Koontz, Dean - TickTock

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Dean Koontz

TICKTOCK

To Gerda

with the promise

sand, surf

and a Scootie

of our own

To see what we have never seen,

to be what we have never been,

to shed the chrysalis and fly,

depart the earth, kiss the sky,

to be reborn, be someone new:

is this a dream or is it true?

Can our future be cleanly shorn

from a life to which we're born?

Is each of us a creature free -

or trapped at birth by destiny?

Pity those who believe the latter.

Without freedom, nothing matters.

- The Book of Counted Sorrows

In the real world

as in dreams

nothing is quite

what it seems.

- The Book of Counted Sorrows

ONE

Out of a cloudless sky on a windless November day came a sudden shadow that swooped across the

bright aqua Corvette. Tommy Phan was standing beside the car, in pleasantly warm autumn sunshine,

holding out his hand to accept the keys from Jim Shine, the salesman, when the fleeting shade

touched him. He heard a brief thrumming like frantic wings. Glancing up, he expected to glimpse a

sea gull, but not a single bird was in sight.

Unaccountably, the shadow had chilled him as though a cold wind had come with it, but the air was

utterly still. He shivered, felt a blade of ice touch his palm, and jerked his hand back, even as

he realized, too late, that it wasn't ice but merely the keys to the Corvette. He looked down in

time to see them hit the pavement.

He said, 'Sorry,' and started to bend over.

Jim Shine said, 'No, no. I'll get 'em.'

Perplexed, frowning, Tommy raised his gaze to the sky again. Unblemished blue. Nothing in flight.

The nearest trees, along the nearby street, were phoenix palms with huge crowns of fronds,

offering no branches on which a bird could alight. No birds were perched on the roof of the car

dealership either.

'Pretty exciting,' Shine said.

Tommy looked at him, slightly disoriented. 'Huh?'

Shine was holding out the keys again. He resembled a

pudgy choirboy with guileless blue eyes. Now, when he winked, his face squinched into a leer that

was meant to be comic but that seemed disconcertingly like a glimpse of genuine and usually well-

hidden decadence. 'Getting that first 'vette is almost as good as getting your first piece of

ass.'

Tommy was trembling and still inexplicably cold. He accepted the keys. They no longer felt like

ice.

The aqua Corvette waited, as sleek and cool as a high mountain spring slipping downhill over

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polished stones. Overall length: one hundred seventy-eight and a half inches. Wheelbase: ninety-

six-point-two inches. Seventy-point-seven inches in width at the dogleg, forty-six-point-three

inches high, with a minimum ground clearance of four-point-two inches.

Tommy knew the technical specifications of this car better than any preacher knew the details of

any Bible story. He was a Vietnamese-American, and America was his religion; the highway was his

church, and the Corvette was about to become the sacred vessel by which he partook of communion.

Although he was no prude, Tommy was mildly offended when Shine compared the transcendent

experience of Corvette ownership to sex. For the moment, at least, the Corvette was better than

any bedroom games, more exciting, purer, the very embodiment of speed and grace and freedom.

Tommy shook Jim Shine's soft, slightly moist hand and slid into the driver's seat. Thirty-six and

a half inches of headroom. Forty-two inches of leg room.

His heart was pounding. He was no longer chilled. In fact, he felt flushed.

He had already plugged his cellular phone into the cigarette lighter. The Corvette was his.

Crouching at the open window, grinning, Shine said, 'You're not just a mere mortal anymore.'

Tommy started the engine. A ninety-degree V8. Cast-iron block. Aluminium heads with hydraulic

lifters.

Jim Shine raised his voice. 'No longer like other men. Now you're a god.'

Tommy knew that Shine spoke with a good-humoured mockery of the cult of the automobile - yet he

half believed that it was true. Behind the wheel of the Corvette, with this childhood dream

fulfilled, he seemed to be full of the power of the car, exalted.

With the Corvette still in park, he eased his foot down on the accelerator, and the engine

responded with a deep-throated growl. Five-point-seven litres of displacement with a ten-and-a-

half-to-one compression ratio. Three hundred horsepower.

Rising from a crouch, stepping back, Shine said, 'Have fun.'

'Thanks, Jim.'

Tommy Phan drove away from the Chevrolet dealership, into a California afternoon so blue and high

and deep with promise that it was possible to believe he would live forever. With no purpose

except to enjoy the Corvette, he went west to Newport Beach and then south on the fabled Pacific

Coast Highway, past the enormous harbour full of yachts, through Corona Del Mar, along the newly

developed hills called Newport Coast, with beaches and gently breaking surf and the sun-dappled

ocean to his right, listening to an oldies radio station that rocked with the Beach Boys, the

Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Roy Orbison.

At a stoplight in Laguna Beach, he pulled beside a classic Corvette: a silver 1963 Sting Ray with

boat-tail rear end and split rear window. The driver, an aging surfer type with blond hair and a

walrus moustache, looked at the new aqua 'vette and then at Tommy. Tommy made a circle of his

thumb and forefinger, letting the stranger know that the Sting Ray was a fine machine,

and the guy replied with a smile and a thumbs-up sign, which made Tommy feel like part of a secret

club.

As the end of the century approached, some people said that the American dream was almost

extinguished and that the California dream was ashes. Nevertheless, for Tommy Phan on this

wonderful autumn afternoon, the promise of his country and the promise of the coast were burning

bright.

The sudden swooping shadow and the inexplicable chill were all but forgotten.

He drove through Laguna Beach and Dana Point to San Clemente, where at last he turned and, as

twilight fell, headed north again. Cruising aimlessly. He was getting a feel for the way the

Corvette handled. Weighing three thousand two hundred and ninety-eight pounds, it hugged the

pavement, low and solid, providing sports car intimacy with the road and incomparable

responsiveness. He wove through a number of tree-lined residential streets merely to confirm that

the Corvette's curb-to-curb turning diameter was forty feet, as promised.

Entering Dana Point from the south this time, he switched off the radio, picked up his cellular

phone, and called his mother in Huntington Beach. She answered on the second ring, speaking

Vietnamese, although she had immigrated to the United States twenty-two years ago, shortly before

the fall of Saigon, when Tommy had been only eight years old. He loved her, but sometimes she made

him crazy.

'Hi, Mom.'

'Tuong?' she said.

'Tommy,' he reminded her, for he had not used his Vietnamese name for many years. Phan Tran Tuong

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had long ago become Tommy Phan. He meant no disrespect

for his family, but he was far more American now than Vietnamese.

His mother issued a long-suffering sigh because she would have to use English. A year after they

arrived from Vietnam, Tommy had insisted that he would speak only English; even as a little kid,

he had been determined to pass eventually for a native-born American.

'You sound funny,' she said with a heavy accent.

'It's the cellular phone.'

'Whose phone?'

'The car phone.'

'Why you need car phone, Tuong?'

'Tommy. They're really handy, couldn't get along without one. Listen, Mom, guess what-'

'Car phones for big shots.'

'Not anymore. Everybody's got one.'

'I don't. Phone and drive too dangerous.' Tommy sighed - and was slightly rattled by the

realization that his sigh sounded exactly like his mother's. 'I've never had an accident, Mom.'

'You will,' she said firmly.

Even with one hand, he was able to handle the Corvette with ease on the long straightaways and

wide sweeps of the Coast Highway. Rack and pinion steering with power assist. Rear-wheel drive.

Four-speed automatic transmission with torque converter. He was gliding.

His mother changed the subject: 'Tuong, haven't seen you in weeks.'

'We spent Sunday together, Mom. This is only Thursday.'

They had gone to church together on Sunday. His father was born a Roman Catholic, and his mother

converted before marriage, back in Vietnam, but she also kept a small Buddhist shrine in one

corner of their living room. There was usually fresh fruit on the red altar, and sticks of incense

bristled from ceramic holders.

'You come to dinner?' she asked.

'Tonight? Gee, no, I can't. See, I just-'

'We have com tay cam.'

'-just bought-'

'You remember what is com tay cam - or maybe forget all about your mother's cooking?'

'Of course, I know what it is, Mom. Chicken and rice in a clay pot. It's delicious.'

'Also having shrimp and watercress soup. You remember shrimp and watercress soup?'

'I remember, Mom.'

Night was creeping over the coast. Above the rising land to the east, the heavens were black and

stippled with stars. To the west, the ocean was inky near the shore, striped with the silvery foam

of incoming breakers, but indigo toward the horizon, where a final blade of bloody sunlight still

cleaved the sea from the sky.

Cruising through the falling darkness, Tommy did feel a little bit like a god, as Jim Shine had

promised. But he was unable to enjoy it because, at the same time, he felt too much like a

thoughtless and ungrateful son.

His mother said, 'Also having stir fry celery, carrots, cabbage, some peanuts - very good. My Nuoc

Mam sauce.'

'You make the best Nuoc Mam in the world, and the best com tay cam, but I-'

'Maybe you got wok there in car with phone, you can drive and cook at same time?'

In desperation he blurted, 'Mom, I bought a new Corvette!'

'You bought phone and Corvette?'

'No, I've had the phone for years. The-'

'What's this Corvette?'

'You know, Mom. A car. A sports car.'

'You bought sports car?'

'Remember, I always said if I was a big success some day-'

'What sport?'

'Huh?'

'Football?'

His mother was stubborn, more of a traditionalist than was the Queen of England, and set in her

ways, but she was not thick-headed or uninformed. She knew perfectly well what a sports car was,

and she knew what a Corvette was, because Tommy's bedroom walls had been papered with pictures of

them when he was a kid. She also knew what a Corvette meant to Tommy, what it symbolized; she

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sensed that, in the Corvette, he was moving still farther away from his ethnic roots, and she

disapproved. She wasn't a screamer, however, and she wasn't given to scolding, so the best way she

could find to register her disapproval was to pretend that his car and his behaviour in general

were so bizarre as to be virtually beyond her understanding.

'Baseball?' she asked.

'They call the colour "bright aqua metallic." It's beautiful, Mom, a lot like the colour of that

vase on your living-room mantel. It's got-'

'Expensive?'

'Huh? Well, yeah, it's a really good car. I mean, it doesn't cost what a Mercedes-'

'Reporters all drive Corvettes?'

'Reporters? No, I've-'

'You spend everything on car, go broke?'

'No, no. I'd never-'

'You go broke, don't take welfare.'

'I'm not broke, Mom.'

'You go broke, you come home to live.'

'That won't be necessary, Mom.'

'Family always here.'

Tommy felt like dirt. Although he had done nothing

wrong, he felt uncomfortably revealed in the headlights of oncoming cars, as though they were the

harsh lamps in a police interrogation room, and as though he was trying to conceal a crime.

He sighed and eased the Corvette into the right-hand lane, joining the slower traffic. He wasn't

capable of handling the car well, talking on the cellular phone, and sparring with his

indefatigable mother.

She said, 'Where's your Toyota?'

'I traded it on the Corvette.'

'Your reporter friends drive Toyota. Honda. Ford. Never see one drive Corvette.'

'I thought you didn't know what a Corvette was?'

'I know,' she said. 'Oh, yes, I know,' making one of those abrupt hundred-eighty-degree turns that

only a mother could perform without credibility whiplash. 'Doctors drive Corvette. You are always

smart, Tuong, get good grades, could have been doctor.'

Sometimes it seemed that most of the Vietnamese-Americans of Tommy's generation were studying to

be doctors or were already in practice. A medical degree signified assimilation and prestige, and

Vietnamese parents pushed their children toward the healing professions with the aggressive love

with which Jewish parents, of a previous generation, had pushed their children. Tommy, with a

degree in journalism, would never be able to remove anyone's appendix or perform cardiovascular

surgery, so he would forever be something of a disappointment to his mother and father.

Anyway, I'm not a reporter anymore, Mom, not as of yesterday. Now I'm a full-time novelist, not

just part-time anymore.'

'No job.'

'Self-employed.'

'Fancy way of saying no job,' she insisted, though Tommy's father was self-employed in the family

bakery,

as were Tommy's two brothers, who also had failed to become doctors.

'The latest contract I signed-'

'People read newspapers. Who read books?'

'Lots of people read books.'

'Who?'

'You read books.'

'Not books about silly private detectives with guns in every pocket, drive cars like crazy maniac,

get in fights, drink whiskey, chase blondes.'

'My detective doesn't drink whiskey-'

'He should settle down, marry nice Vietnamese girl, have babies, work steady job, contribute to

family.'

'Boring, Mom. No one would ever want to read about a private detective like that.'

'This detective in your books - he ever marry blonde, he break his mother's heart.'

'He's a lone wolf. He'll never marry.'

'That break his mother's heart too. Who want to read book about mother with broken heart? Too

sad.'

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Exasperated, Tommy said, 'Mom, I just called to tell you the good news about the Corvette and-'

'Come to dinner. Clay-pot chicken and rice better than lousy cheeseburgers.'

'I can't come tonight, Mom. Tomorrow.'

'Too much cheeseburgers and French fries, soon you look like big fat cheeseburger.'

'I hardly ever eat cheeseburgers and fries, Mom. I watch my diet and I-'

'Tomorrow night we have shrimp toast. Pork-stuffed squid. Pot-roasted rice. Duck with nuoc cham.'

Tommy's mouth was watering, but he would never admit as much, not even if he were placed in the

hands of torturers with countless clever instruments of persuasion. 'Okay, I'll be there tomorrow

night. And after dinner, I'll take you for a spin in the Corvette.'

'Take your father. Maybe he like flashy sports car. Not me. I simple person.'

'Mom-'

'But your father good man. Don't put him in fancy sports car and take him out drinking whiskey,

fight, chase blondes.'

'I'll do my best not to corrupt him, Mom.'

'Goodbye, Tuong.'

'Tommy,' he corrected, but she had hung up.

God, how he loved her.

God, how nuts she made him.

He drove through Laguna Beach and continued north.

The last red slash of the sunset had seeped away. The wounded night in the west had healed, sky to

sea, and in the natural world, all was dark. The only relief from blackness was the unnatural glow

from the houses on the eastern hills and from the cars and trucks racing along the coast. The

flashes of headlights and taillights suddenly seemed frenzied and ominous, as though all the

drivers of those vehicles were speeding toward appointments with one form of damnation or another.

Mild shivers swept through Tommy, and then he was shaken by a series of more profound chills that

made his teeth chatter.

As a novelist, he had never written a scene in which a character's teeth had chattered, because he

had always thought it was a cliche; more important, he assumed that it was a cliche without any

element of truth, that shivering until teeth rattled was not physically possible. In his thirty

years, he had never, for even as much as a day, lived in a cold climate, so he couldn't actually

vouch for the effect of a bitter winter wind. Characters in books usually found their teeth

chattering from fear, however, and Tommy Phan knew a good deal about fear. As a small boy on a

leaky boat on the South China Sea, fleeing from Vietnam with his parents, two brothers and sister,

under ferocious attack by

Thai pirates who would have raped the women and killed everyone if they had been able to get

aboard, Tommy had been terrified but had never been so fearful that his teeth had rattled like

castanets.

They were chattering now. He clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles throbbed, and that stopped

the chattering. But as soon as he relaxed, it started again.

The coolness of the November evening hadn't yet leached into the Corvette. The chill that gripped

him was curiously internal, but he switched on the heater anyway.

As another series of icy tremors shook him, he remembered the peculiar moment earlier in the

parking lot at the car dealership: the flitting shadow with no cloud or bird that could have cast

it, the deep coldness like a wind that stirred nothing else in the day except him.

He glanced away from the road ahead, up at the deep sky, as if he might glimpse some pale shape

passing through the darkness above.

What pale shape, for God's sake?

'You're spooking me, Tommy boy,' he said. Then he laughed drily. 'And now you're even talking to

yourself.'

Of course, nothing sinister was shadowing him in the night sky above.

He had always been too imaginative for his own good, which was why writing fiction came so

naturally to him. Maybe he'd been born with a strong tendency to fantasize

- or maybe his imagination had been encouraged to grow by the seemingly bottomless fund of

folktales with which his mother had entertained him and soothed him to sleep when he had been a

little boy during the war, back in the days when the communists had fought so fiercely to rule

Vietnam, the fabled Land of Seagull and Dragon. When the warm humid nights in Southeast Asia had

rattled with gunfire and reverberated with the distant boom of

mortars and bombs, he'd seldom been afraid, because her gentle voice enraptured him with stories

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of spirits and gods and ghosts.

Now, lowering his gaze from the sky to the highway, Tommy Phan thought of the tale of Le Loi, the

fisherman who cast his nets into the sea and came up with a magical sword rather like King

Arthur's shining Excalibur. He recalled 'The Raven's Magic Gem,' as well, and 'The Search for the

Land of Bliss,' and 'The Supernatural Crossbow,' in which poor Princess My Chau betrayed her

worthy father out of love for her sweet husband and paid a terrible price, and the 'Da-Trang

Crabs,' and 'The Child of Death,' and dozens more.

Usually, when something reminded him of one of the legends that he had learned from his mother, he

could not help but smile, and a happy peace settled over him, as though she herself had just then

appeared and embraced him. This time, however, those tales had no consoling effect. He remained

deeply uneasy, and he was still chilled in spite of the flood of warm air from the car heater.

Odd.

He switched on the radio, hoping that some vintage rock-'n'-roll would brighten his mood. He must

have nudged the selector off the station to which he had been listening earlier, because now there

was nothing to be heard but a soft susurration, not ordinary static, but like distant water

tumbling in considerable volume over a sloping palisade of rocks.

Briefly glancing away from the road, Tommy pressed a selector button. At once, the numbers changed

on the digital read-out, but no music came forth, just the sound of water, gushing and tumbling,

growling yet whispery.

He pressed another button. The numbers on the display changed, but the sound did not.

He tried a third button, without success.

'Oh, wonderful. Terrific.'

He had owned the car only a few hours, and already the radio was broken.

Cursing under his breath, he fiddled with the controls as he drove, hoping to find the Beach Boys,

Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, the Isley Brothers, or even someone contemporary like Julianna Hatfield or

maybe Hootie and the Blowfish. Hell, he'd settle for a rousing polka.

From one end of the radio band to the other, on both AM and FM, the watery noise had washed away

all music, as if some cataclysmic tide had inundated broadcast studios the length of the West

Coast.

When he attempted to turn off the radio, the sound continued undiminished. He was certain that he

had hit the correct button. He pressed it again, to no effect.

Gradually, the character of the sound had changed. The splash-patter-gurgle-hiss-roar now seemed

less like falling water than like a distant crowd, like the voices of multitudes raised in cheers

or chants; or perhaps it was the faraway raging babble of an angry, destructive mob.

For reasons that he could not entirely define, Tommy Phan was disturbed by the new quality of this

eerie and tuneless serenade. He jabbed at more buttons.

Voices. Definitely voices. Hundreds or even thousands of them. Men, women, the fragile voices of

children. He thought he could hear despairing wails, pleas for help, panicked cries, anguished

groans - a monumental yet hushed sound, as though it was echoing across a vast gulf or rising out

of a black abyss.

The voices were creepy - but also curiously compelling, almost mesmerizing. He found himself

staring at the radio too long, his attention dangerously diverted

from the highway, yet each time that he looked up, he was able to focus on the traffic for only a

few seconds before lowering his gaze once more to the softly glowing radio.

And now behind the whispery muffled roar of the multitude rose the garbled bass voice of. . .

someone else

someone who sounded infinitely strange, imperial and demanding. It was a low wet voice that was

less than human, spitting out not-quite-decipherable words as if they were wads of phlegm.

No. Good God in Heaven, his imagination was running away with him. What issued from the stereo

speakers was static, nothing but ordinary static, white noise, electronic slush.

In spite of the chill that continued to plague him, Tommy felt a sudden prickle of perspiration on

his scalp and forehead. His palms were damp too.

Surely he had pressed every button on the control panel. Nevertheless, the ghostly chorus droned

on.

'Damn.'

He made a tight fist of his right hand. He thumped the flat of it against the face of the radio,

not hard enough to hurt himself, but punching three or four buttons simultaneously.

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Second by second, the guttural and distorted words spoken by the weird voice became clearer, but

Tommy couldn't quite understand them.

He thumped his fist against the radio once more, and he was surprised to hear himself issue a half-

stifled cry of desperation. After all, as annoying as the noise was, it represented no threat to

him.

Did it?

Even as he posed that question to himself, he was overcome by the irrational conviction that he

must not listen to the susurration coming from the stereo speakers, that he must clamp his hands

over his ears, that somehow

he would be in mortal danger if he understood even one word of what was being said to him. Yet,

perversely, he strained to hear, to wring clarity from the muddle of sound.

'...Phan...'

That one word was irrefutably clear.

'. . . Phan Tran. . .'

The repulsive, mucus-clotted voice was speaking flawlessly accented Vietnamese.

'. . . Phan Tran Tuong. .

Tommy's name. Before he had changed it. His name from the Land of Seagull and Fox.

Phan Tran Tuong. .

Someone was calling to him. Far away at first but now drawing closer. Seeking contact. Connection.

Something about the voice was . . . hungry.

The chill, like scurrying spiders, worked deeper into him, weaving webs of ice in the hollows of

his bones.

He hammered the radio a third time, harder than before, and abruptly it went dead. The only sounds

were the rumble of the engine, the hum of the tires, his ragged breathing, and the hard pounding

of his heart.

His left hand, slick with sweat, slipped on the steering wheel, and he snapped his head up as the

Corvette angled off the pavement. The right front tire - then the right rear - stuttered onto the

rough shoulder of the highway. Sprays of gravel pinged and rattled against the undercarriage. A

drainage swale, bristling with weeds, loomed in the headlights, and dry brush scraped along the

passenger side of the car.

Tommy grabbed the wheel with both slippery hands and pulled to the left. With a jolt and a

shudder, the car arced back onto the pavement.

Brakes shrieked behind him, and he glanced at the rear-view mirror as headlights flared bright

enough to sting his eyes. Horn blaring, a black Ford Explorer

swerved around him, avoiding a rear end collision with only a few inches to spare, so close that

he expected to hear the squeal of tortured sheet steel. But then it was safely past, taillights

dwindling in the darkness.

In control of the Corvette again, Tommy blinked sweat out of his eyes and swallowed hard. His

vision blurred. A sour taste filled his mouth. He felt disoriented, as if he had awakened from a

fever dream.

Although the phlegm-choked voice on the radio had terrified him only moments ago, he was already

less than certain that his name had actually been spoken on the airwaves. As his vision rapidly

cleared, he wondered if his mind also had been temporarily clouded. It was easier to entertain the

possibility that he had suffered something akin to a minor epileptic episode than to believe that

a supernatural entity had reached out to touch him through the prosaic medium of a sports-car

radio. Perhaps he'd even endured a transient ischemic cerebral attack, an inexplicable but

mercifully brief reduction in circulation to the brain, similar to the one that had afflicted Sal

Delano, a friend and fellow reporter, last spring.

He had a headache now, centred over the right eye. And his stomach was queasy.

Driving through Corona Del Mar, he stayed below the speed limit, prepared to pull to the curb and

stop if his vision blurred . . . or if anything strange began to happen again.

He glanced nervously at the radio. It remained silent. Block by block, fear drained out of him,

but depression seeped in to take its place. He still had a headache and a queasy stomach, but now

he also felt hollow inside, grey and cold and empty.

He knew that hollowness well. It was guilt.

He was driving his own Corvette, the car of cars, the ultimate American wheels, the fulfilment of

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a boyhood dream, and he should have been buoyant, jubilant, but he was slowly sinking into a sea

of despondency. An emotional abyss lay under him. He felt guilty about the way he had treated his

mother, which was ridiculous because he had been respectful. Unfailingly respectful. Admittedly,

he had been impatient with her, and he was pained now to think that maybe she had heard that

impatience in his voice. He didn't want to hurt her feelings. Never. But sometimes she seemed so

hopelessly stuck in the past, stubbornly and stupidly fixed in her ways, and Tommy was embarrassed

by her inability to assimilate into the American culture as fully as he himself had done. When he

was with American-born friends, his mother's thick Vietnamese accent mortified him, as did her

habit of walking one deferential step behind his father. Mom, this is the United States, he had

told her. Everyone's equal, no one better than anyone else, women the same as men. You don't have

to walk in anyone's shadow here. She had smiled at him as though he was a much-loved but dim-

witted son, and she'd said, I not walk in shadow because have to, Tuong. Walk in shadow because

want to. Exasperated, Tommy had said, But that's wrong. Still favouring him with that infuriating,

gentle smile, she'd said, In this United States, is wrong to show respect? Is wrong to show love?

Tommy was never able to win one of these debates, but he kept trying:

No, but there are better ways to show it. She gave him a sly look and ended the discussion with

one line: How better - with Hallmark greeting card? Now, driving the long-desired Corvette with no

more pleasure than if it had been a second-hand rattletrap pickup truck, Tommy was cold and grey

inside even as his face flushed hot with shame at his ungrateful inability to accept his mother on

her own terms.

Sharper than a serpent's tooth is a thankless child.

Tommy Phan, bad son. Slithering through the California night. Low and vile and unloving.

He glanced at the rear-view mirror, half expecting to see a pair of glittery snake eyes in his own

face.

He knew, of course, that wallowing in guilt was irrational. Sometimes he had unrealistic

expectations of his parents, but he was far more reasonable than his mother. When she wore an ao

dais, one of those flowing silk tunic-and-pants ensembles that seemed as out of place in this

country as a Scotsman's kilts, she looked so diminutive, like a little girl in her mother's

clothes, but there was nothing vulnerable about her. Strong-minded, iron-willed, she could be a

tiny tyrant when she wished, and she knew how to make a look of disapproval sting worse than the

lash of a whip.

Those uncharitable thoughts appalled Tommy even as he indulged in them, and his face grew yet

hotter with shame. Taking frightful risks, at tremendous cost, she and Tommy's father had brought

him - and his brothers and sister - out of the Land of Seagull and Fox, from under the fist of the

communists, to this land of opportunity, and for that, he should honour and cherish them.

'I am such a selfish creep,' he said aloud. 'A real piece of shit, that's what I am.'

As he braked to a full stop at an intersection on the border of Corona Del Mar and Newport Beach,

he settled deeper in a sea of gloom and remorse.

Would it have killed him to accept her invitation to dinner? She had made shrimp and watercress

soup, com toy cam, and stir-fried vegetables with Nuoc Mom sauce - three of his favourite dishes

when he was a child. Clearly, she had worked hard in the kitchen, hoping to lure him home, and he

had rejected her, disappointed her. There was no excuse for turning her

down, especially since he hadn't seen her and his father for weeks.

No. Wrong. That was her line: Tuong, haven't seen you in weeks. On the phone, he had reminded her

that this was Thursday and that they had spent Sunday together. But now here he was, minutes

later, buying into her fantasy of abandonment!

Suddenly his mother seemed to be all of the stereotypical Asian villains from old movies and books

rolled into one: as manipulative as Ming the Merciless, as wily as Fu Manchu.

He blinked at the red traffic light, shocked to have had such a mean-spirited thought about his

own mother. This confirmed it: He was a swine.

More than anything, Tommy Phan wanted to be an American, not a Vietnamese-American, just an

American, with no hyphen. But surely he didn't have to reject his family, didn't have to be rude

and mean to his beloved mother, to achieve that much-desired state of complete Americanisation.

Ming the Merciless. Fu Manchu, the Yellow Peril. Dear God, he had become a raging bigot. He seemed

to have deceived himself into believing he was a white person.

He looked at his hands on the steering wheel. They were the colour of burnished bronze. In the

rear-view mirror, he studied the epicanthic folds of his dark Asian eyes, wondering if he was in

danger of trading his true identity for one that was a lie.

Fu Manchu.

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If he could think such unkind things about his mother, he might slip up eventually and say them to

her face. She would be crushed. The prospect of it left him breathless with anticipatory fear, and

his mouth went as dry as powder, and his throat swelled so tight that he was unable to swallow. It

would be more merciful to take a gun and shoot her. Just shoot her in the heart.

So this was the kind of son he had become. The kind of son who shoots his mother in the heart with

words.

The traffic light changed from red to green, but he couldn't immediately lift his foot off the

brake pedal. He was immobilized by a terrible weight of self-loathing.

Behind the Corvette, another motorist tapped his horn. 'I just want to live my own life,' Tommy

said miserably as he finally drove through the intersection.

Lately he had been talking aloud to himself far too much. The strain of living his own life and

still being a good son was making him crazy.

He reached for the cellular phone, intending to call his mom and ask if the dinner invitation was

still open.

Car phones for big shots.

Not anymore. Everybody's got one.

I don't. Phone and drive too dangerous.

I've never had an accident, Mom.

You will.

He could hear her voice as clearly as if she were speaking those words now rather than in memory,

and he snatched his hand away from the phone.

On the west side of the Pacific Coast Highway was a restaurant styled as a 1950's diner.

Impulsively, Tommy swung into the lot and parked in the glow of red neon.

Inside, the place was fragrant with the aromas of onions, hamburgers sizzling on a grill, and

pickle relish. Ensconced in a tufted red-vinyl booth, Tommy ordered a cheeseburger, French fries,

and a chocolate milkshake.

In his mind's ear, his mother's voice replayed: Clay-pot chicken and rice better than lousy

cheeseburgers.

'Make that two cheeseburgers,' Tommy amended as the waitress finished taking his order and started

to turn away from his booth.

'Skipped lunch, huh?' she asked.

Too much cheeseburgers and French fries, soon you look like big fat cheeseburger.

'And an order of onion rings,' Tommy said defiantly, certain that farther north, in Huntington

Beach, his mother had just flinched with the psychic awareness of his betrayal.

'I like a man with a big appetite,' the waitress said.

She was a slender blue-eyed blonde with a pert nose and rosy complexion - exactly the kind of

woman about whom his mother probably had nightmares.

Tommy wondered if she was flirting. Her smile was inviting, but her comment about his appetite

might have been innocent small talk. He wasn't as smooth with women as he would have liked to be.

If she had given him an opening, he was incapable of taking it. One rebellion a night was enough.

Cheeseburgers, yes, but not both cheeseburgers and a blonde.

He could only say, 'Give me extra Cheddar, please, and lots of onions.'

After lathering plenty of mustard and ketchup on the burgers, he ate every bite of what he

ordered. He drained the milkshake so completely that the sucking noises of his straw against the

bottom of the glass caused nearby adult diners to glare at him because of the bad example he was

setting for their children.

He left a generous tip, and as he was heading toward the door, his waitress said, 'You look a lot

happier going out than you did coming in.'

'I bought a Corvette today,' he said inanely.

'Cool,' she said.

'Been my dream since I was a little kid.'

'What colour is it?'

'Bright aqua metallic.'

'Sounds pretty.'

'It flies.'

'I'll bet.'

'Like a rocket,' he said, and he realized that he was almost lost in the oceanic depths of her

blue eyes.

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This detective in your books - he ever marry blonde, he break his mother's heart.

'Well' he said, 'take care.'

'You too,' said the waitress.

He went to the entrance. On the threshold, holding the door open, Tommy looked back, hoping that

she would still be staring after him. She had turned away, however, and was walking toward the

booth that he had vacated. Her slender ankles and shapely calves were lovely.

A breeze had sprung up, but the night was still balmy for November. On the far side of Pacific

Coast Highway, at the entrance to Fashion Island Mall, stately ranks of enormous phoenix palms

were illuminated by floodlights fixed to their boles. Long green fronds swayed like hula skirts.

The breeze was lightly scented with the fecund smell of the nearby ocean; it didn't chill him but,

in fact, pleasantly caressed the back of his neck and playfully ruffled his thick black hair. In

the wake of his little rebellion against his mother and his heritage, the world seemed to have

grown delightfully more sensuous.

In the car, he switched on the radio. It was functioning perfectly again. Roy Orbison was rocking

out 'Pretty Woman.'

Tommy sang along. Lustily.

He remembered the ominous roar of static and the strange phlegmy voice that had seemed to be

calling his name from the radio, but now he found it difficult to believe that the peculiar

incident had been as uncanny as it had seemed at the time. He had been upset by his conversation

with his mother, feeling simultaneously put-upon and guilty, angry with her but also with himself,

and his perceptions hadn't been entirely trustworthy. The waterfall-roar of static had been real

enough, but in his pall of guilt, he had no doubt imagined hearing

his name in a meaningless gurgle and squeal of electronic garbage.

All the way home, he listened to old-time rock-'n'-roll, and he knew the words to every song.

He lived in a modest but comfortable two-story tract house in the exhaustively planned city of

Irvine. The tract, as was the case with most of those in Orange County, featured none but

Mediterranean architecture; indeed, Mediterranean style prevailed to such an extent that it

sometimes seemed restfully consistent but at other times was boring, suffocating, as if the chief

executive officer of Taco Bell had somehow become an all-powerful dictator and had decreed that

everyone must live not in houses but in Mexican restaurants. Tommy's place had an orange barrel-

tile roof, pale-yellow stucco walls, and concrete walkways with brick borders.

Because he'd supplemented his salary from the newspaper with income from a series of paperback

mystery novels that he'd written during evenings and weekends, he'd been able to buy the house

three years ago, when he'd been only twenty-seven. Now his books were coming out in hardcover

first, and his writing income had gotten large enough to allow him to risk leaving the Register.

By any fair assessment, he was more of a success than either of his brothers or his sister. But

the three of them had remained deeply involved in the Vietnamese community, so their parents were

proud of them. They could never be equally proud of Tuong, who had changed his name as soon as he

was legally of an age to do so, and who had eagerly embraced everything American since arriving on

these shores at the age of eight.

He supposed that even if he became a billionaire, moved into a thousand-room house on the highest

cliff overlooking the Pacific Coast, with solid-gold toilets and chandeliers hung not with mere

crystals but with huge

diamonds, his mother and father would still think of him as the 'failed' son who had forgotten his

roots and turned his back on his heritage.

As Tommy swung into his driveway, the bordering beds of white and coral-red impatiens glowed in

the headlights as if iridescent. Swift shadows crawled up through the raggedly peeling bark of

several melaleucas, swarming into higher branches, where moonlight-silvered leaves shuddered in

the night breeze.

In the garage, once the big door closed behind him, he remained in the silent car for a few

minutes, savouring the smell of leather upholstery, basking in the pride of ownership. If he could

have slept sitting upright in the driver's seat, he would have done so.

He disliked leaving the 'vette in the dark. Because it was so beautiful, the car should remain

under flattering spotlights, as though it were an art object in a museum.

In the kitchen, as he hung the car keys on the pegboard by the refrigerator, he heard the doorbell

at the front of the house. Though recognizable, the ringing was different from the usual sound,

like a hollow and ominous summons in a dream. The curse of home ownership: something always needed

to be repaired.

He wasn't expecting anyone this evening. In fact, he intended to spend an hour or two in his

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