Immortal From Hell

by Gene Doucette

  Getting in was that straightforward. Nothing that came after was, though, because I was carrying a currency that belonged to the wrong country, twice over. I didn’t have German Gold Marks—as would be expected of someone fresh off a vessel from Breton—and I didn’t have U.S. Dollars. I had British Pounds Sterling.

  If this had been anything other than a midnight escape—if I’d had proper time to plan things—I would have managed to exchange what I had with what I needed. I also would have probably used proper channels, taken a decent ship with nice sleeping quarters, and most importantly, I would have taken a lot more cash and a proper international visa.

  This was the second half of my problem. A distressing amount of my London wealth was a combination of non-liquid goods, and credit. I had other money sitting in a bank account in Switzerland, but of course I didn’t flee to Switzerland. I could get the money out of Switzerland if I had to, but first I would need to do a lot of things, like establish a new name and address in a country where the person whose name and address I was using was legally residing. Then I’d have to get a bank account and have that bank send a letter to the Swiss bank. To even get that to work, I’d need to communicate with the Swiss by providing documentary proof that I was the person whose name was on my account there. This wasn’t a problem when I went there in person, because I had a passbook, but it was a big problem remotely, because I had no documents the Swiss bank would recognize under the name on that account. To get those documents, I’d need to hire a forger who would take Pounds Sterling. Because again, that was the only cash I had.

  I thought about all of this on the long trip across the ocean, and decided that absent a way to to pull all of that off, I was probably looking at the long game: I’d have to start from the bottom of whatever kind of society I found myself in, and work my way up. Maybe after twenty or thirty years I’d be well enough established to tap some of the Swiss funds, if I still needed them at that point.

  Of course, the correct solution would have been to have gone to Switzerland instead. I can’t remember why I didn’t do that; I had the passbook, and I thought the funds on deposit were probably considerable. And I liked Switzerland just fine. I think I maybe just wanted a new experience, and had had my head filled with Herman’s descriptions of the New World. Sure, he was kind of a terrible person, but I had no reason to think he was lying.

  So to recap: I ended up in New York knowing nobody, with no proof of citizenship I could use, and money that was difficult to exchange. That probably sounds like a desperate situation except that I’d faced similar circumstances hundreds of times in the past. Here, at least, I spoke the language already. It could have been worse.

  The thing is, there are always jobs nobody else wants to do. If you’re willing to do an obscene amount of work for very nearly nothing—and risk getting literally nothing, since there wasn’t exactly an H.R. rep to complain to if the foreman decided not to pay you that week—then there are ways to get by.

  So that was what I did for my first couple of years in America: I cleaned things in which fecal matter was an expectation; I built things that were likely not to last; and I carried things that should have been carried by more than one person.

  If it looks like I’m skipping through this part, it’s because I can’t remember precisely all the things I did do, possibly due to the fact that I spent a decent amount of what I earned on alcohol. Everyone else did, too. I do recall being glad I couldn’t get sick, because aside from drinking, trading communicable disease was everybody’s favorite pastime.

  I was working and living in an area of town called Five Points, a neighborhood that I think doesn’t exist any longer, and thank goodness for that. More than any other part of the city, it reminded me of the London slums. I felt at home there, but not entirely for the right reasons. If you had qualms about killing another man in order to prevent him from killing you, it wasn’t the best place to live, basically.

  And again, had I not been going between work, drink, food, sleep, and work again, I would probably have a colorful story or two about this time, but I can’t really remember much of it. Did I kill anyone in self-defense? Sure. Did I sleep with a lot of women? Absolutely. But only an imp could turn those years into a proper story, and it would take a lot of talent.

  What I do remember is how I got out of this cycle.

  One afternoon, a job took me east of Five Points and into a small neighborhood that was an entirely different kind of dangerous: Chinatown. The Tongs ruled the streets there, in the same way the Irish ruled Five Points. The difference was that I could pass for Irish.

  The job required I move something heavy to the far end of Chinatown. I don’t remember what. Wood, or paving stones maybe. I used a cart and an ass, neither of which were mine.

  This took a decently long time. I know everyone who has visited New York, or who lives there now, has a complaint about the traffic, but you really have no idea how bad it used to be—narrow dirt roads with no real transit laws to prevent someone from just stopping in the middle if they felt like it, combined with a seriously ridiculous variety of conveyances. It all conspired to make it faster to travel very nearly everywhere on foot if you could.

  At least, that was the case in the part of the city I was in. On my one or two trips to midtown, I noted everything was a lot cleaner, the buildings were taller, and the roads wider and easier to get around on, so maybe the congestion was specific to the poorer neighborhoods. (I remember being modestly impressed by the first skyscraper I ever saw, but only modestly impressed, because I was comparing it to the pyramids of king Khufu.)

  I ended up stuck behind a cart that was selling dead chickens. The driver stopped right in the middle of the street, because people kept running up to buy chickens from him. It was kind of like how ice cream trucks operate now, only it was blocking traffic and nobody was eating what they bought as soon it was in-hand.

  As I waited—I didn’t have a horn to lean on and it wouldn’t have helped if I did—I got a good look around, and that was when I spotted it: the three-hares symbol. It was above a door between two shops, painted in gold on a black background.

  I was stunned, because it never even occurred to me the Path might have made it to the New World…assuming it even had. It was, as I’ve said, a common enough symbol, so it was within reason that somebody in Chinatown was using it to symbolize an entirely different thing. Selling dead rabbits, perhaps.

  Without thinking much about the consequences of leaving the cart and the ass in the middle of the street, I hopped down, walked over to the door, and went inside.

  It led to a staircase, at the top of which was a second door, with a different symbol but the same motif: three dragons chasing one another in a circle, red-and-gold on white. This had no symbolic relevance to the Path that I knew of, but it was cute.

  The second door was locked. I rapped on it, and waited. After a decent delay, an elderly Chinese woman opened the door. She looked me up and down, came to a couple of obvious conclusions—I looked like an Irish dockworker, and smelled like one too—and shouted something I couldn’t understand. It was delivered angrily, with a couple of gestures that were universal, so the meaning was clear enough.

  I’ve said before that I’m not fluent in “Chinese”. The reason I say this isn’t because I never tried, or that I don’t have a limited set of phrases I can lean on (as I do in most languages) as an entry-point to fluency. I say it because there isn’t a single language called Chinese. There’s hundreds.

  This is sort of true everywhere, but the difference was that I was around for all the early European dialects, but only a couple of the Chinese ones.

  I’m pretty good in Mandarin, and that’s just about it.

  The woman didn’t yell at me in Mandarin, or in English, and so we were nearly out of luck from a communications perspective. However, I did have a phrase that belonged to neither tongue.

  “Zurgaan gurvan ni neg yum,” I said.

  It means, approxima
tely, six and three are one, in a Mongolian dialect.

  She blinked for an eternity or two, as I held my breath.

  I had no reason at all to think this was actually the Path. As I said, the symbol is used for other things—the trip to Devonshire certainly proved this—so she could have been a purveyor of rabbit carcasses, or just about anything else. She could have also been confused, not because I’d spoken the phrase of the Path, but because she had yelled at me in the same Mongolian dialect. If that was the case, her confusion was entirely warranted.

  “Zam neegdene,” she replied, quietly. (If I’m remembering right, this means a way opens.) The confusion in her expression hadn’t gone anywhere, but at least she wasn’t yelling at me any longer.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked.

  “No English,” she said. Then she looked to the side of the doorway and nodded at someone I couldn’t see.

  “In,” she said, stepping aside.

  Inside the room, to the side of the door, was a large Chinese fellow with one eye and a machete. I wondered if he’d lost the eye before or after he decided to carry a blade around. I was guessing after, because, again, he was quite large, and assuming he knew what to do with the machete, I expected getting close enough to blind him would be a real challenge. I did note that the blade was in his right hand and the eye he’d lost was his right eye, which could be a tactical advantage if it came to that.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked him. The man lowered his blade, and nodded.

  “Yes, Gwailou,” he said, using a derogatory term I’d heard before. It meant something like ghost-man, in reference to my skin color. It was sort of unfair, because I had a decent tan, but whatever.

  “Good, you can translate.”

  He grunted.

  There was a small bamboo tree in a planter at the door that had no excuse for being alive given the lack of sunlight in the corner. The man stabbed the machete into the dirt of the planter and left it there. Not a good way to store a machete, unless you were hoping it rusted, but it wasn’t my machete.

  I followed the old woman past the entryway, to a large table, on the other side of which was a long wall of cubbyholes. Each space held a jar, and each jar had a Chinese character on it.

  “You’re an herbalist,” I said. I had a sudden craving for green tea.

  She was more or less ignoring me.

  “Sit,” the one-eyed man said, pointing to a stool at the table. “I am Lo. Her name is unneeded. Who are you?”

  I did a mental review of the list of names I could have provided, from the one associated with the Path, to the name on the last legal document I had—as an Englishman named Jack—to the Irish name I was currently using.

  “No name,” the woman said. “Traveler.”

  She took a jar down from the second shelf, opened it, and pulled out two dollars, intending to hand it over.

  That doesn’t sound like a lot of money these days, so I wish I could say it was a fortune in the 1890’s. But it was only about fifty bucks. So, still not a lot of money.

  “Ah, of course,” I said.

  She said something in whatever dialect they were using, to Lo.

  “She asks if you need temporary lodging,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Then take the traveler’s pension, and be on your way.”

  “You misunderstand,” I said.

  “You are not owed more than this,” he said. “A roof, and assistance. These are the only tolls a traveler such as yourself should expect.”

  “You take me for a delegate. But I’m more than just a traveler, and am owed more than the traveler’s pension.”

  He translated, and then they proceeded to have a heated argument for a good thirty seconds. I kept waiting for someone to give me something to write on, but that didn’t appear to be happening.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, during a pause. The old woman had shoved the money back into the jar and put it back on the wall, and was now facing away from both of us.

  “She told me to kill you,” he said.

  “That’s certainly not good news. I’m glad you disagreed.”

  “It isn’t that. I’d rather not do it indoors. It took months to clean up, the last time.”

  “The…last time?”

  “The smell was terrible as well. Very off-putting for an herbal shop. She will ignore us until I do this.”

  “You’re being serious.”

  “Oh, yes. She is very stubborn. There’s an alley out back. I don’t imagine I can convince you to go out there with me?”

  “To murder me?”

  “I can’t let you leave, if you know this much of the Path already. Self-evidently, you are not a legate.”

  “How would you know this if you don’t allow me to provide proof?”

  He laughed.

  “Because you reek of a dockworker, which is surely what you are, and no more. Everyone knows the legacies are all Chinese, which you are not. That you do not know this betrays you as much as anything. It is this ignorance for which I must now kill you.”

  “All of them were Chinese? No, that was never true; I don’t know who told you that. Look, can I just get a pen and paper for a proper test? You should both know how this is supposed to go. I mean, unless the Path has changed a lot since I founded it.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Your claim is not only to a legacy, but as a founder, am I hearing this correctly?”

  “I didn’t say, a founder, I said the founder. I don’t want two dollars and a bed for a night, because I’m no mere traveler. I want the full services of the Path owed to me.”

  The woman, still refusing to turn, had stopped what she was pretending to do—organize herbs or something—to ask a question over her shoulder.

  “All right,” Lo said to her. He looked at me. “What is your name, then?”

  “I thought you didn’t want it?”

  “Now we do.”

  “Depends on the audience. For you guys, the name you’re probably looking for is Li Yuan, or Li Tieguai.”

  Both of those names belonged to an immortal being who was ugly and elderly-looking and walked with an iron crutch. (Tieguai means ‘iron crutch’.) I’m still kind of insulted that I’ve been conflated with him, but it’s not the kind of thing I have any control over. It was very specifically a Chinese legend, which was why I thought they’d recognize it. Also, the top, center cubby didn’t have a jar, just a box with Li Tieguai in Chinese characters. I can’t read Chinese worth a damn, but I know what the name they call me looks like.

  Lo didn’t laugh this time.

  “She was right, I should have killed you right away,” he said.

  “You’re welcome to try.”

  He got up to fetch his machete from the bad-place-to-store-a-machete, when the woman stopped him.

  My name came up three or four times during their heated conversation, which was a little entertaining if only because now it seemed their positions had switched. Where before, she thought he should maybe kill me, now he was thinking he’d better and she disagreed.

  “She is a superstitious woman,” he said, after this had gone on for long enough to be a little awkward. “She believes these ridiculous old things. Li Yuan appears as a beggar in the bedtime stories her grandmother recounted, and now a beggar appears before us. I don’t know what game you’re at.”

  “You think it’s a con. I mean, that’s what I’d think, if I were you.”

  “Yes. But I don’t know what you hope to gain. That box is symbolic; it has nothing in it.”

  “If she believes the legends, and she mans this station, then that box is not empty, and it’s not about the box. You owe me more than its contents. But you have no reason to take my word for any of this. We established the tests for a reason. Are you going to get me a pen and paper now, or would you prefer it if I took away your machete first?”

  Lo had something of an internal argument that went on a few seconds, and then he stood,
grumbling, and extracted a piece of scrap paper and a fountain pen from underneath the table.

  I took a few minutes carefully writing out the necessary symbols—again, I don’t much care for fountain pens—and slid it over. Then Lo took down the box, while I appreciated the part where he was surprised to not find it empty.

  He compared what I wrote with what was on the parchment inside.

  “It’s a parlor trick,” he said. “It has to be.”

  “The Chinese legacy to the Path descends from a founder named Xuangang. A second legate named Hsu might have established another blood line, but that he died before this could come to be. These were the only true Chinese founders. I, as you see, belong to all nationalities, unless you prefer the inverse, which is more accurate. I’m Iron Crutch Li, and also Dionysos, and a few others if you’d really like to dive into it.”

  He harrumphed, but then the old woman was yelling at him again, and so he translated everything I’d just said.

  “It’s nonsense,” he insisted again, after the translation.

  “You don’t have to believe a word of it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. The Path wasn’t intended to prove the impossible to the unwilling. I met the criteria. Whether you believe me or not, you—or her, because she seems to be the one in charge—owe the owner of this box its contents along with whatever aid I ask for, within your power. And I’ve just proven ownership of the box.”

  The old woman didn’t wait for the translation. She pushed the box to the edge of the table in front of me and waved over it, as if to say, here you go.

  “What you want?” she asked.

  I wasn’t going to count the money, but there was a decent amount of it, all balled up and slipped into the box at different times. Down at the bottom, there was what looked like pre-Civil-War coins. I wondered if they were still in use.