girls wanted to be her friend. But you know her nature. Study study study all the time.” Peggy emptied the first glass and shoved her chair forward until the edge of the desk bit into her waist. “Julia made things as hard as she possibly could for herself. She was a double major.”
“What did she study?”
“Political science and something else.”
“What else?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You remember.”
I saw her teeth for a second.
“I didn’t see her that often. You know we were not friends, Jing-nan. The only time I ran into her was at the Japanese market or at the library, one of the few times I went.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Peggy shook her head and picked up the second glass. “Back in the US,” she said, sipping her drink.
“You didn’t know Julia was here?”
She gave me a long look, her eyes half-closed. “I. Had. No. Idea. What?! Do you think I killed her?”
“No, I don’t think that.” But you probably don’t mind that she’s dead. “Please, just tell me about when you saw her last.”
“The day she was kicked out of NYU, the end of junior year. Six years ago.” Peggy sipped some whiskey and snorted. “She cheated. You knew that, right?” She arched an eyebrow that seemed to question Julia’s lifetime academic record.
“That’s what I heard, but I have a hard time believing it.”
“You’d better believe it. She was dumping most of her stuff right in the street. All she was going to take back to Taiwan were two tiny, tiny suitcases. I asked her what had happened, and she told me they had caught her cheating. The double major was too much work, and she had taken one little shortcut. All she did was copy one paragraph and they were throwing her out. It was a bad scene. She had me crying, too!”
I folded my arms. Crying with laughter, I’ll bet.
“You knew, Peggy, that I had a serious agreement with Julia.”
“The two of you were going to stop seeing each other and one day you would come for her like a knight riding out of the mist. Blah blah. Who didn’t know about it?” She finished the second glass and her face twitched.
“We never imagined things would turn out this way.”
“No one knows the future, right?”
I felt something at my ankle. It was Peggy’s foot. With some effort I shifted in my seat and pulled my feet underneath my chair. “You know what happened to me, right?”
“I heard, Jing-nan. There was a big chain email going around our old classmates. I was a part of the group that sent a banner and flowers to the funerals.”
“I’m sure you were the one who spearheaded the gesture, so thank you.” She nodded and folded her hands in front of her. “Listen, Peggy. Julia’s parents have asked me to help find some more information about her murder. They say the cops aren’t helping at all.”
“Nobody wants to take the blame for an unsolved crime, so nobody will take it up. Cops won’t do anything unless the victim was someone important, someone rich or famous.”
“Julia was murdered.”
For the first time, I saw a sympathetic look in Peggy’s eyes. “I know. It’s just unbelievable.”
“It would have to be a gangster or a cop—someone who had access to a gun.”
“It could be an aborigine,” she offered. “They’re allowed to carry firearms for hunting and maintaining their culture.”
“I didn’t think about that.”
Peggy looked thoughtful. “A betel-nut girl is essentially a prostitute,” she said. “I don’t mean to speak ill of Julia, but she probably did turn a few tricks, right? Just to get by.”
My hands curled into two fists on my thighs. I had to admit that it was a possibility. If only I had backed down from my big plan and swallowed my pride, she could have stayed with me in the toaster house. She wouldn’t have had to do any of it. I’m sure her parents wouldn’t have been happy about the living arrangements, but we’d be happy, and Julia would be alive.
We could have just gotten married, anyway. Did it matter that the two of us would be back at the night market, living the same lives as our parents?
Doesn’t matter.
Thinking of my father’s favorite phrase rubbed the wistfulness away.
“You want me to tell her parents that their daughter was a hooker?” I said evenly to Peggy.
“Hey, they probably half think it themselves but don’t want to believe it. Maybe you, too.”
I crossed my arms.
“Jing-nan! We really need to consider everything possible.”
“Maybe it was a waste of time for me to come here.”
“You have an issue with me, don’t you, Jing-nan? You always did. Don’t think I can’t tell.”
“This is the issue: you never respected my relationship with Julia.”
Peggy sprung from her chair and pointed at my nose with the white-star end of her Montblanc pen. “You hate mainlanders! You hate me and my family, right?” She put on a smug smile.
“I came here to see if you knew more about Julia, about her life when she came back to Taiwan. I’m an optimist. I thought maybe you might have set aside your animosity and become friends with Julia. I thought you two might have been in touch by email or through Facebook.”
“If it were up to me, we would have been friends,” said Peggy. “When my parents made me a VP I wrote to Julia to offer her a job—an important job—and I told her I didn’t care if she didn’t have a college degree. She completely ignored me. Can you believe that?”
“When was this?”
Peggy visibly stiffened. “Two years ago. I guess you missed the press coverage. I was the youngest female vice president ever in the securities industry.”
“How did you reach out to her?”
“I wrote to her NYU email. It was still good, and I know she read it because I had a read receipt on it.” She splashed more whiskey in her first glass. “Am I really such a horrible person that I don’t deserve a reply?”
“What sort of job did you offer her?”
“I was going to make her my top researcher—reporting directly to me.”
“I can’t see why she didn’t respond,” I said, leaking sarcasm.
“Wait, Jing-nan, why can’t we simply be decent with each other? It’s been so long, after all.”
“It has been a while.”
She slapped the desk and grunted like an old man. “Do you know what’s been going on with me? Do you care? It hasn’t been all good for me, either, you know.”
“I’m sorry, I never even asked about you,” I said as sincerely as possible. “I just assumed you were doing well
because … you seem to be. How have you been?”
“I married a guy from Switzerland after graduation. A banker.”
“You have my congratulations.”
“We got divorced six months ago.” She fixed the shoulders on her pantsuit. “It was over before then, but you know how it is.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“My parents won’t get off my case. They say I should have found a good mainlander boy. Guess I’m cursed, huh?”
She looked sad. The world doesn’t need another sad person.
“Peggy, I’ve changed my mind. I will have a whiskey. A small one.”
“I’ll get you a clean glass.”
“I’ll just use this one. Alcohol kills germs. And anyway, we’re old friends.”
It was nice to see her smile for real.
“You wouldn’t happen to know,” I asked halfway through my shallow drink, “where Cookie Monster is, would you?”
She spit on me when she laughed. “Oh my God, I’m sorry, Jing-nan!”
“It’s all right.” I wiped myself with my hand.
“Wow, I have no idea where he is now!”
“He might be better. You never know.”
She shook her head. “Say, Jing-nan, have you been seeing anybody?”
“Oh, no.” I felt a lump in my throat spiral upward. “I was still going to, you know, marry Julia. Are you seeing anybody now?”
“No. My life is all about work.”
“Your family has all these business connections and you know all these people—a lot of guys, I’m sure.”
She smiled bitterly. “Do you think any of us are free to see each other? We all work eighty-hour weeks!”
EVERY ELEVATOR HAD SEEMED to be going down when I arrived at Taipei 101, but when I stepped out of Peggy’s office they all seemed to be coming up.
I had forgotten how straight whiskey could burn. I felt like my throat and nose had been cauterized. I rubbed my tongue against the roof of my mouth. I needed some water.
Finally the elevator arrived. It was empty, save for the smell of burning cigars. Or was it incense?
I rode down, thinking of Peggy’s words: “If it were up to me, we would have been friends.”
Julia was just like me, I thought. After my exit from UCLA, I completely avoided messages from all my former roommates and classmates. I didn’t want to field their sympathetic emails or explain exactly what had happened. It had been too much for a newly minted orphan to deal with. After a while, people stopped asking, stopped emailing. I’m sure I was no longer even in their address books.
I rode the elevator alone. The car slowed as it approached ground level, and I could hear a disturbance outside. As the doors opened, two big men in overcoats, one wearing shades and one wearing a floppy rain hat, shoved their way in and blocked the doors before I could exit.
I quickly recognized the guy on the left as the American who had accosted me at the Huangs’ parking lot and on the highway. I looked into his shades and he greeted me by throwing the back of his hand against my face. Before I could react, the man in the hat jabbed me hard in the gut with an umbrella handle. My body involuntarily folded in on itself, as if I were a startled armadillo. I staggered to a corner of the elevator and propped myself up. That bastard had gotten me good in the middle and I couldn’t inhale. Behind my assailants, an old woman tried to enter the elevator.
“I’m sorry, auntie,” the man in the hat said. “This car is going out of service.” Unlike the American, he was a yam and spoke Taiwanese. She nodded and stepped back.
The men opened up their umbrellas, I observed, to block the security cameras. There were a few awkward seconds before the doors closed. There was little I could do apart from trying to get my halting breaths under control as the elevator shot up.
The American turned to the side and activated a switch on the elevator panel, possibly with a key. It was hard to see his actions clearly from the floor. I still couldn’t raise the upper part of my body. The car slowed and then stopped. An emergency light on the panel began to blink, and a prerecorded message began to play loudly.
“We apologize for the delay. The car should be moving shortly,” a woman’s voice said in English, Mandarin and Taiwanese, then what must’ve been the same thing in Hakka and Japanese. Her message kept looping through the languages.
The Taiwanese was clean-shaven but had bad skin. Pockmarks on his face glistened with sweat, looking like the crust bubbles on a pizza slice after the cheese has slid off. He seemed to take his cues from the American. Maybe he’d been the one driving last night; he would know the roads, being a native of the island. The fucking Green Hornet’s Kato.
The American spoke, showcasing his bad Mandarin. “Jing-nan, I told you to stop asking about Julia. How come you didn’t listen?”
I gasped for breath and whined a little, unable to speak.
The Taiwanese cradled my chin roughly. “Little Jing-nan, a friendly poke couldn’t hurt you this badly.” He spoke bad Mandarin, too, but I was more interested in the piece of rope he took out from a back pocket. I quickly assessed that it could wrap around my throat twice and have enough left over for two fat fists to grab.
“Hey, come on! No need for that,” said the American. “He gets it now. He’s a smart boy. Aren’t you, Jing-nan?”
The pockmarked man let the rope dangle from one hand. “We should kill him right now,” he shouted over the sound of the prerecorded woman’s voice. “That way we know for sure he won’t keep talking.”
“We don’t have to kill him,” said the American, laughing a little bit. “He just didn’t know how serious the matter was. Now he knows. Isn’t that right, Jing-nan?”
“I’ll be good,” I said breathlessly. “I didn’t know.” I felt stupid and weak for wishing Dwayne were there to stick up for me.
“See? We don’t have to do anything to him. He’ll stop right now. He knows he can’t fool us anymore.”
“Let me have just one punch,” said the Taiwanese as he wrapped the rope around his right fist menacingly. “One in the gut. It won’t leave a mark, I promise.”
The American looked up and petted his own neck thoughtfully. “Jing-nan, my friend is upset because we had to buy these umbrellas for six hundred NT. Each. I think if you agreed to pay for them, he would calm down considerably.”
My right hand shot to my wallet. I managed to stand upright and paid the exact amount. Twelve rose-colored hundred-NT bills, all featuring a portrait of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese revolution and the one man unreservedly loved on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Sun’s engraved likeness somberly reprimanding me for all my wrong actions leading up to this moment.
Shit. Twelve hundred NT. I probably grossed ten times that on an average night, but a thousand NT was my allotted weekly disposable income, after I paid off the debt and interest.
“You still have enough to eat?” the American asked me as he held up the folded bills. He looked contrite and seemed ready to peel off a Sun or two and hand them back.
“He’s got that fucking food stand!” objected the Taiwanese. “He could still eat if we took his whole goddamned wallet. If you still don’t get it, boy, guess where we’re going to show up next!”
“Stop,” growled the American. “You don’t know when you’ve gone too far.” He released the emergency tab. The elevator rose for a few seconds and then slowed. The Taiwanese looked meaningfully at me and tapped his temple. Don’t forget this warning.
The doors opened and the men filed out, snapping their umbrellas shut. I lunged at the panel to close the doors and then pressed the button for the ground floor. The smells rising up from the food court—so different from a night market and so appetizing not even an hour ago—now made me nauseated.
The worst thing about the encounter, I decided later, was that despite the fact that the emergency stop had been on for a few minutes, no one had broken in over the intercom. Typical blasé Taipei thinking: alarms only go off by acci
dent.
I WASN’T GOOD AT hiding things from Dancing Jenny. She freaked out when I finally gave her the brief version of events, from Julia’s parents to the guys who had warned me off and roughed me up.
She raised her hands and called up to the sky. “Oh, Mazu, Mother of Heaven,” she said. I could see Jenny’s nipples darken and push against her nearly transparent bra and cheesecloth shirt. “Are you badly hurt?”
“Naw, I’ll be all right.”
“Lift up your shirt,” said Jenny.
“Why?”
“I want to see something.” I complied and she gasped. “It’s as bad as I feared. I can see auras, you know!”
I bent over and saw a baseball-sized splatter of purple.
“Gan,” I whispered.
“I know you don’t want me to, but I’m going to be praying for you, Jing-nan. I’m going to ask for all the protection you can get!”
“I don’t need help from gods. I just need a gun.”
Anger flashed in her eyes.
“Hey, I’m kidding, Jenny!”
“I’ve had enough guns in my life. Don’t even joke about it, Jing-nan.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Make sure you drink a lot of liquids. Your body needs to wash out the damaged tissue.”
“You know best.”
I left and went to Big Shot Hot Pot. Kuilan was away, so I said hi to her husband. Her son was chopping chives in the back, and he didn’t break from his hacking motion even when I waved to him. I’m glad my grandfather had the sense not to have a dumpling-and-soup business. The fillings are cheap because they’re mostly vegetables, but you have to spend a lot of time chopping.
“YOUR COLOR DOESN’T LOOK good,” Dwayne informed me. “You never liked my color,” I said.
“I’m not joking, kid. You look sickly. You feeling okay?”
“Two guys threatened my life today, Dwayne.” Fuck it. I told Jenny, how could I not tell Dwayne, the guy I talked to more than anybody?
“What!” he thundered.
“But everything’s all right now, I’m pretty sure.”