Da twists his lips together. Is Miss Rosen planning on buying his wasabi Tobiko and then adding some kind of poison to it, killing anyone who eats it? If the tin is found in her bin, with Haiyang Best’s seal on it, the store, the company, the Wong family, will be in serious trouble. She cannot be saying what she means.
“Yes, it is spicy. The Japanese horseradish will surprise them, and, I guess, it might knock people out if they aren’t expecting the bite.”
“That is what I want then. Two tins. I want to surprise people with a taste they don’t expect. See them flying to the floor.”
So Miss Rosen only wants a taste sensation for her guests, Da can appreciate that. He pulls two of the wasabi Tobiko tins from the case and takes them to Bai’s workstation.
When Bai has finished gutting and descaling the anchovies, and wrapping and taping and packing the rest of Paloma Rosen’s selections, bagging it all in ice, and Paloma has counted out from her small change purse a series of large bills that pay for her expensive order, Da says, “Miss Rosen, I will have someone walk you home, carry the heavy bags for you.”
“Not someone,” the old woman says. “You, Young Wong. You can walk me home, carry my bags, bring that fish and Tobiko up all of my stairs.”
Da sighs and reaches behind for his apron strings.
Haiyang Best is kept iced like a freezer and by four each morning, Da Wong is inside, shivering in the dark, preparing for the new business day, waiting for the deliveries, deliberately not turning on any of the lights, wanting to feel the pain of his life. Quality and assurance, these are the words by which Da lives his quotidian fishy life, able, when asked, to spout the store’s history—blah, blah, here for fifty years, certain to be here for another hundred, blah, blah—having given it so many times to tourists who come around, all low-rent journalistic interest without purpose.
Da is startled by the heat when he steps outside into the morning, with Paloma Rosen’s bags of fish looped around his wrists. He eats his lunch and takes his short breaks in the backroom in which it is impossible to warm up, to have a creative thought, or any thought at all. And when Da locks up, always the last to leave, Bai skipping out hours earlier as usual, it is late, nearly midnight, and since the summer began, the sun is always long gone, the rancid heat of the day just barely reduced, day again returned to night.
“Very hot,” Da says to Paloma Rosen.
“No different than every single day this month,” she says. “Where have you been?”
Always inside the fish market. He has forgotten how the rest of the world lives during a steamy Manhattan summer, the way even in Chinatown people slow down, cease zipping around one another, more decorous about not catching elbows or ankles, the lot of them sagging and damp, sweat beads on foreheads, unsightly circles spreading under armpits, tracking down shirt backs. It is a heat fugue Da is joining, everyone together in some version of hell, and yet he feels freed, unexpected joy and relief spreading through his icy insides, warming his fingers, his face, his toes.
“Look,” he says, “the asphalt is bubbling,” and Paloma Rosen stops dead on the sidewalk, looks at the street where the potholes, re-tarred again and again, each layer a shiny, stretchy black, are indeed bubbling.
“I have not yet been able to figure out how to make stone appear to bubble like that,” she says, a sentence whose meaning Da cannot fathom.
“Young Wong,” she says, “do you have a camera on you? Can you take a picture for me?”
Da Wong wonders if she is light-headed again, for it must be obvious to her that he, a fishmonger, hanging onto her fish, is not a photographer on the sly, a camera on a leather strap around his neck.
“I have no camera, Miss Rosen.”
“A phone. Do you have a phone? You must have a phone with a camera, all the phones today have such things attached. Even I have a phone that has a camera, but I left it at home.”
Da Wong does have a cell phone in his shirt pocket and when he is not sure what to do with the heavy bags in his hands, Paloma shakes her head, and says, “Don’t be a dummy, give them to me,” and then he is standing over the bubbling tar, taking a picture, and another, and another.
“And one from a little farther away,” Paloma calls out.
Da backs up and shoots again and again.
“Now one from directly above, up as close as you can get.”
A car is barreling down Grand, and Da watches Paloma Rosen step out into the street and put up a palm, “Arrêtez-toi, idiot,” she yells loudly, and there is the screeching of car brakes, the driver leaning out of his window, yelling, “What the hell, lady?”
Da kneels down on the hot, dirty macadam and takes a picture of the stirring tar over the cavity that leads to who knows where, or how far down.
When he and Miss Rosen are back on the sidewalk, the man in the car lays on his horn again as he passes, jabbing his middle finger in their direction as if his finger were a gun and he could shoot them both with a bullet, shoot them dead where they stand.
Paloma returns the bags to Da. “When we get home, I’ll give you my email address and you can send them to me.”
Da Wong will send her the pictures of the pothole, for what purpose he does not know, but he can use them himself, to try and capture the movement of something prehistoric underneath an old irregular street, try to make it come out right in paint. Miss Rosen has, for the short-term, returned Da to the land of those who are broiling, but living.
They move slowly down Grand Street. Da Wong would not have thought Miss Rosen a window-shopper, but she is dawdling past the store selling Chinese fans, halting in front of the Chinese apothecary, its window stocked with glass canisters filled with teas and medicinal herbs. Inside, along one wall, are hundreds of mahogany drawers all the way up to the ceiling, the Chinese pharmacist busy scooping out leaves, petals, black pellets, weighing, and bagging, and consulting with his patient, a stooped Chinese man holding the hand of a woman who might be his daughter. Young and old are sitting silently on chairs waiting their turns.