To Gerda
with the promise
of
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 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 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 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.'
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 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.
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 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.
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.

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 study, revising a few pages of the current manuscript. His fictional private detective, Chip Nguyen, had been getting wordy in his first-person narration of the story, and the tough but sometimes garrulous gumshoe needed to be edited.
When Tommy opened the front door, ice-cold wind assaulted him, frigid enough to take his breath away. A whirl of dead melaleuca leaves like hundreds of tiny flensing knives spun over him, whispering-buzzing against one another, and he stumbled backward two

steps, shielding his eyes with one hand, gasping in surprise.
A dry, papery leaf blew into his mouth. The hard little point pricked his tongue.
Startled, he bit down on the leaf, which had a bitter taste. Then he spit it out.
As suddenly as it had burst through the door, the whirlwind now wound up tight and disappeared into itself, leaving only silence and stillness in its wake. The air was no longer cold.
He brushed leaves out of his hair and off his shoulders, plucked them from his soft flannel shirt and blue jeans. The wood floor of the foyer was littered with crisp brown leaves, bits of grass, and sandy grit.
'What the hell?'
No visitor waited beyond the threshold.
Tommy moved into the open doorway, peering left and right along the dark front porch. It was little more than a stoop - ten feet wide and six feet deep.
No one was on the two steps or on the walkway that cleaved the shallow front lawn, no one in sight who might have rung the doorbell. Under tattered clouds back lighted by a lambent moon, the street was quiet and deserted, so hushed that he could half believe that a breakdown in the machinery of the cosmos had brought time to a complete halt for everyone and for all things except for he himself.
Tommy switched on the outside light and saw a strange object on the porch floor immediately in front of him. It was a doll: a rag doll no more than ten inches tall, lying on its back, its stubby arms spread wide.
Frowning, he surveyed the night once more, paying special attention to the shrubbery, where someone might be crouched and watching him. He saw no one.
The doll at his feet was unfinished, covered entirely

with white cotton fabric, unclothed, without facial features or hair. Where each eye should have been, two crossed stitches of coarse black thread dimpled the white cloth. Five sets of crossed black stitches marked the mouth, and another pair formed an X over the heart.
Tommy eased across the threshold onto the porch. He squatted on his haunches beside the doll.
The bitterness of the dry leaf no longer lingered in his mouth, but he tasted something equally unpleasant if more familiar. He stuck out his tongue, touched it, and then looked at the tip of his finger: a small red smear. The point of the leaf had drawn blood.
His tongue didn't hurt. The wound was tiny. Nevertheless, for reasons that he could not fully explain, Tommy was unnerved by the sight of the blood.
In one of the doll's crude mitten-like hands was a folded paper. It was held firmly in place by a straight pin with a glossy black enamel head as large as a pea.
Tommy picked up the doll. It was solid and surprisingly heavy for its size, but loose-jointed and limp - as though it might be filled with sand.
When he pulled the pin out of the doll's hand, the death-still street briefly came alive again. A chilly breeze swept across the porch. Shrubbery rustled, and trees shuddered sufficiently to cause moon shadows to shimmer across the black lawn. Then all fell quiet and motionless again.
The paper was unevenly yellowed, as though it might be a scrap of ancient parchment, slightly oily, and splintered along the edges. It had been folded in half, then folded in half again. Opened, it was about three inches square.
The message was in Vietnamese: three columns of gracefully drawn ideograms in thick black ink. Tommy recognized the language but was not able to read it.

Rising to his full height, he stared thoughtfully at the street, then down at the doll in his hand.
After refolding the note and putting it in his shirt pocket, he went inside and closed the door. He engaged the dead-bolt lock. And the security chain.
In the living room, Tommy put the strange blank-faced doll on the end table beside the sofa, propping it against a Stickley-style lamp with a green stained-glass shade, so it was sitting with its round white head cocked to the right and its arms straight down at its side. Its mitten-like hands were open, as they had been since he had first seen it on the porch, but now they seemed to be seeking something.
He put the pin on the table beside the doll. Its black enamel head glistened like a drop of oil, and silvery light glinted off the sharp point.
He closed the drapes over each of the three living-room windows. He did the same in the dining room and family room. In the kitchen, he twisted shut the slats on the Levolor blinds.
He still felt watched.
Upstairs in the bedroom that he had outfitted as an office, where he wrote his novels, he sat at the desk without turning on a lamp. The only light came through the open door from the hall. He picked up the phone, hesitated, and then called the home number of Sal Delano, who was a reporter at the Register, where Tommy had worked until yesterday. He got an answering machine but left no message.
He called Sal's pager. After inputting his own number, he marked it urgent.
Less than five minutes later, Sal returned the call. 'What's so urgent, cheese head?' he asked. 'You forget where you put your dick?'
'Where are you?' Tommy asked.
'In the sweatshop.'

'At the office?' 'Wrangling the news.'
'Late on another deadline,' Tommy guessed.
'You called just to question my professionalism? You're out of the news racket one day and already you've lost all sense of brotherhood?'
Leaning forward in his chair, hunched over his desk, Tommy said, 'Listen, Sal, I need to know something about the gangs.'
'You mean the fat cats who run Washington or the punks that lean on the businessmen in Little Saigon?'
'Local Vietnamese gangs. The Santa Ana Boys...' Cheap Boys, Natoma Boys. You already know
about them.'
'Not as much as you do,' Tommy said. Sal was a crime reporter with a deep knowledge of the Vietnamese gangs that operated not only in Orange County but nationwide. While with the newspaper, Tommy had written primarily about the arts and entertainment.
'Sal, you ever hear about Natoma or the Cheap Boys threatening anybody by mailing them an imprint of a black hand or, you know, a skull-and-crossbones or something like that?'
'Or maybe leaving a severed horse's head in their bed?'
'Yeah. Anything like that.'
'You have your cultures confused, boy wonder. These guys aren't courteous enough to leave warnings. They make the Mafia seem like a chamber-music society.'
'What about the older gangs, not the teenage street thugs, the more organized guys - the Black Eagles, the Eagle Seven?'
'The Black Eagles have the hard action in San Francisco, the Eagle Seven in Chicago. Here it's the Frogmen.'
Tommy leaned back in his chair, which creaked under him. 'No horse's head from them either, huh?'

'Tommy boy, if the Frogmen leave a severed head in your bed, it's going to be your own.'
'Comforting.'
'What's this all about? You're starting to worry me.' Tommy sighed and looked at the nearest window. Clotting clouds had begun to cover the moon, and fading silver light filigreed their vaporous edges. 'That piece I wrote for the Show section last week - I think maybe somebody's threatening to retaliate for it.'
'The piece about the little girl figure skater?'
'Yeah.'
'And the little boy who's a piano prodigy? What's to retaliate for?'
'Well-'
'Who could've been pissed off by that - some other six-year-old pianist thinks he should have gotten the coverage, now he's going to run you down with his tricycle?'
'Well,' Tommy said, beginning to feel foolish, 'the piece did make the point that most kids in the Vietnamese community don't get mixed up in gangs.'
'Oooh, yeah, that's controversial journalism, alright'
'I had some hard things to say about the ones who do join gangs, especially the Natoma Boys and Santa Ana Boys.'
'One paragraph in the whole piece, you put down the gangs. These guys aren't that sensitive, Tommy. A few words aren't going to put them on the vengeance freeway.'
'I wonder. .
'They don't care what you think anyway, 'cause to them, you're just the Vietnamese equivalent of an Uncle Tom. Besides, you're giving them a whole lot too much credit. These assholes don't read newspapers.'
The dark clouds churned from west to east, congealing rapidly as they moved in from the ocean. The moon sank

into them, like the face of a drowner in a cold sea, and the lunar glow on the window glass slowly faded.
'What about the girl gangs?' Tommy asked. 'Wally Girls, Pomona Girls, the Dirty Punks. it's no secret they can be more vicious than the boys. But I still don't believe they'd be interested in you. Hell if they got steamed this easily, they'd have gutted me like a fish ages ago. Come on, Tommy, tell me what's happened? What's got you jumpy?'
'It's a doll.'
Sal sounded bewildered. 'Like a Barbie Doll?'
A little more ominous than that.'
'Yeah, Barbie isn't the nasty bitch she used to be. Who'd be afraid of her these days?'
Tommy told Sal about the strange white-cloth figure with black stitches that he had found on the front porch.
'Sounds like the Pillsbury Doughboy gone punk,' Sal said.
'It's weird,' Tommy said. 'Weirder than it probably sounds.'
'You don't have a clue what the note says? You can't read any Vietnamese at all not even a little?'
Taking the paper from his shirt pocket and unfolding it, Tommy said, 'Not a word.'
'What's the matter with you, cheese head? You have no respect for your roots?'
'You're in touch with yours, huh?' Tommy said sarcastically.
'Sure.' To prove it, Sal spoke swift, musical Italian. Then, reverting to English: And I write to my nonna in Sicily every month. Went to visit for two weeks last year.'
Tommy felt more than ever like a swine. Squinting at the three columns of ideograms on the yellowed paper, he said, 'Well, this is as meaningless as Sanskrit to me.'

'Can you fax it? In maybe five minutes, I can find someone to translate.'
'Sure.'
'I'll get back to you as soon as I know what it says.'
'Thanks, Sal. Oh, hey, you know what I bought today?'
'Do I know what you bought? Since when do guys talk shopping?'
'I bought a Corvette.'
'For real?'
'Yeah. An LT1 Coupe. Bright metallic aqua.'
'Congratulations.'
'Twenty-two years ago,' Tommy said, 'when I first came through the immigration office with my family and stepped into my first street in this country, I saw a Corvette go by, and that was it for me. That said everything about America, that fantastic-looking car, going by so sleek.'
'I'm happy for you, Tommy.'
'Thanks, Sal.'
'Now at last maybe you'll be able to get girls, won't have to make it anymore with Rhonda Rubbergirl, the inflatable woman.'
Asshole,' Tommy said affectionately.
'Fax the note.'
'Right away,' Tommy said, and he hung up.
A small Xerox machine stood in one corner of his office. Without turning on any room lights, he made a photocopy of the note, returned the note to his shirt pocket, and faxed the copy to Sal at the Register.
The phone rang a minute later. Sal said, 'You put it through the fax wrong-side up, dickhead. All I've got is a blank sheet of paper with your number at the top.'
'I'm sure I did it right.'
'Even your inflatable woman must be frustrated with you. Send it again.'

After switching on a lamp, Tommy returned to the fax machine once more. He was careful to load the page properly. The mysterious ideograms had to be face-down.
He watched as the rollers pulled the single sheet of paper through the machine. The small message window displayed Sal's fax number at the newspaper and the word sending. The page of ideograms slid out of the machine, and after a pause, the word in the message window changed to received. Then the fax disconnected.
The phone rang. Sal said, 'Do I have to drive over there and show you how to do it right?'
'You mean you got a blank page again?'
'Just your sender-ID bar at the top.'
'I absolutely loaded it right this time.'
'Then something's wrong with your fax,' Sal said.
'Must be,' Tommy said, although that answer didn't satisfy him.
'You want to bring the note by here?'
'How long will you be there?'
'Couple of hours.'
'I might stop by,' Tommy said.
'You've got me curious now.'
'If not tonight, I'll see you tomorrow.'
Sal said, 'It might be some little girl.'
'Huh?'
'Some other figure skater jealous about the one in your article. Remember that Olympic skater, Tonya Harding? Be careful of your knee caps, Tommy boy. Some little girl out there may have a baseball bat with your name on it.'
'Thank God we don't work in the same building any more. I feel so much cleaner.'
'Kiss Rhonda Rubbergirl for me.'
'You're a diseased degenerate.'
'Well, with Rhonda, you'll never have to worry about catching anything nasty.'

'See you later.' Tommy put down the telephone and switched off the lamp. Once more, the only light was a pale pearlesence that spilled in from the second-floor hallway.
He went to the nearest window and studied the front lawn and the street. The yellowish glow of the streetlamps didn't reveal anyone lurking in the night.
A deep ocean of storm clouds had flooded the sky, entirely submerging the moon. The heavens were black and forbidding.
Tommy went downstairs to the living room, where he discovered the doll slumped on its side on the end table beside the sofa. He had left it propped with its back against the stained-glass lamp, in a sitting position.
Frowning, Tommy stared at it suspiciously. The doll had seemed to be full of sand, well weighted; it should have stayed where he had put it.
Feeling foolish, he toured the downstairs, trying the doors. They were all still securely locked, and there were no signs of visitors. No one had entered the house.
He returned to the living room. The doll might not have been balanced properly against the lamp, in which case the sand could have shifted slowly to one side until the damn thing toppled over.
Hesitant, not sure why he was hesitant, Tommy Phan picked up the doll. He brought it to his face, examining it more closely than he had done earlier.
The black sutures that indicated the eyes and the mouth were sewn with heavy thread as coarse as surgical cord. Tommy gently rubbed the ball of his thumb across a pair of crossed stitches that marked one of the doll's eyes. . . then across the row of five that formed its grimly set lips.
As he traced that line of black stitches, Tommy was startled by a macabre image that popped into his mind's eye: the threads abruptly snapping, a real mouth opening in the

white cotton cloth, tiny but razor-sharp teeth exposed, a quick but savage snap, and his thumb bitten off, blood streaming from the stump.
A shudder coursed through him, and he nearly dropped the doll.
'Dear God.'
He felt stupid and childish. The stitches had not snapped, and of course no hungry mouth would ever open in the damn thing.
It's just a doll, for God's sake.
He wondered what his detective, Chip Nguyen, would do in this situation. Chip was tough, smart, and relentless. He was a master of Tae Kwon Do, able to drink hard all night without losing his edge or suffering a hangover, a chess master who had once defeated Bobby Fisher when they encountered each other in a hurricane-hammered resort hotel in Barbados, a lover of such prowess that a beautiful blond socialite had killed another woman over him in a fit of jealousy, a collector of vintage Corvettes who was able to rebuild them from the ground up, and a brooding philosopher who knew that humanity was doomed but who gamely fought the good fight anyway. Already, Chip would have obtained a translation of the note, tracked down the source of the cotton cloth and the black thread, punched out a thug just for the exercise, and (being an equal-opportunity lover) bedded either an aggressive redhead with a gloriously pneumatic body or a slender Vietnamese girl with a shy demeanour that masked a profoundly lascivious mind.
What a drag it was to be limited by reality. Tommy sighed and wished that he could step magically through the pages of his own books, into the fictional shoes of Chip Nguyen, and know the glory of being totally self-confident and utterly in control of life.
The evening was waning, and it was too late to drive

to the newspaper offices to see Sal Delano. Tommy just wanted to get a little work done and go to bed.
The rag doll was strange, but it wasn't half as menacing as he tried to pretend that it was. His fertile imagination had been running away with him again.
He was a master of self-dramatization which, according to his older brother Ton, was the most American thing about him. Americans, Ton had once said, all think the world revolves around them, think each individual person more important than whole society or whole family. But how can each person be most important thing? Can't everyone be the most important thing, all equal but all the most important at same time. Makes no sense. Tommy had protested that he didn't feel more important than anyone else, that Ton was missing the point about American individualism, which was all about the right to pursue dreams, not about dominating others, but Ton had said, Then if you don't think you better than us, come work in bakery with your father and brothers, stay with family, make family dream come true.
Ton had inherited certain sharp debating skills - and a useful stubbornness - from their mother.
Now Tommy turned the doll over in his hand, and the more that he handled it, the less ominous it seemed. Ultimately, no doubt, the story behind it would turn out to be prosaic. It was probably just a prank perpetrated by children in the neighbourhood.
The pin with the black enamel head, which had fastened the note to the doll's hand, was no longer on the end table where Tommy had left it. Evidently, when the doll had toppled over, the pin had been knocked to the floor.
He couldn't see it on the cream-coloured carpet, although the glossy black head should have made it easy to spot. The vacuum cleaner would get it the next time he swept.

From the refrigerator in the kitchen, he retrieved a bottle of beer. Coors. Brewed high in the Colourado Rockies.
With the beer in one hand and the doll in the other, he went upstairs to his office once more. He switched on the desk lamp and propped the doll against it.
He sat in his comfortable chocolate-brown, leather-upholstered office armchair, turned on the computer, and printed out the most recently completed chapter of the new Chip Nguyen adventure. It was twenty pages long.
Sipping the Coors from the bottle, he worked on the manuscript with a red pencil, marking changes.
At first the house was deathly silent. Then the incoming storm clouds finally pulled some ground-level turbulence with them, and the wind began to sough in the eaves. An overgrown branch on one of the melaleucas rubbed against an outside wall a dry-bone scraping sound. From downstairs in the family room came the faint but distinctive creaking of the damper hinge in the fireplace as the wind reached down the flue to play with it.
From time to time, Tommy glanced at the doll. It sat in the fall of amber light from the desk lamp against which it was propped, arms at its sides, mitten-like hands turned palms up as if in supplication.
By the time he finished editing the chapter, he had also drunk the last of the beer. Before entering the red-lined changes in the computer, he went to the guest bathroom off the upstairs hall.
When he returned to his office a few minutes later, Tommy half expected to discover that the doll had toppled onto its side again. But it was sitting upright, as he had left it.
He shook his head and smiled in embarrassment at his insistence on drama.

Then, lowering himself into his chair, he saw four words on the previously blank computer screen: THE
DEADLINE IS DAWN.
'What the hell. . .
As he settled all of the way into the chair, a hot sharp pain stabbed through his right thigh. Startled, he shot to his feet, pushing the wheeled armchair away from himself.
He clutched his thigh, felt the tiny lance that had pierced his blue jeans, and plucked it out of both the denim and his flesh. He was holding the straight pin with the black enamel head as large as a pea.
Astonished, Tommy turned the pin between thumb and forefinger, his eyes on the glinting point.
Over the soughing of the wind in the eaves and over the humming of the laser printer in its stand-by mode, he heard a new sound: a soft pop. . . and then again. Like threads breaking.
He looked at the doll in the fall of light from the desk lamp. It was sitting as before - but the pair of crossed stitches over the spot where a person's heart would be had snapped and now hung loose on its white cotton breast.
Tommy Phan didn't realize that he had dropped the pin until he heard it strike - tink, tink - the hard plastic mat under his office chair.
Paralyzed, he stared at the doll for what seemed like an hour but must have been less than a minute. When he could move again, he found himself reaching for the damn thing, and he checked himself when his hand was still ten or twelve inches from it.
His mouth was so dry that his tongue had stuck to his palate. He worked up some saliva, but his tongue nevertheless peeled loose as reluctantly as a Velcro fastener.
His frantic heart hammered so hard that his vision blurred at the edges with each beat, as blood surged

through him in artery-stretching quantities. He felt as though he was on the verge of a stroke.
In the better and more vivid world that he inhabited, Chip Nguyen would have seized the doll without hesitation and examined it to determine what device it contained. Perhaps a miniature bomb? Perhaps a fiendishly clever clockwork mechanism that would eject a poisoned dart?
Tommy wasn't half the man that Chip Nguyen was, but he wasn't a complete coward, damn it. Although he was reluctant to pick up the doll, he gingerly extended one index finger and experimentally pressed it against the pair of snapped sutures on the white cotton breast.
Inside the dreadful little manlike figure, directly under Tommy's finger, something twitched, throbbed, and throbbed again. Not as though it were a clockwork mechanism, but as though it were something alive.
He snatched his hand back.
At first, what he had felt made him think of a squirming insect: an obscenely fat spider or a frenzied cockroach. Or perhaps a tiny rodent: some god awful pale and hairless pink mouse like nothing that anyone had ever seen before.
Abruptly the dangling black threads unraveled into the needle holes through which they had been sewn, disappearing into the doll's chest as if something had pulled them from inside.
'Jesus!'
Tommy stumbled backward a step and nearly fell into his office chair. He clutched the arm of it and kept his balance.
Pop-pop-pop.
The stitches over the thing's right eye broke as the cloth under them bulged with internal pressure. Then they, too, raveled into the doll like strands of spaghetti sucked into a child's mouth.

Tommy was shaking his head in denial. He had to be dreaming.
Where the broken sutures had disappeared into the face, the fabric split with a discrete tearing sound.
Dreaming.
The rent in the small blank-white face opened to half an inch, like a gaping wound.
Definitely dreaming. Big dinner, two cheeseburgers, French fries, onion rings, enough cholesterol to kill a horse - and then a bottle of beer. Dozed off at my desk. Dreaming.
From behind the split fabric came a flash of colour. Green. A fierce radiant green.
The cotton cloth curled away from the hole, and a small eye appeared in the soft round head. It wasn't the shiny glass eye of a doll, not merely a painted plastic disc, either, but as real as Tommy's own eyes (although infinitely stranger), full of soft eerie light, hateful and watchful, with an elliptical black pupil as in the eye of a snake.
Tommy made the sign of the cross. He had been raised as a Roman Catholic, and although he had only rarely attended Mass over the past five years, he was suddenly devout again.
'Holy Mary, Mother of God, hear my plea. ..'
Tommy was prepared to spend - happy to spend
- the rest of his life between a confessional and a sacristy railing, subsisting solely on the Eucharist and faith, with no entertainment except organ music and church bingo.
...in this my hour of need...
The doll twitched. Its head turned slightly toward Tommy. Its green eye fixed on him.
He felt his gorge rising, tasted a bitter vileness in the back of his throat, swallowed hard, choked it down, and knew beyond doubt that he was not dreaming. He had never before nearly puked in a dream. Dreams weren't this intense.

On the computer screen, the four words began to flash:
THE DEADLINE IS DAWN.
The stitches over the doll's second eye popped and raveled into its head. The fabric bulged and began to split again.
The creature's stubby arms twitched. Its small mitten hands flexed. It pushed away from the desk lamp and rose stiffly to its feet, all of ten inches tall but nonetheless terrifying for its diminutive stature.
Even Chip Nguyen - toughest of all private detectives, master of Tae Kwon Do, fearless fighter for truth and justice - would have done precisely what Tommy Phan did then: run. Neither the author nor his creation was a complete fool.
Recognizing that skepticism in this case could get him killed, Tommy spun away from the impossible thing that was emerging from the rag doll. Pushing aside the wheeled office chair, he crashed against the corner of the desk, stumbled over his own feet, maintained his balance, and staggered out of the room.
He slammed the office door behind him so hard that the house - and his own bones - reverberated with the impact. There was no lock on it. Frantically he considered fetching a suitable chair from the master bedroom and bracing it under the knob, but then he realized that the door opened into the office beyond and, therefore, could not be wedged shut from the hallway.
He started toward the stairs, but on second thought he dashed into his bedroom, switching on the lights as he went.
The bed was neatly made. The white chenille spread was as taut as a drum skin.
He kept a neat house, and he was distressed to think of it all splattered with blood, especially his own.
What was that damn thing? And what did it want?

The rosewood nightstand gleamed darkly from furniture polish and diligent care, and in the top drawer, next to a box of Kleenex, was a pistol that had been equally well maintained.