The student, growing in boldness, spoke to the man. “Ta mei you jiao ni.” He didn’t call you.
With an anguished cry the man swung his fist again, this time with such fierce savagery and speed that Ted did not see it until it was centimeters from his face. He had only time to close his eyes, and he felt his glasses break against his face, and then the bite of the cobbles beneath him. He opened his eyes in time to see a blurred shape in green moving away through the crowd, shouting obscenities and unintelligible, slurred Chinese.
Ted stood slowly. No one helped him. It would dishonor him and he would lose face. He fumbled with the two halves of his glasses and held them to his face to see the retreating figure more clearly. The man snapped at someone near him and then turned back toward Ted and snarled before moving on through the crowd.
Camilla called him. “Ted, are you okay?” He looked toward her. The crowd had moved toward his confrontation with the man in the green sweater as if pulled by gravity, and Camilla had been left beyond it, like the beach at low tide.
He dropped the broken glasses into his pocket and felt the knot behind his ear. His nose was bleeding, and he wiped it absently on his sleeve. He went to Camilla and Andy, who was crying. “I’m okay. Let’s get our train tickets.”
“That man. Did you know him?” “No.”
“We should tell the police.”
The student still hovered at Ted’s elbow, and he said, “There is a policeman there.” He pointed ahead of them to a man in a dark blue uniform, a whistle around his neck. His job was to blow his whistle at people who brought their bicycles onto the walking street. Ted walked over toward him without thought, draw n to his symbols of power and the authority he represented. Surely he could make this right.
Ted went to him and got his attention. “A man hit me,” he said in his simple Chinese. “He wore a green sweater. He . . . he hit me in the face.”
The police officer looked to the student and they burst into a rapid-fire conversation, only a few words of which Ted understood. An old woman had followed them from the temple square and she gave Andy a candy, which stopped his crying. The student and the officer grew more animated until at last the student pointed the way the man in the green sweater had gone. The old lady interjected something here, and then both the officer and the student dropped their heads and nodded. The officer called something in on his walkie-talkie but then he turned away from Ted. “What’s happening,” Camilla said. “What’s he doing?”
“I don’t know. I guess calling in that guy, telling the other police where he’s headed.”
“No,” said the student. “I am sorry. There is nothing he can do. The man is crazy.”
“So they should go and arrest him, get him off the street.”
The student shook his head. “He is crazy. His head is bad. There is nothing he can do.”
Ted pulled on the sleeve of the officer to get his attention and the officer pulled it forcefully away and pointedly did not look at Ted. “I am sorry,” the student said again. “You are a good man not to hit him after he hit you. His head is very bad and we all are sad for him. We all are afraid of him.” With that the student turned and walked into the crowd and the old lady with him. Ted and Camilla and Andy stood alone in a wash of faces that looked all the same, every one of them identical to the man who had punched him.
Ted held Camilla. She had Andy in her arms, still sucking contentedly on his candy. Ted let Camilla go and said, “Why don’t you two walk home and I’ll go get the train tickets. I don’t want you to stay here after that.”
“I’m not walking home alone,” Camilla said. “What if that man sees me and Andy? Or what if he comes back here to find you?”
“He won’t come back,” Ted said. “That wouldn’t make any sense. Why come back here now?”
Camilla’s eyes flicked to the temple and back again to Ted. “He’s insane, Ted. Didn’t they say that? Doesn’t that mean that he often does things that make no sense? He could be watching us right now, Ted. He could have a knife.” She shuddered. “Let’s get the tickets and go home.”
They bought the tickets. The crowds kept flowing as before, though people noticed his nose and he heard the word for blood whispered all around them. As they walked home he kept increasing their pace. He was nervous. He looked into the crowd for that green sweater over and over but did not see it. Could the man have been possessed? It seemed ludicrous. And if it were true, if he were possessed, then it pounded open everything Ted believed about the universe, it made a terrifying and dark space spread out before him like a cavern.
“Everyone in this town knows where we live,” Camilla said. “We’re the only white family in three miles. That man could find us without trying. We have to lock the doors tonight. I want Andy to sleep where I can hear him.”
Ted said nothing because Camilla was absolutely right. They left the walking street at last and then the final six blocks to their apartment, past the guard who fell asleep every night promptly at eleven, through the locked gates to the cement stairway. As he turned the bolt to their apartment door he felt profoundly vulnerable, naked, afraid. He locked all the doors and windows in the house, even the glass door which only looked down on the shared courtyard. During dinner he kept standing up and walking into the bedroom, holding his glasses to his face and looking down on the street, trying to see if a man with a green sweater might be standing there looking up into their apartment.
They put Andy to bed but worried about leaving him alone in the room even though they were on the third floor. They moved his crib into their bedroom, which seemed somehow safer even though they were still sitting in the living room. After a long time Ted told her about the flash of a thought that he should exorcise the man who had punched him. He expected her to laugh at him, or to mock him. Instead she shrugged and said, “If it was God speaking to you, you should have done it. If it wasn’t him, well, it wouldn’t have done you any harm to try it.” She believed in that, that God could speak in a moment, in a flash of insight. He had never experienced this, or if he had, he had not trusted it. God had the Bible, and this clear and precise set of rules and guidelines seemed the work of a deity to Ted, unlike the mess of communicating to the disordered mind of a human creature.
He couldn’t sleep. He stared for many hours at the cement ceiling, watching the shifting pools of yellow light from the street lamps. He listened carefully for Andy’s breathing. Camilla curled up close to him, much closer than she usually slept. He listened, too, for any change in the traffic pattern, any disturbance, any ripple of abnormality. He wondered eventually if he would really hear anything if the man in the green sweater came near his window, and soon he found himself standing beneath the window’s floor-length curtain, his forehead pressed to the cold glass. He couldn’t keep his glasses together for long and he set them down on the cement sill. Blue taxis and the occasional bicycle slipped past. A few drunks held each other up as they left the neon-lighted bars. He could see the temple in the distance, lit by the markets and restaurants, squatted down and holding court with its acolytes.
He stood for a long time debating the sentence he would speak. He debated getting his Bible, but in the end he knew what it said, knew what it would tell him. “In the name of Christ,” he whispered, “I command you to come out of him.” He stared at the temple, waiting for some response and when there was none he said it louder, “Come out!” It had begun to rain, and bicyclists whipped by, pulling on their rain ponchos, a parade of blue, yellow and red plastic sheets spinning beneath him. His fingers fumbled at the window lock and he feverishly slid it open. The rain increased, and the wind blew against him. “In Christ’s name!” He was shouting now. “Come out of him now!” The rain broke the sky at last and great opaque sheets of it descended on the city and beat against his face and chest. He listened attentively to the sound of the rain hitting the gutters, flooding the broken green tiles of the sidewalk. He intently directed his attention to the distant temple, demandi
ng that the spirits obey, but he could not keep up the intense focus for long.
He slid down to the floor, spent. He reached behind himself and slid the window awkwardly closed and lay there for a moment on the floor, wet, cold, exhausted. He used the windowsill to pull himself to his knees. Nothing he could see had changed. The temple, the markets, the bars, the bicyclists and taxis, all sat and sold and spun through the rain. After toweling himself dry and checking on Andy he lay back in bed where his wife kindly did not speak, but put her head again on his chest and her arm across it. At the edge of sleep at last he heard a great, tortured shriek from deep in the city’s labyrinth. Whether from the brakes of a passing bus or something else he could not say.
The sun, when it came, at last dispelled all shreds of darkness, all hints of rain, all scraps of cloud and made the cement shimmer. Ted stretched his arms and enjoyed the sunlight blanketing his wife and son. Let them sleep! He explored the altered topography of his face in the mirror of the closet sized bathroom. His nose belonged on a larger man, and he painfully removed some clotted blood. By folding his left ear back he could see the grey and green signs of a man’s fist. He moved into the living room and sat on the orange sherbet-colored vinyl couch which the apartment complex had provided. He was glad his family slept, because he needed time to catalogue the events of the last twenty-four hours.
The entire landscape of Ted’s world had altered, and all of his maps were suddenly changed. The man in green had thrown boulders into the river of his mind and had disrupted the flow, had created rapids, had troubled the waters. Beyond that, however, and more disturbing still, was another feeling, something Ted did not recognize and could not explain. A feeling that a great wall of water was coming from upstream, that a dam had broken somewhere and all that Ted knew, all the man in green had done, everything would be swallowed up and buried beneath it.
Ted pulled the curtains open and looked down on the courtyard. The sunlight changed everything. He felt ridiculous now for shouting out his bedroom window in the middle of the night, for letting the rain pummel him. He had behaved in a superstitious way, as if shouting a few words out his window would have influence in the world. It was a shamanistic and ignorant worldview. He laughed, relieved. He went to Andy’s bedroom and opened the curtains there, too. He looked down at the new morning traffic, the bikes and taxis on their way to work, the bus with the loudspeaker rounding the corner and projecting garbled Chinese.
Ted suddenly desired to return to the temple square. Another look at the temple in the daylight would dispel the last of his doubts, he was certain of it. And if he saw the man in the green sweater again, well, what of it? He checked in on Camilla and Andy again, to make sure they were still sleeping. A thought struck him and he took the three salmon-colored train tickets from his wallet. It seemed to him that the train was too early now, that his family should be allowed to sleep. He would run down to the ticket seller and buy new, later tickets. This gave him a good reason to pass the temple, a readily explainable one, a logical one. He could slip out to the temple and be back before they woke. He pulled on clothes and a jacket and then, by the door, his shoes.
Saturday morning meant that the walking street would be a standing street within an hour or so. He hurried past the neon signs, the eight-foot tall trees in their big wooden pots and the pop-blaring shoe stores. He held his breath as the temple came into view, worried that the sunshine wouldn’t work its magic on the multi-hued wood. He quickly scanned the crowd and did not see the man in the green sweater. Ted hoped the man would still be wearing the green sweater, the badge of his identity. If he came, Ted would see him first. Ted forced himself to be calm. He stopped and bought two wooden skewers of lamb’s meat. They were cooked over charcoals right across from the temple square, and dusted with ground red pepper. It was an ordinary day. He had walked into the temple square a hundred times before, and he would do so again today.
He began in the small shop at the temple square’s entrance and looked over the incense sticks and firecrackers, the little postcards, the shallow dish of cash offerings. Nothing had changed here. He stepped past the guardian lions, crossing the arched bridge. Surely if malevolent spirits guarded this place the lions would have roared! He smiled and took a bite of lamb, beginning to enjoy himself. He took a deep breath and sat on a stone bench. He looked fondly at the quaint yellow temple. He had thought the sunlight would make it harmless, but he saw now that it was the power of his own intellect that did it, for the sun had gone behind a cloud and the dropping temperature told him it would rain soon.
Ted stood to go buy the new train tickets and to throw away the empty wooden skewers in his hand and as he did he heard a shout from across the temple square. He looked up and saw the man in the green sweater coming toward him from around the side of the temple, coming toward him fast. Ted turned and moved toward the bridge, determined to move quickly away from the man. Then he saw the second man, pushing people out of his way and headed toward Ted. He wore tan slacks, a gray-checked shirt and a rumpled tan jacket over it. The second man called something to the man in the green sweater. Ted did not understand it all, but he heard the word for foreigner.
For a moment he froze, uncertain where to go. The man in the tan jacket blocked the bridge, and the man in the green sweater would cut him off if he went the other way. His heart pounded in his ears, and the blood rushing to his head throbbed through his swollen face and bruised head. He decided to take his chances with the new man rather than the man in green, so he ran toward the bridge. He tried to barrel past the new man, but he grabbed Ted by the shirt collar and yanked him back, hard.
Without thinking Ted jabbed one of the wooden skewers into the man’s shoulder, and it splintered to pieces as the man fell backward. Ted couldn’t stop. He kept running, crossing the bridge and then diving into the crowd of shoppers. He turned to the right and began to push past the slow-moving old men and women, the college students holding hands, the tourists following the guide with the yellow flag. Just up ahead was where the policeman had stood yesterday, and Ted knew if he could get to him he would be safe. He hoped the man in the green sweater would pause to help his friend, but he thought again of the shark, the unrelenting hunter. Ted knocked into a man carrying a baby, but he couldn’t stop even to apologize, he had to keep going.
The policeman stood at the side of the street, yelling at a man who had tried to bring his bicycle onto the walking street. Ted grabbed hold of him and yanked him away from the conversation. He gasped for air. “Yo yiga ren,” he said. “Ta yao da wo.” He turned back and pointed to his pursuer. But he was not there. The policeman unclasped Ted’s hands from his shirt and pulled away. He studied Ted for a moment. Ted could see the look of recognition. A veil descended over the officer’s face and he turned back to the bicyclist. The officer waved him off without looking at him again.
Precious seconds had been wasted on the policeman, and Ted knew he stood out in the crowd. He was afraid to go back past the temple toward his house, and afraid to stay in the street where he stood out in the sea of Chinese people. The man in green and his friend came skidding across the arched bridge of the temple courtyard, scanning the crowd around them. Ted ducked into a department store, jumping over the two stairs at the entrance and pushing in past the disgusting plastic flaps that hung in the doorway. He walked quickly past a few rows of shoes and tried to catch his breath, tried to calm his heart. He felt for his mobile phone in the pocket of his jacket, and held it in his hand. He could call the police, but his Chinese wasn’t good enough to explain anything. He could call Camilla but it would only terrify her. She couldn’t call the police, either, couldn’t do anything but worry. And she might come down here and put Andy and herself in danger.
He crouched down behind the shoe rack, pretending to look at a pair of loafers but actually looking out through the front entrance. He knew there was another entrance behind him somewhere, probably on the far corner of the building. He saw a flash of green run p
ast outside, running too fast for Ted’s liking. But then, even worse, the green blur came back, lingered outside the department store. Ted could see the man trying to look in through the plastic flaps, debating if it was worth the time to stick his head inside or to keep running. Then he moved slowly on, and Ted breathed again. If he waited a few minutes and slipped back toward home he might have a chance. He hoped the man in green didn’t know where he lived, but everyone in the city knew where the white family lived, so this seemed unlikely. He hoped the man didn’t think to wait for him somewhere between here and his apartment.
Ted turned and quickly scanned the department store behind him in time to see the second man, the one he had stabbed, coming in through the far door. Ted crouched low, but it didn’t help. Shoppers started to gather around him, anxious to see the foreigner’s strange shoe-shopping ritual. He tried to wave them away, but it didn’t work and when he turned again to look the man was moving warily toward him. Ted looked in his hands. He had dropped the other skewer somewhere. He only held his mobile phone now.
As if having the same thought, the man took out his own mobile phone, punched a number in and held it to his ear, never taking his eyes off of Ted. Ted glanced frantically at the door, then back to the man. He was talking now, and slowly moving forward, keeping himself between Ted and the far door. Ted stepped out from between the shoes and backed away. The man said something to him now, something about being friends, but Ted could not understand, all of the Chinese in his brain had been shut off and replaced with survival. He turned and sprinted through the door and smashed directly into the man in green, sending him sprawling down the two stairs and onto the paving stones. Ted half fell, kept moving forward, got his feet under him and ran, back toward home. He had a long way to go still, but he found the crowd working to his advantage. People were shouting and looking back at him, clumping up as he passed. The crowd slowed Ted’s pursuers. He was losing them.
MIdnight Diner 1: Jesus vs. Cthulhu Page 21