He reaches for her. They have sex again. Brenda sniffs Dagou’s hands and seems to find the odor of sesame, surprisingly, a little moving. As he watches her cry out, joy flows through him and into the world, hovering over them both, then releasing into the winter night. It’s Christmas morning. They’re together, joyful, in Brenda’s sweet, glowing bed, and it is like a marvelous dream, his best dream. The world is new at last. It doesn’t matter if the restaurant is theirs, or not: there could be other restaurants, whole other worlds, and he is in the center of splendid possibilities. He must forget about the past. He is free once more; the years-long desperation wanes (it doesn’t go away, it cannot entirely vanish), but for the present, everything is in its proper place.
Dagou sleeps. The bedroom door opens and Alf appears. He’s enormous, the size of a lion, and his round black eyes are as big as eight balls. He leaps onto the bed, planting his huge black paws on Dagou’s chest, and licks Dagou’s face with a tongue like a washcloth. Dagou puts his arms around Alf’s neck, grown as thick as a waist, and feels the comfort of his smooth, warm fur. He’s happy enough to weep. He climbs onto the dog’s back like a small boy and the enormous Alf pushes his way out of the room, trotting down the stairs. The front door opens and he bounds out into the night.
Down the dark street he goes, then turns the corner, loping energetically southward.
“Where are we going?” Dagou asks, gesturing behind them. “Go back!” Dagou directs. “Let’s go get Brenda, Alf! Turn back.”
But Alf carries Dagou through a series of alleyways opening away from Letter City, past the Spiritual House. Then, with a great bound, Alf’s paws leave the pavement, and they’re climbing into the air. Dagou looks down, but the streets have shut beneath him. He can no longer identify the houses.
“Turn back,” Dagou commands, but Alf plunges firmly ahead into the night. Dagou, holding on to the fur of Alf’s strong neck, can feel the dog’s thundering heartbeat. Now they’re high above Lakeside, over the penthouse. The city park is somewhere below, with its empty swimming pool, its carousel shut down and tented for winter. Dagou can just see the lights of Haven, at first glittering and then, as they continue on, receding, until below them there’s only the wide, dark lake. The lake that existed long before the lights, before the town; the lake encountered hundreds of years ago, renamed by the Americans.
James’s Dream
Early in the morning, the distant bells of St. Ludmila ring three times. As he lies in bed with Alice, far above the restaurant, some other, distant sound nudges James awake.
Thump, thump.
James opens his eyes. He and Alice are curled together under Dagou’s furry comforter. In the moonlight, he glimpses Alice’s elf costume carefully folded on a chair.
Alice stirs. “What is it?” she murmurs.
Thump.
“I thought I heard something.” James props himself up on one elbow, but there’s nothing. “Maybe it’s just a tree branch, maybe the wind.”
He hasn’t slept in this apartment since childhood; its noises have grown strange to him. Still, he’s jolted by the unmistakable feeling of another consciousness intruding on his own, another soul.
Alice pulls him down to her. “It’s all right, James.”
He listens, struggling to stay awake; it’s quiet now.
“It’s probably nothing,” he mumbles. “Only—”
Only—for some reason, he remembers the sound of knocking from below, in the train station, as he led the old man, the stranger, up the staircase.
“Go to sleep, James.” Alice takes his hand.
Thump.
They sleep.
PART TWO
THE WORLD SEES THEM
When the newcomers first arrived in Haven, they found a smallish city near a lake. On the margins of the city, Americans were hard at work, building avenues lined with newer stores, businesses, restaurants. Busy living out their own tragedies and triumphs. Paying little attention. The newcomers were noticeable, with their Asian faces. But their dreams and aspirations were an open secret. Visible, but invisible.
You could say that until the death of Leo Chao, their lives were private. No one paid them much attention.
Now they receive subtle stares when they walk down the street. It’s awkward, it is mortifying. After all, they’re not the Chaos; the Chaos’ shame isn’t their shame. It’s true their children grew up with Dagou, Ming, and James. They celebrated Christmas with the Chaos for decades, and everyone makes Winnie’s recipe for red-cooked pork. And it’s true you couldn’t help sensing something wrong. Sensing, over the years, a curiosity growing about that house and the three boys. Too much privacy in their smooth faces like shuttered windows. But doesn’t every family have its own closed windows and closed doors? Isn’t every family a walled fortress of stories unknown even to its neighbors? Disobedience of sons to their mothers, wives to their husbands, and men to their own old mothers?
THREE MONTHS LATER
The Chinese Brothers
It is now late March. Morning sun slants through the plate-glass windows of Skaer’s Diner, reaching the corner where James Chao sits reading with a half-finished plate of scrambled eggs and toast. He glances out from his hoodie. It’s the same university hoodie he wore at the train station, but he’s no longer a student. He hasn’t been on campus since January, when Winnie suffered her second, fatal stroke. At that point, he applied for a leave of absence and moved his things out of the dormitory, back to Haven. His hair is shaggy and more length has come into his hands, but the most noticeable change is in the way he looks out from the hoodie. It’s not the expression of a college student.
There’s another change. The red-haired server at the diner is watching him. From behind the register, she lets her gaze slide over to his corner of the room. She makes eye contact when she takes his order, and comes back to say they’re out of strawberry jam packets but she found one more in the back. James notices her, too, sees the way the small silver cross rests on her freckled chest and moves as she breathes. He knows what her attention is about. In the last few months, he’s experienced a transfiguration; a current has run through his body, waking him up. Still, he can’t quite understand what she sees in him. In truth, he exists in a liminal space bridging his old self to a future self he can’t yet grasp.
He’s rereading a website article, “The Curious Case of ‘The Brothers Karamahjong.’” It’s ostensibly an analysis of the impending trial of William “Dagou” Chao, now known as “Dog Eater,” who has been indicted for committing a “restaurant murder set in an insular midwestern Chinese American community,” an “ethnic enclave” where an “American girl,” a “blond bombshell” (this is Brenda, who changed her hair color senior year of high school) “drove both father and son into a frenzy,” compelling the suspect to work out obsessively, then to embark upon a desperate spending spree, leading to a bacchanalian Christmas bash, culminating in the consumption of the family dog, whose fate has become an anti-immigrant flash point. A party followed by the suspicious death of the father, owner of the restaurant.
“They keep to themselves,” said Jane Yoder, a neighbor James has never met. “They have their restaurant and their own friends.”