As a novelist, he had never written a scene in which a character’s teeth had chattered, because he had always thought it was a cliché more important, he assumed that it was a cliché without any element of truth, that shivering until teeth rattled was not physically possible. In his thirty years, he had never, for even as much as a day, lived in a cold climate, so he couldn’t actually vouch for the effect of a bitter winter wind. Characters in books usually found their teeth chattering from fear, however, and Tommy Phan knew a good deal about fear. As a small boy on a leaky boat on the South China Sea, fleeing from Vietnam with his parents and two brothers and infant sister, under ferocious attack by Thai pirates who would have raped the women and killed everyone if they had been able to get aboard, Tommy had been terrified but had never been so fearful that his teeth had rattled like castanets.
They were chattering now. He clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles throbbed, and that stopped the chattering. But as soon as he relaxed, it started again.
The coolness of the November evening hadn’t yet leached into the Corvette. The chill that gripped him was curiously internal, but he switched on the heater anyway.
As another series of icy tremors shook him, he remembered the peculiar moment earlier in the parking lot at the car dealership: the flitting shadow with no cloud or bird that could have cast it, the deep coldness like a wind that stirred nothing else in the day except him.
He glanced away from the road ahead, up at the deep sky, as if he might glimpse some pale shape passing through the darkness above.
What pale shape, for God’s sake?
“You’re spooking me, Tommy boy,” he said. Then he laughed drily. “And now you’re even talking to yourself.”
Of course, nothing sinister was shadowing him in the night sky above.
He had always been too imaginative for his own good, which was why writing fiction came so naturally to him. Maybe he’d been born with a strong tendency to fantasize—or maybe his imagination had been encouraged to grow by the seemingly bottomless fund of folk tales with which his mother had entertained him and soothed him to sleep when he was a little boy during the war, back in the days when the communists had fought so fiercely to rule Vietnam, the fabled Land of Seagull and Fox. When the warm humid nights in Southeast Asia had rattled with gunfire and reverberated with the distant boom of mortars and bombs, he’d seldom been afraid, because her gentle voice had enraptured him with stories of spirits and gods and ghosts.
Now, lowering his gaze from the sky to the highway, Tommy Phan thought of the tale of Le Loi, the fisherman who cast his nets into the sea and came up with a magical sword rather like King Arthur’s shining Excalibur. He recalled “The Raven’s Magic Gem” as well, and “The Search for the Land of Bliss,” and “The Supernatural Crossbow,” in which poor Princess My Chau betrayed her worthy father out of love for her sweet husband and paid a terrible price, and the “Da-Trang Crabs,” and “The Child of Death,” and dozens more.
Usually, when something reminded him of one of the legends that he had learned from his mother, he could not help but smile, and a happy peace would settle over him as though she herself had just then appeared and embraced him. This time, however, those tales had no consoling effect. He remained deeply uneasy, and he was still chilled in spite of the flood of warm air from the car heater.
Odd.
He switched on the radio, hoping that some vintage rock-’n’-roll would brighten his mood. He must have nudged the selector off the station to which he had been listening earlier, because now there was nothing to be heard but a soft susurration—not ordinary static, but like distant water tumbling in considerable volume over a sloping palisade of rocks.
Briefly glancing away from the road, Tommy pressed a selector button. At once, the numbers changed on the digital readout, but no music came forth, just the sound of water, gushing and tumbling, growling yet whispery.
He pressed another button. The numbers on the display changed, but the sound did not.
He tried a third button, without success.
“Oh, wonderful. Terrific.”
He had owned the car only a few hours, and already the radio was broken.
Cursing under his breath, he fiddled with the controls as he drove, hoping to find the Beach Boys, Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, the Isley Brothers, or even someone contemporary like Juliana Hatfield or maybe Hootie and the Blowfish. Hell, he’d settle for a rousing polka.
From one end of the radio band to the other, on both AM and FM, the watery noise had washed away all music, as if some cataclysmic tide had inundated broadcast studios the length of the West Coast.
When he attempted to turn off the radio, the sound continued undiminished. He was certain that he had hit the correct button. He pressed it again, to no effect.
Gradually, the character of the sound had changed. The splash-patter-gurgle-hiss-roar now seemed less like falling water than like a distant crowd, like the voices of multitudes raised in cheers or chants; or perhaps it was the faraway raging babble of an angry, destructive mob.
For reasons that he could not entirely define, Tommy Phan was disturbed by the new quality of this eerie and tuneless serenade. He jabbed at more buttons.
Voices. Definitely voices. Hundreds or even thousands of them. Men, women, the fragile voices of children. He thought he could hear despairing wails, pleas for help, panicked cries, anguished groans—a monumental yet hushed sound, as though it was echoing across a vast gulf or rising out of a black abyss.
The voices were creepy—but also curiously compelling, almost mesmerizing. He found himself staring at the radio too long, his attention dangerously diverted from the highway, yet each time that he looked up, he was able to focus on the traffic for only a few seconds before lowering his gaze once more to the softly glowing radio.
And now behind the whispery muffled roar of the multitude rose the garbled bass voice of…someone else…someone who sounded infinitely strange, imperial and demanding. It was a low, wet voice that was less than human, spitting out not-quite-decipherable words as if they were wads of phlegm.
No. Good God in Heaven, his imagination was running away with him. What issued from the stereo speakers was static, nothing but ordinary static, white noise, electronic slush.
In spite of the chill that continued to plague him, Tommy felt a sudden prickle of perspiration on his scalp and forehead. His palms were damp too.
Surely he had pressed every button on the control panel. Nevertheless, the ghostly chorus droned on.
“Damn.”
He made a tight fist of his right hand. He thumped the flat of it against the face of the radio, not hard enough to hurt himself, but punching three or four buttons simultaneously.
Second by second, the guttural and distorted words spoken by the weird voice became clearer, but Tommy couldn’t quite understand them.
He thumped his fist against the radio once more, and he was surprised to hear himself issue a half-stifled cry of desperation. After all, as annoying as the noise was, it represented no threat to him.
Did it?
Even as he posed that question to himself, he was overcome by the irrational conviction that he must not listen to the susurration coming from the stereo speakers, that he must clamp his hands over his ears, that somehow he would be in mortal danger if he understood even one word of what was being said to him. Yet, perversely, he strained to hear, to wring clarity from the muddle of sound.
“…Phan…”
That one word was irrefutably clear.
“…Phan Tran…”
The repulsive, mucus-clotted voice was speaking flawlessly accented Vietnamese.
“…Phan Tran Tuong…”
Tommy’s name. Before he had changed it. His name from the Land of Seagull and Fox.
“…Phan Tran Tuong…”
Someone was calling to him. Far away at first but now drawing closer. Seeking contact. Connection. Something about the voice was…hungry.
The chill,
like scurrying spiders, worked deeper into him, weaving webs of ice in the hollows of his bones.
He hammered the radio a third time, harder than before, and abruptly it went dead. The only sounds were the rumble of the engine, the hum of the tires, his ragged breathing, and the hard pounding of his heart.
His left hand, slick with sweat, slipped on the steering wheel, and he snapped his head up as the Corvette angled off the pavement. The right front tire—then the right rear—stuttered onto the rough shoulder of the highway. Sprays of gravel pinged and rattled against the undercarriage. A drainage swale, bristling with weeds, loomed in the headlights, and dry brush scraped along the passenger side of the car.
Tommy grabbed the wheel with both slippery hands and pulled to the left. With a jolt and a shudder, the car arced back onto the pavement.
Brakes shrieked behind him, and he glanced at the rearview mirror as headlights flared bright enough to sting his eyes. Horn blaring, a black Ford Explorer swerved around him, avoiding a rear-end collision with only a few inches to spare, so close that he expected to hear the squeal of tortured sheet steel. But then it was safely past, taillights dwindling in the darkness.
In control of the Corvette again, Tommy blinked sweat out of his eyes and swallowed hard. His vision blurred. A sour taste filled his mouth. He felt disoriented, as if he had awakened from a fever dream.
Although the phlegm-choked voice on the radio had terrified him only moments ago, he was already less than certain that his name had actually been spoken on the airwaves. As his vision rapidly cleared, he wondered if his mind also had been temporarily clouded. It was easier to entertain the possibility that he had suffered something akin to a minor epileptic episode than to believe that a supernatural entity had reached out to touch him through the prosaic medium of a sports-car radio. Perhaps he’d even endured a transient ischemic cerebral attack, an inexplicable but mercifully brief reduction in circulation to the brain, similar to the one that had afflicted Sal Delario, a friend and fellow reporter, last spring.
He had a headache now, centered over the right eye. And his stomach was queasy.
Driving through Corona Del Mar, he stayed below the speed limit, prepared to pull to the curb and stop if his vision blurred…or if anything strange began to happen again.
He glanced nervously at the radio. It remained silent.
Block by block, fear drained out of him, but depression seeped in to take its place. He still had a headache and a queasy stomach, but now he also felt hollow inside, gray and cold and empty.
He knew that hollowness well. It was guilt.
He was driving his own Corvette, the car of cars, the ultimate American wheels, the fulfillment of a boyhood dream, and he should have been buoyant, jubilant, but he was slowly sinking into a sea of despondency. An emotional abyss lay under him. He felt guilty about the way he had treated his mother, which was ridiculous because he had been respectful. Unfailingly respectful. Admittedly, he had been impatient with her, and he was pained now to think that maybe she had heard that impatience in his voice. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Never. But sometimes she seemed so hopelessly stuck in the past, stubbornly and stupidly fixed in her ways, and Tommy was embarrassed by her inability to assimilate into the American culture as fully as he himself had done. When he was with American-born friends, his mother’s thick Vietnamese accent mortified him, as did her habit of walking one deferential step behind his father. Mom, this is the United States, he had told her. Everyone’s equal, no one better than anyone else, women the same as men. You don’t have to walk in anyone’s shadow here. She had smiled at him as though he was a much-loved but dim-witted son, and she’d said, I not walk in shadow because have to, Tuong. Walk in shadow because want to. Exasperated, Tommy had said, But that’s wrong. Still favoring him with that infuriating, gentle smile, she’d said, In this United States, is wrong to show respect? Is wrong to show love? Tommy was never able to win one of these debates, but he kept trying: No, but there are better ways to show it. She gave him a sly look and ended the discussion with one line: How better—with Hallmark greeting card? Now, driving the long-desired Corvette with no more pleasure than if it had been a secondhand rattletrap pickup truck, Tommy was cold and gray inside even as his face flushed hot with shame at his ungrateful inability to accept his mother on her own terms.
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child.
Tommy Phan, bad son. Slithering through the California night. Low and vile and unloving.
He glanced at the rearview mirror, half expecting to see a pair of glittery snake eyes in his own face.
He knew, of course, that wallowing in guilt was irrational. Sometimes he had unrealistic expectations of his parents, but he was far more reasonable than his mother. When she wore an ao dais, one of those flowing silk tunic-and-pants ensembles that seemed as out of place in this country as a Scotsman’s kilts, she looked so diminutive, like a little girl in her mother’s clothes, but there was nothing vulnerable about her. Strong-minded, iron-willed, she could be a tiny tyrant when she wished, and she knew how to make a look of disapproval sting worse than the lash of a whip.
Those uncharitable thoughts appalled Tommy even as he indulged in them, and his face grew yet hotter with shame. Taking frightful risks, at tremendous cost, she and Tommy’s father had brought him—and his brothers and sister—out of the Land of Seagull and Fox, from under the fist of the communists, to this land of opportunity, and for that he should honor and cherish them.
“I am such a selfish creep,” he said aloud. “A real piece of shit, that’s what I am.”
As he braked to a full stop at an intersection on the border of Corona Del Mar and Newport Beach, he settled deeper in a sea of gloom and remorse.
Would it have killed him to accept her invitation to dinner? She had made shrimp-and-watercress soup, com tay cam, and stir-fried vegetables with nuoc mam sauce—three of his favorite dishes when he was a child. Clearly, she had worked hard in the kitchen, hoping to lure him home, and he had rejected her, disappointed her. There was no excuse for turning her down, especially since he hadn’t seen her and his father for weeks.
No. Wrong. That was her line: Tuong, haven’t seen you in weeks. On the phone, he had reminded her that this was Thursday and that they had spent Sunday together. But now here he was, minutes later, buying into her fantasy of abandonment!
Suddenly his mother seemed to be all of the stereotypical Asian villains from old movies and books rolled into one: as manipulative as Ming the Merciless, as wily as Fu Manchu.
He blinked at the red traffic light, shocked to have had such a mean-spirited thought about his own mother. This confirmed it: He was a swine.
More than anything, Tommy Phan wanted to be an American—not a Vietnamese-American, just an American, with no hyphen. But surely he didn’t have to reject his family, didn’t have to be rude and mean to his beloved mother, to achieve that much-desired state of complete Americanization.
Ming the Merciless. Fu Manchu, the Yellow Peril. Dear God, he had become a raging bigot. He seemed to have deceived himself into believing he was a white person.
He looked at his hands on the steering wheel. They were the color of burnished bronze. In the rearview mirror, he studied the epicanthic folds of his dark Asian eyes, wondering if he was in danger of trading his true identity for one that was a lie.
Fu Manchu.
If he could think such unkind things about his mother, he might slip up eventually and say them to her face. She would be crushed. The prospect of it left him breathless with anticipatory fear, and his mouth went as dry as powder, and his throat swelled so tight that he was unable to swallow. It would be more merciful to take a gun and shoot her. Just shoot her in the heart.
So this was the kind of son he had become. The kind of son who shoots his mother in the heart with words.
The traffic light changed from red to green, but he couldn’t immediately lift his foot off the brake pedal. He was immobilized b
y a terrible weight of self-loathing.
Behind the Corvette, another motorist tapped his horn.
“I just want to live my own life,” Tommy said miserably as he finally drove through the intersection.
Lately he had been talking aloud to himself far too much. The strain of living his own life and still being a good son was making him crazy.
He reached for the cellular phone, intending to call his mom and ask if the dinner invitation was still open.
Car phones for big shots.
Not any more. Everybody’s got one.
I don’t. Phone and drive too dangerous.
I’ve never had an accident, Mom.
You will.
He could hear her voice as clearly as if she were speaking those words now rather than in memory, and he snatched his hand away from the phone.
On the west side of Pacific Coast Highway was a restaurant styled as a 1950’s diner. Impulsively, Tommy swung into the lot and parked in the glow of red neon.
Inside, the place was fragrant with the aromas of onions, hamburgers sizzling on a grill, and pickle relish. Ensconced in a tufted red-vinyl booth, Tommy ordered a cheeseburger, french fries, and a chocolate milk shake.
In his mind’s ear, his mother’s voice replayed: Clay-pot chicken and rice better than lousy cheeseburgers.
“Make that two cheeseburgers,” Tommy amended as the waitress finished taking his order and started to turn away from his booth.
“Skipped lunch, huh?” she asked.
Too much cheeseburgers and french fries, soon you look like big fat cheeseburger.
“And an order of onion rings,” Tommy said defiantly, certain that farther north, in Huntington Beach, his mother had just flinched with the psychic awareness of his betrayal.
“I like a man with a big appetite,” the waitress said.
She was a slender blue-eyed blonde with a pert nose and rosy complexion—exactly the kind of woman about whom his mother probably had nightmares.
Tommy wondered if she was flirting. Her smile was inviting, but her comment about his appetite might have been innocent small talk. He wasn’t as smooth with women as he would have liked to be.
If she had given him an opening, he was incapable of taking it. One rebellion a night was enough. Cheeseburgers, yes, but not both cheeseburgers and a blonde.
He could only say, “Give me extra Cheddar, please, and lots of onions.”
After slathering plenty of mustard and ketchup on the burgers, he ate every bite of what he ordered. He drained the milk shake so completely that the sucking noises of his straw against the bottom of the glass caused nearby adult diners to glare at him because of the bad example he was setting for their children.
He left a generous tip, and as he was heading toward the door, his waitress said, “You look a lot happier going out than you did coming in.”
“I bought a Corvette today,” he said inanely.
“Cool,” she said.
“Been my dream since I was a little kid.”
“What color is it?”
“Bright aqua metallic.”
“Sounds pretty.”
“It flies.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Like a rocket,” he said, and he realized that he was almost lost in the oceanic depths of her blue eyes.
This detective in your books—he ever marry blonde, he break his mother’s heart.
“Well,” he said, “take care.”
“You too,” said the waitress.
He went to the entrance. On the threshold, holding the door open, Tommy looked back, hoping that she would still be staring after him. She had turned away, however, and was walking toward the booth that he had vacated. Her slender ankles and shapely calves were lovely.
A breeze had sprung up, but the night was still balmy for November. On the far side of Pacific Coast Highway, at the entrance to Fashion Island Mall, stately ranks of enormous phoenix palms were illuminated by floodlights fixed to their boles. Long green fronds swayed like hula skirts. The breeze was lightly scented with the fecund smell of the nearby ocean; it didn’t chill him but, in fact, pleasantly caressed the back of his neck and playfully ruffled his thick black hair. In the wake of his little rebellion against his mother and his heritage, the world seemed to have grown delightfully more sensuous.
In the car, he switched on the radio. It was functioning perfectly again. Roy Orbison was rocking out “Pretty Woman.”
Tommy sang along. Lustily.
He remembered the ominous roar of static and the strange phlegmy voice that had seemed to be calling his name from the radio, but now he found it difficult to believe that the peculiar incident had been as uncanny as it had seemed at the time. He had been upset by his conversation with his mother, feeling simultaneously put-upon and guilty, angry with her but also with himself, and his perceptions hadn’t been entirely trustworthy. The waterfall-roar of static had been real enough, but in his pall of guilt, he had no doubt imagined hearing his name in a meaningless gurgle and squeal of electronic garbage.
All the way home, he listened to old-time rock-’n’-roll, and he knew the words to every song.