My Last Empress

by Da Chen

  The clerk was some haughty youth wearing a glaring orange tie. At once, he had excused himself, departing his post for a good minute, returning with his superior, a chargé d’affaires, to be sure, who in turn seemed confounded by the simple query. What useless minions! All that pomposity and no one seemed certain of anything. A third person was consulted, a minor legal officer, a typical Columbia man who knew everything and nothing. A fool he was, citing all sorts of irrelevant legalities and farfetched treaties that had little to do with my pointed inquiry.

  Between the three philistines a precious half hour was squandered, during which time a telephone call could have been made to the legation in Peking into the ear of my nemesis, Colonel Winthrop, whose duty it was to keep an acute eye on me, or a messenger could have been dispatched to the nearest Manchurian sheriff from which an envoy could have been deputized for my seizure. Or even more tantalizingly so, Wang Dan himself could have personally ridden out to the gate of the Forbidden City to whisper his intelligence into the waiting ears of his former cohort, the dowager, reporting to her the whereabouts of the prized fugitives for an unimaginable award befitting the task.

  Why would I suspect that Wang would betray us? Why not, indeed? The lordship had, after all, given Q away once. Why wouldn’t he do it again to regain his former glory? All was within the realm of possibility.

  When they came upon me in that glaring noon sun, I felt a sigh of relief unleash from my chest, as if this was destined and certain to occur sooner than later. My obsession and possession had steered me into the dark in search of that everlasting light. It had been tiring, and such fatigue only came upon me now, rightly and punctually.

  Only two hours before, I had awakened in our love nest, my love slave still warm in my snug arms, my scepter ready and upright for mellow morning lust. We might be in flight—who in this world wasn’t in flight from one thing or another?—but this was, after all, our honeymoon with sweetened days numbered. She called me many things: brute, ape, thug, and animal. And yet she had delighted in every groan and every moan. Her playfulness had all but hidden a rather shy self, and only lust could lay bare her real self, a rosy, big-eyed novice in the game of coition. The days and nights on the flat-bottomed boat had provided a prelude to this full blossoming, how timely and opportune. Flight and lust were intertwined, one urging the other. How monstrously I adored and craved her. The more I loved, the more wretched the craving.

  I could never have envisioned an end to all this, and yet end it would and must. I had long been living on borrowed time, an allowance proffered by Annabelle, surely not for this base devouring but for a far loftier aim—that I well knew—and when the time came, I would redeem myself.

  As she lay in the morning light, I had placed a pair of tickets marked for Kyoto en route to Hawaii, garnered with money earned by giving a dizzying pint of blood in direct transfusion to a dying Frenchman at the Tianjin Hospital—white man’s blood being the fluid of gold. On the same desk I had laid a bagful of gold, the last of my inheritance from my departed parents, sufficient for Q to live not a queenly life but a comfortable one anywhere she would call home. Little did I know that it would be the last time we would kiss, and never would I have thought it to be the finality of it all. I glimpsed her one last time, my heart full of contentment, my eyes smiling, wet with pearls of my improbable tears, though it wasn’t a moment for crying or parting, yet it all came to be that way. Any clearer glimpse of my destiny, I would have had to have been pried away by the likes of Hercules; another moment longer and I would not have left her side at all. Now as they came upon me, I felt ready. My heart was set for the inevitable and the unavoidable. Redemption was coming. So was the final judgment.

  In life one makes choices, which in turn became signposts of your path serving as beacons that shine upon you when weakening and dwindling. In the end, life is accounted for only by the measure of these tangible marvels: all other things fade like water, like light.

  So I gave myself in to them, all the alleys swamped with the shadows of royal guards. There might have been sailors from the English navy among them, German and Portuguese soldiers in the midst guarding their domiciliary docks and sanguine ships, but they all seemed indifferent, letting the Manchurians undo me, watching me dragged to a waiting carriage, and if there were Americans there among them, I did not see them. They were the invisible bunch, good for nothing.

  36

  There was a lengthy interrogation during the travel back, with me bound and blindfolded. Judging by the voice, my interrogator could only be the viperine Chief Eunuch Li, that emasculated pseudo-husband of the dowager. The old tree could have just as easily been identified by his ignoble stench resultant from a mélange of fragrance Grandpa insisted he wear to ward off his own fetid body odor, unique among the half-men with their overly quick trait to sweat; consequently he smelled like a street harlot of Canton.

  Among the trotting, and later galloping, sounds of eight rigorous horses, the chief eunuch began by asking me, “Where is the empress?”

  I told him that no price would pry me open to give that secret away even though had they searched door by door within a block of the dripping wharf, they could have easily snatched and snarled her. She was only two stores away from the site of my capture.

  “You’ll suffer dearly for your crime.” He didn’t raise his voice, had no need to do so. The pitch of his voice was already high and venomous enough. “The kind unimaginable to an ocean man like you.”

  In reply I said something to the effect that nothing would be unimaginable in the hands of thugs like him.

  He chuckled, though in a most sinister manner.

  I taunted him about the so-called crimes he mentioned.

  “It was the paramount crime, the unmentionable,” he returned.

  This time I chuckled and he slapped me.

  “You know, you have a woman’s hand, and you strike like one.”

  He slapped me once again, this time backhanding me with sufficient force to throw me to the corner of the carriage. A lull ensued, and all I heard was his wheezing: a leaky valve, the warbling of his steaming wrath. We came to a rolling stop at an apparent rail crossing, allowing a train to rumble by. The Tianjin-Peking Express it must have been, heading inland as we were.

  “You have no right to treat me as such. I outrank you by two degrees,” I said the moment the carriage swayed into motion once more, referring to the honorary rank given me as a royal tutor. “An august position you will never come near.”

  A sinister chuckle. “Your crime strips you of your honors—a decree issued by Grandpa.”

  “Is it really from Grandpa, or did you falsify it as you did many other decrees and favors?”

  He did not answer.

  “I know all about your graft, your thefts, your cunning.”

  “Good that you know who you are facing.”

  “I will report all this to the emperor, and you will lose more than just your manhood.”

  “Too late. Your master was retired to the Isle of Solitude two days ago.”

  “I am an American, you know. My legation will come to claim me.”

  “Your legation was the one who gave me your whereabouts,” Li told me.

  “That’s a lie!”

  He chuckled. “No, it is the sweet truth. They had a duty to turn you in, since you have violated the laws of this sovereignty. You committed the crime of consorting with a royal spouse, and infracted a few more, the least of which was the murder of the hanged royal accountant and the arson that burned our priceless treasure hall to ruin. Where is Qiu Rong?” he demanded, his spittle flying over me.

  “You will never find her.”

  By nightfall the next day we arrived in Peking and passed through a gate, entering the palace. The carriage jostled over the cobbled yards, making the wheels squeak and carriage sway.

  My blindfold was removed, and my eyes opened to view the interior of a hollow chamber, a lone table of butchery at its center. One ominou
s rope hung from a pulley secured to the ceiling beam. On the wall were devices of torture and torment: saws, cleavers, whips, and such like. Four unsmiling hyenas and jackals of the bloody trade stood nearby, bald and swarthy, somber and mirthless, aiders and abettors in the willing game of my death, a thing that I dreaded not at all. I smiled at them, causing puzzlement to frame their faces.

  “I do not fear death,” I proclaimed to the chief eunuch.

  “Death you don’t deserve, Mr. Pickens.” His thin voice echoed in the chamber from the corner armchair he sat in. “You have much to suffer, and you shall suffer like no white man has ever suffered before. Disrobe him.”

  The four men held me down on the table, still soggy with fluids from the last man there, and ripped off my clothes. The last shred was nipped off my loins by a sharp dagger. Nude, I was tied onto the rough surface with leather straps over my neck, chest, and pelvis. Both ankles were secured to the legs of the table so that I was splayed open. As for the purpose of that dangling rope, I would not know of its vile use until later.

  “What is this all about?” I shouted at the eunuch, whose face was perfectly framed in the vee of my crotch.

  “You have given me little choice but to order the ultimate punishment of castration for breaking our jade vase,” Li said, employing the euphemism describing the act of defiling a royal empress. “Our thousand years of righteousness and dignity were ruined by your act of transgression. Without your penile wantonness, you will not be able to insult us anymore.”

  Deafening thunder struck my thin scalp and the world around me revolved in circularity and bare muteness. The bottom of my heart gave way. Barely audible were the rest of Li’s wrathful soliloquy. “You have broken one of our cardinal rules. You will now live your residual time of life as we do, to pay for your grave sin.”

  Adamantly I pleaded for him to behead me instead, to take my heart out, cut off my limbs. Not this.

  He went on, ignoring my plea. “Did you know that it was I who brought her home to her adoptive father the day she came to this earth? Did you know it was I who convinced the dowager to keep her for adoption rather than drowning her as a peace offering? Qiu Rong ascended to the august station as the fourth consort, reaching a sacred rank beyond reproach, and then you came along to bring her to ruination and utmost shame. You have one last chance to spare yourself. Tell us where she is and you will go free, a whole man.”

  His glib words flowed and echoed, vibrating the walls of the chamber. “Qiu Rong or castration?” he asked again.

  When the choice is that simple, then choosing is no labor whatsoever. I spat at him.

  At the chief eunuch’s nod, one of the foursome snatched the ax from the wall, gliding his thumb down the blade to test its sharpness. I steeled myself, taking in a deep breath. Another executioner lit a bundle of incense sticks from which arose a pungent aroma. He circled it over my face and above my loins. In the dense smoke, a spectral fortress was miraged, encircling me. Within me, imagination took flight. In view was that inescapable summer fire above which winged Annabelle, hovering with searing firebugs and incendiary butterflies, the hem of her skirt rising and falling as the ventricles of my heart clenched and spasmed. That which eluded me became my last cocoon, my holy hearth around which I would lay in repose with no lament or sorrow. All the half-men before me had chosen ignoble emasculation for glory. I would do so for want of such: for my twin archangels, A and her kindred Q.

  What ensued was coarse and crude. I watched the sequence as if witnessing the morning birds fly above me or the summer river flowing past me.

  Someone pried my bare thighs farther apart. A shaving blade scraped over me before a cold hand seized my scrotum, tying my mast and testicular lump near the base tight and taut with that hanging rope. Then came one clean swing of the ax, hacking it all off in a single blow.

  Oh, what deathly numbing shock and pain! Shrieks burst from my throat as the bloody chunk was yanked up by the rigorous rope, the messy lump twirling in the air. Then the curtains of my eyes descended, closing out the tragic play. Darkness soothed, overcoming me.

  37

  I was moved out of the palace to a nameless infirmary somewhere on the fringe of Tartar City, barely clinging to consciousness. Passage of time was punctured by bouts of seething pain as if hot lava was searing the core of the open wound, three inches in diameter and rough-edged all around. Blood trickled, wetting my buttocks and my inner thighs, and droplets crawled down my calves.

  The wound had swollen to a mound looking like a crimson crater from within. Flies buzzed over the gaping hole, some landing precariously on the edges, others picking away at the core irking the raw nerve endings, their mouths cutting like dagger tips. I could hardly raise my hand to swipe them away. It was In-In who dispersed them, fanning a palm leaf. Yet even his gentlest breeze incurred tenderness to the unshielded gash, scraping it like a knife’s blade.

  The urge to urinate woke me from a painful dream. In it I was legless, stranded alone on an island with no land or ship in sight, only the silence of despair and helplessness. Worms squirmed toward me in full assault. Only when a thunderous storm doused the island with belts of rain, clapping with deafening thunders, did the worms scurry away, but the rain kept falling, pouring, compelling my guts to tighten and groins to ache. Urgent pain flooded my lower belly, threatening to burst through, to rip me apart. Every cry was in vain, every surfeit of agony cause enough to immolate myself on my own pyre of sin and transgressions.

  Reality dawned on me soon as the pain persisted. What one took in must come out. The painful urge to urinate was blocked by a severed course now muddy with blood and pustule.

  In-In presented me with an opium pipe, an expediency I knew not how he had acquired.

  “What do I do now?” I asked, whimpering pitifully.

  In-In lit the pipe for me and fed it into my mouth. An abject drag filled the chambers of my lungs, immediately calming the scathing pain. Producing a dried reed stalk with a hollow center, In-In squatted between my thighs. Bending over my injured area, he carefully inserted one end of the stem inside the wound, finding the burrow of my urinal track. Slowly he sipped out my liquid excretion through the straw, spitting out what he had sucked up, drawing up some of the glutinous discharge as well so that now the face of castration revealed itself. Gone were the tree and its root, the sac and its marbles. Gone also was that which I had abided by, my manhood, leaving behind just the inchoate terrain of nothingness. Here, before your naked eyes, my ladies and sorrowful gentlemen, lies in all its inglorious rusticity, to wit, the very mournful specimen of my own nomadic no-man’s-land.

  My first inclination was an irresistible itch at self-ridicule. Had I not still been in such pain and a full-length mirror granted, I would have stood up to gaze at my new self, twirling around in display, laughing at my flatness. What simplicity!

  Should I eulogize the bygones as a blind man his missing sight, or trees their fallen fruits and wilted blossoms? Should I lament with bleeding heart and torrential tears that would never run dry?

  Retreating from my reverie, I asked, “How did you learn to clean me like this?”

  “I was served this way by another boy, one who shared the ward with me, but he died not long after from infection.” Standing up, In-In rinsed himself over a spittoon, leaving the stem still inserted in me.

  “You forgot to remove the reed,” I said.

  “No, it has to stay there so when you heal the opening will be intact and not close up.”

  So young yet so wise.

  “Where did you find the money to buy me this?” I asked, waving my pipe.

  His head bent low, his pointy chin resting on his bony chest. “I’d rather not say.”

  “Tell me, please.”

  “My severance wage.”

  “They drove you out?”

  He nodded. “When one’s master goes, so does the servant. There will not be riches waiting for me anymore, just a slow death. I asked to serve you, whic
h earned me this severance wage.”

  Oh, tender was the boy. Tenderer yet his love.

  “It is the only medicine that could heal you. I wished a puff or two when I was chopped.” He pulled out a silk bag from a drawer and showed it to me. “Here is my treasure, all dried and useless.”

  “What are you to do with it?”

  “I am to be buried with it so in the next life I will be made whole again. Here is your sack.” He held up a wet bag still damp with blood and carefully laid it beside me. “Keep it with you always.”

  How I wished I could offer him riches and gold, but I had nothing, only gratitude.

  38

  One November day when the sky was dreary with pending snow, Qiu Rong appeared at our ward. She was radiant, her cheeks rouged, her eyes smiling. I made little drama at seeing her by my side, by which time it had been three months. The wound had healed by then.

  “Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be hiding somewhere?” I asked.

  “I heard, and I wanted to see you. Besides, I missed the ship. It left port before I could get there.”

  I wanted to hold her and cry out all my anguish, but I could not even open my arms to her. Such rigidity I felt, standing there like a frozen tree.

  She came to me, hugging my gaunt frame—I had grown thin. Even then I could not embrace her. Something had gone out of me, and something was different about her.

  Only an interval of a hundred days and some, and yet in my eyes she seemed to have aged, not by moons but by years and years. Her face had filled up, becoming round, and though her dimples were still deep, her eyes had lost that gleaming luster so typical of youth and were now on the verge of turning dull. The blond hair had darkened a shade, and the lush and meaty succulence of her lips now looked dry and chapped. Her bosom had grown rounder and fuller, and her slender waist seemed to have widened by inches.

  “I am pregnant,” she announced with an unsure smile.