Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  This part of the city was almost empty, and emptiness was a spectacle in the most crowded city in the world. In the main alleyways, shops, factories, and homes squeezed shoulder to shoulder like clowns in cars or climbed atop one another like acrobats. People ate, napped, played endless games of chess, and spanked their misbehaving children with their front gates rolled up. Here there were only bags of trash nested together like large eggs and fangs of broken metal pipes dripping cold saliva on our necks. In the fuzzy, mothy fluorescent light, the only light that ever shone on the lowest levels, objects appeared as they did in fever dreams, their edges soft and foaming out of themselves as out of a rabid dog. It wasn’t hard to believe there might be a creature near.

  Besides, who were we to deny the possibility of impossible things, in impossible things? Rabbit was born blue. No oxygen in the brain, the doctors claimed. Say your goodbyes. But Auntie Lai, our neighbor from down the alley, had a vision. She went running to the hospital with the jade pendant she’d inherited from her mother and from her grandmother before that. Figuring that Rabbit was good as dead anyway, the doctors allowed Auntie Lai to do what she wanted. She placed the piece of jade on Rabbit’s forehead.

  Finally the passageway widened a little. Now we could walk two by two, barely. A hot, sour wind blew, leaving grit on our lips and in our eyelashes. We sneezed and sputtered, blinked up indignantly at the guilty kitchen-exhaust vent. Beyond it rippled a strand of sky, black as pomaded hair. A half-moon, or a moon half obscured by building tops, poised itself to glide through the night like a golden comb.

  Ox was wiping his face with a handkerchief. He was the only kid I knew who actually carried one around. “My dad says the new government housing will have air-conditioning,” he said.

  “Oh, really?” Puppy said, in that quiet voice she used when all the aunties started talking about setting her up with their sons but all she wanted was to be left alone to read.

  “He says that there will be a park right in front with a lot of trees. It’ll be really great.”

  “There are a lot of mosquitoes out tonight,” I said. I slapped Mouse, hard, on the back of his arm.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Mouse yelled.

  “It was giant,” I said. “The size of your monster. It was going to suck all your blood.”

  “Well, where is it then?” he said.

  “It flew away. You’re welcome.”

  “Butthole,” he said, but the corners of his mouth were turned up slightly. In the end, he was just glad that we’d agreed to come along, after weeks of us telling him to shut up already about the monster. What finally swayed us was the bulldozers, which had begun lining up outside the city walls. If a (nice) monster in fact lived under the city, we reasoned, then we didn’t want his death on our conscience. We had to at least try to save him. Who else, except the five of us who knew these tunnels best, was up to the task?

  Mouse’s theory was that the monster was a lizard that had grown fat from eating all of the garbage cast down by the people who lived higher up. That was how he’d described the monster: a white lizard with a big belly.

  My theory involved a mad scientist and Z-rays, a more advanced form of X-rays. I hadn’t figured out the details yet.

  “What do you think?” I asked Puppy, because even though she was only a little younger than I was, she was a lot smarter. This was a few days after we’d decided to join Mouse on his rescue mission. The three of us were hiding from the heat on the lowest level of the city, but still the humidity leaned close and breathed on us like a good friend with a bad idea. Around us, factory engines wheezed and groaned, bearing hard white candies and little plastic people with unfinished, prickly seams. Men in white undershirts with the pits stained brown humped boxes from one place to another or crouched on the ground, which was spattered red from their chewing tobacco. Rusting signs that once exhorted safe work habits now timidly suggested them from behind cabaret ads posted by the triads and Bible study flyers posted by the missionaries.

  Puppy gazed up at the sky. Or, rather, she gazed up at the welts of laundry and telephone lines that scarred the sky, that made it ashamed to show those of us living on the lower levels its full face. “Maybe every city has a monster,” she said. “Maybe when so many people live and die in such a small space, a monster starts to grow deep beneath the earth. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, and everyone’s asleep, I like to go and sit on the stoop right outside my door. And sometimes I feel, I don’t know, like a humming, like there’s a wire connecting me to the earth. Maybe that’s the monster, trying to let me know it’s there.”

  “Whaaa?” Mouse said. “Look, I’m telling you, it’s a lizard.”

  Puppy didn’t reply. Her cheeks looked red, but I couldn’t tell if she felt embarrassed at having revealed her private thoughts or if it was simply a shard of light from the neon signs nearby. Or both. In this city, the line between true and false, between wrong and right—between me and not me—was sketched in dust. Fine lines served a purpose only in full light. Maybe that was why the aunties told so many strange stories. Auntie Cheung had one about the piebald, oneeyed cat that showed up whenever someone she knew was about to die. Auntie Mao used to recount the time she wandered into an unfamiliar part of the city and came across a coffin shop. All the coffins were of some black stone that seemed to absorb the light. She didn’t see a shopkeeper, but there on the lid of the center coffin, like an offering or a dare, was a single red apple. Needless to say, she never found her way back to the shop.

  “But what did you do about the apple?” we’d asked her the first time she told the story.

  “What else? I grabbed the apple and ran,” she said. And then, grinning, she leaned in. “But I got punished for it. The apple was cursed, so now every time someone I know is about to die, I have to guide their spirit into the underworld. I’m the cat that Auntie Cheung talks about!” She crooked her fingers into claws and hissed, and we all started scream-laughing. Auntie Cheung rolled her eyes, convinced that Auntie Mao was trying to one-up her.

  Yet the night Auntie Mao died, we could have all sworn we heard mewling. We could have sworn we saw the shadow of a cat. It leapt onto the awning over her door, sat there for a moment as if taking one last good look, and then disappeared.

  We heard—a sigh? The sound sagged slowly as if under the weight of its own sadness. Rabbit jumped and clung harder to her brother. Puppy and I swiveled our heads, trying to locate the source.

  “We’re close! We’re close!” Mouse said. We picked up our pace, horning deeper into the tunnel, reinvigorated by the prospect of meeting the monster. Our footsteps echoed down the long maw, our spirits bounding ahead in excitement. Or perhaps our spirits had always haunted this space, but if so, then what would become of them after this place was gone?

  “I still don’t know how we’re going to save the monster once we find it,” Puppy said. “If it’s as big as you described, Mouse, then how can we possibly help?”

  “We’ll lift it,” Mouse said. “Together.”

  “You told us it was big as a house,” Puppy said.

  “What if we slide a sheet under it and drag it?” I asked.

  “Did you bring a sheet with you?” Puppy said dryly, her brow crinkled like a little bundle of books. What about her books, I wondered with sudden alarm. Was her family planning to bring all of them to Macao? Or were they going to leave them to the clawed excavators?

  We turned a corner and smacked into Mouse, who had stopped abruptly. “What’s going on?” Ox called from the back. Mouse shushed us. Over his head, we could barely make out the dark blur blocking our way.

  Or rather, three dark blurs whose boundaries continuously bled into one another as if belonging to a single, primeval entity that at once consumed and birthed itself: one small blur that turned out to be a dog with an unsettling glow in its eyes, one large blur that belonged to a man sprawled across the ground, and a third, medium-sized blur that appeared to be a baby
carriage. Inside the carriage—the beam from Mouse’s flashlight arced over it—was a toddler staring blankly at the ceiling. The light provoked no reaction from either human, but the dog began to growl. At the sound of the growling, the man began to stir.

  “What do we do?” Mouse whispered.

  “That baby isn’t moving,” Puppy said.

  “We can ask him nicely to let us pass,” Ox said.

  “You ask,” Mouse said to Ox.

  “His eyes are open but he’s not moving,” Puppy said, panic stretching like a fine, silver thread in her voice. “Why isn’t he moving?”

  I laid my hand on her shoulder. “I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “How do you know that? What if the baby’s … What if …”

  The man was rising to his feet. His face was a pale, mushy gray.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Ox began.

  The man opened his mouth, and darkness unfurled from it—a long tongue of glistening darkness that threatened to slurp us up.

  “Go! Go!” Mouse shouted, and we all turned and ran back the way we had come, ran until we felt certain he hadn’t followed. Our lungs burned like temple incense braziers on festival days.

  “We need to report that man to the police,” Ox said.

  Mouse waved his hand dismissively. “Calm down. I know a way around him. A shortcut.” He started walking again. Nobody bothered to ask him why we had taken the other path in the first place when we could have taken the shortcut. That kind of record skipping was classic Mouse.

  Now that the man was far in the distance, so was the cold, metal fear that had needled at us. Mouse and I began to swap theories regarding what we had seen. Feeling himself vindicated, Mouse reprised his story about the jiangshi. When I asked him what a mindless zombie was doing raising a dog and a baby, he grumbled something. Puppy, Ox, and Rabbit trailed behind, immersed in their own conversation. Ox was hovering over Rabbit. Rabbit kept shaking her head.

  Suddenly Ox spoke up. “He was probably just some drug addict, or a triad member. That’s why things will be better at the new place.”

  “How do you know that?” I said.

  “My dad says Kowloon is a bad place to live,” Ox said. “It’s lawless and dirty.”

  “Not really, not like before,” I said. “And how do you know things will be better?”

  “My dad says people get used to living in bad conditions. They protest the city getting torn down because they can’t imagine anything better. My grandpa only moved here because the communists took over his hometown.”

  I picked up a pebble, whizzed it as hard as I could at the wall. “Your dad sure says a lot of things.” My mother had been among the protesters. She’d come home one evening with a swollen eye that looked like lips sewn shut with black thread. On TV the next day the police superintendent lauded his officers for peacefully dispersing the crowd.

  “The people on the outside say we’re only doing this to extort more resettlement money from the government,” she said. “They don’t believe anyone would want to stay here. But they see only the photos the outsiders take, the few of them willing to enter the city anyway.”

  I felt something brush against my sleeve and saw that Puppy had caught up to me. She still looked troubled.

  “That baby’s fine. I saw its leg move,” I lied.

  Her expression didn’t change at all. We could usually tell when the other person wasn’t being truthful. “Sometimes I think I think too much,” she said, pausing to sniff at the fingers of a potted Queen of the Night reaching from a windowsill for a kiss. Even from where I stood I could smell the nectar. Somehow it knew when to bloom despite living down here, set to its heartbeat, watered and sunned by its own seasons.

  “Thinking is good, right?” I said.

  “You’re the only person I know who thinks that.” By six, Puppy had stopped sleeping through the night. By eight, she’d mastered the art of sneaking out of her family’s one-bedroom unit, past her parents, who worked such long hours that they slept quickly and soundly, sometimes in the strangest places (once she found her father asleep on the toilet—the squatting toilet), and past her older brother, who was banished to the couch when he grew too big to share a bed with the rest of them. But by nine, we’d figured out a system. On the nights I couldn’t sleep either, I kept the one window in my family’s unit ajar. I’d climb out of it when she knocked, and we’d take a walk together or just sit and chat until she felt tired again.

  Puppy hadn’t mentioned her move to Macao again after announcing it to us. Sometimes it seemed that, of the five of us, she was the least affected by the news. It bothered me that I didn’t know how she felt about it when I knew how she felt about almost everything else.

  “We should come up with a new system,” I said. “For after you … you know.”

  “We can’t make long-distance calls. They’re too expensive, and the ringing will wake other people up.”

  “I meant something else. I’m sure we’ll think of a way.”

  “Yeah,” she lied.

  All of us lived in the same alleyway, just a few doors down from one another. Puppy, Mouse, Me, and Ox and Rabbit—that was the order. Sometimes I wondered if we would have become friends if we hadn’t breathed and cried and dreamed so close together. Like, if we’d met somewhere in the outside world, at a marketplace or on a playground, would Mouse have been immediately bored away by sedate, methodical Ox and teary Rabbit? Would I have approached Puppy, who went almost everywhere with a book and shied from eye contact?

  Our favorite thing to do was climbing up to the roof, though we usually didn’t because that was where all the aunties gathered for their gossiping, and we couldn’t get away with any mischief under their watchful eyes. We liked jumping and waving at the airplanes that flew barely over our heads, imagining the strange places they’d come from and the strange places they were going. We also liked collecting plastic bags—the more colorful, the better—and when the wind rose, tossing them in the air at the same time. Sometimes we placed bets to see which one would fly the farthest, but other times we just watched them float down slowly like angels.

  When the government first announced their plans, we scoffed. They had tried to destroy us before, many times, and our continued existence seemed as good evidence as any that we would survive this latest endeavor, some politician’s reelection slogan or misdirect from rumors of corruption. But in the end the police came, followed by the machines. How were they going to manicure all this life, all this wilderness, into park benches and plaques, prune us down to a few lines in the history books? How could they memorialize our presence with our absence?

  At least another hour had passed since our encounter with the man and the dog. Mouse had used the word “shortcut,” it seemed, in the spirit of optimism. Now we were near the part of town where pots and pans clanged and glasses clinked late into the night. The air left a film on the skin that smelled of frying oil and perfume from triad-run massage parlors, that distinctive bouquet of citron and rose, a gold arrow piercing a deep-red heart. Somewhere a woman was singing, her powdery voice rising and falling like a makeup puff on a masseuse’s face and chest.

  One would never guess from all the revelry that the police were arriving in the morning to force us out one by one. I tried to imagine silence, the air stripped of its veils of fragrance. I tried to imagine the last neon light in this massive city dimming.

  It didn’t seem to me that reality could sustain such a loss, such an erasure. Surely the city wasn’t getting destroyed so much as displaced to some other world, like in the movies when a master thief has to swap a priceless jewel with a bag of sand. Here there would be a park, but elsewhere …

  We passed by an open window. An older lady who must have been really pretty once was packing up her belongings. On a table near the window was a zither, playing a slow, twanging song by itself, the strings shivering first singly and then in concert as if from a spreading chill. Next to the zither, an orange-red bird in a cage chit
tered and flapped. The song on the zither came to an end, and, for a second, everything in the room seemed to stop. The woman paused with one arm raised; the bird hushed midchirp. Then the music started up again, and the woman looked up from her boxes. Noticing us, she came to the window and shuttered it.

  Puppy’s place was completely packed. Ox and Rabbit’s was pretty much packed as well, the family eager to leave for the new complex. They might have left earlier had their mother not suffered another relapse, which set everything back. Seeing their units was like seeing someone you’d only ever seen healthy in the hospital for the first time. Torn, twisted electrical wires lay limply on the floor. Holes in the wall previously masked by furniture now gaped openly.

  “What if I hang on to some of your books for you,” I said to Puppy. “That way, if you ever need any of them, I can mail them to you.”

  “Well, maybe,” she said.

  “You need someone to take your books, Puppy?” Ox interrupted. “I can help too.”

  “I got this, all right?” I said to him. Puppy flashed me a warning look. I shrugged.

  What if no one had accepted the government’s resettlement package? What if, when the first envoys appeared, we’d all turned our backs to them? What could they have done to the thirty thousand–odd of us? It took only a few of us walking away for this wall of people to fall.

  “Lovely night,” a woman called out from behind us. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”

  We froze.

  “Let’s make a run for it,” Mouse said. “They can’t talk our ears off if they can’t catch us.”

  “If we run, they’ll think we’re up to something and call the police,” Ox said.

  Mouse slapped his own forehead. “We are up to something! Which is why we don’t have time for this.”

  We’d all had encounters with the missionaries, who’d landed on the shoulder of this district many years ago—one of the missions was actually on top and a little to the side of the biggest gambling den in the city. They’d courted my mother when she moved here, pregnant with me by a guy who never called her back and kicked out by her parents. Puppy’s older brother had run off with the missionaries after several failed attempts to persuade their parents, both of whom made a living in triad-owned businesses, to swap steady pay for God’s blessings. No one in the family had heard from him since then.