Misfortune’s Fingertips

The buzzer indicated in seven small electric bursts that a bachelor party had arrived or some crew off the second shift wandering in to spend their tips. Like cogs in a well-oiled machine, seven girls rose from their various activities in one lithe choreographed movement. Each slipped her numbered bracelet off, tossing them into the blue glass bowl to be tallied again for another hour in the service of the nameless washy wash in North Chinatown.

Xu walked down the hall to room 6 and slid the accordion door open. Her quick glance forward before bowing to her patron offered a quick summary as to what she would be working with. Drunk and smiling, he had come for stress relief.

“Well, Alice,” he said, reading the name embroidered on her silken robe. “Aren’t you a vision.” He staggered as he took off his coat, then gave her a long look up and down. “You are the angel here to deliver me, aren’t you?” He chuckled at his own joke.

She bowed and played to the script since her working English vocabulary waxed useless. “You take clothes off. Me take care of you.”

“I bet you will,” he fell heavily onto the folding chair as he pulled off his shoes, socks and pants in one sloppy motion. His shoes blocked the movement, so vaulting forward he cursed while pulling the laces loose.

“You get on table now. Me fix you good,” she said with a slight and well rehearsed smile. “Face down.” She patted the table where he half dove into position. Already excited, he adjusted himself into a relaxed pose.

As with every new sacrifice made in her endless world of service, Xu thought of the last time she saw her parents and brother before the Triads broke them up, delivering them to their indentured existences. She knew there were worse jobs just from the first days she was being processed – greasy broken cooks in restaurants, old women whittled down to skin and bones pressing suits and sewing seams, young men indoctrinated into the harsher gangs as servants and worse. The suffering she witnessed at the hands of her liberators made her regret her father’s decision to leave China for a better life. Here she was fed and groomed, if for no other reasons than to keep up appearances.

Lathering her hands with scented oils, Xu clapped her hands and rubbed them together to loosen her fingers and build up some heat. Her hands met the man’s back and her fingertips gently caressed his spine, his shiver trailing the gesture. Though he was not wholly unattractive to her, he wasn’t the sort of man she’d want to touch. Her hands were kneading his neck when the images started flashing.

She floated above what was inside the poor slob before her on the table. The deep muscle massage to his lower neck revealed his being. A dark lonely sea. His once pride swelled among all his other characteristics like a large wave on which the rest of his personality was floating. Alexander Williamson, it read on the various degrees. They were on old parchment, museum quality. Here a girl in a wedding dress floated alone in a sad sinking wooden boat tethered in chain to a boat in the center. Married but divorced. Floating toward her, Xu noticed the girl’s eyes were black, a dead one she was.

With her Alexander had found Happy once. She worked her hands in a circular motion down the length of his back toward his buttocks where she tapped into his profession. His work, bright and tall, gleamed success, once. A mirror sat on the buoy, a window that looked into the features of countless patients, some alive, some dead, all grateful. The then man, he was good. This sea was littered with small, once happy buoys, all now gone. Happy all gone. These dead floats surrounded the story of his now.

Her hands grabbed and released his buttocks and he sighed slightly as the excitement built. His arousal triggered the now man and she saw quick streaks revealing failure. An addiction bled money through the boats holding now, and he had lost control, he had lost her, he lost a grip on the frame of his patients. One boat held shattered glass, reflecting hundreds of identical bloodshot eyes. Then before he could fix them, the bride had died. His legs were tense, as if he had been running. The man in the boat was running away in place, rocking and swaying unaware of the waters below.

“Flip,” she said, patting his bottom.

“Yes, Ma’am.” He enthusiastically slid around, standing at attention.

She ignored the reason he was there to address his neck and chest. Inside, she glided to the man who was now, broken and running in a boat. His jaw was tense and his words, again revealing themselves in streaks of truth, were harsh and meant to hurt the other girl. A new one, this one, a hopeful one who dreamt of rings and houses and all the things the dead one had. New girl had no knowledge of the dead one, nor any of the chains or lines now man tied to his back. The new girl’s boat was tied to his leaking mess, a separate to his barely buoyant self. Gliding in really close, Xu stepped into the running man’s boat, her hands had worked down to his lower stomach, teasing his anticipation. He groaned on the table.

She spoke to the man in the boat, the now man. “Do you wish to be free of these?” The running man’s stare at a lost and distant shore broke and his gaze found her. He stopped running nowhere. She repeated the question. “Do you wish to be as you were?” Her hand pointed to the chains and ropes anchored in his back.

“I can’t.” His eyes gestured to the other boats and buoys around him. “I’ve done too much, I’ve lost all that I had.” He dropped to his knees into the boat.

“You can,” she said as her hands glided lower. “You are a good man. You are capable of making a brighter now for someone.” The now man looked to the boat with the new girl and he glanced back to the dead bride. “Here is where you decide. It’s sink or swim,” Xu gestured to the cloudy metaphysical sea around them. “Whatever you decide, she has vowed to come with you.” Now man couldn’t comprehend why the new girl would do that. “Love does that. Ask her.” She pointed to the dead bride. Then her eyes met his. “Choose.”

Xu’s hands worked feverishly in the cheap paneled room as the now man watched the sea recede to sand, and the boats, grounded suddenly, melted away. The now man, his feet rooted in the sand, faced Xu and the dark sea. She stepped forwarded and shoved him suddenly to the ground and said, “When you see her again, you shall see what is behind you now. Look at the possibility. Dream your future. Past is paid for.” Xu vanished while now man would wait to see his new girl again, frozen in the moment upon the sand.

“That was heaven,” the man sighed. Fumbling off the table, he slipped money from his discarded pants into her robe pocket respectfully. “This is for you.” She bowed, opened the accordion door and entered the lounge once more. Before returning to her seat where her bracelet was waiting, she dropped the tip into the glass bowl.

Hours would bring other men to judge. She waited for the day her captors would visit her.