Smiling through sweet sips of champagne, Mr. Wu gazed proudly
around the pristine reception hall. The place was nothing short of immaculate, with
its teak walls, jade sculptures, marble-top tables, and crystal chandeliers...
Mr. Wu drew in a deep breath. Then he nodded in
satisfaction, and his eyes twinkled as he soaked in the sights and smells of the
feast, and his ears perked up at the clinking of wine glasses, hum of chatter,
and choruses of laughter.
This was it. His years were coming to fruition. He’d bought
a big house and a fancy car. He’d married a beautiful woman and had a beautiful
baby. Yes. This was it. He was on his way to being a true tiger. He could see
it now. The IPO, the private planes, Swiss bank accounts, luxury ski trips, interviews
on TV. It was happening. By Buddha, it was happening!
Mr. Wu’s daughter, Lin, eyed her father with disgust. Her
eyes blazing as she sat rooted to her chair. Watching her father drink and be
merry, it made her sick. Watching him brag about “his” business… Ugh, it boiled
her blood.
Lin hated everything about her father, starting with his
personality. She hated him as a person, first and foremost. But she also really
hated his appearance. Particularly his head. The shape of his head, it was
weird. It was like a big, boiled egg, like his face was just a drawing on a
boiled egg. Oh, and the way his forehead slopes at too sharp an angle, like a
ramp, as it curves to his scalp, to her, that was also highly unnerving.
Not only did he have a big stupid weird head, but she hated
his short legs and arms too. With his short legs and arms and big bald head,
her father reminded her, unflatteringly, of a Mr. Potato Head doll.
How could any woman be with a man like that, she’d pondered,
in dismay… She’d suspected her mother had had an affair. That he wasn’t her
real father.
God, she really hoped he wasn’t.
Mr. Wu’s wife, Shan, sat by his side, like always, steeped
in silence. While Mr. Wu bloviated, Shan incessantly checked her phone, tapped
on her tablet, kept track of products, sales, and clients. Shan was a shrewd,
serious, silent, and solemn woman. A woman with eyes like crystal balls. A
woman with eyes that always appeared to be staring directly at you, like an
Andy Warhol painting.
Shan was a woman of few words. But when she spoke, her words
were elegant and refined, shot at measured clips.
And when she spoke, people listened.
Lin glowered at her father, thinking of ways to kill him.
She’d most enjoy murdering him with a blunt object of some sort, she fantasized.
To feel the flaying of his flesh… To feel his bones breaking as she beat him to
death... His big stupid head bursting and squishing open like a watermelon…
God, she hated her father. She hated him more than anyone.
It was a secret hate, though, one she’d never confessed. It was a secret hate
that manifested itself in fits of silence, lack of eye contact, and, during
college, a series of online “hookups” with older men, of varying ethnicities.
She’d read once that a woman’s first relationship with a man
is the father/daughter relationship, how that sets the tone for all future
relationships with men.
The mere thought of that made her want to jump off a bridge.
As usual, they left before the drinking games began. Above
them hung an inky-black, starless sky, featuring only a fuzzy outline of its low-hanging
crescent moon, and Lin and Shan crossed through the parking lot, in lockstep,
arm in arm, stepping swiftly in the heavy cold and its growing darkness.
Shan clutched Lin’s arm tighter. Her opal eyes bulged. Then
she peered around, panoramically, and swung her gaze, touched her lips to Lin’s
left ear, and whispered in wet hot pulses that perhaps the car had been bugged.
That Lin’s father had possibly planted a listening device in the vehicle’s
dashboard.
The pair swallowed their words, piled into the Porsche. Their
ride home featuring a symphony of sighs, sign language, screenshots and knowing
nods.
It was just past midnight when Mr. Wu stumbled home,
stinking drunk. His unwelcome arrival like a sudden nosebleed. His arrival
announced as he slammed the door, shaking the house’s foundations. In a form of
mimicry, a madman’s cries cut the air, and he was acting the fool, kicking the
couch, shouting incorrigibly.
Shan, her face twisted in broken sleep, padded forward, her
arms crossed defensively over her chest.
In a red flowery bathrobe, she descended the winding
staircase.
The noise hushed into gaping silence. But only for a minute
or two. Then the screams began, grew louder, shriller. Shan’s pained shrieks
echoing, piercing the character of the night, rousting Lin out of bed.
Lin groggily stepped down the winding staircase. Then a
frisson of fear passed over her like an electric current. Words were dead and
meaningless as she laid weary eyes on her father, Mr. Potato Head… Mr. Potato
Head all red-faced, in the atrium, gripping a brick-shaped butcher knife. Mr.
Potato Head pinning her mother against the double door. Mr. Potato Head
pressing the blade of the knife to her mother’s throat.
Lin ran to the kitchen, grabbed the first blunt object she
saw- a frying pan from off the stovetop- then dashed into the atrium, and
cocked back the frying pan like a baseball bat and whapped her father upside his
horrible big bald head.
Mr. Wu grunted, and the air left his lungs as he dropped the
knife, the knife landing with a clink on the hardwood floor. Then Mr. Wu
crouched and wallowed in pain, cupping his hands defensively over his skull,
and he waddled sideways like a crab, in a lame attempt to escape the oncoming
blows.
Lin continued to hammer at her father’s big stupid head with
the frying pan, hitting him again and again. The pan clanking as it beat at his
skull, the metal reverberating in high-pitched jangles, like a blacksmith
hitting hot iron.
Lin lost herself in the violence. It felt so good. Her
serotonin surged. Bashing her father’s big bald head was such a release, such a
huge release that it was almost orgasmic.
It was the first time she’d ever fought back against her
father. After everything he’d done. And there’d been a lot he’d done. There’d
been countless slaps and shoves. There’d been countless threats. He’d beat her,
her mother with impunity. He’d belittled them. He’d been such a tyrant.
But that was ending. Ending now. And Lin let a bloodcurdling,
celebratory howl. And she swung the pan harder and harder, heaving it at her
father’s horribly ugly head, which was gushing blood and beginning to resemble
a pepperoni pizza, the way his yellow skin was peeling back over his skull to
reveal thick clumpy red patches.
Mr. Wu lay unconscious. Shan then tugged Lin away, hugged
and comforted her. Lin dropped the blood-splattered pan, curled and cried into
her mother’s bosom.
Lin begged her mother to finish him off. It could be
self-defense. They could finally break free of him.
Shan gently broke their embrace. Shook her head. Rubbed her red
face and stared off into the unknown distance, wistfully.
Mr. Wu woke up late the next morning, in the anteroom, his
head throbbing and pulsing, his skull feeling like someone was tap-dancing on
it.
He pushed himself up from the floor, lurched into the
kitchen. No one was there.
Then he moved slowly and lifelessly, like a zombie, making
his way into the backyard, where he threaded through the freshly planted rose
garden, and he purposely stomped on a few budding plants.
The garden led him to the bean-shaped, empty swimming pool,
and he circled the swimming pool, the bright blue crater, a few times, unsure
what he was looking for. Perhaps someone just to tell him what happened to his
head, and why he’d awakened, on the floor, in a crown of blood.
