The Girl with No Face

by M. H. Boroson

  An area had been turned into a kitchen. It had a stove and a sink, and the sink had a copper spout and handles. It took me a few moments to understand what I was looking at. The pipelines under Chinatown led mainly to fire hydrants and a few public water pumps where people would line up to get fresh water. Having a sink with a tap for running water was rare and costly, the province of the rich; I’d never seen such opulence.

  “You have running water,” I observed.

  Nodding, he said, “The water runs both hot and cold.”

  He said it as if that would mean something to me, but I didn’t understand the significance. It sounded like he was describing an attribute that was even rarer and more precious than having his own private water spout.

  I walked to a curtained corner of the room and drew back the curtain. What I saw was perplexing, a shiny white dish the size of a coffin. My eyes tracked the curved porcelain until I saw four legs ending in bestial claws, like some kind of yaoguai. “What is this thing?”

  “It’s just a bath tub.”

  I nodded, taking it in; both the tub and the opaque curtain around it.

  “She would draw the curtain when she bathed?”

  He nodded. “Anjing loved her baths. She’d splash around, and she would call out to me, ‘Play more music!’ and I would crank the gramophone for her.”

  “What do you think happened to her, Mr. Xu?”

  That softening of his face again. The pain in his eyes. “I have no idea,” he said.

  “Was there anyone who might want to harm her?”

  “Miss Xian, she was just a child. Why would anyone hold some kind of grudge against a child?”

  “Could someone have hurt her as a way to get to you?”

  “Attacking Anjing wouldn’t really be a strike against me, would it? She wasn’t really my wife, you know. I mean, she was; we were pronounced married; but really she was just a guest in my home,” he said. The sadness on his face looked profound. “A welcome guest, I should say. I tried to treat her well, I paid for her meals, I bought her clothes and candies. And now she’s gone. I’m used to it, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  He looked down at the floor. “Do you know where I spent my childhood, Miss Xian? On a sugar plantation, a slave in Peru. I lived a life that didn’t matter, among a group of people who didn’t matter. If a boy I lived and worked beside for years were to suddenly keel over dead in the heat while we were harvesting the sugar cane, I had to just look away and keep working, or I’d get the lash. People die, Miss Xian, you have to keep going,” he said. His eyes looked distant, as if the faces of his dead friends were visible to him alone. “It’s just the way things are. I got used to that fact when I was very young.”

  The weight and heat of Mr. Xu’s memories was palpable, and I ached for him. Once again, here was the past, rearing its head in the present, soaked with the blood of old wounds that could never truly heal. I thought of Mrs. Wei’s extinct people, my own mother, my own husband. What has been lost will never return. How could we hope to repair history’s damages? The past was past; the blood that stained us, what could ever wash it away?

  I did not wish to press Xu Shengdian into the wallow of painful memories. It was time to shift the conversation, to guide it, to search for answers. “When you were in Peru,” I said, “did you ever see anything like the plant that killed Anjing?”

  “I never saw much of Peru. Couldn’t go too far with my ankles shackled.” He was quiet for a moment, caught up in memory. “It’s humbling, it does something to your mind, to suffer in the equatorial heat of the fields, laboring all day, sleeping in a cage at night, and it would be one thing to do this labor for a purpose. But I think it’s harder to suffer like that, and know that it’s just so other people, the ones who matter, can eat candy.”

  “You eat candy now, Mr. Xu.”

  “I do,” he said, “and I always shared it with the girl. I tried to give her a good life, Miss Xian. Clothing, warm water, food, music, candies . . . . I even took her for rides.”

  “Rides, Mr. Xu? You own a horse?”

  “No, Miss Xian,” he said, “a do-er-ya-ee.”

  I spent a moment figuring out what he meant, and then my mouth dropped open. “A Duryea?” I said. “You own an automobile?”

  He nodded, and my mouth just kept opening wider. The first time I’d seen an automobile, I thought invisible horses were pulling a carriage. There were probably fewer than a hundred working automobiles in the entire country. They were the province of the elite, the eye-catching property of millionaire eccentrics. On those rare occasions when a Duryea Motor Wagon came bustling and farting down Chinatown’s streets, we would all gather to gawk at the elaborate device, and the drivers would preen before us, waving proud as princes to the adoring crowd.

  “How is it, Mr. Xu, that I have never seen you in your Motor Wagon?”

  “I park it in a stable I rent, outside of Chinatown,” he said. “Driving is a wonderful thing, Miss Xian; my ‘wife’ loved it when I took her for a ride.” He breathed deeply, stood, and moved around the room. The light from the picture windows turned him into a silhouette. The quarters were so much larger than he needed that he seemed almost to be drowning in space, a man alone treading water in the ocean.

  “How did she spend her days?”

  “She attended school at the Mission,” he said. “For each good grade she earned, I would reward her with a lemon drop.”

  “What is a lemon drop?”

  “A delightful hard candy. Would you like one, Miss Xian? Or perhaps a peppermint?”

  “Maybe later, Mr. Xu,” I said, to be polite. “I have not known anyone so fond of candy.”

  “Candy is part of how I choose to live,” he said. His smile would have been boyishly disarming if pain were not so clearly visible beneath it. “At the sugar plantation, forced to labor with the sun burning down on my back, and overseers beating me if I shirked at my duties, I had to work all day even if my muscles felt torn. I was always so thirsty, my skin was so dry, and I was surrounded by sugar cane. All around me were sweets I wasn’t allowed to taste. I suffered all day, every day, so other people could taste a little sweetness.”

  “I used to think you sucked on candies because you didn’t like cigars. Now I’m coming to understand what the candies mean to you,” I said. “Eating sweets is an affirmation of your freedom, is that what you are saying?”

  He nodded, looking thoughtful. “Having clean hands, too. My hands were always scabbed and filthy, when I was a boy. Now it’s important to me to have clean hands.” He walked over to the dresser and dipped his hands in the water basin, sloshing them around. We were quiet for a moment, and his eyes on me were thoughtful, perceiving.

  “Miss Xian, may I ask why you do what you do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Last year you fought a giant monster, you saved Chinatown. You weren’t paid to do that. Now, you’re paid to protect Bok Choy and his family, but you go extra steps. I’ve seen you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He rubbed his hands together in the water, making little splashing sounds. “Like when you exorcised the cigar factory, and exposed that murderer. Your boss gave you an assignment, and you performed your duties, but you went ten more steps than you needed to.”

  “If I had just done what was asked of me,” I said, “injustice would have prevailed.”

  “Is that really what drives you, Miss Xian? An unwavering sense of ‘this is right’ and ‘this is wrong’?”

  “Some things are right, Mr. Xu. Some things are wrong.”

  “Miss Xian,” he said, soaking his hands contemplatively, “I think you see your life as a series of obligations, commitments you have to live up to, difficult chores no one else will do.”

  “A contract binds me; filial duties shape my actions; the path of a chaste widow dictates my behavior.”

  “Miss Xian, you speak of duties as if you’re a windup toy, without a
ny ability to choose your actions. But look at yourself. Look at all the things you do, for everyone. You exorcise ghosts, you protect Chinatown with talismans, you help dead men find their peace. All of us here, the living and the dead, exist in harmony, and it’s partly your doing. Don’t you think you should be proud of your work?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  Withdrawing his hands from the water, he said, “Everywhere you go, people are uncomfortable around you. No one wants to get too close, because they’re afraid of getting drawn in. We don’t have what it takes to do what you do. But we know. We know you risk your life and your soul, staying closer to the land of ghosts than any of us would choose to, and we’re grateful to you. A lot of people think you’re really something special.”

  I turned away so he wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

  “Have you ever felt that way, Miss Xian?” He flicked his fingers, sending water droplets down into the basin. “Have you ever suspected there was something significant about you, a meaning behind every event that takes place? The sense that your life is more meaningful than others’? Have you considered the possibility that you, Xian Li-lin, might be someone important, chosen by some unseen power, destined to make great changes in the world?”

  “No, Xu Shengdian, I don’t need to be special. I just want to live in a way that honors those who came before me—my ancestors, my father and mother, and my husband.”

  He patted his hands dry on a large linen towel.

  “That’s all there is in the life of Xian Li-lin, then? You don’t intend to do anything more than offer remembrance to the dead? A graveyard can do that, and you’re too young and pretty to be a graveyard.” He folded the towel and returned it to its place atop the dresser.

  “I intend to walk down a path I find meaningful, Xu Shengdian.”

  He beckoned me, gesturing an invitation to wash my hands in the basin, and I went over to it.

  “That’s an interesting phrase, Li-lin, ‘walk down a path.’ When I was a boy, there was a time when I wondered if there was any meaning in my life.”

  Glancing into the water basin, I noticed something curious. Something off about it. Some kind of distortion in the light. Shadows at weird angles. The water rippled, fragmenting the reflections, and when the surface calmed down enough, I saw—

  Gods and ancestors.

  My reflection had vanished, been replaced. Looking up from the water was Xu Shengdian’s face, his victorious grin.

  Bent over the basin, I stared at the water. Xu Shengdian was four paces behind me, yet his reflection usurped my own. I had no time to react. No time to grieve.

  Part of my mind told me to back away, but I knew it was already too late.

  “Please,” I said, “don’t do this to me.”

  “I thought I was just a meaningless slave,” he said, “until the ten thousand year tree told me I’m better. I’m important, it said. It taught me that I’m a winner, and the rest of you are just people. People like Anjing, like you, just don’t matter; you’re just here to harvest the sugar so important people like me can enjoy the candy. I’m alone in this room, because you don’t count. You say you want to walk a meaningful path, but you misunderstand your role in life; you’re not the one doing the walking. You are the path, Li-lin, and I am the walker. I am going to walk all over you to achieve my goals.”

  Hearing this, knowing what he’d done to me, I simply fell to pieces, because I knew all the things I was about to lose.

  All the things that were about to be taken from me.

  Everything that made me who I was. Everything that mattered. All of it, all of me, would be torn away.

  Peachwood and talismans could not protect me. I could do nothing to stop it. Who would hear me if I screamed for help? No help would come. By the time anyone arrived, it would be too late.

  The moment I saw his face in the water, it was already too late for me.

  I managed to squeak out two words, the last phrase that would leave my lips while they were still mine. Two words before the grinning gambler who murdered his child bride could steal my life away. Two words to name the curse before it annihilated me.

  Already mourning the end of the life I had known, the end of hope, I said, “Love spell.”

  And then the horror started.

  EIGHTEEN

  Love spells do not come gently as a spring morning. They do not float along on feathered wings, or feel like tiny warm kisses behind your ear, or leave scented jasmine on your pillow.

  Love spells are jagged objects. Like rusty nails and slivers of shattered glass, they pierce your flesh. Like fish hooks, their clawed barbs dig into your skin and never let you go.

  They damage your soul. They contaminate you.

  They overwhelm. They take by force, and what they take, they do not give back.

  The victims of such brutal hexes—usually women—are unmade by the magic. Women under love curses snap like the necks of chickens at the slaughterhouse.

  First the target’s will is broken, because that’s the drive behind any hex involving love: using force to override someone’s will. When a love spell takes effect, its victim loses something crucial; the spell caster has decided that she has no right to choose. Disregarding her desires, he dumps her feelings out like garbage; he alone will decide what she wants and feels, what she is. The hex scrapes out her insides, it transforms her into an empty puppet animated only by his touch. His is the only will that matters; the unbroken one. She waits for his fingers before she makes a move; she is limp without his command.

  A suitor who resorts to such vicious sorcery has probably spent a long time lusting after his victim. Now he dominates her with a hex and makes her love him; passive as tea, she flows into his consuming mouth, goes down his swallowing gullet, one gentle sip at a time. She does whatever he says, she offers him everything she has and is, and she fears she’s not good enough. Whatever he does not want of her is worthless; she begs him to take more from her; she craves his approval, lives in terror of his rejection.

  That’s when he discovers her imperfections. He’d never seen her stomach bare so her unexpected scars unnerve him. He hadn’t known the aroma of her body after hard work. The occasional sourness of her breath makes him feel uncomfortable. He perceives a vaguely displeasing imperfection in the shape of her breasts. The untamed patches of hair on her body remind him of an animal. When he fucks her, her squealing irritates him. No aspect of her ever turns out to be exactly what he wanted, what he imagined. She will disappoint him by proving to be human, even while he robs her of her humanity. Failing to be the woman in his fantasies, she fails him; and her failures teach her how to loathe herself.

  And also, hadn’t there been something radiant about her, some quality of joyous inner fire, that once made it impossible for him to take his eyes from her? No hint of that remains. Look at her now, and sneer; this broken-willed woman, this subjugated, spineless, worshipful worm, has been brought so low; no trace remains of that spark. Her inner flame was snuffed to nothing when he crushed her will.

  A man who forces a woman’s love loses interest in his conquest once he has ruined her soul. Eventually some other woman’s face and inner fire allure him. He feels he has no choice; her beauty compels him, her haughtiness demands response. He must have her too, must knock her down and break her, must take her will and tamp out that brightly glowing flame. This is how to extinguish a match: first throw it down in the dirt, then crush it under your heel. Pfft, it goes out. Light the next and drop it, pfft, another star gone dark.

  I had seen such a woman once, accursed and afflicted; not yet twenty but I thought her a ghost when I saw her. All used up, a withered, grimy, weary remnant of something that had once been human. My father tried to free her from the hex, but she fought him and ran away. Refusing to stop loving the man who shattered her spirit and abandoned her, she took her own life.

  A love spell is not a bouquet of flowers but a boot in your face, grinding its muddy heel.

&
nbsp; Xu Shengdian’s hex was imbued with power on a scale I’d never encountered—godlike, and then some—but the spell itself was simple to the point of being crude. He’d enchanted the water, and when I looked into it, I saw the face of the man who was going to consume all of my thoughts and feelings, who was about to make my world revolve around him. The face of the man who was planning to destroy my will stared up at me, grinning, the expression of the gambler who knows he holds the winning hand. And I, I had nothing.

  There was so much power underlying the hex. Corrupt, ancient, a stream of such intense but putrid magic, a mighty polluted river.

  The cards had been dealt. All that was left now was to turn them over. But we already knew. I could see it in the triumphant grin that replaced my own reflection in the water: he knew he had won. Just as I knew I had lost.

  All would be lost, everything would be taken from me, as soon as the cards were revealed. In just a moment, I would fall profoundly and utterly into love with Xu Shengdian; as soon as I saw his real face, I’d start to adore him, I’d worship him, I’d think of nothing else. The hex would bind me to him, forever; I would become a sniveling, groveling creature, a woman brought low, forced to love him with every fiber of my being. My devotion would be eternal; it would be passionate, whole-hearted, and infinitely forgiving. The hex would activate the moment I looked upon his face—his real face, not the image he left in the water.

  I heard the man—the monster—walk up behind me. I wanted to break down and plead for his mercy, but he might enjoy the feeling of having so much power over me, knowing he had reduced a strong, brave young woman to simpering and tears. If that was what he wanted, he wouldn’t get it. This might be the last time I’d ever be able to refuse him anything, so I held silent, keeping my back to him.

  He came closer. I could feel the warmth emanating from his skin, could smell the almond oil that made his hair shine with such lustre. His hand touched my shoulder, gentle for now, yet firm. His breath rustled my hair.