The Invisible Valley

by Wei, Su; Woerner, Austin;

  He shrank back, momentarily cowed, afraid to step over that mysterious threshold. Then Jade rose and rolled over him, enveloping him like a bank of clouds.

  (Women are such healthy, natural creatures, Lu Beiping would say to Tsung years afterward. Much later, after Jade and I had been together many more times, I asked her why she wanted to do it, why she wanted . . . things to be “good between us.” Laughing, she said: You men are always so keen to find reasons for things. You all run around hewing and hammering, fighting and struggling, always so that this, so that that. So tell me, why were you put on earth? Can you explain to me the reason for that? After she’d said her piece she sat there quietly, still laughing to herself.)

  But that’s a digression. At the moment Lu Beiping lay enveloped in a thick cloudbank, at the foot of a cliff ablaze with wildflowers. Needing no reasons, brooking no arguments, Jade spread him out beneath her like a tract of dark, uncultivated wilderness. She plucked off his glasses and tossed them in the grass, and Lu Beiping, in a daze, closed his eyes. Then her fingers bit into him like flying shovels, turning the raw soil of his flesh. She cupped his face in her hands, fondling him, dandling him, calling up dim memories of his first years on earth; meanwhile spades and pickaxes broke the rocky soil of his chest, and lusty songs rang out over sun-blazed fields. She tilled his belly, rich with tribulation and toil; she tilled the muscles of his legs, which shrank and swelled; acre by acre, she tilled the virgin soil of his body, in which years of accumulated sunlight were pent; and inch by inch his growing, languishing desires, his hungers, long hidden but longing to be revealed, unfurled beneath the smiling gaze of the sun, and were illuminated.

  In one downward sweep, her hands enacted a Genesis: from seed to tree, embryo to adult, primeval glacier to swaying grassland. Every pore in his skin opened wide to drink in the sweetness imparted by her touch, and the evening air prickled with the ferment of rain. The tide rumbled in the distance. Storm clouds darkened the horizon. As her shovel tugged at his burgeoning roots, his brain, soft as ripe fruit, flashed in alarm. No! he cried. Jade! But it was too late; the tempest broke, and a flash flood bore him to the edge of a breathless precipice. For a moment he stood poised over a shimmering abyss; then he leapt.

  Down he plunged, through agate-banded, crystal-bright fathoms, through the impudently wafting aroma of meat.

  Like a fig which, having grown ripe in the jungle’s fermented evening air, at last breaks free from its milk-weeping branch and drops softly to the ground, Lu Beiping fell.

  —Darling, Jade called out to him, drawing him into her arms. Darling, darling . . . oh, my darling . . .

  Even at that dizzy instant Jade hadn’t forgotten about the stew pot bubbling over the fire.

  She eased Lu Beiping, who lay with eyes closed as if asleep, out of her lap and tiptoed over to the firepit. After extracting the thicker logs she buried the flames in ash so that the finished stew would keep warm. When she glanced back at Lu Beiping, still curled on the mat of banana leaves, he was staring at her with a wide-eyed expression of grief.

  —Oh, Four Eyes . . . she laughed. You’re still a child.

  —Fuck you! he yelled. Fucking whore! Fucking cunt!

  As these ugly words escaped his lips Lu Beiping remembered the morning after the ghost wedding, standing at the edge of the well and screaming obscenities into the quiet dawn. These words, too, were ones he’d never spoken before.

  Jade rushed over and embraced him. Lu Beiping tried to push her away, but after a brief struggle she had plugged his mouth with her mouth, pinned his hands with her hands. Those strong, calloused hands, which had beaten clothes for Kingfisher, picked medicine for Smudge, and sharpened saws for Autumn, now clamped tight over the hands that Lu Beiping had used to turn the pages of Balzac and Turgenev. She drew his hands to her chest, fondling them lovingly; then she drew his arms around her waist. Before Lu Beiping’s eyes the curves of her body once again blurred into a haze of warm rain.

  On her skin he smelled the odor of sunlight. Light air. It was mixed with a very different scent, heady and female, but he recognized it immediately as the odor wafting off of his own skin when he bathed in the creek: a wild, petulant smell, like gunmetal, like hoofbeats, like the calls of Yangtze river boatmen. He started to grow short of breath.

  —Fuck you! he gasped.

  —Yes! she said. Do that!

  —I said, fuck you, Jade!

  —Four Eyes, I’m yours!

  This time his desire was prolonged and unflagging. He learned quickly how to use his lips, tongue, and hands as weapons, how to exploit the tactical weaknesses of her eyes, ears, and neck. Where once he’d trespassed timidly, he now stormed in brashly; where once she’d torn him apart and knit him back together, he now did the tearing.

  It was getting dark. The sun had sunk behind the hills, but a single slice of blood-orange light hung on one wall of the gully. A crescent moon had climbed prematurely into the sky, as if impatient for the sun’s descent. They rolled back and forth between the grass and the water, locked in each other’s grips like a pair of tussling leopards, their cries seeming to heighten the quiet of the evening and the brightness of the moon. Over the walls of the gully, as if from stadium bleachers, peered plump banana trees and wizened bamboo, motley clots of ferns and slender betelnut palms, vicarious participants in the spotlit fray. Even the aloof, skyward-climbing vines and the decadent, longhaired epiphytes glanced sidelong at the vehement struggle taking place on the floor of the valley below.

  (Never again, Lu Beiping said to Tsung, have I experienced such giddy heights of emotion as I did on that night.)

  Months later, remembering that night, Lu Beiping would recall how, as they rolled through the grass, Jade had whispered again and again in his ear: Four Eyes, you’re him, you are my Horn . . .

  This time he actually entered her. How it happened was a mystery: Had she guided him in? Or had it slipped in by accident? Had his body known what to do without him telling it and fulfilled the promise of its own accord?

  And so he pressed onward into that hidden valley, into the dim otherworld into which he’d been called. His soul, trembling, began to spin, bearing him back once more to his childhood, back into the earthquake-clamor of his father’s percussion practice, where an eight-year-old Lu Beiping was folding paper wishes. Once, he had made a habit of writing all the wishes that he didn’t dare speak aloud on small scraps of paper and depositing them in his piggy bank, a little bobble-headed mandarin made of Foshan porcelain. He didn’t have much money to put in the bank, since his parents didn’t have much to give, so he filled it with wishes instead. His mother had told him that when he grew up could smash the piggy bank and use the change he’d saved up to fulfill wishes that money couldn’t buy. Following his own childish logic, he concluded that if wishes were the more important thing, he ought to stockpile wishes instead. So he wished to be the inventor of the kite-powered dynamo, the twentieth century’s most groundbreaking invention; he wished for the plastic tommy gun that sparked and sputtered in the hands of the boy who lived next door; he wished for a pipe like the one that jutted so gallantly from his father’s lips; and he wished to be noticed by a certain girl in the other third grade class, who, when all the other girls were wearing pigtails, wore her own hair in a ponytail tied with a burgundy-colored ribbon. A little rosy-cheeked girl to whom he’d never spoken a word, though he’d secretly admired the dimples on the backs of her hands between her thumb and forefinger . . .

  A spasm of light cut short these reminiscences. Through a storm of fluttering paper scraps he watched another young woman approaching. What was written on those scraps of paper? Secret wishes, or inscrutable curses? Could it be that unbeknownst to him, the course of his entire life had been governed by secret messages written on bits of folded paper? Who was that girl—was she the one who’d giggled at him the day he arrived on Mudkettle Mountain, as he searched frantically for
a place to pee? With a delicate chin, a quiet voice, soft footsteps . . . and an unmarked grave? Was she his ghostly soulmate, paying him another visit from the world of shadow?

  As his soul, blissful, fearful, drunk on sweetness and mystery, spiraled skyward out of the valley, propelled by that spinning force—then plunged, abruptly, back to earth—he heard, quite distinctly, the sound of porcelain shattering. It was the crash his porcelain magistrate had made when he smashed it out of spite, after his mother, as a joke, had peeked at one of his wishes. For a second the crisp report of shattering porcelain, along with his own angry shrieks and his mother’s cry of surprise, echoed in the dusky valley.

  A blizzard of snow-white wishes fluttered earthward.

  (Of course, all of this is fanciful embroidery on the part of Tsung, the real author of this story. The only thing that Lu Beiping actually told him was this: that on that night, after he had made love to a woman for the first time, he suddenly burst into tears.)

  Jade pulled Lu Beiping into her lap as Lu Beiping began bawling like a child.

  —No! he cried. No, no, no! No, no, no, no, no!

  —Four Eyes? Four Eyes?

  —Oh, no . . . Oh, no . . .

  —Oh, Four Eyes! Darling . . . dear . . .

  She held him tight, shushed him, pulled her blouse over him like a blanket. But rather than subsiding, Lu Beiping’s sobs grew more violent. Finally, Jade too began to grow distressed.

  —Heavens. I’ve done wrong, haven’t I? It was my fault, Four Eyes. This was all my fault.

  He rolled over and buried his face in her blouse, his body convulsing with sobs. With one hand she stroked his trembling shoulders, while with the other she reached carefully for a stick and stirred the ashes of the fire. Throughout all this she had kept half her mind on the pork, which was still simmering fragrantly in the stew pot. The blackened chunks of firewood hissed, and sparks leapt in the gathering dark.

  Lu Beiping lay facedown, motionless, as if asleep. A damp chill had entered the evening air, and the heat of their bodies made the air feel even colder. A thin line of crimson light still glowed faintly over the mountains. Again, in the course of one evening, his entire world had changed. And this change was likely to be even more momentous than Lu Beiping’s chance discovery beneath that other crimson sunset.

  Suddenly Lu Beiping rolled over, sat up, and gave a sepulchral laugh.

  —So, Jade, are you my ghost wife now? I feel like I’ve just had another ghost wedding—

  Jade spat reflexively, then slapped him across the lips.

  —Peh! Spit on that! Bounty and bliss, Four Eyes, don’t . . .

  Then she pulled her hand back and studied him for a long moment. The Gaffer’s insinuating remarks about Lu Beiping, when the old man came up to the hollow on Midsummer’s Day, rang in her mind.

  —Four Eyes . . . what do you mean by that? Are you serious, or is this just hooey talk?

  While Jade gazed at him suspiciously, Lu Beiping fished his glasses out of the grass, put them on, extracted his shorts from under the banana leaves, put them on too, stooped to pick up Jade’s flowered blouse and tossed it to her, still not saying a word. Then, overcome by the silliness of this silent performance, Lu Beiping gave another macabre laugh.

  —Of course it’s hooey talk. Hey, do you want to smell my feet? After all this talk about my smelly feet, maybe you’d like to take a sniff yourself.

  He waggled a bare foot at her. Jade pushed it away and continued staring at him in silence.

  An intense stillness settled over the creekbend. The all-encompassing din of the insects seemed to deepen the cobalt blue of the night sky. Slowly, Jade pulled on her blouse, then sat with an expectant air, as if waiting for Lu Beiping to go on. Lu Beiping sensed something odd in her manner.

  —Jade, is something wrong? Haven’t you already heard about my ghost marriage?

  Jade shook her head, still gazing at him with the same look of placid, unbroken attention.

  —These mosquitoes sure are getting bad, he said in an awkward attempt to break the silence. He prodded the embers with a stick, and the flames leapt back to life, thinning the cloud of mosquitoes that buzzed around their heads. Jade reached over instinctively to lift the stew pot off the flames, but the wire-wrapped handles were still burning hot, and she released them with a gasp of pain.

  —Crap! Lu Beiping said, grabbing her hands and blowing on her swollen palms. Is it bad?

  Then abruptly, he buried his face in her hands. Jade smiled and laughed breezily.

  —It’s nothing. Oh, Four Eyes . . . you’re a good man, you know that?

  Lu Beiping froze with his face still in her hands. Then he looked up and gave a laugh of relief. Releasing her hands, he tore a strip off of a banana leaf and, using it as a glove, lifted the perilous pot off the flames and set it on the ground. Then, in a calm, even voice, he laid out the basic outlines of his story: how he’d picked up the scrap of red paper next to the rubber grove, married the foreman’s dead daughter, and been exiled to the jungle to herd the cattle. Jade listened, the firelight playing on her face as her expression changed from alarm to sympathy and back again.

  —Did you . . . tell any of this to Smudge? she asked in a cautious voice when he finished his tale.

  —No, said Lu Beiping, grinning at her out of the shadows. I just told him it was because of my smelly feet.

  —Autumn neither?

  —Nope.

  —Good, Jade said, clapping her hands briskly. So Kingfisher doesn’t know either. Let’s keep it at smelly feet. That’s all they need to know. Hey! . . .

  She made a show of trying to grab his feet and sniff them, as if trying to divert attention from the uncomfortable topic at hand. After Lu Beiping had wriggled out of her grasp, she sat back and finally unearthed the fear that had been growing inside her.

  —Four Eyes, this is too baleful a thing. Normally we’d do a spirit-calling, wash the dark out of you. But we can’t, not now. You’ve got to keep your mouth shut around Kingfisher. Living like we do, it’s sins like this that scare him most.

  —It doesn’t scare you? Lu Beiping asked. You looked pretty frightened when I told you.

  —Me, scared? Jade scoffed. I’m a stonewoman, what have I got to be scared about? Hard as the life of a stonewoman, have you ever heard that saying, Four Eyes? Do you know what a stonewoman is?

  —A stonewoman?

  Now it was Lu Beiping’s turn to gaze at her questioningly. He sat, waiting for her to go on and studying her firelit face, whose usual playful expression had been replaced by a sea-deep calm. She drew his hand into her lap, stroked it absentmindedly. As she gazed off into the middle distance, Lu Beiping watched the reflected flames dance in her pupils, sensing through her hand the waves of emotion that were passing through her. After a silent moment that seemed to last an eternity, she laughed and came back from her reverie.

  —I’m a happy woman, she said, heaving a deep sigh. Looking at you, I know I’ve got nothing to complain about.

  Lu Beiping said nothing, waiting for the door of her past to slide open and admit him. From the slope above them there came a rustling sound followed by the rasp of dislodged pebbles. Maybe those meddlesome monkeys were back, sniffing after the meat again.

  —A stonewoman, that’s what they called me. Where I come from, stonewoman is the meanest, dirtiest thing you could call an unmarried girl. A stonewoman is a woman that can’t give birth, can’t bring new life into the world, a woman with nothing down there—get my drift?—no door, no hole, no place for a man to plant his seed. A woman that can’t satisfy her man, a stone-cold, deadwood, good-for-nothing woman! Oh, Four Eyes . . . Jade’s voice, normally a husky alto, now sounded high-pitched and tense: Back home in my unit, I was the roll clerk, I kept track of everybody’s workpoints. The Secretary, he wanted to sleep with me. I told him no. He kept trying to get me into bed
, but I pushed him away every time. Finally he said, There’s no woman in Kwun-chow Crossing that wouldn’t jump at the chance to sleep with me. If you won’t, you must be a stonewoman. But just the sight of his shit-brown teeth turned my stomach. I couldn’t do it, he’d have had to kill me first. He kept on hounding me, and before long I got so desperate I found myself a husband the next village over. But no sooner had I crossed his threshold than I got word that everybody back in Kwun-chow was talking about how I was a stonewoman. His family was furious. I hadn’t lived there but three days and already they were clamoring for a divorce. I had no way out. I ran back to my folks’ place. My parents panicked and married me off again as quick as they could, this time to a dole coddle, a crippled old bachelor living out his days on disability money. He was so old that he couldn’t even take me to bed, just hung around the house and beat me when he was angry. I was nineteen years old and a bride newly wed, but I lived like a stony old spinster, cold and barren. By now the whole town was convinced I was a stonewoman, and even I started to believe it. I had the blackest name of all the girls in the village, men turned away when they saw me on the street. And worst of all, that shit-teethed Secretary—he wasn’t Secretary anymore by now, he’d been struggled down in some Movement or other—started harassing me again, found every excuse to come tap on my door. Said I’d never escape the big stick in his pants. That was the last straw. I ran off and joined the driftfolk. It was at the Kwun-chow ferryboat landing that I met Smudge’s pa.

  She stopped.

  —What year was this? Lu Beiping asked.

  —Sixty-seven, the second year of your big Revolution.

  Jade’s expression softened, and she laughed quietly to herself.

  —I had Smudge at the end of that year. Smudge’s pa, he was the first man to break the stone of this stony young stonewoman. Ha! And now just look at me with my litter of squalling whelps. Four Eyes, tell me if I’m not a lucky woman.