The Black Isle

by Sandi Tan

  They silently removed their underwear, and a meditative, even religious, mood descended upon them as each boy fondled himself to his fullest extent. Each soldier selected his own girl and lay atop or astride his impossible lover. Three of the nymphs withstood just a couple of thrusts from her suitor before her thighs crumbled back into the sand; only the reclining beauty who’d been anointed with the finger stayed intact—she was made of wetter stuff. Within minutes, however, even she was felled. This didn’t stop the boys from kissing and fondling whatever was left and bringing themselves to loud, shuddering climaxes in the sand.

  That evening, after dinner, one of the boys sprinted into the house with sand-covered feet, exclaiming. The others followed him back to the beach with dubious expressions. For a second, I wondered if their sand nymphs had come to life. But as soon as I stepped outside, the commotion became all too clear: The octopus had returned.

  There was no mistaking it—this was Mrs. Nakamura’s maritime love, brought back by the rising tide. The poor suitor crouched, heartsick, on the remaining shoreline, more gray than purple despite the pink glow of the setting sun. Its many arms flexed and throbbed, dragging its muscular bulk in slow motion across the sand while the saucer eyes on its head roamed the coast for one beloved silhouette. How steady its devotion, how uncowed!

  The boys, flush with adrenaline and shouting to each other, ran back into the house. They reappeared hugging rifles, their bayonet tips gleaming.

  “No! Please, no!” I shrieked while they marched back down toward the sea. But they ignored me again, yelling, “Banzai!” till their voices squeaked and croaked.

  The octopus screamed, too, like Caesar, as the four blades disappeared into its flesh. It made a high-pitched whistle, the cry of a freight train in the night—desperate, unstoppable, gloomy with distance overcome and distance it may never yet see. Here was another romantic, reduced in a matter of seconds to shreds and a jelly mass. Its corpse leaked black lines toward the water like a love letter written in the sand, but the ink vanished as soon as it joined the martyrs still standing waist-deep in the tide.

  Eventually the sea claimed everything. It swept over the ghosts, the octopus, and, of course, the harem made out of sand. Above the waves, nothing left a trace.

  But I remembered them all.

  Taro returned, without warning, two months later. There was a spring in his step, as if his time away from me had revived his spirits.

  “The fresh air has done you good,” he told me in the car. “Did you miss me?”

  This was a trick question. But I knew how best to answer. “Yes.”

  “Do you miss Daniel?”

  The name felt like a stab in my heart.

  “Well, do you miss Daniel?”

  “No.”

  “Are you being truthful with me?”

  “No.”

  We drove on for a few miles before he spoke again.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you asked me, before you left. About your brother.”

  I sat up. “What about my brother?”

  “You said you missed him. A lot. Well, who would you rather see—Daniel or your brother?”

  An even trickier question. I couldn’t answer this one.

  “I’m thinking about taking your brother out of prison. But freedom won’t suit him. I think he’s one for routine. There is a wildness in him that needs taming.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Oh yes. You had me very curious. I thought he had to be something magical.”

  “Can’t he stay with us?” I regretted my words as soon as I blurted them.

  “I will take him out of prison. That’s all I can promise for now.” He pursed his lips. “And I will do it not because I think he deserves it but as a concession to you. The boy has a lot of fire. He sat there looking all thin and sickly, but the moment I approached him, he jumped up and spat in my eye.”

  “I’m sorry. Please forgive him.” My lips burned at my own servility.

  Taro turned to me and grinned, as if struck by an amusing idea. “How well do you think he gets along with Indians?”

  Li was assigned to the Rat Brigade—the lone Chinese boy among sixteen Indians, all from poor, tenacious backgrounds that had toughened them and made them ruthless. Their task was to comb the city for rats and take them back to an old opium warehouse by the Black River. The work was simple enough as there was no quota, just whatever the boys could find, but a fierce competition developed between them to outdo one another in the number and size of the vermin they caught. The winner of the day’s contest earned himself a glass of soybean milk—lunch.

  In order to capture the biggest and best rats, the young hunters of the Rat Brigade danced through alleyways, dived down rubbish heaps, and crept into the most rotten slums they could without getting themselves hacked up by Chinese cleavers or Malay parangs or torn to pieces by wild dogs. Luckily for them, not many dogs roamed the city—the starving locals had turned most of them into supper. At night, after a long day’s foraging, the boys returned to shower, eat, and sleep in a military-style dormitory next to the old opium godown. They were, after all, almost soldiers.

  The Brigade was Taro’s brainchild, invented, he said, primarily to take Li out of Shahbandar. Yet he remained determined to keep us apart. He took me to examine the cleanliness of the dormitory, which was also ghost-free, though I was barred from setting eyes on Li.

  “I appreciate your generosity,” I said, choking back my bitterness, “but couldn’t you find him a desk job? Why not put him to work at our house?”

  “Out of the question! I don’t want him anywhere near me. Or you.”

  “He’s not contagious, you know. It’s just anemia, for God’s sake.”

  Taro shook his head. “Anemia’s nothing. It’s rats. It’s as if your brother has a sixth sense…for filth. Today I was told he collected thirty-five rats. That’s a record.”

  “But what do you want with the rats? Feed them to your troops?”

  “Don’t be obtuse.” Taro sniffed. “We’re not savages. We use them for science.”

  A week or so later, Taro came home smiling.

  “I thought you were being metaphorical, but your brother is fading.” His smile grew wider. “And by the way, I found him a desk.”

  The next morning, one of his drivers dropped me off at the hulking old godown at the mouth of the Black River. The warehouse once housed trillions of pounds of Indian opium, cargo that turned civil servants into lords overnight and made Britain the wealthiest country in the world. When I was at school, the nuns always spoke reverently about this very building, but it wasn’t until I stood there—a prisoner of history—that I finally grasped that it had been, in a way, the heart of the colonial world, the spine of the Empire’s spine. An enormous Japanese flag now hung from the roof, covering most of the sun-bleached letters painted across its widest wall, words I was almost sentimental about, if only because they were not Japanese: EAST INDIA CO., UNITED COMPANY OF MERCHANTS OF ENGLAND.

  Along the river, life was at a standstill. The remaining handful of bumboats and sampans were empty, bobbing nakedly on the muddy water, their noses nipping and scraping against the banks. The wide fish eyes painted on each prow stared lifelessly at me. They had only seemed sentient when coolies were running along their backs.

  The only thriving vessel was an unmanned boat with a slow-puttering motor and eyes that had been painted over with black—symbolically blinded. A rope bound it to a gangway leading to the back of the godown. For one delectable moment, I daydreamed about rescuing Li and stealing him away in it, but the idea was laughable. In a war-torn world, where could we possibly go?

  Two armed guards escorted me into the warehouse’s interior, which was nothing like the cramped dormitory Taro had taken me to see. This was a cavernous, windowless hangar large enough to house a zeppelin. But instead of smelling like the smoldering metals of an aviator’s workshop, the warehouse stank of mothballs and formaldehyde.

&
nbsp; On the ground, the hall was divided into separate little areas by household folding screens obviously pilfered from middle-class homes. Some still boasted full-length mirrors, which multiplied the number of workers I saw. Most of the employees—if they could be called that—were grim-faced Japanese in white lab coats. Three Indian youths in the khaki uniform of Cub Scouts half their age volleyed between the sectors; these had to be Li’s Rat Brigade colleagues. I was relieved that they did not look mistreated.

  Under the low buzz of industry, I heard a steady, unmistakable squealing: rats.

  I was pointed to the corner where Li was stationed, cut off from the others by a series of wood partitions. Had Taro isolated him out of cruelty or kindness? With him it was impossible to tell.

  On a stool, leaning over a worktable with his back to me, was a living skeleton in khaki. I ran over silently and embraced him, squeezing him until the shocking contact with his rib cage impelled me to let go.

  “I’ve missed you. They wouldn’t let me see you.”

  He stared at me with dead eyes. I’d first seen that hollow look many years ago, on our fateful seventh birthday. Now, as then, he carried on him the wear of a man many times his age.

  “They killed Father.”

  “I know.”

  He gazed at me, puzzled as to how I would have heard, but that thought floated away and another took its place.

  “So it’s true—you’re his mistress.” He spoke this as fact, not accusation. His spirit was too weak for that.

  “I’m his prisoner.”

  Li ran his eyes over my freshly laundered dress and the floral silk scarf at my neck. “Yet you’ve gained weight.”

  I blushed, mortified. It was true. While others starved, I ate. I was lucky.

  I feared he would say something else cutting that would make me regret my visit, but instead he leaned close to my ear and whispered, in the Shanghainese of our long-ago childhood, “I know what you did. Thank you. Seeing you, I already feel stronger.”

  He turned back to the work awaiting him on his long, aluminum-topped desk. “I have to finish my quota or they won’t let me eat today.”

  I recoiled when I saw his “quota”: a line of five rats, each about a foot long, not counting its tail. Thankfully, all were lifeless.

  “Did you kill them?”

  “They’re just asleep.” He flicked on a task lamp and, with an effort that seemed too great for his frail arm, craned its folding neck to shine on the pests. The light turned their black fur silver. “I have to work fast before they wake up. Or else…”

  With one hand, shaky with exhaustion, he picked up a pair of rusty tweezers and leaned in. With the other, he rooted in the creatures’ hairs, searching.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Fleas.” He glanced back at me. “I wouldn’t stand so close, if I were you.”

  He spotted one almost immediately and carefully liberated it from the rat hairs. The tweezers looked heartbreakingly heavy in his bony hand, but the flea was inert, which simplified his job. He dropped the black dot into a lidded glass jar, where it joined at least a hundred others.

  “Are all those dead?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? They’re just sleeping.”

  “But what are they for?”

  “Don’t know,” he said. “I stopped asking questions. Not knowing makes life easier.”

  I stood behind him while he continued his assignment, cursing whenever he dropped a flea with his trembling hand. When he was done, he put the lifeless rats away in a metal cage and locked the trapdoor. Finally, his gloves came off.

  “My head aches. My eyes burn. My hands shake. Everything feels like hell.”

  I enveloped him in my arms again, and this time, without his gloves, he responded. But his hold was feeble. My brother was a dying man.

  I examined his emaciated face. For all our mutual bitterness, nobody knew me as well as Li did. Beneath the sun-scorched skin, the exhaustion, the rage, and the disappointment, he was still the same boy, my spiritual half who had crossed an ocean with me and endured the same demons by my side. Hugging him, I felt a monumental loneliness at all the times we had spent apart.

  “Don’t kiss me,” he warned.

  “Wasn’t about to.”

  I turned around. Nobody could see past the wooden screens surrounding our little corner. From my handbag, I pulled out a steak knife sheathed in antiseptic cloth.

  Li pulled back. “You’ve come to kill me.”

  “No,” I said. “The opposite.”

  I drew the sharpened blade along the soft inner flesh of my left arm. From it, crimson liquor began to weep. I didn’t think about pain; I thought about life.

  “What are you d—”

  I pushed my wound against his lips, staining them bright red. He bucked back like a wild mare.

  “Drink. It’s our only chance. If you want to live, Li, drink!”

  His terror slowly faded and he gave me the subtlest of nods. When he took my arm in his hands, his grip was unexpectedly firm, as though he feared I might change my mind and back away. Together, we looked at the new blood blooming like a mushroom cap on the surface of my skin. Before long, it would spill down to my elbow.

  He pressed his mouth to the slit, first licking around the wound so no drop would be lost. A grimace of distaste flashed across his face, but it was his body that craved the stuff, and the body quickly won: A familiar look of concentration overtook him, driven by a primal need for sustenance, escape, transfiguration. His inhibitions fell away. He began not only to drink, but also to suck.

  I leaned back against the table for support. For five harrowing minutes, I feared he would never stop.

  Afterward, I wrapped the antiseptic cloth over my wound and pressed it tight to stem the flow. I could feel my blood pulsing just beneath the surface, now in the habit of bursting free. Li slumped onto the floor, panting, his teeth and gums lurid red. He seemed even more exhausted than before, and I was terrified I might have made things worse. Quietly, he raised his hand to tell me to stop worrying. And what I saw gave me hope: His hand had stopped trembling.

  “I’m a monster,” he whispered.

  “No, no, you’re not.” I joined him on the floor and rested my head on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault. You can’t help what you have.”

  He thought for a moment. “What if it is my fault?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He said nothing. I prodded him with a gentle kiss on his cheek. Finally he spoke, again in Shanghainese. “I have a confession to make.”

  I felt a numbness beginning in my wound, reaching all the way to my heart.

  “Remember our seventh birthday? Remember the old man in the park?”

  I nodded slowly.

  “I knew he would be there. Which was why I insisted on going. The night before, I prayed and begged to whoever or whatever was out there. To this day, I’m still not clear who or what I prayed to, but when I saw the old man, I knew he had heard me.

  “I prayed for freedom. Escape. Mother favored me, but I hated it. I hated that we were subjected to all her fears, that she was instilling terror in us so we’d become like her and keep her company in her living tomb. But as a child, what power did I have besides prayer?”

  He began to weep. Once again we were revealed to be synchronous, through and through, in our childhood desire for freedom—especially in our preternatural ruthlessness. I kissed his shoulder.

  “As long as I could escape,” he said, “I didn’t care what they wanted in exchange. And so, in the park, I gave the old man my health.”

  “When he asked you to kill the kitten.”

  He winced at the memory. “I have nobody to blame for my illness but myself. I try to fight it by keeping busy, but it doesn’t do a thing. My hunger never goes away.”

  His confession appeared to comfort him. When I looked at his face again, the ruddiness of life had returned. My blood had nourished him, and for this I was s
upremely grateful. Whatever happened in that park happened a long time ago, in another universe. Whether it was a supernatural pact he’d made or just pure happenstance, at least I’d made him stronger again.

  “You look better. Do you feel better?”

  “Much.” He looked me in the eye. “Thanks.”

  “We’ll survive this, Li. We’ll outlive this war together, I promise you that.”

  I embraced him, and then, just as I was about to be engulfed in waves of sentiment, when I feared letting go of him would mean losing him as I’d lost Father, I forced myself to release him and stand up. I didn’t dare risk staying too long. It tore at my heart that I couldn’t just bring him home and nurse him back to proper health.

  Li remained on the floor, his face crumpled to see me go.

  His hand disappeared into the left pocket of his khaki shorts. It emerged with his weathered talisman, the gold toffee disk, which he held out on his palm. In these circumstances, it shone like an old friend.

  “Take this away from me. Too often, I’ve been tempted to break this open and eat it. It came from that old man, you know, so I suspect it would end our pact, once and for all. But I fear it. I truly, truly fear it because I don’t know what it is.”

  He forced it into my hand, and I knew I couldn’t reject it. I closed my fingers around the tiny little thing. Hardened over the years, it now felt less like a sweet than a coin—one-way fare for the boatman across the Styx. But its wrapper was sticky, reminding me that, for all of Li’s elaborate fears, it was probably nothing more than a harmless lump of sugar.

  “I have to go,” I said, and kissed him on the forehead. “But I’ll come back.”

  “You promise?”

  “I’ll do everything I can for you. Please know that.”

  As I walked away, I passed a wall of wood screens and, in the corner of my eye, caught somebody’s gaze in a mirror. There was a grim, sallow woman staring at me. When I looked again, I realized the phantom was me.

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