The Man With No Time

though a missionary had seized control of a small Asian country and decreed a cure for his homesickness.

Tossed over the sagging princess-sized bed a stained lemon-yellow spread struggled for chromatic dominance with a carpet the color of decayed teeth, an irregularly mottled brown over which you could have changed the oil in a car without leaving a noticeable stain. I'd dropped my keys on it the second evening I was there and spent ten minutes on my hands and knees trying to find them by touch. They didn't move or jingle, so I didn't get a chance to practice my time-binding.

This was my fourth evening, which made it Sunday night. One week since I'd stared at Lo over the red candle.

One wall framed a door and a mirror, below which were a narrow Formica counter and a curved plastic chair. The chair and counter had seceded from the color wars and assumed a sort of spit-gray neutrality. The decor was completed by a simulated wood dresser shoved up against the wall with the pictureless window in it. Above the dresser a bent nail supported an impossibly vivid laser-generated photo of two kittens in a basket. That was it, except for two more doors, one leading to the tiny closet and the other to a bathroom where the grouting was in serious need of attention.

Sitting becalmed on the lemony pouf of the bed, I tried to convince myself that I knew what I was doing. I knew I was putting on my Reeboks because my feet would hurt later if I didn't, but long-term goals were conspicuous by their absence. I didn't really think I would turn a corner and bump into Horace, or that my two murderous Vietnamese kids would wave cheerfully at me from across a room. But the kids had come from Chinatown and Uncle Lo had been assaulted in Chinatown-or so he'd told Mrs. Summerson. Or so Mrs. Summerson had said he'd told her. Still, Eleanor had been sure that Horace was in Chinatown, and more than anything in the world right then, I needed to find Horace. I needed to find him for Eleanor and Pansy, and I needed to find him for me. So I'd sentenced myself to wandering aimlessly around Chinatown morning and night, working my way through Horace's known haunts, and enduring the TraveLodge so I could get an early start.

After three nights of merciless Cantonese meals-lop sop, Eleanor called it, dismal imitation Chinese food the restaurant help would never eat themselves-and after wearing down the tread on my Reeboks tracking kids who, on closer inspection, looked like visitors from the Valley, I'd come to one firm conclusion. I'd concluded that I'd eat at McDonald's.

Only in a city as horizontal as Los Angeles would Hill Street be called Hill Street. Most of it is as level as a billiard table, four lanes of flat black asphalt distinguished from a million other L. A. streets only by the two-story, Chinese-cheesy architecture that crowds it on either side, replacements for the original buildings, slapped together in 1938 by the ephemeral architects of Paramount Pictures as a gift to the Anglo city's fantasy life. The development had been so romantically and persuasively inauthentic that scenes from The Good Earth had been shot there before the whole mishegas burned to the ground. The canned- Cantonese frippery that replaced it was no less unauthentic but much less glamorous, sets for a movie starring Victor Mature, with someone like Veronica Lake playing the Chinese girl he loves, all shorthand Asian Mystery and inscrutable proverbs, pidgin English, horsehair wigs, and rubber eyelids. The wigs were in plentiful evidence, re- Orienting the Western mannequins modeling Chinese robes in the shop windows. The eyelids, the ones on the street, that is, seemed to be real.

Of course, not all of them these days belonged to Chinese. Hill Street, its two parallel streets, and the web of cross streets, alleys, and walkways that connected them were relics of what had at least been a real Chinese neighborhood all those years ago. Now the Asian presence in Los Angeles was more complex, a confused stew of people with nothing in common but tonal languages. The Chinese and Japanese had been joined by the refugees from wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Add the ambitious economic opportunists from Korea and Indonesia and Thailand to the mix, and you had the diverse population that the Anglo newspapers lumped together as “the Asian community.”

Grumbling loudly enough to draw stares, I angled across Hill and into a little pedestrian walkway between shops, on the way to my car and a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. I didn't make it.

My car, Alice, was in view, gleaming horsefly-blue under a street-lamp thirty yards away, when the girl screamed. She was tiny and Asian, and she burst from an alley twenty feet ahead of me and to the right, and then an arm snaked out and grabbed her down jacket at the neck and jerked her back in. I heard the squeeee as her rubber-soled tennis shoes left the pavement, and then another scream, higher and more urgent than the first.

Well, so it wasn't a time for reflection. I wrapped my fist around my car keys so that the points protruded between my knuckles, and sprinted after her. Fist-first, keys raking the air, I rounded the corner and dove headfirst into sucker heaven.

Something hard and heavy landed on the back of my neck, coming from the left, and the whisper it made as it parted the air gave me just enough warning to launch myself off the balls of my feet, subtracting my forward velocity from its momentum, and it struck my neck and folded my left ear forward and pasted it to my head like the flap on a glued envelope, pushing me forward and off my feet. I felt hot blood pour down my neck as I landed on my stomach, and the girl giggled.

Scuffle of shoes behind me. If the girl hadn't giggled I might have been dead then and there, but the giggle galvanized me and I rolled to the right, away from the shoes and into some wooden packing crates. They folded themselves noisily down over me, and whatever had hit me on the neck swooped down again and pounded them into confetti. The feet I'd heard were right next to me and had ankles attached to them, and I drove the points of the keys into the left ankle, trying for the little bones that you can separate but never quite put together again. One of the keys went all the way home.

The giggle was lost in a yowl, and the ankle I'd hit disappeared from view. I rolled farther under the scraps of wood and put both hands against the bottom of a crate and heaved a big piece of it in the direction of the vanishing ankle. Then I stood up, new blood heating my face and neck, and a fist hurtled toward my eyes. Orlando's claims for the miracles of the mind notwithstanding, I failed to calculate the fist's trajectory and velocity properly, and it treated me briefly to a new and gaudily unattractive version of the star-spangled banner. Still, the mind had sufficient time and electricity to suggest that the proper course of action would be to fall down and play almost- dead, and the broken slats of the crate folded themselves cozily over me like a masochist's bed of splinters, and I ignored the shard that had put a second hole in my right ear and lay still. I smelled fish, an odor seeping up from the wood uninvited, like someone else's memory.

“Motherfucker,” panted a familiar voice.

“Is he dead?” That was the girl. She sounded winded.

“Not half,” said the kid I'd treated to the Torture of a Thousand Fingers. “But second half is easy.”

Hands grasped my Reeboks and groped their way up my ankles. The other kid, the one with the ruined ankle, was whimpering. Okay, one down, for the moment. I let Dumbo-Ears pull me out into the alley, grunting with the effort.

“He's fast,” said the girl.

“He's through,” said Dumbo-Ears.

“Fuck you,” said the corpse, and I brought my left leg up between the kid's thighs and hit him right on his personal share of the Vietnamese genetic destiny.

Dumbo-Ears said something that sounded like scummmpff and folded forward, landing conveniently, if heavily, on top of me. I threw him in the general direction of the girl and pulled myself to my knees, a lot more slowly than I would have liked. My hands were so far away that I seemed to be communicating with them by telephone.

He slammed into the girl. I listened with satisfaction as the two of them struck the pavement and then, with a Herculean effort, I got my feet under me. I looked up for a point of reference that might keep me from falling on my face, and focused on the barrel of a small revolver.

“You wouldn't dare,” I said.

The other kid, the good-looking one, cocked the gun with a click, a welcome sound. A revolver takes two clicks. Immediately after the first, I rolled to the right, thrusting my feet forward and tangling his damaged ankle between mine. He fell sideways, and the shot gouged concrete with a resonant spang that bounced back and forth between the walls of the alley like a berserk Ping-Pong ball. I found myself standing over him and raised one leg and sank it into the pit of his stomach.

“Ooof,” he said, lifting his knees to shrink his diaphragm, trying to catch his breath. With another shot at a