by Sandi Tan
“Ken!” Violet repeated, trying to force the door open with her shoulder.
But Kenneth had placed his weight against it. It refused to budge.
“No!” he howled, angrily this time. “I said, jusht her.”
The second I stepped into the room, he slammed the door in Violet’s face and locked it.
I heard her muffled whimper, followed by some indistinct curse hurled at him or me, most likely both of us.
The air conditioner wheezed and rumbled, even though, at three in the morning, it was quite cool outside. For a man who once claimed to hate air-conditioning, he’d clearly succumbed to its appeal as a buffer, sealing himself off in his own climate.
“Pleashe,” he said, gesturing for me to sit.
Before I could properly situate myself, Kenneth retreated to the swivel chair behind his rosewood desk, no doubt worried I’d say something cruel about the stink of alcohol that surrounded him like a mist—or about how his lisp had returned. The stark white walls didn’t do his complexion any favors, nor did his drab gray shirt and pants. He was startlingly gaunt, with purplish bags under his eyes, but I knew his pallor didn’t just come from the lack of sun and sleep. It took more substantial blows for a man of such hubris to look this bad. This wasn’t the vigorous leader from news photos or TV. This was an old man.
I examined the room. His desk faced outward, bank manager style, ready to receive clients in a pair of leather armchairs that looked like they’d never been sat in—until now. Mr. Wee’s mahogany bookcases had been ripped out, no surprise. They were replaced by an industrial trolley, the kind used to ferry books around libraries, and on it sat atlases, dictionaries, and the CIA World Factbook, all in their latest editions.
“Lady Midnight.” He waved for my attention. His nails were slate gray and chewed to the quick. “Well, ish he here, lishening?”
“Who?”
“Daniel, of course.”
I shook my head, appalled. But my answer seemed to relax him. His eyes grew keener.
“So, tell me,” he began again, his lisp miraculously cured. “How did I get myself into this fix?”
He waited a second, gauging my reaction, then reached behind his desk, theatrically pulling up two fresh champagne flutes from a hidden drawer. His hands were steady; despite his act, and what his wife believed, he was completely sober. Ignoring my objections, he raised a sweating, quarter-full bottle of Dom Pérignon from an unseen ice bucket and filled our glasses to the brim. The final few sips in the bottle he poured straight down his throat.
“I am drinking, yes, but I am not drunk.” He smiled. “You’ll have to pardon my histrionics. It was the only way I could get Vi to go and get you.”
I felt a shiver of rage. “And you knew Vi was the only person who could get me to come. Because the situation had to be damn serious for her to go begging her old foe.”
“Clever girl.”
Clinking his glass to mine, he spilled a few drops of champagne on his polished tabletop. He mopped it up with his sleeve. I pushed my flute away, rejecting both his drink and his theater.
“But you did come,” he said, impressed with himself. “Funny how it always takes a catastrophe to bring us together. First the war, then the emergency, now this.”
I glared at him, hoping to make him abandon his glass.
“Oh, don’t worry. I get these bottles by the bateau. The French ambassador says I’m very easy to please—and I am, but only with the right vintage.” He gargled his drink, then gulped it. “You are not amused. Well, I suppose there’s nothing really amusing about me anymore, is there? I’m no longer the omniscient Papa, what with the chaos, forces out there, beyond my control.”
“You don’t get to absolve yourself so easily. It was in your control, all of it. Those are people’s graves you’re destroying.”
“Tough love.” He smirked. “Always with the tough love. Glad I never tried to tame you or I might be missing a hand or foot by now. Or God forbid, worse…”
“We promised them, Ken.”
“No, no, no. You promised them. I said I’d try. My loyalties lie with the living citizens of the Black Isle. Always have. Don’t you understand? I don’t see them. It’s not that they’re not real to me, only that they’re…abstract.”
He gulped down the rest of his drink.
“When you’re lucky enough to be prime minister, you have a cabinet of capable men and women who take care of problems for you. Under my guidance, they make their careful calculations, weighing the pros and cons of every move, and then we enact an agreed-upon plan—problem solved, like magic. You see, that’s my kind of sorcery. I have people so I don’t have to deal with people, keeping my citizens abstract to me and me abstract to them—thus the illusion of mastery. The trouble is,” he chuckled, “when the problem begins as an abstraction, I don’t have anyone who knows how to handle that. Once upon a time, I did, of course, and she was fairly good at her job. Sadly, like all the best minds, she was impossible to keep. You wouldn’t happen to know a replacement, would you?”
“I’m leaving the Isle tomorrow. Nothing you can say or do will change my mind. I’m done with ghosts, I’m done with the bloody Island, and I’m done with you.” I said all of this matter-of-factly so he wouldn’t think I was trying to outdo his melodrama. “This is my final piece of advice. The ghosts want you to see Forbidden Hill for yourself. They want you to understand what you’ve done to them.”
“They want me, do they?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, everyone seems to want me—but you.”
“Self-pity was never your best mode, Prime Minister.”
He grew quiet, withdrawing into himself, as he always did when working through a problem. My defenses went up. He may have been old and beaten down, but this was still Kenneth Kee.
“And after I go and visit them, do you think they’ll leave us alone, let the Isle go back to the way it was?”
“I honestly don’t know. But it would be a start.”
He nodded again, in private contemplation.
I stood up. I’d made my case, seen the house, met the man, felt the panic. My assignment was complete.
“Wait. Please.” His voice was soft. “You and I really should…We have to talk about the past. I mean, we should have done that, before tonight. In a less antic atmosphere. We should have gone about things differently—very differently.”
He rose sharply from his chair and walked toward me, eyes darting as if he couldn’t bear to look at my face.
“You and I should have been together,” he whispered. “We should have damned the cliché and done the whole thing—got married, had kids, lost our looks side by side. Instead of this. It’s madness that we did this to ourselves.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“Nobody understands my jokes here.” He laughed bitterly. “And I mean, nobody! I find myself talking to you—this is where I commune with you, just so you know—because talking to your ghost is better than talking to my wife, my servants, my ministers, all of them combined. And sometimes these conversations get to be so intense, so real, it’s almost as if you were actually here with me. I finally understood how it is that you manage to live with the dead around you all the time. I reckon it’s very much the same thing. A spiritual connection with someone that nobody else can see or understand, someone who just refuses to let you go. A ghost is like a very persistent secret, isn’t it?”
I turned away. I didn’t want him to catch the agreement in my eyes, especially if this parade of feeling was just another of his stratagems.
“I’ve done you wrong, Cassandra. And I’ve done myself wrong because I acted against my own happiness.”
“We wouldn’t have been happy together.” Not with our battling beliefs, not with the cycle of recriminations that was bound to have come following my loss of our child. I knew by now to mistrust such fantasies. “Regret’s a chimera, Ken.”
“Of course we would have been happy.” He loo
ked at me, his face gleaming with conviction. “Of course we would! But I ruined it, didn’t I? I’ve begged your ghost for forgiveness a hundred, a thousand times. Your ghost, not the real you, of course…So let me confess to you now, Cassandra, in the flesh. I speak with all the certainty in the world when I tell you we would have been happy if I hadn’t done certain things.”
He clutched my elbow.
“It was I who lured you to that warehouse. It was I who made the roof fall. I killed our future together.”
At this, I felt a pang, a swelling, of old, buried rage. Though I could never prove he’d been responsible, deep in my heart I knew. How long had I waited for him to say these words, to lay claim to his crime. Yet now that he’d done it, I could only stare at him suspiciously. Was this a penitent’s confession or the plea of a confidence man at the end of his rope?
Before my heart could do anything foolish, I heard my voice say, “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”
Gently, I pushed his hand away and walked to the door. Those long-ago things happened not to me but to my lost doppelganger, a headstrong young woman named Cassandra whose sad history I would soon be leaving behind.
“And there’s Issa. What I did to him haunts me all the time. It’ll haunt me till the day I die, and even after that…Don’t let me be a ghost, Cassandra.”
I had to flee—now—before Kenneth could spin his terrible web and ensnare me once more. I couldn’t amend his past for him.
“Tell me you forgive me,” he whispered, sobs causing his thin shoulders to shake. “I was so afraid of what you had. I was jealous, insecure.”
He made a grab for me again with his damp, clammy hands. I shook them off more roughly than I’d meant to—they were so shockingly cold.
“Tell me, Cassandra. Just tell me, I’m begging you…I don’t want to be a ghost.”
“It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think?” If I could play that scene over again, I would have made my voice kinder than it was then. “What you can still do is go to Forbidden Hill. See it for yourself.”
“But I’m frightened.” He looked at me with plaintive, watery eyes, the eyes I’d once seen on a kitten whose neck was about to be snapped.
“If you don’t go, your life’s work will be meaningless. They’ll destroy the Isle.”
He lowered his head. “Yes…there is that.”
When I closed his study door behind me, Violet was waiting. Her face was hard, as if she’d been bracing herself for this final encounter. She saw me to the foyer.
“I’ve spoken to your bank. The full sum is in your account. You can withdraw or transfer any or all of it. There are no strings. It’s clean.”
I nodded. Thanks would have been inappropriate.
“Let’s keep this strictly between you and me.”
Again, I nodded.
As I walked out of the house, I saw Mr. Wee standing in the porte cochere like a guard, free of the dog’s head. It appeared that the man’s impulse to stay had trumped the badi’s instinct to roam, though he was probably one of those genteel house spirits who stayed behind out of duty and decorum rather than any personal feeling. Having learned the hard lessons of involvement during his lifetime, this Mr. Wee didn’t acknowledge me; now cold and unencumbered, he was one ghost who’d endure for centuries.
I went to a bank machine that same night. It was all there.
One had to give Violet credit where credit was due—the woman never told a lie.
At the airport, something was amiss. From the stewardesses at check-in to the Sikh policeman standing by passport control, the staff was languidly, indulgently glum. I was about to lodge a complaint—I was still a demanding Islander—when I saw that the lady behind the courtesy desk was weeping as if her beloved had just forsaken her.
The gate opened late. Until I hobbled through the aerobridge and found my window seat in business class, I worried that every little delay was conspiring to make me miss my flight—perhaps a final treat from Kenneth Kee.
“Good afternoon,” I said to the tense-looking woman in the seat next to me, thankful she wasn’t the talkative type.
She nodded and, as the plane began taxiing, picked up the late edition of the Tribune she’d carried onboard, dampened and smeared, it seemed, with somebody’s tears. My farewells all said, I hadn’t bothered to look at the papers that morning, not even out of last-minute nostalgia. But the headline now cried out to me, bold and black:
PRIME MINISTER KEE DEAD
ENTIRE NATION MOURNS
A land mine went off in my heart. Oh, Kenneth, I thought. Poor Kenneth.
Yet even as I was shaking from the shock, I can’t honestly say I was surprised. I’d known this outcome was possible from the moment I entered his study. I’d played out the scenarios in my head. But that his end had actually come, that he had failed for the first time to outwit the Fates…I tried to fight back emotions too complex and explosive for me to detail what they were. My tears flowed all the same.
“I know,” said my seatmate. “I’m frightened without him, too.”
She offered me a tissue. I demurred and took her Tribune instead. The front-page story was terse, composed in great haste by a nameless hack. The facts were few. The prime minister, they wrote, had been on a late-night surprise “inspection” of the tunnel under Forbidden Hill, so concerned was he for the safety and well-being of his workers. For the tireless prime minister, the writer stressed, this type of impromptu visit was not uncommon. But this time, while he was in the tunnel, a scaffold collapsed. The esteemed leader “could not be saved.” He was killed by his own boundless compassion, the article stated—not as metaphor but as fact.
I read it twice, trying to tease out hints of the truth between the lines. Had Kenneth sacrificed himself or did the spirits take him by force? But as always, the Tribune was hermetically sealed within its own propaganda.
I had no doubt he was terrified as he walked into the tunnel. I had no doubt he regretted taking my advice. But I wondered if he’d also been moved by the desecrated graves, if he was at all remorseful.
Did the ghosts show themselves to him? Did he, for the first and last time in his life, see what I always saw? Did the dead smother him as they had almost done me? Was it quick and painless or long and agonizing? Had he saved the Isle?
And if, by some crazy chance I had been in his final thoughts, was it love or was it hate? Would he now become a ghost, as hungry for my blood as the ghosts had been for his?
As we lifted off the earth, I took a deep gulp of air. I could feel the plane battling me, as if I were the cargo pulling it down, tethered soulwise to a tenacious platoon of ghosts. They wouldn’t let me go; not Father, not Daniel, not Mr. Wee, and certainly not Kenneth, whose wrath was fresh-born. As for Taro? The Isle had robbed me of my showdown with him.
The jet engine roared, the walls rumbled, the vents spewed white vapors. I gripped the armrests and did my part, lifting my weight off the seat, making myself as light as gravity allowed.
When the clouds appeared, racing by my window like excited lambs, my tears finally abated.
The plane swooped back over the Island, this time high enough to escape its pull. The city lay below us like an architect’s scale model with all its landmarks faithfully reproduced. Balmoral Hotel in white, city hall in gray, green rectangle for the Padang, pastel patchwork for the warehouse district riding the black eel that was the river. To the north, there was no more “up-country,” only one concrete heartland after another, all centrally planned in Soviet clusters and painted in condescending, calming hues. Each township was a monument to Kenneth’s terrible taste. Salmon pink was a recurrent scheme, as was kelp green, the color of his old MG roadster. These estates were even more hideous from the air than on the ground, and the destruction of the jungle far more advanced than I’d supposed. Except for the verdant patch of the Botanic Gardens and the two nature reserves, every green smudge appeared to be an afterthought; I knew for a fact that most of these were
private golf clubs, open only to the very rich.
The plane glided on, higher.
How small this teardrop island really was, even after its multiple expansions. To its south lay the broccoli heads of another land, lusher, larger, fed on darker soil. It seemed to be edging across the strait as I watched, a mother waiting to reclaim her child. And in the waters to the north and east, yet other isles, younger, smaller, and manifold, each a wellspring of viral fecundity, all creepers and thorns, ready to infect the Black Isle should its coast draw any closer.
Alas, poor Kenneth, your Isle has drunk its fill!
Without you, the Isle has lost its greatest distinction—the gifted mendacity, the calculated overreaching so necessary for a tiny port to become a beacon of success. From my God’s-eye view, I could tell its shine was already fading. The somnambulists would carry on, of course, cheap carbon copies with none of your vision or verve, and certainly none of the history that gave rise to your vision and verve.
I gave the place twenty-five years, fifty at most, before it vanished back into the swamp.
“Good-bye, my dirty Island,” I said. “Please help me to forget you.”
THE PROFESSOR IS WITH ME. She’s heard the rest of my testimony—sitting through the final chapter in a state of hand-wringing tension.
This morning, we’re all caught up. On the same page, as it were. Her eyes are bloodshot, either sleep-deprived or moved, quite likely both.
“How do you stand it,” she asks, “living in Tokyo?”
“The language barrier helps. I’m not bothered or excited by what they twitter on about here. It’s all noise to me.”
A glint enters her eyes. “You’re talking about ghost chatter, aren’t you?”
“I’m talking about the living and the dead. That’s how the mind works, you know. Don’t understand something? Out it goes. At a certain point in one’s life, curiosity goes away. Sociability fades. I’m an old woman, Miss Maddin—I mean, Professor. I ask for only two things in this life: peace and regularity.”