The Walled City of Kowloon
Roberto Ontiveros
Henna was two months late on rent and she did that whole “Legally, I have one month before I get the boot”–threat to the landlord, who sighed with sympathy and said, “I will give you that month.” But Henna was afraid to leave her pad now, like, if she dared step outside, the lock would be changed while she hit the laundry or the Dollar General for a Sprite, and so I would bring her what she needed every day when I got off the clock. It helped that we used to date, that I kind of saw Henna as a woman who needed a little help but could manage as soon as she was in the right place, because I’d seen her in the right place and could see that nest of rest happening again.
Being in the right place was the most important and most elusive thing for Henna. When she had that job at the hotel she had the confidence of a cat burglar, and I never even knew her then, just from the talk I get about it, the romantic and economic opportunities that always erupted for her, the many many options of being a smart knockout at a desk job where people maybe came in just to see her; working at the bank was different, it was all hiding in the bathroom and then calling me every night with fears of varicose veins from wrong ways of sitting, tight stocking talk, and too many naps on her days off. When she got let go from IBC it was a relief, but here she is now basically squatting in an apartment that any dude on disability could move SSI money around to manage.
I knocked my special two-tap knock so Henna would not hesitate to open: paper bag of plums, hydrogen peroxide, a box of Kleenex, a can of Canada Dry, two six-packs of hard seltzer, a few bags of pretzels, and then I decided the woman needed real food, so I added a bag of almonds and a few cans of Campbell’s, Chef Boyardee ravioli, jail house/dorm room ramen. It’s what they had at the Dollar General I always hit when walking back from my part-time gig at the library. If she wanted dinner—actual hot food dinner—later that night as we watched a little TV, and went over the want ads, I would order her some takeout.
Henna opened the door in coal-blue sweatpants and a black sports bra and smiled a little dimpled thank you of a smile, and I nodded and walked over to the Formica table in the kitchen area to start putting the Dollar General items up for her, snapping open a can of hard seltzer for her as I did this, and when she shook her head I just took a sip and nodded my unanticipated approval at the subtle apricot flavor, and then just put the whole bag in her fridge, Kleenex and all, and pulled out a chair and prepared to look at my friend.
Henna walked over as if she had a kind of delicate rash, and sat in the chair opposite me. As she exhaled her relief that I’d showed—she was always, though not vocalizing it ever, worried I might stop coming by—I looked over at the TV, which was on mute, and on a church channel. I couldn’t help but smile a little. If Henna was ever going to watch any white-suit holy-roller ramble, it would be at night—like we had done before a few times—drinking and marveling in inebriated mirth at the money-grabbing con job spooky on screen. But this was 6 p.m., and Henna looked as serious as a seventeen-year-old C student about to take the SATs, hoping for luck, and, maybe even a little magic, frozen in prayer before the shade-in-the-bubbles answer sheet, all too aware of the silent timer going down during a fate-forging test and a pair of sharpened number two pencils under a sweaty palm.
“This guy isn’t even trying to preach anymore,” Henna said. “The whole show went infomercial. The whole hour is him trying to sell these white buckets of just-add-water food for the end of the world.”
I took a long sip from my can, then asked her if she wanted a glass of water.
Henna shook her head. “Did you bring any apples?”
I shook my head. She nodded.
“I put a can of Ginger Ale in the fridge for you. It is still warm.”
Henna slowly reached over to curl her fingers around my can of hard seltzer and took a quick sip.
“Did you eat today?” I asked her.
She nodded, and when she did I didn’t buy it and kind of raised myself up to peer into the wastebasket by the broom closet. There was an empty box of animal crackers and one of those little sectioned-off plastic snack traps of cheese and rectangle club crackers, that kind of processed yellow that comes with a little red oblong scoop spreader.
I pulled my cell phone out of my backpack, and pressed for the pizza place we always called. Valentine’s Pizza Pub had a special on Wednesdays but if you had a coupon it was every day and we had that coupon under a ladybug magnet on her fridge and they never asked for the coupon when they came to the door, so we kept using it.
“How many days until the eviction takes?”
Henna pointed to the white broom closet door, where she had taped up a single page of the October calendar. Rather than pen an X on each day she was done with, she’d really gone to town with her art: drawing a little picture of herself in a kind of Apartment 3-G daily comics way, an obvious Henna looking boxed in the each square, some days the cartoon Henna was even decked out in cartoon secretarial outfit, skirt and blouse ensemble; a couple of panels Henna had drawn herself wearing that Polo shirt and khaki pants outfit she had to wear when she worked at the cell phone store at the mall, and in one of the panels she’d drawn herself in the cartoon nude.
When we dated—for that special time when our going around meant going out mattered so much less than staying in—Henna would sketch these way-above-average illustrations for me while I showed her every Kurosawa flick she had somehow missed, and her sketching beside me with Ran or Rashomon playing before us was as awe-inducing as watching a ragman on the side of the road surprise passing pedestrians with sidewalk art, but better than a beggarman-brag because Henna and I were both indoors and on the couch, and Henna’s sketch work felt like a shared art, and she never expected compensation for her craft, not even in the form of praise. It killed me that my ex would just trash the pictures after she drew them, and she would. She never kept them. She kept this apartment very clean back then, so when I would see the cartoons in the wastebasket I would rescue them and now it’s like I have a little book of our time on the couch, that nine-month romance of never leaving this room unless we absolutely had to, and now Henna would not leave until management made her, which was coming.
“I got to be out by Halloween—or I should be. Day of the Dead, when I will be three months late with the rent, the cops are gonna be called for sure.”
I have never been homeless, but sometimes I look that way, sometimes I get lost in a very typical kind of Margot-Kidder-in-a-cardboard-box kind of way. The difference is my options of escape are narrowed by income. In a way it is a blessing; an episode of wandering, and crashing behind the curtained patio of a cabana, a tallboy of uncracked emergency beer by my curled fist, or waking up behind the walled-off space of forest green dumpster when I hear the trash truck beeping its approach. Bum-like behavior that might be just two nights but has been as long as three weeks, but when it is that long there is usually a hospital stay and then a few days in a behavioral center, and then I am good. That has not happened in a long time, certainly would never happen with a routine as delicately reliable as dropping off Dollar General essentials and even entertainment in the way of library books and DVDs to this woman I loved last year from summer to spring and now, doing this daily welfare check, coming to love in a more complicated and perennial kind of way. Put it like this: every time I come by Henna’s place—which has been every day this month since she decided that leaving the place even to check her mail (which I do for her now) was impossible—I have that two seconds of cold-fingers fear when I am about to knock my two-taps code knock that she won’t be here, and that I will never see her again.
There was a non-code knock at the door. I was on my second alcoholic apricot drink. Henna got up excited when she heard the knock and went to open the door. Whatever the person behind it looked like, she would be happy to see. Outside of the white-suited preacher man selling end-of-the-world buckets of add-water gruel on the church channel, and whatever morning show people, afternoon soaps stars and 5 p.m. anchor faces she viewed, I was the only person Henna had seen today. Discounting Valentine’s delivery drivers, I was the only real in-the-flesh person she’d seen for two weeks now.
“Hey, the coupon,” I said and, door open with the delivery guy standing outside, she ran to pull the clipped paper out from under the ladybug magnet and then seemed to almost float to the door.
Henna took her time talking to the delivery guy. Small talk about how the driver’s night had been. Was it a busy day? Asking if the tip was already on the card, and then walking back to a crystal ashtray where she kept her loose bills and giving the guy two of the forty-seven dollars she had left.
Walking over to the table with the large anchovy and mushroom pie, still just wearing a black sports bra and coal-blue sweats, Henna looked like some cocktail waitress working the dome lounge in an unpublished Philip K. Dick Martian mindfuck.
As we ate dinner we watched a documentary on her laptop about the Walled City of Kowloon, a lawless Bladerunner of a place I knew about from pictures when they razed the rhizomatic municipality in 1993. This impossible-looking cluster of alleys and crime, and no cops ever. Missionaries coming in to teach the kids who lived in this layer of no light how to read, stairwells to brothels and unlicensed dentistry.
“This is the fourth time I’ve seen this video,” Henna said, her head on my shoulder and a can of hard seltzer in the space between her crossed legs. “Some of the people who were kids when they finally all got convinced to leave, they say they even miss the place. Miss the hiding or the special feeling of home.”
The clock said 11:11 p.m. I was usually asleep by ten these days that I actually worked and did my best to stay off the streets at night.
But that was not happening this night. I knew Henna would have preferred if I stayed with her, maybe stayed until she left the apartment. But that was not going to happen either, not with my new responsibilities and old hang-ups.
“That Valero across the street stops selling booze at midnight,” I said.
“I’m good,” she said.
I nodded and said, “Will you walk with me to get some?”
Henna turned to look up at me, a smile of sorrow starting up in the corner of her mouth because she knew I was asking her to do something much braver than go on a minutes-to-midnight beer run.
“You can wear my windbreaker over that sports bra, and it will look like you maybe just came out of the all-hours gym.”
Henna rested her forehead on mine. She smelled like a lot of Aquafresh and Purell. When she was alone all day she brushed her teeth like four times and took three showers, and, with dwindling Dollar General supplies, would use the shampoo I got her in very late September as an all-over body soap.
Henna started to get up off the couch and stand and my heart started beating fast like I’d gotten away with something.
She clapped the laptop down and raised out her arms as if to stretch and give me a hug, but she stayed there in this yoga magazine pose, and I knew she was waiting for me to put the gray windbreaker on her.
I smiled as I did this, as if I was decorating a mannequin who came alive with a grin the moment her arms went into the retro Members Only merch I’d pinched from the library lost and found.
I looked around the apartment as if this was the last time I would ever see the place. For days now, every time I came to visit, I left with a white kitchen trash bag of whatever she was getting rid of to drop off in the dumpster. Not for the last two days. Henna had already gotten rid of everything but her journal and her laptop, which I quietly picked up for her and placed in my backpack.
As I did this she walked over to palm the loose bills and change she had in the crystal ashtray on the counter by the kitchen sink. She then picked up the ashtray and handed it to me quick with her eyes on the broom closet where the single calendar page for October had been taped.
As I slid the crystal ashtray in my backpack I heard the Scotch tape slice sound of Henna peeling the calendar page off the broom closet door. I looked at her holding her cartoon calendar sheet countdown and fought an instinct to walk over and save the art I knew she was about to trash, experiencing a feeling of baffling relief when I saw her crunch the month of October into a bud of disregard in her fist and then toss it in the wastebasket like a rock wish into the mouth of a narrow well.
The clock said: 11:33 p.m.
Henna’s eyes darted around the Formica table as if she was looking for lost car keys. She snatched up a little teal-and-taupe-hued purse from the chair she was sitting on earlier that night and every night for the last two weeks I’d been coming by with Dollar General provisions. She looked like a soda pop assembly-line worker snatching up a faulty bottle off the line before good fizz could get capped into bad glass. Then she exhaled and started walking towards the door where I was already standing.
I peered out the peephole until I felt her hand in mine.
On the cement stretch right outside, with the constant cats and the occasional car, and everyone always coming home, the movement-trigger lights never allowed for the true ink of the night.
“You got everything?” I asked, still looking outside.
Henna squeezed my hand and said, “Everything I need.”
I opened the door to the crisp October night, and held the brass knob as if witnessing the world from a very slow train. The sound of a car coasting into the very gas station we were about to enter. The aerosol scent of some strange vanilla, and the pink neon haze of a drycleaning place across the street.
Taking in the uncertain charm of the outside, I stood at an uneasy but eager attention and I did not dare take another step until I heard Henna close the door behind us.
Roberto Ontiveros is a fiction writer, artist, and journalist. Some of his work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, the Santa Monica Review, the Baffler, and the Believer. His debut collection, The Fight for Space, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, and his second book, Assisted Living, was published by Corona Samizdat Press.
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