by Sandi Tan
She smiles. “I believe there’s a third.”
“And what is that?”
“Posterity.”
“Overrated, I now think.”
“All right. Then you won’t mind me doing this.” She collects my microtapes and plops them into her blazer’s ample pockets.
“Only if you give me what’s promised.” I stand up.
“Of course.” She smiles. From another unseen pocket—the woman’s full of secret slits—she withdraws a flat silver box, the type that held cigarettes when people still smoked. “For your spells.”
I take the curious thing from her. Peace offering? I open the lid carefully. Instantly, a plume of fine powder flies into my face. The rest remains static, crumbs and clumps in varying shades of gray.
I know this material too well: bone ash.
“I never really knew my father,” she says. “But it did occur to me that his ashes might bring him to you.”
Suddenly, I understand everything.
His ashes, hence his ghost.
I shut the box, blow the dust from my trembling hands, and look at her properly, with new eyes.
Here before me is a living ghost. Kenneth’s narrow, close-set eyes, Violet’s pale complexion and bushy brows. The calculation of the one, the indignation of the other. Anybody could have seen it, felt it. Why hadn’t I?
“Do you hear me, Cassandra?”
I have to squeeze both my elbows to keep from twitching. Kenneth’s spirit, his ashes, his child—all three have entered my fortress. His triad of posterity.
“Were you too entranced by the significance of your own story to see?” Agnes Mary Kee shakes her head, now impatient. “Of course, a ton’s been written about my father. But all of it’s either hagiography or abuse. He’s always a deity or the Devil, nothing in between, never just a man.
“About a year ago, I was appointed head of the Black Isle’s Board of National Memory, meaning I’m now the custodian of the Isle’s history. The official history, that is. I think Papa would have been tickled. But how do I safeguard the national memory when I still have huge gaps in my own?
“When I was little, your name was whispered around our house like a curse. But my parents refused to tell me who you were, which only made you more mysterious. The phone my father used, next to the pantry—that was an extension. I listened in upstairs. I never forgot your voice, your name, and your adorable repartee…Lady Midnight.” She laughs. “Am I embarrassing you?”
“Too late for that now.”
“As soon as I had the power, I tracked you down. Because of your age, I had to act fast. Memory, after all, isn’t eternal. I dropped hints—mutilated your sacred book, phone calls in the middle of the night—signs to get you in the mood for confession.”
“And you sent your father’s ghost.”
“That was a bonus. I’m glad it worked.”
“So what do you really want from me, Agnes Mary?”
Hearing her name, her voice grows quiet, conciliatory. “You could have stopped him, you know. Saved him. Yet you did nothing.”
“Your father would have perished whether I’d shown up or not.”
She avoids my gaze, gathering her nerve. When she feels sufficiently prepared, she squares her shoulders, draws a deep breath, and gestures for me to sit back in the sofa. It seems she, too, has a story, one rehearsed and refined over years.
“I was sent away to boarding school in England when I was ten. The painting you saw of me at the house—that was done a week before I was put on the plane, kicking and screaming. Mummy couldn’t wait to be rid of me.
“Papa didn’t like children. You were right about that. You were also right that he was afraid of them; he felt they could see through him. He did like me, but that was vanity. I worshipped him. He always said I was more his than Mummy’s, and she hated that. But that’s neither here nor there. I was sent away to school and eventually I landed in Balliol, his old college at Oxford. I don’t know what kind of strings Papa had to pull, because I was never a very good student. I always had this gnawing doubt about whether I’d got in on my own merit or because I happened to be the daughter of Kenneth Kee. But I went along with it because I knew how much it meant to him: If he had gotten me in, it meant he’d had to make some odious pact with somebody, and I wasn’t going to humiliate him by rejecting the spot.”
“You think like your father,” I say.
She nods vaguely, taking it as neither compliment nor swipe.
“I always felt in the way. Even when I went home to the Black Isle for the long holidays, nobody quite knew what to do with me. Papa was always busy. Mummy…well, Mummy was a sad case. She was so madly, I wouldn’t say in love, rather in awe of him that she let him speak to her as if she were a half-wit. It was painful to watch, and eventually, even I had nothing but contempt for her. So once I was done with university, having claimed the degree Papa never got for himself, I decided to find a job in Europe and remain there, sparing myself being caught in the family…dysfunction.
“I moved to London. I had a normal life, which I cherished more than anything. That ended on October thirty-first, 1990. You see, it was still All Hallows’ Eve over there when my mother called. I was throwing a costume party, dressed up as a ghost and horrifyingly drunk. A ghost—what an irony! I was flown home, of course, for the state funeral. Closed casket, fawning speeches by his enemies. Just horrendous. Mummy looked like a corpse herself. A mummy. Most of the reporters didn’t even recognize her at first because she’d been kept in the shadows for so long.
“After the service, I was trapped alone at the house with her. Without Papa filling all the rooms, it was suddenly just the two of us, and the emptiness shocked us both. He really was gone. She was in tears the whole time, but fierce, angry tears this time. I’d never seen her as forceful or furious as on the night of the funeral. She began raving endlessly about this diabolical, larger-than-life force who’d tried for years to bring our family down, this enchantress who killed Papa. That mysterious name from my childhood came up again. Lady Midnight.
“My mother, you may know, never drank. But that night, she popped open all the remaining bottles of Papa’s champagne. We sat at the dining table drinking, just the two of us, virtually strangers, surrounded by maybe forty or fifty bottles of Dom Pérignon and a house that seemed to grow darker by the minute. As we got drunker and drunker, she gave me the history lesson of my life. She told me how you’d connived to marry into our family by seducing her naïve brother, and how during the war, while her father was doing all he could to protect the family, you led the Japanese straight to the house. She held you responsible for her father’s and her brother’s deaths and said that if it hadn’t been for you, she wouldn’t have had to endure those three years…
“After the war, she found solace in her church. But even then, you wouldn’t leave her in peace. You’d show up uninvited at family celebrations like an evil fairy godmother. And, of course, there was your special friendship with Papa.
“You see, you were our family curse. Papa’s death only convinced her you were even more dangerous than she feared. Because you’d even murder the prime minister. She believed she and I were next. ‘Don’t let her win,’ she whispered in my ear that night, clutching me with her ice-cold hands. ‘Don’t give in to that demoness.’
“After she’d completely exhausted herself, she begged me to sleep with her, on Papa’s side of the bed. She was terrified of being alone in their room. She said the house was haunted, that she saw shadows everywhere. She said she needed to be held and caressed. By this time, her voice was hoarse and mascara was running down her cheeks. I was terrified. I thought she’d gone insane. Of course, I refused her. Then she begged to sleep in my bed with me, and I refused her again.
“I told her to turn on all her bedroom lights and take a sleeping pill. I knew she had a huge collection of those things—all politicians’ wives do. Later that night, while I was sleeping in my old room, I felt a cold shudder
rip through the house. I don’t know how else to describe it. A wave of air came up and brushed against me, making my skin prickle. That was my first, and still my only, supernatural episode. Instantly, I had a sick feeling. I ran to Mummy’s room, which was lit up bright as day, with every light switched on. And there I found her—hanging from the chandelier.”
I gasp. I didn’t know. I hadn’t even guessed. Vi, poor, raging Vi.
“No doubt you never heard. The whole thing was covered up, of course. The Tribune didn’t report her death till days later, and even then they said she’d died of heartache from missing her great husband. That ‘fact,’ as everyone knows it, has become part of our national lore. The national lore I’m now supposed to protect.
“I arrived back in England an orphan. It turned out that my father had been horribly in debt. He’d sunk his own money into some of the Isle’s bigger projects, thinking he’d eventually reap profits. But he was a politician, not a businessman. He’d expected I would inherit my mother’s money, but, well, you already know the end of that story: She’d given whatever was left of it to you.”
She pauses to let that thought sit with me—and it does, painfully. I lean forward to touch her arm but she pulls away.
“Our house was absorbed by the state. Nobody asked about the prime minister’s daughter because he’d never discussed me. Maybe if I’d been a son, things might have been different. As it was, I didn’t really exist. Those people you saw at my christening, none remembered me. People have a very short memory on the Isle.
“I worked very hard to make things right. And as you can well imagine, I developed a very keen taste for history. Everything I told you about myself and my work is true. I became a specialist in the history of the Black Isle. I bided my time. And when the Board of National Memory was formed, I felt it was the perfect time to reclaim my place in the sun. I thought I would finally be able to find this Lady Midnight and solve the mystery surrounding Papa’s death. Naturally, the Board was only too thrilled to have me, the daughter of the late, great Kenneth Kee. As always, I wondered whether I’d won the position on my own merit, but this time, I was determined not to be troubled by doubts. Nobody was as qualified as I was on the subject of the Black Isle.
“My husband, a good Canadian named Ernest Maddin, left me after five years of marriage. No children, luckily. He said I’d become possessed, haunted by imaginary demons. But I’d heard your voice on the phone. I knew you were real. And honestly, my mother didn’t have much of an imagination—she couldn’t have made you up.
“And now we’re finally united. Shadow and shadow. If you worry I’m here to seek a nation’s revenge for the murder of its leader, put your mind at rest. I’m here for entirely selfish reasons.”
Again I ache to rebuff her talk of “murder,” but as I’d learned with other dark souls, I have to let her finish.
“I even remember you at my christening. Not that I saw you, but I felt you—I felt the discomfort you created in my mother. She was never quite the same after that. All through my childhood, she was jittery and paranoid, always looking over her shoulder. Whenever we left the house, she held on to me for dear life, convinced that somebody would try to whisk me away. Only much later did I realize it was you she feared. Lady Midnight again. You had a hold over my father that she knew she could never equal, and because of that, you were always there. Lady Midnight, Lady Midnight, Lady Midnight.”
She grabs a couple of tissues from her pocket, fluffs them into a bouquet, and buries her face in it.
“I’m grateful to learn your side of the story, Cassandra. But I hope you’ll understand how…impossible it is for me to forgive you.”
I wait for her tears to slow. “I’m sorry, child.”
She chooses not to hear me. After wiping her face clean of tissue bits, she checks her wristwatch. When she speaks again, her tone is different—flat, frightening, like a civil servant of the Black Isle. “You may want to pack an overnight bag.”
“What for?”
“I’m taking you for a change of scenery.”
“What if I refuse?”
“Then you refuse. I’m not going to force you. But when I told you I had what you’ve been searching for, when I said this would be a fair exchange, I didn’t mean the ashes.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“Bring a coat. It’s going to be cold down there.”
We take a taxi to Tokyo Station, a redbrick neo-Palladian curiosity smack in the glass and steel Marunouchi district. It brings to mind some of the colonial buildings we have on the Black Isle, except being Japanese, it looks as if it were put up just yesterday by a dollhouse manufacturer.
I’ve never been here. I’ve never felt the need to leave this city.
Agnes Mary Kee navigates us through its crowded, serpentine pathways to a platform for the Shinkansen bullet train, one of those duck-billed marvels that’s taken the epic journey on the Tokaido Road, made famous by those Hiroshige woodblocks, and reduced it to a mere three hours. I worry for an irrelevant second that she intends to throw me in front of it, but no, we hop on. The train leaves exactly on time.
We are headed south by southwest, on the nonstop express.
The seats are hard but the toilets are clean. Classic Japan. I don’t complain. I stare like a cat at the mad tangle of telephone wires and the residential blocks that define every suburb for a hundred miles beyond Tokyo. I can’t tear my eyes away, waiting for the scenery to start. Hiroshige-san has promised me Mount Fuji. Mount Fuji before death.
“You left very few clues, Cassandra. Then one day, I contacted the War Crimes library in Tokyo and discovered that you’re a regular, which only makes sense, I suppose. You could never let things go.”
“That makes two of us, then.”
She looks out her window with a smile.
Distant and gauzy, beyond low-slung villages that will never matter, Mount Fuji juts into view like Mother Earth’s ancient pudendum, the white hairs combed neatly flat. She stays with us a good while, and I feel a chill just seeing all that snow. When we leave the mount behind, the real countryside begins, with alpine hillsides blanketed thick and white. A blizzard whips by in a hurry, making the entire carriage rattle.
By the time we arrive in Kyoto, the air is clear again. But still frigid. The cold has tinted Agnes’s cheeks pink, like a child in an old Chinese lithograph. There really is a lot of Daniel in her look—more so than Violet, really—and I feel a sort of tender kinship toward her. She’s almost family, after all. We both represent the end of our respective bloodlines. We’re each the last woman standing.
Outside the station, she hails a taxi and hands the driver an address. He nods and off we go. To the end of my hunting—or so she claimed.
Kyoto is old and calm, not just an anagram but a mirror image of Tokyo. The city itself is split through the middle by the Kamo River, its banks lined with ancient wood houses and shops with slanting tile roofs. Each resembles a little temple, and many of them are precisely that, shrines to handmade crafts: roasted rice crackers, sandalwood incense, powdered green tea. I’ve long assumed that Tokyo’s lifeblood was its countless octogenarians, but Kyoto truly is the city of the old. The toothless and the bent claim every pedestrian crossing, independent and lively as they go about their day on wooden clogs. No self-pity. And maybe related to it, the ghost population is almost nil.
We get out at a sedate temple district on the edge of the city, aglow with lantern light. The sky has turned brooding, overcast. Agnes leads me along a walled street and through tall red-orange doors. And lo, we’re in an enormous compound, with long, tile-roof buildings and a dry rock garden. Perfectly manicured pine trees shoot out of perfectly measured spots in the gravel.
I glance around. There are English words on a sign: SANJUSANGENDO TEMPLE.
“Has this been a kind of pilgrimage?” I ask. “I haven’t been religious, not for a long while now.”
“Nobody’s making you pray, Cassandra. Quite the con
trary.”
It is closing time—four o’clock, with the setting sun, not that I could see it for the clouds. Tourists and pilgrims brush by us as they leave in one continuous trickle, nodding and smiling. The entire complex is suddenly deserted. A handful of lonesome figures in samurai garb wander the property, but I don’t count them—they will likely remain here long after the doors are locked.
Steady chanting emerges from some unseen sanctum, keeping rhythm with a wood percussion bell. Monks.
I envy the monks their tranquillity.
A robed groundskeeper monk has emerged from one of the shorter wooden buildings. He doesn’t so much as glance up at us, becoming instantly absorbed in the serious business of floor sweeping. Beyond this building sits a crowd of gravestones.
“Are we going there?” I point, following my instincts.
“If you like.”
We walk over, slowly because gravel is hard on my feet, and finally reach the temple’s miniature cemetery. The stones are arrayed in flawless blocks, some with long wooden tablets covered in well-wishes. I search among them for the name I know, the name I expect, but the kanji letters are engraved too tightly for my eyes.
“Which one is he?” I ask.
“What you’re looking for isn’t here,” says Agnes. “These graves are much too old, much too valuable. This temple was built in 1164 for a retired emperor.” She indicates the longest building, which stretches over a hundred yards. “I mean, in that hall, there are a thousand and one gold statues of Kannon, the goddess of mercy. They’re really magnificent. Shame we got here too late to see them.”
“But I’ve seen them,” I assert. “On TV not long ago. You can also buy charms in their shop to ward off headaches, knickknacks that guarantee high marks on exams. The gods here are bribable, apparently.”
She clears her throat. “In any case, I haven’t brought you here to sightsee.”
“I hoped not.”
As we walk by the short wooden building, my eyes are drawn back to the lone groundskeeper in his saffron robe and thick white slipper stockings. He looks like a relic from a different millennium—if not the one before, then the one yet to come. It’s become clear that his job is not to chase the stragglers off the lot. He’s frightfully old, little more than a bald skeleton, living out the kind of fate I used to fear: manual labor unto death. Yet he looks blissful. Is this nirvana—or Japanese perversity?