Both of them turned to me like they’d forgotten I was there.
“What is a bad man to you, Officer?” Victor said.
I saw then why he was good at his job. He could slip on that coldness like it was a second face.
I’d forgotten about the small black backpack by his feet. He unzipped it and pulled out a videotape, which he set gently on the table.
“I haven’t told you the whole story.”
10
VICTOR, I COULD SEE NOW, was a reluctant criminal. He enjoyed his job as much as I enjoyed Vegas but kept at it for that most Asian of reasons: obligation. To his brothers probably, who looked up to him. To his family back home, who relied on the money he sent them. And of course to Sonny, who had taken him in and made him a man, programmed to honor duty over desire. I could see it in his eyes every time he looked at Mai. The kid had never truly desired anyone, and this strange new thing he felt made him both defiant and naive. The most annoying kind of criminal.
He nudged the videotape closer to us, like it was some sinister artifact, and I could imagine it all from there: years of him thoughtlessly obeying orders, doing whatever needed doing and looking the other way, and suddenly one morning from his car he sees his boss’s wife, who he’s never met before, standing in the window of their home. She’s watching her husband, his boss, walk to the car that will whisk him away to all the ugly things he does during the day, without her, and she knows this. Her arms are crossed, her stare cold and yet strangely tender, like she is saddened by something she also hates. She frightens him actually, though he feels this inexplicable urge to protect her. She reminds him of his mother or his sisters back home, and maybe also those desolate women he saw in the refugee camp. Every morning he comes to pick up his boss, she’s standing in that window like some troubled ghost haunting the house.
Then one morning, though he’s far away behind sunglasses and tinted windows, she sees him. He can feel her judging him. Her arm is in a cast and she knows now that he has hurt people, stolen from them, perhaps even killed them — all for his boss who’s done terrible things too, including all the things he has done to her.
So when he is ordered without any explanation to follow her, he does so with redemption on his mind. It’s the naive hero in him, the good son. Every day he trails her down the aisles of grocery stores, through the afternoon crowds at shopping malls and casinos, and into half-empty movie theaters, until one afternoon she leaves a letter at someone’s apartment, and when he returns that night and sees who this someone is, he finally understands. All that wandering through the city has been a circling around this young woman, her long-lost daughter, who’s even more beautiful and perhaps more alone.
And so maybe he falls in love with this younger version of her. Or maybe the whole thing makes him think of his dead father and the mother he might never see again. Or maybe it just makes him angry, that people have to carry around secrets like this.
When she appears at his side in the empty hallway of the Coronado hotel, it feels like they’ve been silently speaking to each other all this time. She starts telling him the story he’s been waiting for. In room 1215, she reveals the letters on her desk, the gun in her knapsack, and the fear in her heart. One day soon, she says, intentionally or not, his boss will kill her. She has to leave him, but she wants to punish him too, this man who’s probably given Victor everything he has. When she asks for his help, he refuses, so she reaches again into her knapsack and pulls out the videotape, puts it into the VCR. She goes into the bathroom with her rosary and asks him to knock on the door when he is done. He must watch it all, she says. To the very end. And then she’ll tell him everything else.
THINGS HAD STARTED GOING BAD a year back, when Sonny’s poker game went sour. He’d come home from his sessions moody and drunk, starting arguments and slamming doors for no reason. She had no idea how much he was losing, but the thing he always blamed was his luck. It baffled him, enraged him. He kept telling her about it, repeating the same bad-beat stories in different ways, like he was trying to convince her of how outrageous it all was. She tried to sympathize but had to steel herself against anger that felt directed more and more at her, like he believed on some level that her presence in his life had somehow affected the way the universe was treating him.
She admitted to Victor that she’d blamed herself too for a time, that her own dark moods often scared her more than Sonny’s did and had come to pollute both their lives. A year in the desert had dried up whatever hope and happiness the move there initially promised. She felt walled in by all the mountains, oppressed by the barrenness of the land, the emptiness of the sky, and all that constant sunlight. She told me once that she preferred the nighttime to the daytime because at night most things are hidden, and it made her feel safe. Back then, that made no sense to me.
She went back on her old medication, but it no longer helped her sleep as it once had, so she turned to sleeping pills, even during the day. Mixing that with alcohol made things worse, and she was doing that daily now, just as she had with me. Two or three beers at lunch. A bottle of wine every evening.
Her bad dreams returned. They crawled around inside her all day. She started seeing the people from her dreams. They would walk past the bedroom door or the bedroom window, trail her on her walks through the neighborhood in the middle of the night, vanish behind trees and fences and into shadows. She dreaded the nighttime now — a choice between not sleeping at all or taking pills that would unleash all the terrors inside her.
But Sonny didn’t care. He had no interest in her nightmares or her visions. He slept soundly, I imagine, through all her trembling in the night, her nonsensical murmuring, her waking up with a start and grabbing your arm, your hand, ready to tell you all the horrible things she’d just dreamed. She had no one to tell them to now. Maybe that’s why she got to hating him so.
She started arguments over things she barely cared about, like which lights should stay on or how hot the tea should be. She couldn’t stop herself. As soon as she began antagonizing him, it was like some pulse inside her would quicken and overtake her with an intensity she no longer felt for anything else. I remember it well. That dark eruption of fire in her eyes. A rage I’ve since suspected felt good on some level. She used to lock herself in the bathroom after our arguments and weep quietly for as long as an hour, and I wonder now if — more than shame or sadness — it was out of relief that she was still alive inside.
I doubt Sonny had patience for talking things through, for seeing doctors or finding solutions. They simply stopped doing whatever it was that had made them happy that first year of their marriage, if they were ever happy. They even stopped making love, an urge that had apparently dried up in her. With me, she used to blame her medication or her drinking or her period. Who knew what reasons she gave Sonny, but I doubt if any would have made a difference.
The night of the fall, she awoke to him kissing her hard on the mouth. He’d come home late from the casinos, his breath reeking of alcohol. She pushed him off her, and that’s when she saw the kitchen knife in his hand. He stood up, completely naked. He demanded she take off her clothes. When she refused, he plunged the knife into their mattress. When she tried to run from the room, he seized a handful of her hair and dragged her back to the bed. In their struggle, she grabbed the baseball bat he kept by the door and whacked the knife from his hand. He screamed out in pain, cursing her as she fled the room. At the top of the stairs, he caught her again by the hair, but she turned and kicked him in the groin, which was when he grabbed her face and shoved it like he was taking off her head. She remembered stumbling back and gripping the top of the bannister, then losing her grip and nearly all memory of what happened thereafter.