Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker

“What was it?” I said softly, hearing the sudden quiver in her voice.

“It was the worst thing that ever happened to us,” she said, her fist knuckling down on the bed with each word. “It was the worst thing we ever did together. Our utterly lowest moment. All backward, all wrong. Just so dumb.”

“It was a terrible accident.”

“An accident?” She cried, nearly hollering. She covered her mouth. Her voice was breaking. “How can you say it was an accident? We haven’t treated it like one. Not for a second. Look at us. Sweetie, can’t you see, when your baby dies it’s never an accident. I don’t care if a truck hit him or he crawled out a window or he put a live wire in his mouth, it was not an accident. And that’s a word you and I have no business using. Sometimes I think it’s more like some long-turning karma that finally came back for us. Or that we didn’t love each other. We thought our life was good enough. Maybe it’s that Mitt wasn’t all white or all yellow. I go crazy thinking about it. Don’t you? Maybe the world wasn’t ready for him. God. Maybe it’s that he was so damn happy.”

She was crying a little now, her sobs coming evenly, almost controlled, as though she’d cried enough over the years that this is what was left to her, to both of us, just trickles and weariness.

We lay down together but we weren’t touching. Her eyes were closed, though just barely, the lids frail and milky and almost transparent in the dim light. The heat of her face, her throat, drew me closer to her and the tiny hairs on my cheeks and brow tingled from the nearness. For it was nearness and not touch that had always compelled me. I have only known proximity. She didn’t move away. I didn’t try to touch her. I knew I shouldn’t. I just closed my eyes, and I slid to her until I could feel the warmth of my own face play back against hers, the reflection like an instant map of heat. I thought I could read every contour of her skin and bone, every relief of her flesh. What it all said. As if I could ever read her mind.

I finally met Kwang a week after the scouting. I was charting out with Janice his April and May schedules of meetings and speaking engagements in the expansive war room of his Flushing headquarters. His own small office was set in the back of the war room. The activity ceased for a few seconds as people near the door greeted him. He was alone, which I thought peculiar, because I had assumed that there would be someone beside him at all times feeding him information and strategy and advice. He was only a councilman, but as Jenkins told us our efforts were already acquiring the shape of a campaign, a full-blown interborough enterprise. It was usually Sherrie Chin-Watt or Cameron Jenkins who was with him, less often Janice or some underling like Eduardo or me.

Today he was supposed to be working quietly at home, but here he was, come in for an unexpected visit to his staffers. They seemed to appreciate his presence, which they rightly sensed was solely for them, particularly the younger volunteers, who I could see wanted to say something to him but didn’t and stayed back, nervous and excited.

But everyone took notice of him. From the moment he stepped into the room, I thought each of us was suddenly oriented toward him. Janice and I were standing at the chalkboard in the middle of the room. She didn’t say anything but smiled and turned to the board casually; I would have thought she was generally accustomed to his entrances, but I noticed that her posture had shifted in acknowledgment of the man approaching at her back. She continued chalking times and places on the slate, but I saw that her eyes weren’t following the motion of her hand. I thought she had it the way everyone else did, the way she was waiting for his touch on her arm or his voicing of her name. It made me think that she was a little in love with him, the same way Eduardo and the other people in the room were. The same way, perhaps, that I would be. Somehow you felt for him a pin-ache of unneeded love on top of the respect and hope and plain like of him, that little bit of extra feeling that must separate even a good man and politician from a natural leader of people.

I moved toward the channel made by the desks and chairs. He was joking now with Eduardo. The two of them stood close to each other feigning the movements of boxers, their heads weaving, bobbing, tucked tight behind ready hands. Kwang was around my height, maybe five-ten or so, way above Eduardo, but giving away at least thirty pounds to him. Eduardo had been a junior boxer, as had Kwang. They first met at a boys’ club visit of Kwang’s where Eduardo was coaching. Now Kwang reached out and jabbed gently at Eduardo’s temple and Eduardo took a step back as if stunned and then staggered onto the edge of his desk. Kwang leaned into him with a flurry to the midsection. Eduardo doubled over, protecting himself. They were both grimacing, grinning, swinging.

Janice shouted through her hands, “Someone stop this massacre!”

A handkerchief landed at their feet. Technical knockout.

He put his arm around Eduardo. He nodded to Janice. Then he noticed me. I wanted to look away but didn’t dare. It wasn’t that I was afraid of him, or worried by what he might somehow be able to see. A beginner thinks this, despite many hours of painstaking preparation. It is unavoidable. For the first few assignments you feel perfectly transparent, as if the man or woman in question can witness every leap of your heart. You think they can sense every false move. But in successive turns you grow an opacity, a pearl-like glow whose surface can repel all manner of heat and light.

What I saw now was the face of a recognition, the same face that Emile Luzan offered me that first day, too, in his cluttered third-floor office in Babylon, Long Island. The good doctor from Manila. From the very start he took my hand and said simply that I should not worry. I didn’t know what to make of his gesture save its unorthodoxy, its colloquial and unprofessional tone. I thought immediately that he was treating me differently from his other patients and rather than feign an ignorance that might alert his suspicions I asked if this was his usual method.

“Certainly it is not,” he said to me, chuckling in his ho-ho way. “But my feeling after speaking with you now for half the session is that perhaps only a small part of your difficulties is attributable to biochemical issues, if at all. I don’t think medication is in order, although you seem to feel it necessary. Were you someone else I’d probably just follow your wishes. I shouldn’t tell you that, but I will. Certainly like all of us you have traditional issues to deal with. Parentage, intimacy, trust.

“But hand in hand with all that is the larger one of where we live, my friend, and who you are within that place. Or believe yourself to be. We have our multiple roles like everyone else. Now throw in an additional dimension. A cultural one. Cast it all, if you will, in a broad yellow light. Let us see where this leads you and me.”

For now, I must say to the good doctor, it led to John Kwang.

Kwang certainly didn’t know who I was but he regarded me as if he were seeing a memory. He seemed to light up as he moved past in his pressed, clean-smelling suit, grazing my shoulders and arms with his. I thought that this was how he moved through a crowded room of his loyal cadre, baring his tiny perfect hands, him looking at each of us at least once, connecting and lighting up.

“Eduardo!” he said into the air.

“Yes, boss!”

“All your work done?”

“Yes, boss!”

“Let’s see it then.”

Eduardo stepped behind his desk and pulled a manila folder from a drawer. He laid it open on the conference table and he and Kwang went over it.