by Leigh Lyn
“Damn eunuchs,” growled a tall but hunched fifty-something patient with blackened teeth and unwashed boxer shorts. He was the one who insisted on being called after China’s first emperor, Qianlong.
Unabashed, the anchor continued, “December twenty-first, 2012, the world did not end as the Mayans predicted. What did happen yesterday was a giant eye the size of a beach ball washed ashore in New Guinea.”
Footage showed a slimy, yellowish blob with a cloudy black iris staring morosely at the camera.
“The sign!” exclaimed a female patient six or seven chairs down the row from me.
Like Qianlong, this patient suffered from delusions of grandeur. The matriarch she believed herself to be was Wu Zetian, the only woman to have become Emperor of China and extremely beautiful.
The woman sitting three feet away from me, on the other hand, had a four-foot frame carrying what must have been more than two hundred pounds of wobbly flesh clad in scaling, hairy skin. Long, unkempt hair covered her oily skull in uneven patches. With an intense gaze in her bulging eyes, she turned to the empty chair next to her. “This is a sign from Heaven. A change of sovereignty is imminent.” She caught my eye. “A new Empress will come soon and claim the world.”
“Alrighty,” I said, turning my attention back to the anchor.
He continued with his reporting about the mysterious eye. “Speculations suggest the giant eye may be a genetic engineering experiment gone haywire, and scientists were called in to determine the species of the animal it belonged to. Local aboriginals, however, refused to give it up, having ascribed divine powers to it.”
The male anchor began a new beat. “In Italy, Mario Roberto, an Italian beach café owner, has climbed on top of the dome of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice and occupied it.”
The camera zoomed into a pair of black Calvin Klein’s, dangling from a wash-line spanning between the spire of the dome and a tiny blue pop-up tent. A female reporter, jacked up in a cherry picker, stuck a microphone in the square-jawed, wolf-like face of a heavy-set man. “Why have you climbed up here, sir?”
“I’m protesting against the local government, who wants to sell the country’s most beautiful seafront. They will put my beach café out of business.”
“What do you believe is the government’s reason?”
“Money. They are selling our soul for a few euros and betraying the people by making this country a playground for the wealthy.”
The camera zoomed in on his unshaven face and his frantic eyes as the man ranted. “It’s like the world is infected with a virus that makes people blind. Do they have to sell our mothers before we realize what’s going on?”
“Are you blind?” A blood-curdling scream echoed through the room. I turned and saw Wu mounting Qianlong, who had moved to the empty chair next to her. According to June, the two had been married to each other once, which made sense considering how passionately they hated one another now. Wu tore at Qian’s face and yelled, “Sit still, you stupid man! You’ll see better after the Empress has taken your eyeballs out, you dumbass.”
The Empress poked at the Emperor’s eyes as he warded off her hands. He seemed remarkably helpless given he was twice as tall. Bored by the same drama on and offscreen every night, I decided to turn in early. Passing the nurses’ station, I stalled to say goodbye to Wendy and the other nightshift nurses, but not without mentioning the off-screen spectacle in the TV room. Within a minute, two male attendants hurried past me. After some commotion, they dragged the two royalties out.
“It’s her!” Wu screamed, pointing at me as I looked on from a distance. Inmates lurching out of the room looked at me with suspicious, tense faces. Even madhouse rats could tell I didn’t belong here.
PART TWO
Hong Kong
Chapter 5
Stuck in the traffic on an elevated highway, my gaze drifted from the misty skyline of Kowloon to a black SUV. It was a Lifan, which was a Mainland brand rarely spotted in Hong Kong. Recognizing the driver’s profile, my chest imploded. It was Simon, whom I had not seen in eighteen months. Flabbergasted, I craned my neck to have a better look, but the car had moved too far ahead and was signaling its exit from the bypass. A surge of adrenaline entered my bloodstream.
I glanced sideways at Ben, who was too busy talking on his cell to notice. The first chance I had, I swerved into the left lane and got a honk from the white minivan behind us. In the rearview mirror, its driver gave me the finger. I watched the Lifan turn onto a busy shopping street. Cruising behind, I ducked low to peer through the cars between us in hope of getting a better view. Seeing traffic lights ahead turn amber for the center lane, I slipped into an adjacent opening. My heart beat like a jackhammer as the Lifan came to a halt. The cars in my lane kept turning left one after another until my red Spider was right next to the Lifan. I slowed down as I peeked at Ben, who raised his brows in response to my glance. I smiled, acting as casual as I could while ducking my head to look past him at the Lifan. My heart sank. The man was half Simon’s age. What on earth had given me the idea he was my missing hubby?
“Step on it!” Ben snapped as more honks were directed our way. “Go!”
Jolting into action, I put my foot down, berating myself for being so rash as to act on an erratic hunch with Ben right next to me.
“I’m sorry, babe.”
“What were you thinking?” Ben’s silver stubble glistened in the early morning light as I turned left and drove the Spider around the block before he noticed the extent of our detour.
“Me? Oh, something you said.”
“About what?”
“About life outdoing fiction and lies being truer than reality.”
It wasn’t really what I was thinking at that exact moment, but it was close enough.
“Camus said that, not me.”
“You must have been quoting him then. It suddenly occurred to me how to narrate the unnarratable,” I said.
“I don’t understand.” His narrowed eyes scanned my face as I pulled over in front of the Airport Express. “I’m late though.”
Ben grabbed his leather duffel-bag from the backseat, got out, and walked around to my lowered side window.
“Will you be OK?” he asked.
“Yes, are you going to be gone for long?”
“A day or three,” he said. “I’m just going to check out an artist in Sichuan. See how much the guy is worth investing in. We’ll talk when I come back.”
Ben leaned over to kiss me goodbye.
“You don’t like it, do you?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“My idea.”
“It’s not that, darling. I just don’t know what you’re talking about and I’m in a hurry. Sometimes, Lin, you cloak this bubble wrap of riddles around yourself.”
My muse was also my harshest critic.
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize, darling.”
What Ben didn’t know was that I was really apologizing for keeping my episode at Castle Peak from him. Of course, I would eventually tell him, but not before I cleared my name.
“Perhaps that’s why I love you more. Oh, and don’t forget dinner on Saturday. The artists will be there,” Ben said, walking off.
I watched him disappear into the station and joined the cars in the opposite direction.
The traffic that had moved at a snail’s pace had stopped altogether. I checked the time on my boy-size Jaeger-LeCoultre and listened to its brassy sound after adjusting the hands of the wind-up alarm. It was the first edition of a pioneering alarm watch; the first in a series of antique watches Simon had given me each year for our anniversary. My mother would shake her head, saying it would bring bad luck because, in Cantonese, the word for watch is “Zhong,” which is the same as the word for funeral. And I would tell her superstitions didn’t work on us because we didn’t believe in them.
Life was good for the majority of people in Hong Kong, including us. Although I was neither a devoted nor
a trophy wife, I fit nicely into the dream Simon had of his life. We had good jobs, nice kids, a great apartment, and each other. All that changed after Castle Peak. The impact of those twenty-three days was brutal. After the episode, I just couldn’t go back to my previous life pretending to be the old me, even though it would have made Simon happy. And he didn’t seem to want the person I’d become. It got to the point where I began to avoid him because he either made me feel bad for burying the real me or guilty for letting our marriage die. God knows I tried. But slowly, the good times dissipated like shimmering sand in the wind, and the bad times multiplied. Our marriage died the same way dinosaurs went extinct, fast and irreversibly.
I didn’t blame Simon since it was me who changed first but, after my episode, he was a different person. What I found odd was that he hadn’t been worried. He would give me my medication and let me be. He let me go and do whatever I wanted even though, in the month after my release, I was so heavily drugged that my mind took off with the slightest breeze and fluttered away.
I would find myself in the middle of doing something I had no recollection of having started. Like the time I found myself standing at an ATM holding a wad of banknotes I couldn’t remember withdrawing. Or the time when I got up at 3 a.m. to wander the streets for some bizarre reason. The security guard had given me a strange look, but he wasn’t in a position to ask questions. So, I slipped out.
I couldn’t remember what I had done in those few hours nor how I’d found my way back. The next thing I knew, Simon was opening the door. His face right then told me everything. In that instant, he looked at me as if I were an estranged roommate he had not seen for months. A nuisance who’d shown up without a key and buzzed him out of bed. Simon’s expression revealed how he felt about me. He must have thought I was too demented and no longer what he’d signed on for. Without saying anything, he went back to bed. Regardless of what Dr. Wen had said about my lack of judgment, our marriage failed the test. I was devastated, but I didn’t blame Simon. How could I if I was no longer the same person?
“How can you not?” Bonnie, a friend and confidante, raged when she saw my swollen eyes after I’d stayed in bed and cried all day. “Blame him! You’ll feel the better for it. You obviously care; he doesn’t give a damn.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. After that conversation, I avoided Bonnie’s calls for a few days, cutting off what I didn’t want to hear even though it might have been true. I hated every second of what I had to go through, but thinking he would fake being happy with me out of obligation was worse.
A few months later, Simon disappeared altogether. We were on holiday in Shanghai with the twins. Walking down a busy shopping street, he and I had an argument about something trivial. He walked off and never came back. I returned to the hotel with the twins to wait for him there. They plopped down to watch Chinese cartoons, and I must have dozed off. In any case, when I woke up, the twins had raided the mini-fridge for candy and soda and switched the channel to a martial arts flick. I never saw Simon again despite numerous calls, texts, and inquiries everywhere. At work, they said he’d not renewed his bi-annual contract. I contacted his mother, who lived in New Zealand, but she, too, did not reply. Figuring something was wrong because he never even picked up his belongings, I went to the police.
“We have a legion of missing person cases,” the police officer said. “But we don’t have the resources to investigate every single one. Truth be told, quite a lot of people pull out of relationships without the courage to come clean.”
I was furious that they were unwilling to do anything. I suggested they check his account to see if Ben had accessed it. They looked into it and found that it had not been used, but they said it didn’t prove anything because it was only a subsidiary account which didn’t process his wages or mortgages. “People forget about bank accounts all the time. I myself have one or two I haven’t touched or looked at for a decade,” the police officer said, while watering his plant.
“But Simon used it on the day he disappeared. For all I know, they kidnapped him.”
“There’s nothing we can do unless you’re contacted for ransom. That hasn’t happened, has it?”
I shook my head, trying not to vomit.
“We’re sorry there isn’t much we can do, but we’ll come back to you if we discover material that throws light on the case.”
Disgusted, I’d gotten up and left. They never got back to me. Did my Simon, whose life had revolved around the twins and me, walk out of our relationship without coming clean? It was not inconceivable, considering how much he and I had changed, but I was heartbroken at the thought of him leaving the twins this way. The man was a rock in his own obtuse way.
“I thought he might do this one day,” Bonnie had said. Her gaze lingered in the distance for a second before she added, “Never mind, Lin. Move on. You’ll make life work out for the better.”
And I did.
This watch was the only one I had kept; the rest I’d sold. It reminded me of the happiest days of our marriage. Simon used to send it back to its manufacturers for maintenance once every year. I checked its accuracy on my cell. Quarter to nine versus 8:46 a.m. It was more than a minute off. The little date window indicated it was the first. Wait, was it the first of July?! No wonder the traffic jams were twice their normal length. Today was the anniversary of the Handover, the day when the Hong Kong people came out in huge flocks to protest universal suffrage and commemorate the Fourth of June.
How strange. When Frieda had booked my session for 11:30 a.m. today, I hadn't realized it was a bank holiday. Either my shrink was keeping strange hours or his nurse thought I was in desperate need of urgent help.
Before he disappeared, Simon, the twins, and I used to join the memorial in Victoria Park with thousands of sputtering candles each year. I gave birth to the twins on the eve of Hong Kong’s handover to the mainland. It was the start of a new era: Fifty years in which the Hong Kong people were to work out how to live under two systems that repelled each other like opposite poles of a magnet. On the first of July, we reminded ourselves and the younger generation that the freedom everyone was still enjoying was something they must keep fighting for. Today would be the second time we skipped the memorial because I couldn’t find the time, which didn’t make me feel any better. Life was far from perfect, but as time passed it became bearable.
I had met Ben way back. He came here five, six years ago to set up the Hong Kong branch of a small but well-to-do art gallery. Their mission was to find talented, undiscovered Chinese artists and match them up with affluent buyers. We worked on the same job when he was advising a big client of ours how to “accessorize” the headquarters I was designing. His choice for the centerpiece of the stately lobby was a pair of gigantic gingerbread people painted in fruity pastel colors, frozen in an effervescent tango move.
“It doesn’t match the client’s branding,” I told him.
“Why doesn’t it match the branding?” he’d asked.
“It just doesn’t. The branding is corporate and dignified.”
He grabbed me in front of another consultant and twirled me around.
“That’s why we need to lighten up their business,” he said, with a devious glint in his eyes. Too unsettled to object any further, I left it at that.
I’d always thought Ben was special. He’d sent me J.G. Ballard’s book Kingdom Come in a Manila envelope. In a previous life, he had been a book editor for a newspaper in England. At the time, I’d been designing a retail mall in Hong Kong. So, he gave me an anti-consumer novel to bug me, which was very Ben.
“Consume with Gusto,” was his inscription. In the book, Ballard depicted consumerism as an evil spirit. Lurking under the dome of a suburban mall, it reduced people to their animalistic state by consuming their souls. When riots and looting in the UK happened as J.G. described in his book, Ben commented in his quirky way, “Ballard is a seer, you know. He makes the reader see through his lies.”
B
allard inspired me. Kingdom Come started a hidden engine inside me, and I found myself wanting to write. I needed to justify my role as an architect designing these monstrosities. And it revealed dilemmas inside me I wasn’t conscious of but felt.
Ballard died shortly after the UK riots and, a few months after Simon disappeared, Ben and I started dating. I suppose I liked the way he rattled me to come out of the trenches.
Chapter 6
Four minutes past nine, I walked through Corinth’s glass doors on the top three floors of One Island East, the tallest office building on the eastern side of Hong Kong.
The interior was minimalist with quirky, clever details Peter loved to show off to clients. On a normal workday, three hundred architects, designers, and project managers would slave away at butterfly monitors. Even on a bank holiday, the place was not deserted.
Today, Corinth was reminiscent of how it looked during recessions, when up to three-quarters of its staff was laid off. With Peter at its helm, Corinth had survived four of these spells, which recurred once every decade. Having made enough money with real-estate investments, Peter was now doing it for the “joy of it all.”
My joy at Corinth was its three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the surrounding area, including the spectacular Victoria Harbor. The square office was open plan, and Matt used to brag about having come in at six in the morning once to run a half-marathon along the looping aisle at its perimeter while watching the view, taking a shower in the executive washroom, and starting work at nine. For me, the idea was energizing enough.
I stopped by the white coffee bar to make myself a double espresso. While the black foam dripped into a white mug labeled “Corinth is my Home,” I skimmed through the magazines clipped into milky white folders with the same labels.