I MET BARBARA IN FRONT OF THE PRECINCT. SHE GAVE ME A BIG hug and I saw Rip flash me an okay with his right hand.
“Why didn’t you call me when you first heard about Don?” she asked.
“I wanted to see what kind of shape he was in first. I didn’t want to alarm you for no reason.”
“Is he really that bad?”
“I’m not a doctor, but I think it’s bad enough.”
We walked south to Don’s Park Street apartment. The streets were crowded with city workers and people on jury duty looking for lunch. It was tough to walk side by side, and I stepped into the street often to let people pass us.
It had been a few months since I had seen Barbara. It made me feel a little lighthearted and stupid, the guy I was before Nam, even though Barbara and her friends remembered me as a young gung ho American patriot. Cracker Jack, they used to call me, after the saluting sailor boy.
This is how stupid I was back then. I used to think that Barbara and I would be married and have kids by this time. After all, she was the first girl I had ever kissed. Just a few months ago, we did the toe tangle a few times before Barbara called it off and I got serious with Lonnie.
“As Don’s ex-girlfriend,” I said, “I figured maybe you could help him.”
I had to keep in mind that Barbara’s husband, a guy she had met at Harvard, was killed at Khe Sanh. I hoped the battle wouldn’t come up in our talk with Don, and if it did I was going to ignore it.
“I wasn’t really Don’s girlfriend, Robert. We went on a few dates before his father put an end to it.”
“What happened?”
“Don told me his father didn’t want him to see me anymore because there was the daughter of a family friend they wanted him to meet. Probably an important business or political connection.”
“Did you love him, Barbara?”
“Oh, come on!” She managed to look both amused and annoyed. “We don’t really need to talk about this!”
“Sorry to bring it up,” I said. “But I was hoping that when he saw you it might help to snap him out of it.”
“People don’t just ‘snap out of’ mental illness, Robert. They need medication and a therapist.”
“He’s taking something now that makes him sleepy. It seems to help.”
“Is it Chinese medicine?”
“Yeah.”
“Most of that stuff is superstition and nonsense.”
“But it’s our culture, Barbara.”
“Our culture comes down to food and bullshit that’s been handed down so long it doesn’t smell anymore,” she said. “How have you been?”
“Good,” I said. “Busy.”
“Can I ask what you’re working on?”
“You know those two bodies found under the bridge overpass?”
“Of course I heard about it.”
“What do you know about human smuggling, Barbara?”
“I know that it doesn’t happen without some part of the government—in both the countries of origin and destination—turning a blind eye. Also, it wouldn’t happen if there wasn’t opportunity in the country of destination, and there pretty much always is.”
“How do they know they’ll be able to find work?”
“Because these people are always willing to take bottom-rung jobs and they’ll work for less than kids in high school. They’ll clean bathrooms, mop floors. . . .”
“And wait tables, wash dishes, and work in sweatshops.”
“Why not? If you’re an employer in Chinatown, you’re already likely to be exploiting people in one way or another. As an employer you can increase your margins even more if you hire the most vulnerable employees—illegal immigrants.”
I grumbled.
“Robert, this is nothing new.”
“It seems like someone has been stepping up the smuggling.”
“I hear Fukienese a lot more than I used to and there are places on East Broadway with food in the windows that I’ve never seen before.”
We walked by a teahouse on the corner of Mott and Bayard.
“Remember there used to be a pharmacy here?” I asked.
Barbara glanced at the teahouse quickly and shuddered. “That place gave me the creeps!” she said.
“The old guy who ran that place, he was one of the original Toisan men left over from the bachelor-society days. He used to let me read comic books for hours.”
Toisan was a desperately poor city in Canton Province that was in such a bad way that many of its young men left in the late 1800s to seek their fortunes around the world. All the Chinatowns in America were built up by Toisan men. Like my dad.
“The last time I was here,” said Barbara, “it was to pick up some cotton balls. The guy gave me a condom and told me it was a balloon.”
“He had a twisted sense of humor that maybe went too far.”
“I think he was masturbating under the counter.”
I took in a breath and held it. Maybe there was something behind the pharmacy’s sudden closing.
We walked down Park Street’s sharp decline and went around the corner to Don’s building.
“This place looks like a dump,” said Barbara.
I put my finger to my lips and pressed his apartment button.
The building door buzzed open and we walked in. There was even more trash piled up by the stairwell than before. What stood out to me were stacks of hacked-out layers of linoleum in blue and black diamond patterns.
“I think Don’s been busy,” I said as we went up to see him.
I knocked on his door.
“Robert?” he asked. I was relieved to hear that he sounded sleepy.
“Yeah, it’s me. I’ve brought an old friend, Barbara,” I said. I wanted him to know in advance. Surprises could only be bad.
“Barbara?” he asked.
“Hi, Don!” she said. “I heard you were back in town. I wanted to see you.”
“Why?”
Barbara looked at me. I motioned for her to keep talking.
“Because we’re friends.”
Don didn’t say anything.
“Look, Don,” I said. “I thought I’d bring Barbara in so you guys could catch up. It’s been a while since the three of us hung out together.” The last time was right before the two of them broke off from me.
Don opened the door. I hadn’t heard anything unlock and I was caught a little off-guard. His wild eyes were a little glazed over. He turned them slowly onto Barbara.
“You’ve seen me on the news, right?” he asked.
“I haven’t been watching much TV lately,” she said. “I’ve been really busy at work.”
“Doing what?”
“Work stuff. A lot of reading and phone interviewing.”
“I know you talked about me, Barbara,” said Don, shaking his head slowly and sadly. “You told them everything, but I can’t blame you. They tricked you with their lies.”
Barbara flashed a wary look at me. I nodded.
Don stepped aside and I looked in at his apartment. Most Chinatown apartments had bumpy floors made of successive layers of linoleum floors rolled out on top of each other. Don’s floors were hacked down to the bare wood, reminding me of Beautiful Hong Kong’s offices.
“Why don’t we all go to Columbus Park?” I suggested. It was across the street and I figured it would be far from walls, floors, furniture, and everything else that Don found oppressive.
“That’s a good idea,” Don said.
We went downstairs and crossed Mulberry Street. We found seats on a bench that looked like it had been chewed lightly by Godzilla. Barbara and I sat on either side of Don, who was sitting forward with his head down. He was sweating heavily but refused to take off his field jacket.
“Can I have some coffee?” he whispered. “I’d like three cups of coffee.”
“I’ll go,” said Barbara. You’d better come back, I thought.
I watched two boys and a girl repeatedly trying to drink from a broken concrete water fountain. Old men played chess or chatted among themselves as the pet birds they had brought sat quietly in bamboo cages partially covered by sheets for shade.
“Remember running around this park, Don?” I asked.
“It could be a fake memory,” said Don. “I think I’m really Vietnamese.”
“You are definitely not Vietnamese. You were born here.”
“I don’t know where or when I was born.”
“Just look at your birth certificate.”
“It could be fake.”
I suddenly thought about my father sneaking into the United States with falsified documentation.
“If you were born here, it’s real,” I said.
“Where is here?”
“Don, we’re in Chinatown. New York. U.S.A.”
He covered his ears and leaned back.
“It doesn’t look the way it sounds,” said Don.
Barbara came back with a bag of five coffees. She gave Don three of them and handed one to me. I peeled back the lid and took a quick sip.
Don drank one cup quickly. “It’s too sweet,” he said as he opened his second cup.
“I’m sorry,” said Barbara. “Mine doesn’t have any sugar. Do you want it?”
“No.”
“Barbara was really worried about you,” I said. “I told her you were having problems.”
I looked at Don, who was on his third coffee, ignoring us. Barbara and I were just two more voices in his head talking about him.
To Barbara, I said, “Tell him a good memory you have of him.”
She closed her eyes, drew her head back, and thought for half a minute. Then Barbara cleared her throat and bent down to try to look Don in the face.
“Don,” she said, “do you remember getting on the Cyclone with me at Coney Island?”
“I remember,” he whispered.
“You had fun that day, didn’t you?”
He didn’t say anything but nodded his head. After he had finished the last cup of coffee, Don said, “My head is a big radio and I can’t control the dials. It keeps changing channels and the volume goes in and out.”
“That sounds like schizophrenia,” Barbara said to me. “I thought I had it in college.”
“How do we take care of this?” I asked.
“We have to take him to a doctor.”
“No doctor,” I said. “His old man refuses to let me take him.”
“Robert, he needs professional help!”
“Maybe. If I can’t find something else first.”
“Do you know how sick he is? He could hurt himself! Do you want that? Does his father want that?”
“Of course not! But how are we going to get him to a doctor without identification?”
“What?”
“He doesn’t even have a wallet, Barbara!”
She paused and looked carefully at Don’s face, making sure it was really him.
“You have to talk to his father,” she concluded.
“That guy was an asshole to me when I was a kid,” I said. “He likes me only a little bit more now.”
“Well, he sure wasn’t a fan of me, either,” said Barbara.
Don got up and said he had to go to the bathroom. We followed him back to his apartment building and then watched him float upstairs like a lost kite.