Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

Someone yelled: “Hawk Eye! Did you catch that last pass?”

  But he hadn’t been looking up. He’d seen nothing but the winged shadow beneath the scope, heard the sound of the world being split in two, everything he’d known cut between two sides: here and there. Halfway across the river, with his good eye, he watched as the boat hit a chunk of ice and the motor spun in place, churning froth. Another screech in the sky, another damp shadow. Fat Wang screaming for him to crouch, Hawk Eye held steady the scope’s lens, feet a determined tripod. He scanned the length of the river—the far bank misted white and brown, tall pines lining the shore—knowing he’d make it to the end, could add whatever what metaphorical flourishes were necessary to their love story until he found what he was looking for: her, me, us.

  From the boat, like a white flag of surrender (or a rescue flag?), an arm poked out of a sleeve and waved above the mass of bodies. The palm flashed, five fingers, distant and white as a star. He watched as the hand became an arm, the arm a shoulder, the shoulder a hip, a femur, ankle bone, last tenuous snub of toe. He loved her because he’d made her with his thoughts, because somewhere someone decided this was the way his story would be told. He thought she was beautiful because he was told she was. He thought she was American because that was the word they’d used, nation conjured, when no other temptation, loathed and admired, would suffice.

  His eyes reached the length of the scope to touch her fingers, to interlace them with his own. There, he thought, manipulating the glass to reflect his fingers grappling for hers.

  But the arm recoiled. Silver jets sluiced the sky, spilled a black rain onto the far shore and the riverbank’s ice moaned. Fat Wang dragged Hawk Eye to the ground, the telescope tilting absently on its base, its view of winter’s streaked cirrus clouds above.

  The boat’s engine sputtered against an icy expanse of river. The only sounds were human: machinery created for war, an ever-chattering industriousness. The jets dipped beneath the horizon, trailing white ringlets.

  As Hawk Eye crouched, defeated, on the ground beside his comrades, his arm remained outstretched, fingers hopelessly combing the chilled dirt. What did he hope to find? Maybe he believed there would be another day they’d wake with limbs entangled, eager to tell one another () the story of their own inventing. But somehow, too young for this, he knew what he gained that night was already lost, churning its wake across the angry, uprooted chunks of river ice that now flowed, untethered, downstream. How long could he await a return? He raked his fingers through the cold mud. Peeled away a layer of earth, smeared a clump across his lips, cheeks, chin, throat. He reveled in the cool touch that always supported him, relieved perhaps some things always remain. But what are they? What form do they take when we’re gone? His comrades—they were silent for quite some time. They were listening for the next fall of rain.

  *

  After American Nurse’s departure, after Deng returned from the other side of the river with information about the American advance from the peninsula’s southern region and a frostbit tip of nose, there were meetings, questions behind closed doors, in no-windowed rooms clouded by cigarette smoke, sweat dripping into eyes, stinging and sour. After a week, they lined the boys on the far side of a cold gray metal table. A swinging bulb hung from the ceiling, bending light atop their heads and shoes. In the time since the air raid, they’d lost what stubble and girth made them feel like men in the months prior. Even Deng looked like a boy donning his father’s too-baggy uniform, wrists swimming at the cuffs, lips and cheeks kissed by winter’s bite. Despite his size, Deng killed a man once. He told the troops stories of taking down Nationalists in the wetlands of Hangzhou Bay, tall-spun tales verified by the bulletins tacked on the battalion walls, by Deng’s status in the troop. But standing beside him now, how could Hawk Eye name the way Deng’s eyes pulled toward his cheeks—sadness? No, not sadness. Regret? Guilt? Not even this was shared among those who’d been responsible for a death. What he saw in Deng that day was actually hardness. Not a protective hardness, but the hardness befitting of calcified bones or petrified wood. This calcification clung to the creases around his lips and brow, in the dim light fluttering behind black eyes. He was much younger than these wrinkles insinuated. Did the rest of the troop also bear this look, stripped of the masks of manhood and responsible only for the sweat blinking from foreheads to eyes to chins? What did they share, after all, but the memory of a night they’d selfishly wished would never end?

  Deng shuffled his feet and stood tall as they announced his sentence: for leaving American Nurse alone in his tent that night, he would be demoted from Commander to a lesser post and sent to the wind-harsh western provinces for the remainder of his service. Liu, who Fat Wang quickly pegged as the instigator of their unlawful entrance into the tent, would be sent home to Jilin without any honor and blacklisted from the Party. Fat Wang was given a promotion in Beijing for his ‘heroism’ in turning in Liu. As for Hawk Eye—they didn’t know what to do with him. They knew he was responsible for taking American Nurse away from the tent and into the 40th battalion’s barracks that morning of the air raid, but this didn’t interest them. The party elders merely wanted to know how a boy from the rural outpost of Cen Cang Yan could be given the job of surveying the border. They dismissed the rest—they wanted to talk to Hawk Eye alone about the morning of the air strike. They wanted to know about the American jets: what color were they? How many shot across the white sky above Andong? What color was the hair of the American pilots? What shape and glean of their button eyes?

  One of the prosecutors, with a birthmark the silhouette of a rooster’s foot on his cheek, coughed on his smoke then waved away the cloud between them. He asked, “So tell us, country boy, how many planes did you see?”

  “Seven,” Hawk Eye said, lying. He hadn’t seen even one, only a series of shadows slipping beneath him as surreptitiously as a spider. His lie satisfied them. They passed around unfiltered Panda cigarettes and sipped tin cups of erguotou, the firewater that warmed their bellies, lubricated their throats, loosened their tongues.

  “You know a shell hit just feet from your post on the river bank, Comrade Wang? You heard that from Deng, right?” The prosecutor’s birthmark glistened in the cool, damp light. Everyone was telling Hawk Eye this for days. For days, they said it was a miracle Fat Wang and he survived. They said the river transport taking the prisoners back across the border was sprayed with bullets. That a few of the prisoners had been injured, maybe worse. They said Deng dropped the transport off at the other side and returned with someone else’s blood dappling his uniform. They said Hawk Eye shouldn’t be standing here today telling this story. They called him a Miracle Man.

  You’ve got a spine of steel.

  You must have some strong spirit sitting on your shoulders.

  You’re one brave son of a bitch.

  Hawk Eye nodded. But what he didn’t tell anyone, not even Fat Wang, was that he hadn’t felt a thing. He hadn’t felt the gunfire because all he’d known was the distance between what we can touch with our hands and see with our eyes.19 He hadn’t noticed the American bullets dappling the ground because he’d been stuck inside this distance, the telescope’s lens flexing and narrowing as it attempted to reach that shore from where another pair of eyes once looked into his, told him to follow them to their logical conclusion: a white stretch of sky, a dead tree’s gnarled branches listing in the wind, a magpie calling from the hills, beckoning—where had he seen this scene before and trusted it to be true? He knew with utter certainty he was not alone, that someone else saw this too even though his brain resisted the notion he could be nothing more than Hawk Eye. Comrade Wang. Skinny Wang. Wang Guangling. The country boy. The boy worth forgetting. Memorializing. Paying attention to—then discarding.

  Forget it, a voice reprimanded from a place where the lights had been turned off. Forget you’re seeing this or hearing what you hear. Pay attention and you’ll find me again. Can’t you hear me? I’m speaking to you with the words inside y
our own head, your fingernails digging into your thighs. That’s me crawling an itch up your spine and into your chin. Haha! I’m writing you from the inside and you can’t even see me. I hear your laughter hidden between your ears.

  He tipped back his tin cup of liquor as the swinging bulb reflected shells in his palms. A moth landed on the table, flexed its indigo wings and flew upward, enticed by the light. Insects: how stupid yet how brave.

  “I can’t believe you just stood there. You should be given a medal for that kind of patriotism,” the prosecutor said as the moth’s wings made gauzy shadows beneath folded hands. “Seven American jets,” he repeated. He shook his head. Flakes of dandruff drifted in the light. He reached below the table to scratch his crotch. “Fucking imperialists,” he said under his breath, as if the curse alone would save them from another smattering of bullets on northern shores.

  Above them, on the swinging light bulb, the wings of a moth sizzled and the tiny, frantic body dropped from the ceiling into his cup of erguotou, black legs thrashing aimlessly. He plucked the poor, dumb creature from the liquor, placed it on the table where it careened, wings damaged, toward the edge.

  The rooster-cheeked investigator grew drunker, along with his fat-faced colleagues. Carelessly, his lips perched on words like “border” and “artillery,” he flicked the moth, still teetering on the table’s edge, and it skidded forward, coming to a dead rest on its side. Then Hawk Eye’s comrades abandoned talk of the war, the jets, Imperialists. As if the erguotou functioned as a love potion, they wanted to know where to find the freshest female entertainment in Andong—the city known for its Russian residents remaining from the war with Japan and the Korean refugees with their high cheekbones and fuller-than-Chinese chests. They clucked as if women would appear at the door, raising their skirts for the men to see their knees, the pressed V of their inner thighs, their...

  Drunkenly, Hawk Eye closed his eyes, lulled by the laughter, the eager talk of women. When he opened his eyes, he was alone in the room, voices teetering down the hallway. The tin cups were in various states of disregard, rings of erguotou penning a silver honey on the steel table. Across from him, the moth renewed its journey, plodding through an ashtray filled with smoldering gray embers. When the insect reached the tray’s end, he flexed his indigo wings as if to fly but merely fell sideways again. His thin legs kicked, wildly trying to right himself, wings shivering and useless.

  “You coming?” The rooster-cheeked prosecutor leaned into the doorway. Only the frame could bolster him. He scratched his crotch. That crotch of his required a lot of attention. “We’ll find you a good woman tonight. To reward you for your patriotism.”

  Behind the prosecutor stood several shadowed figures, shifting in eager-to-leave, eager-to-fuck positions. Hawk Eye pushed back his chair and it squealed against the concrete. He didn’t want a woman that night. He didn’t want anything but to sleep away the last few months, to wake up somewhere other than the crowded bunks always smelling of unwashed hair, stale piss, and dried mud.

  “Yeah, I’m coming.” He’d already learned—there wasn’t any point in fighting Party officials; questions only lead to more questions, so not asking any was the best plan.

  He followed the listing shapes down the hallway, suddenly recognizing the liquor’s effect on his balance, tripping over his own feet and trusting the walls to keep him from falling over altogether.

  16. The Cao’E River of Shangyu is now a polluted waterway begrudgingly pulsing north to Hangzhou Bay and named after a fourteen-year-old girl famous for dying in its waters. Her father, Cao Xu, committed suicide here, and, the story goes, for seventeen days Cao’E searched for him, sitting patiently at the riverside for his return. According to one account, she threw her clothes into the water, hoping he’d reach for them but when he didn’t, she jumped in the river and drowned herself in an act of filial piety. Myth or truth? Cao Xu himself drowned while officiating a ceremony to honor Wu Zixu, the Wu Clan’s eldest ancestor, most famous for his filial piety.

  17. I stood in the darkroom beneath Li-Ming’s danwei, a hand to the radio, the other across my chest, atop Baba’s. The pictures Li-Ming took of me smudged clear in ochre light, and, aside from the photographs, our faces were all we could see of one another. I asked Baba to join me here, thinking the darkness could make everything worth saving, childish enough to believe we could right a wrong by adding yet another. I wanted to be loved by the characters in this story. I wanted them to find me distantly fascinating and consumable. The smell of turpentine followed us home. The moon cast a cool, bitter light atop the snow-drifted aspens, our feet, and all this felt like the reason we were drawn together and why we could, so quickly, cleave apart. When we got home, she was gone but her mark was everywhere—the abandoned tea kettle on the stove, its cool, steel body still rimmed in steam, the crane beizi on the futon cocooned in her body’s shape, the book, the one we didn’t understand would become our beginning and our end, opened to a blank page, rustled by wind creeping in from the open window on the sun deck, the unseen ficus plants who, in the dark, bent their heads passively, avoiding any request for an alibi.

  18. Cranes in Chinese poetry: symbols of the immortals. Li-Ming never spoke of cranes but Cold Mountain wrote of them. I’ve never seen a crane but in my research, I discovered there’s a hotel at the base of what is likely Cold Mountain’s home called Double Golden Crane. The hotel’s website photographs advertise a bedside panel to control the room’s lights and television, a haw candy left on the pillow by housekeeping each night. Where is the mountain now? I call the hotel to inquire but the receptionist laughs and says something in a local dialect I can’t understand. “There was once a mountain!” I shout but she hangs up while her wisped laughter boils my ear.

  19. One spring afternoon, as her breaths belabored, Li-Ming asked me to walk into the courtyard with her, eager to feel sun on her cheeks. She held my face in her hands, tilted my view to the failing aspen trees in the apartment complex’s central gathering area. What had she wanted to tell me? I saw a skeletal shape, dead branches, blue sky. Was this all that was left? “Have you ever felt an earthquake?” she asked, but I was an east coaster—we didn’t experience the shifting of tectonic plates but feared the rise of hurricane oceans. “No,” I felt foolish and fragile. “A beautiful thing,” she said but I didn’t know if she meant the tree above us, the sun in its curling perch, or the earthquake she’d once felt. The afternoon sun tugged at the square danwei buildings crowding this dusty neighborhood. Neither of us knew that in less than a decade these courtyard trees would be buzz-sawed, the earth beneath them upended to make way for a parking garage, an office building with windows so shiny the gray sky looked almost infinite.

  Baba

  They say in the dark a twenty-year-old’s eye receives sixteen times more light than an eighty-year-old’s. They say an eye’s lens yellows with age, like skin or a well-worn undershirt. They say by the time you realize this, by the time you know you should have worn hats, shielded your eyes from the sun, it’s too late. They say all this because they know nothing about sight. Know nothing about looking directly into the light of the sun. To be blinded by all that seeing.20

  After the interrogation, after a night stumbling Andong’s crowded streets, the investigators climbing into and out of lousy, mildewed mattresses with too-tall women while Hawk Eye sat on icy stoops smoking an entire pack of filter-less Russian cigarettes, the battalion’s leadership ran their usual battery of tests on the troops: Deng first, then Fat Wang, then Hawk Eye. The boys sat on metal chairs outside the barrack’s infirmary, warped, crooked legs wobbling beneath them. The leadership wanted to know how the air raid, all the questioning that followed, affected their bodies; the investigators cared little about the boys’ minds, hearts. They made them sprint up and down the hallways, listened with stethoscopes to the click-click beating within their chests. They peered down their throats, into their noses, up their assholes. With pinpricks of light, they examined their ey
es. Retinas. They wanted to know if the boys were still good for the fight against the Americans, those wide-eyed imperialists. If they were still worthy of being counted as one of the comrades.

  At the end of the tests, Hawk Eye was the last to stand in front of an eye chart hanging from a frayed string above the doctor’s desk. He stood, as instructed by Nurse Kang, a young woman who smelled of another man’s tobacco, and read the letters as he saw them. Letters that pulled their foreign sounds awkwardly across his tongue, reminding him of his primary school teacher, Feng Laoshi, and her insistence he was too stubborn and righteous to speak English’s more nuanced tones—he wasn’t. He was loath to let his tongue slip, to spout meaningless words. Nurse Kang nudged him, like Feng Laoshi would. He sighed, then read:

  B Z F E D

  O F C L T D

  T E P …

  But the ‘O’ following that demanding ‘P’ was not a letter. It was a mouth, wide and gaping, waiting for him to kiss it.

  O

  He squeezed his lips together, incapable of making a sound. He dug his fingernails into his thighs. O. O. Ohhhhhhh…. Oh, there was the letter ‘O.’ A child’s gaping mouth looking up from a riverbed, that muskrat body too tanned to be a rich boy now. Oh, how was he supposed to follow this O to its inevitable conclusion? Thump. There he was on the bottom, trying to say the letter always his downfall, a reminder he knew everything and nothing at all. O was a circle. O had a beginning and an end. O was a mother’s hair beneath the river’s surface. O was the wife he didn’t yet know, circling the Zhongnanhai moat awaiting a trout’s absent nip.21

  Branches raked the window. Ice melted, drips collecting in buckets outside the barracks; buckets full of last month’s melted snow were everywhere, saved for the leaders’ nightly baths. The rest showered in the bathhouses every other Wednesday, where the steam wasn’t enough to mask their flaccid privates from the view of their comrades. Heat was a luxury. They huddled together at night near the communal fires, rubbing their forearms and crowding closer.