A Temple of Forgotten Spirits

The Shade of Lo Man Gong-1

The Shade of Lo Man Gong

I was standing on Main Street in the fading darkness of early morning, ready to stick my thumb out, walking backward down the sidewalk. The only lights, though, came from streetlights and locked-up storefronts. The city was still asleep.

I needed direction in my life.

On the graveyard shift, lunchtime should have fallen around four in the morning. I worked until six every day, though, so I could eat breakfast in the Canton Forever, a greasy little Chinese diner that served congee in the morning.

Every day, just as alarm clocks were buzzing and ringing all over town, I walked there from whatever supermarket I had been gracing with my janitorial expertise that night.

I worked for a string of six supermarkets and rotated six nights a week, filling in for the regular janitor on his night off. It was the most creative, challenging field I had ever worked in.

“Cuh ming, Mistah Hong,” said the proprietor. He was trying to say, “Come in.” As I entered, he held the door and gave me his usual broad, phony smile and jerky nods. Then he reversed the sign to “Open.”

“Cuh ming,” he repeated, still smiling. He was a short, muscular immigrant with permanently uncombed hair, anywhere between twenty-five and forty years old. Maybe. He wore baggy gray flannel pants and a white undershirt he called a singlet.

I slid into my usual booth.

The little diner had a perpetually dingy look to its black and white linoleum tiles, white Formica tables, and torn fake-leather booths. It looked like a set for a cheap biker movie. Still, the food was good and it was hot.

“Goo moing,” said the guy’s wife. It was her version of “good morning.” She was short and chubby, with a pleasant smile. Then she set down a big bowl of hot, steaming congee—a thick rice gruel with vegetables and meat in it, plus a little plate of other stuff I could drop in it. I liked it all, but I didn’t know what most of it was.

“Hi.” I leaned forward to smell the steam and reached for the soy sauce.

She poured tea for me and left the metal pot. After I had ordered the same breakfast six mornings a week for two weeks, she had quit taking my order and now just brought it out to me. I had been coming for two years.

Other people began drifting in, most of them regulars. Traffic picked up outside. A rowdy bunch of guys, dirty and sweaty and red-eyed, crowded into one booth wearing ratty t-shirts cut off over the waist and baggy, stained pants and work boots. They had the nervous energy and raucous laughter of people who had stayed up all night without planning to.

I ate with a porcelain Chinese spoon, watching the kitchen door as I did every day. Every so often, the couple’s daughter, who appeared to be about four, would peek out and look at me. If I smiled at her, she ran away in terror. However, if I concentrated on my congee, she would watch me until her mother yelled at her.

I sat there blowing on the congee and pondering the directionless state of my existence. That was another morning ritual. I had once expected more than brooms and mops out of life, but was now unburdened of that fallacy.

Working alone every night, six nights out of seven, gave me a strange isolated routine. I had no friends in town, only acquaintances, and had somehow lost the drive for close companionship. Still, I did nothing to fight the situation; I had no more rebelliousness than the dried brown fluffy stuff and the green shiny pickled stuff I was drowning in the congee.

The kitchen door creaked open a few inches. I looked away, into my bowl, and watched in my peripheral vision as one black pigtail in a red ribbon appeared. A second later, I saw two ribbons swaying. A second later, two small, dark eyes peered at me intently out of a chubby face.

Smiley came out to bring tea to the guys who had been up all night. He took a long time getting their orders, since they kept giggling and yelling at each other. Finally, though, he gave them one more idiotic smile and returned to the kitchen.

I scraped the bottom of the bowl for the end of the congee and sat back, gazing blankly at the empty seat across from me. The rut I was in took me in a circle, rotating from supermarket to supermarket without meeting anyone new or finding any breaks in the routine. My mind knew there was more to life, but I didn’t feel there was. The seat had dried mustard on it. So what?

“Hi, sweetie,” called one of the rowdy guys.

I turned to look. The little girl had been peeking out of the kitchen. She started to duck back, but her father came out with several pieces of sausage and eggs and she had to dart forward, to hide among the tables and chairs.

I sipped my tea. It was hard to believe I had been a janitor for two years, but in the beginning it had been hard to believe I was going to do it at all. Well, so much for deep reflective self-analysis.

“Say, ‘hi,’ kid.”

The little girl cowered against a chair, but she didn’t run. One of the guys rose and picked her up. She stared at him, wide-eyed, without making any noise.

“What’s your name?” Still holding her, the guy returned to the booth. Some of his friends started talking to her, but she was too scared to respond. They meant to be nice, actually, but they were strangers to her and loud and rough.

I looked at the kitchen door. Her mother and father were talking inside as they prepared the orders of other patrons. “Uh…wait a minute.” My voice was not loud enough, and wavered uncertainly.

I didn’t do things like this. Solitude and isolation defined my life.

“Hi, honey. Say ‘hi.’” The guy holding her laughed and held her up to a friend, who tried to tickle her. All of them guffawed and petted her on the top of her head, or on her cheeks or shoulders. She started to sniffle.

I glanced back at the kitchen again, but Smiley and his wife were still busy back there. With a deep breath, I got up and walked slowly over to the table, hoping they would put the kid down before I got there.

They didn’t, though.

They looked up at me, expectantly.

“Could I, uh, have her? We’re, uh, old friends.”

“Aw, we aren’t hurtin’ her.” One of them laughed, showing multi-colored teeth, all in shades of brown and green.

“Yeah, she likes me,” said the one holding her. He lifted her up and nuzzled her with a day’s growth of beard.

She sniffled harder. They weren’t going to hurt her, but they weren’t too sensitive, either. On the other hand, I had no clear idea of what I was doing.

“I’ll take her,” I said firmly.

“Oh, yeah?” The one in front of me laughed, stood up, and gave me a casual shove on the chest. I batted his hand away, folded my stomach over his fist, and then rammed the side of my head onto a metal teapot lifted, no doubt ceremoniously, by one of the others.

This was not the direction I was looking for.

I grabbed all six of them by their shirt fronts and yanked them down on top of me on the floor, which bounced twice against the back of my head. I heard the kid screaming and a lot of people shouting, as I drifted off to sleep.

#

The screams woke me up. I bolted upright in the darkness, still screaming, panicked by the noise. The screams echoed in my skull and scorched my throat. I threw myself shoulder-first off the narrow bunk and fell screaming through the shaft of moonlight angling from a window crisscrossed by heavy wire.

The impact shut me up. I gathered my wits and myself off the floor and returned to my bunk just before the men in blue came running in. They flashed lights around the dorm, muttered to themselves, and walked away reluctantly. When dawn arrived, I woke up like everyone else.

Dormitory Two was just a big room in the one-story building, as opposed to Dormitory One, which was another room in the same building. From our regimented walks down the hall at prescribed times, the only difference I could see was in the signs. Dormitory One had a sign saying “1.” Dormitory Two had a sign saying, “No Smoking in Hallway.”

The room had five rows of beds, fifteen deep, made of molded plastic with little walls separating the beds and thin little mattresses.

A big TV, turned off, sat bolted to a high shelf at the front of the room. A trusty, wearing white, swept patiently around the room, rarely looking up. After a while, the men in blue trooped down the hall toward us, visible through the solid glass on the upper half of the interior wall. The outside walls had no windows. They unlocked the door and led us out to breakfast at the mess hall.

I tried to lose myself in the middle of the crowd, straightening my new two-piece suit of institutional green as I went. It fit like a pillowcase on a rabbit. We went up the hall past the guard station, the showers, and Dormitory One to the door of the building. Outside, I squinted in the sunny April afternoon. I had seen very few sunny afternoons since taking over the graveyard shift.

Breakfast in the mess hall was much like my own cooking, gray and tasteless. Just as I turned my used tray in at the window, one of the men in blue came up and motioned for me to go with him.

“Hong,” was all he said.

I followed him, outside and up a little sidewalk to the main building. The man in blue walked with his hands in his pockets and just glanced over his shoulder occasionally to make sure I was still behind him.

And he considered himself a lawman.

All around us, guys in green were working on the grounds. One was driving a small tractor with a wide mower hitched to the back. Two guys with rakes ran around chasing the clippings. I could hear the banging of hammers and the rhythmic buzzing of a hand saw, but I didn’t see them anywhere. This was a minimum security place. The inmates kept the County Farm functioning; in a sense, we were all trusties.

I followed the man in blue into the back of the main building, giving one curious glance toward the women’s building before I went in. None of them was in sight. That was no surprise.

The main building was mostly offices, but it also housed the medical facilities. They were completely sealed off from the rest of the building, accessible only through a heavy metal door. Inside, everything was different.

The man in blue turned me over to a nurse and then left.

“Mr. Hong?” She smiled pleasantly. “I’m Marian. I received your card, volunteering your services.”

“Hi,” I said cautiously. She was about forty and extremely pretty. Her most notable feature was lavender eye shadow. She was tall and big-boned, with a solid, efficient look. I had been looking exclusively at men in blue and men in green or white for some time.

“Come into the office.” She turned, and I followed her into a small room, studying her snug nurse’s uniform.

The room had been set up as a neat and clean little office, though it was extremely cramped. It smelled like a bottle of cologne had been broken there recently. A guy with a pointy face and baggy clothes was writing at a desk. He looked like a rat in a zoot suit.

“Andy,” said Marian. “This is Mr. Hong. Jack, this is Mr. Sand.”

“All right,” said the guy, looking up. “You’ll be with us fourteen days, correct?”

“Yes.” I’d been given thirty, with credit for the fifteen I had done at the County Jail before anyone had given me any.

“Well, we only have one study to put you on right now. A malaria study began yesterday. Can you read?”

“Yeah. I also go to the bathroom alone and cut my own toenails.” That, or something like it, was from a movie I had seen once.

Marian laughed, but Sand ignored me.

“Here,” he said. “This is the contract.”

He handed me a single sheet of paper. If I signed it, they would inject me with malaria and then keep me in the infirmary until they cured it. I would get one hundred fifty dollars from them, in addition to malaria, the money payable when I was released less any purchases I made at the commissary. They had three strains of malaria, of varying strengths, and several cures. Also, if I developed malaria any time in the rest of my life, I could enter a hospital anywhere in this country to be cured at the expense of this natty rodent.