He
emerged from the shadows like a phantom. He came into Mason’s life from a foggy
mist. Actually he arrived by bicycle. It was bizarre how it all happened. Mason
was sitting on a bench by a moat reading a book and watch swans near the castle
when suddenly from nowhere he was approached by a young man.
“What country are you from?” the young
phantom asked.
Mason was startled. It was a sudden
question which came out of nowhere like its uninvited guest.
Mason did not answer.
“I’m from
He didn’t look Japanese. His face, though
Asian, had the shape of a different race. His skin had a reddened tint to it,
not pale or pasty, just reddish a one gets in a flash of embarrassment. His
hair was thick, full and straight, rather long and somewhat untidy.
“Where you from?” he demanded a second
time.
“I live here,” Mason replied.
“No. I mean country.”
Mason wondered how old he was and later
found out he was twenty-two. He was from
“How long have you been living in
“One year.”
His hands looked grimy and calloused. The
nails on the right hand were very long. On the left hand they were cut very
short and the cuticles were bitten from a nervous habit cultivated through
nervousness.
“One year? How did you get here?”
Mason had a natural curiosity. Whenever he
met new people, he wanted to know everything about them. First encounters
sometimes became inquisitions, a chain of questions which often drove people
away. Here the opposite was true. The young man seemed to enjoy the questions,
even anticipating them.
“I came by boat. In my
country very poor.”
“But where did you get the money?”
“I had sponsor. They pay my way.”
His English was not good, but he
understood. Mason wondered where he could possibly have picked up such fluency.
He must have lived on the streets of
“What is your name?” Mason continued.
“Tang Fu.”
“Tang? Are you
Chinese?”
“No. Tang is Vietnamese. Fu is Chinese.”
“Are you a Chinese-Vietnamese?”
“No. I am a Vietnamese.”
Mason’s mind began to cipher a bit of the
mystery behind the young man’s life. He looked poor and sounded unschooled, but
in his own country he was anything but poor. The poor stayed behind to etch a
life out in the streets and hide in the alleys. They had no place to go, no
dreams to share, no future to guide them. Those who moved out of the mire of
the fallen city were those who could buy their way out like birds of passage.
Such a person may have been Tang Fu. His parents may have been merchants who
stashed away money during the war and later were able to contact a Japanese
family willing to sponsor their son to go to
A feeling of trust began to grow between
Tang Fu and mason. Tang Fu drew closer. He was now off his bicycle and sitting
on a stone bench near the moat which surrounded the castle not far from where
Mason was also sitting. A white swan swam by in silence as if eavesdropping. A
solitary raven flew down from the branch of a tree and a cloud rushed silently
to hide the sun which had briefly emerged from the misty afternoon rain.
“I study Japanese in the daytime,” Tang Fu
continued. “At night I work kawa factory.” Pointing
to his shoes he said again, “Kawa, leather.”
He was employed by a shoe company doing
factory work. There was no future in it but it was a job. Perhaps someday with
the proper education and the right breaks he would be able to advance himself.
“Do you miss your family?”
“One brother younger,” he said.
“No. That wasn’t my question. Your family. Do you miss not seeing them?”
“Yes.”
Often Tang Fu had to say things twice to be
understood. He tried to speak slowly even exaggerated certain words and then
saying the same thing in a different way. For all his limitations Tang Fu
seemed to understand what was said. He was not illiterate even though he
appeared unschooled and lacked refinement.
What Mason found most disturbing about Tang
Fu was not his shabby appearance but his eyes. So much can be said about a man’s
eyes. They are the mirrors to the soul, gateways to the mind, lights into the
inner sanctum of feelings and thoughts. For Tang Fu they seemed turned off. It
was as if there was no soul inside. They looked lifelessly out into the world
but they appeared to see nothing.
Nor for that matter
did they penetrate the world outside themselves. They were just eyes that
harbored pain and rejection. They were eyes committed to survival, eyes that
never would admit or accept defeat and vowed to endure. They were cold eyes,
eyes which calculated and moved slowly thinking for a chance to make another
move.
Mason sensed this immediately but found
himself strangely attracted to this youth before him.
“Let me see your hand!” Tang Fu commanded
grabbing Mason’s hand and looking intently at the palm. “Let me see it!” he
demanded. Tang Fu then held Mason’s right palm in his own and looked at the
lines which crossed its surface. The lifeline was long, especially long and the
pillow of the palm was hot but soft.
“Your hand good,” tang Fu said. He uttered
this furthermore with authority as if the secrets of reading a palm had been
entrusted to him and their truth harbored the mystery of a man’s character.
“You have a soft hand but strong mind.”
Mason made no attempt to pull his hand
away. He offered it freely for full inspection.
“There’s nothing in the lines of my hand,”
Mason proclaimed. “They’re just hands. Every hand has lines.”
“Yes, but your lines are special.”
2.
The time passed. It seemed to move quicker
than usual. The sky darkened and the birds returned to their nests. People
passed through the park and disappeared in the shadows of dusk. Some pedaled silently
on their bicycles and the rumble of wheels over fallen leaves was the only
sound or sign of life left behind. The castle darkened and the lights of the
park were turned on but the two remained.
“Come. Sit closer,” The Vietnamese boy
urged.
“You have good eyes. They are kind,” he
continued.
“But you…” Mason said and stopped. He didn’t
want to say what he intended. He wanted to tell Tang Fu that his eyes were not
good; that maybe there was a dark secret he was hiding, a corruption of the
soul at such an early age. There was no proof for this except for the restless
eyes. Who could ever think that eyes held such power, that eyes could speak as
well as stare.
They were beacons out on the threshold of
an abyss; lighthouses that guide ships to shore, points upon which to focus
one’s destiny; eyes not bright and gleaming, eyes inward and destructive – the
soul to the heart, the path to the soul.
“But your eyes…said Mason. “They don’t know
peace.”
“You stay here,” tang Fu ordered. “Let me
get beer.” He was aggressive and far from being passive or shy. He was a
determined person, someone who had a definite idea of how to control the parts
of one’s destiny which were not left solely to fate. He was determined now to
use his own resources to fashion the fate of others.
When Tang Fu returned he was changed. He
brought with him three cans of beer and a packet of chips and sat near mason on
the bench overlooking the moat. His fingers plucked the lid off the can in a
quick anxious flick of the wrist and the fingers of his right hand torn open
the bag of chips as the claws of an eagle might rip into its prey.
“I really can’t stay,” Mason said.
“No. Stay. You can’t go home until we
finish the beer. Only half-hour.” He commanded.
Tang Fu’s eyes glared in the darkness like
black marbles with hardly a trace of white.
“Here. For you,” he said handing over a can
of beer. Mason took it as an obedient child accepting an offer from a parent.
It felt cold in his hands, an oasis in a tin can, a
libation for a strange tryst.
“What do you want from me?” Mason asked
confused.
“I want to tell you my story.” He paused and
then continued. “I have no family. No friend. Nobody.
In my country I was a baby, very poor, many died. Many sick. My father, mother
killed.”
“But you told me you had parents.”
“No real parents, street parents. Real parents dead by war. I don’t remember face. I don’t
remember.”
“How did you come here?”
There was a silence. Tang Fu sipped his beer
and continued.
“I come here by boat.”
“Your sponsor. Who
sponsored you?”
“No. I come by boat. Much
danger. Look.”
He pointed to two deep gashes on his arms
and legs, wounds that had healed and left their scars.
“I swam in danger. Almost
died. Boat came. I was saved.”
His speech was a jigsaw of fragments, words
flying in the air like shrapnel on the battlefield; words with edges on them;
nothing neither gentle nor smooth, held together by nothing other than their
sound. They clung in the air – death, pain, survival.
Mason gets an image. Tang Fu’s words paint
a picture. He sees a little boy in the streets of
This was Mason’s war. He had been a part
of it. He had been there when
Tang Fu could have
been one of them. Faces in fear all look the same. They are drained of life,
pale and desperate. Somehow when calm does return the life within those bodies
which survive gets lost. The eyes turn inward and the years which follow become
haunted and bewitched.
Mason felt a need to repay twenty years
later what he had been a part of. He felt a sense of obligation to this phantom
that emerged from nowhere and mow was fading into the shadows drinking a ca of
beer. All Mason could see now was a silhouette against the glow of a park lamp.
Was there a thread of destiny weaving about him drawing the two strange lives
together?
“I must go now, but I’ll return next
Sunday.”
“No, stay.”
“I can’t.” Mason said in a soft but
determined voice. “I have to go now. I’ll bring you some shirts and sweaters
next week and you can tell me more then.”
Tang Fu said nothing. He sat there
motionless. Mason got up to leave.
“Don’t go,” Tang Fu pleaded and demanded.
“I must.” With this Mason got up and headed
out of the park. At one point he turned to look back but Tang Fu did not move.
He sat on the bench motionless, the can of beer still in his hands and his gaze
focused somewhere on the moat trying to penetrate the murky depths of the
water.
Mason turned and walked out toward the
light and into the street.
The week went by quickly and on the Sunday
of the second meeting it was raining. It was a heavy rain in the early morning
which tapered off into a shower and then a misty drizzle. The sun never came
out, and Mason was not sure if tang fu would return that day. The meeting a
week earlier seemed so bizarre; a young man on a bicycle who sheds forth a life
of sorrow to a total stranger.
Their appointed meeting was to be
Mason brought with him a plastic bag
filled with clothes, shirts, sweaters and ties; things that could stretch if
they were too small and blow freely in the wind if a bit large. He was somewhat
glad to get rid of the stuff, clean out a few closets and make room for badly
needed clothing intended but not yet bought.
Tang Fu was there. He was standing next to
his bicycle near the moat looking and searching for Mason’s arrival.
Mason in the half-light of a cloudy day was
able to get a better look at him this time. He appeared to be much taller and
thinner than he had been a week ago. This was due in part to his standing near
the moat rather than sitting on the stone bench as he had done the week before.
Yet, he was changed. His hair once long and almost flowing was completely cut
and cropped to a crew. He wore a flamboyant shirt of many colors none of which
matched, a spotted shirt splattered as though an artist had sprinkled paint
haphazardly upon it with a brush; a shirt of reds, purples, yellows and blues.
He wore long pants stripped black and white. They made him seem taller than he
really was but the shirt and pants were at odds with each other giving him the
appearance of a clown.
Tang Fu was anything but a clown. Clowns
are not haunted. Tang Fu was. Clowns wear clothes of many colors in flamboyant
styles and wear sad faces and so did tang, but behind the masquerade of the
clown there is a person who separates himself from his costume, who takes off
his make-up and goes home to those he loves. AQ clown’s job is not his life,
but for Tang Fu he was not aware that he looked like a clown. He was not aware
of how he looked He only knew his pain.
He stood in the rain. When he saw Mason, he
smiled.
“I was waiting for you. I thought that you
were not going to come. I was sad. Now I’m happy,” he said.
“Well, I had a little trouble. The
weather…” Mason was apologizing when he really had no need to do so. He was
five minutes late at the most.
“Here. I brought you some clothes. I thought
you could use them or give them to someone who could.” Mason handed the bag
filled with old shirts and sweaters to Tang Fu who took them and simply said,
“Thanks.”
“Tang, were you waiting long.”
“A half-hour. Not
so long but I come from far away. I come special to meet you.”
“Do you have an umbrella?” Mason asked with
paternal concern.
“No umbrella.”
There was a whine in Tang Fu’s voice, a
pathetic sound of someone who had nothing and knew only the depth of his
poverty. His whine sounded like that which a dog makes when it wants its master
to open the door to let it go outside. It was not a practiced whine, but one
which came naturally and could easily be evoked if the situation called for it.
“Come. Let’s get out of the rain. Here
under this awning.” Mason urged.
The awning was nothing more than the
interlaced branches of lilac vines which over the years had meshed into a think
overhead net forming a tent which offered limited shelter but protected from
the open sky.
A bench and concrete platform table
situated in the middle was all that served as a place to rest from the rain.
“Let’s stay here for a while,” Mason
suggested. “Listen, Tang, can you read?”
“Little read. Only
hearing. I speak.”
“Would you like to read? I mean, I can
teach you to read.”
“Me busy company.
No time for study.”
“But, I’ll give you easy lessons. Once a week. Here. I’ll teach you how to read and write. No
money.”
Mason spoke in a cryptic tone as if he
were beating out a message on the Morse code. He felt responsible for this
stranger before him He felt responsible for the war and this young casualty
before him. Much of the rest was a mystery. He had no doubt though that he was
from
“No time to learn.” He resisted being
taught. There was something pathetic about his persona. He didn’t seem to
belong. Perhaps even in his own country he was a misfit, a loner whom no one
cared for and people thought little about.
Suddenly, as if a demon had entered his
body, he began to speak but it was not the same voice and it didn’t come from
within the same mind. It was a voice not his own but the voice of one possessed
within a haunted body.
“Now I remember,:
he said. “It was you after all, wasn’t it? You came back today to get me,
didn’t you It was YOU who killed my parents. It was you I saw the day the bombs
fell.”
His voice was bereft of emotion. It was a
low-pitched monotone, a deep dark voice within a human shell, a voice without
feeling but clearly distinct. As he spoke his eyes were unfocused. They were
neither searching nr nervous, but cold as steel.
Mason felt as if the tang Fu he had met
earlier had taken leave of this body before him and now a demon had replaced
what went before and dwelt within an inner void.
“What are you talking about? I never saw
you before last week. I didn’t kill your parents.”
“It WAS you. I remember now as if it
happened yesterday. My mother and father were home and the sound of planes came
overhead. I wanted to run to the house. My mother called me. Suddenly the
planes came. One at a time. I was in the village. Many children, many faces, many cryings,
many tears. I forgot everything but your face. Your face I remember.”
Mason got up to leave. He realized well
that now he was in the presence of a madman. His heart was filled with pity and
fear. The fear paralyzed him.
“I’ve gotta go.
You’re mad.” Saying this Mason go up to leave.
“It was you. Now, I must kill you or the
soul of my parents will never be able to know peace. If you leave I will follow
you. If you escape, I will hunt you down.” He hardly moved as he said this. He
was not aware of the rain. He did not notice Mason getting up to leave. The
drizzle had now become a steady rain and the awning of vines no longer gave its
protection. The vines were no longer able to shield away the drops which began
to fall on both Mason and Tang Fu.
“My mother’s blood cries out to me,” Tang
Fu shouted. But these were not his words. Some other voice spoke from within
him.
“My father’s blood washes my hands,” he
cried.
A shiver ran through Mason’s spine. The
hands of the dead were rising from their premature graves and pointing at him.
His innocence could not be denied but he was being held responsible for sins he
had not committed.
“Don’t go! Stay!”
Mason was now on his bike. His foot was
reaching for the pedal to ride him out of this circle which ringed him with
fear.
“Don’t go! Otosan!
Only joking!”
Tang Fu jumped to his
feet, “Otosan, Only joking. Come back,
please!”
The voice which cried out to him was not
the same voice that had accused him just moments earlier. It was the voice he
had known the week earlier and the same voice that earlier had said, “I was
waiting for you to come. I was afraid and worried your
wouldn’t show up.”
Mason was now on the muddy dirt path
leading out of the park. He looked back only once and saw the face of Tang Fu
dissolving in the mist as he stood near the awning and cried out once more, “Otosan!”
************
Many months passed; the months of summer;
the humid, moist and fetid days of sunrises and sunsets. Mason and Tang Fu had
parted and seen nothing of each other. Mason felt that at every turn of the
corner he would see Tang Fu riding his bicycle. He avoided the places of their
first encounters. He took the long way around places to avoid any future
contact with Tang Fu. He was convinced now that Tang Fu was a madman, perhaps a
schizophrenic or psychopath. It was an unvoiced anxiety which gripped him, one
which created a nauseous pit in his stomach for, if anything, he wished they
had never met.
What frightened Mason the most was the element
of the unknown, that dark corner of everyman’s life where character is born and
personality is formed. We all emerge from the darkness where shadows rest upon
shadows and layers of hurt, neglect and rejection build up like calluses which
thicken and feel no pain.
As the days passed into weeks which turned
into months, Mason began to forget Tang Fu and with forgetfulness came a
feeling of relaxation. He was confident that Tang Fu also felt the same way.
Perhaps he was really “only joking” as he had said. He most likely had moved
along his own way haunting the castle moat, riding his bicycle into other
lives.
On occasion a reference to the past would
bring back a memory of Tang Fu. It may be a newspaper clipping about
The past is not that easy to dismiss. It
comes back uninvited and takes one by surprise. The summer turned into autumn
and Mason had spent the evening in town with friends. It was late at night and
the clock at the station registered a quarter past twelve. The night was cool.
The sky was clear.
He passed some young teens who sat
clustered near the curb. Their punk hairstyles streaked with red and green
initiated them into their own cult. Mason wondered what they could possibly be
doing past
Reflection he
realized they were doing nothing. Their idleness laid in wait for something to
happen. Between
Riding his bike he sped past them on his
way home leaving both the station and the neon lights behind him. The castle
before him was still lit and stood proudly on the hill. The park surrounding it
was a dark labyrinth of trees and benches, paths and fountains, all swallowed
by and into the night.
The streets near the castle appeared
somewhat deserted and the sound of an occasional car going in both directions
up and down the street broke the silence. It was then that fate moved its hand.
Along the main street Tang Fu came riding his bicycle. His pace was brisk as if
he had both purpose and destination. His hair had grown longer and his eyes,
those lifeless portals into total darkness seemed as searching and haunted as
ever. The passing months had not relieved the madness that dwelt within his
body.
He saw Mason. As the two crossed only
within feet of each other, they exchanged glances and Mason pedaled past to
rapidly increase the distance between them. His first interest was to get away
and detour down a side street. He moved to cross over to the oncoming lane, but
a car sped past cornering the right of way. He tried again but failed. “Where
did all of there cars come from?” Mason thought to himself.
Casting a glance over
his right shoulder, he noticed that Tang Fu had turned around and was now
approaching him from behind. His longer legs gave him the strength to pedal
faster and he was almost upon Mason who found himself
trembling again. He yelled back into the night air, “Go away! Get out of here!
Leave me alone!”
Tang Fu said not a word but continued to
follow. His strategy was to pursue and snot to overtake him. Mason wanted
nothing more than to be rid of this menace. As he was being chased he recalled
Tang Fu’s words in the park months earlier under the awning in the rain. Those
accusing words,” You killed my parents” cut through him very deeply; the soul
of the dead crying out for blood.
He wanted to swerve out into the other lane
and to make it down a side street to escape being pursued. He moved his bike to
the right and did not notice the oncoming car speeding down the center lane. He
pedaled quickly but the final omen echoed in the sound of a collision; the
sound of metal hitting metal, the sound of a body crashing to the ground, of steel
being twisted, of lives being forever changed.
The screech of tires
followed the crashing of steel. The car had swerved to avoid the head on impact
but the front fender had caught Mason’s bike in its flight to be free from
pursuit.
Tang fu biked his way into the shadows and
sirens came to witness to the scene. Tang fu’s eyes were as cold as the chilled
wind which swept through the autumn night. His face was void of feeling and
expression.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” he murmured to
himself.