A Paper Son (23 page)

That night I dreamed Kevin hadn't made it out of the shed in time.

***

By the next morning, San Francisco was a tangle of public works projects: a broken water main in the Haight, stopped-up sewers in Hunter's Point, a sinkhole in the Outer Richmond, flooding in China Basin. The city would not be listing our retaining wall high among its priorities. The extent of governmental involvement thus far had been to ship out some intern from their engineering office who declared the hillside stable. A single strand of thin yellow tape now stretched between the tetherball poles at the edge of the asphalt, forming a childproof barrier and guaranteeing everyone's safety.

I didn't know what Franklin had said to the parents yesterday, but few of them came to my door during the drop-off, and those who did were polite, deferential. Kevin was a celebrity in the hallways. Even after he'd made his way to his desk I'd catch groups of kids from other classes standing in the doorway, pointing and whispering.

Eliza came to my desk and asked me what would happen if the rest of the retaining wall were to crumble.

“The city says it won't,” I said.

She informed me that in 1966, a mudslide in Wales had buried a school and killed more than half of its students.

“Don't worry,” I said. “That's not going to happen.”

“Good,” she said.

At lunch, Franklin Nash slipped into my room, just as my last kid slipped out. “Hello, Peregrine,” he said. “Got a few minutes?”

“Sure,” I said. I started to rise from my desk but he motioned for me to remain. I set down my pen.

He closed my door, sat down on one of the desks in the front row and looked me directly in the eye. The winged pickles on his tie did nothing to diminish the solemnity of his gaze. “How are you holding up?” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “A little rattled, I guess.”

“That's to be expected,” he said. “I'd have to wonder about you if you weren't.” He glanced through the window, at the spot where the shed had been. “Kevin seems to be doing well, all things considered. He's holding court out in front of the bathrooms, with about half the student body. Seems to be making the most of his newfound celebrity.”

“He's a good kid,” I said.

Franklin nodded. “They are resilient at that age. But these things can have consequences that reach far beyond the immediate fallout. As you know.”

I nodded.

“Dr. Eliot will be working closely with him and his parents, who fortunately understand the need for such conversations in times like this. And she'll be depending on you to keep an eye on the rest of these boys and girls and to bring it to her attention the first time you have a suspicion of something amiss.”

“Of course.”

“Great,” he said, opening his arms as if to hug me, though he was half the room away. Briefly I wondered if I was supposed to get up and go to him, but then he brought his hands back down and pushed himself back to his feet.

“Thanks for helping me out yesterday,” I said.

“Anything less would have been a dereliction of duty,” he said, with the smallest of smiles. When he was nearly to the door he stopped and turned back around. “Peregrine,” he said, “on a similar but related note. I've been at this a long while, and I know that some teachers come to school, teach, go home, correct their students' papers, make dinner, and go to bed. Others go home and do other things. Pedagogy is a noble and crucial profession, but I do not pretend that it has to be all-consuming.”

I nodded. I wasn't sure exactly what he was talking about, but I had the sense that something inexorable was bearing down on me.

“I make it a policy not to stick my nose into the private lives of my faculty,” he said, “but sometimes factors outside campus can become distracting. They can become . . . .” He paused, as though searching for words. “They can become detrimental to a teacher's ability to teach at the level of his or her full potential.”

I picked my pen back up and put it down. There was an itch on my neck; I resisted scratching it.

“I mentioned the assistance that will be provided to Kevin and his family. Well, the district has similar resources available for faculty. Of course, I hope my teachers will think of me as one of those resources, but I'm certainly not the extent of it,” he continued.

“Okay,” I said, so quietly I don't think he could have heard me.

He pulled the door open. “Don't want anybody twisting in the wind,” he said over his shoulder. He reached up and knocked on the door frame, twice. “Take care now,” he said.

***

I don't know what impelled me to Pier 23 when school let out the next day. Maybe it was the instinct we all have to retrace our steps when we reach dead ends. Maybe it was a sense of the unfinished—Lucy's phone call had frozen me on the threshold of that strange workshop, before I could take it all in. Perhaps there was nothing there—a storage room for some antiquated equipment, some people with no better place to meet. But there were also those quadruplets to consider, whose existence Annabel couldn't explain.

I zipped up my raincoat, pulled my hood up, and headed for the waterfront. Even in the sheltered bay the water was tumultuous. Gray waves churned together, their tops white and foamy. Sprays of water leapt up above the pilings and beat into the wharves. Pier 23 soon came into sight. Its big door was open and the windows of the building inside were full of light. Forklifts crisscrossed the road that led down the center of the building, shuttling into and out of the cones of orange light cast by the giant hanging fixtures. There were distant shouts, the quick beep of a horn, a faint strain of music.

The office was empty. It looked more or less like I remembered it—clipboards, stacks of paperwork, calendars. I headed for the stairs, trying to decide what I'd ask the mahjong players if I found them there again. A doorway in the back of the building led into another lighted room, where a man in coveralls sat, hunched over a desk. When I reached the bottom of the stairwell he saw me and rose suddenly.

“Can I help you?” he said, in a way that made it clear he wasn't offering help. He circled his desk with surprising speed. He was Chinese. The top of his head was bald, but a sweep of shoulder-length hair hung down from the sides and back and bounced with his steps. He had a thin curving mustache and his eyes were hard and sharp.

“It's okay, I have an appointment,” I said, heading up the stairs.

“No appointments,” he said, quickening his pace.

“Yes, they're expecting me,” I said. I started to climb two at a time. I had to see that room.

“Closed area!” he yelled at me. I expected to hear his footsteps running after me, up the stairs, but they didn't come. I made it to the top of the stairs, hurried down the hallway, and threw open that final door. There was no machinery, no table, no women. It was nothing more than a cluttered storeroom, a fraction of the workshop's size. Junk spilled out of metal shelving units. A photocopier half-blackened with dirt and toner stood against one wall. Parts of office chairs had been tossed in a heap. There were stacks of cardboard cartons in various states of deterioration, an upright vacuum cleaner with a cracked housing.

Then came the burst of footfalls and the man appeared at the top of the stairs, breathing heavily, a length of iron pipe in his hands. Something about the way he held it made me think he'd actually hit people with it before. He saw I was only staring at the garbage in his closet, so he stopped where he was. He watched me carefully over the course of three or four heavy breaths. “What the fuck you doing?” he said. It was not a rhetorical question. He was genuinely perplexed.

I pointed into the storeroom. “The other night, I thought,” I said. “Maybe a different room? Four women? A workshop?”

“Time to go,” he said. “Now.”

“Four women,” I said again. “I'm looking for four women.”

He shook his head. “Wrong place,” he said. “
Ware
house, not
whore
house.” He allowed himself a small smile at his joke—apparently my threat levels were decreasing. “You should learn how to spell. Let's go.”

“No, please,” I said. “Mahjong players. I'm looking for the mahjong players in that machine shop. With the printing equipment.”

He lowered the pipe a few inches but his face showed no recognition.

“Does that sound crazy?” I said. “Do I sound crazy to you?”

“Crazy or drugs,” he said. “Either way, time to go.”

“What about a magazine?” I said. “A journal? Is there a journal here?”

He shook his head. “No books here,” he said. “It's a warehouse, not a library.”

“No, its offices,” I said. “The
Barbary Quarterly.
Is its office here? Do they print something here?”

He shook his head.

“Publishers?” I said. “Editors?”

“Shipping only,” he said. “Nothing else.”

“Do you play mahjong?” I asked him.

Impatience flashed back across his face. The pipe rose; the threat levels were rising again. He stepped away from the stairs and pointed down them with his empty hand. “We can talk more outside.”

I glanced back into the storeroom and beneath a low shelf along the back wall I noticed what looked like the corner of a small white block. “Hang on,” I said. I darted in, ignoring the man's shout. I picked up the block and turned it quickly over in my palm. It was cool and heavy and smooth, and it seemed very old. A Chinese character had been carved into one side, and painted blue. I slipped it into my pocket just before he rushed through the doorway. He was holding the pipe in both hands now, like a batter ready for a fastball.

I turned away from him and tried to cover my head with my arms. “I'm sorry!” I said. “I'm going, I'm going!”

He stayed in the doorway, the pipe still raised. I stole a look at him through the useless barrier of my arms. He was searching the room, perhaps trying to figure out if there was anything at all in there worth stealing. Eventually he backed up, but didn't lower the pipe. “You need help, buddy,” he said.

Once outside I called Annabel. “Where are you?” I said.

“Still at school,” she said, “working on my report cards. How are yours coming?”

“Don't leave,” I said. “I'll be right there.” I flagged down a cab and ten minutes later I was in Annabel's classroom. I dropped the tile into her hand.

“It's a mahjong piece,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I found it.”

She took it and turned it around and over in her hands. “It's hand-carved,” she said. “Ivory. Rare. Where did you get this?”

“Pier 23.”

“The bar?”

“The office in the warehouse. Remember when I asked you about the Chinese quadruplets?”

“Sure,” she said.

“I went back. So what does it say?”

“
Bak
. North.”

“North?”

“It's one of the wind tiles. The North Wind.
Bak Feng
.”

“Come with me,” I said.

“Where?”

“To the top of the hill.”

On our way out, Franklin noticed us through his office window and gave us a wave. We walked up the few blocks that led to the crest of Russian Hill and the view to the north opened up before us. The clouds seemed a little less dark than they'd been lately and though the rain was steady it had lessened a bit. The Golden Gate Bridge was mostly visible; only the tops of its towers were hidden in clouds. At the far end of the span the hills of the Marin Headlands bristled with thick scrub, all the way down to the waterline. The bay, gray and empty, stretched back and around, narrowing as it reached inland for the delta. A lone ship traversed the water, a passenger ferry circling slowly around Angel Island.

“I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for,” she said.

A trio of pelicans cruised through the rain in a loose wedge, far away and high above us.

“Neither do I,” I told her.

She slipped her hand into mine and we stood there watching for a time, waiting for something to reveal itself.

***

That night a vicious surge arrived and killed five people across the Bay Area, three of them in San Francisco. Of these, two were the victims of a car crash in which a little pickup truck, going too fast down Valencia, had hydroplaned through a red light and slammed into a bread delivery truck. I watched the coverage on the little television in my room when I awoke. The graveyard-shift camera crew revealed the scene—a crumpled pickup on its side, the banged-up bread truck, and all around them loaves of bread wrapped in cellophane, pieces of metal, broken glass. The shards glinted in the cameraman's spotlight and looked like a constellation in the roadway. The third death was an elderly man who had fallen, hit his head, and drowned in his flooded backyard. The newscaster, wrapped in a shapeless black raincoat, stood out on the sidewalk, ropes of black hair whipping around her face. She squinted into the wind and rain and shouted wild speculations about sleepwalking and medication. Behind her, the paramedics wheeled a gurney through the rain, a white sheet draped over the body. A sudden gust of wind came up and pulled back a corner of the sheet, revealing a booted foot.

I arose and climbed into the shower with the image of that boot stuck in my head. I have never liked seeing dead people's shoes. I don't mean the slippers sitting on the floor next to the hospital bed, or the loafers on the guy in the casket. I mean the regular shoes of people who awaken and get dressed with no idea they will die that day. The pictures appear on the news: the jeans and worn-out tennis shoes sticking out from beneath the earthquake wreckage in some third-world backwater with no building codes; the basketball shoes and too-long shorts on the inner-city kid caught in a drive-by. I always picture these people on the morning of their deaths, in that quiet, concentrated moment as they tie their laces, or clasp their buckles. I want to go to them then and say, I'm sorry but you're going to die today—are you sure those are the shoes you want to be in when it happens? When I die I don't want to be wearing shoes. I want to have just enough notice so that I can pull them off and get comfortable. Shoes mean death snuck up on you. Shoes mean you had other plans.