The Girl with No Face

by M. H. Boroson

  The first of us to start screaming was my father. In his voice I recognized animal intensity, ancient pain, and devastating loss. Ginny’s voice joined his, then Dr. Wei’s. Mrs. Wei thumped to the lumberyard’s densely packed earth, writhing and screaming, and then Bok Choy joined the caterwauling. The terror and pain underlying each scream curdled my blood.

  And I—perhaps I screamed as well, seeing my terrible red hands dripping blood. It flowed hot and damp, and I was not bleeding at all. It came oozing from old wounds, from the people I loved who died when I could do nothing to save them.

  How was all that blood still there? I had tried so hard to wash it all away.

  Fleeing, I had left my mother behind, alone with her murderer; and my later efforts to stuff her insides back where they belonged were futile. If only I had not run. There was no repairing my broken life, no healing my murdered mother. I failed her. How silly of me, to think I somehow was no longer stained by the blood of the woman who gave birth to me and died protecting me. Here she was now, this mutilated corpse sprawling at my feet, eyeless on the dirt. One severed hand splayed out like a lump of wax in blood and mud beside her jade bracelet.

  This was the Blood Dream drowning me; I swam in the blood-soaked sea of nightmare visions.

  Splayed out boneless as a jellyfish beside my mother’s corpse, was my husband. Tall and kind and dead yet somehow still dying, always dying, opened by gunshots. Pierced by bullets, confused, his eyes going blank. His blood had spilled all over me too. How had I not washed all this blood off, long ago? How was it that my mother and husband were still bleeding?

  Nothing could wash me clean. The air I breathed was moist, it reeked of damp hot blood. The blood of the people I failed. This was the Blood Dream.

  My husband’s soul, crammed for years in too small a space, politely imprisoned, and I, I hadn’t ever realized I could rescue him. Could bring him back. But now it was too late; I couldn’t even remember Rocket’s birth name.

  I forgot my husband’s name! That wound, also, seeped fresh blood. How could I lose the name of the man I loved? How could I fail so deeply that his name was stolen from me?

  Nearby Bok Choy had scrambled to his knees, sobbing below the apparition of a hanged woman. Droplets of blood flowed like tears from her fingers, spattering his face, in his Blood Dream.

  Ginny curled up, crying, clutching the not-quite-real corpse of a boy. His weight hung limp in her arms. Blood poured from the dead boy, painting Ginny red. She convulsed, weeping, in her world of secrets, in her Blood Dream.

  Even Xu Shengdian, the ghost whose spirit body was blooming into a garden of blue flowers, was afflicted; that portion of his soul had its eyes opened wide, and looked shattered beneath a slick red coating of spirit blood. Around him, the broken bodies of men and boys, locked into chains, collared, with manacles on their wrists and shackles on their ankles, were begging him to rescue them, in his Blood Dream.

  Dr. Wei leaned back on the lumberyard table, wobbling on his feet. Pale and stricken, he held his spectacles pinched between two fingers; all around him, people in linen infirmary gowns were bleeding. Somehow my husband was with the doctor too, dying in Dr. Wei’s care, in his Blood Dream, while he also continued to die here in mine.

  Mrs. Wei wailed, her tribe fading into shadows around her. If she wanted them to dance and sing, to weave and cook, there was none of that; she saw them, in her Blood Dream, and they were dead and gone, extinct and forgotten.

  My father looked catatonic. Seeing his vision, his Blood Dream, froze my heart. Father was weeping near a pile of corpses, and levitating nearby, her immaculate white gown seeming to move as if a wind was blowing, was the White-Haired Demoness.

  No one enraged me more than the Bai Fa Monu. No one terrified me more.

  And here she was, in my father’s hallucinations, reveling once again in the massacre. Her back was to me, but her long white gown swept around her and her hair was just as I remembered it: every strand of her bone-pale locks hissed. Floating in the air, she looked proud and beautiful, radiating a sense of sublime bliss as she lofted above the scattered parts of people she’d slaughtered.

  Something felt off about her presence here. She didn’t fit with the rest of the collective nightmares afflicting us all in the lumberyard. Aside from her, every figment was an innocent; we were watching our personal histories take shape, the people we lost, the ones we failed or abandoned. . . . No one was having visions of demons. It made no sense for her to be my father’s remorseful memory; Father would not be haunted by guilt for killing the creature that mutilated and murdered everyone we loved. The Demoness took everything from us.

  So what was she doing here, now, haunting my father’s remorseful visions? Wielding my sword, I stumbled toward the figment. What if she was no imaginary being? What if this was somehow the Demoness in the flesh, come back to life and returned to maim us once more? Part of me had always suspected I would need to face her someday. . . . But not yet.

  I wouldn’t be ready for her yet.

  If the Demoness returned now, there would be nothing I could hope to accomplish. Her cruelty and her power had overwhelmed my father when he was at the height of his strength. What could I hope to accomplish in the dead of night, without a thousandth of his spiritual force, less well-trained, and far physically weaker than he’d been when he barely managed to survive her?

  I dragged myself across the lumberyard’s mess of bleeding nightmares to confront the image of the Demoness. It couldn’t be her. It couldn’t. Not yet, I wasn’t ready yet, I needed more time to prepare, I needed more training, a higher Ordination; I needed to be stronger, so much stronger.

  Step by step I came up behind her. She slowly turned around, and I saw her face, corpse-pale and ecstatically wicked. I stared. Stared. Something shattered inside me. My mind could not accept what I was seeing. Her face. . . .

  One would think, with all the traumas being reenacted in the lumberyard, that no one image would hurt more than all the rest put together. But this one did.

  I could not take my eyes off her face. Like a wounded animal, I started to howl.

  I’d only been a child when I saw the White-Haired Demoness, but there was no way I could ever forget what she looked like. The delight curling her lips as she slivered my friends, the joyous expression as she shocked my cousins into meat and left them to rot. She toyed with our lives and deaths like a mean-spirited child plucking flies’ wings to watch them squirm.

  In my father’s Blood Dream, the pale murderess turned, and finally, I could see her face.

  I saw the rapture of her evil. I saw the forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, and jaw of the witchy figure who licked up human suffering like a savory sauce, the abomination in a female shape who tormented my father’s mind and haunted his nightmares. I saw the fierce upward tilt of her eyebrows. Though the hair of this demoness was pearly white and streaming with monstrosity, this figure was not the White-Haired Demoness who killed my mother.

  Beneath the haunting white mane of this demoness, robed in the clothes of the woman who murdered everyone we’d loved, the monster in my father’s vision had my face.

  I took a deep breath. Glanced toward my father. Was this really how he saw me? Such a loathsome thing. I knew he judged me for defying rules, for using unclean magic when it was necessary, but this . . .

  Here in his Blood Dream, where his remorse and shame took shape, he saw a vision of his greatest failure, and it was me.

  He perceived me as this tainted, disgusting, vile creature, a bloodthirsty, explicitly female horror, butchering entire villages for fun.

  I thought he hadn’t seen me at all, but I’d been wrong. He saw me, all right; he saw me breaking rules, defying orders, befriending monsters, fighting dirty, starting at last to find my voice and come into my strength. And in all his life, he’d only ever seen one woman like that, only one woman monstrous enough to steal the mantle of male power and wear it as her own, in defiance of the order of things. H
e’d only ever met one powerful woman, and she murdered my mother and massacred our entire town.

  I remembered seeing her hover like a moth in midair over two teenaged boys from our village. They’d been twins. What she did to them was grotesque, but even worse was hearing her laugh while she did it. How pleasurably she laughed, how playful she sounded.

  And that was what my father saw when he looked at me.

  What must it mean to him, to see me become a stronger person? All my life, the limits he had drawn around my power. . . . In his experience, a woman could be good, or she could be powerful. Never both.

  Was Father afraid of me?

  I couldn’t stand it any longer, gazing on my own face transfigured into a demonic visage, so I returned to myself, to my own surroundings. I looked at my husband, at my mother; their blood so red and viscous, so hot with the tanging smell of iron, spilling like buckets of unruly paint, over everything. The world wept red tears through their slaughtered bodies. I could feel the hot wet blood of my loved ones on my face, and I wished I had the power to change the way things were.

  All my life, I didn’t have the power I needed.

  As a girl fleeing the Demoness, I didn’t have enough power to protect my mother. When bullets flew at my husband, I didn’t have enough power. And now, now that I and my allies were succumbing, drowning in a red flood of tormented memories, the Blood Dream engulfed me in my life’s traumas and tragedies, and I didn’t have enough power to stop it.

  No extraordinary men were coming to my rescue. My father would not tower above the stars and smash these hells to splinters, not this time. And I myself never held that kind of power . . . or, really, any kind of power at all.

  The strongest man I knew was screaming, hoarse now, overwhelmed by the opened wounds of his past. Power could not help us here.

  Or perhaps it could, but not our power.

  There was power in the universe. In the heavens and the earth. In the Dao.

  My father saw me as a demoness, but he was wrong. And now, it was time. Time to show him what he could not see. Time to wake from all the years I’d spent dreaming my own personal Blood Dream.

  I began. Began to move. Began to dance.

  The dance that moved me was ancient, flowing into my body. My soul had been nursing from the milk of stars and drinking the dew of day. I called down spiritual flames to brighten me, beaming in through the fire agate on my forehead, and radiating outward.

  It was time.

  It was time.

  It was, and it is, and it is now. Then, this then, is now; now is when this is happening.

  Everything that was, is; everything that happened, happens. I raise my hand and grasp the stars as I dance them. The stars dance through me, and this, it happens now. In this eternal moment, I become ancient and forever, pre-historic and the future; I am everything I have been and will become. Oh, believe me, beneath these coldly blazing stars I dance a broken motion; I limp the majesty of Yu the Great. My feet kick up sawdust and wood chips as I drag dirt along the lumberyard ground. I embody the shaman-king of ancient times, his lame gait belying power.

  For I alone in the world, in this moment, I alone know Yu’s secret, the primal and sacred mystery of the power of the sorcerer-king. Though he could divine the future, talk to dragons, transform into a bear, and turn giants into waterfalls, none of this was his true power, or his purpose.

  The secret of Yu the Great is this: he only truly had a single power: the power to understand what was broken in a broken world.

  And in this moment, this ancient, perpetual now, I claim this gift as my own, my strength and purpose. For what world could be more corrupted than this one? Where girls suffer, die, or are annihilated, for a man who was enslaved as a boy, who had been putrefied by communing with an overwhelming force of nature, which had itself been polluted by the desecrated corpses of men who set sail for a mountain of gold and found themselves forced into slavery?

  I see the world’s wounds, and I dance to heal them. To bring peace to a murdered girl, to redeem a faceless girl, I dance now.

  To end a man whose time is done, I dance now.

  And then there is the ancient tree whose ten thousand years of dreaming dormancy and sacred elixir of drunken, healing visions were warped by the suffering of men who had been enslaved. I dance for it too, now.

  To heal the wounded universe. To make the world make sense again. To roll back the floods of suffering and cruelty, to awaken everyone from their Blood Dream. To defeat the ten thousand year tree, and to cleanse it, I dance.

  In this unfolding Now, under the eternal flame of the flickering, faraway stars, believe me, I am dancing for us all.

  This now is ritual, this ritual is now; though centuries may pass between us like flooded rivers, I dance for you, and I always will.

  My voice strong and clear, I say, “I am forgiven,” and the words are true. “My husband forgives me. My mother forgives me. I am forgiven. Love and history wash the blood away. I remember, and I am forgiven.”

  I walk to Dr. Wei, broken-hearted amid the cluster of patients he failed to save. “Dr. Wei,” I speak in the voice of ancient stars, “you are forgiven. You did your best; you saved many lives, cured many illnesses, set many bones. Some of your patients did not survive, I know, but I know you did your best for them. Your very best. You are forgiven.”

  I approach Mrs. Wei, writhing amid her vanquished tribe in her Blood Dream, crying for her lost people. “You are forgiven,” I speak in the voice of the mountain wind. “You never hurt them.”

  Gazing at me, her eyes are mournful and older than the wind. “I forget them a little more every day, Li-lin, which is almost the same as killing them. How can I forget them? Forgetting them is letting even their songs go extinct.”

  “They will not be forgotten,” I say, and I am speaking Mrs. Wei’s native language. “I will come to you and learn what you teach me, and I will share my knowledge with others. Your people will not be forgotten. But you—” somehow I pronounce her name, her birth name, correctly—“you are forgiven.”

  I approach Ginny. She gazes up from the dead boy in her arms, and regards me through strands of hair wet with tears. “You are forgiven,” I tell her in the voice of goddesses. She holds her vision of a dead son tighter. “You may keep your secrets, Ginny. You are forgiven.”

  “I know,” she says. Her beautiful face reveals a depth of sorrow. “I know. Please just let me have a few more minutes with him.”

  I nod and walk to my boss. Bok Choy is prone and crying underneath a hanged woman’s bleeding corpse. “You are forgiven,” I speak a voice empowered by sun and moon. “I do not know whose death you mourn but—”

  “I refuse your forgiveness,” he says. “I’m no part of your salvation ritual, Li-lin. Go away, save the souls that can be saved. I reject the redemption you offer.”

  Primeval powers are dancing through me. I breathe starlight and hear everyone who cries out. Even so, facing my boss, I find myself uncertain. I stare at him with nature’s vision and reborn eyes and yet I cannot tell who Bok Choy really is, what he needs.

  I walk to Xu Shengdian’s ghost. “You are not forgiven,” I proclaim with the authority of Hell’s judges.

  “Fuck you and fuck your ancestors,” his ghost snarls. “The tree will raise me from the dead. I am special! I cannot just die like a normal person.”

  “Do you understand nothing, polluted boy?” I speak with the solemnity of ancient sorrow. “The voice you hear is gods and prophets, singing through a human throat; the Seven Stars are having their say. You died over a century ago; you die now; you die soon. You are killed; you are blamed; you are not forgiven. But look, Xu Shengdian, look and see what the universe is.”

  I show it to him, I show it all to him. I show him how time passes, and history, and the ancient, long-ago, since the heavens separated from the earth, and I allow him to see what a brief flicker his years of life are, in comparison to the vastness of the past and infinitude of
future.

  I show him the depth of the universe, the space between the stars, the faraway. I allow him to see how tremendous nature is, how complete and encompassing, and I give him an opportunity to understand how small he is in relation to it all.

  Xu Shengdian’s soul is on its knees now, weeping. “I didn’t know,” he says.

  “What did you not know?”

  “I didn’t know how beautiful it all is. Oh Li-lin, how did I not realize how small I am? How small I’ve always been.”

  I say nothing, allowing the scope of his vision to grow clearer to him. “I thought it was all about me, but I’m not the center of everything. Of anything. I’m just another person, confused, trying to make a life for myself—”

  I wheel time in my hands until I find what he needs to see. And there it is. We watch his past unfold; a group of boys laboring amid tall stalks of sugar cane. The equatorial sun heats and hurts them all, their hands are raw from handling farm tools all day, and men patrol, bearing whips. Each boy chafes in his manacles. One boy is offered an escape, and he leaves his friends and brothers behind. He goes free while they continue to suffer in their chains.

  “No,” he says, though his voice is a moan. “It can’t . . .. It can’t be true. I must be different . . . . There must be a reason I was set free and they were not. I was chosen . . . . There must be a reason, Li-lin! If there is no reason, that would mean I abandoned them. And I couldn’t, I just couldn’t do that, unless there was a reason. What was the reason, Li-lin? Tell me, why did I not rescue them from their chains?”

  I am crying now, though I do not know if I am crying for him, for his fellow slaves, or for the world. “You will not like the answer to your question, Xu Shengdian: the reason you did not struggle to free the others is that you found it easier to live as if they didn’t matter. You told yourself a story, or the tree told it to you, which reduced the rest of us to insignificant characters in the life of the ‘Gambling God.’ A small lie, but believing it year after year cost you your humanity.”