by Lisa Mason
Jessie pulls off her cashmere bed sweater and hears a sigh behind her, an unearthly whisper. She whips around, knocking her elbow against the window pane. “Rachael? Is that you, honey?”
The bedroom is still streaked with shadows but no one is there.
Yet she’s sure she feels it, her long lost angel’s presence. And there! Is that a little slim shape darting into a dark corner of the room?
The boardinghouse has been haunted ever since Madame De Cassin’s séance, that’s what Jessie thinks. She well recalls that awful time when the sitting room went black and white and strange, and a demonic presence descended upon them all. The eminent spiritualist’s cleansing rituals have done little to dispel the evil influence.
If she thought about it, Jessie would have to say nothing has been the same since the Fourth of July half a year ago. There’s Mariah, sneaking off to her meetings every week. And poor Mr. Schultz, who was a good old egg. He drank rotgut one night, got the cramp and blood on the stomach, and was gone in three days. Zhu had a name for it. Pair o’ somethin’. Fatal ulcers from the drink.
Then there’s Zhu herself, such a levelheaded girl despite her talk of being from six hundred years in the future. Sure and Jessie sort of believes her after watching her heal a crack in a man’s skull. Why not six hundred years in the future? Where else would you get a mollie knife? If Mr. Wells says people can travel in time, then one day they probably will. Miracles happen all the time these days. The news from Europe is they think they will cure consumption. They’ll invent a horseless carriage anyone can buy. They’ll fly to the moon! Serious Zhu, the little Amazon, put on her coolie’s rags and showed Jessie how she could toss a man over her shoulder with her bare hands. Wise Zhu, lecturing Jessie about her buttered oysters and champagne, about using a sheep’s intestine, of all things, to keep off the pox.
In this strange half a year, Jessie has developed a soft spot for Zhu. She hasn’t cared this way about anyone in many a long year. So many strange tales the missy has told her on many a dawn. She complains about a red-haired man who sent her here, that she suspects he didn’t tell her the whole truth about her mission. Jessie can sympathize. She could shake a stick at the number of men who have lied to her.
So it makes no damn sense, Zhu falling so hard for Mr. Watkins. Oh, he’s a handsome kid, no doubt about that, the kind who can charm the bloomers off of any dimwitted chit. But Zhu? He probably doesn’t tell her the whole truth, either. And it’s worse than that. He doesn’t just take her for a roll in the hay. Sometimes, when he gets in one of his moods, he lays his hands on her, badgers her. Jessie thinks she’s seen bruises through Zhu’s lace, seen her troubled face. Then afterwards, he’s sweetness and light, he’s so sorry. Men like that are always so sorry.
Hard to watch. Jessie has danced many a cruel waltz like that, years ago.
And Mr. Watkins? There’s another story. How he’s changed since he first charged in through her door, the headstrong ram, all bright-eyed and boozy in his dusty suit and bowler. Now he’s got the cocaine habit, gone gaunt and strange. Jessie liked him better stinking. Now laughing one minute, the Devil the next, and in a blue funk after that. Bloodstained handkerchiefs. Thinking someone is following him, which in fact someone is. Jessie has seen the thugs lurking on the corner, has heard plenty of rumors. Bad business, a bum deal of his father’s.
Sure and he don’t need to be hopped up if he’s got that kind of trouble. Jessie knows all about cocaine, how it numbs tender flesh. She uses the stuff, soaked in lint, as a topical remedy for female troubles, and the dentist applied it to her gum when he pulled her tooth. But she always declines the spoonful of powder Mr. Watkins offers. Why numb yourself and make yourself half-mad to boot? He claims it’s curing his dipsomania but, as far as Jessie can see, he knocks back the sauce as much as before. Maybe more.
Strangest of all is Rachael. Rachael haunting her, entering her thoughts more and more. Not that a day has gone by when Jessie hasn’t thought of her sweet, innocent angel and prayed for her. But her thoughts about Rachael have always been of Rachael’s happiness in the Summerland. Is she content? Does she have friends and sweethearts?
Now all Jessie can think about is this life. The life Rachael had. The life Jessie has. Why Rachael died the way she did.
Why? Why? Why?
A harsh jangle of bells bursts into her ear, and she just about jumps out of her skin. The new telephone in the smoking parlor rings again and she hurries downstairs to answer it. Pacific Bell, that’s what they call the new switchboard, though only those in the know like Miss Jessie Malone are connected. Sure and she’s got connections from the Parisian Mansion and the Morton Alley cribs to the boardinghouse, and to the fire stations, the lower Dupont callbox, and Gumps. The Queen of the Underworld and the chief of police have the best connected lines in town.
So far, wealthy gentlemen like Mr. Heald, his honor the railbird, and the diamond broker have resisted installing telephones in their Snob Hill mansions. No, they would much rather communicate the old-fashioned way, send a handwritten note by messenger boy to the wife saying they’ve been detained on business and won’t be home tonight. Who wants to hear the wife’s voice berating him on a telephone? Who wants to explain when questions are asked, questions that require answering?
Jessie claps the set to her ear, the handpiece to her mouth. “Yeah?”
Garble, garble, garble. “… ‘s Bertha, Miss Malone.” That’s the door maid at the Red Rooster, Jessie’s Morton Alley cribs. “New girl showed… .” Garble.
“A new girl showed up?” Jessie shouts loud enough to wake up the whole house.
“Yeah,” Bertha shouts. “She says… .” Garble.
“I’ll come on down and look her over later.” Suddenly she’s tired at the very prospect of going down to Morton Alley.
“Tong men… .says she’s gotta get off the street.”
“Tong men, did you say? She a Chink?”
Garble, garble. “On the lam, she says.”
“All right, all right. I’ll get there as quick as I can.” She claps the handpiece onto the set.
Suddenly she’s wide awake. Kick-in-the-gut awake. Even the Queen of the Underworld would rather not tangle with tong men. But the biz is the biz, and you may find yourself purchasing their merchandise now and then. Too little Chinese tail in this town, Jessie thinks, and Morton Alley is so popular with the sailors. A crib like the Red Rooster could always use more Chinese tail.
“Mother of God, Rachael,” she whispers, “I don’t rightly know if I can tolerate the biz much longer.”
There is one person, and one person only, she needs right now.
Jessie climbs back up the stairs.
*
She lets herself into the suite Zhu and Mariah share without knocking. Mariah is banging a pot in their little kitchen, humming, sometimes talking to herself, and the good scent of coffee perfumes the air. Jessie tiptoes across their dark parlor, knocks softly on the door to Zhu’s bedroom.
Her sleepy voice answers, “Yes?”
Jessie hesitates. What if he’s there? She’s never caught them in bed together in all these months. Of all the things she’s seen in her time—lewd things, lascivious things, sometimes depraved things—suddenly Jessie doesn’t want to see her Zhu in bed with Daniel Watkins.
“Who’s there?”
What choice does she have? Who else can she depend on at a quarter to five in the morning? She pushes the bedroom door open.
And sure if it isn’t him, stretched long and lean in the dim golden light of the low-burning lamp next to Zhu’s bed, his dark hair tumbling across the pillow next to her. Zhu sits up, one of her pretty eyes nearly swollen shut, a bruise on her cheek, her lip swollen, too, split and bloody.
“Oh, Rachael,” Jessie blurts out, blinking back tears.
Zhu turns up the lamp. “Jessie? What’s up?”
It’s Zhu, of course, not Rachael, and there is no man lying beside her. Just the crumpled sheets and blan
kets she kicked off during the fitful night. She leans into the lamplight, dispelling the shadow across one side of her face. Displaying her tilted green eyes, sharp cheekbones, the sleepy curve of her smile.
“Jessie, what’s wrong?”
Faint, she must be faint, everything whirling around. No sleep—she hasn’t slept since the day before yesterday. “Ah, Zhu. That was one hell of a premonition. I do not want to repeat it anytime soon.”
Zhu bounces out of bed and comes to her, helping her sit down. Such strong skinny arms, she can toss a man over her shoulder. So serious gazing at her, her serious Zhu. Never met anyone like her girl from the future. If only it were true.
“A premonition? What do you mean?”
“These days I get strange feelings, missy. I see things like what I just seen right now.”
“What did you see, Jessie?”
“Never you mind. Get dressed, you gotta come with me. I’ve never taken you there before. You’re too good to see such things, and that’s a fact. But I gotta take you there now. A Chink showed up.”
“A Chink?’
“Jabberin’ about tong men. On the lam, she says. If that’s so, she’s probably worth it.” Jessie lurches to her feet, irritated now, and seizes Zhu by the collar of her nightgown. “Get dressed, I say.”
“You mean a Chinese girl,” she says, still slow with sleep.
“Yeah, yeah. Who else can help me with this, Pearls Before Swine?”
“I’ll go.” As if her servant has a choice. Then she says, “Don’t you call her a Chink.”
“Sure and that’s what she is.”
“Do you call me a Chink?”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, you’re my Zhu. Is everyone a million years in the future so riled up about what people call things?”
“Sometimes they have been and sometimes they haven’t. Depends on who and where and when. For sure we’ve all been riled up for a long time.”
“All right,” Jessie says. A headache starts throbbing behind her eyes. “Have you got any booze handy?”
“Yeah, actually, I do. Brandy on the night table. Not for me.”
Jessie knows exactly who the brandy is for and helps herself just the same. “Hurry up.”
Zhu throws off her nightgown without a care. Jessie is in the biz of appraising women’s salability, and she watches now, appraising the lean muscles, the long bones, the pale golden skin so unlike any other woman Jessie has ever seen, and she’s seen plenty. Zhu reaches into her wardrobe, swift and sure, pulling on stockings, garters, bloomers, corset, slip, underskirt, bodice, overskirt, jacket, button boots, gloves, hat, veil.
Sure and Jessie bought the kit and caboodle for Zhu herself, all in cerulean blue silk. Pretty. Mistress material for a certain taste. And for a proper gentleman, not the likes of Mr. Watkins.
“Where are we off to in such a rush?”
“Wait.” Jessie flips up the jacket and bodice before Zhu can tuck in and button everything, seizes the strings of Zhu’s corset and laces her tighter. Tighter. She glimpses dappled bruises. Or is it only the dawn light angling across the slim bones of Zhu’s back?
Everything changing and shifting around. Visions and hauntings and premonitions.
“We’re a-goin’ to the dread Morton Alley.”
*
Zhu takes her time tucking in her bodice and fastening her jacket after Jessie has laced her up. She’s spent another strange night with Daniel and, though he was loving and gentle, telling wild tales of his Paris days, he’s left as he always leaves—he never spends the night with her—Zhu is more uneasy than ever. He’s deeply into cocaine and drink, yet under Tenet Three of the Grandmother Principle, she can’t help him. What he is doing is what he has always done. What he will always do. There’s nothing she can do or say. She can’t interfere with his destiny as a man of the Gilded Age.
Then why does she want so badly to persuade him away from that destiny? Why is she involved with this nineteenth century man at all? She asks Muse that question over and over, receives alphanumerics flickering is her peripheral vision. We believe there is a probability. We believe there is a probability. Of what? she demands. Then the alphanumerics flicker out, and Muse is silent.
Zhu tries her best to calm the terror in her heart. The t-port has gone wrong. What else she can conclude? That’s why the LISA techs shut t-porting down. Too many mistakes. World changing mistakes. Spacetime changing mistakes. The t-port has gone terribly wrong, and she’s on her own in the past.
That a Chinese girl has shown up at Jessie’s Morton Alley cribs sends a shiver of hope into her heart. On the lam from the tongs? Wing Sing? Oh, please, let it be her! Now this is something she’s supposed to do something about for the Gilded Age Project.
Zhu takes her time fastening her button boots, slipping her mollie knife into one boot, while Jessie gulps brandy and fumes. Then she’s ready. They clatter down the stairs and out the door to the street. Jessie’s rockaway and pair are stabled far away in Cow Hollow. No cabs are in sight amid the vendors’ wagons at this early hour. They stand, irresolute, at the stoop of 263 Dupont Avenue while the saloons, bathhouses, and gambling joints across the street eject the last of the deadbeats and freshen things up for new customers seeking relief in the morning.
“Hey, it’s getting light, Jessie, let’s just walk downtown. It’s not too far, right?”
“Oh, missy.” Jessie grimaces, holding her side. “I don’t know if I can.”
Zhu grimaces, too, to see her. Jessie’s got some kind of serious medical problem, that’s what Muse says. But Zhu doesn’t need Muse to tell her what’s obvious. Kidney disease, cirrhosis of the liver, possibly cancer in an advanced stage. But what can Zhu do for the Queen of the Underworld? Jessie Malone is no more a part of the Gilded Age Project than Daniel J. Watkins. Jessie is just a local, an inhabitant of this spacetime. Zhu isn’t supposed to trouble herself about Jessie. Why should she bother?
Well. Because she, Zhu Wong, is a Daughter of Compassion, that’s why. Because she’s a devotee of Kuan Yin, the protector of women. Because if she ever sees Sally Chou again, she can say she didn’t fail the Cause in her day or in Jessie’s day. She digs through her feedbag purse, finds the little bottle marked “Montgomery Ward Quinine Pills,” shakes out a neurobic. She breaks the capsule in front of Jessie’s nose.
“Sniff,” she says. Tenet Three be damned.
“Oh no, I don’t take the cocaine,” Jessie objects. “I keep telling Mr. Watkins.”
“This isn’t cocaine, it’s a neurobic.”
“A neurobic. Like what you gave Mr. Watkins after I picked you two up, brawling with them thugs in the street?”
“Exactly. Sniff! Quickly!”
Jessie sniffs, and her grimace of pain instantly transforms into something more tranquil. She says suspiciously—as well she should—“What is this, missy?”
“Something good from the future. Do you believe me?”
“Sure and why not?”
Zhu smiles. Daniel calls her a lunatic and loses no chance to challenge her whenever she admits her true nature and origin. But Jessie mostly accepts her claims with a trusting forthrightness, the way she trusts Madame De Cassin’s spiritualism. Zhu often wishes she could show more to Jessie, using Muse’s holoid capabilities. Of all people, Jessie would appreciate seeing visions from a spirit. Maybe she would stop drinking champagne for breakfast. But Muse will only issue advice and project spectacular holoids to Donaldina Cameron, not to Jessie or to Daniel. What a shame.
“Don’t dawdle, missy,” Jessie commands in her usual bossy way. “You said walk. Let’s get a move on.”
They stride down Dupont Avenue to Union Square, turn down a short, narrow alley beginning at Stockton and ending at Kearny. The waking downtown streets are softly lit with rosy dawn light, but Morton Alley is brightly lit with a garish false dawn. Red lights shine over every door in flagrant disregard of the new ordinance. Union Square and the surrounding streets are quiet and empty, save for the
sleepy-eyed tradesmen with their horses and wagons, but Morton Alley seethes with loud and frenetic humanity.
Alphanumerics flash in Zhu’s peripheral vision as Muse opens a file. “Beyond the time of this Now,” Muse whispers in subaudio, “after the First Great Quake destroys most of the city, Morton Alley will be rebuilt and renamed. There will be jewelry shops and boutiques, art galleries and posh cafés. They’ll call it Maiden Lane and no one will remember the ‘maidens’ you see here now.”
Zhu gapes at a hellish scene. Naked maidens lean out from the casement windows, shouting prices, trilling like creatures in heat, describing in detail certain acts they can be hired to perform, and belittling the anatomy, wealth, and intelligence of the mob of men below their windows. The alley is thronged with drunken men who shout back at the maidens, at the door maids, at the bouncers, at each other. Men stagger from crib to crib, peer in the barred windows at the occupants as though viewing animals in a zoo, shout approval or disapproval, pinch flesh when they can reach it. Two fellows reel by locked in a violent embrace, their faces bloodied by several rounds of fisticuffs.
“Don’t worry,” Jessie shouts in Zhu’s ear, “the bulls won’t bother no one here unless there’s a shooting.”
Unlike the Parisian Mansion, where Jessie’s girls are blond or red-haired and well-endowed, these women are of all different shapes, sizes, and races. Zhu spies every color of humanity here—ivory white, golden yellow, fawn brown, ebony black. She’s oddly reminded of pirates of the high nineteeth-century seas, their captains equal opportunity employers welcoming Oriental, Hispanic, white, and black as long as the crewman is sufficiently qualified with seamanship, swordsmanship, avarice, and bloodthirstiness.
But as she and Jessie press through the crowd and draw nearer to the windows, Zhu sees their faces. Despite their variegated skin colors, hair colors, and eye colors, their features fine or bold, their bodies robust or frail, these women share one thing in common—a look of deep despair behind the bawdy façade. A look born of the cruel grip of degradation. Cast over all of them is the patina of poverty, makeup plastered over the taint of disease.