Burning Time (6 page)

He was one of the lucky ones. Somehow the bullet missed the carotid artery. He lost his voice box, and was six months in the hospital, but he didn’t die. She did the follow-up on him, so she knew how he had to learn to talk by holding the hole closed with a flap of skin.

Being a cop wasn’t as high maybe as being a doctor, but April knew the Korean wouldn’t have lived if she hadn’t been there to get help and keep his blood from escaping out the hole in his neck while they waited for the ambulance.

She wasn’t afraid of getting hit like that. She’d pulled her gun, but she’d never used it except at the range every month, and no one had ever shot at her. What scared her was the empty, falling-down buildings, with the windows boarded up, and what happened in them. There were ghosts in the buildings, living and dead. Sometimes the
windows weren’t boarded up. They were just holes. She could see the pigeons flying in and out.

What scared April was getting a call about a dead body in one of those buildings and having to go in and find it. Down an elevator shaft, or just lying on the floor in a room upstairs. She used to dream about it every night. Getting that call and having to climb the stairs looking for it, having no idea which room it was in. Or what else she might find. On the night shift when she was a rookie she confessed this to one person, and then everybody knew.

Long-ago advice from her mother: Never tell your weak place. People can break you from there. After she told about her weak place, April worried that they would get her there when that body turned up.

They didn’t, though. When she finally got the call she had known would come because she dreamed it too many times for it not to happen, her supervisor told her she didn’t have to go in. He didn’t break her in her weak place after all. He told her to wait for backup. It was on the third floor of a walk-up. Boarded up except for the front door.

April stood downstairs that day, thinking they would make her go in when they got there because you weren’t supposed to have any weak places in NYPD. If she didn’t go in when they asked her to, she wouldn’t get promoted. She’d have to stay on foot patrol in Bed-Stuy all her life. That was another scary prospect.

April knew whenever she was really frightened from deep inside it always came from something her mother told her, something Chinese that didn’t make sense in America. Her mother talked constantly, and couldn’t seem to stop. Her father hardly spoke at all. Sai Woo said she had to fill the silences her husband made or else ghosts would come in and fill them with wickedness. April said
there weren’t any ghosts in America, and her father might have something to say if Sai Woo gave him a place to let his thoughts out.

This was when her mother looked at her with the greatest scorn and dropped another one of her priceless pearls that had nothing to do with anything.

“Sun rises in the East, goes down in the West,” like April was supposed to know what that meant.

Still, April did know what it meant. It meant there
were
ghosts in America, and you were supposed to eat the ones that plagued you just like in China. If you devoured them, they healed you. In China they would devour anything at all. If it was hairy or bony or truly awful, they ground it up into powder, put it in boiling water, and drank it.

As April stood outside the Bed-Stuy building waiting for backup that day, she felt old China crowding all around her. If she were a true American cop, she’d have no trouble climbing those stairs and looking at the body. So what? How bad could it be? But if she were truly Chinese under everything, she’d have to consume some little something, a hair or a piece of dust, something from the scene. If she didn’t do that, the weak place would always be there inside of her.

But something magical happened when her supervisor showed up and said, “All right, April, you stay down here and secure the area.”

“No, it’s okay. I can do it,” she had assured him.

She climbed up the three flights of stairs, not first maybe. But she was there when they found it. It had been there for months. There wasn’t even any smell anymore, nothing like a dead animal decaying behind a wall. There was just a pile of rags and hair and bone with some dried skin that looked like leather covering it. Was this what I
was afraid of, she asked herself. She decided she was all American and didn’t have to consume it.

So this was what I wanted, she thought now, going up the stairs into the dorm where Ellen Roane lived. The place was gloomy and looked almost deserted. The girl would have been better off living at home. Better address downtown. But not the freedom to do as she pleased. April went inside. There was a fat guard sitting at a small table that didn’t look like it was always there.

“I’m looking for Ellen Roane,” she said.

“Well, you won’t find her here,” the guard said. He was Hispanic, not very friendly.

“How about Connie Shagan?” April said. Connie Shagan, the Roanes had told her, was Ellen’s roommate.

“Won’t find her either. Or any of them.”

“Is there a teacher, uh, a professor, who lives here I could talk to?” She hadn’t wanted to, but now she flashed her shield.

The guard looked at it and shrugged. “There’s still nobody here. It’s spring break.”

April Woo cursed herself five hundred times as she walked back to where she left the car. See what happens when you leave out one tiny question. One detail that changes the whole story. The parents didn’t bother to tell her everybody disappeared. All the students, and even the professors disappeared. And she didn’t think to ask. It wasn’t very smart.

She would talk to the parents in the morning when they came in with the girl’s picture and ask them if they really wanted to put their daughter in the system when she was probably skiing in Vermont. With the Barstollers, who had a Chinese maid. She smiled at the thought, as she took the car back.

Troland Grebs was up all night with bad dreams again. Monkeys were beating each other. A bull in the garden was goring somebody. He was in a cold sweat, only half drunk from a long evening of drinking. He couldn’t stop thinking about that girl in the movie. First time he saw it, he had to walk out.

At three he gave up trying to sleep and went outside for a walk. The smells of the ocean off Pacific Beach, the palm and orange trees, the smooth green grass of front lawns soothed him. He walked around, circling his neighborhood many times. Just as the light was graying and before the sun rose, he was back in his one bedroom apartment, sitting on the tiny terrace on the third floor waiting for the jogger to come by.

For months he had been waking up early to sit up there and watch her. She lived on the third floor, too, on the other side of the garden. He had heard people call her Jane, but he had never spoken to her. She kept her shades drawn. He never saw her undressed except this way, in the bicycle shorts and two tops. One stretchy thing made of a
few straps over a similar thing with more straps in different places. Crisscrossed and so tight Troland wondered every day how she got them off. He knew how he would get them off. From the terrace he watched her dispassionately.

She came out of the door and stretched. He could see her raise her arms and breathe. She started jogging in place, looking up at the sky. She plugged her Walkman into her ears. She never saw him, never looked in his direction. She took off at a moderate pace and disappeared into the street. After she was gone, he went in to shower, then dressed carefully and went to work at the plant just north of Lindbergh Field.

He wasn’t talking much any more. He sat at his drafting table for hours every day, working on the intricate details of jet engine modifications, sunk deep in his own thoughts. Ever since the Persian Gulf War he’d been moving closer and closer to the insides of the cruise missiles he’d worked on all the years they hadn’t been needed, and no one believed would work. Now everybody knew that they could seek out and destroy. He felt his mark was on every hit in Iraq. It made him feel powerful. He had started seeking out and destroying, had gone back to where his own power used to be.

What the soldiers did in Kuwait got him thinking about things he hadn’t wanted to do for years. But they just raped. He liked adding his mark afterwards. Long ago he got in trouble doing it to whores in Mexico, and had to stop. He had put the urge away in a drawer, along with the colored pencils and the old drawings. He had been good a long time, and then the war came. His very own missiles started killing people, started talking to him like they knew him. And he found out he could get away with it now. But right now he felt bad, and was pretty sure the
movie had put a curse on him. But he wasn’t sure exactly why.

At work he started thinking about it again. It was so boring. At first it was just people talking about sex and their “feelings.” It was so bad he almost walked out. But then the girl suddenly was naked, and he decided to stay.

All at once he felt a flicker of something unpleasant about her. Then that was quickly overridden by the excitement he had thinking that the other actor resembled, and might in fact be, him. He was aroused. He folded his leather jacket across his lap.

The guy in the film was fucking the girl with his leather jacket on and nothing else. This was also like him and turned him on. He looked quickly around, then burrowed his hand under his jacket. The bulge was enormous, too large for his pants. He rubbed back and forth with the palm of his hand. Except for the woman’s nudity and the man in the leather jacket, this was not very exciting sex. He switched his thoughts to the jogger who never had a name when he imagined fucking her.

He called her the jogger and thought about grabbing her before she got to the street. Just taking her by the arm. He unzipped his pants and untangled his dick. The softness of his skin around the hard core always surprised him. It was a tool, a defier of gravity like the cruise missile. It could seek and destroy. He thought of shoving it into the jogger and watching that stuck-up, satisfied face fill with fear. He liked the idea of scaring her—no, filling her with fear so big there was nothing left of her but cunt and pure terror.

The fuss they made in the paper all the time made him mad. Don’t make such a big deal of it! Real men always did it, always would. Rape wasn’t so bad. It was a natural thing, happened every day. Soldiers did it. He touched
himself, thinking of the Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait. Things they did to the girls with their fathers watching. Shot the brothers in the street. No mercy. In the ass and everything. Probably did it with their clothes on, too. Grabbed women in their own houses and slammed them against the wall. Even made the children watch. Well, he’d seen his father do it.

He stared at the screen, but didn’t see it. It was natural to conquer. He thought of pushing the jogger to the ground, getting on top of her and shoving his dick into her, of making her kneel in front of him and suck him off. Put her lips around him hard, and move her tongue just right.

You could kill someone that way. Shove too hard and just keep going down their throat. It was good to force his way into places he wasn’t wanted. They were just cunts. Places to put sperm. They had no right to get their noses out of joint. Drops of semen oozed out onto his hand, lubricating his dick. It felt good.

The Kama-sutra advised murdering the husband, father, brothers—anybody attached to a woman who resisted a man she didn’t want. That’s what the famous book
said:
When every attempt to get her failed, they had the
right
to kill her protectors and then rape her. Take her off and do whatever they wanted with her. The pressure intensified.

He didn’t know why he thought of the Kama-sutra now. It was a book he read years ago. He used to masturbate while studying the chapters on the special marks you could make biting and scratching and slapping. Scraping the skin and biting so hard the skin broke or went black and blue. In India, no one was ashamed of walking around with bite or scratch marks. They were considered signs of mastery. It was only the West that was behind.

The scene changed. Troland’s eyes flickered. They had their clothes on again, were talking. There was something familiar about the girl on the screen. Now she was walking down the street with her back to the camera. It was a familiar walk. It irritated him that the actress seemed to be someone he knew. He couldn’t be interested if he thought he knew her. His dick became soft in his hand. Who was it?

It was impossible that he knew her. He couldn’t know her. The film was somewhere else, in a city. Looked like New York. He’d been there once. It wasn’t here. Was it a bimbo he knew from the beach? No, he didn’t know anybody who looked like that. Her skin was really white. He tried to relax. There was no way he could know her. But he couldn’t get excited again. He began feeling bad. What was the matter with this stupid movie? It wasn’t even right. He felt angry.

It
was
somebody he knew. Couldn’t be. He looked around. The few people who were here were now looking bored. People who came to movies like this didn’t want to see talking and walking. His hand was sticky. He had gotten dirty and was no longer excited. He began to feel irritated and angry. Something was making him feel powerfully uneasy. But what?

Somebody got up and left. That was the right idea. He shook his head, unnerved. That girl. That hair. The voice, now that he listened to it. How could it be? Under the leather jacket he put his limp dick back in his pants. Small and pitiful as a sparrow. Zipped up and went out into the California night. He couldn’t forget it.

He left the plant at five-thirty. It was still blisteringly hot in San Diego, even though the sun had begun its descent into the ocean. He rode over to the beach to watch the simmering red disc go down. He often went there after
work. It cooled the panic. He liked to stand there for an hour or so, leaning against his Harley, with his leather jacket strapped over a six-pack of beer on the back. He knew from the way the girls studied him from the sides of their eyes that he still looked good having a couple of beers and watching them on the sand in their thong bathing suits. He hated them all.