The lesson of my childhood was that if you anticipate misfortune, you make it hurt less. It’s a fool’s truth, but what truth isn’t?
When I got home the following evening, I stayed in my car and stared for some time at the dark windows of my apartment. I was still in uniform but driving my old blue Chrysler. A drowsy fog crawled in from the Oakland bay, a cataract on the sunset, the day, which now felt worn. “Empty Garden” played on the radio, a slow sad song I hadn’t heard since my twenties. I remembered the old music video, Elton John playing a piano in a vacant concrete courtyard amid autumn leaves and twilight shadows. I sat back and scanned the complex of buildings surrounding me and thought of Suzy and the flowers that decorated every corner of our old house, and at the pit of me was not sadness or anger but the hollowness of forgetting how to need someone.
Three kids on bicycles glided past my car through fresh puddles left by the sprinklers. Some twenty yards away, an elderly man strolled the courtyard with his Chihuahua like a scared baby in his arms. In the building that faced me, three college guys were leaning over their balcony, smoking and leering at a pretty redhead who passed below them with a baby stroller. Then I saw a skinny Asian kid — a teenager — walk in front of my car, turn, and approach the window. He smiled and gestured for me to roll it down. His hands looked empty. He was wearing a Dodgers cap and an oversize blue Dodgers jacket zipped all the way to his throat. His smile was like a pose for a camera, and when he bent down to face me, he was all teeth.
I cracked open my window.
“Hello, Officer,” he said. “Nice evening, huh?” He slipped me a folded note through the crack, and before I could say anything, he jogged away around the corner of the building.
I recognized the yellow paper, the Oakland PD logo, ripped from the notepad on my kitchen table. The words were neatly printed in red ink: We’ve come from Las Vegas. Leave your gun in the car and come into your apartment. We just want to talk. Follow these instructions and no one will be harmed.
That last line lingered on my lips as I refolded the note and slipped it into my breast pocket, glaring again at the windows of my apartment. Why would they warn me? Why give me a chance to walk away? I considered calling in for help, but had to remind myself that if I hadn’t told a soul about what happened five months ago, there was no explaining it now, at least not to anyone who could help. I could have driven away too, but I’d done that before and it had only led me here, to this moment. Or so I suspected.
And that was really the thing: whatever it was, I just needed to know. Nothing more exhausting than the imagination.
I pulled my gun out of its holster and made a show of holding it over the steering wheel before placing it into my glove compartment.
Walking away from the car felt like leaving a warm bed. I had lived in the complex for over two years, ever since the divorce, and liked it well enough, but only then, as I was trudging up the path toward my apartment, did I see how its tranquil beauty seemed like a postcard of someone else’s life: the ivory stucco buildings leaning into shadow, hugged by tall trees and trimmed bushes and small perfect squares of lawn drowned now, even in winter, by the evening sprinklers. I began my climb up the stairwell. I noticed for the first time how craggy the stone steps were, how awfully they’d scrape at your skin if you were to go falling down the stairs.
Not sure what to do at my own front door, I knocked. There was no answer, so I slowly turned the knob. The door was unlocked. It opened into darkness. As soon as I stepped inside, the lamp in the living room clicked on.
There were two young Asian men standing side by side in front of the TV set. The taller one spoke up in perfect English: “Close the door, please.”
I remained in the doorway and gripped the doorknob, one foot still lingering on the porch. I remembered the last line of their note and took another step inside, nudging the door shut with my heel.
It’s always difficult to tell with Asians, but the two of them could have been no older than twenty-five. The short one sported a goatee and slick hair and stood ashing his cigarette into my potted cactus, his wiry frame wrapped in a shiny black leather jacket. The other one, buzz-cut and sturdy in jeans and a bomber jacket, was a foot taller and moved that way, having just, without a word or glance, handed his binoculars to his partner, who dutifully set them atop the TV. I saw no sign of a gun on either yet, which bothered me more than if they’d already had one pointed at my head. They were not nervous, though they expected me to be. The goateed one, like their messenger outside, acted happy to see me; he had nodded when our eyes met, right after the lamp flickered him into existence. But it was the taller, stoic one who again spoke.
“You are Officer Robert Ruen.”
“Who’re you? Why are you in my home?”
“I’m sure you can guess. You came up, didn’t you?”
“Did I have a choice?”
He said something to the goateed kid that I did not understand, but I knew for certain then that they were Vietnamese.
Casually, the kid put out his cigarette in the cactus pot and approached me with a sly grin and his palms out like he wanted a hug. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Officer, I’m gonna search you right now. Wanna make sure we all on even ground.”
I hesitated at first, not sure yet whether I should cooperate or play dumb and tell him to search himself. His pleasantness both irked and intimidated me. I put my hands on the front door and let him pat me down. He was half my size, but his hands were solid, with weight and intention behind them. Satisfied, he gestured for me to make myself comfortable on my own couch, which I did after quickly sniffing him and smelling nothing but cigarettes.
They’d been waiting for some time. A couple of my travel magazines lay open on the coffee table beside two open cans of Coke from my fridge, and the TV remote sat atop the TV instead of its usual resting place on the arm of the sofa. I was surprised they hadn’t kicked off their shoes and made coffee.
The kid watched me as I, by force of habit, slipped off my loafers and set them neatly to the side. He chuckled lazily and turned to his partner. “I think we dirtied up his carpet.”
His partner looked at his watch, then at my shoes. Again he spoke in Vietnamese. The kid threw him an exaggerated frown, but he repeated himself and was already silently unlacing a boot. A moment later they had both tossed their shoes onto the tile floor by the front door.
“Our Christmas present to you,” the kid said to me in his white socks.
“How did you get in here?”
“Through the front door. Simmer down, Mr. Officer. We just waiting for a phone call.” He shut up for the moment, waiting like his partner.
On the wall behind them hung the samurai sword I had bought ages ago at a flea market for forty bucks. I had unsheathed it once or twice to admire it, and now wondered how sharp it actually was.
“Hey,” the kid said, struck by something. “I got something else for you.”
Though I was going nowhere, he gestured for me to remain seated. He arched his brow mischievously at me, as if at some eager child at a birthday party, and reached into his jacket pocket. I held my breath as he pulled out another cigarette, which he put to his lips. From the other pocket, he revealed a silver flask. Holding out an index finger like a perch for a bird, he carefully poured the contents of the flask over the length of it. He raised it to his face and flicked his lighter. The finger ignited in a calm blue flame, which he promptly used to light his cigarette. He held up the finger like a candle, blew a lazy plume of smoke over it, and watched it burn itself out as he flashed his jack-o’-lantern grin. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to scare me, entertain me, or make fun of me.