Eleven Twenty-Three (5 page)

Since we left, Tara’s once-rich parents have
managed to pay Tara’s third of the rent so that Tara’s roommates
Julie and Miranda could keep the house and Tara and I would have a
place to return to should Suzhou not work out as planned. I was
already losing my apartment back in August when we signed our
contracts with Soochow University, and everything I own is now
packed away into a small storage room on the far north side of town
or crammed into the trunk of my Honda Accord parked in Tara’s back
yard.

Through the blinds and dusty lace curtains
come thin floating lines of color from the traffic light outside. I
spend some minutes depersonalizing myself, wishing I was the
traffic light out there. I can see its changing red, green, and
occasionally yellow glow draped across the bare white wall by the
window. For one brief moment, as I lie in Tara’s bed and catch
tinted glimpses of random friends’ faces on the corkboard whenever
cars pass in the half-night, I want nothing more than to be just
another traffic light standing sentinel to the approaching
evening.

I stare at Tara’s naked back while rubbing at
the dried film left on my penis from the sex earlier today. The
tattoo on her shoulder, which is of a ferocious oriental dragon
coiled around a serene fairy, troubles me, and I go back to staring
at the green and yellow and red that paints the wall the color of
dusk.

When we left the airport today, Tara and
Hajime and I had an early, frantically conversational lunch at a
Jewish sandwich shop near Church Street in Orlando. I went outside
three times to smoke a cigarette, but it kept getting drops of rain
on it and burning out. Hajime asked us lots of questions, about
China, about the Chinese, about teaching and money and how the food
was and our collective stomach flu experiences while living abroad.
Tara asked him lots of questions back, about Hajime’s sister
Mitsuko and her now-husband Mark Conet, about Jasmine’s new
boyfriend Michael, about drug experiences and the weather and how
the art and surveillance cameras were going.

“Why aren’t you talking, bro?” Hajime asked
me as he finished his club sandwich. “Is it that post-travel
anxiety thing?”

“Kind of,” I said. “Sorry.”

Not much time passed before Hajime and Tara
launched into their usual mealtime political debates. Tara pointed
out that at least with the attacks on September 11, assuming
Hajime’s inside job theory was even
true
, the men behind the
atrocity had accountability to attend to. The deaths appeared to be
reduced as much as possible. The tragedy was then played off as a
terrorist plot hatched by angry foreign extremists, and in the end
Americans only wound up loving their nation
more
for it.

“Well, for a while, anyway,” Hajime threw
in.

Tara posited that at least in America, there
was a veil to hide the ugly truth from the world that day, and
because of that veil, there has been an unprecedented show of
brotherhood and a unified, fervent xenophobia ever since. It’s like
Woodstock, if Woodstock was backed by oil barons and war profiteers
and instead of dancing in the mud, attendees splashed around in
their own middle class blood.

“But this domestic past-tense event is very
different from the situation in Myanmar,” Tara said. “It’s a
nowhere country unpronounceable by most and unidentifiable on a map
by others. The entire infrastructure there is collapsing under an
oppressive military junta that gobbles up
eighty-nine
percent
of the annual GDP every year, and virtually nothing is
done by the world at large. Innocent people, among them Buddhist
monks whose only crime is marching in peaceful protest along the
streets of Yangon, are unabashedly executed every day. The Karen,
Shan, and Karenni minority groups are systematically slaughtered,
but there’s no Don Cheadle movie to bring American attention to it,
so they’ll more than likely be forgotten before ever being
remembered in the first place.

“Starving children, sweat shops, slave labor,
human trafficking, rape used as a weapon—”

“Sounds like a party,” Hajime laughed. “And I
do like my parties.”

“If you weren’t such a lame post-millennium
Weatherman
wannabe
, you’d care more about this, Hajime.”

“Nice history drop, Sunshine,” I said, my
interest briefly piqued.

“Burma is a veritable buffet line of human
rights violations, and what’s most important to remember is that
these atrocities are not footnotes of the distant past or even the
byproducts of yet another blasé
coup d’etat
, but preventable
terrors transpiring right here in the present moment.”

I sipped my drink and thought about the
briefcase in Hajime’s trunk.

“Hajime, you’ll never un-bomb the Towers,” my
girlfriend insisted. “However, you
can
do something for the
Burmese now, and should.”

“But what economic interests do we have
there
?” he asked, sipping from a bottle of green tea. “My
point is that Myanmar or Burma or whatever you want to call it
definitely needs
somebody’s
help, but unless they’re willing
to be raped of all their natural resources and turned into another
Starbucks location, they’re better off getting their help
elsewhere—from the United Nations and a little aid from the
International Court of Justice, maybe? Besides, America definitely
has
enough
shit on its mind right now. You do realize that
our economy is destined to crash in the next, say, eleven months,
right? At
most
. Capitalism as we know it will never see
2009.”

I stifled a yawn and escaped before they
asked me to choose a side. It was actually refreshing though to
hear Hajime get passionate about some tragedy other than Myanmar,
as I had been hearing Tara blathering on about Tatmadaw and
slaughtered villagers for the past five months and was ready for a
new cause to shrug off.

After lunch, Hajime drove us the
hour-and-a-half back to Lilly’s End. Once on A1A I stared at signs
for Daytona and Cocoa Beach, for surf shops and roadside curios and
an attraction featuring the Florida skunk ape. Then we were heading
over the St. John’s River, through marshlands and thick woods. The
rain finally stopped and the sun peeked out from behind retreating
gray clouds. Two jets soared high above our heads, leaving long
thick vapor trails in a crisscross pattern before disappearing
silently into the atmosphere.

When we came to the old gas station that had
burnt down two summers ago, I knew we were home, and I lit a
cigarette in symbolic salutation.

The End was as we had left it: in a deep,
rainy slumber. The matching granite fountains downtown were turned
off. There were ragged holes in some of the awnings at the store
entrances from a minor hurricane that swept through in October. Old
couples slouched along Main Street, eyeing us contemptuously. I
waved to one of the sleepy-eyed town cops in his wrinkled
sand-colored uniform when we passed him and Andre, the owner of
Bill’s Burgers, chatting on the sidewalk bordering Massachusetts
Avenue and Courtney Park. When we drove by Kennedy High School and
the muddy P.E. field, I glimpsed permanently tanned beach girls (I
thought one of them was Olivia for a split second, until I realized
she would never be caught dead out there on a rainy football
field), afraid to sit down on the wet bleachers. There were slimy
guys kicking a disgusting soccer ball back and forth. Then there
were rows and rows of houses without yards, complexes of condos and
half-finished hotels that bore the names of the animals or flowers
or shells or indigenous peoples that were dislocated in order for
the structures to be built in their honor.

According to Hajime, the population of
Lilly’s End still hovered somewhere around three thousand, four or
five now that it was winter and all the dissipating, elderly New
Englanders had migrated south to wreak havoc.

I saw sandwich shops and pizza parlors with
pseudo-ethnic names on the doors; boutiques that catered to old
women with missing eyebrows and too much make-up; surf shops and
beachwear stores that would be out of business before February;
Coquina Shores, my mother’s apartment complex, where by now she was
most likely already on her first glass and in the middle of
watching some random show on Real TV while doting on her cats but
hating everything else; and on the north side of town, just before
making our turn toward Tara’s house, we passed the dug up pit where
the post office was scheduled to be erected, now covered in huge
blue tarps and marked with orange NO TRESPASSING signs. We had seen
and half-dismissed from memory everything the town had to offer in
less time than it took for me to finish my cigarette. Beyond the
immolated gas station on the southern tip, there were only
mangroves and marshland, stingrays and coarse-sand beaches. Just
past the post office at the other end, fishy docks and a pier where
one of Tara’s friends was once raped, and where a man named Abraham
Tyson penned the town name a long time ago.

Tara told Hajime the story about the
briefcase. I simply nodded to most of her regaling and added, “I
know, it’s crazy,” and then, “No, that’s really what happened,”
when appropriate.

“So what now then?” he asked, pulling me out
of the trance I was undergoing.

“What do you mean?” I said, lighting another
cigarette and rolling down the window.

“I mean, what are you going to do with the
briefcase he stuffed into your bag?”

“Yeah, Layne,” Tara echoed. “What are you
going to do now?”

I considered the question for a moment.

“Well, I guess I’m going to call the police
and tell them what happened. This guy Scott, or whatever his real
name is, would have had to break into our bags somewhere in San
Francisco. Either that or paid someone off to plant the case in
there. Our luggage was tagged with all of our information, you
know. It could have been done.”

“You’re going to call the police and just
give them the briefcase?” Hajime asked incredulously. “You mean you
don’t want to know what’s inside it at least a
little
bit?”

“No, I don’t. For all we know it may be a
bomb or something.”

“I don’t think so,” Tara said. “Remember what
you told me back in Shanghai, Layne? You said that he would never
be able to get a bomb past airport security. Remember? So maybe
Hajime is right. Maybe you should open it. I have to admit, I am
more than a tad bit curious.”

“There’s no—fucking—way,” I said, inhaling
furiously on my cigarette. “If it’s not a bomb, it could very well
be full of some kind of, like, exotic flesh-eating bacteria or
nuclear secrets or something. I could be getting set up to
unwittingly play a role in some terrorist plot, Tara.
Whatever
it is, all radical political statements aside,
tomorrow morning I’m turning it into the police and calling the
airline and forgetting about it. That’s it.”

“Tomorrow morning?” Hajime asked. “Isn’t your
dad’s funeral tomorrow morning?”

“Oh,” I said. “Well,
after
the funeral
I’m going to, anyway.”

Hajime dropped us off at the old yellow house
Tara and her friends had leased amid four or five more hugs. He
promised that he’d see us tonight, since he was having our friends
over anyway and they couldn’t wait to see us, which I kind of
thought was at least in part a lie. I told him that we would try to
make it, that Tara and I had dinner with our respective families at
seven and it would have to be later, and asked if Mitsuko would be
there.

“It’s tentative,” he said. “But the rest of
them are a definite. Have you ever heard of Bohemian Grove? No?
Well then I’ve got to tell you about it tonight.”

And then he left.

Tara and I carried our bags inside her empty
house. I held my duffel bag with great unease, and quickly placed
it in the tiny garage out back while Tara made calls to her family.
Before I left the duffel and its contents in the dark, I unzipped
it and contemplated the briefcase tucked away inside for a long
time. Finally, I reached down and tried to open it, but
predictably, it was locked. Then I held the unlatched handcuff in
my palm, fingering the steel as if it would somehow provide me with
an answer. Instead I became queasy and quickly snatched up my
duffel, left the briefcase on the floor, and vacated the garage
without looking back. Tara and I both showered. I made a call on
Julie’s phone to my mother to confirm that we were home and that I
would be at her condo by seven, and then had my cell turned back on
by the phone company. I went outside to the back yard, pulled off
the blue tarp, and revved up my Accord to make sure it was still
running. Julie (not Miranda, though) promised to drive it and
Tara’s Cavalier around every once in a while to keep the battery
from dying. It gurgled smoke from the muffler and shimmied and
shook before finally kicking to life and running hesitantly, which
was enough for me at that point. I finally went inside the droopy
yellow house and Tara and I had sleepy welcome home sex and passed
out on her bed.

I thought of Mitsuko when we did it.

“Sunshine,” I say into Tara’s ear as she
struggles to awake. “I’ve got to get ready for my mom’s. Do you
hear me right now?”

“I’m…getting there,” she whispers, and rolls
away from me again. “I’m in the middle of a happy dream, sweetie.
Come back in fifteen minutes.”

“You’ve got to get ready for your parents’
dinner too. Wake up.”

“But I’m dreaming still…”

“What are you dreaming?” I ask, sitting up
beside her and lighting a cigarette. I glance out through the
blinds and realize that the traffic light outside already means
nothing to me.

Three minutes pass before Tara says
anything.