by Zen Cho
Chief Thug threw her on the ground. Jess rolled instinctively, curling up like a touched millipede, so when he kicked her it caught her in the back and not the stomach.
It still hurt. Jess drew her knees up in the fetal position, whimpering. Blows landed on her upper back, her neck, her shoulder, her ear. The god wasn’t going to help her. Nobody was coming. She cut her lip on her teeth and felt her mouth filling with blood. She was going to die.
There were raised voices above her. The men were shouting, quarreling among themselves. She couldn’t make out what they were saying. She should crawl away while they were distracted, but she had scarcely formulated the thought when she was hauled roughly to her feet.
Someone shoved her in the back. She staggered over tarmac onto the cracked concrete slabs that covered the shallow drain running along the back of the shophouses. The rich stink of the drain rose in her nostrils.
A man pushed her against the wall. The exposed brick scraped her cheek. He fumbled at the hem of her dress, pulling it up.
“No,” said Jess, “fuck you.” She struggled, trying to pull her dress back down, trying to break free, but she wasn’t strong enough. She heard herself babbling, praying, “Sister! Sister! Kill them! Fucking kill them all! Kill me. Let me die. Please, oh God, oh God.”
She felt air on the back of her thighs. Her underwear was exposed. The man kicked her legs apart. Jess had never been touched except in love or lust, never fucked anyone she didn’t want to. All her life she had been treated as something precious, someone who mattered. Maybe that was why the Black Water Sister was angry at her.
“I’ll give you whatever you want,” said Jess. She wasn’t sure if she was talking out loud or inside her head, but it didn’t matter. “Anything. All the blood you want. All the lives. You can fucking bleed these assholes dry. Sister, please!”
A heavy hand held her down. She could hear the man fumbling with his pants, the zipper coming down.
There was no answer to her pleas, from the god or the men. But suddenly a great calm descended on Jess, flattening her fear and anger until it was as if they had never been.
She didn’t need to make a big deal of this. It had happened before. Men were like that. They couldn’t control themselves. It would be over fast. It wouldn’t hurt much, so long as she relaxed. Afterwards, when he had calmed down, things would be better. He would do something nice for her to show he was sorry, like tapau her favorite charsiu for dinner. All she needed to do was empty herself of terror and anger and the will to resist, become a still vessel for his rage. He was doing this because he loved her.
But he doesn’t love me, thought Jess suddenly. He’s not—why would he love me?
He was her husband, came the answering thought. Of course he loved her. That was why she had married him. It hadn’t been for money, he never had money even now. She was the one who worked. It was her wages that would pay for the charsiu.
It was like the drive in the dark car, a street lamp flashing past once in a while, illuminating the interior and revealing the passengers’ faces to one another. Occasionally there was a burst of lucidity, light washing through Jess’s mind and laying its contents bare.
She wasn’t alone in her head, Jess realized. There had been no need to call out to the Black Water Sister. The god was here with her, inside her.
With the realization came a sense of her life and the Black Water Sister’s, parallel streams running alongside each other until they joined together. For a suspended moment the two of them stood outside time, in the space between the god’s past and Jess’s future.
Here, they—she—could see everything clearly. The outcome of her past had not been inevitable, just as what was happening to her now could be avoided, quite easily. Before, she had died alone, but now there were two of them, welded into one—dead and alive, flesh and spirit, past and future.
And she didn’t have to put up with what was being done to her.
You didn’t have to put up with any of it, thought Jess.
She wasn’t frightened anymore. She reached back for the man’s hand.
But of course she’d had to put up with it, argued the voice in her head—the god’s voice, though it felt like Jess’s own. What else could she have done? Left her husband and gone back to her family? Her family would have told her that a woman’s place was with her husband. They would have scolded her for making a fuss about a few small quarrels . . .
But now they were dead. And she was still here.
She pried the man’s fingers from her neck. He was protesting, but the protests trailed off when she crushed his hand in hers. The bones ground together with a satisfying crunch. The man screamed.
She turned, jerking him forward, pulling him off-balance. He lurched into her. She put her mouth on his jaw as though she was kissing him and bit down until her teeth met bone.
The coppery taste of blood bloomed in her mouth. She spat and pushed the man away, kicking him between the legs so he doubled over.
After you are dead, the boundaries between you and other souls grow thin. She could feel the man’s agony. It was divinely irritating, a sensation like picking at a scab.
Without difficulty she took a knife off another man who was coming toward her. She stabbed him in the gut, but something stopped her from making sure of the death. She pushed him gently to the ground and stepped over him to get to the next man, the blood singing in her veins.
She had never felt like this before, in life or in death. No one else had ever offered her such a wondrous sacrifice—these men’s bodies for her to break and bloody and use, as hers had once been used; their suffering a banquet for her to pick over at her leisure, their pain a salve for her own unceasing torment.
A great tenderness welled up inside her for Jessamyn, a profound love for this strong young body that would let her do all she wanted. She would do the girl justice. She was going to enjoy the night.
TWENTY-THREE
Jess came to herself slowly.
She was lying in a bed. The air on her face smelled unfamiliar, but it was cool and dry enough that she had to be indoors. She opened her eyes and looked up at a nondescript beige ceiling.
She was in a hospital ward. She turned her head and saw Ah Ma.
“Ah Min?”
For once Ah Ma’s image held steady. Her hair was gray and brittle. She was in those pajamas old Chinese ladies always wore, and her face was concerned. It made her look like the kind of grandmother who cooked you nice food and nagged you about your weight and stayed in her grave once she was dead.
“Ah Ma,” Jess meant to say, but her voice fluttered away from her.
She felt terrible. What had they been doing with her body?
She remembered the god’s pale face in the darkness, the promise in it—and the threat. What had she been doing with Jess’s body?
“Ah Ma,” Jess tried again. This time the words came, scraping her throat on their way out.
For the first time ever, Ah Ma looked glad to hear her voice. Relief crossed her face. She said gruffly, “Now only you come! You know or not how many times I called you?”
“What time is it?” said Jess. Her voice sounded thin and creaky, the voice of someone who had barely survived a grave calamity. “How did I get here?”
“Ambulance lah then. You think what, the god flew you here?” said Ah Ma. “She doesn’t give chance to her mediums. If it’s down to her, you’ll still be lying there in the morning. Lucky thing there was no block anymore. Must be the god chased away the foreign spirits when she entered you. After she went off, I went inside you and took you out to the main road so people can find you. You were bleeding, you know! The doctor had to staple you up, like exam paper like that.”
Jess’s head hurt. Memories of the night came back to her in bits and pieces, like a bad dream. Chief Thug’s face right up against hers, so close she could se
e every bead of sweat, his blood warm on her hands. The guy who’d pretended to be a cleaner, sobbing like a child.
“Where is she?” she said.
She didn’t need to specify whom she was talking about. Ah Ma knew.
“How I know? I’m not the medium anymore. She ran off back there in the alley, after she finished playing with those men.” Ah Ma shook her head. “You were covered in so much blood, the doctor thought you must be dying. Didn’t realize it was other people’s blood. Your mother almost fainted when she saw you.”
“What?” Jess sat up, but she regretted it immediately. The movement sparked off a series of explosions, pain lighting up all along her body. She looked down and saw a cast on her right forearm, covering her wrist and ending before her fingers. There was another cast on her left ankle, the one that had betrayed her when she was running away.
But she was in clean clothes—her own faded T-shirt and shorts, imbued with the familiar scent of the detergent Kor Kor used.
“My mom came?” Jess touched the soft weave of her shorts with her good hand.
“The hospital called your parents. Your mother brought you new baju to wear. Your old one, the dress, she threw away because of the blood. Didn’t even want to clean it.” Ah Ma sniffed at this wastefulness. “She cried the whole time she was washing you. She and your father stayed here for a few hours, then they went back to rest. They didn’t sleep last night. Worried because you didn’t go home. Your mother is like that, the mind is not strong.”
“She is strong,” said Jess. “She was. She’s had a tough few years, that’s all.” The thought of her parents looking after her made her feel like a kid again, treasured and safe. She wished they were still there. “Why didn’t they wait for me to wake up?”
“They did,” said Ah Ma. “Only after they talked to you, your parents went back.”
“I woke up before?” Jess had no recollection of this. Maybe it was the head injury. “I don’t remember talking to them.”
“It wasn’t you who talked to them,” said Ah Ma. “It was the god.”
“What do you mean?” said Jess, but her body already knew the answer. She felt cold, nausea rising in her throat.
“I called you again and again, but your spirit don’t know went where already,” said Ah Ma. “When you opened your eyes, it was the god who was there. She didn’t say much. She was quite confused, or tired, maybe.”
The god had sat in Jess’s body, talking to her parents while she wasn’t there. The idea chilled her to the bone. The god belonged to dark alleys, violent men, nighttime and desperation. She wasn’t supposed to seep into the daytime. She wasn’t supposed to take over any more of Jess’s life.
“You said she went away after she—” Jess swallowed. “After she dealt with the guys who kidnapped me.” She didn’t want to think about the men—what they’d tried to do to her, or what the god might have done to them. “Did you summon her back?”
“Why I want to call her for what? I said already, I was trying to call your spirit to come back to your body. Instead she came,” said Ah Ma. “This is happening is because you didn’t follow protocol. When you invoke the gods, you must do it properly. Carry out the rituals. Then when you don’t want the god anymore, ask them to go back. But you simply do only. Whenever you felt like it, you called her. The god is not like a contractor, you call when you need them to fix the toilet or what.”
Jess seized onto irritation with relief, grateful for any distraction from her mounting dread.
“I wasn’t the one who invited her in in the first place,” she said. “That was you, if you’ve forgotten! I only called on her when I got attacked.”
“I also suffered. You think I didn’t suffer?” said Ah Ma, never one to shy away from a fight, even when her opponent had multiple broken bones. “Ah Kong, after he drank he went crazy. Anything also he wasn’t scared to do. One time he picked up the iron when it was hot and threw it at my head! So many times he almost killed me.
“But I tahan. I didn’t call the god just because I’m scared. These spirits, when you ask them to come, it’s like inviting your friend to stay at your house. You invite too often, they’ll start to think they can come whenever they want. You let this big sister enter you so many times, she thinks your body is hers already. Your body also cannot tell what’s the difference between your soul and her soul.”
The joy of battle drained out of Ah Ma.
“You watch out,” she said heavily. “Next time she goes inside you, could be your spirit cannot get back in. Sometimes it’s like that.”
Jess stared, petrified.
She knew Ah Ma was right, better than Ah Ma knew it herself. After all, it was Jess who had crossed the boundary between herself and the god, letting it be crushed under the need of the moment.
The Black Water Sister had been in her head, but it hadn’t stopped there. For a time they had been the same person. Jess had felt the god’s hurt that was her rage that was her hunger. A soul who died the way she had could never be at rest.
Now that she had Jess as a channel for that hunger, she would never let her go. That dark fury would consume Jess until she burned down to nothing. Her body might live on, but she would end up as insubstantial as the dead herself—a hungry ghost, exiled from her own life.
“Ah Ma,” she said, “you have to help me.”
“You think I won’t help if I can?” said Ah Ma tetchily. “Even if you’re a gay, don’t listen, scold your grandmother, you’re still my granddaughter. And you taught Ng Chee Hin a lesson. After what happened to his men, hah! He won’t dare to say grandfather story this or grandfather story that. He’ll know how to respect!
“But I can’t do anything. Who am I to fight the god? That useless bastard.” Her tone made it clear she was talking about Ng Chee Hin again. “In the end you beat him, made him lose face. But because of him, you’ve ended up losing even more. He won’t even know how much you suffer. Same as Ah Ma, last time.”
She meant herself as a penniless young woman, not much older than Jess, but already widowed by her own volition, abandoned by her lover and charged with the care of two children.
Jess was in a pretty bad state, but she couldn’t imagine dealing with a situation like that. She felt a sudden rush of fondness for Ah Ma—this ornery, redoubtable survivor who’d never stopped being mad about the bad hand life had dealt her.
“I’m not asking you to fight the god,” said Jess. “I need you to get me out of this hospital, that’s all.” She looked at the cast on her leg. The idea of getting out of bed was daunting. “I’m not sure I can walk with this thing. But you could help me.”
“You want me to go inside you and help you walk?”
“You did it when you got me out of that alley, right? Even if it hurt, you wouldn’t feel it.”
“That’s different. That one no choice,” said Ah Ma. “Now you’re safe in the hospital, the doctor is looking after you, you should rest. If you move here move there you’ll hurt yourself only.”
“So I should lie here and let her take over?” said Jess. “If it’s a choice between hurting my leg and losing my soul, I’m going to take my chances with the leg.”
“You want to fight the big sister?” said Ah Ma. “After you gave her those men’s blood, she is very strong now. Even the big god will find it hard to beat her. You ask Tai Seng Ia to chase her away now, maybe he can’t do it also. You think you can?”
Jess shivered, even though the AC wasn’t that strong and she was already sticky with sweat under her clean clothes. She’d mostly been managing not to think about the men, but she couldn’t avoid the question any longer.
“What happened to those guys?” Jess took a deep shaky breath. “Did I kill them?”
“You think I went to check if they’re alive or not? I ran off as fast as I could.”
“Ah Ma.”
“I don’t know,” said Ah Ma. “The god was rough. She made sure those bastards bled. But she didn’t get to play with them for long. Your body couldn’t tahan. Anyway, if they die, they die. Why do you care so much? It’s the god who did it what.”
Jess wasn’t convinced. In her patchy memories of last night’s violence, it was another force that had fought those men, that had struck and hurt and stabbed with a strength she didn’t possess. But the fierce triumph that had coursed through her veins, the vindictive satisfaction—that had been her own, as much as the god’s.
She looked at her bruised hands. They had been cleaned. She could imagine Mom patiently wiping them, giving loving attention to every crease, careful of every inch of skin. But the nails were still encrusted with dried blood.
“I can’t live like this,” whispered Jess. She cleared her throat. “I have to do something.”
“But you want to go where?” said Ah Ma, her voice rising. Someone who didn’t know her would have thought she was working herself up into a fury. Jess thought, She’s softening. “I told you already, even if you leave Penang, you cannot run away from the god.”
“I’m not planning to run away,” said Jess. “I want to go to the temple.”
“And do what? You destroyed her altar already. What more is there to do? You want to cut down the tree? Offend some more gods?”
“I want to talk to her, that’s all. Are you going to help me or not? Don’t forget, I got you in front of Ng Chee Hin,” Jess added. “So you could tell him what you thought of him.”
An involuntary smile spread across Ah Ma’s face at the recollection. She tried to hide it, turning down the corners of her lips, but her face had already betrayed her and they both knew it.
She raised her hands. “Fine. If you want to go and break your legs, who am I to stop you? But if end up you get cursed because you don’t want to listen to Ah Ma, you don’t blame me!”
“I won’t,” said Jess. If her plan didn’t work, soon there wouldn’t be much of her left to blame anyone. But she didn’t say this. “Thanks, Ah Ma. Let me call Ah Yen. Where’s my phone?”
