by Aimee Liu
I jump when the real Tai touches my wrist. My camera is pointed the wrong way, my body turned back toward the intersection. The traffic light blinks yellow.
“Party time.” He leaves his hand just long enough to steady me, then takes his position behind Mrs. Ling. The man across the graveyard is gone.
I scramble up onto a nearby tombstone and position the lens at an angle that won’t read the language of eyes but only the gestures of bodies: Jenny and her mother standing side by side in front of the grave; David lighting first the joss sticks, then the stacks of money, and slowly returning to his mother’s empty side. The air fills with the lurid sandalwood incense and a brief, minimal warmth from the flames. Everyone bows three times to the dead man’s spirit as the burning bits of silver and gold tumble across the dirt, then flicker and rise on a wave of air, pulled by invisible strings.
Just as the ashes are disappearing through the iron bars to the crossroads, skeletal hands clamp my arms. The ghost turns me.
Tai’s mouth. Tai’s jaw. Black hair bleached to the pallor of stone and white eyes from the dead.
I hold onto my camera and curl my tongue to keep from crying out that Lao Ling has not escaped. He is trapped. My film has caught his entrapment. I have dishonored him and now must be punished by demons.
I hold onto my camera and shout without sound. What face can a ghost man have?
He turns me with fingers biting into my bones. A calm like ice pours through me as the wraith’s mouth opens. His face is crevassed with lines. It is not Tai’s face.
“You,” the ghost-demon accuses. “You survive.”
I hold. I hold onto my camera and finally press down. Down, down, down on the shutter.
“Maibelle!” Tai calls from another world. By the time he arrives my arms are free. The ghost has faded away.
“You all right?” He cranes his neck to see beyond me. “Don’t be frightened. That’s Winston Chang. He’s a homeless guy used to live in Chinatown. A little crazy, but he’s never hurt anybody.”
“I’m all right,” I say. He lifts the camera from my grip. “I’ll be all right.”
* * *
We part company outside the cemetery. David goes with his family to their cousins’ in Queens, Tai and I take the subway back to the city. We don’t talk much, but I can feel him waiting. He holds his notebook awkwardly, upright in his lap. It bobs forward and back with the train’s motion. He positions his mouth to speak, then doesn’t, instead fixes on the striped stocking cap of the woman in front of us.
“What is it?”
He startles, looks over. “The stripes. They remind me of noodles.” His eyes wander around my face. “Are you hungry? I could make us noodles with shrimp.”
The notebook falls flat. His cheeks strain against a smile.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. I’m starving.”
It’s the first time I’ve been back to his apartment, and I’m not prepared for the sight of packing boxes, the absence of pictures from his walls. Only the prayer rug is still in place.
“You’re moving?”
“My cousin’s decided the real estate’s hot enough. Time to sell.”
“But where will you go?”
“I’ve sublet a loft. It’s a little raw, but big. I can have it for three years.”
“Where?”
“Fulton Street. Brooklyn.”
“You said you’d be stranded anywhere else.”
“I’ve been stranded here.” He waves his arm at the squared-off walls, the plywood doors, and confetti floor. I know what he means. It’s like a motel room. Not even my mother could transform it. I just assumed that didn’t matter to Tai. Certainly not enough to leave Chinatown.
He moves into the kitchen and begins pulling out pans and food. Outside the sliding glass, the sky has softened to a loose amber color that brightens the spurts of rooftop smoke leading down toward the river. The water itself is black as a paved road. It pulls, drawing me toward the balcony.
Tai puts down his knife. He lifts his hand, beckons me back.
“Come. I can use your help here.”
I stay where I am but turn away from the glass and the light. A clock hums in the kitchen. I try to concentrate on the sound, to use it as an anchor, but Tai’s presence is stronger. The quality of his silence. The stillness of his waiting face. So different from that ghost-man in the cemetery. How could I have confused them?
Unbidden, the words unravel into each other, bend backward in circles and squares. He comes forward, leaving his tools, his task. We sit on the floor. Darkness sweeps the room. The words keep spinning out of me, but he catches and keeps them.
As I talk, the space between us shrinks, the strength of Tai’s listening holding us in balance. He hears my dreams as if casting for a fish. His attention is his hook, his attention and the even softness of his gaze, which sinks, touches, pulls one buried image up after another. I’m afraid of the pictures inside my head, of the memories behind them. I’m afraid of what I am likely to see each time I close my eyes. But he’s not afraid. He’s not fishing, either.
By the time I reach the most recent nightmare, about killing my parents, I am breathing hard, perspiring, hot, as if I’ve been sprinting or fighting. But that changes after I finish to a sense of incredible lightness. Almost giddiness. I feel unsprung.
“As if you’ve reached inside,” I tell him, “and pried open the fingers of a huge fist.”
“A giant’s fist?” He touches my wounded thumb. We are facing each other on his prayer rug. “You did the work.”
“But you listened.”
“I think dreams can tell you things you need to know.”
He is wearing a pale green shirt, open collar. Cross-legged, his jeans hike up to expose a strip of smooth skin above the tops of his socks. White socks. Black sneakers. The edges of the soles are wearing through to canvas, the middles pressed into wave patterns.
“Maibelle?”
“I’m sorry.
“You don’t have to confront them alone.”
“I don’t think—”
He leans forward and kisses me. Swiftly. Fully. His lips are soft and comforting.
I push him away.
“That won’t help. I’ve tried.”
“Not with me.”
“It won’t be any different.”
“I think it will.” But he doesn’t try again. “Would you listen to me, then? My nightmares.”
I nod. The sounds and smells of cooking seem to simultaneously erupt in apartments above and below. We continue to sit in darkness. It’s hard for me to listen. I’m not like Tai. The thought shames me. I try harder.
He is telling about Lao Li, how he changed after I left, his love for Old China becoming an obsession.
“He organized his own gang of Boxers.”
I grope for the connection. “Boxers?”
Tai explains that Li talked endlessly in his final months about the “foreign devils” who had ruined his country and left it to rot. He had trusted them, thought they were his friends, but they were evil. All of them. He talked himself into believing that it was still not too late, he could bring back the old ways and stop the barbarians even now. He would resurrect the Boxers, the antiforeign movement of the last century whose Chinese name meant “Fists of Righteous Harmony” and whose mandate was to preserve the dynasty and destroy all foreigners. Li convinced Tai to join.
“He told us to think of tourists as foreign oppressors, encouraged us when we roughed up a few Jersey kids. Still, I couldn’t think of it as what it was—a street gang—until he gave us weapons… I pulled a gun on someone.”
The reds and blues of the prayer rug vibrate in the lamplight. I follow a river into a flower into a circle.
“But you didn’t pull the trigger.”
“No, I couldn’t. But I came so close, Maibelle. It terrified me. I told Li I had to quit. He went crazy. Yelled that I was betraying him. My family were all cowards. My father—he said terrible things. Unfo
rgivable things. A few weeks later he died. They said it was a brain tumor. So I thought, that’s why he changed so, became so cruel and obsessed. But the damage was already done.”
I press the nap to calm the colors. Li. Tai’s words squeeze my memories of him into a tight, unyielding ball.
“The gang start calling themselves the Dragonflies, hook up with one of the tongs. They say my father has to pay lixi, but he tells them no, Li protected him. My dad doesn’t understand why things change, now he’s an old man.”
“You didn’t tell him how Li had changed?”
Tai makes two fists and presses his knuckles together. “He believed Li was his friend.”
“But you made him understand he had to pay!”
“They wanted too much.” Tai turns away, toward the window, and speaks to the darkened glass. “Late one night I come around the corner down the block from my parents’ store and see the gang out front. Six of them. They’re laughing, shouting, like who cares if anybody sees them. A couple have switchblades out, goofing around like kids. The others crouch on the sidewalk, all business. Tying rags around these stones, soaking them with gasoline. I knew but I couldn’t move, couldn’t yell.”
Tai faces me, searching. “It was like I was asleep, Maibelle—you know how sometimes you scream in a dream and no sound comes out, you run and run and don’t get anywhere—that’s my nightmare. All I could do was watch. I watched them light the rags. Chuck the stones through our window. I watched them laugh and run away. A second later the store blew up.”
I feel sore, as if I have a blister inside my chest. I close my eyes and see the muzzle of a gun rising. I look quickly, catch his gaze. The irony and rage I find there stay the gun but burst the blister.
“They used firecrackers. Firecrackers, three to a bundle—same as for New Year’s, you know? But these were packed with black powder.”
I scoot forward, pull his hands into my lap. On the soft insides of his wrists I feel his pulse beating steady, persisting in spite of his words. They are only words. Only story. But he won’t let it end.
“My mother was in the back room working late. We had bars on the windows and doors. The explosion was so powerful—it lifted the desk, slammed it against the window. We found her crushed between the bars.”
I picture the Mrs. Wah of my childhood—a squat, energetic woman in a pastel housedress and flapping galoshes. A grin too wide for her face. She gave me butterscotch candies and called Henry her number-two son. Her forearms were as tough as baseball bats from hacking up all those chickens, but that didn’t do her much good in the end.
I imagine Tai’s pulse weakening, stopping, and rub his hands hard, to awaken the blood. He reclaims them and his voice pours over my head.
“I remember the roar of the birds in the basement, beating their wings against the cages. It wasn’t the explosion or fire that killed them, you know? It was terror.”
“I know.”
Tai’s face seems to graduate into shadow, not crisply halved, but gently, the way twilight blends toward night. You sense things at twilight that you can’t fully see, and in just this way I know his eyes are following mine as I trace the hard, smooth angle of his jaw with my forefinger, find the flat, dime-sized tip of his chin, and turn back and up to the deep, hidden space just below his ear where the resistance of bone gives way to softness.
His kiss is even softer. He smells of the night and, dimly, reminiscently, sandalwood. I gulp that scent, yank it around and into me like water. I can no longer tell if my eyes are open or closed, whether my feet are on the floor, where his lips stop and mine begin. I draw closer, and he gives a low, earthly sob, pulls me against him, molding his body to mine until I can no longer touch the space between us.
He starts to undress me, but I pull the clothes off ahead of him. There will be no more words, just his lips, the roughness of his shirt. And when the fabric slips away, the smoothness of his skin. We will make love. Love. Love.
I feel the darkness of his eyes on my face, the lines of his body, his hair. At his touch my skin springs into gooseflesh.
“You never told?” I whisper.
“Told?”
“About your mother. What happened to your father?”
He stops moving. “There were threats. I left instead. My father died of a stroke a year later.”
“But you never told.”
“Not until tonight.” He cups his hand over my shoulder.
The hand tightens. I want to trust him, I have, but the light behind my eyes breaks into a deep white glare so powerful I no longer can see him. His bones squeeze against me. Not just my shoulder, my wrists and feet, dragging me down. A weight on my chest, pushing. Pulling. How can it be so black and so bright? Like a flare through a blindfold. His hands grope.
I sniff the air around him. Not sandalwood now but fish. A deep, briny silt. The odor seems to steam from his skin, from his pores. Salt, brine, raw as sex. Not love. The smell pours over me, into me, stronger than the darkness. I can’t breathe through the stink of this man. This lover. I can’t breathe.
The smell becomes a pressure on my throat. Voices laughing, crying. I look down but can’t see, can’t fly away. Hands like insects crawling inside my skin. The smell makes me sick. Down. I’m looking, falling. They’ve cut off your wings, Johnny tells me.
Get out!
I rear back and snatch my clothes. This man isn’t right. Not blond. Not Johnny.
“Maibelle, what is it?”
He sounds breathless. I lunge for the door, one leg, then both. Shirt. Shoes without socks. Find the knob and turn.
He stands and steps forward. Arms widen. Naked.
“Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me!”
If it’s locked, there’s the window. Flight. No, that’s crazy. No wings.
The door opens and I run. Down the endless, echoing fire stairs. Out into the street and crowds of people. I run between cars. Point uptown and go. If I stop, they’ll come after me, back to the white light, splitting pain.
“Get out of there,” the White Witch yells as I run. “Protect yourself.” She means with my weapon. My camera. But I’ve left the camera behind with them. With him.
In the moonless dark the orange eyes of cigarettes blink and jab. Voices climb as I pass, and behind, some shout. The stink of fear surrounds me.
There are no cabs for blocks. Some streets have no light. But Canal Street, ahead, is lit up like Vegas. There waits a Checker but when I look in the window the driver’s head seems to lift off his shoulders. Murderous blue eyes, hair as shiny as a plastic bag. His cheeks are on fire.
I run on.
I see myself as a madwoman like the old Bowery pawnshop ladies. Gray skin, empty eyes, caved-in bodies. Alone. So alone they’re untouchable. I slow down. Can’t let that happen to me. I can’t but it will. It’s already started. I have to shake myself out of this. Else I’ll be damned.
I am walking by the time I reach Eleventh Street. I can still feel my heart twitching, but I pay attention to my breathing. I check periodically, no one is following. No eyes in the dark. Only people, coming and going, their voices making clouds in the chill night air.
A cab waits outside my building. He gets out and hands me my camera bag. I take care to avoid his touch, his eyes.
“Why, Maibelle?”
I pull away and run inside.
17
That night the phone rang. And rang. I was afraid it would rouse Harriet. I assumed it was Tai and so took the receiver off the hook. Afraid to sleep, I was just filling the developing tank in preparation for a night in the darkroom when someone hammered on my door.
“Maibelle.” A man’s voice in a high whisper. I didn’t recognize it.
Telescoped through the peephole, my brother stood waiting outside. I flung open the door to welcome him.
“Good, you’re dressed,” he said. “Your phone’s broken.”
“What’s going on?”
His arms hung, jerking, at his side
s.
“Dad’s collapsed.”
My father was in the emergency room at New York Hospital with my mother waiting for the surgeon to arrive. Henry said something about sending a telegram to Anna, but I couldn’t listen. I was transfixed by an older couple dripping blood. In their late eighties, someone said. Attempted a double suicide. Dark red stains bloomed like carnations across their sheets. My father’s lung had collapsed. They’d already taken the X rays. Cancer.
When I finally worked up the courage to look at him, I was astonished to see him blink. It was too hard for him to speak—I could see the pain clasp his face with each breath—but despite this he gripped my hand. His nails were still bitten to the quick. His hair was a little damp. The moonpuffs soft and full. His head seemed immense by comparison with the rest of his body, veiled by a sheet.
Whatever had happened earlier in the evening was pushed aside by the pallor of his skin. No nightmare, nothing that could happen to me, could possibly be worse than this. I had told him about the hidden pictures, and now he was dying.
My mother leaned over him, kissed his cheek, and rubbed his other hand.
The emergency room seemed unnecessarily dark and, except for the moans of the old people, too quiet. I looked around for someone to complain to. Some soothing light, music. And heat. This wasn’t a morgue!
My brother put his arm around my shoulders and drew me away.
“Calm down.”
“I’m calm!”
“You’re shaking. You’re crying.”
I hadn’t noticed.
“He’s not dead, Maibelle. We don’t have a prognosis yet. Don’t make it worse than it is.”
But I couldn’t help it. I kept seeing him trying to claw his way up to the plates of food, to the intersection of roads where he could choose his route of escape.
My brother sat me down. I got up. The doctor arrived. I kissed my father before they wheeled him away. His cheek was icy.
“Give him some blankets!” I yelled down the forbidden hallway. “Can’t you see he’s freezing to death.’”
