Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  “I’m really sorry.”17

  Wo zhen dui bu qi.

  Her palm pressed like casket to mouth, lips against her hand so as to kiss her flesh to his.

  His eyes worried shut. On the black screen of his memory: the night of Ba Jin’s film, flickering black and white on a barrack bed sheet in Shangyu City, that stench of the drained river reaching their noses and stinging their eyes, his mother scratching the boils climbing her thighs like ivy. A full moon guided her to the river, her home for countless generations. His hand reached for hers beneath the glittering surface, her hair gripped his wrist. Too late. Too late. It’s easy to tell a story from the beginning when the beginning is something you’ve devised. Harder to drop into its middle, muddle your way through tarried earth, a war, a mother’s death. If he had to start from the beginning again, he would recall nothing but American Nurse’s hand against his mouth. How it felt to kiss his own flesh to find hers, two bodies touching as through a pane of glass.

  American Nurse’s hand released, leaving behind the indentation of her sweat-shriveled fingers. She ran her fingernails down his curved spine. Sang a song he didn’t know with low, dire tones belonging to thick-shouldered American farmers, to fields sinking into horizons entangled with a golden dusk. She didn’t smell like Commander Deng described—no cinnamon and jasmine, but the honey-sweet pods of his hometown’s soap tree, his mother’s favorite. She leaned closer, hand finding his lips, fingers parting ever so slightly to probe her tongue toward his. That feeling of falling again, like a body slowly descending under water. Or a stone. Burials. She wasn’t his mother, he reassured himself, while American Nurse confirmed this—she spoke in rambling, pitched syllables he didn’t understand, words slipping unlike his mother tongue, traversing a map he hadn’t crossed, rivers and mountains forged to reach this place so far from home. Was she drowning too? He touched the cool spot behind her ear, tracing that crescent scar he hadn’t noticed until now.

  She placed her hand atop his.

  She shook her head: ‘No.’

  No, he knew. Bu, she said.

  Bu, he said, kissing her throat, her skin salted soap.

  Bu, she said, her lips curling into a child’s smile, eyes cool.

  Bu, he would not speak a word.

  Bu, they would not speak together.

  Bu: her whispers catching on the penetrating strobe of Fat Chen’s flashlight.

  Sirens rang, awakening Skinny Wang from a world in which he’d become Chuang Tzu’s storied butterfly—he flew over the Yalu’s slate gray fields alongside another blue butterfly. Overnight, Skinny Wang had become a romantic.

  American Nurse was beside him, rolling in sleep above the sheets once stained by his comrades. Her hair was a swallow’s nest. He closed his eyes and flew toward that dream abandoned minutes earlier. The earth, steady in the distance below, the sun a globe he could reach for with wings. But who was the butterfly? Their wings singed when they reached the heavens—unlike the famous xian immortals, he would fall…

  Flashlights pulsed through the canvas, shredding what civility they attempted in sleep. Boots stamped an uneasy chorus on the Yalu’s crusted banks.

  “Kuai zou!”

  “An air raid,” Skinny Wang noted, as if the events outside their tent were still distant and he was still that wisp-winged butterfly. He stood slowly, shuffling blood into each limb, reaching confidently for his pants and fastening his belt, envisioning himself like the heroes of those Soviet films, but he wasn’t playing the part well—American Nurse didn’t understand. She opened her eyes and quickly stood at the next siren’s wail, cupping her ears and allowing the bed sheet around her to drop, exposing her naked body, all those curves and indentations the troops loved so much, expected of her golden skin. Despite the fact Skinny Wang had been more intimate with her than this, in this instant, she looked blisteringly naked.

  He gasped. She gasped, experiencing her unexpected nudity, then dashed around the tent, buttocks wiggling, searching for her old uniform, the white faded yellow. After some searching, she pulled the coat over her head, mud penned across the garment’s chest. The mud was in the shape of the character:

  To speak, to say, to tell.

  What could Skinny Wang say? American Nurse, now dressed, shushed him. She crouched in the corner, arms sheltering her head. He quickly buttoned his shirt, its once-starched collar lilting. He pulled on his People’s Volunteer Army jacket with its gold buttons rusted brown, readjusted the five-tipped star pin, and jogged to her side. He placed his hand atop her head, attempting a gesture of both gratitude and protection, but she shied away.

  “Qilai,” he instructed, softly. Stand up. The vocabulary of his nation’s newly-penned anthem:

  Qilai! Qilai! Qilai!

  He gripped her elbow, but she pulled away.

  “Qilai,” he said, this time in the tone Commander Deng used to rouse the battalion each morning. American Nurse rose reluctantly; he’d never felt more like a woman’s man, as protective, despite the fact that, fully standing, her height dwarfed him, reminding him how quickly his size could suddenly be made a mockery. She pinched his side. He reached behind to feel her hand straddling his bony hip.

  Shadows washed over the tent from outside. Sirens swallowed their pulsing drone. American Nurse buried her nose in his armpit and inhaled. Her arms enveloped his waist. Her chest’s rise mimicked his. Suddenly, there was enough time. To listen. To wait. But to think so would be as daft as a fish attempting to fly.

  “You coming?” Deng’s face slipped past the tent’s flap. His cigarette smoke circled upward in a slow tango with the dawn sky.

  Deng.

  Deng.

  Deng.

  Spoken in a different tone, their leader’s name could mean “to wait.” Realizing this, Skinny Wang laughed. Deng squinted. American Nurse, instinctively, ducked behind a Nationalist-era wooden wardrobe. She remained there, sheltered by the sturdy outline of that well-constructed Soviet furniture. How long had they been naked before this quick, instinctive dressing? An eternity, and yet like the span of an eye’s wink. To wait. “Deng” could mean to stare or to ascend. Deng could be anything. They all could.

  “Deng,” Skinny Wang said, smiling. “Deng. Deng. Deng.”

  Deng shook his head, smiling. He was handsomer than the rest, with more highly-guarded cheekbones, fuller lips, a taller, less Southern nose.

  “Thanks for taking care of my possession,” he said, winking. He nodded at the rows of soldiers marching toward the barracks. “You better get in there soon. This air raid’s not waiting for you, Comrade.”

  As he closed the flap after him, Skinny Wang was relieved Deng didn’t know nor care what happened in this tent. He walked behind the wardrobe and pulled American Nurse closer to his chest, but she slipped away, found her belt and looped it into her uniform, eager to be fully dressed. Why was she acting as if she’d seen a ghost?

  “Deng,” Skinny Wang said, pointing at the tent’s flap. He pinched his own cheek to confirm he was truly here, that he wasn’t the butterfly he’d transformed into minutes earlier and looked to her strong shape outlined in the lights spearing the tent. He didn’t recognize this form. They were now two different entities altogether, existing in universes so far from one another they could only examine each other through the telescopes of their own devising.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Bu.”

  “No Deng,” he said, tapping his chest with his thumbs. This was not a Deng. He was not Deng. He was Skinny Wang. He could see across rivers, into forests. He’d found American Nurse first. With these eyes. The same eyes, he wanted to explain, which now lost focus, could only see the tip of her tall Western nose. He supposed this was what love was like but who was he to say?

  “Bu Deng,” she repeated the Chinese, smiling timidly. A relief: language working with them for once, not laboring against them.

  “No Deng,” he repeated, taking her hand and leading her outside.

  Above, a fading
full moon struggled against dawn, its face patronizing and sullen. There weren’t any planes as the sirens warned but still the blaring calls pulsed on, retiring to a place inside their heads where repeated sounds are difficult to silence. Skinny Wang’s comrades filtered sleepy-eyed out of their tents, marched in line to the 40th Battalion barracks at the northern edge of the camp near the proud bronze arches of the Yalu River Bridge connecting two great empires. They’d practiced this march a thousand times.

  “What’s going on?” Skinny Wang asked Liu, who instructed men where to go.

  Liu stood outside the barracks, feet planted, arm outstretched.

  “Qiren you tian,” Liu said, quoting the Chinese idiom about the man from the state of Qi who feared the sky would fall and crush him. “No sky falling on you tonight, Skinny Wang. It’s just a drill.”

  “I’m taking American Nurse with me then.”

  Liu’s eyes peeled open dimly and for once Skinny Wang saw what his young wife loved in him—his coolness, his calm wide face, his ease. His mouth rose wryly, a smile befitting only the victor: Did Liu think American Nurse would choose him? Was this what it was like to love a woman? She couldn’t be anyone’s but Skinny Wang’s: this he’d established in the time it took for the dream of the butterfly to fade and for her to find her uniform balled beside the sputtering gas lamp. She is mine, he wanted to insist, but already he knew: in wanting to own her, in wanting to consume her like swallowing a pork xiaolongbao whole, he would destroy her. She could no more be his possession than she could be free to roam this frozen stretch of river, between a nation newly minted and a land filled with the sounds of fighter jets, the spitting crack of gunfire.

  “You sure you can handle the bitch?” Spit lined Liu’s lips. He pinched American Nurse’s hip. She didn’t flinch, frozen solid as the Yalu’s shores.

  Liu laughed then jogged to follow the last of their comrades into the barracks, breaths trailing behind.

  American Nurse and Skinny Wang walked arm-in-arm, ice crunching beneath their slow, heavy feet, breath rising beneath a wanting winter moon, cranes rummaging for tubers between the pines, the river’s frozen layers speaking their own language of awakening. How many years would Skinny Wang remember this moment as if it were his wedding march? As if he were returning home with his bride on his arm, his parents waiting in the narrow doorway of their cluttered pingfang, his mother’s lips rising into a knowing smile: A woman, she would say, someone to finally make a man of you, Wang Guanling, using his milk name as she always did. He’d show American Nurse: Sword Temple with its stooped monks kowtowing before the golden Buddha and the gifts of oranges and dates, the Xiao’s rows of fermented tofu steeping in wooden cauldrons, the river where his brother once pulled him from the weeds after he attempted to swim downstream without knowing a single stroke. And the mountain. The tall, towering mountain where his mother’s body rested, peaceful, except for the occasional earthquake tremor, the mudslides arriving each May. He’d been looking for her for years. Where would he find her? The beloveds would hide behind Sword Temple, kissing, insisting she’d always stand beside him smelling like soap. Even among the ringing sirens and stomping army boots. Falling in love was easy. Digging yourself out was harder. “Bu Deng,” she’d said. “Bu.” She’d seen what he saw. She knew of a place beyond this place, of a world where butterflies become human and hair becomes weeds. She taught him this. She knew the human eye, when shut, witnesses more than when openly examining the green of a leaf or the trek of an ant. He knew all this because he loved her. She knew because she’d found him. What is it about people that makes me sigh, their endless encounters with happiness and pain…

  The wide wooden doors of the barracks smacked open then shut again as soldiers streamed past. Now the pair’s turn to step inside, to enter the rest of their lives alone. As if to signal this shift, the sirens ceased. In the brief silence, Skinny Wang’s ears widened. Listen: American Nurse breathing, fleshy lungs expanding and contracting beneath a solid, confident breastbone. Her heart beat: strong and coarse, singing a victory song for him.

  For me.

  Ta-dum.

  For me.

  Ta-dum.

  For me.

  Ta-dum.

  The sirens resumed. Deng pushed the pair into the barracks, petalled bruises of cinnamon lipstick lingering on his wide, tanned neck. He’d found his Manchurian princess after all.

  “You,” he said, pointing at Skinny Wang. “Get to your telescope. This isn’t a fucking drill anymore. The Americans are coming.”

  Deng grabbed American Nurse by the shoulder and pulled her toward him. With his touch, she bared teeth.

  “Stop,” Skinny Wang said, but his words were made inaudible by the renewed siren drone.

  As Deng dragged her away, Skinny Wang stood helplessly, hands withdrawing into fists inside the pockets of his damp, wrinkled pants. Deng’s arm aggressively (or was it protectively?) around her waist, bodies side-by-side, she slowly grew smaller such that she was not the tall woman standing beside Skinny Wang, but the size of his hand. Her hair, which she’d pulled into a bun during her frantic dressing, loosened into wavy snakes that crawled over Deng’s shoulder.

  His arm on her back. His palm on her waist. Her hair glancing his skin. The moon swallowed by the blue-gray sky. Clouds flirting with the hillsides, tip-toeing closer. The earth, brown along the rivers, green atop the forests, swelled with lonely pride.

  Skinny Wang’s feet instinctively made their move, as they would always do in times of fear or anger. “Wait!” he called Deng’s name in the falling-rising tone. As he ran, he pulled his hands from his pockets and his mother’s thimble tumbled down the frozen riverbank toward the mismatched shapes of Deng and American Nurse. Skinny Wang reached for it, but tripped, knees landing harshly on hard mud. White on brown could be silver on brown, could be American Nurse leaning forward, digging her hands into the earth. She could turn, reach for his hand in the distance, a hesitant last grip, but where the thimble had been was now a comb—he stretched forward, extended his arms to scoop up the fallen amber object. Why does memory play games with the objects of our lives? The teeth jabbed his fingertips. Teeth and mud and the last grip of her fingers before Deng dragged her into a boat that peeled the river’s navy skin. He held the comb to his face, wondering exactly what he’d lost, what scene of the story he’d merely imagined. Had his mother left him her thimble or her comb? Such was a mind capable of resisting reality. Such was a man whose arms and legs were drawn by a distant puppeteer, the eager flicking of wrists that lifted an elbow, shrugged a shoulder, cocked a head.

  Hello, Hawk Eye. Nice to meet you.

  As he lay prostrate, the comb in his outstretched arm, the earth crumbled beneath him, a steady heel stomped into his back.

  “Hurry your turtle feet, Hawk Eye.” Fat Wang stood over Hawk Eye, the little boy from Cen Cang Yan who was once called Skinny Wang and now was mastering a new name. Fat Wang helped his fallen comrade to his feet then directed him to the line of soldiers running to shelter by the riverbanks, the telescopes with their greedy gazes. Hawk Eye shoved the comb in his coat’s breast pocket where it could be warmed by the heat of his chest. He thought he glimpsed silver on the bank, but then a fellow soldier’s boot stamped it away. Like awakening from that dream, he’d forgotten, momentarily, who led him here, how he had a name, several in fact, how he’d always marveled at the sound of someone calling for him, reminding him who they believed he was meant to be.

  “Hawk Eye!” a voice spun in the distance, but this time he didn’t turn to see who called. With his bare eyes, he scanned the horizon, but couldn’t see American Nurse, or Deng, or the boat, or barely the far bank of the river shrouded in morning fog or the cranes18 who’d since alit to some other shore, a more quiet, passive riverbank on which to make their roost. Around him, his comrades swarmed the banks of the Yalu like river rats while roving shadows blackened the hills from above.

  *

  They say you see them before
you hear them, blue birds dampening the soil beneath your feet with wide-winged silhouettes. Fat Wang yelled for Hawk Eye to cover his head as the rising sun’s rays disappeared. Black everywhere, morning blinded, and a sound like the sky being torn in two.

  His comrades kneeling beside him, Hawk Eye stood, gripping the scope, his stronger eye trained on the near banks. He fixed his view on the boat cutting across the remnant ice floes, a silver army cruiser with the requisite five red stars freshly painted on its sturdy flanks. Our boat. The People’s Republic of China’s boat heading away from these western shores to the eastern forests on the opposite side of the Yalu. To a war that wasn’t theirs, a war that implicated them all due to the sheer audacity of shared borders. Lines on a map so thin the boys could trace them with one long pinky nail. Lines that could be shredded, born anew. Their boat straddled that line like she owned it.

  He searched for the golden head, the hair that slid from its bun, once beneath his nose. On the boat, a cluster of black-haired men donned mud-caked army-green helmets. So many men that looked just like them. Where was she?

  “Bu,” Hawk Eye whispered, hoping she’d hear his call down the long barrel of his telescope. “Bu Deng.”

  “What? Get down, you turtle shit!” Fat Wang huddled beneath Hawk Eye’s feet within an oil drum’s tin box big enough to fit two men. Behind them, their troop’s Russian pps submachine guns trained the sky.