I look at myself in the bathroom mirror now, tall and silver-haired—features still cleanly cut, yet somehow fragile, like Sir Laurence Olivier after the medical bills set in. At this morning’s signing, a pale young woman with a bolt through her septum told me: “No offense, Mr. Darbersmere, but you’re—like—a real babe. For an old guy.”
I smiled, gently. And told her: “You should have seen me when I was twelve, my dear.”
That was back in 1943, the year that Ellis sold me for the first time—or rented me out, rather, to the mayor of some tiny port village, who threatened to keep us docked until the next Japanese inspection. Ellis had done her best to convince him that we were just another boatload of Brits fleeing internment, even shucking her habitual male drag to reveal a surprisingly lush female figure and donning one of my mother’s old dresses instead, much as it obviously disgusted her to do so. But all to no avail.
“You know I’d do it, Tim,” she told me, impatiently pacing the trawler’s deck, as a passing group of her crewmates whistled appreciatively from shore. “Christ knows I’ve tried. But the fact is, he doesn’t want me. He wants you.”
I frowned. “Wants me?”
“To go with him, Tim. You know—grown-up stuff.”
“Like you and Ho Tseng, last week, after the dance at Sister Chin’s?”
“Yeah, sorta like that.”
She plumped herself down on a tarpaulined crate full of dynamite—clearly labeled, in Cantonese, as “dried fruit”—and kicked off one of her borrowed high-heeled shoes, rubbing her foot morosely. Her cinnamon hair hung loose in the stinking wind, back-lit to a fine fever.
I felt her appraising stare play up and down me like a fine grey mist, and shivered.
“If I do this, will you owe me, Ellis?”
“You bet I will, kid.”
“Always take me with you?”
There had been some brief talk of replacing me with Brian Thompson-Greenaway, another refugee, after I had mishandled a particularly choice assignment—protecting Ellis’s private stash of American currency from fellow scavengers while she recuperated from a beating inflicted by an irate Japanese officer, into whom she’d accidentally bumped while ashore. Though she wisely put up no resistance—one of Ellis’s more admirable skills involved her always knowing when it was in her best interest not to defend herself—the damage left her pissing blood for a week, and she had not been happy to discover her money gone once she was recovered enough to look for it.
She lit a new cigarette, shading her eyes against the flame of her Ronson. “’Course,” she said, sucking in smoke.
“Never leave me?”
“Sure, kid. Why not?”
From Ellis, I learned to love duplicity, to distrust everyone except those who have no loyalty and play no favorites. Lie to me, however badly, and you are virtually guaranteed my fullest attention.
I don’t remember if I really believed her promises, even then. But I did what she asked anyway, without qualm or regret. She must have understood that I would do anything for her, no matter how morally suspect, if she only asked me politely enough.
In this one way, at least, I was still definitively British.
Afterward, I was ill for a long time—some sort of psychosomatic reaction to the visceral shock of my deflowering, I suppose. I lay in a bath of sweat on Ellis’s hammock, under the trawler’s one intact mosquito net. Sometimes I felt her sponge me with a rag dipped in rice wine, while singing to me—softly, along with the radio:
A faded postcard from exotic places . . . a cigarette that’s marked with lipstick traces . . . oh, how the ghost of you clings . . .
And did I merely dream that once, at the very height of my sickness, she held me on her hip and hugged me close? That she actually slipped her jacket open and offered me her breast, so paradoxically soft and firm, its nipple almost as pale as the rest of her night-dweller’s flesh?
That sweet swoon of ecstasy. That first hot stab of infantile desire. That unwitting link between recent childish violation and a desperate longing for adult consummation. I was far too young to know what I was doing, but she did. She had to. And since it served her purposes, she simply chose not to care.
Such complete amorality: It fascinates me. Looking back, I see it always has—like everything else about her, fetishized over the years into an inescapable pattern of hopeless attraction and inevitable abandonment.
My first wife’s family fled the former Yugoslavia shortly before the end of the war; she had high cheekbones and pale eyes, set at a Baltic slant. My second wife had a wealth of long, slightly coarse hair, the color of unground cloves. My third wife told stories—ineptly, compulsively. All of them were, on average, at least five years my elder.
And sooner or later, all of them left me.
Oh, Ellis, I sometimes wonder whether anyone else alive remembers you as I do—or remembers you at all, given your well-cultivated talent for blending in, for getting by, for rendering yourself unremarkable. And I really don’t know what I’ll do if this woman Huang has found for me turns out not to be you. There’s not much time left in which to start over, after all.
For either of us.
Last night, I called the number Huang’s father gave me before I left London. The man on the other end of the line identified himself as the master chef of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant.
“Oh yes, tai pan Darbersmere,” he said, when I mentioned my name. “I was indeed informed, by that respected personage who we both know, that you might honor my unworthiest of businesses with the request for some small service.”
“One such as only your estimable self could provide.”
“The tai pan flatters, as is his right. Which is the dish he wishes to order?”
“The Emperor’s Old Bones.”
A pause ensued—fairly long, as such things go. I could hear a Cantopop ballad filtering in, perhaps from somewhere in the kitchen, duelling for precedence with the more classical strains of a wailing erhu. The Precious Dragon Shrine’s master chef drew a single long, low breath.
“Tai pan,” he said, finally, “for such a meal . . . one must provide the meat oneself.”
“Believe me, Grandfather, I am well aware of such considerations. You may be assured that the meat will be available, whenever you are ready to begin its cooking.”
Another breath—shorter, this time. Calmer.
“Realizing that it has probably been a long time since anyone has requested this dish,” I continued, “I am, of course, more than willing to raise the price our mutual friend has already set.”
“Oh, no, tai pan.”
“For your trouble.”
“Tai pan, please. It is not necessary to insult me.”
“I must assure you, Grandfather, that no such insult was intended.”
A burst of scolding rose from the kitchen, silencing the ballad in mid-ecstatic lament. The master chef paused again. Then said: “I will need at least three days’ notice to prepare my staff.”
I smiled. Replying, with a confidence which—I hoped—at least sounded genuine:
“Three days should be more than sufficient.”
The very old woman (eighty-nine, at least) who may or may not have once called herself Ellis Iseland now lives quietly in a genteelly shabby area of St. Louis, officially registered under the far less interesting name of Mrs. Munro. Huang’s pictures show a figure held carefully erect, yet helplessly shrunken in on itself—its once-straight spine softened by the onslaught of osteoporosis. Her face has gone loose around the jawline, skin powdery, hair a short, stiff grey crown of marcelled waves.
She dresses drably. Shapeless feminine weeds, widow-black. Her arthritic feet are wedged into Chinese slippers—a small touch of nostalgic irony? Both her snubbed cat’s nose and the half-sneering set of her wrinkled mouth seem familiar, but her slanted eyes—the most important
giveaway, their original non-color perhaps dimmed even further with age, from light smoke-grey to bone, ecru, white—are kept hidden beneath a thick-lensed pair of bifocal sunglasses, essential protection for someone whose sight may not last the rest of the year.
And though her medical files indicate that she is in the preliminary stages of lung and throat cancer, her trip a day to the local corner store always includes the purchase of at least one pack of cigarettes, the brand apparently unimportant, as long as it contains a sufficient portion of nicotine. She lights one right outside the front door, and has almost finished it by the time she rounds the corner of her block.
Her neighbors seem to think well of her. Their children wave as she goes by, cane in one hand, cigarette in the other. She nods acknowledgement, but does not wave back.
This familiar arrogance, seeping up unchecked through her last, most perfect disguise: the mask of age, which bestows a kind of retroactive innocence on even its most experienced victims. I have recently begun to take advantage of its charms myself, whenever it suits my fancy to do so.
I look at these pictures, again and again. I study her face, searching in vain for even the ruin of that cool, smooth, inventively untrustworthy operator who once held both my fortune and my heart in the palm of her mannishly large hand.
It was Ellis who first told me about The Emperor’s Old Bones—and she is still the only person in the world with whom I would ever care to share that terrible meal, no matter what doing so might cost me.
If, indeed, I ever end up eating it at all.
“Yeah, I saw it done down in Hong Kong,” Ellis told us, gesturing with her chopsticks. We sat behind a lacquered screen at the back of Sister Chin’s, two nights before our scheduled rendezvous with the warlord Wao Ruyen, from whom Ellis had already accepted some mysteriously unspecified commission. I watched her eat—waiting my turn, as ever—while Brian Thompson-Greenaway (also present, much to my annoyance) sat in the corner and watched us both, openly ravenous.
“They take a carp, right—you know, those big fish some rich Chinks keep in fancy pools, out in the garden? Supposed to live hundreds of years, you believe all that ‘Confucius says’ hooey. So they take this carp and they fillet it, all over, so the flesh is hanging off it in strips. But they do it so well, so carefully, they keep the carp alive through the whole thing. It’s sittin’ there on a plate, twitching, eyes rollin’ around. Get close enough, you can look right in through the ribcage and see the heart still beating.”
She popped another piece of Mu Shu pork in her mouth, and smiled down at Brian, who gulped—apparently suddenly too queasy to either resent or envy her proximity to the food.
“Then they bring out this big pot full of boiling oil,” she continued, “and they run hooks through the fish’s gills and tail, so they can pick it up at both ends. And while it’s floppin’ around, tryin’ to get free, they dip all those hangin’ pieces of flesh in the oil—one side first, then the other, all nice and neat. Fish is probably in so much pain already it doesn’t even notice. So it’s still alive when they put it back down . . . alive, and cooked, and ready to eat.”
And then—they eat it.”
“Sure do, Tim.”
“Alive, I mean.”
Brian now looked distinctly green. Ellis shot him another glance, openly amused by his lack of stamina, then turned back to me.
“Well yeah, that’s kinda the whole point of the exercise. You keep the carp alive until you’ve eaten it, and all that long life just sorta transfers over to you.”
“Like magic,” I said. She nodded.
“Exactly. ’Cause that’s exactly what it is.”
I considered her statement for a moment.
“My father,” I commented, at last, “always told us that magic was a load of bunk.”
Ellis snorted. “And why does this not surprise me?” She asked, of nobody in particular. Then: “Fine, I’ll bite. What do you think?”
“I think . . .” I said, slowly, “. . . that if it works . . . then who cares?”
She looked at me. Snorted again. And then—she actually laughed, an infectious, unmalicious laugh that seemed to belong to someone far younger, far less complicated. It made me gape to hear it. Using her chopsticks, she plucked the last piece of pork deftly from her plate, and popped it into my open mouth.
“Tim,” she said, “for a spoiled Limey brat, sometimes you’re okay.”
I swallowed the pork, without really tasting it. Before I could stop myself, I had already blurted out: “I wish we were the same age, Ellis.”
This time she stared. I felt a sudden blush turn my whole face crimson. Now it was Brian’s turn to gape, amazed by my idiotic effrontery.
“Yeah, well, not me,” she said. “I like it just fine with you bein’ the kid, and me not.”
“Why?”
She looked at me again. I blushed even more deeply, heat prickling at my hairline. Amazingly, however, no explosion followed. Ellis simply took another sip of her tea, and replied—
“’Cause the fact is, Tim, if you were my age—good-lookin’ like you are, smart like you’re gonna be—I could probably do some pretty stupid things over you.”
Magic. Some might say it’s become my stock in trade—as a writer, at least. Though the humble craft of buying and selling also involves a kind of legerdemain, as Ellis knew so well; sleight of hand, or price, depending on your product . . . and your clientele.
But true magic? Here, now, at the end of the twentieth century, in this brave new world of 100-slot CD players and incessant afternoon talk shows?
I have seen so many things in my long life, most of which I would have thought impossible, had they not taken place right in front of me. From the bank of the Yangtze river, I saw the bright white smoke of an atomic bomb go up over Nagasaki, like a tear in the fabric of the horizon. In Chungking harbor, I saw two grown men stab each other to death over the corpse of a dog because one wanted to bury it, while the other wanted to eat it. And just beyond the Shanghai city limits, I saw Ellis cut that farmer’s throat with one quick twist of her wrist, so close to me that the spurt of his severed jugular misted my cheek with red.
But as I grow ever closer to my own personal twilight, the thing I remember most vividly is watching—through the window of a Franco-Vietnamese arms-dealer’s car, on my way to a cool white house in Saigon, where I would wait out the final days of the war in relative comfort and safety—as a pair of barefoot coolies pulled the denuded skeleton of Brian Thompson-Greenaway from a culvert full of malaria-laden water. I knew it was him, because even after Wao Ruyen’s court had consumed the rest of his pathetic little body, they had left his face nearly untouched—there not being quite enough flesh on a child’s skull, apparently, to be worth the extra effort of filleting . . . let alone of cooking.
And I remember, with almost comparable vividness, when—just a year ago—I saw the former warlord Wao, Huang’s most respected father, sitting in a Limehouse nightclub with his Number One and Number Two wife at either elbow. Looking half the age he did when I first met him, in that endless last July of 1945, before black science altered our world forever. Before Ellis sold him Brian instead of me, and then fled for the Manchurian border, leaving me to fend for myself in the wake of her departure.
After all this, should the idea of true magic seem so very difficult to swallow? I think not.
No stranger than the empty shell of Hiroshima, cupped around Ground Zero, its citizenry reduced to shadows in the wake of the blast’s last terrible glare. And certainly no stranger than the fact that I should think a woman so palpably incapable of loving anyone might nevertheless be capable of loving me, simply because—at the last moment—she suddenly decided not to let a rich criminal regain his youth and prolong his days by eating me alive, in accordance with the ancient and terrible ritual of the Emperor’s Old Bones.
This morning, I told m
y publicist that I was far too ill to sign any books today—a particularly swift and virulent touch of the twenty-four-hour flu, no doubt. She said she understood completely. An hour later, I sat in Huang’s car across the street from the corner store, watching “Mrs. Munro” make her slow way down the street to pick up her daily dose of slow, coughing death.
On her way back, I rolled down the car window and yelled: “Lai gen wo ma, wai guai!”
(Come with me, white ghost! An insulting little Mandarin phrase, occasionally used by passing Kuomintang jeep drivers to alert certain long-nosed Barbarian smugglers to the possibility that their dealings might soon be interrupted by an approaching group of Japanese soldiers.)
Huang glanced up from his copy of Rolling Stone’s Hot List, impressed. “Pretty good accent,” he commented.
But my eyes were on “Mrs. Munro,” who had also heard—and stopped in mid-step, swinging her half-blind grey head toward the sound, more as though scenting than scanning. I saw my own face leering back at me in miniature from the lenses of her prescription sunglasses, doubled and distorted by the distance between us. I saw her raise one palm to shade her eyes even further against the sun, the wrinkles across her nose contracting as she squinted her hidden eyes.
And then I saw her slip her glasses off to reveal those eyes: Still slant, still grey. Still empty.
“It’s her,” I told him.
Huang nodded. “Fought so. When you want me to do it?”
“Tonight?”
“Whatever y’say, Mr. D.”
Very early on the morning before Ellis left me behind, I woke to find her sitting next to me in the red half-darkness of the ship’s hold.
The Humanity of Monsters Page 6