Ming Kai shook his head.
All joy had drained from Ming Kai’s face: it had become hard, petrified. He said something in Chinese, and the woman said something back to him.
She had a sweet voice.
“Her name is Wu Li,” Ming Kai said. “She is from Shanghai. She is not my wife.”
“But . . .” Now it was Elijah’s turn to fall mute. At that moment it was hard to say whose heart was more broken, Elijah’s or Ming Kai’s. Both had dreams that were shattered: Ming Kai’s dream of love, and Elijah’s dream of riches. Ming Kai wanted to die; he knew he would never see his real family again. But Elijah was the sort of man who, in the absence of authentic hope, created his own. He was the sort of man who could build a town in the middle of nowhere in order to conform to a dream, the sort of man who saw a wall not as a thing to go around but as something to be driven through.
He snapped the reins, and the horses began their descent to the place that would one day be Roam. Ming Kai had to move out of the way lest he be trampled—it was as though Elijah were no longer able to see him. But as the wagon passed, Elijah spoke.
“You’ll get used to them,” he said.
Ming Kai did get used to them. It took some time, but he did. They were not his family, but they were still a family, and they were much better than no family at all. He gave up the secret of his silk to Elijah, and Roam was born. And like everything that had ever been built in the history of the world, it was built by those who had nothing and, almost certainly, never would have anything more than that, people who sacrificed themselves for a future they would never see, almost all of them Chinese.
In America, Ming Kai learned, it is easier to be happy than sad. It’s better to forget what was and to remember what is, or better yet, what might be. The old self is wiped away like chalk on a blackboard, overwritten with new words in a foreign vocabulary. There is no history here. In America you can fly, because there’s no past to weigh you down. Only here could this place, which had been nowhere forever, become a town. And it grew so very fast, fast beyond imagining, and soon, sooner than anyone could have believed—especially Ming Kai—there was a road, and buildings, and homes, and stores. It was all so fresh, so new. It smelled new, and for a full year after construction began you couldn’t breathe outside without swallowing a handful of sawdust. Chinese poured into Roam. What had taken Elijah and Ming Kai months to discover took the rest of the world a matter of days. Words travel on the wind, across the sea, into the ears of anyone willing to listen. Steel and braided wire and coal were brought in by the wagonful from as far away as Arcadia, and a mechanic named Shapiro was kidnapped and forced to design and build the factory. He died before it was done—worked beyond exhaustion—but Elijah was able to finish it himself, because he had the kind of mind that could subsume another man’s thoughts. He just made it bigger—twice as big as the design called for. It grew into a great steel giant. Ming Kai had never seen such quantities of silk emerge from its warehouse doors. Moths were everywhere, too: in every window, in every lamp, their carcasses littering the muddy streets like dead baby angels. But even before all of this happened—on the day he saw his new family, in fact—Ming Kai knew he would have to become a new man. China was thousands of miles away, and he would never return; best to let go of the memory as well. Good-bye, family and the old tarnished world. Hello, sweet and glossy future!
As Elijah had predicted, Ming Kai got used to his replacement family, and like fish growing legs and learning to crawl on dry land, everyone changed. Sing Loo became Sarah, and the boys were named Thomas and Norton, and together with Elijah, Ming Kai and his worms created a new world; the future would see them produce enough skeins in a month to drape the entire town of Roam in a billowing sheet of silk. There was so much beauty: is there anything more beautiful than silk? Every bed in Roam was covered in it. Women wore the loveliest silk dresses, and some men wore their silken pajamas out early in the morning, taking their dogs for a walk. And there was no man, no matter how poor, who couldn’t boast a drawer full of handkerchiefs. It was a soft town with a sweet sheen, and Ming Kai had helped create it. That was something. That filled a spot inside his large heart.
Once they were settled, Ming Kai had Elijah over for a feast. The boys played in the dirt beneath the table, and Elijah smoked a fat cigar.
“Thomas and Norton seem like good boys,” Elijah said. “And Sarah, she’s a good cook.”
“Yes,” Ming Kai said. “What you say is true.”
Elijah stood, and it seemed as if in that moment all the blood drained out of his face. He turned a chalky white, and his cold eyes flared. The old Elijah died then, and a new one was born.
“Before we go any further in our enterprise, you should know: they are yours,” Elijah said. “But everything else is mine.”
GHOSTS,
PART II
There was a fire burning down the street, and from what Digby could see of it—which wasn’t much, since all he did was poke his head out the tavern door—it looked like it might have been the fire station itself. He wasn’t particularly worried about it, though, because fires in Roam had about the same ambition the rest of the population did: soon it would die out on its own. There were a lot of fires these days. Sometimes it was just a great big pile of old furniture, or books, or clothes, or whatever got collected during the course of an entire lifetime spent in one place (always too much to take with you to the new life), but some of the other fires were a good deal bigger. Entire homes, shops, businesses—turned to ash. Digby understood the rage, he understood the bitterness. But to burn down your own home? The place you raised your children? It seemed unnecessary. Were Digby himself to leave Roam—and at this point in time he had no plans to, but who knew what tomorrow might bring—he would make sure the tavern was clean, the lights were off, and the keys were on the counter along with a note wishing the very best to whomever wanted to have it.
He took another step out into the day and craned his neck to see around the door. Yes, it was the fire station. He wondered if Sam Morgan had started it before he left; he used to volunteer down there. Sam Morgan, driving away in that beater with the mattress strapped to the top. Is there any sadder sight? A man, a wife, two kids. A family with nothing to call their own except all the time in the world. And that car, same as the rest of them around here, cobbled together from the parts of half a dozen other cars, not cars at all really but rumors of what cars were supposed to be. Digby knew there had to be a place where cars were actually made, that there was a time when they were new and shiny, but by the time the cars got to Roam they were seven different colors, cannibalized, chopped up, three doored, loud as all creation. He’d seen people using the trunks as bathtubs. He witnessed one poor soul warming up a sandwich on the engine block. The steering wheels were sometimes completely missing and in their place were two blocks of wood wired to a metal rod, and inside the car no place to sit at all: you just had to squat. This was the trade-off of living in what Digby thought of as a frontier community: it took a while for the future to get here, and by the time it did it was the past.
The old-timers liked a fire, though. Most of them left the tavern to get a closer look at it, gathering at its edge, as if to warm themselves. Digby watched them file out the door, hundreds of them, all dressed up in their pants and dresses and hats, strolling down Main Street as if they actually lived here, as if this were still their town.
Digby shook a cigarette out of its pack and struck a match on the wooden post supporting the portico. Again he was beset by that sadness, a family trait; his father had it so bad that there were days he wouldn’t get out of bed at all. He would just lie there, staring at the ceiling. All Dr. Carraway had to do was look at him to know what it was: nostalgic melancholy, which he described as a deep sadness brought on by thoughts of the past, and since sometimes all a man had was the past, this nostalgic melancholy could be quite dangerous, in some cases even fatal. The only cure was to paint a picture of the future so
bright and powerful and real that it overwhelmed the patient’s obsession with times-gone-by.
The past that Digby’s father was thinking about had everything to do with Allie Wei, his first girl; he was thinking of her jet-black pigtails and her eyes—one brown, one blue—and of the day they made love in the mulberry trees behind the factory, and fell asleep, and woke up the next morning naked, overlaid in a layer of silk, the dusty fibers sent airborne during the manufacturing process. She died a year later, her lungs ravaged by the silk dust. He thought he had stopped thinking about her when he met and married Digby’s mother, but it had been but a temporary reprieve, and when he turned fifty he was overwhelmed by almost palpable images of her. They possessed him. So Dr. Carraway wrote out a prescription for Digby’s father: Stories. Three times a day. Morning, noon, and just before bed. They were to be stories not of what was, or what is, but of what could be. That was the only thing that could cure him.
Mrs. Chang had never been much of a storyteller, so little Digby took on the job. But he only had one story to tell, and he had his mother leave the room to tell it. When you die, he told his father, you will find Allie in the field behind the factory. It will be exactly as it was. She will be naked and covered in silk dust. So will you. But she will never die again, and neither will you, and you’ll be together forever.
Then let me die, his father said.
You will die, he said. But you have to finish this life first. Keep this story in a little box beside your bed, and look at it every morning when you wake and every night before you sleep. It will make you happy.
His father was happy for the rest of his life.
Digby had no one to tell him stories, and who knew if they would even work with him, because his melancholia came from the past and the present. It was this town; it was Roam itself. It was in the very air he breathed. To live with what had happened to his home . . . It was as if he had to watch a good friend die, and then had to view the corpse every single day for the rest of his life. It was almost impossible to remember the Roam that once was, now that it had been abandoned, burned, broken, and worn down by time itself, all because of the curse born with it (or such was the old story people told). He grew up just as it was beginning the long, slow descent into decay, but he could remember all too well the town it used to be, its Main Street lined with shops and bustling with people, all of them dressed in the silk produced in McCallister’s factory just half a mile away, hidden behind a line of poplars as if it were the secret engine that powered the town. And it was. The day the factory died was the day the town began to die. It was the rich who left first, taking with them all the money, secure in their ability to find a life elsewhere. Left behind were the workers, mostly Chinese and combos, who had nothing at all. Now almost every storefront was dark and empty. A few old-timers had moved into them: Digby could see them in the windows, as if on display. The quiet was eerie, too, another absence that had all the qualities of sound: he could hear the silence, even feel it.
Digby stood by the door of his tavern and had these thoughts. Then, in the silence, he heard the dogs. They belonged to the lumberjack who lived in the woods at the edge of town. Lumberjack Smith, the sole human being who had actually come to Roam in the last few years and stayed here to live. When he heard the dogs barking Digby knew this meant the lumberjack was coming into town for a drink, as he did every day. The dogs followed Smith everywhere, about a dozen of them, each one as black as the next. The closer they came to town the more they barked, and when they reached Main Street they began to howl, howl as if they’d gone completely mad. Digby thought it was because they could see the old-timers, too.
YARD SALE
The saddest part of the day—of everyone’s day, really, of every day everyone in the entire town had to live through—was when Rachel and Helen set up their little shop on the northwest corner of the intersection at Twelfth and McCallister. They were there every Monday by ten (unless it rained), and today was no different. Here come the girls, said old Mrs. Branscombe, half to herself, half to her old dog Comer, a basset hound she’d named after her dead husband because she could not imagine living out the rest of her life not saying his name. There they were: Helen and Rachel pushing an old metal cart down the sidewalk, the one they borrowed from the big grocery store that had closed its doors years ago. Rachel insisted on pushing it, as heavy and unwieldy as it was, while Helen walked ahead with long, aggressive strides, as if she were challenging you to try and stop her. Townsfolk at their windows gawking, shaking their heads, sighing, the girls, again. Helen didn’t care what they thought. She knew how they felt, but it fed her determination to do it, every Monday, at ten, until what she and Rachel were selling was all gone.
Tied to one side of the cart with rubber ropes was a card table with a fake alligator-skin top, which they unfolded and placed just before the stop sign. Rachel and Helen sat in two old wooden chairs behind the table, and Helen had a cigar box—PUNCH CIGARS, HANDMADE IN SPANISH HONDURAS, the box said—that served as her cash register.
What were the girls selling? Everything. They were selling everything they had, one thing at a time. Helen had it all worked out, what they were selling and when—the order, as it were, in which they would be dismantling their lives.
They’d started with their parents’ things. Their parents had the most, so they were still selling them, ten years after their deaths. All their clothes, every coat and every dress, every pair of trousers. They had almost sold every sweater (there were many sweaters, since Mother and Father both wore sweaters of various weights and warmth deployment all year long, cold-blooded creatures that they were). Every sock, hat, tie, and belt—everything but their underwear, which Helen had thrown away in the days just after they were buried, unable to stand the idea of her dead parents’ underwear in the house. All of their things: books, pens, cuff links, hairbrushes, and boxes and photos of old friends, all of it available for purchase on the corner of Twelfth and McCallister.
After this, they would begin to eat away at the rest of it, all those things belonging to the house itself, and then what was Rachel’s, and then—Helen would probably stop there. And with all the money she’d earned she’d buy some new things for herself.
They had a ways to go. There weren’t a lot of people in town left to buy things, and those who remained couldn’t bring themselves to approach the girls. But sometimes Jonas came by to flirt, and that was nice. He never bought anything unless Helen made him, though, promising with her smile the recompense he never stopped wanting.
There was a sturdy magnolia growing there. It had a nice strong branch jutting out over the sidewalk, and it was here Rachel hung the clothes. A dress of her mother’s, a pair of slacks belonging to her dad. Then a coat—his jacket—the herringbone he wore almost every day, still saturated in pipe smoke, a bit threadbare. It was a wonder he wasn’t wearing it when he died. Rachel pressed her face against it and took a deep breath. She pressed the palms of her hands against the tattered and—she smiled—ticklish wool blend. She stuck her hand in the pocket.
“Look,” she said, holding up her fingers. They were speckled with tobacco flecks. “Everything is here except for him.”
Helen took Rachel by the wrist and brought Rachel’s hand close to her face and smelled it and, as though she were testing some food that may have been too hot, or poisonous, tentatively stuck out her tongue and captured a small brown remnant of Mr. McCallister. This dust, proof he’d once had a place among the living, transported her back into the old world, one of youth and love and possibility, the big world, before it had become so small and dead.
“Let’s keep this jacket,” Rachel said.
But Helen shook the jacket out, watching the brown flakes scatter and fall.
“Everything must go,” she said. She hung the jacket on the tree. “It’s for the best.”
“But, Helen,” Rachel said. “These things are all we have left of them. Once they’re gone—”
“Exactly,”
Helen said. “That’s the idea.”
“I want to stop,” Rachel said. “I want to stop doing this.”
Tears welled in her sister’s eyes, and Helen wondered, as she always did when her sister cried, if there was something different about them, if the tears of a blind girl had a quality the tears of the seeing did not.
She held her sister close. “You smell good,” Helen said. “Like a flower. And listen to the birds. They always come out for you.”
These small kindnesses were usually enough for Rachel. But not today.
“It’s not right,” she said. “And it must look . . . wrong. A blind girl and her sister setting up shop on a corner.”
“Oh, Rachel,” Helen said softly, still holding her sister tight against her, tighter now, too tight. “This is what people have always done. Ever since long ago. For generations it’s been the same. When people die, you take their things and send them out into the world, and in that way—”
“I don’t believe you,” Rachel said, pushing her sister away. “I’ve never seen anyone do that before. Who else does that?”
Helen almost laughed. “No,” she said. “You’re right. You wouldn’t see anyone doing that anymore. But people used to set up shop on the corner all the time.”
Helen knew that if she said the same thing over and over again, and said it with conviction, eventually Rachel would believe it. Even Helen found herself believing some of the stories she told. Sometimes she felt like she was living in more of a dream world than the one she’d created for Rachel.
“A long time ago,” Helen said, “but not that long ago, you would see people on every corner of this town, selling their things. It was called . . . cornering. And some corners were the good ones, and some were the bad ones . . .” But Helen stopped midstory: somebody was coming.
“I think we have customers,” Rachel said, cocking her head to one side, like a dog.
The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel Page 5
