The Boy Who Escaped Paradise by J. M. Lee

Author:J. M. Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

PALE DAYTIME MOON

Kunlun owned three cars with three-liter engines—a Mercedes-Benz, a Lexus, and a Hyundai Equus—and his three drivers were on call around the clock, playing mahjongg as they waited by the garage. Kunlun often preferred to walk to his appointments, and when he did I went along. The July sun blasted the sidewalk and hot air snaked up my legs. I made up games with numbers I encountered in the street, picking them out from signs and license plates and even branching into addresses and the number of floors in a building. I thought of the street with an empty lot next to three-, one-, and four-story buildings as Pi Street. Prime Number Street was the busy thoroughfare lined with eleven-, thirteen-, seventeen-, and nineteen-story buildings. Luxury cars, buses, taxis, and bicycles rolled past in a jumble. I preferred the cars with the older license plates, composed solely of numbers without any Latin letters. I caught the lucky license plate number 88888—with 8 pronounced ba, similar to fa in fa chai, meaning to earn wealth, that must have been unimaginably expensive to obtain. With 9 signifying plenty and 7 resembling the word for happiness, both of those numbers would have also been at a premium.

Kunlun purchased a fine suit at a department store and sticky cockroach traps at a rundown marketplace. We bought a few other things. I counted out the bills and he put the receipts in his pocket.

“Would you like something cold to drink?” Kunlun asked as he strode ahead.

“Coca-Cola, please.”

He got himself a green tea and handed me a can of Coke. With a hiss, the gas escaped. My tongue prickled, and I felt rich. It reminded me of Jae-ha.

Back home, I put the food in the refrigerator and placed the new pruning shears in the shed. I planted the new flower seeds in the garden and watered them, and changed the rubber ring in a leaky faucet. Kunlun unfolded the receipts and recorded them in his ledger, using a large calculator. “Double check that everything’s accurate, Gil-mo.”

I took a look at savory 5s, warm 8s, and mushroomy 3s. Nine had the funk of long-fermented food, and 7 crunched and shattered. “The calculations are correct but the sum is wrong.”

Kunlun peered at his ledger.

“The fedora was twenty percent off,” I reminded him. “It was marked as 2,300 yuan, but we only paid 1,840 yuan. But the full price is on the receipt. You forgot to tally our drinks, since we didn’t get a receipt. One cup of green tea is 2 yuan and the Coke was 4 yuan. So you have to subtract 460 yuan and add 6 yuan. The sum should be 4,396 yuan.” I dumped the coins out of his wallet and counted the bills. “Since you have 1,787 yuan in your wallet, that checks out. You initially had 6,183 yuan.”

Beginning the next day, Kunlun allowed me to reconcile the receipts.

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