I met Nancy in the lobby of her apartment building two hours later. She had already changed into her latest indie outfit—cut-off stovepipe denims and a new T-shirt that sported a graphic of Ian Curtis’s left eye blown up to cover her entire chest.
I saw one of the doormen cringe as her cheap wooden sandals clacked against the tiled areas of the floor.
“What’s in the box?” she asked as we waited for the elevator.
“Let’s talk when we get into your apartment,” I said. I must have looked scared, because she didn’t say anything else.
When we were in her place, I waited until the door was closed, locked and chained behind us before talking.
“Nancy, when I saw Mr. Huang, he turned up the TV volume and said he wasn’t supposed to have this box.”
“What’s in it?”
“I don’t know, exactly, but it’s Julia’s stuff. I haven’t opened it yet.”
“Why did he turn up the TV volume?”
“Julia was working for …” I thought about how cautious Mr. Huang had been and also spelled out “C-I-A” on my palm. Nancy gasped. “People are monitoring them.”
“That means they’re monitoring you, too,” she said. “And also me.”
I patted her arm. “You’ve got doormen downstairs to protect you.”
“We’re not really going to be safe until we know what’s in there.” She tapped the box, which was wound shut with duct tape, forming crosses on the top and bottom panels.
“Can you get me something to cut this with?”
“What if there’s a head in there?” she asked.
“Look at the shape, Nancy. Only SpongeBob SquarePants’s head could fit in here.”
Nancy went to the kitchen and brought back a steak knife.
“Everything seemed to go smoothly with Mrs. Huang, right?” I asked as I hacked away at the tape.
“It was so easy to make her come with me. I told her I had a message for her from Julia and that she had to come to the temple to hear it. She couldn’t put her shoes on fast enough. Mr. Huang looked pretty skeptical, but he didn’t dare say a word to stop her. The only thing that held us up was the elevator.”
“That elevator sucks,” I said. She nodded. The duct tape was strong as hell and as fibrous as an unripe mango. “I saw you guys get in the cab.”
Nancy sat down and grabbed hold of herself. “Mrs. Huang covered her face and cried in her hands the entire time. I felt really guilty, like I was tricking a little kid.” Nancy wrinkled her nose. “Also, I realized that it was pretty racist for me to be wearing a Paiwan outfit. I wanted to tell her it was all just a trick to get her away from the apartment.”
I managed to cut through one of the duct-tape bands on the top. “You didn’t tell her anything, did you?”
“No, of course not. I was resolute about carrying out the mission. Anyway, when we entered Guandu Temple, something weird happened.” She rubbed her hands and arms as if spreading lotion.
I put the knife down. “What happened?” I asked. “Did Mrs. Huang start freaking out?”
“Not yet,” Nancy said. She was now rubbing her knees. “I felt something walk right through me. From my back to my front. It felt like a cool breeze, only it went through my body, not just over my skin. It was definitely a spirit.”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts.” I put a hand on her back. “You were just nervous.”
She sat down and turned away. “It was definitely something. It is Ghost Month, right?”
I went back to the box. “Nancy, Santa Claus isn’t real, either. It’s just stuff for a holiday.” I severed the other end of the tape band. Now I just had to slit the tape along the flap edge.
“I don’t believe in ghosts, Jing-nan. Honestly. But it was really something. Anyway, Mrs. Huang was walking in front of me and all of a sudden she froze, as if that thing had just walked through her, too. She began to shake, and then she screamed that Julia was there.”
I put the knife down again. “Are you serious, Nancy?”
She nodded hard. “Mrs. Huang knocked over a table of incense burners—on purpose, I think,” Nancy continued. “Then she started pushing people, saying that the Americans killed her daughter.”
“That must have really freaked out all the worshippers,” I said. Temples were noisy with cell-phone ringtones and yelled prayers for help, but nobody touched anybody else. “What did Mrs. Huang do when you told her your fake story?”
“I never got to tell her, because they took Mrs. Huang away.”
“Who took her away?”
“Policemen. There were signs up that undercover cops were around because people have been breaking into the money boxes. I thought the signs were just for show. She was acting so crazy, it took two men to grab her and carry her away.”
I almost wished I could have seen it. The only time I had seen Mrs. Huang flip out was when someone stole some fruit from her stand. The thief wasn’t a big guy, but he probably weighed twice as much as her. She followed him as he tried to scamper away, but the market was too crowded for him to bolt. Mrs. Huang screamed and slapped him repeatedly until he dropped everything he had stolen that night from all the stands.
How could such a plucky person also have a vulnerable side?
Poor Mrs. Huang. I felt a little bad that we had tricked her, but I had no idea that she would be so susceptible to a plan that hinged on a costume. Then I thought about how mean Mrs. Huang had been to me the last time, and I felt less bad.
“I hope they didn’t do anything to her,” I said, renewing my fight against the box.
“I didn’t stick around,” said Nancy. “I just took the MRT home after that.”
I had just cut the last bit of tape holding the box shut, but I hesitated before opening it. I crossed my arms and sat back.
Nancy came over and put an arm around my waist. “Jing-nan,” she said. “Open the box! I’m dying to see what’s inside!”
I pulled all four flaps open and something fluttered inside. The box was packed with papers, some in binders and some held with clips. Julia’s work for the CIA.
I flipped through some of it. Everything was in English. Essays on the political future of China, Taiwan and the US. A study of potential outcomes if Taiwan were to declare independence. None were good. Most tantalizing of all was a thesis project about military intelligence on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The abstract noted that China would recruit more Taiwanese officers as spies not only to check the island’s military efforts, but to stymie America’s Asia strategy, as well. Taiwan was one of the biggest US allies in the Pacific, along with South Korea and Japan, and realistically it was the only base the US could attack China from.
Under that was a report on the head of a Taiwanese chip company who was selling technology to the Chinese government. Nancy snatched it away, and I was about to protest when I saw what was underneath it.
At the very bottom of the box, folded in half and tucked into a flap, was Julia’s diploma from NYU. I thought she hadn’t graduated. How puzzling. I touched the signatures. They seemed real.
The diploma hadn’t been handled with care. It was wrinkled from water damage.
I touched the paper with wonder before I understood. Not graduating was only part of the cover story. Being a betel-nut beauty was another.
I showed Nancy the diploma.
“Look. Julia did finish college.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” said Nancy. She was still reading the chip report.
“Nancy, why are you so interested in that?”
She put the papers aside. “Julia is the one who helped put Ah-ding in jail. Look, she recorded him talking about selling technology to the Chinese in addition to fixing bids on Taipei city-government contracts for laptops.”
I picked up the papers and flipped through them. “Looks like she planted a bug in his car! Did Ah-ding chew betel nut?”
“He did,” said Nancy, her voice dead. “He went to Hsinchu City a lot, too, of course. Ah-ding had a few plants out there.”
“He must have stopped at Julia’s betel-nut stand at some point, and that must have been when she bugged his car.”
Nancy stared into my eyes. “What was she doing in his car?!”
“Nancy, she probably didn’t have to get into his car to bug it! She probably dropped something when she handed him the bag of chews.”
She sighed and looked visibly relieved. “Do you know how weird it would be if Julia and Ah-ding had slept together?”
“Please,” I said. “I don’t want to imagine that.”
On my way to work, I had a hard time visualizing anything but Julia with a tag team of repulsive older men with reddened teeth.
DWAYNE WAS IN A bad mood when I finally showed up just a little later than usual at Unknown Pleasures.
“You didn’t call, you didn’t text,” he grumbled. “I was thinking maybe you were hopelessly tied up … between that girl’s legs.”
“I can get out of any hold,” I said as I hastily washed my hands. “I get a lot of practice here.”
“Yeah, but I don’t grab you the same way she grabs you. Right?”
“Gentlemen,” admonished Frankie with as much disgust as possible. We swung into position and got to work.
It was a busy night, but not exceptionally so. When I was coming back from the common bathroom, I saw two teenaged boys break away from my moped, trying to stifle laughter. All right, maybe it was the oldest, worst-looking vehicle in the night market, but I’m stubborn, and the flagrant mockery made me even more determined to keep riding it.
Kuilan came over to chat and brought over a bowl of noodles with one of her new fried-chicken fillets on the side. I thought they were okay. She was touting and shouting about her new organic chicken, but they didn’t taste any better than Kentucky Fried Chicken. In fact, the current specimen in the glassine bag in my hand was too heavily seasoned with chili powder. Eating it was like licking the sun.
“Jing-nan, did you hear?” said Kuilan. “There’s a rumor that the big move is back on!”
I crossed my legs.
“Are you sure, Kuilan?”
“It’s those lousy developers trying to push us out again. They make all of us mainlanders look bad! I’ve seen them walking through the market with their money buddies from China, checking the sightlines and drawing up the blueprints in their minds.” She gestured all around before thumping her fist on her chest. “They don’t even see us or our stands.”
I took another bite of Kuilan’s fiery cutlet and wiped away tears as I chewed.
“Nothing’s been announced, though, right?” I struggled to ask. I picked up the bowl of noodles and eagerly drank the pickled soup.
“You know how it works, Jing-nan.” Kuilan propped up a foot on the side of my front grill and counted off points on her fingers, taut with patches of healed skin. “They’re going to finalize the deals first behind closed doors. Then they announce that they are examining the idea and want to involve the community. The land’s probably already been sold and the construction bids already accepted.” She closed her hand and shook her scarred fist at me. I drank some more soup to clear my mouth, but it only spread the spicy heat around. “Kuilan,” I said, “we can sue them and tie everything up in court. There are a lot of ways to fight this thing if we want to.”
Listen to me. Acting all tough even though I had an out with Peggy Lee’s company, if I wanted it. I was the new Mr. Huang.
Noticing my watering eyes, Kuilan gasped, “You really do care, Jing-nan! Your parents would have been so proud of you!” She rubbed my arm and went back to her stand.
We sold a broad range of grilled and fried meats, but we didn’t sell fried-chicken fillets, and I felt self-conscious about having it on my breath. I swished my mouth a few times with Coke to get rid of the taste. When I wasn’t looking, Dwayne grabbed my bottle and chugged it.
“Gan ni niang!” I yelled and slapped his back.
“Watch your mouth!” Frankie said, uncharacteristically loud. “There are kids here.”
“Then they’re out too late.”
A big anime convention was underway, and a platoon of Japanese attendees made their way to the night market from the Taipei International Convention Center. They were easy pickings for the stands that had barkers fluent in Japanese. That wasn’t the case for Unknown Pleasures, but a lot of Japanese came over because they were Joy Division fans. I always made sure to give them a little extra, and they struggled through English to talk about their favorite songs.
One dude, who was dressed up as a character from the world of Final Fantasy, tucked his plastic sword under his left armpit as he showed me pictures of his Joy Division vinyl collection on his phone. He had two copies of their first record, the four-song An Ideal for Living EP, and close-up pictures of the matrix numbers scratched in the inner grooves to prove they were genuine.
I couldn’t help but shake my head at the Hitler Youth drummer on the cover and the inside sleeve picture of the Nazi soldier pointing a gun at a Jewish boy. Joy Division had taken their name from a fictionalized account of brothels at concentration camps that operated for the pleasure of Nazi officers.
What a bunch of stupid punks, flaunting Nazi imagery only to offend people. Isn’t it embarrassing to be confronted with the dumb ideas you had in your youth?
I resolved right then to retire my T-shirt of the Hitler Youth drummer. I couldn’t justify wearing it anymore, even if it was the cover of a Joy Division record.
AT THE END OF the night, I counted up the money and was surprised by the amount of cash. We had done better than I thought. I paid out Dwayne and Frankie and said good night.
As I was going over to my moped, Ah-tien, Kuilan’s son, caught up with me.
“Hey, Jing-nan?” He tried smiling but looked extremely apprehensive and couldn’t stop rubbing the back of his neck.
“Hi, Ah-tien.” I had my helmet in my hands.
“Why don’t we hang out a little bit tonight?”
“I kinda just want to go home now.”
He gave a fake laugh, which required an incredible amount of effort on his part. “If you stay here a little longer,” he said through gritted teeth, “we can sit at one of the late stalls together. I know a good place for congealed pig blood in hot pots.”
“Some other time, I promise,” I said.
Suddenly angry, Ah-tien spat out, “Then go ahead! See if I care!” He stomped off.
Wow, that was really weird, I thought to myself. Maybe he’d always felt bad that we weren’t friends and was trying to bridge that gap. I should have met him halfway.
Honestly, though, I’d never liked him or his negative energy, and I was all right with the way things stood now. We didn’t need to be buddies.
JUST OVER THE FIRST bridge, my back wheel started to make a lot of noise. Before I could pull over, my bike fishtailed. I managed to jump off before it leapt out from under me, the rear wheel popping off its axle. I tried to land on my feet but only succeeded in tumbling into a forward roll.
Miraculously, my only injury was a scratched-up right palm. I made a fist to make sure none of the bones were broken. My phone was okay, too.
I looked over the wreck. I was too shocked from my tumble to feel anger or disappointment and had only pragmatic thoughts. I resolved to move all the parts over to the shoulder and walk home.
I suddenly noticed a small circle of white light that seemed to fall upon me. It opened up and bathed my entire body. My arms and legs disappeared in the thick milk. Then I couldn’t see anymore.
Oh my God. I had died in that accident. Now I was a ghost. I teetered on my feet. I could feel the ground begin to rumble. Was my soul about to be judged?
From out of nowhere, a large pickup truck, painted black as night, pulled up to me and turned off its high beams. A man got out of the passenger side of the cab.
“When are you going to realize that I’m on your side, Jing-nan?” said the Taiwanese-American. “You didn’t call me, and you never answered any of my emails.”
“I didn’t know it was you,” I said. “I don’t know if I would have answered if I did.”
He cocked his head, and I think he smiled. “Did you hit your head, Jing-nan?”
“No.”
“Come here. Let’s put your bike in the bed. We can sit there, too.” I didn’t trust him, but I didn’t have much of a choice, either. Even if Nancy were awake, it would take too long for her to come by and scrape my carcass off the road. I looked at my dirty knees and my right palm, which I noticed had sprung a small rivulet of blood.
“So you had those little punk kids mess up my bike,” I said. “Too bad they didn’t finish the job. I’m still alive.”
“Actually, they executed it perfectly. We figured the wheel would fall off right around here. And that piece of shit doesn’t go fast enough for you to get seriously hurt, anyway.”
The road wasn’t completely deserted. I made sure that the several cars rubbernecking got a good look at my face in case the American tried to disappear me. I was tired, sweaty and thirsty.
“Could you give me a hand here?” I asked.
Another man popped out of the cab. It was the Taiwanese guy with bad skin who had dropped me in the elevator. “Jing-nan,” he said, slapping my back. “Sorry about that thing before.” I went to one end of the moped, but the Taiwanese said, “Let me grab that.” He lifted the moped onto the truck’s bed by himself.
I went back for the loose wheel, expecting both guys to get back in the cab, but the American remained in the truck bed. He really did want to sit with me.
The truck bed had seats built in against the back panel of the cab. I sat down and noticed circular scrape marks around a grommet in the floor for another seat, or maybe a mounted gun. We snapped on seat belts.
The American tapped the roof of the cab and we pulled out onto the road. He eased back in his seat and lit up a cigarette. After a few puffs, he spat over the side. He crossed his right leg over his left knee and folded his arms behind his head, as if we were in his living room, which happened to be in a mild wind tunnel.
“You must be a contractor with some American agency,” I told him. I wanted to say “the CIA,” but that could escalate things quickly. “You should be in Iraq.”
“Jing-nan, the less you know, the better.” He took a quick drag on his cigarette. The annoyed look on his face told me I had hit at least a partial truth. “I’ve been trying to elbow you out, but you keep coming back in, like one of those tropical bugs that won’t stay squashed.”
“I could call the cops on you for what you did to me.”
A thoughtful look came over his face, and he wiped his chin and mouth. “Don’t you have enough trouble with the police?” He chuckled and flicked his cigarette over the side, sending glowing ashes into the wind. I looked at my scraped hand and brushed gravel bits off of it.
In English he said, “You gotta learn to be more careful, Jing-nan.”
I said back in English, “Are you taking me home?”
“We will, but I want to show you something first.”
“Are you sure you’re not going to shoot me and dump my body someplace?”
“There are people who want you dead, Jing-nan. They think you’re out to fuck up their operation. But I see you as you really are: a little lovesick bastard hung up on his old girl. I get you, because I know some other guys like that.”
The Taiwanese driver turned onto National Highway One, heading east toward Keelung.
“You know that I’m an ABC. I’m here on American business.” Behind his face a steady stream of silhouettes of shacks and factories went by, an animated story of Taiwan’s too-rapid industrialization.
“What kind of American business are you on?” I asked.
“We work best with nondemocratic governments. More stable than governments subject to free elections. That wasn’t a problem for most of Taiwan’s history. Now that you allow political candidates from all these dissident political parties, and they actually win elections, we’ve had to partner with, uh, nongovernmental agencies that are more stable and discreet.”
A series of double-trailer trucks driving away from Keelung groaned by in the opposite lane.
“Nongovernmental agencies?” I asked.
“Organized criminal groups, Jing-nan. There are gangs here that are three times as old as Taiwan’s democracy—gangs that were formed by mainlanders after the Chinese Civil War.”
I wanted to know how he fit into all of this. After all, ABCs could join these gangs, as well. “Are you a criminal?” I asked.
He folded his arms and licked his lips. “I handle the relationship with the gangs, Jing-nan, but I’m not a gangster, and I can’t control everything they do. The whole Julia thing they’re handling in their own way. She was an innocent bystander caught up in an intragang power struggle, but her death was not in vain.” He rolled his cigarette between his thumb and middle finger and regarded it clinically before tossing it aside. “They’re taking care of the guilty parties their way. I don’t have anything to do with it, and neither does America.”
I felt my throat lock up, but I managed to chirp, “Who killed Julia?”
“Specifically, I don’t know and I’ve never asked. I told you. It was friction within Black Sea, but everything’s all right now, or will be soon.”
“Black Sea, huh?”
“Oh, fuck. You better just forget I said that.”
I interlocked my fingers and pounded my hands against my knees. “I was gonna marry her, you know?”
“Let me guess. You were also going to have two cars, a suburban mansion and two kids going to the Ivy Leagues?” The American laughed out loud before composing himself. To show that he was serious, he switched back to speaking Mandarin. “You’re talking crazy, Jing-nan! Look at you! Look at what you do! Look at where you live! I don’t want to make fun of you, but take a good look at who you are!”
Both of us leaned into a turn. We were now headed south on Fuxing North Road. We went into a tunnel, and engine sounds echoed around us like lost souls. We came out and whipped through Zhongshan District. Construction barriers narrowed the road, and we were probably driving too fast. Our wheels pounded metal plates set in the asphalt to the one-two beat of Joy Division’s “Isolation.”
As we drove by assorted works in progress, I thought about how I hadn’t really finished anything. Not college. Not my promise to Julia. Not paying off that family debt to German Tsai, which I felt like bringing up, to make my case seem less subject to my personal failings.
I looked at the American. He didn’t give a shit what I had to say, anyway. Probably thought all Taiwanese were stupid and simple.
“You know,” I said. “I wasn’t supposed to end up living such a stupid, simple life.”
“Jing-nan, who are you trying to kid? You keep the same schedule nearly every day. You go home, have a beer, wash yourself and sleep. You’re entirely predictable.”
I turned my body to him as best as I could. “I think you’re projecting your life onto mine,” I said.
“Oh, no. I’m talking about you. Well, until Nancy started fucking it up a little bit. She noticed the smell.”
“What smell?”
The American pointed up at the sky and wormed his finger upward.
“She noticed the frying smell. When we were drilling holes for our surveillance equipment, we used cooking oil as a lubricant. That caused the smell. We figured you wouldn’t notice after a long night surrounded by frying meats, but the girl …”
The American took out his cigarette pack, had a second thought and stuck it back in his coat pocket.
“We usually use rifle microphones to listen remotely,” he continued. “But your crappy little house is built from a composite of scrap metal, rock and concrete. It’s completely soundproof!”
He nodded at me with approval and leaned into my arm as we made a right on Heping Road. This would take us to Wanhua District. So they were taking me home after all. Still, they were bastards for what they did to me.
“You bugged my house?” I asked, feeling my hurt hand pulse.
The American put his hand over his heart. “I personally didn’t want to, but we did. Everything we ever got from you was completely useless, just like I said it was going to be. You don’t even have people over. Except for that one intimate night with Nancy.” He winked at me.
My arms shook with anger as I hugged myself. “Why the hell did you bug my house?”
“Don’t blame me, Jing-nan. I told you to stay the fuck away and you didn’t. You forced us to evaluate your threat level.” He pointed at my nose. “Everything that happened was your own fault.” He jerked his body away from me and checked his phone.
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “You destroyed my bike and you spied on me. You can go to hell.”
“Don’t get mad at me,” the American said over his shoulder. “I saved your life tonight.”
“You people put my life in jeopardy by messing with my bike! And if you hadn’t been there, I’m sure that eventually somebody would have come along and helped.”
We slowed down around the Taipei Botanical Garden. The gates were locked, and lumbering palm trees looked down at us like curious giraffes. When we were kids, there were signs that banned the mentally challenged from entering the garden. We used to joke that so-and-so couldn’t go on the field trip there. I don’t remember all the people that we made fun of, but Cookie Monster was definitely one of them. The Taipei Botanical Garden didn’t lift the ban and remove the signs until 2011.
I became apprehensive again. Were they going to kill me and make it look like I had been trying to enter at night, a thief trying to steal rare aquatic plants for his private garden?
“I saved your life by destroying your bike. Right about now, you’d be asleep in bed, right?” I played with my seat belt, unsure if I should take it off now that we had stopped.
“I know for sure you would be.” He waved his hand to the northwest. “Your house is somewhere over there, right?”
You certainly couldn’t see my house from here. My little toaster building was blocked by much larger buildings down the block. This road would take me home, though. What was this crazy American trying to get at?
“It’s somewhere over there, sure. Ten blocks away. So what?”
He smirked and allowed himself to have that second cigarette he’d denied himself earlier.
“Keep looking.”
I crossed my arms. I wondered if he had watched me undress, if he had video files of Nancy and me having sex.
Suddenly, I heard an explosion in the distance and saw a flame flick up in my neighborhood. It flared upward at first, but then steadied to a constant flame.
“That’s your little house on the prairie right there, Jing-nan,” said the American. “Your ass would have been Cajun fucking blackened right now.”
“You’re lying!” I said.
He used his phone’s walkie-talkie function to talk to the driver and instructed him to go by my house. I was somewhat unnerved that he didn’t have to give him my street address. We went past Longshan Temple, which still had lights mounted to help guide lost souls. A block later and I could tell that it was my house on fire before we actually drove by it.
The explosion had been well planned. The destruction and remaining fire were concentrated on the exterior wall—where my bedroom was—and away from the adjacent apartment building, which was buzzing with people yelling and pointing out of their windows.
My records. Records that Julia had once held in her hands. My music files. Even the burned CDs. All gone. I took in a series of halting breaths. All those sounds had been silenced. I didn’t care about the actual stereo equipment or anything else in the house. I didn’t even care about the house itself. All of that music was now in the hereafter. I’d wasted most of my life putting that collection together.
I reverted to my teenage self. I just wanted to die.
My head was chilly. I ran my fingers over my hair and they came out slick with sweat.
“Satisfied?” the American asked in English. I nodded dumbly. We drove down a few more blocks, made a U-turn and stopped at Longshan Temple.
“This is where you get out, Jing-nan.”
“What do I do now?”
“Go walk to your house, talk to the fire fighters. Tell the cops your bike broke down and you caught a ride from a ‘depressed friend.’ ”
“A ‘depressed friend’?”
“They’ll know. Don’t worry about your moped. We’ll fix it up and bring it back to the night market.”
I snapped off my seat belt and crumpled my head into my lap. “All my things are gone,” I moaned.
The American put a heavy hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry about that. Say, Jing-nan, that box you got from Julia’s father was in there, wasn’t it?”
I raised my head and stared at him vacantly. The box was still at Nancy’s.
He read my expression all wrong. “It’s better destroyed, Jing-nan. Believe me.”
“Easy for you to say.” I stood up.
He touched my left forearm. “Jing-nan. It stops here, okay? You’ve already found out all there is to know about Julia. Don’t go looking for more trouble, because next time, they will kill you.”
I was about to make a comment about the diploma, but I stopped myself. After all, it probably didn’t mean anything and the American might suspect I still had it. He had saved my life tonight but he wasn’t my friend.
I looked down and nodded. Then I hopped out and walked slowly to the burned foundation of my home, the source of the light and smoke pouring up into the night sky.
I WAS HALF A block away when I slowed down to a stiff-legged, undead trudge.
I couldn’t bear the thought that everything was gone. All the music I had ever listened to in my life. I also began to miss specific books and certain clothes, such as my Joy Division hoodie. It was cooler because it had a picture of the band and no words to clue in non-fans. The little paperwork I had accumulated at UCLA was gone as well. Julia had left behind more things than I now owned.
I still had the memories of living in that home with my mother, father and grandfather, even though most of them were merely prosaic. Eating, washing, sleeping.
Damn it, if I had only worn my Joy Division hoodie today! Sure, it was too hot for a hoodie, but I could have pulled it off while riding my moped.
As I drew closer to the fire, the air stank of chemicals oxidized into evil spirits that bit the insides of my nasal cavity and the roof of my mouth. I clamped the inside of my right arm over my nose and continued.
The concrete-and-stone wall topped with glass was still intact, but the metal gate was gone, probably already in the hands of a scrap-metal dealer. Even with the obvious gap, the outer wall was in better shape than what had been my family home. The roof was gone and the walls had crumbled. The flames had lost some intensity since we drove by, but they were still going strong enough to throw off heat. I sat on a brick stump and watched embers winking at each other and cackling.
A fire truck had beaten me there, but it hadn’t used the siren, or I would have heard. Even more curious, the water hoses remained rolled up behind the roll-down gates on the sides of the truck. Two male fire fighters, one with a helmet and one without, stood at the rear of the truck, both glued to their cell phones.
“Hey!” I said to them. “Why aren’t you putting this fire out?”
“Who are you?” asked the man with a bare head.
“This is my house!”
“You’re Jing-nan, huh? You’d better talk to General Yang. He’s the guy over there.” He switched his helmet to his left armpit and pointed to a heavyset fire fighter talking to a man I knew to be a plainclothes policeman and German Tsai on the far corner of the block.
I marched over to the three of them. I saw the so-called general gesticulate to the others that he was going to handle me himself. He was the kind of guy who buckled close to the crotch because he refused to get a longer belt to accommodate the child he was carrying in his womb.
“Jing-nan, I’m Mr. Yang,” he said. “I’m glad you weren’t home.”
“How come you won’t put that fire out?” I said.
German Tsai rubbed his nostrils with his right thumb and looked away. The policeman put his hands in his pockets and stared at the ground. “It’s more dangerous if we turn on the water, Jing-nan.”
“How could it be more dangerous than having an open fucking fire, General?”
I don’t know what set him off more, me cursing or calling him “General.”
“You live in an illegal house, you know that?” he bellowed. “You’re lucky we came at all! Can you smell that? Do you know what that is?”
“A bunch of chemicals, obviously.”
“It’s tar! The walls of your home were filled with tar and probably some other industrial waste! We can’t spray water in there when we don’t know what toxic crap we could be spreading around. It’s safer to let it all burn away completely.”
“That’s bullshit! Put out that fire right now!”
German Tsai approached, showing me his open palms in a calming gesture. “Now, look, Jing-nan, everything’s pretty much lost already,” he said. “I know that things don’t look good now, but you and I are going to work things out.”
Mr. Yang felt free to add, “This is what you get for living in an illegal construction! This building should have been demolished decades ago.”
I headed back to the two fire fighters. “He’s not going to put out the fire,” I told them.
The man with his helmet on shoved his phone in his back pocket and said to me, “Come here.” He brought me around to the back of the truck and popped open a storage door. “Take one,” he said, pointing to a rack of dirty shovels.
I picked one with a flat edge and he took one with a rounded blade. We walked toward the fire. I never felt more like a hero, even though it was my house.
The outside west wall had blown apart where most of the fire was concentrated. The east wall—the one next to the adjacent condominium—was merely scorched. The flames had nearly burned themselves out by then. The fireman dug into a dirt patch along the remains of the north wall. He threw dirt across the fire and nodded to me. I went over to the dirt patch and scooped up a shovelful of moist earth.
The two of us were able to smother much of the fire. It seemed too easy.
“Everything that can burn has already burned,” the fire fighter said. He held up his shovel and pointed with the handle end. “Look at the pattern of the burns on the floor. Your house didn’t catch on fire. This looks like a grenade or explosive hit it here.”
“This fire was no accident,” I said, resting my foot on the top. “I know it was arson.”
“You said something about arson?”
The plainclothes policeman stood right at my elbow. He wasn’t a low-level beat cop. He looked impossibly young for his mid-fifties—I knew him from around the neighborhood when I was growing up. I remembered him roughing up would-be delinquents who tried taking a day off from school, one of whom was my best friend who lived in his family’s car-repair garage. That garage had been bulldozed years ago and was now an office building filled with dimly lit windows.
“I’m just guessing here, officer,” I said.
“You’re Jing-nan, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I remember you from the neighborhood. You’re a decent kid. I never had to knock any common sense into your head. I’m sure you remember me. I’m Ou-Yang.”
“I remember you.”
“You fell pretty far from the tree. Other people in your family got mixed up in the wrong racket.”
“Are you talking about my grandfather?”
“Not so much. Your uncle was the one I was thinking of. I had to run him and his hoodlum friends out of the neighborhood a few times.”
“You mean you were working with German and his gang?”
Ou-Yang grabbed my shoulder hard. “Well, forget about all that. So you want to tell me more about the fire? You seemed to know something about it.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Well how about this, then? It’s a little funny how you came home so late, and coincidently after the fire. Where were you?”
“Ah, I was with a depressed friend.”
“Really? Who?”
“I said ‘depressed friend.’ ”
“And I said, ‘Who?’ ”
“That phrase doesn’t mean anything to you?”
“It means you have a troubled friend. Or maybe you’re really the depressed one, and you’re projecting your problems onto an imaginary friend.”
The fire fighter decided he had done all he could and returned to the truck.
“Ou-Yang, an American told me to say …”
“Oh, an American! All right, I get it. Say no more.”
“What just happened?”
“You let me know it’s all being handled at a higher level.” Ou-Yang slapped my shoulder and walked back to German and General Yang.
The fire had died down to the point where I could enter where my front door had been. The whole house looked a lot smaller now that the Sheetrock walls were gone. My bedroom had been adjacent to the west wall and so had my CD rack. I looked down at what used to be my music collection. It looked like a puddle of burned macaroni and cheese.
The smell was worse than when I first arrived. I cupped my nose and mouth with my left hand as I jabbed the shovel around, cracking melted plastic.
My desk had caved in, and my PC was sitting in the middle of the wreckage looking like a fried, deflated volleyball. Nothing remained of my plastic speakers.
The bathroom tiles had disintegrated, so I guess they weren’t made from genuine ceramic, after all. The sheet-metal sink had wilted to the side. The only thing that remained unscathed in the entire house was the squat toilet, that oval of porcelain set in the floor. It would probably withstand a missile attack from China, as well. The survivors wouldn’t be lacking places to poop.
I stepped back into what had been the living room and saw what looked like a little pile of flour. I poked it with my shovel, and two blackened metal spirals rolled out. I realized that the coils were the remnants of my old notebooks and that my little box of high-school memorabilia was a heap of ashes.
The yearbook with the picture of me and Julia was gone.
I knew I should have scanned it, but I had never gotten around to it. Well, even if I had digitized the picture, it would have ended up as part of the twisted blob that my PC was now, because I wouldn’t have uploaded it anywhere.
It also meant my high-school diploma was gone. A sudden realization stopped me in my tracks.
My house had been burned down to destroy Julia’s box of stuff. Only my arsonist didn’t know I had it stashed at Nancy’s apartment. Maybe it wasn’t Black Sea who had firebombed my house. Maybe it was the CIA, trying to cover their tracks. I didn’t know if I could believe the American.
I gulped in some air and nearly retched. There was a terrible oily taste in my mouth.
A cable-news van pulled up, scraping its guts against the curb as the side door drew back. A woman tumbled out and immediately began to haul out canvas bags of equipment. A man came out of the cab and helped her.
Ou-Yang came up to me. “Jing-nan, get out of there.”
“Out of where?”
“Get out of the rubble, it’s dangerous, plus you’re destroying evidence. There are still some open flames in there.”
“It’s not dangerous anymore.”
Ou-Yang yanked me out of the foundation of my house. He pointed at my nose with the index finger of a hastily pulled-on industrial-strength rubber glove. “Stay the fuck out, you!” He grabbed my shovel and began to root around.
General Yang was also compelled to act before the cameras were turned on. It sure would look bad for the police and fire fighters to be standing around idle at a fire. On a slow news day, the loop could be playing until the afternoon.
Obviously, Ou-Yang had more experience at posing than General Yang.
“How long do you need in there?” Yang asked Ou-Yang, his voice breaking.
“Shut up, fatso!” Ou-Yang replied. “I’m working!”
Yang headed to the fire truck and yelled, “Let’s get those hoses out!”
Ou-Yang continued to scrape around. The TV people were setting up.
The driver was also the cameraman. “This place smells like shit,” he said as he unwound cords.
“It was an illegal house,” said the reporter. “They smell awful when they burn down.”
“This was my house,” I told her. “Are you going to do a story about it?”
“Maybe,” she said cagily. The woman looked me over. “You lived here by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you live here?”
“I used to live here with my parents and my grandfather. They’re all gone now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman said with the empathy of an automated voice menu. She was younger than me and also tougher.
Ou-Yang called me over. “Is this yours?” he asked, holding up half of what used to be a digital clock radio.
“No,” I said. “We … I only had a round clock in the living room.”
“This isn’t yours?”
“I’ve never seen it before.”
“This was part of an explosive device. The fire radiated out from where I found it.”
“Hey,” called out Yang. “Are you done in there already?”
“Yeah, go spray it down,” said Ou-Yang. He bagged the clock radio and lit a cigarette. He walked over to the reporter, smiled at her and asked if she smoked.