My Last Empress

by Da Chen

  All my feeble mind can recall is that she pushed me away as a bale of hay, aflame, fell hard on us. My foot caught on fire and a certain stench overwhelmed me. I remember pulling her slender arm, her bare feet; then another haystack toppled against my shoulder and I lost her hand. I was found unconscious, slightly burned and bruised, fifteen feet from her incinerated remains with my right hand reaching for her. From that cursed moment on, I have been living only to regret every second of life without her, my Annabelle.

  When the authorities questioned me about the fire and my burned clothing, I was told not to mention our tryst. There were numerous clues linking me to that fateful night, but the tentacles of the elder Pickens made them all vanish. I was repulsed by the cover-up, and I wrote a moving confession of all the ins and outs of our affair leading to the climax of the fire. Upon reading the report, Annabelle’s father and the principal not only burned it in my presence but also threatened prosecution with the possible charge of involuntary manslaughter and possible expulsion if any word of it got out.

  In Andover’s official record, the death of Annabelle was omitted altogether. The flames of 1891 warranted only a footnote as being the first fire on the famed campus.

  3

  In the aftermath of her death, my moods swung wildly, and an escalating depression plunged me into bouts of harrowing head pains, leaving me a gaunt ghost of my former self. Speaking of ghosts, I made love to Annabelle’s ghost every night, sometimes twice or even thrice, my headaches permitting. She might be dead to the world—her tombstone said so—but under my quilt, in my arms, she was always my living bride, my virginal wife. When I began my first year at Yale, my headaches miraculously subsided, and musical studies began to interest me. I found the combination of pipe organ and stained glass particularly soothing. Bach was a forest of solitude echoing with Annabelle’s angelic laughter, Beethoven an islet of nostalgia, lush with her sashaying shadows. Stained glass was my darkened sun, freckled with pigeon poop.

  Even though the organ stopped, the music lived on in my head with gnawing reprisals, keeping me starkly awake all night, though never away from my Annabelle. Insomnia only made a Hercules out of me and a Joan of Arc out of her. What a honeymoon it was, though it did bring back my headaches with shocking ferocity, which at various intervals pushed me as far as wanting to kill myself, but I never did. The night always came in time, and I simply could not unlove my Annabelle.

  I dabbled in poetry writing, first as a sonneteer, then as a balladeer. The narrow wards of rhymes and meters left me smothered with claustrophobic gloom. It was in prose that I blossomed. I envisioned myself a nervous diver standing atop a roaring cascade. Once letting go, I soared like an eagle. The soaring, not of me but of my poisoned pen, proliferated an enviable body of work: forty-three essays and two eclectic tragicomedies. But the gem amidst the roughs was the twelve bound volumes of letters to my Annabelle: four hundred and twenty-one letters in all. They were burned to ashes on Annabelle’s twentieth birthday in a fire aiming to end it all, yet narrowly I escaped, a sobbing arsonist.

  The flirt with fire was cathartic, though it did leave a scar around my waist where the letters had been tied. The windows of my heart suddenly opened; desire stirred from the base of my spine, and thoughts of infidelity tortured me. I wrote copious confessions to my Annabelle, and she wept with me under our quivering quilt. The glory of our subsequent lovemaking was worth all my penitent penmanship and conniving contrition.

  4

  Annabelle reigned over me like the empress she had yearned to be in life. She was formless, airlike, ubiquitous, and pervasive. She lived in the light, in the air. She was all the colors of a rainbow, all cycles of a season, and I, her lone subject, surrendered on the shrine of her glory. In my head, I could trace her thoughts forming, dissolving, re-forming, and vanishing again. In my heart a sadness lingered, not of mine but of her origin. She mourned her own death, and I mourned her grief.

  My surrender simplified all my urges, for hers were now mine and mine were subjugated. If any element of me rebelled against her royal wish, headaches rolled in like an afternoon tide, threatening to bury me in the darkness of her existence. But why would I, in my rare foolishness, rebel against such a fine ruler? In her boundless generosity, she showered me with love and lust, comforted me with her warmth on cold nights, and guided me with her omnipotent wisdom, which, among other things, aided me in escaping a narrow brush with a certain sanitarium.

  The dean of Yale had urged my father many a time to consult with a certain Dr. Price, aptly named for his pricey establishment where he had been known to cure those possessed. Prior to my compulsory oral audience before the Collegiate Fitness Board, which included the renowned Dr. Price, invited by Father to test my sanity, Annabelle had me read a certain journal titled Proceeding, published by the American Society of Psychical Research, a Boston institution established in 1885, specializing in the research of parapsychology, telepathy, hypnosis, apparitions, and the paranormal. “The Possessed and De-possessing,” a feature in that particular issue by none other than Dr. J. S. Price, showed me the ins and outs of that pseudo-science cooked up not by any scientific endeavors but by the compilation of hearsay and rumors.

  I did a perfect job, acting in every minute detail contrary to the set rules established by Price for diagnosing one possessed. I was sure of myself, revealing no hint of a mental double life. I was nostalgic of Annabelle (the possessed felt no nostalgia). I was outrageously boyish, coming in unbathed for days (the possessed took on the invading spirit’s personality—she was squeaky clean). In the end, I threw in some teary moments, confessing to seeing her ghost and being frightened (the possessed did not tell). Not only did I convince those graying academicians of my sanity, I also led them on a wild goose chase with my pseudo-knowledge of the dark side, suggesting the Hindu method of depossession—blowing cow-dung smoke in my face or burning pig excreta under my bed—at which time I noticed Dr. Price pull out his handkerchief and cover his nose.

  The Collegiate Fitness Board members, at Price’s recommendation, labeled me as deeply depressed but only slightly delusional, hanging rather thinly to a blade of sanity. Even a subsequent discovery of a silk-draped wooden mannequin taken from under my bed was not sufficient to send me packing for Dr. Price’s place. But Dr. Price did, as a cautionary catchall, prescribe for this “abnormally disturbed youth” two classic medicinal solutions for my invisible ailments: group exercise (to peel away from my sorry self and rebuild a robust body, which in itself is the best pharmacy) and Oriental studies (finding the ghost’s “life story” to demystify my ghost, a classic trick).

  As the following journal will attest, both prescriptions by our Bostonian ghostbuster not only failed to free me from the tangle of Annabelle but also in time and in many avenues fastened my abject soul tighter to that illusion of my lost love. I, in the words of the wizard Dr. Price, advanced from passive seer to a progressive ghostchaser who would trot the globe in search of the shadow of his lost love.

  5

  From the beginning of my Yale years, I had shunned all sweaty sporting activities involving more than one male participant—myself. The fear of denting the delicate her in such mindless physical clashes kept me away from the likes of football and basketball, and the thought of baring my Annabelle-in-my-head to the filthy locker room frightened me. But luck was well on its way. My extracurricular activity would soon show some pink in an utterly male choice: synchronized swimming. A world champion was invited to teach Yalies how to swim pretty, and I (we) did swimmingly well in this merman’s ballet. The certain female something helped me gain the only A-plus given by our miserly Olympian.

  By the autumn that followed, my cheeks had regained their rosiness and my appetite was robust: I ate like a depraved, deprived prisoner with a hulking appetite for two. Suffice it to say that the rigor of such fierce sport did nothing to part me from my ghost. On the contrary, it set our sex life once more afire, with me burning through five mannequin
s in one summer, stolen from a fashion outlet that had gone bankrupt.

  Upon my improved health, as Dr. Price had suggested, I, with Annabelle’s subliminal consent, took on Oriental studies with Professor Archer, a famed Orientalist. He was a man of few words, suitable for all vocations but teaching, yet in his own quiet way he showed us the world. The seven continents were seven white rocks strewn randomly in his own delicate Japanese garden. The ancient Silk Road, Archer demonstrated with a pair of his shabby leather shoes in which he had traveled the rugged gateway to the Orient. The climb along the spine of the Himalayas was but a mountaineer’s hat, broken and goggleless, and the boat ride down the boisterous Three Gorges of the Yangtze River was a photo of three boat boys, half naked, pulling the boat by rope along the shore and a bottle of murky water fetched from the delta of the river where it embraced the sea. No one had taught us more with less.

  Demystifying only mystified this hollow mind. Annabelle used to be just that angel from the quaint Orient; now her entire world threatened to swallow me, and the only escape seemed to lie in the belly of the beast.

  I read voluminously under his tutelage and quickly became his favorite student. In my spare time, I begged Archer to coach me in the lilting Mandarin language, one of his thirteen learned tongues. In his crowded den where he guided me with his hand over mine through the calligraphy of those graphic words, Archer became an eloquent man with an endless flow of tales. A shot of whiskey sufficed the man for a good three hours of chat. With his sometimes decisive, at times dreamy, verbal stroke, he painted a verbal canvas of an ancient Middle Kingdom where the emperor, descended from dragons, reigned, and the empress, the offspring of swans, loved. In the collages of images knitted together by the hands of my imagination, I substituted Annabelle’s eyes and body into the storied empress. Leafing through the pages of dynastic histories, I saw Annabelle sitting on the throne reigning over her golden palace, Annabelle boating in the palace pond, Annabelle riding her Gobi desert stallion galloping toward me away from the Forbidden City wall. And, alas, Annabelle nude in bed with a faceless opium-smoking emperor surrounded by countless concubines.

  Soon Annabelle’s Peking shanghaied my Yale. Barren New Haven merged into the quaint canvas of a fairytale kingdom complete with golden palaces, soaring mountains, and meandering rivers: my world and hers roped together in a tangle of two cities. Yale shimmered like a mirage in the sunrise of a forbidden city. Library shelves brimmed not with classics of Greek origin or Latin letterings but with imagined Chinese scrolls containing the wisdom of thousands of years. My dormitory grew curled roofs, its facade carved with nine dancing dragons. Professor Archer, in profile, vanished into the body of a scrawny Manchurian monk, his words mangled with a Chinese tongue. Everywhere I turned, pigtailed Yalies dressed in silk gowns kowtowed to one another. My specters were everywhere playing hide-and-seek with me, awakening Annabelle’s pulse, and at times I returned to those golden days of our nascent love, not on the leafy campus of Andover but in a sumptuous palace where she dodged me from column to column, chamber to chamber, her giggles echoing in my heart. Oh, ghosts did occur in New Haven!

  Yet in all this vicissitude, the smoldering emperor remained devilishly faceless. The perplexing blankness haunted me everywhere I looked, trailing in Annabelle’s wake, clad in his imperial garb, a faceless ghost smoking his bubbling pipe. How I abhorred his victorious smile beaming at me. Oh, that fire of jealousy! It drove me to the brink of madness. He began to bear upon me like a nagging headache, appearing and disappearing at will. Soon His Facelessness started appearing under our quilt.

  “Go back to your imperial silk bed!” I demanded angrily.

  What incensed even more was Annabelle’s reaction to our new cast member. She giggled with her coconspirator, hiding behind His Facelessness. I had to conclude that my illusion was having a sticky affair with another illusion and that it was time I, the unhappy husband, did the husbandly thing. I adopted the tactic of separate and destroy.

  I read and reread Dr. Price’s thesis “Separating Reality from Illusions,” the only respectable publication on the subject. It was obese with theoretical assumptions and presumptions but skeletal with effective and potent tools of practical usage. But in the footnote, our good doctor did point me to the right horizon in the form of a caveat.

  Page 367 pointedly warned:

  Avoid a certain Mandarin ritual named Sha Gui, meaning “killing the ghost.” The ancient rite invites the hidden ghost to surface by means of a mysterious nature; then the performer of the rite, usually a monk, sacrifices livestock in the ghost’s presence, ending the viability of such an illusion. The reader must heed the severe consequences that are bound to follow. Quite often, the surfaced ghost is never killed, which, for all intents and purposes, leads inevitably to the augmenting of an existing illusion, causing one to live forever in a whirl of delirium.

  6

  One muggy summer day found me in pigtailed Chinatown where an inky advertisement, wet in the gutter, landed me in front of a storefront hidden along Canal Street. The store sign read summarily in Mandarin: Tell Fortunes & See Ghosts. The one-eyed Chinaman within was picking earwax for another Peking man while the store owner’s wife, a petite bound-feet beauty, embroidered a silk apron. A boy, likely their son, was slurping steamy porridge from a bowl atop a rickety table. I made my request in teetering Mandarin.

  The busy Chinaman barked, “See no white ghost. Out you go!”

  The boy nearly ran me out of the store when his father stopped him to inquire what price I was willing to pay. I let known my generosity and desperation by leafing through a crisp pile of dollar notes. The Chinaman hurried the other man’s ear job with three deep digs, suffering the customer to depart with squeaky pain, and then bargained with me in tilting pidgin English, “White ghosts three dollars.”

  I said, no problem.

  “White chicken cost more fifty cents.”

  Not to worry, I affirmed.

  He gestured his woman and the boy to vanish behind the counter, and he led me along an unlit corridor into a gui fan, a ghost chamber.

  The wall of the dark chamber was festooned with a dozen straw men painted with ghostly faces staring down at us as we sat in a circle: the black face of a forest ghost; the green face of a drowning ghost; the red face of a fiery ghost; and the pink face of a birthing ghost. My gui shi, ghost master, with a beady parrot wobbling on his shoulder, wrote down Annabelle’s name and mine on a piece of paper and inquired about the cause of her death.

  “Fire,” I said.

  “That cost you more,” he murmured, showing two crooked fingers.

  I nodded, and the ritual started with his hitting a gong while the boy lit dozens of thick incense sticks. Smoke instantly filled the air. The gong sang like a dirge as he chanted her name in a fawning tone, calling for her spirit.

  “An-na-belle. An-na-belle,” the boy repeated after the gui shi.

  The parrot mimicked the boy, their shouts forming an eerie cycle of “An-na-belle.”

  I squinted my eyes in the thick smoke to gain that first glimpse of Annabelle, only to have the gui shi scream at me, “You not cry yet? Give me palms.”

  When I did, the gui shi plunged two needles into the heart of my hands.

  I sobbed.

  The boy stood up and began to beat the fiery ghost with a stick as the gui shi burned my name and Annabelle’s into ashes. Through the curtain of my tears, I suddenly saw Annabelle flying like an angel, roped from above, swinging amidst the thick smoke. Her face was draped with a red cloth like a village bride, her waist thin and stemlike. Her shivering voice called my name, “Peetkins, Peetkins.”

  Oh, my heart! I leapt to my feet, lunging at her, only to be stopped by my gui shi, who whispered, “That your Annabelle.”

  “Can I see her face?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “She shamed of burned face. Too ugly.”

  “Oh no, my Annabelle,” I cried, crawling
all over the chamber, chasing after her as she swung back and forth in the misty smoke. “You are never ugly to me. Please … please,” I begged until I felt faint from the beguiling incense, reminiscent of the flaming aroma of that summer night.

  In a last desperate attempt, I clutched the Chinaman’s knees, begging him to let down my angel. He replied with a stinging slap across my face, rendering another dizzy spell in my already surging head. The boy leapt up from the floor to fan the smoke into swirls, and the gong was hit even harder, rippling my eardrums. Tears trickled down my cheeks uncontrollably. Was this the whirl of delirium forewarned by Dr. Price? My delicious delirium? Then through the patches of the thinning smoke, I caught a glimpse of a rather chiseled and familiar face.

  “Who is that?” I demanded.

  “You!”

  “What am I doing in the mirror?”

  “No mirror, you white idiot. You faceless emperor in your dreams!”

  “Me?”

  “We kill by chopping chicken’s head off.”

  I touched my face. So did the mirrored image. I reached over with my trembling hands, and it was gone as suddenly as it had come. The last thing I remember was the boy jumping at me with the stick he had beat the fiery devil with and the shattering pain exploding in my fuzzy head.