Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

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.

The light revealed the park as brown and dirty. Bums slumbered beneath newspaper blankets at its edge, too smart to risk being caught farther inside. The dead grass was littered with bottles and crumpled paper.

An asphalt path led from the Alvarado entrance into the park. Horace began counting at the first step, and the path led us down a short hill, through a copse of bushes, and to a gate. Eleanor had Pansy by the arm.

“Two hundred,” Horace said. He looked left at some tall oleanders.

Horace had short legs. I ran a couple of yards forward, to the edge of the oleanders, and stopped. No one else moved.

Then I said, “Pansy. Horace.” I wasn't sure I trusted my voice.

They all came up behind me and stopped. Eleanor drew in her breath, and it caught and broke, and Pansy let out a small flat high sound like the whistle from a steam kettle and ran past me to the swing where Julia sat, her left wrist tied to the rope of the swing by a bright pink gift ribbon.

Eleanor's reaction was the Chinese one.

“He kept the boy,” she said.

The room was full of babies, and they all had numbers written on their wrists. Some of them wore colored ribbons around their throats, trailing enormous floppy bows over their shoulders. Those babies were not crying. The other babies had lengths of string around their necks, dirty pieces of string tied in rotting knots, and they were crying desperately. A very thin, stooped woman in a conical straw rice-paddy hat like the ones we used to see on the newsreels from Vietnam moved from one crying baby to another, spooning something white and thick into their mouths. As they sat up and sucked at the spoon the strings around their throats blossomed into bows, and when the bows became big enough they pulled the babies over onto their sides. Now the other babies were beginning to cry, their colored ribbons dwindling into dirty string, but the thin woman ignored them and shuffled in her rope sandals to the wall.

There was a big round orange button on the wall. I hadn't seen it before. The thin woman pushed it, and the wall slid upward to reveal a broad, steep chute. She pointed to a handle below the chute and gestured for me to pull it. When I did, dozens of new babies cascaded down the chute and into the room. The old woman raised her head to look at me, and beneath the conical straw hat I saw she had a black eye.