Land of Big Numbers

by Te-Ping Chen

  He was working as a consultant now, he said, living with his sister. It was hard to readjust to life here. “Everyone works so hard,” he said. “Everyone expects you to be on top of your game.” It was lonely, he said. He’d been feeling lonely for two months before that day I’d first found him sprawled out on the porch, asking for Lisette.

  “I guess it was a little pathetic,” he said.

  “Not at all.”

  “I guess you must feel lonely, too, coming all the way from China,” he said.

  I told him not so much, honestly, that I’d left home so young I felt lonely when I went back there, too.

  I told him about the Tunnel of Love, and he brightened. “That’s what I need, a new start,” he said, and gave a laugh like the bark of a dog, a dog that was a little old, a little sick. I told him I’d take him there sometime. We were a little tipsy by then, I suppose. I told him that I’d been thinking about creating a cradle experience, an infant experience, for our parks. A crib that you could lie inside, with a giant mobile suspended above your head softly playing nursery tunes, and maybe a couple of giant faces that would peer down at you every so often and coo.

  Perry looked at me strangely then, but nodded, trying to be agreeable. “Sure,” he said. “I guess that sounds kind of nice.”

  Afterward we wiped the dishes together in the kitchen, Perry automatically reaching for the drawer where Lisette had kept the towels. They were the same red-and-white-striped ones she’d used before, but he must not have noticed, I thought; anyway, he didn’t comment on it. It was late, and the wine had gone to my head, and maybe his as well. He pulled open the pantry door to pick his coat up, and as he did, he paused and said a hoarse, “Hey.”

  It was the mail. All the accumulated stacks of Lisette’s mail, which I had kept tumbled in bags in the pantry and somehow that evening had forgotten about. I stopped breathing, suddenly panicked, suddenly afraid.

  After she’d left, I guess Lisette must have changed her phone number, because whenever I called, it just rang and rang. Still, I was getting her credit card statements, and for a while I watched her travel across the country: a cheap motel here, a quarter-tank of gas there, a hot dog with fries, never staying anyplace very long. After a few months, I could see where Lisette had wound up, a small town of two thousand people—​no, I won’t tell you where—​a town where she lived and worked and bought groceries, all carefully itemized, down even to the address of where she pumped her gas, every page a postcard. For months before Perry had turned up, I had nursed fantasies of going out there.

  “It’s not hers,” I said stupidly, my brain thick and slow.

  “Of course it is,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me? Maybe there’s something useful here.” He knelt and began turning envelopes over.

  “Stop it,” I said. “It’s mine.” Perry was picking it up, great handfuls of mail, sifting through and cramming pieces of it into his coat pockets, ignoring me.

  I shoved him, but he didn’t move. “Stop it,” I said, panic rising. I tried grabbing the mail from his hands, but he pushed me aside easily and stood up, panting slightly.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” he said.

  I don’t know what to tell you. My blood surged then, hot, and for a moment my vision got all funny like it was overlaid with a thin vellum, for a moment I couldn’t see. “Come back here,” I cried, but he had already left the kitchen and was pacing around the apartment, as though looking for someone.

  He was in my room, Lisette’s room, with its big bookshelf still lined with her stuffed animals, the orange throw pillow that had been hers as well. He was opening up the closets, looking under the bed. I stood outside the door helplessly, my heart pounding like it was trying to escape and screamed: “Trespass! Trespass!”

  “Jesus,” I heard him say, from inside.

  When he came back, his eyes were suspicious, watchful. “What did you do with her?”

  He looked bigger to me at that moment, as though he had been pressing weights since I had seen him last—​maybe he had given up looking for Lisette and taken up boxing instead, I don’t know. Maybe he was armed. Maybe he would attack me and sling my body into a river with a victorious Ha! and jump into a car and start driving cross-country in that beautiful tuxedo of his, moonlight glistening in his hair.

  I began backing away. “Nothing,” I said. “We were friends, that was all. She moved.”

  He was advancing on me, his face looking sour and even uglier than when we’d first met. How could I have missed the signs before—​his physiognomy was all wrong, he had a criminal’s face. “So where did she go?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and retreated so far that the backs of my legs hit the couch and I fell backward onto the seat. I felt something tickling my cheeks and realized I was crying—​how undignified. “Go away,” I screamed at him, and kicked my legs a little, for good measure. “Go away!”

  Perry looked at me disgustedly. “Jesus,” he said again, and strode back into the kitchen. When he returned, he was carrying two grocery bags that bulged with mail, which he steadied against his chest as he headed toward the door. As he passed the couch, he paused and looked at me.

  “There’s something wrong with you,” he said. “You need some real help.” He kept moving to the door; in another moment he’d be gone.

  Something rose up in me then, an agony of bile and anger and frustration. Without having made a decision, I sprang up and found myself running after him and knocked into him with the force of my entire body. His arms were full and he didn’t move quickly enough—​besides, he didn’t see me coming—​and he was thrown off his feet and his head hit the corner of the radiator with a thud, louder than you would believe, and he fell to the ground with a kind of grunt.

  For a while I lay on the floor where I had fallen as well, my legs tangled in his, aghast, embarrassed. The violence of it was abhorrent. I didn’t know what had come over me. “I’m sorry,” I said out loud. In a few minutes, when I had recovered myself, I sat up and bent over him solicitously. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  He was still, very still. It occurred to me that he hadn’t moved at all. “Come on, get up,” I said.

  He didn’t move. He didn’t move and he didn’t move and he didn’t move. Whenever I think back to the scene my stomach curls and my body seizes up, and I am wracked with guilt and all I can think of is I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.

  Then again, sometimes I lie awake here at night to the sound of water dripping from the pipes and I get angry, too. I think of Lisette’s look of impatience just before she left and how she never called. I think of Perry driving his car at high speeds through Abu Dhabi, a steady beeping emanating from somewhere in the back. I picture Lisette’s mail scattered around his body after he’d fallen in a slick litter, catalogs and circulars, dozens of envelopes containing letters and bills and statements disclosing the motions of her new life. I get angry and I think, We all spend our lives looking for someone; why should he be the one to find her?

  Shanghai Murmur

  The man who lived upstairs had died and it had taken the other tenants days to notice, days in which the sweetly putrid scent thickened and residents tried to avoid his part of the hall, palms tenting their noses as they came and left. At last someone sent for the building’s manager, who summoned his unemployed cousin to break the lock and paid him 100 yuan to carry the body down the three flights of stairs.

  There was a squabble as the residents who inhabited the adjoining rooms argued that they should have their rent lowered; the death was bad luck. Xiaolei stood, listening, as the building manager shouted them down. She felt sorry for the man who had died, whom she recalled as a middle-aged man with tired, deep-set eyes, who’d chain-smoked and worked at the local post office. She supposed if she ever asphyxiated or was stabbed overnight, the same thing would happen to her.

  That evening, she brought back a white chrysanthemum and went
upstairs in the dark, intending to leave it outside his room. As she carefully mounted the steps, though, she saw the door stood open. The room was windowless, with a blackness even denser than that of the hall. She didn’t wait for her eyes to adjust. She pitched the flower into the void, barely breathing, and ran back down the stairs.

  If she came to the store more often, Yongjie would have noticed in a flash the flower was gone; she had the sharp female eyes of a southerner. But most days she wasn’t around; in addition to the flower shop, she ran her uncle’s poultry slaughterhouse, which occupied most of her time. Since she’d been at the job, Xiaolei probably could have gotten away with taking whole sheaves of flowers: high-waisted, frilly-leaved stems of alstroemeria, clusters of lilac batons. She thought they looked better in isolation, though, and kept her windowsill lined with individually pilfered stems, each housed in its own soda bottle: a tousled-headed rose, a single agapanthus in electric blue.

  It had been three years since she’d said goodbye to her parents, telling them she’d gotten a job at a microchip factory down south in Shanghai. Plenty of girls had already left their village; no one expected them to farm anymore. As it happened, she didn’t know what a microchip was, but she’d heard a segment about them on the radio. She was sixteen and took a teenager’s cruel pride in telling her parents about the microchips—​a Japanese company, she’d said authoritatively, that made exports for Europe—​and they’d been impressed enough to let her go. All the way up until she boarded the train, she’d been expecting them to catch her in the lie. When they hadn’t, she felt disappointed and unexpectedly sad, boarding a train to a city fourteen hours south where she knew no one and had only a phony job waiting.

  The next morning, when she got to the flower shop, she was in a foul temper. She had not brushed her hair, and her reflection in the mirror behind the counter made her wince. It seemed that days of fighting to board buses, hustling for space on the sidewalk, elbows always out, eyes half squinted, trying to see if someone was cheating her, lips pursed and ready to answer back, had left an indelible mark. She was not yet twenty but felt the years deep beneath her skin, as though Shanghai had grafted steel plates in her cheeks. Already she’d lost a teenager’s mobility of features, felt the exhausted cast of her eyes. Everyone she met had a story about someone from their hometown who’d made it big in Shanghai. Somehow she’d never actually met any of those people firsthand.

  Still, she thought, the flower shop had helped. When working at the bottling plant, she’d felt herself turning into something nearly savage, fingers stiff, mind numb, chest a cage. There’d been cats in their village who’d hiss and spit at anyone who came near them, and Xiaolei thought she could understand why. Sometimes if she wanted to leave her room, she first found herself listening from inside for any hall noises and waiting until they subsided before exiting; the sound of another door rasping open would prompt her to pause. If she spotted people her age clustered in the courtyard—​a few girls had made friendly overtures—​she’d turn and make a hasty retreat, as if suddenly remembering something. It wasn’t surprising, she told herself: all wild animals fear human contact.

  But for six months now, she’d stripped rose thorns and sold bouquets, and there was a civility to it, an aperture onto a part of Shanghai that she’d almost stopped hoping she’d ever see, which soothed some of the growling in her chest. She sold flowers to office secretaries and grieving widows who arrived in sleek black cars and men who dispatched identical bouquets to separate addresses, their wives and their mistresses. She learned to flatten her tones and inflect her voice with a certain inquisitive softness that wasn’t native to any one place, certainly not Shanghai, and customers seemed to appreciate it.

  Her moods were all over the place these days, low currents that eddied peaceably before surging up into the sand, erasing everything in their path. Maybe someday she’d open her own flower shop. There were skyscrapers rising everywhere across Shanghai, a neon tangle of signs and burnished steel, men in suits and women in high heels, click click clack. She could sell potted plants for their hallways, build up her own business, maybe meet someone in the elevator, get an office job. It wasn’t impossible.

  By lunch she had stopped thinking about the dead man and her spirits began to lift. Outside, the sunlight reflected off the white strips of the crosswalk, and the street almost glowed. She’d sold six bunches of daisies that morning and taken in an order for a funeral spray of chrysanthemums; Yongjie would be pleased.

  It was Wednesday, so she’d been saving the best flowers all day for her favorite customer, first selling the ones with edges threatening to turn brown, those petals that had started to swoon and go loose at the tips—​another two days and they’d come undone.

  By five o’clock he still hadn’t arrived, though, and she felt a creeping sadness clot her limbs. As she helped other customers, she kept one eye out the door for his silhouette. The light outside was turning that pallid gray of late afternoon, stealing across the sidewalk, muting even the garish red sign across the way that blared HEALTH PRODUCTS, ADULT PRODUCTS, the jumble of computer cords and pipe fittings next door and beyond that, the dirty, slovenly floors of a small restaurant named for its chief menu item, Duck Blood Noodle Soup. He wasn’t in sight. She stared resignedly at the remaining flowers, fought the urge to tip them from their buckets onto the sidewalk.

  The day after the next was a Friday, meaning she’d have to wake up at 3 a.m. to try and beat all the other flower vendors to the wholesale market across town, then spend the next few hours slopping heavy, wet bundles back to the store. It also meant she’d have to wash out the buckets, already rancid with rotting stems, before leaving for the night. The scent of dying stock flowers, their stems soft and mushy in the water, she thought, compared almost unfavorably to that of her neighbor’s corpse.

  And then, suddenly, the man was outside the store and smiling at her with his crinkled-up eyes. He ducked inside the door as if he were dodging inclement weather, though it wasn’t raining, and rolled his shoulders backward, relaxing them. He’d cut his hair, she noticed, and was wearing the same white collared shirt as always; she envisioned his closet lined with whole glowing rows of them.

  At the sight of him, she felt the room come into focus again, her face unfreeze. “Seven red roses and three lilies?” she asked, not quite able to meet his eyes, and he nodded. “The nice wrapping, please.” She felt a warm thrum in her chest; the ease he carried with him worked on her like a balm, though he rarely said much—​indeed, now that she’d memorized his order, there was scarcely any need to speak at all. She stepped toward the buckets with their floral charges, grateful now for their perked-up appearance, and tucked her hair behind her ears.

  Gently, she eased each flower from its bucket and started splaying them out in her left hand, a galaxy of rose heads, then carefully threaded the lilies in among them. Once finished, she slid out a sheet of pink paper and one of purple tissue and laid them tenderly atop each other on the worktable. She thought she could feel his gaze on her and moved more slowly, just for the pleasure of drawing out the moment.

  Then, with one unsteady hand, she raised the cleaver and brought it down on the flowers’ stems. She placed them at the trembling center of the paper and brought its edges together, carefully tying an orange ribbon around the bouquet’s middle. They weren’t very nicely assembled, far more ragged than she would have liked, and she hoped he couldn’t tell. Yongjie made bouquets perfectly, so even across their tops that you could drape a cloth over them and mistake them for pedestals. She handled all their big orders.

  When she turned to look at him, he was standing at the counter, back to her, but as though sensing her movement, turned to look at her expectantly. She could feel little trickles of thought bubbling up that she wanted to share with him, but tamped them down as she handed him the flowers, feeling a jolt as he took them, as though they were an extension of her fingertips. It was foolish, she knew: the flowers were likely for a wif
e, or a mistress.

  “What do you do, anyway?” she said hastily, trying to cover her embarrassment as she assumed her position again behind the counter. “I see so much of you, I’ve always wondered.” That was an understatement; in her mind she’d already constructed an elaborate life for him. He was a doctor specializing in the brain, he played the violin, he liked stinky tofu and walks in the park, had been to Japan.

  He looked at her and smiled and the clean lines of his shirt, the dark thatch of his hair, the contrast of it, made her ache. She wanted to lean over the counter and stare at each strand of hair, count the hair follicles on his chin. “I do sales,” he said. Then, examining her, as though rethinking his statement: “Well, I’m in sales,” he corrected himself, and there was that smile again. He laid the flowers carefully crosswise atop the counter and began fishing for his wallet. “Here, I’ll give you my card.”

  Xiaolei looked down and studied it—​it was matte and thick to the touch. The company wasn’t one she’d ever heard of; she couldn’t tell what they did and she wouldn’t insult him by asking.

  Outside you could tell the time by the ranks of red taillights forming on the street; dusk was pressing in. Farther down the road was an expensive residential compound sealed with fat shrubs and a tall iron fence around its perimeter. The building, which bore the name Triumph Mansion, was six years old but still had the bewildered air of a fresh transplant; the neighborhood had not yet developed to match the pocketbooks or aspirations of its new residents. Xiaolei looked toward it now, as if for clues. Was she being rude by not speaking? Should she speak?

  His gaze was no longer upon her as he fumbled, emptying his pockets, looking for his wallet. The silence had gone on too long. “It’s a nice neighborhood,” she said hesitatingly at last. “Do you live at Triumph Mansion?”