by Leigh Lyn
“It sounds like a plan.” I smiled.
“Anyway, let me introduce you to some people.”
The details of their conditions Frieda had lavished on me over the course of the year popped in my mind as I met Dr. Wen’s colorful clientele. Lorna, the kleptomaniac who got arrested every time I heard her name; Samantha, the anorexic girl who cut her wrists; and Leonard, Dr. Wen’s treasured schizophrenic.
“And this is Lin.”
I smiled, wondering if meticulous details of my disorders popped up into their minds too when they heard my name. Dr. Wen appeared with two guests who he introduced to the benefactors and patrons of the event as Dr. Yao, a four-foot-eleven female with the freckled face of a thirteen-year-old and Dr. Wong, a six-foot-five male with a Freud-like beard. Dr. Wen talked at length about their long list of credentials and their amble worthiness to forge forward with the vision and goals of the NGO. “And then there’s Dr. Liu, who should be here in a minute.”
Unnerved by so many experts in unearthing the secrets of one’s mind, I went outside to admire the boat’s beautiful white sails from its long deck. The water surface broke like the wings of a million bats struggling but failing to rise from its surface. Wrapped around us was an explosion of neon lights mapped on the facades of skyscrapers that lined the opposing banks of the harbor. Set against the velvety black background of the peak and reflected in the dark water, Hong Kong’s nocturnal beauty never failed to awe me, although I’d seen it a million times. Tonight, I joined the polite chatter of Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chan, the grandparents of the foul-mouthed boy, Daniel, who had chosen to brave the chilly sea breeze.
Frieda spotted us through the glass window from inside the brightly-lit cabin and signaled that the buffet was ready, mouthing the word ‘food.’ I went back inside to join the queue behind Daniel who looked even more bored than I was.
I consoled him. “At least they have junk food.”
“And booze. Try the punch. They don’t know I upgraded it,” he replied.
At fourteen, he was only two years older than Maxy and Mimi but, tonight, he looked like a duplicitous maverick trapped in a boy’s body. Loaded with food and beverages, he and I returned to the windswept deck where a cozy seating area was nestled in the prowl.
“I heard you’re off the hook,” I said, averting my eyes from a rare steak oozing crimson on Daniel’s plate. In the light of the candles protected from the wind by a glass cylinder, Daniel’s freckles danced to their flickering rhythm.
“Yep. Effing idiot. I switch it off, and he presumes me friggin’ ‘cured’.”
“Your swearing is voluntary then?”
“Are you serious?” Daniel rolled his eyes. “You grown-ups are frigging hilarious.”
“Are your parents here tonight?” I asked. “I’ve never met them.”
“I can’t frigging remember the last fucking time I saw them myself.” He stuffed a tiny potato into his mouth while his eyes wandered over the billowing sails. “That’s not completely true. The last time I saw my mother, she sat me down for what must be the most important talk of my effing life,” Daniel smirked. “She told me my dear father—whom I idolize but hardly ever see because he’s got a real family—was not my father. I am not just the illegitimate son, I’m the wannabe illegitimate son that my effing mother had with another man still.”
Appalled, I stared at Daniel and, lacking something more appropriate to say, I stammered, “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.” Daniel shrugged. With his eyes half-mast, he added in jest, “So when someone calls me a bastard, my come-back now is that I’m a bastard squared!”
Lost for words, I gaped at Daniel, who put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t give it a fucking thought. I’m used to it.”
“You should come and visit us at our place sometime,” I said. “You will like the twins, especially Maxy. She collects tarantulas and has a large collection of rare insects.”
“No effing shit? I love those hairy things.” Daniel’s eyes widened and a smile broke through when I showed him some photos of Tim and Kim on Maxy’s Facebook page.
“There’s one issue though.”
Suspending a piece of bloody steak in front of his mouth, he said, “What’s that?”
“You’d have to switch off and not swear in front of them.” I looked him in the eye. “The twins copy bad habits they think are cool.”
“No frigging problem.” Daniel smiled. “I can speak like the king of Spain if you want me to.”
“Cats or mice?” We turned toward the brightly-lit doorway of the cabin where the hoarse voice had slurred from.
“Both, I kid you no kidding, but what have you been drinking?” Daniel snarled.
“Why, you want some? Can I join you?” The bright light behind outlined her plump figure but obscured her face.
“Please do,” I said, ignoring Daniel’s mocking face.
The silhouette tiptoed toward us. Only halfway between us and the door did her facial features gain definition in the flickering candlelight. The violet eyes lined with theatrical lashes. It was Lorna who, pointing her head backward, said, “What a bunch. I feel like a lab rat in a maze with them cats hiding in the hedges.”
I scooted over to make space for her.
“Who’d you get? Yao or Wong?” she asked, lighting up a cigarette.
“Neither,” Daniel replied. “I’m fucking cured.”
Remembering what he’d just promised me, he added, “I mean… miraculously cured.”
“You?” she asked, shifted her attention to me.
“I’m done too.”
“That calls for a celebratory drink,” she said, taking a shiny, silver flask out of her handbag. She topped up our cups and raised hers.
“Congrats, folks,” she said, and emptied it in one gulp. Daniel followed her example while I took a small sip. It was whiskey.
“And you?” I asked.
“A condition of my probation is continuous psychological treatment, so I got Yao and Wong.” She rolled her eyes. “Two shrinks to make sure I stay off the hook, if you know what I mean. My dad thinks it is money well spent. So, I have Liu, the hypnosis guy as well. ‘Just in case,’ my dad said. He wrote them a big fat cheque for the NGO.”
Smoke slithered out of her pursed lips, dispersing in the night breeze.
“What’s that like?” I asked.
“Boring. The countdown, the relaxing and the Do-you-remember-this and don’t-you-remember-that bullshit doesn’t work on me.”
Hang on. I turned to Lorna. “What did you just say?”
“I’m saying the induction phrases ‘Do-you-remember-don’t-you-remember-blah-blah-blah’ do nothing for me.”
“Hey, what are those guys schmoozing about?” Daniel said, rising half out of his seat. He craned his neck to get a better view of the cabin. Following his gaze, I saw Daniel’s grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Chan, standing at the back of the cabin, nodding and laughing at something the psychiatrist with the baby-face had said. Mr. Chan handed a piece of paper, the size of a cheque, to the psychiatrist.
“I hope they are not getting any effing ideas,” Daniel grunted.
Smiling, Mrs. Chan put her hand on the child-shrink’s shoulder when something behind them caught my eye. Through the strip window behind Mrs. Chan, I saw a tall, thin figure who seemed to be looking straight back at me. His face moved closer to the glass and, slowly, his features lit up and then... I bolted and screamed. Everyone on the boat turned to find out where the racket came from as I yelled, “There! Look there!”
I pointed to the spot where I saw the face seconds ago.
“What? Where?” Daniel asked. “What are we supposed to see, dude?”
“There! That man, who was there a second ago!” I screamed.
Both Daniel and Lorna got up, stumbled toward the right side of the deck while giggling and looked along the narrow strip that ran around the cabin.
“I don’t see no one, dude. What fucking man are you talk
ing about?” Daniel slurred.
“Is everything alright?” Frieda appeared in the doorway, looking at me like a dentist would at a bad set of teeth.
“Anything wrong?” Dr. Wen said, standing behind Frieda.
“It’s… It’s nothing,” I stammered. “I thought… I saw someone, but he’s gone.”
I had encountered many apparitions, but never someone I had killed.
“Gone?” Daniel laughed out loud. “Man overboard, man overboard!”
Ignoring him, Dr. Wen walked out on the dark deck and sat down at our table facing me. “Who do you think you saw?”
I shook my head, not knowing how to explain what I’d seen.
“You may just have mistaken someone for someone else in the dark,” Frieda said, standing behind Dr. Wen while more people spilled out onto the deck, amongst whom were Daniel’s grandparents. I’d like to agree with Frieda and was about to when my eyes caught a tall, thin shadow move on the left side of the boat. My heart stopped, and my mouth dropped. Dr. Wen turned around to follow my gaze, after which he waved his hands in front of my eyes.
“What on earth are you looking at?” Dr. Wen asked.
“That!” I pointed at the shadow approaching us.
“Don’t you see that?”
My eyes stayed glued to the dark figure, and I held my breath as it emerged from the edge to the better-lit center of the deck. The tall, thin man stood there in silence and gazed at me with his murky eyes.
“Look! Can you see him now, for crying out loud?” I cried.
Silence. No one spoke until Daniel said, “A normal dude, bitch, that’s all I see,”
I turned and looked at Daniel, who laughed. “Okay, he’s got screwy eyes, but he’s just a tall skinny dude.”
Lorna also broke out in laughter.
“But if you see him too, he must be real!” I shouted, jumped and squatted on my chair.
“What the fuck are you saying?” Turning to Lorna, he giggled. “What the fuck is she saying?”
“Are you drunk, Daniel?” Mrs. Chan asked. “How much of the punch have you kids been drinking?”
“He frigging died!” I screamed and looked at Shi Gong, who was standing motionless, staring at me.
“I killed him,” I muttered. “He was lying in a puddle of dried blood.”
Everyone was staring at me. “This is Shi Gong, my uncle.”
“Lin darling, calm down,” Frieda said.
“Don’t ‘darling’ me! You told me about him, after which I went to visit him. He has the same murky eyes as my granddad, the same physique, and I have the same earlobes as him. I’m not crazy,” I looked around for sympathy.
“So what if—?” Frieda began, but I cut her short.
“Last time I saw him, his skull was split in two, and his brain had spilled out on the floor. I swear I saw it with my own eyes.”
“That must have been a dream, Lin,” Dr. Wen said.
“No, it’s not. I didn’t tell you, but I did it. And look! He’s right here.”
Dr. Wen took a vial of pills out the inner pocket of his jacket. Holding out two in his palm, he said, “I hear you, but why don’t you take these and calm down first, Lin?”
“No!” I pushed his hand away and stepped down from the bench to walk away, but Dr. Wen grabbed my wrist. I wrestled to free myself, but Shi Gong stepped forward. A chill went through my body as he put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s alright,” he said.
“Get away from me.” I shrank back and turned away from him as far as I could.
Shi Gong took another step forward. All eyes were on him as he bent down and picked up the pills. Steady-eyed, he handed them to Frieda, who was standing nearest to him.
“Thank you, Dr. Liu,” she said.
I looked from Frieda to Shi Gong. Dr. Liu? Why was she calling him Dr. Liu? Without flinching, their bewildered eyes fixed on me, scrutinizing every blink or twitch on my face.
That was when I ran to the balustrade and flung myself over it. The fluttering black wings of gigantic bats rose out of the water to meet me. Water enveloped me in an explosion of muffled sounds; it filled my ears as I milled my limbs, looking frantically around me till I learned that up was where I’d drift if I stayed still. I kicked my legs manically to move faster. When I broke through the water’s surface, I gasped for air and choked at the same time. Just in time, I wiped the water from my eyes to see the bats rise again as a lanky figure plunged in not far from me.
A head popped up momentarily.
“You could have told me the water was cold, bitch,” Daniel said, swimming toward me.
PART FIVE
Sai Kung
Chapter 49
The sky was dark when Wen set sail toward the horizon in his forty-foot boat he had owned for ten-odd years. They’d named it Chang E—after Karen’s favorite folklore heroine who fled to the moon after stealing an immortality elixir from her general husband and had lived there ever since—because they’d loved sailing at night under a cool, mysterious moon rather than a blazing sun.
With Bull’s Eye at his feet, Wen followed a Southern course. He avoided the ferry route to Macau and other little islands, until the sun peeked above a vast and gleaming South China Sea with nothing in sight but water below and the sky above. After a few more hours, he lowered the sails and waited until the boat had come to a complete standstill on an immense silver sheet so flat that God seemed to have it ironed. Wen took out a shiny copper urn and sat down with it at the stern. The sun had climbed to the top of the pale blue sky by now, casting a stark shadow over his trembling hands as he opened the urn and stared at its content for a long time.
Bull’s Eye gawked at him through the triangular cuts in his radish-shaped face within which his hazel eyes glistened. He liked his new life. After forty years of living in the heart of Hong Kong, Karen and Wen had moved to Shek O, a small hamlet at its eastern coastline with a tiny population that preferred life slow enough to appreciate the smell of the ocean and the Pacific wind on one’s skin. Away from the main beach where the tourists went, there was a second, sandy shore where the locals went to get a cold beer at a tiny café and watch the sun dip into a waning ebb. Down a winding footpath from this was their new house. The designer, who was a patient of his, had described it as a “reinterpretation of the primordial hut.” Karen had blindfolded him the first time and led him to it by hand.
The scent of soil, flower pollens, and warm sweet rolls would have reminded him of home were it not for the untamed sound and smell of the ocean outside but, most of all, their new house smelled like orchids, which was Karen’s lifelong love she'd passed onto him.
“The designer made me come up with lists of fragrances for different seasons even though I told her there’d been too many. Then she programmed the building management system to dispense them at certain times.”
When Karen told Wen to open his feeble eyes, he found himself immersed in light coming from all directions. He was in a space enclosed by walls of light. Made of double layers of clear and translucent glass, they glowed and cut like slivers of a tamed sun.
“They’re petals,” she said. “I told her about the recurring dream I had as a kid in which I lived in a white flower bud. I would watch the world while hiding in it and feeling safe and protected.”
Much to his relief, it wasn’t always bright. The luminance of the walls depended on the weather outside; on dull days when the light outside was muted, the walls followed suit. On grim days, the walls were too. It had an unspeakable sense of connection to a nebulous force of nature. Even at night, light glowed from within, and the house became an oracle and a beacon. On wet days, the rippling pattern of water on the white glass changed the space into a dry burrow from which one could watch the torrential rain. In places, these hollowed, petal walls embedded washrooms, storage and even a small conservatory for their flowers.
Karen loved everything about their house, but the thing Wen liked best was that, from the living room, one could walk strai
ght out on a tiny pebbled beach. It was along this rocky stretch of shore where he and Karen had taken long strolls while Bull’s Eye ran in and out of the waves that had become his committed playmates in his daily game of chase.
It didn’t last though. Karen—who had rarely been sick in all the years they’d been together—fell ill a year after they moved in. Having been around sick people his whole life, he’d been blasé about the mild symptoms. It turned out she’d contracted a parasitical virus that would have been harmless had it not gotten into her blood and caused her organs to shut down within days. It was over before he realized and could not be undone. Ever since, he had lived with the notion he’d done less than he could have to save the love of his life. This regret gnawed at him from the inside no matter how often their kids told him to stop beating himself up about it. Every room and detail of the house reminded him of her, and it hurt to think they wouldn’t be enjoying it together anymore because of his carelessness. This was anything but how he imagined his retirement to be.
It was at her funeral when their entangled minds unfolded. He’d laid out trays of sandwiches, dim sum, and egg tarts on a white-clothed table in the garden, in front of the orchids Karen had planted. James Junior, Stacy and their close friends were there. So were Karen’s relatives, some of whom he couldn’t name for the life of him. He overheard one of Karen’s cousins—a plump woman in her sixties called Yan—whisper to another cousin, a small shriveling woman of a similar age called Mo. “Dunno what he’s thinking, holding a Western-style funeral like this. I’m sure she would like to have crossed over to the next world with the help of a Taoist priest, the Buddhist way.”
Mortified, he stared at Yan. Embarrassed, she bent her head over her plate of food. That was the first time Karen appeared next to him.
“Make them tea, Jim; my people prefer Chinese tea,” she said.
Like children conjure up imaginary friends, his mourning soul had hailed his life companion into existence. And Karen had looked better than ever. Young and wearing the same yellow chiffon dress she’d worn when he first laid eyes on her forty-nine years ago.
