by Bogi Takács
“Yes, or gone morning, already, maybe.”
“How long were you here?”
“All night.” She looked at me, her face puzzled. I blushed, and tugged layers back over myself. As soon as I broke skin contact, my stars faded away. “You didn’t come out at sundown, so I came looking…and you were so dark and cold, I hope I did the right thing.”
“How? How are you here? How did you stay?”
“I-I don’t know?”
“Thank you,” she said, and covered my hand with hers. Shadows swirled, and despite myself I shuddered as a chill swept up my arm. But as her hand moved, tiny stars bloomed and closed in its wake. “I’ve never had stars, before,” she said, sounding shy. “And nobody’s ever—gone into the night with me. Like that. Thank you.”
She made tea, and I laid a fire, and we warmed up slowly in the weak winter sun.
I stayed with her the next few nights of darkened moon, with a hot water bottle and post-holiday-sale electric blanket for backup. She slept the night through easily. Always, by morning, my touch was dawn-lit. “I don’t know,” she said. “My aspect has never infiltrated somebody else before; I don’t think it’s supposed to work like that.”
“Who knows? You are a mystery.”
“Though nobody ever—nobody else ever tried.”
“I’ll try everything once, and probably twice, in case the first time was a fluke. You know me.”
“I do. And I’m glad.”
When the next new moon came, she asked for me. It would be an easier one—the days were slowly lengthening, after all, fraction by fraction. I held her, and we were a comfort to each other. A shy one, a quiet one, and admittedly a somewhat dark and chilly one, but a comfort, nonetheless. The cold and my bones grew no friendlier with each other, but kindling stars in my skin seemed to give me a buffer, a little. Or maybe it was just a placebo effect, helped along by its own beauty and that basic human need for touch—either way, it helped. The next moon I volunteered, starting from the waning quarter, and I stayed.
She kissed me for the first time in March, at the equinox. I had asked her if the night she saw—or felt, or showed, I wasn’t sure of the word—with her aspect was always the present night, that current night. She thought it over for a moment.
“I think I can find a night-memory instead? I’ve never tried. Mostly people don’t see them on purpose. Should I try to show you?”
“Sure. How about a nice summer one, maybe? Mild and warm.” I was jesting, somewhat.
“All right. I know one that…okay. Ready?” and she leaned over, and in one motion, cupped my cheek and kissed my mouth.
Cold burst on my lips, but not the burning ache of winter-dark; this was a summery cool, just starting to crisp up into autumn, damp and tingling. I recognized the night that stretched across the living room—I’d seen it here, just five months prior. The cobalt sky, the light-limned horizon, the perfect dome of a clear September twilight.
I melted into her kiss—strange, to kiss someone with my eyes wide open, but she opened hers, too, as she felt me lean in, lips parting. I saw her eyes smile, dancing, and then widen in surprise: all across the formless, deep-sea night above us, the stars were coming out.
Her Sacred Spirit Soars
• S. Qiouyi Lu •
鶼鶼 chien1chien1 (Wade–Giles), kimkim (Cantonese Standard)
lit. a pair of interdependent mythical birds, each having one eye and one wing
fig. an inseparable couple
Bodies pressed together, we soar over the mountains of Guilin and come to a stop on a verdant peak. We fold our wings together, the iridescent feathertips of my wing resting over yours. You bear our weight on your leg; when you tire, I bear our weight on mine. We work our two eyes together.
The river below glitters with a million shades of sunset; small boats drift across its surface, marbling those resplendent colors. A zephyr rustles through the trees and whips up the scents of all the flora and fauna around us. We take flight again, our wings perfectly synchronized, and glide over the water.
The little boats scatter, making way for a larger ship that emerges from around the bend. The sight of this ship feels wrong, a gash in the landscape—whereas the other boats are small bamboo rafts lashed together with hemp rope, this ship is a hulking thing, sleek and angular against the rolling curves of the mountains. It smells of fire, but not a wood fire. Something older, dragged up from the earth, acrid and wrong against the petrichor of the mountains.
One shout, followed by another. Humans burrow up from within the boat; they unlatch a mechanism and aim it at us. We climb higher, but it’s too late—pow! A long, low whoosh comes up behind us, and knotted rope entangles us, drags us down from the heavens.
We thrash our wings, kick our legs, but the net holds on tight. We are large among birds, but small among humans. They crowd around us, block out the sunlight, and enclose us in a box. Our hearts flutter together, beating fast, faster, staccatos of panic in our chests. The gaps between the slats offer us the tiniest room to breathe. We crane our necks to see out, but they’ve draped a black cloth over our crate, hiding us from the world.
We have no sense of time in here. Sometimes, when they remove the cloth, a hint of sunlight streams through; other times, the room is dark. The only constant is the rocking of waves beneath us. They feed us half-spoiled fish scraps and we gobble them down, but it’s never enough. We tremble against each other.
As the days pass, we wane together. Anxious, we mutilate our bodies; we’ve plucked out many of our feathers, the glittering emerald and scarlet strewn about in our crate, feather-threads rumpled askew. Only the pale color of ginkgo trunks stripped bare remains on our chests.
When we finally reach land again and the humans take us out of the ship, the smell of the ocean remains the same as that of the ocean back home, but we only recognize half of the stars in the sky. They’ve shifted and rotated, resting in a different place against the sea-black of night. The humans take us somewhere where there aren’t any trees, transfer us from the crate to a cage. We squawk, our voices hoarse; they rattle our cage, squawk back, and we quiet down.
Their voices echo off the walls and create a forest of chatter that we can’t understand. I bury my head into your neck, close my eye, and we’re left with just your half of the room. You cock your head and peer at a small group of humans in conversation.
They feed us better fish here. There’s no river inside, but the brightness of all the metal fixtures reminds us of water anyway. One day, when the humans let us out of the cage to fly around in a large room, we mistake a shining table for a puddle. We come to a stop on its surface, expecting our feet to sink into cool water and mud. But while the tabletop is cold, it does not yield.
Something aches within us.
The humans seem excited the next time they remove the cloth draped over our cage. They murmur among themselves as they take us to a room we’ve never been in before. They lay us on our back; we struggle against them, clawing at them, thrashing our wings, but still they clamp down on our legs and necks, strap our wings to our bodies. They retreat. We can still see their shapes around us, but there’s something dividing them from us.
Buzzing, louder than a million cicadas screeching together, fills our ears. Leagues of lightning flash, arcing purple-bright over our bodies.
The lightning strikes and tears us apart.
The world goes white.
I wake up alone.
I can bear the weight of two kim, but not of one. I struggle to stand, my wing weighing me down; I balance myself only for a moment before tumbling. I reach out for you, but I can’t find you anywhere—you’re not by my side, nor do I feel your presence in any other way. I want to crash myself into the cage, throw myself around until I can get out and find you, fill this gaping hole in my heart, but my one wing doesn’t cooperate without yours, and my one eye can only see half of what we saw together, and my one leg keeps giving way without your weight to balance us.
You
can’t be dead. I can’t be alive. A single kim doesn’t make sense—the humans separated us somehow, but why did I survive? Did I not love you enough?
I inch myself over to the door. I struggle to stand, gather my energy, then throw all my weight into my inevitable fall, hoping that somehow, somehow, I can break past this lock.
I crash into the cage until my entire being bleeds.
(Except, without you, I am not entire at all.)
They take me to another room. I glower at them, but my heart hurts, I haven’t eaten, and I’m too weak without you to resist. A young human lies on an angled table, eyes closed. Wires cling all over to the human’s body like leeches; the human breathes, but barely. I sense little vitality. The humans cover me with leech-wires too, all the while braying amongst themselves.
Lightning flashes and the sight of it again shakes me out of my melancholy, hurls me into a panic; I close my eye and flutter my wing—except I can’t move my wing, not anymore.
Everything’s whirling and I’m caught in a typhoon, ripped from my body, every thought needle-sharp as it draws across my mind, everything a thousand fires and flashes. I ground myself somewhere else, but the entire landscape shifts. My body feels different. Smells grow and diminish; I hear so much more, and the range of noise overwhelms me. I open my eye—my eyes—and find I can only see what’s before me. So many colors have disappeared. I have to turn my head—I can turn my head—to see anything else.
A lump of beige dappled with bright green and scarlet and black lies still on the table beside me, and I think: A bird. I am a bird; I was a bird, but the bird is dead and—
And I’m still here. I’m still alive. I am no longer the bird; I am this wingless thing, this four-limbed thing, this human. Somewhere in my memories lies the sensation of flying through the sky, but also visions of other worlds: tall buildings, automobiles that smell just like that ship—diesel, my mind supplies, that smell is burning diesel. From somewhere within bubbles up a word: Meisun. A name. My name.
These memories aren’t mine, and yet they are mine. They’re distant though, so distant, and recalling them is like trying to grasp the shape of pebbles on the bottom of a murky pond.
“You’re conscious,” someone says. Before, their words were just sounds, but now I recognize them and understand them.
Or maybe I’ve always understood them.
“Yes.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m—” I hesitate. I’m ready to answer, but I’m not ready to answer. A flurry of memories whips up; I try to catch them one by one, but suddenly I want to retch, and instead I shake my head and let everything settle back down. “I don’t know.”
“Hmm.”
As the person before me takes notes, I steal glances back to the bird body. I know it’s me, but I also know that it can’t possibly be me.
“Where is the other bird?”
“Other bird?”
I try to tell this person your name, but kim don’t have names. Why does the emptiness where your name should be hurt so much? I swallow and nod at the bird body.
“You separated us into two. That one is—was—me. Where is the other one?”
“Oh. It died after we severed the bond. We’ve preserved the specimen. This one will also be preserved.”
My head spins; I raise a hand up to steady myself. Something glints: a bracelet circles my wrist, and the letters stamped into it read REVIVAL. When they catch me looking at the bracelet, one of them speaks up.
“Your identification. We’ll continue to monitor you, and this just shows that you’re part of our project.”
My stomach churns. This thing is a mockery of a jade bangle. It’s silver and dead, nothing like the beautiful greens and browns that I dreamed would encircle my wrist, if only I had the money to purchase a piece. The light flashes off the bracelet again—in my mind’s eye, I’m soaring, and I see water gleaming with sunlight.
I furrow my brow.
When have I ever had a need for anything like a jade bangle, or even the right kind of limb to wear one?
As they keep me here, I recall more about myself and the world: It’s 1949. We’re close to San Francisco, in Berkeley. I’ve been in California for four years now. Days bleed together, all of them the same: the researchers take my vitals and ask me to recount my memories. Each one is a double-exposure, ghosts overlaid on ghosts; some days, it’s all I can do to shake my head and say that I can’t speak any more.
Gradually, though, like water wearing down stone, the double visions begin to fade, and I can filter them more easily. My memories start to congeal, bit by bit. When I get to the point where I can recount complete narratives, the researchers breathe out a sigh of relief and prepare me for a meeting that they tell me is very important.
Representatives from the NIH come to tour the facility. Dr. Ackerman, who’s worked with me the most, explains to me that “NIH” stands for “National Institute of Health” and that they’re the ones who fund their research. He’s going to need me to speak to them later. I nod.
After Dr. Ackerman comes back from brunch with the representatives, he guides me from my room to a meeting room. I’m seated in a stiff, high-backed chair in the front; Dr. Ackerman stands beside me. The low, warm hum of a slide projector fills my ears. He drones on and on; I don’t fully understand what he’s saying, even if I do understand most of the words he’s using.
“…electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, is the last option for treatment-resistant mental illnesses, but retrograde amnesia is still a common adverse side effect…kimkim, or Oriental Lovebirds, are two individual birds who have fused into one; they are part of the mythology of the celestials, but they are indeed real, and even their feathers have potent medicinal uses…energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but only transformed…as we’ve shown in this first phase, it is indeed possible to reverse the bond between the two birds and store that energy in cells….”
He switches slides between his words, each click punctuating the rapt silence. The panel of unfamiliar faces before me nods and scribbles in their notepads; I struggle to stay awake. Then, I hear my name and look up.
“Meisun here is a unique case—our study also partners with the Revival group at Stanford; our colleagues there have shown that, while energy transfer from living animals into comatose humans can effectively bring them back out of their comas, the inadvertent transfer of animal sensory systems and reflexes leaves an indelible mark on the human, who is often caught in a state of being half-human, half-beast…because Oriental Lovebirds are renowned for their healing prowess, we hypothesized that perhaps the effects of transfer would be lessened; we extend that hypothesis to the ECT study and theorize that smaller doses of energy would cause little to no transfer and also prevent amnesia. We have high hopes, as our hypothesis for the Revival study appears to be correct. Meisun, could you tell our guests a little bit about yourself? You can start with where you’re from.”
I nod. I’ve discussed my memories so often with Dr. Ackerman and the others that this is becoming routine.
“I was born in Toisan, and most of my family still lives there. My parents married me to a Kam Saan haak, a merchant who was already here in California. I traveled here in the bottom of a boat.” I pause. “I was in a box—no, no, that’s not right. It was just very cramped, like being in a box. And then once I got here, I was detained at Angel Island for months.”
One of the representatives raises an eyebrow. “And what was that like?” he asks.
“It was—it was lonely. Difficult. I was in a cage—a jail cell. The only thing there to keep me company was the poetry all over the walls, all from other detainees.” I frown. I feel like I’m missing someone, that there’s a hole in my heart. You, I think, but recalling details of you is like trying to cup water in my hands.
The representative nods. Another one looks up and scrutinizes me, his eyes a vibrant green, and I think of forests in the mountains.
“Can you tell us about y
our husband, your life here?”
I nod. “We had a little shop in Chinatown. Hard work, but we made enough money that I could even send some back home. We never made enough to be rich, though.” I smile ruefully. “I didn’t think I’d settle down here, but it looked like that was happening. And then—”
My heart skips a beat. I close my eyes, and I remember a sound—pow!—and things flying toward me. I tremble, but still I speak.
“Then the riots—people coming in to burn down Chinatown, and then they shot my husband, and they captured me—no, no; they surrounded me and beat me down and I remember everything hurting and then lightning—a storm?—and then there was….” I take in a shuddering breath. “Nothing.”
The first representative shakes his head in sympathy. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Well, Dr. Ackerman,” one of the representatives says after a moment, “this is indeed a very promising case, and you present compelling arguments for an ECT trial with Oriental Lovebird energy. We’ll get to work on renewing your grant and the Revival group’s grant; expect confirmation from us within two weeks.”
Dr. Ackerman grins. He looks at me and places a hand on my shoulder. The touch feels unfamiliar, strange.
“Wonderful job, Meisun.”
A few people begin to join the facility, all of them with bracelets like mine, but I find that I’m skittish. I dart away from them and spend most of my time in my own room, with its bare walls and sparse furniture, its window facing out toward an expanse of unfamiliar trees. Sometimes, I gaze out and a memory flashes across my mind: a forest from above, like I’m flying, and then I close my eyes and I am flying, and you’re pressed up beside me, and we’re so whole and complete together.
Then the memory fades, and I’m left remembering that the only person beside me had been my husband, who I’d never come to love. Who, if I’d loved, would have been a betrayal of you.