The Worm in Every Heart

“So why’d you even call me, then—if you were just planning to suck and run?”

“I didn’t.”

“You fucking well did.”

I glanced up from my search, suddenly interested—this conversation was beginning to sound familiar, in more ways than one. Shades of Franz, so sure I was the one who’d called him about Jen. So definite in his belief that I’d actually told him I would help her out with the latest in her series of recurrent supernatural/psychological problems . . . and for free, no less.

“You called last night, when I was studying for Trig. Said you’d been thinking about us. Said you’d be down at the Khyber anyway, so show up, and you’d find me.”

“Last night.”

“Oh, Jude, enough with this bullshit. You’re telling me what, it just slipped your mind?” He grabbed his desk phone, stabbed for the star key and brandished it my way. “How about that?”

I squinted at the display. “That says ‘unknown caller’,” I pointed out.

Ed dropped the phone, angrily. “Look, fuck you, okay? It was you.”

With or without evidence, there was something interesting going on here. A call from somebody who claims to be me being received once is a misunderstanding, maybe a coincidence. But twice? In the same night?

By two different people?

I see you twice, Grandmother Yau had said. And Carra, weighing her words:

. . . something.

My pants proved to be wadded up and shoved under the bed, right next to Ed’s cowboy boots. I shook them out, pulled them back on, buttoned the fly. Ed, meanwhile, kept right on with his time-honored tirade, hitting all the usual high spots: My lack of interest, my lack of loyalty. My lack, out of bed, of anything that might be termed normal emotional affect. My lack, in general.

Adding, quieter: “And you never loved me, either. Fuck, you never even really wanted me to love you.”

“Did I ever say I did?”

“Yes.”

Coat already half done up, I looked at him again, frankly amazed. Unable to stop myself from blurting—

“—and you believed me?”

* * *

Heartless, I found myself repeating—a good half-hour later—as I fought my way east through the College Street wind tunnel, back from Ed’s apartment. Heart-lost. Heard last. Hardglass. Then, smiling slightly: Hard-ASS.

The word itself disintegrating under close examination, melting apart on my mental tongue. Like it was ever supposed to mean anything much—aside from Ed’s latest take on the established him/me party line: “I used to quote-quote ‘love’ you, but now I quote-quote ‘hate’ you, and here’s yet another lame excuse why.”

Annoyed to realize I was still thinking about it, I shrugged the whole mess away in one brief move, so hard and quick it actually hurt.

Chi-shien gweilo! I thought. What would I want with a heart? You don’t need a heart to do magic.

Which is true. You don’t.

No more than you need a shadow.

* * *

A sharp left turn, then Church Street again: Going down, this time. My Docs struck hard against the cracked concrete, again and again—each new stride sending up aftershocks that made my ankles spark with pain, as though that shrugged-away mess were somehow boomeranging back to haunt me with its ever-increasing twinge. And because I couldn’t moderate myself, couldn’t control either my speed or my boots’ impact, the ache soon reached my chest—after a couple of blocks—and lodged there, throbbing.

Rhythm becoming thought, thought becoming memory; memory, which tends to shuck itself, to peel away. You get older, look back through a child’s tunnel vision, and realize you never knew the whole that tied the details together. You were just along for the ride, moving from experience to experience, a flat spectacle, some kind of guideless tour. You remember—or think you remember—what happened, but not where, or why. What you did, but not with who. Details fade. People’s names get lost in the white noise.

Reluctantly, therefore—for the second time in as many days—I found myself thinking about that shell of a thing I’d once been, back before the big split: That fresh-faced, fresh-scrubbed, fresh-off-the-boat Chink twink with his fifteen pairs of matching penny-loafers and his drawer-full of grey silk ties. And just as smiley-face quiet, as neat and polite, as veddy, veddy, Brit-inflectedly restrained as he’d always been, the homegrown HK golden boy mask still firmly in place, even without a Ba and Ma immediately on hand to do his patented straight-Asian-male dance for anymore . . .