by Peter Watts
“Of course it’s a secret,” she said.
“Shut up,” the boy said.
“Why? I want to know.”
Then the boy said, “He won’t tell because you aren’t. None of us are.”
“We’re not what?”
“Like him!” the boy screamed, pounding her helmet with both of his hyperfiber hands. “Not yet and maybe never. We’re not Remoras, and of course he doesn’t trust you with secrets, and this is an awful day, a very sad day, and can’t you understand that . . . ?”
Oil of Angels
Chen Qiufan, Translated by Ken Liu
As soon as Doctor Qing’s hands pressed against my naked back and slid downwards, my skin felt as though it had grown wings. I knew then that all my efforts had been worth it.
This massage clinic was located near Di’anmen, the Gate of Earthly Peace, along the ancient Hundred Flowers hutong. The clinic had no sign and took no walk-ins. New clients had to be recommended by existing clients and call a special phone number to make an appointment. The initial waiting period ranged from a week to a month, depending on how busy the clinic was and the doctors’ moods.
After checking my ID and appointment number, the receptionist brought me upstairs to a small waiting room decorated in a minimalist Scandinavian style rarely seen in Beijing. The cream-colored wallpaper and furniture appeared faded in the city’s corrosive, dirty air, but the owners didn’t seem to care. A faint fragrance permeated the air without the pungency of artificial scents. It smelled familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I struggled to recall it, forcing myself to scan the bad sectors of my memory over and over, until a sweet-looking girl came to tell me that the aromatherapy room was ready for me.
This new room suggested the dim inside of a silkworm cocoon: purple light, filtered through layers of silk, cast moiré patterns against the wall like ripples in a pond. I felt lost in this tiny room no more than a few feet on a side.
As I came out of the bath, I found Doctor Qing silently waiting for me. She was an ordinary, middle-aged woman, not too tall, dressed in a light-colored uniform. Pointing to the massage table, she said, in an authoritative tone exactly like a real doctor’s, “Undress and lie on the table. Face down. Arms at your sides.”
But I was already nude.
She was blind and couldn’t see my body, and this made me feel less awkward. I climbed onto the bed, carefully settling my face into the hole. Below me, I saw a lotus-shaped ceramic candleholder. Air heated by the tiny flame wafted up to me, carrying the familiar scent.
“That’s neroli oil. It helps you relax. Calms you,” Doctor Qing said as if she knew what I was thinking.
“Doctor, there’s something on my mind . . . ” I struggled to bring up my problem. A hand lightly pressed against the back of my head, where my MAD was installed.
“Stop thinking. Your mind will never tell the truth. But your body never lies.”
Warm oil dripped against the center of my back. Her palms then spread the oil around in a circular motion. My consciousness seemed to follow the same motion, swirling slowly, drifting, like a leaf caught in an eddy.
“I’m using only carrier oil, made from sweet almond extract, suitable for a wide variety of skins.” Doctor Qing’s voice seemed to come from outer space, from light years away. “Since this is your first time, I can’t use any essential oils. I have to get to know your reactions first. Of course, I’m not just talking about your body . . . ”
Before I could react, her hands shifted direction and dashed from my back to my sides like two slippery fish. An indescribable pleasure bloomed against my body like the layers of a lotus flower. I had never imagined that one woman could set another woman’s body on fire so quickly. I felt aroused.
Even more incredibly, as she continued to manipulate my body, the thoughts that had confused and bothered me floated up into consciousness like bubbles, and then burst and disappeared, one after another. What remained of my reason tried to figure out just how the therapy worked, but suddenly, I cried out.
A surge of dark emotion wrapped around my hip like a python. My womb felt squeezed, distorted, even though it was empty. Terror oozed from my skin, making me clammy and cold. I heard someone sobbing like a lost child. I searched for the source of the sound, which seemed so close at one moment and so far away the next.
The python disappeared, taking away the terror and discomfort. I woke up. Doctor Qing’s hands left my waist.
“I think that’s enough for today.” She seemed to want to say more but stopped herself. “You should rest.”
Doctor Qing left the room. It was a long while before I recovered enough to turn over. I was trembling, panting, like I had just emerged from a nightmare or a passionate bout of sex.
My face felt wet and cold. I was the one who had cried, the disconsolate child.
And I could no longer avoid that word, the source of all my questions, the word that filled my mind.
Mother.
My mother left me when I was four, leaving me with my grandparents. I never saw my father. He had died before I was born, and how he died was always a mystery to me.
When I was eleven, my mother returned, and took me from my small town to Beijing, where order had finally been restored. She had married a man with money and power, and she paid for me to go to an expensive private school, bought me the best of everything. But from then on, I refused to call her mom.
After I began college, I moved out of my mother’s home. I worked extra jobs and didn’t sleep more than five hours a night so that I would not have to spend another cent of that man’s money. I didn’t hate my stepfather. He was a nice man, and until my grandparents died, he would often send money to them in my mother’s name. I just didn’t want my mother to get the mistaken impression that I needed her.
Whenever anyone commented that I was like my mother, I would stare at them until they realized that it was a gaffe and apologized.
But they were right.
From the little I remembered, she never showed love, or even care, the way other mothers did. She was always demanding, nervous, moody. Sometimes she would scream, swear at me, and demand I leave the table for doing nothing more than scraping the spoon against the bowl too loudly. When she felt down, she would not speak to me for days. Her home always felt like an ice cellar.
I tried to understand how my stepfather could love her, especially when she hit him. He always told me: Your mother hasn’t had it easy.
I thought: No one in the world has had it easy.
We were all born in the years after the Catastrophe, and she had been born during it.
Good thing that we have the MAD.
The Memory Assistant Device was invented back in my grandmother’s time. Initially, it was meant to help the victims of mental trauma after the Catastrophe. Then the government sponsored it, and it became a part of every infant’s standard medical care, like immunizations. The earliest MAD models required wired connections, but by my mother’s generation, wireless was the norm.
Of course, not just anybody had the right to access and control memories—even their own—only experienced memory doctors had such authority. This meant that you had to explain your problems to them.
I wasn’t good at talking about my feelings. This was a trait my mother and I shared, I admit.
I remember a young doctor and myself facing off for half an hour. I answered his questions with silence until he threatened me: “I won’t sign the authorization form unless you give me a reason.”
I knew that he really did want to help me—otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered asking. I hesitated, and then said, “Abuse.”
He glanced at me and wrote something down in his notebook. I thought: I’m so not good at lying.
In the end, I accepted his proposal: since eliminating all memories having to do with the abuse would have left me with nothing, leaching the emotions from those memories would work much better.
“Every memory would seem like a scene from a T
V show,” the doctor said. “And you’ve turned the volume way, way down.”
I suddenly found him attractive.
We dated for a while, until he—like the others—left me because he could stand me no more. Most of the time we were together, I said nothing. Like other men, he tried to please me in various ways: trying to figure out why I was feeling low, plying me with good food, surprise presents, trips, music, sex, but nothing was particularly effective. Instead, I grew contemptuous of his apparent stupidity and excessive solicitousness and responded with manipulative gestures, such as suddenly cutting off all contact with him. When I imagined him almost driven to madness by my antics, my mood lifted—even I couldn’t explain why.
“You’re sick,” he finally said.
“You should have known that already,” I retorted.
“But those memories have already been tuned!”
“What you erased was only the shadow.”
After the procedure, I could recall the time my mother and I spent together without becoming emotional, but my own life had become a bad copy of a flawed original. An irresistible force compelled me in her direction, to start down some fated path, towards self-destruction. I tried everything: psychotherapy, yoga, mystical Buddhism, vegetarianism, anti-depression medication, family systems therapy . . . nothing worked.
I felt myself connected to my mother in some way that surpassed time and space. Or maybe it was what he said: epigenetic memory.
The theory holds that stress from childhoods spent under the care of irresponsible, cold, short-tempered parents could increase the amount of DNA methylation experienced by children. Many important genes responsible for neural communications, brain development and functioning would then not express normally, resulting in difficulties for these children in perceiving and expressing love, substituting fear and desperation in its place.
Worst of all, such damage is heritable.
As I grew older, my friends got married and became parents, but I felt myself pulled away from this well-trodden path. I knew what that force was: I was afraid that I might become another nightmarish mother; I was afraid that my children would be like me. I might die, but the curse would be passed on, generation after generation.
My mother contacted me through my friends. She was sick, and wanted to see me.
I told her I didn’t want to see her.
After a period of silence, I received another message. If you change your mind, you can find me here.
I looked at the address. Resisting it was like resisting gravity.
“I’m using Angelica oil this time. It can reduce tension and relieve stress-induced migraines and anxiety.” Doctor Qing’s voice drifted down to me from above. “But remember not to expose yourself to too much sun afterwards. Some of the components are light-sensitive.”
I mumbled an acknowledgment, too focused on the feeling of her hands roaming about my neck and head. This was my fourth time here. Now that Doctor Qing and I knew each other better, there was a kind of doctor-patient trust between us. She was professional, experienced, and able to intuit meaning from my body’s slightest responses. I hadn’t told her about my mother yet; the right opportunity hadn’t arisen.
Lulled by that grassy, slightly acrid scent, I again sank into semi-consciousness. My body floated, drifting along the ground. I couldn’t control the speed, altitude, or direction. Like a passenger on a rollercoaster, all I could do was to allow myself to be carried along the rails.
My vision became dim and fuzzy, and it was impossible for me to say what I truly saw. But the emotional flavor of everything was sharpened. I felt anxiety and anger coming from all around me, resonating with me, as though I was in the middle of a crowd swarming like a hive of bees.
A stone fell into the water; fiery light flickered; sorrow, like the muddy ground after spring rain, held me in place. I felt death approach me, step by step, and I had no way to escape, my consciousness imprisoned in such a tiny space that all that was left was desperation.
I saw a little girl squatting in the only sphere of light in the endless darkness. She seemed to be drawing something.
In spite of her blurred features, I was absolutely certain that she was my mother.
Of course, in dreams we often know for certain who a particular person is, even when we do not see her clearly, but it was odd to dream about your mother as a little girl.
I tried to touch her, but I couldn’t move at all. The sphere of light shrank and moved further away.
I tried to scream, but no sound came out.
She disappeared in the darkness.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t pry.” Doctor Qing’s voice pulled me back into the real world. “You must love your mother very much.”
“What makes you say that?” My voice rasped with resentment.
“You cried out for her.”
I said nothing.
“Aromatherapy works on the body and the mind at the same time. Some people react to essential oils in unpredictable ways. Feelings repressed for many years could suddenly resurface.”
“—I haven’t seen her in nearly five years,” I blurted out.
“Would you like to talk about it? It can help with your therapy.”
I took a deep breath, exhaled, and the flame in the lotus candleholder flickered. She couldn’t see me, and I couldn’t see her. This made me feel safe enough to talk.
My lack of reservation surprised even myself. This was the first time I had ever told anyone of the history between my mother and me. I told her of my childhood, my mother’s odd moods, my stepfather, and my many boyfriends. Finally, I brought up my experience with MAD.
“You really went through with it?”
“But it didn’t work. I changed the past, but I couldn’t change the present.” I mentioned the strange dream I had just had. “Maybe I even made it worse.”
Doctor Qing seemed to be deep in thought and didn’t answer me right away. When she spoke again, her tone sounded unnatural.
“Have you ever thought . . . it might not be your mother’s fault? The dreams—they might not belong to you either.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Before I became a masseuse, I was involved in scientific research. A dangerous project I was working on blinded me, and then I was laid off. I was just glad that I survived.”
“What kind of research, exactly?”
“I don’t know. They erased all my memories of it.”
“Oh.” In fact, I had heard many other stories like hers. The state would sometimes erase the memories of some individuals because they violated the law or because they knew too much. Afterwards, their social status inevitably declined. “But what does this have to do with my dream?”
“After I lost my old job as a researcher, I tried to make a living in many different ways. But because of my blindness, I couldn’t last in any of them very long. In the end, I sort of stumbled into this profession. Sometimes, I wonder if it was all arranged ahead of time.” Her tone was casual, amused. She also didn’t really answer my question.
“Arranged? By who?”
“The person who saved me, who laid me off, and maybe even . . . who blinded me in the first place.” She sounded so calm, as though she were only discussing some essential oil. “Even though my memory had been erased, some aspects of my training remained with me. My intuition and logical approach have served me well in this new profession, too. For example, I’ve noticed that some of my clients react to certain essential oils in an unusual manner. They’re like jewelry boxes that are opened by different keys; yet, once open, they all held the same jewels.”
“You mean—” I held my breath.
“Yes. You’re all dreaming the same dream. I can’t say it with one hundred percent certainty, but based on the descriptions, you’ve all experienced the same scene. All of you saw your parents as children. It’s . . . odd.”
My heart beat faster, as though suddenly free of the bounds of gravity.
“Why ar
e you telling me this?”
“I like you. You remind me of my daughter. After the accident, she never let me near her again. Sometimes, I think maybe there’s a way to correct all these errors. I don’t believe in fate or any kind of supernatural force. I believe in rationality and logic.
“I believe it’s almost time to reveal the answer to the riddle. I can help you, and you can also help me—assuming you want to.”
“ . . . how do I help you?”
“Go see your mother.”
She lay in the special care unit, looking even thinner and older than the version of her I had imagined. Her eyes struggled to hold me, but her gaze kept on slipping away as though my body had been covered by light-deflecting grease.
The doctor told me that she was suffering from ataxia, cause unknown. They needed to do more tests, but something was probably wrong with her cerebellum.
In front of her bed, I stood with my arms crossed, staring at her coldly. Even the most impatient nurse would appear more like a daughter to her than I. I tried to push away the hateful thought, but it refused to obey and leapt into my consciousness, unbidden:
You deserve this.
“Come, come closer.” Her lips quivered violently.
I shook my head, sighed, and walked to the head of her bed, getting as close to her as I could tolerate. I detected a strong medicinal odor, but under that was another scent that I hadn’t encountered in a long time. In a flash, it was as if a tunnel through space and time had opened up and brought me back to my distant childhood.
It was the smell of my mother.
“I’m going to die soon . . . ”
“No, you won’t.”
“I know you hate me.”
“No.” My voice grew fainter. “I . . . don’t.”
She appeared to want to laugh, but the muscles on her face spasmed and twisted even more violently. The sides of her face throbbed as though they were about to take off into air.
