A Paper Son (11 page)

“To the shed?”

“To China.”

Henry nods. “There's more paper at school,” he says. “I can get some if you need it.”

Rose smiles. “Then I won't have to write so small,” she says. Henry crawls over and peers at the sheet, one side of which is already covered in his sister's tiny handwriting. “Do you want me to read it to you?” she asks him.

Henry's face lights up, and Rose smiles. She remembers how much Henry loved their collection of books back in California. He would sit with them on the floor for hours. Rose pulls the sheet from the bucket and settles herself against the wall with her legs folded and her brother pressed closely to her side. It is too dark for her to make out the words now, though, so she begins to recite from memory. She tells him as much as she can remember before they hear their mother's voice calling for them. Rose retrieves the little bundle of supplies, slips the sheet back into it, and ties the cords. “We'll come back tomorrow,” she whispers.

“Hey Mr. Long,” Kevin said to me, upon entering the classroom the following Monday. “Did you know it's been raining for fourteen days in a row?”

“No,” I said, “but that sounds about right.”

“It
is
right. I was wondering something. Where does all that water come from?”

“Duh,” said Eliza. “The clouds.”

“But how does it get into the clouds?”

“It evaporates from the ocean,” Eliza said.

“Yeah, but what part?”

“All the parts. It doesn't matter.”

“It does matter,” he said. “We have all this extra water here, so that means somewhere, some fishies are missing a lot of their water.”

“That's dumb,” Eliza said.

“That's not how we respond to one another's ideas in this classroom,” I said.

“The fishies don't think it's dumb,” Kevin said, and stuck his tongue out at her.

The bell rang. I opened with a lesson on the word “myself.” That morning I'd been watching the news in my apartment as I dressed, and an interviewee was talking about his flooded basement apartment. “And who lives there?” the reporter asked. “Myself and my roommate,” was the answer. I cringed and vowed to bring up reflexive pronouns with my young language guardians that day. I ran through that and then during the first recess, with Franklin Nash entertaining my room-bound kids, I slipped out of my room and headed for the bathroom and the photocopier. Hanging from my shoulder was my bag, and inside it was my folder of mazes. With no possibilities for dodge ball in the local forecast, I needed all the indoor activities I could muster. The photocopier was churning out copies of my second original when Annabel appeared.

“So thanks for breaking my heart,” she said. She lifted her bag onto a nearby table and patted it, as if it contained the broken pieces.

“I think it was you who turned down my dinner invitation,” I said.

“That's right, I did, didn't I? Well, we're even, then.” She pulled out a couple of books and laid them on the table. “I was referring to Li-Yu and her poor kids,” she said. I must have looked startled, because she laughed, and then she said, “Are you that surprised to find you have readers?”

“I guess I am,” I said. “I didn't know anybody read anymore. You really read that?”

“I can't believe you just dispatched Bing like that. I mean, sure, maybe he deserved it, but what a nightmare for Li-Yu and those kids. I'd ask you what happens next, but I'm sure you wouldn't tell me, and I think I'd be disappointed if you did anyway.” She continued to talk about the story, but suddenly I couldn't understand what she was saying. Something was wrong; something wasn't fitting together. And then I realized—I hadn't submitted that installment yet. The first draft was still sitting in its folder on my computer. And then I thought of Eva, sitting at my desk and reading my story. On my laptop where my e-mail program resided, perpetually open and active.

Annabel had finished talking, and was now looking at me, expectantly. I think she had just asked a question.

“Sorry, what did you say?” I said.

“Autographs,” she said.

“Where did you get these?”

“Franklin told me to be on the lookout for them,” she said, handing a pair of journals to me. “He said you'd be too modest to mention them yourself. Everything okay?”

On one, the familiar girl with the empty face stared at me. The photograph on the other journal was a shot of a gray tombstone on an overcast day, black Chinese characters carved deep into the stone. Some flowers, drained of their colors, wilted in an attached glass vase half-full of black water. I opened it to the table of contents. There were a handful of poems, as in the first journal. There was an excerpt from someone's memoir. And there was the second chapter of my story. I flipped to it and skimmed. It was exactly as I'd written it.

“I hope you won't mind if I comment on your bio,” Annabel said, “but I'm not sure if coy is your thing.”

I hadn't sent them a bio. They had never asked for one. I'd never heard anything from them at all. I fanned through the journal and found a listing of contributors and their bios on the final page. Mine read: “Peregrine Long might be a San Francisco writer.”

“Can I borrow this?” I said.

***

Immediately after the last bell rang I vacated my classroom, bypassing with mumbled apologies three or four parents who were hoping to have a word with me, and trotted home through the storm. Eva was sitting at my desk, at my computer. The lights were off and the glow from the monitor made her look ghostly.

“Not exactly the patient type, are you?” I said.

“What's that?”

I flicked on the light and crossed the room. “So this came to my attention today,” I said. I tossed the second copy of
The Barbary Quarterly
onto the desk. It slid past a bowl, which contained a half-eaten baked potato, and bumped into her elbow.

She looked at it for some time, and then traced the characters on the tombstone with the tip of her finger. “I thought quarterly meant once every three months,” she said.

“Good point,” I said, “but that's not what I meant.” I retrieved the journal and thumbed through the pages, searching for my story.

She picked up her dish with the potato and held it in a cupped hand, under her chin like a rice bowl. “What's this about patience, now?” she said.

I found my story, bent the spine back so it would stay open, and dropped it in front of her. “This,” I said. “I don't get it.”

“What are you talking about?” she said, prying loose a chunk of potato, rather casually I thought. “You don't get what?”

“Why you would send this in! Despite our arrangement, there are some boundaries here, you know.”

“I didn't send anything anywhere,” she said. She shook salt into her potato, sniffed it, gave it another dash. “Why would I do that?”

“I need to see that,” I said, pointing to my computer.

“It's yours,” she said. “You don't need my permission.”

I pulled my laptop out from under her and took it to the couch. She'd been browsing through a page of obituaries. I hid her window, found my e-mail program, and steered the arrow toward the sent mail folder. There was nothing with the journal's address from the last couple of days. When had I written that chapter, exactly? Wednesday night? Thursday? What was today's date? I looked around for the flier, but it wasn't on my desk where I'd left it. I scrolled back through the previous week's e-mails but I didn't see anything.

“So you're accusing me of what, exactly?” Eva asked, jabbing her fork back into her potato.

I kept searching. There was my first submission—nothing besides that. This wasn't making any sense, and I said so. Eva didn't respond. She watched me, the sound of her chewing suddenly obnoxious, too noisy. Where was that flier? I looked under the desk, and then under the table. Had I put it away somewhere? I searched the coffee table, the shelves, any obvious place I might have set it in an absentminded moment. I looked through my desk drawers and found nothing; an Internet search was equally fruitless. I even called 411, something I hadn't done in years. I was a little surprised when someone answered. The operator made small talk about the weather as she searched her system. I got the feeling she hadn't spoken to anyone in a while. But she couldn't give me information on
The Barbary Quarterly,
either. I reached for my phone and scrolled to Franklin Nash's name.

Eva appeared in the kitchen doorway. “I have a theory,” she said.

I held up my hand, pointed at the phone. Franklin answered on the second ring.

“Peregrine!” he said. “How can I help you?”

“That flier you gave me, for
The Barbary Quarterly
. Where did you say you found it?”

“Pier 23. I'm enjoying your story, by the way. I'm sorry I haven't had the opportunity to mention it to you yet.”

“Thank you,” I said. “What, was it sitting on the bar or something?”

“No, not at the restaurant. Next door, just near the entrance to the warehouse. Tacked to a bulletin board.”

“You were at the warehouse?” I said.

“Passing by,” he said. “My eyes are always open.”

I thanked him, hung up, and checked the time. It wasn't quite four o'clock. Pier 23 wasn't far—maybe a five-minute drive. It was a long shot, but it was all I had. Eva watched me don my raincoat. “You're going somewhere?” she said.

“Looking for something,” I said.

Outside the rain hammered on the sidewalk, the parked cars, the mailboxes and the leafless trees. I drove through it and tried to figure out how things would end with Eva. What would she do when I failed to conjure her uncle Henry from out of my pages? Would I eventually just make something up about him? Would she believe me, and just go away? I didn't think so. She had a shitty poker face and her reaction to my last batch of pages told me she knew a lot more than she was admitting. I wasn't going to be able to just write a chapter about how he'd run away to join the circus and lived happily ever after.

I made my way to Bay Street and headed east. Wide brown rivers littered with flotsam churned through the gutters. The road dropped out of the hills and into the city's flat skirt where ponds stood in the intersections, their surfaces riotous. On the Embarcadero, rush hour traffic inched through the rain. A street car clattered down the median, its steel wheels hissing on the wet tracks. I found a parking spot a block from Pier 23 and crossed over to the wide sidewalk that ran along the boulevard's outer edge. On sunny weekends it would have been clogged by joggers, strollers, tourists on bicycle taxis, but today it was barren. The huge warehouse door at Pier 23 was open, but it was quiet inside. Spheres of yellow tungsten light shrank and dulled as they receded into the building's cavernous depths, where endless rows of loaded pallets towered two and three stories high.

The bulletin board was on the wall, on the far side of the doorway. Tacked to it was a flier identical to the one Franklin had brought me, a single pin stuck through it, yellow dye bleeding from its bottom edge and streaking down the cork board. It was barely legible, but I could just make out an address—1326 Grant Street. The flier would have turned to mush in my pocket so I committed the address to memory and then, without really planning to, I stepped into the dark warehouse. In its front corner stood a two-story structure made of modified, stacked shipping containers that looked as though they might house offices. Its door stood open and a weak light leaked out of the windows along the top level. From somewhere inside the building came the sound of chair legs scraping on a floor. I stopped and strained to listen, but no other sounds came to me. I stepped through the door, hoping I might find someone who knew about the flier. Just enough light trickled down the stairway to reveal an office that looked like any other warehouse office might—a scuffed linoleum floor, desks covered in papers, clipboards hanging from screws in the walls, shelves full of binders with printed spines, a layer of grime over all of it. With my heart rate rising and my breath held, I circled around the room, looking things over, reading labels, looking at the headings on papers.

There was one computer in the office, circles of dirt in the indentations of its keys. The clipboards held documents for shipping and receiving—signatures, dates and times, weights, quantities, origins and destinations. On the wall hung a calendar that featured women in bikinis and power tools. There was no reference to the
Quarterly
anywhere.

I headed for a stairway, where a once-red strip of carpet ran up the middle of the plywood stairs, its center blackened by traffic, its edges the color of wine. It was strangely silent—the traffic outside, the streetcars, even the rain had quieted. I began to doubt I'd heard the scraping of that chair. I climbed slowly and at the top I turned and entered a long dim hallway whose sides were lined with doorways, all closed but for the last one. I approached, straining to catch sounds, and leaned into the weak yellow light. I caught a taste of machine oil.

It was a workshop, far larger than I expected, and it looked as though it had been brought there from an earlier century. Squat low machines of greased steel filled the bulk of the room, bristling with cogs and levers and rollers and spindles. Everywhere around them stood wooden tables, holding wooden racks and boxes, all of them stained black. Against a back wall leaned wide long rolls of paper, and when I noticed the arrangements of carved metal letters laid out in the racks on the tables I realized it was a printing press—over a hundred years old, I guessed, but evidently still in use.

Only then did I see the women. There were four of them, hunched over a square table in the dark far corner of the room, studying something by the light of a small fixture on the wall above them. They brought their hands together in the middle of the table and a soft clattering sound, like rocks tumbling beneath the recession of a wave, rolled toward me. It was the mixing of mahjong tiles, a sound I'd heard in the parks and cafés in and around Chinatown.