My Last Empress

by Da Chen

  Nine, the royal digit of the Chinese emperor, was Annabelle’s favorite number. She had professed to wanting to have nine children, with the little runt, a curly girlie, to be named Nina. She believed in the cycle of nine lives, each one a reflection of the previous. “Which one are you living now?” she used to ask me. She yearned to soar up to the ninth heaven where the pears of immortality and the peaches of longevity were grown. Harmless it might seem, but in the end, nine were injured, including the curator and Parisian girl: the former lost his voice, his Adam’s apple slashed, rendering him a permanent mute—he, I gathered, was to talk me out of going to China—the latter lost an eye, making her a one-eyed beauty, and clipped her lip, popular not even in the eccentric city of Paris, making it an utter impossibility to be matched with anyone. In one act of genius, all paths to perdition were cleared of my Annabelle’s foes. No one, I mean no one, but the devil could have done it except for my sweet darling girl.

  So there you have it. I had thought of doing in my folks, but in the end it was the ghost who took the charge with the cobweb of nines. There are no laws or tenets prohibiting her from such deadly vengeance: she is dead. No hanging or beheading could hurt her anymore. My conscience was utterly clean—no bloody fingers or smoking gun. Just a snugly hidden ghost doing what might very well have been my own intended deeds.

  There were moments, many moments as I roamed in my dark world, when I felt as if I was the only seeing soul among the blind multitude. I was the clear-eyed chosen one who had crossed over to the dark side, secretly privy to the underbelly of a busy loom that wove the fabric of coincidences, making them seem so conveniently and banally coincidental. Nothing happens randomly. Every occurrence is the result of much nail-biting premeditation in the mammoth cosmic game of chess played by angelic go-betweens, those butterflies of which my Annabelle is one, as the following chain of miraculous events will attest.

  9

  I wasn’t the only one on earth dreaming up little angelic ghosts as colorful butterflies. At the close of the previous chapter, on the point of my comparing all ghosts to butterflies, In-In, my presumed illiterate ink boy, tugged at my sleeve, picked up his little brush, and proceeded to draw a butterfly with the simplest of strokes, yet affecting such vividness, as if the little creatures in flight were futilely barred behind the red lines on our draft paper.

  “You are an accomplished painter,” I complimented him.

  “Baba painted paper lanterns, and I apprenticed at his shop, painting little creatures on the bottom,” he replied shyly.

  When I asked him why he had painted me such a lively gift, he told me dead people soar up to become butterflies in China. I pinched his rosy cheek with affection and awarded him with a tael of silver for having stayed up past midnight to whet my ink.

  All the little eunuchs in the palace had to work so very hard, and for what? A sunless living ahead of them all. He would have been better off, much better off, staying a lantern painter in the faraway village. But who am I to chastise him for what he had not chosen himself? It might have very well been his parents’ choice to make him a sacrificial lamb to serve the palace so that the rest of the family would live forever in heavenly and material blessings.

  In-In, as I observed, wasn’t really the country bumpkin that he pretended to be. This wasn’t the first time he had let out his secret. Upon rereading my unfinished memoir, I had encountered numerous corrections stealthily brushed in by the boy, making up a dot here, extending a stroke there. Though I marveled over his refined penmanship, I often wondered why he was hiding his literacy, and what else was he hiding from me. No matter, and no hurry, which seemed to be the pace of the palace. No one is without secrets here.

  In-In’s drawing had to have been inspired by a much loved fairytale that I had read during my double-visioned senior year at Yale. Butterfly Lovers could have been plagiarized from the Bard’s Romeo and Juliet, except for two countering facts: it had been penned long before our bearded Brit had been fathered, and it had a happy ending—the mark of the prodigious Chinese art of melofantasy. Two doomed lovers, who had died separately yet were buried side by side, soar away from the dusty earth as butterflies. Now and again on starry nights, a common eye could spot the lovers blinking in the margins of the Milky Way.

  I dwell on our beloved flyers because this very chapter under my dripping brush could well be named “My Butterflies.” Life, if one sees closely, does take on certain themes.

  For two years following Susan’s death, I ensconced myself in my ill-gotten abode, barricading myself in Mother’s bedroom where I was purported to have been born. I felt a certain umbilical link to that space, which promised the possibility of a new beginning. Mother was nowhere to be found, though her things, her scents, her motherly something, hung perennially in the air, mixed with the fragrance of gardenias seeping in from the garden down below.

  The barricading was necessitated by my illusion that the entire house, three stories plus a little attic, were flown with little butterflies. Not your normal type but dark and white ones, choking themselves into every nook, vying for anything as a foothold to rest their busy wings. Everywhere I went they surrounded me, landing all over me. Annabelle told me that they were the nimble players of the aforementioned cosmic chess game, the undying spirits of rotten corpses and scattered bones. Without this nesting place, they would forever flutter in windblown graveyards and weedy cemeteries. Worse, at night they were hunted by ghost catchers to clock their time for a journey of finality—good men to heaven, bad fellows to hell.

  In the security of my domain, in the gloomy twilight, we made my birthing room our eternal bridal suite, me and my Annabelle, as I planned our very next step with thumping heart. I penned many a letter to one Mr. Plimpton, the head of the CSVM—a goateed square fellow, a pioneer of foreign missions who had spent his formative years in the Amazon jungles encoding the Indian dialect—begging for him to give me a position in the vicinity of Peking, boldly capitalizing my offer to cover my own expenses for my tenure. My desperate tone must have gravely moved the man, so much so that he was willing to create a new mission for me in the city of Pao Ki, three miles east of Peking, on the condition that I enroll at the New York Theological Seminary as an interim student to fluff up my sermonic pedigree and that, as an additional condition, I should consider remarrying. A spousal presence was not only pastoral but also a necessity. Think windy pastures with only cliffs and sheep to gaze at.

  I was all but ready to consider delving again into the dangerous waters of matrimony when I suddenly received a grave letter not only informing me of the death of Reverend Plimpton (choked to death by butterflies in his throat) but also with his death, the scratching of his original plans to open another mission for me. I still remember that rainy day. The entire city was silver and iron. It was on that very afternoon that a letter from my former Yale professor would arrive. No doubt pitying me as an orphan and widower in need of monastic solace, he informed me that a certain Chinese luminary named Yip Han was searching for a scholar to tutor the young emperor of the Qing Dynasty. Professor Archer had written a glowing letter pointing out my outstanding qualities and unblemished academic achievements under his own tutelage, sans my bout with insanity. The moment I tore the letter open, I could almost feel Annabelle’s shriek of delight. Again and again she was the very one pulling all the strings, making the least possible person write letters for the least qualified candidate.

  A meeting took place near New Haven. Mr. Han, the first Mandarin Yalie, sent by the palace to study modern science, had eventually fallen into the trap of Connecticut and married into the rather prominent family of Catherine Kellogg, producing a brood of modified Chinakins in snow white Connecticut. Mr. Han commented that he would have been the best teacher to teach the emperor Western things, but a subtle gesture—pointing at his short hair—told it all. He had forsaken their most telling token of loyalty to the Royal Court, cutting off his pigtail. A return home would be improper, to say the least
.

  An annual fee was talked about, fifteen hundred lian of silver, a thing that came rather as a surprise to me for I would have paid my own way to be inside the palace. Mr. Han, at the end of our talk, informed me that a decision would be arrived at after he had seen all the candidates. But a rare butterfly, a purple emperor, suddenly appeared near his window. He, an avid butterfly collector, chased into the courtyard, abandoning his talk with me, his net in hand. When he returned, beaming happily, the position was readily offered to me. It was a sign, he said, though later he wrote to say that the butterfly mysteriously disappeared from his collection without a trace.

  I took this as a call for me to charge into our destiny. I dashed about trying to prepare for the journey of my life. After all, I was the last Pickens, and I could see no point in my future where I would be returning to this metropolis. There was only going, going, and going that I heard in my heart. Not a ding of coming back. The hunt for Annabelle’s incarnation was the only bugle call I heeded. The voyage was more sacred than my own worthless life and the mission holier than all the gods melted together.

  I put the house up for sale. An initial enthusiasm was dampened by my dogged refusal to let in the prospects for fear of their seeing what I saw—the resident butterflies. My unbending rule was mistaken—as a broker would whisper—as a sign that it was not only cursed but indeed haunted as speculated in society. It scared away a ruddy-faced English family, a social climbing French couple, and a scion of a Jewish banking family, all looking for a house with a fashionable address.

  There were also stocks to sell. Mother had substantial stock holdings in a few aluminum concerns, the sale of which, unbeknownst to me, could tip a certain corporate balance among feuding families. Naturally, I was first the object of much nagging ingratiation and later, with my cold indifference, of heinous threats of bodily harm.

  The tenderest care was given to the disposal of Mother’s portraits of her gardenias, a girlish hobby dating back to her Smith days. I had grown up among easels of her favorite blooms, lumpy imitations on oily canvas. They were my motherly flora, which I personally entrusted to a renowned German framer, paying to have them all properly set and hung and have on permanent display in a third-tiered art gallery, memorializing a closet artist posthumously. As for Father’s beloved belongings—golf clubs, a collection of pipes, and those wing-tipped white shoes—I dumped them from the shadowy pier on a moonless night along the East River, the closest inlet I had to the Long Island Sound. The exertion exhausted me. I was found sprawled, fainted, on the fishy pier the next morning by a stocky longshoreman.

  Then and there Mr. Davis, my estate lawyer, had me sign all my power over to my father’s sister, Aunt Lillian, a thin-lipped spinster, healthy as a horse and thrifty as a beggar, to be my administratrix. I had to be hospitalized for the remainder of the winter. Not only did I feel wobbly due to dizziness but also a chronic nausea had me heaving up everything that a dwindled appetite could hold.

  When I was released come spring, good news was in order. The house had been snatched up by a titled and brazen homosexual from Hungary who donned a red cape with butterfly motif. Aunt Lillian blushingly reported the manners of the dainty duke and the whopping price agreed upon without the buyer’s seeing the place, which quickly brought to my mind the picture of a pale nightwalker. Later news confirmed his unnerving habit of keeping his windows as closely shut as I had. Little did we know, the queen of all butterflies had come to town.

  The stock sale, belated by lengthy negotiations, an unexpected market rise (lack of foreseeable output from southern aluminum mines), and Aunt Lillian’s hatred for the squabbling clans, caused her to sell them all to the open market for double the price. Best of all, my health turned robust with Annabelle nursing me, enabling me to withstand the arduous journey ahead. My recovery coincided with the availability of the first luxury ship advertised, departing from the coast of California. By March of 1898, Annabelle and I were well on our way, languidly ensconced in a paneled train crawling to the golden coast.

  10

  After suffering through a month-long wait in San Francisco—every day I spent in a rocking chair on our hotel veranda, wondering about the mysterious Oakland wrapped in its blue wispy mist—we finally set sail across the Pacific battling through the treachery of the Hawaiian trade winds and the Okinawa typhoons.

  In aqua April our ship reached coastal Tianjin during a slanting drizzle and amidst rumors of inland peasant riots and a southern cholera scare. I felt prone to neither fear nor fright, and I cast about looking for any transportation further inland. A timely tip from a Parsi from Punjab led me to hire the only coolies available, two strapping twin brothers of Shandong origin, who chewed scallions and tobacco leaves with equal rhythm and rigor. The twins had misgivings at first. Boxers were killing the blue-eyed, red-haired foreign heathens, and all sula in their service. But I deigned to let it be known that a triple fee was in offer if they would be willing to shoulder the three-day foot journey to Peking. The Tianjin-Peking express had ceased operation—German owners, who feared railroad sabotage, were hoarding railcars for future military use in retaliation against the murder of a certain traveling German count.

  The twins were still of two minds, identically confounded, when I proffered a folded Accord of Employment with the Dragon Throne’s golden seal imprinted as a closure. To see the chattel belonging to the emperor was to be blinded into submission. The brothers genuflected and prostrated on the dusty road long after such paper was safely returned to my inner coat pocket.

  For my safety, and their twin pigtailed necks, an accord of another sort was acquiesced between us. Even the roguish hands of rebels would refrain from prying a bridal veil or a rouge coffin lid, the brothers reasoned. Forthwith I was suffered to conceal my salient self in a dainty sedan behind an expediency of red drapery, playing a bride en route to her new home.

  Three days of shortcuts and leeways, I alighted from my stealthy sedan in Peking.

  The brawling brothers bargained for a raise in their carrying fees, having outrun bandits near Kaifan and eluding rebels in Roujiafu. I rewarded them accordingly on condition that I retain the veil as souvenir. The brothers ripped it off their carriage and gave it to me, then fled like ghosts, their pendulant pigtails swinging in the wind.

  A blinding Mongolian sandstorm coupled with the lingering rebel fear rendered Peking a cascading castle of dust with its citywide commerce athwart, with inns and taverns interred in a gray shawl.

  Ruefully, I accepted a meager offer of lodging from the loathsome American legation, on condition—theirs not mine—that I subject my mercenary self to a lengthy interrogation as the sole witness, save for several wretched Franciscan nuns, to the atrocities en route from the coast. Sessions lasting hours on end were conducted by a military attaché, a Colonel Winthrop of Wingdale, New York (pop. 79), with a twitching inclination of his left cheek. Such tic occurred with each death and bruising encounter I enumerated. A protracted rendition of our final flight from the hot breaths of Boxing rebels over a narrow rope-bridge, across a ribald river, along a hill-hugging path spiraling over several mountain waists, led our gallant interrogator into a ticcing spasm, which had to be duly doused by a shot of fierce whiskey before more was to be extracted from me.

  The sandstorm raged on.

  Knowing the worn credence that a welcomed guest is a useful one, I made a practice of ending our sessions with cleverly inventive cliffhangers and plot twists to ensure another night of deserved stay under the legation’s roof. My ever-expanding narratives were so convincing to my host that later sessions were eagerly attended like readings of some exalted writer. My audience grew to be the full ambassadorial staff, including spouses and ladies of such establishment who would one moment sob at my sordid saga, at another burst into uproarious laughter on account of a minor triumph or sly dodge of ever-tailing enemies in a journey fitting better the duration of three months rather than the paltry three days I actuated on the road. But w
ho was counting? An enthralled audience is a willing conspirator.

  I am not singularly to blame for any factual embroidery or fictitious needlework. I merely acted on their unspoken plea to prolong the notion of my heroic roguery and their false security ensconced behind the wall of marbled premises in such time of despair, which in turn beget gallantry such as mine. Consequentially, as days wore on, my service earned me an ad hoc seat aboard the legation’s six-man strategic council aiming to advise the Congressional Commission on the Chaos in China.

  My reportage was begrudgingly transcribed by a secretarial officer into lengthy homebound dispatches, which made up the bulk of timely intelligence for the Washingtonian despots to decipher. My officialdom was short-lived and fairly doomed when, in the aftermath of having my account telegraphed, certain inconsistencies—dates and localities, bandits and rebels—began to emerge. The traitor was my transcriber, whom I had fatefully bumped off the inconsequential council with my own appointment—a little Indochina intrigue of sort. But it suffered me not the least.

  The same colonel pleaded with me to serve as the ears and eyes in the Big Within, the Forbidden City, which I readily rejected with disdain, mumbling something to the effect that it offended the chastity of my lofty position as the anointed royal tutor to the boy emperor. The colonel then let it be known that his door was always open. I felt not the least obliged to expound on the gist and bounds of my hidden aim; a tethered man could barely glimpse a heaven-bound kite, let alone the stringless one that I am.

  As soon as the dust storm settled and the metropolis emerged from its veil, I hastened across Tartar City, where the Manchurian elites lived, to the office of Neiwufu, the Imperial Household Department, to present my notice of arrival, knowing well that an auspicious date had to be piously prayed for and cautiously selected by the Court astrologists before the young emperor could begin such alien education with the first ocean man in their hundreds of years of Qing Empire tradition. A prompt edict was issued to the legation informing me of such, hinting at an infinite delay, thus allowing me to start reconstructing the four corners of my Annabelle’s pillared universe. A lengthy peruse within the legation’s vaulted Archival Chamber, aided by a librarian named Martha, under the labeling of “Inland Christian Missions,” unveiled the pebbled road map of Annabelle’s former petaline whereabouts: Hua Cun, Flower Village, the seat of her father’s fallen mission in the easterly outskirt of Peking.