Free The Foreigner by Francie Lin Page A

He chuckled at my expression. "Don’t be alarm, just an old man getting a good cry over old photographs. Excuse me if I am a little embarrass; I am so used to being alone, and you startle me." He patted my shoulder and checked his watch. "Now, let me wash up and then we will go and have some dinner, no? You have slept all afternoon. Good!"
    His fingers were smeared with some kind of grease.
    Shower water ran in the bathroom.
It’s none of your business,
I told myself.
He’s the only friend you have here
. But Atticus had been a little too smooth, a little too rapid in his excuse.
    The water ran. Quietly, ear cocked toward the bathroom, I opened the cabinet and pulled out the narrow drawer.
    Inside, a pistol lay on a tray of blue felt, like an offering, its snub nose gleaming and velvety with oil. Bullets had been lined up in a corked test tube and tucked into a fold of felt, half-hidden by a blackened chamois; he must have been polishing the gun when I came up behind him. I touched the barrel, briefly—cold, mechanical, with no human report. I remembered Little P’s knife, and my scalp tightened. It was nothing, I thought. Perhaps Atticus was a collector.
    The water in the bathroom stopped. Hastily, I pushed the drawer back in and shut the cabinet.
    Atticus reappeared some minutes later, looking refreshed and cheerful in a clean shirt and vest.
    "In your honor, tonight," he said, "we will have a little seafood dinner. My treat, if you will."
    "That’s not necessary, Atticus."
    "Of course it is not necessary! That is precisely what makes it a treat." He purred a little at his own joke, fussing around with his keys and pocketing his wallet. Then he became serious. "But you must not do only what is necessary in life, Emerson. You must have your extravagance too. It is the only way to stay alive. Otherwise, there is nothing but eating and shitting, no?"
    He laughed and went downstairs to pull the scooter around, tossing me the key so that I could turn out the lights and lock up. He seemed so happy, and so calm.
     
     
    ATTICUS, I was to discover later, had a serious political life that occupied him whenever his work at the Palace did not. During the few nights I spent on his couch, he did not come home until quite late, and when he did, he looked simultaneously beatific and spent, his face shining in a rare display of enthusiasm as he said good night and went to bed, humming. On that first evening, he stopped to peer in the windows of the Géant store, where dozens of white flat-screen televisions illuminated the sleek interior with pictures of a protest outside the Presidential Building: banners and crowds, tears and shouting.
    "These are exciting times," Atticus said, observing the video feed. "Very exciting times. You do not know much about the history of this island, do you, Xiao Chang?"
    "No."
    "A shame." He glowed. "We are a democracy, you know. It does not mean so much to you, I understand, but for us, for us it was forty years with the martial law, and before that a few centuries with the foreign occupation. You understand what that means, Xiao Chang? No independence." He lifted a finger pensively. "No identity. Or a double identity: one for the rulers, the other hidden away. A half-life. A non-life. A killing of the soul. It goes on still, you know; we have not liberate ourselves entirely. But we have done some things, no? In just seventeen years we have made ourselves a democracy. No bloodshed," he said proudly. "No guns. Only reason." He clenched both hands.
"Il faut tenir."
    I only vaguely understood what he was talking about. The television news, incomprehensible to me, saturated the city—the noodle shops, the auto shops, the convenience stores, even some of the taxis—but it seemed not to implicate me in its grainy, discolored events. Perhaps I felt the way my mother had felt when watching
Doctor Zhivago
: that these tragedies were present but unaffecting, because they were happening to