When Fox Is a Thousand

by Larissa Lai

  The fifth woman winds her hair around her finger as she speaks. “My father works in a café as a short-order cook and my mother works there as a waitress sometimes, but she spent a lot of time with me and my brothers while we were growing up. I married an Asian Studies student when I was eighteen and studying at the community college to be a nurse. I quit my own studies to pay for his, working as a waitress in a girlie bar. My family, had I told them, would have been very upset, so to them I pretended nothing had changed. Until I found myself drawn to one of the dancers. After hours in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and blue jeans she was the loveliest thing I had ever seen. It was not my husband who came after me, but my brother. He thought it had something to do with his honour. One night he came after me with his hockey stick. If I was found in the park, he must have somehow buried me there.”

  “Well,” says the judge, stroking his beard more gravely than ever, “only one young woman was found dead this morning, so only one shall find rest within this jurisdiction of the underworld. We shall determine who it is, and the rest shall become wandering ghosts, unless you can find another county to take you.” The incense smoulders madly and the flames of the torches burn higher. A faint breeze nudges the gauze in a gentle wave, so that the judge’s body seems to undulate for a moment, and then is still again.

  “That doesn’t help,” said Artemis. “All the killers are elusive.”

  “I know,” said the Fox. “Guess I couldn’t be of much help on that one. Tell you what. I’ll help you find your birth mother.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to find her. I’m very tired. Can we talk about it some other time?” She rolled over and was fast asleep and snoring again before the Fox could express her urgent desire to try her new-found powers.

  Artemis’s eyes were closed so she didn’t see the way Fox vanished and the green light rushed like gas through the vents and under the windows. A thin green smoke followed, but she didn’t notice anything until there was the sound of breaking glass and a cold blast of air from the direction of the broken window. Amongst the shards on the concrete floor stood a small, wiry young woman with long black tresses that billowed about her like an ad for moisturizing shampoo. Forget those golden-haired, trumpet-sucking angels in their chaste robes with their sickly chicken-white feathers! Their pimply pink complexions have nothing on this creature. She smelled faintly of quality cosmetics; her makeup was subtle, barely noticeable although it made her skin look unnaturally moist and blemish-free. She wore a well-fitted dress of crushed silk the colour of old ivory, and two marvellous diaphanous scarves that swirled and shimmered in the breeze that blew through the broken glass, so that she looked as though she had just stepped down from a cloud. Two heavy, shiny black wings with the power of sweating horses were spread wide behind her.

  Artemis opened her eyes wide. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Nenuphar.” There was something of the Fox about her, but Artemis just smiled to herself and said nothing.

  Nenuphar grinned, and Artemis noticed that one of her front teeth was missing. The rest were yellow and crooked. She had sweetened her breath with mouthwash, but underneath was the quiet but persistent odour of rotting meat.

  “Put your shoes on, let’s go.”

  Artemis couldn’t remember having removed her shoes. There they were placed neatly side by side at the end of the couch. She put them on, careful not to pull too hard on the frayed left lace, which threatened to snap any moment. Nenuphar watched.

  As soon as she was done, Nenuphar stepped towards the door with a slim-hipped gait, leaving the broken glass behind. Down the elevator they went and into the cool night.

  The sky was spitting gently and the whole night seemed to be bathed in a barely perceptible version of that same chemical green glow. Artemis trudged behind Nenuphar, who walked in strides too long for her own legs, giving her an affected kind of toughness. The great black wings remained closed against her back, although a slight up-and-down motion betrayed the working of her lungs. Although Nenuphar was not quite Artemis’s height, Artemis found herself struggling to keep up with her rapid pace.

  “Where are we going?”

  “East.”

  “How far?”

  “Far. Better hurry or we won’t make it on time.”

  “On time for what? Can’t you slow down a bit?”

  “You’d be faster if you hadn’t drunk so much.”

  “I won’t make it at all, at this rate.”

  The angel continued her pace and turned right on Georgia. The rain came a little harder as they began their trek across the viaduct. The city was a cozy, hazy orange to their right and the warehouses beneath them were dark. Cars flew by, spraying their faces with water. Artemis found the wine fog beginning to clear and her breath even out. She wiped the spray from her face.

  “Come on, hurry up.” Nenuphar twitched her wings in frustration, spraying more water backwards. Artemis’s nostrils filled with a smell not unlike that of a wet dog. As they came off the bridge onto Prior Street, she stopped.

  “Okay, enough now. My legs hurt and I’m drenched to the bone, and you won’t even tell me where we are going.”

  Nenuphar ruffled her feathers. Her eyes went dark in her small, sharp-featured face. Artemis noticed thin lines beneath them and wondered how old she really was.

  “I’ve been on this planet for nine hundred and eighty-one years more than you. Don’t you think I know what I’m doing?”

  “I don’t appreciate your patronizing attitude. It’s unfair.”

  “Well, sometimes life is unfair.”

  “Isn’t there a better way than walking? We could take the bus.”

  “Can’t have people looking at me.”

  “What about a taxi? You could sit in the back and I’ll chat to the taxi driver so he doesn’t notice.”

  “No.”

  “Well, steal a car then. I can’t walk anymore,” said Artemis, only half joking. She sat down on the curb, her feet in the gutter.

  “Stay here.” Nenuphar walked off and disappeared behind a tree, the metal taps on the heels of her cowboy boots clicking loudly against the pavement. Artemis stared after her, gritting her teeth as a trickle of cold rain rushed down her back.

  As she sat, she imagined dragons in the cracks in the sidewalk. The coolness of the night had washed away the alcoholic blur. She waited. The familiarity of that act allowed a heightened sense of reality to sift slowly into her mind, and for the first time all evening, it struck her as vaguely absurd that she was following a Chinese angel through the streets of her city as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

  Nenuphar pulled up beside the curb in an iridescent champagne-pink Mazda hatchback. She leaned over and unlocked the door. The dashboard glowed a soothing hi-tech blue. Nenuphar stepped down hard on the accelerator before Artemis even had a chance to close the door. The night twisted away behind them faster than the speed of light. With her foot on the accelerator, Nenuphar told a story.

  THE CAT MOTHER

  There are gaps in the flow of reality that can’t be filled. They can grow even between close places, between the shore and the sea, between the fields and the house. I used to forage for poultry in a village of women. All the men were away in the city, earning money to send home. One night after a meal of fresh chicken, I met a ghost by the village well. This is the story she told me:

  “My sister and I worked in the family fields. We didn’t want to, we would have preferred to go to Guangzhou, to work in a factory and own lots of shoes. We complained about it often to our mother, who just sighed and said that women had to resign themselves to their fate. This was something we didn’t want to accept and we often chided her for being old-fashioned.

  “One afternoon, our old mother came to the fields. We thought she was bringing lunch, but she had come to scold us. She carried on through the worst heat of the day, cursing us and pelting us with stones. This continued for many days until one evening, after supper, I
asked her why. My mother was shocked. She said she had not left the house in months except to go to the well for water or to her sister’s house, where the grain was stored.

  “‘It must be some evil spirit plaguing us,’ she said. ‘You should kill it the next time it comes.’

  “In the hottest part of the day during the second planting of rice, our old mother worried about her daughters. She put fresh barley water in a jug in order that we might have a cool drink, and set out for the fields. We saw her coming. We mistook her for the evil spirit, and forced her head under the leechy muddy water of the paddies until she drowned. We buried the body in the dyke along the eastern edge of the property and hurried home to celebrate. Our mother was there with a feast already prepared. We did not think to ask how she knew in advance of our telling her, but sat down to enjoy the meal. The spirit cooked well. There was fresh fish at every meal for the next year. The family worked hard and lived relatively contentedly until a wandering nun paid us a visit the following summer. She took me aside and said, ‘Your mother has a strange smell about her.’ I laughed at the nun and asked her what cause she had to say such a rude thing when she was a guest in our house, but the nun had already begun chanting. She walked into the kitchen where our mother leaned over the stove, her voice sliding up to a higher pitch. Our mother dropped to the ground in the form of a cat and rushed out under the gap below the back door. Realizing we had killed our real mother the year before, my younger sister jumped into the well and drowned herself. I turned the situation over in my mind one last time, and then I leapt after her.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?” Artemis asked.

  “I’m not trying to tell you anything. The story is whatever you make of it.”

  “You’re saying there’s never any going back.”

  “I’m not saying any such thing.”

  “I think we should turn around now.”

  “But we’re so close.”

  “I don’t want to meet her. I don’t want to know what she’s like. She’s probably some miserable garment worker who will shed all these tears and make me feel guilty. Or an evil real estate agent that I’ll have to be embarrassed about for the rest of my life.”

  “Surely you want to know where you came from.”

  “Do you know where you came from?”

  “Only loosely. I mean, I know about the foxes. I know a little about the Poetess, although there is one matter I’ve never been able to clear up.”

  “What is that?”

  “Whether she did or did not murder her companion.”

  “Why haven’t you tried to find out?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did try. I went to the Library of the Western Heavens while you were sleeping.”

  She can be pretty nosy when she wants to, that much is certain. I was very pleased with my new powers of transformation. Now no longer reliant on corpses, I could change at will into any shape I could imagine. The angel Nenuphar was amusing, although next time I will have to remember to do something about her teeth. And the black wings? Perhaps brown would be more subtle.

  I wanted to see if I could travel any faster than I used to. I wasn’t much faster than a twentieth-century airplane before my thousandth birthday. Not that it mattered. I hate travelling. But I wanted to know.

  On the morning of my thousandth birthday, I changed into an eagle with a human head. I don’t think I imagined the head carefully enough. It looked suspiciously like that of the poor woman I inhabited on my fiftieth birthday. But I was impatient to get going. I hurried as fast as I could over oceans and undiscovered continents to the Islands of the Blest, farther to the West than any human can imagine. (For, if you know how to travel it, the world is not round at all, but a spiral that keeps circling outwards. Every three hundred and sixty degrees things may look the same as on the previous round, but that is an illusion.) I wanted to check the scrolls on the Poetess’s life to find out what had really happened on those last mad days of her life, whether, as they said, she had strangled the young friend she employed as a maidservant, or whether she was entirely innocent of the deed.

  The library was a great sprawling complex with rolls and rolls of paper tucked into many shelves. Between the reading rooms were courtyards with living fountains and singing birds and butterflies that would tran-form into handsome young women to guide or entertain anyone who stayed there any length of time. I saw one among the stacks, explaining an older style of calligraphy to the newly appointed Heavenly Marine Official of the South China Sea. In another wing, a librarian stepped from her chrysalis for the first time, reciting T’ang Dynasty poetry to the flowers. That was how I knew I was in the right section.

  A powdery wing brushed against my cheek. I turned in time to see a rainbow-hued creature with a wingspan twice the width of my palm vanish down an aisle. A moment later, a librarian stepped from the same aisle and looked me dead in the eye. “Can I help you with something?” She was not at all the willowy creature I had expected, but I suppose aesthetics change with the times in the Western Heavens as they do in the secular world. She was a muscular, large-boned woman with a heavy squarish jaw and thick glasses with heavy black rims. She wore a Western-style man’s suit in light herringbone tweed with a tasteful and well-ironed white shirt and a showy silk turquoise tie that made my eyes hurt.

  “I’m looking for biographical material on the T’ang poetess and Taoist priestess Yu Hsuan-Chi,” I explained carefully.

  “Hmmmph,” she said. “Just got your credentials, did you? What are you? A good-hearted geisha saved by some simpering lower official?”

  “I beg your pardon!” I cried. “There’s no need to be rude. For your information, I’m proud to say I am a Fox who has just reached her thousandth birthday.”

  She looked down at her shiny black patent-leather shoes, so I could not gauge her reaction, but I hope she wasn’t smirking. “You will find, if you are a true scholar or spend any length of time here, that in those days very few records were kept on women, if any at all. We may have a few items collected from the mortal world. Let me take a look.” She took me to a computer terminal at the end of the aisle. “Aha. Here. Two anthologies, one with two of her poems in it, one with four. One of them is also available in English translation.”

  I could see this was going to be difficult. “I want to know whether or not there was any real justification for her execution,” I said.

  “Oh yes, you did say biographical, didn’t you?” Her efficient fingers moved rapidly over the keyboard. She shook her head. “Nobody’s really taken an interest in that kind of thing for thousands of years. Oh, okay, wait. There is a young man who was recently appointed to a newly created post, Heavenly Official of Immigration.” She put a thick palm up to the side of her mouth. “I think he might have foreign blood.” And then, in a normal voice, “I believe he made a donation of some T’ang Dynasty research materials recently. But none of it has been catalogued yet. Have a seat, will you. I’ll go down into the stacks and see what I can find.”

  I strolled into the courtyard and lay down on an elegantly carved stone bench with a dragon’s legs beneath, a lion’s head on one end, and a dragon’s tail on the other. It had been placed beside a little fountain that tossed water up into the air and brought it down again in brilliant colours. The sound of water against stone was soothing. I dozed.

  I awoke to a rough hand on my shoulder. “You shouldn’t fall asleep. The guards will think you’re a bum and have you kicked out.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “They’re all in English, I’m afraid,” said she. “The new official was an American when he was living. And they’re bound books, not scrolls at all.”

  “I don’t suppose I can take them with me.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  I spent a few hours flipping through them, and then copied out key sections. This is what I copied.

  “When the patron came and knocked at the door, I told him through the door that you were not in. Withou
t a word, he rode away. As for romantic sentiments, it has been years since I had such feelings. I pray that you will not suspect me.” Hsüan-chi became even more incensed. She stripped Lü-ch’iao naked and gave her a hundred lashes, but the latter still denied everything. Finally, on the point of collapse, Lü-ch’iao asked if she could have a cup of water. Pouring it on the ground in libation she said, “You seek the way of the Taoist triad and of immortality, yet cannot forget the pleasures of the flesh. Instead you become suspicious and falsely accuse the chaste and righteous. I shall certainly die by your evil hands. If there is no Heaven, then I have no recourse. If there is, who can suppress my fervent soul? I vow never to sink dully into the darkness and allow your lascivious ways to go on.” Having spoken her mind, she expired on the floor. Frightened, Hsüan-chi dug a pit in the backyard and buried her, assuring herself that no one would know of it

  – SAN-SHUI HSIAO-TU

  translated by Jeanne Kelly

  Of her many lovers, Yu Xuanji became particularly attracted to a handsome young poet named Li Jinren. The two had frequent meetings but one day Li Jinren arrived only to find that his paramour was not at home. While waiting for her to return, he was entertained by the maid Luqiao. When Yu Xuanji arrived at the convent, she saw her lover with Luqiao and fell into a jealous rage. In her fury, she grabbed the hapless maid and flogged her to death.