Your Face in Mine (35 page)

I want to tell him. This is it, I’m thinking, this is the door, the way around and over and out. Mort Kepler is a steaming pile of crap, yes, but he’s also a real reporter, who has actually in his life turned a story around and sold it. Leave it to him to break the news. Who cares if it’s
Mother Jones
or
The Nation
? Let him have the scoop, let him write the book, and then go back to Baltimore and start again. Hire a lawyer and negotiate a plea deal. Probably it’ll all amount to nothing. Look for another NPR job. Move back in with the parents, if it comes to that. Take shelter. Embrace the ordinary. Take shelter in this pockmarked
face, in these big capable hands. Treat Mort Kepler as a father confessor. Why the hell not?

Because I’m free, that’s why. When I’m Curtis Wang, I’ll never have a conversation like this again. What would Mort Kepler say, if Curtis Wang were sitting across the table? He’d be mincing his words, biting his tongue, thinking all kinds of inappropriate thoughts about the Little Red Book and internment camps and industrial espionage and Yao Ming. And penis size. How else do men like him measure their distance from other men, when it comes down to it? Wasn’t I tempted to ask Martin about it, once, long ago? To ask, that is, as a joke, whether Silpa had invented penis extensions, as a side project, to correct for anatomical averages? I can see it in Mort’s face even now, in embryo:
Chinaman, my dick is bigger than yours.

Why would I choose that? Why would I step out of the circle of belonging, where I’ve always been? The gilded prison house of whiteness, with its electric fences, its transparent walls? Being the most visible, therefore the most hated, of all? The one who can always condescend, not the one condescended to?

Reader, doesn’t the question answer itself?

I’m expected back at the office, I tell him. Conference call at five.

No more R&R, huh? Who’s the conference call with?

I give him a pitying look.

Enjoy the rest of your time in Bangkok, I say. Go get a massage at Wat Po. They’re only five bucks.

The massages I want are all in Patpong.

With that, I give him a wave, and walk easily out of the bar and down the alley, as if I’ve lived here all my life, and step into a hot pink taxi waiting at the corner. No one follows me.

I wake up with Wendy sleeping next to me.

Her hair spilling across the pillow, her fingers dug into the crook of my elbow. Long white curtains blowing away from an open window, a French door, actually, on her side of the bed. Birds twittering and the hump and sizzle of the surf.

We’re on vacation. Meimei is with my parents in New Paltz. I know these things immediately, automatically, when I open my eyes. This is the vacation we promised each other we would take for our eighth wedding anniversary. Vieques. My supervisor at BUR, Kathleen, insisted we borrow her condo.

How is it that things sometimes fall into place so easily?

That was what Wendy asked me at dinner last night. We were picking through the remains of a grilled yellow snapper, eating the last tostones with our fingers.

I mean, when we came to the United States, she said, the first thing I promised myself is we would take
vacations
. She switched to Chinese. My parents never took one. Where would they have gone? All their family was in Wudeng, and it’s not as if they could have afforded to go back to Shanghai. Or Beijing.

We’ll take them, next time we go.

It’s expensive now. Not like when we lived there. Even a three-star hotel in Beijing now costs a hundred bucks a night. It’s like New York. I looked it up. The real question is, when can
we
afford to go, period?

We’ll work it out.

You always say that.

When I stand up my gaze crosses the room to a small mirror, an antique, propped on the dresser, in a blue frame crudely painted with doves. My chin, my eyebrows, my neck. My eyes.

Remember when I first met you, she’s murmuring, how funny I thought it was that you came from a town called Athens? Curtis, I’m so glad we came here. It’s a place we won’t have to explain to each other. But next time we have to bring Meimei.

Don’t make me feel guilty about that.

I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I said
next
time.

We are in the midst of ordinary life, I’m thinking to myself, as I cross the room and pull on a loose cotton shirt, one I’ve kept crumpled in the back of my closet since the last time I went to the beach. A good life. I close my eyes. I don’t have to think about it at all.

—

I’m being pulled up through a warm ocean, thick, silky, amniotic, toward the surface’s blue light. A throbbing, murmuring voice:
no one knew she had the gun. Where’d she get it? Korea? You know what the prison sentence is for owning an unregistered firearm in Korea?

—

When I come back from the 7-Eleven, with three slices of pizza stacked up in a box, two Dr Peppers and a Sprite and a bag of crab chips in a plastic bag, Alan and Martin have pulled themselves out of the water and are lying stretched out, facedown on the pool deck. No towels. Skin on concrete, hands by their sides. They look like they’ve been executed where they lie. The lifeguard ignores them.

What the fuck are you doing?

Sunbathing, Alan says. Vitamin D.

You’ll turn into a crispy Chicken McNugget. It’s about 105 out here, Loco Blanco.

That’s Blanco Loco, Martin says.

From the back, from an angle I never see, two slabs of human tissue, two specimens: one white as Crisco, white as Sherwin-Williams Bright White, white so that he reflects the sun, an oblong moon; one turned dark, coal-dark, much darker than his usual medium-toned, maple-syrup color. I stand there for a moment, fascinated. It’s not usually this stark. Pink, brown, and yellow, Martin says. We’re the twenty-first-century Neapolitan trio.

You know something? Alan’s voice is muffled by the concrete. This is it. I could
live
like this.

And if the sun were a little hotter, we could just turn right back into pure carbon.

Shut up. I mean it. Freeze time. So I can just lie here in the sun, smelling that pizza Wang brought back, watching Katie Cryer over there practice her synchronized swimming or whatever it is.

It’s so unlike him, a positive statement of any kind, let alone a declaration of happiness, that Martin lifts his head and turns it to the other side, so that he faces the back of Alan’s head. And I think,
this isn’t my story. This is a dream I’m going to wake up from and never remember.

Write a song about it, why don’t you?

Maybe I will.

—

—Hell, it was a cheap Saturday Night Special she bought in Woonsocket when she was going to Brown. Trust me on that. I can tell you the store; I’ve been there myself. Only place to get a retail handgun between New Haven and Boston. Maybe she thought it was cool, like Charlie’s Angels. How are you supposed to predict these things? She’s in Bangkok for eight months, a
week for the surgery, six weeks in recovery, and then the rest of the time working in the goddamned kitchen or on the computer. I think we got her out of the house three times. Didn’t want to sightsee. Didn’t want the goddamned
pad kee mao
.

—

Daddy, Meimei says, when I lift her out of bed, Daddydaddydaddydaddy. Stringing together the words with great satisfaction. Her legs wrap halfway around my waist, little pincers, little monkey limbs. She went to bed in one of Wendy’s old T-shirts and a pull-up diaper, now heavy with urine, pressed against my stomach. Do we have to get up already? It’s still
dark
.

It’s December, I tell her, flipping on her closet light, her little body still cemented to me, pulling a plum sweater-dress off its hanger. Let’s let Mama sleep, okay? Don’t talk too loud. Her heels thump on the carpet.

Can you make me oatmeal?

Yeah.

After
you make yourself coffee.

Priorities, little girl, I say, switching to English. Priorities.

With bananas
and
raisins?

I think we’re out of raisins.

Then you should get more, silly.

I have to go by the store on the way home this afternoon. Will you remind me?

Can I draw a note on your hand?

No. No more drawing on people’s hands. Miss Lewis warned you about that, right?

Her face, as it cranes up to look at me in pretend puzzlement—is it the murky light from her tiny tableside Dora lamp, or has she gotten darker? Has the brown in her eyes crushed the blue?

Stay, Daddy, she says. Stay with us. Stay here. In this story.

I can’t. I have to go to work.

—

—
Yeah, she walked into the office and just popped him. Just like that.

We’re working on tracing his lists of suppliers. At this point the maintenance drugs are the crucial thing. Problem is, he kept way too much of it in his head. And as far as a replacement surgeon goes, we’re absolutely screwed. I mean absolutely. This was an irreplaceable asset. He would have been training ten assistants after the announcement, after we were out in the open. But not now. Too dangerous. Yeah, you know, our coverage with the Chens gets us up to five million. But believe me, Sasha, this isn’t a money thing. You have to know people at these pharmacies. All this stuff is hand-prepared.

What did you think? That I had a private stash somewhere? Maybe I should have. Jesus Christ, it all went through him, okay? Tariko’s just out of his mind over it. It was his job, primarily. Watching her, I mean. Monitoring her movements. But she didn’t make any movements. She just sat there and stewed.

Our guy’s on it. Obviously. The important thing is to watch for noises in the press. What’s done is done. I’m not after any vendettas. I’ve made that clear. She’s untouchable as long as she stays in Korea, and I doubt she’s going anywhere else. No, there’s been nothing in the papers. Mai is helping out with that. We told the police he was alone in the office and the cameras were out for maintenance. Disgruntled former client. Apparently it’s a thing in Bangkok. They didn’t seem too interested. His family took the body. No idea where the funeral was.

Whatever you say. The important thing is, Sasha, we need chemists. An in-house staff. I couldn’t give a damn where they’re located. Put them in Vilnius, put them in São Paulo. Put them in Juárez. We have all his papers, but what good does that do us? Ten synthetic chemists, say, on a yearly contract. Get them straight out of grad school, get them from Sandoz and Merck and
Pfizer, get them from meth labs, I don’t care. As long as they can do the work. We’re talking about a total reboot here. The drugs come first. Self-tanning. Yeah, okay, I said it, right? Silpa’s not even cold. So shoot me. Let’s talk primary markets. Then we develop the surgeons. Five years down the line, Orchid reopens. In the meantime, we’re Orchis Pharmaceuticals, Ltd. I just did the paperwork. Caymans.

No, my same office. Same address. Orchid Imports, 200 Light Street, Sixteenth floor, Baltimore, Maryland 21001. I’ll be back there in a week. Have to take care of some business first. Tariko’s wrapping things up, no. Sold the house to a Saudi. Six-fifty, that’s fifteen percent profit. Silver linings, right?

•   •   •

I
wake up again, now, a haze of light filling the gauze bandages over my eyes. A white world, inside a fluorescent tube. The airplane window vibrates against my cheek. Sunlight above the clouds, the brightest sunlight, unfiltered, un-ozoned, cell-killing, cell-dividing. It’ll hurt to open them at first, Silpa said, under the bandages, but you shouldn’t hesitate. Move those babies around. You don’t want the eye muscles to atrophy. Anyway, by that time you’ll only be a day or so away from full use.

You there? Martin asks. You there, Kelly?

Curtis, I say, through a dry mouth. It’s Curtis.

Shit. Sorry. Curtis. Now I can stop taking your pulse. I was sure those Vicodins were really something stronger. Never seen anyone sleep so long.

I wasn’t asleep the whole time.

I hear him taking a moment to digest this.

The important thing, he says, is that we’ve got your back. Nothing changes. Payments as normal. Deliveries as normal. Here we are, landing in Shanghai in forty-five minutes. As promised. Passport in hand.

It didn’t sound that way to me.

Forget what you heard. You were addled. I could have been talking Klingon.

Silpa’s dead, I say. Isn’t he? Did I get that much right?

The alert bell pings overhead, and a voice comes over the loudspeaker.
Dajia hao,
the flight attendant says. She has a chirpy Shandong accent. A warm tear rests on my upper lip. How good it is, I’m thinking, to hear a language I completely understand.

Here. Martin presses a cold glass into my hand. Don’t worry, he says. Ginger ale. I’m not trying to knock you back out.

So I guess your plans are off the table.

For now, he says. For now. The moment has to be right. Think globally, act locally. You have to expand your consciousness. The
world
is Baltimore, remember? It just doesn’t know it yet. His face slackens; he might be, impossibly, about to cry. I’m always at home, he says. You know why? My money travels with me. There’s nothing more beautiful than stepping up to that ATM for the first time, wherever you are, putting your card in and watching the color of the bills shooting out. It’s like sex. That’s when I think,
there’s nothing I can’t do.

Not me, I say. That’s never worked on me.

Tell me about it.

No, I mean, in my universe, Baltimore is a fixed point. It doesn’t expand and contract.

You’ll see how that changes when you come back to visit.

What do you mean,
come back
? I’ve never been there before.

Heh-heh-heh, he says. Don’t fuck with me. Trying to give yourself retrograde amnesia? It’s not that easy. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Seriously, I say. I’m from Athens, Georgia. Didn’t you know that? Never been to Baltimore in my life. I mean, I passed through on 95 on the way up to Cambridge.

As I say it, I will it into being: an orb, a warm, pulsing thing, orange-yellow, the color of butterscotch candy, rising again out of my very center, up into my throat. My guide-light. It points only in one direction.
The future vibrates in me; my legs are shaking. I want to tear off the bandages
right now
.

Do I feel sadness? I ought to ask myself that, but it seems like an impossible question. Should I grieve for them, for my lost girl, for the woman who could finish my sentences in two languages? And spend my life, waste my life, along with theirs? I’ve
become
them. I didn’t make the world. Should I give up on it?

My senses have grown sharper, I’m thinking: I can hear a magazine rustling in the seat behind us, keys clicking on a laptop, a can of Diet Coke snapping open. The rustle of life itself. The
impatience
of it. All these people fidgeting with their phones, drumming their fingers, feeling money trickling away with every waiting second. The towers of Shanghai, towers I won’t even recognize, floating up out of an electric haze. The light thrown off by assets multiplying. Isn’t this the pattern of heaven? I’ve grown old, I’m thinking. Old and slack, in my original habitat, in the cage of one body, hardly even aware that it is a cage. Time to wake up. Time to plant some seed capital. Who cares if it’s with Orchid, or with Hue, or Hue.2, or something I haven’t dreamed up yet? Money, I’m thinking, to paraphrase
The Art of War
, always finds its place. And when I have enough, whatever
enough
means, I’ll endow another wing of the Harvard Library. The Wang Center for Translation Studies. Or maybe the Miao
Center for Translation Studies. Or, if the time is right, the Thorndike Center. The Wendy and Meimei Thorndike Center.