Six Short Stories

[SKuM]

CHRIST ALMIGHTY

Six long weeks abroad… Sixty five pounds of silver by weight, nearly two thousand by sterling… Four hundred nautical miles off the shore of home…

Three torn sails, four cracks in the hull (only one serious) and a punctured barrel of oil on the portside deck, ground deeply into the wood now like a slick grey lacquer. It was, what, eleven at night? How would we know?

Twelve men on board, eleven now more or less. Marcos was lying in the cabin beneath us with a temperature of a hundred and four, rocking himself back and forth like a dying man in a cradle. We hadn’t checked in on him for hours, nearly a day and a half it must have been by now. Maybe he was still alive, who would know but his God? The swells rose and fell from underneath us, our third day in the storm. Strong Atlantic currents kicked from under us like a branded mule, cold nor’easter sheets of rain rushing in from the south and soaking our masts and our wrinkled bitter flesh. We manned our positions and waited and prayed now, commandeering our pinnance, The Astoria, the wretched pint-sized infant brother of a war-won Spanish galleon, with the tenderness of an angel’s feather.

The silver was a gift from Davies, a Sheffield ex-military chap in the Bahamas who owed me a favor for a time I saved his life, twenty years prior. “Take it,” he had demanded, a bottle and a half of island rum deep into the night, as we walked alongside the beaches that ran up against the back of his palace of a home. “God knows I have no use for it here. They tell you…” He leaned forward and retched. “They tell you that there is a new life in the New World. You know what there is in the New World? Negroes and banana plantations. And goddamn…” He spit caustic spit, stomach acid burning spit on his shoes. “Goddamn thieves for bureaucrats.”

I had never done a Transatlantic in such a tiny vessel before, hadn’t even heard of something being tried or considered. But there she was, sitting unused for the better part of a decade in a backwater Haitian port, mildew spotting up between the thin seams of wood paneling like unruly lichen, and I knew we had to give it a try. The silver would pay well in London jewelry shops, and I might even be able to pawn the boat.

It must have been around four in the morning, give or take a half hour but not too far off until dawn at least, when the lightning struck. A thin cackle of white hot light and then the wisps of smoke coming off the deck like tendrils every which way. The wood groaned, the belly of the ship violently lurching starboard, and then the brilliant vision of a thick pine foremast coming backwards off the bow of the boat, sails and all, ripping through a quarter ton of rigging before finally deflecting off the mainmast and tearing deep down into the gallery.

Then, the men coming out of the woodwork, har har, with shouts deadened under the early morning winds. I remember hauling myself hand over hand on wet rigging cordage above a gaping hole in the deck of the ship, looking two stories down all the way into the bilge room, and then crawling down from above on more rigging to come up upon the scene. Seven of my men, inadequately dressed and visibly shivering, were huddled around Scherer, Tomlin and Eduardo. Scherer was long gone, his head caved in from the front and little white splinters of bone flecked across the wound. Tomlin too, a long thin plank of wood jagged and sharp on one end, disappearing into nothingness deep into his chest. Eduardo, though, crouched low like a tiger in the foetal position, grasping his left shoulder with his right hand, the bone shattered in its socket and the blood coming out thick and red from under his torn wool overcoat. He whimpered, like a whipped cat.

“Kingsley! Kingsley, they’re dead!”

“¡Apremiantemente! Get the medical supplies!”

“Caridad, shut up,” I yelled to the Spaniard. “Stay put.”

I rolled Eduardo over on his back, and he screamed. We were, what, eight days from shore? He would never make it. The wound would grow green and pus-filled, infected from the inside with metastasizing vegetation and the arm would saw itself off with the brittle salty sea air as its hacksaw.

I turned to the impetuous kid from Malaga. “Caridad, grab the tobacco from the galley. And the honey, and the hardtack.”

We had made a promise, all shook on it between ourselves in the Port-au-Prince, that every dying man would earn a last smoke. Eduardo’s eyes grew wide, and his uninjured arm lunged forward to grab the cuff of my pants. “I make it, I just need bandages! Kingsley, I seen it yesterday, in the aft gallery!”

I hadn’t the energy to argue with him, so I kicked his hand off of me and sat down. It was raining harder than I had ever seen it rain in my entire life, I thought. It would be no more than three or four hours before the bilge room and the gallery would fill up below, with such a large hole in the topside deck. The bilge pump would never manage.

Caridad had come back with the tobacco and a morsel of food for us all, the eight of us plus Eduardo. Marcos must have still been in the quarters, shivering and feverish or maybe long gone, but we didn’t think of him. Two of the men had taken it upon themselves to dump the bodies of Scherer and Tomlin off the starboard deck, and who was I to argue? Eduardo still lay lying on the floor, but nobody looked at him. We bought five pounds of honey before setting off, a bit of morale to spread on the stale, now moldy hardtack we ate for two meals daily. Might as well get our money’s worth. We dragged the half-empty barrel of crude oil into the middle of our circle, got some sparked magnesium inside the top and, despite the rain, got a half-decent fire going, little torches blowing out of the bullet holes in the sides of the barrel. We all got our cigarettes lit despite the rain, spreading long-fantasized honey over our shingles, now waterlogged and decomposing in our laps. Nobody mentioned the bilge pump. It was almost festive.

When the cigarette came to Eduardo, he crushed the tobacco in his fist and threw the remains in the puddle that he now lay in, the water pooling up around his back and his knees.
He screamed: Give me the fucking bandages you fucking assholes! Hysterically, like a child or a dog or something else very immature. There was a muffled uproar among the crew over the wasted tobacco.

I walked over and tried to lift him up off the ground by the neckline of his shirt, as my Lieutenant Commander had done to me once in the distant past when I was a Midshipman in the Royal Navy. But the tattered clothes my men wore were not the thick cotton of British military dress, and Eduardo’s shirt ripped off of him immediately. So I kicked him square in the forehead with the heavy leather of my boot, felt his head roll back against its weight and the skin split open between his eyes. He leapt to his feet, dragging his limp arm behind him, shouting. He scampered up to the starboard gunwale of the boat, a spotty trail of blood belying his brief alacrity.

He screamed: God help me! I just wanted the bandages! I don’t understand… I just… I…

But his speech had devolved into broken sentence fragments by then, his frame racked with convulsive sobs. He choked on his own breaths, the inhalations too sharp for recognition by his lungs. And then, a lurching swell that thrust The Astoria forward as we cleared a wave, and he was off. As quietly as he had come into our lives, chain smoking cigarettes on a Dominican port town looking for work with bulging muscles under a thin farmer’s undershirt, he was cast back out into the world without so much as a splash.

The sky cleared within minutes, something I have never seen before or since. The weather changed as if an act from God, deus ex machina fit for fiction only. We finished the last of the hardtack and honey in a single sitting, and the tobacco too. It took us a day and a half to finish pumping the water out of the bilge rooms, and another five after that to replace the rigging and sails on the mainmast. The hull was undamaged, as was most of the mizzenmast and the gallery. Unbelievable. We arrived in the Bristol Channel eleven days after the storm, with strong tail winds unusual for that stretch of the Atlantic. We had eaten no food since the storm, and arrived blisteringly excited, receiving a proper welcome home from the Cardiff authorities.

We divvied up the silver between us, myself getting the lion’s share, though we all received much more than was expected, dividing the pot by eight instead of twelve as it were. I even found somebody to pawn The Astoria off onto, a young eager lad high off a recent entrepreneurial mining endeavor in Northern Scotland, who paid about a third more than he should have. I never spoke to any of the crew again, although I received an invitation to Caridad’s wedding in Barcelona shortly after our return. I purchased a home in London soon thereafter, a spacious living arrangement with art in the dining room and a flowerbed in the backyard, overlooking a brilliant view of the Thames. I opened a jewelry shop. I went out to eat on Wednesdays, to the theatre on Fridays and to Church on Sundays. I married.

Sometimes, on quiet nights when the westerly fog rolls back off the shores of Plymouth or Portsmouth, and it seems like you could see all the way back to the New World if you tried hard enough, I think, Christ Almighty, what do you want from me? What did you expect?

PLAYTHINGS

The woman had known Chandrika for eleven days when he proposed to her that they leave the country and start a new life elsewhere, selling tea and trinkets in Kolkata, or cooking his native Sri Lankan food in exotic Western cities like Amsterdam or Barcelona. Her name was Sachini, and she had once been considered beautiful. They met on a rainy Sunday night, on a long squalid road in the southeast edge of Chennai where the prostitutes gathered in long rows along the sidewalk in front of brothels and clapboard hourly rate motels. She was standing under a filthy plastic awning, her thin dress with the patched shoulders soaked in the warm mist that blew under her shelter, and when Chandrika offered to buy her a dinner after in exchange for thirty minutes, she said yes. He tucked away his umbrella into his bag, and brought her inside.

Sachini had never been outside of Chennai, let alone India, and didn’t know at first whether she wanted to follow the man or not. He told her electrifying ideas, some so fantastical and scarcely believable that she racked her brain and could not find responses to the claims he made. “The world is wider than you could ever imagine,” he would say, stroking her bare stomach on the brothel mattresses. “It is malleable, like soft iron. You can toy with it, if you wish, snap it in half like tiny plastic kids’ playthings.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, I don’t believe you. It is an important moment to remember, very special indeed, the morning you wake up and realize that the people who construct the world around you are no smarter than yourself.”

Sachini wasted hours of precious work time lying on those beds, listening intently as if in a trance. She had always been told as a child by her grandmother that Sri Lankans, especially men, were unintelligent and ineffectual and best avoided. What would my grandmother care, she thought to herself, about a lowly Sri Lankan man, considering everything else she would have to criticize about me. So she let herself believe in him. She conjured images of Paris and New York in her free time and in her dreams, grilled fellow women in adjoining brothels on how to cure tea leaves and how to make good lamb curry. It was deus ex machina writ large in the pages of her life, and the stars shone bright at nights that time of year, when the cloud cover scattered.

“Sachini, I need a favor from you.”

That was how he started the conversation on the twelfth day in the basement of the old abandoned warehouse he lived in, with forty other Sri Lankan men – or more appropriately, mostly teenagers – in the farming land to the west of the city. They wore military fatigues during the day and ran drills in the fields behind the house in the early mornings and at dusk. They seemingly ate little food, and during mealtimes they huddled around the few hot plates available to them and professed their devotion to the cause. Chandrika wore no such clothes, and the young men deferred to his commands. Sachini had heard little about the political unrest in the island nation three hundred miles to the south of her, but now here they were, training for suicide bombings and assassinations and showing up at the doorstep of her workplace offering her hot dinners. Their emblem hung on a painted board near the kitchen sink, a small but fierce looking tiger drawing crisscrossed with bayonetted rifles like a skull and crossbones, above the cursive stylized title of their organization: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

“We need… I need you to accept a package from a man who will come to your place of work in two or so days. Take the man into the room with you, accept the package, leave it under the bed. I will be there later that day to see you.” He beamed, a devilish smirk with a raucous chuckle. “Only I will bring you more than a cardboard box for a package.”

Sachini paused. “What is in the package?”

“Hey!” He threw away the key that locked his zippered his mouth shut. “No questions, baby, just do as you’re told.”

And so it went. It struck her, years later, how stupid she was for believing that he would take her to Paris. He was a revolutionary, a hardline nationalist, and such men did not abandon their homelands to live happily ever after with foreigner whores.

The man with the package arrived three days later, wheeling a Western-style travel suitcase behind him. He was overweight, a lighter-skinned northerner in a clean Hawaiian t-shirt and baggy denim jeans. He spoke no more than ten words to her during the time he was around.

“You are Sachini?”

She nodded.

“Fifty rupees for thirty minutes.”

She nodded.

“Let’s go.”

Chandrika picked up the package the following day, never telling her what was inside the two-wheeled suitcase, and they made love for two hours straight. She accepted no money from him for the service.

Sachini had only been hit twice before, her father both times. Once when she was very young, for spilling six liters of milk on the dusty kitchen floor, and a second time when she was fifteen, for kissing a Muslim boy in the maintenance shed behind the school. Chandrika started hitting her four days after the package, in the heat of the moment. At first she thought it was on accident, and then he did it again. It was two weeks later before she brought it up with him, in a plaza with a clear-watered fountain and manicured grass in downtown Chennai. He stared at her with fierce burning eyes and grinned a shit eating grin. “What, you don’t love me? I just want to feel close to you.”

Sachini stared at her feet.

“You want a lunch?” he asked, not waiting for her to speak. “Let’s get a lunch. I’m hungry.”

It was another week before she heard from him. She had given him two addresses and a phone number to contact him with, and checked them each twice daily. He had another package that he needed her to take. She would have to travel for this mission though. He had not called the first meeting a mission, and she accepted. Sachini paced the backwater alleys of her neighborhood at night, squandering the last of her savings on overpriced packs of European cigarettes. She smoked them one after the other in long succession, the streets alternating between rotting asphalt and dirt every cigarette and a half. She muttered little aphorisms picked up from Chandrika under her breath, startling passersby with her whispering and quick jerky movements and the intensity of her gaze. She felt that there was an enriching to her life, that a vacuum of pain had been filled with a searing purpose. It ballooned up in her lungs, coming up sometimes in acid reflux tickling the back of her throat. Once, she threw a stone at the window of a home with wood-paneled walls and real shingles and plastic gutters. Despite her best efforts, it still shocked her to hear the shattering of the glass, the kerplunk of the rock hitting their floor and the commotion of the family sitting inside, bowed over their dinners. She ran into the darkness, her fists clenched and her chest taut and heavy with the revolution, like a wind-up action figure.

Her mission was to take a bus to the outskirts of town to the west, only ten miles from where Chandrika and his hardscrabble teenagers plinked targets and meditated and drilled marching routines for sixteen hours a day. There were holes in the floor of the public buses in her province, and she alternated her gaze between the gravel speeding past her feet and the barren plains that stretched out into the poorest regions of India, where leather-skinned bumpkins eked out more miserable lives than herself, digging potatoes out of the dirt and overmilking the dregs of their emaciated cows.
She arrived at the stop she was told to stop at, and it was nearly dark when she arrived. There was an old abandoned sugarcane mill placed squarely in the middle of nowhere, that hadn’t been used since the nationalization of the industry under the leadership of Nehru in the fifties. Thick brambles grew up and into the crumbling concrete of the two story building, the setting sun peeking through a hole in its western wall. It still emitted a faint odor of sweetness, as though the milled sugarcane had permanently soaked into the ground and the walls.

She watched the bus fade into the horizon, kicking up thick clouds of dust behind it, and then in a flash there was a burning pain in the back of her neck. She felt her legs give way beneath her, felt rough calloused hands grab her arms and her legs. She felt her left knuckles connect with the sharpness of a row of teeth, felt another blow on her left side, and tasted the blood trickling down from her brow into her nostrils and her mouth before losing consciousness.

“I’m sorry baby, there was nothing I could have done. We need money for the revolution, we need shoes and guns and food for our soldiers. They eat fucking gruel and hardtack for dinner, what do you want from me?”

Sachini tried to spit in his face, but her mouth was swollen and she drooled down her chin. Her wrists and ankles were rubbed raw with the manila rope, her eyes bloodshot with tears and the infuriating caked blood that itched in her eyelids. She had no doubts about what lay in her future, and as her face blanched with fear, she tried to face it with resoluteness. She had heard horror stories from friends in her brothel, about midnight kidnappings and lives lived on the margins of existence. Young girls shipped like freight cargo from city to city treated like sacks of potatoes who made wealthy the filth that handled them. In her Parisian hallucinations she found nothing more than the dangers of dreaming grandiose.

[editline]18th December 2014[/editline]

HOMEMAKING

“You know this to be true, Simavero. Don’t let your heart get in the way of your head.”

“Julius, please…” Simavero said, staring at his feet. He made a quick hand motion across his throat, as if to take his own life. “For two seconds. Shut up.”

The two men sat on wooden crates across from each other, a cheap plastic table with steaming tea cups between them. The dim light of the setting sun threw shattered fragments of orange light across the dirt floor, peering in and out as the wind toyed with the opening flap of the canvas tent they sat under. The shade was a welcome respite for Simavero, as his newly sewn military fatigues, a two piece camouflage suit, seemed unbearably burdensome to him in the oppressive heat of the South India summer. He wore the patch of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam proudly on the chest of his fatigues, and had helped design and stitch the emblem throughout the previous month. It was a small emblem, but he thought the tiger looked ferocious, and resembled the tiger he had seen in his own life, twice, with his own eyes. At times, when Simavero wondered what the fuck he was doing squatting in the forests of another country, eating bland food and running wind sprints up hills, yelling at the untrained, often incompetent youth that followed him across a vast strait of saltwater looking to start a revolution, he thought of the eyes of that tiger that roamed the wilderness surrounding his childhood village. He longed to return to Sri Lanka, to his birthplace, to begin the actual insurgency. He was tired of training, tired of the mock raids and the endless fruitless discussions. If they were supposed to be fighting for their homeland, why did they have to come so far away from it to learn how?

He had only once been to India before, as a young man, and remembered little. The memories seemed more fragments than anything, like a flickering light bulb. Occasional bursts of a vision of a sand beach or a melon, a brightly colored sari, maybe, or a unique smell of curry powder. Simavero knew nothing but the Ceylon tea of his native Sri Lanka, and he sipped at the drink in front of him slowly and intently, teasing out curious jasmine and citrus notes here and there. Julius had also sweat through his clothes, a dusty three piece suit with no insignia, but paid no mind. He finished the rest of his tea, too hot for most to touch, in one large gulp, and poured himself a fourth cup. Julius pulled a small brass pocket watch out of his suit jacket, checked the time, and coughed.

When Simavero was born, his brother Chandrika, two years his elder, shared his stuffed lion with him. Where Chandrika went, the lion went, and where the lion went, Simavero went. It fell to pieces after a few short years, its stitching not sturdy enough to handle the day-after-day abuse of being dragged around in the dirt, across streams and up and down trees. First, it lost its arms, right then left, then its legs, left then right, and finally its head, until it was little more than an orange ball of cotton with a long skinny tail, like a puppet on a leash. Chandrika would always share his milk and rice with Simavero, even when the family funds dried out for two years when Simavero was seven and eight, and the boys’ father had to punch new holes in their belts. When Chandrika caught influenza for a week and a half, when Simavero was ten, he gave all of his dinner portions to his younger brother. “No sense letting me eat them,” he would say, his teeth clenched like a smile, though they both knew it was a grimace. “I’ll just throw it back up.” They usually shared a bowl and spoon, because the family only had so many bowls and spoons to give out, but Simavero liked to think it was because of Chandrika’s generosity anyways. Simavero was the youngest of nine children, but he spent little time with his older sisters and brothers. They were boring, talked about boring things and worked boring jobs. Chandrika was exciting.

“We will need to do it at night,” Julius explained, “because it is the only time he is alone.” Simavero thought Julius talked in the slow, nasally, pedantic way that Indians all talked, although he had to admit he didn’t know many Indians. “I have the decoy with me.” Julius revealed, from a second pocket in his suit jacket, a small, slender gun. Simavero recognized it instantly as the standard issue pistol of the Sri Lanka Armed Forces. “It is a simple plan, Simavero. You enter his tent, you shoot him, you drop the gun. Leave through the back of his tent. Walk to your tent, wait two minutes, walk back to his tent. There will be a commotion by then, and you are done.” Julius placed the gun on the table between them, and took another gulp of his scalding tea.

It was a simple plan, but it was clever, and it would work, and Simavero knew it. His men would find the gun, there would be outrage and fear at the assassination, and renewed anger and hysteria towards the Sri Lanka government. They would call together a meeting, Simavero would undoubtedly be elected the new commander of the Tamil Tigers, and the group morale would strengthen. They would no longer have to deal with the ordeals of their current schizophrenic leadership

But he could not look at the gun. He stared back at his tea, talking into his cup, rather than to Julius. “He is my brother. He has his faults, I cannot argue this.” Simavero swallowed. “And he… he no longer has any place in our organization. He must leave.” He paused. “But I will not kill him. I will talk to him, tonight, and there will be no more problems. I can assure you this, Julius.”

Chandrika shared with Simavero the story of his first kiss, with a real girl, when Simavero was thirteen. They stayed up for the better part of a night, huddled around a lone candle whispering in the fire pit in the center of their family’s circle of ramshackle houses. There were only seven girls their age in their village, eight if you included Senuri, who was slightly younger, and Chandrika had kissed the third ugliest one. It was thrilling nonetheless, and Chandrika had decided that he was to marry her. The details that Chandrika provided for him that night proved to form the basis of how Simavero acted himself five years later, when he too married a girl. When Chandrika first started stealing cane sugar from the plantations outside of town, when they were in their teens, he shared his loot with Simavero. They were always hungry growing up, always looking for something more to eat, and it was such an unbelievable pleasure to have something so sweet to chew on at night, after a long and hard day’s labor. They kept them under their pillows, only bringing the stalks out after everybody else was asleep. Their mother never found out. After long, Chandrika invited Simavero to come out with him, and shared him his tactics as well. How to tell when the farmer was about to go to the bathroom, what times of the day he would come out to check on certain parts of his fields, what places were best to hide when he watered the field. It was a long and productive partnership.

Simavero flinched when Julius slapped the teacup out of his hands, sending the shards of porcelain across the dirt floor of the tent. Julius cut a wide gash across his thumb as he slapped the cup, and the hot tea burned them both. Julius soaked the blood of his injured hand into his pant leg, without looking, and pointed the index finger of his opposite hand directly at the face of the man across from him.

“Don’t stare at your fucking cup when talking to me,” Julius said. Simavero looked up. “Do you know where you would be without me? You would be nothing.” Julius spit to his side. “You would still be a pissant vagrant in Sri Lanka, making useless speeches to useless kids who couldn’t even buy themselves a new pair of shoes. Who do you think buys your guns? Who feeds and clothes your fighters?

“Don’t forget where you would be without me, Simavero. I can cut your program anytime I need to. Your brother is a threat to everything we are doing here, and he knows too much to let him free. What’s worth more to you, your country or your brother?” Simavero refused to let his gaze leave Julius’. “Because if it’s Chandrika, then you’re the wrong man to lead a revolution.”

When they were young men, after they had moved to Colombo and wanted little to do with the small villages that formed like detritus around that urban center of attention, Chandrika formed, and then shared, his intimate knowledge of the quality of the city’s prostitutes with his younger brother. It had not been hard for Chandrika to convince his brother to leave their wives. “Why eat only one apple,” he said once, laughing so hard he could barely speak, “when you can buy as many apples as you like?” Chandrika shared his growing fervent nationalism, his belief that they could never be happy without an independent Tamil state, over long dinners of scant sweet potato meal and an abundance of sugarcane liquor. He shared his dream that, one day, they could exist free of the tyranny of their government, a people free to govern itself how it pleases. A paradise, he would say, a revolution! He repeated the words like a narcotic, an obsession, so much that it became hard to distinguish the attractiveness of the concept from the attractiveness of the action itself. Revolution as a solution to bad governance, to no food, no liquor, to bad prostitutes and irksome family obligations.

“I hear you, Julius.”

Simavero bowed his head, rested his face against his knee for a long moment. He had killed five men before, three in cold blood. He had executed an Indian police officer at point blank range after leaving the man tied up and without food or water for thirty six hours. But they had offered nothing to him, meant nothing to him in the grand scheme of things. They were, in the words of Julius, pissants. Vermin. Little mice that scurry around in dirty corners and under ovens, tickling your ankles with their slender filthy tails if you’re not paying attention. It was one thing to stomp a mouse, another thing entirely to kill the family dog, a beloved pet of fifteen years who finally succumbed to the mad bite of rabies and who for the good of everyone around him needed to be tied up in the back and shot.
Simavero envisaged the pull of the trigger, the scattering of Chadrika’s skull, the rearranging of his brother’s neural connections that forced him to make the decisions he had made. It would be a revolution, Simavero imagined, a liberation of Chandrika from his addled brain so that he would no longer have to be plagued by his own actions. He would free his brother from the tyranny of life.

Two years after they started their organization, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, they found political and economic support from independent parties in India. A dream finally realized. But Chandrika had little left to share with Simavero at that point in their lives. When the elder brother tried to share his heroin and hashish, better than the best in all of Tamil, our glorious Tamil, he said to his younger brother, Simavaro declined. Simavero had no such interest in the freely shared narcotics of the Indian mainland, had no desire to spend long hours in dark damp basements using semen-soaked t-shirts for tourniquets, prodding overfarmed veins with thrice-used needles. Simavero wanted a real homeland for his people to thrive in, while Chandrika, to an increasing extent every day, just wanted politics as a way to expedite his own maligned desires.

There was a scream, a wailing piercing shriek, and then a series of more masculine shouts, lower-pitched and frightened. Simavero grabbed the rifle leaning up against the closed flap of his tent, though he could barely hold it; his hands were shaking and soaked to the marrow with sweat. He waited: one second, two seconds, three, eight, nine, fifteen and twenty, and then began jogging towards the commotion. His men had lit several lanterns by then, and they stumbled over their words to explain the scene to him as he arrived. The massacre inside leaked in thick streams out from under the flaps of the tent, just barely visible in the dim light, like the spontaneous bursting of an old dam releasing warm torrential whitewater. A young man of fifteen or sixteen crouched down onto his knee and offered Simavero the pistol in front of his weeping face. Simavero tried to grab the pistol from him, but the barrel was too hot to touch and he let it fall to his feet.

There were dozens of his men in a circle around the tent now. They murmured:
“It is a Sri Lankan pistol!”
“The filthy fucking pigs, they have killed Chandrika!”
“They have followed us to India. It is impossible!”
“Our glorious leader! Oh God, our beloved Chandrika!”

All eyes fell on Simavero. He turned and stared back into the pits of their skulls, a long sweeping gaze.
“Dinesh, secure the camp perimeter. Bring ten men,” Simavero said. “Nobody comes in or out.”
He carefully laid his rifle on the ground in front of him. Simavero had to summon no theatrical talent at all when he grabbed the thick canvas in two bunched fists and, in a surprising show of strength, pulled the tent to the ground in one fell pull. Nobody suspected a thing either when he emptied three long lungfulls of murderous anguish into the night sky, only partially extinguished by the ever dimming midnight fog.

[editline]18th December 2014[/editline]

AMERICAN DREAMS

Nguyên Liệu Food and Beverage was the fourth diner in twenty years to serve out of the dilapidated single-story building on the corner of Seventeenth and Market. Seventeenth led south into the outskirts of town to the south, a series of ramshackle residential neighborhoods with chain link fence perimeters and gutters packed with fast food trash and broken liquor bottles. Market cut the city of Richmond laterally: to the east, a devolving urban sprawl of increasing alienation and disquietude until finally breaking through into the endless farmland of the California Central Valley, where first generation immigrants toiled long hours pulling asparagus and apricots and almonds and tomatoes out of the ground and off trees, offering only their sweat and the formative years of their lives in exchange; and to the west, the San Rafael bridge, cutting across the San Pablo Bay into the glimmering Marin headlands, a sea of dense thickets and trees, scattered white-collar towns and cities. The remains of World War gunnery pillboxes littered those hillsides just out of sight of the towns, rusting rebar jutting out of crumbling concrete lying dormant and eagerly awaiting to serve. And finally, beneath that, the city of San Francisco itself, the beacon towering above the shore break. There was a gas station and an ampm kitty-corner from Nguyên Liệu Food and Beverage, and a liquor store besides that. Across the street, in various positions throughout the intersection, there were also two used gun stores, which shared the same building, a Taco Bell, a Roscoe’s knockoff chain, an Allied Cash Advance, and a used mattress and furniture store.

Nguyên, like the two owners before him, left everything the way it was after he bought it: the Formica countertops, the plastic patio chairs, the back grill caked with decades of grime that no amount of bleach and scrub brushes could get rid of. He even left a coffee pot from the original diner on the burner in the back, a cracked Mr. Coffee drip that would have been retired two decades prior in most other restaurants. It was cheaper that way, to leave things the way they were. There were left-over paintings and posters as well, including a dusty Marlboro advertisement with Joe Namath on it from the late 60s, which, unbeknownst to Nguyên, had Namath’s signature on the back and was worth upwards of two grand. Nguyên would not have been able to identify “Broadway Joe” if somebody had asked him, having never bothered to tease out the fine print in English at the bottom of the poster, and indeed would have been unable to recognize a single player in the history of the NFL.

Nguyên sold a variety of Americanized appropriations of Vietnamese food, and usually, the closer the meal was to standard American breakfast diner fare, the better it sold. It took Nguyên, and his wife Huong, about two weeks to learn to properly cook bacon, three weeks for fried eggs and one for hash browns. There was no Vietnamese community in their neighborhood in Richmond, although thousands of their countrymen lived in tight-knit communities elsewhere in the Bay Area, with Vietnamese cuisine grocers and Vietnamese language libraries in San Francisco and Berkeley. As a result, much of their menu was left untouched by patrons, who just wanted a cheaper alternative to commercial diner chains like Denny’s and IHOP, and had no interest in wasting money on shit like mì bò viên and rau muống xào tỏi. Eventually, after four of five months, Nguyên was fed up with driving all the way across town to the Oriental Supermarket to pick up the specialty items needed to make a lot of the foods he ate growing up as a child, just to watch them rot in cupboards in the back. After a year and a half, Nguyên didn’t even serve most of those Vietnamese foods anymore, sometimes couldn’t even remember how to properly make them for his family for weekend dinners. Once or twice a month, Nguyên had vivid, petrifying, impenetrable nightmares about cheeseburgers and French fries and battered cod.

Huong complained about this sometimes to Nguyên at night, when they would take the bus home with leftovers from the day’s cooking from the restaurant, eating it with their two daughters in the living room of the apartment. More often than not, their daughters would already be back from the elementary school they both attended, having bused home themselves an hour or two prior. They would sit at the center table, studiously hammering away at mathematical proofs and deciphering values for variables, learning to spell curious words like thesaurus and elucidate. Huong would sometimes argue, over dinner and textbooks, that the four of them should move elsewhere, because they lived in a shithole not suited for humans. Nguyên would respond, softly but fervently, that it was his brother who had pulled the strings to get them here (which was true), who had started this restaurant solely as a means to help Nguyên raise his kids (which was partially true), and who, in an inspired fit of passion, built the building with his own two hands (which was so obviously untrue as to be ridiculous), and that it would be a dishonor to leave, to disrespect his memory like that. This was the ultimate trump card, and the family knew that. Nguyên’s brother, Cadeo, had been shot twice in the back, killed for the thirty seven dollars in his wallet and the six dollar watch on his wrist, only eight months after the family first arrived in America. There would be no leaving Richmond.

Nguyên came to know the owner of the local hardware store by name, because he had to replace his storefront windows at least twice a year. Marcus, of TruValue Hardware, was a busy man: there were many broken windows in the city. More often than not, the windows were smashed open with thrown rocks, bricks, or bottles. There was nothing of value in Nguyên Liệu Food and Beverage. Once, a man – there was no way to tell if it was a man or not, but Nguyên could only assume – shot the window open with a small handgun, and stole three knifes used to chop vegetables and potatoes. Police inspected the two bullet holes in the wall across from the window the following morning, and confirmed that it was likely the same gun used to rob three other convenience stores in the past week. The two policemen, laughing with each other, told Nguyên not to worry, because the bullets probably cost more than the knives. Nguyên, lying on his back after another night of passionless sex with Huong, envisioned drunken vagrants and hooded criminals thumbing through the register only to find nickels and dimes, kicking over stools and sending broken shards of glass skittering across the floor in frustration over their wasted bullets. They were always minorities in Nguyên’s imagination, transplants into the American dream that clung like leeches and parasites off of hardworking members of society like himself.

Nguyên Liệu Food and Beverage didn’t go out of business for thirteen years, which, while unimpressive in the grand scheme of restaurants, was quite a feat for that dilapidated grey building on the corner of Seventeenth and Market. By that time, only the Roscoe’s knockoff and the ampm still remained; the rest of the stores were replaced with coffee shops and a grocer and an Italian restaurant that sold pasta dishes for dinner for $17.95. The Liệu daughters had long since left Richmond: the eldest was a registered nurse practitioner in Queens, having graduated from New York University, and the youngest was finishing up her second degree in law at UC Los Angeles. Sometimes, late at night in the dark recesses of the libraries they would study in, they recalled the long nights spent at their dinner table, pouring over books and rereading paragraphs two or four or twenty times in a row. They would recite the sharp mantras of their father, unconsciously and accidentally, imprinted permanently into their dreams as though they had no choice. It was good that they got good scholarships, because otherwise, Nguyên wouldn’t have been able to send them to such prestigious schools. It was also good, though, that Nguyên Liệu Food and Beverage never succeeded too much. Universities have quotas to fill, and poorer families, the Liệu daughters later came to realize, look better on paper than richer ones.

Nguyên considered starting a new restaurant for years after his first restaurant went out of business; there were huge markets for Vietnamese food elsewhere in the Bay Area. But after thirteen years of boiling hotdogs and frying eggs, he no longer felt confident making the dishes he had eaten and loved as a childhood. Business was fierce in Little Hanoi, and if you weren’t good, nobody bought your food. So they stayed in their apartment in Richmond, watching television soaps during the day and eating quiet dinners at night. Nguyên found a job working at the checkout isle of a large commercial grocery store only a few weeks after filing for Chapter 7, while Huong laundered clothes and learned how to measure chest circumferences and take in suit jackets and trousers. Decades later, long after he had lost the drive to undertake such an endeavor, his hands thin and skeletal and draped with inert curtains of skin, Nguyên considered starting up the business again, starting anew in a new town cooking new foods and meeting new customers. But his vivaciousness had left with his daughters: that quiet hope remained chained to the cave of one’s thoughts that dares not rear its ugly head in public, that is doomed to forever eke out a quiet existence in dark recesses of dreams.

[editline]18th December 2014[/editline]

IN THE HEART OF THE CITY

I was raised by my mother too, in the part of Los Angeles where the white kids don’t grow up. I was beat up a lot, growing up, and it never seemed unusual to me. It was just the way of the world. I hated those kids, hated everybody at that school. Towards the end of the fifth grade, one of the boys hit me with a ball during a lunch recess, a red one used for kickball and basketball and other games. When I was lying on the ground after, touching the swollen part of my neck and trying not to cry, I called him the word my mother used to use to describe the black families across the street from us. He said what did you say to me, and so I said it again, and then I was hit again, this time in the teeth. The teachers didn’t get the boy off of me until two or three minutes later, even though they were only just across the basketball courts when the fight broke out, and by that time I was missing six teeth and had a severe concussion and a broken fibula and tibia. When I was discharged from the hospital four days later, my mother picked me up with her ex-husband’s truck filled with all of our things, and we drove east and didn’t stop until we ran out of gas in New Mexico. That was the first story I told to Maurice when it was my turn to speak.

I had passed Nguyên Liệu Food and Beverage maybe thirty or forty times, but had never even really considered going inside. Walked down Seventeenth on a daily basis for almost three weeks straight nine or ten months back, when a client – Marshall… Marshawn was his name? – wanted to meet on the picnic benches at Chaplain Park. No, he couldn’t have been Marshawn because he was white, with long brown hair in matted dreads dangling down past his shoulder blades. He, Marshall, I mean, wore only denim shorts and flimsy shoes with no socks, even in rain, and his hair looked frightening overlaid against his pale frame, emaciated and inked up. We would meet there at three or four in the morning and stay until the sun would rise. It struck me now, walking south on Market, that one’s appreciation of the nuances of a new city, the trees in the parks and the clothes of strangers and the smells of cheap restaurants, starts to fade from consciousness after only a few short months. Almost dies entirely after a year or two. The fantastic becomes the mundane. In a moment of piercing clarity, I noticed just how repellant the storefront was: the peeling stucco façade, the filth and dead bugs in the window sills, the chipped neon sign – which couldn’t have really been neon, if one thought about it, but probably rather a simple electrical circuit with a series of incandescent bulbs. With the glass chipped like that, the buoyant gas would just dissipate if it was real neon, wouldn’t it?

When I entered the diner, I asked the cashier if a young African American gentleman had come in just recently, and he said yes, that he had, in the back corner near the newspaper rack. The cashier said the man – hắc chủng, he called him – had been in the bathroom for nearly fifteen minutes. He was curious why I wanted to know, but asked no questions: one speaks only the barest minimum of conversation with strangers in neighborhoods like these. I sat down across from the gentleman’s untouched plate of food, a mess of runny eggs and bacon encrusted with the grime of the place, and made myself as comfortable as is possible for somebody of my size in such a small, chintzy chair.
The newspaper next to his plate was unopened and crisp, and probably unread. “Richmond Pulse”. November 18, 2003. Reporting on the heart of the Bay Area since 1933. In the image printed on the front page, two serious men sat across from each other at a heavy wood table, one who looked something like Mayor Dwight C. Jones and another who I didn’t recognize. Richmond police stem rising crime epidemic. Statistics reveal Richmond as second-most deadly city in California. The article argued with an editorial published the day prior in the San Francisco Chronicle over the failure of the drastic measures taken against crime in the city.

One must mentally rehearse dialogue in moments like these, especially if one’s capacity for making good first impressions is stunted, as mine is. Talk about your past, your history. Be genuine, I counseled myself. Clients respond well to genuine. I was running through my stories when he walked up to the table.

In high school, in Little Rock, Arkansas, four years after my mother and I left Los Angeles, I discovered marijuana. I smoked it every day for years, buying it in small plastic bags and little film canisters behind the SuperSavers and the alleys behind the school, in the parks near the library and the public pool. I smoked it in the school bathrooms and the gym locker room, in the fields outside of the city and the asphalt parking lots behind lawyers’ offices and Chick-fil-As. I smoked it because I knew where my mother kept the house savings, in the cardboard box in the bathroom behind the towels and the over the counter medications, and because it was her goddamn fault for leaving it in such an obvious place. We ate bulk-packaged beans and lentils and no vegetables and Jimmy Dean meats for breakfast lunch and dinner, postponed expensive visits to hospitals and dentists, sold the last of our furniture to Goodwill for twenty dollars apiece. This is how we made ends meet. I never once smoked with another person, had nobody to ask and wouldn’t have asked anyways even if the opportunity presented itself. Sometimes I would eat benzodiazepines or barbiturates, but they were expensive, and I had to stretch my funds as far as I could. The year was 1973, and marijuana didn’t expand anybody’s conscious anymore, even high schoolers’. It was just a cheap way to get fucked up.

His name was Maurice, and he was not sober. I had hoped he would be, but knew, knew from three and a half years of experience, that they never were. Maurice hadn’t been using for long though, only a year or two if his mother was to be believed, so I thought it was at least a possibility. As he walked up to the table from behind me, my eyes met his eyes, and they were glazed over, bloodshot and struggling for recognition. His jaw was clenched tight, a seemingly involuntary and purely physiological reaction. He wore a filthy red shirt and large denim jeans, and looked impossibly old for his age: it was hard to believe that he was less than half my own age, only a few years out of high school. He knew I would be here, I could tell from his eyes, or at least that I might have been here. His mother must have told him, he must have still been talking to his mother, which was good information to know. He seemed upset that I knew his haunts.

“Hello. I’m John, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” I stuck my hand out to meet his. “You are, ah, Maurice?” The handshake was not returned, and so I put my hand back between my legs. “Sit down, please. Take a seat.”

Maurice took his seat.

“You the man my momma sent?”

“Yes, Laurene sent me to talk to-”

“How do you know her?” Maurice interrupted. “How do you know Laurene?” His food sat idle between us.

The important thing here, here and now, is to remain calm, dispassionate but not disconnected. Unperturbed. “I run this service, Maurice, it’s like a private business. I have advertisements, in the newspapers. I have an email address. You can trust me, Maurice, I’m legitimate. You’re not the first person I’ve talked to this week.”

Maurice emptied half a bottle of ketchup on his plate, eyes never leaving mine. “Ok, but I don’t want you laying any fingers on my momma, you hear?”

The comment was fascinating, threw me off guard, and it was a long moment before I figured out how to respond. “I hear you, Maurice. I run a legitimate business, a service in exchange for money. You can trust me.”

“So what?” Maurice asked. “We sit here and you tell me what my problems are and I’m supposed to listen and say yeah yeah yeah and then we both go home, you with my momma’s money, and I’m supposed to be cured?”

“It’s not that simple. I just want you to talk about yourself for now. Anything you want, you can focus on anything you want.” Maurice ignored me, eyes now on his plate. He tucked into his potatoes and eggs to fill the silence. “If it makes you feel comfortable, I can talk about myself first. That makes some clients more comfortable.” I had these stories catalogued like in a mental Rolodex by now, told so many times that they were no longer mine, no longer me, but rather fictions imbedded in the community collective conscious. They were not particularly great stories, but they were true, and they served their purpose well. Be genuine, John.

A decade after I last talked to my mother and two dozen jobs later, long after I graduated from William Jefferson Clinton High, I found myself in Las Vegas, Nevada. I worked in the basement periodical section of one of the public libraries in the outskirts of the north side of town, where the fourth-rate strip clubs and liquor stores devolved sharply into a morass of hot sand and tumbleweeds. I had no friends during my sprawling American tour, only the most meager of acquaintances met with the cordial smiles and assumptions of distrust that workers of these kinds of jobs come to know so well. In such times, one can really only find solace in books. Kant and Euclid, Keats and Yeats, Thoreau and Saint Augustine and Thucydides and Homer. The job finally afforded me the time to pursue my passion, and I did so with vigor. There is a magic and a solace to the basements of libraries in cities that have no need for such books. It was there, I explained to Maurice, that I delved into the history of psychology, Maslow, Freud, Skinner, Bandura, earned a self-styled degree in therapy and counseling. I explained to him why I have no license or accreditation, why I run my business out of a cramped bedroom on the seventh story of one of the old project-turned-apartment complexes on the east side of town. I told him how often the elevators were broken, how torturous of the walk the stairwell is, twice a day at least. I told him how much I wanted others to find that same solace too. These are my stories, I told Maurice. If you were to be so kind as to tell me yours, I said, I am all ears.

He asked me if he could buy a coke before we continued, and I said yes, of course. At the cash register, he pulled a bottle of brown liquor from under his waistband, half-filled the Styrofoam Dixie cup with his drink. He was more inebriated than I had thought. His back was to me, he must have thought I couldn’t see him. He took his seat across from me, awkwardly holding the bottle up in his pants with his hand in his pocket.

“Could I have some, Maurice? Bit thirsty.”

He looked up from his drink. “Hey, man you don’t want none of this shit. Ah…”

“There’s free refills, Maurice. What do you care?” A heavy silence sat at the table, thick like molasses. “Look, just give me the goddamned drink, okay?” I grabbed the cup from his half of the table, drank more than half in one long pull, and it felt good, soothing. I put the cup down. “It’s free, Maurice.” He waited. “The whole thing, the whole meeting. I won’t charge your mom a penny, just give me the rum.” Maurice shuffled the bottle out of the crotch of his pants and rolled it, slowly, across the table until it fell into my lap with a dull plastic thud.

I don’t remember exactly what I said then, but I finished the cup before I said another word. The rum was Military Special, bottom shelf hobo liquor. It was $6.99 a bottle back when I was buying it, probably more by the time Maurice bought it. I cracked a joke about Maurice knowing his shit.
“Hey, it’s the only thing cheaper than Sailor Jerry,” he said, chuckling and looking at his feet. His face turned serious for a brief moment. “You drink?”

“Not for six years I haven’t.” I swilled from the bottle again, the warm rum on my lips, and Maurice showed no judgment in his eyes, no contempt, but rather only a simple and final recognition and understanding between two men.

Maurice was born in Mason Dixie, Alabama. Only a twenty minute drive from where I once spent three months working at a gas station on the 104, holed up in a cheap motel reading everything Faulkner ever wrote, twice. He was raised by his mother too, moved to Richmond when he was six or seven when his dad left.

“There wasn’t much to do growing up. I played football and soccer a lot. I helped my momma cook dinners. I worked at that burger joint down on Vernon for a few years, helped pay the bills, you know? But that’s not what you want to hear, is it? That’s not what my momma paid you to listen about.”

He sat pensively, lost in thought. He finished his cup of rum and coke, told me how he hadn’t slept in four days on account of the speed. Hadn’t eaten before this meal since his momma cooked him mashed potatoes and pork cutlets last Tuesday evening, just a few hours before he started up on yet another ride. I could tell that the full weight of the comedown was beginning to bear upon him. Sometimes I want to die, John, he said. He began to stutter. What did my momma say about me, John, he said. John? He scratched at his arms, poured himself more rum, but I had to help him because he was spilling on the table.

“Do you really think I could learn to love them books too?”

The man burst into the restaurant’s double doors with a manic vigor, a lit cigarette hanging out of the corner of his clenched mouth. His eyes were wide, wild with desire. He was skinny, a ripped white shirt dangling from his bony shoulders like a cape, his long greasy hair tied up in a ponytail behind his head.

“Bạn! You can’t smoke that in here! Giao hợp hậu môm, get out of my restaurant!”

He bolted straight to our table, in quick jerky movements, and slapped me hard in the back, an audible thwack that seared up my neck into the back of my head.

“Maurice, Jesus, you’re looking rough man, you look awful. You look like you need some Benzos, you’re crashing hard. Come back to my truck man, I’m loaded. We need some sleep, I’ve been coming down for hours.” He stared down at my eyes. “Who’s this fat sack?” He waited. “Hey, cabrón, who are you? ¿Qué estás haciendo aquí? What’s your deal and why the hell are you talking to my friend?”
Calm down, John, act confidently. I tried to stare back into his eyes, meet his gaze, but he blew smoke into my face and I winced. “Hey, do you hear me? Is anybody home? ¿Hay alguien en casa?” He rapped the knuckles of his fist on my forehead, like a doorknocker. “Ist da jemand zu Hause? Ĉu iu hejme? Eínai kaneís sto spíti ekeí? Je, kuna mtu yeyote nyumbani?” Through the throbbing pain, I recognized only the German and the Greek, but he spoke them impeccably, with a verbal panache that seemed inconceivable. “He’s a mute, Reese, a fucking moron.”

“Bạn! Put out your cigarette and get you and your chết tiệt hắc chủng friend out of here.”

He twisted suddenly, pointing a long untrimmed fingernail at the cashier. He slammed his other fist on the table, sending Maurice’s empty plate skittering across the floor. He screamed, “Eh, tú. chino. Jodido chino!” His face contorted when he yelled, frothing at the mouth. Maurice sat quietly at his table, staring at the man’s feet.

The man stormed over to the register, and then the knife appeared, a long slender little switch with ornate floral patterns in the handle. Nguyên recoiled at the sight of the blade, his back up against the grill. The only other patrons in the diner had left long ago, leaving the four of us alone with our thoughts and our actions. The world slowed, the adrenaline creeping up my spine like so much old fear.

“It’s Nguyên, right? Of Nguyên Liệu Food and Beverage fame?” Nguyên nodded, the knife now at his neck. “Now, what makes you think that I don’t speak Vietnamese, Nguyên? What makes you think,” his voice now rising, suddenly and thunderously like a Samuel L Jackson impersonation, “that you can pull that kind of shit here, and call my good friend, Maurice Lawrence Watson, hắc chủng? Bạn có nghe tôi không?”

Maurice tapped me on the shoulder, his voice a soft whisper. “John, let’s go. The door is right there.” His full body was shaking now, a subtle but impervious tremor that signaled the beginning of his full-blown withdrawal symptoms. “We can make it John, come on.”

I sat there, still reeling in shock. I looked over to Maurice, his eyes pleading, but I didn’t move. I sat there, staring at him, for two seconds, ten seconds, and it struck me that I was drunk. My skin buzzed like static, little pin pricks like needles prodding my arms and my forehead. I couldn’t move. Then there was a scream, muffled and wet. Nguyên was on the ground, behind the register with his head cradled at an impossible angle up against the grill, and the knife was pocketed. Droplets of blood were sprayed across the Formica counter, and the man’s right sleeve was soaked with the violence of the act.

“Reese, let’s dip, I’m waiting.”

“I’m coming, Rico. Give me a minute.”

I whispered, “Maurice!” but he was already up. He vomited as he stood up, his comedown in full swing now. He grabbed the bottle from the table, took a swig, and dropped the bottle to the floor. I listened to the plastic bottle bounce around as Maurice stumbled out of the restaurant, Rico in tow. I caught his eyes through the window as he walked out the door and down the sidewalk, but there was no more recognition. I picked up the bottle off the floor. The cap was open, maybe a third spilled out onto the floor. But there was still some left, maybe four or five shots worth, so I started drinking until there was not much left at all. It would be twenty minutes at least before the police showed up, probably more like forty five. Nguyên, curled up in the corner, his clothes now saturated with himself, was much too much to think about, let alone look at. Ultimately, it was that final flickering gaze, bloodshot and glassy, that occupied the entirety of my thoughts for nearly a full half hour after, alone and drinking another man’s liquor in a cheap diner in the heart of the city.

[editline]18th December 2014[/editline]

ONLY ROAD OUT OF RICHMOND

Nguyên Liệu Food and Beverage was the fourth diner in twenty years to serve out of the dilapidated single-story building on the corner of Seventeenth and Market. Nguyên, like the two owners before him, left everything the way it was after he bought it: the Formica countertops, the plastic patio chairs, the back grill caked with decades of grime that no amount of bleach and scrub brushes could get rid of. He even left an original coffee pot on the burner in the back, a cracked Mr. Coffee drip that would have been retired two decades prior in most other restaurants. It was cheaper that way, to leave things the way they were.

“Over medium. Bacon. The fruit is extra now?”

“Yes. Two dollar.”

“Shit, you’re breaking my balls man. Ok, no fruit. You still have free refills?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, make that a small coffee then.” Nguyên punched more numbers into the register. “No, I said a small coffee. For chrissake, either learn English or send your fucking daughter out next time.” Maurice paid at the counter and slunk to the back corner of the restaurant next to the newspaper rack.

“Richmond Pulse”. November 18, 2003. Reporting on the heart of the Bay Area since 1933. In the image printed on the front page, two serious men sat across from each other at a heavy wood table. Richmond police stem rising crime epidemic. Statistics reveal Richmond as second-most deadly city in California. The article argued at length over the failure of the drastic measures taken against crime in the city. Also, a new playground in Chaplain Park, the Oakland A’s lost their seventh game in a row, and an old lady died in her living room with the stove on. Maurice couldn’t understand why they would go to the effort to build a new playground at the park: kids didn’t go there to play on swings and slides.

When he came back from the bathroom, he was more drunk than he was before. The drinking helped the comedowns, Maurice reckoned. No better way to reenter life after four or five days and nights of useless energy, running around between parked cars and liquor stores at half past four in the morning, than with a big breakfast and a bottle of cheap rum. He figured he hadn’t eaten since his mom cooked him pork cutlets and mashed potatoes last weekend. Was that really four days ago? Seemed longer than that since he’d seen his mom, but it was hard to tell. The days blended together, distinguishable only by degrees of sobriety and the presence of the sun. He kept the bottle tucked inside his jeans, which almost slipped out when he walked up to his table.

A big white man was sitting across the table from Maurice’s steaming plate of food. The man had sweat through his dress shirt, the kind one finds for a dollar fifty in the clearance rack at Goodwill. He was huge, morbid, couldn’t barely even fit in his chair, with a balding head and long wisps of hair sticking out of his shirt on the back of his neck. When Maurice walked around the other side of the table, he got a good look at his face: bloated, round glasses a half inch thick, a week long beard. He wheezed loudly when he breathed. He looked up and Maurice saw that his right eye was grotesquely lazy, staring out and away from his head at the ceiling.

They stared at each other for a long second before the man stuck out his hand. “Hi. I’m John, it’s nice to meet you. Your are, ah, Maurice?” Maurice kept his hands in his pockets. If he took his right hand out, the rum bottle would fall to the floor, and besides, he didn’t want to touch the man anyways. John put his hand back down at his side under the table, and Maurice took his seat.

“You the man my momma sent?” Maurice asked?

This was the third time Laurene had sent somebody to talk to Maurice since he had graduated from high school. She never told him to his face that she had people for him to meet, even though he was at her house at least once a week. Once she left a voicemail on his friend’s home phone, and it rambled on for over four minutes before she finally got to the point