Eleven Twenty-Three (4 page)

“I miss
everything
from back home,”
she yawns. “Did you have a nice rest?”

“It must have been fine. I didn’t wake up
screaming this time.”

“Is that what happened last time?”

“Something like that, yeah,” I say,
suppressing a yawn of my own. “I guess I’m kind of glad to be going
home too.”

“Good,” Tara nods, and we sit in trepidation
as our flight makes its final descent into San Francisco on a
Thursday night we already experienced in an airport in China. When
our plane finally lands I ask Tara if this is reality, if I am
awake, or if it’s yet another one of my pointless dreams.

11:08:12 PM

We make our way through San Francisco
International in a weird somnambulistic trance. It’s not very
crowded this late at night. The food court is empty save a couple
of janitors chatting in Spanish while eating sandwiches. Most of
the terminals are deserted and the vacant leather chairs seem to
weep as we pass on our way to the connecting flight to Orlando.

“It’s too bad we’re not here for a few days,”
Tara says. “I’d like to go back across the Golden Gate again.”

“After the last conversation the four of us
had there a couple of years ago?” I ask incredulously. “I don’t
think so.”

“It’s so dead in here,” she says, looking
around.

“Maybe they’re all jumping off the
Bridge.”

“They close the footpath at night,” she tells
me, and I pause momentarily to imagine a lone faceless man, his
eyes the fog of the Bay, his cheeks red with same-old tears and
final tenacity, as he climbs over an ineffective barrier and
proceeds toward the center of the Golden Gate in cold amorphous
darkness—another forgotten dead man the authorities won’t be able
to add to the bridge’s official scoreboard.

I sigh.

The first time we passed through this
airport, things were different.

I had some small sense of hope and
expectation for the first time since losing my job back in April.
There were people everywhere; they nodded and waited patiently in
the food court for an open table; the seats in the terminals were
filled with travelers reading magazines and listening to their
iPods; there was sound and osmotic waves of electricity coursing
through us all.

Tonight, as Tara and I trudge toward the one
final plane that will take us home again to see my mother, my
friends, and my dead father’s body, the prophetic emptiness of the
airport is stifling, almost terrifying.

“I wish the food court was still open,” Tara
says. “I missed the Lad Na on the plane. Do you think they’ll serve
us food on the last flight?”

“I doubt it, Sunshine. Maybe there will be
something open near our terminal. It’s kind of unnerving in here,
isn’t it?”

“God, I hate how long this ordeal is,” she
sighs. “You know, it’s almost not even worth coming back at the end
of the month.”

I glance over at her, at her tired eyes and
puffy nighttime cheeks, at the disheveled sanguine hair and the
collapsing bun she has it in and then at the black and pink mailbag
she has strapped over her breasts and the wrinkled Interpol t-shirt
and the constricting jeans she is wearing.

And with disturbing clarity I know everything
that will happen between us before December 29, the day we are
supposed to go back.

Once we are home and she settles in with her
family and our collective friends and all the opportunities that
she will have and I will not, Tara will bring up the marriage thing
again. Minutes later, with mascara tears smeared down her cheeks
like a ruined impressionist painting, Tara will storm out of the
room. A couple of weeks after that, my three-year girlfriend will
watch me with unspoken angry resolve as I board another flight back
East. And we both will know that when my plane lands again sometime
in late July, it will be over between us, and all of our future
conversations will be spoken in a language of silent assumptions
and great physical distance.

During this lucid moment in a half-deserted,
murmuring airport, I have no doubt what kind of non-future my
partner and I will soon face. What really troubles me is that I
can’t make myself care as much as I know I should.

Just as we are about to pass one of the men’s
bathrooms and I decide to excuse myself, Mr. Scott emerges, walking
at a very brisk pace. We momentarily make eye contact and I smile a
greeting. But when I see his cold blank expression and his obvious
intentions, I realize that the man we spoke to only hours ago on
the opposite side of the planet is now a total stranger.

“Hey,” Tara exclaims, just recognizing him,
“long time no see—”

Mr. Scott passes within ten feet of us,
heading in the opposite direction. He does not wave, nod, or even
hesitate in his trek.

“Um…okay,” my girlfriend stammers. “Yeah,
that’s fine. That’s cool.”

I stop and turn to watch him hurry away.

“Maybe something happened,” I suggest
quietly. “Maybe something bad came up and he’s upset. Maybe he was
drunk at the bar and doesn’t remember us.”

“Yeah, well maybe he’s just an asshole,” Tara
says.

“That’s possible too, I suppose.”

And that is when I notice it.

Just as he rounds a corner and disappears, I
see that the briefcase he had attached to his wrist back in
Shanghai is now gone.

08:34:34 AM

Our plane arrives in a rainy, pensive Orlando
sometime around 8:15 in the morning. We take the tram back into the
baggage claim area, now teeming with Disney-venturing tourists
wearing tacky sunny clothes and wielding seething vampire children
on each arm.

We left some things behind at our apartment
in Suzhou—not so much Tara but definitely me—and each of us have
two suitcases apiece along with the shopping bag I carried onto the
plane and the mailbag Tara has been wielding for almost twenty-four
hours now. I left my CDs, about three dozen bootleg DVDs, our wok,
the George Foreman grill, the bedding, the oil painting of Guilin,
thirty or so knick-knacks worth about fifteen American dollars,
some unnecessary clothes that make me look awkward, that cologne I
never wear, and our subscription to the
China Daily
that
will now pile up outside our front door for the next three weeks.
Tara left a dreadful pink blouse, some leopard print panties with a
small hole near the crotch, and two unflattering, saggy bras
behind. She has nothing invested in returning.

After collecting our luggage we head outside
into a gray, humid morning and wait for Hajime to pick us up. Tara
and I smoke cigarettes that help us forget our hunger and the
encroaching conversations we will have once we get back to Lilly’s
End.

I wince and consider the prospect of having a
total breakdown.

Florida—the nation’s awkward dangling
appendage—is just a goddamned terrible place to return to. It
always was. It rains almost incessantly and yet always seems to be
in the midst of a mysterious drought of Ethiopian proportions. The
only Chinese anyone knows involves a buffet line, and the only
questions they know to ask us will concern edible cats and the
One-Child Policy. The old people stagger about, reduced to zombies
of the grocery store lines and early morning mall walks. This time
of year, the beach is cold, the sand is damp and crystalline, and
the sharks are out there waiting patiently should we ever choose to
finally make our escape into the Atlantic. Here, I’m just another
lecherous ex-teacher lucky enough to be omitted from the current
sex offenders list.

Hajime shows up in his Vibe twenty-eight
minutes later. He parks at the curb and jumps out of his car to
greet us. This is the longest Hajime and I have been apart in the
eleven years or so that I have known him, and he is taller now than
I remember him being back in August. As usual, he is wearing one of
his patented black t-shirts from the Disinformation catalogue and
jeans with holes intentionally carved out at the knees. His
sunglasses hide his eyes and accentuate his pale Japanese skin.
That idiotic black jelly bracelet still encircles his right wrist.
He’s grown a tiny goatee that I will convince him to shave before I
return to China.

“If it isn’t the Sick Men of Asia
themselves,” he bursts. “Give me a fucking hug, for god’s
sake.”

He gives Tara a long squeeze coupled with a
brittle kiss on the cheek, and then moves on to me. I wrap my arms
around him and am relieved by his sudden arrival and unchanged
histrionic demeanor.

“Thanks for picking us up,” I say, smelling
the back of Hajime’s neck, his jet-black hair, his confident
aura.

“No problem,” he says. “Sorry about your dad,
man.”

“It’s not much of an issue. Pop your trunk,
bro. Let’s get out of here.”

“No welcome-home kiss first?” Hajime asks me.
“Your loss. Just push the meth supplies out of the way back there
and you guys should have plenty of room.”

I glance back at him and raise my
eyebrows.

“Kidding, bro. I live in the South but I’m
not
that
Southern.”

Tara places her things in the trunk and
pushes them over to save room for my duffel bag and the blue
suitcase I bought just before we left four months ago. I grab my
duffel and feel something hard just at the top of it. This is
interesting, since all I threw in there were clothes and a few
folders and some small knick-knacks for my mom and Hajime.

A flash: cold gray steel rubbing against
wood; the clinking of a roulette wheel; sweat dripping down my
forehead; misgivings; a psychic moment.

“Hey, Sunshine,” I say. “What did you pack
into my black bag before we left? Your make-up case?”

“I didn’t pack anything in there,” she says.
“My make-up is in the big suitcase. Why do you ask?”

“Hold on a minute,” I say. “I’ve got to check
something.”

“Did you two let a terrorist borrow your bag
for five minutes or something?” Hajime asks, having no idea.
“Didn’t you two incorrigible Americans listen to the voice at the
airport warning you
not
to do that?”

“Normally what you said would be funny,” I
murmur, and hunch over at the curb and unzip my duffel. “But it’s
not funny now…”

I peer inside just as the oxygen is sucked
out of my body and Orlando momentarily ceases to exist.

“I’m not even sure how to deal with this one,
guys,” I say, clenching my eyes shut.

Inside my bag, resting comfortably on the top
of my dirty shirts and crusty jeans and wrinkled slacks and about
thirty cheap postcards of the canals in Suzhou, is a black leather
Schlesinger American Belting attaché case, four-and-a-half inches
deep, eighteen-and-three-quarters by thirteen-and-one quarter inch
in size. There’s a piano hinge in the back, nickel plating, and
double combination locks. Emerging seamlessly from the handle plate
of the case is a three-foot metal coil with an unlocked steel
handcuff at the end.

I thought I was returning home early this
Christmas for nothing more than one funeral, one uncomfortable
dinner with my mother, and two or three long conversations with
friends and family I didn’t want to have back in August and become
nauseous with the thought of now. I considered the possibility of
finally having to endure Tara’s climactic final break-up with me,
and then the unavoidable drawn-out aftermath.

But it was not until now, in this moment
outside a muggy gray airport, that I reach that place, a place of
sadness and dread.

A place where I am afraid.

Document Two

“When every eleven twenty-three heralds
mayhem under a veil of hellish smog, and every eulogy spawns a
funeral at the precipice of the still point.”

Lilly’s End, Florida

Population at 11:00 AM EST on Friday,
December 7, 2007: 4,181

“Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw indeed
no living object, heard no living sound, we found the same void,
the same silence...As we should have expected before the entombed
gates of Pompeii or Herculaneam a complete eternal silence reigns
in the town, on the highways, in the country...the tomb of a whole
people.”

- Alphonse de Lamartine,
Le Voyage en
Orient

“Where we are,

There’s daggers in men’s smiles; the nea’er
in blood,

The nearer bloody.”

- William Shakespeare,
Macbeth

“The only true dead are those who have been
forgotten.”

- Old Jewish saying

[
TIME
UNDETERMINED
]

I am afraid.

When I finally awake from a dreamless
post-flight nap, I find that I have no idea where I am or what I’m
doing or why I feel so sick with misgivings and regret that I came
home. Reverse culture shock, maybe. One of our co-teachers warned
me about the phenomenon, and told me that the first time he
returned to England after having lived in Jinan for a year, his
sudden ability at the airport to read the billboards and posters
and understand
everything
the people around him were saying
sent him into a panic, and he spent his entire first week back home
hiding out in his old bedroom, terrified of everything familiar and
absolutely certain that if he went outside, he would die and so
would everyone else.

The room I’m in now is dark and Tara sleeps
soundly next to me. She feels lifeless when I touch her and so I do
not touch her anymore. Instead, I take in my surroundings. There
are stuffed animals piled up around a baby rocking chair in one
corner of the room. A jubilant, soft-looking yellow frog takes me
in good-naturedly from behind two cute koalas and a monkey. There
is a Cold War Kids poster to my left, and a corkboard full of
photographs next to a small desk littered with old bills and
Hallmark cards with inspirational Frost and Angelou quotes etched
across pictures of promising roads and living forests. Outside of
this room, I can hear a minor susurrus of squeaky laughter,
Miranda’s suicide-inducing conversation, and the jabbering of
someone on
Hogan Knows Best
. I sigh, realizing I must be in
Tara’s house on Flint Street.