Bestiary
Page 21
When she opened her eyes, three moons in the sky. One was whole and the others were halves. She sat up and saw a snake hanging on to her calf by its fangs. Ama wrenched it off. Before she could lie back down, the water tore in two. A body nosed onto the banks, gutting the mud. It was a woman with scales the color of blood, wearing her skin inside-out. She tucked her arms and legs into her body before oaring them out, shoving away the mud with each winging. Ama undressed and curled beside the riverwoman in the mud, soaking in the palm-sweat of night. She lowered her head to the riverwoman’s skin, tilting her tongue into the belly button, lapping out its sour lake of sweat.
Ama remembered the river was conceived not by the sea but by a body: It had been pissed down the mountain Papakwaka, cleaving streams into the stone. Ama propped herself above the riverwoman’s ribs. The mud slapped against itself, a sound like farting, and they both laughed. Ama kneeled between the riverwoman’s knees and touched with her tongue the black hair there, gummy with mud and moonmilk. Ama’s tongue was its own language, a language that didn’t need to be taught to it. When the riverwoman came in her mouth, Ama didn’t rinse it for days, kept tonguing the salt between her teeth.
The riverwoman flipped onto her stomach and the mud opened around her, her limbs waning back into her body. Red scales rushed up her belly like a flame and she slid forward through silt, belly-flopping back into the river.
Back home, Ama undressed and scrubbed the mud from her dress, but it had ground itself too deep into the weave and become inseparable from the fabric. She shook it out, went outside to dry it anyway, and saw something clinging to its hem. A scale the size of her toenail. Ama placed the scale on her tongue and sucked on it all day until it blurred away. When her belly rose as rapidly as bread, she knew this would be her last daughter.
Ama thought of the riverwoman whose belly never left the ground, the way her hips gave into honey. The scale Ama swallowed: It must have doubled itself inside her, daughtering. This daughter was only hers. Hers and the river’s. Hers and the dead’s. This daughter—my mother—was the one Ama would see as her second body, a liability. Months later, when Ama tossed all her daughters off the bridge and into the river red, she would watch the snakes warring over their meat. She was waiting for the riverwoman to bring her daughters out of the water, her tongue hooking their mouths, dragging them back to the surface.
While Ama was dropping her daughters into the river, trying to skip the last baby like a stone, she thought of water as the best of all mothers. Water had none of its own wants: It served only the thirst of others. Ama knew being needed was a kind of divinity, and she was tired of being that good, that god. When she dropped my mother into the river last, Ama thought: I am returning her to the river that will raise her better, raise her like a flood I will run from.
* * *
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In her house there was only her. When we’d pulled away, I’d looked through the back windshield, holding Agong’s head in my lap like a fruit I couldn’t figure out how to fit in my mouth. Ama watched me from the dark of her doorway, her knees blurring into each other. Her mouth was pitted from her face, a hole where she once had a name. She welded her left hand to the doorframe, held the dark open for us to exit through. The night was the same throat-dark as the inside of her house, and leaving felt like being swallowed, like symmetry: The farther we drove, the lower down we lived in her throat.
We didn’t know if she was waiting for us to leave or to come back, only that she stood there longer than I looked, that the road startled like skin when we backed onto it. Even after we left, I found her face in a palm tree, a run-over dog, cows scabbing over a field, the dark bracketing our car, my mother in the rearview mirror, teething on her tongue to keep herself awake, one hand hooking out the window. Her fingers undoing the button of the moon. With my sleeve, I dabbed at the window like a wound, tried to wipe away Ama’s resemblance to the night. She let us go because years ago she’d tried to sever herself from her daughters, and not even the river could cut through them. She let us go, knowing she was with us in the car and in our yard, a fishline threaded through our spines.
When I was home, I walked between my yard-holes, knowing Ama was on the other end of them. I fed my hands to the 口, imagined that Ama was doing the same on her end, our hands touching halfway between her city and mine, knotting at the wrist-root. This was the only way we could see each other, with our hands alone: without our full bodies to hurt each other, without words to want from each other. In the holes, a reforested dark. In a month, a tree would grow from the 口, a subterranean sapling just beginning to breach ground, touch night. The tree would have bark thick as buckles, a hollow trunk. It would grow to her height, dress in her shadow, a tree narrating her absence. In a month, when the tree braided out of the hole, born from no seed but my hands, I would water it.
* Fact: The Nationalists confiscated my grandmother’s land a second time. Watakushi, she said again and again. It is mine. It is mine. She claims her land in a language that’s not hers. She lines up her Is like a fence: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. The I doesn’t indicate a presence but an absence, the place where a body has been redacted from the sentence.
Story: Ama married a soldier, the only type of man who keeps his job forever. In return, she received a daily ration of rice. Her fields regrew as fingers and made a fist around the U.S. military base. The American soldiers taught her how to hunt communists, how to shoot a winter melon the size of a commie skull. The [ ], led by General [ ] [ ]-[ ], banned all languages but [ ]. This alphabet was banned too, meaning that this text does not exist in history. The soldiers broke glass bottles on the beach, cementing the shards along the shore to gouge the feet of invading commies. The radio said to prepare for an invasion at night, prepare for soldiers who come to eat your feet, and Ama said: What about the soldiers already here? What about the ones in my bed, the ones who fuck me into five daughters, the first one who sees only shadows, the second one I beat into bone, into something that floats?
Myth: If you said anything about General [ ] [ ]-[ ], the river tattled on you. The river was made of ears and started a rumor of snakes. The snakes slithered into the bodies of dumped prisoners, feasting on the brains and swallowing their memories. Now the snakes are the only ones who tell stories.
DAUGHTER
Birdbirth
When we arrived home, my mother unfolded Agong on the sofa while I visited my yard-holes and made sure Ama hadn’t emerged from one of them, hadn’t followed us back by swimming beneath the highway, bobbing her head out of the 口 to breathe. I walked through the yard, parting the darkness of the night like a pair of thighs. From the 口, something white poked out of the soil, bone-bright. When I plucked it out and held it up to the window, it was blank. It was the sheet of paper Ama had buried for me, saying I’d write back someday. I considered folding the sheet into a minnow and feeding it back to the 口, but instead I kept it, sliding it into my waistband. The paper molded to my belly, metal-hot. I had no words to write yet, but it didn’t feel right to bury something blank. Inside the house, my mother tucked Agong into our sofa, its cushions still smelling of Dayi’s sweat. She’d tried embroidering Bible verses onto them with silver thread but gave up halfway, each sentence left open like a body midsurgery. The word righteous was unraveling to its root.
My mother and I kneeled together beside Agong, turning his head to the side and opening his mouth to irrigate his drool, redirecting it into an ashtray. I wanted to say I never meant to hurt him. She cut a hole in his shirt so that it wouldn’t chafe against his burn wound, a steak-raw stripe the length of my hand. Dabbing the wound with spit and mud from the yard, my mother told me not to touch it. It glowed like plum meat, stripped of its skin, pus drying into sap. I wanted to say that my tail had outgrown me, grown crooked like the roots of Duck Uncle’s tree that time our sidewalk split open and scabbed. Its re
ach was beyond this body, this city.
When I tried to speak, my mouth felt full of bees. I didn’t know how to own what I’d done. My mother touched her knuckle to the back of my neck, told me to go away and sleep. She’d stay awake all night to watch him, to pad the sweat off his cheeks with her sleeves, to reel him in from dreams too deep. He reminded me of the neighborhood stray with a spotted face. It was incontinent, dragging a river of piss up the driveway.
That night I dreamed of Ama in the yard, feeding chicks out of her left hand. With her right hand, she practiced the width of the hens’ necks. She dug into the soil, tore out white carrots that glowed like rib bones. She sat all night in front of the TV the way my mother did, face scabbed in blue light, watching soap operas about women who married their husbands’ ghosts when they didn’t return from war. In one of the scenes, the wife doesn’t want to sleep with her ghost husband, so she tricks him by dressing a dead goat in her clothes, tucking the goat into her side of the bed. But the ghost husband isn’t tricked. He gets revenge by cleaving the goat open and sewing his wife into its body. When the wife-goat is slaughtered and spit-roasted for a feast, no one ever finds out who they are eating. I woke, wanting to know the ending, but there was no one in the room to tell it.
* * *
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The verb cleave has two meanings: to split from and stick to. Another doubling: When my mother says mother she means the body that gave birth to her and the one that tried to kill her.
In the kitchen, my mother’s cleaver was pinned above the sink like an earring, its shadow spanning the whole floor. I took it down, holding the wooden handle that still wore her hands’ heat. My mother said Americans waste money on sets of many knives, but we only needed one. A cleaver, she said, does the job of memory. It only knows how to multiply a thing. I asked if the cleaver felt sorry for what it hurt, and she said, There’s no use feeling guilt for what it was built to do.
* * *
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My brother farted close to Agong’s face, pulling down his pants and posing his butt cheeks next to Agong’s dreaming mouth. Sometimes Agong woke, skin shimmering in sores. Sometimes his nostrils trumpeted open, breathing it all in. I imagined that his body was full of my brother’s farts, and that one day he’d rise from the bed like a balloon we let go of, a balloon butting the moon aside to replace it.
We jarred Agong’s shit and brought it to our zhongyi, who looked at it under light and in the dark, who poked it with a straw and smelled it through one nostril and then the other, reading the odor out loud to us. The zhongyi combed it with a salad fork. We weren’t sure what he was looking for. Maybe death could be unburied from his body like a seed and be replanted in someone else. My brother and I spent hours killing him in our mind, rehearsing our grief early. We invented so many ways to kill him before he died of his own body. We knew he would be proud of us. With a plastic bag. With a deep fryer. With a blow dryer. With a tree branch. With a tire swing. With a rope and a pantry. We didn’t know how old he was, but we figured that was another way we could kill him: cutting him down like a tree to count his rings.
At the Chinese pharmacy in Milpitas, my mother asked for a powder that would remarry Agong’s mind to his memories. Instead, they gave her aicao and told her to bathe him in blackened water, summoning the soul back into his body. His soul is inside him, my mother said. It’s just that he doesn’t recognize it. At the back of the store, Agong was grinding a dried ginger root against his teeth, swatting away the sunlight. We paid for the ginger and left, and when Agong saw our reflections in the window, he spat at it. I flinched even though I knew it wasn’t really my face in the window, just the image it widowed. Twice a day, we spoon-fed Agong a mash of bananas and rice. He straddled the armrest of our sofa like a pony, simulating hoof-noises with his boots and neighing through his nose. A strand of spit was yo-yoing from his mouth, descending before he slurped it up again.
Instead of helping him remember, the aicao bath gave him diarrhea. We reached into the toilet with a pair of barbecue tongs, picking out fragments of bullets from his shit so that they wouldn’t bruise our pipes. My mother gave him vitamins that made his nipples shrivel and slough their black velvet. Sometimes the vitamins gave him earaches too, and for relief my mother plugged his ears with ice cubes. He’s crying out of his ears, I said, drying the sides of his neck.
In the morning before school, I heard my mother in the kitchen, grinding pills with her wooden bowl and pestle. I looked into the bowl and the powder inside was dust-fine, the air choking on chalk. She was sweating, arms flexing as she crushed the shards to sand. I asked her if she’d found a new vitamin to try, and my mother answered by grinding harder, the bowl buzzing in her hands.
While she bobbed the pestle up and down, I told Agong the story of the Monkey King, plucking out a strand of his ash-colored hair to demonstrate how the monkey had multiplied himself, each strand growing into a soldier. My mother overheard me and said I shouldn’t give him ideas. So I told him the other monkey myth, the one about my mother’s cousin. The cousin’s boyfriend gave her a monkey when she turned nineteen. He brought it to her in a bamboo cage with a rope bow-tied around it. My mother’s cousin said, I fuck this boy and he gives me a monkey? I’d rather he’d given me syphilis.
She gave the monkey away to a neighbor, who tied it in his tree and put a little bell around its neck. The neighborhood boys liked to come around and throw stones at it, pull it down out of the tree and kick it down the street. The monkey turned mean, peeing on your head or ejaculating onto your shoulders, yanking on your hair like a leash when you walked under its tree. It got so mean it jumped down on my mother one time, tried to skin her skull like a tangerine. Parting her hair with her fingers, my mother showed me a bald spot the size of a quarter where the monkey had hooked its claw.
Then one month, the monkey disappeared and Ama grew wounds all down her arms and cheeks, her chin skinned so bad that the flute of her jawbone was exposed. Ama freed the monkey? I asked, and my mother said, That’s not the end of the story. The monkey turned up drowned in the river, all battered up, its bones crushed into ellipses. Once an animal gets mean, Ama liked to say, there’s no way to make it good again. You kill what can’t be saved. All of her murders began as mercies.
I get it, I said to my mother. The moral is you can’t really save anything. My mother laughed and said listen, little anus, the story’s still singeing: The neighbor’s tree, the one that had once carried the monkey, burned down in a night. No one had seen anything or smelled any smoke, but one morning the tree had no torso. There wasn’t even a stump, just a socket in the ground that bled for a month. The same woman who did that, my mother said, threw us into the river. I said, Maybe she thought you were a fire. But I thought of what Ama had said: Maybe it was true that a mean thing could not be made good again. Maybe my tail had been corrupted into something that couldn’t be saved. I’d whipped it against Agong. Ama had walked me with it like a leash. I no longer knew how to hold it, and at night when it tried to cuddle against my leg, I swatted it away, orphaning it to the other side of the bed.
After grinding the powder, my mother squatted next to the sofa. She propped up Agong’s head with a pillow and tried opening and closing his mouth with her hands. He won’t swallow, she said. She said she’d tried everything: pinching his nose shut, sugaring the spoon, tickling his throat. Agong, I said. If you don’t swallow, your stomach will get so light it’ll float out of your body. You need to anchor it with something solid. He was listening. He swallowed.
I remembered the story of gegu: to cure your father by cutting your own flesh and feeding it to him. I glanced at my mother’s thighs, but they were the same size I remembered. That night I stayed awake to the soundtrack of my father’s voice saying thigh, saying knife, saying father.
When I was tired of counting the leaks in our ceiling, I slipped off of the mattress and walked to the pantry, where my mot
her kept her toes in the cookie tin. The lid popped from its socket soundlessly and I looked inside, knowing already what had been taken. The tin was empty, rinsed clean, my mouth mirrored back at me. I thought of my mother in the kitchen, grinding out powder for hours. The pestle multiplying her toe-bones. To give something a new shape, she’d said. You have to break it.
In the morning, Agong seemed familiar with himself, passing the mirror without spitting at his own face inside it. My mother gave him her hand mirror, introducing himself to himself, and Agong nodded. My mother pointed to herself: your daughter. Then at me: your daughter’s daughter. Agong agreed. He ate a frozen waffle with his fingers, the edges laced with ice. He asked if it was snowing outside and we explained it was ash from the wildfires up north. He wanted to go outside and catch ash in his mouth, but we said the ash was made of corpses, the air carrying bones on its tongue. Inside the house, he watched TV with the sound off, substituting the dialogue with his own memories: Once, I fished with my father. He taught me which ones to throw back: He said if it’s bigger than your dick, butcher it. If it’s not, give it back to the river.
But when the week ended and looped back, Agong repeated the stories with words in a dialect I’d never heard before. I tried to rearrange his words back into a narrative, but Agong spoke in a rhythm like swimming, dipping down and out of his own stories until I understood nothing. Once in a river I fished my father raw. He taught me butcher me. He tried to bite off his tongue until my mother held his jaw open and told him to stop, reciting a list of everything inside his body that was still his. Tongue. Bones. Blood. Throat. Mouth. Eyes. Ears. Anus. Neck. Intestines. When we ran out of things inside him, we repeated them all again in different dialects: This is your tongue. These are your teeth. They are not enemies.