The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  * * *

  Last night, I called the number Huang’s father gave me before I left London. The man on the other end of the line identified himself as the master chef of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant.

  “Oh yes, tai pan Darbersmere,” he said, when I mentioned my name. “I was indeed informed, by that respected personage who we both know, that you might honor my unworthiest of businesses with the request for some small service.”

  “One such as only your estimable self could provide.”

  “The tai pan flatters, as is his right. Which is the dish he wishes to order?”

  “The Emperor’s Old Bones.”

  A pause ensued—fairly long, as such things go. I could hear a Cantopop ballad filtering in, perhaps from somewhere in the kitchen, duelling for precedence with the more classical strains of a wailing erhu. The Precious Dragon Shrine’s master chef drew a single long, low breath.

  “Tai pan,” he said, finally, “for such a meal . . . one must provide the meat oneself.”

  “Believe me, Grandfather, I am well aware of such considerations. You may be assured that the meat will be available, whenever you are ready to begin its cooking.”

  Another breath—shorter, this time. Calmer.

  “Realizing that it has probably been a long time since anyone had requested this dish,” I continued, “I am, of course, more than willing to raise the price our mutual friend has already set.”

  “Oh, no, tai pan.”

  “For your trouble.”

  “Tai pan, please. It is not necessary to insult me.”

  “I must assure you, Grandfather, that no such insult was intended.”

  A burst of scolding rose from the kitchen, silencing the ballad in mid-ecstatic lament. The master chef paused again. Then said:

  “I will need at least three days’ notice to prepare my staff.”

  I smiled. Replying, with a confidence which—I hoped—at least sounded genuine:

  “Three days should be more than sufficient.”

  * * *

  The very old woman (eighty-nine, at least) who may or may not have once called herself Ellis Iseland now lives quietly in a genteelly shabby area of St Louis, officially registered under the far less interesting name of Mrs. Munro. Huang’s pictures show a figure held carefully erect, yet helplessly shrunken in on itself—its once-straight spine softened by the onslaught of osteoporosis. Her face has gone loose around the jawline, skin powdery, hair a short, stiff grey crown of marcelled waves.

  She dresses drably. Shapeless feminine weeds, widow-black. Her arthritic feet are wedged into Chinese slippers—a small touch of nostalgic irony? Both her snubbed cat’s nose and the half-sneering set of her wrinkled mouth seem familiar, but her slanted eyes—the most important giveaway, their original non-color perhaps dimmed even further with age, from light smoke-grey to bone, ecru, white—are kept hidden beneath a thick-lensed pair of bifocal sunglasses, essential protection for someone whose sight may not last the rest of the year.

  And though her medical files indicate that she is in the preliminary stages of lung and throat cancer, her trip a day to the local corner store always includes the purchase of at least one pack of cigarettes, the brand apparently unimportant, as long as it contains a sufficient portion of nicotine. She lights one right outside the front door, and has almost finished it by the time she rounds the corner of her block.

  Her neighbors seem to think well of her. Their children wave as she goes by, cane in one hand, cigarette in the other. She nods acknowledgement, but does not wave back.

  This familiar arrogance, seeping up unchecked through her last, most perfect disguise: the mask of age, which bestows a kind of retroactive innocence on even its most experienced victims. I have recently begun to take advantage of its charms myself, whenever it suits my fancy to do so.

  I look at these pictures, again and again. I study her face, searching in vain for even the ruin of that cool, smooth, inventively untrustworthy operator who once held both my fortune and my heart in the palm of her mannishly large hand.

  It was Ellis who first told me about The Emperor’s Old Bones—and she is still the only person in the world with whom I would ever care to share that terrible meal, no matter what doing so might cost me.

  If, indeed, I ever end up eating it at all.

  * * *

  “Yeah, I saw it done down in Hong Kong,” Ellis told us, gesturing with her chopsticks. We sat behind a lacquered screen at the back of Sister Chin’s, two nights before our scheduled rendezvous with the warlord Wao Ruyen, from whom Ellis had already accepted some mysteriously unspecified commission. I watched her eat—waiting my turn, as ever—while Brian Thompson-Greenaway (also present, much to my annoyance) sat in the corner and watched us both, openly ravenous.

  “They take a carp, right—you know, those big fish some rich Chinks keep in fancy pools, out in the garden? Supposed to live hundreds of years, you believe all that ‘Confucius says’ hooey. So they take this carp and they fillet it, all over, so the flesh is hanging off it in strips. But they do it so well, so carefully, they keep the carp alive through the whole thing. It’s sittin’ there on a plate, twitching, eyes rollin’ around. Get close enough, you can look right in through the ribcage and see the heart still beating.”

  She popped another piece of Mu Shu pork in her mouth, and smiled down at Brian, who gulped—apparently suddenly too queasy to either resent or envy her proximity to the food.

  “Then they bring out this big pot full of boiling oil,” she continued, “and they run hooks through the fish’s gills and tail. so they can pick it up at both ends. And while it’s floppin’ around, tryin’ to get free, they dip all those hangin’ pieces of flesh in the oil—one side first, then the other, all nice and neat. Fish is probably in so much pain already it doesn’t even notice. So it’s still alive when they put it back down . . . alive, and cooked, and ready to eat.”

  “And then—they eat it.”

  “Sure do, Tim.”

  “Alive, I mean.”

  Brian now looked distinctly green. Ellis shot him another glance, openly amused by his lack of stamina, then turned back to me.

  “Well yeah, that’s kinda the whole point of the exercise. You keep the carp alive until you’ve eaten it, and all that long life just sorta transfers over to you.”

  “Like magic,” I said. She nodded.

  “Exactly. ‘Cause that’s exactly what it is.”

  I considered her statement for a moment.

  “My father,” I commented, at last, “always told us that magic was a load of bunk.”

  Ellis snorted. “And why does this not surprise me?” She asked, of nobody in particular. Then: “Fine, I’ll bite. What do you think?”

  “I think . . . ” I said, slowly, “ . . . that if it works . . . then who cares?”

  She looked at me. Snorted again. And then—she actually laughed, an infectious, unmalicious laugh that seemed to belong to someone far younger, far less complicated. It made me gape to hear it. Using her chopsticks, she plucked the last piece of pork deftly from her plate, and popped it into my open mouth.

  “Tim,” she said, “for a spoiled Limey brat, sometimes you’re okay.”

  I swallowed the pork, without really tasting it. Before I could stop myself, I had already blurted out:

  “I wish we were the same age, Ellis.”

  This time she stared. I felt a sudden blush turn my whole face crimson. Now it was Brian’s turn to gape, amazed by my idiotic effrontery.

  “Yeah, well, not me,” she said. “I like it just fine with you bein’ the kid, and me not.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at me again. I blushed even more deeply, heat prickling at my hairline. Amazingly, however, no explosion followed. Ellis simply took another sip of her tea, and replied:

  “’Cause
the fact is, Tim, if you were my age—good-lookin’ like you are, smart like you’re gonna be—I could probably do some pretty stupid things over you.”

  * * *

  Magic. Some might say it’s become my stock in trade—as a writer, at least. Though the humble craft of buying and selling also involves a kind of legerdemain, as Ellis knew so well; sleight of hand, or price, depending on your product . . . and your clientele.

  But true magic? Here, now, at the end of the twentieth century, in this brave new world of 100-slot CD players and incessant afternoon talk shows?

  I have seen so many things in my long life, most of which I would have thought impossible, had they not taken place right in front of me. From the bank of the Yangtze river, I saw the bright white smoke of an atomic bomb go up over Nagasaki, like a tear in the fabric of the horizon. In Chungking harbor, I saw two grown men stab each other to death over the corpse of a dog because one wanted to bury it, while the other wanted to eat it. And just beyond the Shanghai city limits, I saw Ellis cut that farmer’s throat with one quick twist of her wrist, so close to me that the spurt of his severed jugular misted my cheek with red.

  But as I grow ever closer to my own personal twilight, the thing I remember most vividly is watching—through the window of a Franco-Vietnamese arms-dealer’s car, on my way to a cool white house in Saigon, where I would wait out the final days of the war in relative comfort and safety—as a pair of barefoot coolies pulled the denuded skeleton of Brian Thompson-Greenaway from a culvert full of malaria-laden water. I knew it was him, because even after Wao Ruyen’s court had consumed the rest of his pathetic little body, they had left his face nearly untouched—there not being quite enough flesh on a child’s skull, apparently, to be worth the extra effort of filleting . . . let alone of cooking.

  And I remember, with almost comparable vividness, when—just a year ago—I saw the former warlord Wao, Huang’s most respected father, sitting in a Limehouse nightclub with his Number One and Number Two wife at either elbow. Looking half the age he did when I first met him, in that endless last July of 1945, before black science altered our world forever. Before Ellis sold him Brian instead of me, and then fled for the Manchurian border, leaving me to fend for myself in the wake of her departure.

  After all this, should the idea of true magic seem so very difficult to swallow? I think not.

  No stranger than the empty shell of Hiroshima, cupped around Ground Zero, its citizenry reduced to shadows in the wake of the blast’s last terrible glare. And certainly no stranger than the fact that I should think a woman so palpably incapable of loving anyone might nevertheless be capable of loving me, simply because—at the last moment—she suddenly decided not to let a rich criminal regain his youth and prolong his days by eating me alive, in accordance with the ancient and terrible ritual of the Emperor’s Old Bones.

  * * *

  This morning, I told my publicist that I was far too ill to sign any books today—a particularly swift and virulent touch of the twenty-four-hour flu, no doubt. She said she understood completely. An hour later, I sat in Huang’s car across the street from the corner store, watching “Mrs. Munro” make her slow way down the street to pick up her daily dose of slow, coughing death.

  On her way back, I rolled down the car window and yelled: “Lai gen wo ma, wai guai!”

  (Come with me, white ghost! An insulting little Mandarin phrase, occasionally used by passing Kuomintang jeep drivers to alert certain long-nosed Barbarian smugglers to the possibility that their dealings might soon be interrupted by an approaching group of Japanese soldiers.)

  Huang glanced up from his copy of Rolling Stone’s Hot List, impressed. “Pretty good accent,” he commented.

  But my eyes were on “Mrs. Munro,” who had also heard—and stopped in mid-step, swinging her half-blind grey head toward the sound, more as though scenting than scanning. I saw my own face leering back at me in miniature from the lenses of her prescription sunglasses, doubled and distorted by the distance between us. I saw her raise one palm to shade her eyes even further against the sun, the wrinkles across her nose contracting as she squinted her hidden eyes.

  And then I saw her slip her glasses off to reveal those eyes: Still slant, still grey. Still empty.

  “It’s her,” I told him.

  Huang nodded. “’Fought so. When you want me to do it?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Whatever y’say, Mr. D.”

  * * *

  Very early on the morning before Ellis left me behind, I woke to find her sitting next to me in the red half-darkness of the ship’s hold.

  “Kid,” she said, “I got a little job lined up for you today.”

  I felt myself go cold. “What kind of job, Ellis?” I asked, faintly—though I already had a fairly good idea. Quietly, she replied:

  “The grown-up kind.”

  “Who?”

  “French guy, up from Saigon, with enough jade and rifles to buy us over the border. He’s rich, educated; not bad company, either. For a fruit.”

  “That’s reassuring,” I muttered, and turned on my side, studying the wall. Behind me, I heard her lighter click open, then catch and spark—felt the faint lick of her breath as she exhaled, transmuting nicotine into smoke and ash. The steady pressure of her attention itched like an insect crawling on my skin: fiercely concentrated, alien almost to the point of vague disgust, infinitely patient.

  “War’s on its last legs,” she told me. “That’s what I keep hearing. You got the Communists comin’ up on one side, with maybe the Russians slipping in behind ’em, and the good old U.S. of A. everywhere else. Phillipines are already down for the count, now Tokyo’s in bombing range. Pretty soon, our little outfit is gonna be so long gone, we won’t even remember what it looked like. My educated opinion? It’s sink or swim, and we need all the life-jackets that money can buy.” She paused. “You listening to me? Kid?”

  I shut my eyes again, marshalling my heart-rate.

  “Kid?” Ellis repeated.

  Still without answering—or opening my eyes—I pulled the mosquito net aside, and let gravity roll me free of the hammock’s sweaty clasp. I was fourteen years old now, white-blonde and deeply tanned from the river-reflected sun; almost her height, even in my permanently bare feet. Looking up, I found I could finally meet her grey gaze head-on.

  “’Us’,” I said. “’We’. As in you and I?”

  “Yeah, sure. You and me.”

  I nodded at Brian, who lay nearby, deep asleep and snoring. “And what about him?”

  Ellis shrugged.

  “I don’t know, Tim,” she said. “What about him?”

  I looked back down at Brian, who hadn’t shifted position, not even when my shadow fell over his face. Idly, I inquired:

  “You’ll still be there when I get back, won’t you, Ellis?”

  Outside, through the porthole, I could see that the rising sun had just cracked the horizon; she turned, haloed against it. Blew some more smoke. Asking:

  “Why the hell wouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know. But you wouldn’t use my being away on this job as a good excuse to leave me behind, though—would you?”

  She looked at me. Exhaled again. And said, evenly:

  “You know, Tim, I’m gettin’ pretty goddamn sick of you asking me that question. So gimme one good reason not to, or let it lie.”

  Lightly, quickly—too quickly even for my own well-honed sense of self-preservation to prevent me—I laid my hands on either side of her face and pulled her to me, hard. Our breath met, mingled, in sudden intimacy; hers tasted of equal parts tobacco and surprise. My daring had brought me just close enough to smell her own personal scent, under the shell of everyday decay we all stank of: A cool, intoxicating rush of non-fragrance, firm and acrid as an unearthed tuber. It burned my nose.

  “We should always stay
together,” I said, “because I love you, Ellis.”

  I crushed my mouth down on hers, forcing it open. I stuck my tongue inside her mouth as far as it would go and ran it around, just like the mayor of that first tiny port village had once done with me. I fastened my teeth deep into the inner flesh of her lower lip, and bit down until I felt her knees give way with the shock of it. Felt myself rear up, hard and jerking, against her soft underbelly. Felt her feel it.

  It was the first and only time I ever saw her eyes widen in anything but anger.

  With barely a moment’s pause, she punched me right in the face, so hard I felt my jaw crack. I fell at her feet, coughing blood.

  “Eh—!” I began, amazed. But her eyes froze me in mid-syllable—so grey, so cold.

  “Get it straight, tai pan,” she said, “’cause I’m only gonna say it once. I don’t buy. I sell.”

  Then she kicked me in the stomach with one steel-toed army boot, and leant over me as I lay there, gasping and hugging myself tight—my chest contracting, eyes dimming. Her eyes pouring over me like liquid ice. Like sleet. Swelling her voice like some great Arctic river, as she spoke the last words I ever heard her say:

  “So don’t you even try to play me like a trick, and think I’ll let you get away with it.”

  * * *

  Was Ellis evil? Am I? I’ve never thought so, though earlier this week I did give one of those legendary American Welfare mothers $25,000 in cash to sell me her least-loved child. He’s in the next room right now, playing Nintendo. Huang is watching him. I think he likes Huang. He probably likes me, for that matter. We are the first English people he has ever met, and our accents fascinate him. Last night, we ordered in pizza; he ate until he was sick, then ate more, and fell asleep in front of an HBO basketball game. If I let him stay with me another week, he might become sated enough to convince himself he loves me.

  The master chef at the Precious Dragon Shrine tells me that the Emperor’s Old Bones bestows upon its consumer as much life-force as the consumed would have eventually gone through, had he or she been permitted to live out the rest of their days unchecked—and since the child I bought claims to be roughly ten years old (a highly significant age, in retrospect), this translates to perhaps an additional sixty years of life for every person who participates, whether the dish is eaten alone or shared. Which only makes sense, really: It’s an act of magic, after all.