Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  Lao K hopped off and Doufu joined her, the two of them rocking the cart and my bicycle back and forth while I pushed the pedals forward until I was able to gather enough speed to keep the wheels rolling.

  “Jump on!” I shouted and Lao K sprinted to catch us. Xiaofei extended a hand, launching her onto the wooden platform with a thud.

  “You okay?” I turned but the girls shouted: “Keep pedaling! Don’t turn around!”

  The book chafed my waist, sharp angles jabbing bone.

  Li-Ming’s noisy breathing was finally masked by the jangling of the cart’s loose wheels and rusted axles, car horns honking at cluttered intersections, pigeons whistling through the air above and the sky now so black it seemed the stars had retired, retreated to their dark homes, afraid—of what? That their glimmering brightness may be seen, relied upon?

  My daughters didn’t know I’d once scaled mountain paths with these legs, scrambled loose rocks above a golden desert, saved a crane, rescued a prisoner of war, built an empire of glass. They didn’t care. They laughed at the insanity of this scene and the laughter kept my legs moving, heart racing, my breath—that breath. What else is there to do in life but breathe? Li-Ming’s head bobbed like a doll’s as the cart chattered around corners and down the narrow hutongs we’d known all our lives. We couldn’t stop any of this: we hurtled past the busy Deshengmen intersection—that Gate of Victorious Triumph under which so many armies claimed a win—past the lamb kabob and roasted sweet potato vendors calling from behind plumes of smoke. Three potatoes for two kuai! The juiciest lamb in Beijing! We encircled the old city wall aglow with green lights in celebration of the summer. Who wanted to save the city wall, Li-Ming? Was it you who taught me that lesson? Before I could ask, we rolled downhill, our city aslant, wheels gaining speed without effort, as we raced over the bridge crossing the ancient city moat on our way to Houhai Park and its metal fishing boats rocking on loose moorings, those bobbing clown-faced ducks, then turning into crowded Xinjiekou with its street-side shops shuttered after evening hours, passengers clustered around bus stops, impatiently awaiting a ride home.

  “Turn right, Ba! Right!” I couldn’t decipher which girl yelled, but I leaned into the brakes and maneuvered the handlebars to the hospital rising patiently on the horizon. In the last stretch, we careened around courtyard walls of siheyuan homes closing in around us as the road narrowed, a lone slivered moon struggling to be seen between tree shadows, loose strands sticking like spider webs to our hair, ears, shoulders. What were we escaping? We pressed on. We pressed on without stopping to tilt our heads to the sky. I lied, I thought. I was wrong. Can you hear me, Old Man? The book jabbed my hip—paper spine to calcified bone. Poets will remember this. Musicians will sing of this. But my girls, , they were laughing the laughter of the insane, because what choice is there but to seek humor in a late night bicycle race toward a hospital named for a growing ‘pool of water’?

  I opened my throat, expelled a laugh that frightened a pair of doves roosting in the dragon-encrusted hutong eaves. The birds flapped vigorously to lift their heavy bodies into flight—I knew exactly how those birds felt. Even in my dreams I swam through air as if it had mass, like invisibility could buoy us. What a waste. As I laughed louder, a bicyclist attempted to pass, his stout body rocking forward, arms waving—ta ma de, I realized: my brother! For a moment, he looked like my mother—as solid and confident as the day she walked to the river’s edge. He’d always be like her and I would be—who was I again?

  My brother waved his hands in my face: “Slow down!”

  Xiaofei, the practical daughter, brought feeling to my feet: “Ba, how will you stop?”

  “Lao Wang, slower!” Li-Ming demanded, her words dense as zhou.

  Why stop? I wanted to pedal and pedal, the strength of my once-young legs leading us to that destination we couldn’t see but knew was there on the edge of a map, the border of a neighborhood lined in leafy trees, the far corner of a street you loved to trace its lines with a finger, a kiss.

  But my body obeyed the commands, heels digging into the pedals, wheels skidding abruptly, cart leering forward then settling to earth in a heaving sigh. The girls’ laughter turned into cautious, exasperated huffs. No one moved.

  Finally, my brother, acting in his assigned role, offered a hand to Lao K. She stood slowly, shaking blood into her legs, then took Xiaofei’s hand and the three of them then finagled arms beneath Li-Ming’s body, shimmying her to the edge of the cart.

  “Brother, the wheelchair,” Doufu instructed.

  Although my hands steadily gripped the bicycle’s handlebars, although they’d blistered from the journey, they carefully peeled away. My body took over as my mind cautiously followed. The wheelchair my brother had the foresight to load onto the cart happily snapped into form and the three of them positioned Li-Ming into its seat. As I pushed her toward the hospital, a nurse jogged from the entrance and pried my grip, wheeling my wife into the golden light of the lobby as we stood in the courtyard, our breath catching up to our lungs, eyes watching, watching and waiting, but for what exactly, we didn’t know. We couldn’t name this yet.

  “Lao Wang,” my wife turned at the doorway and the nurse slowed her wheelchair to a stop. I saw my wife’s face but it was like looking at my own face atop a watery surface.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, because it seemed the most reasonable thing to say under such circumstances and I hadn’t formally acknowledged the guilt—how I had wanted to burn the book, how I wanted to turn back time, how I didn’t want to bring her to an end she couldn’t rewrite.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “This isn’t your fault and besides, this isn’t the end.”

  If this wasn’t the end, I didn’t understand why my fingers were feeling their way to the last pages, sensing the closing of this papery clutch around me like the sun tipping over the sky’s dome, bringing with it the inevitability of

  dusk

  /dawn

  dusk

  /dawn

  dusk

  /dawn

  “Keep reading,” she said, nodding at the book that nudged its way out from under my shirt.

  I ran my fingers through the pages, only then realizing the core of the book was carved out, replaced with hand-written and typed papers where the words of Li-Ming’s favorite poet were once bound.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked, but the attending nurse, with a nod to the front door, insinuated our time had passed. There wasn’t a clock on the wall to announce the turning of seconds into minutes. Not a sun in the sky to peel shadow lengths from trees and park benches. No magpies tweeting a familiar song or the smell of soap on our fingers or the remnant hot glass beneath our nails. What was I to do with the ten thousand things we’d misplaced between then and now/here and there? There was nothing by which to judge what was happening as I opened the spine and the pages tripped over one another in an ambivalent Gobi wind. From the north. In the summer.

  Autumn in Beijing falls like a knife slicing a pig ear—

  I distantly remembered another scene like this—how desperate I was to collect words in my palms, how deeply I believed holding on to something you once loved meant love would last forever, never spoil or turn to air or dusk or this—

  I looked to my hands and saw only a broken sun, a damned, irreversible dawn.

  54. As Feng-kan, a friend of Han Shan, wrote: “Reality has no limit so anything real includes it all.”

  The Last Letter

  Dear friend,

  I looked out the window like you reminded me before you left, before the book was lost and before I made a mess of my life on account of not being brave enough to do the opposite. I know you wanted me to see everything—the shape of aspen leaves fanning the breeze, that same breeze lifting a young girl’s hairs off her sour milk forehead, a grandfather limping beside her who combed his thinning wig with camphor oil and how I remembered that tangy smell from my own grandfather, how being close to him singed my eye
s and made me cry. How the buses let out the sick and elderly climbing the hospital stairs, bemoaning the state of their bodies. How time was the only thing we battled. And gravity. How I knew what it was like being in pain. How buoyant I felt when that pain subsided, if only because of an opiate drip, the slow release of a tablet a nurse placed on my tongue, how bitter it tasted, how sweet too. How life was comprised of so many equal and reverse opposites and how for every life there had to be a death. I think they call it “entropy,” but I never did finish physics class, was punished for my poetry and sent down to the Jiangxi farms before I understood the physical rules governing everything we believe certain on earth.

  If the girl hadn’t stepped back from that roof along that Beautiful Country coast, if I hadn’t tugged on her shirtsleeve and reminded her to look to the sky before the fall, would I be sitting here writing you? Would you be reading this? Does a butterfly’s flexed wing cause you, three thousand kilometers away, to itch your thigh?55 Someone set a pendulum swinging over the Japanese sand gardens Lao Wang loved to visit in People’s Park—until it rained and the patterns blurred, soggy and nonsensical, a pile of mush. Nature wins. Thank the heavens: nature will win.

  When Doctor Gang looked at me (eyes squinting, lips pursed, tongue pressing the inner cave of her cheek) and said the words I expected to hear (“three months, if you’re lucky,”) I already knew: Find you. You, I realized, were the only person who could save me from myself. Who could explain to everyone around me why I had to resurrect their stories to preserve my own. Why my husband’s thimble turned to an amber comb turned to nothing. Why he could never tell a story the same way twice. Why I was protector and destroyer of the truth all at once. What did they call the path to Han Shan? Laughable? Haha. My underwater laugh.

  But I didn’t find you. I only found her.

  She reminded me of you at first—even though the two of you, empirically speaking, look nothing alike (where Lao K is tall, you were short; where Lao K is broad-shouldered, you were slight; where Lao K is auburn-haired, you were black haired… and so on). But you are the same in the way two trees don’t have the same height or shaped leaves but produce a pleasantly mingled scent in spring. And I love her the way I loved you those years ago, the way only women love one another: violently. When she showed up with her lanky limbs, her head in the clouds, I knew: Another one of us! Lao Wang lost his way, but he was like Lao K once. Only Xiaofei is the grounded one, born without a vision of the world within this one. Sometimes I wonder if my daughter’s really mine—it’s a tragedy we birth children so different from ourselves. I’m sure my mother would’ve agreed if I’d ever the courage to ask her.

  But in the end, the American wasn’t enough: I still needed to find you.56

  From Jishuitan Hospital that afternoon after Doctor Gang’s pronouncement, I bicycled to your family’s apartment overlooking Houhai Lake, skipping a meeting with the Deshengmen Council for Preparedness during which I was to give a speech about “Postal Safety in Today’s City.”

  I trounced up the three floors to your old sun-laden apartment, found your home smelling of freshly-sautéed jinjiang rousi as soon as I opened the door, reminding me what it was like to be a child, to crave sweet-soyed pork. All your siblings chattered in their back bedroom; your home so utterly different from my own. Mine: a quiet vestibule like a temple’s inner sanctum where I tiptoed around the broken edges of my parents’ unhappiness, their inability to sire a troop of children; yours, the vibrant marketplace of a village where everyone was related and spoke in the same pitched, humming accent only they together understood.

  “I knew it,” I imagined you said. You painted your lips for the occasion, rimming the broad outline with a deeper mulberry. And when you said, “I knew it,” I knew you weren’t referring to the sickness chewing holes into my breasts, but to the fact eventually I’d find a reason to climb Cold Mountain. I didn’t care about the figurative. I’d spent my life scaling linguistic cliffs carved by a man long dead. I wanted to touch the cold stone walls, shuffle bare feet along dusty earth. I wanted to probe my fingers, unpeeling layers of rock, sand. Wanted to know what was behind this artifice, the hardest, yet most futile facade. I wanted you to lead me there.

  “How could you possibly know?” I asked my long-lost friend. You invited me to the room where we first saw butterflies burst from a chrysalis your mother cared for, the pod still tethered to a shelf on the deck. You served chrysanthemum tea in a pink porcelain mug (one you bought on the streets of Paris from a bald, toothless vendor who fell in love with you at first sight, like all men). A sunspot I hadn’t noticed beckoned browner on the outer frame of your cheek, the shape of a hog’s head. We’re older than we realize, we said, laughing, time pulling a moat of light across the floor. I pointed out your sunspot, rubbed it like a stain on a shirt, expecting friction to erase the mark, but it wouldn’t disappear. How could it? I looked up and you recognized the emergence of my elderly self. We would grow old together because that’s how time works.

  When did you become me and I you? Where did we lose each other?

  So you’d apologize, hearing questions I hadn’t asked, wiping a drip of tea from the back of my hand, shaking your head, and reminding me of the time we sat in this same room when you braided my hair, how this was the first time I understood why bodies yearn to be close, why we never fully inhabit anyone else, no matter how much we love them.

  “You’ll understand one day too,” you said, tickling my shoulders with your fingertips as they finished the braid, causing the buds of my breasts to tick like roasted beans beneath my shirt. Your mouth was close to my ears and I wanted you to press your cheek to mine but you stood there, radiating an unfamiliar heat from my shoulders to the deepest trench between my legs, accordioning my bowels.

  “We’ll chase each another forever, like the sun wraps around the horizon. Always returning,” you said in the book of my misremembering.

  “But does it?”

  A spit bubble on your lower lip reminded me we were human, unpainted and raw as the inner fruit of winter melons. I didn’t understand how words could become air and then fingers typing on a typewriter, then sound (hammer slapping page!), then paper and someone else’s thoughts. See! We live on typewriters like this. Pages I hammer like chiseled stone with my fingertips and leave on the windowsill beside my bed for the girl to retrieve. Pages I write with a blunted pencil, strokes trailing too early. This is how it begins, I think, but just as quickly stamp that thought below my bloated, tired feet with the advent of another thought: Maybe there is something more. Maybe we are too stupid to see it with our eyes.

  And in that long-buried apartment not yet forced to rubble, you walked me to the edge of the sun deck where the butterfly flapped wings against pale, dusty glass. Holding out a hand, the butterfly emerged, settled on your pinky, an old friend elated by the visit.

  “Before we were who we are now, we were eggplants and cauliflower our parents ate, and before that, we were rain sprinkling that field beyond the city, clouds gathering between valleys, that sun setting like a firestorm over a horizon so far and yet so near we think we can touch it.”

  Your slender fingers, the butterfly-less hand, kneaded my shoulders, vined words climbing these outer walls, curling between brick and glass and making ropes of strands of cells, and finally, I understood: I’ll begin with this and end with it too.

  I recited for you the Cold Mountain poem about living in the clouds, the one to which we turned when we teetered upon the ineffable.

  You laughed, loosening your grip.

  “My old friend Huang Li-Ming,” you said, like we were in fact old. In truth, we were almost, we just couldn’t see it yet, still believed we were as young as our girlhood bodies could ever be. “Remember the day we sat on the moat outside Zhongnanhai using fishing rods we made from string, pins, and branches, placed raisins on the hooks, and waited for hours to catch a fish?”

  “Of course.” There were few days I remembered so clearly. Alt
hough all I truly remembered was the exact second the bite snagged the line and we were pulled forward off our bony asses into the moat’s murky, lotus-laden waters. Flailing in the shoulder-deep moat, we didn’t let go of the line, pulling the struggling fish closer, arms scooping rapidly as if our lives depended on the catch, our fingers wrapping the carp’s fat head, both of us kicking to shore, the fish gasping too as our mouths opened to the sky, hair slick against heads.

  Here, now: the fish’s scaly breast within my palms, a carbonated mouthful of the moat’s warm, summer water, slippery grass between my toes as we climbed the wall, beaching ourselves like sea creatures, waiting for the sun to score us dry. We were just children, too young for our minds to wrap around our hearts like weeds to the trunk of a tree. We didn’t have time to recollect the moments we’d someday remember so clearly as if they were happening all the time, even within the lives of those we loved, those we’d left behind.

  But what had we remembered and what was rewritten to cord the yarn, to find seamlessness where everything is broken into shards?

  Which is why I ask you now: send me away. Send me to the farthest reaches of the world, to the girl on that other shore, to the daughter who wasn’t mine. Send me so that I may fly the circumference of earth, however small, however large. If I’ll fit in a pineapple cookie tin (our favorite flavor!), that would be best. And please ensure the postage comes with a China Post guarantee, one of the peony stamps we loved as children. I’ve seen how the Post treats packages so I expect dents and bruises, but I also expect, like all shipments that passed through my offices, to make it to my final destination.57

  55. This morning, from a New York Times report on theoretical physics: two particles separated by immense distances still feel the pulse of one other, are so entangled that the action of one instantaneously influences the other. In quantum entanglement, there’s no individual body but an entire state of being whereby every object within the system is tied, energetically, to the whole. But as soon as we measure an individual particle, the entire system collapses, severing signals, disconnecting a connectivity as of yet beyond our comprehension.