A Paper Son (33 page)

I launched myself over the edge, jumping outward to clear the tangle of bent rebar that jutted from the sheared foundation. It was not until I was sliding down a wall of mud that I realized I was heading directly toward the other ends of the severed bars, whose broken points were waiting in the mud and water to skewer me. I tried to throw myself over and past them, but I could neither push nor kick off the steep sodden slope—my limbs simply disappeared into the mud. Something jabbed me in the thigh. I flopped over, scraped down a few feet of concrete, and slammed into the base of the wall, all the feeling in my leg gone. Muddy water crashed down all around me; black spots appeared before my eyes. With what felt like a hundred pounds of mud clinging to me, I fought my way to my elbows and knees and put my head down, where I could suck in air without breathing water. I transferred my weight to my forearms and my good leg and peered down through a corner of the doorway. The room was filling up fast. The water's surface roiled with wooden furniture and the shining primary colors of children's raincoats. I took a deep breath, and then another, and then tipped over the edge. There was an explosion in my wrist as I caromed off the edge of something big and hard and then I plunged into the black depths, the mud pulling me to the bottom, my hands groping through the darkness.

A sudden warmth washed over me and I opened my eyes. The water had become still and clear and clean, illuminated by thick rays of sunlight that reached down from the distant surface. A classroom appeared beneath me, but it wasn't Annabel's. I was drifting down, into a room without a roof that stood by itself in the middle of an ocean floor as barren and sandy as a desert. The room's walls were white and sparse. An empty blackboard stretched the length of the front wall. Clean wooden desks stood in orderly rows, each of them paired with a small backless wooden stool that shifted slightly in its spot with the current. The desks were all empty but for one near the back, which held a single sheet of paper, a small shallow bowl of black ink, and a calligraphy brush. On the sheet were two Chinese characters. I swam down toward them, studying the brushstrokes as I approached. It looked as though they'd just been written—faint lines of ink arched through the water, describing the brush's recent path from the ink bowl to the paper and then to the brush's resting place alongside the sheet. The calligrapher was not in sight.

I was just about to seize the sheet of paper when I felt myself being lifted, up and out of the quiet, bright classroom. There was a sound like a waterfall and the classroom quickly receded. The water turned cold and darkness swallowed the blackboard and desks. Something heavy hit me on the back of the head. Suddenly my lungs were spinning saw blades, tearing at the inside of my chest. I reached up and swiped at my face, as if to clear the water away, and it worked—there was air now, somehow, and I was still rising, out of the water, up through the prostrate doorway of Annabel's room. I felt something solid beneath me and I clung to it, too weak to do anything but cough out water and suck in great rasping lungsful of air.

Franklin Nash came into focus, squatting beside me. He was breathing heavily and his sleeve was torn and blood was running down the side of his face. “They were all in the library,” he managed to say, his chest heaving mightily. “They're all okay. We have to go now. I need you to come with me.”

He reached for me. I vomited a plume of mud and coffee onto his hands, and then I blacked out.

***

Vague impressions followed: movement through space, gradations in light, temperature changes, and then, much later, a blurry grid that seemed at first to be a giant flyswatter poised above me, but which then came into focus as ceiling tiles. The edges and corners of the room came into focus, followed by a clock, and then a small television fastened to the wall with a metal bracket, advertisements on its screen and the volume low. My sister's voice came next.

“Mornin', Sunshine,” she said. “I brought you
dim sum
, but the nurse told me I couldn't give you any. So I'm adapting.” There was a Styrofoam box on her lap and a pair of chopsticks in her hand. “How do those feel?” she said.

“Those?” I said. My voice sounded too deep, muted, as if it was coming out of an iron box hidden deep in my chest. Everything looked too soft, too pink.

“The staples. How do they feel?”

“Staples?”

“Six of them, in the back of your head.” She opened the box, releasing a cloud of steam, and chopsticked a piece of
siumai
into her mouth. Through her mouthful she listed my injuries: In addition to the staples and their associated concussion I had a broken wrist, which was wrapped in a cast that reached from the base of my fingers to the middle of my forearm, and a bruise on my thigh the size, shape, and color of an eggplant. In addition to that, she said, I had an extra-large cocktail of antibiotics and painkillers running through me, which explained the pink softness. All of which, Lucy said, put me somewhere between the craziest and luckiest motherfucker ever. “Wait until you see this,” she said, still chewing, gesturing toward the television, where a handsome middle-aged man was holding a football and speaking to the camera about his erections. “You're going to shit yourself. Just wait.” In the next ad strands of mozzarella stretched across the screen in drug-induced slow motion. A nurse about my age leaned in through the doorway, glanced at me, and smiled.

“He's up,” Lucy said. “He said he wants more drugs.” She winked at me. “I've got you covered.”

The ads ended and CNN's logo darted into the frame. A reporter stood in the rain in the street out in front of Russian Hill Elementary School. “For those of you just joining us, I'm in San Francisco,” he said, “where a third-grade teacher is in stable condition after plunging into
this.
” The scene, shot from a traffic helicopter, was obscured by a gray curtain of driving rain, but clear enough: Annabel's classroom, on its side, wedged into the muddy hillside on its broken foundation, rebar jutting out like insects' legs, and the pipes, still pouring forth their torrents of water, all of it silent, shaky. I watched myself burst through the doorway and arrive at the edge of the precipice. The camera zoomed in and out and in again, lost its focus and then regained it, and I watched myself land on the wall amid the falling water and disappear into the room. Franklin Nash emerged running from the doorway, arrived at the edge, and immediately turned back inside. The helicopter descended; the cameraman fiddled with zoom and focus until the frame held the severed ledge, the upturned face of the drowning classroom, the door into the hallway.

“They've been looping this over and over,” Lucy whispered, through a full mouth. “You're bigger than the Middle East, Chechnya, everything everywhere. How does it feel?”

For a long, terrible minute nothing happened on the screen. Lying there in the bed I imagined the water enclosing me again. I thought of the classroom, the sheet of paper and the calligraphy, but this time there was no peace, no warmth—only the precariousness of Annabel's classroom, and the sense of my tiny, fragile body trapped inside of it. I was beginning to feel panic coming on when Franklin burst back through the doorway with Albert, the custodian. Together they were carrying a long ladder, which they dropped over the edge, hooking its top over some of the protruding rebar. Franklin climbed down the rungs, taking them three or four at a time, and jumped down to the wall. The falling water obscured the details here—there was movement, and limbs, and another excruciating period of nothingness, and then the top end of Annabel's classroom blew apart like a bursting water balloon. I winced and there was a throb in my thigh that pulsated outward and sent shockwaves shuddering to my toes and ears and back. The picture veered suddenly, as if the sight had caused the cameraman to jump, and when the camera regained its focus it revealed an avalanche of water and mud, dotted with colorful specks of classroom furniture, pouring down the side of the hill. Franklin clung to the bottom of the ladder with my limp body draped over his shoulders.

“Is he married?” Lucy asked, through another mouthful.

I tried to breathe, tried to settle my jumping heart as I watched Franklin carry me to the top of the ladder, where Albert helped pull me to safety. The camera tilted to the wreckage of Annabel's classroom, a pile of unrecognizable rubble at the bottom of the slope.

A near death, I figured, should be easier to understand for someone who'd already had the experience of dying, but I wasn't ready for all those considerations just yet. I wanted to think about something else. I tried to push myself up to a sitting position, but I couldn't put any pressure on my wrist. I gasped and fell back down. Lucy hit a button and the bed's motors whirred and did the job for me.

“I was in a classroom,” I said.

“The whole world knows that by now,” Lucy said. “But can you believe that? What are the chances? They were en route from a fender-bender on 101, right over Russian Hill when the pilot noticed your place of employment break in half.” She shook her head and bit into a
char siu bao.
“This is some historical shit here. I think your fifteen minutes is going to be more like fifteen thousand.”

“No,” I said. “I was in a classroom in China. I swam down through the water and it cleared and I was floating in an empty classroom. There was a sheet of paper on one of the desks, with two characters on it. I memorized them.” I closed my eyes and despite the pink puffballs inside my eyelids and the specter of the disintegrating classroom I was able to visualize each stroke of both characters.

“You also got a major thump on the head,” Lucy said, her eyes still on the television. “I wouldn't be surprised if you saw dancing unicorns down there.” She laughed and pointed at the screen, where Annabel's classroom was blowing apart over and over at various speeds. My school photograph, taken earlier that fall, had been superimposed in the corner of the screen. “Your boss used to be a Green Beret,” Lucy said. “Did you know that? Do you think they'll make a movie about him?”

I was about to ask her to bring me a sheet of paper and a pencil, but the nurse swept into the room, with her smile and an armful of things. She said something warm to me, fiddled with something, and then everything went gray again.

***

“We have to find Eva,” I said with a gasp. Things in the room had changed—the colors were different; angles had shifted. It was colder, and the voices coming through my door echoed as if in a wide empty hall. The television was off. My heart was drumming. “We have to find Eva,” I said again. I tried to fix on the images from the dream I'd just had, but they dissipated too quickly. All that remained was the memory of Eva's departure, and a sense of peril.

A kiss fell upon my cheek, and then another on my forehead. “I'm a forgiving person,” Annabel said. “I would have settled for lunch.” With her fingertips she began to trace swirls and waves on my arm. The glow of her smile warmed my cheek.

“Lucy's not here?” I said.

“She went home. You've been asleep a long while. She said you weren't too impressed with your newfound celebrity.”

“It doesn't seem relevant,” I said.

She laughed, and the music of it drove away the last of the dream's fragments and shook me out of my lingering disorientation. Her eyes were bright and black, like glints of light on water at night. Her smile was part joy, part pride. “You're okay,” I said. “You're okay, and your kids are okay?”

“Miraculously.”

I took her hand. Feeling was coming back now; patches of prickly warmth migrated through my leg and I felt as if my head was resting on the pointed end of a spike. “There was a classroom,” I said.

“So I hear,” she said.

“There was something written on a piece of paper.”

“Hold that thought,” she said. “Me first.” She reached into a bag on the floor and produced the red recipe book. She held it between her flattened palms, as though she was praying. “It was lost,” she said. “It's been lost for a long time, trying to find me.”

“It's not about tofu, is it?” I said.

She shook her head. “Eva was right. It's a book of poetry by Du Fu. Which sounds a lot like tofu, especially if you're talking to a busy waiter in a crowded restaurant and there's a serious language barrier.”

“And the missing pages?”

She unfolded a stack of papers. “There were four poems, one on each side of the two missing pages. Three of them don't matter, but this one does.” She handed me a sheet, a printout from a web page. The poem was called “Banquet at the Tso Family Manor.” “Read the last line,” she said.

“‘I think of my little boat, and long to be on my way,'” I read aloud—the same line that had appeared in the mazes in my room's window. I handed it back to her, making no attempt at all to connect the phenomena. My efforts thus far had been futile, with each discovery—the violinist, the rooms at Pier 23, the Yung Hee Seafood Company—only posing further questions. I was an ant trying to discern the shape of its colony, a man trying to see the back of his own head. Either things would be revealed, or they would not.

“Surprised?” she asked.

“Constantly.”

“All right. Your turn. Tell me about the classroom, and this message,” Annabel said.

“I need paper.”

She dug a small notepad and a pen out of her purse. The pain in my right wrist wouldn't let me hold a pen so I had to draw the characters' strokes with my left hand. I traced them carefully, slowly, and managed to do a passable job.

“This is
han
,” Annabel said, tapping the first one. “It means
very
, or
much
.” She pointed at the other character. “
Li
,” she said. “That means
miles
. Many miles.”