Tommy couldn’t read the wrenching series of emotions that passed across his mother’s face.
Having said her piece, Del stroked Scootie, scratched behind his ears, and murmured appreciatively to him:
“Oh, him a good fella, him is, my cutie Scootie-wootums.” After a while, Mother Phan got up from her chair. She went to the television and turned it off.
She went to the Buddhist shrine in the corner, struck a match, and lit three sticks of incense.
For perhaps two or three minutes, the survivor of Saigon and the South China Sea stood staring at the shrine, inhaling the thin and fragrant smoke.
Del patted Tommy’s hand.
At last his mother turned away from the shrine, came to the sofa, and stood over him, scowling. “Tuong, you won’t be doctor when want you be doctor, won’t be baker when want you be baker, write stories about silly whiskey-drunk detective, won’t keep old ways, don’t even remember how speak language from Land of Seagull and Fox, buy Corvette and like cheeseburgers better than com tay cam, forget your roots, want to be something never can be… all bad, all bad. But you make best marriage any boy ever make in history of world, so I guess that got to count for something.”
By four-thirty that afternoon, Tommy, Del, and Scootie were back in their suite at the Mirage.
Scootie settled in his bedroom to crunch dog biscuits and watch an old Bogart and Bacall movie on television.
Tommy and Del consummated.
Afterward, she didn’t bite his head off and devour him alive.
That evening at the reception, Mr. Sinatra called Mother Phan, “A great old broad,” Mai danced with her father, Ton got tipsy for the first time in his life, Sheila Ingrid Julia Rosalyn Winona Lilith answered to three other names, and Del whispered to Tommy, as they did a fox-trot, “This is reality, tofu man, because reality is what we carry in our hearts, and my heart is full of beauty just for you.”
A Note to the Reader
Ticktock is a new novel, not a revision of a book originally released under a pen name, as have been some recent titles in my publication schedule—such as Winter Moon and Icebound. But I have asked my publishers to handle this one in the more subdued manner with which the revised pen-name books have been published, as opposed to the greater attention given to other new novels like Intensity and the forthcoming Sole Survivor. To explain why, I will give you a peek into my—admittedly disordered—mind.
Two and a half years ago, when I finished Dark Rivers of the Heart, one of the most intense and arguably most complex books I had ever done, I was exhausted; more to the point, I was shaken by the darkness of the story. I decided that I needed to tackle a project that was considerably lighter in tone.
Over the years, I’ve become known for mixing different genres of fiction with reckless abandon—suspense and terror and mystery and love story and a little science fiction—changing the mix with every novel. In a number of books—Watchers, Lightning, The Bad Place, Hideaway, Mr. Murder, to name a few—I had even blended large measures of humour into the mix, though according to the common wisdom of modern publishing, this is a sure sales squelcher. These became some of my most successful novels, however, and readers responded to them enthusiastically. Consequently, after Dark Rivers of the Heart I decided to tackle a new and strange mix of genres: the supernatural thriller and the screwball comedy.
Good screwball comedy—exemplified by splendid old movies like Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story —is different from all other comedy in that its form is nearly as strict as that of the sonnet. Some basic requirements include: a male lead who is smart, witty, sensible, but befuddled by the other eccentric characters with whom he becomes involved; an appealing female lead who appears to be an airhead but who turns out, by the end, to be the wisest of all the characters; she should also be an heiress; she should have an astonishingly eccentric but lovable family; all of the screwball characters should be largely unaware of the way in which they leave the male lead in a state of perpetual confusion; the dialogue should be of a rarefied type that has characters talking at cross purposes, that allows the most outrageous things to be said with convincingly deadpan seriousness; the story should be propelled by surprising character twists and revelations that delight us and that are logical within the given structure of the story; and if possible, there ought to be a dog.