Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

It was eleven o’clock and Bruno wasn’t home. Although he knew the kid was sophisticated, Art was still freaked. He looked around for the notebook, hoping he might find some clue, but Bruno had evidently taken it with him. On the desk was Art’s laptop. He’d seen Bruno checking Facebook from time to time, but in general he didn’t seem to use the computer much. Now he turned it on and checked the browser history, finding it had been cleared, as if the boy had covered his tracks.

He began to pace around the apartment, fidgeting. He made some coffee, then went through the mail and opened his bills. His mouth dropped when he saw that his credit-card balance was nearly two thousand dollars — charges for music sites, tons of iTunes, and what looked like Internet porn.

His head throbbing, he went back into the office and checked the laptop again. In a folder labeled School he found a long list of obviously noneducational files, and when he clicked on one of the porn videos it brought up images so disturbing that he had to close his eyes, though of course he opened them again right away. “Fifteen,” he said. “Jesus.” The video concluded and prompted him to visit its home site, where he was invited to “Rate this video! Share your comments here!” Beneath this, a notice instructed him to type the following words as a security measure:

Mice imp

Those word pairs from Bruno’s notebook — he was collecting anti-spam phrases. Art couldn’t believe a porn site, of all places, was trying to discourage spam. On the screen, two women were gyrating around in front of a man holding a gun. Someone was moaning, someone else was shrieking, both out of sync with the video. Staring at it, Art didn’t even hear Bruno come in.

He smelled smoke and waved it away, only belatedly realizing it meant the boy was home. He clicked off the porn, blushing violently, and turned around to see him busily stuffing the clothes on the floor into his duffel bag. There was a cut on his forehead and another on his arm, just above the wide leather cuff he wore on his wrist.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Did you miss me?” Bruno said, smirking.

Art reached up and grabbed his arm, hard. “Where were you?”

The boy shrugged.

“Stop shrugging !”

Bruno reached for his cigarettes, but Art knocked the pack out of his hand. And then Bruno burst into tears, his mouth contorted, the explanation coming out in rapid, babbling French that Art couldn’t understand.

“Hey,” Art said. “Hey.” He tried to hug the kid but Bruno pushed him away, again grabbing for a cigarette.

Eventually, after he smoked three of them and had a shot of bourbon, the story brokenly emerged. Bruno told it sitting at the kitchen table, his voice soft, his eyes not meeting Art’s: he’d gone to the apartment of a woman who’d advertised on Craigslist. But her husband was there, and he wanted to watch. When Bruno started for the door, the man came after him with a knife.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Art said.

“No,” Bruno said, calmer now, though his fingers were still trembling, with some dark substance, whether dirt or blood, rimming the nails.

“What the hell are you doing answering ads on Craigslist? You could’ve been killed.”

Bruno looked around the room vaguely. “There is nothing else to do here.”

“You’re in New York City and the only thing you can find to do is meet strangers for sex? Jesus Christ, who are you? What happened to taking in a goddamn Broadway show?”

The eyes that met his were blank, dark. Unreachable. No wonder Inès wanted him out of her hair, Art thought, no wonder she was willing to send him halfway around the world to a father he hardly knew. This boy — there was something off in him, more than just teenage mischief, some wiring gone amok.

“Like I said, Bruno, you could have been killed.”

“Sure,” he answered. “Anyway, you don’t have to worry about it. I am leaving. My mother will buy me the ticket.”

“No,” Art said.

The kid looked at him, surprised — as Art himself was. But here he was, sure of what he was doing. He had one ball left: enough for whatever. Enough for this.

“No,” he said. “You stay.”

The kung pao chicken was what kept me going back night after night. That and the hot and sour soup. Otherwise the Chinese restaurant had nothing going for it. You know those places where there’re loads of Chinese people ordering from a separate menu, and you gesture that you want what they’re having and suddenly you’re eating steamed dumplings and buns with mysterious, delicious fillings and side dishes of spicy, tender broccoli? This was not one of those places. In countless visits I never saw a single Chinese customer. In fact only Mr. Lu, who cooked the food, was Chinese. His wife, Stacy, who took the orders, was blond and hailed from Plano, Texas. Mr. Lu churned out egg rolls and fried rice and kung pao chicken at an amazing pace; you didn’t often see him, but you could hear him screaming at Stacy when she went back into the kitchen with the orders. It always sounded like he was outraged by what people had selected, but Stacy told me it was just because all the years of clattering pots and pans had damaged his hearing.

The place didn’t even have a name — neither on the door outside nor on the menu. It was just a Chinese restaurant across the street from my apartment. I started going there the week I moved in, having dropped out of college and come to the city to make my name, find fame and fortune, the whole nine yards. The very first time I had the kung pao chicken and the hot and sour soup, the next morning I got a call from a casting agent who wanted to audition me for a detergent commercial. I didn’t get the part but still decided the chicken was my lucky dish, so whenever I was feeling down, or tired, or in need of a boost, I’d go back. I felt that way a lot, so I was a regular.

During the day I was temping at a mortgage company, a job so tedious it caused me actual physical pain — backaches, headaches, stomachaches. The money was good, though, and I’d been temping there for so long they changed my status to perma-temp. I made fifty cents more an hour than the ordinary temps, and my boss gave me a plant to put in my cube. All day long I sat in there and proofread people’s mortgages, which were passed from bank to bank, back and forth, like chips in a poker game. For legal reasons I had to make sure that the stamps on the front of the mortgage matched these poker-game trails documented at the back. When I was done proofreading a big stack, I filed them in a cool, dark, windowless room we called the Cave. Sometimes I lay down in the Cave and took naps. I didn’t mean to slack off, but the idiocy of the work made sleep irresistible. Nobody ever seemed to notice, anyway, just like they didn’t when I was gone for two hours in the middle of the day on an audition. They were just as bored themselves, and at times it felt like we were all in a trance, dreaming this shared tedious dream.

After work I sometimes went to a class or an audition, or came home to check my messages to see if I’d been called back for anything, which I hardly ever was. Often, too tired to cook, I’d head across the street to the Chinese restaurant. A counter at one end served as a kind of bar, meaning Stacy would bring you a beer if you sat there long enough. When I was done eating I’d occasionally hang out there for a while. It never occurred to me that a young woman sitting alone at a bar could expect a certain amount of attention, that she could be sending out any kind of message to the world at large. I believed that a woman ought to be able to behave exactly like a man did, in any situation. This attitude often got me in trouble. I refused to flirt with male casting agents and directors; I wouldn’t wear makeup to auditions for roles where I was supposed to be the attractive ingénue. “In your heart you want to fail,” one of my actor friends told me once, a statement that, though I didn’t realize it at the time, was absolutely true.