The Starving Years (12 page)

Nelson groaned. “That could’ve been me.”

Marianne drifted up, dressed now, as well as she could be in her heelless shoes and torn skirt, and looked over his shoulder. He stopped the frame on the protest sign, and even Randy stood up to get a better look at it.

Child Killers

“I told you they found out about those factories in Mexico,” Marianne said. “Some of the workers were twelve and thirteen years old. They locked them in. Total fire hazard. Especially the way manna plants are always blowing up.”

“That hasn’t happened in over five years,” Nelson said. “Now that they know ventilating the fermentation gasses won’t affect the consistency if they do it after the coagulation process gets going.”

“Maybe the Voice of Reason did another update while we were asleep,” Marianne suggested. “I’ll bet they saw this video. Maybe they’ll know what it means.”

“Who?” Nelson asked.

“No,” Tim told her. “I checked like fifteen minutes ago. Nothing new. We’ll look again later—right now, we’ve got to get going.”

Tim’s guests pulled together whatever few possessions they’d managed to bring with them. Tim shrugged on his army surplus jacket, slung his battered messenger bag over his shoulder, and stuffed a roll of toilet paper, a sock full of emergency cash, his netbook, and a few pounds of manna into it. What he really wanted to bring was the portable 2TB backup drive, but he suspected it would call too much attention if he unhooked the firewire and disconnected the power supply. The flash drive, though…that was too precious to let out of his possession. He pulled it from its USB port—the warning about not ejecting the disc properly had been disabled years ago—and tucked it next to his cell phone and wallet.

Nelson transferred a folded piece of paper from the sweatpants to his slacks, then went through the rest of his pockets—gum, wallet, keys—and a few business cards fluttered to the floor. He ignored them. Tim felt his heart beat faster.

It made sense for Tim to be the last one out. He needed to lock up, after all. So while everyone else was turned toward the door, he grabbed one of the cards and glanced at it—
Nelson T. Oliver, PhD, food science / manna specialist
—then pocketed it.

It might not be the most satisfying way to get Nelson’s phone number. But it would do.

Chapter 12

It was cold and damp outside. The sky, pre-dawn dark. The streets felt too quiet, like they were holding their breath, waiting for a new surge of panic like the burst of violence outside the job fair. Only this one would be worse, because it would be premeditated, fueled by greed and revenge. The desire to loot. To destroy.

Javier wanted to believe that human beings were intrinsically good—and that it was mainly circumstance that drove them to destroy one another without morals, without conscience. But maintaining that belief was a challenge.

The five of them walked in a tight group, with Marianne in the middle and Randy, the largest, bringing up the rear. Nelson still looked woozy from his medication, but it was clear from the way he’d gone quiet that whatever happened at home was serious, probably more serious than he’d let on, judging by the way his manner had become abruptly sober.

If Nelson had carried himself more like he did now—quiet, focused—rather than acting like a horny teenager, Javier could very well have fallen for him back at the ill-fated job fair. Javier wasn’t sure what that said about himself.

Canal Street seemed safest, wide and obvious, with fewer places for desperate men armed with guns or baseball bats to descend on them. The streetlights were lit, but traffic now seemed sparse, even for the predawn hour. They turned down a narrow side street only at the last possible moment, once they were well into Chinatown.
 

Despite the fact that the immigrants here lived in apartment buildings rather than corrugated metal lean-tos, the third-world smell wasn’t that different from the shantytowns of Caracas. Piss and garbage. Smoke. Fish. The fish bodies rolled in on trucks filled with ice in the wee hours of the morning, where they were traded in the back rooms of the jewelry exchanges and the bail bonds shops. Manna might be nearly as cheap as its packaging, but that didn’t mean the older refugees ate it. The food of their culture was all that remained of their identities. Ironic, when those who stayed behind in Asia were now subsisting on rice-flavored manna.

Nelson led the group to a dark red doorway covered in graffiti four or five layers deep, and he pressed the intercom. A woman’s voice answered in an Eastern language. “It’s Nelson,” he said, “I’m home.” Before he could get his key in the lock, the door buzzed open.

“You live with an actual Chinese family?” Randy said—he seemed genuinely surprised.

“Vietnamese. It’s…well, it just worked out that way.” He took the narrow stairs two at a time. Everyone kept up with him. There was certainly enough adrenaline coursing through all their veins to make it easy.

“You speak the language?”

“Me? Not very well. It’s all vowels. And whenever I try, I manage to screw it up and say something rude. They’ve got like a hundred pronouns and I always pick the worst one.”

On the third floor, he stopped in front of a door with gang symbols scrawled on it in scuffed marker, and pushed the key into the lock. Before he turned it, he said, “Maybe you guys should wait in my room. Grandma’s not used to seeing so many towering non-Asian guys. Especially guys all beat up and bruised.

“Now I’m curious,” Randy said. “When this is all over, you gotta have me over for a beer and a baseball game.”

“It’s a date.”
 

Nelson opened the door, and a pre-adolescent boy hovered in the hallway, shifting anxiously, much the way Nelson had when he was eager to leave Tim’s apartment. Javier doubted he was solely Vietnamese, and not just from the American jeans and T-shirt he wore or the way he carried himself. His hair and eyes were dark brown, but his features were a blend of Asian and Anglo. “Did you find her?” He spoke English without an accent.

“I just got your email.”

“But I sent it last night. What were you—?”

“I had a migraine.” Nelson took him by the shoulders, turned him, and encouraged him to walk up the hall so everyone else could squeeze in. Randy locked the door behind him.

“Who’re all these people?” The boy strained to look back over his shoulder as Nelson herded him in. He regarded Javier’s eye patch with a mixture of curiosity and awe that wasn’t unlike Nelson’s strange fetishizing appraisal at the job fair.

“Introductions—friends, Bobby. Bobby, friends. Look…I know you have a lot of questions, but let’s sort a few things out and try to track down your mom first. Okay?”

Nelson pushed open the door to a bedroom and waved toward it. “I’ll be right in,” he said, without looking to see what anyone was doing in his room. Instead, he propelled Bobby to the end of the hall, which opened up into a larger living space. Javier hovered in the doorway, and cocked his head to see. A larger living space, yes, but filled to capacity. The walls were hung with shelves full of candles and statuettes, and a ten-speed bike hung from the ceiling. Voices filtered in, a woman speaking Vietnamese, then the boy translating, Nelson answering, but they spoke quickly in hushed voices, so Javier couldn’t really discern anything other than what he’d been told.

“So d’you suppose that’s his kid,” Randy mused, “or what?”

Javier turned toward Nelson’s room. The bed, a desk, and a dresser with a huge tube TV on it filled the floor space. Tim was inspecting a leaning stack of DVDs that was one good stomp away from falling over. Randy and Marianne were looking at an inkjet printout, a photo of Nelson and Bobby with pretend noses and mustaches superimposed over their regular features, laughing. Of course not, Javier almost said. But given Nelson’s age and the fact that the boy was half-Anglo, it was certainly possible. And why else would Nelson be living with a Vietnamese family three generations deep? “What difference does it make?” he said. It sounded snippy, even to him.

“He just didn’t strike me as the daddy-type,” Randy said.

“Not really,” Marianne agreed. “Childish himself. Or maybe child-like. That’s probably a better description.”

At least, Javier thought, neither of them presumed that being homosexual precluded Nelson from fathering a child. For all they knew, ten years ago Nelson might have still been concerned with fitting in, dating women to reassure himself the attraction to men was just curiosity, nothing more.
 

Which didn’t ring true to Javier, even as he thought it. That was
his
story. He doubted it was Nelson’s. Even knowing him for only a day, Javier could see Nelson didn’t give a damn what anyone thought, and probably never had.

Javier glanced at the bed. The sheets were mismatched, and the faded paisley bedspread was stained as if a glass of red wine had spilled on it years ago and never quite come clean. The bed was big enough for two, with two pillows, but the pillows were stacked on top of one another as if only one person had used them. Possessions were piled and scattered—books, a guitar, a chess set, a microscope covered in punk rock stickers—but they all seemed like Nelson’s things. Not those of a mysterious missing Vietnamese woman.

Nelson headed back down the hall with Bobby trailing behind. “Where’s my phone?” Nelson asked him.

“Charging.”

“Good thinking.” He slipped past Javier, touching him as usual, but distractedly now, a brief hand on the shoulder to keep from colliding with him as he navigated the doorway. Tim flinched back from Nelson’s desk as if he’d been caught snooping. Marianne sat on the bed and pulled out her phone. “There’s still no signal.”

Nelson pulled his phone from the charger buried among books and papers on his desk. “No, but Internet’s up. I might be able to get a VOIP connection.” He opened an app, dialed, then held up his finger for quiet. Everyone leaned toward him, straining with hope.

When the man on the other end answered, his voice sounded small and far away. But it was audible. “Cullen.”

“Kev. It’s Nelson.”

“Shit, it’s crazy here…some kind of riot—”

“I know. I was there.”

“We had a few dozen incoming last night, and there’s still more trickling in. The bigwigs are meeting right now to decide whether they’re gonna activate the Unified Victim ID System.”

“Kevin…” Nelson’s voice was strained. “Tuyet’s missing.”

There was a beat where Javier wondered if Nelson had shifted his grip on the phone, preventing this Kevin’s reply from being heard. But after a pause, he said, “I’ll check and call you right back.”

“Why would you ask him?” Bobby stood in the hall, agitated.

“Go sit with Grandma, okay?”

Bobby’s face crumpled, and he turned and ran toward the living room. Nelson pushed past Javier again. Javier found himself missing all those flirtatious brushes and touches from before. It was less than a day ago—but now it seemed like a distant, fading memory from a much better time.

“Bobby—”
 

“Why’d you call Kevin? She’s not at the morgue. She’s not.”

“Shut up, you’ll just freak your grandmother out. Bobby? Don’t you dare tell her.”

Javier slipped out of the bedroom and eased his way toward the living room. It was fairly large, but a lofted bed with a desk beneath it took up much of the space. The smell of Asian cooking was strong. A glance into the adjacent kitchen revealed it was just as cluttered with items as the rest of the apartment, baskets of fresh produce, strange, foreign-looking pots and pans, a steamer, a huge ladle.

“He’s got a VOIP phone too,” Nelson said in desperation. “That’s all. Bobby, stop bawling.”
 

A short, thin woman—not exactly what Javier had been picturing as “Grandma,” since she was maybe in her late forties, wearing a Knicks sweatshirt and her hair in a tight ponytail—was whispering something urgent to Nelson in Vietnamese. He was right. It was practically all vowels.

She glanced at Javier, his eye patch, then turned back to Nelson and said something else…or maybe it was whatever she’d just said, repeated with more emphasis.

He stammered something back in halting Vietnamese. It sounded incongruous coming from his mouth, like hearing a Berber slip into French. Even so, at that moment, Javier felt something inside him shift. Something profound. He’d assumed plenty of things about Nelson Oliver. Entitled. Overeducated. Shallow. Playboy. And now he could see that every last one of them had been wrong.

***

“It’s okay,” Nelson told
bà ngoai
in Vietnamese. Since that was his go-to phrase, something that meant anything from, “Don’t worry about the B on Bao’s report card,” or, “we’ll figure out a way to pay the electric bill,” or, “that guy I brought home was just leaving,” the family’s matriarch wasn’t particularly comforted.

Bao—Bobby—told his grandmother something that sounded pretty much like, “Nelson’s going to find mom.” Nelson didn’t think he heard the word
morgue
in there. Not that he knew the Vietnamese word for morgue. Hopefully Bobby didn’t, either.

If Pham Thi Mai had been an American woman—or, heck, even a
white
woman of almost any nationality—Nelson would have hugged her, or at least patted her on the arm. But
bà ngoai
didn’t do displays of affection. Even arm-pats. “Mai,” Nelson said, hoping she’d understand that by using her given name he was being urgent, and not rude. “It’s okay.”

She stared him in the eye, and it spooked him. Mai was no more fond of eye contact than she was of physical contact. She hadn’t looked at him like that in years, not since she’d worked out that while Nelson was happy to be the man of her house, he didn’t intend to be the man in her daughter’s bed, and they’d fallen into a sort of truce. Nelson was the one to look away. No doubt there was a whole laundry list of stuff they should do while they waited for Kevin to call back. Things like…like….

He couldn’t think of a damn thing. And that scared the shit out of him.

When he turned away from
bà ngoai
to escape the weight of her unaccustomed gaze, he saw his ragtag group of new friends clustered in the hallway. Marianne was there in front with her ruined shoes, toes upturned, looking like a beat-up elf. Randy stood behind her with precisely half his face covered in a blue-green bruise like some sort of comic book villain. Javier’s expression was unreadable. Tim—well, that weirdo was probably still rifling through Nelson’s desk.