The Man With No Time

its taste. Foremost among them seemed to be wet dog hair, softened and modulated by a hint of aluminum and a reedy note of newsprint, the entire rich and complex bouquet culminating in a strong finish of industrial-strength benzine. In mitigation, it had enough caffeine to set an army of water buffalo doing the hokey-pokey.

Lek, I thought. Thai. Lek and Ning and Lala, all of them thousands of miles from rice paddies and gilded temple spires and easy smiles. The Chans, Chinese. The tongs. The Vietnamese kids. All of them here now, part of a city that has more Koreans than anyplace outside Korea, more Cambodians and Thais than anyplace outside Cambodia and Thailand, more Japanese than anyplace outside Japan. Hell, we have more Canadians than Vancouver. A hundred languages, literally, are spoken in the public schools. All these people, Filipinos and Armenians, Turks and Guatemalans and Salvadorans, migrating over the lines and the empty blue spaces on the maps to create whole communities in a big ugly basin where the dominant gas is carbon monoxide and the dominant currency is disappointment. Mass movements, mass migrations, to get here.

And what was here?

Immigration, Im-migration. In my caffeine-saturated state, the word broke apart easily. I was composing an ode to immigration and my knees were taking turns jiggling up and down by the time the day was born rosy-fingered through the haze in the eastern sky, and a light went on upstairs in Mrs. Summerson's house.

The light beckoned to me. I looked around. No one in the street. No one watching from the windows of the other houses, or at least no one I could see. I got up and stretched and ambled across the street, just your average wired guy out strolling at the crack of dawn, and then I ducked under the arbors and ran, half bent over, to the wall of the house that faced the street, positioning myself against a section of clapboard between two large windows.

I heard singing, and the window to my left lit up. Growing in front of it was some sort of bush that someone who knew something about bushes could probably have identified. With the low arbors behind me I felt secure from the street, so I sidled like a good moth toward the light and waited behind the bush, peering through the gossamer or crinoline or whatever it was for all to be revealed.

What was revealed, eventually, was a woman in her late seventies having tea with her breakfast. I learned a new way to break and eat a soft-boiled egg, and I learned that Mrs. Summerson used linen napkins even when she ate alone and that she refolded them neatly to present a clean surface each time she touched one to her lips, which was often, and in general I learned that my standards of gentility were precariously low. Abandoning the light, I left her to her protein and checked every window I could see through and found the rooms on the other side empty. No lamps came on anywhere else in the house. If Mrs. Summerson was secretly playing host to Uncle Lo or to several thousand tong members, they were apparently breakfasting in the rooms upstairs. In the dark.

The orange rim of the sun was barging its way over the horizon by the time I arrived at the Chan apartment and found all the lights blazing away. I went up the stairs two at a time to try to burn off a little of the caffeine and walked into bedlam.

Pansy was on her knees in the corner, directly below the cross that Mrs. Chan, who took no chances where religion was concerned, had hung next to the family's Taoist shrine. Horace was pacing the rug around the dining- room table in precise rectangles, changing direction every time he reached the chair at the head of the table. He was holding his wristwatch in his hand. Eleanor was pouring coffee onto her wrist, missing a cup on top of the television set by inches, staring at me.

“How-but how did you know?” she sputtered.

“Know what?”

The coffee hit her foot, and she looked down. “Lord,” she said, without force, “look at that. He's called, Simeon. He called about twenty minutes ago.”

“What did he say?”

“Just said hold tight, he'd call back.” She picked up the cup and poured into it, rattling it badly against the spout of the coffeepot, and extended it to me.

“Thanks anyway,” I said, feeling something hot rise in the back of my throat.

She nodded absently and started to look at her watch. She was holding the cup in the hand that had the watch on it, so I reached out and took the cup before she dumped coffee all over her stomach. Since I had it, I drank some.

“What time, what time?” Pansy demanded, getting up from her place of worship. Her pillow had pressed her hair flat on the left side of her head, and her cheeks were flaming red. She'd buttoned her blouse crooked.

“Five-eighteen,” Horace said, reversing direction around the table. He looked like one of the wooden soldiers in The Nutcracker. “Five-nineteen,” he corrected himself, staring at the watch in his hand as he marched. He walked into a chair and knocked it over.

The phone rang.

Everybody stopped dead.

“Simeon,” Eleanor said. “The extension in the bedroom. Horace, you take this one. Pick up, both of you, at the end of the third ring.” Pansy stood absolutely still in the middle of the room, hands clasped in front of her stomach like an old-fashioned opera singer about to embark on the big aria.

The bedroom was a mess, blankets thrown to the floor and clothes spilling out of the closet. I unplugged the cord leading into the handset, lifted the handset, and plugged the cord back in at the end of the third ring.

“Hello,” Horace said.

“I'm Lo,” Uncle Lo said. Then he said something in Chinese.

Horace responded. Since I couldn't follow the words, I listened to the other sounds coming through the earpiece: a horn, something that might have been a motorcycle, birds. A pay phone, then.

“-okay?” Uncle Lo said at the end of a long string of tonal monosyllables.

“MacArthur Park,” Horace said, sounding like he was about to have a coughing fit. “Alvarado entrance.”

“Walk two hundred steps,” Uncle Lo said in English.

“Okay,” Horace said. “Two hundred.”

“Look left.” Then Uncle Lo asked a question in Cantonese.

“All of us,” Horace said, “and Simeon, Eleanor's boyfriend. You met-”

“I remember. Okay, okay. No problem. Come now.” He hung up.

Ninety seconds later we were at the bottom of the stairs, piling into Alice. Pansy rocked back and forth in the backseat, repeating something under her breath.

“What is it?” I asked. “What did he say?”

“Says he wants to show us he's serious,” Horace said. He was sallow and there were circles under his eyes as definite as the rings left by a wet glass. His hair stuck up wildly on the back of his head.

“Whatever that means,” Eleanor murmured. She had her arms wrapped tightly around herself as though she were very cold.

“It means, it means, that he's going to ask us for, for whatever he wants, and he wants to prove, you know,” Horace said a little feverishly. He peered through the windshield at the brightening sky as we cruised east toward the park. “Prove he means it,” he finished. He swallowed with a sound like someone pulling a cork.

“What did he say the first time he called?”

“He say, good morning,” Pansy said unexpectedly.

“She answered the phone,” Horace said. “She's answered every single phone call since. .”

“He say, can we go somewhere,” Pansy continued. “I say, sure. He say, call back.” She subsided. A moment later I heard her say it all again, very quietly. Then she said it again.

“Left,” Horace said. “Left.”

“He knows, Horace,” Eleanor said.

“Then he can just do it.” Horace's voice went up. “You don't have to correct me.”

“Sorry,” Eleanor said, and everyone fell silent.

“He say, call back,” Pansy repeated for the fourth time, and then she began to weep, a little stifled sound that went put-put-put, like a child's imitation of an engine. With Pansy's sobs powering us, we arrived at MacArthur Park.

The sun was still slipping up, but a low ridge of cloud had eased its way east, cutting off the top of the bright circle. With the circle's bottom edge still below the horizon, the day was momentarily lighted by a deep orange strip. The trees had that peculiar luminescent lividity they sometimes assume before heavy rain.