by Matt Wallace
“Spent three summers workin’ the line at the Fragrant Lotus Garden in Houston. You soak in more than that moo shu smell, y’know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Long ago,” Mr. Mok begins, speaking more quietly and with more compassion than Lena has yet heard in the old man’s voice, “fenghuang, sacred, divine, protect my people from yaoguai.”
Lena looks at Bronko.
He waves his hand. “Like . . . evil spirits. Demons.”
“And agent of yaoguai,” Mr. Mok adds, irritated. “Fenghuang serve light, serve balance. Fenghuang keep balance here on Earth.”
“Why ‘long ago’?” Lena asks.
“They were hunted to near-extinction,” Bronko explains.
“By who? Or what?”
Bronko’s lips tighten. It’s almost as if he’s afraid to answer that question.
“Pandas, mostly.”
Lena’s eyebrows shoot up. “Pandas?”
Bronko glances uncomfortably at Mr. Mok.
“Yeah,” he says, tentative. “Pandas. Y’see—”
Lena can’t help it, nor does she even try. She bursts out laughing.
“Come on, Chef. Seriously. You’re talking about pandas? Black-and-white, nibbling bamboo—”
Mr. Mok suddenly springs to his feet. “Panda agents of pure evil! Panda most vile creature ever walk the Earth!”
“Don’t start with the panda thing,” Bronko practically pleads with him. “All right? It’s not her fault. She doesn’t know. She’s not saying—”
“None of you know!” Mr. Mok rages. “All you do, you ignorant gweilo, you go to zoo and take a picture of a panda with your phone. ‘Awwwwwww, the panda ate the bamboo! The panda make a sneeze! I post a video to YouTube! Get so many likes! Panda so cute! So sad they gon’ be extinct. Must protect the panda!’ Cannot name one Chinese province, but evvvvvvverybody in America know panda. Panda, panda, panda!”
Mr. Mok curses for thirty full seconds in Cantonese then before finally stabbing a finger of ultimate judgment at Lena.
“I tell you this!” he practically spits at her, seething. “Panda make fool of you all!”
As he continues to explode, Bronko leans in and whispers to Lena. “Apparently, pandas were engineered to kill fenghuang like our friends Larry and Mary in there. A big-ass war ensued. Most of Larry and Mary’s kind were killed. Ditto the pandas. The ones that lived are kind of like Nazi war criminals and I guess our zoos are like Argentina. They hide out there behind an impenetrable wall of public relations, and as long as they keep actin’ cute, they’re untouchable.”
Bronko turns back to Mr. Mok, speaking loudly but politely above the old man’s continued rant.
“Mr. Mok! May we please feed the sacred beings now before your admittedly justified screechin’ causes them to starve?”
That alone seems to quench the fire in the old man. He turns away from them and kneels, beginning to roll up his prayer rug.
“Panda War great and terrible,” he mutters to himself. “Panda War last centuries. Kill millions. But no Wikipedia page, no happen. Only thing worse than panda is Internet.”
Cursing quietly, he pads across the room to return the rug and his other ceremonial garb to their proper place of storage.
Now that the initial shock of the information has worn off, Lena begins to feel guilt knotting her guts. She wants to apologize to the old man, but the strictly rational part of her brain still clinging to basic truths of the “real” world before Sin du Jour simply won’t allow her to even form such an expression aloud.
Bronko hunkers down with a grimace. Lena can hear the bones in his knees pop. He opens the cooler. Half a dozen foot-long cylinders of thick stainless steel are arranged atop cold packs. There are small, clear slits running along the side of each cylinder. The tubes inside are filled with a murky liquid, and as Lena looks down at them, she can see dark shapes clearly moving through that muck.
“Dare I even ask, Chef?”
Bronko half-grunts and half-chuckles. He grasps one of the cylinders and holds it up to her.
Unafraid, Lena takes it from him and examines the small window into the tube more closely.
“Is it . . . an eel? Or a snake?”
Bronko stands, holding another one of the cylinders in his hands. He carefully fits the top of it against the hole in the glass habitat. On the other side, the fenghuang begin bobbing up and down on their thin legs and pronged feet, tittering excitedly.
“Both and neither,” he tells her. “Just like Larry and Mary here ain’t exactly birds. They’re all things from a time of legends, a time that don’t exist no more. Makes ordering takeout a helluva thing, y’know?”
He depresses a button on the side of the cylinder that pops the end cap open. A slick, dark spear of scaly flesh lances from inside the tube and goes slithering off across the rocks.
The fenghuang whip away from the glass and spring into the air, soaring low over the rocks and through the foliage, after it.
“They like to hunt,” he explains to Lena. “It’s part of the whole deal. A regular ol’ snake wouldn’t last half a tick.”
“So, where do you get . . . Chinese phoenix food?”
“I don’t,” he says, taking the cylinder in her hands and readying to release its occupant into the habitat. “Ritter and the team rack up a lotta frequent-flyer miles tracking them down.”
Inside the habitat, Larry and Mary have pulled apart their first course and Mary is hot on the tail of the one Bronko has just released through the glass.
“So . . . this is like a takeout service Sin du Jour provides?” Lena asks, watching them. “How does he afford that, selling thirty-year-old toasters and crap?”
“There’s no charge,” Bronko says, chucking an empty cylinder and readying another.
Lena looks away from the creatures inside the habitat, staring up at him, confused.
“But this has gotta cost a freakin’ fortune. Does Allensworth—”
Bronko laughs, loud and hard and sour.
“Allensworth wouldn’t piss on either one of these things if they were on fire. He ain’t exactly the conservationist type. Not to mention the Chinese he works with are probably the ones who bred the damn pandas in the first place.”
It takes Lena a moment to process it all, and she still comes up short.
“So, what? You front this? Yourself?”
Bronko nods.
“Every week?”
He nods again.
“Why?”
“Because if we don’t do it, no one will. And Larry and Mary in there’d just . . . waste away. Now, they ain’t the last of their kind, strictly speaking. I know of a few other places like this, none of ’em local. But . . . it’s gettin’ close for ’em. And there’s no place left for Larry and Mary except the ones people like Mok make. The world, our world and the one we serve crab cakes and terrines of whatever-the-fuck too, both those worlds have moved on, and they’ve left behind . . . as Mok over there’d call ’em . . . creatures of light and balance.”
Lena doesn’t know what to say, not to any of that, but the implications of his words are like a barbed weight on her chest.
Bronko just watches her, waiting.
A moment later, Lena bends down and picks up the last cylinder. She turns and angles it carefully against the hole in the glass, popping the cap and releasing Larry and Mary’s final course into the habitat for them to enjoy.
Bronko grins.
As they pack up the empty cylinders in the chest, Mr. Mok approaches them, again clad in his street clothes.
“You have many questions,” he says to Lena.
“I, uh, I guess so,” she replies, not sure what else to say.
The old man nods. “To feed fenghuang is a holy thing. A sacred thing. You take on that responsibility now.”
Lena’s eyes dart to Bronko, then back to Mr. Mok. “I’m just helping out—”
“You have questions,” Mr. Mok continues, ignoring her. “If I can answe
r for you, I will. You may come to me with your questions.”
“Wow. Okay. Thank you.”
Mr. Mok doesn’t respond. He merely stares at her, as if waiting for something.
Lena looks to Bronko.
He shrugs. “I think he wants you to ask him a question.”
“Oh. Okay,” Lena says, inhaling deeply. “All right. I . . . Okay, I’ve got one. What’s with the Hall & Oates shirts?”
Bronko has to stifle his laughter.
Mr. Mok squints at her very seriously. He holds up a single, withered digit of his right hand, the gesture almost reverent.
“Hall & Oates number one rock and roll forever.”
Lena nods very slowly. “I see. Got it. Thanks.”
Mr. Mok nods with a sharp grunt, moving past them to close the doors of the armoire.
Lena’s expression as she peers up at Bronko must be asking another question, something like “What the actual fuck?”
He only shrugs. “Ancient Chinese wisdom right there, man. You gonna argue with it?”
HEAD OF THE CLASS
Darren crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in the Dodge Neon he and Lena have shared for so many years, neither of them can now remember who actually owns it.
The address Ritter gave him is somewhere in Brooklyn Heights. Darren was obviously disappointed when Ritter told him he’d be too busy to continue training Darren over the next few months, but Ritter took the time and care to make Darren understand Ritter wasn’t blowing him off. He told Darren he’d found a temporary replacement instructor for him, and that training with someone new would help Darren far more than it would hurt him.
Knowing—or at least suspecting—the kinds of people (humans or otherwise) Ritter would refer him to for training actually has Darren excited.
He finds himself pulling up to the curb in front of a dilapidated brownstone. That’s not so odd, but the fact that it also seems utterly forgotten does strike Darren as just short of a miracle. There are no construction vehicles or equipment attached to the place. There’s no signage indicating it’s for sale, or has been sold, or will soon be the site of luxurious new condos. It’s sitting in the middle of a vibrant, rejuvenated street, yet the building has been left to age completely unimpeded.
There should be realtors bleeding each other in the yard for control of such a property.
Darren leaves his car parked and treks across the brief dead patches of ground just beyond the brownstone’s rust-crippled gate. He double-checks the address and finds it’s the same one Ritter jotted down for him. That old, familiar impulse to flee the uncertain before he embarrasses himself fires up inside Darren, and his conscious mind stomps on it with a soccer hooligan’s fury.
He refuses to be afraid of people anymore, let alone a spooky-ass building in Brooklyn Heights.
Finding the front door unlocked, Darren confidently lets himself in. Ritter told him he’d be expected at this time, and expected is exactly how he’s choosing to behave.
The place has been completely gutted. There aren’t even dividers between floors. At first, Darren wonders if he’s early for some sort of fight club. That’s what the space reminds him of with its bare, stained concrete floor, industrial columns and rusty steel beams standing out against the shadows of the high, dark ceiling.
“Is anyone in here?” he calls out, answered solely by the echo of his own voice. “My name is Darren Vargas. Ritter told me I’d be starting training here today. I work with him at Sin du Jour.”
No answer, not even the flutter of pigeons in the high beams or rats scurrying in the walls.
Darren takes out his phone, ready to call Ritter and at least verify the address. He’s cursing himself for not at least asking Ritter more about what the hell he was supposed to find here. Taking people he looks up to totally on faith is an old Darren move.
The mirror wasn’t there just a brief second before, and nothing Darren’s rational mind attempts to con him into believing can or will change that fact.
It is there now, a seven-foot pane of reflective glass held in a simple black iron frame.
It’s just standing there, in the middle of the ground floor, erected to perfectly face Darren as he glances up from his phone.
“Okay,” he says, just to hear something besides silence as he stares at his reflection in what he is already determined not to think of as the ghost mirror.
It’s just him looking back. He’s trimmed back his beard because James was starting to complain, and sculpted it into a slight V shape because Darren loves how it looks on Denzel Washington’s son in that HBO show Ballers.
“Is this, like, a test?” he calls out. “Is it magic? Like that Harry Potter mirror. Or is it—”
His reflection actually changed several seconds before, but it was so subtle, it took him until this moment to realize how it has changed.
Darren is no longer looking at himself as he is now; he’s looking at himself as he was several months ago. His beard is gone. His high-and-tight haircut has reverted to all those oil-slicked dark strands he used to cultivate, trying to look like a Tejano pop star. His body is just a little softer; the definition he’s earned through training practically every day is gone.
It’s more than simple grooming choices, however.
It’s that stupid, frightened look he always used to wear.
It’s all summed up in his eyes and in that placid, perpetual smile that begs to be liked, or at the very least not victimized. His eyes are desperate, cloying, even terrified.
That look is plastered on his face, and it’s all the Darren of now can see.
All he sees is the version of himself who watched helplessly while his best friend was about to be killed by a monster.
All he sees is the Darren he’s been working every day for months to kill.
“You fucking pendejo,” he says to that Darren, the one who never spoke Spanish, who didn’t want to sound “too Mexican” because he’d been hardwired to believe he’d never rise above busboy that way. “You fucking weak pendejo. Look at you. Look at you!”
His reflection doesn’t speak any of those words. Darren’s reflection, his old self, stands mute. The curses and disdain being hurled at him causes that Darren to physically crumple, just a little, but enough to make him appear exactly as weak as his new self accuses him of being.
“Stop it!” Darren orders his reflection. “Stop that crap now! Stop it, you pathetic piece of shit!”
His reflected self tries, but the tears begin to roll over his cheeks. It’s just two thin streams at first, but once the floodgate is broken, he begins crying full-on.
The disgust that churns in the pit of Darren’s stomach as he watches his former self cry is a feeling unlike anything he’s ever experienced. He feels as if he’s no longer looking at a person, a human being evoking empathy and basic decency. Darren is looking at a thing, a loathsome subhuman thing unworthy of even the simplest compassion.
“You’re nothing,” he says to his weeping reflection in a voice no one who knows Darren would recognize. “You’re less than nothing.”
That empty, bottomless disgust turns. It becomes fury. It becomes an all-consuming desire to destroy the weak, pitiful thing staring him in the face. The Darren staring into that mirror, at that abominable version of him, is shaking. He can barely control his limbs. His lips peel back over his teeth like an animal growling at prey.
In the next moment, he’s lunging, diving at the mirror, into it, through it.
The glass shatters, but Darren’s reflection is not obliterated. The shards rain down harmlessly, evaporating like raindrops on a steaming street. The black frame of the mirror simply melts into the shadows surrounding it. The mirror is gone. What’s left is that weeping Darren in the flesh, and he falls under his snarling, enraged present self with a shriek of fear and pain.
The Darren of now straddles his past self upon the dirty concrete and begins hammering fists down into his face.
* * *
Darren o
n top doesn’t realize tears are now pouring from his own eyes, angry, hot tears mixing with the spittle flying from his snarling, cursing mouth.
He beats that perfect replica of his face until it’s unrecognizable, not only as him but as something human. He pummels it until the muscles in his arms and shoulders burn from the exertion of it, until he’s gasping for breath and his knuckles are split and bleeding and throbbing with pain. He finally stops when he can’t feel anything under his fists anymore. He holds up two trembling, brutalized hands that are totally gloved in viscous red and dripping with gore.
What they’ve left on the ground beneath him barely has a head.
Shaking, Darren rolls away from the near-headless form, flopping hard onto his back. He’s sobbing uncontrollably now, holding his battered fists against his body, curling around them as he convulses and retches. The thunder in his head and the torrent in his guts are a storm that lasts for centuries, perhaps longer, wrecking him to his core.
What’s left in its wake is a shell. When the blood has finally stopped flowing, when the tears and mucus have all dried up, and when the howling ceases, the only thing Darren feels is hollow. The rest is totally numb.
He doesn’t know how long he stays curled up there on the floor, alternately staring at the grain in the concrete and the darkness inside his own eyelids.
When he thinks he’ll just stay there forever, lie there until he becomes part of the floor, petrified and beyond the veil of human feeling, in that moment, a voice finally answers him.
“That . . . was just lovely,” the voice says, made of smoke and reeds and spoken through sheer silk. “You’ve already far exceeded my expectations. Usually, it takes days to hollow out a potential sword. But you, sweet boy, are ready to begin your training right now.”
STOP TWO: (Underneath) 57th Street & 7th Avenue
Bronko and Lena catch the Q train on Canal and ride it to 57th and 7th. Lena usually enjoys the train, the motion and the time to herself, even if that last part is often interrupted by some rando who doesn’t understand headphones and a book are popular international symbols for “leave me the fuck alone.”
