Breakable Things, page 17
“This is… slightly unexpected,” Li Jing tells the procession at her door, caution beating hummingbird wings in her chest.
They are all here, she thinks. The entire clan. Her eyes find relatives memory had previously transformed into a vague blot of words and actions, grandnieces and grandchildren grown sapling-sleek. Li Jing’s gaze maps the bleakness of their attire, stark monochrome complemented by fisted hands and dour expressions. Wariness thickens into a weight.
“Everyone’s here to see Ah Kong.” Zhang Wei stands in the vanguard, comforting in his breadth. “And you, of course.”
“He’s not dead.” The statement is razored. A warning. Li Jing pushes on the door, only to locate Zhang Wei’s foot in the split. “You don’t have to come en masse just yet. One at a time. And today is not a good day. He’s tired and so am I.”
“Ah Ma. Please.”
Li Jing glances over the horizon of her shoulder, finds Zhang Yong’s silhouette in the antechamber to their bedroom. She sighs. Her husband had always been the disciplinarian, she the tender heart of their family. Zhang Wei’s desperation peels back her shell, leaves only grudging assent.
“Only if you promise to keep the children quiet.”
The stream of guests is endless, overwhelming, coiling through the house like snakes. Li Jing loses herself in the cadence of their arrivals, oscillating from kitchen to seating areas, moving cups of tea and day-old pastries. Eventually, she allows her children and her grandchildren to assist her. Under her supervision, they concoct cookies, mugs of hot chocolate, delicate things to nibble upon between anecdotes.
The hours pass.
Suspicion melts into an elegiac contentment, even as Li Jing watches Zhang Yong come alive under the constant attention. It has been months since his eyes glittered so brightly. Only once, at some indistinct point in the afternoon, does she feel a whine of irrational terror, a worry that they might be thieving from a diminishing supply. That when they leave, they leave her with only a husk of a husband, hollowed of humanity.
But her panic is fleeting, quickly replaced by guilt. That’s not how people work, Li Jing tells herself, pushing aside the warning bells that clang and dance in the back of her head.
The hours continue their patient march.
“Where do you keep Ah Kong’s things?”
Li Jing jolts her head up.
Most of the guests have departed, leaving only Zhang Wei and his woman. An older couple that Li Jing does not recognize and their brood of three. A niece she barely remembers. Faces without names, perambulating through a home suddenly two sizes too small.
“Why?” It is the only word that she can manage.
“They’re expecting him at the home.”
“The home?” Li Jing repeats, throat parched. “What home?”
“There’s a nursing home at the corner of the city,” Zhang Wei replies, his eyes roving the room, unwilling to meet Li Jing’s. “It’s a good place. Great, in fact. Highest rated in the whole city. They even have a dedicated zoning area for patients. Beautiful, beautiful place. Well-attended. Grandpa would look splendid there.”
Li Jing’s voice is child-soft, child-meek. “But we decided he would stay here. Besides, our neighbourhood needs a book store.”
“What if he becomes a library instead? You hardly have the space for that.”
He won’t, Li Jing thinks. I’ve seen the blueprints tattooed on his stomach. I’ve seen the cache of books in his liver, the oaken shelving of his ribs, the old-fashioned cash register nursed in his left lung.
“That’s not the point.” Li Jing tells her grandchild, hands convulsing.
“No.” Zhang Wei agrees, stepping forward to arrest her shoulders with broad palms. “The point is we’re trying to do what is best for you. I promise you. It’d be fine. You need to believe me. Come, Ah Ma. We’re even organized a rotation system. You’ll have rooms with all of us and live with each family a week at a time.”
“No.” Li Jing says, trying to wrestle away. But Zhang Wei’s grip is as inexorable as death’s advances. “No. I’m not going with you.”
“It’d be fine.” Zhang Wei sighs, voice now feathered with a twinge of frustration. “Besides. Look. Ah Kong agreed.”
He unfurls a cream-colored parchment, its tail branded with Zhang Yong’s jagged signature.
“You tricked him.”
“Be reasonable, Ah Ma. Why would I do that?”
“He’s old. You—I didn’t see him reading that. He didn’t talk to me about it and we always, always discuss contracts together. What did you do? What did you do?” Li Jing’s voice crests into a shout, red-stained with fury. She squeezes her eyes shut. Her veins feel stretched like power cords, crackling.
“I told him what he needed to know. Anyway, it’s all decided. Ah Ma, please. Don’t make this difficult.”
No.
Li Jing closes a fist, feels her fingers constrict around her dread, around the panic that clogs her lungs and her thoughts and her throat. Feels her grip choke earth and stone, walls and wood.
And
something breaks.
You’re not taking away my husband! Li Jing startles at the scream for it is almost hers. It emanates from every dimension, avalanche-loud, incendiary. The old woman opens her eyes and marvels as the room curls around her like a loyal serpent, pillars and rafters curving like the bowed backs of monks.
“Get out.” She snarls between sobs. “Get out and leave us. Get out and take away all of your presumptions, your rotations, your, your—get out.”
When her family hesitates, Li Jing answers with a ripple of the floor, spears of cherrywood coursing forward like hounds on the hunt. It takes a heartbeat for epiphany to strike, but the other occupants of her bloodline soon flee in a stampede of footsteps and wails.
“Dear.”
The house throbs in Li Jing’s blood. She can feel her husband’s heartbeat slackening, cooling to rock, to the ticking of a grandfather clock. In all the clamor, she had lost track of her husband’s condition.
“I’m here.” Li Jing stumbles to Zhang Yong’s side, sinks to her knees. Her embrace is ferocious. “I’m here, I’m here. I’m here.”
“I’m afraid.”
Too soon, too soon, too soon. The thought presses salt into the membrane of her eyes. She thought they had more time together, more weeks. This is too soon.
What she says instead is:
“I’m here.”
She will tell him that a thousand times if she has to, Li Jing thinks. Until her words become a wall between him and the dark. “And it will be all right. And when I die, I’ll have them put my bones in your garden. We’ll be together always.”
Zhang Yong says nothing, only tenses his hold on her hand.
“I’m here. Don’t worry.” Li Jing repeats softly, as though the statement was an invocation against grief.
She is still whispering to him when the light bleeds from his eyes, when his skin greys to stone, when her heart disintegrates to ash.
A day passes.
Li Jing’s family return. Instead of her cottage, they discover a grey cube twenty feet high, smooth and featureless as an egg. There are no windows, no exits. They wait for a time, believing Li Jing will eventually emerge. Even witches must eat.
But she does not.
A week flits by.
Two weeks.
Three.
By the end of the twenty-first sunset, her family surrenders its pursuit. Li Jing and her husband are pronounced deceased, their epitaphs a flurry of tsking noises.
By the end of the year, Li Jing and her husband are mostly forgotten, consigned to myth and drunken discussion, legends without substance, ghosts to be studied without the frame of truth.
If you promise not to be disruptive, you may visit the store.
-Li Jing
Li Jing signs the last letter and sighs. Her fingers are brocaded with ink, her smile with exhaustion. A part of her aches for the liberty of isolation. It’d be so much simpler than explaining everything that had transpired. So much easier than instructing herself not to loathe Zhang Wei for his intent, to forgive his motivation if not his actions.
But that is not what Zhang Yong would have desired.
Li Jing sips tea from a cup made from her husband’s bones, its golden heat suffusing the ivory with something almost like life. Her eyes wander the ribs of her new domicile. The store is beautiful, lush with books and paintings like photographs, conjured flawless from history. When she closes her eyes, Li Jing can already see her family exploring the space, investigating cabinet and bookshelf, stove and garden. Briefly, she wonders how Zhang Wei will take to the statuette of him in the pond, marble-skinned and pissing fresh water into a glass-smooth pond.
Tomorrow, she decides, she will send out the letters and court her family’s questions.
Tonight, it is tea and reading and learning the patterns of this unfamiliar silence, which sit as awkwardly as new lovers. Nothing will ever replace the way Zhang Yong’s presence curled around hers, jigsaw-snug. There will never be a salve for that gasping loneliness she experiences each morning when she awakens and, in that purgatory between sleep and awareness, forgets why his side of the bed is unfilled.
But she will survive, will rebuild her existence, brick by brick, around the absence. Li Jing has a lifetime of memories in her foundations. It will never be perfect again, but it will be someday be enough.
Li Jing splays her book, begins to read. And in the quiet, the rustle of pages sounds almost like the chuckle of love departed but never forgotten.
bargains by the slant-light
“Yes.”
Yes, she murmurs. Yes, yes, of course. Voice parched of inflection, a rasp of a syllable like velvet rough against a nipple, she repeats the word until the devil shakes his antlered head, the metronoming of his skull keeping time with the click of scissors pale.
He does not tell her no.
Devils break bread with bargains, after all, and he’s grown a taste for her flavor of desperate: earthy as molasses, with a tang like coffee fresh from the first pot of the day. But still, that does not stop him from feeling bad.
So, when she peels her shirt—striped, too big for her rangy frame—back, breasts crisscrossed with stitches, it isn’t with glee that he approaches her, but some blend of reverence, the worship of a hunter, or more accurate still, the idolatry of a first-rate chef. Because there is no meal without the meat, no fulfillment without first the cooperation of the prey.
He cuts her apart. He butterflies her, taking care only to slice along the dotted lines, undoing what he’d done before, the topography of her flesh unraveled into bloodless petals until she lays there, exposed, lung and liver bare as the descent of her clavicles.
It hurts. That is part of the price.
If he were anyone else, he’d tell her the truth of her denuding: that she is exquisite like this, raw as a trust newly broken. But he does not. Most nights, he is perfunctory, lingering only as long as necessary to unspool what he requires. Some evenings, he laminates his butchery with precious metals, transforms her into a study of kintsugi.
But today, he does neither.
“Why?”
It is the first time he has ever asked her why, and he thinks of when they first met, the halogen cold on her skin and her eyes immense. She looks up, past the firmament of her ribs, down past the trellises of her hips, down to where the devil sits chastely between her thighs.
“Because it’s hard.”
The devil nods. No one makes a deal for something simple, something sweet as a kiss, as summer, as that first dance of fingers brushing against one another.
“I loved him,” she says.
“Love him,” she corrects, sighing, as the devil unspools a filament of tissue from her naked heart. He winds it around a finger, while she counts the ceiling tiles, enumerating the mundane until she finds balance in their banality, stretches and tugs until the flesh goes pop. “Utterly. But you knew that.”
The devil nods again.
“And it hurts to love something that should not love you back. To love and have no place to put it. To love and to know you don’t want compensation, but in fact, that love’s indifference.”
“Then, why?”
“Because love isn’t fair.” Her heart does not, to the devil’s surprise, bang against her bones. Instead, it merely sits, a wound spread wide. “When we love, we hope that the other reciprocates with more because it’d be a shame to be the one more invested. But affection isn’t competition and even if it was, you can’t win every wager you make.”
The devil says nothing. He threads her muscles with string he’d wefted from the hairs of a hanged man. The strands are infinitesimal enough to be forgiven as striations of her dermis. In response, she endures, half-breaths and half-lidded eyes.
“What do you want of this?”
“I don’t know. You don’t stop loving someone because they lack the means to love you back. A spouse remains a spouse, although you’ve agreed to be friends. A lover remains a lover, although they lie unconscious for months at a time, unable to breathe, their heartbeats rationed by machines.” His touch does not excite her, but it excites something nonetheless, a frisson of animal instinct, plucked wholesale from a shelf in the back of the brain. “I want… I want to love them better, I suppose.”
The devil slots cartilage and tendon together, one joint after another, silent until at last, “It won’t bring them back.”
“I know. And even if it could, I would not want them this way. Some loves are homes, some are halfway houses. Rest stops, gap years. They were meant to only stay for a while, so their breath loosens enough to let them live.” She sits up, a spill of strings pooling in her navel. “I wish I wasn’t merely that. I wish this was easier.”
The devil says nothing.
“Remake me,” she tells him for the hundredth time. “With a heart that has no room for want, no space to disgrace itself with selfish impulse. Fill it with ice. Fill it with lead, heavy as hope. Let that heart beat with something better than blood, something less hot, less hungry. I want…” She wets her mouth. “I want to want less.”
The devil says nothing still. This was the bargain she’d made on that cold blue night, and the one he’d fulfill. She’d asked him for a new heart. He’d told her, dressed then in the bones of an old man, the calcium papered with moss, that there was only one way, that he’d have to build it from the one she wears behind her breast.
And she said: Yes, oh yes.
He stares. For one lucent moment, he thinks of telling her no, of a dialogue with the one who’d split her open, who’d left a map for him in her ventricles, dotted lines where they’d run their knife, their hands, where they’d bruised the muscle with a love malformed and tender. But she’d paid in promises, the only currency that matters. And besides, who was he to speak? Humanity, if one is lucky, is a hundred years of hurt and hope.
“I pray he’s worth it,” the devil says, his harvest pocketed.
“One day soon, I think he will be.”
The devil nods. Contrary to what many believe, devils do not like to lie. “I will see you tomorrow night.”
And just as she has every night before, she sighs and whispers without contempt:
“Yes.”
some breakable things
It is strange to think that someone had cut your father open, flayed his muscles and cracked apart the interleaving of his ribs like he was some contentious puzzle that required solving. Did they weigh his heart? His lungs? His liver? The length of his intestines, still sour with the half-digested remnants of last night’s dinner? You have no idea how autopsies worked, only that they are a kind of bizarre intimacy, penetration and halogen-lit dissection, a baring of skin, meat, and spirit.
“You okay?”
You jolt like a fish on the line, mouth working soundlessly, before you discover the capacity to shape a platitude, display it on the arc of a thin smile. “I’m fine.”
You’re not. Not remotely. You’re uncertain if you ever will be, even though you suspect that time will, regardless of your input, ameliorate the grief that creases the margins of your consciousness like a word you can’t remember, or a song you can’t forget.
But no one wants to hear you’re not okay, only that you will be, can be, already are. People want to be useful, you think, as you pat the umpteenth shoulder with a tepid hand.
“I’m fine,” You repeat with greater zeal, coercing a smile that borders on real. “Honest.”
Your voice drains as you look up and over that faceless head, the fifth in a long line of well-wishers. In the distance, framed by the ebbing sun, a slant of trees bloodied with pink flowers, is your father.
As though to make up for his absence in life, your father’s ghost follows you everywhere. Never too close, never near enough to encapsulate in a hug, but never at a distance where you can justifiably ignore the knowledge of his presence.
He trails you into supermarkets but not public lavatories, cafes but not changing rooms, forever hovering outside the door, his face a blot of colors runnelling together, recognizable but not necessarily identifiable. At home, he occupies doorways, both ends of the stairwell, the foot of your bed. You quickly learn that he will leave you alone whenever you sleep on the couch, seemingly repulsed by the suffering his company incited, so you colonize the living room. A bad back is worth seven hours of bad sleep.
“I didn’t know you were close,” says a friend, an accusation inlaid in her low, breathy voice.
“It’s complicated,” you reply, uncertain, the explanation sticking in your throat. In the back of your head, an unhappiness amalgamates into words that sounded like how dare you, how could you, why would you. “I’ve always—”
You look up. In the periphery of your vision, your father’s ghost cocks his head, his features a flesh-colored smear. You breathe out.
