The Dragon and the Stars

by Derwin Mak

  He spent his every waking hour trying to salvage what he could of the old lipstick, using all the tricks he knew and sparing no expense on new ingredients. Finally, at the end of the month, he emerged tired and triumphant.

  He stood outside his workshop with his hands raised high, holding a new jar of pearly black lipstick, a feeling of accomplishment swelling in his chest. But all around him was silence and dust. What use was lipstick without a woman to put it on?

  And so Zhou Liang went on a hunt for the perfect mistress. He searched the teahouses and brothels; he looked in the slave markets and asked his merchant friends for help; he even took a wagon to neighboring villages to see if the pickings were better somewhere else.

  In the end, it was his son-in-law who quietly brought a girl to him, explaining that it was losing the family face to have the patriarch run about like some hot-blooded youth sniffing around for girls.

  Her letter of introduction said her name was Jiu Xiang and that she hailed from the wild provinces to the west. She was very pretty, and her body glowed with a healthy vigor quite unlike the women of the city, but Zhou Liang clucked his tongue when he saw how tan her skin was. He would have to keep her indoors for a while to make her pale.

  She wasn’t a shy girl. The first morning he came to her, she disrobed in a perfunctory manner, then turned to face him with an expectant look. It took a few minutes of embarrassed mumbling on Zhou Liang’s part to explain that he only wanted to do her makeup.

  Her expression changed, as if his request was some sort of deviance, but she sat on the stool and allowed him to do his work. He smeared the lipstick on her with his fingers. He’d grown to enjoy the feel of it during his time in the workshop.

  Over the next few weeks, he applied lipstick each day, giving her clear instructions not to remove it until night. He also kept her hidden away from the rest of the family, moving his effects to an isolated wing of the estate.

  She began to experience the same changes Zhou Liang had seen in Mistress Fei. Her face narrowed, her cheekbones lifted, and her eyebrows thinned. She took on more sensual mannerisms, wore the red silks, and would only eat soybeans.

  The daily contact with her began to arouse a great desire in Zhou Liang’s body, and one night he invited her to bed. She’d nodded demurely but smiled at him in a knowing way.

  That night, he lay in his soft silk bed, listening to the crickets as they sang outside. Jiu Xiang announced her arrival with a light knock on his door before slipping inside, a small red lantern bobbing as she held it behind her back.

  “Come closer, girl. I’d like to see your face.”

  She stepped closer, her face and figure still hidden in the shadows of the room as her dainty slippers peeked out into the moonlight.

  “You shouldn’t have come looking for me, old man,” Jiu Xiang said. Her voice slid over him like the fragrance of peach trees in warm summer air. “I was going to consider your debt paid when you gave me Mistress Fei’s body, but having you so close is too great a temptation to resist.”

  Jiu Xiang lifted the lantern to her face. Her eyes flashed green in the light, and she gave a great snarl, showing sharp bladelike teeth.

  Zhou Liang screamed in terror, backing up against the wall as her mouth bubbled over with globs of blue fire. She sprang onto the bed after him, setting the silk sheets ablaze as she sank her jaws into his neck and tore his throat out.

  The Man on the Moon

  Crystal Gail Shangkuan Koo

  THE Man on the Moon carried a small suitcase with him to Earth and checked in at the hotel.

  While he was away at a press conference the next morning, the cleaning lady who came to make his bed and replace the empty plastic bottles in the shower indulged her curiosity on the suitcase that lay on the luggage rack with its lid open. The bundles of red silk cords in it disappeared from sight when she touched them, which was a little too odd for her, so she pulled out the Book underneath them instead.

  Two columns divided each page, filled with names that were matched neatly by row in the Man on the Moon’s tiny cursive. The cleaning lady found her parents’ names next to each other. Her grandparents weren’t matched, but then her grandfather had been a philanderer. When she discovered that the name next to hers wasn’t her husband, she cried at the foot of the bed, wiping her tears on the sheets.

  After she had put the sheets back into order, she found her husband’s name and a blank space in the column next to his. Excitedly, she tried to fill it with her name using a pen from the desk drawer. The pen wouldn’t write on the Book but worked perfectly when she scribbled impatiently on the slip of cardboard reminding guests to reuse the towels. Finally, she hurled the pen away and vainly tried to tear out the pages.

  They found her huddled against the foot of the bed again, crying over the Book, and had a housekeeping boy watch her as they informed the floor manager. The boy sat next to the middle-aged cleaning lady, awkwardly crossing and uncrossing his arms. There was never anything comforting to say about being disappointed by destiny.

  The hotel’s address was printed below a picture of the Man on the Moon’s ageless face in all the newspapers the next day. If a young man were to pick up the newspaper, he would discover that the Man on the Moon was looking for contestants to enter a beauty pageant he would be holding at the hotel’s grand ballroom. Once the winner was decided, the Man on the Moon would write his name next to hers on the Book of Matches and tie one of his red cords between his and her ankles, as he had done for thousands of years to all the couples that he had predestined. When the Man on the Moon leaves Earth to resume his matchmaking duties, he would compensate her with eternal youth while she waits for the end of the world, when he will return to bring her away and marry her.

  After reading this, the young man would put the newspaper down to finish his cereal and prepare for his shift at the appliance store. It is possible that he would cut the article out and shove it into the back pocket of his jeans to show to his friends later at the pub. It is also possible that he would keep it as a talisman, hoping that he and the girl who always fishes the lime out of her drink with a spoon and slips it into his are matched in the Moon’s Book. Anything is possible for young people. Even if she has told him that she will be leaving the country at the end of the year when her studies finish, he would still hope that he had not misunderstood the choice of her microwave oven to break down on his shift when they first met a year ago. He might wait for a revelation or decide to act. Anything is possible for young people.

  Sad songs and poetry have been written about the Man on the Moon, but he had stopped reading them a long time ago. When the journalist asked why, he said that they distracted him from his duties. Like the prayers that lovers offered him from mountaintops or temples during the midautumn festival, they were remarkable in their variation but ultimately none of his responsibility.

  The general manager of the hotel began to run out of rooms for prospective contestants who wanted to preserve their youth for one reason or another and had made reservations too late. Tickets for the contest audience sold out for exorbitant prices, and news networks set up tents around the building.

  When asked by philosophers if he was responsible for wrong circumstances that plague lovers, the Man on the Moon replied that there were no such things as wrong circumstances.

  When asked by psychologists on how to fix a broken heart, he insisted that it can only be prevented by learning to wait instead of gratifying every momentary impulse that besets the heart.

  When asked by human rights advocates on what grounds he made each matchmaking decision, he answered that he only followed the forces that trace across the world in intricate, ordained patterns which they would not comprehend.

  When asked by religious groups about the end of the world, he answered that only his bride would be able to survive the collapse of all the patterns of the universe. In the hubbub that this produced, the general manager of the hotel, who hovered solicitously wherever the Man on th
e Moon went, announced that they had only one question left.

  When asked when the world would end, the Man on the Moon said that even he has to wait for its occurrence. This answer brought a bigger slew of organizations that flooded the hotel’s restaurants and coffee shops, much to the general manager’s delight.

  From the balcony of his suite, the Man on the Moon watched the vague figure of a young woman on the street below lean over to kiss the young man standing next to her under the lamp.

  The Man on the Moon lit a stick from a cigarette pack that the general manager had given him to help him relax.

  The young man picked her up in his arms, their laughter rising up as briefly as the smoke from his cigarette. It was too far to see if they had cords around their ankles that led to one another, but the Man on the Moon noticed that they held each other in a tight, too-fierce embrace, which meant that they were aware something was wrong. Perhaps it was too little time or too much space in between. Perhaps there was another person. Anything was possible. Precarious lovers were all alike in their desperation, and the Man on the Moon assumed that there was something written in the Book of Matches that would eventually cause a breaking of hearts and more sad songs and poetry.

  The couple on the street walked away arm in arm, and the street lamp seemed to dim in their absence. The Man on the Moon took a puff, coughed violently, and decided he didn’t like the taste of it.

  For each contestant who preened and wriggled before him, the Man on the Moon would look at her feet and consult the Book of Matches to check whether he had already predestined her to someone else. Then he would study her face to see if there was something that deserved to survive for eternity. No one knew what prompted him to tell her to stand on the back of the stage or to step down.

  This angered many of those who had bought tickets to the contest to gather information on their own destinies. Some of the audience heckled him. Others tried to grab his Book. Most of them dissected the lack of excitement on the Man on the Moon’s face, which was shown in closed-circuit television screens in the hotel building.

  Groups of people stood outside the hotel every day. Those waving bullhorns shouted that the Man on the Moon should save everyone when the world ends. Those waving bulky cardboard props of his Book shouted that he should not have the freedom to choose his lover if nobody else has it. A small group was cheering on the most significant beauty pageant in history, but because they weren’t waving anything, they were largely ignored.

  Many of the contestants offered to aid him in making up his mind. They behaved so spiritedly in his bed that when he refused to promise them victory, they could not help but turn against him with insults about his performance.

  Some of them said nothing at all, choosing only to slap his face. Surprised at their reactions, he held the door open for them and repeated that a week was really not too long a time to wait for results.

  Just pick one. Toss a coin, if you want. Toss a thousand coins. You do it so easily for us, don’t you? Why can’t you do it for yourself?

  Annoyed with his impatience, the Man on the Moon did not answer the general manager. The suite where he stayed was papered with photographs of women. They smirked, they simpered, they leered, depending on the light. They watched him tally their attributes against each other and spend many hours trying to tell their glaring smiles apart. At the end of the day, he always felt that if he chose one, he would be choosing all of them.

  The Man on the Moon learned to smoke and kept the curtains open to air the room. His Book of Matches lay forgotten on top of the bureau. From the street that his balcony overlooked, he was often seen knotting his red cords together in irritation until they looked like a tangle of hair that clung to the shower drain.

  In an effort to clear his mind, he put on the croak and hobble of an old man and walked unnoticed through the news vans and the groups of waving people.

  He went to the park first, where lovers sat together exploring fingers and lips and the prospect of staying in that moment for eternity. In that sea of red silk that only he could see, cords twisted around to look as if they linked with each other, but the Man on the Moon knew that most of the couples were either bound to no one or to someone else. Although he could not blame them for being blind, their happy ignorance upset him all the same. Frequently he had to stop himself from telling the truth by choking back his words and coughing in a manner that made his disguise even more believable.

  He hastily set off for somewhere with fewer provocations, and soon passed by a block of old brick apartments.

  She was seated on the apartment stoop, waiting for someone. She drummed her fingers absently against her knees, watching a bird that had alighted on top of a grated air shaft on the pavement, and looked at him politely as he intruded into her line of sight.

  It was when her eyes veered away to return to the bird that the Man on the Moon, in a moment of astonishment, suddenly found himself wishing that she were waiting for him.

  She sat on the edge of time, between past and future, and it was not called the present because the present was a word that humans used only to deceive themselves into thinking that they can learn from the past to prepare themselves for the future. There was no point in panicking about the end of the world when it was inevitable. Humans compelled themselves to go through exercises in choice, thrashing like epileptics, grasping at the wrong threads and knotting them this way and that. Who would not be irritated to find his handiwork treated in such a manner?

  But she sat so coolly on her seat in the arena of the city. She wanted nothing; she only waited to know what it was that she would want. The stoop steps could crumble at her feet, the Moon could come crashing down from the sky, and she would only bend down to pluck a piece of debris off her sandals. She would listen to the sound of the wind blowing through his gigantic web of silk as the world plunges upside-down, twisting within itself, as she waits for him.

  He realized he was terrified of speaking to her, so he let the old man do so while he listened anxiously at the clumsiness of his words. He asked her what time the library closed. He asked if he may sit with her. He asked, in a studied way that ensured he appeared wistful rather than overly curious, for her name.

  She answered everything and added that she was waiting for a male friend, the light tone that tinted her voice implying that she was trying to keep him from embarrassing himself. A look of horror crossed the old man’s face, but when he looked at her ankles, it immediately vanished. Then the old man smiled brilliantly at her, as though all the light of the world was in him to do as he pleased.

  She responded with a quick smile of her own that showed her awareness of an incoming lull in the conversation. As she waited in silence, the Man on the Moon felt an urge to burst out of his disguise and store each impression of her deep in the hollows of his elbows and knees, where no one would find it.

  He sat placidly with her instead, imagining how he would tie a red cord around her ankle, and left only when he realized that he could wait no longer.

  The news that the Book of Matches had been stolen appeared in all the papers the next day.

  The Man on the Moon hunched on the sofa, head in his hands, mindless of the flashing cameras around him. He smoked and emptied his ashtray frequently. Sometimes he wept. He would not answer questions about the end of the world. He would not offer speculations of what would happen to new predestined couples without the Book. Only when asked about the contest results did he say that he had already chosen the winner, but without the Book he could not write his name on the empty space next to hers. When the reporters pointed at the photographs on his wall, he would not tell them which one she was.

  Advertisements for the missing Book were sent out.

  Many came to his suite, and their demands for a reward were just as diverse as the Books they claimed to be his. Some wanted to survive the end of the world. Some asked to be transformed into a demigod. Some wanted the same power in matchmaking. They were easy demands t
o turn down in their impossibility. As the days wore on, the Man on the Moon refused to even look at the Books they brought. None of them had given him the right reason to steal it.

  He dreamed for the first time. He was in a hotel, and a soft, warm hand was touching his, but he was blind and could not see who she was. He could hear the silent wail of the world ending, but he had to search with his hands to remove the veil from her head.

  Desperately he prayed that it was her. His fingers groped for her face, but he was already bowing to the disintegrating heavens and turning around to bow to her. Wait, wait, he screamed, and he reached out and pulled at her clothes so violently that they tore. They felt like paper, and he ripped off the pages a fistful at a time until his hands burned.

  He awoke in the darkness, and for a moment, he thought he was still blind.

  A man aware of the danger of being separated from his lover could choose to wait or choose to act. If he chooses to wait, he would force himself not to think about what would happen after the year is over. He would use all his paid leaves from work to take her to the coast because that is all he can do to distract himself. Afterward, he will keep her microwave oven and the beach kitsch she had bought from the man whose board shorts had too many pockets and help her pack her books before taking her to the airport. They will talk again about her career goals and family obligations in vague terms, and he will watch her leave. He would spend the following years waiting for a revelation, which he hopes will come in a neatly wrapped package and which he knows will arrive as a sack of uncertainties that would slowly crush him.