Native Speaker (11 page)

I figured, too, that what she meant by protection was to put up what staffers called a “Chinese wall” between a release of the information and anyone else high up in the Kwang office, Sherrie Chin-Watt or Jenkins. John Kwang, without mention, would never know of it. I would soon learn that this was typical, that any political life was made up of minor battles and skirmishes, opportunities on the edge of the front discovered or sometimes created by people like Janice Pawlowsky. John Kwang, evidently, had come to trust her judgment and loyalty and willingness to sacrifice herself. It was only later that I fully understood the depth of his trust in the people working under him. I, finally, would prove his trust wrong. And that was the strangeness for me, that someone like Janice, with all her attendant cynicism and ambition, could believe in another person so singularly, that she could shelter her candidate, her man for office, and step in front of angry bullets shot from his opponents or the press.

We kept on scouting neighborhoods for homeless shelters, community centers, training schools, drug rehabilitation clinics, halfway houses. Sites where he might be seen in the coming months. Photo ops. She made me stop several more times. Our last stop, toward dusk, was an abandoned tenement building beside an elevated ramp of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. She had me get out and stand on the crumbling steps. Then she rambled across the street and peered back at me through her palm-sized director's viewfinder.

“Hold your hand out, like you're shaking with somebody!”

I extended both, like Kwang in our file photos at the office.

“Good! Now go inside the archway and come out!”

I stepped back into the entrance. The walls of the lobby were badly damaged, unsheathed layers of wire and wood and corrugated paper hanging out of gouges in the plaster. The tiled floor was mostly shattered and broken through in places down past the joists. I could see into the basement where mangled parts of children's bicycles lay in dusty heaps.

“Come on out! Slowly, slowly.”

I walked out in the light of breaking clouds. I lifted my face to the sky, as commanded. She told me to raise my arms in victory. So I did.

“Freeze,” she said. “Awesome.”

O
ur boy, Mitt, was exactly seven years old when he died, just around the age when you start really worrying about your kid. Then, you look long at his tender arms and calves and you wish you could keep him inside the house for the next ten years, buckled up and helmeted. But all of a sudden, more than you know, he's outside somewhere, sometimes even alone, crossing the streets, scaling rocks, wrestling with dogs, swimming in pits, getting into everything mechanical and combustible and toxic. You suddenly notice that all of his friends are wild, bad kids, the kind that hold lighted firecrackers until the very last second, or torment the neighborhood animals. Mitt, the clean and bright one—somehow, miraculously, ours—runs off with them anyway, shouting the praises of his perfect life.

From the time he was four we spent whole summers up at my father's house in Ardsley, mostly so Mitt could troop about on the grass and earth and bugs—the city offering only broken swings and dry swimming pools—and Lelia and I seemed to share an understanding of what would be safest and most healthful for him.

My father would call me each year a few days before Memorial Day and say as if he didn't really care,
Ya, oh-noon-guh-ya?
and I would answer him and say yes, we were coming again this summer, and he could get things ready for us.

The city, of course, seemed too dangerous. Especially during the summer, the streets so dog mad with heat, untempered, literally steaming with possibilities, none of them good. People got meaner, stuck beneath all that hard light and stone. They worked through it by talking, speaking, shouting and screaming, in every language on earth. And the cursing: in New York City, summer is the season of bad language. It shouts at you from propped-up windows, it hangs on gold chains out of cars, it lingers at phone booths, peep booths, in every standing line for movies and museums and methadone.

And then there were the heat waves, the crime waves. The clouds of soot and dust. In the evening it all descended unseen, an invisible ash of distant fires, soiling us everywhere.

So escape. Rent a car, pack it up, drive right into the heart of dreamland. Here, it went by names like Bronxville, Scarsdale, Chappaqua, Ardsley. The local all-stars.

We wanted our boy to know a cooler, softer ground. On the expansive property of my father's house stood high poplar, oak, the few elm not yet fallen with disease. They didn't appear much different to me than they did twenty years before; they looked just as tall, as venerable, the capital of my father's life. And there would wend Mitt, the child of ceaseless movement, leafy stick in hand, poking beneath the shady skirts of the trees for the smallest signs of life.

Lelia and I would watch him from the back patio. My father slept in the sun with a neon-orange golf cap pulled down over his eyes. Sometimes he spoke from beneath it, his weary Korean mumbling, and I could only read the embroidery of the word
Titleist
in place of actually understanding him. Mitt would shout for us from the trees, holding up something too small to see. My father would groan in acknowledgment, lowing the refrain of my youth.
Yahhh
. Mitt, unconcerned, hopped a little dance, his patented jig, waving madly, legs pumping. We waved back. I shouted to him, too loud.

He brought back rocks to us. Dead insects. Live slugs, green pennies, bits of faded magazines. Every kind and condition of bark. Stuff, he said. He arranged them carefully next to my father's chaise like trinkets for barter, all the while recounting to himself in a small voice the catalogue of his suburban treasure. He offered the entire lot to my father.

“I give you a dollar,” my father said to him.

“Two!” Mitt cried.

“Lucky silver dollar,” the old man countered, as if luck had meant anything in his life.

“The one on your desk?”

“You go get it now,” he said, pointing up to the top window of the house.

Mitt liked to carry the coin with him. I knew because he would produce it wherever we were and start rubbing the face with his thumb. My father must have advised him so, told him some Bronze Age Korean mythology to go with it, the tale of a lost young prince whose magic coin is sole proof of his rightful seat and destiny.

A week after the accident, when the nurse at the hospital desk gave me the plastic bag of his clothes, I found the coin in the back flap pocket of his shorts. The coin was warm—the bag must have been left near a window—and I wondered how long the shiny metal could hold in a heat, if it could remember something like the press of flesh.

He loved the old man, adored him. Whenever you looked, Mitt was scaling the wide bow of that paternal back, or swinging from his shoulders, or standing on the tops of his feet so that they walked in tandem, with ponderous, doubled soles.

There were certain concordances. In profile, you saw the same blunt line descend the back of their necks, those high, flat ears, but then little else because Lelia—or maybe her father—had endowed Mitt with that other, potent sprawl of limbs, those round, vigilant eyes, the upturned ancestral nose (like a scrivener's, in my imagination), his boy's form already so beautifully jumbled and subversive and historic. No one, I thought, had ever looked like that.

The kids in my father's neighborhood gave him trouble that first summer. One afternoon Mitt tugged at my pant leg and called me innocently, in succession, a
chink
, a
jap
, a
gook
. I couldn't immediately respond and so he said them again, this time adding, in singsong, “Charlie Chan, face as flat as a pan.”

They're just words, I then told him firmly, confidently—in the way a father believes he should—but mostly because I didn't know what else to say. And after the same kids saw Lelia and me play with him in the front yard they started in with other things, teaching him words like mutt, mongrel, half-breed, banana, twinkie. One day Mitt came home with his clothes soiled and said that they had pushed him down to the ground and put dirt in his mouth. He proudly told my father that he hadn't cried. Lelia, who up to now had been liberal and assured, started shrieking angrily about suburbia, America, the brand of culture we had to live in, and packed Mitt up the stairs to scrub his muddy face, telling him all the while how wonderful he was.

That evening my father and I went around the neighborhood to talk to the parents. We walked stiffly in silence on those manicured streets, and it seemed a repetition of a moment from many years before, when an older boy named Clay had taken away my cap pistol. I remembered how my father had spoken to Clay's mother in a halting, polite English and how he had excused her son for taking advantage of my timidity and misunderstandings.

“My son,” he explained, “is no good for friends.” The woman hardly understood what he said, and Clay—grinning to himself behind her and looking more menacing than ever—only temporarily handed over my toy gun.

Now, as the first front door opened, I spoke calmly and severely, explaining the situation as one of gravity but not crisis. But then, at the sight of the offending boy, the old man behind me inexplicably exploded, chopping the air with his worn fingers, cursing red-faced like a cheated peasant in our throaty mother tongue until the bewildered child began to cry. His mother protested meekly (you could tell she knew my father) and I, too, wanted him to stop yelling, to shut up and let me speak. Instead I allowed myself to sacrifice this boy and his mother, perhaps even myself, and let the old man yell this one bloody murder, if only for Mitt.

I know this: a child doesn't forgive or forget—he works it out.

By that last summer Mitt was thick with them all. Friends for life, or so it must have seemed. I knew their names once, could place them with their well-fed faces. After he died they all seemed to get hidden away somewhere, like sets of precious china, and eventually I forgot everything about them.

But for a long time the little arms and legs and voices were part of my nightly ritual before sleep. Like a cinematic mantra, a mystical trailer of memory, I replayed the scene of all those boys standing in the grass about the spontaneous crèche of his death. Lelia knew I did this with the night. She would grasp my hand until she couldn't wait any longer for me to say something, and finally she would fall asleep. When her hand went limp, I would let myself wander over the ground of what happened. I could only see it when she slumbered. I needed her right next to me, I thought, bodied up, but off in another world.

I was just coming back from the store with more soda and candy for the birthday party. A boy came running out toward the car, leaping and waving his hands. He was sick-looking, half-smiling and jumping. As I turned the car into the driveway I heard nervous, confused shouts echoing from the backyard through the tops of the trees. I ran around the side of the house without turning off the ignition. All the boys were standing there lock-kneed. In the middle of them was Lelia, sitting on the grass, cradling his dead blue head in her arms and lap and rocking on her knees. She was wailing nothing I could understand or remember now, and she sounded like someone else, an anybody on the street. A boy to my side was crying fitfully and telling me between gasps how they didn't mean to stay on him as long as they did.
It was just a stupid dog pile
, he kept shouting,
it was just a stupid dog pile
. And then my father came out from the sliding porch door and saw me, a cordless phone in his hand, and he yelled in Korean that the ambulance was coming. But before he made it to us his legs seemed to fold under him and he sat back unnaturally on the matted lawn, his face so small-looking, arrested, so short of breath.

I bent down and started blowing into Mitt's mouth. Lelia cried that she'd tried already. She kept screaming about it and I had to tell her to shut up. I didn't know what I was doing. I pulled open his mouth and blew anyway, a dozen times, a hundred, pumping down on his chest with all my weight, eventually pounding on him as if he were solid ground. I shudder to think that I might have injured him, hurt his delicate breastbone or his ribs, or worse, that his last thought was to ask why his father was harming him. I've read the dying feel no pain but sense everything that goes on around them. They view the scene from a brief distance above and no matter who they are or how old, they gain a wisdom from that last vista. But we are the living, remaining on the ground, and what we know is the narrow and the broken. Here, we are strewn about in the lengthy expanse of an archipelago, too far to call one another, too far to see.

During certain nights, I pulled a half-sleeping Lelia back onto my body, right onto my chest, and breathed as barely as I could without falling faint. I could see her wake, flutter a moment, look for my eyes. She let herself balance on me until she was no longer touching the bed. She knew what to do, what to do to me, that I was Mitt, that then she was Mitt, our pile of two as heavy as the balance of all those boys who had now grown up. We nearly pressed each other to death, our swollen lips and eyes, wishing upon ourselves the fall of tears, that great free anger, that great obese heft of melancholy, enough of it piling on at once so that sometimes whether we wanted to or not we made love so hard and gritty we had to say fuck to be telling the very first part of the truth. In the bed, in the space between us, it was about the sad way of all flesh, alive or dead or caught in between, it was about what must happen between people who lose forever the truest moment of their union. Flesh, the pressure, the rhymes of gasps. This was all we could find in each other, this the novel language of our life.

Mornings brought sober hope, then the usual imperatives. Look for Lelia (she was most often gone before I woke, already off somewhere in the city working with students). Now, keep thinking. Think for keeps. Then, isolate the wonderments, the curiosities of his death; they will help you to see. Shed sentimentality. Stop this falling in love with fate. Reside, if you can, in the last place of the dead.

Maybe this way:

A crush. You pale little boys are crushing him, your adoring mob of hands and feet, your necks and heads, your nostrils and knees, your still-sweet sweat and teeth and grunts. Too thick anyway, to breathe. How pale his face, his chest. Blanket his eyes. Listen, now. You can hear the attempt of his breath, that unlost voice, calling us from the bottom of the world.

* * *

Lelia and Mitt used to play around with a tape recorder I sometimes brought home from the office. It was a palm-sized model, voice-activated, that I used in the beginning for making notes to myself about work. I didn't need to use it much later on. Mitt especially liked the microcassettes the machine used. He would peer at their miniature opaque housings, twist them around in the light, and he was always holding them up to his ear and shaking them, as if trying to rattle loose their secrets. He said to me once that these little ones could hear you even when you whispered, so that you had to be extra careful of what you said.

I knew he sometimes watched me speak into the machine. Later I saw him mimicking me; he would recline on the sofa with his little legs propped on pillows, speaking intermittently into the recorder as though he were taking drags on a cigarette. He'd talk about imaginary people in an aimless, child's way. After a while he expertly put in another tape, pretending to mark the old one with a name or note. When he was a little older, he would actually make recordings of himself and sometimes of us, the machine being small enough that he could hide it easily. Of course I feared his perceptiveness, what he might have seen of me, or even possibly thought in his young mind.

But I knew, too, that he got the notion of being careful of what you said mostly from being with us, his father and his mother, how we were beginning to speak to one another during the course of a day with more waiting and quiet than any real noise or talk. I remember him playing in the park one weekend when he was five, tumbling as he would on the black rubber beneath the playground ladders and nets, with Lelia and me sitting on a bench a few feet away. We were arguing quietly, or at least I was. I kept looking around to make sure that the other parents couldn't hear us. Lelia didn't seem to care. She wasn't yelling but her voice was clear enough that when she raised it in the crisp autumn air I thought all of downtown could hear our trouble.