by Lisa Mason
“Hurry,” Muse whispers.
*
Zhu flees into the night, Jessie and Daniel dogging her heels. Four bruisers follow them up Montgomery Street to the Barbary Coast, and three shadows slip out of Tangrenbu. She feels a hand on her shoulder, a hand on her elbow. She stops and whirls, facing Daniel J. Watkins and Jessie Malone. “I’m leaving you tonight,” she tells them, gratified at their look of despair. How on earth did she ever get involved with these people? These ignorant misguided people of the Gilded Age?
YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SURROUNDED BY LOVING FRIENDS
That was her fortune in the Japanese Tea Garden. Daniel and Jessie, loving friends? The very idea is outrageous. Yet seeing their despair at her announced departure, she can’t help but think there’s some truth to it. Jessie rescued her from the hatchet men, took her into the boardinghouse, fed and clothed her and gave her a chance to survive. And Daniel? He’s her lover, the most compelling lover she’s ever known. The father of her unborn child.
Zhu loves the Gilded Age, how can she deny it? The pleasures and debaucheries of this ancient night are beautiful, wild and free. Free in a way Zhu has never known freedom before. She wasn’t free as a Daughter of Compassion. She was empty, emaciated, gripped with the blind yearning to belong to something. Gripped always, ever since she could remember, with the need to numb the deep apprehension of incipient disaster. Burdened with a presentiment of doom, a premonition. She was brutalized, and became brutal.
Daniel and Jessie love her in the only way they know how, she knows this now. Why did she stay in the employ of the Queen of the Underworld? Why have an affair with Daniel? This has got to be the final, irrational answer. They have always loved her, and she has always loved them.
Not a pattern of pain, of atrocity. No! Zhu won’t accept that.
“Don’t you make fun of no mermaids,” Jessie is shouting at the peepshow entrepreneur with his sad little pickled monkey, and he mutters, “Sorry, lady. It’s just a peepshow.”
“Watch out for that Muldoon,” Jessie says in Zhu’s ear, pointing out the weasel of a man in the scarlet cutaway. “He’s a crimp.”
Daniel slings his arm around her shoulders, grins at her, and Zhu smiles back. In the golden glow of the gaslight, he’s so beautiful, his dark hair spilling over his collar, his pale skin stretched over his cheekbones. He’s going to die. And there’s nothing she can do.
But why? Why must that be? Are they all like the aurelia, human beings trapped on the cross of destiny? No! Zhu will not accept that.
Daniel had a life before the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications decided to t-port her six centuries into the past. He must have a life now. He must go to Paris to see the Lumiere brothers’ moving picture machine. Perhaps he’ll work with Thomas Edison. Perhaps he’ll return to California, to Los Angeles next time. He’ll know the work of another Charles Chaplin, not the painter of broken-back nymphs, but an actor who goes by Charlie and will make people laugh.
They stride past the Lively Flea, the most debased showcase on the Barbary Coast. Zhu stares at the nightmarish shows, live on stage. She presses her fingertips to her throat.
Temperance women crowd outside the swinging doors to the Lively Flea, commence a song, ring brass bells, bang on drums. “Shall we gather by the river, the beautiful, beautiful river? Shall we gather by the river… .”
A temperance woman approaches Zhu and hands her a leaflet. “Turn away from sin, my child. Turn away from the degradation of women and children. Turn away from the oppression of the colored races. Turn away from cruelty to God’s creatures.”
“Thank you,” Zhu says and hands the leaflet to Jessie. Alphanumerics flicker in her peripheral vision.
“Heads up, Z. Wong,” Muse says urgently.
Striding along the waterfront, there she is.
Wing Sing.
Zhu would know her moon face anywhere, her delicate cheekbones, the bow of her mouth. Her tall slim figure in the gray silk dress, a Newport hat pinned over the shiny black braid that swings down her back. Wing Sing strides freely on fashionable lady’s button boots with daring broad square toes. Beside her strides a blond woman. Li’l Lucy? Maybe, though if she is, Lucy has lost a lot of weight. Wing Sing and her companion duck into Kelly’s Saloon & Eye-Wink Ballroom.
Is this the way it’s supposed to be? Of course Zhu gave the gray silk dress to Wing Sing. Of course Zhu wears a sahm of apple-green silk. She had the garment custom-made at Lucky Gold Trading Company so she can be comfortable during her pregnancy. It’s nine minutes after eleven. Zhu has less than an hour to return downtown, catch the cable car up California Street to the intersection at Mason. She can’t miss this rendezvous. Not this one.
“Let’s have a drink!” Daniel declares and charges in through Kelly’s swinging doors.
Jessie grips Zhu’s elbow, her face taut and pale. “Let’s don’t go in there, missy.”
“Why?”
“I got a bad feeling. What do you call it? A premonition.”
“Hurry,” Muse whispers.
“Jessie, I can’t wait.”
Daniel charges back out and sweeps them into Kelly’s. “Come along, ladies. It’s on me.”
Crummy bar, smoke and sawdust. The four bruisers sashay in through the swinging doors, Harvey strolls in with Muldoon the crimp, and they all exchange ribaldries with the barkeep, Mr. Kelly himself. Now three hatchet men drift through the swinging doors. The eyepatch turns his glittering eye on the crowd.
Wing Sing stands joking with a gang of sailors, who shout prices and what they’d like her to do to them. Zhu takes her arm, leads her to the table where the skinny blond sits.
Zhu peers. “Li’l Lucy? Is that really you?”
“Yeah, it’s me, Miss Wong. I know, I’m so ugly,” Li’l Lucy says sadly, concealing her bony face and black-rimmed eyes behind a fluttering fan. “Hop is awful hard on a gal’s bloom.”
But Wing Sing is hard, contemptuous. “Just look at you, Jade Eyes. Fat with your baby, huh?”
Zhu studies Wing Sing’s slim belly. “You will be, too. Fat with your new daughter.”
Li’l Lucy giggles but Wing Sing is furious, her eyes slick with tears. “No, no, I not make baby. I lose Rusty’s baby, my monthlies stop. Hop stops monthlies, that why singsong girls smoke hop. Maybe hop make me lose baby, too. Anyway, good for the biz.” Wing Sing reaches over and slaps Li’l Lucy on her sallow cheek. “Shut up, you. I sad.”
Li’l Lucy stops giggling.
“You so clever, Jade Eyes,” Wing Sing says. “Have fancy explanation for everything.” She leans so close, Zhu can smell the sickly sweet reek of opium on her breath. “You know what ‘Wing Sing’ mean in the tongue of my village?”
“It means ‘everlasting life,’” Zhu says impulsively. Now how did she know that?
“So clever, like I say. You think I want to live forever? Like this? Huh.” Wing Sing’s face is a mask of sorrow. “Forget it. I go off and die.”
Daniel strides to Zhu’s side, glancing coldly at Wing Sing and Li’l Lucy. “You’re supposed to come and have a drink with us, miss.”
“So what you want with me, Jade Eyes?”
This is when Zhu is supposed to give the aurelia to Wing Sing. For the future. For Wing Sing’s daughter. Wing Sing will get pregnant again. She must.
“The aurelia,” Muse whispers in her ear. The monitor isn’t helping. The monitor is defective. She’ll have to think for herself.
Zhu turns away from them all and bows her head.
“Why, Muse?” she whispers. “Why should I give her the aurelia? Wing Sing never had it. I have it. And Wing Sing isn’t pregnant, I am. If the aurelia is an enigma, a time anomaly with no beginning and no end, what difference does it make who gives the aurelia to Chiron in 1967? Maybe Donaldina Cameron had a premonition when she asked if the old green-eyed Chinese woman in the holoid is me.”
“The aurelia,” Muse repeats stupidly, as if the monitor is jammed.
“What d
ifference does it make under the resiliency principle? The principle Chiron is so afraid of? If, under the resiliency principle, we can actually create reality then I, Zhu Wong, choose. I’ll be a hundred and one years old in 1967. With my gene-tweaking, I’ll easily live that long. That is my sacrifice, Muse. I’ll stay.”
Muse is silent, and Daniel shakes her arm. “Come along, my little lunatic. Enough of this talking to yourself.”
“I want you to take care of yourself, Wing Sing,” Zhu says, a deep foreboding rising in her chest. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what, Jade Eyes? I bad luck to you.”
Muse whispers urgently, “The aurelia.”
The aurelia. Zhu conceals the brooch with her hand. This is Kelly’s, after all. The place is crawling with thieves, cutpurses, desperados, and crimps. A small, tightly corseted woman conspicuously faints near the cooch booths. Fanny Spiggot is working the crowd.
Zhu lurches to her feet. She’s got to get out of this place fast!
But Harvey, Muldoon, Kelly, and the four bruisers surround her and Daniel. Smiling, Harvey brandishes two tall tumblers brimming with drink. “So you’re takin’ me to court, are ya, Mr. Watkins? Well, have a drink with me first.”
“Thank you, sir, don’t mind if I do. You’ll get due your justice.” Daniel, smiling back, takes a tumbler. Kelly guffaws. Daniel raises the tumbler to his lips.
Now suddenly the eyepatch glimpses Zhu. He and his hatchet men stride across Kelly’s, heading toward her.
Zhu kicks, moving easily in the sahm, and plants a hard heel in the gut of one of the Harvey’s thugs. She whips her fist like a snake striking and knocks the doped drink from Daniel’s hand. The tumbler falls to the floor and shatters. Now the trapdoor flips up, waiting like an open grave, Kelly’s confederates waiting in a boat below the pier, ready to kidnap the next drugged man and take him out to a clipper ship bound for Shanghai.
Jessie yells at the sailors, “Do something, ya deadbeats! You gonna let them crimps shanghai an honest gentleman?”
Someone seizes Zhu, and she whirls and strikes. She gasps at the sharp sting of a knife cutting the skin of her arm.
“No one cross Chee Song Tong,” the eyepatch says. “No woman cross me, Jade Eyes.”
“I never crossed you.”
“You steal from us. You steal from me.”
“Then summon a policeman. Have me arrested.”
“This our law, Jade Eyes.” He lunges at her with the knife.
Daniel yells, seizes a shard of glass from the shattered tumbler, swings it at Harvey’s thugs. They descend on him, fists flying, the awful thud of skin on skin. Daniel falls into the filthy sawdust, arms and legs flailing. Two thugs drag him by his ankles to the trapdoor. Harvey holds up a hypodermic needle, a narcotic spurting from its gleaming tip.
Jessie screams, “No, no, no, no!”
Zhu leaps at the eyepatch, infuriated, heedless of his knife, and whips the side of her hand across his throat. He staggers, and she seizes a gun—a Smith and Wesson revolver—right out of his waistband. She fires off two rounds, aiming wildly. Harvey disappears like a counterfeit coin. The thugs drop Daniel’s legs and slink away in the smoke and confusion.
Jessie yanks Daniel to his feet, slings his arm over her shoulder. The trapdoor flips shut, a grave denied its corpse.
The eyepatch stares at Zhu, choking from her blow, his face a mask of malice. But, wait. An inexplicable look of betrayal pierces that mask, some connection Zhu didn’t know they shared. Two Chinese struggling to survive in San Francisco, maybe? We are all strangers in Gold Mountain.
Ah, forget it. Forget it! He’s a goddamn gangster.
She trains the Smith and Wesson on him, gripping the gun in both hands. He looks around, determined to satisfy Zhu’s debt, and seizes Wing Sing, who screams and staggers, awkward in her Western dress and fashion boots. He wrestles her in front of him, a human shield. Zhu aims for his feet—she’s an excellent shot after Changchi—and squeezes the trigger. If she wounds him, maybe he’ll lose his hold on Wing Sing. Click! And nothing happens. The gun needs reloading, and she has no ammunition. She flips the barrel into her palm and leaps toward him, intent on inflicting a serious dent in his ugly skull with the grip.
The eyepatch whips the knife and cuts Wing Sing’s throat, ear to ear. She shrieks, a terrible gurgling cry, and blood sprays all over the gray silk dress. The eyepatch shoves her away, and Wing Sing falls to her hands and knees, then collapses facedown on the floor.
Police whistles shriek, and the crowd stampedes for the swinging doors, pushing and shoving. The eyepatch joins the exodus, vanishing from Zhu’s sight. She flings the Smith and Wesson into the sawdust, kneels over Wing Sing, gently turns the girl over, and pulls out her mollie knife.
But it’s too late to heal such a mortal wound. Wing Sing’s life hemorrhages away.
“I’m sorry, Wing Sing,” Zhu whispers, sick to her soul, and presses the girl’s glassy eyes shut with gentle fingertips. “I’m so very sorry.”
Jessie and Daniel yank her to her feet, pull her out through the swinging doors to the street.
“Ain’t nothin’ you can do for her now, missy,” Jessie says.
“You got that right,” Zhu whispers.
“Let’s scram outta this joint before the bulls raise holy hell.”
“Does this mean you’re not leaving me for the future?” Daniel says, smiling in spite of his his split lip and black eye. He plants a bloodstained kiss on her cheek. “I’m so glad, my angel. You know how much I adore you.”
Muse whispers, “Hurry.”
March 17, 1896
Saint Patrick’s Day
13
Woodward’s Dancing Bears
On her way back from the Snake Pharmacy with a white paper packet of powdered willow bark, Zhu hears Old Father Elphich announcing the latest hot talk as he tends to his newsstand on Market Street. He holds aloft a copy of the Examiner, displaying the headlines in a hand clawed by arthritis, and proclaims—
TONG WARS RAGE IN CHINATOWN
HATCH MEN HACK AS COPS WATCH
“Hey, newsboy, gimme a Call,” shouts a rotund gentleman fairly bursting out of his chartreuse velvet waistcoat, emerald studs the size of dice winking on his cuffs. The gentlemen of San Francisco’s Gilded Age call Old Father Elphich “newsboy” despite the fact that Old Father Elphich’s chalk-white hair falls to his waist and he must be pushing seventy-five.
Zhu jostles her way to the newsstand amid gentlemen crashing together their steins of green-tinted beer, downing shots of green-tinted gin or whiskey the color of old copper infused with a liquid patina. Everyone in San Francisco is Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day and, goodness knows, people need some cheer on this cold rainy spring day. Despite the morning drizzle, celebrants quaff their libations out on the sidewalk, hoping to sight a lucky rainbow in the blustery skies. The saloons along the Cocktail Route are serving up great steaming platters of cabbage and corned beef, pots of freshly ground mustard and horseradish, boiled potatoes and carrots, black loaves of rye bread, sweet pound cake laced with butter, tart San Joaquin strawberries with pale green whipped cream.
A parade careens down Market Street, the white horses, grays, and piebalds dyed various shades of green. Plenty of crepe paper shamrocks, steamers, and rosettes as bright as new grass. A tipsy brass band in kelly-green top hats pounds out “When Irish Eyes are Smilin’” surprisingly in tune, given their red-faced condition.
A gaggle of blond and red-haired Irish sporting ladies ride by in a rented phaeton with a gypsy top. Well oiled, rouged, and whiskeyed, they wave and cheer, kick up their legs revealing green garters, pull down their bodices to show the green lace along the tops of their corsets. One lady boasts a shiny emerald beauty spot on her abundant breast. Gentlemen cheer as they pass, and the proper ladies glare, scandalized. Someone will run off to have a word with the mayor’s staff about such lewd public conduct, but that someone is likely to find the mayor’s staff at the Irish ladies�
�� sporting house tonight.
“Saint Patrick’s Day,” Muse whispers in her ear, “is generally observed in San Francisco despite the holiday’s ethnic and religious origin because people intuitively want to celebrate the vernal equinox, the rebirth of life after winter, the joyful fertility of spring, the commencement of a new cycle of… .”
“Thank you, Muse, that will be all.” Zhu cuts the monitor off. She’s not feeling very joyful. And though she could call her miraculous escape on the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen a rebirth of sorts, the commencement of a new cycle, since that night she’s been left with confusion, fear, a child on the way, and Daniel dying.
She buys an Examiner from Old Father Elphich, slips into the shelter of a flower stand in front of the Metropolitan Market, and scans the front-page article. There’s the usual righteous rant against criminal activities in Tangrenbu, though the white community doesn’t really give a damn about the tongs and their nefarious enterprises except when bloodshed proves bad for the tourist trade. In 1896, Tangrenbu is a prime tourist attraction. The bloody skirmish—a man beheaded, another gutted—was apparently a dispute over a girl. A Chinese slave girl. Another pretty girl kidnapped, duped into a false marriage, or simply sold by her parents and smuggled into America through the coolie trade.
As usual, the press writes about the girl as if she’s a criminal, too, and not the victim she most surely is.
“Wing Sing, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Zhu whispers. The grief, the guilt tug hard at her heart.
Alphanumerics scroll across her peripheral vision. “Listen well, Z. Wong. An anonymous Chinese woman in a Western-style gray silk dress got her throat cut in a Barbary Coast saloon on the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen.” Muse recites these facts dispassionately and opens the file that Zhu has studied over and over. A collection of newspaper clippings and articles much like the inky paper she holds now in her hands. Muse highlights the relevant text. “She dies. She always dies. No one knows who or what she was. No one has ever known a thing about her except that she did not have bound feet. There was nothing you could do.”