Shades Within Us, page 35
When I finally fall into sleep, my dreams are full of great machines paving over all the earth, and nothing stops them, and when they pass, nothing remains to watch them go. They are the grey, and the grey spreads, until it is become world without end.
I’m to be schooled here, to learn a profession that suits this new grey world, that will put money in our pockets and stores on our shelves. We haven’t much—what little we owned was left behind, by and large, when the evacuation and resettlement came—but I’ve a good pair of shoes and a better pair of trousers, and I walk with head held high all the way to the gates of the school I’ve been assigned, littles at my heels and trying to hide their own fear under puffed-out chests.
Normal, I’d tease them some, remind them that they’re only littles, they don’t have to know everything in the world yet, especial not when they’re on their way to learn. But today I’m as scared as they are, and we’re all of us trying to look like we’re not. I won’t trouble them today. Better to let them have what pride they can find, let them go with dry hands wrapped around the apples Mam handed to each of us before she ushered us out the door.
A bell chimes. The teeming sea of students parts, flows like so many rivers into different rooms, and I flow with them, away from my littles, into a room of people my own age, where I can sit and learn amongst my peers.
My peers, who include the teens from yesterday, the ones as called me scrounger, who sneered down their noses to me. I frown to see them, and take an open seat near the front, waiting patient for the teacher to come.
No teacher comes. Instead, our desks go transparent, and words appear there, screens set to each of us individual. For a while, I can lose myself in learning, in doing numbers and joining words—takes me a bit to remember how grammar is for the grey, but I get there, I get there. Mam always said we’d need to know to understand how they shape a sentence, even if we found our own cadence, found our own words. I’ve never understood how townies could find comfort in everybody sounding all the same. It’s not like two gardens will ever sprout a matching harvest, no matter how similar the soil.
It’s half through the lesson when a ball of paper hits me upside the head. So wasteful, and so dear; paper’s a luxury, and I can’t imagine being willing to spend it on throwing.
I pick up the scrap, press it flat with my fingers, think about all the things as could have been writ on it, or drawn, or anything of the sort. None of them are there. Instead, someone has writ, big and ugly, SCROUNGER GO HOME.
Paper’s still paper; lines can be erased. I fold the hateful note away, tuck it inside my desk. I can coax something bright from it later, when there’s time and space enough for it, when my eyes aren’t burning with the tears I won’t let happen. Show them weakness and they’ll never let me live past it.
Half the class is done when a throat is cleared. I look up. The girl from the street is there, scowling fiercely.
“Give it back,” she says.
“Give what back?”
“My paper. It’s not yours. You’re a little thief, and I want it back.”
I blink at her, purposeful slow. “I’m sorry. Where I come from, if you throw a thing at a body, you don’t own it anymore. Unless it’s a toy, and they’ve agreed to the game already.”
She scowls. “You know that’s not how we do things in civilized places. Give it back.”
“So’s you can crumple it up and hide what you said to me? I don’t think so.” I look thoughtfully back to my screen. “Has to be a teacher sometime, or it’s not really a class. Bet they’d like to see what you’ve been saying to people as don’t know anyone here, nor have anywhere else to go.”
She hits me.
It’s so fast and so sudden that I don’t have the time to so much as flinch away. One second, everything is as it ought, and then next, her knuckles are slamming into my cheek, her fist is hitting hard against my flesh, and I don’t think, I don’t stop and I don’t think about what it means, I just react, as violent as she did, but not with my hands. Hands are for the weak. I reach with the part of me that knows the green, and I find the green growing in her hair, on her skin, the little specks of the living world that surround all of us each and every day. I grab hold of it and yank, and she bursts into bloom.
The flowers are small, and white, with thin petals and trembling stems. Mossy leaves surround them, holding them up. The girl screams, shrill with more fear than pain, and I snap back into the moment, staring at her with my own terror naked in my eyes. I did this. I used the green as a weapon, and for what? Nothing more than a blow.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I cry, reaching for her. She shies away. The little flowers are already dying, withering and falling from her skin. I haven’t done any permanent damage. I’d need to try harder, to work longer to make them root deep, make them part of her for keeping.
That’s a thing for later-life, when time has been spent and flesh is finished. It’s a thought that makes me feel a little ill, even as I’m still trying to reach for this stranger who’s been nothing but cruel to me. What’s to become of the groves now, of the grandparents and great-grandparents who’ve already gone to the green? Will the townies who took them from us maintain them, leave them peaceful? Or will they chop our ancestors down, forgetting we traded flesh for wood, that we told them we’d do so?
“I’m telling,” wails the townie girl. She runs out of the room, her friends behind her. Half the other students follow, not wanting to linger in company of a monster like me.
I stand, knees shaking. I need to go. I need to get out of here before they come for me.
A hand takes mine.
I start to flinch away, even as I turn. There she is, the girl with the green in her eyes.
“Come,” she says.
I go.
She leads me out of the school, around the back, never saying a word. She walks along the grey streets in the grey world, and everything is frozen, everything is numb. I don’t know how to speak to her. I don’t try.
She pulls me into the gap between two buildings. The sun goes away, blocked out by a walkway overhead, and everything is black and grey and I hurt someone, I reached into the green and I hurt them. It doesn’t matter whether I meant to or not. Intent is only what you plant, not what you grow, that’s what Pa always says, and he’s right, he’s right, and I’m in the grey, and I’m in the wrong.
We step out of the shadows. She lets go of my hand.
Everything is green.
It’s a small space, closed in by walls, with holes in the tin roof above us, letting the light shine through. The light shines down, and everything is green, from the trees to the flowers to the raised vegetable beds, which I know so well, even though I’ve never seen them before. I’ve planted beds like these a hundred times over, dug my fingers into the soil, gentled the worms in and the weeds away. I breathe deep. Everything smells of growing. Everything smells of home.
“How . . .?”
“They can’t take us out of the green,” she says, and her voice is low and soft, like she doesn’t use it much, like she’s gone out her way to forget its strength. Maybe that’s part of how she’s stayed alive so long as all of this. “They can take us from the fields and farms, they can bring us here and lock us down, but they can’t take us out of the green. The green doesn’t let go.”
I don’t say anything. She looks at me, so serious. So calm.
“My da says the doctors and the scientists put the green in us a’purpose, when the farms and fields were dying. People hurt the world but bad before they split the wild and the tame. So the scientists took people who volunteered, who were willing, and they put green in them, to keep things growing good. They did it with science, only pretty soon people started calling it magic, and then they called it wrong, and then they called it a lie. They changed the whole story of who and what we were while we were working in the fields, filling their stomachs, helping the world back toward true.”
She touches a tomato plant with the tip of her finger. It wraps itself around her hand like an embrace.
“That’s why they’re pulling us to the cities now; that’s why they’re teaching their children to hate us. They’ve decided it’s wrong to make people as can do what we do.”
Again, I whisper, “How?” This time, the question isn’t about the garden.
This time, I’m asking her to tell me how she’s survived here, in a world as doesn’t want people like us. A world as wants us to disappear into quiet little rooms with doors that lock, where they won’t ever have to look at us again.
A world as fears and doesn’t want the green.
“We never forget.” She takes my hands without fear; she smiles like a sunflower opening, yearning for the sky. She smiles like all the green, and I smile back, our moods pollinating the air around us, until I finally feel like I can breathe.
“They can take our land, but they can’t take the green,” she says. “They can take our words, but they can’t take our dreams. They can take and take and take, and we can give and give and give, and when it’s all said and done, we’ll sprout again, up through the cracks. We’ll break it all, if we have to.”
She picks a tomato, offers it to me. It reddens and ripens in her hand. By the time I take it, it’s ready to eat. I offer her my apple in exchange, the bruises on its skin healing under my fingers. She smiles again.
“All we have to do is grow until they forget they hate us.”
There will be time. Time for apples and for tomatoes, time for littles to grow up and start families of their own, families in little rooms and secret gardens. Time for them to become parents, to guide their children. Time for all of us. I’ll have to say my sorrys, make them believe it was a trick of light. That shouldn’t be too hard. People as throw things, whether they be paper or punches, don’t want to believe there’s magic in the world. Don’t want to believe in the green. So we’ll wait. We’ll wait, and we’ll remember, and when the time is come to us, we’ll leave our hidden places, and we’ll bloom.
Oh, how we’ll bloom.
DEVOURING TONGUES
S.L. Huang
You come into the sharehouse bone-weary. Slip off your shoes and socks, press your bare toes into the ridged tatami floor. The mats are old, the fabric edging shredded at the seams, but they feel clean on your soles after standing swollen in your shoes for so long, hour after hour stocking cheap snacks at the konbini.
Your thin futon is folded in half so it doesn’t take up the whole floor. The Reaper lounges on it, his black-gloved fingers trailing against the tidy blankets, the fingers unnaturally long and curved—sharp talons even through the leather.
“What do you have for me today?” he asks.
You have to think to answer in English. You’ve been speaking Japanese to customers so long it wants to spill out by reflex. That’s good, you remind yourself. That’s good.
“I need to be more natural,” you say, stumbling over the combination of consonants in the word. “The okyakusama ask me question, and I freeze. I freeze.”
“Questions,” the Reaper corrects, and you can feel your face going hot, the blood rushing in. Akaku natteru, you remind yourself. The word comes slower in English; you think bosh and bush before remembering blush.
The Reaper draws himself up into a spindly skeleton cloaked in black, like melting in reverse. “Say it again.”
“The okyakusa—the customers. They ask me questions, they—I can’t think when they stare. I’m worried I get fired.”
If you lose your part-time job, you will be lost. You cannot ask your family for money like some of your classmates do, whenever they want to go shopping in Shibuya or take a weekend trip to sightsee around Mount Fuji. Your family expects you to be the earner, once you have been accepted into a good college in Japan and are fluent in four useful languages. They brag about you back home: Our daughter always studied English too much, straining her eyes on those books. She wants to work in international business. So much English in her head—it must be why her Chinese essays are so poor!
They think they are boasting while being appropriately humble. They don’t know how right they are.
You wanted to go to college in America, make your English smooth and fluent like the flashy, brash actresses in Hollywood TV shows, but the visa didn’t work out. Immigration laws and the reality of stacking costs narrowed your choices still further. Tokyo seemed like a good opportunity . . . but you are in limbo now, trying to stuff your head with a fifth language in only two years so you can pass the entrance exams for university, working the maximum hours your student status allows, your budget just barely stretching to cover language school tuition and rent.
You need the Reaper. You can’t afford to fail in your classes.
You can’t afford to be good in your classes. Your Japanese has to be more than that. Natural. Effortless. You have to swallow this tongue whole, so you inhale meaning and blow out answers until you shine at your eventual university. And once you have your degree, you will have such a wealth of choice, you will find a good job, a stable home to settle in—and you will be able to move your family too, somewhere they can follow their hearts without yours pounding with worry about what will happen if they catch anyone’s eye.
The places where that is true seem to be shrinking rather than growing. But you will buy this liberty with your education if you have to squeeze your way into the last free country on Earth.
This is why you summoned the Reaper. What he takes hurts, but two years is not so long. Not so long, you tell yourself. You will not lose too much.
He has crossed the narrow floor, hot and close. He leans his head in to you, the cowl of his cloak hiding a deeper black within.
“Feed me,” he purrs. “Trade me. A word for a word.”
“Don’t take too much,” you hear yourself say, your breath a thread.
“Only what you need. Only what you ask for.”
“None of the English,” you remind him. Your English is still not good enough. You need it all.
“I promise, my dear,” the Reaper says, and bends down for a kiss.
You close your eyes because it is easier than seeing nothing. You feel his face on yours, the dry, cold edges of a mouth, cracked and sharp. His tongue worms in between your lips, forking and suctioning and choking you until you gag.
You can feel him scraping at the insides of your skull. Concepts flow slippery as silk, images and scents flickering through your consciousness: green onions frying in oil, laundry flopping onto the drying rack, the sun filtering through the dangling fronds of your mother’s houseplants and dappling the half-inked drawings spread across her table . . .
You’re struggling against him by the time he breaks away. His tongue slithers out of you, and you stagger back, retching. Your throat is raw and sore.
You turn your face away. You hate that he sees.
He will not leave, of course. You called him, and now he haunts you. He will lounge in your small, hard desk chair, sated, while you curl on your futon trying not to reach for the memories.
They’re just as sharp and clear as before. But when you see the green onions, you think cong and cung and negi, but in your birth tongue, your mother’s voice, you only find a blank.
Tomorrow, your Japanese will be better. Your teachers are always impressed with how fast you progress. You are such a “majimena gakusei,” they say—so focused, studying so hard.
The Reaper gives as well as takes.
You told yourself it doesn’t matter that you lose your Teochew. Nobody speaks it, nobody but a small clutch of unimportant towns in southern China, no one you will speak to again after you buy your family’s freedom with your tongue. Only your parents, and they also speak Cantonese, just as many of the people in your hometown can. For the rest of China there is your Mandarin, textbook-grammatical from school but perfectly functional.
Your parents quietly disapprove of the way the government forced you to learn Mandarin, but you’re secretly and shamefully grateful. Mandarin gives you half of Asia. Cantonese is a useful bonus. And English gives you the world.
Teochew gives you nothing. Redundant. Useless.
But your eyes still prickle and blur, and you wish you could remember the names of your mother’s houseplants.
You boil zog for dinner in the sharehouse kitchen, rice stretched thin in water until it thickens into a porridge. It’s cheap and easy and the delicate scent reminds you of home.
Though you’re not sure home is home anymore. You never planned on going back, and now, if you imagine yourself again in your parents’ flat, you immediately feel the scratching boredom of trying to live in a skin that has grown too tight.
It makes you feel a traitor, even if your aim from the beginning was to leave.
Yet Tokyo isn’t home either, with its people who are too reserved and its buildings that are too tall and its clean public buses that always run on time. You walk down streets that are too orderly and the signs around you are all mixed up the wrong way round, intelligible characters muddled with hiragana, and everything with a dozen pronunciations. The grammatical forms buzz around your head like they want to sting, taunting. You have enough trouble in English with go and went and gone; now you must parse ikaserarenakatta as wasn’t made to go and mairitakunakatta as deferentially didn’t want to go. No matter how well you know the verbs, untangling them always takes too many seconds of stumbling thought . . . at least until you beg the Reaper. When his tongue slithers out of your skull, somehow the Japanese syllables tumble about in the space left behind, sticking and breaking apart until they decompose into effortless understanding.
You hate him for it.
It’s worth it, you remind yourself in four other languages, until one day you can only do it in three.
You’re changing trains at Shinjuku when a white European family zeroes in on you. Two older women in their fifties, two girls, one gazing around with eyes wide as bowls and the other toeing the station floor with the sullenness of a teenager who’s sick of travelling with her family. You don’t know how they decide to approach you—something in your clothes or carriage or the wideness of your chin or eyes must make you stand out like neon, with the same clumsy misfitting that you feel.
