Fat Aunt

Fat Aunt

He rang the doorbell hard. Eventually a woman pushed the door curtain a crack and looked out. Opening the door, she spoke, “You here already? Where is luggage?” He looked at her short rotund body in sweats, her face is catfish-like; she is shorter and fatter than he remembers of her seven years ago.

“It is at the Greyhound station,” he answered her question almost involuntarily.

“So, if you don’t like Fat Aunt, you  just go back to Aberdeen, eh?” Expecting no answer, she tells him to follow her upstairs. “Be careful of Buddha figurines on steps,” she admonishes, “they worth money.”  He made a mental image of someone escaping a fire and tumbling down the stairs because  of tripping over the figurines. Money can cost you your life, he thought to himself.

Two weeks earlier in Seattle he got a call from his father telling him of his cousin Martin’s funeral. His father told him to come home immediately. He took the Greyhound home. His father told him what had happened.

“Martin got out of corrections, found his girl friend shacking up with a Wah Ching,” his father begins to relate what he had heard from the Old Guy Benny. Apparently, Benny went down to San Francisco and questioned the guy who killed Martin. Martin had in a fit of jealousy climbed through his rival’s window at night armed with a knife.  As he approached the sleeping couple, his ex-girlfriend screamed. The new lover grabbed his gun from under his pillow and shot Martin in the neck. Martin kept coming. The new boyfriend shot him again in the neck. Incredible as it seemed, Martin was still upright and kept coming. Two more rapid shots to the neck finally put him down. Benny told his father,  “It was self-defense. There is nothing we can do.”

His father then said, “You go and keep your Aunt company. She is lonely now her youngest son died.”

So, he came to stay with his Aunt as a matter of family obligation. Fat Aunt put him in Martin’s room.

The minute he stepped into Martin’s room, he had a peculiar sense that it reeked of hyper-masculinity.

In the semi-darkness the first thing he noticed was a black panther figurine on the dresser, a stack of Hustler on the foot of the bed and a Bruce Lee poster  with chucks on the wall. But he was so tired he immediately crashed onto the bed and slept.

In the middle of the night, Fat Aunt roused him from his sleep. “I want you  make  phone call for me to Hong Kong,” Fat Aunt ordered, “It is mid afternoon there now and I am looking for a boy to claim for a godson so  he keep Martin’s memory alive.” Fat Aunt was all business, like the boss of two sweatshops she was. The nephew had spent some time in Hong Kong and knew that it was “funny business.” Nevertheless, he dialed the number Fat Aunt gave him and handed the phone over to her.

“You go back to Aberdeen now and go back school in Seattle. I don’t need you now.  I will have someone  honor  memory of my son. Since the nephew was born in China, he knew something was in the works but he doesn’t ask. He is a mathematics student. And he is also a philosophy student. He quoted Wittgenstein to himself, “Whereof one can speak, thereof must one speak clearly, and whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one remain silent. All I know is that it costs money to make a telephone call to Hong Kong, he thought to himself, and all I did was to dial a number which I knew nothing about.