The Disappearance of Lawrence Lee

Lawrence always called her a walking contradiction, and she had worn the description proudly like a badge.

She drank beer out of a straw. She always wore mismatched socks; not because she wanted to make a statement, but because they kept getting lost in the wash. This was possibly made worse by the fact that her favourite pair of combat boots had holes in them, and you can always see the two different colours peeking out. Despite how many times her friends reminded her, she always forgot to keep her bag or her wallet zipped, so every time they slip from her grip coins rained from them.

The fingertips on her left hand were blistered from trying to play guitar, although after five years she still could not bar chords. She blamed it on her tiny hands, the guitar with the high strings and wide fretboard. On her other hand her fingernails were much longer and carefully painted; she did not care that they were asymmetrical. Her makeup, however, was always flawless. She went anything between smoking one cigarette (when she remembered that she was quitting) and half a pack (when she did not) every day. Lawrence had been the one who got her into smoking. Every month she reminded herself to listen to jazz, because she thought it made her seemed more cultured, but somehow she always didn’t seem to be able to bring herself to listen to anything but post-rock.

She also happened to be the last person to have seen him and, afterwards, heard from him at all. It was two weeks ago, when they went to see The Little Prince movie together; he had joked about getting separate seats, in case emotions got the better of him. The Little Prince was infamous for making children laugh and grown-ups cry. They were both movie lovers, in a city that many called a cultural desert, although she had always rejected that label; she thought it was just the fault of people who did not dig hard enough for the water. There was one cinema in the whole of Hong Kong, the Broadway Cinematheque, that could be relied on to always have one weird foreign film or the other showing at any given time, and they had bi-weekly movie dates. Together, they had watched everything under the sky, from film festival hits like Only Lovers Left Alive to foreign films no one else would see with them, like that Japanese movie about a midnight diner.

They also had a special soft spot Woody Allen. He was still spitting out at an incredible pace of one-a-year, and for the past couple of years, whenever they came out — first Blue Jasmine, and then Magic in the Moonlight, and then Irrational Man —it had become some sort of tacit agreement between them that they were going to see it together. That last one, she was particularly glad to have seen with him; the pretentious philosophical ramblings Joaquin Phoenix was spouting reminded her of the pair of them a couple of years ago, when they were still in school and thought using ‘post-modern’ to describe every piece of art they didn’t understand was cool; they laughed at odd moments together, in ways that the rest of the cinema did not understand.

Another time, they had gotten tickets to a local film at the last minute and was stuck in the front row. Just ten minutes into the movie, a girl sitting next to her in the classroom violently slashed her wrists, splattering blood across the screen, and the pair of them had nowhere to hide. The film was a crime thriller about a young mainland girl who had come to Hong Kong; she was an aspiring model, but ended up being a cliche: a compensated dating teenager. She later became something even worse: a statistic. She was murdered. And all this was based on a true story.

She wondered, now that Lawrence had disappeared, whether it meant that she would have to see movies alone from now on. She could never drag any of her friends to go with her; they either fall asleep or complain incessantly about the films’ slow pace (they were almost always slow, or they didn’t have enough explosions). Also, she would very unlikely be able to find anyone else who liked Woody Allen or hated the sound of popcorn-chewing as much as he did.

At least, last time he had done so, he had the decency to write Luke a card telling him not to worry (Luke had forgotten to read it until three months later). This time, he had simply disappeared, without so much of a warning.

“I called Lawrence’s mom the other day, when I was drunk,” Daisy said. “I told her that Lawrence hasn’t been paying the rent and now he’s even disappeared, and she should do something about it.”

“No!” she laughed. “What did she say?”

“I was rather disappointed at her response. Or maybe I should say, her complete lack of response.”

“Well, we see who he takes after, then.”

They didn’t really understand, at first, that he was gone. She had sent him a message last week, asking if he wanted to do a museum run together; the government was putting out some sort of weird ‘Appreciate HK’ scheme to get on people’s good side, and it mostly backfired, with people complaining that they rather have livelihood problems solved than enjoy the odd trifling perk here and there. The free museum program was part of that scheme. The last time they had gone to see anything together was an Andy Warhol exhibition years ago, and although he had pretended to mock everything he see (thereby mocking Andy’s Warhol mocking of the real world — it made her head hurt to think about it) she knew he had a good time.

He didn’t reply to the text message.

And then, David Bowie died. She worked at a newsroom and was one of the first to have picked it up on twitter. At first people didn’t believe it; they said his account was hacked. And then Duncan Jones himself confirmed it, and the world came crashing down. So she told him. “Bowie’s dead.” In her head, she said it the way Bruce Willis said “Zedd’s dead”, although of course it didn’t quite have the same ring to it.

She knew there was no way he would stay silent and ignore this. They both adored him, loved his performance in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, marvelled at his out-of-the-world, avant-garde take on everything he touched. Laughed at the “Heroes” scene in The Perks of Being A Wallflower Together.

“Fuck,” he replied seconds later.

And that was the last anyone’s ever heard of him.