We ordered blue points on the half shell, beef consommé, tomato soup, roast lamb with mint sauce, halibut baked in port wine, roasted asparagus, potatoes Parisienne, and, for dessert, sorbet and Muscat. I smoked a Havana cigar, and she took a puff or two, because why not? She discovered a fondness for cigars. “I wish I could have another one, someday,” she said, watching the smoke curl up into the air and dissolve, much like her life. “But had you not called me into being, I would never have tried it even once. At least I tried it once.”
Our hotel room was on the 9th floor, with a view of the mountains. She fell asleep peacefully in my arms, and then I fell asleep as well to the sound of her gentle breathing. When I woke, it was 5 in the morning, and she was gone. I was still fully dressed, and a breeze was riffling the curtains in our lavish chamber. I got up out of bed, stumbled down the spiral staircase that led to the lobby, and I wandered out onto the avenue. The town was blue in the shadowy moonlight. Between Sidonie Street and Fawley Lane, a young man suddenly appeared where a moment before there had been only empty space. He had dark and long red hair, which waved in the night breezes. He seemed confused. A moment later he was gone, replaced by a portly man holding hands with a Colored woman, and then, after a moment of confusion, they too were gone.
“Deadlings,” I whispered foolishly to myself. Summoned by someone’s dreams.
A few more perplexed deadlings popped in and out of the world, and so I watched this for a while, but after a couple of them provoked a bewildered, lurching fist fight and popped out of the world at the same moment, I lost my interest, and I wandered across the avenue and followed Fawley Lane to the north. The street narrowed to muddy pathways between dark buildings (and which reminded me of the slums of home) and then widened to a starry thoroughfare that crawled up over a stone bridge which crossed a body of water – a canal, maybe – flanked by marble and stone buildings from a far earlier, apparently European era. On the other side of the canal, I walked alone until I came to a quiet sign that read Café. A thick black arrow pointed one story up. I pushed open a heavy wooden door, trod up a torch-lit stairway and into the empty café. A wide window looked out over a dark, quiet cityscape.
There were just three tables in the room, little round wooden tables. One of them, which was close to the window, was lit by candlelight, and was set with a short white tablecloth. The other two looked sadly neglected. I sat down at the table in the window, and I looked out at the canal. A duck dived from the sky and frolicked briefly in the moonlit water.
After a few moments, a man walked through a door in the back of the café, and he approached my table. I recognized him immediately as the man from the frugal hotel in the Sidonian city center.
“I suppose I am your waiter,” he said.
His voice, thickly New England.
“I suppose you are the reason I am here,” he added.
I asked him to explain. I said that I was new in town.
He wagered a guess that I had woken at five in the morning, and that I had wandered about the city and eventually found myself at this café. He further guessed that I had not for a moment questioned that I was meant to be a customer in this establishment. And so I had sat down and waited, even though the dive was hardly welcoming.
“I, on the other hand,” the man continued, “awoke at four in the morning, wandered the streets of this city, and I found myself here at this café with the absolute certainty that I was intended to take an order. A cup of coffee, I believe.”
I shrugged.
“All right, then,” I said.
“A cup of coffee it will be?” the man asked, making certain. “In the kitchen, there is a cup of coffee, which looks and smells freshly brewed. Otherwise, the kitchen is entirely empty.”
“Yes,” I said. “A cup of coffee. If that is what is meant to happen. If that is what I am meant to order.”
The man nodded, vanished through the kitchen door, and he returned a moment later with my coffee in a china cup, which steamed alluringly.
“You take your coffee without cream or sugar, I imagine,” he said, as he placed the cup gingerly on the table. “There is no cream or sugar in this establishment, and so I imagine that none is desired.”
He gestured to the empty chair. I nodded, indicating that he could join me if he wished. He sat, and he watched me drink my coffee.
His name was Frederick Slocum, he told me. I said that I was honored to make his acquaintance, but I didn’t tell him my name. I still did not know the name that was meant to accompany this new face.
The coffee was very good, strong and hot, but not bitter. I would have expected that a society that had mastered Magic might have also mastered the art of decent coffee, and here, at least, I was not disappointed.
“What brings you here?” he asked me, and he didn’t really wait for me to answer. “I’m here from New York. Not originally. From New England originally. Family of maple syrup farmers.”
He laughed at this, as though it were funny, and I laughed along, as though I also found it funny.
“I imagine I have something to show you,” he said. “Shall we see what it is?”
After I finished my coffee, we left the café, and he steered me to a sharp left, away from the canal and into a narrow alley that descended between two plain but towering brick buildings, until we were nearly underground. Now the sun began to rise, and as we exited the alley we found ourselves in a meadow spotted with blue and gold wildflowers. Small, idyllic villages dotted the horizon, while the Sidonian metropolis receded into the distance behind us, glowing in the sky like a daytime constellation. I noted to Slocum that all of this seemed far larger than Sidonia’s little Montana valley, and he nodded. I said that I had never seen a city reflected in the sky, indeed burned into the sky as though with a branding iron, and he smiled a little.
“It all seems impossible,” he remarked. “Doesn’t it? Everything.”
He looked around us.
“There should be a path somewhere near here,” he added. “A little trail, leading us – wherever we are going.” He smiled. “I find there is always a trail, leading me where I am going. Wherever that happens to be.”
Now, please forgive a slight digression. I had believed, up to this point, that while certain Sidonians were attracted to the movement by politics – a more egalitarian world, rights to the masses, and so on, which I believe was Lucy’s motive – the remainder were driven by pure greed (or pure need). But this was not entirely correct, and I realized it on the little side trip that I took with Mr. Slocum.
My life hasn’t been easy, as you may have discerned, and my guess is that your life hasn’t been easy. Life is not easy. Maybe you have lost a job. Maybe it was a job that made your existence a misery, but losing this terrible abomination of a job has made your life even worse than it was before. Maybe you lost your spouse – either to an accident, or an illness, or to someone whom your spouse simply loves more than she has ever loved you. Maybe you lost a leg or two. When events of an uncontrollable nature happen, religious types may tell you that God has a plan. Philosophical types who do not necessarily believe in a deity may quote Nietzsche (without necessarily knowing that they are quoting Nietzsche) and insist that whatever “does not kill us makes us stronger.” If your favorite horse kicks your wife in the head, and she descends into a coma that persists for the next three decades, it may be part of God’s plan, but it is probably not, and while it doesn’t much matter either way (whatever God intended or didn’t intend, you need to find someone else to comfort you and pick the radishes that your wife once picked), and while none of us can prove it one way or another, it is certainly evident beyond any doubt that your wife, having been kicked in the head without being killed, is not the stronger for it, Nietzsche notwithstanding.
I mention this only because, as I watched Slocum search for a path that he had never seen before, but which he knew without a speck of doubt that he was intended to follow, I realized that there was more to this movem
ent than bread and circuses. Sidonia had wiped out the messiness of life and promised its denizens not merely just rewards for their faith and loyalty, but a careful existential design, mapped out by a thoughtful God who would never look away when your horse rears up and your wife is in the way. It is not just greed that draws us to Sidonia, it is submission to a Kingdom of Heaven that has thoroughly reorganized the chaos of life into mathematical certitude, without the doubt and tribulations of Job. Life is not a search for the mysteries of God, I realized. It is a search for the certainty of mathematics. Truly, here in Sidonia, everything happens for a reason.
After a while we reached a little trail that led into the woods, which at length grew thick and seemed impassable. The path continued onward, and as long as we remained on the path, the brush parted for us. After about a quarter mile walk through the thickest, darkest stretch of the forest, we came to a small clearing, where six young men sat on the forest floor in a circle. One of them was playing a lute beautifully and singing like an angel. They wore green and blue uniforms, which, though unfamiliar to me, gave them the bearing of soldiers of war, or a mercenary army. No guns, though. Still, I backed up nervously when they came into view. Slocum put his hand on my arm, trying to reassure me, but also holding me steady. I consciously relaxed. This was, after all, why I had come to Sidonia.
The soldiers stood, and the man with the lute leaned it against the tree.
He smiled. I could see in his eyes that he recognized me and respected me, but I could not yet tell whether we were personally acquainted, and so I held back a bit. I nodded politely.
“Sidonian brothers,” said Slocum. “Look who wandered into my café, early in the morning.”
He smiled, and it was not unkind.
“You should have told Mr. Jerome that you had arrived,” said the younger soldier.
“I hope I have not offended him,” I said. “I wanted to experience the Sidonian dream as an anonymous visitor.”
“With all due respect,” said the soldier who had earlier been playing the lute. “You are an Otherworld Fabricator, are you not?”
I pursed my lips noncommittally. I was not entirely sure if I was disguised as a Otherworld Fabricator.
“You cannot see things as a plebian would, sir,” he insisted to me.
My new face clearly belonged to someone rather important, someone with perhaps great powers, someone who could flit along the borderline between worlds, pursuing the great Cause. It was the first time that I had begun truly to recognize the scope of the movement, although I was to become all too familiar with it when the Sidonian war exploded in earnest, early in the following century.
I followed the Sidonian soldiers, who led me out of the forest back into the city, down the main boulevard and right up to the gate of the Sidonia Palace, which opened, and we walked through, and the riches and wisdom of the universe revealed themselves to us.
Chapter 18
Master Yu’s train stopped in the night in New Jersey, and he took an early morning boat into lower Manhattan, then hiked the remaining blocks to Chinatown. As he passed Wall Street, glowing red in the sunrise, a young man stood at a street corner, unwashed in a fashion that Master Yu recognized as a political form of grubbiness.
“Sidonia is coming!” the man bellowed, his voice cracking with fatigue and righteousness. “Justice is nigh!”
He had pamphlets, which he waved about, although there were as yet no takers.
Yu came to a modest little house off Baxter Street, with an apartment in back of a Chinese cigar shop, and he rapped lightly on the front door. At length, an old and weary Chinese man pulled the door open a crack.
“I am looking for a wise sage,” Master Yu said. “Or perhaps a man whose name is ‘wise sage.’ ” Then, remembering the last piece of the puzzle, he added, “And perhaps you have a minor harem? Four wives, or thereabouts?”
The old man shook his head in resignation, and he pulled the door fully open.
“I imagine that I have been expecting your visit,” he said. “Come in and have a cup of tea.”
The old man’s surname was Chang, but his first name was Chihche, which, if pronounced with different tones than the ones he actually used, would have meant “wise sage.” Pronounced slightly differently, it would have meant “lewd strumpet” or “gifted artisan.” But he was not himself a wise sage, a lewd strumpet or a gifted artisan. He was just a tired old man who’d had the bad luck or unfortunate judgment to have moved into a house with an ancient secret in the cellar.
The house was furnished rather haphazardly, in keeping with the old man’s personality. A painting of the Kitchen God was hanging in the kitchen, where it should be.
As Master Yu enjoyed his tea, four women doted on him, all of them pale and white, with rosy, healthy cheeks, and in their late thirties to early forties. The pale white women were chattering away in fluent but rough, flawed and heavily accented Chinese, and it grated on Master Yu, although he appreciated the effort. He could hear the sound of children overhead, shouting and playing, in Irish-brogued English and Chinese. When the women were out of earshot, he inquired, and the old man admitted with some embarrassment that he was married to each of the four women, who were all Irish.
“Why?” Yu asked. “Why did you marry four Irish women?”
“Almost no Chinese ladies here in America,” he said. “And in America, only Irish ladies willing to marry a Chinaman.”
“I am happy that you have four wives,” Yu asked. “Because it fulfills the prophecy. But what I meant to ask was, why more than one?”
“They less demanding than Chinese ladies,” Chang said, grasping at straws. “Let me sleep when I want to sleep.”
“Maybe you like Irish ladies,” Master Yu said, “so you marry one, see another one on the side from time to time when your wife isn’t looking. But why marry so many?”
The true answer was less than simple. Back in China, Chang Chihche fell in love, hopelessly and forever, with a young woman fated to die. She died beautifully and in his arms, expiring with a gentle and delicate sigh on her lips, as the sunrise bloomed like a flower.
Bereft and heart-broken, Chang traveled to America, where he sought to forget his sorrows in an ocean of hard labor, which would stretch from early morning till late at night and leave him with a dark and dreamless sleep.
Nevertheless, when he awoke in the early mornings, he was lonely, and no one woman could ever replace his little dove.
So he married four.
One with the courage and passion of his lost love; one whose smile he cherished, and who had a golden laugh; one whose compassion came close to compare; and one with a fierce intelligence.
These four women whom he married, when taken as parts of a whole, were very nearly the equal of the beautiful pearl of his far-lost memory.
He didn’t tell this to Master Yu. It was too personal, too romantic, and it was not something for a gentleman to share with a stranger. So instead, to his shame, he shrugged, and he said that he didn’t really know, come to think of it, how or why he’d gotten himself into this particular kettle of fish.
“They’re not like Chinese ladies,” he said.
A little silence passed between them.
“I don’t think,” Yu Dai-Yung said again, “that this explains why you chose to marry so many of them.”
The shadows flickered behind him.
Chang sighed.
“Maybe, not knowing it, I do it to fulfill the prophecy. Hmm? Yes?”
Master Yu changed the subject.
“I found a very old document, Chang Chihche. It directed me, I think, to this very home, this very spot, unless I have misread it terribly.”
The tired man was silent.
“There is something unusual in this house,” Master Yu said. “Is there not?”
Master Yu heard a distant rumbling, like faraway thunder. The sky outside remained blue and clear.
“You cannot fight Red Eyebrows here in the real world,” Mas
ter Yu said. “You must fight them from somewhere else. From their home, where Eyebrows are born.”
Chang Chihche sighed again.
“There is something,” he said, “in the basement. In a room in the basement.”
And his red weary eyes grew redder and wearier.
He gestured to the stairs. There was something in the basement, he repeated, that might prove of interest to Yu Dai-Yung.
An old nag was tied up in the corner.
Yu Dai-Yung nodded to the horse.
“This is your horse,” Chang Chihche said.
Yu Dai-Yung said that this wasn’t his horse.
“My horse is a brown horse with strong legs. I left her in a stable in Sacramento. A beautiful horse. This is not my horse. This is an ugly horse. This horse can’t run. This horse would die if we went to war against the Red Eyebrows, or tried to traverse even the first mile of a desert battlefield.”
The old man shook his head.
“This horse has had a long life. He was a wild island colt, the fastest of his year. He fought the other horses, and he won. He fell in love, to the extent a horse can really fall in love – I suppose he fell into a sort of canny, devoted loyalty – and he became a father himself. He was captured, he was tamed, but he never gave up his will to fight. It is this perspective – experience – which will serve you well where you are going.”
And then the tired old man uttered words that terrified Master Yu so badly he felt as though his heart had been cut open.
“You will need to travel to 枉死城.”
The terrible poet blinked.
“I’m going to 枉死城?” he asked.
This was indeed alarming. 枉死城, this place to which Master Yu was soon to be consigned, could be translated loosely as the Chinese Hell of the Innocent Dead, which doesn’t fully do justice to the terror it would strike into the heart of your average terrible Chinese poet, who might wish to write about it, but who wouldn’t yearn to visit. It was a place that lived in myth and, Master Yu had always believed, in reality. Of all the magical places of Chinese legend – and there are quite a few – the Hell of the Innocent Dead was the one in which Master Yu had always believed most fervently.
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