Lurkers Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Sandi Tan

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Soho Press, Inc.

  227 W 17th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tan, Sandi, author.

  Title: Lurkers / Sandi Tan.

  ISBN 978-1-64129-255-9

  eISBN 978-1-64129-256-6

  I. Title

  PS3620.A6836 L87 2021 813’.6—dc23 2020028033

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  So violent and motley was life, that it bore the mixed smell of blood and roses. The men of that time always oscillate between the fear of hell and the most naïve joy, between cruelty and tenderness, between harsh asceticism and insane attachment to the delights of the world, between hatred and goodness, always running to the extremes.

  Johan Huizinga

  The Waning of the Middle Ages

  I.

  GIRL IN THE WINDOW

  —

  May 2006

  to

  July 2006

  – 1 –

  HOT DAMN

  The only time Rosemary remembered seeing her father happy was when he was playing Vice City. Instead of jacking cars, shooting hookers and tussling with cops, he strolled along Ocean Beach, its simulated Miami beachfront, minding his own business. From the boardwalk, he would gaze out at the undulating orange waves. For hours.

  If he got in the way of a stray bullet or became the unlucky victim of a mugging, he picked himself up and started over. When he was released from the hospital, he’d walk, and walk, and walk, until he got back to the water. At no time would he steal a car or hijack a bike to speed up his journey—that, he knew, was the surest way to attract attention.

  Sometimes, for a change of pace, he headed to the bridge leading to Starfish Island. This was the most isolated spot that he knew of in Vice City. And he would stand on its pedestrian ramp, staring out at the bay where the water was blue, not orange, and the lapping of waves could be heard.

  If anyone walked in on his game, he’d turn around and say, “Boring, right?” He’d say this grimly, like a scientist pushing technology to its limit in order to collect important data. Not that this was any different from the way he pursued everything else; the man was terminally embarrassed to show pleasure.

  “Maybe all he wanted was to be someplace else,” Rosemary said to her younger sister, a week after his funeral. “Maybe he should have just taken a vacation.”

  “Don’t be obtuse,” said Mira, looking up from her homework. “He hated traveling. He hated, like, airport security asking him perfectly normal questions. He even hated being on the freeway, away from the two gas stations he ever used. Can you just imagine him, like, on a Greyhound bus, with all those winos and child molesters?”

  “Remember how he played Vice City, though?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Maybe he just wanted to be someone else. You know?”

  “Blond dude in a Hawaiian shirt?”

  “Maybe he did.”

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe . . .”

  The girls felt a certain nostalgia for how simple life had been just a month before, when their father was alive. There was a time for everything then. They were home from school at 3:40, ramen boiled at 3:45, homework was pulled out at 4:00 and at 4:02, the Mystery Boom Box started blasting its infernal melodies.

  Like clockwork each day, Christina Aguilera’s voice bounced off their house, their garage, the brick floor of their patio, as well as the walls, garages, and patios of the five other houses with yards that backed onto theirs.

  The sisters could never figure out where the boom box was; echoes made pinpointing impossible. But it had to be one of the houses visible to them from their den, or that their den was visible to. The music always began just as the girls laid out their books, as if some diabolical imp with birding binoculars had been watching and waiting by his stereo.

  “I freakin’ hate that album!” Mira got up and slammed the windows shut. “Someone should go out and just shoot whoever’s doing this to us!”

  “I vote for Dad,” said Rosemary. They both giggled.

  Their father, Mr. Park, was sixty years old and a man of the old school. He hailed from the South Korean port city of Pusan, where even his degree in electrical engineering could not guarantee him work. Apparently, there had been a glut of engineering grads in his province and many of his classmates wound up working in fisheries or as stevedores. After fifteen years as a security officer at the port, he emigrated to America and found work at a second cousin’s tofu restaurant in LA’s Koreatown, becoming its oldest busboy at forty-two. It was in that lively, compact enclave that he met and married the girls’ mother, Joon, a woman then half his age and the only daughter of an embittered pastor. When Joon’s father died a year later, dutiful Mr. Park, whose conversion to Christianity was as new as his marriage, left the restaurant and took over his father-in-law’s ministry.

  He believed in hard work, family and, incrementally, the values of the Korean evangelical church. After the ’92 riots destroyed much of Koreatown, he and his young wife took their two-year-old, Rosemary, and retreated to Santa Claus Lane in Alta Vista, a family-centered community crouching in the benevolent shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains, twelve miles north of LA.

  Santa Claus Lane was idyllic compared to Koreatown. It was about a third of a mile long, lined on both sides with mature deodar pines and protected at both ends by stop signs. A sign that said dip stood at its middle, right outside the Parks’ house. Had Mr. Park’s English been more proficient he might have taken it as a slight—he was always touchy—but linguistic prowess and malice being absent, everybody lived peaceably.

  He remained nervous around black people but decided that settling down in what their realtor called a “mixed neighborhood” would be the best way to assimilate Rosemary—and her soon-to-be-born sister Miracle—into the American way of life. Besides, before buying their careworn bungalow, he’d counted the number of churches within its two-mile radius and come up with thirty-four. Black people of faith didn’t scare him, not even the singing kind.

  In the years immediately following the riots, Mr. Park withstood stares and taunts from all kinds of people while doing simple chores around town. Once, a black woman threw a carton of sour milk at him while he was filling up at the gas station. But he rarely feared real trouble. His faith in God grew stronger by the day, and with his savings he started his own ministry, All-Friends Worship, the local chapter of a vast Korean evangelical network whose flagship was a literal cruise ship docked in Gyeonggi Bay.

  All-Friends Worship was a blue clapboard Victorian with an improvised, concrete slab extension. It looked as if a semi had backed into a strip mall, dropped off some old granny’s house, then vamoosed. Not that aesthetics mattered to his flock. There were small pockets of Koreans, refugees from the riots, scattered around the San Gabriel foothills, and for many of them, Mr. Park’s church was the one place they could meet others of their own kind and speak uninhibitedly in their own language. For the women of this type, All-Friends became a home away from home. They came to church to compare their children’s test scores and exchange crockpot recipes; they discussed gaming the discount racks at Macy’s and how to find
the one sales rep who would speak Korean if her supervisor wasn’t around. One enterprising woman even started a Texan line-dancing club, whose sessions boldly collided with Bible Study Thursday.

  Because of these women, Sundays at All-Friends had the chatter level of a fish market back in Mr. Park’s home city of Pusan. When it didn’t bring him nostalgia, it brought him the shivers. Because of these women, Mr. Park decided against letting his daughters learn Korean. Korean inspired a henhouse insularity in women that he didn’t want his daughters to have. Whereas with men, Korean was a stabilizing force—it was blood, gave them identity. It was not something they clung to out of desperation because they feared all else.

  Not learning Korean was fine by the girls. Rosemary detested the Korean language on aural grounds. When Korean rolled off the tongues of Westerners who came to the language late in life, it took on a strange baroque musicality, like drunken Italian. But when native Koreans like her parents spoke it, it sounded guttural, coarse, accusatory. It skewed combative whether one was asking someone on a date or threatening them with a cleaver.

  Sometimes Rosemary didn’t know what bugged her more—having to hear Korean spoken all Sunday, or the fact that her father’s church had a name with bad syntax. All-Friends Worship. First, there was the weird hyphen; then the ambiguous logic: Was it an exhortation for all friends to worship or a worship belonging to all friends, in which case an apostrophe was missing?

  At school, the kids who took an Asian language were mainly adopted Chinese girls. They studied Mandarin only to please the parents who’d rescued them from the fleapit orphanages of Fujian—and they always looked miserable about it. If she’d had a say in her own ethnicity, Rosemary would have opted to be a Latina, not of the stumpy Central American variety but the whippet, Gap assistant kind; she wanted to be the type who could bleach her black hair chestnut and still have it look natural. Like a less trashy Christina Aguilera, with quadruple-pierced ears and a Grumpy Bear hoodie from Hot Topic. In other words, just Latina enough. And oh yes, a nose stud.

  Rosemary didn’t mind the Mystery Boom Box as much as Mira did. Sure it was loud, and whoever was playing it had to be either deaf or out of their mind. But at least there was a reliable schedule to the madness. It began at 4:02 every day and ended at eight. Two rounds of Aguilera’s Stripped, followed by a couple hours of KROQ. It might have made it harder to concentrate on calculus, but she did enjoy watching the reactions it provoked in her otherwise sedate, otherwise non-communicative parents.

  It became dinner conversation.

  “Kee Hyun, the music. We must stop music,” her mother would say. “For the girls.”

  Her father would grunt and chew on a pickle. “Maybe they stop soon.”

  “Stop soon?” Her mother would take her father’s bowl before he was done eating. “Music has been here three weeks. Girls hard for study, Kee Hyun.”

  “Maybe I go tomorrow.” Her father would grab his bowl back.

  “You always say tomorrow. Yesterday you say tomorrow. Last week you say tomorrow.”

  “Maybe I go tomorrow this time.”

  “You always say maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe!”

  “Hot damn! I go tomorrow.” It would be the only time the girls ever heard their father swear.

  One evening, Mr. Park went looking for the boom box. He had considered wearing his minister’s uniform but decided against it lest it appear he was using the Lord’s authority to settle petty scores. He walked back and forth past ten different houses before he found what he hoped was the correct one. It was hard to tell because of the rush-hour traffic whizzing past on Lake Ave.

  Under the roar of the cars, he practiced over and over his opening words, “Excuse me, Sir, Madam, I am your neighbor,” improvising a series of friendly gestures and a facial expression approximating a smile. During a lull in the traffic, he took a deep breath and entered the property. It was a Craftsman bungalow, just like his, but desperately in need of two new coats of paint. Under his breath, he practiced, “Excuse, Sir, Madam, please, I am your neighbor,” as Christina Aguilera’s singing vibrated through his skull, threatening to mix up his words.

  He walked up the driveway quietly and peered into the backyard. Shivers. Propped up on a couple of apple crates, speakers aimed at the back fence, was the Mystery Boom Box. Booming. The rest of the yard was a patchwork of junk—dented aluminum siding, rusted barrels, rotting fruit from a dying grapefruit tree. Yet on the back of the old Mustang resting on cinder blocks was a gleaming Jesus fish, a reassuring sign that he would find common ground. He jogged to the front of the house.

  Before he got to the porch, a fat woman in a red housecoat pushed open the screen door and bellowed: “What ya want?”

  “Excuse me, Madam, please, I am your neighbor,” he began. He gave her a little wave.

  “Git outta my yard!” The woman’s orange hair was slick from the shower and her thick glasses made her eyes emphatically huge.

  “Please, your music, Madam. I live over there.” He waved vaguely toward a bunch of houses, not wanting her to know where he lived. An overweight teenage girl in shorts joined the woman at the door. She had her mother’s freckles and square jowls.

  “Music too loud for ya?” the girl said, in the same jeering tone her mother used.

  Mr. Park nodded and started to back away. He felt that he had registered his point, and gave them a quick wave goodbye. As he walked briskly off their property, he heard one say something to the other. The mother started cackling—the throatiest, most lurid laughter he’d ever heard coming out of a woman.

  Approaching home, he half expected his daughters to sprint out and give him a hero’s welcome, the kind of lapping affection they’d routinely showered him with when they were younger. Instead, it was his wife who came out the front door—scowling.

  “What’s matter? You don’t find house?”

  “I found house,” he said, his pride wounded. “Of course, I found house!”

  “Then why still music?”

  Mr. Park glared at his wife and walked into the house. There, he saw the girls doing their homework, with the den windows still tightly sealed. His heart sank. He plodded to his bedroom and shut the door.

  Mr. Park said very little that weekend. The girls took it as a sign that his mood was improving when on Sunday afternoon, he agreed to their usual game of post-church badminton, even with the boom box going full blast.

  As a student in Korea, Mr. Park had been a badminton champ who stunned opponents with his ruthless, lightning-fast smashes. But in America, with his daughters, he played American badminton—soft strokes, big loops, lots of laughter, lots of pointless running. He always took on both the girls at once, and deliberately let them win most of the time just so he didn’t have to watch them sulk.

  The girls noticed something different about his game that evening—the old Park Kee Hyun of South Pusan Technical University was reemerging, stroke by stroke. Soon, he was slamming the shuttlecock across the net at such velocity that at one point, it grazed Rosemary’s arm and left a crimson line. And he wasn’t letting the girls win, either. Mira called the game off when she realized they never got past two or three volleys. Their father grabbed a few loud gulps of iced barley tea and retired to the house with his head held high.

  With their Dad out, the girls played a leisurely round—swooping parabolas, giggles punctuated with cries of “Oops!” and “D’oh!” They must have lost track of time because the boom box had stopped and it was dark by the time they were done. They ran back into the house, reeking of perspiration and bug spray.

  Their father was still in the shower, which was very unusual. They could hear the water running. After knocking on the door five times and getting no answer, Rosemary asked their mother to get the master key.

  Mrs. Park banged on the door herself before sliding the key into the lock. Finally, with jittery hands, she pushed the
bathroom door open.

  Mr. Park, head minister at All-Friends Worship and father of two, sat lifeless in a sea of murky red, his knees tucked under his chin. A box cutter with a yellow plastic handle sat neatly in the soap dish, its blade retracted so no one else could hurt themselves. He faced the door with his eyes closed, and under the endless cascade of the shower, he looked like he was still crying.

  People were unexpectedly generous to the family in the week following Mr. Park’s funeral. Even Kate Ireland, the solitary, vaguely Asiatic brunette across the street came over with a bag of decaf beans from Starbucks and a Hallmark look of sorrow. Kate’s mother would have done a lot more, but coming from Kate, the Parks knew this was plenty. In the early days, when Mr. and Mrs. Park were still new to the area, Kate never even waved hello.

  In all their years as neighbors, the Park girls hadn’t had any contact with her, always telling each other that she was the kind of person they would hate to grow up into—mousy, friendless, repressed. Kate’s mother, on the other hand, had been an exuberant, retired white lady right out of the Lifetime channel, bringing by star-shaped cookies around Christmas; sadly, she had moved away. The girls liked Kate’s German shepherd all right, when it was still alive and would wag its tail from behind the window. But why have a dog if all you did was lock it indoors like a cat?

  Mrs. Park insisted she was responsible for Kate’s new neighborliness. A few days after the German shepherd’s death, Kate had gone into some kind of trance while watering her geraniums. She hadn’t noticed as water gushed down the sidewalk. It was Mrs. Park who ran over, turned the hose off, sat the woman down on her own front step and let her sob for ten minutes. It was then that Mrs. Park finally learned the dead dog’s name: Bluto.

  “Death bring living people together,” Mrs. Park said to her girls. “Even though dog dying not as bad as people dying.”

  Somebody sent the grieving family a book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. They couldn’t figure out who it was until they scrutinized the packing slip in the Amazon box and found a greeting from Mira’s cello teacher: “I’m Sorry.”