And, now, Sweet Jesus, that man, long lost in time, high in a cold rain, had fallen in the graveyard grass.
I heard voices and saw headlines:
J. C. ARBUTHNOT DEAD BUT RESURRECTED.
“No!” I said to the white ceiling where the rain whispered, and the man fell. “It wasn’t him. It’s a lie!” Wait until dawn, a voice said.
5
Dawn was no help.
The radio and TV news found no dead bodies.
The newspaper was full of car crashes and dope raids. But no J. C. Arbuthnot.
I wandered out of my house, back to my garage, full of toys, old science and invention magazines, no automobile, and my secondhand bike.
I biked halfway to the studio before I realized I could not recall any intersection I had blindly sailed through. Stunned, I fell off the bike, trembling.
A fiery red open-top roadster burned rubber and stopped parallel to me.
The man at the wheel, wearing a cap put backward, gunned the throttle. He stared through the windshield, one eye bright blue and uncovered, the other masked by a monocle that had been hammered in place and gave off bursts of sun fire.
“Hello, you stupid goddamn son of a bitch,” he cried, with a voice that lingered over German vowels.
My bike almost fell from my grip. I had seen that profile stamped on some old coins when I was twelve. The man was either a resurrected Caesar or the German high pontiff of the Holy Roman Empire. My heart banged all of the air out of my lungs.
“What?” shouted the driver. “Speak up!”
“Hello,” I heard myself say, “you stupid goddamn son-of-a-bitch you. You’re Fritz Wong, aren’t you? Born in Shanghai of a Chinese father and an Austrian mother, raised in Hong Kong, Bombay, London, and a dozen towns in Germany.