by Temple Drake
He opened the door of his Mercedes and climbed in. Should he have brought the wooden box with him, as proof of something, as evidence? As he sat behind the wheel, not moving, his phone rang. He expected it to say Unknown again, but it was Ling Ling, her daughter crying in the background.
“Mr. Zhang,” she said. “I wanted to remind you. The funeral’s tomorrow.”
“I hadn’t forgotten,” he said.
If they failed to observe the proper rituals, he thought, would Mad Dog come back to haunt them? Or would he haunt them anyway? After all, his life had been cut short in a brutal manner, and his death would almost certainly have caught him unprepared. What had Mad Dog told him on the night they saw the owl? A ghost is a manifestation of something that is incomplete. He didn’t look forward to being visited by Mad Dog. He had been bitter enough when he was alive. Imagine how bitter he would be now he was dead.
“I’d like to thank you for helping us,” Ling Ling was saying.
“Don’t mention it,” Zhang said.
He fingered the bill for the funeral, which was in a folded envelope in his jacket pocket. How would Mad Dog have reacted if he knew who was paying? He imagined the old man’s lips twisting as he framed some typically caustic remark—
But another call was coming in, and he had to cut Ling Ling off. It was Johnny Yu, asking if the locksmith had shown up. Zhang said she had.
“Were you satisfied with the job she did?” Johnny asked.
“I was. Very.”
“And how did Beijing go?”
Zhang sighed.
“As bad as that?” Johnny said.
“Not good.”
“I have something interesting for you—something a bit different.”
“Go ahead.”
“Tell me again about the day you turned your back / on everything dear and took the stony track / that led away from your house and hearth—the death / of the old without sight of the new.”
“It sounds foreign,” Zhang said.
“It was written by an Englishman.” Johnny paused. “His name is Harsent. He’s still alive.”
Zhang had both his hands on the steering wheel, but he still hadn’t turned the key in the ignition, or switched on the windscreen wipers. The world outside looked bleary, blurred. It was quiet where he was.
The death of the old without sight of the new.
The English poet had described him to perfection.
* * *
—
It took more than an hour to drive to Kangqiao, the roads covered with sheets of water after the downpour, the traffic moving slowly. The skies were clearing, though, and by the time he pulled into the car park of the Holiday Inn at just after two o’clock a weak and colorless sun had broken through.
The young woman at reception asked how long he would be staying.
“A few hours,” he said.
Once in his room on the twenty-first floor, he sat on the bed, facing a window that framed a square of empty grayish yellow sky. He remembered the white neon sign that said WHERE ARE YOU, its loneliness and desperation made keener by the absence of a question mark. He took out his phone and sent Naemi a text. In all probability, she would never receive it, but he couldn’t help himself. He had not imagined that his life could be so disrupted, or that he could be so shaken. The end of one affair usually signified the beginning of another. He wasn’t accustomed to feeling agitation or regret. Rather, he would be grateful for what had happened, and grateful that it had not gone on too long. He would be excited by the prospect of what lay ahead. Not this time, though. He saw her as he had seen her last, her dark dress stained darker still with blood. Obviously, she had not been real, and yet the apparition had been so detailed that it felt believable and true. Her actual presence, by contrast, had often seemed like a fantasy. The tangled gold-blonde hair, the heavenly skin…
He looked around. It was indistinguishable from the room where they had made love in September. The same neutral, inoffensive pastel colors. The same drab art. Taking off his shoes, he placed them side by side next to the bed, then he removed his suit and hung it on a hanger in the cupboard. He hung his shirt on a hanger too. He slipped out of his underwear and his socks and laid them, folded, on a shelf beneath his suit and shirt. In the same cupboard, he found a white toweling bathrobe and a pair of white hotel slippers. He put them on. Pushing his key into the pocket of the robe, he left the room and set off towards the lifts. As he passed down the corridor, he heard a burst of laughter from a TV, and then applause. Later, the murmur of a woman talking on her phone. A damp, swampy smell rose off the carpet. It was a Monday in October, three in the afternoon. How had it come to this?
He reached the lifts and pressed the call button. Almost immediately, one of the lifts arrived, and a man in a shiny, pale gray suit stepped out. He seemed to hesitate, but Zhang stepped past him without looking and pressed 24. The doors slid shut. The lift ascended. He had a sudden urge to call Torben Gulsvig and tell him what he had seen in the Embankment Building—not his vision of Naemi, but the matte-black walls, the traces of loose earth on the bedroom floor, the wooden box…He wanted to know whether any of it sounded familiar to Gulsvig, and if so what he made of it. He would put in a call after his swim. He should also call his son, Hai Long. He wanted to ask him to come and spend a weekend in Shanghai.
He entered the pool area and showed his room key to a girl in a gray-and-orange uniform.
She gave him a long look. “You were here before.”
“You have a good memory,” he said.
“Not really.” She glanced beyond him, towards the pool. “It’s strange, but not too many people use this place. Sometimes a whole day goes by, and nobody comes in at all.”
“You don’t get bored,” he said, “or lonely?”
She shrugged, then smiled.
He asked if he could rent or buy a pair of swimming trunks and some goggles. She had trunks and goggles in Lost Property, she said, and he was welcome to borrow them. He thanked her. She fetched the trunks and goggles, and handed him a towel as well, then she returned to her station by the door, next to the cash register.
He stood by the silver sculpture with its sleek curves, its vaguely shell-like shapes. Since the last third of the pool had been conceived as an overhang, with glass walls and a glass ceiling, the water made a fourth wall that was seemingly built from the same ambiguous gray-blue material. There was the conviction, difficult to dispel, that if he stepped into the water he would also be stepping into the sky, a world that was limitless and dizzying, and offered no way back.
He pulled on the trunks, which were too big for him, then took off the robe and laid it on a plastic lounger. Stepping out of his hotel slippers, he walked to the vertical ladder at the shallow end and climbed down into water that felt surprisingly cool. A shiver shook him. He moistened the goggles and fitted them over his eyes, then pushed away from the tiled edge. He was swimming breaststroke, and the water parted before him in an inverted V, small waves peeling away on either side. The water that lay ahead was still smooth, so smooth it was hard not to think of it as solid. He was swimming towards a kind of precipice that he couldn’t see, but this time he didn’t feel any fear. He was looking forward to the feeling of suspension, of being afloat twice over, once in water, once in air. One stroke, and then another. His head above the surface, then beneath it. Then above it once again.
As he approached the glass panes, the place where the bottom of the pool became a window, he was aware of a movement in the corner of his eye, and he thought it must be the girl in the gray-and-orange uniform, she had come to tell him something, there was something he should know, but before he could turn properly and look there was a loud flat sound, a sort of crash, as if somebody had dropped a metal dustbin lid, and he was pushed sideways with great force, and the water and the sky both vanished, and all he could see was a blackness
flecked with silver, like a memory of fireworks when he was a child in Beijing, his hand in his mother’s hand, his father somewhere else, abroad perhaps, but then the blackness began to shrink, and he was shrinking with it, and he knew he wasn’t going to make it to the end—
SHE STOOD AT HER LIVING-ROOM WINDOW, a small suitcase on the floor behind her. Her throat ached, and there was blood on her top lip. She was thinking about her last night with Zhang. She had been worried that he might ask why she had fought with Mad Dog, and why she had pretended to be in London, but his mind seemed to be on other things. He had even asked her what London had been like! Was it possible that Mad Dog hadn’t said anything? By the time they reached the Shanghai Museum, she found she was beginning to relax. Then, in the early morning, he came out with it. I forgot to tell you. Mad Dog died. She had been startled by the news. This wasn’t an outcome she had ever imagined. How could it have happened? Mad Dog had been alive when she left. He must have tried to get to his feet and then lost his balance and fallen down the steps…Within minutes, she received a second shock. As she stood in Zhang’s service lift, about to say goodbye, a look of horror rose on to his face. You killed him. It was you. There was a violent detonation in her head. Everything flattened, wrecked. Then a numb feeling. The lift dropped slowly through the dark, the light in the ceiling fizzing, blinking. A wire had come loose. She had no memory of what came next. No memory of leaving the building, or walking through the grounds, which would have been deserted at that hour. No memory of flagging down a taxi, or traveling across the city, or arriving at her apartment, though she supposed she must have done all those things. Because she found herself standing at the window in her living room, as she was now. Her brain tingling as the life stole back into it. Like pins and needles. It was you. How could he think such a thing? He was distraught about the death of his friend. He wasn’t seeing straight. And it was clear to her then, if it wasn’t clear before, that she could never set eyes on him again, not ever…
Earlier, it had rained so hard that the Shanghai skyline had disappeared. Now, the rain had eased. Just a drifting curtain between her and the view. A Monday morning in the middle of October. An ordinary day. But not one she would forget. She wiped the blood from her mouth, then turned from the window and left the apartment, pulling the case behind her.
Out on the street she hailed a taxi.
“Longyang Road,” she said. “The station.”
The driver eyed her in his rearview mirror. “You going on a trip?”
“I don’t want to talk,” she said.
Shrugging, the driver turned up the volume on his radio and pulled away from the curb. He waited for a black Mercedes to pass, then he turned right, onto a bridge that spanned the creek.
She stared through the window as they bumped down into one of the narrow streets that ran behind the Bund. The traffic slowed, then stopped. A young man in a chef’s apron sat on a doorstep outside a restaurant, shelling prawns. His T-shirt said ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT. She let out a laugh that was scarcely a laugh at all, just a short sharp exhalation. She found it hard to believe that her years in Shanghai were over. The ache in her throat wasn’t an infection. It was regret.
Zhang Guo Xing.
When she arrived at the bar in the Park Hyatt, she was able to approach him without him knowing. She saw him first, just as she had in the club on the night they met. His head was lowered. He seemed lost in thought. He wasn’t scanning the bar for her, as men she was meeting normally did. He wasn’t apprehensive, or predatory. He might almost have forgotten that she was coming. She liked this about him. He mirrored her desire for an intimacy that would be more profound because it sprang from confidence, not need or lack. She stood by the table for a few seconds, watching him. Then, finally, she spoke. Have you been waiting long? He glanced up and saw her. Once again, he surprised her, since he didn’t have the look of a man who wanted something from her. It was more as if the sight of her gladdened his heart. She felt, oddly, like the view from a high window—miles and miles of wooded hills and valleys unfolding into a distance that was hazy, blue.
Have a seat. What can I get you?
The taxi dropped her at Longyang Road station, and she took an escalator up to the concourse, where she bought a one-way ticket to Pudong airport. The woman told her the Maglev would be leaving in thirteen minutes. She stepped onto a second escalator that led up to the platform. Once she had boarded the train, she sat down and stared out of the window. Not long afterwards, a middle-aged man in a New York baseball cap sat nearby. He looked Taiwanese, or possibly Malaysian. A camera with a long lens hung around his neck.
When she lay down with Zhang in the Chairman Suite on that first night, everything that he did felt right. He touched her body as if he was already familiar with it. He knew when words were needed, and when they were not. How often did that happen? She wondered briefly if he had also lived more than one life—if she had been with him before…But no, he was too young in himself. Too new. It was instinct on his part. It was her good fortune. Even then, though, she had registered a flicker of anxiety, scarcely detectible, yet catastrophic, like the discarded cigarette that starts a forest fire. If he knew how to touch her, what else did he know? What would he sense in her? How would she conceal what she needed to conceal? She had wanted to sleep with him the moment she saw him. She was someone who responded quickly. But she seemed drawn to the very people who endangered her. The intuitive, the curious—and sometimes, also, the malevolent. How long could she give him? A week? A month? Or should she remove herself immediately? As she gazed at the top of the Jinmao Tower, the china animals motionless behind her on their artificial grass, she was torn between self-indulgence and self-denial. They were both powerful, both painful. That was what her life was like. Raids on the sublime tended to be followed by rapid withdrawals. I don’t love you. Forget me. I was never here.
In hindsight, one thing was certain. She should have ended it before she met Mad Dog. She should have ended it as soon as Torben appeared. That was a sign, if ever there was one—the past floating up into the present and capsizing it. What did the fishermen in Finnmark used to say? The wave that sinks you is the wave you never see. It should have been a one-night stand—an assignation that couldn’t be repeated. The exotic stranger, the deluxe hotel. Nothing wrong with that. But she had been undisciplined, and greedy. She’d allowed herself to become involved…
As the train slid out of the station, there were announcements in a number of different languages. The airport was thirty kilometers southeast of Shanghai, and the journey would take just over seven minutes. They would be traveling at speeds of up to 430 kilometers an hour. Something about the shortness of time it would take to reach the airport undid her. She began to tremble, tears spilling from her eyes.
“Are you all right?” The man in the baseball cap was leaning towards her, across the aisle.
She held up a hand to ward him off. “I’m fine—”
“Can I help?”
“No,” she said. “Thank you—”
The train gathered speed, tilting on its rails. A digital screen at the far end of the carriage showed how fast they were going: 180 kmh. 190 kmh. 210 kmh. The man in the baseball cap was on his feet in the aisle, taking photographs of the screen.
The flat land outside the window was a blur.
She remembered dancing with Zhang in his apartment late at night. They had ended up pressed against each other, barely moving, the music Spanish, sentimental. Pero tengo que ser / Tengo que ser como soy…In that moment, she would willingly have traded all her many lifetimes for a single life with him, but as the song suggested she couldn’t get away from who she was.
430 kmh. 431 kmh. 430 kmh.
The train had reached its optimum speed. Had she loved him? She thought she had.
The tears kept coming.
* * *
—
The Maglev slowed and sto
pped. As she left the train, the man in the baseball cap asked once again if he could help in any way. She thanked him, then said she was feeling better. Though she was several hours early for her flight, she headed straight to Security. She handed the uniformed official her passport and boarding card. He studied her name, the name that was about to become obsolete. It was a pity. She had grown to like it. But this was her last day as Naemi Vieno Kuusela. The official lifted his eyes and was looking at her steadily. Perhaps he could tell she had been crying. But there was nothing unusual or suspicious about that. People were always crying in airports. At last, he stamped her passport and handed it back to her. This, too, would become obsolete as soon as she cleared Customs and Immigration in Frankfurt.
Since her flight wasn’t due to leave until the evening, she decided to check into the hourly rate hotel. A manager with a badge that said ANGELA escorted her to reception on the seventh floor of an annex, where she was given a simple, uncluttered room. Switching on the TV, she took off her coat and shoes and lay down on the bed. Her tears had left her feeling shaky, weak. This moment, when it came, never felt good. There was usually somebody she cared for, or somebody she had to leave—somebody whose silence she had to secure if she was going to survive. Sometimes her hands were dirty, sometimes not, but her heart was seldom clean. Through the sealed window, she saw dark clouds massing to the northwest. It looked as if a thunderstorm had descended on Shanghai.
She remembered the day her English boyfriend Peter died. After calling the police—she had used a public phone box, and had chosen to remain anonymous—she ran to the halls of residence where Torben lived and knocked on the door of his room. She was crying and shaking. Torben didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t liked Peter. He had never thought Peter was good enough for her. Then again, he wouldn’t have thought anyone was good enough for her, and he was sufficiently self-aware to realize that, and to be able to laugh at himself. He put his arms around her and held her until she calmed down, then he made her a cup of Nescafé and rolled her a cigarette.