by Tiffany Tsao
“Grease burn,” she said with a wry smile. “It was my first time deep-frying anything. Hazard of living your whole life with maids and cooks.”
Then, suddenly: “Why are you here?”
Tante Sandra’s question was angry—more like a demand. With a jolt, I became aware of what she’d probably just realized herself. We hadn’t told her the reason for our visit and she hadn’t yet thought to ask.
I took the cowardly way out and shot a glance at my sister. After all, the whole mission had been her idea.
Estella’s face colored as she worked out what to say. “I thought finding you might save us,” she finally managed. “Save the family, I mean. There’s so much wrong with us. You of all people know that.”
Our aunt stared at us as if we were mad. “How would finding me help?”
Estella and I were silent. What on earth could we say? That we’d counted on finding someone else entirely? A breath of fresh air? Drops of dew? My sister and I had set out to resurrect a savior and bring her home. She would reform us, or at least temper us—so we’d thought. And now here she was, unearthed and scornful, and not what we’d wanted at all.
How would finding me help? Our aunt’s question mocked us. We had no answer to give.
Again, that unnervingly pretty giggle from our aunt—and in its wake: “Nothing can save the family. You’re beyond help.”
* * *
It was late when Estella and I left Tante Sandra’s house, and, having abstained from the cookies, I was starving. Our aunt hadn’t offered us any dinner, and we hadn’t suggested staying for one. The thought of sharing a meal with her made me feel ill, for reasons I wasn’t entirely sure of. All I knew was that I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. We wished each other well and said our good-byes, Tante Sandra stationing herself on the porch to see us off. She looked neither happy that we’d come nor sad that we were leaving, and I imagined that Estella and I must have looked pretty much the same way. We were already speeding down the interstate back to LA when I realized that no desire had been expressed on her part or ours ever to contact each other again.
Estella drove like a demon, weaving in and out of lanes whenever there was traffic, breaking a hundred miles an hour on the more deserted stretches of road. My suggestion that we make a quick stop for a bite to eat went unheeded, as did my observation a little later that drive-through fast food might be a good option if we really didn’t want to lose any time.
I was about to remark that our flight back to Jakarta was not until tomorrow and that it didn’t matter if we stopped to eat before heading back to the hotel, when she anticipated me, snapping, “How can you think of food after what just happened?”
Her tears then came rolling down each cheek, leaving trails, like tiny skiers on a snowy slope.
“There’s nothing left, Doll,” she whispered hoarsely. “No one left standing, not a single one. Not Tante Sandra. Not even Oma. My God, we don’t even have Oma to believe in anymore.”
The engine roared and the speedometer crept over 110.
“Stell, calm down,” I said, trying to keep the alarm out of my voice, confining it to the fingers gripping the edge of my seat.
“Easy for you to say!” she exploded. “What do you care? You checked out when you started Bagatelle!”
“I do care,” I replied, my voice rising in response to hers. “I’m here, aren’t I? On this failure of a mission that was your stupid idea!”
My sister’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Well, thank you for gracing me with your presence! You shouldn’t have!”
“You’re right, I shouldn’t,” I rejoined. “But if you’ll recall, you were the one who begged me to come along.”
The knives were drawn now. Defeated, and hungry to boot, we turned on each other, precisely because turning anywhere else wasn’t an option.
“Anyway,” I continued, “you have no right to hold Bagatelle against me. You’ve always encouraged me to go ahead with it alone although I’ve asked you repeatedly to come on board.”
“Only because someone has to be responsible and try to save the family!” my sister yelled. “We can’t all retreat from reality and devote our time to fashioning glorified trinkets out of bugs.”
Hurt, I slashed wildly, “As if you’re in a position to save them. As if you didn’t kill your own husband.”
“As if you’re not just as bad. As if you didn’t help me do it.”
“You didn’t have to act on my advice,” I shot back.
“Or administer the poison you gave me for the occasion?”
My voice died in my throat. She had a point. The poison had been mine—one of the failed attempts at creating Bagatelle’s patented serum before my fleet of scientists had got it right.
“You’re so self-righteous.” Estella sneered. “Now that you’re in business for yourself, you think you can pretend our sins aren’t yours? We share a history, Doll—you, me, our family. You’re part of us whether you like it or not.”
I didn’t answer, just kept my eyes on the illuminated asphalt of the road ahead. She was only speaking the truth. My autonomy was an illusion—I would always be one of them.
“You know, Doll,” my sister murmured reflectively, “I thought Bagatelle would be a good outlet for you—and me by proxy; that’s why I was so supportive. But in hindsight I’m not so sure. You’re too out of touch with real life.”
“Is that so bad?” I found the strength to croak.
She frowned, her anger gone, channeled into what appeared to be grave concern. “Maybe it is. I know you’re proud of Bagatelle—I am too—but it’s making you live too much in your own little world.”
Here she paused. “And I need you,” she added. “You know that. I always have.”
Our truce was unspoken. We drove the rest of the way in silence. In fact, we barely spoke for what little remained of the trip. I think we were afraid we’d end up discussing what we’d discovered—not just about our aunt or Oma, but ourselves.
Or myself, rather. I’d worked so hard to put the past behind me that my role in Leonard’s murder seemed positively surreal. A bad dream I’d stashed away, now seeping from the confines of its sodden box. Or maybe it was the reverse: reality’s poison dripping into the fairy tale my life had become.
Poison. The one I’d offered my sister to kill Leonard was the perfect agent. Genetically modified fungal extract, concocted in my labs. Therefore unknown, therefore untraceable. That particular version had produced death, not dormancy, so Bagatelle’s scientists had kept on tinkering. But it had been ideal for ridding us of my brother-in-law once and for all. An antidote, one might have called it. Yes, a lethal cure for the disease that was Leonard. The love that my sister persisted in feeling for him would have no choice but to stop short at the grave. Even now, I knew I would have murdered Leonard again, to save her once and for all, to avenge what he had done to her and me.
As I sat in that car, speeding through the dark, something else frightened me too: the way Estella had criticized Bagatelle for removing me from the real world when she needed me. She had spoken as if she were the one who had permitted Bagatelle to come into being, and as if she were deciding whether it should continue to exist. In short, she acted as if I didn’t have a say at all, which I knew wasn’t true, but it unnerved me nonetheless. All through the flight home I was plagued by the sense that something terrible had been set in motion, and that it couldn’t be stopped.
* * *
When we landed in Jakarta and parted ways, I was relieved to say good-bye, though I tried not to show it. I buried myself in Bagatelle-related work, almost as if to affirm that it was really mine, that I was in charge. So what if Estella had been right about how it had become my escape from reality? What was wrong with that? Estella tried to ring me, but I ignored her calls. And her texts. Sunday came and went without us meeting for the brunch that had become a ritual of ours. I still couldn’t rid myself of the nameless and irrational fear that had sprung up inside
me on the drive back from our aunt’s house.
A little over a week passed. There were three days left until Opa’s big birthday bash. I’d just eaten dinner and was curled up in my living room with a stack of Bagatelle sales reports and a half bottle of Montrachet. When the knocking on the door commenced, loud and sharp, I was startled; the twenty-four-hour concierge and intercom system downstairs were supposed to prevent visitors from being a surprise. I called for the maid, but to my annoyance the pounding continued. Where was she? Had she fallen asleep? With some reluctance I rose and went to answer the door.
“Who is it?” I demanded to know. I certainly wasn’t stupid enough to let someone in without asking. But there was no reply, just another series of insistent raps.
“Who is it?” I called again, trying to sound not the least bit scared.
Then there came another sound—of a key turning in the lock.
Whose key? Mine? I glanced at the hall table next to me. My set of keys was still there.
The door swung open. I leapt back and snatched up an umbrella—the nearest weapon to hand.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Doll, it’s only me.”
Indeed, it was. Estella.
“STELL? WHERE DID you get a key?”
“Don’t be stupid, Doll. I’ve always had one.” And with that, my sister pushed past me, deposited her purse on the hall table, and kicked off her shoes.
Of course she’d always had a key; she’d just never used it. I felt silly immediately. And also alarmed. The initial relief I’d felt at finding Estella, not a burglar, at my door vanished, and the overwhelming desire to avoid my sister reasserted itself. Especially since her mere presence had revealed yet another fact I’d decided to repress for some reason. I could understand why I’d chosen to forget painful things like my crush on Ray Chan and the exact role I had played in poisoning Leonard. But why forget that Estella has a key? I wondered, my heart beating just a little faster.
“Care for a drink?” I asked—unnecessarily. She’d already found the wine and claimed my glass as hers. You’d think she owned the place, the way she was taking my spot on the sofa, flipping briefly through the sales reports before tossing them aside in a flutter-storm of loose paper.
“Hey,” I exclaimed. “Those were in order!”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve come to a decision. You have to move on from Bagatelle. It’s distracting you.”
“From what?” I scoffed.
“From helping me, of course. That was its original intent. But now Bagatelle has become an obstacle—that much became obvious on our trip.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Don’t you think you’re too immersed in your own world, Doll?”
She’d said the same thing on the drive back from Tante Sandra’s house: You live too much in your own little world. Before I could respond, my sister stood up and began to circle the living room. She drank in its handsomeness: the dark woods and plush fabrics; the authoritative furniture, made especially, it seemed, for rich old men to sit in or lean on as they smoked expensive cigars. Yet there was an oddly wistful note to her admiration—as if everything in the apartment was about to be packed away.
“It’s a gorgeous world, I have to admit,” she said, “but it’s served its purpose, and now it’s doing far more harm than good.”
I sighed. “I don’t have time for this, Stell. Please just tell me what this is about.”
She chuckled. “Yes, you’re right. It’s better to be frank. I guess it doesn’t come naturally—we’re part of the family, after all.”
She took one last sip of wine and motioned for me to follow her around the corner and down the corridor to where my bedroom and dressing room were located. By the time I’d caught up with her, she was standing at the end of the hallway, facing the wall. She made a motion, as if turning the handle of a door, and the next thing I knew, a brass knob appeared in her hand. The door itself materialized soon after, swinging open.
“After you,” said Estella, standing to one side, motioning for me to enter.
“Wh-where…?” I managed to stammer, breaking into a cold sweat. How had Estella done that?
“Don’t be scared, Doll,” Estella said, giving me a reassuring pat on the back and shoving me through. “It’s just one of the labs at Bagatelle.”
* * *
She was right. The room was instantly familiar: the blinding white of the walls and floor; the broad stainless-steel countertops; the lights in neat luminescent rows overhead. To our left were the mesh-topped glass terrariums housing the test subjects for the new serum. I shook my head in an attempt to clear it, to wake myself up.
Impossible. This couldn’t be happening.
“And yet it is,” said Estella, reading my mind.
“How are you doing this?” I demanded, grabbing her by the arm.
She only laughed. “Shouldn’t you check on the silkworms? See how they’re faring?”
Her mere suggestion had the effect of a magic spell. I released her immediately and ran over to examine the terrariums. The mulberry leaves were in desperate need of changing, and the floors were piled high with leaf debris and droppings—and carcasses. Almost every silkworm was dead. For a moment I forgot about Estella, mesmerized by the fungal tentacles poking out of their bodies, splitting apart the fleshy segments as adeptly as someone might peel and partition an orange.
“Aren’t you going to ask why we’re here?” said Estella, standing behind me.
I whirled around to face her. “Why are we here?” I asked in a trembling voice.
“To shut down Bagatelle. It’s taking up far too much of your energy and I need you for something else.”
“And what would that be?” I said, wincing. My head had suddenly begun to ache.
“We have to do something about our family.”
“We tried. We’re beyond redemption, remember?”
She drew close. “Don’t worry, Doll. I’m not talking about redemption anymore. The time for that has long since passed. But we can’t leave the family as it is either. We’re sick, Doll. Gravely ill.”
She peered into one of the terrariums. “We’re infected. Like these silkworms,” she said, “but worse. When it comes to us, there’s no end in sight. We keep on feeding, keep on thriving even as the corruption keeps on circulating inside us. Remember what you said on the flight to LA? ‘We’re so good at hiding the bad stuff, we manage to fool ourselves’?”
I nodded weakly.
“That’s the problem with us: The bad stuff remains hidden, entrenched. And none of us know we’re diseased, or if we do, we don’t know how dire it is.”
Sliding the mesh top off one of the terrariums, my sister reached in and extracted a twig. At least a dozen silkworms had crawled up its length and clamped themselves there—a symptom of the final stage of the fungal disease. A few still twitched, but the majority were dead. Out of the latter grew orange stalks, fat and tuber-like and knobbed.
“They’re like us,” she murmured contemplatively. “Trying to crawl away, clinging on for dear life, not knowing it’s the infection itself that makes us crawl and cling. We think we can escape, but we can’t: Leonard trying to ‘flee from sin,’ as he called it, and Tante Sandra running away. You and me too, Doll: The fungus is inside us. Even though we know about it, there’s nothing we can do.”
I struggled to follow her train of thought. The pulsing in my head was getting worse. “The fungus…” I repeated, pressing my forehead to my hands. “You mean…”
“Fooling ourselves about how bad we are. And if there’s anything I’ve learned from our trip, it’s that we’re very bad. And that we’re very skilled at deceiving ourselves that we’re actually good. You look awful, Doll. Have a seat.”
Estella wheeled an office chair out from underneath one of the countertops and pressed me into it by the shoulders. I tried to push her away, but I was too weak with pain.
She continued: “I was upset abou
t how our trip turned out, obviously. But I don’t think it was for naught. On the contrary, all that reminiscing you and I did—it made me realize how much I’d buried. The ambient vices that Leonard tried to cleanse us of: corruption, excess, materialism, greed. We do what we do because we have to, or because everyone else does it, but that doesn’t make it right.”
I began to have a sense of where this talk was heading. I wanted to protest, but I felt as if my skull was about to crack. I gripped the armrests of my chair. Estella kept speaking, ignoring my agony.
“I don’t blame us, Doll,” she said. “It’s not our fault we’re rotten—no more than being infected is the fault of these poor silkworms you experiment on. That’s just the way it is. Attribute it to whatever you want: sin, environment, upbringing, culture. But the fact that we hide it from ourselves, that’s what makes it really tragic. Not to mention dangerous. And that’s the real reason we need to be stopped.”
“Stopped…” I murmured, suddenly aware I’d been reduced to an echo, aware I couldn’t feel my limbs, though my hands were still anchored to the chair. What have you done? I wanted to cry, but couldn’t. I recalled the silkworm test subjects—how the fungus would take control of their bodies toward the very end.
Stop, I wanted to say. “Stopped,” I repeated instead.
My effort seemed to amuse Estella. “Exactly. I’ll say it again too,” she said. “We need to be stopped. Think of all the harm we inflict on each other and the world because we’re convinced that we’re not deadly: Ma and the family pushing me into marriage with Leonard and genuinely doing it out of love; and Ba even, standing by, hands in pockets, letting everyone else do what they think best. Shall I go on? How about our family and Leonard’s conspiring to kill him, citing the sake of the greater good? And Leonard himself, frantic and blind as a bull in a frenzy, goring me, then turning on his family until we put him down?