Strange Beasts of China, page 20
I understood my professor. If there was an afterlife, if he had a soul, he’d tell me. If I went to his lab, I’d know everything. Just like every previous visit. This I believed firmly.
I trusted him.
* * *
—
THE LAB WAS COMPLETELY DESERTED. THROUGH THE WINDOW, the eucalyptus tree cast its vast shadow. I stood there and just for a moment, it was like returning to the past. Those busy, unknowing, happy days, which would never come again.
I opened his cupboard – the lock was as squeaky as ever – and found his files covered in a thick layer of dust. I unbundled them all and lay them on the ground. Page by page, I searched and searched.
I had no idea what I was looking for, but I knew my professor would have an answer for me. I kept searching, cursing all the while. ‘Stubborn old man. Kept refusing to digitise these – you just used your computer for games. Ridiculous.’
Then a folder with two words that burned into my eyes like a flame: returning beasts.
I opened it. The first item was a sketch – a human woman, very beautiful and perfectly rendered. Clearly my professor’s handiwork. She was looking straight at me, her lips slightly parted, as if she had a thousand words to say. Even more arresting was the pregnant swell of her belly.
Before I could think more deeply about it, I’d turned the page and here was the same three-dimensional drawing from our textbook: a scrawny returning beast, hideous face and stark pale skin, red eyes glaring. I’d seen this image hundreds of times while revising for my exams.
Next page. The beast bone pendant, the same picture I’d seen all those years ago, but with some words scrawled underneath. My professor’s writing was awful, and I might well have been the only person on earth who could decipher it. ‘An artefact with a beastly stench, humans seek but could ever possess it.’ He must have failed every writing class he’d ever taken – couldn’t even explain things simply. I stared at this line, puzzled. What could he mean by this?
The pregnant woman on the first page – could she be Zhong Liang’s mother? How was Zhong Liang connected to the returning beasts? And the woman?
Three pictures, laid out like the final question on an exam paper designed to massacre students’ brain cells.
I turned the page but the rest of the folder was rubbish, just random things like old exam papers. What a hoarder.
I was still alone, a lost lamb with no one to help me. It hit me again and again that my professor was dead, and I was left with just these desiccated scraps of paper to remember him by. A soul? What nonsense.
He was dead. The dashing scholar, the brightest of his generation, gone, no more.
* * *
—
ALL THE WAY HOME I HAD A SPLITTING HEADACHE. MY BRAIN felt like an obsolete computer, churning away, unable to make sense of the data. All I could hear was Zhong Liang’s voice faintly calling me, battering relentlessly at my mind.
If he were here, I would swing around and slap him. The little devil.
The lobby was empty. I stood there a moment, remembering Zhong Liang standing right there not long ago, posing like Schwarzenegger. My eyes dampened. At that moment, Fei the security guard came by and gave me a strange look. ‘Zhong Liang’s just gone up,’ he said, ‘And…’
Zhong Liang!
I flew out of the lift door and banged on my door. Zhong Liang opened it – naughty boy, when did he get a copy of my key? – such a handsome young man, his smile like the sun as he said my name.
I thought for a moment this was another hallucination, and held back before throwing my arms around him. ‘You bastard! Where the hell were you? How dare you show your face again?’
He hugged me back, and buried his face in my neck. ‘Underground,’ he answered.
This wasn’t real. If I woke up at that moment, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
But Zhong Liang really had returned. He pulled me inside, shut the door, and led me to the sofa, where someone was laid out. ‘This is my mother.’
A female returning beast.
She was badly hurt, and her breath was ragged. She was grimacing in pain, but when she saw me, she managed a smile.
‘Is this…’ I was thoroughly confused.
Zhong Liang pulled over a chair for me, and knelt at my feet as if we were in nursery school and I was his teacher. ‘My mother,’ he said again, gently.
‘But she’s…’
‘She’s human,’ said Zhong Liang. ‘Or at least, she used to be. If she hadn’t helped me escape, I would eventually have looked like that too.’
I stared at Zhong Liang, open-mouthed, until I realised how stupid I must appear.
The beast groaned, and Zhong Liang swiftly leaned over to stroke her forehead. ‘It’s all right,’ he murmured, ‘It’s all right.’ The look on his face made my eyes wet again.
‘What’s wrong?’ I finally asked, my voice choked.
‘She’s dying,’ he said calmly.
‘Why don’t you take her to the hospital…’ I cut myself off. I knew why.
The beast looked at me, then at Zhong Liang, and smiled as if she were thinking of the past. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘This will be over soon, and I’ll see your father again.’
We said nothing. Zhong Liang was crying too.
The beast beckoned me and took my hand. ‘I know how it hurts to lose someone you love,’ she said. ‘That’s why I brought him back to you. When I saw you that night, I knew you were good. You smell different from all the other beasts. No wonder he loves y—’
‘Enough,’ Zhong Liang interrupted. He took her other hand, avoiding my gaze.
The beast had shut her eyes, but now they sprang open, bulging. ‘The bone,’ she said, her voice fearful. ‘The beast bone…’
I came to my senses and pulled it off my neck. Zhong Liang took it from me, gave me a long look, and put it on.
The beast let out her breath. ‘Good,’ she said to Zhong Liang. ‘They won’t find you again. That’s good…They’re too clever, too complicated, too silent, too tired. You mustn’t go back. Take care of yourself, I won’t be able to protect you after this.’
She glanced at me, smiled, and raised her hand as if she had something to say. A ghastly rattle came from her throat. Her hand closed tightly around mine, then slackened.
She was dead.
Zhong Liang didn’t seem to realise. He remained kneeling by the sofa for a very long time, before turning to me. ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘You must be tired.’
I couldn’t speak.
This was Zhong Liang’s past, and he hadn’t breathed a word about it. I understood now that his innocence didn’t come from not knowing anything, but rather from having seen everything there was to see, understanding it, and setting it down. He’d let go of what I hadn’t been able to. I knew that now. My professor must have too.
We buried the beast, and Zhong Kui got his beloved son back. Overjoyed, the family did as they were asked, and gave the beast a glorious send-off.
* * *
—
WE WERE ALL AT THE FUNERAL. ZHONG LIANG WAS AS HANDSOME as a film star in his black suit, one hand on Mrs Zhong’s shoulder, the other in mine. As the gravediggers lowered the coffin, I whispered, ‘She’s back in the world of spirits now.’
Zhong Liang laughed. ‘There’s no world of spirits. The people down below—’
‘People?’
‘Yes.’ He turned to me, smiling like this was nothing, thoroughly charming. Bending to my ear, as if this were a private joke, he said, ‘All of us here, we’re beasts—’
A blaze of light. I knew everything now.
That’s what my professor was trying to tell me. ‘Not one of us is innocent.’
He’d known all along. When he rescued the woman from underground, helped her have her baby, and sent the child to live with the Zhong family, he’d known the answer to the riddle. Every one of us had beast blood, pure or half or a quarter or one part in ten thousand. We reeked of beast stench. There was only one piece of beast bone in our world, and in giving it to her son so he could remain undetected, the mother allowed herself to be captured and dragged back to the underworld. My professor kept the child hidden, and eventually brought him to my side. This man who ought to have grown up underground, and me, the beast who’d come out of nowhere. In the vastness of Yong’an, the two of us lived an illusory existence.
I smiled and took Zhong Liang’s hand. In the distance, below the hilltop graveyard, the city was slowly being swallowed by the setting sun, all of it glittering in the radiance, so mighty yet so weak, its skyscrapers reduced to shadows. Here’s where we came and went, lived and died, our beastly stories playing out here.
What for?
Returning beasts and humans all had their own riddles. Birth as a process of returning, death as a process of longing. To them, this was the most terrifying curse, a catastrophe. Their punishment after their headlong flight.
But to us – ignorant, foolish us – this was nothing at all, just a tender promise between lovers.
* * *
—
RETURNING BEASTS ARE NOT BEASTS AT ALL, BUT HUMAN. The beasts live in the above-ground city. The stench of the beasts and the filth of the city drove away the humans. They came upon a huge underground cavern, and built a city there. Now there are only beasts left on earth, some pure-blooded, others mixed, going about their business peacefully.
Underground, humans live with no material worries, and a hierarchy of their own. From time to time, though, there is an escape; but these fugitives are always caught, without a single exception. As punishment, they then have to live in caves, where they are whipped, and forced to exist on salt and water, torments too numerous to count. After several years, they become returning beasts.
The returning beasts are sent in pursuit of those who escape, scouring the earth for them. They never fail. Hence their name, for they force the return of all who would flee.
Over thousands of years, the beasts grew foolish and now do not know they are beasts, nor do they recognise humans as people. In this city they built, they have offspring, accept their destinies, fight and make peace, love and hate, grow old and die.
Humans possess intellect, and claim the knowledge of the ages. They take neither sorrow nor joy from material gain or personal loss. Thus their existence is more difficult than necessary, as they strive too hard for cleverness, and push away from the heart. The fugitives fear capture, and the captured fear escape. They live out their days in uncertainty.
What good fortune for the beasts, to lack intelligence; how cursed humans are, that they possess it.
EPILOGUE
IT WAS NOT YET MARCH WHEN I WROTE THIS BOOK, BUT spring was already making its presence known. When I was little, I remember older people talking about the willow trees along the river looking green in early spring, and I think this must have been the time of year they were talking about.
This city doesn’t have willow trees, so instead, the higher-ups imported little banyan trees from the southernmost tip of the country, their lush aerial roots tangled around their own trunks, evergreen. Come the winter, their crowns had to be shrouded in huge plastic bags that would swell like hot-air balloons with each gust of wind, lifting the entire city into mid-air.
I seldom go out when I’m writing. The farthest I venture is to the supermarket downstairs for snacks – as soon as a story starts, I feel hunger, a gnawing and ravenous hunger.
Suffering through night after night, I shut the curtains and resisted looking at the outside world. Towards the end, I lay in bed as stiff as steel, aching all over. Finally, I was no longer young.
At long last, I called my editor and said, ‘I’m done. Three hundred generations of vengeance, distilled into the torments we inflict upon each other in this life. Now we can turn out the lights and go.’
My editor laughed. ‘Enough of that, just send me the manuscript.’ I faxed it to him, page after page, reading as I went: unsmiling sorrowful beasts, immortal joyous beasts, martyred sacrificial beasts, unreturning impasse beasts, reincarnated flourishing beasts…Chapter after chapter, all based on my experiences, but when I looked at them again, it all felt so unrealistic, I wondered if any of this had actually happened.
In Yong’an, this familiar yet strange city, beasts hid their true natures as they walked calmly right past you.
I never encountered any of the beasts I wrote about again. The sorrowful beasts’ cotton mill went bankrupt, High School 72 was shut down three months ago, and the Temple of the Antiquities was finally torn down during the last round of building works in the city centre, becoming yet another gleaming glass and aluminium shopping complex. As for the prime beasts, after the murder case came to light, a nervous government shut them all up in jail again.
All their legends had come to an end, and no one was looking for new legends.
‘You’re pure bad luck,’ my editor teased.
Whether by coincidence or the murky workings of fate, all my beasts had vanished, leaving behind the stories they’d given me, withered and dry, staring at me.
But stories are stories. Cause and effect are one. Those who write stories are doomed to be toyed with.
The first chapter in this book was squeezed out of me by my editor, whom I must have hurt in a past life. He called me three times in one day, alternately threatening and cajoling. I had a mountain of bills, and no choice but to write. I churned out a tale of sorrowful beasts I’d heard just a few days ago, and shortly after that, as if in a natural progression, the story of the joyous beasts came knocking on my door. One after another, these enormous dark shadows came chasing after me. I wanted to stop, but kept moving ahead, a mere observer to start with, then tumbling into their midst. By the end, when the returning beasts had gone, I’d written what I wanted to write, and I understood my own story. Our sorrows and joys are all our own. A poem instead of tears.
The same clouded blood flows through our veins. All we have are stories.
The afternoon I finished my manuscript, I took advantage of this rare moment of relaxation to turn on the TV news. A vicious dog attack, a corrupt shopkeeper swindling customers. Strangely, whether today or yesterday, the same few incidents had been broadcast repeatedly. I smiled to myself. I had a long break ahead, and even these stale news items would be fascinating.
Then, right at the end, something different for once: an explosion of unrest at an asylum in the suburbs, during which countless patients had escaped. The police were doing their best to catch them all, and in the meantime, residents were urged to take precautions.
The camera panned across the chaos of the institution. A doctor in his white coat, looking as hapless as one of his patients, said, ‘I don’t know how it happened, they just ran…’ He would have sobbed, but he had no tears left.
He was cute, like my former therapist. Something vindictive reared its head in me, and I burst out laughing.
This was joyful. I felt carefree.
Before I was done laughing, the phone rang. I picked up, and an unfamiliar male voice said my name. ‘I’ll be waiting for you at the Dolphin Bar.’
‘Who are you?’ I said, startled.
‘Charley.’
‘Charley!’ Even more startling. Charley who’d been locked up in an asylum, Charley who’d been a sacrificial beast – and sacrificial beasts had once been gods.
* * *
—
THERE WAS CHARLEY AT THE DOLPHIN BAR, THE SAME MISCHIEVOUS grin on his face.
I sat across from him, and because I didn’t know what to talk about, all I said was, ‘Charley.’
He smiled frankly. ‘Good to see you. I know what you’ve been going through.’
‘How would you know?’
‘Your weekly series in the city paper.’
So that was it. Countless people read my stories each week in the newspaper, and they’d write me letters to commiserate, or to praise me, or to yell at me for making it all up – but god knows every word I wrote was the bloody truth, my own regret and pain. I must be the most foolish author in the world, slicing my heart open and displaying it to strangers, but none of you know – no one does – that all my beasts have vanished, and now no one believes they were real, and no one even understands why I laid them out for you. I don’t understand it myself.
Apart from those in the stories, that is. Apart from Charley.
He said, ‘I came to say goodbye. Your book is done, and the story of the sacrificial beasts was finished long ago. I ought to leave this place.’
‘Why?’
‘People should leave when their story is over,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know that?’
‘Does that mean the other beasts will carry on?’
‘I know there’s a knot in your heart still. I’m here to untie it for you.’
‘What is it?’ I was puzzled.
‘They both loved you very much,’ said Charley. I sat staring at him. He’d answered the question I’d asked myself a thousand times, without ever being able to speak the words. Tears came to my eyes.
‘Don’t cry,’ said Charley, smiling. ‘Your mother was a beast too, a bloodletting beast. They adored each other, but couldn’t be together, nor could they have offspring. And so, together, they created you. Do you know why they called you the heartsick beast?’
And in that instant, I did know. My professor putting his arms around me and saying, ‘This is my heartsick beast. My heart is sick for you.’
I shut my eyes and smiled.
My father and mother. How did they fall in love? Why couldn’t they stay together? I didn’t know, but that didn’t matter. They loved each other, and they loved me. That was enough.
