When her father entered the room, Mai had asked him if there were a very young child in the house. There wasn’t. Mai had been the youngest of the eight children, and the six who had succumbed to various illnesses had been dead for years.
Could it be the ghost of one of those lost siblings? Trying to warn her? Or haunt her jealously, bitter that she lived while it had never had the chance?
Another thought came to Dot. What if the child had not been a person who was dead...but one who, at that time, hadn’t yet been born? What if, in fact, that child had been Dot herself?
As she had during her dream of the living ocean, she shivered. She rinsed out her glass, put on her knee-high boots, and left the house without saying good-bye or wishing her father goodnight. Perhaps he had even forgotten she was in the house, as he had seemed to have forgotten his long-hidden machete.
9: Two Mothers
Because they’d found that they both had the same day off, Mai and Dot had driven to Boston’s Chinatown to spend an afternoon together. It was chilly today; Monday, September 29. Last night, the crescent moon had been a sickle blade in the crystalline heavens, so distinct and sharp it almost cut the eye. As a child, Dot had found it hard to believe that the moon was still a ball when it looked like that. As an adult, she knew there was nothing missing from that distant world – there was simply much that was hidden from her view.
Two large foo dogs bordered the entrance to Chinatown; in the modern canyons of the city, they seemed like sculptures displaced from some alien planet. They were smiling or snarling and looked to Dot more like dragons than dogs.
In a Chinese jewelry shop where the proprietors spoke Vietnamese, Mai purchased a gold chain with a sinuous dragon hanging from it as a present for Lee’s upcoming birthday. She selected the chain with immense care, insisting on 18k gold and haggling with the two women behind the glass security shield until she got the price down to $170.
“Wow, expensive present,” teased Dot, but Mai said nothing as she led them out of the store in her brisk manner. Dot changed the subject slightly. “Does Lee like dragons?”
“Dragon is good luck. And he used to do karate, when he is younger.”
Dot knew that dragons were as important to her mother’s people as they were to the Chinese. At the start of the lunar calendar, Tet was celebrated – the Vietnamese New Year festival. On the third day of Tet the dragon dance was performed outdoors; people would carry aloft a long, mock dragon as if it were a proud trophy of such a beast, using poles to simulate its movements. Mai had told Dot that the Vietnamese themselves were “The Children of the Dragon.” Legend related that the dragon prince Lac Long Quan had married the princess Au Co, and together they had produced one hundred offspring. But later, Au Co took half of those children and relocated to the mountains. The dragon prince took his fifty children, and moved them to the sea.
Dot had her own version of that story, based on its rich symbolism. The phallic masculine dragon, Lack Long Dong (a water elemental) had knocked up the feminine, dual aether/earth elemental A Ho, and they had divorced, dividing custody of their half-breed brats so as to seed and colonize a nation. But their divisiveness, she thought, was a perfect symbol for the country that had known such familial dysfunction, such self-destruction, in the 20th century. She had never shared this irreverent take on the story with her mother, however, who related these folktales with great solemnity even while remaining a Catholic. Dot wondered if it had crossed her mother’s mind that Lee might be the dragon prince, and she the mountain princess – both from different worlds and perhaps ultimately unable to bring those worlds together. Without having met Lee, Dot didn’t know whether she could fully wish them success or not...
In a Vietnamese restaurant, the mother and daughter had bowls of beef pho and spring rolls which showed the pinks and greens of their contents through their translucent skins, and then they poked around briefly in a Chinese apothecary. Peering into a glass display case, Dot wrinkled her nose at a basket full of sea horses that looked not only dried out but mummified. Apparently not amused by her reaction to his wares, the old man behind the counter – standing in front of life-size, mystical-looking diagrams of the human body – glowered at her. “Bird face,” Mai whispered to Dot. Bird face was equivalent to calling a man a penis face. Crab face was the same insult but directed toward a woman. Instead of referring to her own reproductive region as a “crab,” however, Mai had nicknamed it Bin Laden due to its bushiness. She knew this amused her daughter.
“So when can I meet Lee, Mom?” Dot asked Mai as they strolled past a sidewalk cart selling trinkets, potted bamboo plants and cheap sandals.
“Someday; I don’t know.”
“Is he good-looking?”
“Why you ask me that for?” But a moment later: “Yes, he’s very handsome.”
“Why does his wife want to divorce him?”
“I don’t know; stupid woman. She’ll be sorry someday. I can’t believe he’s so nice to her after she cheating on him. He still talks to her, they still living together. They went to dinner the other night like friends. If that was a Vietnamese guy...” She trailed off.
“I was just wondering if there was anything wrong with him that made her want to divorce him. If he has an alcohol problem, or if he ever hit her, or...”
“No, never like that. Not that guy. He’s nice – too nice. He lets her walk on him.” After a thoughtful moment, Mai went on, “But he too depressed all the time. He told me he had that problem all his life and takes medicine for that. I don’t understand why Americans get sad all the time. Take medicine for what? What that for? Sometimes Lee so sad I don’t like to look at his face.”
“You don’t know why he’s sad?”
Mai admitted, “I think he’s sad because he afraid I change my mind about seeing him. Worry all the time...”
“Do you love him, Mom?”
“Don’t ask me that, okay?”
“Mom – it’s okay. I know how it is with Dad. I don’t blame you at all.”
Mai murmured. “I love Lee...but I told you before, not that easy.”
“Your relatives here and back home, they don’t have to live in your shoes, do they? And if you’re afraid Dad would hurt you if you left him...”
“Ha, I’m not afraid of him. Coward,” she snorted.
“Well, if he ever tried anything, you call the police and they’d put him away in a second.”
“He never hit me like he hit you.”
“Mom.” Dot paused before venturing on with her question. “Have you two been to bed?”
“Don’t ask me that!” Mai snapped.
“I’m not a child, I’m twenty years old...”
“Don’t ask me, I’m very seriously.”
“Come on, Mom.” Dot linked arms with her.
Mai jerked her arm away. But after several steps more along the sidewalk, she muttered, “One time. Just once. He wants to more, I know, but...so hard for me.”
“Mom,” Dot said simply, fondly. She felt both sad for – and oddly proud of – her mother at that moment, and circled her waist with her arm. This time Mai didn’t pull away. But knowing how difficult this was for her mother to discuss (she often teased her mother for being a “Vulcan”), Dot didn’t pursue that personal line of conversation any longer. Instead, trying not to be distracted by the bodies jostling along beside them, she began to relate to her mother the latest of the unsettlingly realistic dreams she had finally managed to bring up to her, recently. (Could she really call the dreams nightmares? That seemed unfairly simplistic.)
“Mom – last night I had another weird dream. I woke up on the beach like I always do...and I walked to the temple that I told you about. And that thing came into the temple through the same doorway I did...”
“The ghost,” said her mother.
“I guess, a ghost. It came at me like it did the last few times. And then I heard that man’s voice say, ‘Step onto the dais.’ And he took my arm and pulled me up onto
that round platform in the middle of the temple. But this time it was different...”
“What, different?”
Dot stopped walking, so her mother did likewise. “This time I turned and I saw the man who spoke to me. I looked into his face.”
“What did he look like?”
Dot squinted her almond eyes, as if to better focus on the memory. “I don’t know. He was tall. Good-looking. Older than me.”
“Was he a ghost?” asked Mai.
“I don’t know. But he didn’t look scary. He looked like he wanted to protect me.”
By the time the women drove back to Salem, it had become night. The moon was again a crescent. It still looked like most of it was missing, though no stars showed in the area where the orb hid its full face in blackness.
By October 2nd, the moon became half full. Mars was still a pronounced red sparkle in a sky damp from an earlier rain. In Salem, the annual Haunted Happenings had commenced; they would define the Witch City throughout the entire month.
After he left ManuCel that evening, Lee Todd stopped for a quick dinner of a sandwich and coffee before pointing his car in the direction of the Hawthorne Nursing Home to visit his mother – and hopefully, Mai, if she was on; he found it ever difficult to keep up with her schedule, the frequent overtime. He himself had never been one for heaps of overtime, additional part-time jobs; the idea of spending the greater portion of each day working depressed him. Life was too short, one’s free time so fleeting. He thought of Mai as being stronger than he was.
Along the way to his mother’s room, Lee nodded to the friendly Ghanaian orderlies and dourly pretty Puerto Rican nurses. One, named Clara, stopped him and said with a smile, “Mai already went home, Mr. Todd.”
He smiled back at her. “Now you don’t think I came here just to see Mai, do you, Clara?”
“Not just,” she teased, continuing along the corridor ahead of him.
Still smiling, Lee stopped at his mother’s room and turned into its doorway. There, he came to an abrupt halt.
His mother’s new roommate was named Gail Lawson. She was a woman as small and frail as Mrs. Todd, and not much more aware of her surroundings. Lee had certainly never seen her standing before, as he did now. She was so still, her features so transfixed, that had she been lying down instead of standing between the two beds, one hand clutching the curtain that separated them, Lee would have thought she was dead.
His mother’s bed was empty, the blankets trailing off the far side. Mrs. Lawson’s eyes were trained on a spot between the beds, out of Lee’s range of sight.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed, lunging into the room.
“She was fighting,” he half-heard Mrs. Lawson mumble in a small drugged voice.
His mother lay on the floor between the beds, her body curved in the beginnings of a fetal position. An ancient, battered crescent moon. Lee crouched down beside her and took one gnarled hand. To his surprise (he didn’t dare feel relief), she made a faint attempt at squeezing his own.
“I heard her fighting with someone,” Mrs. Lawson said, “maybe a nurse. But when I looked the person was gone...”
“Mum,” Lee whimpered helplessly, like a child again.
His mother’s lips didn’t flicker and her eyes didn’t open, but her fingers closed around his hand with additional strength. A final electrical surge of life.
“Oh my God,” the nurse’s aide Clara said behind him. He heard her dart away, heard her yelling. He closed his own eyes and stifled a sob, and in the blackness behind his lids a picture flashed into life as if a movie projector had been switched on...a television screen lighting up in a dark room...
Lee stood naked in the open air. He had never as an adult been naked outdoors, maybe not even as a child. In the face of what he saw around him, he was only barely conscious of being without clothing, but his body was aware of the unnaturalness of its natural state, felt its vulnerability keenly. Though the air itself was warm, almost humid, a violent shiver electrified his skin. Every cell shuddered.
He stood upon a circular raised platform or altar at the very center of a circular structure, tall arched windows positioned between columns with no roof to support. Beyond those pillars and through those windows he saw only impenetrable churning mist, tinged a copper color with the light from some setting or rising sun, the exact location of which he couldn’t determine through the fog that pressed upon this observatory or amphitheater as if it were a small model packed away in wads of cotton.
But even the building and the fog were only peripheral impressions like that of his nakedness. What Lee found himself truly focused on was the young woman he saw directly ahead of him, her back to him. She was nude as he was. Her hair was black, short and ragged in the breeze. She was as delicately slender as a child, her hips barely defined, a half cleft dividing tiny buttocks. And she did not seem to be at all aware that he stood behind and above her on this platform round as a harvest moon.
Except for the shortness of her hair, he thought he knew this woman. He thought he loved this woman.
Despite her beauty and familiarity, Lee’s attention drifted in the direction that the woman was staring. In the threshold of the structure he saw a figure. As this figure entered into the arena, it seemed more a membrane than a man. Its forward motion was both gliding and spasmodic, and its approach did nothing to define its form. It was a remotely anthropomorphic mass of silvery gray flesh...which let out a choked, dog-like bark. The sound made Lee’s intestines knot tight. And now the creature drove ahead of it a horrible stench like decomposing fish washed up in the tide.
The Crooked Man, his mind echoed.
Lee felt a lurch of concern for the small, nakedly vulnerable woman. She backed up until she came to the edge of the circular platform he stood upon, and leaning down, he quickly grabbed hold of her arm at the elbow. “Step onto the dais,” he commanded, at the same time jerking her up beside her.
Startled, the young woman spun around to look up into his face. For a moment he thought that this woman was indeed Mai – but she was younger, without the tattooed eyeliner and lipstick, and there were subtle differences in her features besides. Though she was at least partially familiar to him, the woman didn’t appear to recognize him at all. But she didn’t withdraw from him, didn’t struggle. Together, they looked back toward the approaching apparition of flesh...but billows of clouds poured in from everywhere at once and swallowed them up utterly.
With a gasp, Lee let go of his mother’s hand. The fingers slipped away limply.
When his mother had been alive, only moments earlier, her eyes had been closed.
Now that she was dead, her eyes were open.
10: The Fall
On October 10th, the moon became full again. “Moonlight is sculpture,” Salem’s own Nathaniel Hawthorne had said...
At night Mars was still a glistening drop of blood in the sky. Lee had thought it was to have diminished, receded to its previous anonymousness by now, though maybe he was forgetting what the articles he’d read had predicted regarding the duration of its nearness to the Earth.
Leaves were becoming ensanguined and falling in earnest. Their dried husks, like dead flakes of skin fallen from the red planet, rustled across the cobblestoned sidewalks of the Witch City. Their vivid yellows and oranges contrasting with the acetylene blue of the cloudless afternoon sky and the white fronts of Federal Style homes, the leaves that flooded yards and encroached on gutters looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle poured out of a box, the image the puzzle portrayed apparently one of some tremendous conflagration.
At ManuCel, his place of work, Lee Todd looked from his top-floor office window – glowing yellow with the luminosity of the foliage outside – back to the papers spread upon his desk like so many more shed leaves. On the top page, he had scribbled two lines from a nursery rhyme that had come back to him minutes earlier: “There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile.” He hadn’t been able to recall more than that, and he now crumpl
ed the sheet, dropped it in his trash can. He rustled through the remaining papers, but his turn of mind was more philosophical than analytical, despite the grim news these reports conveyed.
Some of the cells this company worked with were taken from the bodies of people who had donated their organs in the event of their death. Those cells – viewed through microscopes, fretted over in their Petri dishes, sold over the Internet – were the surviving tiny bits of this man, this woman, this husband, this mother, the bulk of these individuals now rotting in the ground. He had personally watched, many times, as cells split into two. Multiplied. Lived on, the vampiric undead, soaking up their pink nutrient solutions like diluted blood. These tissue constructs were shreds of immortality.
Not that even a single cell of his mother’s body had survived in this manner. In a way, he felt desperately sad that he had never asked her to donate her organs for transplant and her tissues for research at some company like ManuCel. But what would it really matter, ultimately? They would not be cloned into a new version of his mother. And even if they could be, it would be a twin with its mind erased blank. It would not be her.
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