The Blue Dragon by Ronald Tierney Read Free Book Online Page A

matter. And it was coming up to the first of the month.
    A big yellow taxi found its way through the buildings like a big ship in a narrow harbor. The driver complained but helped her load her belongings. Should I follow? I couldn’t, actually. Would she vanish?
    Didn’t matter. I couldn’t do anything about it.
    I moved down the street and sat on a step, waiting—for what, I wasn’t sure. The question was, would I recognize it when it came? At one point, after an hour or so of waiting, I saw Mrs. Zheng and the little boy emerge. I couldn’t imagine what I would learn from following them. But sometimes it’s the seemingly ordinary act that reveals something important. She walked him to the park. And he wandered about from ladder to swing and from swing to slide.
    Mrs. Zheng talked with another elderly Chinese lady. There were no smiles and no pauses in the conversation. There was nodding and frequent glances at the children. Afraid I’d be suspected of being a loitering pedophile, I went back to the Blue Dragon.
    I wondered if Ted’s things were still in the apartment. I would have loved to take a look through his belongings. However, I didn’t want Ray to know I was outside the building, watching, staking it out, so I decided I’d wait until evening to check out Ted’s apartment, now that his girlfriend was gone. I would come back dressed in my usual natty manner.
    I must have missed those who went off to work early—Mr. Zheng, the Wens. At nearly eleven, as the sun climbed down the brick walls of the buildings, Mr. Emmerich came out. He had a canvas bag in his hand and headed toward Stockton Street and its produce markets. I followed him.
    He went to one of the larger markets. I watched as he haggled in Chinese with the woman behind the counter over the price of the oranges and later a twisted ginger-root. He was not a pleasant man. Voices were raised. A few people turned to look, but most didn’t, and those who did turned away quickly. I assumed they knew him.
    He made two more stops. He went inside a shop that appeared to specialize in herbs and teas. He picked up a Chinese newspaper. Then he headed back to the apartment.
    If someone had come or gone in the interim, I had missed it. I waited and waited. At noon the narrow and comparatively quiet street was fully lit. Traffic had increased, and the plastic clicking of mahjong had begun.
    A homeless man sat down beside me.
    “You want to know how the universe began?” he asked.
    “How?” I asked.
    “A speck of sand.” He was very brown, but beneath the dirt and tan, he was Caucasian. He had a dusty look—his face, his beard, his jacket, his pants and shoes. He looked like a large speck of sand himself.
    “That’s quite possible,” I said.
    Norman Chinn passed by. He had his briefcase and was heading toward the building. He looked bedraggled.
    My new philosophical friend continued. “It was a perfect place, perfectly balanced in such a way that it didn’t exist. And there came a speck of sand. And it disrupted the harmony of nothing and this”—he waved his hands broadly to encompass all of the world they could—“is the result.”
    I nodded.
    “Do you believe that?” he asked.
    “I believe that’s possible,” I said. “It’s called the vacuum theory.”
    “What?”
    “The world exists in a pristine state. Everything is symmetrical. And the introduction of a single particle—your grain of sand, for example—causes reality to come tumbling out.”
    “True?” he exclaimed in disbelief.
    “I don’t know. It’s a theory.”
    “I’ll be damned,” he said. He stood up, shook his head and walked away, saying, “Crazy, crazy, crazy.”
    Mrs. Zheng came back with the little boy and a large bag of what I presumed to be food. She stopped in front of the door to get her keys. She dropped them. When she stooped down, she kissed the boy on the cheek, dabbed her thumb on her tongue and wiped away something above the boy’s eye. She smiled.