A Paper Son Read online

  I thanked him, hung up, and checked the time. It wasn’t quite four o’clock. Pier 23 wasn’t far—maybe a five-minute drive. It was a long shot, but it was all I had. Eva watched me don my raincoat. “You’re going somewhere?” she said.

  “Looking for something,” I said.

  Outside the rain hammered on the sidewalk, the parked cars, the mailboxes and the leafless trees. I drove through it and tried to figure out how things would end with Eva. What would she do when I failed to conjure her uncle Henry from out of my pages? Would I eventually just make something up about him? Would she believe me, and just go away? I didn’t think so. She had a shitty poker face and her reaction to my last batch of pages told me she knew a lot more than she was admitting. I wasn’t going to be able to just write a chapter about how he’d run away to join the circus and lived happily ever after.

  I made my way to Bay Street and headed east. Wide brown rivers littered with flotsam churned through the gutters. The road dropped out of the hills and into the city’s flat skirt where ponds stood in the intersections, their surfaces riotous. On the Embarcadero, rush hour traffic inched through the rain. A street car clattered down the median, its steel wheels hissing on the wet tracks. I found a parking spot a block from Pier 23 and crossed over to the wide sidewalk that ran along the boulevard’s outer edge. On sunny weekends it would have been clogged by joggers, strollers, tourists on bicycle taxis, but today it was barren. The huge warehouse door at Pier 23 was open, but it was quiet inside. Spheres of yellow tungsten light shrank and dulled as they receded into the building’s cavernous depths, where endless rows of loaded pallets towered two and three stories high.

  The bulletin board was on the wall, on the far side of the doorway. Tacked to it was a flier identical to the one Franklin had brought me, a single pin stuck through it, yellow dye bleeding from its bottom edge and streaking down the cork board. It was barely legible, but I could just make out an address—1326 Grant Street. The flier would have turned to mush in my pocket so I committed the address to memory and then, without really planning to, I stepped into the dark warehouse. In its front corner stood a two-story structure made of modified, stacked shipping containers that looked as though they might house offices. Its door stood open and a weak light leaked out of the windows along the top level. From somewhere inside the building came the sound of chair legs scraping on a floor. I stopped and strained to listen, but no other sounds came to me. I stepped through the door, hoping I might find someone who knew about the flier. Just enough light trickled down the stairway to reveal an office that looked like any other warehouse office might—a scuffed linoleum floor, desks covered in papers, clipboards hanging from screws in the walls, shelves full of binders with printed spines, a layer of grime over all of it. With my heart rate rising and my breath held, I circled around the room, looking things over, reading labels, looking at the headings on papers.

  There was one computer in the office, circles of dirt in the indentations of its keys. The clipboards held documents for shipping and receiving—signatures, dates and times, weights, quantities, origins and destinations. On the wall hung a calendar that featured women in bikinis and power tools. There was no reference to the Quarterly anywhere.

  I headed for a stairway, where a once-red strip of carpet ran up the middle of the plywood stairs, its center blackened by traffic, its edges the color of wine. It was strangely silent—the traffic outside, the streetcars, even the rain had quieted. I began to doubt I’d heard the scraping of that chair. I climbed slowly and at the top I turned and entered a long dim hallway whose sides were lined with doorways, all closed but for the last one. I approached, straining to catch sounds, and leaned into the weak yellow light. I caught a taste of machine oil.

  It was a workshop, far larger than I expected, and it looked as though it had been brought there from an earlier century. Squat low machines of greased steel filled the bulk of the room, bristling with cogs and levers and rollers and spindles. Everywhere around them stood wooden tables, holding wooden racks and boxes, all of them stained black. Against a back wall leaned wide long rolls of paper, and when I noticed the arrangements of carved metal letters laid out in the racks on the tables I realized it was a printing press—over a hundred years old, I guessed, but evidently still in use.

  Only then did I see the women. There were four of them, hunched over a square table in the dark far corner of the room, studying something by the light of a small fixture on the wall above them. They brought their hands together in the middle of the table and a soft clattering sound, like rocks tumbling beneath the recession of a wave, rolled toward me. It was the mixing of mahjong tiles, a sound I’d heard in the parks and cafés in and around Chinatown.

  And then the ring of my cell phone burst into their room with a clang like a fire alarm. The heads of the four women snapped up and around and centered on me. We stared at each other, all of us motionless. My phone rang again, and I slapped a hand over it, as if I might hide the sound. And then I realized what I was seeing. The women’s faces—all four of them—were identical. I turned and ran back to the stairway.

  ***

  “Eva,” I shouted when I burst through the door, “the mahjong players. Who are they?”

  She’d been watching television, and now she looked at me over the tops of her glasses. “What?” she said. She lifted her arm and clicked through a couple of channels.

  “The mahjong ladies. You mentioned them yesterday.”

  “I think that was on Saturday.”

  “Fine. Who are they?”

  “Why is your face all red?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Are they related?”

  “To whom?”

  “To each other.”

  “No. Why?”

  “They aren’t sisters or anything? Where do they play their games?”

  “Chinatown. Where else?”

  “Not at the piers?”

  “Why would you play mahjong at the piers?”

  “Do they run an old printing press or something?”

  “Certainly not,” she said. “What gave you that idea?”

  “You said they’d know what to do. Or something like that. I need you to take me to them. Would you do that, please?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “They’re out of town.”

  “Maybe they’re back,” I said. “I really think we should go to see them.”

  “They aren’t back. They’re on a cruise. They’re somewhere in the Caribbean right now.”

  “Why did you bring them up? Why did you think they could help?”

  She shrugged. “They speak Chinese. That’s all.”

  “Why do we need someone who speaks Chinese?” I said.

  She lifted the remote again and clicked through another couple of channels. Canned laughter leaked through the speakers. “I thought they could come in handy at some point, that’s all,” she said.

  I attempted a deep breath. “Okay, we’ll look into these mahjong ladies later,” I said. “But for now I’ve got a place in Chinatown I need to visit.” I checked my memory and was glad to find the Quarterly’s address still there. “Actually, I’d appreciate it if you’d come.” I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d asked for her help. Maybe I needed an objective third party. A touchstone.

  “No thanks,” she said, pointing through the window at the storm outside and turning her attention back to the television. “This weather isn’t fit for a lady. Maybe next time.”

  Parking in Chinatown was always a nightmare so I walked. Despite the rain the sidewalks there were jammed with people. Women rattled along with little metal carts, their heads wrapped in clear plastic bonnets, oblivious to the downpour. Vendors and soaking wet deliverymen barked at one another in Cantonese. The wind and rain had not managed to wash out the smell of rotting fruit and offal from restaurant kitchens.

  The 1300 block of Grant Street was just south of Pine. I slowed my pace and searched the busy storefronts for addresses, avoiding
the sidewalk invasions of plastic-draped bins full of odd vegetables and embroidered slippers. The rib of someone’s umbrella jabbed me in the back of the head and a rivulet of water slid over my collar and down my back. Few of the buildings had visible addresses, but 1326 was clearly marked by black numbers, nailed against a dirty white wall, right above the doorway. Above the address were the words “Yung Hee Seafood Company,” in red. I stepped inside. It was dark and cool, and quiet but for the sound of bubbling water in the acrylic tanks of live fish, which covered one wall, and stretched deep into the shop.

  A man stood at the counter, flipping through receipts. “Excuse me,” I said, already knowing how he’d respond. “I’m looking for the offices of The Barbary Quarterly?”

  He squinted at me and tried to repeat what I’d said, destroying the r’s and the l.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “It’s a journal,” I said. “Like a magazine.”

  “Fish only,” he said.

  “Is there an office here? Upstairs, maybe? Downstairs?”

  “Fish upstairs, fish downstairs, fish only,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Somewhere close by, maybe? Offices? A publisher?”

  He shrugged and gestured toward the wall of tanks, as if to provide the visual equivalent of his “fish only” message. And then the voice of that strange violin came drifting down to me. My head jerked up and I searched the ceiling for speakers. “That music,” I said. “What is it?”

  He shrugged again.

  “The music,” I said, my voice a little louder than I’d intended. I couldn’t see any speakers. “It sounds like some sort of violin. What is it? Do you have a radio on?”

  He was squinting at me again. “Music?” he said. He shook his head. “No music. Just fish.”

  “No, the music you have playing,” I said. “I don’t want to buy it. What’s the name of it? The name?”

  “No music,” he said again.

  I took a deep breath and looked hard at him. He looked genuinely perplexed. Perplexed and uncomfortable. He’d stopped searching through his receipts and his hands had disappeared beneath the counter. I took a deep breath and spoke slowly. “I hear violin music,” I said. “Do you?”

  He craned his neck, turned his head one way and then the other, and then shook it. “No,” he said. “Sorry.” The look on his face was one of pity.

  ***

  By the time I reached my block I was soaked through and chilled to the core. Through the smell of rain I caught the scent of coffee and I pushed through the door of Ike’s corner store to find he’d just brewed a fresh pot. His lights were bright and he had his heater cranked up, and though most of me was buried beneath too many layers of wet clothing to feel it, the warmth broke across my face like a wave. He gave me a little nod without smiling and went back to flipping through the pages of a magazine. At his self-service coffee station I filled the largest of his cups and fixed the lid over the top. I took a sip and felt the bolt of heat fall down my throat and into my belly, where I imagined it glowing. I walked to the counter.

  “Buck seventy-five,” he said, needlessly, pushing the magazine aside. I extracted a pair of damp dollar bills from my wallet. Just as he tucked them into the register the power went out. Complete blackness took over the room; the compressors and fans of his refrigerators fell silent. “Ain’t that a bitch,” he said, his voice a growl. He chuckled. “Should have seen that coming, I suppose.” I heard the small tinkle of coins and the scrape of one of them against the plastic of his till. “Hold out your hand,” he said. I reached cautiously into the darkness between us. With one of his hands he found the back of mine. I could feel his calluses and cracks against my knuckles. He put a quarter in my palm, and when he felt me close my fingers over it, he let it go.

  ***

  I walked back outside into darkness so complete it was palpable. I groped my way up the street, swinging an arm back and forth in front of me, hoping for a pair of headlights to sweep through and illuminate the block. Every step I took was a small panic, and I began to realize what it is about the darkness we find so terrifying. Our fears—muggers, wolves, public speaking—all remain at bay in the light, because we have our eyes to tell us they aren’t there. Without sight there is only faith, which wavers easily, and when it does our imagination surrounds us with criminals and carnivores, the expectant eyes of a waiting crowd of strangers. For me the fear is falling. I know of no particular incidents or threats that should have led me to this, but as a boy I lost great amounts of sleep because of that feeling, in the first moments of sleep, when a dream, just underway, seems to lose its flooring, and drops the dreamer back into bed, his heart pounding, his eyes wide. Some nights I was knocked back and forth between dreams and my mattress four or five times, disoriented and nauseous, my pillowcase souring with sweat.

  That night as I groped my way home each concrete square of sidewalk had been replaced with a deep hole, and it was only the taste of my coffee that kept me connected enough with my neighborhood to keep my feet moving forward. Somehow the holes all managed to close up just before I fell into them.

  I made it to my door and felt my way up through four flights of stairs and down the hallway to my door. Inside I groped through gloom for an open spot on my bookshelf for my coffee cup. I pulled off my raincoat and headed to the kitchen, where there was a drawer with a flashlight and a couple of candles.

  “So you know about the Northern Expedition?” Eva asked, from somewhere in the darkness, perhaps the couch.

  I lit a candle and put it on my desk. She was indeed on the couch, a blanket pulled up to her chin. “What’s that?” I asked. I sat down and went to work on the wet knots of my shoelaces. Rainwater dripped from the cuffs of my pants and pooled on the floor.

  “Those soldiers. They were in the service of Chiang Kai-shek, marching north to fight the warlords. So that’s why they were on the road that day, with Li-Yu and Henry and Rose,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. In the gloom I couldn’t see enough to get my shoes untied, so I pulled out my cell phone to use its light. My sister’s name was on the screen. I’d missed her call—she’d been the call that interrupted the mahjong game.

  “You can look it up. It was one of the biggest military campaigns in history.”

  “Okay,” I said. I finished one shoe and moved to the other. I wasn’t in the mood to discuss irrelevant story details with Eva. I now had the phantom violin music swirling in my head along with the mahjong players and their anachronistic workshop. “But they’re just extras,” I said. “It doesn’t matter where they’re going, or why.”

  “It matters,” she said. “It matters a lot.”

  “I just wanted to bring the poems into it,” I said. “They could have come from a farmer, or a vendor, or Henry’s teacher, or anyone else.”

  “But they didn’t,” Eva said. “They came from the soldier.”

  “Yes. Because the other day I saw a Chinese actor downtown dressed as a soldier.”

  There was a soft thump from Eva’s direction; it sounded like she’d banged her leg on the coffee table. I waited for her to yelp or grunt but there was only her breathing, which seemed suddenly loud in the darkness.

  “An actor?” she said. “From which play?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I dropped the shoes next to the raincoat and began working my arms out of my sweater.

  “You didn’t wonder?”

  “Wonder what?”

  “I’m not sure there are any plays running now that would feature Chinese soldiers.”

  “There is, because I saw him.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  I ignored her question. This was getting tedious. My sweater fell to the pile and was soon followed by my socks. I headed for the hall closet, where I had two clean towels on the top shelf.

  “I used to have the poem,” she said.

  “What poem?” I retrieved the towels, hung one in my bathroom, and s
tepped back into the living room, trying to mop the water out of my hair.

  “The poem the soldier gave to my mom. To Rose. It was called ‘Sighs of Autumn Rain.’”

  “What do you mean, you had it? What does that mean?”

  “The sheet. The page. The page the soldier tore out of his book for my mom on the first day she and my grandmother walked my uncle to school.”

  I tried to see her face, to read something sensible into her story, but the candle was behind her, illuminating only the hard thin edge of her brow and cheek. “So what happened to it, then. Where is it?”

  “It’s in a trunk,” she said, “on the floor of my basement apartment, which is now flooded.”

  I wadded the wet towel and dropped it on the floor. “I don’t suppose the trunk would be waterproof,” I said.

  “No.”

  I squinted again, but her silhouette was featureless, immobile.

  That night, when her children are sleeping, Li-Yu sneaks across the room to the side of Rose’s bed, finds the bundle of paper and pencils, and quietly unties the cord. She extracts a single sheet and a pencil, reties the bundle, and pads across the room to the doorway. In the hallway outside she finds just enough light to write. Holding the sheet against the wooden floor she addresses a letter to her sisters. Please help me, she writes. She tells them about Bing, about Xinhui and Mae and the house and the rice paddies and Rose and Henry and a bleak future that threatens to swallow them whole. I have nothing here, she writes. I have nothing and I hate it. Please help me. She folds the letter and hides it beneath her mattress, and in the morning before the children rise she takes it in both hands and approaches Mae’s sofa with small steps and her head bowed.

  “Mae,” she says. “May I please have just a few coins?”

  “Why? Everything you need is here in the house already.”

  Li-Yu holds up the sheet. “It’s a letter for my sisters.”

  Mae holds out her hand. “Give it to me,” she says.

  Li-Yu hands it over, and Mae unfolds it. “Why don’t you write in Chinese?” she asks.