Authors: Charles Foran
Dad went to speak. Suddenly worried by what he might say, I decided to try explaining again. “Father Romesh … He said—”
“And you
let
Sarah take her picture?”
“He didn’t see me do it,” I said.
“I did see you,” he said.
“Does it matter now?” Rachel said. “Is this what we should be worrying about?”
“What does not matter any longer is you being part of this conversation,” Mom said. “Not when you advised your very foolish, very naive sister so poorly. And of course Jacob knew that Sarah bonded with an attractive young hooker and took her photo. He wanted a copy for himself.”
With a groan Dad dropped his elbows to his knees and his head into his hands.
“Chill, parentals,” Rachel said. “Please.”
“Switch her off,” Mom said.
“No!” I said.
“Sorry, SeeSaw, but if they’re just going to carve each other up, I’d rather be expelled from the abattoir. But here’s the thing—Leah? Jacob? Pay attention for a few seconds,” my sister said. “Check out our platforms. Learn where we’re at, who we’re hanging with and planning to meet. Learn how we move from place to place and space to space, silent and quick and beyond detection by your analogue radars. If you don’t know my Facebook, you don’t know me. It’s where us digital kids live, Mr. So-So Cool Kwok.”
Raising his head, he applauded her slap-down with a defeated smile. I wondered about the word “abattoir,” but didn’t ask.
“I’ll let myself out,” Rachel said.
Her screen went dark. All that remained was the three of us squeezed into the corner frame, Mom on the bed, Dad in the chair, me now moved to the floor next to him, legs folded under my bum.
“Don’t slouch, Sarah,” she said. “Your posture is terrible.”
She was making a mess of things—with me, with Dad, with Rachel—and had to know it. But she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stop.
“Who are you calling?” he asked.
“I’m texting Sanjay.”
“Tiffin man,” I said under my breath.
“To beg for a seat for Sarah on the initial company flight. A seat, or seats, I already turned down for you and her.”
“We’re not ready to flee the infected pool just yet,” he said.
“Infected port, you mean,” Mom said. “Didn’t you hear? The WHO has declared Hong Kong port contagious, and shut it down. About a third of our business is with shipping companies. I could work twenty hours a day sorting this nightmare out.”
“You don’t sort out a nightmare, Mom,” I said. “You get through it, and then wake up.”
I sought my father’s eyes. We locked gazes, how we used to do, nothing to be afraid of or to hide. I couldn’t lie to him and he couldn’t lie to me.
“Dad and I will get through it,” I added.
Her phone pinged. “Never mind,” she said. “There are three partners ahead of us who want to bring family members with them. They’ve another plane chartered for December twenty-third.”
“We’ll be fine without you,” he said. “Gloria will look after us.”
Gloria! With all the drama, I’d forgotten my promise not to
leave Hong Kong without her. But Dad, aware of how much she meant to me—my Asian mother, more than my Filipino one—had sent a reminder.
Thanks, Dad
, I said silently.
“You know I have no choice in the matter,” Mom said. “Partners signed contracts agreeing to accept repatriation in the event of a, what did they call it, ‘political or environmental emergency.’ I thought the clause was a joke. After all, what
isn’t
these days?”
“We’ll be okay, Leah.”
“They’ve threatened her directly, Jacob. What more evidence of an emergency do you require?”
He kind of frowned, kind of winced, like he wasn’t sure if, this time, she wasn’t being more than her usual mean, bossy self.
“I’m going to speak with Sanjay,” she said, rising so abruptly her laptop fell to the floor. “On the phone. Tell him that, if Sarah can’t come with me, I won’t leave on the first plane. He’ll just have to accept my decision.”
“Phew,” he said once she was gone.
“I still won’t go with her in two weeks. Not to London or Toronto or any city where it’s cold and grey and I don’t know anybody. I don’t belong over there. I belong here.”
He nodded. Her words had left him sad. All at once Dad looked tired, and older than usual. Closer to his actual age, although I’d never say it. Opening his own phone to the Net, he asked me to show him. “Mary, Tai Long Wan,” he said.
For more than a month—since November ninth, basically—I’d been waiting for one of them to ask.
“We’ve been sneaking, or creeping, is it called, onto your sister’s Facebook since she was your age. Your mother, mostly, though she stopped once Rachel left for university. Two weeks ago she asked if we should try sneaking onto yours, or make you show us.”
“You could have sent a friend request.”
“Would you have accepted it?”
“Did Rachel?”
“Emphatically not.”
“I might have,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. I told her I didn’t want to see your Facebook. I said it was like our parents demanding the transcripts of the phone calls we made as teenagers. It’s not fair and it’s not healthy. Not that my folks would have asked,” he said. “My mother especially. She stopped taking me seriously once I started dating white girls.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I managed to say.
“I also said that we could trust you weren’t doing anything stupid with your profile. That we’d always been able to trust you to be the sensible, or just cautious, one.”
Dropping my gaze—okay, I’d lied to him a little lately—I opened my wall.
“Your friends?” he said of the rows of Asian girls with black hair, dark eyes, and regular features. “I can never tell them apart. How come they don’t come around anymore?”
I chewed more lip to stop myself from answering his question.
Because we don’t wear masks. Because they think we’re infected.
“There’s Miriam,” I said, “and there’s Chelsea Ho. That’s Xiaolong Chan, from Stanley, who did come to our house when I was little. And Clara, and Brittany, and Rachel …” When he failed to react, I added, “Your older daughter?”
He squinted to view the tiny screen. “Of course.”
“And here she is.” I pointed to the special page I had made for her. “Mary, with no last name.”
He took the phone from me. “Really? This photo is causing all the fuss?”
“Not that one.”
He waited. I didn’t want him to ask for the other image. I didn’t want to show it to him.
“We shouldn’t be the last people in Hong Kong to see it,” he said.
Now flushing—I could feel the same heat in my cheeks that I’d felt in the bathroom stall at Dr. Wilson’s office—I retrieved the phone and Googled “Mary, Tai Long Wan.”
Dad examined the photo for five minutes—or so it felt. I shouldn’t have studied him studying her. But although he knew I was, he allowed his expression to change. Jacob Kwok had a long hard look. He definitely liked what he saw. He also suddenly dropped—was this possible?—those same years that had crept back onto his face. “I was too distracted on the beach to really notice,” he said. “But I get it now.”
“Get what?”
He hesitated.
“Tell me, Dad. I need to know.”
“This girl almost certainly belongs to someone. Bought and paid for. We can’t be interfering with this.”
“Oh.”
“And we’d better show your mother.”
Being on my knees, I had no trouble snatching the iPhone back. “It’s still private.”
“Hardly, Xixi.”
“I’m not showing her Mary.”
“She can Google too. We’re not
that
last century.”
“I’m not …”
At the doorway he stopped. For a second I thought he was going to demand that I delete “Finding Mary” from Facebook. But instead he asked if I’d go to Mass with him tomorrow. “We haven’t been in a couple of weeks,” Dad said, “and I know I have plenty to confess.”
The next morning we were the only passengers on the 6 to Stanley not wearing SARS condoms. The driver gave us a dirty look as we paid, Hong Kongers on the lower level muttered
gao cho ah
while we made for the stairs, and even the upper-deck amahs, usually insta-members of the Cool Kwok fan club, showed their disapproval by not devouring him with their eyes. But at least we weren’t swarmed. The noisy Net—Twitter, Facebook, and websites set up by bored Hong Kong teens—was loud with stories of deepening weirdness. Girls were being hired by malls to bottle-spray customers who passed through their doors, masked or not, a minty disinfectant that triggered sneezing fits. Grannies were brushing by security guards to storm apartment buildings and banks and wipe down elevator panels and ATM machines. Gangs were roaming streets in Kowloon and the New Territories, chanting “No to SARS!” and hunting the unprotected. Surrounding the troublemaker, the gang members, named “N-95s” by the blogosphere, would force the person to choose from a selection of masks in white or grey, and then snap a cell-phone photo of the newly converted for posting, like police mug shots, on their website. YouTubes of N-95 interventions were attracting a half million viewers a day. On TV and YouTube, Cantopop idols, some of who did look like Dad, were asking the vigilantes to remember to be courteous.
Though we told no one, Gloria and I
had
been swarmed earlier in the week, and also ended up on the Net. Ready to pull out my hair from watching the Peak Tram climb up and down the hillside all morning, I convinced her to ride the trolley to Causeway Bay. Starving models on the outdoor stage in Times Square wore particle masks the same colours as their designer dresses—closer to towelettes, tugged over their flat chests and barely covering their behinds, each cheek no bigger than a pork bun—while
they paraded beneath the usual pollution sun. Many of the girls wobbled doing the angry catwalk, as if balancing, never easy on an empty stomach and six-inch heels, was impossible due to the extra weight of gauze. I had been explaining to Gloria how the models were taught to pout onstage, and so were likely choking on fabric, when a granny with bow legs and tiny feet started yelling at me. I wanted to ask if her feet had been bound when she was a girl, but never had the chance. “You infect us!” the lady kept shouting. Soon a crowd, most with salt-and-pepper hair and spots over their skulls, blocked our escape. “If she spits, you’ll get sick!” another said. Someone pushed someone, who knocked into me, my sunglasses almost flying off. “Hey,” I said, “watch the Vuittons!” Onstage a model about my age, hearing the brand name over the techno beat, halted her strut. Her mask was canary-yellow with cherry lips outlined in sparkles.
“Run!” Gloria said through her mask. Crushing my hand in hers, she shoved old people from our path, not stopping until we were three streets from the square. Though the N-95s would have expired chasing us, she wasn’t taking any chances. In a laneway beneath the overpass she wept. “I know no kung fu,” she said. “How can I protect you?” “You don’t know kung fu?” I answered. “How’d you get this job?” In the taxi back to Mid-Levels, I Googled “Flash Mob, Hong Kong” and clicked onto a jittery forty-eight-second video, filmed from a window overlooking Times Square, showing a swarming from eighteen minutes earlier. Two victims, one masked, one Vuittoned, busted out of the mob and took off up the street. A teenager in a towelette, watching from an outdoor stage, must have misstepped, and when she toppled off the ramp the camera settled on her.
Dad and I reached St. Mark’s two minutes before Mass. But on pushing through another crowd to the front doors, we found
Father Romesh blocking entry, arms crossed and scalp sweating. From within the church came the bleat of air horns, the kind used during rugby games.
“Fumigating the joint, Father?” Dad said.
“You missed last Sunday,” the priest replied from behind his protection.
“Business trip.”
“And you, Miss Sarah?”
“My mom wouldn’t bring me.” When I had asked Gloria if I could go to the amah Mass with her—I liked humming the Tagalog liturgy—she said she couldn’t attend. Not with the shame of Miguel on her conscience. Not with God so angry with her.
Father Romesh patted his skull, nice-doggie style. “We have a problem,” he said. “Two, matter of fact.”
The first problem was the flock of sparrows that had got trapped in the church earlier in the week, and which, unlike the resident swallows, zigged when they should have zagged around the ceiling fans. Six sparrows so far had been clipped by wood wings, emitting sprays of feather and plume and, most distressingly, kamikaze-ing onto the confessional, the sacristy, the baptismal font, and Mrs. Leigh-Jones. At the amah Mass earlier that morning, a sparrow had plopped onto the altar just as Father Romesh was preparing to turn the wine into the blood of Christ. He yelped and swept the bird from the surface using the first tool that came to hand—the Holy Book. About this reaction the priest was ashamed and, on being told that sparrows hated loud noises, ordered the fans turned off, the windows flung open, and all the air horns in the market bought and put to work.
“Such carnage,” he said with a sigh. Sweat now streamed from his skull, staining the mask like the underarms of a T-shirt.
“Why not leave the fans off during Mass?” Dad said.
“The swallows must still be exiled, Jacob.”
“What’s the second problem?” I asked.
The second problem was us. At Mass last Sunday the priest had announced that, effective immediately, any parishioner yet refusing to don an N-95 particle mask in sober, responsible precaution against the lethal airborne contagion would be asked to worship from the meeting room in the adjacent rectory. The room had its own entrance and washrooms, both of which could be scrubbed down afterwards, and a flat-screen TV to broadcast the service from a virally safe remove. Taking communion, sadly, would not be possible.
“Any blood smeared over the rectory door?” Dad asked.
Father Romesh patted his head, his eyes gone black. “That was to protect those within the house from the evil passing outside.”
“Exactly,” Cool Kwok said, lighting a tumour way closer than the ten-metre rule.
“Your daughter will remember the rectory from Sunday school,” the priest said, “including Christmas pageants. Didn’t you play a lamb one year?”