Free The Foreigner by Francie Lin

moaning. So you have to appease them while they’re wandering and hungry. You have to buy good luck for next year by showing them some respect. So that old man there?" She indicated an old couple crouched on the sidewalk, tending a fire in a red metal canister. "He’s burning paper money. For his ancestors. You’ll see it all around. Businesses’ll do it too—they put out tables with fruit and incense and soda and stuff.
    "Superstitious crapola!" she bellowed suddenly, swinging her rucksack like a weapon. "Opium for the conscience! Narcotic for the soul! And shit for the environment too, you know? Down with tradition!" She shook her fist at the old couple, who regarded her mildly, unconcerned, before turning back to their fire. "Up with the earth!"
    But I didn’t think it was superstitious. When she was gone, I walked back up to the main road. As I passed by the couple, the old woman accidentally knocked the money burner over, spilling ash into the gutter—the gray saltpeter of communion. Some of the cinders rolled into my path. I stepped over them carefully. Ash, too, could live.
     
     
    IN THE end, it was Atticus who finally came and got me, on his silver Vespa.
    "Climb up, please," he said, placing one elegantly shod foot on the curb. I stared, for he looked different in his riding gear: less gentle, more taut. His helmet was black with a mirrored visor, which he did not lift, and there was something unnerving about it, a kind of menace, or void, that erased Atticus completely, though his lilting voice still came softly from behind this facelessness: "Climb up, Emerson."
    He lived in a rather swanky part of the city, in the northern district, in a large, airy, two-level apartment with stone floors that felt cool and dry after the noonday heat. Woodcuts of dragons and other animals hung in a row above a low couch, and a moody, patterned light fell on a single orchid blooming near the windows. Long shelves of English and Chinese volumes were carefully arrayed along the walls; even the bathroom had a bookshelf: Dickens, Tolstoy, an anthology of Chekhov plays. A collection of helmets brooded on a long console—not motorcycle helmets but old combat helmets, German-style and Japanese, even a kind of medieval armored piece with a feather and rusting slots. A kabuto helmet with its masked mouthpiece snarled up at me, ringed about by a few black smooth rocks.
    "You look very tired, no?" Atticus asked, removing his helmet and stashing it precisely on a rack behind the door. "Through there"—he nodded toward a small door below the stairs—"is a bedroom. No, no," he said, holding up a hand as I tried to protest. "Is no use arguing. I cannot talk to a man who has not slept well. When you get up, you can tell me everything, but for now, you will sleep." It was a command.
    So I carried my bag into the room and lay down on the clean sheets and slept, fitfully at first, then more deeply, sinking into a little cocooned space where the confusion of the day was walled off by anonymity and strangeness. Not my mother, not even my worries about Little P could find me here. A moonscape opened out, stars shooting across the horizon. Weightlessness and moon rock. A figure spiraling off into darkness, lonely and remote.
    When I awoke, a gray light had settled over everything. There was a strange quiet in the apartment, like a high-pitched hum. I sat up, mouth tasting of dirt and anxiety. There had been a girl somewhere in my sleep, but I could not remember her, and it seemed, confusingly, that the forgetting was the source of my sorrow. I reached for my suit jacket.
    Atticus was standing at the console cabinet when I came out.
    "Sorry, Atticus. How long have I been asleep?"
    He didn’t respond. His back was to me, his head bent intently over something, so that I was nearly behind him when he finally noticed.
    "Emerson!" Swiftly, he dropped something in the console drawer and closed up the cabinet with a smooth, decisive click.
    "Oh, now."