I must have looked startled as he put the plate before me.
"Do not worry, Mr. Wyeth." Ha's old eyes disappeared into amused slits but his gaze stayed fixed on mine. "Just enjoy. Ha is giving you very good fish today. You know this, you see this fish before, you must show the others it is very good to eat."
I took the piece of sushi, looked at it. Ha shuffled out from the bar and toward H.J. and Gabriel, who had not eaten any fish. "Please, it is very good. Protein. Very strong." Then he turned back to me. "Is it good?"
I watched Jay set his cigar on the table next to his plate. I saw Allison watch me. I popped the piece of fish in my mouth. I chewed.
"Hmm," I told them, "that is terrific."
"Yes."
"Are you sure there's no more?" I said. "I could eat a boatload of this stuff."
Ha bowed his head in apology.
Denny ate his second piece, Gabriel tasted his first. We needed a pause, a lag of a minute. I listened, and thought I heard the first footsteps of the staff arriving upstairs.
Allison looked at her watch.
"What's that?" demanded H.J.
"The restaurant is opening," she said. "I've got waiters and waitresses arriving, sous-chefs, busboys, everybody."
"Can't you close it?"
"No," said Allison. "I'd have to call thirty people."
We heard a vacuum cleaner start up.
"You lock that door at the top of the stairs?" asked H.J.
Gabriel nodded.
"Nobody can get down here?"
"No."
"What time will everybody leave?"
"Maybe one a.m.," said Allison. "That's a long time from now."
"Big night planned?" I said to Allison, trying to kill time. Jay was studying his cigar.
"Convention bookings, two waves. Insurance salesmen or something. They'll be there all night."
Ha busied himself with cleaning up. Now it seemed there was a lot of spit in my mouth. I glanced at Gabriel; he'd eaten his second piece, H.J. his first. Jay had lifted his piece, examining the skill of its creation.
"I'm feeling poorly," Denny announced. "Numb. My eyes don't move." He tried to grasp the bar but toppled over, heavily, right in front of me, gun loose in his hand.
"Denny?" Gabriel lifted his gun as he watched Denny's legs shake queerly. But then he himself was blinking rapidly and began to wave his hands around his head as if to stop a pestering fly, wetness spreading across his crotch. He fell down on one knee, pitched sideways.
"What the fuck?" cried H.J., mouth full. "Denny? Gabriel?"
Ha remained stooped over the bar, the portrait of servility. Mournful, almost. I wanted him to look up at me now, because of course I had eaten the fish in good faith, in all the faith that I had, and I needed- as I was feeling odd- I needed to know that I hadn't eaten too much, that Ha had only served me the right amount, just enough and no more. I felt oddly disconnected from my thoughts, unafraid, in fact, to reach down and take Denny's gun from his hand.
"Hey!" yelled Lamont, noticing. He pointed the gun at Ha, at Jay, at me.
"I'm sick," called H.J., lurching toward the doorway. "Get me out of here."
Lamont swung his gun at me.
I pointed Denny's gun at him and fired — then felt a kind of electric zipper running up the back of my throat. I wondered about my eyes, and I lifted my hand to touch them, but it was too heavy to lift. I fell sideways in my booth and the room broke into crooked planes. Maybe Ha wanted to kill all of us, maybe that was the truth. Jay had his piece of sushi in his fingers. About to put it in his mouth. "Fish," I coughed, pointing.
"What?"
But if he ate the fish or spat it out, or if H.J. made it up the stairs, or if Lamont was shot I didn't know, for I slumped in the corner of the booth, staring at the salt shaker. The roof of my mouth now itched terribly, and my toes and hands began to tingle and turn numb. I could not move or refocus my eyes. Perhaps they had closed, I didn't know. Some time may have passed… in the meantime I felt my breath within my chest, moist, my whole life in there, as it is with everyone's, and I felt a peacefulness at the thought of death, perhaps even a willingness to die, if it was really so easy as this, but then I either saw or imagined that I saw Jay bend forward coughing, at first violently and then weakly. Had he eaten the fish? Allison may have rushed to him. I became fascinated by her hair, a wig of translucent snakes that convulsed rhythmically above her head. Allison knelt to the floor, and I watched Jay get up or not. But whether this was dream or truth is lost to me now… a cascade of sparks froze against the surface of my face until it caramelized and cracked into distinct jigsaw shapes of numbness, and they fell out and away from my face piece by piece and it was then that I believed I heard- what sounded most distinctly like- another gunshot, and I saw or believed I saw the speeding bullet appear before me, the slo-mo rotation of the slug trailing an elegant thread of blue smoke, and just as the slug approached my face one of the melted jigsaw puzzle pieces fell away, and the bullet- still rotating to perfection- pierced it, making it shatter like glass, yet silently, and then continue into and through the empty place on my cheek. Of course this was impossible. I had the sensation of falling into myself, folding downward, heart collapsing into my lungs, lungs into my intestines. Then I went blind. It was not the sensation of darkness but of nothingness, like trying to see the world when one is asleep, and I felt something large twitch in my ear and it must have been my eardrum reacting to a loud human sound, and I sensed heat or, more accurately, smoke, some smoke or burnt vapor spiraled up my nose, familiar yet ominous, and there was a scream that seemed to take forever against the same eardrum, and only afterward did I understand it was a woman's scream, and who she was I did not know. You cannot know the usual things when you have eaten Shao-tzou fugu fish from China. You cannot know who people are, including yourself. You can only hope that there is still a breath in you somewhere, a faint glowing in the lungs, and perhaps too you know that you have fallen in dumb paralysis to the cold black-and-white tiles of the Havana Room, which would seem the first step toward being permanently dead.
Ten
A clattering wet darkness, cold and filled with exhaust- this is where I awoke, a bulkily shifting weight atop me, hurting my back and legs and my head, my face pressed in lip-snarled compression against a leaking plastic mass. When I moved against this restraint, pain sparked down my neck, dwindling away as I fell limp again. I pushed off harder and this time the volume atop me settled to either side and the air was better. I was in what sounded like a truck going forty or fifty miles an hour. The top of my head seemed to flatten, then crater downward, then pop out to its original shape. I vomited, but I could not smell or feel what came out of me, and I was already so slick with refuse that I did not feel my own spew, whether it landed on me or away. I cannonballed myself to my hands and knees, only now beginning to hear a muffled shrieking in another language, tinny and incomprehensible- Chinese, coming from what sounded like a radio a few feet in front of me. A blast of music followed, then near silence. I took this opportunity to yell as loudly as I could.
The vehicle slowed, with much excited hollering of men's voices. The truck seemed to be executing one barrel roll after another, or perhaps that was me, tumbling sideways. I vomited again, upward, and this time I tasted myself, felt the stomach acid wash in my eyes. The van or truck accelerated and rocketed over bumps and stones and craters and thousand-foot pits and whatever else might break its tires, and then stopped, the bulky mass rocking forward, then settling back onto itself as the vehicle came to a dead stop. I vomited a third time. A bag fell against me. The engine stayed on. I heard the voices, a door open, then the voices come alongside the walls of the vehicle. The lock on the door was being opened. I lifted my head. A rectangle of light opened at one end of the space and two Chinese men in overalls and long rubber gloves stood before me. I hollered bloody murder again and they climbed into the garbage and hauled me out feetfirst, roughly, yelling as if I had betrayed them, and I fought them out of instinct, but they got their clammy gloves around my legs and pulled me roughly through the leaking garbage bags, then along the slick floor of the van. I fell straight to the ground, banging my shoulder on the bumper, and before they slammed the doors shut, one of the men picked up a fallen bag of eggshells and shrimp carcasses, a pause just long enough for me to look up and into the van- it was a van- and notice, or think that I noticed, a man's brown dress shoe resting in the refuse, a shoe not my own, since I had both of mine still on. I fell backward, stunned and weak, my lungs filled with exhaust as the van sped crazily over a rubbled wasteland, through a broken fence, then into the street. The sky above me was a cloudless infinity of blue. A seagull winged lazily past. My eyes hurt, my head felt too big, my back numb, legs stiff and weak. I rolled to my stomach, got one knee up, stood, staggered, vomited again, this time a thin, burning gruel, wiped my mouth with my sleeve, pulled a piece of limp lettuce from my hair, and saw now that I stood in an abandoned lot strewn with bricks and bottles. I was suddenly cold and dry-mouthed. The garbage had kept me warm. I felt my pockets and was pleased to discover my wallet, with all my identification as well. Plus a set of keys I didn't recognize. I studied them. They were Jay's. I had to give them back. I counted my cash, found I hadn't been robbed. No, that would have been a relief, in a way. I was being dumped, taken out with the garbage.