Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3)

by Steven Drachman

  Master Yu smiled sadly.

  “I suppose I don’t need to know what Camus will say about my plight,” he sighed.

  She nodded.

  “In all this bad news, however, I have found one silver lining. Something that may make your tragedy a bit easier to bear.”

  Master Yu stared at Tang.

  “You are destined to be a father,” she said. “You shall not entirely vanish from the Earth.

  Chapter 33

  We rode through the night, south of Hsi-Wang, and in the early dawn we could see the Falsturm stronghold, Vializ, glittering in the far south, with the last loyalist villages dotted about the countryside.

  “Time will wait for us,” Tang said. “The Gates that stand between us and Malchut guard a bright morning in July 1905. That won’t change. The Falsturm’s armies stand guard over that moment.”

  I tried to smile.

  We passed ruins of old homes — homes that had once belonged to whomever the demons had once been — and then we tramped across a hardened lava river, a memory of some great cataclysm that shook this land back when it was real.

  At length, we came to a little cabin, built of polished wood that shimmered like gold, as though it bred its own sunlight, sheltered ever so slightly by a young Peking willow tree.

  “I would hope that after all this waiting, you could warrant us at least triplets,” I said.

  Master Yu allowed a very small smile.

  “To defeat tyranny,” he said, “I will do my very best, General O’Hugh.”

  Master Yu hesitated a moment.

  He said, “Li-Ling was married to a man who died, and upon his death he became a vengeful deadling. He would kill any man who might wed Li-Ling, which is why she declined my proposal when I was in San Francisco.”

  “He cannot harm you in this realm,” Tang said.

  “What about when I return to 1905?” he asked, “in Malchut?”

  “You do not need to worry about that,” Tang replied.

  “You have ascertained something in your journey to 1905 that has shown you that he will prove no threat to me, in order to convince me.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have used information that you have uncovered while roaming in order to convince me of a certain course of action in the present. How is this possible? Would that not expel you from the interlinear Maze, and me as well?”

  “This information has not changed your decision,” Tang said. “It has merely made you feel better about your decision. So this has not changed the course of events, and neither you nor and I will be expelled from the Maze.”

  We left him to enter the cabin alone.

  Inside:

  “How did you get here?” Yu Dai-Yung asked, and she said, “How did you get here?’ with a smile, and she laughed, this woman he loved against his will. Master Yu believed that they were meeting each other again in a beautiful little cabin in the Hell of the Innocent Dead. To Li-Ling, they were standing in a little room in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Outside their window was Duncombe Alley. Beyond that, the fish market, a cigar factory and the crowds on the street. It was as though Master Yu had never left.

  “Do I look different to you?” he asked, his one eye wide and curious.

  She shook her head.

  “You are as handsome as you always were,” she said.

  He laughed at that. He wondered.

  “As I always was.” He was a man of words, after all. Neither a particularly talented nor an insightful man of words, but a man who thought about words, in his own way. She had fallen in love with him, after all. She didn’t mind. “Exactly as handsome as before,” he said. “Not a ts’un more, not a ts’un less.”

  She smiled.

  “You are handsome,” she said. “And you were ever handsome,” she added. “And I adore you.”

  “I have one eye,” he said sheepishly. “I lost one eye in the town of Rency just southeast of the rancid Maldensses swamp when I mistakenly attempted to recruit a Falsturm loyalist to our Cause.”

  “No one,” said Li-Ling, “needs two eyes. You have exactly the right number of eyes, my Darling.”

  “I have lost my hair,” he said. “Every last bit of my hair.”

  “Who needs hair,” she said, “when one has a hat?”

  “I have lost my hat.”

  Master Yu took her hand and he led her out of the hut, and she in turn led him out of the little room in Chinatown, and she led him down the stairs, and he led her down a hill, and when she reached the street and he reached the valley, they stood together, both of them, in a place neither one of them had ever seen, which stretched for miles, until they reached a small joss house at the edge of a gorge, under a Yünnan cypress tree. The ceremony was brief, and there was but one witness, an old man who sat in the corner, and who smiled benignly. A remarkably lifelike projection of the staggeringly beautiful opera singer Christine Nilsson sang Oh Mio Bab Bino Caro, which is by Puccini or one of that gang. Master Yu recited a poem that he had written in his hovel in Hallitanud, one morning after he had awoken from a dream in which he had seen Li-Ling’s smile, during one morning in Hallitanud when he was most despairing and yet most hopeful, because a love such as this, even if doomed, had redeemed him. Master Yu’s poem was derivative of the work of the Tang Dynasty poet Li Po, and Li-Ling noticed this but did not say anything, as she was flattered that Yu Dai-Yung’s love for her might aspire to a great master’s admiration for the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River. It was the wedding’s artistic low point, but its emotional high point, which is how these things go, sometimes.

  After the ceremony, they crossed Dupont street to the Hang Far Low Restaurant, where Master Yu had once eaten dinner with Chinatown’s crime bosses, one night that seemed now like something from another life. Li-Ling brought my friend Master Yu to the third floor, marched him through a great majestic cavern of polished wood and elegantly robed patrons, until she reached a small table in the back behind a set of sliding doors, where attentive servers brought a generous glass of red-rice arrack to render them happily flaggered, then bird’s nest soup, Taranaki fungus imported from New Zealand, goose, quail, fish brains, bamboo shoots, sherry oysters, chicken, pigeon and suckling pig.

  As Tang had predicted, the newlyweds felt no fear of Li-Ling’s deceased lover, who was wont to return to Earth as a marauding and at-times-murderous deadling. But this was after all not a day on Earth; this was not the Chinatown or the Hang Far Low Restaurant that they had once known. This was the platonic ideal of a day on Earth; this was the platonic ideal of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The platonic ideal of music. This was not false; this was more real.[] There was no sign of the crime bosses in their silk robes embroidered with dragons — Master Lu the whoremonger, Master Hu the slave-trader, and Master Hsu the opium-dealer were absent from the Platonic ideal of the Hang Far Low restaurant — and the erh-hu and ti-tzu musicians played flawlessly. This is how Prometheus had imagined the world, back when he first thought of the idea of people, and the world, and everything, back before everything went bad for him and for all of us, before the eagle flew out of the sky to eat Prometheus’s liver, before the world rotted from the inside out, like an old boiled egg. Master Yu and Li-Ling were living in the perfect idea of reality; moreover, they both recognized this immediately, although only Master Yu could put a name to this concept. “There CAN be an Age of Aquarius,” the oracle told me in the jungle — and here it is!

  A carriage awaited them outside the restaurant on Dupont Street, and it ferried them to the Market Street wharf, where the American Steamship Company’s Abbotsford vessel awaited, which ferried them across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris, where they checked in at the Hotel Continental, on the right bank of the Seine, a mammoth structure that occupied several blocks, and at which the new honeymooners’ mix of exoticism and wealth was welcomed without judgment.

  When they arrived in Paris, it was April 23, 1881, and the following day it was still April 23, 1881. Indeed, for as long a
s they would dwell in Paris, it would always be that same date: April 23, 1881. A day in springtime. But the happenings of the day were always different; different news appeared on the front page of Le Petit Parisien; different dancers appeared in the evening at the Closerie des Lilas; different singers at the café-chantants; different horses raced at the Longchamp. New books arrived at Galignani’s. Sometimes it rained; sometimes the orange trees at the garden of the Tuileries smiled in the sunshine and bobbed gently on the wind.

  They boated at Asnières perhaps fifty times; they took coffee at Café Durand most mornings, which must have meant that they would visit the café thousands of times during their time in the city. Yet they did not age; Dai-Yung was ever a vigorous and handsome middle age; Li-Ling remained ever youthful. The fetuses in her womb did not grow, but she knew they were there. She sensed twins; triplets perhaps. Always that same day, sometimes sunny, sometimes rainy. They would never see the Dreyfus affair, nor the Panama scandal. Those things would come later, and would come never.

  Master Yu, of course, spoke French beautifully in his beautiful voice and recited French poetry by heart, and he even spoke French poetry by heart that he had translated into a particularly graceful Chinese, he was handsome and sported a mysterious black patch over one eye, he had money to spend, and he had a very very beautiful young wife who eventually spoke French herself and whose own cutting intellect was unexpected and thrilling, and so they both fused seamlessly with a certain type of Parisian; not every Parisian, naturellement, but a certain type, and there were enough of this type of Parisian that my friends did not feel unwelcome. Their growing social group never remarked upon the fact that every day was April 23 and that every year was 1881, and they never remarked upon the fact that none of them ever seemed to age, so perhaps they were traveling in a timeline distinct from our young couple. “Perhaps,” Master Yu said one evening, after he and Li-Ling had left the masked ball at the Jardin Mabille, and as they prepared for bed and the sun rose, “perhaps to-morrow, they will remember the events of this day as occurring on April 22, and they will awaken to-morrow expecting it to be April 23. And the next day, they will remember to-day as having occurred on April 21. And to them, it will have.” And then he thought again and mused, “Maybe each one of them is a Parisian who once lived in the Hell of the Innocent Dead, but who was avenged after his earthly body had succumbed, and came here, to a replica of Paris on the day he died, to live forever.

  “Or maybe,” Master Yu mused, “none of them is real. Maybe we are imagining them.”

  Li-Ling replied, “Je m’en fiche,” which means that she didn’t care what the explanation was, and she didn’t care, because what did any of it matter? She knew one thing that mattered, and she knew another thing that mattered, and neither of those things had anything to do with what sort of emotional and temporal relationship their Parisian friends had with April 23, 1881.

  Madame Tang has told me that Li-Ling and Dai-Yung lived in Paris for fifteen years, and I have here in my home many thousands of pages from Master Yu’s journal describing his idyll. The perpetual honeymooners lost track entirely; they might have stayed forever, except that one day a carriage awaited them outside their hotel, across the street at the Place Vendôme, and it didn’t seem as though it would leave if they hid inside and shut the curtains, and they knew it was time to go, so they packed up the clothes they had brought with them and various mementoes that would remind them of their time in the City of Light, and which Li-Ling might keep after her husband’s death. The carriage took them to Le Havre, where the Dauphine rocked on the gentle waves.

  They sailed for a day that lasted six months. For a while they stopped in Hangchow in 1265, the capital city of the southern Sung Dynasty.

  Hangchow was a city of a million people, of winding streets, multi-storied houses of wood and bamboo, and perpetual celebration, especially on the 8th of the second moon, which was the day on which Dai-Yung and Li-Ling arrived, and in which they continued to live for their entire sojourn in the city. Observation towers dotted the city, manned at all hours to watch for fire; on the Imperial Way, tented chairs carried wealthy women aloft; canals traversed the city, running parallel to the Imperial Way, filled with flowering water lilies and fleets of sailboats, and fringed with flowering plum trees.

  Master Yu didn’t mind living in a southern city, as long as it was filled with northerners, and even the Emperor.

  The two perpetual newlyweds lived with two pet cats and two caged grasshoppers, in a two-story house on Earth Street.

  In the evening, sometimes, they took the Hundred Flowers boat to one of the Lake’s two islands and dined in its palace, and when they returned late in the night, the lake would be filled with hundreds of boats, and the harmonies of the singing girls echoed across the water. Sometimes they visited one of Hangchow’s restaurants to drink plum flower wine and eat silkworm pie in the courtyard, under trees thick with apricot blossoms, and returned home through moonlit streets crowded with acrobats, puppeteers, jugglers, singers and storytellers, and drunken revelers strolling along the canals.

  Master Yu joined the Poetry Society of the Western Lake; he had always wished that he could have lived in the 13th century in Hangchow, and that he could have joined the Poetry Society of the Western Lake. And now he had done so.

  The denizens of Hangchow lived in the shadow of an enemy in the north, poised to attack, which means that they lived on the brink of extinction, like the dodo in 1662, or the Germans in the Weimar Republic, or all of us, in America and anywhere in the world, as we await the Coming Storm of 1937 (as Lum and Abner have dubbed it), or like Master Yu and his bride, who both knew that he would die in battle, and who both knew when he would die in battle. The joy of Hangchow was the joy of people living at the edge of the abyss, a unique joy, not an unjoyful joy, something precious.

  After a while, they awoke one morning in their two-story house on Earth Street, and the carriage awaited them, and so they gave away their two cats and two grasshoppers to their neighbors, and the carriage carried them to the Grand Canal, where a sailing barge awaited them, which took them to the ocean, where they transferred to the Dauphine, which carried them around the world. On the fifth day at sea, they met a storm and a cove, and something seemed familiar about all this to Master Yu, and he asked the captain to authorize a mission into the fog. At length, Master Yu and Li-Ling were on a lifeboat, and they had plunged into the fog, and the storm immediately subsided.

  This was the last they saw of the Dauphine.

  Within a few minutes, the fog receded behind them and a lush wooded isle came into view. The waves deposited Dai-Yung and Li-Ling on the white-sand shore, and they descended from the shore into the woods, where at length they reached a trail of sorts, overgrown and weedy, and after twenty minutes or so on the trail, there he was: my buddy Rabbi Palache (descendant of the most infamous pirate rabbi who had ever lived) appeared from around the bend, a heavy-set man in a gigantic black hat, galloping along on his supernaturally strong horse. His long grey-black beard waved thickly behind him as he rode forward in the island-mountain wind. His black coat flapped at his side.

  Master Yu waved.

  “You are Rabbi Palache!” he shouted. “I am a friend of Watt O’Hugh! The Third!”

  The rabbi threw himself recklessly from his ridiculously strong horse, and he grabbed the terrible Chinese poet’s hands.

  “I did not know that I was headed here,” Master Yu said, “but now that I am here, I think it is a good thing. We could use some training, some rabbinic tricks, Li-Ling and I, before we go into battle.” Then he repeated, “We didn’t know that we were coming here,” and the rabbi said, “No one knows that he’s coming here, until he’s here.”

  The rabbi taught Master Yu a few valuable spells. The secret of disguise, for example, which many centuries earlier Elazar ben Azaryah had used to look suitably old and wise (when he had needed to look old and wise), and which I had once used more recently to infiltrate the Si
donian capital, when it yet existed, in Montana. He taught Dai-Yung and Li-Ling some magical tricks for killing an enemy, only if absolutely necessary. The rabbi could not, unfortunately, teach the poet how to avoid a death that awaited him, inevitably, in the year 1905, if indeed it did await him in the year 1905. Rabbi Palache expressed no opinion on Master Yu’s fate; he was not a seer of the future; as a rabbi, he was philosophically and ethically opposed to seeing into the future. All he could do was teach Master Yu how to take down a few bastards before his inevitable demise, whenever it might come, with respect to which the rabbi expressed no opinion. Li-Ling thought that she might wish to take down a few bastards as well, and so she trained alongside her husband, and alongside another soldier from our army, and by the end she was a formidable fighter and magician as well.

  After their exhausting training was completed, an energized Dai-Yung and Li-Ling heard a ship’s horn from beyond the mist, and so the rabbi loaded them into a rowboat and rowed them out of the cove, where once more the American Steamship Company’s Abbotsford vessel awaited, which ferried them back across the Atlantic Ocean. On April 23, 1881, they docked at the San Francisco harbor, from which they took the train to Oregon, and then from there they took a stagecoach to Missoula, Montana, from which they set out by foot to Lady Amalie’s inn, where they arrived on April 23, 1881. The old woman met them at the gate, and she was smiling, but there was sadness in her eye. “In her left eye only,” Master Yu would later tell me; he noticed it. He knew why it was there. When he met Lady Amalie at the gate to her inn, Master Yu was healthy, he was not sick, but he was dying, and everyone knew it, and everyone knew when he would die. “Still,” he told me, “I have lived many lifetimes, and most importantly, I have lived the lifetime I have wanted to live.”

  We’ve been here before, you and I.

  A reader of the second volume in my Memoirs — if indeed the recollections that I have scribbled out on these pages have found any readers, if indeed anyone has somehow dug them from the town waste dump and wiped them clean of the feces that have clung to them, and then miraculously found the pages of this third volume (retrieved from the bottom of a steamer trunk in the back of an attic, perhaps stuffed into a pair of old shoes) — any such reader will be familiar with the absurdity of Lady Amalie’s curious inn, located as it was in the middle of a little clearing south of the Montana mountains and yet not on any map, nor of any time.