Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  IV

  Return to Forever

  A change of state. Molecules in transition, liquid to vapor. A Chinatown dollar-store teacup flying a dragon kite of steam.

  “No more sleep!” said Irene Jew. With a whoosh, the window shade abandoned its post, and sunshine surged through the breach. “Time to get up. Big day!”

  Gwen opened her eyes. Dust motes drew paisleys across the dazzle: molecules in transition. And Gwen just another molecule, a big fat molecule, tumbling random through space.

  “Big day,” she ironized. “Woo-hoo.”

  Her world now consisted of four walls and a lone window at the back of the dojo, secreted behind a knobless door that was in turn concealed behind a life-size, full-length still photograph (slick pecs and abs, flying slippered right foot, teeth gritted in a predatory smile) of the eponym and presiding spirit of the Bruce Lee Institute of Martial Arts. Her life was a bedroll and a blue duffel, a meal in a paper bag, every day adding its sorry page to the history of the homelessness.

  The thirty-sixth week was fertile ground for self-pity in the gravid female, and Gwen’s thoughts upon waking struck her as neatly diagnostic.

  Master Jew cupped the teacup with its painted mountain landscape in her tiny hands, trained to mend and heal, as well as to deal blows by Lam Sai Wing, who had studied under the great doctor and righter of wrongs Wong Fei Hung. She squatted beside the sleeping mat in her black cotton pants and shapeless white tunic, waiting out her latest hidden guest and source of irritation until, at last, said individual hoisted herself halfway out of the bedroll. Gwen took the cup into the outsize hands that had cupped the tender skulls of a thousand babies and whose lineage of instruction likewise could be traced directly back to the nineteenth century, to a midwife named Juneteenth Jackson, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Gwen’s twice-great-grandmother.

  “Hot tap water,” Gwen said. She made a face. Her tone damned not only the idea of drinking hot tap water but all the eventualities that had led her to another lonely reveille in this glorified closet, its sole ornament a Chinese dollar-store Ming vase in which stood a plastic red Gerber daisy that was really a ballpoint pen. To this cut-rate futon with its smell like stale waffles. To this moment at which a cup of hot tap water must—she would not have dared to refuse Master Jew—be drunk. “What I need is a cup of coffee.”

  “Coffee make your baby restless,” Master Jew said. “Make him want to run away from home one day.”

  Along with the cup of hot water, then, Gwen must evidently accept an implicit criticism of her own flight from home and hearth. A ninety-year-old Chinese master of kung fu, even a female one, was not likely to be all that progressive, you had to figure, when it came to the question of proper relations between husband and wife.

  Gwen drank and was amazed, as always, by how good hot tap water actually felt and tasted, how well it suited your throat and gullet going down, how drinking it seemed to loosen some inner string or melt an inner coldness you did not even know that you harbored. Master Jew claimed to be able to cure all kinds of ailments with nothing but a mugwort cigar and the regular consumption of moderately hot water. In the darkness of Gwen’s belly, the son or daughter of her worthless husband gave a flutter kick of gratitude for the drink.

  “How’s your back?” said Master Jew.

  Gwen reached the fingers of one hand to palpate the muscles at the small of her back. In the past few days, her pregnancy had been finding new, painful uses for the largest knots of muscle on her frame. She woke in the company of charley horses, grandma cramps, stiffness of the joints. She shrugged. “It hurts.”

  Master Jew knelt and reached behind Gwen to plunge her fingers into the root system of the lumbar like a gardener with a crocus to transplant. Gwen drew in a sharp breath at the pain, yet the abrupt rough contact of the old woman’s cool, dry, soft-skinned fingers came as a shock to her exiled heart. Gwen loved Master Jew the way one was supposed to love one’s kung fu master: furiously, like a child.

  “Better,” Master Jew said.

  “A little,” Gwen admitted.

  Here was the reason that Gwen had been drawn into and persevered with her studies at the Bruce Lee Institute for so long, training hard for nearly four years until she had earned her black belt: because qigong, like Master Jew, didn’t seem to care if you believed in it or not.