21
“What are these?” Simon yells from the kitchen.
Please, not another pair of briefs. (Mental note: clean the house, someday.) I wipe the condensation in a circle, try to see what he is talking about. A slice of toast in one hand, two red wood carvings in the other. “Toast!” I say.
He finishes the bread, the coffee, and stops by the bathroom before he leaves. “Did you get your money yet?” he asks casually. “Seems like the monkeys froze the bank accounts of everyone at Oak Tree. Nice try…But we’ve been preparing for that. Fake names…ghost accounts. At least Dr. L and I were.”
I shrug, wonder if he heard me talking to Jason on the phone.
“Let’s just hope they don’t crash the entire economy just to distract us a little more. America can take presidential assassinations, mega-floods, even the plague. But mess with the economy, and it’s war.” he says, takes another sip of his coffee, and continues, “But we need to be ready before it escalates.”
He leaves the mug on the head of the dummy and I have to hold back my growl. Tell him I’m more worried about my own brain.
“I told you,” he says, through his next bite, “as long as you have me, you’re safe. By the way,” he continues, his voice almost tender, “no awkwardness, right?”
The idiot doesn’t know girls can have casual sex too. Although last night he was pretty nice. “Hey, did you say all that just ’cause you wanted to fuck me? Not the economy stuff, the things about me being….Because if you did, it was a pretty good job for a…”
“What d’you mean? You’re the one who seduced me!” he protests, in false indignation. “And yes, you are indeed the most extraordinary specimen I’ve seen among our kind.”
“Oooh, is that you being romantic?” I say, mocking mostly myself. Deep in my guts, and a bit lower than that too, I kind of like it, but I’d never confess.
He leaves while I’m still showering. I told him to. So I get dressed, prepare a bite for myself, and grab the carvings Simon was playing with before he ate my food and didn’t bother to do his dishes. The TV is on. Just the news. Nothing there I am interested in seeing. So I grab the remote and press off.
But it doesn’t work.
Instead, it brings a world of colored squares like those in my vision. Although this time it is empty, other than a single little pink creature in the middle of a wide lawn. A pig. What the fuck is that? Then the bell rings and the screen goes dark. What an asshole. “Is that your idea of a prank?” I say to Simon through the crack of the door. Except it wasn’t him.
Jason!?
My face is so shocked he has to laugh. But soon his smile melts away and he comes in, avoiding my eyes. In my head, I’m scanning the place for any signs of last night’s visitor. “You haven’t cleaned the apartment since I left?” he asks.
Phew. I ask him again what he’s doing here.
End of his shift, he says. Got my call, thought he could stop by to say hello in person, talk, scoop up a few things he left behind before his trip….
Yes, like your man panties…“What trip!?”
“Syria. I decided to go help at a refugee camp next Thursday. First trip as the head doctor.” he says with more heartbreak than enthusiasm. “By the way, glad you told me to cash the money. Thanks. The bank said after the blackout things got a little unstable, so they had to shut down some accounts for security reasons. I left part of in on the red bag behind the sugar bowl, if you need it. How about your…job?” he asks. From the cabinet in the corner, he grabs a handbag that may actually be mine, stuffs it with his giant first aid box, a few T-shirts he left behind (bye, pajamas…) and goes straight to the place where he left his blue and white briefs. Motherfucker dropped it there and still remembers?! He pauses, quietly. When I realize, he’s holding a yellow boxer instead.
Godammit, Simon!
The Buddhist doctor gives me the saddest grin, the one from a superior being who has no business asking questions, then magically remembers to check his watch and zip up his bag. “Just realized I’m kind of late now.”
In panic, I ask him to wait. He does. I can’t find an explanation, though. Go blank. “I understand,” he says, the melancholy dripping from the side of his eyes. “We broke up, you moved on.”
He leaves, and I call Simon. “What the fuck? Did you take my ex’s underwear?” He says he didn’t, that would be gross. Just threw it under the bed and put his in its place to make me remember him. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Guess I am better off alone.
We hang up and I leave, slamming the door behind me, fantasizing Simon’s neck was right there, waiting to be chopped. We broke up, Jason said, I moved on. I didn’t. I am just a giant fuck-up, Jason. Unfortunately, he’s not around to hear it anymore.
When life weighs on my back, I like to breathe my roots in the quietness of China Camp, the old fisherman village in the North of the Bay. Let the water wash my feet, watch the fog dance afar, reminding me of Wudang and all the stories I left behind. A world that keeps calling me back. But I was running late, Chinatown would have to do. I check the sky, too pretty. Damn. Beautiful mornings attract tourists, who take a walk through those few blocks into an obstacle race. Sometimes, in these situations, I play “don’t touch me,” a little game I invented to see how many bodies I can avoid until someone’s body hits mine. Good for the footwork, I decided, not caring if that was true or not. But it’s tough. Not to move around them, that’s easy. But keep my cool…for some reason they seem to believe the right way to walk on the sidewalks is on a forty-five-degree angle! Not forward, not across, in between, just to slow me for as long as they can. It must be a conspiracy. A massive joke the world is playing on me today. And that’s not the only joke.
Other than the language, the writing, and half of the faces, Chinatown looks nothing like real China. Not ancient enough in its old, or modern enough in its new. Yet every time you get to a crossroads and look in the right direction, you see the Transamerica Pyramid pointing up, and that makes you smile. The view of the distant building, with its architectural statement rising up from Downtown, may be the most Chinese thing in the neighborhood. That and the eateries. Those are the real deal if you can read Mandarin.
Back to my mission: the sham kung fu school. It is open. Class packed and everything. From the window, I spot the three old sages teaching a class together (I call them that in my mind because the image works, even though I don’t think that highly of those old farts). Three of them, three students, and a circle of young men and women around them all. The “sages” adjust the students in a V-shape formation, the tallest one in front, then tell the mob to form a group facing them. As the crowd attacks, they push forward as well, piercing through their foes, punching and kicking, and getting hit a lot too. But coming up unscathed on the other side.
Trying to make as little noise as possible, I go in.
“We learned to fight from the animals,” says Master Som. “Tigers, mantises, cranes, vipers…they are loners. They defend themselves and no one else. Well, we don’t know about dragons, but my guess is they are loners too.”
Master Lau says: “Dragons are absolutely loners. Ever seen a pack of them?”
Mr. Tián adds: “It’s called a school, not a pack.”
They all laugh at their own grandpa jokes while I hold my breath—that’s exactly what I told Shifu, minus the senile affectation. Mr. Som continues: “Would you stop interrupting me, for the immortals’ sake? What I was trying to say is that there are other animals that fight together. The lion. The monkey…” That’s when they see me. Mr. Som waves me to wait.
“When you learn their styles, you learn their single forms. But if you look at the real world, from the epic battles of Shaolin to the most common wars between every little village you can imagine, the truth was settled in packs. And guess what: the style of packs is called…strategy! For next class, I want you to study strategy. Go find a good book—Sun Tzu’s, or The Book of Five Rings, that despite being written in the Capital of the East is still a good piece of work, or any other book on strategy you can find. Read, take notes. Next week we will discuss it more.”
Class dismissed, I wait, watching them share last observations, laugh, push each other, and do their final bow to the masters before they leave. I miss my class. I long for the camaraderie you only find among brothers and sisters in arms. And, in the back of my mind, there’s something else. Like a mental itch, an idea trying to burst, but I can’t quite process yet. That’s why I need my super brain. But I’m here on a mission. So I give them a Daoist bow and extend the lacquered feather I took back with me “by mistake.”
“Xie xie,” Master Som bows back at me.
“Decided to resume your lessons, young one?” asks Master Tián.
“Not really, Shifu. Trying to see if my girl ambition can bring me somewhere first.”
Master Lau asks about my student and the others admonish him. “Shut up, pervert,” utters Master Som, hitting him with a cane on the shin.
They apologize.
In my head, I skim the list of students, wondering if the old perv was thinking of the twins, perhaps Connie.
“Mrs. Lee,” says Master Lau, “black one, big chest.” He gets another slap from the owner of the school.
“We don’t say those things anymore,” Som says, stroking his long beard.
“Whatever. That one has the spirit of a dragon horse, I can tell! And I tell you more: we have a link…”
A link, that’s it! My mind races. Packs…links…a memory so vivid I could be there again: in the Cave of Insights, Shifu asks in disdain if I had any original idea yet. I do now. Back in Chinatown, Master Lau winks at me as if he had seen it too. My thoughts shoot in so many directions, I get lost. I turn to face back, face forward, back at them, at the street. One more time I bow, then again. Even to the wall. What are you doing, Yinyin? Leave, I order myself. And obediently, my body follows, cringing hurriedly through the door.