The Secret Talker Read online

  He smiled too. “Can I trust you?”

  She said, “Of course you can’t.”

  He pulled a face at her, acknowledging her meaning. Just to be sure, she asked him how to spell “disappoint.” He got it right, not a single letter missing. Her suspicions were completely dispelled now, and he was found not guilty.

  * * *

  The secret talker enlightened Hongmei, telling her there was no problem; it was safe to receive another woman’s admiration.

  Hongmei bluffed, I know who you are. When you’re spying on other people, please don’t forget that you’re being spied on too.

  This wasn’t a complete lie. Not long after their first conversation about the secret talker, Nini had asked one of her male admirers to tail Hongmei in hopes of spotting the secret talker. On a couple of occasions, he’d spotted a tall, thin woman hanging around. She hadn’t thought much about this clue, until now.

  The secret talker said naturally she understood that she was definitely being spied on. She added, This has already become a tactic we mutually understand. Next, she continued with her solicitation, saying Hongmei ought to try loving a woman, because only another woman could take emotion as seriously as she did.

  Hongmei said, Stop playing with me.

  Five minutes later, she was back, saying, Weren’t two marriages enough for you? Even with your current husband, don’t you feel cheated? Why not try a woman? Otherwise you’ll never know what you’re missing.

  Hongmei said, I’m going to make you reveal yourself.

  The person was silent for a bit, then said, For the sake of a small clue, you’ve even missed your class—that wasn’t worth it.

  Hongmei thought, So she even knows I skipped class. On the keyboard, though, she teased, No matter what, I like your style. Your hair is great too, and your outfit. Everything is so nice, not at all like a Peeping Tom. Then she remembered something else Nini’s spy had said: the tall woman had limped a little. She went on: Your way of walking is very bold, very distinctive. Why not just stand up straight and emerge from behind these beautiful words?

  A long silence. Hongmei felt as if she and this other person were pugilists sparring in the dark, feeling their way, silently circling each other. Neither could afford a false move. Sure enough, the secret talker replied, asking Hongmei if she was treating everything she’d ever said as a joke. For instance, what about her long-lost daughter? She said that no matter what sort of demon Hongmei imagined she was, the daughter actually did exist. Like an unhealed wound, the daughter pained her from time to time.

  In order to prove this, she sent a series of photographs. A girl growing from an infant to the age of ten, a sickly looking, sensitive child.

  Hongmei was touched. This girl had the eyes of an old soul and looked heartbreakingly familiar. She examined the pictures carefully, one by one, trying to think whose eyes these were. She was almost certain she’d seen them before. As she stared, she realized with a start that another pair of eyes was watching her through the daughter’s. Intuitively, she sensed that this person (whether a man or a woman) did have such a daughter, and that there had indeed been a tragedy with this child at its heart. She replied to say how pretty the girl was, though she had an air of misfortune. She said, I feel like I’ve seen those eyes somewhere before. No, it’s not a feeling—I actually have.

  The person answered that the reason she’d lost contact with her daughter for so many years was because of a single misdeed. During the divorce proceedings, she snatched the child from her school and hid her away for several months. At the time, it had felt like the only way she could keep her daughter, but they were discovered, and she lost custody.

  Once again Hongmei could tell there was real anguish there even if this specific story didn’t end up being real. Instinct told her this wasn’t the extent of the suffering. She asked, Since your daughter went back home after this visit, has she called often?

  The person said that in the end, her daughter hadn’t completely believed her.

  Hongmei asked, What do you want her to believe?

  That I love her, that I’d never hurt her, no matter how many stupid things I’ve done, answered the person. Just as I don’t want to hurt you. If you agree, I’ll leave and never bother you again.

  Since she’d stopped seeing this person as a “he,” Hongmei now felt safer. When she was out walking, she would stop abruptly and look to see if the tall woman had shown up. Yet nothing was ever out of the ordinary. She had returned to her usual routine: going to the library, to school, to the mall, to the supermarket. This was much better; she no longer felt like she was in the path of a pair of beastly eyes. She realized she was staring at the secret talker’s message, wondering which patch of shadow the woman had been hiding in to have seen her so clearly. She stereotypically imagined her to be like many of the other lesbians on campus: short hair, rimless glasses (or no glasses might be better?), defined features (but not a mask), and bottomless black eyes like the little girl’s.

  Feeling calmer, Hongmei told those black eyes what sort of person she was: a follower, too easily swayed by shallow sensual pleasures. More than a decade ago, for the sake of that first caress with Glen on the bus, she’d sacrificed everything, her job, her reputation, her marriage. The evening when four soldiers in full military dress escorted her from her classroom, she’d turned like the heroine of a tragedy and taken one long, last look at the light in Glen’s hostel window.

  That had been at the start of November, the coldest time in Beijing, a couple of weeks before the heating came on. Behind her were the twenty or so evening self-study classmates who’d watched as the soldiers had surrounded her. A military jeep was parked outside. She knew this was the vehicle that would take her away. She was mainly a translator of machine operation manuals but at that moment was accused of leaking Chinese military technology secrets. As absurd as the charge was, she had no choice but to comply. The jeep took her to a patch of wasteland. What would Glen do? Wait for her at the “usual place”? Or would he give up and start wandering around, searching for her? Soon, her classmates would tell Professor Glen where the girl called Qiao Hongmei had gone—a place she’d never come back from; a few rows of simple huts in the wilderness, one of which had been turned into a temporary cell.

  The soldiers brought her into a large room filled with piercing light. Waiting there were three officers, one deputy regiment commander and two company commanders. The interrogation began. She sat in the position of the accused, her icy hands clenched into fists. They asked what she thought of Professor Glen. She said: “Scholarly, upright.” They said, “When he passed on the secret reports you gave him, he only used one word to describe you: ‘unique.’” She said she’d never passed on any so-called secret reports. They told her Professor Glen’s letters home to America had been decoded, and they contained huge amounts of classified information. She said that was impossible. She spoke a great deal, trying to make them grasp a simple fact: from the start of her job to the present moment, she’d not been in contact with a single document containing the word “classified.” Besides, her main task was to translate English instruction guides into Chinese, so what secrets could she possibly pass on? The questioning went on for weeks. She became severely sleep deprived and lost her appetite. But the greatest torment was not having fresh underwear to change into. She knew they intended not just to punish but also to humiliate her.

  They were deadlocked, tossing the same few questions and answers back and forth, until suddenly, at the three-week mark, the interrogation stopped and she was told to write out her every encounter with Glen, every word, every action, every detail, to record all of it with dates.

  Hongmei told the secret talker that she’d handwritten more than three hundred pages of this “regret journal” when she had a sudden revelation about herself. She now knew herself to be a woman for whom monogamy was difficult. Each time she met a new man she would forget everything else and go after him. “New” as in someone who had
a mystique about them and gave her a sense of the unknown, snapping short her destiny with her existing man. She said that as a girl from a small village, she was attracted to distance, to anything or anyone that felt foreign. When Glen had said “I love you” in class with that bizarre pronunciation, she had become obsessed. Those three Chinese words, spoken by him, had seemed to transcend themselves, a breakthrough in linguistic expression.

  She said, Glen, this American man more than twenty years older than me, smashed the world as I knew it and opened up a vast swathe of unknowing. While I was there, every glance, every touch, felt wonderful. When our last line of defense falls, I think I could die there.

  Perhaps the consciousness of those two hundred thirteen young girls now resided in her. A shame they would never know what they were missing out on.

  The secret talker responded, asking how she had gotten back together with Glen.

  After a forced confession, Hongmei was released from prison. It took two years of her working in various humble jobs before she was finally able to squeeze a little extra money out of her salary after paying her rent and meals. One day as she walked past a public phone booth, she stopped. Yes, two years had passed. And Glen was then a Pacific Ocean away from her. Yet the love and longing for him still hurt so much. She found herself on the street, asking to change a ten-yuan bill for coins. She walked back to the phone booth and started inserting coins. She pulled out a business card that Glen had given her, on which he’d written out the spelling of the word “ostracize.”

  She made that transpacific phone call to Glen’s office. This was the only piece of information she had about him. She got his voicemail, asking her to leave a message. She said, “Hi Glen . . .” but couldn’t go on. How many times could he have stopped loving her, found someone else, in those two years? She’d lost her rank, her urban residency permit, her husband, and her home, ending up as a temporary worker in a small private business. She’d planned to say, “Glen, I love you”—two years ago, the two of them hadn’t bothered and so had missed out on saying the words that would have clarified their status. But she couldn’t make herself do it—those words weren’t as full of meaning as “Hi.”

  7

  Three days after that, Glen showed up at her office in a tracksuit and a baseball cap. If he hadn’t been carrying a travel bag with the United Airlines logo, she would have thought he’d come straight from a long jog.

  The secret talker said, Very good—a fairy tale ending.

  Hongmei responded, If this were the ending, it really would be a very sweet fairy tale.

  She shut down the computer and thought moodily, What is wrong with me? Treating this person like a confessor, or a shrink? Isn’t this in a way also masturbatory?

  * * *

  Nini called to her from the classroom door, “Hongmei, problem!” Her arms were waving wildly over her head, revealing freshly shaved armpits. “The secret talker wrote again last night!”

  Hongmei told her to speak Chinese, and while she was at it to cut down on the histrionics.

  Nini told her the secret talker was actually a twenty-year-old woman! The night before, she’d messaged Nini late into the night, saying she’d caused someone’s death. Her long fingers dug into Hongmei’s forearm. “I asked her whose death. She only explained herself in the small hours of morning.”

  Here’s what happened. At the age of six, this self-proclaimed woman of twenty had been undergoing hypnosis therapy for her anxiety when she mentioned incest during a session. Over the next two years, the therapist used the clues she provided while in a trance to deduce and finally solve the case, working out that between the ages of five and six the girl had been repeatedly raped by her father. She’d completely forgotten this traumatic episode, but hypnosis had brought the memories back. This coupled with her parents’ messy divorce was enough evidence to bring the father to court, where he was almost bankrupted by the legal fees, and his reputation was destroyed. The therapist went on to write a bestselling book about the affair, turning their trauma, fake or real, into gold. With his final words, written before his suicide, the father wanted the girl to understand that he would die bearing a grudge—he and she were both victims of persecution. As an adult, the girl gradually came to understand that her father might truly have been innocent, that it was the therapist who’d induced her, while she was little, to say what she did—maybe for fame or chasing a Freudian theory—so her words could then be further twisted into testimony against her father. The outcome had been terrible. Now all grown up, she believed it was impossible to completely forget such a harrowing event. No matter what Freud might have hypothesized about humanity’s ability to repress memory, the fact that she didn’t remember these rapes could only mean they never happened in the first place.

  Hongmei read through Nini’s email printouts, her eyes lingering on the final paragraph: “This will be my last message to you. I know I’ve disppointed you, because you weren’t looking for a girlfriend like me.” The same misspelling.

  She asked Nini if she really believed the secret talker was a twenty-year-old girl.

  Nini said she was utterly confused and had no idea what she did or didn’t believe.

  They were at the campus sports field. Half the townspeople had congregated here, watching some radical students get ready to burn the flag. The protests in San Francisco, a two-hour drive away, had been going on for two months now, though this was the first major activity at the university. One student was reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech over a loudspeaker while others climbed the pole and brought down the flag. As with most other places in America, sixty-five percent of the people in this town were fat. A visual reminder of their wealth, their excess—something Hongmei hadn’t understood until she moved here. The overweight populace was raising a cheer when the police arrived. At the same time, the flames started.

  Police cars surrounded the crowd. An obese police officer waved at people he recognized. The students led a chorus of “Give Peace a Chance.”

  Hongmei wondered where the secret talker was at this moment.

  Back at the condo, she found no one on the lawn—everyone was watching the excitement. It was noon and so quiet she could hear her skirt rustling against her legs. Glancing at her watch, she noticed one of the elevators had been on the sixteenth floor for five minutes now. The other one had an OUT OF ORDER sign. All the residents must be watching the flag-burning from the roof. Not much happened in this town.

  She decided to climb the stairs. On the seventh floor, she realized there was another set of footsteps, also heading up. She started stomping, ascending a few more levels, and the other person did so too, as if in response, the echoes taking a while to fade. She felt something prickle on her back—beads of sweat like countless little bugs wriggling from their eggs, poking their heads out, then crawling all over her. She tried to calm down. What was there to be afraid of, in broad daylight? Yet she’d never seen such a deserted day. She decided to tiptoe down and catch her chaser, but the other person retreated even faster. She thought, How come now I’m the pursuer? Rapidly, she drew closer to the other person. Now she was chasing full throttle, but the other pair of feet were nimble too, vaulting away in a series of dancing leaps. At the ground floor, there was nowhere to go. The foyer was more than a thousand square feet and empty, containing nothing but three armchairs for visitors.

  Hongmei hadn’t expected him (or her) to scurry down to the underground parking garage. She wasn’t going to follow. What if it was a trap? Countless horror movies had shown her that parking garages were the perfect places to get murdered.

  She trudged back up, heading to her apartment in defeat, legs trembling violently. At the fourth floor, she heard the metal garage door clang. He (or she) was back again. Another pair of exhausted legs, dragging him (or her) upward. She crept up, and he (or she) slowly followed.

  Hongmei sat down on the steps at the ninth floor. Even the most fancy apartment buildings had dark sta
irwells with no windows, illuminated only by energy-saving lights, the permanent grayish glow spilling onto bare concrete steps. After a minute, she was about to stand when she caught a whiff of weed. A respectable resident of this building forced into this nasty place to satisfy a craving. Those footsteps hadn’t been following her at all; it was just some addict trying to avoid trouble.

  * * *

  Glen wasn’t home. He’d left a note saying he was off to watch the flag-burning. He’d scrawled these words—so the chaos was affecting him too. These last few years, she and Glen had been communicating more and more through notes. It saved time, and they were less likely to quarrel.

  Turning on the computer, a glass of wine in hand, she prepared to have a proper chat with the secret talker.

  She told her the story of the girl who’d destroyed her father. Perhaps the secret talker was familiar with this tale? But by the end of the tale, Hongmei’s tears were flowing down her cheeks. After leaving his suicide note, the father had driven into the New Mexico desert and overdosed on sleeping pills. He hadn’t wanted his daughter to see his corpse.

  The next day, the secret talker still hadn’t replied. Glen was bustling in and out, posting bail for students from his department who’d been arrested. Several others wanted to enlist, and he was talking to the university to guarantee their readmission. Hongmei found this Glen, with three days’ worth of stubble on his face, much more alluring, as if she were having a brand-new crush on him.

  Day three—still no response from the secret talker.

  Hongmei sat before the computer, her mood gray.

  Maybe telling her over and over that she liked men had led to this abandonment. Or maybe she’d thought that Hongmei and Nini were in cahoots to play a trick on her. Then it was seven days without a message. Hongmei stared at the blank screen and felt herself drawn into the twists and turns of this mazelike secret talker. Her desk was a jumble—two mugs, the coffee in them solidified; a sandwich on the computer, one bite taken out of it, the protruding ham dried out to the deep red of an old wound. Behind her, the study was a wasteland too, six or seven books lying open beneath a layer of dust. Her mirror was covered in little notes, reminding her to take back her library books, to return Professor So-and-So’s call, to water the plants. The one hanging from the window hadn’t died of thirst yet but seemed to thrive in its unkempt state, even as a spider spun a web from it up to the ceiling.