by John Klima
The second bird joins the first; they wheel together in the sky, hesitant at first, but gaining speed as they realise they’re no longer confined. Soon, they’re both lost to sight.
“He who hurts not any living being, he in truth is called a great man . . .”
Husband and Fourth Spouse turn to face the family. Husband is smiling, looking fondly at Fourth Spouse; but she in turn is looking straight at Liang Pao, and her gaze is a reproach.
Don’t you remember the life you were promised?
They walk back to where Liang Pao is standing, side-by-side—the only time in their lives when they will be positioned as equals.
Liang Pao bows, and hands Husband a scroll commemorating the event: two mandarin ducks, holding a lotus blossom and a lotus fruit in their beaks. “May you find bliss and harmony for a thousand cycles.”
Husband smiles, and shakes his head. “No need to be so formal. Walk with us, will you?”
In the gardens, monks watch automated units as they hoe the rough, dry soil of the planet—few things grow on New Zhongguo. From time to time, they unscrew the filter container, and release the underground insects trapped against the grid.
“Hard at work,” Fourth Spouse says, non-committal.
Husband shrugs. “They serve New Zhongguo. As we all do.”
Even wives. Even caihes.
Husband’s gaze turns back towards the monastery. The abbot, accompanied by a few of the monks, is making straight for him. “That will be for my donation. I’ll leave you two alone,” he says—and the way he says it makes Liang Pao sure that he’s intended this all along.
He and Fourth Spouse watch Husband start an animated conversation with the abbot, waving his ample sleeves.
“He’s a good man,” Liang Pao says, though he doesn’t know why he says that.
“And I’m his wife.” Fourth Spouse’s tone is lightly ironic. He expects her to talk about leaving, or to mock him once more—but instead she holds out her arm to him, in the prescribed position for a chaperone. “Come,” she says. “Nothing says we have to revolve around him.”
As on most of New Zhongguo, the gardens are sparse: the few fields are devoted to the production of natural grain. Further on, a small fountain breaks the monotony of wheat, its spout of water shaped like a blossoming lotus flower. Monks toil in the fields, supervising the automated harvesters, or carefully trimming the stalks—an atmosphere of reverent industry almost alien to Liang Pao, who cannot remember the last time he did manual work outdoors.
Fourth Spouse’s arm is warm against his skin—and his breath has quickened again. With the pregnancy over, he isn’t as strong as he usually is; and he fights an overwhelming urge to bring her closer to him, and to . . .
No.
“What do you want?” Liang Pao asks, when they’re out of earshot.
Fourth Spouse shrugs. “Some time on my own, I guess,” but he sees that’s not it—and she’s pressing herself closer to him, her grip changing, becoming a caress through the silk.
There’s the same smell in the air as when he first met her—except much, much stronger: flowers and sweat, the faint odor of sugared ginger overlaid with a stronger, more acrid one, and his breasts tightening, hungering for her touch . . .
Spring-scents, he thinks, desperately. That’s all there is to it. Spring-scents.
But he’s reacting, unstoppably—his yin-humours just aren’t as efficient now that the pregnancy is over. He’s free of the languor, and something tingles within his womb, spreads to his whole skin, a haze of desire he’s never felt in his life . . .
He wants to . . .
Almost instinctively, he reaches out, tipping her face upwards, bringing those wide, enthralling eyes closer to his own—breathing in the sweet smell of her scent, imagining her skin brushing his, her sweat mingling with his—he’s not thinking, not any more—save of the need burning through him, the ache deep within to be more than what he’s been turned into . . .
And in her moist eyes, too, he sees only the reflection of that need—a fire that sears away prudence and reason and education.
He needs . . .
Her lips part, revealing teeth the color of white jade—they brush his, and the fire arches in him, from breasts to womb, reaches its crux.
“So you’re a man after all,” she whispers, and he doesn’t care, he doesn’t know if she’s right or not, it doesn’t matter.
But, against the wave of desire, something within him is reacting—beating fists against a glass panel, struggling to be heard. He brings her closer to him, for a second kiss, a second brush of fire, frantically seeking the warmth of her hands through her loose sleeves . . .
We used to lie against each other afterwards and whisper sweet nothings on the pillows . . .
And he sees it in her eyes, in the set of her jaw, in the name her lips open on, which isn’t his own. He sees it in her arms and in her stance—the coiled muscles of someone straining to be free, to flee by any means possible.
His breasts ache—heavy with milk, and not with this alien, frightening desire. Gently, he releases her. She watches him, panting, her cheeks flushed.
“I’m not her,” he says, slowly, softly.
“Do you think it matters?”
“Yes,” he says.
He remembers the kite, cut free of its string—and the way it disappeared from sight, taking his sorrows and sadness.
“Of course it does,” he says—but so low he isn’t sure she can hear.
*
He goes to see Husband, afterwards. He finds him ensconced in a chair within the library, watching a multi-sensorial shadow-play to the plaintive music of oboes and the smell of sandalwood.
Husband shifts positions when Liang Pao comes in, surprised. “First Spouse? What is—”
Liang Pao cuts him short—something he wouldn’t have dared do, only a day ago. But desperation makes him brave. “Flowers can’t bloom, if the earth isn’t right.”
“I don’t understand,” Husband says.
Liang Pao kneels, putting his left hand on the floor in front of him, and the right arm against his back—the posture reserved for a supplicant before the Emperor. “I humbly and reverently beg you to let your spouse Qin Daiyu go.”
He stares at the ground, hearing only a swish of robes as Husband comes to tower over him. “I thought you’d talked to her,” Husband says.
Liang Pao doesn’t move. He forces himself not to. “I have.” And, more quickly, before he can remember what he’s doing, “Her place wasn’t with a High Official. Her place isn’t here. Flowers wither if the earth is too shallow, and caged animals only waste away. I beg of you—”
“Enough.” Husband’s voice is curt. “Do you have any idea how much I paid for her, Pao? How many favors I had to ask from High Officials?”
Liang Pao says nothing. There is no answer he can make.
“I rescued her,” Husband says. His voice, too, comes fast, the words tumbling one atop the other, like a children’s game with paper cubes. “I took her inside this house, where she’d be happy. I . . .”
Liang Pao lets Husband’s voice fade into silence before he speaks. “I know,” he says. “And it is not a humble spouse’s place to tell you what to do. But Fourth Spouse is not someone you can cage. She—” He knows he cannot mention the woman—whoever her name is. To Husband, that relationship will only be an abomination.
There is only silence, in the wake of his words—broken by the bursts of music from the shadow-play in the background.
Finally, Husband says, “She’s not happy, is she?”
Liang Pao tilts his head backward, sucking in air through his teeth—signifying, without words, that it’s very difficult. The message is as clear as he can make it, without saying “No” outright.
He hears nothing; only Husband’s slow, steady breath. Even the shadow-play has fallen silent.
“I see,” Husband says. “I will consider this.” Which, coming from him, is a good as an affirmati
ve.
“I humbly thank you,” Liang Pao says. He rises—only to meet Husband’s piercing gaze. He’d throw himself to the ground again, but Husband raises a hand, preventing him from doing so.
“Stay here, Pao. Tell me something.”
“Yes?”
“What about you?”
What about—? He says nothing. He thinks of Husband standing by his side in the examination room, worry etched on his face; and of the sweet smell of lips brushing his, kindling a fire in his womb. He runs his hand against his breast, squeezes and feels the milk seep into the silk of his tunic.
“Not all lang birds long for the sky,” he says, finally. Not all birds will see the bars of their cages open; nor do they wish to. It’s enough, sometimes, to be reminded of who you are and what you chose. “My place is here.”
He sees Husband smile—a small, barely visible upturning of the lips, soon hidden. Emotions destroy, he thinks, but he knows it’s not quite true.
Sometimes, like metal, things need to be destroyed—fed through the fire so they can emerge stronger.
Moons later, he receives a package, and a letter traced in a quick, deliberate hand that breathes strength onto the paper. It’s not signed; but he knows who wrote it.
I humbly thank you for everything, the letter says. I have the audacity to hope that the following gift is acceptable—in remembrance of our meeting.
Inside is a small, round box engraved with the characters for “dragon” and “phoenix”—the symbols for man and woman. When he opens it, he sees that a miniaturized refrigerant unit occupies most of the inside—and that the small, rectangular sheath at the centre contains a liquid he knows all too well: nitrogen. Within, suspended, is her gift: one of her last eggs, the most precious thing a woman can give to a man.
He sits in his chair for a while, staring at the characters sprawled on the page—Third Son blissfully suckling milk at his breast. From outside come the noises of steel-yarn unfolding in the breeze: First Son, Second Son and Husband flying their kites, challenging each other to go higher and higher.
Liang Pao feels, once more, the tightening in his womb, the alien feeling he associates with her and dares not name.
So you’re a man after all.
Gently, he sets the box apart—out of his reach. No, he thinks, realising that she never really understood him. I am what I am. I have no regrets. I am caihe.
Rising, he descends into the courtyard, to help his family cut the strings of sadness and misfortune.
Cutting
Ken Liu
At the top of the mountain, far above the clouds, the monks of the Temple of Xu spend their days cutting words from their holy book.
The monks’ faith originated a long time ago. They deduce this by the parchment on which the Book is written, which is brittle, wrinkled, and damaged by water in places so that the writing is hard to read. The Abbot, the oldest monk in the temple, recalls that the Book already looked like that when he was a young novice.
“The Book was written by men and women who walked and talked with the gods.” The Abbot pauses to let his words sink into the hearts of the young monks sitting in neat rows before him. “They recorded what they remembered of their experiences, and so to read the Book is to hear the voices of the gods again.” The young monks touch their foreheads to the stone floor, their hands splayed open in prayer.
But the monks also know that the gods often spoke obscurely, and human memory is a fragile and delicate instrument.
“Think of the face of a childhood friend,” the Abbot says. “Hold that image in your mind and write a description of it, giving as much detail as you can marshal.
“Now think of that face again. It has changed subtly in your memory. The words you used to describe that face have replaced some portion of your memory of it. The act of remembering is an act of retracing, and by doing so we erase and change the stencil.
“So it was with the men and women who composed the Book. In their zeal and fervor they wrote what they believed to be the truth, but they got many things wrong. They were only human.
“We study and meditate upon the words of the Book so that we may excavate the truth buried in layers of metaphor.” The Abbot strokes his long, white beard.
And so, each year, the monks, after many rounds of debates, agree upon additional words to cut out of the Book. The bits of excised parchments are then burnt as an offering to the gods.
In this way, as they prune away the excess to reveal the book beneath the book, the story behind the story, the monks believe that they are also communing with the gods.
Over the decades, the Book has grown ever lighter, its pages riddled with holes, openings, voids where words once rested, like filigree, like lace, like a dissolving honeycomb.
“We strive not to remember, but to forget.” The Abbot says, as he cuts out another word from the Book.
* * *
* * *
The Night We Drank Cold Wine
Megan Kurashige
Being late, Rhodes says, is just a symptom of bad luck. It doesn’t have anything to do with the person waiting.
He tells me this so I can imagine all the unlucky things that keep him from where he wants to be: misplaced keys, traffic jams, a stopped clock, bad directions. Sometimes, Rhodes leaves without thinking about how to get where he’s going. He wanders from his door, takes the circuitous route, and ends up somewhere else, having never paused to check the time. When he’s really late, he calls.
“I know,” he says before I mention it, “I’m late.”
I don’t ask anymore, but Rhodes always explains. If I decide to pick up the phone, he will tell me a story of unexpected coincidences to make me laugh; and I will hardly believe it, even though I know his stories always turn out to be true.
“I went to my parents’ house,” he might say. “And I locked myself in the basement. I called for them, wheedled, yelled, pounded on the door, but they didn’t hear because they were upstairs, trying to remember a song they used to know. I could hear them singing—something something, flowers and sun in your something hair, la la la la low—and then they started dancing. And, you know my dad, all the thumping shook the floor, shook the whole house, and something fell off a lamp and hit me, and you know what? They stopped singing and everything was quiet so all I could hear was the ringing of the key on top of my head.”
Rhodes will always be there soon. You can walk back and forth on the hot summer sidewalk, until your shirt clings and the houses turn on their lights when it starts to get dark, and you’re tearing pieces of grass into green confetti that sticks to fingers and under nails, and you’re shaving off the rubber of your sandals layer by layer; and Rhodes will be there in the end. He just has bad luck getting there.
*
I wanted to go dancing because it was too hot to stand still. I wanted to manufacture my own breeze and blow away the heavy air that wrapped my skin in thick, impenetrable wads of humidity. My head had a block of slow summer nothing wedged in its center, and I kept thinking that if only I moved fast enough, I could make it go away.
“Where should we go?” Rhodes asked. He had to move a cardboard box off the passenger seat before I could get into the car. It rattled and clinked against his chest when he lifted it onto the seat behind.
“Anywhere,” I said.
Rhodes has this way of looking at you when he’s trying to make up his mind. His eyelids go soft and his cheeks crumple to meet them so he looks like he’s trying to shrink the world down to something he can see.
“That’s helpful,” he said.
We could have gone someplace nice. We could have gone someplace cramped and dirty with neighbors shouting down the noise. It didn’t matter. The car was too warm for sitting, even with the night pouring in all the windows.
“We should go then,” Rhodes said, but instead of turning on the car, he reached behind us, untucked the flaps of cardboard, and sank his arm into the box. It was full of bottles, mostly empty from
the noise, but he took one from the bottom, twisted off the lid, and gave it to me.
The mouth was crusted with tiny flakes that stuck to my lips. The liquid behind the green glass was a vicious yellow, and I would never have drunk it, except that it smelled like nasturtiums, peppery and wet.
It tasted like what wine tastes like when you’ve only imagined it, before you’ve ever had a sip. It was sweet, and slightly thick, and slippery enough to go down before my tongue could finish tasting it. My mouth felt like I had licked something sharp.
I asked Rhodes what it was, and he said it was something he made, an old family thing that wasn’t really a secret, but complicated and boring to explain, and it was too hot for that kind of conversation.
We shared the bottle, sipping it in turns until there was nothing left.
I rubbed my teeth to lose the alcohol sting, and my blood rushed up under my skin to throw away heat like a burst of fine powder in the dark. I was blushing, red all over, patched and blotchy. It made me shiver and my skin twitched tight at the illusion of being cold.
“I know a good place,” Rhodes said. He rolled up the windows. He huffed on his hands and scrubbed his fingers together.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“You haven’t been there before.”
“How do you know?”
Rhodes thinks he knows everything about me, but when I looked at him, his face pale and smeared with cold, I thought about how easy it is to sit on the surface of someone, to float along on your brittle scrap of boat and forget the ocean, with all its currents and whales and sunken treasure, that waits beneath your feet.
Rhodes drove to a street not far from where we used to live, back when we were small. The houses there have thin fences on three sides and trim lawns in between that they sit on, like polite gifts in half-opened boxes.
