When Fox Is a Thousand

by Larissa Lai

  As the story progressed, Artemis found her eyelids becoming heavier and heavier. The moment it ended, she dropped into a deep sleep from which nothing could have roused her. She woke in the morning to find herself surrounded by the familiar walls of her own bedroom.

  “Your phone number was in her pocket. She wasn’t carrying any ID, SO you’re our only lead. I’m sorry to inconvenience you like this, but you do understand.”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Artemis felt the words come too easily out of her mouth, like precious coins she wasn’t sure she wanted to spend. A woman’s body lay in the morgue, and it was someone she knew. Someone who was carrying her phone number when she died.

  “Inconvenience,” he had said, as though her phone or water pipes might be momentarily disconnected, or the street she lived on blocked off for construction for a day or two. “Inconvenience … understand.…” she mumbled to herself, trying to fend off the nervous breath that rose from her diaphragm. She felt like bone jelly inside a hard casing.

  She knew there was no point procrastinating, but she somehow didn’t feel ready to go. Not yet. It wasn’t right. There had to be a ritual. To begin with, she must be clean. No point going to her first experience of death dirty and unprepared. She walked slowly to the bathroom, slippers flapping against the worn wood floor. She ran scalding water into the tub and added bath salts – why not, this was a special occasion of sorts. The smell of lavender and eucalyptus was soothingly familiar for a moment, but then she noticed for the first time a rough, soapy chemical odour underneath. The pleasure seemed tainted and the horror of what she was about to see returned, filling her stomach with that soapy chemical smell, and a memory from childhood which she had thought was lost for good. It was the memory of going into fever, late at night, when dreams swell to disproportionate size, engulfing the child who has conjured them.

  She was perhaps ten years old and in bed sick with the flu. Her mother and father were asleep in the next room. Eyes wide open, she dreamt of a huge cloud of steel machine parts: coils, hinges, gears, and blades whirring through the sky like mutated clockwork. It was headed straight for her parents’ room, so she climbed out of the high bed that her father had made her and went into their room in time to see one cloud settle on each parent like a giant vulture and begin to feed. She screamed and screamed, but nothing came from her throat but a bone-dry rasp.

  For the next year, it was like that every time one of them left the house. She was so afraid the dream meant one of them would die in a car accident or fall from a tenth-floor window or be knifed in a shopping mall parking lot. But they always came back, day after day, perhaps with a little less blood in their faces each time, though she didn’t notice that until years later. In the meantime, the nightmare eventually faded away.

  But the metal bird was back now, and the rusty hinges and gears scraped and creaked through the convolutions of her brain, dripping gluey black oil as her body soaked up the chemical stench of the bath salts only thinly masked now by the stale perfume of flowers and trees. More than ever she felt an urgent need to be clean. With a generous amount of soap and an old washcloth she scrubbed and scrubbed herself until her skin felt raw. She climbed quickly out of the tub, dried off, and dressed.

  Her hair was still wet when she arrived at the police morgue.

  “You mustn’t be alarmed,” said the tall policewoman who greeted her, “by the cuts around her face and down the centre of her body. We had the autopsy done this morning. We had wanted you to identify her first, but it has taken us a couple of days to reach you.”

  Artemis nodded. “The phone was off. Do you have any idea who it is?”

  “There are tattoos, but they don’t help unless somebody can identify them.”

  They arrived at a pair of grey swinging doors.

  “She’s just in there.”

  Artemis stood at the doors for a long moment, until the policewoman gently pushed her from behind. She in turn pushed the doors and they swung wide. The body was right there, an all-too-simple human shape flat on its back on a steel table. She didn’t know what she had expected, whether it was clothing, or gore, or a familiar if unhealthy face to look her in the eye and smile feebly, as though death were nothing but an extremity of sickness. The body lay there. The flesh was grey except for a few bruises on the forehead, left cheek, arm, and ribs. There was a long cut down the centre of the torso, which bifurcated just above the belly. It had been coyly sewn shut, as though to tastefully conceal something lewd or embarrassing, as though death and nakedness were not enough. It was not frightening to be here in the way she had expected. There was a familiarity to this feeling. To this woman. It was not the familiarity one has with a living acquaintance, of knowing someone because you’ve worked with them before or maybe gotten stoned together once.

  Trying to see the body as someone she might have known was a different task again. The tattoos, of course, were familiar, but death had made this woman a stranger. Artemis approached more closely, searching the dead eyes for a sign, trying not to stare at the wiped-clean bullet wound in the side of the head. She gazed at the face and let the features settle on her mind. She looked down the length of the bruised and sliced and examined body as though gazing at broken wheels of cheese in a deli. The body was small, but it filled the room with its grey deadness in much the same way a horse or any large beast fills one’s consciousness with its presence.

  And then she was tumbling into a memory so vivid she almost lost her balance and fell across the corpse. In the pink dressing room of the bathhouse she saw Ming, nonchalantly shedding her clothes, revealing the bright new tattoos, the rounded belly.

  The body on the steel table was the same body. When the realization struck her, she screamed, but nothing came out except a bone-dry rasp. The policewoman took her gently by the shoulders and guided her back out into the hallway where the lights and the walls were comfortably, generically institutional.

  “Are you okay?”

  Artemis nodded her head a bit feebly. Someone handed her a glass of water and she drank it. As it went down her throat she thought of rats in a sewer. She looked up at the policewoman.

  “Can you make a positive ID for us?”

  “Yes, she’s Mercy Lee.” Her voice came out flat and expressionless, like she was acting in a suspense thriller but didn’t really know what to do. “She has family in Burnaby, I think.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve been sick. A week ago, maybe two. Was she murdered?”

  “We think so,” said the policewoman. “Any idea why someone might want to kill her? Was she involved in a gang or anything like that?”

  “I don’t think so. She was an artist and a student and sometimes a writer, working for feminist media and stuff like that, but nothing that heavy-duty.”

  “Why do you suppose your number was in her pocket?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  The moment she got home, Artemis went straight to the bathroom and ran herself another bath.

  I still remember the first time I ever saw a dead fox. I was young. It was still years before I’d even heard of such things as rope and poison, of brown bottles and pig’s bladder. By the bank of a river, fishing for trout, a fox had taken a hunter’s arrow in her side. She was young, perhaps my own age. Blood gushed out of the wound, matting her fur. Her eyes were closed and already flies were buzzing greedily about. Between her paws lay a half-eaten fish, its dead eyes staring.

  I felt a deep sorrow. I lay down beside her and pushed my moist snout against her dry one. I thought I heard her sigh. My mother came rushing out of the hedge just in time.

  “Don’t!” she cried. “Don’t you know that’s the most dangerous thing you can do? Foxes can help each other in life, but you must never try to animate a dead fox. She will drag you down into the Ninth Fox Hell and you won’t stand a chance of reincarnation for another thousand years.”

  The
thought of that close call still makes me shudder, even in the wake of my new-found immortality.

  Artemis stood at the magazine rack, flipping through the latest issue of Vogue. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Fox in the same human form as last time. She was dressed in torn jeans and a T-shirt. Artemis didn’t quite want to believe it was her. But the Fox rummaged aggressively in the poultry department, poking and squeezing at the cellophane-wrapped packages of chicken parts. She spotted Artemis and ambled over carrying a red plastic shopping basket containing two large chickens. The packaging was coming apart and pink juice trickled onto the floor.

  Artemis was flipping through a section on new lingerie for spring, which featured a short-haired Eurasian model. She heard the sound of boots approaching but didn’t look up.

  “Sleep well?” Under the bright fluorescent supermarket lights the Fox looked remarkably human. The Levi’s and T-shirt, both of which were desperately in need of washing, were the same ones she had worn in the woods. Her skin looked tired. There were bags under her eyes and a few pimples forming on the side of her nose.

  “Yeah, I slept fine,” said Artemis.

  The Fox smiled and put her arm around Artemis like a long-lost friend. “You don’t look so well. Did you eat today? Maybe your blood sugar is low. You need some protein.”

  “All of this is very stressful, you know. I think I’m going crazy.”

  “I feel bad about the little trick I played on you the other night. I thought I would make it up to you.”

  “How do you plan to do that?”

  “Any information you want about the past or the future, I’ll find the answer for you.”

  “You can do that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Who killed my friend Ming?”

  “That will take some time. Would you like to come to my place for dinner?”

  The Fox picked up the copy of Vogue and tossed it into the basket with the chickens. She took Artemis by the arm and walked out the door. Nobody seemed to notice that she hadn’t paid for her groceries.

  Out in the parking lot the sun glowed softly behind the clouds. The smell of rain lingered in the air. Artemis slumped back into the cool black leather seat of the Fox’s BMW.

  They circled around the industrial-turned-yuppie district of Yaletown for a good fifteen minutes looking for parking. Finding a spot, the Fox pulled up close to the car in front. She didn’t notice until too late that her right-hand mirror was too close. There was a loud crunch and the left-hand mirror cracked off the other car.

  “Ooops!” she cried, laughing, and pulled away. “I guess we’ll have to park somewhere else. “Boy, some stuffed suit is gonna be mad!”

  Artemis chuckled nervously. “I thought you lived in Richmond.”

  “No, no. Rented that. I thought it added to the plausibility.”

  The Fox found another parking spot and they walked three blocks to her front door.

  “Maybe it’s time to move out of Yaletown,” said the Fox. “It’s being taken over by too many expensive furniture types.”

  They went up to the third floor in an enormous freight elevator.

  For a warehouse space it was not particularly big. It had been divided into several sections with white rice paper screens. Against the far wall was a long row of windows beyond which the city glowed. There were thick wool Chinese carpets scattered randomly about, and soft couches, low to the ground and generously loaded with brightly-coloured cushions. Halogen lights dangled from the ceiling, glowing dimly Artemis found herself wondering how the Fox had managed to steal all this stuff.

  The Fox indicated a couch facing into the kitchen. “Sit down.”

  Outside, the sky had begun to darken. Artemis slumped into the cushions. The Fox handed her a snifter of brandy and the Vogue magazine, from which she had carefully wiped the chicken juice. Artemis thanked her shyly. She sat back and watched as the Fox unwrapped the chickens, put them in the sink, and rinsed them. She took a board from the cupboard and a cleaver from beside the stove and expertly chopped the chickens into small accurate pieces, clicking the blade against the board after each passage through flesh and bone. Her hands were quick and strong. She cut in such a practiced manner that Artemis wondered whether she was older than she looked.

  There was the sweet odour of onions and soy sauce and chestnuts and rice. The comfortable smell made Artemis drowsy and she dozed for a moment among the soft cushions. The sky was black when the Fox woke her. The table was set with tall silver candlesticks, heavy silver chopsticks, and cloth napkins. But there was only one dish, which struck Artemis as odd for a Chinese meal – chestnut chicken and rice. The Fox produced a bottle of good red wine from the cupboard above the stove and generously filled two glasses. Whatever the meal might be lacking in variety, it did not lack in quantity. The Fox filled Artemis’s bowl, and when it was empty, she filled it again. They didn’t speak. The Fox ate quickly and noisily her nose twitching every now and then. Artemis ate slowly and sipped steadily at the wine.

  The wine made her head heavy so heavy that she could not finish eating, but had to rest her head on the table. She woke once to find the Fox had gone. She could barely stagger to the sofa before she sank into sleep again.

  Sometime in the night, there was a hand on her shoulder. It was the Fox. “While you were sleeping I went to the Court of the Underworld to check up on your friend. This is what I saw.”

  THE JUDGE OF THE UNDERWORLD

  In the High Court of the Underworld, five young women are lined up on their knees in front of the judge. He adjusts the wings on his cap and strokes his long, sparse grey beard like a smooth trail of smoke. The young women wear white linen shifts with clean lines. Varying lengths of smooth black hair hang down their backs, each tied with a single white ribbon, except for the one whose hair is cut close like a boy’s. Their faces are identical, right down to the mole beneath the right eye. Between the young women and the judge hangs an immense veil of gauze, so that he appears as a ghost to them, and vice versa. Incense and torches burn all around them, generating great clouds of smoke. From a distance, way above their heads on the surface of the Earth, comes the eerie sound of professional mourners wailing, an impersonal kind of wail, which makes it all the more perturbing.

  “How is it that you all come to be here on this day?” the judge asks.

  The young women remain silent.

  “Do you know one another? Are you sisters?”

  “No,” says the girl with hair like a boy. ‘Tve never seen any of these women before.” The other four girls nod their heads to indicate that they are experiencing similar confusion.

  “All right,” says the judge. “Then we shall have to begin with each individual’s story. Family history and circumstances of death. You first.” He points to the young woman to his right.

  ‘I am the daughter of a forklift driver,” she says. “He worked mostly in shipyards, so I never saw him. He used to be a doctor in Vietnam, but nobody cares about that in Canada. I was a student in Engineering. I wanted to be a boss at the kind of places where my dad had to work. How did I die? I love the ocean, you see, so I often went for walks on Kits Beach or English Bay. On this particular night the moon was full and orange. I was walking in Stanley Park. There were lots of Asian families fishing for smelt in the tide that had swelled so high it could have lapped right over onto the path. I felt safe walking there, knowing these families were all around. So I walked, and maybe I didn’t know how far I had walked. I was surrounded by four young white men with shaven heads and baseball bats. They said something about Orientals taking over the city and putting white people out of work and then all I remember is a long dark tunnel.” She falls silent.

  The judge strokes his beard with one hand and nods his head gravely.

  The second girl, the one with hair like a boy, begins. “My mother was a successful businesswoman, but she’s dead now. She died of cancer. My father is a Chemistry professor. I was walking with him around the
seawall. He was telling me about his childhood, and how the Japanese had invaded Guangzhou during the war. His family hoarded rice because they were afraid there would be a shortage. We walked a long way, and then my father went to use the public washroom. I waited just outside the door. Two men with jeans and crewcuts approached me. ‘Faggot,’ they said. ‘Bum-fucker.’ I began to explain to them that I wasn’t, and that I was waiting for my father, but they said they knew by the way I walked. They were carrying little cudgels like the kind English policemen have. They used them to beat against my skull until it cracked. I passed out. I woke up just once before I died to feel dirt being shovelled into my face and then that was it. I don’t know what happened to my father.”

  The third speaks with a firm British accent. “I was being sponsored into Canada by my aunt, who is very rich and owns a flat in Richmond. My mother and father are both garment workers in Hong Kong. He is an overseer, she is a seamstress. I was studying for a business degree at the University of B.C. I was lucky. My aunt was very kind to me. When she was not in town, I looked after her flat, and sometimes drove her car. It was new and red and driving it felt like flying. Some young men found out where I lived and started asking me to get money from her to prevent them from beating me. I got a couple of hundred dollars from her by saying I needed it to buy books, but when they wanted thousands, I couldn’t ask. They broke into my basement suite late one night and made me drive them to Stanley Park in the red car. I was beaten to death with a crowbar.”

  The fourth one says, “My father is a conductor and my mother was an opera singer in Taiwan, but she doesn’t sing anymore. She could sing both European- and Chinese-style opera. She clicked her castanets and sang Carmen so well my father was afraid that bullfighting might be imported to Taiwan. She made a lot of money, but when they were married, my father didn’t want her to perform anymore. I think it was because as the conductor of a second-rate orchestra he made far less than she did. They’re divorced now, but she still doesn’t sing. She willed me her fortune and all her fabulous dresses. When I was little I learned to play the violin, Suzuki method, you know. When my husband married me, it was my music he loved, not me at all. The minor keys made him weep. The major keys made him dance. But when he discovered that I cried when I was sad and my breath stank in the morning, he started sneaking out with a trombone player. Maybe he thought those deep substantial tones were something he could catch in his hands. I suppose it was my money they came after me for. As a person, I had long since become invisible within the walls of his house. I began to walk regularly in the park at night, wishing for violence because my heart was broken. When it came, it was like sleep being granted to a woman without eyelids.”