by Francie Lin
" ’This is the way the world ends,’ " he sang:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
He stirred the potting soil with a finger. "You can tell by the architecture that Chiang and his army never wanted to stay." He gestured widely out the huge windows. "It is so temporary, everything is so cheap and falling down. No beauty anywhere, no investment in anything. The place looks like a big shantytown. At least the Japanese, they built the roads and the train station and the school during their occupation. And yet the Kuomintang, they expect loyalty. They expect loyalty to the idea of being Chinese. One China! One China!" he said mockingly.
He lapsed into silence, turning the plant on its tile again.
The intercom to the entry door buzzed, and I jumped. I had forgotten about Atticus’s friend. Atticus buzzed him in. I gathered up my things.
"Did you know," Atticus said, walking me to the door, "that in Xinjiang they force people to use official Beijing time? Xinjiang is hours ahead of the capital! But business is done according to the official watch. Beijing says this is a unifying practice."
He laughed, a note of scorn uppermost in his voice. Then he grasped my arm tightly. "So you will forgive me if I seem a little ideological in my beliefs, Xiao Chang? One has to fight an idea with an idea. I cannot stand an authority that expects blind following, blind loyalty. I cannot stand it. I have rejected everything in my life that requires such blindness from me. Even God. Even the Confucian teachings—even those. I have not swept my father’s grave in ten years," he said.
He let go of my arm and stepped back, reverting to the calm, solicitous man I knew. "He beat my sister when we were young. A good Confucian son would forgive him and take care of his grave anyway. But how can I? She walks with a limp now. She is blind as well."
"I’m sorry, Atticus."
He waved this away. "She, of all people, forgave him. She lives in a disability home in the U.S. now. That row of statues on the shelf there, she is the one who made them. Strange, no? They look almost like people."
He picked up one of the figurines and held it out. It resembled a faceless Madonna, black and kneeling.
"She also painted them herself. She says the colors have a feel. She says black is peaceful."
He sighed and held the door for me. "I am sorry, Emerson. I did not mean to lecture. Bring some oranges for Friday, yes? Good. See you then."
THE TEMPLE ossuary was a white pagoda with many rows of long tables set up in the front courtyard under a pavilion, facing a blackish statue of Matzu, a local deity. A weathered-looking stall across the street sold offerings: oranges and guavas, ghost money for burning—silver and gold spots painted on heavy brown paper and bundled together with twine; squares of the same heavy brown paper printed with drawings of shirts, pants, telephones, and VCRs. As I looked over their stockpiles for the dead, the proprietress and her daughter tried to interest me in a cloth representation of a house, but I shook my head. My mother hated maintaining property, and I had the oranges already. Still, I felt that I should buy her something else.
"I guess I should just give her money," I told Angel, distressed by the number of choices.
"Sure. Practical."
"It does seem depressing." I paid the proprietress gloomily. "You’d think death would be a respite."
"Want a Coke? I have a Coke in my backpack," she said.
"My mother drank Pepsi."
As we crossed the lot, the wind came up, whipping the pavilion and pulling the canvas taut with a crack of thunder. Despite the cold, several people were making offerings at the long tables, sticks of incense in hand and heads bowed in obeisance before an assortment of gifts: a liter of 7UP, a bag of tangerines. Smoke drifted over the grounds, dissolving into the white sky as if the sky itself were no more than a continuance of ash and cinders.
The administration was housed in a low pillbox to the side of the pagoda. Atticus was already in the main office. The director greeted us quietly and sat down to check something on her computer. The room was heated by a single kerosene element, and its walls were whitewashed, so that I had the disjointed sense of being near the sea. I sat down uncomfortably on a rattan chair as Atticus read over the contract for me.
I had expected to feel a surge of solemnity and weight, but the reservoir of tears that I thought was dammed inside had dried up, and instead I felt flat and detached. So this was what death eventually came down to: contracts, filing cabinets, outdated computers, a stack of dot-matrix printouts, and an enormous analog clock on the back wall with the hands stuck at nine and seven. Faint, tinny AM voices issued from the director’s little ghetto blaster.
"Do you want monks?" asked Atticus. "You can get Taoist monks to pray for her, I think. An extra fee."
"She wasn’t that devout." The numbness in my breast was starting to thaw. "She gave a little money to a Buddhist organization in California. Is this a monastery?"
"It is not. You can contract with a monk separately."
When we were done with the paperwork, the director took a set of keys from a drawer and motioned me to follow her. Both Atticus and Angel declined to come along.
I followed the woman out to the graveled lot and then up the stairs into the crematorium.
I suppose I had been expecting the funerary pomp that had adorned my father’s columbarium—the fountain, the fake flowers, the meticulously groomed carpets—but the interior looked rather like library stacks, the aisles narrow and claustrophobic, the metal lockers bare and numbered in black stencil. We toiled through wing after wing of anonymous grids, and I had no sense of haunting, as I sometimes did in cemeteries and crypts and even museums. A janitor was mopping a long, featureless canyon of ceramic tiles as we mounted the central stairs.
The burial space was on the third floor, in an awkward position in a stuffy corner. The director stopped abruptly and shook out her keys, which made a meek chime against the wind whistling around the flanges of the pagoda. The director opened the locker and left me with my mother.
I took the purse off and laid it on the ground. The cord was dirty and frayed from wearing it against my neck, and I was suddenly grateful for the heavy lockers and the solid, institutional floor. I had bought an urn with a sprig of willow carved into the brownish glaze, and now I unwrapped it, placing it carefully beside the lockers, and unzipped the purse.
A cloud of fine dust rose as I stirred the ash gently with a finger. I would have liked some kind of acknowledgment to attend the transfer, a few final words of religion or peace spoken by someone who knew them, but it was just me. I crouched down on the floor and addressed the purse softly.
"Here you are, Mother." This came out plaintive rather than up-beat. "Here you are."
I waited for what seemed a decent interval. Then I dumped the ash into the urn.
"Don’t worry about Little P," I told her.
It felt silly to be talking to a heap of cinders. Before, I had mourned the loss of her as a discrete body. A corpse I could follow in my mind’s eye, even into the ground, but the consciousness of dust was a place I could never enter, never batter my way into through grief, dream, or imagining.
Now I was mourning the imminent loss of her as a body at all. I didn’t, I thought, staring down into the little black cavern of the urn, really believe in the existence of anything apart from bodies. The janitor made his way up the stairs and began pushing his mop around down the hall, humming closely. No souls, no transmigration. I was therefore locking away the last I would ever have of my mother.
WHEN WE got back to the center of the city, it was already quite dark, and contrary to the morning’s predictions, an unseasonable rain slicked the roads. The trains expelled commuters in long, stale breaths; the evening vendors selling sausage and candied tomatoes were out on their isolated corners, heat lamps shining like jewelry inside their warming cases. Angel had pulled out her cell phone and was consulting her voice messages briskly as I waited. Despite her signature fat
igues and shapeless silk jacket, she looked different somehow, some kind of orangish glaze on her mouth, and her head seemed bigger.
"Well." Angel snapped her phone shut and looked at me dubiously. "I guess I’ll see you at home."
"Wait." I stammered a little; the thought of going back to my silent bower was at the moment so monumentally sad. "…a drink?"
She brightened a little and stuck her hands in her pants pockets, a sign that she was pleased.
We went to a foreigner pub near Yongkang, the interior of which was hung with Bavarian crests and tattered German flags. Only a few customers idled around the heavy wooden bar: an Australian and his girlfriend, and a tall, burnished American in a white lawn shirt perched on his stool, playing with an olive. He ignored us as we sat down next to him, giving a barely perceptible nod to Angel’s hello before curling his body slightly away, as if to protect the olive.
"Love Buddha," muttered Angel.
"What’s that?"
She indicated the American imperceptibly with her head. "Love Buddha. Him. You only find foreigners like him in Asia, I guarantee. A Love Buddha. Yellow fever."
I looked at him dully. "He looks perfectly normal."
"Ha. Blond, blue-eyed, not quite good-looking? Check. Drawstring pants? Check. Leave it to a professional, boyo, I can tell you exactly what he’s like. Martial artist. Drinks healing green tea and believes in peace. Sanctimonious bullshit. Speaks only to locals. Won’t talk to other Americans—will actually ignore you if you speak English to him on the street. Afraid of tainting his beautiful Oriental dream. He probably does tai chi with the ladies’ groups in the park. Eventually he’ll go home and write a memoir about his time in the mysterious Far East, how the natives all accepted him as one of their own."
She scowled at him. He frowned censoriously and edged farther down the bar. The bartender, a pretty young woman with blackened teeth, came over and spoke to him. With her he haw-hawed in muscular, flexing Chinese as if they were tremendous old friends.
Angel ordered a neat whiskey, and I had a sidecar. When the glass arrived, she lifted it toward me in a kind of salute. Then she said quietly, almost conversationally: "I know you didn’t do it, Emerson. I know you’ve still got her in the purse."
The casualness with which she said it made her seem momentarily cruel. The regular knock-knocking of my heart desisted, suspended like a breath before dying. I reached for my glass. "I don’t know what you’re talking about."
"C’mon, boy. I’m not outing you. I just want you to know that I know. So you don’t have to pretend with me, you know?"
There was a cracked mirror behind the counter. In the dim bar I looked and saw for the first time how much of my mother there was in my face. The nose and ears, and especially the narrow eyes, which observed me with mute sorrow and confusion at the uncertain resurrection of a woman who should, by all rights, have been laid to rest by now. I felt for the purse, which was tied up under my jacket; I hadn’t wanted the temple director to see. I took the purse off and laid it on the bar, where it sagged, bending toward us in a bow of humility.
"I couldn’t." There didn’t seem to be any better or more descriptive words for the fact.
"I have to protect her," I said, so fiercely that my voice cracked. "Had to, I mean. My father died when I was eleven. My brother was still a baby, and we didn’t have any relatives around, or friends. You try to be good, at that age. You haven’t learned that model behavior isn’t a form of currency. I tried to be a good student. In fourth grade, Dickie Deaver stole my lunch money every day and I never complained. One day I was playing with my viewfinder and he threatened to smash my face in if I didn’t give it to him, so I let him have it. When I got home, I told my mother I’d lost it, and she thrashed me. We weren’t very rich then," I added lamely, to excuse her. I took a peanut from the bowl. The nut meats were small, dark, and wizened, like little mummies in paper shrouds.
"I’m not busting you," Angel repeated, surprisingly gentle. "I just wanted you to know I knew."
"Let’s not talk about it anymore," I said. "Let’s talk about you for a change."
"I am one hundred percent single," she said confidently.
"Oh." I blushed a little at the revelation. "No boyfriend back home?"
"I had one once," she said and frowned. "A Catholic. I never understood about the Protestants before, but I do now, believe me, boyee! He’s the reason I’m an atheist."
"What was wrong with him?"
" ’Love the sinner, hate the sin,’ he used to say about gay people. And fornicators. And Democrats. That schmucky pious saying let him go all around campus feeling like Jesus while he slept his way through the Young Republican Club. ’I forgive you, even though you live in sin,’ he’d say after—well, you know, after. It was okay for him, because he felt bad after and would cry a lot. ’I forgive you’? Maybe that was what Father Williams said to him when he was little, after their weekly confab in the confessional, and I’m not talking about confession. Also, he had a painting of Reagan over his desk. I mean, one he painted himself."
I shook my head. "Then why did he go out with you if he wanted to bed a socially conservative Republican?"
"I think I was his Magdalene," she said without irony. "His exquisite taste of secret depravity. That’s the only thing I’m proud of in the whole thing. I hope he rots in hell because of me."
"How romantic," I said. "And there’s been no one since?"
"Not a one." She looked at me with a kind of weird intensity; I chalked it up to the whiskey.
"But you’re only twenty. When I was your age—"
I stopped; I had not thought of J in some time.
"When you were twenty?" Angel prompted.
"Nothing. I had a… relationship." The word sounded dismal and dry compared with what the thing itself had been. "I thought she loved me, but it seems she loved someone else."
"What happened?"
What had happened? Nothing. Something.
"Look, I’d rather not talk about it."
"But why? If it was twenty years ago—"
"Angel," I snapped. "Have another drink."
But after we had finished our drinks and gone home, and I was alone in my leaky house with the ashes tucked back under my pillow, I stared up in the dark and the sound of water came trickling back. The day had been hot and damp, and the tepid pond had lapped the shore. Our legs had touched; J had seemed expectant, languid. It was the most natural thing in the world to lean over, touch her waist, and kiss her. A brief, sweet, pendulous moment when she seemed to submit—and then the kiss went too far. I broke away, gasping.
"How long is this going to go on?" she called, following me up onto the bank as I retreated along the path through the woods.
She brushed aside a branch and stood at the edge of the copse regarding me. The water had dried on her skin. A kind of loneliness tore at me.
"I’m tired of it," she said. "You want me; you don’t want me. I’ve been patient, but I’m getting too old for this. You have to say the word yourself. What do you want?"
"You," I said, afraid. "But not just any old way. Not just some kind of, I don’t know, animal rooting around in the mud. The moment has never been right. Just give me some time."
"Emerson." In the muddy light, she sighed, looked at me with pity and exasperation. "Don’t you know?" She touched my cheek.
Later, I would think of her touch as a killing one—the gentle, hypnotic stroke that lulls the unsuspecting to sleep. In the end, the ashes beneath my pillow had proved more constant than J had, less duplicitous, less bound to make a point about the harshness of the world.
CHAPTER 15
ZHONG QIU JIE APPROACHED, relentless: three weeks, then two. Angel, who knew nothing of my money and family troubles, took me on a review circuit of teahouses all over the city: civilized, little, dark places with smoky teas and carved pots; bubble-tea stands; a minimalist tea café with industrial seating and some kind of bizarre theater troupe rehearsing behi
nd a blank white sheet. In the garden courtyard of a rich, pensively designed teahouse, notes of the erhu fell like droplets in the lambent light of late afternoon.
"Do you taste the oils?" asked Angel.
"Hm?"
"Oils." She pointed at something, an imperceptible film on the surface of the tea.
"Oh." I tipped my cup and squinted, checked my cell phone.
Angel punched me in the arm. "You’ve been looking at that thing all day," she complained.
I merely shook my head.
"It’s that girl, right?"
"What girl?"
"Starbucks girl. Million bucks girl. Still waiting on her, right? That’s so quaint."
"I’m not waiting on anyone," I said, in no mood for Angel’s pokings and proddings. I had left messages for Little P all week, none of which he had returned. Though Poison had said Mid-Autumn Festival, there was no reason to trust my rat-faced cousin. The erhu plucked, the fountain in the courtyard plashed. The artificial quiet grated. Restless, I spilled my tea.
"Sorry."
"Go home," said Angel irritably. "Call me when the chickie dumps your ass. I’ll be laughing too hard to say I told you so."
Outside, I dialed Little P again and got no answer. I started for home, wishing too late that I could go back to the teahouse with Angel; the peace there was better than this aimlessness and worry.
The market arcade near my house was eerily deserted, awnings flapping, plastic stools stacked—too early for dinner, too late for lunch. At the mouth of my street, I paused, uneasy. Was it paranoia or fact, the feeling of being shadowed? I looked around. Of course there was nothing. I’d make myself some tea. I unlocked my gate, trod the path through the weeds.
As I shut the gate, something winked in the grass. A piece of embedded glass had been knocked from the top of the wall. I picked it up carefully, intending to throw it away, when I looked at it again.
