Well, Abe said "Where you want this killing done?"
I work in Dahu. Nice neighborhood. Mountainous. Beyond the apartment complexes, you see mountains. Lot's of them. From a distance they appear purple. On overcast days, their peaks are masked by clouds.
I'm told there was a language school boom in Dahu, several years before I showed up. Money started pouring into the place. It's easy to tell, just by looking, what stores were and weren't there, before the boom. It's surprising to me that the old shops weren't swallowed up by the new money. They weren't renovated, either.
The store you buy your bronze plated Buddha from has to look old, after all.
It's comforting, looking at a run-down vegetable stand across the street from a 7-11 and a Starbucks. . . all before a wide lake encircling a mountain that is only speckled with lights come nightfall.
And further off, more mountains. . . always more mountains in Taiwan. . . the most mountainous region I've ever dwelt in. . .
About a block and a half from my school, there's a Burger King. I go to this Burger King a lot. Coffee. Thirty New Taiwan Dollars a shot. That's a dollar, U.S.. I wish I could buy coffee elsewhere, not that I could afford to, usually. Burger King gets my money every time because they're the only ones in the neighborhood who serve up good. old fashioned drip coffee. You can't get that at most places. . . Not here. Here they serve it out of a machine. . . it's basically instant coffee, filtered through a loud, clunky machine.
Coffee isn't catching on in Taiwan, just yet.
I go to Burger King and I get my coffee and I duck off somewhere, out of sight, so I can puff in peace. Now, if it's a Friday night we're talking about, I need to go for optimum stealth because the three blocks surrounding our school are swamped with kids and their parents.
Last Friday night, I went subterranean. Sometimes, that what I do when it's raining.
Going subterranean entails going into the basement of Burger King. It might not be, properly speaking, Burger King's basement. It'd be more accurate to call it the basement of the building Burger King's in. Yeah.
The basement, all I ever see of it, anyway, is one big L. And you walk down some stairs from the street above and there you are right at the top of this L. To either side, there aren't any walls, really. You have these steel shudders. The kind that roll down from the ceiling. They're blue, and they might be mistaken for corrugated tin by way of a hasty glance.
If you walk all the way down to the corner, at the end, you'll see a ladder running up into a trapdoor.
There's really no lighting, down there.
I went into this basement after my 4:40 class had ended. . . right about 6:13, I'd say. I had my coffee, and I had my smoke, and I had about fifteen feet between my ass and the stairs.
I moved forward. The sun had set, and the sky never gets too dark in Dahu. . . but, ahead of me, there was only black. You don't see this kind of black, often. No light thrown back at me whatsoever, I thought. I couldn't even my own hand in front of my face. I kept moving forward.
And then I saw them.
At the end, there at the corner, was a set of doors. Plain old doors. They were closed, but the room behind them was lit, and the light. . . faintly, faintly, faintly. . . peeked through the tiny bit of space between the steel doors and the doorjams. . . so that what I saw, after my eyes had adjusted, was two perfect rectangles joined by a line down the middle. The light was evenly dispersed, I wasn't able it see it's reflection on the floor. Two white rectangles.
How seldom that the human eye should register something so utterly simple!
When I turned around, I saw that the red, red, red neon lights trimming the Burger King were reflected down the stairs, and into the basement. Starting with the softest hue of pink, the steel shudders ran into red near the mouth of the basement, and the concrete steps were purple. . . I was standing in the very middle of that hallway. . .
I turned my back on the light and let my eyes catch the rectangles again. . . the air around me was cool and still, and my own pulse against the cup of coffee. And everything got quiet. No machines humming, below. No traffic above. Just quiet seeping in and chasing everything else away, inside and out, through and through.