DANIEL
Daniel was nervous. Usually his nervousness manifested as writing, as pacing, or as the consumption of espresso. He had always found fiction easiest when he was nervous, as if anxiety improved the volume and velocity of his creativity. Some writers find their work leisurely, serene, or a kind of old-fashioned labour. For Daniel it was like coping with a rash. It was a relief when it abated.
Tonight he was not writing. Instead he was trying to relieve his nerves by reorganizing his belongings. Real estate agents call it “staging,” as if the objects in a house are the actors in a play. You are the playwright, Daniel supposed, and your life is the play. He was well aware which of his possessions occupied the lead role, however, and he had no intention of taking Paumgarten anywhere near the Presidio.
Accordingly, Daniel was staging the most banal, domestic parts of his existence. He had refreshed the fruitbowl. He had concealed all the boxes of tissues. Now he gathered up the stray phone, tablet and laptop cables, tossing them with his multivitamins into the catch-all drawer. He agonized over which magazine(s) to leave on the coffee table in the living room. (The London Review of Books and Largo Home, he decided.) He dithered over the music in the stereo. Although his housekeeper had been through that day and the whole house was spotless, even the tree branches dusted, Daniel worried that it might seem too spotless. He decided to set out a half-filled glass of sparkling water. He spilled some almonds on a kitchen counter, reconsidered, cleaned them up, set out a bowl instead. He put away The London Review and Largo Home and replaced them with Thrasher. Opening the refrigerator he took a deep breath. White wine, soy milk, soft tofu, passionfruit, eggs, pudding, red ribeye steaks, a tray with gherkins, olives, sliced Chinese sausage and saucisson sec. Some old parmesan at the back, its rind flecked with green spots. Eva had made a big Caesar salad for yesterday’s dinner; Daniel wished now that he had asked her to make extra so it could be sitting here in the fridge, covered in plastic wrap, evidence of his robust and healthy spirit. At least there was the charcuterie platter. Would Paumgarten even look in his fridge? It was hard to say. Certainly Daniel would not invite him to do so. Would Paumgarten examine it without asking, during a pause, when Daniel wasn’t looking? It would be the crossing of a line, yet perhaps precisely the sort of line a journalist might be inclined to cross, if that journalist were writing the profile of a celebrity and if the contents of that celebrity’s crisper seemed like they might offer insight into the celebrity’s broader, ineffable being.
So Daniel decided he ought to toss the pudding. And maybe the cheese. He had made the decision but not yet begun to act upon it when he received a notification on his phone. Somebody had arrived at the gate. Assuming it wasn’t the astronomers circling round for another gander, it was – he checked the clock – yes, Paumgarten was on time. Daniel closed the fridge and went to the window, parted the lace with two fingers. A chameleon lolled at his feet. Outside, a panther-black sedan had pulled into the guard station. Daniel’s phone buzzed again.
“Mr. Max Paumgarten here for his eight p.m.”
“Thank you, Mr. Wu.”
Daniel watched Mr. Wu say something to Mr. Yu, at the car window. Yu nodded. Both men walked around the vehicle – one clockwise, the other counter – peering through its windows. The guards were good at their job. Mr. Wu rapped on the trunk and Daniel briefly considered ringing Wu back, telling him to waive the screening. He didn’t want Paumgarten to think the subject of his profile was a security-crazed nut. But Daniel did not call, because he was indeed security-crazed, and the risk of criticism did not outweigh the risk of allowing a nefarious party onto his estate.
Meanwhile, in the front seat of the car, the man who called himself Max Paumgarten yanked the trunk release. The trunk’s open lid obscured his view of Mr. Wu, who was peering inside. Wu was short and stocky, with pockmarked cheeks. His eyes – quick, large, handsome – gave his face a certain power. The compartment seemed empty. He used his fingertips to lift the trunk’s spare tire. He did not examine the bulky vinyl cover pressed around and under the spare.
Mr. Yu – taller than Wu, with a blanker, unreadable face – was still at the driver’s side window. “Welcome, Mr. Paumgarten,” he said. “You may park by the entry.”
Paumgarten’s smile concealed a long exhale.
Inside the house, Daniel let the curtains fall shut. He stepped away from the window. Just then a loud noise went off – an engine shriek – and when the writer looked out again a cloud of black, incenselike smoke was drifting up from the car. The sedan had advanced only a few feet past the guards’ station and was halted there, helpless. Paumgarten got out of the car.
“Shit,” he said.
Daniel watched the guards emerge and stare, like bewildered tourists.
“What is it?” one of them asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You can fix?”
Paumgarten spread his palms. “I’m a journalist.”
They stared some more. Behind them, the electric gate shuddered shut.
By now Daniel was standing framed in the house’s front doorway, a hand shielding his eyes. He was conscious of first impressions; he hoped his pose conveyed a mixture of calm and curiosity. “Is everything all right?” he called.
“Mr. Merrett Leys?” said Paumgarten.
“Daniel,” Daniel said. “You must be Max.”
“I must be. Look, my car, it’s —”
“Broken.”
“Well, I guess. I’m sorry about this. It’s a rental.”
They both gazed at the sedan in the manner of men who are baffled by automobiles. A short distance away, Mr. Yu and Mr. Wu were also still gazing. In the place of bewilderment, their faces showed irritation, most of it directed at Paumgarten. This did not abate when Paumgarten got back behind the wheel, trying to coax the vehicle into motion. The ignition cycled uselessly. No one noticed the three broken wires hanging slack by Paumgarten’s knee, beneath the steering column. No one, that is, except for the driver himself, who had been the one to break them.
“No dice,” Paumgarten said.
“Should we call a tow?”
“I guess so,” Paumgarten began. “The rental company —”
Merrett Leys held his phone aloft. “I have a mechanic in town. Let me text him.”
Paumgarten began to protest.
“Don’t worry – it won’t cost you anything.”
The journalist calmed. “I should just really contact the rental company before we do anything…” Then, as Daniel had not stopped thumbing something into his device, he added, “I guess we’ll postpone our talk?”
Daniel raised his head. “Why would we postpone it?”
“I’ll have to go with the car. Who knows when I’ll be done. And I know you’re so busy…”
Daniel was about to say that he wasn’t that busy, but he caught himself. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Maybe —” Paumgarten said.
“What is it?”
“Maybe we could hold off calling the tow? Until after we speak? That is, if you don’t mind this smoky hulk in the middle of your drive.”
“You’ve come all this way,” Daniel said carefully.
“You wouldn’t mind?”
“Of course not,” said Daniel, who had his back to the gritted expressions of his hired security. “I would hate for your journey to have been wasted. Anyway, where are my manners?” Abruptly he made a gesture he had spent the afternoon mentally rehearsing – extending his arm so that his open hand took in the sprawling brick house, the laden and burnished plum trees, the red maples and the green lawn, turning slate in the twilight, and the rambling rose garden that stretched to the tower on the far side of the estate. “Welcome. Welcome, welcome. To Rongshu Wu, the Banyan House. It’s so nice to meet you.”
“The pleasure’s mine,” said Paumgarten. “Here. I brought you some bourbon.”
So Daniel allowed a black-haired man, a former comedian temporarily calling himself Max Paumgarten, into his home. Paumgarten’s car remained in the driveway, dark and solid. In a curious coincidence, the vehicle’s stalled shape happened to obstruct the view from the guards’ clean white cabin to the ivied, turreted folly that Daniel called “the Presidio.”
His guest did not look around as he followed the author into the house. He kept his head down. He did not gaze up the hill at the Presidio, or across it to the gardens, or into the dwindling violet of the evening sky where something dark was darting, whirring. It was roughly the size of a tea set.
Daniel began by giving Paumgarten a tour. One of the things he’d most liked about the New Yorker profile of Zadie Smith was the way Paumgarten made her home seem like a reflection of the novelist herself, an index of her depths. Daniel was proud of his house, confident in it. Whereas at times in life he felt inadequate – as if he were less of a person than he pretended to be, not just less talented but less fully formed – his home in Taiwan was everything he wanted it to be. Its rooms were evidence of his wealth and good taste, proof of his distinctiveness, and unlike his previous home, on Fogo Island, Rongshu Wu possessed an additional aura, conferred by its setting near Yangmingshan National Park and, of course, by the banyan trees. Daniel felt an exquisite pleasure every time he revealed the interior to a guest.
“Good grief,” Paumgarten whispered when he glimpsed the banyans.
Daniel rocked back on his heels, gratified.
Paumgarten shook his head. “Did the house…? Was it built like this somehow?”
“The trees came of their own accord,” Daniel said. “The building was derelict after the war. The banyans gradually took over.”
Although Paumgarten knew the premise of the Banyan House, he had not been able to imagine it. The surprise showed on his face.
“The structure itself is almost a hundred and fifty years old,” Daniel said. “Much of the brick is original. It was built as the home of a camphor baron, famous for his rose garden. And for his camphor, I guess. When he died, there was trouble with the executors and so on. The roses grew wild. Maybe the banyans were already growing here, below the foundation, or else they spread from the jungle. It wasn’t until the 1940s that they took over. They burst through the floor, scrambled up the walls. A set designer finally bought the property in the seventies. She tore out some walls, built those beams to support the heavier boughs. An admiral took possession in the late eighties, a pineapple-cake tycoon after that, and then, last year, me. I rebedded the roses, redid the windows” — he gestured — “and some other little things, like raising the ceiling in the study…” He pointed. But Paumgarten still hadn’t diverted his gaze from the centre of the room, where the first extraordinary banyan tree rose and outspread, its trunk as thick as a subway pylon, branches that extended at almost horizontal angles, fragile and sturdy, bowed and yearning, propped on roots that reached toward the bamboo floor or from it, a myriad of sinuous supports, like ropes or chains, dividing the space and embroidering its walls, patterning the whitewashed brick. They penetrated the house’s panels and joists, dipped through doorways, under masonry, braiding through the other banyans that had also pushed up through the floor and suffused the building, pervading its maze of rooms.
Paumgarten turned a full circle, awed. “It’s like you live in a forest.”
“Yes,” said Daniel. “In spring we get birds.”
Paumgarten had taken out a notebook and begun writing something down. Daniel experienced a bloom of intense satisfaction.
They spent the next hour exploring the ground floor of the house. Daniel showed off the library, dining and billiards rooms, his corals gleaming in glass cases. He pointed out his kitchen and its humming refrigerator, keeping his distance. He led Paumgarten past the copy of Thrasher magazine.
“You skate?” Paumgarten asked.
Daniel was breezy about it. “Sometimes.”
They made small-talk. About the banyans, about Paumgarten’s flight to TPE, about the shamrock-green and china-white corals, about living in such an old home and keeping it tidy, about collecting too many books, about keeping chameleons as pets, about Daniel’s relations with his neighbours, about not having many neighbours, about the weather. About a movie poster for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. About banyan weevils and the prevention thereof, about Taiwanese breakfasts, Taiwanese lunches and dinners, about ice hockey and Daniel’s ambivalence thereto, and about writing. “Is that where you write?” Paumgarten asked, gesturing at a small teak desk.
“I write everywhere,” Daniel said. “I find it’s important not to discriminate.”
Eventually they sat down, each man on his own plump leather chesterfield. The charcuterie platter sat between them, next to Paumgarten’s whirring dictaphone. They had actual snifters of bourbon.
A huge bay window looked east, into the darkness of the estate.
“Do you like living alone?”
“I get a lot of work done.”
“Are you working on something now?”
“A lady never tells,” Daniel said. He reconsidered his quip. “I mean – yes.”
“What’s it about?”
Daniel paused. “A noodle maker,” he said finally.
“A noodle maker?”
“That’s right.”
The fronds of the banyan wafted in the periphery.
“Winning the lottery must have…disrupted your routine.”
Daniel jammed a cushion under his elbow. “Yes and no. Writers have to be resilient, don’t you think? Anything can happen in a day. You mustn’t let life distract you from your pages.”
Paumgarten nodded.
“Funny story actually.” Daniel got up and crossed the room, picking up a zip-lock bag from a table. He brought it to Paumgarten.
“Do you know what these are?”
“Rocks?”
“Open it.”
The journalist did and at once pushed the bag away. “Ugh – what’s that smell?”
“They’re meteorites,” Daniel said, taking back the bag. He reached inside and pulled out one of the pitted, metallic rocks.
“Why do they smell like that?”
“It’s something to do with the minerals. Off-gassing from reentry. Sulphur? I mean, I don’t really know. They landed right here.”
“On the house?”
“Around the property. Just over the past week! A whole spray of meteorites. There are probably more outside. It’s not that unusual apparently – a conflux of conditions, geographical, meteorological, astrophysical, and then for a few days one spot gets pelted with shooting stars.”
“How random,” said Paumgarten. He examined the rocks through the bag.
“Like Mr. Wu said: ‘Auspicious!’ Some government astronomers picked it up on their radar. This morning they came round to explain. As you might expect, you have to be careful about fires – meteoroids can come in quite hot.”
“Are they worth anything?”
“I imagine so.”
“Even with that smell?”
“Maybe it fades? Or you can wash it off? The astronomers who came took it all very seriously. They laid out the rules. I’m entitled to keep everything smaller than eight inches across.”
“So if a putrid space-basketball comes flying through your roof, you’ve got to hand it over.”
“Unfortunately.”
Paumgarten shook his head. “Daniel, you lead an unusual life.”
Daniel waved his hand. “It’s a state of mind.” He suppressed a grin. This was going well. Perhaps the meteorites would become the story’s lede? He felt he was conveying an appealing mixture of openness and mystery. Above all he wanted to seem intriguing: for Paumgarten’s article to paint him as thoughtful, writerly, a beguiling character with sombre insights. A sense of humour, yes, but not too much humour. Serious-minded. He took another swallow of bourbon. Paumgarten did appear to like him. That was half the battle. The writer hadn’t really asked anything about money, which was a relief, as the issue of money seemed tacky and mildly embarrassing. It made him feel underhanded. He had won the lottery; what else was there to say? What else would he ever choose to say?
“I wanted to tell you I loved The Labrador Sea,” Paumgarten said.
Daniel stared into his lap. “That’s kind,” he said. He did not, could not, know whether Paumgarten was telling the truth. He hated this and accordingly hated such compliments, the cruel opacity of them. The only thing worse than someone hating his book was for someone to lie about loving it – and the doubt this sowed, sick and swirling. Whenever anybody told him they liked the book he was dogged by a suspicion they were lying. Their words (their tone, each syllable’s subtlest micro-inflection) reversed through the bundle of his brainstem, souring reality. Perhaps his novel wasn’t bad, but he knew each one of its failings. They came to him like old friends, long time no see! They fluttered up every time he opened the screen of his laptop, hoping to write another page. The Booker win and the approbation his novel had subsequently enjoyed had not, as he had hoped, cured him of this self-excoriation, but amplified it. Was he not now even more of a fraud? Was his admirers’ praise not now even more embellished?
Paumgarten’s eyebrows furrowed.
“What?” Daniel said.
“You seem stricken.”
Daniel expelled a hollow laugh.
Paumgarten considered for a moment and said, “I’m not blowing smoke up your ass.”
Daniel looked into his drink. “I wouldn’t know if you were.”
“Do you think I’m lying to you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Daniel said. He wanted to sound nonchalant. “You do the work for its own sake. Not for other people’s approval. You must know this from your own work.”
Paumgarten seemed unsettled by this. “Yes.”
Daniel gathered himself to his feet. “Let me show you something.” Now that darkness had fallen, the air inside Rongshu Wu had changed. It was cooler, moister. The rooms’ rice-paper lamps cast their light in shallow overlapping circles, like ripples on the surface of water. Paumgarten followed Daniel between the banyans’ prop roots and under a hanging bough. The interrupted lamplight gave each of them jaguar spots. They passed through a doorway and into a snug room, where halogens shone white. Their spots had disappeared.
The items nearest the door were comics and graphic novels, perched in shatterproof display cases. Daniel’s first editions of MAUS and Fun Home, Tintin Goes to Dawson City, LOSE 1, Hair Shirt, an autographed copy of the Love and Rockets debut. He had the yellow Quimby the Mouse/Sandman crossover, some original Fletcher Hanks, Moebius’s Dune sketches. He passed all this without comment and halted at the end of the room, where there were no more books or comics. The cases here contained what looked almost like CDs: round, hand-sized discs, with circular holes in their centres. Some of the objects were made of variegated stone, others seemed translucent, glass-like.
“Fossils?” asked Paumgarten.
“They’re jades.”
These weren’t the jade-green of jade-green crayons or the jade-green of jade plants, deep and vegetal. Nor could they be compared to flea markets’ cheap, jadish junk – elephants and medallions on a collapsible plastic table. The objects were white-green or silver-green or aquamarine, their colours almost slipping, as if perceived through water.
“They’re called bi discs,” Daniel said. “From mainland China, Stone Age. People made these things for literally thousands of years, millennia, across a huge geographic area, spending unimaginable resources to do so.” He lifted a case lid and took out one of the discs. He was always surprised by how heavy they were.
He placed it in Paumgarten’s hands. “No one knows what they were for.”
“Not currency?”
“No, they didn’t trade them. They hoarded them, buried people with them. Relics, storehouses of power. Empty rings. Or imaginary doorways.”
Paumgarten held the disc up to his eye, blinked through it. The jade had been carved with an interwoven pattern, like braided grasses.
“Hundreds of people devoted their lives to these things,” Daniel went on. “Why? Was that worthwhile? Or a waste? They thought they needed them, they were sure they did. A story they told themselves. And about these other objects too – cong tubes. Archaeologists find them beside the bis. Jades as well, but rod-shaped. Not discs – wands.”
“How many of them do you have?”
“I have some bis,” said Daniel. “They’re very hard to acquire. I keep saying that one day I’ll stop collecting bi discs and I’ll start collecting congs, the inverse, not the empty rings but the solid centres.”
A pause passed.
“Is that what the building’s for?” Paumgarten asked.
“What building?”
Paumgarten cleared his throat. “I saw it when I came in. The silo thing. Is it for your collection?”
“That’s just storage. Landscaping equipment.”
Paumgarten raised the bi again, looked at Daniel through it.
“Where were we?” Daniel said.
Back on the chesterfields.
“Where do you get your ideas?” Paumgarten asked.
“When did you write your first story?”
“Did you always want to be a writer?”
He continued refilling Daniel’s glass of bourbon.
“How did you convince yourself to keep going?”
When Paumgarten got up to urinate, the outside night loomed in. Everything on the other side of the windows seemed held in place. As if nothing could possibly happen there.
Later, each of them was sitting on the floor. Daniel had his back to one of the banyans’ roots. Paumgarten was a couple of feet away, leaning against the lower section of a chesterfield. His dictaphone whispered on the rug.
Daniel said: “To tell you the truth” — he drew up his knee — “you’re drawing a false dichotomy. Yes, it requires luck to get published. It requires luck for your book to ever be read, for it to win a prize. Luck to win a draw. All of it’s luck. And at the same time none of it is. Have you ever been in love?”
Paumgarten said, after a moment, “Of course.”
Daniel put down his glass. “Did it ‘just’ happen or did you also make it happen? How much of one and how much of the other?” He didn’t wait for Paumgarten’s answer. “I wrote a book. The best book I could. I did the work, page upon page, and I put it into the world. Everything follows from that.”
“The lottery?”
“I bought the ticket,” Daniel said.
“But surely that’s —”
“It’s of a different order. It is. But there are not just two categories of things, things that are earned and things that are not. The reality’s woollier. Is a coincidence pure chance or evidence of a connection? Often it’s both.”
Paumgarten pressed his lips together. He looked into his notebook, turned a page. “It’s funny you should say that.”
“Funny?”
“Your book had all these coincidences. With my own life. Bicycles and motorcycles. Strange flocks of birds. Letters to a woman named Lou.”
“Lou? Really?”
“I’ve been writing all year to a woman named Lou,” Paumgarten said. A sadness had come into his face. “I’ve started hating them. Letters. One-sided and strange.”
“They’re a useful device.”
“They’re always hiding something.” Paumgarten raised his head. “Are you offended?”
“Of course not,” said Daniel. “Perhaps I lean on them too much.” His finger traced along the carpet, a river in blue thread. “No letters in my next book, I promise.”
“At least not between lovers.”
“All right.”
“Great. Then I promise to buy a copy.”
“My agent will be relieved!”
Paumgarten began to laugh. But Daniel watched a different thought pass across his eyes, stilling him.
“Do you think you’d write anyway?” Paumgarten asked. “If you didn’t have sales? If no one cared?”
“If nobody was reading?”
“Yeah.”
Daniel closed his eyes for a second. “People always treat that question as a sort of secret weapon.” His tone was forthright but his body language was almost embarrassed. “A knife that might stab to the artist’s heart, revealing his frailty, his insincerity, his ego. But it’s actually the opposite. When you ask that question – you, Max from the New Yorker, ‘What if no one read your work?’ – the answer wells right up. It feels more certain than ever. Visceral, natural, obvious. I know it immediately: I’d do it anyway.”
Do I really believe this? Daniel wondered.
I do.
He straightened. “Your question’s still important. But it isn’t profound – not to me, no offence. Where it resonates is as a matter of commerce. When nobody reads your work, how can you live? How can you pay for your meals and your mortgage, your air fare, flowers for Mother’s Day? That’s the way the question matters. If you happen to be broke. If every day of writing brings a whole night of doubt. Why am I wasting my time on this? I can’t justify it. I can’t afford this labour. What if no one reads it? If no one reads it, will you be all right? Will you be able to carry on – physically, materially? To keep the heat coiling through the radiators?”
He intended to stop there – that line about radiators, a borderline-excessive literary flourish. However Paumgarten was watching him with such untempered attention – an attention that seemed both ample and unfilled, like a sort of vacuum – that after a few seconds he continued talking.
“If you can afford to carry on, then the question’s easy. If money’s no worry – if you’re solvent or comfortable or rich, if you’ve won the lottery, if you’re able to sustain, self-sustain, idle away – then never mind if anybody reads your pages. Never mind that. Fuck it. Some days it might matter but other days it won’t. And it needn’t. What’s really important becomes clearer. Words splashing onto a page, like rain from nimbostratus. The puddles they leave. The skinny rivers. What’s really important is the feeling a book rouses as it’s finding form, chapter by chapter, and how you feel when it’s done. Each moment is different, but each is sustaining. At least on the good days. On those days, when I’m lucky, the desire to write feels as forceful as any feeling I’ve known – lust or loneliness or grief. ‘Will anyone read it?’ I don’t consider that. What I’m thinking is: ‘A comma here?’ ‘A period?’ ‘A lustrous word or a plain one?’ ‘What kind of tree should be growing there, in this story, spreading its branches above their heads?’ ”
Both of them were staring at the boughs.
“Huh,” Paumgarten said.
Daniel worried suddenly that this speech had been jejune. Why was he making such lofty statements? Did he believe everything he was saying? He didn’t really know. He wanted to believe it. He would act as if he did; there was power enough in that. One set of lies to make up for another.
Paumgarten looked at his watch. “A noodle maker, you said.”
“It’s a metaphor for making art.”
The dictaphone made a sound like a lock being cut. The two men exchanged a look. Paumgarten reached over and took out the little cassette.
“That’s my last tape.”
“Old school,” Daniel said.
“Yes.”
They lapsed into quiet.
“I forgot about my car,” Paumgarten said.
“It’s outside.”
“It’s fucked.”
“Just leave it.”
“No, I’ll call the tow.”
“Just leave it. It’s late.”
“I can still call.” Paumgarten swallowed. “I think I’m a bit drunk.”
“Where’s your hotel?”
“The Grand Oriental.”
“I’ll ring you a cab.”
“The car —”
“Forget it until tomorrow.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No.”
The room held their silence like ashes in an urn. One of Daniel’s chameleons had moved soundlessly, inch by inch, onto the sill of the bay window. It was the same slate grey as the glass and the world outside, nearly invisible; Daniel perceived it only because he was so practised at discerning them, his chameleons. Beyond the lizard and the window lay his estate. There were some distant blue-toned flashes, like the flickers of will-o’-the-wisps. Fireflies perhaps, or guards on their peregrinations. Daniel forgot the flashes as soon as they had faded. Living on Fogo there had been so many weird, faint glimmers: spirits shifting on the seashore. Yangmingshan held a different share of mysteries. Rongshu Wu was peaceful, its old joins trembling in the tropical breeze. The Presidio was secure, locked with steel and software, reinforced concrete. Daniel was sitting with a journalist, a great journalist, who would tell his story and in the telling cement it, make it real. He needed this, because he knew what he had done to get here, the cheat of it, and he craved anything that would liberate him from this true and dishonest story, as if there were another story that could redeem his fictions.
Paumgarten rolled over and started getting to his feet. “I think it’s time,” he said.
“I’ll call that cab.”
Paumgarten bent and picked up the dictaphone, slipping it into his shirt pocket.
They went outside to wait. Daniel still wasn’t accustomed to the heat of Taiwan’s summer nights, the way it didn’t really subside. Each of them was surprised by the deafening mechanisms of the insects. All the evening’s other sounds were indistinguishable. They proceeded past Paumgarten’s stalled black car, Mr. Wu’s stern face behind the guardhouse window. Mr. Yu must be on patrol. The estate’s gates parted.
They stood together on the hard-packed dirt.
“My Lou stopped answering,” Paumgarten said.
It was pitch black and they couldn’t see each other’s faces. “Your Lou…” Daniel said. In the fresh air he did not feel as drunk as he had, not even with the drone of the cicadas in his ears, and he did not feel certain what to say to this man about his Lou, or whether to say nothing. He found he was running a calculus: would Paumgarten resent him later for this moment? For his own vulnerability, or Daniel’s silence? It would be so easy for the journalist to punish him.
“Maybe her letters got lost,” Daniel said.
But when the taxi came, Daniel wondered if he was actually drunker than he thought. In the bright lights of the car he said, “I hope you got what you needed,” and he didn’t understand Paumgarten’s bitter laugh, a laugh as if Daniel had said something regrettable, something tragic.
“It was what it was,” Paumgarten told him. “See you in the morning.”
Once Theo left the house, Daniel Merrett Leys spent twenty-one minutes fixing himself a bowl of cereal, eating it, and paging through an old issue of the New Yorker, plucked from a stack, looking exclusively at the comics.
There was a cartoon about a lock and a key. “You busy Friday?” asked the key. It was wearing a necktie.
He turned the page without smiling. All around him, even in the rooms he was not in, the banyans fanned.
Bi discs shimmered in their velvet.
A glass of water, long-deserted, let go of its last bubbles.
An unmarked octo-prop drone crouched on Rongshu Wu’s roof.
A car sat in the drive.
Mr. Wu, who had returned from his rounds, reclined in the guardhouse with Mr. Yu. From time to time, each of them glanced at the green-tinted midnight on their screens. A control panel showed eighteen untiring LEDs.
Mr. Yu riffle-shuffled a deck of cards. Mr. Wu watched him do so.
The gates were locked as tight as mirrors.
Cameras stood wide-eyed.
A light flicked out. Merrett Leys had gone to bed.
Mr. Yu turned over a queen of spades.
Not far away, in the long grass near the bank of the creek, Simone and Suzy rose to their feet.
Theo, in a Grand Oriental hotel room, took his “dictaphone” from his pocket, put it down beside the TV.
JF, at the ink importer’s house, clicked an icon on his computer and pressed enter. A progress bar appeared.
For the briefest instant, the images wavered on Messrs Wu and Yu’s screens.
Simone breathed in the jasmine air. She felt warm – that odd, dull, wetsuit warmth. The ground had turned to mud where they had been crouching. She brushed grass and grit and soil from her haunches, listening through the churn of jungle sound for a voice in her earpiece.
“On y est,” JF said finally. It was a scrambled channel. “You can go.”
For now they had only disabled the video surveillance. Merrett Leys had given Theo the wireless password; the trojan in his dictaphone had whirred away; after several hours the camera system was compromised. The guardhouse monitors were no longer live: like the men’s card games, the footage repeated in permutating loops. The drone kept its bat’s-eye view, lest Wu or Yu embark on patrol. Simone and Suzy stalked across the lawn. Although they had left their dive masks they still wore bulky waterproof packs; night vision goggles gave their faces a curious resemblance to crickets’. The passage they had used, underwater, was too narrow for them to carry much; the current was too strong to swim back the way they’d come.
The pair went immediately to the rear of the guardhouse. In the gloom of its northern retaining wall, they picked the lock on the outdoor utilities compartment. The internal panels used combination locks: these they simply guessed, each woman with one hand on a packet of luck.
Once they had access to the electronics, Suzy connected a thermostat-sized control box. They waited open-palmed, like insecty supplicants, for its LEDs to align; the pinlights blinked, like pips on a die. Working remotely, JF powered down the estate’s high-gain antennas and deactivated the alarms’ alert system. Suzy moved away, up the hill to the tower – her progress hidden by the bulk of Theo’s car. Simone, on her belly, inched toward the rental’s trunk.
Suzy took thirty minutes to scale the tower’s wall, ten more to pierce the ventilation grille on its roof. The arc of her oxyacetylene torch was a light like lightning as it crackles in its cloud. Simone had returned by then from the driveway, dragging the vinyl shell concealed beneath Theo’s car’s spare tire. Passing across the lawn, unsilhouetted under a moonless sky, Simone was a sleek black spot. Or else she was not. Suzy watched her sister through the infra-red: a figure dragging an object into the rosebushes, hauling it singlehanded, like an enchanted hunter with the carcass of a bear.
Simone deposited the unmade meteor a little away from the tower, tucked among the thorns.
As the night wore on, the burglars penetrated each of the Presidio’s locked chambers. The sisters descended its spiral staircase, working side by side. First a room full of cash, stacked bills in plexi boxes, which they left undisturbed. Next a room of heirlooms – furniture, photo albums, candlesticks and jewellery. They ignored this too. There was a room with every edition of The Labrador Sea, spiral-bound drafts and editors’ notes, and another with acid-free boxes of back-issue comic books, series Merrett Leys had been collecting since his teens. Some of the doors had key codes, combination locks; these they serendipitously solved. Others they cut, with odourless oxyacetylene.
Finally, about halfway down the tower, they reached a chamber with double-kited walls, Mas Hamilton locks, a giant bank-vault door. Infrared beams, overcome with lead film bags. Proceeding patiently, painstakingly, the sisters breached the room’s defences and entered its hall of mirrors. Packed among the reflections, in hundreds of suede bags, waited a material like glittering sand.
“Thank God,” whispered Simone. It was not a tower full to the top with luck but a bonanza all the same, among the largest caches they had ever found.
They heaved out the sandbags a few at a time, carried them to the roof, hoisted them off the side. They landed softly in the verdure.
Their drone was the lookout, still as a gargoyle. Whenever Mr. Wu emerged on patrol – as he did at times – and whenever Mr. Yu came out – as he did, too – JF chirped a warning in the women’s ears.
Mr. Wu sang as he walked. A tuneless quiet song.
Mr. Yu did not sing. He counted every step.
But it was Mr. Wu who heard them. Simone and Suzy were crouched in the rosebushes, hefting sandbags toward the object Simone had retrieved from Theo’s trunk. There’s no concealing certain presences: they’re conspicuous, unassailable. Mr. Wu came all the way to the edge of the thorn-swirled garden. His sandals imprinted the soil. Perhaps he heard a rustle, a snap, their steady breathing. Perhaps he simply felt them there. He pointed his flashlight at the tower – the building’s unbroken brick, its sealed front door. He pointed it at the security camera – a serene black globe. His flashlight skimmed the bushes, gilding the sandbags, but he did not see the sisters. An animal, he thought.
Simone, lying face down in earth, wore explosives on her back.
Suzy, beside her, felt a worm lift and loop beside her cheek.
Eventually Mr. Wu walked on.
The sun rose, and everything became precarious.
The thieves were more visible now, exposed under Yangmingshan, and they hurried to finish their work. At his workstation, JF sipped a sixth cup of tea. Theo was dozing, dreaming, in a tousled king-sized bed. Merrett Leys was sleeping too. They had to act before the night-watch left at 8 a.m., replaced with fresh new eyes. Already the San Marziales had taken down the rope ladder. They had lowered their goggles, the top halves of their faces flushed, damp, like little kids’, and were standing in the roses, vibrant blooms of chi can hong xin and pale Souvenir de Malmaison, stuffing sandbags into the shell. It was soft and expandable, elastic, lined with mirrored foil. As cargo filled it the vessel got larger, larger, until it was itself as big as a room. The shell was pebbly – smears of gallium, bands of heat-scored rock and grit. A coating of pale charcoal. Set among the roses, it looked like a great, deflated boulder.
Once the main task was finished, Simone used a footpump to fill the rest of the shell with air. Suzy cast about with her torch, burning back the briar, touching white flame to roses. Soon a scorched circle surrounded their false, fallen meteor. They took the C4 from Simone’s waterproof pack – harmless-looking packets, like rare cheeses – and began to plant it in the earth. Wires led from the explosives to a contraption on Simone’s belt.
The last step was clean-up: sweeping for footprints, gathering equipment, using a spray-bottle to douse the area in skunk juice, pepper and valeric acid. When they had prepared the stones for the drone, they had only needed a few drops; here Suzy dispersed fetid spritzes of the stuff.
“Those poor roses,” Simone said.
The worst part was the way they did not wither. As dawn broke, the reeking mist hung like dewdrops. Flowers freshly kissed.
Theo was in a taxi, staring at a four-inch plastic crab. The crab stared back. It had shiny eyestalked pupils and a cheery, guileless smile, a carapace painted the same fire engine red as Provisions K’s sign. It stood on the driver’s dashboard, its claws open and upraised. In friendship, Theo thought. It wobbled as they climbed the road to Rongshu Wu.
Theo’s phone buzzed.
All set, read the message from JF.
You’re on.
Theo turned the phone face down on his lap. He was hung over. No, he wasn’t particularly hung over. That was just an excuse. Before going to bed he had stood in the hotel bathroom drinking glasses of lukewarm water, hydrating, rinsing away his deceptions, washing down the role of Max Paumgarten. Theo had wanted to go to sleep as himself.
Now he was on his way back to the Banyan House, the same role resumed. “Paumgarten,” Theo murmured, feeling the name on his tongue. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was doing Daniel harm. He had liked him. Immediately, without effort, despite the writer’s anxieties and ego, despite the way he tried to bluff through certain answers. Despite his long-winded speeches. In a lifetime spent at comedy clubs, Theo had known a lot of talkers. Daniel was agreeably strange, thoughtful, his frailties showing. He had allowed Theo into his home, a liar into the living-room, and he had been generous.
The crab grinned at him.
This is what it is to be a thief, Theo thought. You thieve.
The gates to the property were closed. Theo paid the driver and disembarked, bade a silent farewell to the dashboard crustacean.
He pressed a button on the gate’s intercom. The estate seemed different in morning light. Through the gate’s bronze bars: the brown ribbon of the driveway, a splendid scribble of roses, the tower like a distant chesspiece. Theo’s sedan still sat stalled before the guardhouse.
A voice crackled across the intercom.
“Hello. Max Paumgarten back again for his car.”
“One moment.”
It took more than one. Theo waited, waited, shuffled in circles as Mr. Yu tried to rouse his employer. While Theo waited he listened for any sign of the Gang’s clandestine work. Nothing. The fence glittered. He could see the house’s stained-glass windows, half-moons high up. Perhaps that was Daniel’s bedroom. Perhaps it was the room where he had shown him the bis. Perhaps it was his private cinema, his library, the billiards room, his elevated, temperature-controlled wine fridge. Theo’s heart tightened. The writer and his treasures, his hoard. It was envy, envy at its loosest, unrooted. There was no single aspect that Theo yearned for – it was Daniel’s prosperity in general, his success in general, the way the world was generally open to him and whatever he might choose to imagine. The writer hadn’t earned any of it. The state of his life, the colour of it, was founded on a lie. Daniel’s riches and opportunities, his fame. The camphor baron’s house and the twisting banyan trunks. His kindness. Theo stared at the swirls his footsteps had left in the dust. Daniel did not even deserve his wisdom. All of it he had stolen.
Mr. Yu’s voice rippled from the grille. “Welcome,” he said, and the fifteen-foot gate rattled aside.
Theo strolled up the drive, hands in his pockets.
He and his friends would steal some of it back.
Daniel stood on his steps in a robe, not so different from the previous evening. He is a charlatan, Theo thought. He’s a sham.
“Hello!” Daniel shouted.
Theo raised his hand in greeting.
As he did so, something exploded in the yard.
The rose garden was on fire. Smoke was climbing up in columns, as if somebody were drawing inky fingers through the sky. Daniel ran cautiously at first but then with increasing urgency once he glimpsed the scene. He turned to make sure Paumgarten was behind him. Blackened petals had been ripped from their stems, sprinkling the crater like the remains of a wedding. Flames glittered among the blossoms, amaranth pinks and fool’s-gold blonds, curling the blooms. The scent was like honeycomb, until the wind changed. Daniel covered his face with his sleeve. The meteor stood at the centre of the wreckage, burnt and weathered, a boulder as big as a shed, with fumes that curdled the air, wilting the grass.
It hadn’t been an explosion, Daniel understood now. It was the sound of landfall. He was coughing at the stench, the smoke, tearing as he marvelled, wide-eyed. “Can you imagine…!” he shouted.
Paumgarten shook his head.
“A meteor! A shooting star!” Daniel whooped. “Look at the size of it!” His laughter was muffled by his terrycloth sleeve. “Does it ever stink!”
“Sulphur, you said?”
“More like a garbage fire!”
Daniel glanced toward the Presidio. It seemed unscathed, safe. He went back to marvelling, exchanging half-hidden grins with Paumgarten.
“How did you sleep?” he eventually asked.
“Like a lamb,” Paumgarten said.
“I can’t believe you’re here for this.”
“If it weren’t for my second-rate car…”
Mr. Yu had appeared, out of breath. Mr. Wu could be seen back near the house, labouring to carry a hose.
“Hey, be careful with that.” Paumgarten was pointing at Yu’s brandished fire-extinguisher. “Shouldn’t we let it burn off? Maybe there are chemicals that would react to the spray.”
Yu ignored him, taking aim at the smouldering roses, releasing toots of foam.
“It could be radioactive, right?” Paumgarten said. “We should all keep our distance.”
The group retreated. As the morning poured in, the meteor looked ever more ravaged, shining.
From down the hill: the sound of an engine.
They turned. Daniel saw Wu, swathed in garden hose, turn too. “Did you call your tow?” he asked Paumgarten. The vehicle was just visible through the gate – halted now, idling. Its driver leaned on his horn.
Not a tow. A cube truck, the wine-red colour of young Beaujolais.
“That’s the astronomers!” Daniel said.
He took a few steps down the lawn, signalled for Wu to go and let them in. “Cripes, they’re fast!”
“The government?” Paumgarten said.
Daniel gazed toward the giant reeking stone. “You have to concede,” he murmured, “the thing is bigger than a basketball.”
A few minutes later, the National Astronomical Service’s burgundy truck rumbled up the greeny slopes and all the way into the rosebushes. When Wu shouted a complaint, a woman leapt from the cab – one of the officials who had visited yesterday. She replied with her own invective, waving him back. Three more women sprang from the cargo area, and then the other official, the black man; all wore the crisp blue uniforms, NAS patches on their shoulders. The three women donned surgical masks, then swarmed toward the meteor.
“Did any of you touch it?” the man demanded, in English.
“No,” said Daniel.
“Good. Please stay back.”
The young women circled the rock, stamping stray flames. They produced cables, laying them across the area. All of them wore turtlenecks under their coveralls.
“Is it dangerous?” Daniel asked.
“Yes,” replied the man.
His partner had snatched away the fire extinguisher and was barking at Mr. Yu.
“Will you just take it away?” Daniel said.
“Also yes.”
Paumgarten, with a tone of incredulity: “The whole meteor?”
“The whole meteorite,” said the man.
“What bullshit,” said Paumgarten.
With cables securing the thing in place, the women had fitted its circumference with a set of pneumatic jacks.
“According to Article 41B of the Republic of China’s Statute on Aerospace and Astronomy Research,” said the man, “the NAS lays claim to any landed astral matter above twenty-five centimetres in diameter, whether or not said matter is located on public property.”
Mr. Yu said something in Mandarin.
The other astronomer growled a reply.
“Is there any compensation?” Paumgarten asked.
“There is no compensation,” the man said.
“That’s insane!”
Daniel flashed him a look.
“No, I’m sorry,” Paumgarten went on, “some priceless astrological treasure lands in this man’s yard and you’re entitled to tear in here and whisk it away? To some lab?”
“Yes,” said the man. “To some lab.”
“Please clear from the area,” said the woman, hustling them back.
“It isn’t right!” said Paumgarten.
“Max…” said Daniel.
“Please clear,” the woman repeated, taking Paumgarten’s arm. He shook off her grip.
“Sir,” said the man.
Daniel and Yu were now exchanging glances. Paumgarten was flushed. He kept forgetting to keep his sleeve across his face. “Where’s your warrant for this?”
“Have you been drinking?” Daniel asked.
Paumgarten shouted, “They can’t just stroll…Hey!”
The workers’ jacks, wedged under the meteorite, had lifted the object off the ground. The boulder teetered, steadied.
“Can your truck really carry it?” said Daniel. “How many tons must it weigh?”
“Most meteorites this size are hollow,” the man replied. Quickly this fact seemed borne out: the trio of women had balanced the boulder on a dolly and were guiding it across the grass.
“They’re just taking it,” said Paumgarten.
“Max, it’s fine,” hissed Daniel.
They heaved it up the ramp.
“Hey, stop!” Paumgarten bellowed. He lunged toward them and then was jerked straight back as the man from the NAS seized him by the collar. In a swift movement, and with unexpected violence, he used a plastic cuff to secure the journalist’s wrists behind his back. “What the fuck!” yelled Paumgarten.
“You are hereby detained under the authority of the Statute’s recovery and protection clauses,” the officer said.
“Sir —” said Daniel.
The man loomed toward him. “Yes?”
His partner hoisted the fire extinguisher.
Daniel shrank back. “It’s just he didn’t do anything wrong.”
The woman pointed toward the Banyan House. “Please wait inside.”
Daniel gazed at Paumgarten, helpless. Paumgarten gazed back, then turned to the lanky NAS leader.
“Now,” the man said.
The truck was creaking with the weight of its freight.
Petals were everywhere.
The sun was shining.
Mr. Wu finally arrived with the hose.
“Now.”
Fifteen minutes later, Daniel Merrett Leys finally reached his lawyer. It was to be a very confounding phone call. The thieves’ luck-stuffed truck was already roaring out the gates of Rongshu Wu. The counterfeit meteorite trembled on the cargo floor, its vinyl dimpling as they barrelled from dirt to asphalt. Two of Roie’s daughters sat around the stinking booty, seat belts buckled; the other was opening a slit on the side of the meteorite, helping the San Marziale sisters out. Theo sat up front, wedged between Roie and Sebald. With a loud, vaguely dental snap, Sebald severed the zip around Theo’s wrists.
“Thanks,” Theo said.
“I hope I did not cause you much discomfort,” Sebald said.
The truck tumulted down the mountain, into the city. Roie had turned on the radio – some kind of Taiwanese children’s choir, their voices sharp and raucous – and Theo’s mind was whirring like rewinding tape, visualizing the scenes that had led to this moment. After weeks spent planning with Simone, the starfall and its aftermath had seemed unreal, a dream come to life. Now he imagined everything he had not witnessed: the sisters’ eel-kicking underwater journey; their tiptoe and skulk; a darkened hand tossing a grappling hook – up, straight up, somehow undescending. What had the view been like from the tower’s parapet? How much luck had they found?
The truck rattled through the gates of the ink importer’s house and down the pebbled driveway to the lot. JF was waiting for them, perched on a ladder, extending dragonfly-green bottles of bubbly. While Sebald and Theo bounded toward him, cheering, solemn Roie crossed behind and hauled up the trailer door. Her daughters appeared: kicking off their astronomers’ coveralls, retying their sneakers. One of them stooped at a wing-mirror, refreshing her lipstick; another kneeled beside a thermos and poured out cups of tea.
At first Theo didn’t see the San Marziales. Their silhouettes were lost amongst the detritus at the back of the truck – the giant slow-crumpling meteorite, the putrid fumes, bits and pieces of gear. Then Suzy stepped out of the fray – exhausted, filthy, uncharacteristically fragile. At the edge of the cargo bay, Roie all but caught her. When they kissed it seemed rough and almost rueful. Watching them felt like trespassing. Until they separated: then the women stood radiant, like smiling playing-card faces, jacks or queens of spades.
Maybe seeing this affected what happened next. Or else maybe it was simply the look on Simone’s face when she appeared, dishevelled, dirt-smudged, reeking, grinning, so much more worse for wear than he expected. When she jumped down from the truck he took her in his arms. To his surprise she kissed him on the mouth. Soft lips, clicking teeth.
Soon everybody was holding a cup of cava in one hand and a cup of oolong in the other. Theo and Simone toasted cup to cup to cup to cup, drank two times. JF and Sebald dragged out an industrial fan, propped it at the mouth of the truck, to try to disperse the smell. The fan was shoving Simone’s hair around. After a few minutes she scampered up the trailer hitch and knelt in the shadow of the strange, fraudulent boulder. She undid the fastenings and the vinyl sloughed open, showing its mirrored interior and dozens of sandbags jumbled inside. Sandbags, holding something that wasn’t sand.
Still, the No Name Gang had a rule: check the dice. No matter how certain your score, test the goods. Simone raised a wooden cup. All of them were watching. She rolled the bones, shook, threw. The dice test showed six times six equals thirty-six pips, and all the thieves exulted.
An hour after takeoff, the airplane cabin was quiet, lights low. Men and women reclined with open mouths, dry tongues; others lay catlike, curled toward the walls. Theo was unnerved by flying first class. Air travel ought to be a makeshift, incommodious hurtling. It shouldn’t be like a night in a dulled and peculiar hotel.
The meteorite made him uneasy too. They had hosed it down, negotiated a cargo rate, checked it in under a fake name. Flying through the air alongside a shooting star, even a fake one, seemed a little like asking for it.
How did I get so superstitious? Theo asked himself. The answer was this: by finding out that luck is real.
Suzy and Sebald were snoozing in the row ahead of them, JF snoring in the row behind. Theo and Simone had watched Top Hat together – each on their own tiny screen, with its own crummy headset. It was like and unlike their time at the cinema(s). “I always watch old movies on planes,” Simone had told him. “Makes it feel like an education. Like I’m getting something done up here.” They timed it “3-2-1” so they were laughing at the same pratfalls, awed by the same softshoe.
Afterward, Simone took out a folder. A creamy piece of carton folded in her lap.
“What’s that?”
“We found it in the tower. With the luck. In a safe.”
She withdrew a letter. One page of heavy linen stock, formatted like a wedding invitation or a municipal declaration – a block of text with four massive margins, centre justified. The typeface looked familiar, Times New Romanesque, but not quite that, like a younger version. The fulcrum of the capital L reminded Theo of a gilded, half-open hinge.
The letter was dated four years earlier.
Dear Daniel,
Let me first say how happy I was to meet you in Ichiro’s olive grove. Some nights I acquire a vivid sense of the softness of the world – how easily the boundaries between things blur, disparate entities coming together. It makes me excited but always a little frightened. You and I spoke of islands, the way they’re defined by their edges. “What is an island without its water?” you said. Sometimes we require walls, despite all our dreams of softness, permeation. We must be true to ourselves.
Listen to me, the two-bit sage. Again, it was a pleasure talking with you – a fellow collector with interests besides collecting.
I wanted you to know that my invitation remains open, should you ever change your mind. I already harbor portions of several other friends’ collections. It is a way of diversifying risk. It gratifies me to do this for kindred spirits, fellow travelers. Safeguards are easier en commun; even then they aren’t easy. Maybe they are the hardest part of our pastime.
Good luck with your book.
“What’s ‘Ichiro’s’?” Theo said.
“Ichiro Teruteru. Probably. The eldest son of Akio and Hikaru Teruteru.”
Theo looked at her blankly.
“They’re like the Rockefellers of luck.”
“Someone sent this to Daniel?”
She nodded.
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Huh.”
“There’s another one.”
Unlike the first letter, which had been sent to Merrett Leys’s old home on Fogo, the second used his address at Rongshu Wu. It was dated nine months ago.
Let this letter serve as promissory note: (i) acknowledging the receipt of approximately one tonne of pure, unwinnowed chance; and (ii) entitling you to its return, in full, upon request. The costs of transportation shall be borne by you. This property will be held by me until a mutually agreed upon time, such agreement not to be unreasonably withheld or delayed. In the case of loss, your chance shall be replaced at my own expense. Reasonable protections will be made against winnowing-away.
This note is non-transferable.
Each document ended with the same valediction, and the same signature:
Until our roads next cross —
Brightly,
“Is that an M?” Theo asked.
“Or two Ns?”
“Mysterious.”
“Yes.”
“A luck collector.”
“Yes.”
“Who keeps luck for others, out of the goodness of his heart…”
“Or her heart, yes.”
Theo reread the letter.
“Sounds like a trick.”
“Maybe so. But on whom?”