by Larissa Lai
Her face must have betrayed fear or anxiety, because Ming said, “I thought you might find this exciting, get your mind off Claude, and give you a taste of some twentieth-century action. I thought you might have some aggression to burn off. If it’s gonna make you miserable, you don’t have to do it.”
“I wish you had warned me.”
“If I hadn’t told you it was a surprise, you wouldn’t have come.”
This she could not deny. “All right, what do I do?”
The figure at the end of the range, her target, had a human shape, a white outline tracing that ancient form, the shape of terror and vulnerability. From the chest area, a series of concentric circles rippled out, separated by single digits. Ming showed her how to stand at forty-five degrees to the target, how to aim, lining the sights up with the bulls-eye without cranking her neck in an awkward position. She explained to Artemis how to hold her breath at the moment of explosion so that her restless lungs wouldn’t throw her aim off. Then there was nothing in the room but Artemis and that taunting figure. She squeezed the trigger slowly and blew a hole through the heart.
“Not bad at all for someone who acts so chickenshit,” pronounced Ming cheerfully, pulling the little stub of steel from Artemis’s hand. The gun’s recoil had left her numb.
They fired a few rounds each. Ming had been practising. She must have been, since she never missed, except when she experimented with the moving target. Artemis’s results were more erratic, sometimes spot on, sometimes missing the figure altogether.
At one point, coiling all her concentration into her eye, she did not notice how badly her hand was shaking.
“Rest for a minute,” said Ming. “You’re not going to hit a thing if you’re that nervous. Don’t want you to shoot yourself.”
“This is such a strange sport. These things have been designed for the express purpose of killing, and then we handle them so carefully to make sure we don’t.”
“You never know when you might need to. Then you’ll be glad you know how.”
“It must be a Catholic thing, to follow one’s temptations right to the edge and then feel guilty for acting upon them.”
“It’s a self-defence thing,” Ming snapped.
The intensity of this routine practice absorbed them so entirely they did not hear the rumbling laughter in the next booth. Not, that is, until a man on the other side of the thin wall growled, “Here’s one for you, Charlie,” and blew the head of the paper figure right off.
“I think we should leave,” said Artemis.
“It’s just some lame soldier who’s still sore about Vietnam,” said Ming.
“I don’t care. We don’t belong here. Let’s go.”
Ming levelled her eyes at her. “No. I’m not going to leave because some brainless gimp doesn’t understand that I have every much a right to be here as he does.”
A ruddy boyish face peered around the corner. “What did you call me, Chinaman?”
Another head peered around the corner. “Jeez, Phil, it’s a girl.”
“Fuck off, honky trash.”
“Hey hey hey, what’s going on here?” A burly security man appeared from nowhere and placed a heavy hand on Ming’s shoulder. “We don’t permit racist name-calling around here, young lady.”
“But –”
He shook a finger at her as one would at a naughty child, and gently nudged the two young men back into their booth.
“Come on, I’m serious, let’s go,” Artemis urged.
“No.” Ming lined up a round of bullets in the magazine, jammed it into the stock, and slid into a firing stance. She released the whole round with scarcely a second between shots. Not one went even close to the bullseye.
Artemis was relieved when Ming finally consented to leave and the glass doors swung shut behind them. It began to rain as they crossed the asphalt parking lot.
“I don’t know what hurts more,” said Ming, “bullshit like that from the outside or the games that women play with one another’s heads.”
“I can definitely relate, but what’s happened to you lately?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just talking generally. Actually, I was thinking about you. Still bitter about Claude?”
“She gave back all my stuff yesterday.”
“That’s pretty final. Don’t look so miserable. You’ll get over it in time.”
It was unbearable that Ming should patronize her. “Guess what was in the bundle?” she offered, too juicily.
“Tell me.”
“A bunch of letters to Diane from her brother. She knew he was going to be killed.”
“What?!”
“Shit. I guess that’s a secret. Don’t spill it, okay?”
The next morning, Artemis woke up, earlier than usual, to the steady sound of hammering. Contractors had been working on the house next door for the past few months, but this was the first time they had started so early. Winter was coming, and no doubt they wished to complete as much as possible before the heavy rain began. Artemis heard a stirring upstairs, heavy feet on the thin wood floor. She pulled a pillow over her head and the covers over that. She drifted off for a few minutes more. But then she couldn’t ignore the commotion that had started up outside. She leaned out the window.
The foreman was complaining in rising tones to two policemen, neither of whom would look him in the eye. One gazed vaguely at the workers who were watching from where moments ago they had been hammering or sawing. The policeman was shaking his head. The other policeman concentrated on his pad of tickets. Joanne had poked her head out the window right above her.
“Fine ‘em lots!” she yelled. Behind her another woman was laughing and soon the two of them were in stitches. “Serve those foreigners right for not obeying the laws.”
Artemis gritted her teeth and moved into the kitchen to make coffee. She had reading to do for a class that afternoon anyway, on Classical History, a lecture on military strategy during the Trojan War. Vaguely she wondered what it might have been like to be cooped up all night in the belly of a horse and then obliged to fight in the morning.
At ten o’clock, Joanne banged on her door. “Those pigs sold the house today. To that yuppie ‘artist’ couple that were here at the beginning. Squeezed ‘em good for a bunch more money by the looks of it. We’re being evicted.”
“Great.”
“Yeah, but the bylaw requires them to give us three months’ notice. I’m gonna stay and just delay paying my rent until I’m ready to leave.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Sure you could. I’m here. I’ll back you up.”
“It wouldn’t be right.”
“If you’re gonna let that stop you –”
The phone rang in the kitchen.
“It’s Marlina. Better get it. Give the old cow some trouble for me, will you?”
Yesterday someone I recognized crossed the courtyard. Her hair was loose and wild and her dress whirled around her like a storm. Was it her graceful dancer’s step that made it seem as though she were flying? She fled through the courtyard and into the bamboo grove. At the place she entered, the slim green leaves shook for a moment and then returned to their flirtation with the wind.
What is a ghost? People say they inhabit tablets or trees or flowers or stones. I have never been so sure. There are ghosts that live inside me, wandering my arteries and veins, travelling into my heart and out again. Round the spirits go through my bloodstream in their own vessels, some close to the regular clunk of my heart, pounding like the sun, its red spot pulsing. Others orbit at a greater distance. It takes them a longer time to come back around. Lu Ch’iao was close for a long time, although lately her arc has grown wider. She sails through on her own wings like a wild swan or an angel. The grey feathers fall into my rushing blood, swirl down, and sink, get carried into my left atrium and lodge there, slowly amassing into a clot. Still her wings beat. I imagine the dense mass of muscle beneath the feathers, muscle that has been pounding for all these
years like breath, never stopping. One day she will get tired or too many fallen feathers will accumulate. Perhaps I will die of a heart attack.
I imagine my father travelling in a sedan chair. He would like that, having gone on foot pretty much all his life. Four handsome bearers would carry him around inside his curtained box. Inside, he would have a storehouse of all those medicines that were familiar to me as a child, and many that were not – things that he had collected on his travels, far into the land of the West, pills that work their magic, healing instantly, only to reveal the ingredient for slow painful death years down the line. He will soon need a ship. He will meet many merchants on my oceans and rivers. Perhaps one will give him the black liquid smoke that the Chinese will suck into their lungs as they give away all the treasures of the Middle Kingdom to the white corporate dragon.
I imagine my mother as a crazy, irregular comet in beautiful colours, gold and lightning blue. She burns with an intense light from a great distance off, zigzagging through her orbit and glowing like a sunset on the ocean. I have stopped imagining her as a fairy godmother with gifts of finery and a magic vehicle that will take me away from myself forever. She is a star in the distant sky, endlessly falling.
And the butcher princess? Does she travel on the back of a horny boar, his sharp, coarse hairs spiking her tender thighs? His hooves gallop against my heart like the most noble of horses. Will she betray me in the end, send me on my own travels in the other world, beneath the skin of someone who remembers me? Or will she turn my blood to arsenic that will coax my heart into stopping?
Artemis descended from the bus and began her short trek through the wooded area behind the house. It was growing dark and the crows hung over her, cawing their usual cryptic warnings, which she ignored. She was just going around a bend in the path when Ming jumped out at her.
“What the hell!”
Ming grinned. “Today, Arty-Miss, I’m inviting you to my humble abode. I’ve got something to show you.”
“You do?” Ming’s theatricality set her suspicion alarms ringing.
“Don’t look at me so funny. Come on, I’ve got my father’s car while he’s away.”
“I thought you hated your father.”
“I never said that.” She paused. “You won’t think any less of me because of the car, will you? It’s a Volvo. A station wagon, though. It’s a very practical car. Fits lots of stuff and should last forever.”
“Where is your dad?”
“In China.”
“What for?”
“Just business. I don’t know what he’s doing.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Not really.”
“I thought you said he was doing something that upset you.”
Ming squirmed and Artemis immediately wished she hadn’t said anything. “Never mind. Why do you want to take me to your house?”
“I’ve got something to show you. A surprise.”
*
The house faced directly onto the rushing traffic of Boundary Road, although there was a thick, raggedy hedge around it, blocking out the view, if not the noise. The place itself was a sprawling box, the lower half done in orangey brick, the upper half in white stucco that showed three large cracks and plenty of mildew. Ming opened the door to the smells of mothballs and stale cooking, not overpowering but still noticeable. It was carpeted in the dreadful browns, greens, and oranges of the seventies. The walls were dark wood panelling.
“Come meet my mother,” said Ming, leading her up the green carpeted stairs over which a thick plastic runner had been riveted. Upstairs, the walls were finished in eggshell stucco with bits of sparkle in it that came off on your hands if you leaned too hard against it. The living room was huge and spotlessly clean. There was a cross over the mantelpiece, and a number of religious magazines neatly stacked on the glass coffee table. There were a few of the usual knickknacks – a sea anemone trapped under red- and blue-coloured glass, a ship in a bottle, photographs of the children at various ages against backgrounds that shifted from hazy white to hazy blue and slipped into cardboard frames in fake wood colours – but on the whole, the place was unusually uncluttered.
“My parents are very wary of idolatry,” Ming explained. The thick shag purred beneath Artemis’s sock feet.
They found Ming’s mother out on the deck, assembling what appeared to be a TV stand from a department store kit. It was the same brown panel colour as the walls downstairs. She knelt over it, laboriously twisting the screws into place.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said to Artemis politely when Ming introduced them. “Get your friend a drink now, before you drag her all over the house. Maybe she’ll talk you into coming back to church this Sunday.”
“I’m fine,” said Artemis as Ming rummaged through the fridge and emerged with a half-full bottle of Pepsi. You could tell it was flat by the way it poured. “Really. I don’t need a drink.”
“Just take it,” said Ming, “or my mom will give me hell for being rude. I can’t wait to move out.”
The phone rang. Ming picked it up. “Yup … yup … uh-huh … okay.…”
“Is everything okay?” Artemis asked afterwards.
“Everything’s fine.”
They shuffled back downstairs. Ming threw open the door to her room. In contrast to the neatness upstairs there were clothes, books, newspapers, records, and photographs scattered all over the floor. The brown panelling had been painted over white on three walls and a dark eggplant purple on the long north-facing wall. If there had been carpet, it had been stripped back to the bare concrete.
“Ignore the mess,” said Ming. At the back of the room was another door. Ming pushed it open. Artemis followed her into the dark. Somewhere in the centre of the room Ming fumbled for the cord that would turn on the bare yellow bulb.
Artemis blinked. Surrounding her on every wall were giant paintings of bodies tumbling through space, faces screaming, bolts of fabric uncoiling into nowhere, snakes, dragons, and birds with scales of gold screaming into a night of blinking stars. Drapes of real fabric, smooth silk or cotton with patterns of flowers and animals had been incorporated into one. Another was studded with bits of broken mirror, sharp and dangerous, reflecting back her own eye in a thousand biting pieces. In one, a gigantic woman with a mouth like a cave and teeth like stalactites was swallowing animals in a long line, pigs, sheep, goats, cows, bears, tigers, elephants, and a mangy dog. In the corner of another, a small figure crouched, stark naked, with her hands over her face.
“I began doing these after my father started going away all the time.”
“Ming, they’re incredible. You should try to get them shown.”
“I don’t know if I want to. Right now, I just want my friends to see them.”
“These are nothing like what you had at the border that time.”
“Well, it takes time. And the scale is important.”
She was right. The things towered. They took you in, swallowing your whole field of vision.
It was dark and the wind was up when Ming dropped Artemis home.
“You want to come in?”
“I better get going.”
“Come in for second. You’ve never seen my place and soon it’ll be too late. We’re being evicted.”
A strange look crossed Ming’s face. “Okay.”
They stomped up the porch steps. Artemis flicked open the mailbox, took out the mail, and then, after some fumbling with the keys, found the appropriate one and stuck it into the lock. “Hey, it’s unlocked. That’s weird. I never forget –”
The door swung open. Even in the dark, she could make out the mess. She flicked on the switch. Furniture had been overturned, books pulled down from the shelves, sheets and blankets from the bed had been dragged into the hall and were covered with milk, spaghetti sauce, and broken eggs. The living room mirror had been broken and there were little shards of glass everywhere, like the ones in the paintings.
“Who would do this?”
“Jesus,” Ming muttered under her breath. “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“I can’t believe this has happened.” Artemis stared blankly at the mess. Ming had a pained expression on her face. Artemis ran out onto the porch and banged on Joanne’s door. Joanne clattered down the stairs and came out in a bathrobe, wet hair sticking to her head.
“A woman was here earlier,” she said. “A Chinese woman. I assumed she was a friend of yours. She seemed to know where to find the spare key.” She looked inside. “Shit. You know, I thought I heard some commotion, I don’t know why, I just figured it was okay, you know, because I’d seen her and she looked like a normal person.”
“Who could it have been? Diane? But why would she do this? I mean, we’re not the best of friends but –”
“She was looking for the letters,” said Ming.
“You knew? You knew! You were in on it with her. Goddamn it, Ming!”
“I had no idea she would wreck the place.”
“How did she know about the letters in the first place?”
Ming’s vaguely pained look was now more a look of panic.
“You told her. I can’t believe it. I don’t even have the fucking letters.”
“Think about how she must feel that you know about her brother, you know, that she knew what would happen to him –”
“Get out of my house.”
“Art –”
“Get out.”
Ming slunk down the front stairs. As the lights of the Volvo station wagon went on and the engine started, Joanne wrapped her arms around Artemis.
“Never mind,” said Joanne, rocking her back and forth. “We have to move out anyway.”
“I wonder if I should call Claude, to warn her.”
As if on cue the phone rang, and it was indeed Claude.