Timothy Hallinan: The Man With No Time

Horace Chan had pointy little eyebrows like upside-down Vs. If they'd met over his nose, they would have formed a perfect M, and the M would have stood for Maybe. For years I'd been watching Horace make a bet and then hedge it, as reflexively as the rest of us inhale after we exhale, and now I was watching him hedge the biggest bet of his life: the one he'd made when he got married.

This was serious, because Horace was almost my brother-in-law. And even worse: He was one of the very small group of people whom I love. So why was I watching him nuzzle some stranger dressed in a little something that could have been sewn from the cellophane torn from four packs of Marlboros?

“She like you,” Horace's Uncle Lo observed sagely.

Horace snickered. Horace had an unappealing snicker under the best circumstances, and these weren't they. I tried to kick him under the table.

My kick missed and struck Uncle Lo on the shin.

“Sorry,” I said. Uncle Lo was the guest of honor, the reason I was watching Horace punch holes in his marriage.

Uncle Lo didn't seem surprised that I'd kicked him. He was maybe seventy years old, and looked like nothing had surprised him since his seventeenth birthday. His face, generously seamed by gravity and time, had probably been under absolute control since his whiskers sprouted. Control over facial expressions was something people apparently learned early in Mainland China.

“You have hiccups?” he asked. For the tenth time that evening, I asked myself why I didn't like him. I was supposed to like him. After all, Uncle Lo was the Chan family hero. And the Chan family included Eleanor Chan, my longtime ex-girlfriend and the person I loved most in the world. I corrected my aim and tried to kick Horace-Eleanor's equivocal brother-again, and missed everyone.

“Getting late, Horace,” I said, resorting to a less physical form of communication.

“I love you,” the girl to my right said promptly, wrapping her arms around my neck. “No shit.”

“That's very promising,” I slurred, perhaps denying the line the points it deserved for sheer novelty. How many beers had I drunk, anyway?

“Promise her anything,” Uncle Lo said, leaning toward me as though we shared a confidence.

No points for him, either, as far as I was concerned. There was a candle on the table, shielded in a rippled red glass, and it splashed his face from beneath with a malevolent light. To my intoxicated Anglo eyes-even after years of seeing my future in Eleanor's Chinese eyes-Uncle Lo, looming over the candle, still looked like a lot of racial stereotypes-mostly of a host of villains in black-and-white movies. The effect was heightened by a black eye that reminded me of the circle surrounding the eye of the mutt in the "Our Gang" comedies, except that there was nothing comic about it. Of course, the stereotypes might have been suggested by our surroundings, a mostly-Chinese hostess bar somewhere in the Asian colony known as Los Angeles. But bar or no bar, Uncle Lo didn't look like a hero. A pirate, maybe, but not a hero.

The hero glanced at his watch for the eighth or ninth time. “Telephone?” he asked. The girl to my right said, “In the back,” and stuck her tongue into my ear.

“Yeesh,” I said, swabbing it with my little finger.

We all watched him go, thin and only slightly stooped, against the background of the bar, prematurely tinsel-festooned for Christmas. The other booths were jammed full of Chinese males in three-piece suits and young Asian women in outfits of varying degrees of transparency. A dead Christmas tree twinkled depressively in a corner.

“He's only been here twenty-four hours,” I said to Horace. “Who could he know?” I looked at my little finger. It was wet. “And where'd he get the shiner?”

“Somethin wrong with you ear?” asked the girl to my right.

“It's the humidity,” I said, striving for pleasant. “Listen, Horace-”

“Taste funny, too,” said the girl to my right. She'd told me her name was Ning when we sat down, and I saw no reason to doubt her. Whether she loved me was another question. I wiped my finger on my shirt.

“Want a Q-Tip?” Horace asked, producing one from a vest pocket. Horace made a practice of carrying one of everything, up to and including small articles of furniture, in his pockets. Another sign of irresolution. Why be prepared only for the library just because you've decided to go to the library? You might change your mind and wind up on a freighter bound for Kuala Lumpur. I could have traveled the world for a year on the contents of Horace's pockets.

I didn't want a Q-Tip, but Ning had already grasped it and inserted it into my ear. I yanked back as though she'd poked me with a cattle prod, and the girl sitting next to Horace joined Ning in a hearty laugh. The laugh settled it: Both women were Thai. Nobody but a Thai can laugh that heartily without breaking a rib.

Horace managed an economical Chinese chortle, and Ning put the dry end of the Q-Tip in her mouth and bounced it up and down. Horace, who didn't smoke, produced a lighter from somewhere and extended it, and Ning waggled it up and down between her teeth and said, “Peetah. Peetah, Peetah, Peetah.”

“Bette Davis never said that,” I observed.

Ning gave me what the Thais call “small eyes.” It's not a friendly expression. “You no fun,” she said. “Him,” she added, indicating Horace, “him fun.”

“He's also married,” I said, looking at the girl sitting next to Horace. “In fact,” I said, stretching a point, “we're all married.”

“You taste married,” Ning said, sliding away from me.

The girl next to Horace responded to the bulletin by twining her arms around his neck and saying, “Married. Pah. ”

“Who married?” The lady whom the management had assigned to Uncle Lo slid into the booth. She was a few years older than Ning, and maybe a decade older than Horace's girl, and she was mistakenly trying to make up for added years by subtracting clothes. With less on than the average whelk, she succeeded only in looking like she'd somehow managed to reclaim her baby fat. Her name came to me out of the fumes: Lek, Thai for “little.”

“Everyone in the world,” I said, a bit wildly, noticing that my glass was empty again. “Me, him, and the other him.” Ning picked up my empty glass and waved it in the direction of the bar.

“More,” she called. Actually, “Mo-ah.”

“No,” I said. The bartender sang out something cheerful and untranslatably Asian, then began to pour.

“Married?” Lek shrugged. “If he not married, why he's here? Man who's not married don't need bar. Not married, got plenty girl.”

I rubbed my face, which seemed to have gone numb with a wooden, absolute numbness that suggested the onset of some exotic neurological disease. So I wasn't drunk. I was only dying. “We don't need girls,” I said.

All three girls responded with merry Thai laughter, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on nitrous oxide. As the hilarity crested, a beer was slapped down in front of me, and a young Chinese-looking woman seated herself at an electric piano and began an energetic phonetic rendition of “Jingle Bells.” People sang along in various languages.