by Ho Sok Fong
Her thoughts carried on like this. She felt another tide of gratitude and all at once her mind was illuminated.
How miraculous, she thought excitedly, these aren’t my own ideas. Someone has planted the seeds for them in my brain.
The clock stopped chiming. A steady tock-tock-tock returned to the hall. Kikuko made the sign of the cross, then clasped her hands together. “Amen.”
She felt transcendent. As if she were sitting inside a flower growing toward the sky. She searched her mind for sentences that could capture this elation and settled on Psalms 4:7: “Thou hast put gladness in my heart, more than in the time that their corn and their wine increased.” Psalms 139:17: “How precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God!” And then Psalms 139:3: “Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.” Energy coursed through her body. She felt at once powerful and profoundly relaxed, as though the gateways to her soul had been thrown wide open. It was like drinking the fine wine at one of Sir Kimson’s parties.
Pastor Chiu’s face and body appeared before her, only he wasn’t floating in the air this time; he was reclining on the Persian rug. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes were starry, and he was unbelievably sexy. Naked like Adam, looking up at her from between her thighs.
Heat spread rapidly from the pit of her stomach, until her whole body was boiling.
“Oh God!” She leaped up and rushed to the kitchen.
The kitchen was astonishingly dirty. Fragments of broken plates were piled in the corners. Firewood that had once been stacked neatly under the stove was strewn all over the room. The sawdust covering the floor was clumpy, like a blanket of dead leaves. She tilted the clay water pot on the stove, removed the lid and started scooping the contents into her mouth, without even looking inside. The water tasted stale, as though it had been sitting there a long time, but she didn’t care. It was pleasantly cool.
Then came the next part.
The butler rose up soundlessly from the other side of the stove, clutching a hammer. His face was black and his eyes were ringed with green. One of his cheeks had swollen up, turning a mottled purple. His finger was bleeding. A living dead man.
Kikuko screamed. Ran out into the sun.
She ran as fast as she could, not pausing to put on her geta. She had not been this frightened in a dozen years; she ran so fast that she was about to take off. Her hair flew out behind her and her sleeves flapped like wings.
All she could think was: don’t be scared don’t be scared don’t be scared. It can’t hurt you, nothing can hurt you.
There’s only one bastard who can. He can definitely hurt me, but I’m going to love him so much…
Out on the lawn, the balloon was inflating. A perfect, shiny sphere.
The cable that tied the basket to the work platform was taut and twitching. Hans looked on in delight.
“This one, I’ve flown it once before, long-distance! For a little jaunt over Sandakan, oh, it’s perfectly safe.”
He opened the little wicker gate to the basket.
“Just don’t fall into the jungle, don’t let those natives—”
“Move it!” said Sir Kimson.
Before Hans could get out his reply, Kikuko had swooped past like a bird. An enormous ball of fire erupted behind her.
And there it was: the grand residence of Sandakan’s esteemed superintendent, Sir Kimson Wings, crashing to the ground. Flames leaped and half the sky turned black with smoke.
Kikuko jumped into the basket. Sir Kimson followed, slashing the mooring cable with a knife. The balloon was full of air. The grass receded. The people below were pale with fright, sliding quickly away beneath the basket, shrinking to specks. A man ran along the road like a wronged ghost, screaming, “Stop him, that conman, that fraudster—”
Said fraudster offloaded a sandbag and turned up the burner. The flame blazed golden.
Someone opened fire, but it was no use. They were too far away. A little squadron of soldiers sprang up, marching through the house as though they had been lying in wait. Red uniforms, black felt berets, moving in a perfect V formation. They looked like ants.
The balloon passed over impeccably ordered plantations. Rubber, coconuts, cacao. The jungle covered the hills like a rich green quilt. The branches of the Kinabatangan River weaved in and out of the undergrowth. St. Michael’s church looked no different than any of the other buildings around it; they all looked like tinderboxes.
The docks. Kikuko craned her head out of the basket, looking for the Manila ship—it should have come in that day, the last arrival of the season. Where was it? The balloon continued along its invisible path through the sky, and suddenly everything was even farther away. Zinc roofs merged into terracotta roofs, lying in static waves beneath the sun.
The balloon followed the curve of the bay, then flew out over the ocean. An island like a green olive. Islands scattered like gravel. White foam seemed to spout directly from where the blue dome of the sky met the water. Kikuko was too high up to perceive the waves: all she saw were white lines, rolling and dispersing, rolling and dispersing.
A tiny boat bobbed in the middle of the blue.
“Lan-ka ship! Me, me, me!” Sir Kimson’s face shone with glee; he was so overcome that he could barely speak English.
“There they are, my Caos of the South Seas! My family! Come to meet me! Those red-haired devils are so high and mighty, but they can shove their ang moh heads up their assholes, this dogshit ping-bong is all mine now!”
He threw his head back and laughed.
He tugged gently on a dangling cord, which opened the little vent at the top of the balloon, extinguishing the burner. Abruptly, they dropped to barely a hundred meters above the water.
The ship was not a pretty sight. Rotting, decrepit, loaded up with rusting copper and iron debris. All its surfaces were thoroughly blackened. Men and women were milling about. It didn’t seem like a freighter, but it hardly seemed like a fishing boat either.
Kikuko thought of rumors she’d heard about cruel, unfeeling pirates, especially the notorious Caos, and felt the hairs on her arms prickle. The ship was close now, and the people on board were shouting. The man she had known as Sir Kimson shouted something back and they tossed out a rope. At the end of the rope was a devilish hook, which glinted in the sunlight—a few moments and it would land in the basket. Kikuko offloaded a sandbag and fired up the burner. The balloon shot up. A transformation took place among the people on deck: they screamed and yelled at the top of their lungs.
Their voices gradually fell away.
“Shitting, shitting fuck!”
The wind blew, carrying the balloon along with it. They were not as high up as before. Soon, they were back above Sandakan. Soldiers scuttled along the narrow alleyways, every so often firing up at the balloon. Kikuko could see the sparks at the ends of their rifles.
“You’re going to get us killed,” she said.
“Not so easy,” said the rogue. “The northeasterly is coming.”
“You think you’re so clever,” said Kikuko.
“Mong-gang! You stupid cunt! I was born on the seas. That devil bastard they called Sir Kimson is dead and gone. They know I’m a pirate now, and as you’re with me, if they kill me they’ll kill you too.”
“Atama okashi!” said Kikuko, reverting to Japanese. “Get out of the way!”
“How can I get out of the way? Leave that sandbag!”
Kikuko wanted to shut off the burner. Once again, she and Sir Kimson were tangled together, ready to tear one another apart. To Kikuko, wrestling like this felt like embracing herself. The sun was blinding. A bright halo flitted before her eyes, making the pirate look not quite real, like a figure from a dream. At certain moments, he seemed to disappear completely. Then the basket would turn and the halo would vanish, the shadows would settle, and he’d come back into view. But even then, she wondered—is this an illusion? Who is he really?
She bit him. He roared in pain and slapped her
across the face. That brought her to her senses. All she had wanted was to give thanks, receive blessings, love. To love and be loved, to hold and be held.
When the basket spun, its suspension cables became tangled up with the rope for the vent. Somehow they stayed up, their lives at the mercy of that bundle of rope. As dusk fell, they headed into the sea of clouds along the horizon. Islands drifted through it, the wind carrying them in from the distance, the whole sky an expanse of ink-blue ocean. Thousands of waves seemed to bat clusters of islands toward the shore, then pushed them away, then new waves rolled in from the distance and began all over again. In this way, the islands never met the shore but neither did they leave it. They were near then far, near then far, on and on, in an endless rhythm.
Kikuko knew what happened to bodies without shells. They frothed, turned into clouds, then into smoke. But sooner or later, so did the tough ones. Shell or no shell, they all turned to smoke in the end.
The horizon whirled, sketching an enormous circle. The setting sun turned the jungle a wildfire red.
The northeasterly arrived, and it blew them out to sea. Perhaps because the hot air was starting to fail, or perhaps because it was October, sometimes they drifted gently, and other times they jerked violently from side to side, like a quick-stepping dancer. They were in a wicker basket two hundred meters up, floating up and down, weaving back and forth across the shoreline. When the balloon dropped, the abruptness was shocking: for a moment it felt as if they were already dead, plummeting into the sea from the heavens.
Until the fall stopped, and the balloon rose again.
Kikuko felt the weight return to her body. The pirate was solid again. His bones knocked against hers, his joints against her breasts, shoulders, waist, backside, thighs. It hurt, but at every collision she felt a pang of desire.
Her shoulders trembled. From her head to her feet, she frothed like whisked batter. Her stomach was cramping intensely. She couldn’t control it, it was simply too bad, and even if they were about to die, she still had to—now—right now—
“Filthy whore!”
“It’s your water that’s filthy! What kind of trickster is so stupid he couldn’t leave one maid behind?”
“No point! If I’d known this would happen, I’d have sent the butler to the pig house and got a pig to fuck him so hard his balls ended up in his ass.”
“But what about the cooking, boiling the water?”
“I kept a whole house of them and I used one a day, then I killed them after. The day before yesterday I’d finished the whole lot, and yesterday no one came to serve me—goddamn it, you stink! Couldn’t you at least die first?”
Shit the consistency of watery porridge dripped through the basket, falling on—well, who knows where the wind took it. Fortunately, the rain came, slicing through the blue of the sea and sky. The balloon dropped and the waves were suddenly so close that they threatened to carry off the basket, but then the descent stopped again, thanks to the razor-sharp reactions of this old pirate by the name of Cao, who rapidly offloaded two more sandbags. The rain had skewed his fake nose and beard, making it look as though his features had been ripped off and then badly reassembled; only his chin remained in place. He added fuel to the burner and the balloon tilted, as though climbing a mountain, narrowly avoiding an enormous ship that was slicing through the waves.
Kikuko wiped rain from her eyes, striving to read the ship’s name. And there it was, written out in katakana: Manila maru.
Oh God. Kikuko felt a trembling spark of hope: I beg You.
Was he there?
The deck was soaked from the rain. The balloon flew so low over the ship, it almost seemed it would land.
That’s October for you, month of unruly winds and unpredictable currents. The balloon cruised slowly over the deck, where rain splattered and bubbled. It passed over the wheelhouse and chimneys, and steam from the latter might even have dried the bottom of the basket a little; might even have pushed it higher up. Deckhands and steerage passengers watched a whale-like shadow move over their heads. A shadow huge enough to crush them and, even through the downpour, a shadow that howled like the sea.
March in a Small Town
“The girls wielded their scissors with great zeal, cutting out their clothes patterns.”
— Xiao Hong, “Spring in a Small Town”
TWO YEARS EARLIER, nimble of hand and foot, bare soles smacking across the floor, Cui Yi had been able to run through all ten rooms without even pausing for breath. Ten was not so many, but it was a tall, thin, four-story building without an elevator. During the day, the hallways of the second, third, and fourth floors were lit by a couple of dim lamps. The wallpaper was old and floral-patterned, with damp patches and scuff marks faintly visible beneath the windows and along the base of the wall. Two Malay maids were in charge of cleaning the place, and had been for over twenty years.
Seeing as Cui Yi was there, her aunt gave her the task of running up to inspect the rooms as guests were settling their bill, to make sure the towels, slippers, mats, drinking glasses, teapots, and so on were all accounted for. They were hardly high-quality items (the insides of the teapots were black with stains, and the flush toilets and desk lamps were always breaking), but that was no guarantee. Once, a guest had walked off with the light bulb.
“People do the strangest things,” said her aunt.
The guesthouse was near the bus station, indicated by a sheet of galvanized iron hanging from the ceiling of the five-foot walkway, featuring white lettering on a painted blue background. When the bamboo shutters were pulled down against the sun, it was not uncommon for bird nests full of eggs to come down with them.
There was a rickety wooden staircase on one side of the lobby. At each turn in the stairs, a louvre window looked onto the pasar; early every morning, sunlight splashed through the slats. Cui Yi used to charge up those stairs, taking them two or three at a time on her way back down. She didn’t worry about the wood giving way—if it did, that would be her passage to a whole new world.
This particular year, Cui Yi had arrived in February. Her cheeks had filled out, although the rest of her was still skinny, and she wasn’t as quick on her feet. The stairs felt narrower and her feet seemed to have grown. She climbed slowly now, taking one step at a time.
Every so often she sat with her legs up behind the reception desk, painting her fingers and toes with her aunt’s nail polish. She copied her aunt’s way of nestling the phone in the crook of her neck and greeting callers with an affected, sing-song, “Nam Tin Guesthouse…” When there was nothing to do, she picked up a newspaper, usually either New Life Post or Mun Sang Poh, and went to sit by the door, reading the serialized novels. She liked the feng shui and palm- and face-reading sections too, and would go examine herself in the mirror, or flip over her hand to inspect the lines. Even her aunt couldn’t resist joining in with that—she would reach over with hers, asking when she was due to strike it rich in the lotto. Three of her aunt’s fingers were adorned with sparkling rings, and there was a grotesque tattoo of the character 恨 on her wrist. Regret. The strokes on the left-hand side, supposed to represent the heart, were oddly squashed. “Didn’t it hurt?” Cui Yi asked once. And her aunt replied, “The heart part did.”
The first Saturday in March, Cui Yi helped style her aunt’s thick hair into a beehive, just like Jenny Hu’s. She stabbed it full of bobby pins, securing the structure from every side. When the bell rang at reception, she had just painted on the first of her aunt’s eyebrows.
“Damn it,” grumbled her aunt. “Trust them to show up now, right when I’m in the middle of something.”
“I’ll go,” volunteered Cui Yi.
“My ass you will,” said her aunt, and strode to the front desk.
In the bedroom mirror, Cui Yi could see through the reflected doorway to the reception area beyond. Her aunt’s hair looked beautiful, like a big black conch shell. Her backside was even more impressive, a fact all the more apparent because she
was standing up and shifting impatiently behind the desk, causing her buttocks to jiggle from side to side.
The figure at the desk had his back to the light, and an expression gloomier than an overcast sky.
Cui Yi watched her aunt turn away from the desk and yell, “Ah Cui!” She was staring right at her, looking through the door and into the mirror.
“Ah Cui—”
“Coming!” shouted Cui Yi, not moving an inch. She had a perfect view of the guy from where she was. He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than she was.
“I’m taking him up, watch the desk,” said her aunt.
Cui Yi stared as he moved away from the desk, and everything returned to being blank and lonely. She went to sit in the lobby. The idiot next door was singing again, Titti titti, little titti titti… He was always inside, behind a shadowy, grate-covered window that faced onto the street. He only sang for the Indian; that was how you knew the Indian was back. The Indian never wore a shirt, only pants, and his hair was matted into coarse, rope-like dreadlocks. The singing had no effect on him and after a while the same was true of Cui Yi, who often found herself listening without really hearing. Today she sat in a daze, watching the comings and goings in the street, her thoughts flitting like mosquitoes, and she couldn’t have said when exactly the idiot stopped.
Cui Yi moved back to the bedroom and slumped across one end of the dressing table, head in her hands. Her aunt’s slippers slapped down the stairs. Her face slid into the mirror.
“Don’t swing your feet, it’s bad luck,” said her aunt. “Want to come out with me?”
Cui Yi slowly shook her head.
There was nothing left for her to help with. Her aunt put on eyeliner. Cui Yi heard someone in the lobby and, in the mirror, watched the guy leave through the front door.
Sometime after six thirty, her aunt was finally ready. She had cloaked her generous body in a full-length dress of gold brocade, which swished around as she admired herself in front of the mirror.
