basis with Kim, the proprietor of The 38th Parallel, but was barely on nodding terms with the people in Summer Love, Kim's tie-dyed competitors next door, which says a lot about my dietary preferences.
“Vin. Good to see you.” Kim looked up from his cash register as I walked in lopsided, struggling with my suitcase. “Where you been?”
“Disneyland.”
“Hah, Disneyland, always Disneyland. You wan' the usual?”
“You got jellyfish on the menu?”
He shook his head after a moment of consideration. “No, no, sorry…”
And to think I could have learned to hate it months ago. “Never mind,” I said. “I'll stick with the usual.”
“Yes, sure, sure. Good choice, good choice. One large serve of bulgogi coming up. You wan' rice?”
I nodded. The exchange with Kim was all very cheery. And, in fact, I was cheered to be home, even though there was nothing and nobody waiting upstairs for me, not even a potted plant.
Kim's toothy good humor changed to a scowl as he barked the order to his wife like he was a vicious dog going at an intruder. His old lady seemed impervious to it and simply trudged off into the back room to rustle up my order. Mr. Kim attended to several other take-out customers over the phone while I flicked through a couple of old People magazines on the counter. The covers featured the usual parade of Hollywood fuckups, people who had every reason to believe they'd won the lottery of life, but were instead hooked on a brand of narcissism that ensured they were unable to love anyone as much as their own manufactured self-image. Divorces, tantrums, dishonest trysts, clinics, bizarre surgery, drunken traffic accidents, affairs. If it wasn't pathetic, it'd be hilarious.
I sifted through the pile. On the bottom lay a three-day-old copy of the Post. According to the front page, since I'd been away, Pakistan had had a change of government. A couple of soldiers in the previous president's bodyguard had decided they didn't like his policy of being friendly toward the U.S. and so they'd peeled open his vehicle like an orange with a dozen or so pounds of Composition B while he was still inside it. Fundamentalist gangs were roaming through Karachi and Islamabad beating up anyone who looked like they were living in the twenty-first century. India was jumpy. America was nervous. After years of relative quiet, shots had already been exchanged over the long-disputed territory of Kashmir. Everyone's nightmare was no longer just a bad dream: we now had a bunch of religious dimwits sitting on top of an unknown number of fission-boosted atomic warheads and the missiles capable of delivering them. Another pressure cooker—just what the world needed.
“Here you go, Mr. Vincent, sir. You enjoy.”
“Thanks.” I dropped the newspaper back on the counter and exchanged the plastic bag he was holding toward me for the handful of shrapnel jangling in my pocket. “Keep it,” I said, knowing the tip was around five bucks. As Mr. Kim was also the building's unofficial security guard, I figured he'd earned it.
I avoided the elevator, my usual practice, and took the fire stairs to the second floor. The stairwell was poorly lit, with a little halfhearted graffiti here and there as if the artists could barely be bothered. I knew how they felt. The place was around forty years old and going through a kind of architectural midlife crisis. The ceilings were a little low, the rooms just a bit too tight for comfort, like wearing a sweater that shouldn't have been thrown in the dryer. The place was in need of a new coat of paint, or maybe a wrecking ball, I couldn't decide which. But the rent was cheap, and Mr. Kim's bulgogi—beef in soy sauce—was a real winner.
I arrived at my apartment, put down my suitcase, and fed the key into the lock. Problem. The door was already unlocked. It was only then I noticed a faint strip of light outlining the door's bottom edge. Did I leave the place that way, unlocked with the lights on, before heading off to Japan? No, I did not. There wasn't much inside worth stealing, but that didn't mean I wanted some stranger looting it. What I did have was a small safe bolted to the floor, where I kept various articles that were valuable to me—passport, birth certificate, favorite lucky rabbit's foot, my M9 Beretta service pistol as well as a worn U.S. Army-issue Vietnam War-era Colt .45 an uncle of mine confiscated from a dead