NVK

by Temple Drake

  “I’m interested in art, in poetry—in culture generally.” He gestured with the cigarette he had just lit. “I’m not a collector, though. I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Do you live round here?”

  “Not really.” Turning lazily, he leaned back against the railing. He held his cigarette below his chin, with his thumb against the filter, and watched her through the smoke that coiled upwards, past his face. “What about you?”

  This, too, was sly.

  “I live there.” She pointed at her own dark windows.

  “Sir Victor Sassoon built it,” he said. “In 1934.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Apparently, it’s constructed in a loose S shape—a subtle reference to his initial.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You’d need to see it from above, of course. From the air.” He smiled, his stained teeth showing once again. “Anyway,” he said, and he took a deep final drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt into the soupy waters of the creek, “I should be getting along.” He brushed a few flakes of ash from the arm of his jacket, then looked at her sidelong. “Have a nice evening.”

  She watched as he set off along the promenade. Just before the bridge, he climbed down a flight of steps and signaled to a taxi that happened to be passing. He didn’t look back, not even once.

  “Strange encounter,” Zhang said.

  “Twice in a matter of two days, and in two completely different locations.” She pushed the hair out of her eyes. “It seems an unlikely coincidence.”

  Zhang agreed that it seemed unlikely.

  “It’s not you, is it,” she said, “spying on me?”

  He held her gaze, though his heart was beating fast. “Why would I spy on you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “If you see the man again,” he said, “tell me. Maybe I can do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I know people. I might be able to sort it out.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. Finally, she nodded. “All right,” she said.

  “It’s late,” he told her. “I should get some rest.”

  He woke again to see her standing naked at the bedroom window. Her back to him, she appeared as a silhouette, slender triangles of daylight showing on either side of her, between her elbows and her waist.

  “Can’t you sleep?” he said.

  She turned from the window. “I have trouble sleeping.”

  “Are you worried about that man?”

  “It’s not that.” She glanced at her watch. “I should go. I have a busy day.”

  “Would you like a lift somewhere? Chun Tao could drive you.”

  She leaned over him and kissed him, her hair falling across his face. “That’s sweet of you, but there’s no need.”

  He heard the hiss of the shower, but didn’t hear her leave.

  When he woke an hour and a half later, at seven thirty, he rolled over in the bed and lay where she had been lying. Her pillow smelled costly, exquisite. The Sacred Tears of Thebes. He smiled. As he washed and dressed, he remembered how he had flown over windswept grass, and he remembered the exhilaration, a heart-bursting feeling that seemed to belong to childhood. I didn’t know I could do this. He could see the landscape even now—the quaint wooden houses, the river, the distant line of trees. They were no less vivid in daylight than they had been in the dream—except that it hadn’t been a dream at all, since he hadn’t been asleep. Why had he imagined such a place? What did it mean?

  Once in his office, a Starbucks Frappuccino next to his laptop, he put in a call to Mad Dog.

  “What?” Mad Dog sounded tetchy and listless, the legacy of too much whiskey and Tiger beer. In the background, Zhang could hear the chatter of cartoons. Mad Dog lived with Ling Ling, a woman half his age, and Ling Ling had a five-year-old daughter.

  “You got home all right, then,” Zhang said.

  “No thanks to you.”

  “Any damage?”

  Mad Dog’s chuckle was dry and humorless. “Unscathed.”

  “Do you remember what you said when we were upstairs,” Zhang said, “by the toilets?”

  “I was drunk. Forget it.”

  Zhang checked his watch. He had a meeting in five minutes. “Will you be at home at lunchtime?”

  “I’m retired,” Mad Dog said. “Where else would I be?”

  * * *

  —

  When Zhang stepped out of the building at half past twelve, the sky was blue, and a fierce and abrasive heat pressed down on everything. A young woman in a red dress and sunglasses walked past, her head protected by a red umbrella. It was a relief to climb into the Jaguar—its tinted windows, its chilly leather seats. Chun Tao drove north through Lujiazui. Men lay on plastic loungers in the shade. The parks were empty. The sun no longer felt like something that was good for you. His thoughts drifted back to his time in Vancouver. Driving to the beach in a convertible. The fresh salt sting of the air, the glitter of the waves. He had done his best to fit in—he learned English, and started wearing T-shirts and jeans—but his life never seemed entirely normal or natural. Even the sex was different. The girls he slept with were always putting things into words. What do you like? Should I blow you? Did you come? So many questions…They sped down into the Dalian Road Tunnel, emerging a few minutes later on the north side of the river. The dappled streets, the toxic sunlight. More women with umbrellas. When they approached the junction of Anguo Road and Tangshan Road, he told Chun Tao to pull over.

  “I shouldn’t be more than an hour,” he said.

  In the alley where Mad Dog lived, all the doors and windows were open. Men stood about in their underwear, with plastic slippers on their feet, talking or smoking or simply staring at the sky. Zhang pushed on the door that led to Mad Dog’s yard. Mad Dog was sitting by the wall in a white undershirt and a pair of stained tan trousers. On the Formica table next to him was a packet of Shanghai Gold, a lighter, a teapot standing on a newspaper, and a half-drunk glass of tea. A sloping sheet of pale green corrugated plastic jutted from one side of the house, shielding him from the sun and rain. Strung across the yard behind him was a washing line hung with children’s clothes and two faded pink bras.

  “Bit of a nip in the air today.” Mad Dog bared his teeth, which was the closest he ever came to smiling. The air under the lean-to was solid, humid. Thick as soup.

  Zhang pulled a dishcloth off the washing line, spread it over the dusty seat of a white plastic chair, and sat down in the shade. Mad Dog pushed the packet of Shanghai Gold towards him.

  “I don’t smoke,” Zhang said, “remember?”

  “You used to smoke. You used to smoke more than all the rest of us put together.”

  “That’s why I stopped.”

  “So now you’re going to live forever?”

  “Longer than you, anyway.”

  Mad Dog reached for the packet and shook out a cigarette and lit it. The flame coming from the lighter and the glowing tip of the cigarette seemed to add to the heat of the day.

  “It must be important,” he said, “for you to come all the way out here.”

  All the way out here. Zhang smiled. Mad Dog might live in an alley no wider than a hotel corridor, but if you got on the metro it was only four stops to the city center. It was just that he liked to think of himself as marginal, alternative.

  “It’s because of what I said to you,” Mad Dog went on, “isn’t it.”

  Zhang didn’t respond. He remembered a brief exchange with Naemi as they drove back into town after the gig at Yu Yin Tang. I don’t think Mad Dog likes me. He had tried to reassure her. He doesn’t like anyone. Which was true, actually. Mad Dog was often caustic, and even, sometimes, violent—especially if he had been drinking.

  Selecting a glass from the narrow shelf beh
ind him, Mad Dog poured Zhang a glass of tea. “I meant every word.”

  “Why would you say something like that?”

  “There are things you don’t know about me.” Mad Dog studied the end of his cigarette, took one last drag, then flicked it away from him, into the yard. “I wrote a book once.”

  “Really? What about?”

  “Ah, I surprised you.” Mad Dog allowed himself a small, sour smile. “It was a history of ghost culture in China, from ancient times to the present day.”

  Zhang stared at his friend. Mad Dog a writer? He would never have guessed.

  “I studied the subject for many years,” Mad Dog went on. “I even taught at the university.”

  “What’s this got to do with Naemi?”

  “Let me tell you a story.”

  Sipping his tea, Zhang felt a bead of sweat slide down the middle of his chest.

  “A woman who had died in childbirth walked into a grocery shop one morning,” Mad Dog began.

  “Good opening,” Zhang said.

  Mad Dog gave him a look that meant, Don’t interrupt.

  “She bought the kind of food a mother and baby would need,” he went on. “As always, the shopkeeper admired her looks, but kept his eyes lowered, out of respect. She paid for the groceries and left.

  “When she had gone, the shopkeeper noticed that the money she had given him had turned to ashes in his hand. He ran out into the street and looked around. The woman was already some distance away. It was raining, and she had no umbrella. Her black hair grew blacker, and her wet dress stuck to her back, and to her bottom. The shopkeeper was struck more than ever by her beauty.

  “After following the woman to the gates of the cemetery, he lost sight of her. Not knowing what else to do, he wandered among the graves. The rain eased. A weak sun shone.

  “When he finally found her, she was lying in a coffin, dead. On her breast was the baby she had given birth to. Waving its arms. Crying out as the rain tickled its face.”

  Mad Dog finished his tea.

  “Have a think about that,” he said, “while I make us some lunch.”

  As Mad Dog disappeared indoors, Zhang’s phone rang. It was Wang Jun Wei. He wanted to know if Zhang had reached a decision about the Iran deal.

  “There’s a meeting tomorrow,” he said, “in my office. It would mean a lot to me if you were there.”

  Zhang said he would do his best.

  After finishing with Jun Wei, Zhang called Sebastian, a German commodities trader who he had worked with before. He asked Sebastian if he could attend a meeting the following day. He apologized for the short notice.

  By the time he had talked Sebastian into it, proposing a fifty-fifty split on fees, Mad Dog had appeared again, with two steaming bowls of noodles. The two men began to eat.

  “The broth is excellent,” Zhang said after a while.

  Mad Dog nodded. “I’m a good cook. Better than Ling Ling.”

  “So that’s why she stays with you.”

  The gums above Mad Dog’s top teeth showed. “What did you think of the story?”

  Zhang shrugged. “It’s a ghost story, like a thousand others.” The hot food was making him sweat even more. Did he have a fresh shirt back at the office? He couldn’t remember.

  Mad Dog put down his chopsticks and lit a Shanghai Gold. “When I met your blonde friend the other night, I felt uneasy. At first, I thought it was because she was foreign. But I’ve met foreigners before—obviously. I get irritated sometimes, confused as well, but uneasy? Never. So I watched her.” He brought his cigarette up to his lips and took a deep drag on it. “I watched her all evening.”

  Pushing his bowl away, Zhang sat back. A breath of air moved through the yard. He had a sudden craving for one of Mad Dog’s Shanghai Golds.

  “And?” he said.

  In the light that filtered down through the corrugated plastic, Mad Dog’s face looked pale and sickly.

  “There’s a moment in the story,” he said, “when the shopkeeper realizes that he is dealing with a ghost.”

  “When the money turns to ashes?”

  “Yes.” Mad Dog reached sideways, past the end of the table, dislodging the ash from his cigarette by flicking the filter with his thumb. “There was a moment, also, with your friend.”

  Zhang was watching Mad Dog closely now.

  “We were sitting on the terrace, just the two of us,” Mad Dog went on. “You’d gone inside, and Laser was over by the door, talking to someone. She wouldn’t meet my gaze—she was staring out into the park—but I didn’t take my eyes off her. Then, all of a sudden, she turned her head and looked at me, and that was when I saw her.”

  “Saw her? What do you mean?”

  “She was ancient,” Mad Dog said. “Her hair was gone, and her fingernails and teeth were black. Her eyes shone with a strange, cold light.” He paused. “She opened her mouth, as if to speak, and her tongue stretched out towards me, much longer than a human—”

  “Stop,” Zhang said. “That’s horrible.”

  Mad Dog shrugged, then dropped his cigarette butt on the ground and trod on it.

  “You were drunk,” Zhang went on. “You said so yourself.”

  Mad Dog slowly moved his head from side to side. “I looked and looked, and in the end I saw.”

  Zhang shook himself, then checked his phone. Seventeen new e-mails, including two from Sebastian, and one from his wife. “I should be getting back.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Thanks for the lunch.” Zhang stood up and lifted his jacket off the back of the chair.

  As he walked to the door that led out to the alley, Mad Dog called after him.

  “What are you going to do?”

  TO AROUSE HOSTILITY IN PEOPLE was nothing new. All her life, Naemi had encountered it, and almost always from men. But she was thinking of the first time, which had happened in a past so deep it felt invented. Her name was Netu then. After her family was killed, she had taken a random path through countryside laid waste by years of conflict. In an attempt to escape the violence, she had found her way at last to the coast of Finnmark, that acid-eaten edge of the world, all inlets and islands, which many believed to be the entrance to hell itself. In those days, hell was seen as a cold place, and no place was colder than Vardø, though she arrived on a summer’s day, when sea and sky were a matching blue, and the light breeze smelled of the pine tar used for caulking boats.

  In time, she met and married a fisherman called Halgard, and went to live with him in a turf hut belonging to Elsebe, his mother. One of the richest people in the village, Elsebe owned a wooden shack down by the shoreline, a boathouse, and half a dozen racks for drying fish, but her husband had died of a fever not long after Halgard was born, and then she lost her left eye to an infection. Something in her had corroded, and she was always bemoaning her fate, rebuking a world she thought of as conniving and malevolent. She took against Netu from the beginning. It is possible she would have taken against anyone who came between her and her son. Some mothers are like that.

  Halgard was tall, square-shouldered, and easygoing, with a ready grin that put Netu in mind of her father, but he was often away for twenty or thirty days in a row, hunting seal and walrus in the Barents Sea, or fishing for cod. The moment he was gone, Elsebe would begin to find fault with her. Not until the early spring, when the light returned, would Netu be able to get away. While the snow was still on the ground, she would strap on skis made from the shinbones of reindeer and leave the village, losing herself in the eerie magic of the tundra. In the summer, she would go for long walks up the smooth green slopes of Domen, or out towards the Kibergsneset peninsula. It might not have been safe to wander off alone, unarmed—by August, the polar bears were desperate for any sort of food—but that didn’t stop her. For those few hours, she could escape her mother-in-law’s constant ins
inuations and complaints. The old woman would be waiting for her when she came back, though. Shirking your duties again, I see. Doing as you please. I suppose you think you’re too good for us. By the time Halgard returned after a long stint at sea, exhausted and elated, she would be at her wits’ end. Halgard assumed it was because she had missed him—and she had, though that was only part of the story. When she attempted to explain what she had been through, he found it difficult to believe, since his mother was careful to hide that side of her nature from him. Also, he didn’t like to hear his mother criticized. She tried a different approach, asking if they might perhaps live elsewhere, but her entreaties usually coincided with his homecoming, when he was happy to be alive and back among his people. He had no desire to move, he told her. He belonged in Vardø. And besides, how could he leave his mother all alone, with no one to look after her?

  There was another source of tension. Halgard wanted a family, but the years went by and no child came. Children were vital in a small community like Vardø—without children, it would die out—and barrenness was seen both as a failure and as a selfish or hostile act, a kind of withholding. Where are all my grandchildren? Elsebe was always muttering, which did nothing to dispel the pressure.

  One June morning, Netu and Halgard walked out along the shore and sat on the flat rocks to the south of the village. The sea lay calm as a lake, the water silver gray, like the belly of a fish. The moon was half a chalky thumbprint high up in the sky.

  “Is something wrong with you?” Halgard asked.

  She had been asking herself the same question. When she first began to drink her own blood, her monthly cycles had become irregular. Then she stopped menstruating altogether. She had told no one, not even the women in the village. Especially not the women in the village. Instead, she faked her periods, using blood from slaughtered pigs and deer. She needed to prove she was the same as everybody else. Inside, though, she realized she was in the process of turning into someone—or something—unfathomable, and it occurred to her that she might have forfeited her fertility as a result. It was part of a bargain, perhaps—a bargain that had somehow been struck without her knowledge, a bargain in which she had had no say. She was as troubled by her inability to conceive as he was. After all, aside from any longing or frustration she might feel, it was a threat to her.