I gave Sarah a new sweater and jeans, and the latest CD of her favorite sulky music. She hugged me and I almost cried to feel her arms tighten around my shoulders. I thought, Why haven't we been hugging all the time?
Nathan was barely present. His head was tilted towards Sarah and me, and I think I saw him smile once or twice. I don't know. I might have imagined it. But in my memory, he smiled.
The next day he was gone. I woke and wandered sleepily into his room to find his bed empty. The blanket lay across his bed in rumpled hills and valleys, but underneath, nothing stirred. I sucked my breath in hard, so hard it cut down the length of my throat like a knife. That first breath wasn't enough, though, and I kept gasping for air. Each time I did, the knife cut deeper.
I attacked the bed, scooped up armfuls of quilting and sheets. I think I howled a curse. I screamed, "Nathan! Nathan!" over and over. I threw off every blanket and then the mattress, the box springs. I would have ripped up the floorboards if I'd had the strength. I ran downstairs and looked in the living room, where sometimes he'd land after a fall in the past. He wasn't there. I ran down to the basement and searched through boxes full of discarded memories, but he was not there.
He was not there.
———·———
He was not there. Not anywhere in the house. Sarah finally found me in the kitchen, nibbling a Christmas cookie, one of those that have been cut into a shape. I was eating a Christmas tree trimmed with green frosting. She asked me what was the matter and I shook my head. She knelt beside me and said, "Mommy." I almost cried. She never called me that. It was always Mother. Never a sign of affection from that girl, but I am proud of her for that. In this way, she is protected.
I didn't know what to do, what the procedures were, so I took the bus to the hospital. I went to the ward where Nathan had had tests at one time. There was a nurse at the desk, scribbling on a pad. I said, "My son —
"He's doing well," she told me. I blinked. "You're Mrs. Murphy, right?" I nodded, wanting to be Mrs. Murphy instead of Mrs. Livingston right then. "You can go in and see him now," the nurse said. She pointed to the door behind me. I went in. There he was — Mrs. Murphy's son — sitting in a chair next to his bed, staring out the window. I looked where he was looking, but the window was filled with light. Light so bright, no one could look at it without going blind. I turned to him again and saw the floral pattern of the wallpaper behind him. I saw it through him.
———·———
Sarah and I did not eat much after the memorial service. She lost a lot of weight and I got a new job, cleaning rooms at the Bakersfield Inn. I bought her a new wardrobe as soon as I could, and took her to a dermatologist. She was so happy. She practically danced through the front door after school each day. We tried to put Nathan behind us as best we could, but it was difficult. While we ate supper together one evening, Sarah put her fork down on her plate and said, "He's still here. I can feel him. He isn't gone, Mother."
We both looked up at the ceiling for some reason, but there was nothing there.
I should have known she was right, though. She is a smart girl, smarter than I'd ever guessed. She brings home straight A's. When she said he was still here, I should have believed her.
Several nights after Sarah and I looked up at the ceiling, I heard someone knocking at my front door. It was very late, after midnight. I immediately suspected trouble, but I gathered my robe around me and went down to see who was there.
The knocking grew more insistent as I went downstairs. At first it had been a rapping, but now it became forceful, and the door shook a little in its frame. I grabbed at the collar of my robe, as if that could protect me.
I went to the picture window first, and pulled back the curtain a little. It was snowing outside, the flakes drifting in piles along the windowsill, collecting on the steps of my porch. Under the florescent street lamps, the snow in the front yard, and in my neighbors' yards, seemed to glow purplish-white under the dark sky. The window was cold. It gave off coldness as a fire will give off heat.
There was no one on my porch, but I still heard the knocking. I pulled back from the window and looked at the door again. It shook in its frame.
I dropped the curtain and went to the door. I opened it just a little, in case someone was out there and I needed to close it quickly. It didn't matter, though. There was no one. I swung the door wide and stepped outside.
The knocking had stopped as soon as I opened the door. Now I looked around, turning my head quickly one way, then the other, trying to see if any prankster shadows ran off, scurrying down the street, choking on their own laughter. I saw nothing. I looked down, puzzled, and saw the snow piling up on my porch steps, drifting onto the porch itself.
There were no footprints.
I stepped back inside and slammed the door. I locked it. I pressed my back against the door, and again the knocking started. The door bucked at my back, lifting under the blows.
"Stop it, Nathan," I whispered. "Please stop it." Sarah was at a friend's house, spending the night, and I was thankful she was not here right then. The knocking continued.
I ran upstairs and went into his room. I had tried not to go there since that Christmas morning, only to feed the fish and that was all. The bed still lay on the floor in a jumble, mattress and box springs thrown against opposite walls. The fish tank gurgled, its small light glowing in the dark room. The Siamese fighting fish floated inside, fanning its fins. I closed my eyes, opened them. The knocking would not stop.
I went over to the fish tank and peered inside. I pressed so close my head bumped against the glass. The fish must have felt my bump against the aquarium was an attack, though, because suddenly it turned on me, a bloated red tumor, and swam at me, fins flying.
I don't know what came over me, sir, but I couldn't help myself. I grew angry too. I couldn't help it. Perhaps my own face grew bloated and red as well. As the fish charged, I grabbed hold of the edge of the tank and pushed it onto the floor. Glass shattered. Water poured out, and the fish with it. It flipped and flopped on the hardwood floor, next to the diver figurine that had landed nearby.
Sometime during all of this, the knocking had stopped.
———·———
He is not dead, as I told you. I want you to say that in your book. That night was only the first in a series of visitations. Sarah has been here to witness several others since. He knocks on the door. He turns on the shower. Sometimes he will even cook us a meal. But his favorite is the knocking. He continues to return to that.
The Widow Parkinson had been right at one time. I suspect that, before she opened her door to the Mourners, her husband had been visiting her as well. But she's denied what I've come to know, down in my bones, deeper even. Sometimes you don't see things for what they are until they reach a vanishing point.
But that was the widow's choice. This is mine. Right now, no matter what anyone tells me, I know Nathan is here. He is here, sir, in this house, in these rooms, breathing along with us. He is entirely alive.
If you're very quiet, you may be able to hear him. It's him you should be talking to anyway.
Listen closely.
I think he has a lot to say.
KEN LIU
Ken Liu (born 1976) is a Chinese-American science-fiction writer, poet, lawyer and computer programmer. His short stories have appeared in F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and other magazines, as well as several anthologies, including the Year's Best SF. He is also a translator of science fiction and literary stories from Chinese into English.
His short story "The Paper Menagerie" is the first work of fiction, of any length, to have swept the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. His short story, "Mono no aware" won the 2013 Hugo, and his novella "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" was also nominated for a Hugo.
The Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu
One of my earliest memories starts with me sobbing. I refused to be soothed no matter what Mom and Dad tried.
Dad gave up and left the bedroom, but Mom took me into the kitchen and sat me down at the breakfast table.
“Kan, kan,” she said, as she pulled a sheet of wrapping paper from on top of the fridge. For years, Mom carefully sliced open the wrappings around Christmas gifts and saved them on top of the fridge in a thick stack.
She set the paper down, plain side facing up, and began to fold it. I stopped crying and watched her, curious.
She turned the paper over and folded it again. She pleated, packed, tucked, rolled, and twisted until the paper disappeared between her cupped hands. Then she lifted the folded-up paper packet to her mouth and blew into it, like a balloon.
“Kan,” she said. “Laohu.” She put her hands down on the table and let go.
A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together. The skin of the tiger was the pattern on the wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green Christmas trees.
I reached out to Mom’s creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. “Rawrr-sa,” it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers.
I laughed, startled, and stroked its back with an index finger. The paper tiger vibrated under my finger, purring.
“Zhe jiao zhezhi,” Mom said. This is called origami.
I didn’t know this at the time, but Mom’s kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.
#
Dad had picked Mom out of a catalog.
One time, when I was in high school, I asked Dad about the details. He was trying to get me to speak to Mom again.
He had signed up for the introduction service back in the spring of 1973. Flipping through the pages steadily, he had spent no more than a few seconds on each page until he saw the picture of Mom.
I’ve never seen this picture. Dad described it: Mom was sitting in a chair, her side to the camera, wearing a tight green silk cheongsam. Her head was turned to the camera so that her long black hair was draped artfully over her chest and shoulder. She looked out at him with the eyes of a calm child.
“That was the last page of the catalog I saw,” he said.
The catalog said she was eighteen, loved to dance, and spoke good English because she was from Hong Kong. None of these facts turned out to be true.
He wrote to her, and the company passed their messages back and forth. Finally, he flew to Hong Kong to meet her.
“The people at the company had been writing her responses. She didn’t know any English other than ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye.’”
What kind of woman puts herself into a catalog so that she can be bought? The high school me thought I knew so much about everything. Contempt felt good, like wine.
Instead of storming into the office to demand his money back, he paid a waitress at the hotel restaurant to translate for them.
“She would look at me, her eyes halfway between scared and hopeful, while I spoke. And when the girl began translating what I said, she’d start to smile slowly.”
He flew back to Connecticut and began to apply for the papers for her to come to him. I was born a year later, in the Year of the Tiger.
#
At my request, Mom also made a goat, a deer, and a water buffalo out of wrapping paper. They would run around the living room while Laohu chased after them, growling. When he caught them he would press down until the air went out of them and they became just flat, folded-up pieces of paper. I would then have to blow into them to re-inflate them so they could run around some more.
Sometimes, the animals got into trouble. Once, the water buffalo jumped into a dish of soy sauce on the table at dinner. (He wanted to wallow, like a real water buffalo.) I picked him out quickly but the capillary action had already pulled the dark liquid high up into his legs. The sauce-softened legs would not hold him up, and he collapsed onto the table. I dried him out in the sun, but his legs became crooked after that, and he ran around with a limp. Mom eventually wrapped his legs in saran wrap so that he could wallow to his heart’s content (just not in soy sauce).
Also, Laohu liked to pounce at sparrows when he and I played in the backyard. But one time, a cornered bird struck back in desperation and tore his ear. He whimpered and winced as I held him and Mom patched his ear together with tape. He avoided birds after that.
And then one day, I saw a TV documentary about sharks and asked Mom for one of my own. She made the shark, but he flapped about on the table unhappily. I filled the sink with water, and put him in. He swam around and around happily. However, after a while he became soggy and translucent, and slowly sank to the bottom, the folds coming undone. I reached in to rescue him, and all I ended up with was a wet piece of paper.
Laohu put his front paws together at the edge of the sink and rested his head on them. Ears drooping, he made a low growl in his throat that made me feel guilty.
Mom made a new shark for me, this time out of tin foil. The shark lived happily in a large goldfish bowl. Laohu and I liked to sit next to the bowl to watch the tin foil shark chasing the goldfish, Laohu sticking his face up against the bowl on the other side so that I saw his eyes, magnified to the size of coffee cups, staring at me from across the bowl.
#
When I was ten, we moved to a new house across town. Two of the women neighbors came by to welcome us. Dad served them drinks and then apologized for having to run off to the utility company to straighten out the prior owner’s bills. “Make yourselves at home. My wife doesn’t speak much English, so don’t think she’s being rude for not talking to you.”
While I read in the dining room, Mom unpacked in the kitchen. The neighbors conversed in the living room, not trying to be particularly quiet.
“He seems like a normal enough man. Why did he do that?”
“Something about the mixing never seems right. The child looks unfinished. Slanty eyes, white face. A little monster.”
“Do you think he can speak English?”
The women hushed. After a while they came into the dining room.
“Hello there! What’s your name?”
“Jack,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound very Chinesey.”
Mom came into the dining room then. She smiled at the women. The three of them stood in a triangle around me, smiling and nodding at each other, with nothing to say, until Dad came back.
#
Mark, one of the neighborhood boys, came over with his Star Wars action figures. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber lit up and he could swing his arms and say, in a tinny voice, “Use the Force!” I didn’t think the figure looked much like the real Obi-Wan at all.
Together, we watched him repeat this performance five times on the coffee table. “Can he do anything else?” I asked.
Mark was annoyed by my question. “Look at all the details,” he said.
I looked at the details. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say.
Mark was disappointed by my response. “Show me your toys.”
I didn’t have any toys except my paper menagerie. I brought Laohu out from my bedroom. By then he was very worn, patched all over with tape and glue, evidence of the years of repairs Mom and I had done on him. He was no longer as nimble and sure-footed as before. I sat him down on the coffee table. I could hear the skittering steps of the other animals behind in the hallway, timidly peeking into the living room.
“Xiao laohu,” I said, and stopped. I switched to English. “This is Tiger.” Cautiously, Laohu strode up and purred at Mark, sniffing his hands.
Mark examined the Christmas-wrap pattern of Laohu’s skin. “That doesn’t look like a tiger at all. Your Mom makes toys for you from trash?”
I had never thought of Laohu as trash. But looking at him now, he was really just a piece of wrapping paper.
Mark pushed Obi-Wan’s head again. The lightsaber flashed; he moved his arms up and down. “Use the Force!”
Laohu tu
rned and pounced, knocking the plastic figure off the table. It hit the floor and broke, and Obi-Wan’s head rolled under the couch. “Rawwww,” Laohu laughed. I joined him.
Mark punched me, hard. “This was very expensive! You can’t even find it in the stores now. It probably cost more than what your dad paid for your mom!”
I stumbled and fell to the floor. Laohu growled and leapt at Mark’s face.
Mark screamed, more out of fear and surprise than pain. Laohu was only made of paper, after all.
Mark grabbed Laohu and his snarl was choked off as Mark crumpled him in his hand and tore him in half. He balled up the two pieces of paper and threw them at me. “Here’s your stupid cheap Chinese garbage.”
After Mark left, I spent a long time trying, without success, to tape together the pieces, smooth out the paper, and follow the creases to refold Laohu. Slowly, the other animals came into the living room and gathered around us, me and the torn wrapping paper that used to be Laohu.
#
My fight with Mark didn’t end there. Mark was popular at school. I never want to think again about the two weeks that followed.
I came home that Friday at the end of the two weeks. “Xuexiao hao ma?” Mom asked. I said nothing and went to the bathroom. I looked into the mirror. I look nothing like her, nothing.
At dinner I asked Dad, “Do I have a chink face?”
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 421