any unexpected things had happened to Arthur Arellano, and the transformation of his modest garage into a warehouse, stacked with boxes upon cardboard boxes of counterfeit goods, was far from the most surprising. Written on the boxes were names like Chanel, Versace, and Givenchy, designers of luxuries far beyond the reach of Arthur and his wife, Norma. Their presence made Arthur uneasy, and so it was that in the week after Louis Vu delivered this unforeseen wealth to the Arellanos, Arthur found himself slipping out of his rented house at odd hours, stealing down the pebbly driveway past his Chevy Nova, and opening the garage door to ponder the goods with which he was now living so intimately.

Even under the cover of night, Arthur resisted the urge to pocket a Prada wallet or a pair of Yves Saint Laurent cuff links, even though Louis ended nearly every phone call by saying, “Help yourself.” But Arthur could not help himself, for he was troubled by a lingering sense of guilt and a fear of the law, trepidations that Louis addressed during their weekly lunch at Brodard’s, where, under Louis’s tutelage, Arthur had cultivated a keen taste for Vietnamese fare. According to Louis, Brodard’s was the finest example of such cuisine in the Little Saigon of Orange County. As Arthur ate the first course on their most recent visit, a succulent salad of rare beef sliced paper-thin and marinated in lemon and ginger grass, a cousin to the ceviche he loved, he wondered how the same dish would taste in Vietnam. Usually Louis would hold forth on how the dishes at Brodard’s were even tastier than those in the homeland itself, but as the waiter cleared away the plate, Louis chose another subject: why his business did more good than harm.

“It’s like beautiful people and ugly people,” Louis said. “Beautiful people can’t let on that they need ugly people. But without the ugly, the beautiful wouldn’t look half so good. Am I right? Tell me I’m right.”

Arthur eyed the next course the waiter was slipping onto their table, six roasted squab fetchingly arrayed on a bed of romaine lettuce. “I suppose you’re right,” said Arthur, whose grasp of capitalism was tenuous at best. “Those look delicious.”

“The moral of the story is this,” Louis said, choosing a bird for himself. “The more fakes there are, the more that people who can’t buy the real things want them. And the more people buy the fakes, the more the real things are worth. Everybody wins.”

“That’s the way you see things,” said Arthur, lifting a squab by its slender little leg. “But don’t you think you’re just telling yourself what you want to hear?”

“Of course I’m telling myself what I want to hear!” Louis shook his head in mock exasperation, his eyes wide behind his sculptural Dolce & Gabbana eyeglasses. “We all tell ourselves what we want to hear. The point, Arthur, is this: Do you want to hear what I’m telling myself?”

Arthur had indeed wanted to hear the many rhetorical questions posed by Louis over the past few months. For example, Louis had said, consider his eyeglasses, manufactured in the same factory that produced the real D & G frames, but after hours, with ghost workers whose shadow labor resulted in a product that cost two hundred dollars less. For those with limited income, didn’t the right to own some Italian style trump any possible losses to Dolce & Gabbana? Or, Louis went on, think about Montblanc. Arthur had never thought about Montblanc and did not know it was a pen company until Louis told him. Did it suffer more than its workers in Wengang, China, Louis asked, if those workers could not make their replicas of the very expensive originals? Although Arthur had no idea what Wengang looked like, he could conjure up a blurry image of the faraway Chinese, dark haired, tight eyed, and nimble, somewhat like Louis himself.

“I’m hearing what you’re telling me,” Arthur said, watching Louis eat his squab with the bird perched between thumbs and index fingers, his pinkies pointed upward and outward. “Otherwise your things wouldn’t be in our garage.”

“Hopefully you’ve been listening and not just hearing,” said Louis. “Money’s to be made, Arthur. Good money.”

But for all of Louis’s talk of profits, Arthur and Norma had refused the ten percent commission Louis had offered. Lending Louis their garage was an act of sympathy stirred by the sight of his apartment, a one-bedroom cave doubling as a warehouse. The loan was also a way of paying back Louis’s father, who had saved Arthur’s life last year, however inadvertently. As Louis nibbled on the squab, Arthur was moved once more by the memory of Men Vu, a man he had never met.

“Keep those boxes in our garage,” Arthur said. “Like I told you, it’s our gift.”

Before Louis could respond, Arthur’s cell phone buzzed. The text message was from Norma: pick up dry cleaning. After Louis leaned over to read the message, he poked Arthur in the shoulder and said, “You should pick up some flowers for Norma as well.” Arthur meant to ask what kind of flowers he should get for his wife along with her clothing, but the arrival of the bananas flambé, Arthur’s favorite dessert, distracted him from doing so. Even though he had the nagging sense throughout the afternoon of there being something he needed to do, what that was he could not remember. All he could see in his mind’s eye was the waiter lighting the thimble-size pitcher of rum and pouring the flaming liquor over the bananas, a spectacle that never ceased to seduce him.

The most unexpected thing to happen to Arthur Arellano, and the fateful event that brought him together with Louis Vu, was the failure of his liver, an organ to which Arthur had given much less thought than his nose, or his big toe, or even his right hand, all of which he could have lived without, however uncomfortably. Thus, when his liver began dying a premature death some eighteen months ago, Arthur was unprepared in every way except for having health insurance, courtesy of his younger brother and employer, Martín. The insurance covered his visit to Dr. P. K. Viswanathan, who explained that Arthur’s liver was the unwitting victim of a disease Arthur understood only in its parts: auto, immune, hepatitis. Swiveling in his seat as he talked, the doctor said, “Autoimmune hepatitis means that your body no longer recognizes your liver as a part of itself. When this happens, your body rejects your liver.”

“My body can do that?”

“Your body is a complex organism, Mr. Arellano.” The doctor stopped swiveling and leaned forward, his elbows on the leather writing pad of his desk. “It can do pretty much whatever it wants.”

Arthur left Dr. Viswanathan’s office convinced of his imminent death. People needed far more organs than were available, and never had Arthur won anything worthwhile in his life. He was a chronic loser of bets big and small, from the thoroughbreds at Santa Anita to Pai Gow at the Commerce Casino’s pay-to-play tables, his undistinguished career as a gambler culminating in the loss of the pink bungalow in Hunt­ington Beach, miles from the shore, in which he and Norma had invested seventeen years of mortgage payments. After the bank repossessed the bungalow in the twenty-ninth year of their marriage, Norma left Arthur to live with one of their daughters and Arthur moved into Martín’s house in Irvine. It was at the university hospital there, not long afterward, that he learned of his diagnosis, which explained how the problems he was having—the pain in his joints, the fatigue, the itches and skin rashes, the nausea and vomiting, the loss of appetite, all the things that Arthur blamed on the stress of his gambling debts over the past several years—were merely symptoms of a rot far deeper. But of all these signs, the one that drew Norma’s attention when she came to him at Martín’s house after the diagnosis was the jaundice, the creeping yellowness of his skin that compelled her to exclaim, “Why haven’t you been taking care of yourself, Art?”

During the next hour in Martín’s sun-saturated living room, Arthur humiliated himself twice, first by seizing ­Norma’s hand and, without warning, bursting into tears, and second by confessing to having cashed out his life insurance policy. Norma did not ask how he had spent the money, and Arthur did not have the heart to tell her about Pechanga, the Indian casino in Temecula where he had lost seven days of his life, as well as all his money. For a long time Norma was silent, but when she sat down at last, he knew she had resigned herself to seeing him through his illness. When she put one hand on his knee and the other to his cheek, he also understood that the autoimmune hepatitis was God’s sly way of keeping them together. This was the one benefit he could find in what was otherwise a disaster, the fear of which kept him awake at nights, staring into the darkness and wondering what lay beyond it, if anything. It was the first time he had ever been afraid for his life.

His one chance was the transplant. He fantasized about it the way he used to dream about winning the lottery, imagining how he would be a new man; someone kinder, more reliable, harder-working; somebody to make Norma proud. Thinking about the organ that would save his life, he invariably also thought about who the donor might be. In the months of waiting for news of a liver, he and Norma debated whether they should ask for the donor’s identity if Arthur was so fortunate as to receive an organ. Sometimes, Dr. Viswanathan explained, donors or their families brushed away their right to anonymity. Eventually, however, Arthur and Norma decided in favor of letting modern medicine maintain its air of mystery and the miraculous. Thus it was not by choice but by accident that they discovered the liver’s origin, a year after the operation, when Arthur was back working as an accountant for Martín at Arellano & Sons, the landscaping service founded by Arthur’s father, Arturo, known by one and all as Big Art. The revelation arrived in a manila envelope from the hospital, left in the mailbox of the Spanish-style cottage that Arthur and Norma were renting from Martín at a substantial discount. Inside the envelope was a quality of life survey with the donor’s name printed next to Arthur’s own, courtesy of a bug in a hospital computer, as they and several dozen others eventually discovered when the scandal reached the headlines. On seeing the name, he felt a tremor run through his liver. He blamed it at first for what he thought was a delusion, but when he passed the survey to Norma, she saw the name as well.

“Could it be Korean? Like the Parks?” she asked, referring to their dry cleaners, Mr. and Mrs. Park, migrants from Incheon via Buenos Aires who spoke better Spanish than the Arellanos did. “If it’s not Korean, maybe it’s Japanese.”

For his part, Arthur had no idea. He had trouble distinguishing one nationality of Asian names from another. He was also afflicted with a related, and very common, astigmatism wherein all Asians appeared the same. On first meeting the Parks, he had not thought that they were Korean, or even Japanese. Instead, he had fallen back on his default choice when confronted with a perplexing problem of identification regarding an Asian. “There are a lot of Chinese around here,” Arthur said. “I’d bet this guy is Chinese.”

In fact, Men Vu was from Vietnam, a widower and grandfather who had been killed in a hit-and-run, a story Norma discovered by sleuthing online. Faced at last with a real person and a real name, Arthur reluctantly concluded that he could not go on acting as if he did not know the origin of his transplant. As long as the donor was anonymous, Arthur was not obligated to him in any way. But now that he had a name, Arthur believed it was only right and proper to find someone, anyone, related to Men Vu to whom he could give thanks for having saved his life. Finding that person was more complicated than Arthur expected, since there was no Men Vu in the phone book, leaving him to call every Vu listed in Orange County, of whom there were hundreds. After going through those who spoke no English, those who hung up on him, and those who uttered something rude in a foreign language, Arthur found, at last, Louis Vu, who listened without interruption and then said, with only the slightest accent, “I’m the one you’re looking for, Mr. Arellano.”

Louis pronounced his first name “Louie,” or, as he put it, “the French way,” and for their meeting provided an address ten minutes distant, in Fountain Valley, a pleasant suburb of tract homes, condominiums, and sprawling apartment complexes Arthur had always admired for its forthright and modest motto, which embodied all that Arthur had wanted for himself, Norma, and their brood. Those unassuming words were printed on a stone block situated on a meridian at the city’s border, greeting Arthur, Norma, and all who entered Fountain Valley with this promise: “A Nice Place to Live.”

Only when he was in his own living room that evening after a long afternoon of balancing the books at Arellano & Sons did Arthur remember what he had forgotten, just as Norma unlocked the front door. He turned off the television broadcast of the World Series of Poker, and as he explained that he had overlooked running down to Park Avenue Dry Cleaning, he discerned her unhappiness by the way she uttered “hmmm” without making eye contact, the noise vibrating somewhere down deep in her throat. She said “hmmm” when he asked her what she was cooking for dinner, and then said it again when he asked her what was for dinner the next day while she washed the dishes. Only when he stroked her back in bed, with the lights out, did she finally say something else.

“Let me make something very clear to you, Arthur.” The pillow into which her face was turned muffled her voice. “Do not touch me, and do not come close to me.”

“But—”

“Would it kill you to think about me for one moment in your life? Would it kill you to do something for me, just to see what it feels like?”

“It’s the liver,” he said, an excuse that had served him well over the past year. “I’m still getting used to it.”

“No, you are not. You are completely recovered and good as new. That’s the problem.” Her back was still turned to him, and her breathing was labored, the way it was when she walked up more than two flights of stairs. “Art, you’re fifty years old, and you act fifteen. Now go to sleep and leave me alone.”

Arthur leaned his chin on Norma’s shoulder and whispered, “Didn’t you say we should talk more to each other?”

“Arthur Arellano.” Norma shrugged off his chin. “Either you sleep in the living room, or I will.”

Middle-aged bodies like Arthur’s were not made for couches, and after a miserable night, Arthur gave in to a moment of weakness the next morning, calling his brother to ask for refuge. The phone was answered by Elvira Catalina Franco, his brother’s Guatemalan housekeeper, who greeted him the way she’d been taught by Martín’s wife, Carla: “Arellano residence. May I help you?” But when his brother said hello, Arthur discovered that he could no longer supplicate himself, for already he could foresee Martín’s disapproving look, the eyes, cheeks, and lips puckering around the nose, pulled tighter together by the drawstring of Martín’s facial muscles.

“I just called to say good morning,” said Arthur, avoiding Norma’s gaze as she entered the kitchen. “Good morning.”

Martín sighed. “This isn’t high school anymore, Artie,” he said. “You’re too old to make prank calls.”

Even after Martín hung up, Arthur pretended to carry on a conversation, for Norma was behaving as if there was nobody in her kitchen while she toasted two slices of wheat bread, poured herself a cup of Yuban, read the headlines in the Register, and chuckled along with the KDAY disc jockeys. Arthur, hovering in the corner, sensed that he was merely a specter, already dead, acknowledged by Norma only as she brushed by him on her way out the door, saying over her shoulder, “Don’t forget your pills.”

He found his translucent orange prescription bottles and a glass of filtered water in their usual place, arrayed on the bedroom dresser. First he swallowed the diuretic, sipping from the glass and sighing. He hated taking most of the medications, even though the second pill, for lowering his blood pressure, was absolutely necessary, as was the third one, the immunosuppressive that ensured his aging body would get along with a liver of an even earlier vintage. Dr. Viswanathan had said that there would always be a risk of rejection, and the resulting sense of unease weighed on Arthur, the daily reminder of the alien within him that was delivered in quad­ruplicate form via these pills, even the fourth and final one that he somewhat enjoyed, the antidepressant. Although it was good for filing down his emotional rough edges, it was not as satisfying as the painkillers he had taken in the immediate months after the transplant, dots of magic that made his skin feel like cotton under his own fingers. The antidepressant only restored in him a feeling of normalcy, and why, Arthur wondered, should he need a pill for that?

Martín’s behavior that morning in the office confirmed for Arthur how correct he had been in not asking for help. The office was in Martín’s guesthouse, a clapboard cottage separated from the main house by a swimming pool cleaned with a robotic, stingray-like device that kept the water sapphire blue. Arthur had barely turned on the computer and begun contemplating his morning game of blackjack when Martín entered, sat on the edge of Arthur’s desk with its stacks of unfiled receipts and invoices, and began going into minute detail about his family’s vacation at Lake Arrowhead that weekend. “Jet Skis,” Martín said. “Champagne brunch. Filet mignon. Pink sunsets.” This, at least, was what Arthur heard, the office itself affecting his hearing, with everything from the brass paper clips to the art deco sconces reminding him of what his brother possessed that he did not, Arellano & Sons, bequeathed by Big Art only to Martín when Arthur’s bad habits became obvious to their father.

“So, how was your weekend?” Martín said. “How are you and Norma doing?”

“We’re fine.” Arthur studied the computer screen, where he was being offered the chance to double down on a pair of tens. “We’re doing great.”

“Just thought I’d ask.” When Martín rotated the platinum watch on his wrist, Arthur saw black threads of earth under his brother’s fingernails. Arthur suspected Martín deliberately left the dirt there as proof of how he ventured out with the landscaping crews to trim a few hedges once every week, another sign of the saintliness that led Martín to trust, or perhaps to torment, Arthur with the accounting. “You know Norma talks to her pedicurist, who talks to Elaine, who talks to her mother, who talks to me. I don’t even go looking for this, Artie. I just hear it because it’s out there.”

“I appreciate your concern.” Arthur doubled down and drew a king and an ace, the kind of good luck that never happened when he was playing blackjack at the casinos. “But maybe the pedicurist said something different to Elaine, who said something a little different to Carla, who said something a little different to you, until you heard something a lot different from the way things are.”

Martín sighed, coughed, and glanced at his watch. “We’re brothers, Artie,” he said, raising himself from the desk, which creaked in relief. At the door, Martín paused, as if to say something else, and then left, the absence of his considerable heft palpable, an imaginary cutout into which Arthur’s own body could fit. According to Dr. Viswanathan, the donor would have been a man of roughly the same size and weight as Arthur himself, and from there, before having learned about Men Vu and meeting Louis, Arthur had conjectured that the donor might be in other ways like him too: middle-aged and graying, of a Mexican ancestry only vaguely remembered by word of mouth from ancient grandparents with faces like Easter Island statues, vulnerable to the seductions of seven-dollar all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets and sugar-glazed doughnuts pregnant with raspberry preserves, a profile also befitting Martín. Would Martín have given Arthur a spare part of himself? A kidney, say, or bone marrow? Would Arthur have done the same for Martín? The questions bothered Arthur all day, and later that evening in Louis’s apartment, he gave the most honest answer he could to his friend.

“I think so,” Arthur said. “I would, I think I really would.”

The bones and scraps and wilted garnish of their dinner lay on the coffee table in Styrofoam containers, whisked to Louis’s door every evening by the teenage son of a widow who cooked for two dozen bachelors. She used the four-burner stove in her own kitchen to conjure dishes that were, Louis said, minor masterpieces, aromatic catfish caramelized in a clay pot, tender chicken sautéed in lemongrass and chili, a deep-dish omelet of mushrooms and green onions, ­wok-fried morning glory studded with slivers of garlic, ­everything meant to be dipped in a pungent sauce that was the lifeblood of Vietnamese cooking, a distilled essence of fish imbued with the color of dawn and flecked by red chili pepper. Satiated, Louis sighed in appreciation and said, “It’s like getting shot at. No one really knows what he’ll do until bullets are flying.”

“Really, I would,” Arthur said. “Even though I can’t stand him, he’s still my brother.”

“It’s easy to say when you won’t ever have to do it.”

Indeed, Arthur never would. After he had bravely announced to Dr. Viswanathan that he too wished to donate his organs, the doctor had explained how the cyclosporine and corticosteroids Arthur ingested to keep his body from rejecting the liver had ruined his body for donation. Secretly Arthur was pleased, feeling that his decision to donate, before he was told he could not, gave him a toehold on the moral high ground, the kind of real estate that Louis said could not be bought. Louis knew the value of real estate, for he owned two houses and a condo in Perris, the affordable suburb in the far-eastern reaches of the Inland Empire that he liked to call the other Paris. Even now Louis was doing his homework, watching a television show about increasing the resale value of houses with simple and inexpensive renovation ideas that involved thrift-store shopping, Dumpster diving, and attic treasure hunts.

“I love that stick-on floor tile they’re using in the kitchen,” Louis said. “From here, you can’t even tell it’s not really marble.”

“Why don’t you just live in one of those houses you bought?” Arthur said. Louis’s apartment was even bleaker than before. With the inventory gone, the mismatched furniture was fully exposed, as were the walls, once white but now gray. “You should enjoy your quality of life. That’s one thing I’ve learned this year.”

“But I am enjoying my quality of life.” Louis stretched out on the couch, from whose depths would later emerge a double-size bed for Arthur. “I’m thinking about how my renters pay my mortgage and how I’ll profit from those houses in a few years. I’m thinking about how I’m going to corner the market in better than genuine goods, which is a bigger market than the one for things most people can’t afford to buy.”

This, Arthur realized, was the difference between them. Arthur thought of what he had done, what he was doing, or what he should have done, but Louis thought only of what he would do. For example, rather than resigning himself to saying “fake” or “knockoff,” Louis preferred to say “better than genuine.” But, he always emphasized, his wares actually were better, in the sense of being much, much cheaper. Why own one of the originals, he liked to say, when for the same price you could own a dozen, two dozen, even several dozen, of the better than genuine version?

“It’s not all about money, Louis,” Arthur said. “What about a wife? A family?”

“You mean love?” Louis pointed to the gold ring on ­Arthur’s finger. “Can you say that’s made you happy, Arthur?”

“It’s not love’s fault if things haven’t worked out between me and Norma.”

“I’ve tried love,” Louis said, as if it were a kind of soft, malodorous French cheese. “It’s okay, but the problem with it is the other person involved. She has a mind of her own. You can’t say the same thing about things.”

Arthur watched Louis for any sign of irony, but the small frown on Louis’s face indicated he was serious. “Tell me about her,” Arthur said. “Or was there more than one?”

“It’s all in the past, Arthur.” Louis gestured over his shoulder dismissively. “And I never think about the past. Every morning that I wake up I’m a new man.”

Arthur had tried to get Louis to talk about himself before, never with any success, and so he changed the subject. “Thanks for letting me sleep over,” Arthur said. “I appreciate it.”

“You’re my friend,” Louis replied.

Arthur interpreted the statement to mean that he was Louis’s only friend, for Louis never mentioned anyone else. “You’re my friend, too,” Arthur said, putting as much feeling as he could into his words. For a moment, the two of them maintained eye contact and smiled at each other. Then, before the situation became more emotionally complicated, Arthur excused himself to go take a shower.

The first inkling Arthur had the next morning of a less than auspicious day was the office computer crashing, taking with it into oblivion the last week’s worth of record keeping. Despite Arthur’s tinkering, the computer was still frozen at the end of the day, and it was a frustrated Arthur who climbed into his Chevy Nova, turned the ignition, and heard nothing but a mechanical screech, leaving him to ask for a jump start from Rubén, the Arellano & Sons landscaper who worked on Martín’s house and who had once confessed to Arthur that he was indocumentado, which Arthur knew was true for more than one of Martín’s gardeners. By the time Arthur stopped off at home to pick up fresh underwear and his razor before he went to Louis’s, he was wondering what more could happen. Norma was in the kitchen, microwaving a TV dinner, and when she saw him, she gestured at the notepad by the phone, saying, “Someone called for you.”

Arthur was relieved at having something to do besides scurrying furtively around his own home. The caller’s name was Minh Vu, and as Arthur dialed the number, he wondered if this person was one of the many he had called months ago. While Arthur had not recognized the accents he had heard then as being of Vietnamese origin, he could now hear that accent quite clearly when Minh Vu answered the phone, even if his English was perfectly understandable as he said, “I think you know my father.”

“I do?”

“His name is Men Vu.”

“Oh, so you must be Louis’s brother!” Arthur said. “He didn’t tell me he had a brother named Minh.”

During the brief pause on the phone, Arthur could hear a woman cooing to a crying child. Then Minh Vu said, “Who’s Louis?”

The remaining conversation took six minutes. After ­Arthur hung up the phone with a shaking hand, he informed Norma that Men Vu had eight children, not four, none of whom was named Louis. One of them—Minh—had received the apology from the hospital after it had accidentally revealed their father’s identity to the recipients of his organs. Seven strangers had inherited not just his liver but also his skin, his corneas, his ligaments, his pancreas, his lungs, and his heart, and these seven strangers now knew their father’s name. For the past few months since the hospital’s apology, the Vu clan had been arguing about whether or not to contact these seven strangers, and only now had they agreed to do so. At first, ­Arthur hadn’t known whether to believe Louis or Minh Vu, who was outraged when Arthur said, “How do I know you are who you say you are?” But Arthur began to be convinced when, without hesitation, Minh Vu had provided him with a phone number, an address, and an invitation to visit his father’s house in Stanton, where, he said, Arthur would find photographs, hospital records, X-rays, and ashes. Having kept himself calm for the time required to tell Norma the story, Arthur suddenly discovered himself in need of a drink. He found the last bottle of Wild Turkey he had ever bought stashed beneath the kitchen sink, half-full and untouched since the diagnosis.

“Oh, my God.” The first sip brought tears to his eyes. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“We’ve got to go over there, Art,” Norma said, her dinner forgotten in the microwave. “Louis’s got to tell us what’s going on.”

“No, this is up to me and him.” The whiskey had burned off the fringes of his panic, and Arthur swallowed some more straight from the bottle. “Just the two of us.”

“You are an idiot.” Norma enunciated each word, as fierce as she was during the year of waiting. “What if he gets violent? We don’t even know what he’s capable of—he’s been lying to us all this time. We don’t know what he wants from us. We don’t even know who he is.”

But Arthur was not listening, the third shot of whiskey having run an electric wire from his throat to his gut and down to his toes, bringing him to his feet and out the door to the Chevy Nova despite Norma’s entreaties. He was about to turn on the engine when the liver throbbed inside him, the size of a first-trimester fetus, forever expectant but never to be born, calling for his acknowledgment, gratitude, and love the way it constantly had done in the weeks after the operation, rendering him so breathless with its demand that he had to roll down the window and gasp for air. Overhead the moon was shining through a tear in a curtain of clouds, a perfect round bulb of white light reminding Arthur of the first thing he had seen upon awakening from his operation, a luminous orb floating in the darkness that he dimly understood to be heaven’s beacon, telling him that he had crossed over to God’s side. The orb grew steadily, its edges becoming hazy until it was a whiteness that filled his vision, a screen from behind which something metallic rattled and indistinct words were murmured. Someone was saying his name, a person, and not, as he had first thought, God, for Arthur was alive, a fact he knew both from the spear of pain thrust through his side, pinning his body to the bed, and from the voice he recognized as Norma’s, calling him back to where he belonged.

On hearing of the conversation with Minh Vu from a breathless Arthur, Louis did not open the doors to any number of alternative futures and parallel universes where he was the son of the man who had saved Arthur’s life. Instead, Louis merely sighed and shrugged. He was on his knees, sorting through a new shipment of goods, the boxes shoved up against the walls of the living room and labeled Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Vera Wang. While Arthur sank into the couch, Louis got up and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I suppose it had to come out eventually, didn’t it?” he said. “I’m sorry, Arthur. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Arthur closed his eyes and massaged his temples. In addition to the corkscrew of pain in his guts, a headache was chiseling out a groove in his skull. It made sense now why Louis had always been evasive about visiting Men Vu’s grave. While Louis had attributed this to the bad blood that had run between him and his father, the real reason was that there was no blood at all.

“If you’re not Louis Vu,” said Arthur, “then who are you?”

“Who says I’m not Louis Vu?”

“You just made it up when I called you,” Arthur said. “Louis Vuitton is your idol. And Vu is a very common Vietnamese name.”

“Louis Vu is really my name,” Louis said. “And I’m Chinese.”

“Oh!” Arthur gasped. “I knew it! I knew you were Chinese!”

“But I was born in Vietnam, and I’ve never been to China.” Louis sat down beside Arthur on the couch. “I can barely speak Chinese. So what does that make me? Chinese or Vietnamese? Both? Neither?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care.” Arthur groaned and rubbed his temples. “Why? Why did you do it?”

“Put yourself in my shoes, Arthur.” Louis leaned back and crossed his legs, the feet capped in fake Fendi wingtips. “I get a phone call asking me if I am related to another man who shares my last name. Most people in my situation would say no. But I don’t get your kind of phone call every day, and when I get it, I have to see where it takes me. So I played along. It’s how I’ve gotten ahead.”

“I want you to get your things out of my garage.” The pressure in Arthur’s head and the spike in his gut were excruciating. “Tonight.”

Louis shook his head mournfully. “I’m afraid not, Arthur.”

“What do you mean, you’re afraid not?”

“Don’t get me wrong, Arthur. This is business, not personal, okay? Otherwise, I like you a lot. We’ve had fun, haven’t we? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“We are not friends,” Arthur said, his voice cracking because he really had considered Louis to be a friend.

“We’re not friends?” Louis appeared genuinely hurt, his lower lip quivering. “Over something like this? Come on, Arthur!”

“Just get your things out of my garage tonight.”

“But where would I put them?” Louis’s lip stopped quivering, and an expression of gloom slowly descended on his face, dragging down the corners of his lips and eyebrows. “No, I’m afraid those things will have to stay. And please don’t think of calling the cops. It might be hard to explain why you have a garage full of fake Miu Miu and Burberry.”

“Then I’m going to take your things out of the garage myself,” Arthur cried. “I’ll take them out to the desert and leave them there.”

“If I were you, Arthur, I’d think very carefully about touching my things.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“You’ve got something on me.” Louis inspected his finger­tips. “But I’ve got something on your brother, don’t I?”

“What?”

“Come on, Arthur!” Louis’s shout startled Arthur, who had never heard Louis raise his voice or seen him lean forward, as he did now, and snap his fingers an inch from ­Arthur’s face. “Wake up! Who’s your brother underpaying to clip his lawns and trim his hedges?”

The weight of Arthur’s naïveté pressed him deeper into the couch as he recalled Rubén, Gustavo, Vicente, Alberto, and all those other employees of Arellano & Sons of whom his brother asked no questions, so long as they produced Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, either real or faked well enough to be mistaken for real. Those phantom identities were easy to obtain, as Louis had shown Arthur one day, fanning out on the coffee table five driver’s licenses, each one with Louis’s picture but a different name. Arthur buried his face in his hands as he imagined a raid on Arellano & Sons, leading to arrests and deportations, with disgrace for Martín and defamation of Big Art’s good name.

“I think it’s time for you to go home, Arthur,” Louis said, leaning back into his corner of the couch. His voice was tired, and his face was pale. “Why don’t you just go home?”

The light in the bedroom was on when Arthur pulled into the driveway, although the rest of the house was dark. He was afraid of what Norma would say, so he bought some time by opening the garage door, in case the miracle he had prayed for on the drive home had actually happened. It hadn’t. The boxes were still there, flaxen in the moonlight and stacked to the ceiling and the walls, right up to the edge of the driveway. Louis had conquered every square foot of storage for his fountain pens with their plastic barrels, his sunglasses without ultraviolet protection, his watches that kept perfect time for a day, his designer jackets without linings, his pants with hems that unraveled easily, his discs of pirated movies filmed surreptitiously in theaters, his reproductions of Microsoft software so perfect as to come with the bugs infesting the genuine item, his pseudopills that might or might not help, might or might not harm—a garage crammed with things fashioned by people whom he would never know but to whom Arthur felt bound in some way, especially when he imagined the obscure places from where they might hail.

Greeting Arthur at eye level were the names of Gucci, Jimmy Choo, and Hedi Slimane, beautiful and exotic appellations written on the boxes with a blue marker. Arthur and Norma had yearned for such names upon encountering them in Bloomingdale’s and window-shopping at the boutiques on Rodeo Drive, but when the clerks had ignored them, they understood that they themselves were unwanted.

“Arthur Arellano!”

Arthur turned. Norma stood at the back door in a frayed bathrobe, her feet bare. “I can explain,” Arthur said, extending his arms hopefully. But when Norma folded her own arms over her chest and raised an eyebrow, he saw himself as she saw him then, offering nothing but empty hands.