Jiang lowered his arms and slumped against the mill. The villager went his way. Alone, Jiang muttered to himself, “You old fool, you cannot command a demon.” He put a hand over his empty stomach and shuffled toward the path out of town. At the weed-frayed end of the grooved road, he willed his speed back into his legs, and his skeleton lurched as if trying to rip free of his flesh. A cannon boom resounded behind him, and he jumped about in fright to see the firewood logs lathing in midair and cracking apart into sticks that spun like batons and clattered to a neat pile. A demonic hissing filled hearing as the sorghum stack leaped from the ground, unraveled in midhop, and dropped into a precise stack. Jiang looked to the mill in time to witness the corn launch out of the wicker baskets and explode in a vortex of kernels, cobs, and husks. The cobs and husks collapsed into separate heaps, and the golden kernels streamed into the mill. With an eerie scream, the grinding stone spun, crushing the kernels to cornmeal.
Jiang shivered violently. The power remained his to control after all! He limped back to the woman’s courtyard on wavery legs and met her as she fearfully stuck her head from around her bamboo wall. “What was that noise?” she asked in a splintery voice. “I thought it was an earthquake and hid under my bed.”
Jiang laughed—his first laugh in years and years—and the laughter invigorated him like an elixir. “Young woman, that noise was just this old man finishing his chores. Is my breakfast ready yet?”
The woman stepped out of her courtyard and gaped in astonishment at the cleanly hewed wood and meticulously separated sorghum stalks. When she turned about and faced the baskets of corn empty and the cornmeal sitting in the clay bowl under the mill, she shrieked. “You’re a demon!”
Jiang’s laughter collapsed to a frown. “A hungry demon, woman. Have I not done what you asked of me?’
Villagers gathered, muttering, wondering what all the commotion was about.
Jiang leaned closer to the stunned woman. “You must tell them nothing until I am gone. Feed me, and I will leave you in peace. Do you understand?”
“Millers wife,” one of the villagers called. “What was all that noise we heard?”
“How should I know?” the woman asked, ushering Jiang into her courtyard. “An earthquake—or one of the government’s airplanes. I don’t know.” As soon as Jiang’s back turned, she signaled with a tilt of her head and a fearsome grimace for the villagers to get help, and two of the younger men dashed off immediately.
At a small table under a latticed window of translucent rice paper, Jiang was seated and served steamed dumplings, salty soybean milk, and unleavened pancakes chopped up and quickly fried with mustard greens and white cabbage. He thanked the woman and ate with gusto.
She watched him with twittery eyes as she prepared tea. The villagers lingered outside her courtyard, marveling at the perfectly hewn wood, separated stalks, and ground corn that just the night before the woman had loudly berated her husband for not having started. Their mumblings drifted into the narrow house.
“What will you tell them when I am gone?” Jiang asked.
“The truth,” she answered and poured him tea in a thin blue cup without a handle.
“And what does the wife of the miller believe the truth is?”
“That you are a demon.”
Jiang sipped the tea and lowered his lids with satisfaction. “That’s what I figure, too.”
The woman’s nervous eyes widened. “You don’t know yourself?”
“Not at all.” He relished the tea, letting the steam unfurl under his nostrils. “I woke up yesterday from a nap and this new strength—this magic—was mine.”
“Oh, then it is certainly a demon who entered you while you were sleeping. You must see a priest and have it driven out. It could ruin you.”
“Thank you for your concern, miller’s wife. But I am an old man. Life has already ruined me. Besides—the demon cuts firewood pretty well, doesn’t he?”
The mutterings outside the courtyard intensified, and one of the village cadre leaders entered with a youth carrying a rifle and wearing a cap embroidered with a red star. “What is all the commotion we’ve heard from your house, miller’s wife? And who is this stranger you’re feeding in your home?”
Jiang rose and bowed. “Forgive me for making such a racket,” Jiang said. “I simply did some chores for this woman, and she has rewarded me with a fine breakfast.”
“He has chopped all the firewood, sorted the sorghum stalks, and ground the corn for me,” the miller’s wife said in an excited burst, “all in an eye-blink!”
“What are you blathering about?” the cadre leader asked angrily. “Do you think I am a fool?”
“You can see for yourself,” the woman insisted. “All in an eye-blink! Didn’t you hear the noise?”
“Who are you, old man?” the cadre leader queried, studying Jiang closely yet seeing nothing at all unusual in his features, dress, or manner.
“I am Jiang Cheng-yu from the White Cabbage Village of the Yangtze Gorges.” Jiang bowed again. “I hope I haven’t alarmed you. I’m just passing through.”
“On your way to where?”
“Wherever my feet take me.”
“Don’t be flippant with me, Jiang Cheng-yu,” the cadre leader snapped. “You will find yourself in trouble with higher authorities if I do not get very clear answers to my questions.”
“No disrespect is meant, sir,” Jiang said, bowing again. “I don’t know where I am going. I am a wanderer.”
“There are no wanderers,” the headman insisted. “Where are your travel permits?”
“I have none.”
The cadre leader squinted. “Then we will have to take you to the district police so that they can decide what must become of you now that you’ve wandered so far from your village.”
“But he has magic!” the miller’s wife blurted.
“Be silent, woman!” the cadre leader barked. “Bring him with us, comrade,” he ordered the youth with the rifle and militia cap.
“Forgive me, but I cannot go with you,” Jiang said. “I stopped here merely for breakfast. I am grateful to the miller’s wife for that. And now I must be on my way.”
“Our way is your way now, comrade,” the cadre leader said and nodded to the militiaman.
“I do not wish to hurt anyone,” Jiang said as the militiaman took his arm and guided him out to the courtyard.
“Then come with us without fuss, and you won’t be harmed,” the cadre leader promised.
In the courtyard, Jiang willed his speed back into his legs, and his body shrugged like a wild horse. The militiaman flew into the bamboo wall so forcefully that the wall collapsed, and the crowd of gathered villagers gasped.
“Forgive me,” Jiang apologized and stooped to see whether the young man was all right. But when the stunned youth shook off his shock and reached angrily for his rifle, Jiang bounded over him and skipped like a startled springbok for the path that led back to the railway.
The villagers whooped in amazement, and the sound of their cries paced him as the great strength in his legs carried him out of their sight in a blur.
Jiang berated himself for having stopped. This was not an age of marvels. This was the same world of tyrants and greed that he had always known. He couldn’t barter magic for food without becoming a prisoner.
Jiang ran without stopping until he caught up with a freight train traveling east. Along the way, he passed ox-driven carts, farmers in their fields, and fishermen on the river, but he didn’t slow for their astonished shouts. Once he caught up with the train, he leaped onto the back of it, clutching the iron ladder at the back of the last car, and climbed up to the top. There, he lay down and watched the bucolic landscape roll by.
The hills to the north looked laggard and the river to the south low, showing her boulders like bones. The brassy sun made the water shiver, and the shawls of her currents spread wide in midstream and pleated toward the shores. The sight soothed him, and the reverberant choir
of the rocking train lulled him to sleep.
In a lightning-colored dream, the white devil waited for him. The dead were not there this time. The white devil looked as confused as he. “Your name is Jiang, right?” the young man asked.
This voice arrived in ruffles of echoes. “How do you know my name?”
“I don’t know,” the youth said. “I guess, the same way you know my name—from these dreams.” He looked around with startled eyes at the hideous silver fire enclosing them.
Jiang thought and remembered the dream where his dead son had named the youth. “Dirk,” he said, and his voice throbbed in the lunar silence.
“Yeah, that’s me. Look, you’re Chinese, right?”
“Yes. I am from White Cabbage Village near the Yangtze Gorges.”
“I’m from Honolulu in America.”
“Ah, Golden Mountain. That is a place I’ve heard many tales about but can barely imagine.”
“Well, you’ll be seeing it firsthand pretty soon.”
“Is that where this demon is taking me?”
“Yeah, I think so. There’s some kind of thing from another dimension that needs our help.”
“Yes. A demon.”
“I guess that’s as good a name as any for it. This demon needs us to help get it back home. That’s about all I really understand so far. I’m sorry you’ve gotten caught up in all this.”
“No need to apologize. I am proud that the spirit powers have chosen me for this work. I had thought that my life was spent. I have no family, and so I had believed that my life had come to nothing. I am glad to be of some use. Only one thing disturbs me.”
“What’s that, Jiang?”
“My children and wife. They are dead, yet I saw them in my last dream—with you. They were weeping pitifully. It hurts me to think that they are unhappy.”
“I know what you mean. My dad’s dead, and I saw him in a dream, too. He wasn’t happy, either.”
“Can you show me the demon that we must return to its home?”
“Sure.” Dirk opened a pocket among several pouch pockets with snaps on his beige pants and took out a silver coin. He held it up, and it disappeared against the mirror-gloss of the dream. Out of its invisibility, motion whirred, and a shadow of blowing whiskers and twitching hairs appeared and loomed closer.
Pincer legs and snicking mouthparts pounced out of the glare, and a spider face lunged into the dream. Jiang howled and thrashed awake.
He sat up into a rush the wind and had to clutch at the shuddering wood planks of the train’s roof to keep from tumbling off. What he saw displaced the fright of his dream with awe. Tiled roofs jounced by, and a cityscape stretched to the limits of his sight. Brakes hissed and squealed, and station platforms swung into view among cranes and trestles. A sign jogged past with the name NANKING in bold red ideograms.
As soon as the train stopped, Jiang climbed down the ladder and hopped to the platform. Porters and workers stared at him, and he ignored them and strolled wide-eyed across the train yard. In the almost ninety years of his life, he had never once been to a city. The station’s restroom at first confused and then amazed him with its flush toilet. After relieving himself, he ambled out into the noisy street, stunned by the crowds, the fleets of bicycles, and paved roads shared by cars and wagons alike.
Looking up at the sky was like gazing out of a ditch. A few trees appeared on the wider boulevards with the joyous familiarity of old friends in this alien place of concrete and asphalt. Though tempted to sit under one and watch the bustle, he twitched with the very power that had carried him this far from White Cabbage Village urging him on through the stink and press of the city.
Where am I going? he wondered. The memory of his dream on the train circled back on him. Was that truly a dream? It had been more like a spirit visit, warning him of the danger but specifying nothing. Thinking about it, he accepted that he had no choice but to relent to the power occupying him. That hardly seemed a chore since for the first time in many years he knew no fatigue. He moved through the currents of people like driftwood, letting his body choose its own direction.
Sooner than he would have guessed, the clogged streets and towering buildings fell behind him. Low buildings with red-tiled roofs jammed the flat terrain, and not far away factory pillars coiled thunder-cloud fumes into the sky. The railroad curved out from the factories, past the packed-together houses, south, in a splay of numerous rails. Jiang jogged along the tracks, waving at rail yard workers and passengers on incoming trains.
With eerie speed, he watched the landscape rush past. Legs a blur, feet like invisible flames, and arms rhythmically swaying at his sides, he moved as though he were a man out for a vigorous stroll. The engineers of the trains he passed blared their whistles at him and called ahead to the next station their sightings of the wind-running old man. But the fantastic strength guiding Jiang outwitted all attempts to monitor him: He switched tracks, he ran through stations unobserved by paralleling passing trains, and, most effectively, he defied reason and so he avoided official scrutiny.
Cities, alike in their morose squalor, hopped by: Chinkiang, Changchow, Wuhsi, Soochow. Frazzled red and brown roofs, soot-stained walls scribbled with scarlet ideograms, and rickety fences and ramshackle trackside sheds looked to Jiang like autumnal litter waiting for the cold. An occasional flowering tree graced the desolate corridor of smudged walls and houses that had been worn ragged by rushing trains.
The intoxicant of the blossoms reminded Jiang of his home and the great distance he had traveled in one day. A tint of horror suffused him at the thought, and he glanced down at his body to see if the ghost fire persisted. It did. A transparently slim light enveloped him, spinning off in swirly tangles of energy. He stared hard at the indistinct streamers and met again, with a stab of fright, the tiny, evil faces in the loose-flying flames. He put his attention back on the trackside houses, where clouds mopped the cluttered roofs.
By late afternoon, he had zipped through the massive switching yard at Shanghai and had arrived at the wharves. Huge ships under hulking derrick towers congested the harbor. Stevedores flurried industriously between warehouses and piers, gulls whirled and screamed, and the effluvia of the sea freighted the air.
Jiang’s inhuman speed puddled out of him on the tracks, and he crossed the rails and the loading docks by his own frail effort. He slumped beside a tar-speckled, guano-streaked bollard and watched a cargo ship preparing to depart. The firm conviction that this was his destination swelled in him, and he studied the busy wharf and gangways for a way to board the ship.
The gangways lowered and cranes swung aside, and there seemed to be no direct way to get on board. Jiang knocked his fist against the bollard in frustration and then noticed the thick rope that extended from bollard to ship. Without hesitating, for the other lines were already being cast off, he leaped up on the rope with a spryness that delighted and terrified him and, faster than a man sliding down a greased ramp, he scurried up the rope and onto the ship’s deck. He peered down from the bulwark of the ship at men bent to their labors, too intent on their efforts to notice him. Terrified by the poise of the living steel coiled in the muscles of his legs, he almost shouted to see oil-green water sloshing below, his black-slippered feet more like paws, gum-soled as a lizard’s.
Voices chattered closer, and Jiang scurried along the deck in the opposite direction, seeking an open hatch. Everything was secured. In desperation, he threw himself at the nearest scuttle and heaved at the lever handle. It wouldn’t budge. Voices chattered closer, and in the last ravening seconds, he willed celerity into his muscles. Enraged strength kicked through his bones, flapping every muscle of his body, and the latch turned, lurching the hatch open and tumbling him into darkness.
He closed the portal quickly, then looked to see where he was. A caseous light like moonlight tingled in a large vault of stacked crates and boxes and stuffed burlap sacks. With a stifled parrot’s shriek, he noticed that the lunar glow in the chamber seeped
from his own body. He sprang to his feet like a released genie, splay-fingered hands on his chest. The pale glow leaked through the fabric of his clothes, raying from pores of the exposed flesh on his hands and face.
He went over to a porthole between stacks of lashed crates and opened its latch with the heel of his hand, admitting natural light into the room. The spooky flesh-shine vanished in the stronger illumination, and relief swelled in him. He paced the packed chamber and determined by the few stenciled ideograms he could read that the cargo in this hold was food. Sacks of rice slumbered atop each other, crates of canned peanut oil and boxes of dried noodles flanked the porthole, and cartons of various nuts, crackers, and dried fruits had been neatly piled in wooden bins.
Jiang opened a container of crackers and one of assorted dried fruit and began to eat. That seemed natural. Why else would the demon have led him here? Bound for wherever the ship was bound, this was his next meal. He stood at the porthole, nibbling and watching as the big ship was tugged from the pier and guided out of the harbor. The sounds of busyness on the dockside dimmed, and the vibrant noise of the ship’s engines came on like a giant’s mutterings.
Clouds galleried about the sun, low over the retreating shoreline, and the last that Jiang saw of China dazzled in sun shafts. He watched until the land dimmed to a black silhouette against the green shadow of the sunken sun. Goodbye homeland, he thought. I gave you my life, but my death lies elsewhere.
The hatch rattled as the lever shoved open. Jiang ducked quickly behind one of the wooden bins, and the hatch swung aside. A white uniformed man entered with a clipboard in hand. The overhead electric lights came on in a flutter, and Jiang watched the man’s shadow from where he crouched. When the shadow veered left, he skulked right, duckwalking around the side of the bin. The instant he met the sailor’s back, he dashed through the hatch onto the deck.
Sea air wound about him, and he let the excitement of his unknowing hurry him along the deck. Night reared ahead. A waterfall of stars glimmered in the direction that the ship sailed. Behind, an emerald bar of dusk tasseled into wire whisks of red light.
Arc of the Dream Page 11