Ticktock (3 page)

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 by 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.

He lived in a modest but comfortable two-story tract house in the exhaustively planned city of Irvine. The tract, as was the case with most of those in Orange County, featured none but Mediterranean architecture; indeed, the Mediterranean style prevailed to such an extent that it sometimes seemed restfully consistent but at other times was boring, suffocating, as if the chief executive officer of Taco Bell had somehow become an all-powerful dictator and had decreed that everyone must live not in houses but in Mexican restaurants. Tommy's place had an orange barrel-tile roof, pale-yellow stucco walls, and concrete walkways with brick borders.

Because he'd supplemented his salary from the newspaper with income from a series of paperback mystery novels that he'd written during evenings and weekends, he'd been able to buy the house three years ago, when he was only twenty-seven. Now his books were coming out in hardcover first, and his writing income had gotten large enough to allow him to risk leaving the
Register.

By any fair assessment, he was more of a success than either of his brothers or his sister. But the three of them had remained deeply involved in the Vietnamese community, so their parents were proud of them. They could never be equally proud of Tuong, who had changed his name as soon as he was legally of an age to do so, and who had eagerly embraced everything American since arriving on these shores at the age of eight.

He supposed that even if he became a billionaire, moved into a thousand-room house on the highest cliff overlooking the Pacific Coast, with solid-gold toilets and chandeliers hung not with mere crystals but with huge diamonds, his mother and father would still think of him as the “failed” son who had forgotten his roots and turned his back on his heritage.

As Tommy swung into his driveway, the bordering beds of white and coral-red impatiens glowed in the headlights as if iridescent. Swift shadows crawled up through the raggedly peeling bark of several melaleucas, swarming into higher branches, where moonlight-silvered leaves shuddered in the night breeze.

In the garage, once the big door closed behind him, he remained in the silent car for a few minutes, savoring the smell of leather upholstery, basking in the pride of ownership. If he could have slept sitting upright in the driver's seat, he would have done so.

He disliked leaving the 'vette in the dark. Because it was so beautiful, the car should remain under flattering spotlights, as though it were an art object in a museum.

In the kitchen, as he hung the car keys on the pegboard by the refrigerator, he heard the doorbell at the front of the house. Though recognizable, the ringing was different from the usual sound, like a hollow and ominous summons in a dream. The curse of home ownership: Something always needed to be repaired.

He wasn't expecting anyone this evening. In fact, he intended to spend an hour or two in his study, revising a few pages of the current manuscript. His fictional private detective, Chip Nguyen, had been getting wordy in his first-person narration of the story, and the tough but sometimes garrulous gumshoe needed to be edited.

When Tommy opened the front door, ice-cold wind assaulted him, frigid enough to take his breath away. A whirl of dead melaleuca leaves like hundreds of tiny flensing knives spun over him, whispering-buzzing against one another, and he stumbled backward two steps, shielding his eyes with one hand, gasping in surprise.

A dry, papery leaf blew into his mouth. The hard little point pricked his tongue.

Startled, he bit down on the leaf, which had a bitter taste. Then he spit it out.

As suddenly as it had burst through the door, the whirlwind now wound up tight and disappeared into itself, leaving only silence and stillness in its wake. The air was no longer cold.

He brushed leaves out of his hair and off his shoulders, plucked them from his soft flannel shirt and blue jeans. The wood floor of the foyer was littered with crisp brown leaves, bits of grass, and sandy grit.

“What the hell?”

No visitor waited beyond the threshold.

Tommy moved into the open doorway, peering left and right along the dark front porch. It was little more than a stoop—ten feet wide and six feet deep.

No one was on the two steps or on the walkway that cleaved the shallow front lawn, no one in sight who might have rung the doorbell. Under tattered clouds backlighted by a lambent moon, the street was quiet and deserted,
so
hushed that he could half believe that a breakdown in the machinery of the cosmos had brought time to a complete halt for everyone and for all things except for he himself.

Tommy switched on the outside light and saw a strange object on the porch floor immediately in front of him. It was a doll: a rag doll no more than ten inches tall, lying on its back, its stubby arms spread wide.

Frowning, he surveyed the night once more, paying special attention to the shrubbery, where someone might be crouched and watching him. He saw no one.

The doll at his feet was unfinished, covered entirely with white cotton fabric, unclothed, without facial features or hair. Where each eye should have been, two crossed stitches of coarse black thread dimpled the white cloth. Five sets of crossed black stitches marked the mouth, and another pair formed an X over the heart.