WHEN CARLA LEFT THE HOUSE after throwing the glass at Derek, Nadine turned on him. “You have a lot to pay for, Derek. She’s right. Why did I spend my life with you? How … how could you be so selfish?”
“I don’t want to hear about it, Nadine. Ever since the day those children came here, you turned on me.”
“Turned on you? They were children, for God’s sake! You’re a grown man. Take some responsibility.”
“Responsibility! Didn’t I take them in? Didn’t I?”
“You were duty bound. You were supposed to love them too.”
“You sided with that bitch against me. You and your family took her side. How the hell you could take her side after she ruined my life.”
“My God, Derek. She killed herself! You made her kill herself.”
“I didn’t make her kill herself. Don’t blame me for that.”
“Who else?”
“Just like I said. You take her side and turn against me. She was crazy. Shit, she had a mental condition!”
“Well, she wasn’t crazy enough to stop you from putting your dick where it didn’t belong.”
Derek wheeled on Nadine, raising his hand to hit her.
“Go on, hit me, Derek. It will be the last thing you do. Go on.”
“Fuck you, woman,” he said, pushing her aside to leave the room. “I don’t have time for this! You can go to hell.”
“You’re the one going to hell!” she yelled after his back going up the staircase. From the kitchen, a few minutes later, she heard him slam out the front door.
Derek hadn’t pushed Angie over the balcony, but he might as well have.
His friends, his family, had formed a protective circle around him after the inquest. Nadine felt like a bystander. Derek’s arms had gripped her shoulders in a nervous vice. She was his prop, his evidence that Angie was just a crazy bitch trying to come between him and his family. His grasp of her shoulder confirmed for Nadine that Derek was to blame. Angie’s mother had spat at him in the courtroom, shouted at him, “Figlio di puttana!” Outside, after the inquest, she walked over to him, reaching for him in what seemed at first a gesture of forgiveness. Nadine knew it wasn’t peace, it wasn’t forgiveness, it was vengeance. Derek saw Angie’s mother and made a strangling sound before she grasped his neck. “Fucking get her off me!” he screamed. He closed his eyes, she had something in her hand that was cutting into the right side of his neck. “Bastardo! Figlio di puttana!” Nadine watched in sweet horror, wishing the worst. It was a St. Christopher medallion. Derek thought it was a knife and tried to wrench himself away, yelling, “She’s got a knife!”
After the suicide they had taken in his children by Angie. Angie’s sister had dropped them at his door, the little girl, Nadine knew about her, and a squalling baby she didn’t quite know about. Derek had denied it, his face in that soft way, as if he had been wounded. He had promised her that it was over, that the woman, Angie, was a madwoman. That yes, the first child was his. It had happened at the time that he and Nadine weren’t doing well. But the baby, he swore, was not his, not at all. He had had nothing to do with that woman again. She was crazy, following him, coming to his home. He was paying her child support and that was all.
Nadine wanted to refuse, she would not raise another woman’s children, she wanted to leave him but she hadn’t. He had chosen her, hadn’t he? He could just as easily have taken off with the white girl, but he had chosen her, chosen to stay with her, and so some vanity in her, a vanity, of course, tinged with racial vindictiveness, made her take his choice as an honour.
The truth, she knew, was that Derek was a vain man, not a forward-thinking man. He could not start over again with another woman. He had been quite comfortable living in that way with Angie on the side. Nadine calculated, counted on that streak of conservativism in Derek. When she finally agreed to take his children in, it was with another calculation. That he would never be able to thank her. That would be their pact. Something else involuntarily crept into the bargain. Nadine gradually and sometimes violently ceased to love Derek. What she felt for him was certainly strong but it was not love. Another fascination took hold of her—why Angie? What did Derek see in Angie? Nadine was tortured by this. The thought also occurred to her that taking the children would reveal this. That Derek could betray her for someone less worthy was to her impossible. So how was Angie more worthy?
She searched the children’s faces for what element there might reveal Angie’s attraction. But what it took for her to take care of another woman’s children without cruelty was every ounce of her sense of herself as a good human being. It wasn’t hard with the baby. He was like an unformed bit of matter, he knew nothing. But Carla was a brooding, watchful little girl who was grieving for her mother. She would sometimes ask Derek when Angie was coming for her and the baby. Derek would bark at her eventually, saying that Angie wasn’t coming back and that she should be quiet. The child was unhappy, and in those early days Nadine could not bring herself to comfort her. Carla would sink into quietness and strangeness. All Nadine could summon up was a prissy reprimand of Derek: “The little girl has lost her mother, you’re her father. You should explain it to her.” Nadine really meant “You’ll spend a lifetime explaining it to me.”
You can’t resent children for long. Or at least Nadine couldn’t. She didn’t have it in her. Some did—there were stories of child abuse in the papers every day. One poor boy beaten to death by his stepmother and father after he’d come to the city from Jamaica. Nadine knew where her anger was. Derek was the one who should suffer. She ignored her sisters hissing at her on the telephone about why she should not be taking care of Derek’s bastards. She made Derek blunder through the first month of feeding and dressing and taking care; begging his mother to help out. She wanted him to know just what he would owe if she took on the task of caring for Carla and Jamal. And despite herself she came to give them a kind of love, especially the baby, who didn’t have the reserve of the little girl.
The sisters found her behaviour unusual. In the years that passed they shook their heads at her, saying she was either stupid or a saint for taking on the burden of Derek’s children. And they did not know and Nadine did not confide in them what a struggle she had in damping down her hurt and resentment, her feelings of utter betrayal. She had turned a corner morally in being able to bring anything like love to her relationship with these children. She took it as a triumph over Derek, over herself, over conventional wisdom, to come to the point of considering Angie’s children her own. The complexities of this triumph—some distorted, some like an epiphany—she never revealed or for that matter understood herself. She felt guilty about Angie. Why? Because Angie had killed herself in some respects because of her, Nadine. Her existence, which stood in the way. Was that vanity too? she wondered. Angie had killed herself because of Derek’s callousness. Or perhaps Angie was mad, as Derek said, and had killed herself because of that. Whatever it was, Nadine felt guilty. She should have put a clean stop to it long ago.
There was a terrible flattery also in Angie’s death. For Derek. Nadine had overheard a man at a social function pointing to Derek as they passed by and saying in an appreciative tone, “Woman kill herself for him, you know?” She shared in this flattery, as women in her social circle told her better Angie than she, and complimented her on sticking it out or encouraged her to leave his ass now. So for all this terrible praise she took extra care of Angie’s poor children. It was the sign that she had no malice toward Angie, no malice for a dead woman; that she was better than Angie. And anyway, why should these children suffer because Derek couldn’t keep his fly zipped? And she was not about to let them suffer so that people would say that her jealousy made her mistreat them. She would take instead the beatific garment offered to her, taking Carla and Jamal in and loving them.
And she had. She had loved them. Beyond what she had thought possible. That’s the thing with children. They opened a person up. They came with their own presences and opened you up. Now Nadine could not recall with the same intensity ever not loving Carla and Jamal. Perhaps there had been in her a small resentment toward Carla. She bore a resemblance; unlike Jamal, Angie was there in her. Perhaps she had been unable to completely love her for this. Perhaps it was why she had been unable to form the words to tell Carla that it had not been her fault. She had not meant to leave her without an answer. She recognized a whinging smallness in her hesitation. She told herself that she did not say anything because Carla was too young, not because of these resentments. She told herself no, she would never transfer these to her. And she didn’t, at least she thought so. Self-doubt made her think everything twice, made her mistrust her best feelings. She loved Carla. As much as she could.
Nadine’s love for Jamal, however, was unreserved, so uncontrollable at times that she never made the right decisions about him. He got whatever he wanted from her. Whatever whim of his needed satisfying she gave in to. With Nadine, Jamal had no compass for right and wrong, and when Derek stepped in, he bludgeoned his way in, his meter of hatred for Angie as clearly present as his wounded passion. Between them Jamal was a temperamental bundle seeking continuous attention yet blowing up because of it. Sometimes Nadine was speechless with this love, confused at the depth of it, as deep as if Jamal were her son in flesh. In fact, this love had alienated her from her son by blood. He found her weak because of it. But she would do anything for Jamal. There had been many confrontations with Derek, some coming close to violence in defence of Jamal. She’d stolen money from Derek for Jamal, she’d hidden the fact that he had dropped out of school, she’d covered up his lying, and on the numerous occasions that Derek had put him out of the house, she had gone looking for him with Carla and brought him home.
Carla had left home at nineteen, by which time she had grown lank and long as if from too much rain and small portions of strong sunlight. When she first told Nadine and Derek her plans, they both involuntarily screamed “no” at the same time. What about college, university, how was she going to make a living? Nadine took it back, quickly saying, “If you really think so, Carla. If you’re ready.” Yes, go, Nadine thought. She had lived with this brooding, watching child for eleven years. Relief is what she felt. She would not have to answer any questions. If Carla stayed at home, she would be a child who had to be answered, but if she left home, then she was an adult with a separate life and Nadine wouldn’t have to feel any more guilt for Derek, or for the death of Angie.
So as quickly as she had said no to Carla moving out, Nadine took it back. “Yes, yes, darling. You’re big enough now. As long as you think you could manage.” She would do her best to help Carla, help her fix the place up. She would visit her. They would be different. They would be adults together, they would go to the movies together, meet on their lunch hours and have a laugh. She wouldn’t have to love her any more. Carla would find people that she could love. She had not exercised this muscle at all with them.
“I can manage. I have a job. I found a place already.” And that was that. Carla wasn’t asking them, she was saying that she was going. She was saying, if they heard her right, I’m leaving you both. Don’t need what I never got.
Nadine searched herself for some word that would ease them over into friendship. She wanted Carla to know that she was happy for her, but Carla was gone, retreating, or rather advancing into her life. Who were her friends, and how did she know the city enough to have found a place, to be ready to live on her own? What Nadine had not said had cut her off too. She would have to wait for Carla to come to her. One day she was sure it would happen. Carla would see how she had protected her and shielded her from the bad things in life. But Carla circumvented every effort she made to come by and visit her. When she baked something and said she’d come and bring it, Carla said no, not to bother, she’d pick it up from her at work, or she’d merely say, “Don’t cook me anything,” in her exasperating whisper. Nadine wasn’t the kind of demanding mother that others were. She knew where to stop and she knew why. She didn’t want anything boiling over. She didn’t want that whisper to turn into a growl.
Today Nadine dressed for work feeling an unusual absence. She would tell her that she, Carla, was not to blame for anything. She would tell her that she was too small to understand at the time, too small to be burdened. It was too late, but she wanted to tell her, she wanted it to make a difference. An urgency moved her. She would tell her the whole story. But she was going to find Derek first.
She left the house and could hear far off a train lumbering and squeaking along the tracks at Cherry Street. She looked at her watch, she should get to work. A sweet smell of fresh bread was coming from the bakery, a recorder was playing music at the school next door. She walked toward the Chester subway, feeling a sharp light on her, her head tingling as if she had inhaled water. The city around her seemed new, soft-skinned and tender.
She handled the facts of the day briskly—the white counters, the green screen of the computers, the ruby coagulates, the sharp needles, the shiny sinks. By lunchtime she had decided to skip the rest of the day and go talk to Derek. She’d been to Derek’s workplace infrequently. She was going to leave him, now finally, if he didn’t do what he had to do.
Derek managed a car wash in the west end of the city. Good weather or bad, six or seven men would by turns be shivering from the cold or wet, rubbing cars down with wet rags, lit cigarettes in their hands to keep them warm. Over the years Derek hired an assortment of the city’s down and out, men who had the good fortune of being the latest wave of immigrants: Sikhs, Caribbeans, Vietnamese, Sri Lankans, Russians, and Somalis. Somalis and Ethiopians now made up the majority of the crew. Two old Caribbean men and one Ukrainian had been with the shop even before Derek. Most days Derek sat in the small warm kiosk taking money from the customers while the crew ran the cars through the wash and then wiped them to a shine. That is, unless a pretty woman came to get her car done. Then Derek would come out, ordering the crew to make sure that her car was waxed well and all the running boards wiped. He would turn on the charm, holding her by the shoulder and giving her a free coupon and his assurances that she could call him any time, come by any time; managing to get her phone number and, if she was married, implying all the while that she may not be happy and that he was available to talk or have a coffee. Derek’s game was a quick and slippery charm. In the middle of the oil-stained, deluged, smelly car wash, among the ruggedly dressed, rough-handed, broken-faced men, Derek was immaculate, well dressed, and sweet smelling. He always exuded the lover, the charmer.
Walking toward the car wash and seeing him standing with the men, pointing to the hood of a car, Nadine felt a wave of both desire and revulsion pass through her. Yes, she had loved Derek for this very thing, his virility, his easy lust. And here it was, more than twenty years later, still intact despite everything that had happened.
Derek was startled when he turned to go back to the kiosk and saw her. He hurried toward her, assuming she had come to make a scene and to squelch it before she did so in front of the men. He turned a smile on her as he would a customer and made a grand embrace as the crew would expect him to behave toward his wife. The crew, today a Sri Lankan, the two old Caribbean men, and the two young Somalis, looked on appreciatively. Derek called, to one of the older man, “Roger, take over the kiosk for me. I’m going to take my wife to lunch.” Then he checked his pockets for his keys and guided Nadine to his car.
“I want you to go get your son out of jail, Derek.”
“Get in the car, Nadine.”
“I mean it, Derek. I’m tired of this … tired with you now.” She sounded exhausted.
“You see what that girl did to my car, Nadine?” He showed her the scoring around the body. She looked at him pitifully.
“It’s nowhere near what you did.” Something in her tone told him this would not be their usual bickering.
“Do what you have to do. I’m done,” she said before he turned the key in the ignition.
It’s late spring in this city. Seasons mean nothing to me. Money is my season. Korea beat Italy. You never know, they could beat Germany next. But I doubt it. That Teutonic bunch have no creativity, but they have order. I’m the opposite. Sometimes I think I haven’t the heart for another city. It’s just that I haven’t the bones to reach my hand into another set of lives, feel the sweat of stupid dreams.
What am I doing here, anyway? Well, I lost the compass for knowing where I was long ago, I suppose. So it’s useless asking who I am. You’re more interested in how I got off of Pulau Bidong. How I got here and how grateful I am. How I know the alleyways that lead to the back doors of Chinatown in this city. What if I told you that there’s a web of people like me laying sticky strings all over the city?
You want to know how a person like me could get into such esoteric matters. After all, what pause would I have between scuffling off a boat in the South China Sea, the eternal boat to Pulau Bidong. Get this, a person like me gets to know things. And if you were a boy like me, you’d wise up soon enough to the way things get told and what the weight of telling is.
Well, I was rescued by monks from Pulau Bidong, and they had a good thing—begging. I shaved my head and put on a brown robe and learned to solicit alms on the mainland. We were like a gang, like any conglomerate of businessmen. We had territory, we had monopolies, we had wars, we had alliances, until a schism broke out between the monk who was my father, an ascetic with an opium habit, and a high-tech monk with a laptop computer, a Web site, and a dream of expansion into America.
I was fed up with Loc Tuc. The other side was more promising than that black hole of an opium high. The Dong Khoi had freed me of allegiances. By this time I was a bone of a man, my body looked older than my face. My face always saves me; I’m told it has the innocence of a child’s. That face remained with me. I myself don’t recognize it when I look at it in the mirror. Who is that? I ask. That clear-eyed weepy boy, the waiting look, innocent, innocent like a banded kingfisher. I’ve managed to change everything except that face. It’s waiting for its mother and father to come back. You would fall in love with it. My body has done everything hurtful, but that face keeps hanging on.
The new boss with the laptop had his hands on everything. I used to call him “du-ma-nhieu” behind his back. He had a mobile cellphone and partners on every continent. He would find somebody for you as far away as Alaska. But I didn’t want to find my mother and father any more. I told him that. I was finished with that long ago. You should see our crew of monks, orange-gowned and macerated, we moved like a dust cloud. But we had uzis and palm pilots. We controlled the unofficial refugee trade from Malaysia and Thailand to China and out; we hacked into offshore bank accounts. Of course, other residuals and commodities came our way. Use your imagination. We exported the I Ching for idiots and took a shared interest in pirated Thoughts of Mao Tse-tung and replicas of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. In our dim corner of the world we unravelled languages while we traded in everything from plastic hair combs to liberated Ford Broncos from New York. You may not understand this, but the world came to us and we ate.
The monk with the laptop was a dangerous man until he fell in love with the girl sewing tongues into Brooks high tops. When he looked at her ravaged fingers, it became personal. We blew up a factory, and the girl dropped him for ruining her life. She had the police hunting us down because we made it political. It’s all right when the economic wheels are turning—theft is nothing—but turning principled is another matter. You have to know how to run your life, you have to take the highs with the lows. Never get used to an easy life—it’ll slip out from under you any time. Years, years we spent living well, under the radar, then he goes and does this thing. So I had to find another way; it was getting ideological. I didn’t want to make it into the newspapers any more. I stole the laptop and the cellular and cut out on a boat to Fushen. Hopped a freighter and ended up on the Pacific coast of Canada with some teenaged girls heading for the tenderloin district of San Fransisco. I’m doomed to boats.
You want to know how I felt? Did I grow, did I believe, was I hopeful, was this a journey to start a new life? How could I have betrayed the new boss, how could I steal from him, am I redeemable? Did I have a moment of revelation? Can I turn my life around? You’re better at that.
For some of us, the world is never forgiving. And anyway, we don’t believe in such things, these ideas of forgiveness, redemption—it’s useless. That high-tech monk is probably dead by now and has figured out another incarnation.
The ship ran aground in the Juan de Fuca Strait. I bailed out. Me and some others hit land before the Coast Guard came. The laptop and the cellular were wrapped in oilskin. I knew they would be my collateral. “The danger of the sky is that we cannot climb up into it; the danger of the earth is the mountains, rivers, and hills—constant pitfalls—seek and you gain a little.”
By now the monk was a blade of grass, but he had kept files. There were correspondences on the laptop, letters from and letters to. Some woman had been sending letters to the new boss for years, searching for a boy. There was a network of middlemen and pharmacists, payoffs and bribes that the monk had a hand in. Someone was searching for their sister, someone else for a grandfather. “For the weak at the outset, good luck is a matter of following along.” How was the monk supposed to find them? Boys would not be boys any more, this sister not a sister, this grandfather is a pile of dust. But they kept writing, and the monk kept taking, and sending hope from Klong Toey. Sometimes he may have found someone, but they had to pay too. Hitchhiking the Trans-Canada Highway, I knew the laptop was my capital.
My body keeps moving out of wilfulness. What is physical is uncontrollable. If I didn’t have to take a piss, the Mounties would never have caught me. There’s my face again in the cameras of the world. This time I’m ducking, shielding it with my handcuffed wrists. Looking better, looking better, though. Only biding time. They gave us orange overalls. The men and the girls. I suppose it’s a blankness of another kind. I suppose it’s the same picture as at Pulau Bidong those many years ago. But I can’t complain. There’s something to anonymity, stereotype, being part of the hordes. It can be a camouflage. Let others try to escape it.
Let them complain. I’ll slip into it and disappear. Did I tell the Amnesty people who I was? Who I’d been? No. What for? To complicate things? Let them have their picture, I say. Yes, I’m innocent of all things. Yes, I’m guilty of all things.
When they relaxed the detention rules, I took off with two girls worth eighteen thousand dollars apiece. Thirty-six thousand on delivery to Margaret Yao in Toronto. I searched quickly for the laptop, which had been confiscated. One of the girls found it, while the other one chatted up a guard. Then, waiting for early-morning changeover, we ran off.
There were fears and figures and dates in that computer and then there were those stories which I must confess I found seductive. The transactions that the monk made in identity. Everything is mystery. As cold as those dealings were, the way he wrote those stories was poetry. I suspect he and I were brothers beyond what we told each other. But perhaps not. He was sentimental, after all. Look how he got caught up in that factory girl’s life. When I read the monk’s poetic meanderings, the laptop went soft like blood.
He’d been taking money from that one woman for more than ten years to find a boy named Quy. He inherited this mark from the monk he deposed and destroyed with the best dose of opium since the Buddha made heaven. Every four or five letters he would give her hope and relate how he had seen her boy and the boy was now a holy man, and then he would plunge her into despair, saying no, it might not be him after all. Then he would ask her to send as much money as she had so he could go to the sacred temple in the interior, where he was convinced the holy boy had gone. Then he would berate her about how little she loved her son that she would send such a pittance. This was the monk’s most intense relationship, I could tell, until the factory girl came along. I came to believe that he was Quy himself; otherwise, why would he keep up so many letters with this one mother when with all the rest he robbed them and moved on? But then again the subject of all this could just as well have been me, for one of the names I go by is Quy and I was lost one night in a bay, or so I’ve told myself.
The new boss never showed any particular interest in me. How would I know that he saw in me one hundred years of meditation, that I had lived several other lives?
Innocence is important for a hero. I’m not innocent; neither was the monk. Innocence makes a story more appealing to some. It’s dangerous where I’m concerned. How many times did I have to repeat my own story to some stupid new humanitarian. My words passing like through a sieve. No amount of relating would help. It was always new to them. It got so that to amuse myself, since I was so bored with it, I made minor changes to the tale, or in the end I fantasized wildly. Either way, I was a liar or I was mad. Either way, my listeners went away as if they’d heard nothing. So much for innocence as arbiter of any situation. I never tried to find myself or who I belonged to. The thought made me weak. It paralysed me. Whenever my mind wandered there, I became a child. This Lon inside me would whimper, “Why don’t they come for me?”
When the monk fell in love, he called this danger on himself. Maybe he was weak. I warned him. He had moments, reclusive, when we would not see him for days. Away on business or just lying on his mat. Perhaps then he longed for the woman in the letters, perhaps then he dreamed of going to her and forgiving her. He stole more from me than I care to say. I don’t blame him; I would have done the same. And I warned him.
As I said, spring. Me and the girls sat on a train to the city for three days, and then we arrived. It wasn’t hard to convince them that I was one of the bosses, that I knew people and they owed me. I fucked them both. I missed my tape of Mallaria and the Stone Crows. Ku Yie playing guitar with Carburetor Dung would have been nice. Well, what can you do on a train for three days? I had to ditch them. They were planning to do the same to me. But they weren’t my only ticket. The laptop was a gold mine.