The savory seagull-poop smell of the ocean tells me I’m in the right place, but most of all it’s the perpetual crashing and washing of the surf that calms me, settles me, and provides the appropriate soundtrack for my thoughts, which are everywhere. I came west to drop in on Dr. Ancona and decided to stick around until the sun rises in a few hours, when I’ll have to make my way to the Greyhound station downtown. I figured it’d be safer to sleep on the beach instead of hanging around the cops and addicts on Skid Row. It didn’t work—I can’t fall asleep—but I’m pleased to be here, anyway. The Pacific Ocean seemed to be waiting for me, waiting to remind me of its patient enormity, and I feel fairly safe. Somewhere inside I knew I had to come see all this blue-green water before leaving Los Angeles.
I wiped my prints off the doorknobs and the dead bolt before leaving the house in Alhambra. Lang was still lying on the front step. His cuts weren’t bleeding much anymore, but his eyes were half closed and he seemed badly concussed. I fished his phone out of his pants pocket and called an ambulance, all the while trying to keep one hand over his eyes so he couldn’t see my face.
“What happened?” Jules asked when I picked her up at Union Station. “Where’s Sun?”
“He’s not coming with us,” I said.
Once we got on our way, I explained everything, starting with all that had happened in Beijing. I told her that ketamine wasn’t the product, just the painkiller, and Ice was an organ-smuggling operation with Ancona as the buyer. But we had ended it, along with Zhao and Ouyang’s lives, as Sun demonstrated his deadliness again and again. When I had caught her up to the last hour, she pulled her hatchback over to the shoulder of I-10. She piled her hands on top of her head and stared at the windshield for what felt like several minutes. I expected her to be distraught, to be furious with me, but when she finally spoke, her words were calm and measured.
“So basically what you’re saying is that Sun is our secret adopted brother whom Dad abused pretty badly,” she said. “And he murdered Dad, and we’re the only ones who know, but we’re, like, fine with that.”
“Jules, I’m not ‘fine with it,’ but it’s not so black-and-white. What’s that line you sent to Dad, something about holding two opposed ideas in your mind at the same time?”
She shook her head at me. “That memory of yours? Seriously, Victor, you belong in a laboratory.”
Then I told her that I might be facing some legal problems. That I didn’t know if Lang would recall my presence at the house in Alhambra. I told her how I was caught on camera at the SinoFuel Towers, and how my DNA-filled blood and vomit was all over the factory floor where Sun killed Ouyang, so it would be a good idea for me to disappear for a little while. People would be looking for me, I said—I just didn’t yet know who, or how hard they’d be searching.
To my surprise, all she said in response was “Just promise me that you’ll find a way to get in touch, okay? Like, soon, and regularly.”
“You’re not going to try to stop me?”
Jules shook her head again. Her gaze remained fixed on the boulevard, and her voice was low and steady. “Victor, after you left, I was completely on my own. I was in that house by myself, feeding Dad’s fish and wondering if you were going to come home in a body bag. Or just not come home at all, like a Vietnam MIA, and I’d just be sitting by a window for the rest of my life, knitting mufflers. I was furious at you for leaving, and I was so anxious that I couldn’t eat or sleep. When I found out the life insurance wasn’t going to come through, I had a full-on panic attack. I completely lost my shit.”
Her voice cracked a little bit, and she blinked a couple of tears out onto her cheeks.
“I was in that terrible state when you called me from China. Then, after I spoke with you, I realized that I was having this crisis about losing some money that was never mine in the first place. And I was freaking out about you making choices that I had no control over. I started thinking about Mom, how dependent she was on Dad and us to meet all her needs. She started out trying to save him, and she ended up as his enabler, his audience. And you were the same—you were letting Dad decide what happened to you. Or so it seemed at the time, but now I guess we know it was Sun, not Dad. Either way, I’m not going to live like that. I decided right then that I wouldn’t be the next link in that chain. I can choose my own course in life. Whether or not I’m okay is only going to be up to one person: me.”
She had stopped crying, and her tears were drying on her cheeks in salty tracks of mascara. She turned to look at me.
“It’s going to take some time for me to process all this shit about our family. But in some way, I always knew it was there, and I never wanted to face it. Meanwhile, you went to China, you confronted these awful men and learned all this stuff that I never could have figured out. And what you did back there, giving the gun to Sun—that was another risky decision. You did that to protect me. I think you’re fucking insane, frankly. You threw away the life Dad gave you, and you let Sun play you like a violin, all because you had to have the answers at any cost. You had to win.”
It was my turn to tear up now. I was that boy again who got carried away, who trusted the wrong impulse, and no words, no actions could take me back in time or repair the damage I had done.
“You were right all along, Jules,” I said. “I never should have gone. I fucked up. I fucked up so badly. I don’t understand what happened. None of it seems real now. I thought I was doing what I had to do, that I was being loyal to Dad.”
“You men, you throw around these big words like loyalty and revenge, and really you’re just acting like a bunch of baboon males, chasing that adrenaline, thinking with your nutsacks. And don’t tell me you weren’t hounding some floozy in Beijing, because I can fucking smell it in your aura. You only get laid once a year, and trust me, big sister can tell. Victor, I’m glad you want to leave town, because I could really use some distance from all this family shit right now. I need to figure out my life on my own. But look, you’re not off the hook with me. You’re still my family. So be careful, and find a way to stay in touch.”
I promised to contact her within a few days, and I told her I loved her, that I knew I had caused her to suffer, and that one day I would make it up to her. She told me she hoped I’d have the chance, and then she gave me a hug that lasted for a long time. And I felt powerfully in that moment that change for the better could hurt just as much as change for the worse, and only time could show me which was which.
I found an old receipt and a ballpoint pen in Jules’s glove box, and I copied her number and a few others out of my phone. Then I switched it off and threw it out the window. Then I asked her if she could drop me off in Venice, but I didn’t tell her why.
First, though, we had to stop at the Quad.
Andre and Eli were playing Mortal Kombat X when we came in.
“He’s here! Victor!” said Eli, tossing aside his controller, leaping up, and pulling me into a hug that smelled of deodorant spray and snack mix.
Andre didn’t say anything. He just lumbered to his feet with a big grin on his face and bent forward to wrap his arms tightly around both of us.
I explained that the police might be looking for me and I had to go. They followed me around the suite as I repacked my gym bag.
“It’s all good, really, guys,” I told them. “I just need to lie low for a minute and see how some things play out. Check in on Jules, okay? I’ll be in touch. Don’t worry, seriously. If the police show up, just say you don’t know where I’m going.”
“We don’t,” Eli pointed out.
“Yeah, it’s better that way. I’ll explain everything later, promise.” I snatched Sun’s Lakers cap off the coffee table, dodged into the kitchen, tossed some protein bars and trail mix into my bag, and headed for the door.
“Hey man, hey!” Andre grabbed my arm. “Are you sure about this? I mean, you seem really large and in charge right now, but you’re also wearing makeup and saying some crazy shit. Are you sure you don’t wanna just chill for a minute and talk it through?”
He had an iron grip on my forearm, like he wasn’t ready to let me go. Like somehow he knew what I knew: that even if I could come back, our lives would never go back to the way they were before.
“This is just goodbye for now, I promise. Hey.” I reached up and hugged my best friend. “I’m still Victor, man. I’ve still got your back.”
Eli spoke up. “Holly came by asking about you. Twice. I don’t know if that affects your decision to leave, but it would definitely affect mine. I mean she was looking super nice.”
I hugged Eli, too. “I’ll see you guys a little further down the line,” I said.
I had Jules drop me a few blocks from Dr. Ancona’s house in Venice. I stashed my bag in his neighbor’s shrubbery. Ancona had a sleek modern house with a concrete pond out front. In the driveway there was a late-model black Navigator and, next to it, a German sports car in canary yellow. I rang the doorbell a couple of times, and after a minute he opened the door a few inches—the most his chain lock would allow. From what I could see, he was a stocky, graying man around my height, with thick eyebrows and a ruddy complexion. He was wearing a bathrobe.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hey, man,” I affected a sort of stoned surfer tone. “I found this tube of lipstick on the street in front of your house. I thought it might belong to your wife or something. Looks like a nice one.”
“Hey, kid, it’s almost midnight. I’m—”
I gave him a quick blast, and his hands flew up to his eyes as he started cursing. He started back, but I was quicker, reaching in and snatching the collar of his bathrobe, yanking him forward so his chin and mouth were pressed up against the edge of the door.
“Don’t move!” I dropped the surfer voice. “Don’t make a sound, or I swear to God I will break down this door and empty this tube of pepper spray onto your balls.”
I held the tube a couple of inches from his face, which was watery and red. His nostrils were pointed right at me, and behind them, his eyes darted back and forth.
“Listen up. Are you listening? Those are some slick cars in your driveway, Ancona. You’ve got it pretty good here. Stick to your day job, okay? I came here to tell you that everyone involved in your little side hustle is dead. Did you hear about that? Vincent Li died because you and your buddies wanted to make a buck. And now your buddies are dead, too. Are you getting all this or do I need to make it clearer?”
I pulled his face tighter against the door and pointed the lipstick at his eyeballs. He managed to mumble something almost unhappy enough to satisfy me.
“Stick to your day job,” I said. “Or you won’t even see me coming.” Then I gave him another quick blast in the face with the pepper spray, right up the nose. I shoved him backward, and he collapsed onto the floor, wailing, with his hands over his face.
I ran back to my bag, took out Sun’s Lakers cap, and pulled it low over my eyes—probably an unnecessary precaution, since I knew too much for Ancona to send the cops after me. I wandered aimlessly through the canals and alleyways of Venice, coming down off the confrontation and trying to get my head right. It felt good to threaten Ancona, but I was bluffing. If I had it in me to do any more killing, then Sun’d be lying on that kitchen floor next to Rou with a bullet in his brain. But I’m not like him. It had all clicked together when I watched him cut Rou’s throat. Dad had trained him to use violence, and he’d trained him too well.
“Jiāngshān yì gǎi, běnxìng nán yí,” Dad would say. “It is easier to move mountains and rivers than to change who you are.”
Once Sun had made his mind up to carry out Dad’s plan, he didn’t care if Ai also had to die, or if Wei lost her job, or that he or I might have died, too. He was raised on the notion that lives come and go cheaply, starting with his own, which he had swapped for a few square meals. Now all four leaders of the syndicate he had served had died within a couple of weeks: Ouyang and Dad by his hand, Ai by Zhao’s, and Zhao by mine. But when he had the chance to kill the only person who knew what he had done, he let me live. I didn’t know what was going through his peculiar mind when I put my life in his hands. But I would’ve liked to believe that pulling that trigger was as impossible for him as it had been for me. It would’ve been if he loved me half as much as I loved him.
His trail of carnage had shattered my world, and I missed him already. He had shown me how to think about what I did not know, to respect what I could not see. The infinite threads of cause and effect were bound together in knots I couldn’t untie by myself. But I wasn’t ready to give up on figuring shit out, and part of me wished that Sun would be there to help me with the next part of the puzzle.
A competing operation in Seattle. I wasn’t going to kill anybody. I just wanted to not be anyone’s tool anymore—not Feder’s, Sun’s, Flat Head Chen’s, or anyone else’s. I wanted to be my own Victor, like Jules had said, and think a little more critically about the ramifications of my actions. And I also wanted to know if we had shut down the organ trade by exposing Ice, or merely given Chen a monopoly on the market.
Anyway, I had to make myself scarce, and Seattle seemed like as good a place as any other to lie low until I could figure out how much trouble I was in. If it was bad, maybe I could slip across the border to Vancouver. In an econ class I’d learned about the influx of Chinese there, cash-laden officials and executives from the mainland who wanted a safe place to invest their piece of the new China pie, usually in the form of steadily appreciating North American real estate where a mistress could be maintained quietly. Perhaps a better place than Tijuana for me to find something to do.
Then I had to laugh a little when I caught myself imagining the sort of work I could find on the sketchy side of another foreign city. Maybe Sun was right when he suggested that I preferred excitement to leisure. But I was ready to put Beijing behind me. I didn’t want to go to prison, and I’d witnessed enough bloodshed for two lifetimes. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking forward to. But I knew it wasn’t college sports. The obsessions of my old life now seemed as trivial as a television drama, and anyway, I’d been miscast for my part. I knew now that I’d be more comfortable on the outside looking in, moving watchfully, undetected, on the borderlands of a society that made no sense to me, though it contained all I’d ever loved.
That’s about as far I’d gotten in my ruminations when I happened upon a twenty-four-hour coffee shop in Santa Monica. After peering in the windows to check for cops, I went in, ordered a hot chocolate, and pulled out my laptop. The first thing I did was check some local news sites for coverage of the house in Alhambra. Nothing yet—good. Nor was there anything in the Chinese media about Zhao or Ouyang, although VOA had a report about the Falun Gong protest at the SinoFuel Towers. Through a glass, darkly, indeed.
I figured it’d be okay to check my email one last time, and I was glad I did. Gregoire had written to let me know that he’d made it back to Paris. The magazine had agreed to run his Ice piece as a cover story, but he still hadn’t written it. With the great video footage we’d given him, he might turn it into a something bigger: a TV news feature, maybe even a minidoc. Could we Skype to discuss some of the details? Sighing to myself, I copied his email address onto a napkin.
In the bathroom I splashed cold water on my face. My left eye was puffy and purple, and the tear in my earlobe had scabbed over. My sparse beard had grown in wiry and uneven. I could close my eyes and still clearly see Ouyang’s bloody head, still feel Wei’s fingertips on the side of my face. But I’d been someone else yesterday; today I knew so much more, and that knowledge gave me more sight, more strength, more patience. I knew I’d become someone else again tomorrow, though I didn’t know who. Hopefully someone cleaner.
When I returned to my laptop, I saw that I’d just received a message from someone called WSQ1212 at a popular Chinese domain name.
Xiaozhou, nǐ háihǎo ma?
That’s all it said: “Xiaozhou, are you okay?” WSQ—it had to be Wei Songqin. But what if it wasn’t? I knew right away that I would risk finding out. Wei had told me that she couldn’t become a new person just by crossing an ocean. I still believed she was wrong. Dad had come so close.
But I have no idea how to tell her that. I’ve spent the last couple of hours sitting here on the beach, thinking about that and a billion other things, worrying Ai’s silver coin with my fingers, getting nowhere and getting no sleep. Now it’s 4:00 A.M. and I’m still not particularly tired. It occurs to me that this young day is already almost over in Beijing, and the night is about to begin. Somewhere over there, a perfect woman is putting on a mask, a Mongolian dwarf is dragging open a door, and a prisoner is about to lose his liver. As for me, lagging way back here in Pacific Standard Time, I have a lot more catchup to play, so I’m looking forward to the twenty-hour bus ride north.
I like long bus trips because they restrict your freedom. All your choices of potential actions vanish away, and all that’s left is time—time to work through the backlog of thoughts and anxieties crowding your mind until nothing’s left and you just tilt your head back and gaze in blissful boredom out at the world racing past.
I can see the world moving out here on the beach, too, this night uncommonly clear, the stars setting in the west as deliberately as the hour hand on a watch, the ocean yanked into billows by the pull of the moon, an unseeable force that gives the tides their motion, their power to shape and reshape the shoreline, their power to seduce, their power to destroy, their power to transform.