Is it loaded?”
“No.”
“May I?”
“Sure.”
Eli picks up the pistol, inspects it in both hands. Andre and I requested each other for roommates as freshmen and ended up in a triple with Eli Henochowitz, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn. At least he was raised Orthodox. He has a kippah, but he only wears it for Skype purposes. Eli started exploiting what he calls “Internet arbitrage opportunities” when he was an eighth grader. At this point he’s heavy into cryptocurrencies, freelance SEO, and all sorts of other inscrutable online endeavors—he likes to call himself a webusinessman. Once, blackout drunk on Jaegerbombs, he boasted to a roomful of basketball players and Tri Delt sisters that he was a senior member of a secretive antifascist hacking collective. Nobody was really interested.
Eli’s nominally enrolled in college as a COMM major to prevent his parents from wigging out. He applied early decision to SDSU, he told us, “for the weather and the hos.” After an occasionally awkward adjustment period, Andre and I came to love Eli for who he really is: a borderline genius with the heart of a saint, the imagination of a twelve-year-old, and the libido of a bonobo.
“Victor,” he says, “why the fuck would your dad leave you a gun?”
“That’s not everything, either.”
“Is there a crossbow, too?”
“Look at this stuff.” Andre gestures toward the case on the table.
Eli sets the gun down on the coffee table and flips through the little burgundy passport with my name in it. “Since when are you a Chinese citizen?”
“I’m not. I have American citizenship, and you can’t have both.”
He fingers the cash. “How much is this?”
“Fifty grand. And one hundred thou in renminbi. Chinese yuan. It’s like fifteen grand in dollars.”
“Fuckin’ A, Victor.”
“No kidding.”
“So that’s it? No note or anything?” Eli asks. I shake my head. “And you have no idea why he would leave these things to you?”
I don’t, I tell him, but I recount my experience at the massage parlor, how Ailan gave me the feeling that Dad had all kinds of secrets. I also tell him about Jules’s and my meeting with the lawyer, and how it seemed like he wasn’t giving us the whole story. “Not like he was lying, but like he was just telling us the parts we needed to hear. The whole thing felt rushed.” I shake my head, stare at my hands. “Or maybe I’m just imagining things.”
“Do you think he knew what was in the locker?”
“The lawyer? I dunno. Possibly.”
“I thought your dad was killed by a burglar.”
“I thought so, too.”
We sit there for a moment and stare at the money, the passport, and the handgun on the table. Mostly at the gun. It’s a Walther PPQ, which according to Google is the finest striker-fired 9-millimeter on the market, whatever the fuck that means. The three of us went to a shooting range on a Groupon once. I shot pretty well. Eli was terrible. Andre made it look easy.
“So what do you guys think this means?”
Eli puts a gentle hand on my arm. “A lot of time when people keep secrets, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. My parents know nothing about my life here, and trust me, that’s for their own well-being. Like, I eat pork now and then, but it’s not like every Tuesday is a coke bender.”
Andre clears his throat pointedly.
“Anyway,” Eli says, “my point is that, if I died, I’d probably want my folks to know who I really was. So what’s a good reason that your dad would have a gun and some stacks of cash? Like maybe he’s a police informant. Or a spy for the Chinese intelligence services. And he’s hidden that information from you for your own safety, but now he wants you to know because you’ve got all this untapped potential, right? And so now you—”
“Whoa, okay, Henochowitz! Back up the trolley,” Andre cuts in. “Vincent Li befriended stray dogs. He meditated twice a day. Somehow I doubt he was narcin’ on dealers after his long shifts managing four restaurants. Look, Victor, this stuff is crazy, I mean, money and a gun? But maybe your dad left this stuff to you as some kind of emergency kit. There’re no indications that he wanted you to do something with it. For now, what you’ve gotta do is take it easy and take some time to, you know, process and stuff. Right? Am I right?”
I sort of nod. Take it easy: the path of least resistance, a classic Andre position. I know what he’s saying is true. But having something to do would really hit the spot right now.
In Andre’s car we are quiet. After a while Andre asks me what I’m thinking. I tell him how much I hate staying at the house. How I wouldn’t go back at all except that Jules says she can’t fall asleep there if she’s alone. How I hear her getting up in the night to double-check that the doors are locked, and she’s got a hammer sitting on her bedside table.
How I lie awake at night and watch different versions of Dad’s murder in my head, over and over.
“I wish I could comfort you,” he says. “But if it were my family and my house, I’d probably feel the same way.”
For dinner Jules and I pick at takeout that someone from one of Dad’s restaurants sent over. I ask Jules about how design school is going, but she gives me a short answer. Then, as if to be polite, she asks me about college, but I find that I don’t have much to say, either. Given that she’s already having trouble sleeping, I decide to wait until the morning to tell her about the gun.
After dinner I wash the dishes. Dad always did the dishes, even when it was his turn to cook. He got a big kick out of doing the dishes and singing show tunes at the top of his lungs while Mom sat in the breakfast nook trying to read a magazine or do the crossword. Sometimes she would give up, come into the living room where we were watching TV, snuggle up with Jules and say something like “Six hundred million Chinese men and I marry the only one who has memorized Cats.”
I’m lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling and fighting down the persistent bubble of misery rising in my stomach, when Jules knocks on my door. I tell her to come in. She sits on the side of my bed and says, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I say back.
Her forehead is crinkled up, and her eyes are wet and shiny. She makes little tiger fists in her lap and examines her cuticles. She turns her face away, addressing herself to the wall. “I seriously can’t feed the fish. I can’t go down there and feed all those stupid tropical fish without thinking about how it was like the greatest joy of his life to feed his fish.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. For a while there is no sound but her sniffles and her tears pit-patting onto my bedspread.
She finally breaks the silence: “Play me in Ping-Pong?”
“Sure.”
We descend to the basement and play a best-of-five. I play conservatively, returning neatly, trying to work her toward the corners, but she sends it all back with big looping spin shots that put me on my heels. I get one game off her, but only because she’s less focused than I am. A million years ago, a prior version of Jules won state in tennis. Whooping up on me seems to put her in better spirits.
“I guess you’re still my bitch,” she says as we wipe down and fold up the table.
“Mmhmm.”
“How about I teach you some basketball, too,” she suggests brightly.
“Okay.”
Upstairs, in the hallway, she leads me to her room.
“I need to show you something,” she says.
The walls of Jules’s childhood bedroom are white and bare, but every inch of the floor is covered with clutter. I poke a half-unpacked suitcase with my shoe. “It’s like a tornado hit Madewell.”
“Shut up. It took me an hour to read this insurance policy. Seriously? China needs an alphabet.” She hands me the stack of papers from Perry Peng. “I need you to tell me I’m understanding this correctly.”
The cover page has just one line in the middle of it: “Xìng Nián (Běijīng) yŏuxiàn gōngsī, Happy Year Co. Ltd., Beijing.”
“Holy shit,” I say after a while.
“Right?” Jules is slouched against a pile of bedding with her nose in some weighty hardcover.
“This policy is worth twenty-four million renminbi.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, holy shit.”
“I know.” Jules sets the book down on her bed and flicks her bangs out of her eyes. “I feel like such an idiot for questioning the lawyer guy like that.”
Silence sets in as we process. Four million dollars. Two students, ages twenty-five and twenty-two, with four million dollars.
“Does it mean anything for you?” I ask her.
She tips her head to one side, brow furrowed.
“I don’t know, Victor. I guess I could drop out of design school and open a boutique. Or travel around the world. But I’m not ready to think about using this money. It just doesn’t feel right. I’ll file the claim and we’ll figure it out later.”
“So you know, it might be tricky to convert it to dollars because there are some restrictions on the yuan. You might be able to buy Chinese equities— What?”
There’s a little smirk on Jules’s face. “So that’s who you’re gonna be, huh?” she says.
“What is?”
“An economics major.” She says the word like it’s a synonym for necrophilia.
“I am an econ major.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I guess so.”
Jules’s gaze strays upward into her imagination of my future. “I know Dad was all about it, but I just can’t picture you sitting in a conference room while people do PowerPoints about corporate synergies or whatever. For like forty years of your life.”
“Yeah, well. Not everything is fun and games.”
She sits forward again, starts talking with her hands. “I’m just saying, you don’t have to follow whichever track Dad laid out for you. I mean, have you read a newspaper lately? What’s the point in putting your nose to the grindstone when we’re on the fast track to extinction anyway? Dad slaved away like Sisyphus at those restaurants, and look what it got him. Everything can disappear, just like that.”
“So? You’ve got a solution to that problem?”
“No solutions, Victor. I just want do an original something, be an interesting someone. And at the end of it all, feel like I lived on my own terms, even if I lived in a shit world. I mean, seriously, Victor, you’re still really young. Don’t you even care who you become?”
I have never shared Jules’s negative appraisal of the world we live in, which has been pretty good to me aside from the pair of obvious whammies. Dad was born in the middle of an epic Communist disaster, and all that he did—immigrating to California, the restaurants, everything—it was all so we could have a nice life here at the top of the food chain, a life I’ve always intended to accept. So what if stuff’s a little boring sometimes, and the news is depressing? The news is never not depressing.
But I know better than to argue with Jules when she’s in a righteous mood. One time she tore into me for a whole hour for letting my teammates call me “Rice,” which I admit is a bit racist but was basically just a hazing thing that she didn’t understand. Tonight doesn’t seem like the night that we resolve the questions of “Isn’t the world fucked?” and “Should Victor conform?” So I play defense by diverting the conversation to Jules’s weak spot: herself.
“Sure, I think about that stuff all the time. I really do,” I say. “But I don’t have any bright ideas. What do you actually want to do? Design clothes for rich ladies? Or go back into advertising?”
“I don’t know.” She’s inspecting her cuticles again.
“You would make a great lifestyle blogger,” I say, suppressing a smile. “I mean, if you really focused on curation, you could have a superpopular Pinterest board.”
She flops back onto the bed. “Please stop talking.”
“Well then.”
“Blow it out your butt.”
“Okay.”
After a minute she sits up and recrosses her legs. “I’ll be the Ping-Pong champion of the galaxy. And you will be my noble steed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We will travel from planet to planet, spreading a Ping-Pong message of peace. I’ll feed you on Thursdays.”
“Good night, Jules.”
Lying in my childhood bed, I can’t help thinking about the way this house used to be, when Jules and I were nothing more than rowdy kids and Mom and Dad were nothing less than heroes: breathing, singing, hugging grown-ups, not yet a set of cooling memories, reasons to go to church or visit a lawyer. I want to go back to then, I want to go back to them, I want so much to go back and not take it for granted. Not guilt-trip Mom into buying me Jordans, not slam my bedroom door on Dad when he was trying to give me a pep talk after a bad game, but just bask, bask, bask in all that warmth.
My nose wrinkles up and my eyes fill with tears. This goes on for a while until I sit up and find my phone and my earbuds and cue up a Mandarin news podcast from the VOA bureau in Beijing. Feuding political factions. Villages where everyone has cancer. Import tariffs on solar panels. The world’s workshop, pollution and population, propaganda and pandas—the newscasters speak Mandarin impossibly rapidly. I understand about half of it, as usual, and as usual, it lulls me to sleep within a few minutes.