by Ed Lin
Goodbye, Julia. There’s still so much I don’t know, but I think I understand everything I need to.
I walked back through the dark alley. I felt at peace with myself. Finally letting her go felt like cutting off a gigantic tumor from my back that I had forgotten I was carrying.
Not a tumor. That wasn’t fair. More like a big old burden of failure to keep my promises. Everything was going to be better now.
I cheated a little, though. I didn’t get rid of everything.
I kept Julia’s diploma. I couldn’t bear to throw it away, even though it looked like crap, all crinkled and folded. It still represented an accomplishment. Her success. Her genius. I kept it folded in my wallet so I would always have it close by. Certainly the CIA couldn’t begrudge me this.
I WALKED NORTH ON Zhongshan Road and found a used bookstore across the street from Ming Chuan University, where I bought an American book of short stories. I tried to read them while sitting at a park bench, but I didn’t seem to have the patience to stick with any of them for more than a page or two. Even though the cover made no mention of it, they all seemed to be about love. I watched the elevated MRT line rumble across the street, and it looked so lonely.
I tried a new drink at Starbucks, and as I slurped it down, it hit me that I was falling in love with Nancy. How could I be? She used to sleep with a guy who was more than twice as old as she was, after all. Was she the kind of woman to get serious with?
I looked into the sad suds at the bottom of my drink and felt sheepish. She was right to point out what a hypocrite I was for taking her to love hotels and yet pretending to stand on some higher moral ground.
And what about Julia? The woman I had been planning to be with forever had worked three-quarters naked as a binlang xishi.
What a chauvinist I had been. What a lout. Who the hell was I to pronounce that being a mistress was immoral? Who was I to judge that a betel-nut beauty didn’t deserve respect? After all, I pimped food every night with a shit-eating grin.
At about 3:30 P.M., I arrived at Unknown Pleasures and met Frankie. I told him everything, and he didn’t seem surprised by any of it.
All he asked was, “Did they fix your moped?” I told him that it was in my usual parking space and that it was in great shape. He nodded, and we went about getting the place ready. Dwayne showed up about twenty minutes later.
“What are you doing here so early, Jing-nan?” he asked. “You weird me out when you beat me here.”
“What’s wrong with me being early? It’s my stall, all right?” I hosed down the street and brushed a stiff broom over the asphalt. Damned cigarette butts.
“It’s your stall? Look at the balls on this one, Frankie!”
The Cat looked up from his task and rolled his shoulders back, left and then right. “About time they dropped,” he said.
I leaned against the broom and looked Dwayne in the eye. “My house was firebombed last night,” I told him.
“What?! You’re kidding me, right? You mean your grandfather’s place?”
“It’s just a pile of ashes, scrap metal and rubble now.”
Dwayne rubbed his forehead, trying to get the image out of his mind. “I didn’t see anything on the news about a fire.”
“It didn’t make the news,” said Frankie.
I held up a fire-scorched wok. “Everything’s burned to this color now!”
Dwayne rubbed his eyebrows. “This is some evil-spirit shit.”
“No, it’s not. It was arson.” I brought the broom inside and washed my hands at the main sink.
Dwayne followed me in and pointed both index fingers at me. “You have to repent to the gods, Jing-nan!”
“It had nothing to do with them, because they don’t exist.”
“Why are you talking like this? Even if you don’t believe in them, you don’t have to piss them off! You better say sorry to Mazu!”
“Mazu, my ass!”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. I couldn’t believe how distraught the big guy was getting. He was acting like a student about to have his hands whacked with a ruler in front of the whole class.
“What is your problem, Dwayne? You don’t even believe in her. Mazu is a Han Chinese goddess.”
He put his fists on his waist like an old-time wrestler. “But I respect her. You should, too. We live on an island, so you’d better damn well respect the goddess of the sea! And you know what month this is!” He held up his left hand, warning me not to say the forbidden word. “It’s Ghost Month!” I said.
Dwayne rubbed his hands anxiously.
“Ghost, ghost, ghost!”
“Jing-nan, settle down now,” said Frankie. “You don’t like it when people force their beliefs on you, so you shouldn’t force your non-beliefs on them.”
“Do you know what really gets me?” I said, feeling my arms shake in anger. “The actual cause and effect get buried under all this superstition and incense. Gangsters torched my place, and I know because their American friend told me! That’s why it wasn’t on the news!”
Dwayne looked me in the eye. “If you were good to the gods, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“The gods weren’t good to me, so why should I be good to them?”
Frankie spoke up. “You’re insured, aren’t you?”
“We’ve got some,” I said.
The house wasn’t formally insured. An illegally built home was nearly the same as a legitimately registered address. Getting an electrical line isn’t a problem. Same thing with running water and cable television. You can get your mail delivered there, too. But homeowner insurance? Forget it. Insurance companies were already loath to cover legit homes that were shoddily built; there was no way they would extend policies to people who couldn’t even say what their walls and floor were made from.
“I haven’t seen the policy in a while,” I said. “I’m going to meet my insurance rep soon.”
“ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND LOUSY NT!” I yelled at German Tsai. I was too mad to be intimidated by him, even though we were sitting in the front seats of his car.
He seemed amused by my loss of control. “I don’t think anyone else would pay you that much for the house in that condition. This also cuts through all the red tape with the insurance company for the building next door, not to mention the lawyers.”
I pounded his dashboard. “It’s probably worth fifty times that, German!”
“You’re exaggerating,” said German. “Besides, it’s more than you make in three months. Say, I’ve got your cash right here, and remember that I brokered this deal personally, Jing-nan. Don’t embarrass me. The Black Sea are not unreasonable people.”
I sighed and stomped my right foot.
“Look,” he continued, “if you don’t want to take the money, I can just apply this to your family debt.”
I felt the blood drain from my head. “I’m still in debt?”
German chuckled. “Hell, yes, you still owe! This whole thing was set up by my dad for your grandfather’s gambling debt. The promissory note is as legit as a Sun Yat-sen note.” He rolled down his window, spat binlang juice and wound it back up. “I sympathize with you, Jing-nan, but this deal was set up before you or I were born, and we inherited the terms.”
“I lost all my music in the fire,” I said, feeling like a sulky teen. “Do you know how much that cost? That was probably twenty thousand NT right there!”
German put a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you. The debt on the last statement was about three point five million NT, right? I’m going to bring it down to three point three million NT.” I could save that much in about a decade, if I stopped eating and buying clothes and gas.
Sensing an opportunity, I said, “Just keep the debt where it is, but drop the interest.”
German leaned over, and a dull whirring sound came from his seat as he eased it back almost completely. It meant a lot less money for him, but it also gave me a realistic path to pay off the debt fully.
I DIDN’T HAVE MANY albums on my phone, only about thirty compared to the several thousand on my hard drive, which included live performances by Joy Division and New Order downloaded from sites that had wound down years ago. My PC library had also included songs from pre-concert sound checks I had copied from a guy at UCLA. I’ve never seen them anywhere else. I’d probably never hear them again, especially since the conglomerate corporations that owned the publishing rights to Joy Division and New Order were now vigilant about shutting down sharing sites that dared to post material from either band.
Listening to music was a huge part of my rituals for going to sleep and getting up in the morning, almost as necessary as water for brushing my teeth, washing my face and flushing away my waste. Nancy preferred to only listen to music through headphones. That was fine for me when I was in transit, but in my home (or her home), I really needed to feel the sound moving through the air, as a part of the living world and not just isolated in my ears.
Nancy didn’t have a desktop computer or a stereo system. She listened to music on her phone and laptop. I examined her video system, which had speakers that were better than the old stereo system I’d had hooked up to my computer.
I sat on the floor and picked my way though a drawer of cables in the wall unit under the television, as tangles of black cables piled up in my lap like cyborg pubic hair.
“What are you doing?” Nancy asked.
“I’m looking for a cable that will let me connect my phone to the USB port in the television. I lost mine in the fire.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Just a second.” She went to her bedroom and returned with a portable hard drive the size of a Big Mac. “You can plug this into the TV.”
“Whoa, what’s this?”
“It’s the music files from Bauhaus. I only asked for Joy Division and New Order, but there’s a bunch of other stuff on there, too.”
My fingers tingled with the excitement of finding Joy Division material that was new to me. “What’s on there?” I panted.
“I’ll show you my laptop. I already copied the entire drive.” Nancy plopped down on the couch, flipped open her computer and clicked on the music folder. She dragged her fingers across the track pad, showing me the names of the files.
It was hard to say what I hadn’t heard yet. Live bootlegs rarely listed the dates and places of the performances, and when they did the information was often wrong. I would have to hear them all, and I would.
“I went ahead and corrected a few misspellings,” she said. “I get annoyed by that. The best one I saw was the ‘Love Will Tar Us Apart’ twelve-inch single.” She looked into my eyes and laughed with her entire face and spirit.
I looked upon Nancy with nothing but love. I had nothing left, and she gave me more than I’d ever had, both musically and emotionally.
“It’s a miracle,” I told her. “Thank you so much.” I got on the ground and hugged her calves tightly.
Unfortunately, the television’s firmware wouldn’t recognize a portable hard drive of that size. We settled for listening to Joy Division playing somewhere in Manchester over her trebly laptop speakers.
Even though the music’s integrity was compromised by the quality of the speakers, Nancy agreed that it was special to hear music move through the air.
“Did you ever go to Boar Pour More’s MySpace page?” she asked casually. It was a test. If I asked, “Who are they?” I would have failed.
Luckily, I remembered that it was a band that Nancy drummed for. They had a clever name, a play on bopomofo, the phonetic system for learning how to pronounce words in the Mandarin dialect.
“I tried, but it looked like it had been taken down,” I said. “I found one picture in a Google search of you drumming, though.” Nancy paused the music and clicked on a bookmark that was supposed to be a shortcut, but a message confirmed the band page was gone.
“Damn it, I’ll bet Pei-pei, the singer, took it down.”
“How long did you have blonde hair?”
She put a few strands of hair through her mouth and chewed it. “Just a month. I had to try it.” Her face sank a little. “Man, I told all these people at Bauhaus to check out our page.”
“Sorry you had to find out it was down through me.”
“Aw, it’s not such a big deal.” She was glum enough that I could tell it was.
“Can you play me some of the Boar Pour More song files?”
Her face got even longer. “Pei-pei has them, of course. She was going to have them remastered.”
I grabbed her right hand. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll go on to do better things.”
“I’m going to start another band sometime soon. Hey, Jing-nan, you can be the singer!”
“No, I’d be terrible!”
“You’re a great singer, and you have charisma, too!”
“Well, you don’t want to be in a band with a singer who works at night. How would we ever book any gigs?”
“Maybe you don’t have to work at night.”
“No, I have to be there, Nancy.” I laughed nervously.
“You could sell the stand and get a day job. Who cares if you make less, right?”
I took a deep breath. Clearly, Nancy and I would be seeing a lot of each other in the near future. We were going to be in a committed relationship, if we weren’t already in one. But it was still too early to tell her about my family-debt situation.
“Nancy, it’s not my dream job to run a night-market stand, but it is a dream job for Dwayne and Frankie. I would never want to let them down.”
“Are you sure? They don’t look very happy there.”
“Those are the faces they were born with. I feel bad for them.”
I STEPPED INTO AN elevator to find that the air-conditioning unit was broken. I immediately broke out into a light sweat. I had expected more from a high-class building like Nancy’s. I was about to step out to catch another when a white-gloved hand reached out and gently blocked my exit, also obscuring my view of the man’s face.
“Sir, this elevator was called for you,” he said. The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“So what?” I asked.
“Sir, you need to stay in it.” The man stepped in with me and pressed a button to close the door. I still couldn’t see his face, because he kept his back to me, but his uniform and cap were in good shape.
The doors closed, and the walls became transparent. Stars surrounded us. Why was I having such strange experiences with elevators?
“Can I breathe here?” I asked. “We have oxygen, right?”
“Sir, of course.”
I looked down at the earth. As we rose I saw the West Coast of the continental US beneath us.
“That’s where I went to school, for a while, anyway,” I said.
“Sir, look over there by that light,” said the man.
“Is that the sun?”
“Sir, some people call it that.”
We were drawing closer to the light, and I felt the car heating up.
“Can’t we do something about the temperature?”
“Sir, only the lady can.”
“You mean Julia, of course. Let me ask her for help.” I saw her in the distance, asleep on the floor of her own elevator car, also bound for the sun.
The conductor pointed at the emergency call box on the elevator. “Sir, you may ask her for help.”
I pressed the button and watched Julia slowly stir in her car and then answer the intercom.
“Jing-nan, is that you?” She didn’t bother to cover up a huge yawn.
“Yes! Julia, I need your help!”
“Where are you? Have you been out here the whole time?”
“I’m behind you. Listen, can you do something about the air conditioning? It’s broken.”
“I could, but I don’t have the money to send a repairman there.”
“I have money. How do
I get it to you?”
“Just burn it and I’ll get it.”
“Do you mean burn notes as if you were a dead person?”
“It’s similar to that. You and I don’t believe in such things, but this is how it works out here. There’s no other way.”
I opened a smaller panel at about waist height, revealing a single flame the size of a tiny pilot light. This was going to take a long time. I sat down cross-legged, threw open my wallet and slowly burned the first bill.
“Did you get that, Julia?”
“I did, but it’s not enough. I need another hundred NT.”
I had trouble with the next bill because it was wet with my own sweat. As I struggled, out of frustration I said, “This is the worst elevator I’ve ever been on.”
“You’re not on an elevator,” said Julia. “You’re in a coffin, Jing-nan.”
I tried to stand up, but the elevator had shrunk to the size of a coffin. I didn’t have enough room to even turn my head. Where had the man who was with me gone?
“I don’t want to die!” I bleated.
“We all have to die, Jing-nan. I’m just ahead of you. Now burn me money so I can help you!”
“It’s just making it hotter in here, Julia.”
“If you’re not going to send me money, then I’ll have to go to work for it.” The intercom clicked off.
I looked at Julia. She shed her clothes and then began to swivel her hips around. She was completely naked. “Binlang, binlang!” I could hear her cry through space.
I pounded on the wall. “Stop it, Julia! I don’t care about the air conditioning! It doesn’t matter! Just stop what you’re doing!”
The elevator man’s face, now upside down, came in close, until we were touching noses. “I wanted to warn you, Jing-nan, but you were destined to take that ride.” The man was Ah-tien.
I woke up with my elbows and head pushed up against the headboard.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I stood outside of Big Shot Hot Pot and looked back at the kitchen. I saw Kuilan and her husband Bert. Now where was that—