Tick Tock

sad.”
    Exasperated, Tommy said, “Mom, I just called to tell you the good news about the Corvette and—”
    “Come to dinner. Clay-pot chicken and rice better than lousy cheeseburgers.”
    “I can't come tonight, Mom. Tomorrow.”
    “Too much cheeseburgers and French fries, soon you look like big fat cheeseburger.”
    “I hardly ever eat cheeseburgers and fries, Mom. I watch my diet and I—”
    “Tomorrow night we have shrimp toast. Pork-stuffed squid. Pot-roasted rice. Duck with nuoc cham.”
    Tommy's mouth was watering, but he would never admit as much, not even if he were placed in the hands of torturers with countless clever instruments of persuasion. “Okay, I'll be there tomorrow night. And after dinner, I'll take you for a spin in the Corvette.”
    “Take your father. Maybe he like flashy sports car. Not me. I simple person.”
    “Mom—”
    “But your father good man. Don't put him in fancy sports car and take him out drinking whiskey, fight, chase blondes.”
    “I'll do my best not to corrupt him, Mom.”
    “Goodbye, Tuong.”
    “Tommy,” he corrected, but she had hung up.
    God, how he loved her.
    God, how nuts she made him.
    He drove through Laguna Beach and continued north.
    The last red slash of the sunset had seeped away. The wounded night in the west had healed, sky to sea, and in the natural world, all was dark. The only relief from blackness was the unnatural glow from the houses on the eastern hills and from the cars and trucks racing along the coast. The flashes of headlights and taillights suddenly seemed frenzied and ominous, as though all the drivers of those vehicles were speeding toward appointments with one form of damnation or another.
    Mild shivers swept through Tommy, and then he was shaken by a series of more profound chills that made his teeth chatter.
    As a novelist, he had never written a scene in which a character's teeth had chattered, because he had always thought it was a cliche; more important, he assumed that it was a cliche without any element of truth, that shivering until teeth rattled was not physically possible. In his thirty years, he had never, for even as much as a day, lived in a cold climate, so he couldn't actually vouch for the effect of a bitter winter wind. Characters in books usually found their teeth chattering from fear, however, and Tommy Phan knew a good deal about fear. As a small boy on a leaky boat on the South China Sea, fleeing from Vietnam with his parents, two brothers and sister, under ferocious attack by Thai pirates who would have raped the women and killed everyone if they had been able to get aboard, Tommy had been terrified but had never been so fearful that his teeth had rattled like castanets.
    They were chattering now. He clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles throbbed, and that stopped the chattering. But as soon as he relaxed, it started again.
    The coolness of the November evening hadn't yet leached into the Corvette. The chill that gripped him was curiously internal, but he switched on the heater anyway.
    As another series of icy tremors shook him, he remembered the peculiar moment earlier in the parking lot at the car dealership: the flitting shadow with no cloud or bird that could have cast it, the deep coldness like a wind that stirred nothing else in the day except him.
    He glanced away from the road ahead, up at the deep sky, as if he might glimpse some pale shape passing through the darkness above.
    What pale shape, for God's sake?
    “You're spooking me, Tommy boy,” he said. Then he laughed drily. “And now you're even talking to yourself.”
    Of course, nothing sinister was shadowing him in the night sky above.
    He had always been too imaginative for his own good, which was why writing fiction came so naturally to him. Maybe he'd been born with a strong tendency to fantasize—or maybe his imagination had been encouraged to grow by the seemingly bottomless fund of folktales with which his mother had entertained him and soothed him to sleep when he had been a little boy during the war, back in the days when the communists had fought so fiercely to rule Vietnam, the fabled Land of Seagull and Dragon. When the warm humid nights in Southeast Asia had rattled with gunfire and reverberated with the distant boom of mortars and bombs, he'd seldom been afraid, because her gentle voice enraptured him with stories of spirits and gods and ghosts.
    Now, lowering his gaze from the sky to the highway, Tommy Phan thought of the tale of Le Loi, the fisherman who