Jimmy Tong was dead. Eddie Cardone had watched the life bleed out of the only man who’d ever taught him the rules of Chinatown, the man who’d pulled him from Columbus Avenue street corner cons into better-paying hustles. And then, when Eddie needed him, Jimmy had tried to save him, driving him out of Chinatown under fire, but the night had eaten him alive.
That left Eddie to run alone, without his closest ally, through streets that felt stranger with every step. He remembered Lillianne as he ran, and why he couldn’t leave Chinatown on his own. He loved her. It was that dumb love where he had nothing to base it on but a belief that, against all odds, she was the one.
The rain kept falling as Eddie ran, hitting him cold and cruel in a way only New York rain could. He heard shouts and running behind him. He stumbled down a side street, alley walls looming like damp tombstones. The gun in his waistband felt heavier now, like it had picked up a soul or two.
A shot rang out behind him—close enough to make his ribs jump. He veered down a side street, tripped over a half-submerged curb, and landed face-first in a flooded gutter. For a long moment, he didn’t move. Rainwater mixed with blood at the edge of his mouth. He blinked.
Red neon rippled across the puddle. Steam rose from a sidewalk grate.
He looked up.
Hop Sing’s Dumpling House.
The glow of its red lanterns was precisely as he remembered from his first night with Jimmy. Time hiccupped. Eddie staggered forward, the gun a leaden weight in his belt.
A man, who stood like a guard or a guardian, blocked the door.
He was Chinese, but dressed like he’d stepped out of another century—long coat, high collar, eyes like chipped marble. Rain didn’t seem to touch him.
“You can’t go in there,” the Guard said, voice rough with age and accent.
Eddie’s breath came hard. “Just need to clean myself up.”
“You can’t go in there,” the Guard repeated.
Eddie felt a force field around the Guard. Like standing too close to a live wire or leaning over the edge of a subway platform as a train tore past. His teeth buzzed in his skull, and a cold threaded through him.
Eddie staggered back a step, suddenly unsure if the street was level or if his own legs were betraying him. The rain seemed to fall more slowly. The neon bled in streaks, long and liquid.
Some instinct older than thought told him this was a boundary, the kind you didn’t cross without leaving something behind.
He edged sideways, eyes drawn toward the steamed window.
And there it was—himself, alive and dry and laughing in a booth with Jimmy Tong.
His heart slammed. He peered through the window again.
Inside, he saw himself seated with Jimmy in the booth, laughing like nothing had ever gone wrong. At the bar, Lillianne swirled her drink, oblivious to fate. Eddie watched himself stand, cross the floor, and lean in toward her.
The scene from that first night, perfect and impossible.
He stumbled back. “What the fuck is goin’ on? Jimmy’s dead. What the hell is this?”
The Guard tilted his head, voice like a slow knife. “You start… over again.”
“What? Over again? What are you talking about?” Eddie’s voice cracked. “I’m right here! That’s me in there—how the hell is Jimmy alive?”
The Guard didn’t move. Didn’t blink. The rain ran off his coat without wetting him.
Something in Eddie broke. He lowered his shoulder and charged.
The Guard moved with sudden, impossible speed. His hand whipped inside his coat and came out with a short, curved blade that gleamed under the neon. Eddie barely jerked back in time; the blade sliced through the wet sleeve of his coat instead of his throat.
They grappled in the doorway, slipping on the rain-slick steps. The Guard’s strength was inhuman. He slammed Eddie against the brick wall, the knife a silver flash in the storm.
“You… start… over… again,” he grunted with each shove.
Eddie smashed a fist into the Guard’s jaw and felt bone give just slightly. The Guard staggered, but didn’t fall. Eddie spun, drove a knee into his ribs, and ripped the knife from his hand.
The Guard straightened, eyes burning in the dark. He didn’t bleed.
“You can’t change what you are,” he said. “First drop… makes ripple. Ripple never stop.”
Eddie panted in the rain, knife shaking in his hand, the window to Hop Sing’s behind him showing his other self raising a glass with Jimmy.
The world tilted. A cold certainty slithered into his bones.
Eddie ran.
He didn’t know where he was going. His legs just carried him, pounding through puddles, lungs burning, the rain slicking his hair to his forehead. The fog thickened. It clung to him, narrowing the world into fragments.
Then the smell hit him: seafood, briny and old, as if the air had been marinated in crab shells and saltwater. He skidded to a halt.
Doyers Street.
The brick tenement loomed like a memory he wished he hadn’t had. Water dripped from a fire escape onto the hood of an abandoned delivery van. He looked up, heart hammering against the cage of his ribs.
Lillianne’s window.
The blinds were half-broken, the same crooked slats that had watched him once before, after that first night in her bed—the night when he thought he’d stumbled into heaven and now realized he’d stepped into a trap built by fate.
Something moved behind the glass.
Eddie’s chest tightened.
A figure.
Himself.
He froze. His mind couldn’t catch its own thoughts. He was out here, soaked to the bone, staring up—and he was in there, shadowed in the dim apartment, tilting his head down at the street as if he’d been waiting for this exact moment.
The figure’s face was his face. The slats of the blinds cut it into stripes, like prison bars.
Eddie’s throat closed. The night felt rigged.
And then her voice slid into his skull, as if whispered through the rain:
“You ever heard of presque vu?”
Almost-seen. Not-quite-known. The truth on the tip of the tongue.
The fog thickened until the street itself seemed to sway. Eddie could smell Lillianne’s perfume in the mist, ghosting in from memory or imagination. He saw himself in that window and thought, for the first time, that maybe he was the ghost—watching a life he’d already lived, a life he couldn’t touch.
Something deep in his chest shifted. The fear wasn’t a spike anymore—it was a slow, cold sinking, like his body knew before his brain did.
He backed away, careful, like any sudden movement might break the spell. His shoes splashed in the gutter.
Then he turned.
And ran for the gallery.
The fog swallowed the edges of Bayard Street as Eddie approached the gallery, his lungs dragging air like it was soaked in lead. Every step felt heavier. Like gravity had remembered him.
He slowed near the curb, boots sloshing through an oily puddle where the red of the neon sign smeared into a ghost of itself. NEW CHINA ARTS, the letters blinked faintly overhead, humming with the same low voltage as the night Lillianne had made her entrance beside him.
But now, the streets were nearly empty. No crowds. No press. Just the memory of noise held in wet pavement and echoing stone. Somewhere far off, a car honked. Somewhere closer, a cigarette hissed out in a puddle.
And then—
The Guard was there again.
Same man. Or not.
He stood beside the gallery’s glass double doors, not in Tang robes this time, but in a sharp charcoal suit that looked tailored straight from the 1930s. His hair was slicked back. Face unreadable. Hands folded in front of him, not a speck of rain on his shoulders. The fog curled around him like it knew better than to touch.
Eddie stopped. Breath short. Heart banging.
“You know what’s happening to me?” he said, voice low.
The Guard said nothing—just those eyes, clouded jade, chipped and infinite.
“HEY! I’m talkin’ to you!”
The Guard finally moved—only his mouth. “Revolving path.”
Eddie blinked. “What?”
The Guard tilted his head. “Karmic wheel.”
The words struck like a dropped brick. Eddie took a step back. The sidewalk felt unstable. The light in the gallery windows flickered.
“You don’t make sense.”
“Neither does time,” the Guard said.
The rain suddenly lightened. The fog thickened.
Inside the gallery, behind the glass, shapes moved. A party. An echo of the night. Just like before. Just like always.
Lillianne in black. Tommy near the podium. Guests with wine and bulletproof grins.
And—yes.
Eddie.
The other him, already inside. Gun already drawn.
Eddie froze. His own hand drifted to the weapon in his waistband, as if acting out a memory his body had never forgotten.
“Revolving path, karmic wheel, fucking Chinatown! I didn’t fire those shots,” he muttered.
“Not this time,” the Guard replied.
“You mean it could be different? The outcome, I mean?”
“There is your reality, then there is the way things work.”
That stopped him.
Eddie turned fully toward the glass. His reflection blurred with the one inside. He couldn’t tell which version of him was real anymore—the one outside, watching? Or the one already mid-act, about to turn the art world into a crime scene?
He looked back at the Guard. “What am I supposed to do?”
The Guard’s voice dropped. Softer now. “Break the picture.”
Eddie frowned. “What picture?”
But the man was already stepping back, vanishing into the fog. Dissolving like he was made of vapor and ancient silence.
Eddie gritted his teeth. His legs moved. Toward the door. Toward fate.
Inside, the gallery erupted in applause.
The cloths were coming off the canvases.
And the painting—the one that had changed everything—was about to be revealed again.
Eddie reached for the gun at his waist.
His hands didn’t shake. They should’ve. But they didn’t.
Inside the gallery, the final canvas was being unveiled—his face already half-exposed, immortalized in shadow and guilt. The applause was rising. Glasses were raised. The loop was hardening into myth again.
The other Eddie inside was watching, but not moving.
So this one did.
Eddie raised the gun and fired through the glass.
CRACK.
The bullet punched through the pane, through the chaos, through the crowd’s certainty.
Screams erupted. People dove to the floor. A second shot shattered a wine glass. A third hit the painting dead center, ripping through the portrait of the assassin’s face, warping it with a clean black hole.
Inside, people scattered. Sirens howled in the distance. Tommy’s men drew guns, but there was no shooter in sight.
Eddie was already running. He vaulted over a railing and vanished into the mist. He ducked into alleys, climbed a stairwell slick with mildew, and collapsed behind a dumpster, his chest heaving.
The fog wrapped around him like gauze.
Then—soft steps.
The Guard appeared at the mouth of the alley. Same suit. Same silence. Not even breathing hard.
“You broke it,” he said.
Eddie stared. “Broke what?”
The Guard tilted his head. “The story.”
Eddie wiped rain and sweat from his eyes. “Good.”
“But now it starts again.”
Eddie’s mouth went dry. “What?”
“You chose. You acted. You step outside pattern,” the Guard said. “So now pattern reforms.”
Eddie’s voice cracked. “No. No, I’m done with this.”
The Guard stepped closer.
“You must return to where the ripple began,” he said. “You start… over again.”
Eddie blinked. “Hop Sing’s?”
The Guard nodded.
And then the world began to pull.
Not literally. Not physically. But everything bent, subtly, like heat distortion over blacktop. The buildings rippled at the corners. The alley curled in on itself. Eddie’s vision narrowed like a camera lens.
His body didn’t resist.
The smell of five-spice and fried dumplings hit him like a slap.
The booth creaked beneath him. Soy sauce stuck to his elbow. A laminated menu sat on the table, sticky with something ancient.
Eddie blinked.
Jimmy Tong sat across from him, grinning, chopsticks in hand, slurping noodles like nothing had ever gone wrong.
"You good, kid?" Jimmy asked, mouth full.
Eddie stared at him. Open-mouthed. Barely breathing.
Jimmy Tong was dead. Eddie had watched the life bleed out of the only man who’d ever taught him the rules of Chinatown, the man who’d pulled him from Columbus Avenue street corner cons into better-paying hustles. And then, when Eddie needed him, Jimmy had tried to save him, driving him out of Chinatown under fire, but the night had eaten him alive.
Now Jimmy was here. Alive. Eating noodles like the clock never broke.
A glass clinked at the bar.
Eddie turned his head.
Lillianne Wong sat at the bar, laughing at something the waiter said, her fingers circling the rim of her glass like a storm looking for a coast.
The same as before.
All of it the same.
Eddie sat frozen, heart stuttering.
A voice echoed—not in the room, but in his head, ancient and final.
“You start over again.”
The air inside Hop Sing’s was warm, but Eddie felt cold.
Outside, rain streaked the windows.
Inside, the cycle had begun anew.
But with a new twist.
Tommy Huang walked in and sat with Lillianne.
Jimmy Tong dabbed his mouth with a napkin and turned to Eddie. “Bullet to the head. Drop the gun. Keep walking.”
Jimmy’s eyes shifted from Eddie to Tommy. And then back to Eddie.
“And don’t fuck it up.”
end of part five
© Michael Arturo, 2025
Michael Arturo is a playwright, screenwriter, and fiction author who also writes random essays on social and political issues. He was born and raised in New York City. His plays have been produced in New York, London, Boston, and LA. He also created the Double Espresso Web Series from 2010 to 2014.
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