by Lucy Taylor
Silence like a nuclear winter reverberated through the phone.
“Imelda? Estas alli?”
“You.” A pause while she seemed to collect herself. “Well, this is unexpected.”
He found himself speechless. He’d forgotten how sublime her voice was, how soothing and mellow, the voice of a fairy godmother laced with an erotic subtext.
“Imelda,” he said. “I’m so happy you answered. Are you alone?”
“I’m always alone now, Hugo. Where are you? What are you doing?”
“I’m on the Sea Mist, headed to Vancouver.”
“Still at sea? I’m surprised. I thought you’d have built that house in Merida you always talked about, that you’d be living the good life by now.”
The good life costs more than it used to, he felt like saying, and money draws people to you for all the wrong reasons, like flies buzzing over carrion, but given what had occurred between them, it was a sentiment he could ill afford to voice. “All these months, I’ve wanted to call you. I want us to meet somewhere, in Vancouver or maybe I could fly down to B.A. I need to see you. I need to explain why I left.”
“I’m sure you’d come up with something quite original.”
Was she chuckling or holding back a sob? It was hard to tell.
He talked on, the words erupting out of him, wheedling and desperate.
“I’m so sorry, Imelda. The way I left was crazy, cowardly! I had this idea I wasn’t worthy of you, that I would be a burden to you, an embarrassment, that I’d never fit into your world. I was a fool, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Stop!” She spat the word like an invective. “Tell me, Hugo. How did you squander the money? Was it drink? Gambling? Putanas? Maybe just bad real estate or too many greedy relations with their hands out.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t insult me. My sons admitted what they did. The older one is a chronic alcoholic like his father was, maudlin and sentimental. He drinks and listens to samba music and confesses his sins like a child. Now he and his brother regret their meddling bitterly, because I’ve disowned them both.”
“Imelda, it isn’t what you think. I had no choice. Your sons threatened to kill me. They said they’d burn down my family’s house in Merida. They threatened to—”
Her laughter crackled through the phone like broken glass.
“How much did they pay you, Hugo? How much did it cost them to make sure you wouldn’t be filching too much of their inheritance?”
“It wasn’t about the money. I was happy with you. I felt—”
“Felt what, Hugo?” she said, the words so slathered with contempt they dripped like honeyed offal.
“I was in love with you, Imelda. I still am. I want to come back.”
As he spoke, he caught a glimpse of black hair billowing. Naqi emerged from a stairwell beside a glass-enclosed poster that touted the charms of that evening’s singing sensation. It was the first time he’d seen her outside her cabin. His heartbeat quickened, and he found himself turning away to conceal the cell phone.
Imelda was saying something he hadn’t heard.
“I’m sorry, what—?”
“Find some other wealthy fool,” she said and the phone went dead.
««—»»
Four orange inflatables holding twenty passengers each were launched from the back of the Sea Mist, accompanied by two guides. The hike would be short and only mildly taxing, suitable for people with more stamina for gorging themselves at the buffet than trekking across a glacier. Now, with snow flurries beginning to make visibility iffy, its duration would be curtailed even more, a development unlamented by Hugo.
The Zodiacs put in at an area of bare, vegetation-free bedrock left behind as the glacier had retreated. Naqi and Hugo followed up the rear as the guide led them up a path paralleling the ice. To one side rose a dark forest of fir and Sitka spruce, to the other loomed a wall of massive seracs, jagged pinnacles of glacial ice resembling frozen giants wearing pyramidal hats. There was a sound that Hugo couldn’t place, a constant crackling like soda water fizzing.
Naqi, as though reading the question in his eyes, said, “Haven’t you ever heard bergy sizzle before?” When he looked blank, she added, “It’s the sound of air bubbles being released as the glacier melts.”
She took his hand as they huffed uphill, pausing frequently for the guides to explain some aspect of glaciology, which Hugo almost entirely tuned out. The snow was falling harder now, dusting the bedrock and accumulating in the branches of the spruce and fir whose roots found tenacious purchase in the thin, rocky soil. Beyond the sediment deposits, the frozen river flowed, eons of glacial ice, cracked and grooved and fissured.
The group gathered on an outcropping of rock while the guide described how seracs formed by the intersection of crevasses. Hugo found himself contemplating an ice ridge, white as bone, that rose like a bent and twisted spine, a bridge to the end of the world. Naqi’s hand slipped out of his. When he reached for her, she was gone.
Behind him, Hugo saw only snow, and beyond that, a glimpse of blue-white cornices dissolving into the pixilated frenzy of whirling flakes. He yelled Naqi’s name, and a fat woman in a pink Lands’ End parka turned her hooded face to shush him, plump finger to pursed lips.
He muttered something rude and turned away in time to glimpse a grey-white blur, low to the ground, that dashed between two outcroppings of rock. He blinked, unsure what he had seen.
Behind him, the group was moving on, the guide’s commanding voice fading so quickly into silence that Hugo had the impression a crevasse had yawned under their feet and swallowed up the lot of them. Thinking that Naqi might have returned to the Zodiacs, he turned and started to retrace his steps.
Within a few hundred yards, the trail was blocked by a fallen Sitka spruce, toppled by the glacier’s advance into the adjacent forest. He hadn’t seen the spruce before and paused to reorient himself, bedeviled by the wind and snow and the skin-crawly sensation that black eyes within the blue-tinged shadows observed him and sensed his fear.
Whichever way he turned, impossibly fleet shadows meteored across the periphery of his vision.
Skirting the fallen tree, he quickened his pace, heedless now of whether he was still on the trail or veering toward a crevasse or treacherous snow bridge. He began a sliding, stumbling run. Wolfen bodies razored into view, their lean forms resembling frantic scissor strokes opening up dark rents on a sheet of white paper. With synchronized precision, they flanked and circled him.
They were wolf-like, but unlike any wolves Hugo had ever seen on nature shows or pacing behind bars in zoos. Long, ribby torsos extending from humped, muscular shoulders, snouts low to the ground like truffle-rooting swine, eyes fierce little nuggets of tar shot through with red. Their grey pelts mirrored the glacial ice, tinged with glimmers of blue, so that, viewed from behind the whirling snow, they seemed to shiver, ghost-like, incandescent.
Naqi’s command came from behind him. “Don’t move, don’t make a sound.” Silent as shadow, she inched out from a vertical furrow at the base of a serac. Hugo, moments before the animals appeared, had looked right at her hiding place and seen nothing.
Crouching, she circled slowly and dropped to her knees. Her hands shook as she removed her left glove and put out her hand, fingers splayed. She swung her head from side to side, long hair dragging the ice as she emitted sounds that Hugo could only associate with loss and bitter mourning.
At first Hugo hoped the group from the ship—who surely must have noticed their absence by now—would hear her frightful keening, but the wind was gusting vigorously and wailed along in a high, vicious soprano, the noise as white and undifferentiated as the flakes boiling around them.
The attack came too fast for him to see—a flash of fur and fangs and two white snail-like objects that skittered across the snow, trailing slimes of scarlet.
Another of the shaggy, grey-white animals approached, its piggish snout aga
pe with teeth that would do credit to a butcher’s arsenal, snuffled at the bloody morsels and gulped them down.
“Come,” Naqi hissed. Grabbing his arm, she started crawling backward, their pace torturously slow, Hugo expecting any second for the pack to fall upon them and tear their throats out. When they were finally far enough away, she yanked him to his feet and steered him cautiously around a series of snow-filled crevasses and onto a flat stretch of bedrock that gave way eventually to forest.
When they heard the guide yelling for them, Hugo called back and they were quickly taken to the Zodiacs and ferried back to the ship. Naqi kept her wounded hand wrapped in a scarf and tucked inside her parka. Back on board ship, she refused all Hugo’s entreaties to go to the infirmary. In the elevator, she stared straight ahead with empty eyes and gritted teeth. When he tried to comfort her, she shook him off.
“You’re bleeding! Let me help you!”
She turned away, but not before he saw the cold resolve in those black eyes flicker like a candle dimmed and pain twisted her features.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “Don’t come to my cabin again.”
And left him standing, stunned and furious, when the elevator door opened.
««—»»
A stiff drink, he thought. Make that a half dozen shots of Tecate to get the circulation going in his frozen body and tamp down his rage. How dare the bitch dismiss him like a servant! He bolted for the closest lounge, the Yukon Territory on Deck Three. Along the way, he passed the Photo Op Shop, where shots of passengers taken when they first boarded the Sea Mist were posted on bulletin boards for purchase, arranged by deck and cabin number. He hurried past, then suddenly, remembering something Inz had said, he halted and went back.
Inz had been wrong to describe the woman in 518 as old. ‘Old’, in Hugo’s estimation, hovered somewhere between sixty and eighty. Maisie Kent from Bristol, England, looked mummified, an ancient crone with cropped white curls, pearly teeth, and a jaw-dropping diamond the size of a pea on her withered finger. She bore as much resemblance to Naqi as the Bering Sea to a duck pond.
««—»»
Hugo threw aside the Do Not Disturb sign and stormed into the suite. Cold assailed him. The balcony door was open, and, a fierce wind blustered through. Blood speckled the carpet, and a warm, coppery reek tainted the air.
He strode to the balcony, automatically slamming the slider shut behind him. This time the fact that the balcony was empty didn’t alarm him. He shouted Naqi’s name like an oath.
At once, she came out onto the balcony that belonged to the adjacent suite, looking at him as he must have stared at her, with horror and dismay. Blood still flowed from the stumps of her amputated fingers, but not nearly enough to account for the amount staining her pants and parka. Her clothes were slick with it, her hair stippled red.
Hugo shouted above the wind. “Who the hell are you? What happened to the woman in 518?”
Behind her, gold curtains caught by the wind, swirled out the open door. Something wrong there, Hugo registered, but was unwilling to take his eyes off Naqi. He had not forgotten she was perfectly capable of jumping between the balconies. He found himself taking a step backward.
“You say you’ve never seen anyone fall overboard,” said Naqi, taking a step closer. “I myself have seen it several times. Usually, it all happens in a flash, the person who’s about to fall doesn’t fully understand what’s happening or what it is they’re seeing. But that old woman surprised me. She looked into my eyes and saw me as I really am. She saw into my soul. No one has ever done that before. It took courage. I made sure she was already dead before I threw her overboard.”
“Jesus, why would you kill her?”
“Why do you think? I’m not officially on board the ship. I needed her cabin.”
She moved forward again, closing the distance between them and blocking his view of the curtains, which flapped wildly behind her. At the same time, Hugo felt the vibration of the Sea Mist’s engines and knew the ship was about to leave its current position and sail up the fiord. Naqi felt it, too. For the first time, her eyes left Hugo and she looked at the shore.
“There!” she said. At the glacier’s terminus, where bare bedrock gave way to forested banks, Hugo saw blurred movement, grey shapes milling and massing behind the swirling snow.
A nauseating cold stabbed his belly. He stepped away from the railing, at the same time that Naqi mirrored his movement on her own balcony.
With her good hand, she pointed toward the shore. “My kind have been imprisoned in the ice for eons. Whether it was Aguta who caused it or something else, who knows? The few who escaped have been wandering ever since, waiting to be reunited with their tribe.”
Hugo barely listened. He was looking at the slider, sickened to see he’d closed it on his way outside. He would move toward it casually, he thought—calmly, like nothing was happening—he’d go inside and lock it, and call security to report the murder of a passenger.
“The old ones have accepted my offering,” Naqi said. “Now I can rejoin my kind.”
Hugo inched closer to the slider. “Your fingers…you offered them your fingers?”
She gave a funny smile. Behind her, the wind whooshed beneath the drapes, billowing them inward, revealing gobbets of meat and bone protruding from a pink sock that was ripped and blood-soaked.
“Inz!” he cried, but his voice emerged a muffled croak, more plea than shout.
“I decided to spare you,” Naqi said. “I killed her, so you could live. Yet here you are.”
He lunged to grab the handle of the slider, but her leap carried her there ahead of him. An animal odor mingled with the reek of blood and for an instant, he endured the sight that Maisie Kent in her last moments must have seen, the essence of Naqi’s feral soul, all fangs and sinew and claws.
There was no choice. He leaped for the railing and plummeted over, head first. The world upended. Above him loomed the water, a foam-flecked, obsidian sky, while from below the howling nightmare rushed up to slash his face. Then all reversed, and scarlet claws scraped scalp from skull.
The last sound reaching Hugo before the frigid water filled his lungs was the thunder of nearby glaciers starting to calve.
The roar of destruction and collapse echoed up and down the fiord while, from the shore, there rose an ecstasy of yipping, an infernal glee infused with bone-deep knowing, that the Great Thaw had finally begun and untold legions of their kind were soon to be released upon the world.
The Butsudan
Hiroshi-san died at the start of the New Year. Now, nine months later, it is the beginning of Obon, the festival of the dead in Japan, and he is due to come home for a visit.
As I trudge back from the market, I can sense the happy excitement and anticipation of the people around me, many of them already wearing yukatas, lightweight summer kimonos, in preparation for the dancing that will start tonight, but all I feel is a profound, stomach-turning dread.
As a Westerner, I don’t share the Japanese belief, based in Buddhist legend, that the dead are allowed to leave the underworld to visit once a year, that they are guided back to their earthly homes by bonfires and candles. And yet, this morning I took extra care as I arranged the little bowls of dumplings and noodles on the butsudan, the family altar where the ancestors are worshipped. I set sake and plum wine on the second shelf and arranged a mixture of chopped eggplant, rice, and cucumber on a lotus leaf beside it. I played the pious hostess preparing the symbolic feast. Despite myself, I thought of my dead husband and murmured a brief prayer that, if there should be an afterlife, it finds him well and happy.
I doubt it.
Hiroshi-san was as stingy with a kind word or a smile as he was with the small allowance of yen he doled out to me every week. He was a dour and miserly man in life. In death, why should he be different?
The festivities are already starting in the town park, where the Bon-Odori, the traditional dances, will take place. A young man climbs the pla
tform in the center of the dance space and begins pounding a taiko drum. I see families lugging coolers filled with beer, ice tea, and shaved ice—it is the hottest time of the year.
As I pass the torii gate that marks the entrance to the Shinto shrine up the hill, some children scamper past me. One of them, a little girl with jet hair and huge black eyes, stops to gape at me, then hurls the one word I learned very quickly upon coming to Japan. “Gaijin” she shrieks and points at me. “Gaijin, gaijin!”
Foreigner. A woman, apparently the girl’s mother, grabs the child’s hand and yanks her along, but the girl stares back at me over her shoulder, taking in my yellow hair and green eyes as one would an exotic butterfly pinned to a board. It has happened so many times, you’d think I would get used to it, but I never do. I was married to Hiroshi-san for five years, but still I am a stranger here. Still an object of curiosity, my height and coloring an invitation to stare, my halting attempts to speak the language ever a source of bewilderment and amusement.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
When I came to Japan to marry Hiroshi-san, shortly after meeting him at an art gallery in Chicago where I worked as a receptionist, I imagined an exotic, romantic life in a foreign land. I envisioned tea ceremonies and Noh dramas, Zen gardens where red-lipped kimono-clad geisha performed classical dance. What I got were bitter winters and steaming summers, gangs of sullen teenagers with spiked hair and iPods, subways full of salarymen who leered first at me and then at their porno mangas, and a language as incomprehensible as the chattering of crickets on a summer morning.
And along with that, side by side with the kitschy and the profane, an astonishing array of festivals that link the human and the divine, all aimed at invoking the good will of the deities and ancestors.