Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  52. Here Li-Ming used the word “wu” for “thing,” or “substance,” which is a homonym in Chinese with the word “nothing” (also “wu,” but in the rising tone). Wu: Thing. Wu: Nothing. Rising. Falling. Going up, we are nothing. Coming down, we have gravity, a form.

  53. “What was your favorite book as a young girl?” Li-Ming asked me as I continued snipping her hair, now almost complete to her forehead. Her scalp showed through in white patches, the way sunlight pours through a tree. “Anne of Green Gables,” I answered in English, unsure how to translate the title. “I don’t know this book,” Li-Ming said. I said, “No, I don’t think it’s well-known in China.” “Is it poetry?” “No,” I laughed—the silly girlhood stories set on the coast of Canada would surely seem frivolous to Li-Ming and her serious life full of ku and ke lian. “Then why did you like it?” she asked. “It was from a simpler time,” I said. “Before cars, television.” “Ah yes, a simpler time! That’s what this is about too,” Li-Ming said, brushing stray hairs from off her shoulder and shaking her head, now empty of longer locks. “That’s where we’re the same.” Of course Li-Ming never read Anne of Green Gables, never traveled by car alone, like I did three years later, to the reddened cliffs of Prince Edward Island, and contemplated a jump. What would’ve been the ending to this story if an Arabian horse, meandering from its pasture, hadn’t judged me with an albino eye, caused me to retreat from the edge? One of my favorite passages from that book Li-Ming never read is a scene where Anne and her friends re-enact the story of Lancelot and his lovelorn Elaine, but they don’t get the color of her right. “So ridiculous to have a redheaded Elaine,” Anne says.

  The hair, no that wasn’t right. Ridiculous!

  Li-Ming would agree: when we play a role, we must get the hair right.

  Baba

  Time: convex and purple, the shifting of sun in the same angle morning and evening—but this is the rising sun and that’s the setting sun and here’s a body on its side, incapable of breathing. Breath: a poet may call it life’s earliest, most impulsive art.

  It’s time, my brother Doufu said. He was a patient shadow in our house for weeks, watching as my wife withered into her smallest form, worried none of us sensed the inevitability destructing her. When Li-Ming reached for notebook and pen, he’d slap her wrist. “There isn’t time for that,” he’d say and she’d roll her eyes, take the deepest breath she could, and retort, “If there isn’t time for this, I’d rather there’s time for nothing.” She meant: I’d rather be dead. But she wouldn’t speak that word in our presence so we tiptoed around her; the sharpening of pencils, the chewing on pen tips. We didn’t ask what she was writing; there wasn’t time for questions.

  On an evening when the seasons shifted from hot to hottest, I came home from work, my fingers sore and scented by sparked glass. My brother stood outside our apartment’s entranceway smoking a cigarette and ashing it into our first floor neighbor’s potted plants. I’d never seen him smoke, nor had he ever been so brash about where he discarded his refuse.

  “You smoke? Since when?”

  He ignored me, flicking the butt to the ground where he squelched it with the rubber heel of his sneaker. He cleared his throat then spit a neat globule of mucus on the cement between us. He said, “It’s time.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Time for what? Yes, I could use a trip to the bathhouse. I stink. It’s time for that.” I mock whiffed my armpit.

  “Fool. It’s time for Li-Ming to go now.”

  “Go where?”

  “Jishuitan.”

  Jishuitan: the corner of two streets that became the name of a city neighborhood that became the hospital where my wife would receive her final treatment. Funny, but it was my wife who would remind me: Naming things is what makes them tangible. Naming things makes them impossible to lose. Naming things takes an expanding pool of water at the center of the city and makes it a hospital: .

  “Come upstairs,” my brother said, waving me to follow and for the first time I saw the jaundiced cheeks of a man who’d been a smoker his whole life. What else hadn’t I seen until this moment? What had I missed?

  I followed his oversized body as it plodded upward, marveling at how differently we were shaped. We were the last two Wang men with mismatched statures, footsteps that couldn’t match a beat. Despite our shared ancestry, I should’ve hated him for telling me what to do, for reminding me of Jishuitan. I should’ve asked him to return to Shanghai on the next train. To stay out of our lives. But how could I? In truth, he filled the gap of my inabilities, aligning Li-Ming’s pill bottles on the kitchen table each morning, reading the instructions and doling out her allotted dose. When the girls asked questions, he always had an answer whereas I would simply stare at them, dumbfounded by the summer red blossoming on their cheeks, how perfectly their tongues formulated language. Since I carried Li-Ming up the stairs after Xiaofei’s diving meet, my head and mouth lost connectivity. Communication wasn’t needed. I needed sleep. And water. And time.

  My brother unlocked the apartment door and led me into my own home. He still smelled of smoke, an awkward a scent on him. He draped a cool, wet washcloth over Li-Ming’s forehead; she looked like a traveler in a desert who had stopped by an oasis waiting for the sun to set.

  “Li-Ming,” I said, beginning my usual replaying of the day’s events, a ritual we began weeks earlier when doctors required she stay inside. “I’m home from work. Did you hear what Mrs. Xu said about the neighborhood council? They want to ban automobiles from parking in the courtyard.”

  Li-Ming pretended to sleep, white crescents showing between eyelids. I should have slipped into bed beside her and slept away the days indefinitely, judging time’s passing by the sun’s shadows sliding over the canvas of our bodies. A valiance in giving up, in withdrawing from the world as it’s lived, cocooning yourself in a den of your own making.

  “It’s time,” my brother reminded me.

  “Time?” I asked.

  “Time for Jishuitan.”

  I laughed. Time for Jishuitan sounded like a Hong Kong movie title.

  “Not funny,” my brother said. Why was he always serious? Had he inherited my mother’s temperament? Was she a serious person the evening I found her crouching on a corner outside Big World, waiting for us while we explored the Hall of Mirrors, licking her fingers then smoothing my hair, whistling a tune I didn’t know? Was she a serious person when her head leaned into mine on the walk back from Ba Jin’s film, whispering about the ways of the storks downstream, how best to avoid their clutch? When her arms waved to me from the river and I couldn’t decipher if she was drawing me closer or shooing me back? I couldn’t hear her voice or sketch the exact details of her face. Was she the one I needed to save at the river or someone else? Li-Ming nearly drowned. I hadn’t saved her. Who was it that bore her to the air, made her whole again so this story could be constructed out of snippets of conversation and memory and photograph and one day, we would crouch beneath the futon, pulling the pages like a loose sting of yarn, eager to find the unraveling’s inner core? I couldn’t trust my mind any more than I could believe Mrs. Xu’s gossip. Time created a tunnel and while the picture at the end was always the same, as the years progressed, the tunnel grew in scope, altering my view of the ending, making that which once seemed large and real, look distant, unreliable. My fingers, I thought, looking to my hands, were still Cen Cang Yan large, still bore the bulbous, knotted roots of a country boy.

  “Tell the girls,” my brother said. “I’ll ready Li-Ming’s things.” He busied himself in the kitchen, transferring boiled water to canteens and whistling a song I didn’t recognize. Maybe we were all actors in a film called Time For Jishuitan. What was my role?

  The actor playing me nodded, but the hallway between the living room and the bedroom was longer than I remembered. Too many clothes left to dry on the wires strung between the walls: Xiaofei’s starched underwear with tiny blue flowers coloring the edges, Li-Ming’s abandoned padded bras, my broth
er’s only other pair of pants frayed at the hem, Lao K’s sweat-stained gym socks.

  From the back bedroom, light seeped beneath the doorframe, pooling yellow. The girls whispered. I could push open the door and there they’d sit, thigh-to-thigh on the twin beds they’d pushed together, slumped over Li-Ming’s camera which Lao K would explain to Xiaofei and Xiaofei would pretend to listen because we were already into the long, slow progression of months during which Xiaofei stopped listening to anyone, fully recoiled into herself, like one of those fluffy rodents on the CCTV-9 programs Li-Ming loved to watch. Loved. Then. There was time then for watching television programs about adorable rodents. Time to wait for the shifting evening light. Time to sit at the kitchen table undisturbed by the loudspeaker announcements or the egg vendor on the street or Xiaofei’s colicky cries from the back room or—what was there was time for? Time: a slippery fish caught outside the Forbidden City’s moat. We watched as she writhed in our palms, eye examining us—or pleading an unheard prayer?—while the knife pulled across the scaled, metallic skin, revealing an unexpected, thriving pink.

  If only I could give that door an honest, patient push. My finger quivered.

  Li-Ming’s wheezing stalled me, made the girls notice my heavy breathing on the other side of the door, how it sounded like I was gasping for breath when really I was trying not to turn from the actor playing me to the man I’d always been.

  “Ba? What do you want?”

  The door nudged open and Lao K stood there in her sweatpants from her private high school with an angry phoenix on the pant thigh. She listened to her portable cassette player. Xiaofei was at her desk, frantically scribbling the English words for:

  haphazardly

  profoundly

  eloquence

  With Lao K’s presence, Xiaofei’s English advanced a form, much to Li-Ming’s pleasure. This also gave the girls shared words we didn’t understand. On the bed where Xiaofei sat, the blankets were askew, pillows dented from the previous night’s sleep—the entire room like a dormitory (books stacked, magazines splayed open on the floor, dirty socks balled beneath the bed). When had I last entered this space? Months, if not longer, and Li-Ming was bedridden for weeks. The room smelled like the only space in the apartment occupied by a human presence. Lao K tapped her foot to a beat bursting from her headphones.

  “What do you want, Ba?”

  Xiaofei still didn’t look up—I’d been invisible to her for weeks.

  Lao K reluctantly peeled the headphones off her ears. She looked at Xiaofei, who was still hunched over her homework.

  “Give me a minute,” Lao K said.

  “Okay,” I complied, standing in the doorway.

  “No,” she clarified. “One minute alone.”

  “Xiao-Xiao,” I said, waiting for my daughter to turn. She didn’t.

  “One minute,” Lao K said and before I could protest, she shut the door.

  I didn’t know what happened in that bedroom in the minute that followed, but it felt like much more time had passed when the door finally slipped open and Lao K shook her head as if she was not surprised I was still there. The kettle had cooled enough not to squeal, my brother was awake and fully dressed, and Li-Ming was not wheezing but had a look of patient certitude on her face from her beizi-laden bed.

  Xiaofei was emboldened, gathering books into a bag, finding her sneakers, and a canteen bottle filled with warm water (whether this was for her benefit or her mother’s, I didn’t know). Lao K looked into the main room, her long bangs shielding her eyes from my view but somehow she saw everything she needed.

  “You’re bringing the book?” It was my wife’s voice. A voice I hadn’t heard so decongested for months. Who was the woman buried beneath all these layers for so long? The overstuffed beizi, the woolen shawl, the sweater vest, the long-sleeved cotton turtleneck, the first, then second, then third layer of skin subsuming further levels of fat, tissue, intestine: my wife. I knew her as my wife. And that was her voice.

  The girls didn’t seem startled by her voice’s return, the first voice Xiaofei ever heard.

  “Are you bringing the book?” Lao K asked.

  Xiaofei looked up from tying her shoes. “Yeah, Ba, are you bringing the book?”

  I wanted to act coy—this was my final jurisdiction as a father, the last time I’d act authoritative. I wanted to say: “the book is hu-li-hu-tu, this idea of going to Jishuitan is hu-li-hu-tu—why don’t we forget everything and go to Rending Lake Park for the afternoon, and get lime icicles from the Xinjiekou stores?”

  But I said: “Yes, I’m bringing the book.”54

  “Good,” Lao K nodded.

  My wife made a happy sound, a pigeon in a puddle.

  “Now it’s really time,” my brother affirmed from the living room.

  I joined him there.

  “Your hand,” Li-Ming’s directorial voice scratched, returning to its more recent pitch. She reached toward the widest spot on my palm where a collection of scars crisscrossed, thin white paths across a valley landscape—like in Lu Xun’s story, My Old Home, that ends with the thought the earth didn’t have roads until men, collectively, passed along the way, leaving trails for others to follow. I wanted to know: How would we find our way home when we’d never been there together? But Li-Ming simply said, “Give me.”

  I gripped her warm, unscathed palm.

  “Time,” she said and even though it was past evening, I looked to the clock on the wall, the same clock since her parents’ days in the apartment, the clock we used to judge the shifting of seasons, the raising of a daughter, the relative distance between who we were now and what we believed then. We lifted her body from its sunken shape, wrapped her in Xiaofei’s childhood beizi with its white cranes alighting to distant hillsides, and carried her downstairs, as gingerly as an antique chair.

  “Xiaofei, take your mother’s shoulders. Lao K, hoist her legs,” my brother directed. He and I took charge of Li-Ming’s midsection, surely the heaviest, all that flesh and digestion and heart.

  At the bottom of the staircase, we placed Li-Ming on the stoop. She slumped forward and Lao K sat beside her, propping her against her own long torso. My brother unlocked Lao K’s bicycle and I readied the other bicycle with the back cart attached—the same vehicle on which we brought the American to our home two seasons earlier. We hoisted Li-Ming one last time, positioning her on the cart by leaning her against the wooden lip at the back, her daughters acting as sentries.

  I only then realized I still wore my nighttime shorts.

  “I need to go upstairs,” I told the group.

  “We have to go now,” my brother insisted.

  Li-Ming’s chin was to her chest. For once, she wasn’t spirited enough to protest.

  “I forgot something,” I said, ignoring the pleas of my daughters—Ba, it’s time to go… There isn’t time for forgotten things….

  I jogged upstairs, jostled the key in the lock, three times to open—always the same!—and rummaged in the back bedroom for a pair of pants, retired until autumn. But who was I kidding? This wasn’t about pants. This was about that book. Where had Li-Ming put it? I was suddenly inspired to burn the thing as Li-Ming had herself attempted.

  I found the book tucked beneath Li-Ming’s pillow. This was the first time I’d held the book in decades—not since Li-Ming first showed it to me on the train to my father’s house and I traced the verses she’d copied, told her she should never write such gibberish because writing poetry was the same as telling lies.

  What rubbish! I shouted to the big, empty room. My wife’s life was ending because she believed in things too easily destroyed, irrelevant. But what was I to do but play along, wait for the next scene? This was always as it had been—the shadow puppet behind a screen, the voice not mine shouting “North! North!” or the hands digging in a breast pocket for a thimble I’d think was mine but would one day be burned in a courtyard fire, smelted for a fingernail of scrap metal. Whose story begins where and how are we to
turn the page when we’re not the ones penning the final verse? I tucked the book into the waistband of my pants and jogged downstairs.

  The girls waited on the back of the bicycle cart. My brother stood astride Lao K’s bike and was smoking again.

  “You’re smoking,” I said.

  “Yes. Can you pedal three women all the way to Jishuitan?”

  “Sure,” I said, but my legs were useless: bony and frail. Three women behind me: one old man at the helm. An illogical proposition, a challenge of strength beyond measure. I wanted to accept the trial, to prove I could pedal us the final kilometer along the uneven hutong alleyways, jangling over potholes, past frightened pigeons scuttling out of our path as fast as their stout legs allowed. I was only one man but I needed the strength to move four bodies. I stood on the pedals, pressed all my weight atop the contraption, edging the bicycle forward. We rolled backward a few centimeters.

  “Ba, let me push us to start,” Lao K offered.

  “No need.” I leaned forward again, but we rocked backward half a meter. The book, still in my waistband, jabbed my skin like the elbow of a child.

  “Ba, we’re not going anywhere,” Xiaofei complained.

  “Relax. All of you relax.”

  “Yeah, Ba, let me push us.” Lao K’s voice rose above her sister’s. Together, they grew more confident than either alone, in the way many half-decent singers, when joined, comprise a pleasant choir.

  “Okay,” I relented. “You push us to start.” She was the stronger of my daughters, and she was right—we weren’t going to go anywhere without a nudge.