The computer beeps harshly at me and I twitch in my chair, almost falling out it. I understand the computer’s language of beeps. My algorithms found Wenton. There is a 98.4% probability (which is a near statistical certainty) that he is holed up in one of the floating ships in Old Bay. All I have to do, all I’m supposed to do is make a few keystrokes, and inform the Army of the White of my findings. It’s all there. Another job well done. Another to be assigned shortly thereafter.
I grab two fistfuls of my own graying, curly hair and I let the computer beep at me.
* * *
Mr. C_____ guides his gondola between the abandoned ships of Old Bay. Mr. C____ has never been on a gondola before.
I am Mr. C____. I guide my gondola between the abandoned ships of Old Bay. I have never been on a gondola before. I am doing surprisingly well, I think, with the standing and pushing my boat along with the long oar. My legs feel like rubber, a headache bores greedily into the inner fathoms of my skull, and I’ve thrown up twice, but I am doing well.
The rusting ghost ships of the city’s fabled merchant marine past hulk above me, blotting out all but a thin strip of the night sky. The gently lapping water echoes off their bloated tin stomachs. Dowsing paths between the ships becomes increasingly treacherous until, finally, the mass of ships funnels my gondola into the green ship’s hull.
There are rats thrashing around in the dark water, swimming away from the ship, away from me, as though they are fleeing. But they are not fleeing, are they? No, they are not. They are amassing for an assault on the city. I don’t have much time.
Climbing the ship’s moored, emergency ladder with its thin rungs and slicked hand holds proves exceedingly difficult, a physical task that I fear is well beyond me. But I climb anyway, awkwardly clutching to the umbrella. My mind desperately reaches for a memory, an experience or a relationship from which to draw strength, and finds only an empty space that perhaps was once filled with something other than regret. My will to fill that empty space with a new memory of my own making is enough for now.
I clang and clatter onto the ship’s wide deck, and into light. Gusting wind pushes and prods at my unsteady body, but the sky has cleared and a deep, full moon shines patiently above me. My head buzzes with pain. I don’t care. I am Mr. C____ and I have left my desk in the Great Hall and I have managed to transport myself onto the green ship in the middle of Old Bay. I am here. I am.
The surrounding ships, those floating headstones, are swarmed by thousands of rats as they head to the city. There is a handheld device in my pocket. I cup my hand gently around it and feel its battery-powered warmth. I can signal in the Army of the White at anytime.
I stumble across the deck toward the main cabin. The doorway is a shadow. The cabin door is missing, gone. In the doorway there is a shadow inside the shadow. The shadow is the Large Man. It is Wenton. He is waiting for me.
“Hello, Wenton. I am Mr. C____ and I insist that you come back to city with me to face the consequences of your heinous crimes.”
The Large Man steps out of the cabin, onto the deck, and into the moonlight. He towers over me. He is larger than the problems that can never be solved. He wears the familiar fedora and trench coat. His face, having been further ravaged by acromalgy, is almost unrecognizable; a jigsaw puzzle that hasn’t been put together correctly. His chin juts further than the prow of the ship, cheekbones made of marble, and his eyes are black dots, and uneven. I mean to say his black dot eyes are not level and they pock his face below a brow as thick as a park bench. Wenton walks like a mountain might. His legs are disjointed, unwieldy masses that are lifted under obvious and considerable strain then dropped and allowed to collide cacophonically with the deck.
I slowly back away and he follows. His hands are ominously in his pockets.
I point my umbrella tip at his face. “Don’t come any further, Wenton,” I scream, louder than I intend, and my head nearly splits in two from the pain. “I know you’ve had a horrible go of it, believe me, I understand. I understand your suffering and your fears and your disappointments. The disappointments are worse than the fears, aren’t they?” I stammer, and pause, knowing that I’m speaking only in vague platitudes and sentiments, but I believe in the sentiments, and I do believe I’m getting through to him, that he understands me, that someone understands me. “I am not so different from you, Wenton. I too yearn for something more. A new reality, yes? I want to be remade, but by my own hand, my own remaking. It’s what this is all about, isn’t it? For the first time, I’ve figured that much out on my own.”
Wenton sways in the wind and doesn’t say anything. I watch his hands. My free hand goes to my pocket as well, and the handheld.
“Come on, my good man, let’s go back to the city. We can talk more if you’d like. Have a coffee. Perhaps some broth. We could do that. You could tell me about your life. I’d love to hear everything about that, actually. I won’t judge you. I’ll listen. Forget about the rats and what they want and just come with me.”
At the word “rats,” the Large Man reanimates and steps closer to me. He says, “You don’t know anything.” The voice is a whisper, but one made out of a thousand other whispers. It’s not an emotional retort, but a cold statement of fact. It’s this coldness that coalesces with the disjointed legs and mismatched face that makes me realize what has happened to Wenton.
I strike the advancing Large Man in the head with my umbrella. The fedora tumbles off his head and pieces of his scalp and face slide off and fall to the deck in strips and chunks. Underneath the skein of what used to be Wenton is a writhing mass of rats. Exposed, the rats themselves begin to break rank and fall to the deck. The Large Man melts away, sloughing bit by bit and rat by rat.
I frantically pull out my handheld, open the emergency two-way line—although I don’t know if anyone is listening to me—and shout, “This is Mr. C____. It’s the rats! The Large Man is made out of rats!”
One rat runs across the deck and bumps against my foot, but it does not attack. It just drops to its side. It appears to be dead. A dead rat. Dead like the rat I’d encountered in the gutter in front of the Great Hall; that other dead rat that was the source of my biased assumption, the inspiration of my intuition, the fuel behind my adventure. This dead rat that was alive only moments ago is desiccated and its eye sockets are empty, but now, I look more closely at it and its skin boils, its dead skin boils as though there are thousands of other rats contained within the dead rat, and those other rats are bursting and straining for final release.
Instead, black and madly twitching ants pour out of the dead rat, which deflates as quickly as the Large Man did. The deck quickly turns black as countless ants stream out of all the rats’ bodies, forming a billowing storm cloud that converges on me. Ants inside of rats inside of Wenton…
I want to run away and jump off the deck and hopefully into the water and not crashing into the gondola even though I do not know how to swim. Despite the approaching horror or maybe because of it, I do not seem capable of running. Particularly now with my legs more than ankle deep in an ever-growing ant swarm.
I never considered the ants. Who would ever consider an ant?
* * *
Mr. C____ stands in situ before the members of the Consortium, as is required by Parliamentary Procedure. He is dressed in black waits to be addressed.
We are Mr. C____. We stand in situ before the members of the Consortium, as is required by Parliamentary Procedure. We are dressed in black and wait to be addressed.
Mr. C____ once stood before the Consortium many years ago, during his Initiation, when his memories of a previous life of intolerable suffering and sadness were wiped away, when he was first remade. We have remade him again. He will be our legend, forever remembered for his part in the beginning, the beginning of our greatest triumph.
The members of the ill-fated Consortium stand behind a marble white desk that spans the cavernous length of Parliament. The decreased membership still clings to their black, s
ilk robes and hoods obscuring their identities, but we know who and what they are.
“Problem Solver, now that the war with the rats finally nears the end, we again have a problem that needs solving.” We cannot tell which member of the Consortium is speaking. It does not matter.
We who are Mr. C____ do not say “At your service,” as is required by Parliamentary Procedure. We begin with the Great Swarm that issues from Mr. C____’s mouth.
* * *
Paul Tremblay is the author of novels The Little Sleep, No Sleep Till Wonderland, Swallowing a Donkey's Eye, Floating Boy and The Girl Who Couldn't Fly (as P. T. Jones with co-author Stephen Graham Jones), and the forthcoming A Head Full of Ghosts (William Morrow). His short fiction and essay have appeared in The Los Angeles Times and numerous Year's Best anthologies. He lives just outside of Boston, and when he's not writing about narcoleptic private detectives, girls with two heads, or teens who float, he helps administrate the Shirley Jackson Awards. You can find him online at paultremblay.net.
Unfilial Child
Laurie Tom
A-Nging answered the door, shuffling aside like an old hen to allow June inside. She was stooped with age that belied her dark hair and smooth face. But one only needed to look at A-Nging’s eyes to get a sense of the years she had seen. June did not like to meet them.
“I heard your neighbors saying something about a big bird,” said June, setting a pink box full of dim sum on the counter of her grandmother’s kitchen. “Did one of the eagles escape the zoo?”
She remembered the old lady with her arms spread wide to show its size, and could not imagine anything that large living in Chinatown. Sometimes seagulls flew in from the coast, drawn by food, but even the largest seagull wouldn’t have gotten that much notice. An eagle at least made for a better story, and the zoo was only a few miles away.
“If you had paid more attention learning Chinese as a child, you would know,” said A-Nging.
June had heard the word gui in the conversation, which she understood as “ghost,” but there were so many homonyms in Chinese that it was not hard to confuse one word for another without enough context. Context made the difference between talking about a horse, the ocean, or one’s mother.
“Nobody teaches Hoisan,” said June. “It’s the hick Chinese.”
A-Nging frowned and June pretended not to notice. She mostly remembered growing up and the other Chinese kids at her school declaring that she must not speak Chinese because she did not know Mandarin. She could not manage even basic words. The dialects were too different.
“Anyway, I thought you would be interested,” said June, “since you like birds so much.”
The apartment in the senior citizen center was not that large; only a single bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen barely big enough for two in stand inside. But what wall space her grandmother had chosen to decorate was covered with images of birds. She had a hanging scroll of cranes and a framed print of pheasants in the living room, and a painting of birds with the heads of women in the bedroom above her bed.
From the bedroom came an unusual cry; half laughter, half demand. A baby.
“I’m watching a granddaughter for one of the neighbors,” said A-Nging. “She must have just woken up. Go ahead and make yourself comfortable and I’ll be right back.”
June opened the refrigerator and put the pink box of dim sum inside that she knew A-Nging would never thank her for, but would eat anyway. At least she would have one less thing to complain about. June wasn’t the granddaughter who visited empty-handed.
She wondered how her dad had ever managed.
June could see his portrait at age eighteen, sitting on the shelf above the TV. The color was faded, and it was his graduation day. Kiang had been A-Nging’s only child. She had more pictures of him, but this was the one she was most proud of. It was also the most recent.
Though A-Nging had told her of her parents, June had never known them. Of her mother she had nothing at all, not even a photo. A-Nging had raised her and for as long as she could remember, A-Nging was the only family she’d known.
The baby uttered cranky cries, but they were low, and she could hear A-Nging coo to her in soft Chinese. June wondered if her grandmother was trying to find the next best thing in the absence of any younger grandchildren of her own. She didn’t push June to get married, but it was impossible to ignore her stories about all the wonderful grandchildren her neighbors had.
June looked out the window to the street below. A-Nging had a good view of Broadway, the main thoroughfare through Chinatown, and there was the empty shell of a new building across the street. The architecture was sleek and modern. Not like the old Chinatown she had seen as a child, not like the Chinatown A-Nging had moved to when June decided she no longer wanted to live at home.
Chinatown should look Chinese, not like the latest development in downtown L.A.
The baby warbled and June noticed a large black feather on the window sill. It reminded her of when she and A-Nging had lived in a different apartment miles away in Gardena. As a child she would often find feathers in the yard by their apartment building. Black and white and very large. A-Nging would tell her that so much could be learned about a bird by the feathers it shed, whether it was a water bird, a songbird, or a hunting bird.
“She’s a good girl,” said A-Nging, returning to the living room. She had a baby in her arms that might have been six to eight months old. June was not good at guessing baby ages. Most of her friends were still single.
June smiled politely and waved at the girl. “Hello.”
The girl eyed her hand and then turned back to A-Nging. She twisted further and reached.
“Oh, I think she sees something she wants.” A-Nging laughed and June wondered if that was what it had been like when she was that age, when she was just a child with no expectations of her.
Good children grew up to be doctors and lawyers. They didn’t become case workers for the government, poking their noses into other people’s private business.
“I can come back another time,” said June.
A-Nging picked up a photo from the shelf and held it in front of the baby, who reached for it with an eager hand. “That’s your Auntie June,” said A-Nging. “Do you like that picture? Auntie June was only six years old then.”
June knew the picture. She had been stuffed into a frilly red dress she hadn’t liked and wore a dainty child’s purse she promptly lost the next time she had to wear it. Still, she was smiling. A-Nging had promised her ice cream if she was a good girl. It would have been just another photo of her as a kid, except that peeking out from inside the purse was a small plush owl.
For as much as her grandmother pushed her towards birds, the only ones she had liked were owls. She liked their faces, how they could turn their heads, their expressive ear tufts, but A-Nging found them disgusting. “Unfilial bird,” she said upon discovering June’s toy, and she told her an old tale of how the young owls devoured their parents in order fly.
June didn’t care. That plush owl had survived five attempts at being thrown out before her grandmother finally succeeded. And now it was forever immortalized as a tiny face peering out from a purse in a childhood photograph.
“It’s not too late for you,” said A-Nging.
And it took a moment before June realized her grandmother was speaking to her again.
“I don’t have a husband, much less a boyfriend yet,” said June. “I’m not getting pregnant any time soon.”
“Aren’t you always telling me how there are so many children you see at your work who need families?”
“Woah. Aren’t you the one that tells me I shouldn’t be prying into other people’s families?”
“If they want the kids you should not, but if they don’t…” A-Nging shrugged. “There are unwanted children in any country.”
“I…wasn’t really thinking of adopting.”
Truthfully, June hadn’t even thought of parenthood, figuring that she would w
ork on the dating end of things first, and after that last blow-up with the guy from Finland she thought she might need a break from even that.
“I always thought of you as my daughter,” said A-Nging, setting the photo back on the shelf. “But I never understood why you only liked owls.”
* * *
When June was young Chinatown was a magic place where nearly everyone looked like her. It was where A-Nging would take her on Sundays to eat dim sum and she would gorge on egg tarts and steamed rice cakes. She could not speak Hoisan very well, but she knew enough to ask for an-pak and flut-gaw. And then if she was a good girl she would get a pack of flaky melon cakes to take home.
Now she just thought about what an incredible pain it was to come here with a car. She parked up on College Street to avoid having to pay for all day parking at one of the lots and walked down the steep hill to Broadway, carrying a bag of oranges with her. Oranges were lucky. They should be a good gift for a visit.
Chinatown’s heyday was decades ago. By the time June was born it was already in decline as the newer Chinese immigrants moved out to the San Gabriel Valley and the American born disappeared into the suburbs. June had tried getting A-Nging to move out to Alhambra near her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. A-Nging only spoke Hoisan, and the San Gabriel Valley was overwhelmingly Mandarin. At least in Chinatown many of its longtime inhabitants still spoke the tongue of the Four Counties.
Streets of Shadows Page 12