Chapter 2: His First Encounter

Soy Sauce

The cut was gone by morning.

Lian stood at the bathroom mirror with his thumb turned to the light and waited for the sting. The pain stayed away. The skin had closed as clean as the inside of his wrist, without a scab or a seam. Last night the same spot had burned down to the bone.

He pressed the pad with his forefinger. Under the pressure it stayed a thumb.

He told himself that was good news and shut off the tap he had forgotten was running.

For two days he stayed out of the basement, and he had a solid excuse. Upstairs still held forty boxes of house. He taped them, labeled them, and stacked them in the hall, and every one he sealed went up like a small alibi.

On the second morning Dad caught him at the top of the basement stairs with a toolbox in one hand.

"Help me get the water heater loose before the movers come."

"I wasn’t doing anything."

"Didn’t say you were." Dad was already going down. "Come on."

Lian followed. The cold met him three steps from the bottom, and the smell rose with it. Stone, rust, old newsprint. He held the flashlight while Dad lay on his back under the water heater and cursed the pipe fittings in two languages.

"Wrench. No, the other one. The ugly one."

Lian passed tools and kept his eyes on his father’s hands. Black knuckles, a bandage gone gray at the edges, a wedding ring worn smooth as a river stone.

At the back of the room the book sat on the crate where he had left it. He aimed the light everywhere else. Dad kept his back to that corner, and Lian was glad of it and chose not to ask himself why.

The heater tore loose with a groan of scale and old water. Dad sat up grinning through the grime.

"Twelve years that thing beat me."

"Congratulations."

"Your grandfather would’ve had it out in ten minutes." Dad wiped his palm on his jeans. "Don’t tell him I said that."

"He’s dead, Dad."

"He’d still hear about it."

That afternoon Jun dumped a stack of paperbacks beside Lian, who was packing the shelf.

"You’re doing it backwards. Heaviest on the bottom."

"That’s not a real system."

"It’s my system. I invented it."

Jun kept passing books. Then, out of nowhere, he reached for Lian’s hand, as he used to when they crossed streets as kids.

Lian’s arm snapped back. A paperback hit the floor. His fist had closed before he decided to close it, and his nails had cut small half-moons into his palm.

Both of them looked at the book.

"Okay," Jun said. His voice had gone small. "That was fast."

"I didn’t mean to." Lian picked it up. His hand looked ordinary again. He could not have said what he expected Jun to see.

Jun let it go. He passed over the rest of the books one at a time, carefully, as if each might go off.

By the fifth day the house looked half abandoned. Furniture stood in the middle of the rooms. Pale squares marked the carpet where the couch and the shelves had been. The movers were coming at the weekend.

At dinner Jun was still arguing about who would get the top bunk in the new house, in a bed Mom had never agreed to buy.

For days his food had arrived on his tongue as weight and heat, with the flavor missing.

Tonight the chicken was different.

He lifted a piece and the meat split into long pale threads. It smelled fine. It looked like every chicken his mother had ever cooked. His stomach lurched anyway, hard enough that he put the chopsticks down and gripped the table edge until it passed.

"You good?" Jun asked, already going after the piece Lian had dropped.

"Not hungry."

Mom glanced at him and turned back to the pan. He knew that glance. She was filing it. She would ask him later, when Jun was out of the room.

After dinner she sent him out for soy sauce. The good kind, in the glass bottle. The corner store was a few minutes away if he cut through the lot behind the old laundromat, and he did, because he always did.

At the mouth of the lot his feet slowed. He told himself he was being stupid and kept going.

The lot was empty at dusk. Weeds pushed up through the cracked asphalt. The laundromat vent breathed out warm air that smelled of dryer sheets. The streetlight flickered once, then again.

In the flicker he saw her.

A woman sat against the laundromat wall with her knees pulled to her chest and her face turned toward the fence. He gave her the short glance a stranger gets and kept walking.

Three steps later he heard the crying.

The sound held one pitch, level and long, with no gap in it where a person would breathe.

He stopped.

"Hey. You okay?"

She turned her head toward him slowly, as if his voice had reached her from a long way off.

Her eyes were red. A bright track ran down one cheek. Her mouth shook, and every tremor of her lips matched the last, down to the width.

She looked at him like she had been waiting.

"Can you see me?"

The words had no air in them. Her lips moved a half second after the sound.

"Can you see me?"

Lian stepped back. "Sorry, I didn’t—"

"Can you see me?"

She raised a hand toward him, palm open, as if offering something. Her fingers folded back at the first knuckle, all four at once, with a dull crack like a stick breaking underwater. Her face stayed sad the whole time. She looked as sorry about it as he was.

The fingers kept folding until they lay flat against the back of her hand.

She was still asking.

Can you see me. Can you see me.

He was already running. The fence tore at his shoulder. He only felt it later, under a streetlight on the main road, with his hands on his knees and his lungs raw. The soy sauce was somewhere behind him. He had never reached the store.

He looked back.

The lot was empty. Above it the lamp flickered over a patch of weeds.

He went over what he had said to her, again and again. Hey. You okay. Four words, and none of them explained what he had just seen.

He tried the ordinary explanations one at a time. A breakdown. A trick of the light. Grief leaves fingers alone, and light stays silent.

He went home the long way. Eleven streetlights between the main road and his front door, and he stood under each one for a count of three.

In the kitchen he told Mom the store was closed. The lie slid out smooth. That bothered him more than the lie itself.

She studied him with the dish towel in her hands. Then she set a plate of leftovers in front of him. Under the table Jun’s foot knocked his once, and Jun went back to his homework.

Later, alone in his room, Lian checked his thumb.

The place where the cut had been was ridged now. A dark mark sat beneath the skin, the size of a lentil, like a bruise forming from the inside.

He pressed it with his forefinger, hard. Every part of the thumb registered the touch except the mark.