LITMIR.BIZ

      13

      South Carolina

      August 2010 ♦ 29 years old

      I put my bags down, lay on the scratchy comforter, and tried to steady myself. “Run,” I could hear the mugger say, over and over, like a slow-motion sports reel; I could marker a circle around my knees and write: “Here’s where I stopped playing dead.”

      “The mugger” wasn’t his name, I reminded myself, keeping my breath steady and my eyes on the cheap light fixture in the ceiling. His name was George Huggins.

      I knew because I’d seen his mug shot. In the photo, his eyes were warm; familiar; friendly, even. His goatee was trim, his expression pensive.

      I knew a lot about Huggins now, and what had happened after that night he pinned me to the sidewalk with his gun. His dramatic citizen’s arrest had been all over the news back in July. He was charged with the murder of Jinghong Kang in downtown Oakland, a Virginia man in town for a job interview with Google. Kang’s death had been a big black mark on the Bay Area’s new dot-com boom, the family man shot over a few bucks. Then there was the funny detail of the woman he was with, who was left mysteriously unharmed.

      There was another couple, the paper reported, that the police suspected Huggins had mugged after us and before Kang—a man and woman sitting in a parked car, not far from where I’d been thrown to the cement that night. The man was shot, but lived. Again, the woman was unharmed.

      Parker called me at work when the Chronicle published his picture. I pulled it up on my screen for confirmation, but I’d known as soon as she said It’s him that the Kang case we’d been hearing about and our guy were connected.

      It was spooky to see him again, those blank eyes, watching. “Laborer,” the DOJ database said, under his “occupation.” Initial reports suggested he lived out of his car.

      I turned on the tap, brushed my teeth in the moldy motel bathroom, careful to look at myself only briefly, warding off the weird energy, the warble between the shape in my mind and the one in the mirror.

      “Men,” Mom had said. I’d thought that was all I needed to know.

      You’d have to be pretty destroyed to hold a gun to another person’s face and shoot it, I thought. And you’d have to have abandoned yourself to the core to want to annihilate a child.

      I lay in bed and tried to sleep, but I could hear things in the dark, even over the grinding noise of the air conditioner: sirens, creatures swooping across the sky and dive-bombing the highway. There were animals under the water somewhere, moving steadily toward their prey.

      I wouldn’t sleep tonight, and if I did I would drift in and out of the harrowing dreams that kept my body dazed with exhaustion back home. I’d made a kind of peace with the buzz of it.

      I put my hands behind my head, listened to the air conditioner crank, and let myself think about Roy. The last time I’d seen him, back when I was in college, he’d seemed more husk than man, hobbled and graying in a golf shirt and saggy khaki pants. I hadn’t been afraid of him exactly, but of what he could conjure.

      A few months ago, I’d started a tattoo on my chest that began: Love your. It was supposed to say, Love your ghosts, but I’d stopped the tattooist short. I wasn’t so sure I could commit to that, and now the space above my heart was fill-in-the-blank.

      Men, I thought, uneasily. I understood why my mom made that word a volcano, but I didn’t know how to situate the bearded man in my dreams against it. My limbs got heavy just as the light slatted through the plastic blinds, and I fell asleep thinking about how I needed to know my father in order to understand his undoing. And I needed to face the biggest ghost of all: How could I be sure there wasn’t something terrible and destroyed lurking inside of me?