The Man With No Time

“Where are we?” I demanded. “Albania?”

“We're in China,” Eleanor said. “Right now, we're in China.”

“This is Willis Street,” I said stubbornly.

“No,” she said. “Three or four hours ago, this was Willis Street, Los Angeles. Now it's China. Something Chinese happened here. Whatever happens next will be Chinese, too.”

I looked at her with longing. “You're as Chinese as I am.”

“Three or four hours ago, that was true. Now it isn't.”

I sat there, trying to control my giveaway Occidental face and waiting for all my immediate responses to line up in an orderly fashion. Then I eliminated all of them and said something else, something that might let me into the game.

“Chinese or not Chinese, maybe I can help you without doing anything.”

“Yeah?” Horace asked skeptically.

“I know how to ask questions. I can ask you questions. Only you and Horace. And maybe those questions will help you get a better picture of whatever the hell is going on. I won't act on the answers, I promise. But maybe they'll help you when it's time for you to stop holding still and make decisions.”

“Decisions,” Horace said vaguely.

“What do you do when the phone rings?” I asked. “Let's say it's Uncle Lo, and he's got a deal. You've got to know as much as you can. I don't know anything, which makes me the perfect person to ask the questions. I promise, I swear on whatever you want, that I won't do anything with the answers. They're for you. They're to help you think of things you might not think of otherwise, because otherwise will be too late. And you know how Edmund Burke defined Hell? It's the truth, recognized too late.” Well, maybe it hadn't been Edmund Burke.

They looked at each other again, brother and sister united against a world that included me. It was a new wrinkle in our relationships. I sat there feeling like a visitor from Internal Revenue. I wanted to hug them both and then knock their heads together.

“Go,” Horace said when they'd finished their silent conference.

I went, taking refuge in reason. “Hypothesis one: Uncle Lo came here from Hong Kong. Did you pick him up at the airport?”

“No.” Horace looked surprised by the question.

“Did anyone you know pick him up?”

“No.” That was Eleanor.

“Did he phone first?”

“He knocked on the door,” she said.

“When?”

She glanced at Horace, who had gone very still. “About nine on Friday. Nine at night, I mean.” She looked at me, and faltered, then swallowed and went on. “I'm always here for dinner on Friday, you know.”

I had a question ready, but her words choked it off. Friday was Eleanor's happiest night, the night Horace and Pansy shared the twins with her, and she'd arranged her working schedule to accommodate it, and also-I privately believed-to make it more difficult for them to cancel. Six days a week she wrote at home in Venice; on Fridays, she drove early in the morning to the big downtown library and did research there until it was time for her to drive to Willis Street for dinner. No one could call her to change the plan. Once, when we were both drunk, Horace had suggested that Eleanor loved the twins as much as she did because she and I had never had any. I'd pushed the idea away in self-defense.

“So you were eating,” I finally suggested.

“We'd just finished,” Eleanor said. “You know Pansy, she was in the kitchen slogging around in soapy water. Horace was introducing himself to his fourth beer, and Bravo and I were carrying the twins around on our backs.” Bravo, curled beneath the uprighted dining-room table, thumped his tail at the sound of his name.

“Bravo and you?” I asked, seeing the picture.

“He can't carry them both,” she said defensively. I ached to hold her.

“So the doorbell rang.”

“He knocked,” she said. She saw the look in my eyes and almost smiled. “He was at the back door.”

“How'd he get the address?”

“He had a letter Mom wrote him six or seven years ago. He showed it to me. There was an address, but we'd changed our phone number.”

“Did you see his airline ticket?”

“Oh, come on.”

“But he told you he'd just landed from Hong Kong.”

“That's what he said.” She was sounding impatient.

“Did he go down to pay a taxi or anything?”

“Um,” she said, looking at Horace again. “No. No, he didn't.”

“So if he came in a cab, he paid the cab off, and he sent it away before he climbed the steps leading to a seven-year-old address.”

Horace liberated another strand of hair and let it whiffle its way to the floor. We all watched it all the way down. Eleanor's hand was in her hair, a prelude to pulling.

“So, he could have come from Hong Kong or from Stockton,” I said. “No way to tell. Eleanor, lay off your hair, okay?”

“Yikes,” she said, pulling her hand away and tucking it under her.

“Okay. We don't know where he came from.” I cleared my throat. “Hypothesis two: It was Uncle Lo who took the twins, instead of someone else. What's gone that belongs to them?”

Horace blinked. “Good question,” he said, getting to his feet and plodding toward the bedroom, like a man walking uphill.

Eleanor waited until he was gone and put her hand in mine. “Don't try to understand,” she said.

Her hand was warm and smooth and familiar in mine. I moved over to sit next to her, and she leaned against me and breathed on my neck. I knew she didn't mean anything by it; she was just breathing. She breathed a couple more times, and I bathed in her warmth.

“Four sets of clothes,” Horace said, returning, “for each of them. And Julia's duck and Eadweard's clown ball.”

Eleanor straightened. “Their favorites,” she said. She looked reassured at the news.

“Did he see the twins play with them?” I wanted her back against me.

“That's all they play with,” Eleanor said, blinking very fast.

“Hypothesis three,” I said, raising my voice to distract her. “Uncle Lo wasn't really Uncle Lo.”

Eleanor passed a hand over her eyes and stared at me. “Of course he was.”

“What did he say when you opened the door?”

'He said, 'Mei-Yu.' '

I must have looked blank, because she said, “That's my name, remember?”

“You recognized him?”

“I was a little girl when I saw him last. It was more than twenty years ago. Of course I didn't recognize him.”

“So he told you who he was. He said, ‘I’m Uncle Lo,' or something.”

“Yes. And showed me the letter from Mom. He called Mom by her first name, too, Ah-Ling, and he asked about Horace, calling him Ah-Cho.” She recited the Chinese names like magic words, and they had been; they'd been the spoken charms that opened the door.

The letter. “And you let him in.”

“First I hugged him, then I started crying. Then I shouted for Ah-for Horace, I mean-and then I let him in.”

“And then Bravo tried to eat him.”

“I forgot,” she said. “Bravo barked before he knocked on the door. Yes, Bravo went for him. Uncle Lo looked like he was going to faint.”

“Did you doubt at all that he was who he said he was?”