1974
“I don’t want to,” he said. It was a half-hearted protest.
“Yes you do. You say you don’t, but I can hear what you really mean. You mean you want to,” Killner told him. Killner was the band’s manager. He hated Killner’s voice. Unpleasantly dry and papery, it got into his ear and skittered around until he lost track of his thoughts and ended up agreeing to whatever it was Killner wanted him to do.
Killner kept talking. He took the phone away from his ear and stared at it, half-smiling at the buzz of unintelligible words. Eventually he put the phone back to his ear.
“Besides, you’re not the only member of this band,” Killner was saying. “I already talked to PJ and Toby and Mack. They all want to do it. You’re crazy to pass this up. You haven’t done anything in six months—no recording, no gigs. Do you want everybody to forget about you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s great. You know this band is nothing without your voice. Do you want to let everybody down? Those fans? PJ and Toby and Mack?”
“Look,” he told Killner. “Singing is my life. I sing to myself every day; there’s no way I could stop. I love it more than anything else in the world. But I told you before, I don’t want to do any more records and I especially don’t want to do any more live shows. Something always happens. I don’t know why it is, but something always happens. Remember the guy who died at our first gig?”
“That guy had a history of heart trouble.”
“Right. What about the people who’ve died in car wrecks when they just happened to be heading home after one of our concerts? What about that girl who tried to stab her lover in the parking lot after a show? What about the guy who started screaming during the last concert? Guys came to get him, Killner. Guys in white coats.”
“I thought that only happened in the funny papers. They took him to the hospital. I heard later that all he would say for three days was, ’His eyes.’ His eyes. They thought he was talking about his eyes, Killner. That was the night I wore the black robes and the green Day-Glo paint around my eyes. My eyes looked like they were glowing. What about that?”
“It was your costume, not—”
“I’m not finished. What about that suicide note, Killner. What about the note? Remember the fifteen-year-old girl who sent me her suicide note and threw herself off a building? Remember ’I love only you and I’m doing what your voice tells me to do?’ What about that, Killner?”
“Do you hold yourself accountable for all the crazy people in the world?”
“Only-when-they’re-crazy-became-of-my-voice."
“Look...” Killner’s voice turned oily, seductive. “This is an incredible opportunity. It’s amazing that they even want you to play there. Rock bands never play there.”
“We’re not a rock band.”
“What’s wrong with being a goddamn rock band? Never mind—don’t start. They know you’re an artist. You know what they want you to do? They want you to do the flying bit.”
He closed his eyes, remembering the glinting Peter Pan wire, the stomach-dropping sensation of soaring.
“Like in ’72. Remember how you loved that? The first time you did it, you told me it was the most glorious performance you’d ever given—soaring above the stage, singing your everloving heart out in midair. You want to miss that?”
He kept his eyes closed. He had always imagined that flying would be nearly as incredible as singing. Doing both at once had been almost too much to bear.
“So what do you say?”
“No,” he whispered. “I told you no and I still say no. I can’t hurt any more people.”
Killner gave up then and said goodbye in aggrieved tones. Ten minutes later the phone rang. That would be PJ. When Killner couldn’t convince him to do something, he always enlisted PJ to give it another try. PJ had a way of making things sound so simple and appealing that one felt like a fool for ever having refused them. He wanted this so much; he wouldn’t be able to say no again. He wasn’t going to answer the phone.
It rang again.
If he picked it up, he was lost.
The phone screamed at him.
He had to answer it.
He mustn’t.
He had to.
He snatched the receiver off its cradle. “All right,” he yelled into the phone. “All right, all right, I’ll do it, all right, only leave me alone.”
“What?” said PJ’s voice as he choked back a sob.
***
He was wearing his oldest costume black, pure black, with white face and dark, hollow eyes. It had always been his favorite, the simplest yet the most powerful, and the black flying harness blended well with it.
He thought about flying. It had been so long—
PJ’s hand was on his shoulder. “I realize this is rough for you,” PJ told him. “You know we really wanted to do this show. Thanks for agreeing to it.” He nodded at PJ, didn’t speak. The others were used to his pre-concert silence; it no longer fazed them. They thought he was saving his voice for the show. They didn’t understand that when he was going to sing, speaking just wasn’t worthwhile.
It hardly seemed to matter now.
He pushed aside the window curtain and looked out at the sky. No cotton candy clouds this time; tonight he saw only a small cold moon floating high in the sky, haloed and partially obscured by clouds.
One of the stage technicians came up behind him. “Listen, I wanted to remind you about the harness wires once more. Be careful. Make sure the wires are well away from your neck before you give the signal that you’re ready to go up, because I can’t see what you’re doing. That wire’s sharp. If I pull you up while one of them’s looped around your neck, it could cut your head half off. Just take your time and give me the signal when you’re ready.”
The tech patted him on the back, between the straps of his harness. He smiled madly and waved the guy away, wanting nothing more than to end the stream of chatter. He didn’t need a briefing on those wires. He knew everything about them.
There were ten minutes to go, then five, then none. They were onstage before he really knew what was happening. PJ and Toby and Mack pranced a bit, happy to be performing again. He stood still at center stage, staring out at the crowd.
He could see faces in the first few rows; they were watching him, wanting him, wanting the deepest part of him. Who would he hurt tonight? Who would go home and put a gun to his forehead—who would hurt a person she loved—who would lose his mind?
No one.
No one at all, if he knew what he was doing.
He sang the first song. He threw himself into it so hard that by the end of the song he was on his knees, clutching the microphone with both hands, pushing every bit of air in his body into the notes. His glory had reached its crescendo. If anyone noticed the wetness on his cheeks, they thought it was sweat. He held the last note of the song for a full minute.
The crowd went wild.
It was time to fly.
He eased himself up, trembling, and went to the rear of the stage where the wires dangled. They glinted gold and silver and all the colors of the stage lights, thin as hairs but strong enough, together, to support a hundred and thirty-five pounds of him. He began attaching them to the hooks on his harness. When he came to the last wire, the one that supported the largest part of his weight, he glanced into the wings. The tech nodded, ready to pull him up.
He looped the wire around his neck and gave the signal.
1980
He got up and walked away from the piano to the window. Fine mist from the crashing of the waves on the rocks was hitting the glass—there would be a storm soon. He might sit by the long window and watch its glorious fury.
He returned to the piano and played a little more, a sprinkling, dancing tune that skipped across the polished floor. He rested his cheek on the top of the piano, loving its sleek coolness against his skin. His hand strayed to his throat and stroked the tight, shiny scar that stretched nearly
from ear to ear. His fingers traced the jagged line of it. He remembered the relief he’d felt, waking after the hours of impossibly delicate surgery, when the doctor told him his vocal cords had been severed and he would never talk—let alone sing—again.
He sat at his piano for a while. Then, when the long, sweet sound of serenity had completely filled him, he went to the window to watch the storm.
(1985)
Xenophobia
I hated Robert. He thought he was a Punk Rocker. He wore one pink hightop sneaker and one yellow, and he never washed his hair, so it stood up in filthy little twists all over his head. When I took him down to Chinatown, I was hoping I could get him drunk and sell him to some unscrupulous Chinese chef for big money. It’s said they use dead cats. Why not Robert Foo Yung?
He talked so much on the bus (about uninteresting things like the book of poisonous recipes he was writing) that we got off at the wrong stop and found ourselves in the porn district. The light of the setting sun was as red as desire. X’s paraded across every marquee. The poster girls’ nipples and lipstick had long since faded to a dusty orange. The signs and lampposts and even the square of sidewalk we stood on seemed to vibrate silently in the hellish glow, as if some enormous city-machine thrummed far below the pavement. “You’ve gotten us lost,” said Robert, licking his lips nervously, and then we rounded a corner and saw the pinnacle of Chinatown’s first gaudy pagoda rising above the city.
The streets of Chinatown thrilled me, but my excitement was spiked with a vein of clear unease. I sometimes wonder whether my large Caucasian presence was merely tolerated on the exotic streets, perhaps even found secretly amusing. At night the lights of Chinatown turn the sky bright purple, and the banners hung from balcony to scrolled balcony crack in the wind like shots, their messages unreadable (Good Health? Long Life? Get Fucked?). There seems always to be a smell of gunpowder and hot sesame oil in the air. The neon runs together in a blaze of colors, red and white and green and gold and azure, and if you should happen to arrive after dropping a nice hit or two of acid, all the spiky Chinese characters will jump off the signs and race round and round at a giddy speed, laughing into your mystified, unslanted, unblack eyes.
We stopped in front of a restaurant and considered having Dim Sum, but the menu was written in Chinese, all up-and-down. “Fried lice,” Robert translated, putting his sticky fingers all over the window glass. “Monkey brains in syrup. Eyeball pie.” He giggled. I noticed a crust of old lipstick in the corners of his mouth. Why had I brought him? Could I drag him into the shadowy serene interior of some temple, leave him sacrificed before a smiling golden Buddha?
A river of people flowed around us as we stood waiting for something to happen on the corner of two inscrutably marked streets. Most of them wore neat black clothes and neat black slippers, and were a full head shorter than Robert or I. The darker of the two streets was lit mostly with blue neon—the blue light is a universal advertisement for Chinese food, and a native far from home knows that where he sees it he will find the rice lovingly steamed, the pork pickle well-braised— and the glossily bobbing heads flickered with highlights of unearthly blue. I felt immense, pale, bloated. Robert was worse. He shifted from foot to pink-shod foot, muttering under his breath, twirling a matted lock of hair round his finger. His eyes had taken on the color of the night sky over Chinatown. One look into them and I knew tonight would be a hideous adventure that might never end. He had that wild empty glare he got sometimes, like his soul had gone out to party and left him behind and he was determined to catch up with it. Once when he had gotten that glare in New Orleans, we woke up three days later in a motel room that reeked of ash and sour vomit, wearing nothing but dirty underwear and beaded Mardi Gras masks.
But right now he only wanted ice cream. We huddled in a sweet shop, eating vanilla because the other flavors— lychee, almond, green tea—sounded too Chinese. Even the vanilla had a peculiar aftertaste, faintly oily but too delicate to offend. Beside us was a display case full of strange dusty-looking pastries: thousand-year-old eggs in sugared nests, squid jellies piped full of cream. The shop was lit by a single weak lamp behind a paper shade. In its dimness I made out only one other customer, a lone old man nursing a cup of tea.
Robert wanted to drink, but had spent our last money on the bus fare and the ice cream. We sat at the table trying to think of a way around our poverty, or straight through it if need be. “We could find some girls,” I said.
The very ends of his hair trembled. “Chinese girls? I heard that their, you know, their, you know...” His voice was loud and babyish.
I lowered my own voice almost to a whisper, hoping he would copy me. “Cunts, Robert.”
“...That they open sideways instead of up-and- down."
Most of Robert’s babble slipped past me, but not this. I stopped eating my ice cream and became lost in trying to visualize such an intriguing possibility. In my mind I could see the tantalizing orifice, but it remained mad deningly vertical; I could not make it turn sideways. Only when Robert poked me in the ribs did I notice the old Chinese man standing silently before our table.
He might have been three hundred years old. He might have been a Biblical king come out of the desert, with cold stars gleaming in his long black eyes. He might have been a bonsai tree, shrunken and gnarled, with skin the color of old wood. But he was well-dressed, I saw: a neat and sober black suit, a shirt so white it took on a faint silver glow in the dim light. A little beard grew under his chin like a goat’s, waggling when he spoke. “If I may disturb you?” He paused, then added, “Gentlemen?”
Robert was beyond speech; he just stared, his mouth open a little, a last trace of vanilla on his lips. The moment stretched out long, punctuated by the blinking of neon outside. On—and the inside of the shop was bathed in garish night rainbows. Off—and there was only the lamp behind its faded paper shade, and the soft web of shadows. At last my manners came back to me and I pointed at a chair. “Go ahead. Disturb us.”
He sat neatly, his hands folded before him. They were like old ginseng roots: long-fingered, tapering, dry. The beard waggled again. “You were saying you needed money for the night’s... ah... festivities.”
His perfect English suddenly annoyed me. I became tough, but suave; all I needed was a snap-brim hat and a pencil-thin moustache. “You want to give us some?” His eyes seemed to burn a hole through my facade. “Not give... not exactly. I am a businessman, you see, and I require a service. If I were to offer you five dollars each, might you be able to perform a service for me?”
“Five dollars!” Robert snorted. “We wouldn’t wash your chopsticks for five dollars.”
“I see,” said the old man. “And if I were to add that you might have unlimited use of a bottle of good cognac?”
Before Robert could say anything I leaned across the table and put my face right up next to the old man’s. “Just what business are you in, mister?”
The man paused. I saw neon flickering across his eyes. On—and they exploded with a thousand firework colors. Off—and they were flat black, the color of dynasties long fallen to dust, the color of Mystery incarnate.
“I am an undertaker,” he said.
It turned out that the man wanted Robert and me to keep vigil over the corpse of a middle-aged woman while he slipped out to drink with another undertaker. His apprentice was ill, he explained, and his parlor had already been broken into twice. Bandits came through the window and robbed the corpses of rings, watches, even—on one occasion—an artificial foot. I wondered who had wanted the foot, and why, and if the other undertaker was also abandoning his charges to go out drinking. At the back of my mind was still that disquieting image, the one I could not quite visualize.
Robert looked sidelong at me. It would be an easy ten dollars—if the old man’s story was true. Why would he trust us to watch over the corpse of a stranger, and a Chinese one at that? At worst the man might lead us to a secret slaughterhouse where we would be hung on hooks, bled dry
by tubes of bamboo shoved beneath our skin, and sold as cheap sides of pork to the less reputable restaurants. At best, he might lure us to an opium palace where we would be used like other, choicer cuts of meat, kept blissfully stoned every hour. But if the old man was telling the truth, his cognac would give our evening a fast start. Robert stared at me: he would not refuse, so neither could I. “All right,” I said, and we followed the old man out of the sweet shop.
It was getting late now, and a party had begun in Chinatown. The street was a dazzle of lights, a feast of smells. Neon ran riot. Traffic signals stayed red or turned green, and cars inched along the narrow street flashing their headlights impatiently. Slabs of pork sizzled on a grill, oiling the air with the tender red scent of meat. I saw a row of ducks hanging in the window of a grocery, skinned, their eyes scooped out and their beaks tied shut with dirty bits of string. Below them was a porcelain bowl filled with what looked like thousands of tiny dried-up human hands.
The man led us down an alley, along a steep unlit back street where tough Chinese stood on the corner passing a pint of wine. We entered a high vaulted passage, then wound through a maze of corridors that opened onto a courtyard made of moonlight and stillness. Here flowed a small stream over rocks of luminescent alabaster. Here grew trees that seemed carved all in jade, each leaf, each twig. I looked up. The square of night sky above the courtyard was a deeper purple than we had seen earlier, a velvet hand cradling a cold slice of moon. We came upon an iron staircase that spiralled up into darkness. The old man beckoned to us, then began to climb.
We went down a long hallway lit by votive candles in wall-sconces. The tiny blue flames flickered sharply in one direction, then in the other, though I felt no draft in the hall. We passed a line of tightly shut doors and were admitted into the last one.
“This is my parlor,” the old man told us.
The room was wrapped in shadow. The darkness didn’t recede much when the old man pulled a silk cord; the only light in the room came from a lamp with a shade of heavy red paper, as dim as the one in the sweet shop.