by C Pam Zhang
Stubborn, Sam is. Won’t answer. Only looks at Lucy with speaking eyes. The question Sam asked in Sweetwater fills the silence between them. Don’t you ever get lonely? All along she called Sam selfish. Turns out it was Lucy who couldn’t see past herself—who didn’t ask the same.
A thing she learned gambling was when to fold her cards down. She lets go the other questions. She could ask why Sam insisted on carrying this burden alone, why Sam didn’t tell her when Sam had a chance, why Sam’s so damn proud. So stubborn. But. All this is as much a part of Sam as the bandana and the boots, Sam who lives by different, unbent rules—Sam who could take a fortune and dump it in the ocean. Lucy folds down her anger and her fear. What’s left is the old, tired-out feeling of arriving at the end of a long trail to a dirty house.
And then it floats up, the last question that matters. “Why baths?”
Sam shrugs. Lucy yanks hard at the bandana. It slips, showing skin two shades lighter. So soft. This, out of everything, brings the threat of tears close. “You used to hate baths. Tell me why, Sam.”
“She looks at me. Renata, that’s her name. They don’t look at the men who buy time in their beds. You know that? They don’t kiss them, or really look. But she looks at me when she’s bathing me. She sees me. The proper way.”
Lucy closes her eyes and tries to see.
She sees Sam, shining.
Sam at seven, shining in dress and braids.
Sam at eleven, shining through loss and grime.
Sam at sixteen, this conviction, these grown-up bones.
She sees the gold. Not what Sam dumped, but the other kind. These hills. These streams. Shining too, despite their history, with a value more than metal. So much lost from this place. So much stolen. And yet the land is beautiful to them, because it was their home too. Sam, in Sam’s own way, tried to give that land a proper burial.
All that, Lucy can accept. The dead hills, the dead rivers. She’d shoot the last buffalo clear in the heart if it could save Sam.
Not Sam.
Lucy’s whole life, Sam was undimmed. That, she can’t see: the world without Sam in it.
Lucy opens her eyes. She reties the bandana. Hiding, once more, the tenderest part of Sam.
“Let me try talking to him alone,” Lucy says. “I’m the clever one, remember? I can figure something.”
Gold
Alone, she bargains with the gold man.
First they pretend to offer what the other won’t accept.
She offers the debt paid at sundown, in gold, if he’ll let them go off and collect it.
He offers a cloak made from Sam’s skin.
She offers double the debt paid tomorrow morning.
He offers Sam’s limbs broken into pretty shapes.
She offers a game of cards, right then and there, for triple the debt.
He offers Sam’s lying tongue cut out and served to her.
She offers her loyalty. Her smarts. Her clean hands.
He offers Sam’s hands chopped and worn as a necklace.
She offers him the services of a prospector’s daughter, a knowledge of these hills that she was born to.
He offers her two graves dug so deep in these hills that no one will find them.
They sit in silence, then. A known silence, as if of old friends swapping a story they’ve each heard before. She examines her hands, her feet, her skin, as if seeing them for the first time. Always ask why, she remembers someone telling her. Always know what part of you they want.
The gold man accepts her offer immediately. As if he knew the bargain she would strike before she did. Elske might say he saw her value.
* * *
—
And for a small price, a nothing price atop the existing debt, Lucy buys the right to lie.
She meets Sam alone in the shadow of the ship. In a few minutes it’ll be noon. In a few minutes the ship will sail.
She tells Sam she’s reached an agreement. She’ll work for the gold man. A secretary, of sorts, doing sums and writing histories. A year or two, three at most, and she’ll pay off the debt. After that she’ll take the next ship over.
Sam’s chin goes up, the stubbornness in Sam—
There is only one way.
Lucy leans back through the years and hits Sam across the face. Gulls screech and rise in the hard, clear air. The shadows of their wings darken Sam’s cheeks. Sam’s eyes. When the gulls pass, the mark remains. Lucy learned from the best. How to pivot and how to swing. How to put the whole weight of your body and your good leg and your bad life, yes, your life weighed down by grief as heavy as gold in the silt of your stomach—how to put it all behind a blow. How to then roar and break a person with words, make a person feel small and stupid. You think you’re smarter than me? I’m the one he needs. You’re worthless. Go. Git. How to stroke a face afterward. Bao bei.
And she learns that it hurts, deeper than the sting of her palm, to see that person shrink from your touch. Wondering, as Sam boards the ship, if Sam will ever remember her without the shadow of that blow.
* * *
—
Elske observes Lucy’s face when she is marched through the red door by the hired man. It’s the man Elske listens to, and his explanation of the payment. Elske doesn’t ask Lucy this time. Elske only touches.
A hard touch. Elske’s hands press through skin to feel the shape of Lucy’s bones. She gathers Lucy’s hair and tugs, pulls Lucy’s lips back from her teeth as if examining a prize horse. Elske mutters, cocks her head, yanks at Lucy’s crooked nose. No longer the gentle teacher—that was a story Elske told so well that Lucy believed.
She’ll do, Elske says at last to the hired man. I’ll take a cut, of course. And we’ll have to wait until she grows out her hair.
In the three months it takes for Lucy’s hair to reach her shoulders, Elske rewrites her. Elske selects a green fabric to tell the story of Lucy’s skin as more ivory than yellow, and a high slit to tell of longer legs. Elske consults books—not the blue one, illegible to her, but books written by travelers in her own language. From these and from the remnants of Ma’s stories that Elske plucks from Lucy, Elske writes a new tale. Of poured tea and lilting speech, downcast eyes and sweetness, a story as unlike Lucy’s own as fool’s gold is unlike true gold—but that doesn’t matter.
Lucy brings up the original offer, once. Elske doesn’t even bother to smile. That was then, and between us. This trade is on different terms.
At the end of three months, hair swept into a bun, Lucy steps into her own frame.
As she stands at the wall she thinks of all those silly arguments she had with Sam, stories against the history books. Back when Lucy was young enough to believe in one truth. She says a silent apology.
* * *
—
She pays the debt remarkably fast. It’s easy. She dug a grave years ago; now she throws into it every Sam and every Lucy that came before. All her soft, rotting parts.
The parts she keeps are her weapons.
The work is easy. The thirst of all men the same thirst. She goes blank when a man points at her. Some want a wife to listen. Some want a daughter to instruct. Some want a mother to hold their head and rock them. Some want a pet, a slave, a statue, a conquest, a hunt. They look, and see only what they want.
It goes easier after she learns how to look back at them. Their faces blur into the same few faces, repeated like suits in a deck of cards. Some men are Charleses, and these she teases and coddles; some are Teacher Leighs, and to these she plays the pupil; some are ship captains to flatter; some are mountain men to accede to; these men, and these men, and these men. Their wants a pattern as predictable as campfire tale, till she can sense the next word, the next need, the next motion of a mouth or hand before it happens.
It goes easier after her nose is broken. She reads one man wron
g, and then blood runs hot over her lips. She doesn’t wail as Elske does. She’s already thinking of how she should have nudged him, how she should have stepped forward instead of back, the words she should have spoken. She’ll be smarter next time; no one can say she’s not learning.
Her nose breaks in the same place it did many years back. It heals straight, erasing the last mark of her old self. Elske marvels, and after that adds Lucky to the story she tells about Lucy. Gold leaf is spun through Lucy’s hair. The men choose her more often.
Her debt shrinks.
It goes easier after a man comes that she mistakes for another. Narrow eyes. High cheeks. She lets her eyes fill with herself, for a moment. Then she sees: his hesitant walk, his weak chin. Wrong. Still she undresses him slowly, observing; still she tips her head close to hear him speak. New sounds. Not a Charles, not a teacher, not a sailor, not a gold man, not a mountain man, not a miner, not a cowboy. Something else. A possibility. When he mumbles in his sleep, she lets herself tremble as she puts an ear to his lips. The words she doesn’t understand are a comfort.
That man came on a ship along with hundreds more like him. Men with faces like Lucy’s, who choose her often. Lucky, Elske says again. Because the gold man has revived a long-abandoned project, joining the Western territory to the others with the last leg of a great railroad. He brings shiploads of cheap workers, men only, from across the ocean.
For a time, Lucy is gentler with them. Their speech a blank to her as her life is a blank to them; and on it, she writes the stories she wishes. My day is very well, she says in response to their babbling. How did you know red is my favorite color too? One day, there is a man who pays for a bath. Just a bath. Oh, she says as she fills the tub, I should’ve guessed that you were a prince in your country. She soaps his back, his broad shoulders, and then—something makes her kiss the part of his hair. He looks up. Her heart beats as his mouth opens. She is certain the next words will be ones she understands despite their two languages.
But he only puts his tongue in her mouth. He upsets the water, overturns the stool, leaving suds on the rug and bruises on Lucy, till Elske comes up with a hired man to remind him, firmly, of the coin it costs for extra services. As he spits and cusses, dragged out soaking and transformed, she realizes: his hair and eyes may be familiar, but he is no different. Another Charles, another mountain man.
She sits a long time watching the water drain. Herself emptying too. Coming to understand that even among faces like hers, she can still be alone.
It goes easier after that.
The ships come, the tracks grow, the hills are razed to hold them. In the Western territory the dry grass blows, torn up at its roots. There are tales of dust storms, though Lucy, in the red building, doesn’t see or smell or taste or swallow their grit. All in service of a great railroad to span the continent.
She hears the cheer that goes through the city the day the last railroad tie is hammered. A golden spike holds track to earth. A picture is drawn for the history books, a picture that shows none of the people who look like her, who built it.
The mountain man said that no man in this country could complete the railroad. He was right, after all.
On that day, Lucy claims sickness. She lies in bed. Her eyes closed. Trying to summon up old images. Gold hills. Green grass. Buffalo. Tigers. Rivers. Trying to remember any story but the ones she spends her days selling. The images flicker like mirage, gone the moment she gets close. She stares as long as she is able, mourning what she can before it slips away.
The trains have killed an age.
It goes easier after Elske gives her a gift. Or rather, Lucy earns it. Twelve months’ good work for a key to the room of books. For two days Lucy sits reading, searching, her feet tapping as her eyes race across the pages, an old wandering itch in her though she hasn’t left the red building. History after history of other territories across other oceans: hills smeared with jungle, plateaus cold as ice, deserts, cities, ports, valleys, swamps, grasslands, peoples. Lands vast and distant—and all of them recorded by men like those she knows. Even one history of this territory. A book thick with dust, clumsily written, the name of a schoolteacher big across the front. She looks for a promised chapter but finds in those pages only a few lines, herself reduced to something crude and unrecognizable.
At the end of the two days her eyes blur, the words blur; she shelves the books, her limbs gone numb. She falls into a deep, dreamless sleep and doesn’t return again to the room. Certain, now, of the truth she’s suspected. New places there may be, new languages—but there are no new stories. No lands left wild where men haven’t touched, and touched.
She doesn’t try the blue book. No point, now, in reading it.
* * *
—
At the end of many months, when her debt is paid, the gold man lies winding his watch in her bed and says he’ll give her a gift. Any gift, he says, as if generous, as if he hasn’t already extracted all value from her.
He asks her what she wants.
She asks, first, for a mirror. Lets herself look at last—no, see. The nose is strange to her, as the face is strange, thin and stilled. She will never be pretty, with a girl’s shine. She will be beautiful in a way that makes the chests of certain men ache to behold, as if they hold dowsing rods. She cut her hair, but it came back to haunt her. She checks over her shoulder, but no one stands there. The white of her neck is her own. Her unblemished face, her own. No one can hurt her now. Her body is immortal, or rather it’s died so many deaths in so many men’s stories that she fears no longer. She is a ghost, inhabiting this body. She wonders if she can ever die.
For the second time, the gold man asks what she wants.
The old word is on her tongue. She hasn’t spoken it in a year. She tries to remember oceans, ships, star fruit, lanterns, low red walls. Tries to imagine a piece of them for her. But the storybook images have been replaced by the faces of the men she’s known, too close, too clear, their lines and pocks and cruelties. She sees herself on those red streets, coming upon the men, upon their wives and their children. Their horror. Her horror. Stretch wide as it may, that land no longer has a place for her. She thinks of Sam grown taller on that land, longer of stride, more shining. Sam taking up all the space Sam wanted, speaking a language not Lucy’s. She holds that image for a moment, brilliant in her head. Then she lets it go. She lets it go. Gives Sam up to a people Sam wanted. Those people were never truly hers, and now never can be.
The word on her tongue she lets go. She does not say it.
For the third and last time, the gold man asks what she wants.
She thinks of the other direction. The hills where she was born, and the sun that bleaches sky and brightens grass. She thinks about when she stood in a dead lake and held what men desired and died for. She thinks that was nothing, really, compared to the way the noonday sun makes the grass blaze. Horizon to horizon a shimmer. Who could truly grasp it, the huge and maddening glint, the ever-shifting mirage, the grass that refused to be owned or pinned but changed with every angle of light: what that land was, and to whom, death or life, good or bad, lucky or unlucky, countless lives birthed and destroyed by its terror and generosity. And wasn’t that the real reason for traveling, a reason bigger than poorness and desperation and greed and fury—didn’t they know, low in their bones, that as long as they moved and the land unfurled, that as long as they searched, they would forever be searchers and never quite lost?
There is claiming the land, which Ba wanted to do, which Sam refused—and then there is being claimed by it. The quiet way. A kind of gift in never knowing how much of these hills might be gold. Because maybe if you only went far enough, waited long enough, held enough sadness pooled in your veins, soon you might come upon a path you knew, the shapes of rocks would look like familiar faces, the trees would greet you, buds and birdsong lilting up, and because this land had gouged in you an animal’
s kind of claiming, senseless to words and laws—dry grass drawing blood, a tiger’s mark in a ruined leg, ticks and torn blisters, wind-coarsened hair, sun burned in patterns to leave skin striped or spotted—then, if you ran, you might hear on the wind, or welling up in your own parched mouth, something like and unlike an echo, coming from before or behind, the sound of a voice you’ve always known calling your name—
She opens her mouth. She wants
Acknowledgments
To the hills of Northern California for holding me in splendor. Bangkok and its lesson of solitude. The half-lit seat at Luka in Silom. The counter at Hungry Ghost on Flatbush. The fireplace at High Ground. Green Foxfire at the Hambidge Center. The Jane Austen studio at the Vermont Studio Center.
To the echo and collage of Divisadero. The thick love of Beloved. The snap of The Shipping News. The long, traveling songs of Gawain and the Green Knight, Little House, Lonesome Dove.
To Mariya and Mika, odd friends of the heart. Will and Capp St, steadfast. Mai Nardone, cantankerous and true. Jessica Walker and Tiswit. Brandon Taylor, alien twin. Lauren Groff, champion of women. Bill Clegg and Sarah McGrath and Ailah Ahmed, tenacious believers to the end. Aaron Gilbreath at Longreads and the team at The Missouri Review. All of Riverhead and Little, Brown.
To my mom and Ruellia, for what is hard to say. My dad, once more. My 奶奶 and family across the ocean. Avinash, my home.
And to Spike, prince among cats, who stayed with me long enough to see this boat to water.
About the Author
Born in Beijing but mostly an artifact of the United States, C Pam Zhang has lived in thirteen cities across four countries and is still looking for home. She's been awarded support from Tin House, Bread Loaf, Aspen Words and elsewhere, and currently lives in San Francisco.
