by Temple Drake
“Take the nu gui,” Mad Dog was saying. “A nu gui is the spirit of a woman who has been mistreated. She might have committed suicide. She might even have been murdered. Or she might just have led a miserable life. The nu gui generally returns to the place where she experienced the abuse. What she is seeking is not revenge but justice. She tends to frighten women, but rarely does them any harm. With men, however, she behaves like a femme fatale…” He gave Zhang a knowing look.
“If you go back in time,” he continued, “women’s lives were harder than men’s. Their voices were seldom heard. They were more likely to have grievances. Perhaps that’s still the case, even today…” He paused under a streetlamp to light a cigarette, and then moved on. “It follows that female ghosts are more plentiful. They have the best stories too—the most poignant stories. In a typical zhiguai, a mode of expression now viewed as giving a voice to the voiceless, one finds countless instances of female ghosts.”
The two men passed through the compound’s eastern gate. Binjiang Avenue was almost deserted, just the occasional goods van or taxi. They crossed the road, their shadows slanting away from them, over the sodium-lit tarmac. Entering Dongchang Riverside Greenland, a strip of park that bordered the river, they set off along a wide path that would lead, eventually, to the bus station on Lujiazui West Road.
Mad Dog picked up where he had left off. “Ghosts aren’t necessarily evil,” he said, “or even disruptive. Of course, there are ghosts who seem determined to cause trouble, but that’s probably because they misbehaved when they were alive. More often than not, though, ghosts are personifications of misfortune or distress.”
The two men passed a huge iron grapple bucket that was mounted on a plinth, like a sculpture. Until the late eighties, a coal-processing plant had stood on the land where the park now was.
“In ancient Chinese,” Mad Dog went on, “the character for ‘ghost’ has its root in the character for ‘to return’—and there are many reasons for returning, life being so infinitely preferable to death, despite all the suffering and boredom that go with it.” Letting out one of his typically humorless chuckles, he flicked his cigarette butt into the bushes. “In the final analysis, ghosts are manifestations of something that is incomplete. That’s what a ghost is: someone who still has something to resolve.”
Out on the river, a tug surged past. Mud swirled beneath the surface of the water. A faint breeze blew, carrying a sweet, rotten smell that reminded Zhang of chicken feed.
He walked on, with Mad Dog following behind. A few moments later, Mad Dog stopped him by pulling on his arm.
“What is it now?” Zhang asked.
Mad Dog pointed. “Look.”
Next to the path, and overgrown with climbing shrubs and creepers, stood a rain-stained concrete structure that had been preserved from the old mining plant, and perched on the high girder that ran horizontally across the front was a large brown owl.
Stepping closer, Mad Dog clapped his hands.
Zhang asked what he was doing, but Mad Dog ignored him.
“Go away,” Mad Dog shouted. “Leave us be.”
“Mad Dog?” Zhang said.
But Mad Dog kept shouting and clapping and jumping up and down.
Zhang turned his attention to the owl. Though it was gazing at Mad Dog, the old man’s antics didn’t seem to have any effect on it whatsoever. Its indifference was absolute, disdainful. Otherworldly. Mad Dog whirled off across the path and scavenged in a nearby wastebin, returning with an empty soft drink can. He took aim and flung it at the owl. It missed by at least a foot. The owl didn’t even flinch. The same flat platelike face, the same unblinking eyes.
And then, when they were least expecting it, the huge bird shook itself, unfolded its wide wings, and soared off into the darkness over the river. To Zhang, it appeared to have departed on its own terms, as if obeying some decree or summons to which it alone was privy. He found that he was a little in awe of it.
“Did you see that?” Mad Dog said in a low voice.
“An owl.” Zhang shrugged.
“Yes, but did you see?” Mad Dog turned to him, and his eyes were glittery and wild. “It was her.”
Zhang stared at his friend. “What? You think—”
“I don’t think. I know.” Mad Dog went and leaned on the railing that bordered the west side of the path. “Some ghosts have the ability to turn themselves into animals, or objects—even into weather. It is believed that they gain strength from such mutations. They don’t observe the usual boundaries, you see. Time, space—identity…The skin is not as big a barrier as people think it is. And with female ghosts, there’s an extra level of significance. When they transform themselves, it represents a protest or a rebellion. They’re challenging all the old patriarchal notions of logic and law.”
Zhang joined Mad Dog at the railing. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”
“What I find odd,” Mad Dog said, “is that they usually transform themselves into something that seems ordinary or natural, something suited to the environment. You’d think she would have appeared as a duck, or a dog. A gust of wind. Much more unobtrusive. But no. Obviously, she wanted to stand out. She wanted me to notice her. In deciding to be an owl, which is a rare sight in these parts, she was signaling her presence.”
He bared his teeth as he stared out into the dark.
“And the significance of that particular bird is not lost on me,” he continued after a moment. “The owl flies in absolute silence and hunts in the pitch-black. During the Shang dynasty, people used to think of it as the god of night or dreams. They also believed it carried messages between this world and the next. For that reason, the owl appears repeatedly in Shang ritual art. From the sixth century onwards, however, there was a shift in how the owl was viewed. It was no longer seen as benign or helpful. Instead, it became a bad omen. A harbinger of doom. In certain dialects, there is a striking resemblance between the sound an owl makes and the word for ‘to dig,’ as in ‘to dig a grave.’ When you hear an owl hooting, you should prepare for a death. Your own, or someone else’s. Someone close to you. It’s no accident that owls appear on the Han dynasty’s burial ceramics.”
Zhang was shaking his head, but Mad Dog hadn’t finished.
“It was for my benefit. Don’t you see? She was telling me she knows I’m onto her.” Mad Dog’s teeth were gritted now. “It was a warning—a threat…”
“I’m sorry,” Zhang said, “but you’re blowing this whole thing out of proportion.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s late. I’m going home.”
“Before you go.” Reaching into his jacket pocket, Mad Dog produced a small square mirror, a gnarled twig, and a red envelope. “Take these,” he said, “and keep them on your person at all times—especially when you’re with her.”
“What for?”
“They might help to protect you.”
Zhang held the twig up to the light.
“It’s from a peach tree,” Mad Dog said. “Peach trees are often used in exorcism rituals.”
Zhang studied the other objects. The mirror had a cheap tin surround that was speckled with rust. He opened the red envelope and peered inside. All it contained was a circular piece of orange peel.
“Humor me,” Mad Dog said.
“Well,” Zhang said, “it’ll hardly be the first time I’ve done that.”
Mad Dog stood facing him, a stooped but dogged figure, the river at his back. “You know something? Sooner or later, you’re going to have to start taking me seriously.”
“Am I?” Zhang shook his head again and turned away.
* * *
—
At lunchtime the next day, Zhang took a lift to the ground floor of his office building and walked out through the revolving doors. Naemi was already waiting in the pickup area, in a taxi. She was dressed simply, in a short black dress and trainers. A
pair of ’70s-style sunglasses hid her eyes.
“You’re not wearing your contact lenses,” he said.
She adjusted her sunglasses. “Yes, I am,” she said. “This is just fashion.”
He smiled. “I missed you so much.”
“I missed you too. How long has it been? Four days?”
“It feels longer.”
They set off along Century Avenue. Under the trees that lined the road were groups of street cleaners in their baggy pale blue uniforms. The sky was grayish yellow.
“How was Hong Kong?” he asked.
She talked about a friend of hers, an artist called Kung Lan, who was in the final stages of preparing his new show. It was scheduled to open at her gallery in the first week of October.
“What kind of show?” Zhang asked.
The concept was simple, she told him. Kung had noticed that when young women looked at their phones the expression on their faces tended to be either contemplative or beatific. In his view, they bore a striking resemblance to medieval paintings of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child. The stark white glow emitted by most phones only added to the atmosphere of reverence. Kung was in the process of creating a series of high-contrast color photographs, which were to be blown up to larger-than-life size. Some of the images were posed. Others had been taken surreptitiously—in the street, or on public transport. Kung had Daoist tendencies, she said. In his late fifties now, he belonged to a generation of artists whose disenchantment with politics was matched by its reservations about a society that was fast becoming materialistic. While his images would take their place in the tradition of Chinese portraiture, which was more than two thousand years old, they would also be seen as an attack on the new consumerism. He was calling the show Modern Madonnas.
“It’s going to be wonderful,” she said. “You should come.”
“Maybe I will.” Zhang glanced out of the window. They were still heading south. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
Ten minutes later, they pulled into the forecourt of the Kangqiao Holiday Inn. Zhang paid the driver, then stepped out on to the tarmac. On the other side of the road was a Muslim restaurant and an office that sold real estate. The sun felt hotter than it had in Lujiazui. There seemed to be less air.
Standing in the lobby, he watched as Naemi walked over to reception. He was surrounded by people in green plastic visors and pastel-colored leisure wear. A tour group from another part of China. Foreign tourists would never stay here. It was too far from the center.
When Naemi returned with a room key, they took a lift to the twenty-fourth floor. He wondered why she had chosen such an ordinary, out-of-the-way hotel. Was it anonymity that she was seeking? Did she want to avoid running into anyone they knew? Or was there a thrill to be found in places that were neutral, and characterless? What was happening between them was so vivid, perhaps, that it didn’t need much of a backdrop.
He followed her out of the lift and down a corridor. Pink carpet, cream walls. He watched her bare legs, her blonde hair shifting against her shoulders. The small of her back. She seemed so youthful, so healthy. Everything he learned about her while she was elsewhere—the gloomy apartment building, the sinister medical supplies, Mad Dog’s ghoulish visions—was undermined or contradicted the moment she appeared. He found it hard to equate one version with the other. In her hand was a white paper shopping bag he hadn’t noticed while they were in the taxi.
They arrived in the pool area. Glass walls stretched from floor to ceiling on all sides, the white-and-orange apartment buildings of Kangqiao clustered below, only dimly visible through the milky veil of the heat haze. A silver sculpture stood at the shallow end, its curves reminding Zhang of seashells. The surface of the pool was perfectly smooth. No one else was there.
“Are we going swimming?” he asked.
“You are.” She reached into the bag and handed him some trunks and a pair of goggles.
“You’re not coming in?”
“I had an eye infection while I was in Hong Kong. I’m still recovering.” Her gaze drifted away from him and out over the water. “I swam here for the first time in the spring. It’s quite an experience.”
A few minutes later, he was standing in the shallow end. Naemi was sitting on a white plastic sun lounger, her elbows on her knees. What did she mean—an experience?
“You’ll need the goggles,” she called out.
He wet the goggles and put them on, then he pushed gently out into the pool.
It wasn’t until he was approaching the deep end that it happened. One moment, the bottom of the pool was lined with pale blue tiles, as most pools are, the lanes marked by slender strips of a much darker blue. The next moment, the tiles were replaced by glass, through which he could see the concrete side wall of the hotel dropping away, and the cars in the car park, small as toys. There was the feeling that he might fall, and he had the urge to hold on to something solid. He had stopped swimming, and was floating facedown, like someone snorkeling, and it felt unnatural, and miraculous, though the sense that he might be in danger hadn’t gone away. His brain seemed unable to choose between two equally compelling interpretations of reality.
He started to swim again, keeping his eyes on the ground twenty-four floors down. When he reached the deep end, he realized that the last third of the pool extended horizontally from the side of an otherwise sheer building, and that it must be visible from the street below. He would also be visible, a tiny figure suspended in the water, in the air.
Naemi called out to him again. He couldn’t hear what she was saying.
He swam back to the shallow end, then turned around. Though he was prepared this time, there was still a part of his brain that feared he might plummet to his death. But there was another part that looked forward to the moment when he swam out beyond the edge of the building, into space. There was another part that couldn’t wait.
Later, when he’d had enough, Naemi wrapped him in a white bathrobe.
“What do you think?” she asked.
He pushed the hair back off his forehead. “It reminded me of something that happened the last time we made love.”
“Really?”
“I had a kind of fantasy or daydream,” he said. “I was flying over fields or meadows, the grass flattened by the wind. I flew over some wooden houses too. A blue river. A row of trees. Then the ground dropped away, and there was just the air rushing in my ears, and all that green and blue a long way down…”
Naemi’s enthusiasm for the pool had turned into something else—a strange blend of fascination and disquiet.
“That’s what you saw?” she said.
“Yes.” He looked at her. “Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing’s wrong.” She seemed to shake herself, and her mood changed again. “When you got into the taxi, I had to make sure you sat on the left side. I didn’t want you to see the hotel—the way the pool sticks out from the side of it.”
“How did you know I could swim?”
“I didn’t.”
“What would have happened if I couldn’t?”
She smiled. “That would have ruined everything.”
* * *
—
When Zhang arrived back at work, his secretary said that his father was waiting for him. It was a day of surprises, it seemed. But then his father made a habit of appearing unexpectedly. He had once told Zhang that unpredictability and the exercise of power were linked. Zhang consulted his watch. 4:25. His father might pride himself on being unpredictable, but Zhang already knew what he was going to say.
In his office, he found his father sitting at his desk, eyes lowered. He moved to the window and leaned on the sill, facing away from the view.
“Long lunch,” his father said.
Zhang smiled.
After his swim, Naemi had take
n him to a room on the eighteenth floor, where they had made love. Later, as they lay on the bed, half asleep, she asked if he had seen anything this time. Not this time, he said. You weren’t too bored, I hope, she said. He laughed. No, he said. I wasn’t bored.
His father looked at him and shook his head. “You lack focus. Drive. You always have.”
“That’s not what they told me at Sauder.” Zhang had studied for his MBA at the Sauder School of Business in Vancouver.
“Are you going to contradict everything I say?”
“Only if I disagree with you.”
His father pointed to the chair on the other side of Zhang’s desk. “Sit down.”
Zhang sighed, then took a seat.
For several long seconds, the two men eyed each other. Zhang’s father’s hair was cut brutally short, as always, and he wore a heavy gold signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. He was shorter than Zhang, and stockier, a physique that had been molded by decades of Sanshou. Unusually for someone of his generation, he didn’t smoke. In fact, he had never smoked. Among his colleagues in the Party—he had worked for the ministry of foreign affairs, and had acted as adviser to two successive presidents, Yang Shangkun and Jiang Zemin—his nickname had been “Fresh Air.” He was seventy-three, but looked fifteen years younger.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“I went for a swim in Kangqiao,” Zhang said. “The traffic was bad on the way back.”
His father didn’t seem surprised, though Zhang knew he was. The old man never gave anything away. During the years when he moved in political circles, he had cultivated a look of blankness that masked every human emotion, including anger.
“Why Kangqiao?”
Zhang began to describe the pool at the Holiday Inn, but as he spoke he saw his father beginning to lose interest. He had always found it hard to hold his attention, even as a boy.