“Den,” Val said, short for Dennis. Also: Den of iniquity. Den of despair. A den, she told me once, was a place where things just settled in their own filth. “Have you still not decided what to do about your mother?”
“Val, what about him?” I said, changing the subject, pointing to Hung Solo gyrating his hips across the room. I guess it was Star Wars night. She rolled her eyes. “Look, I’m still getting my ducks in a row. I don’t even have a suitcase anymore. I can’t just up and leave. I’m needed at the hotel.”
“I think you’re full of shit,” she said. “Your brother’s rich. Mr. Fang can replace you with some reject in a second. Unlike most of the other dipshits in this place, you actually have somewhere to go.”
“Don’t you have a sister in Philly?”
Val talked all high and mighty with her tiny-liberal-arts-college superiority, but she always got real silent when I turned the tables on her. Once, not long after she moved in a little over a year ago, she asked me to help hang a painting that her late husband had bought her—an impressionist portrait called Clara Searching, a mother and daughter digging in the mud by some Japanese artist named Miki. We’d been exchanging firsts—first album, first kiss, first toy we could remember getting during the holidays. I thought we were in a place where I could ask about her husband. She had a little shrine devoted to him in her television entertainment center—a bunch of photos, a watch, a pair of glasses, all surrounded by votive candles.
“Was this an anniversary gift or something?” I said.
“More like an ‘I want to seriously date you and you said you liked art once’ gift.”
“Sounds like a good guy,” I said, after we’d finally managed to hang the piece so it wasn’t tilting to one side. “How long were the two of you together?”
She got real quiet after that, pulled out her client files, began flipping through their family requests, something I was often too lazy to do. But I knew from the way her eyes were moving that she wasn’t really reading.
“I’m sorry if I . . .” I said a minute later, over the whir of the vacuum as she started straightening the room. I stood by the doorway, watching her tears drop onto the carpet before letting myself out. Val ignored me for weeks after that, and I never really knew what to say to her. When we passed each other in the halls, I’d complain about the water pressure. If I saw her at the employee continental breakfast that the hotel provided once a week, I’d hand her a plate of mini muffins. I knew she liked them, and they tended to run out.
“Thank you,” she’d say, barely looking me in the eyes.
“Don’t mention it,” I’d say. “Want some company?”
“I think I’m just going to eat in my apartment,” she’d say. And I’d watch her slink across the lobby into the elevator. It wasn’t until the company held a training seminar about our loyalty card program that Val apparently decided we could be friends again.
“Welcome back to the land of the living . . . sort of,” I said when she sat beside me during the lunch break. We ate our turkey sandwiches, shared our chips, and when I asked her if she wanted to marathon a few selections from the Criterion Collection, she didn’t run away.
My tenuous friendship with Val was a constant reminder of how close I was to being entirely alone, which I think made me more thoughtful 50 percent of the time, the kind of person Val might want to hang around. The only other coworker I talked to was Mr. Leung, our head janitor. He had a long, wispy beard and bushy eyebrows reminiscent of an old master in a seventies kung fu film. It made watching him work an almost meditative experience. I confessed as much to him once and was immediately afraid that I’d come off as one of those Asians who knew jack shit about being Asian, which was mostly true. But he smiled and a few days later asked for my help in providing under-the-table services for some impoverished families around Chinatown.
“We have bio bag,” he said in a thick accent. “We need to burn. No money.”
I spent that night mulling over Mr. Leung’s request, realized that I’d be helping someone while also sticking it to Mr. Fang, who hated the idea of assisting the needy or desperate. I almost didn’t tell Val about it at all, since she seemed like a rule-following whistleblower, but when she saw me passing a note to Mr. Leung, I let her in on the plan. We would wait until Friday evening to begin, when Mr. Fang went to see La traviata for the umpteenth time with his wife. I’d wait by the service entrance for Mr. Leung and his friends to roll in the bodies they’d been storing in the freezers of local restaurants.