The Man With No Time (8 page)

I completed my trial by fire one evening when Mrs. Chan uncovered a dish of brown, dense, grainless meat surrounded by some kind of fungus and proudly announced that it was dog. It was too much.

“Does it have a name?” I'd asked Eleanor.

“Spot,” Eleanor said, catching a smile from Horace. “Dick and Jane are out combing the streets for him now.” There were just the four of us at the table; Pansy was still living, undreamed-of, in Singapore. Husband Number Two had skillfully fled the scene after only seven months.

Mrs. Chan said something to me in Chinese, gave me a thousand-watt smile, and cut off a great whacking piece. It made a slapping noise as it hit the plate.

“I wonder whether it could do tricks,” I said, feeling my stomach shrink away to nothing and threaten to invert itself.

“I have to say this very fast,” Horace said, looking at Eleanor but talking to me, “this is really venison.”

Eleanor nodded at Horace and smiled. Their mother looked suspiciously from son to daughter and back again, and Eleanor held up her plate like a good little daughter. A couple of minutes later, we all dug into Bambi. When we finished, I was a member of the family.

Months later Mrs. Chan clarified matters by admitting over yet another meal that she'd consulted a fortune-teller on the morning of the Bambi Banquet, and that the soothsayer had peered into my future and seen a golden shower. Horace, who was translating, stopped suddenly, looked down, and scratched his nose, and Eleanor remarked that it was a good thing her mother didn't understand American slang.

“If she did,” she'd said, “God only knows what you'd be eating.”

And I'd been a guest of honor at Horace and Pansy's wedding and at the twins' hundred-day party, and welcome always in the cramped apartment that Mrs. Chan ruled. I'd seen Husband Number Three abandon ship in haste after his wife, having already gone to all the nearby barber shops to pick up hair clippings for her backyard compost heap, dragged a comb through his brush and found several long blond hairs. There had been a scene. There was always a scene.

I wasn't used to scenes. My family didn't have them. We loved each other politely and fought with silence. No one in my family ever threatened a relative with a meat cleaver or kicked a hole in a door. We touched each other's clothing, not each other's skin. I found that I liked scenes. I liked getting the anger out and over with, the spontaneous upwellings of love, the unpredictable eddies from some deep, lovingly familial current.

Horace's roomful of broken computers and applications for jobs he never intended to take. The encyclopedic, uncataloged knowledge of wholly unrelated facts that he unveiled in long, rambling lists. Pansy's cameras and quiet wit and shy, blinding smile. The big round heads and sweet, unblinking eyes of the twins. The sheer variety of Mrs. Chan's husbands. Everything about Eleanor. I'd isolated myself in years of study, wondering where I was going and who I was going there with. I woke up next to Eleanor one morning, sometime after the death of Jennie Chu, and thought I'd figured it out at last.

Bravo sat bolt upright in the backseat, indulging the conceit that he was in a limo and I was the chauffeur. I reached back to pet him, and he dodged my hand, discouraging familiarity from a mere driver, and I pointed the car south toward Wilshire.

It had all held together until Topanga. As long as Eleanor and I moved from temporary dwelling to temporary dwelling, a couple of nomads setting up and striking our tents, we were inseparable.

Maybe it was something about the idea of a house. I said I wanted it, and I thought I did. I said I looked forward to the prospect of more time together without friends and acquaintances to bother us. After months in the house, after she'd finished her first book and sent it off and I'd earned some money as an investigator, we began to talk, loosely and theoretically but earnestly, about marriage. I immediately had an affair.

And then another and another. They were meaningless, joyless, mechanical, purely technical violations of faith. She found out about one and forgave me. Later she forgave me again. Then she received simultaneously an advance for book number two and the news of affair number three, and she stopped forgiving me and moved out, into the little house in Venice in which she still lived.

Once separated we became close again and remained close, closer to each other than we were to anyone else in the world, and then the twins came along. We both loved the twins and they drew us closer, until her publisher, a New Age entrepreneur named Burt, took her to bed. Or maybe Eleanor took him to bed. It didn't help matters that I thought he was a vulgar, pretentious clown. Even then, though, I still had the family to love. I could still share in their lives.

But now they'd become Chinese, and they'd built a wall around their crisis that only a Chinese could pass through. I didn't have the password.

As I drove I asked myself whether my feelings were hurt and answered the question untruthfully in the negative. What was burning a hole in my stomach, I persuaded myself, was that they had done so much for me—they'd opened my life emotionally, they'd given me their love without asking themselves whether I was worth it—and here was an opportunity for me to do something for them, something I was reasonably good at, and my help was being refused.

I wanted desperately to see Eleanor.

Colored Christmas bulbs gleamed and winked in the gathering November dusk, framing the houses of the impatient. We picked up a little drizzle halfway to Santa Monica, not really rain but low fog sliding in from the ocean. Bravo put his head out the back window and let the wind pin his ears back, and I fought the temptation to do the same as the windshield slowly went from transparent to translucent to opaque. “Maybe you'd like to drive,” I said to him as I pulled over on Santa Monica Boulevard and got out to wipe the glass. He barked.

“You've been watching too much TV,” I grumbled, climbing back in. “It isn't funny there, and it's not funny here.” He maintained a dignified silence until we turned south onto Ocean, when his ears went up straight.

“Well, aren't you the navigational genius,” I said. Normally I didn't go to see Eleanor unannounced—especially since Burt emerged from the ether—but under the circumstances I figured it would be all right. Anyway, Burt was in New York. Bravo whined, and his tail thumped against the seat as I made the right onto Windswept Court and pulled up in front of Eleanor's house. As I came to a stop he put both front paws against the window and panted loudly.

“Slow down,” I said. “Do you see her car?” He turned his muzzle over his shoulder to look at me. “Do you see a light in the window?” His tail whapped the seat back. “God, what a stupid dog,” I said, feeling desolate. “Anybody can tell she's not here.”

He looked away and made a hunching motion with his hind legs, ready to jump out of the car.

“Hold it,” I said, putting my hand on his rump. “We'll go up and check, but you've got to get out of the car like a gentleman.”

I opened my door, and he scrambled over the seat back and across my lap and out, waiting for me by running short, impatient circles in the driveway. I climbed out with exaggerated slowness, and the moment I had both feet on the driveway, he charged up the sidewalk to the front door. I joined him and rang the bell three times, as much for me as for him.

“See?” I said, trying to sound happy about it. “Nobody home.”

We got back into the car together, both disappointed. He lay down on the backseat, dispirited, with his ears flat. “I know,” I said. “I love her, too.” We made the long slow drive to Topanga in silence.

The fog had preceded us. Topanga Skyline was blocked by a police car parked lengthwise across the street, its flashers firing red and blue into the mist.

“You can't get up,” the cop said. “Fire equipment.”

“I live there.” I showed him my driver's license.

He shrugged. He had small, uninterested eyes and nostrils you could have saved quarters in. “Back it up. Go somewhere else.”

I started to say something snarky and then remembered that I still had the Vietnamese kids' semiautomatics in the trunk. “Thank you, Officer,” I said. “Always nice to talk with a servant of the people.”

I took Alice around the back way, up an unpaved fire road and then down again until it struck Burson, which in turn intersected Topanga Skyline at the top of its arc. We were above the fog here, and I could see it brimming silver like a ballet lake below us, cradled in the cup created by the sides of the hills. It wasn't hard to imagine the ghosts of plesiosaurs paddling through it.

I parked Alice at the foot of the steep, rutted, unpaved driveway, and Bravo charged up it ahead of me. I huffed up at my own speed, toting the two guns, and joined him at the house. He was too busy sniffing to notice me until he heard the door open, and then he barreled past me and went to sit in his cave under the table that holds my computer. I put the little warriors' semis away the way I put most things away, which is by dropping them behind the largest object in sight. In this case, it was the couch. I made a note to take a look one of these days and see what else was back there. When I got the courage.

We are creatures of habit, and my habit when I get home is to go out on the deck in front of my living room and look at the best view in Southern California. I was anticipating a placid vista of pale mist and dark mountains. What I saw made me swear out loud and brought Bravo out to stand next to me and stare down through the darkness at 1321, on fire for the second time in four years.

PART II

MIGRATING STARLINGS

G. Kramer of the Max Planck Institute in Germany noted that when migration time arrived, starlings tended to take off at a certain angle with respect to the position of the sun. If the apparent position of the sun was changed by mirrors, the migrating starlings tended to take off in a direction which had the same angle relative to the sun's position in the mirror. . . .

—Geza Szamosi
The Twin Dimensions: Inventing Time and Space

6 - Guardian Angels

S
he finally emerged from the bar a little after two-thirty in the morning, looking smaller and chubbier than she had inside. I waited in the shadow of a van and watched her come, dressed in pressed jeans, white sneakers, a T-shirt, and a white unzipped windbreaker, the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms. Her shoulder-length hair looked like she'd wet it and then combed it with her fingers. She'd turned the collar up against the drizzle. She was humming.

The name of the bar, according to the scrawl of darkened neon tubing across its front window, was
Behind the Fan
. I'd missed that last time I was here. It shared a tiny mall with a Korean liquor store and a laundry. Both were closed and dark. At this hour, there was virtually no traffic behind me on Western Avenue. Being there again brought Uncle Lo to mind, and I found that I couldn't really remember his face as a whole. It had disintegrated in my memory into a collection of Identikit options: a mass of downward-sloping wrinkles set off by a black eye, high, sloping cheekbones, a mouthful of gold teeth.

I let her get well past me before I stepped into the light and called her.

“Lek,” I said.

She wheeled immediately, the heel of her sneaker making a faint squeal against the asphalt, and her hand came up out of her little purse with a white canister in it. She extended her arm to its full length and pointed the can at my face. Bracelets jingled on her wrist. “Stop there,” she said.

I stopped. “Mace?”

“You bet,” she said. “Put you away good, too. What's your problem?” Her English in the bar had been heavily accented. She'd left most of the accent inside.

“I was here on Saturday night,” I said. “With two Chinese guys, one young and one old, remember?”

“So what?” The hand with the mace didn't shake at all. I hadn't paid much attention to her in the bar, but now I was struck by the size of her eyes. They seemed to take up half her face, and their whites were as clear as porcelain under the streetlight. “I didn't ask you who you were, I asked what your problem was.”

I slowly held my hands up, palms toward her, two feet apart. Gave her my Harmless Smile, just a big Boy Scout looking for a good deed. “Nothing up my sleeve,” I said. “I want to talk for a minute.”

“I get paid to talk,” she said tersely.

“And you sound different when you do.”

She made a small raspberry sound. “Oh, shooah,” she said, “everybody like pidgin,
na?
Make everybody feel same-same Rambo, got too-big gun.”

I couldn't help it. I laughed. Her face darkened, but then her Thai good nature carried the moment and her teeth gleamed, sudden and white in her face.

“Well, it's the truth,” she said. “You think the guy wants to know that his little piece of sweet-and-sour has a day job translating English news for the local Thai paper? Will he tip her more if he knows she went to school longer than he did?”

“You have a degree?”

“I have two from Thailand, in English. Ning's a nurse, three-quarter time.” She turned her head slightly to one side, regarding me. “I remember you now. You're the one who was no fun.”

“You can put down the mace, then,” I said.

“No way,” she said, “but I'll change hands and lean on my car. My arm's getting tired and my feet hurt.” She backed up against a gleaming little white Toyota that was parked facing out. The mace went from the right to the left hand. Her chin lifted a quarter of an inch, a prompt for me to talk. “So?”

“I want to ask you about the old man.”

“Lo,” she said.

I nodded, faintly surprised that she remembered him.

“Funny old guy. Still likes the girls, maybe too much. Like a dog sniffing, but funny about it. Some old guys never seem to run out, you know?”

“Lucky him,” I said. “Some of us run out almost immediately. You were with him when he made his phone call.”

“No.” She raked damp hair back from her forehead with her right hand, and her eyes suddenly seemed even larger. “I was in the toilet, trying to look younger.”