Spirits Abroad, page 35
But she hadn’t been interested. Idiot that she was, she had gone into the library and taken down her silly romances, her philosophers, her biographies of great men and women, her Greek and Latin primers. She’d read everything except anything that mattered. She’d told herself that even if nothing was happening externally in her life, at least she was learning. That was something valuable in itself. The nuns at the convent school would have said so.
But the nuns at the convent school had been wrong about death. Why should they be right about anything else?
And Junsheng—he thought so little of her that it had not even occurred to him to hide his research, though everyone knew she spent hours in the library. This was a level of disregard that went beyond contempt. To Junsheng she did not have a brain; she did not have feelings; she did not have motivations. She was a total nonentity and need not be worried about.
The worst thing was that he was right.
Locked in a wordless tantrum, she went to her room and packed her things. Then she went to Junsheng’s bedroom and searched his wardrobe. For some reason, when his descendants burnt hell money (which they did with pious fervour and regularity), it always appeared at the bottom of his wardrobe, under the magnificent traditional garments he never wore and the naughty magazines they hid.
There was quite a lot of money this time. Junsheng must have been too distracted by his plans to collect it.
If Yonghua agreed to her plan, they would not have far to go. But where they were going, there would be demons to bribe, as well as gods they would need to hide from. They might have to spend a night or three outdoors. They would need the money.
She put it at the bottom of her bag.
Then she screwed up her courage and went to look for Yonghua.
“She is in the music room, mistress,” said a paper maid. The newly awake Siew Tsin noticed the look she gave her. It was a wary look, almost as if she were afraid of her reaction to—what?
She puzzled over it on the way to the music room. It was strange: she had never thought of the paper servants as real before. She had not considered that they might have feelings and thoughts of their own. But weren’t they basically the same thing as Yonghua?
People.
We are slave owners, she thought.
The idea was so shocking that she forgot to announce herself when she got to the music room. She opened the door, the words already on her lips to tell Yonghua. But her mouth stayed open and the words never came out.
Ling’en and Yonghua sprang away from each other. Ling’en was looking more human than Siew Tsin had ever seen her, her usually flawless hair dishevelled and her face a fevered pink, as if she had been drinking.
Yonghua was not flushed and her hair was tidy, but the look in her whiteless eyes was dazed.
She had looked like that the first time she had met Ling’en, Siew Tsin realized. And they were here, where Siew Tsin had first played Yonghua Bach. Here.
“I am sorry,” said Ling’en. It was an astonishing thing to hear from her, but Siew Tsin barely felt the surprise over the sharp pain at her heart. “Yonghua wanted to hear a folk song from my home region. I can’t sing, so I have been playing her scraps. We were—that is—”
She seemed to realize how ridiculous she sounded. She stopped and gathered her dignity around her.
“I should be going,” she said. She nodded at Yonghua like a schoolmistress chiding an absent-minded child. “Remember what I told you.”
“Yes,” said Yonghua. Her voice was a floating thing, unmoored from feeling. She turned her face to follow Ling’en as she left.
Yonghua’s creator must not have taught her that people were allowed to smile for themselves, over their own happiness. She had never smiled except when the script in her head told her it was the appropriate social response. As she looked after Ling’en, her face was smooth as a block of silken tofu.
Someone should have taught her that you smile when you are happy, thought Siew Tsin. Someone ought to help her find out everything she wants to know.
“Were you looking for me, second sister?” said Yonghua, her eyes still far away. “Or do you want to play the piano? I should not disturb you. I will leave.”
“No,” said Siew Tsin. “Stay. I am going.”
She went back to her bedroom and unpacked her bag. She put everything away. It would be a while before she could bring herself to look at the things again. But she kept the money.
Siew Tsin woke in the morning to confusion. The house rang with raised voices. As she went downstairs, rubbing her eyes, paper servants rushed past her. Distress hung in the air like a bad smell.
Junsheng was sitting in the dining room, drinking black coffee. He had a newspaper spread out on the table in front of him, but he wasn’t reading it.
“Good morning,” he said when he noticed her.
“What is happening?” said Siew Tsin.
He had clearly been waiting for somebody to ask him this. He took off his spectacles and set them on the table with the deliberateness of an actor following a script.
“It appears it is just you and me again,” he said.
Siew Tsin reached out blindly and touched the table. Its solidity comforted her. She sat down.
“Ling’en has outmaneuvered me,” said Junsheng. He spoke in an even, detached voice, sounding like an old scholar lecturing on some abstruse topic. “I thought she was angry about Yonghua because she was growing pious in her old age. Ling’en never used to care about what was allowed or not allowed by the gods. We used to be the same. We believed in doing the best one could for oneself and one’s family.
“But some people take up religion, you know, when they get old. When Ling’en scolded me about Yonghua, I thought: Maybe soon she will give up and turn herself in, let them process her into the next life. I was right about that. But I was not so clever as I thought. I did not predict that she would take Yonghua with her.”
“How do you know where she has gone?” said Siew Tsin. “Was there a message?” Wouldn’t Yonghua have left her a message?
But that distant absorbed ecstasy in Yonghua’s eyes—no. She would not have been thinking about anyone else.
Oh, love was so cruel.
“Where else would she go?” said Junsheng. “She knows she could not evade me if she stayed here, and she would hardly have escaped to any of the other courts of hell. No. She has gone down the bridge.”
Of course Ling’en had thought of it before Siew Tsin did. Ling’en had done everything first—married Junsheng, kissed Yonghua, run away with her to find the next life.
“And she just had to take Yonghua with her,” said Junsheng. He shook his head. “Ling’en was not spiteful in the old days. I remember her when she was young. You are a nice enough girl, and Yonghua was a work of art, but Ling’en was a real woman. I died before she did, you know, and in the five years after I died our family’s wealth tripled under her management. I never met anyone like her. And now we have come to this.”
“What will happen to them?” said Siew Tsin.
“Ling’en will die,” said Junsheng. “Yonghua will probably get smashed to pieces once the authorities realize what she is. May Ling’en be reborn as a cockroach for this turn. What is it?”
A paper servant put his head in at the door. He was fluttering as he came forward, his face pale.
“Master, we interviewed Lady Meng, as you ordered, and it appears—it appears—”
“Ling’en drank the tea?” said Junsheng.
“Both Mistress Ling’en and Mistress Yonghua did,” said the servant.
Junsheng frowned. “That would have had no effect on Yonghua. She cannot be reborn. She is not real.”
“Lao Ding told Lady Meng this,” said the servant. “Lady Meng replied, ‘Then this will make her real.’”
“That is impossible,” scoffed Junsheng.
“Master, there is more,” said the servant. “At Lady Meng’s pavilion, it seems they purchased this.”
He opened his hand. In his palm lay a twist of red thread.
Junsheng could not have looked more shocked if the servant had slapped him in the face. He reached out and picked up the string.
When a spirit is ready to go on to the next life, there is one way for it to cling to the things its old self valued. Only one thing may be chosen—the most precious thing. The one person amongst all people in the cosmos, living and dead, it wishes to hang on to, when it becomes necessary to let everything else go.
The spirit and its chosen one bind their ankles together with red thread. They may take each other’s hands and smile at each other. When they walk down the bridge into the world of the living, they know it won’t be the last time they see one another. The red thread is better than a promise—it’s a guarantee. It means they’ll meet again in the next life. It means they’ll love each other there, too.
Siew Tsin would not have thought of that. She didn’t know women were allowed to bind themselves to each other. She would have sacrificed herself and Yonghua on the mere hope that the next life would be better.
There were so many ways in which she was a fool.
“I don’t understand,” said Junsheng. Siew Tsin recognized the tremor in his voice. That was how she had felt when she’d seen Ling’en and Yonghua in the music room. But they would each have to suffer their betrayals alone.
She got up from the table and walked out of the room.
She kept walking: out of the house, down the slope, into the streets of the tenth court of hell. In her cotton samfu she drifted through the crowd, jabbed by the elbows of busy spirits. Blue-faced demons threw suspicious glances at her. She almost got mowed down by a sedan chair. She kept walking.
Lady Meng’s pavilion was on the other side of the settlement. The farther she walked, the emptier the streets became. The buildings thinned out, until the signs of commerce and habitation had dropped away. The road opened out. She saw the end of the line.
It snaked down to Lady Meng’s pavilion, perched on the edge of a cliff. Past the pavilion was the bridge, gleaming faintly in the shadows. Siew Tsin’s ears filled with the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks below.
The spirits in the queue . . . Siew Tsin averted her eyes, then remembered her purpose and forced herself to look. There were spirits who had been dragged from their comfortable homes in the tenth court when they fell out of favor with the hell officials. They hit out wildly and wept, promising gold, their houses, their women, anything if only they were granted a reprieve.
This was humiliating enough, but worse were the spirits who had come up from the other levels of hell. The inventive tortures inflicted there had left them looking scarcely human. Siew Tsin passed a skinless person who flinched from the touch of the air; a groaning woman whose tongue rolled out of her mouth onto the ground, an unnatural red length; a man whose body had been so distorted by cruelty that he lay on the ground, curled up on himself like a caterpillar, and had to be pushed along by demons.
But there was something odd about these spirits. They were not weeping like the spirits of the tenth court, made craven by prosperity. There was peace in their eyes, a serene understanding of unhappiness. They had come a long way. They knew themselves better than any living human was allowed to.
Suffering purifies the soul. That was what the nuns had taught her.
But the nuns had been wrong. She put her hand on her chest, as if she could press out the pain in her heart.
The hell officials dourly standing guard along the line did not even look up as she passed. Now that Yonghua had left her, Siew Tsin had become invisible again. Her breath did not stir the air. Her feet left no marks on the ground.
Where was Yonghua? Had Ling’en and Siew Tsin figured out the truth, or was Junsheng right when he said Yonghua could not be reborn? If she was still here, the attempt failed, she must not be smashed to pieces or torn apart by spirits wanting her immortality. Siew Tsin must save her.
If the plan had worked and they had both got away, Siew Tsin would never see Yonghua again. If the pact had failed and left Yonghua alone, she would be in danger, and she would need Siew Tsin.
That was a horrible thought, a horrible thing to desire. It had all gone wrong, and Siew Tsin had gone wrong with it.
A hand touched her elbow. A little old lady smiled up at Siew Tsin.
“You are one of the willing,” she said.
“I don’t know,” said Siew Tsin. But when the old lady said,
“Do you want to see the sea?”
Siew Tsin said, “Yes, Auntie Meng.”
They walked arm in arm towards the sound of the waves. Siew Tsin found herself telling Lady Meng everything, from the beginning—when she had died, no more than a girl. She felt very old now. If she were still alive she would be nineteen years old.
“Did it work?” she said. “Did Yonghua escape? Junsheng said she has no soul.”
Lady Meng said:
“This is not mine. This I am not. This is not my soul. What passes to the next life is the inexorable force of kamma. Someone like you has no more soul than the terra-cotta woman did.”
“Ling’en and I thought she could be reborn,” said Siew Tsin, mostly to herself. “So we were right.”
Lady Meng’s eyes creased in a smile.
“Insofar as there is a you,” she said. “We are at the bridge. Look.”
The bridge arced out into space. At the end of it shone light—light as she had not seen it since she had died—the warm yellow light of the sun. Beneath the bridge lay a dark sea.
The bridge led nowhere. There was no end to it. The brave leapt off it and dived into the unknown sea. The cowardly inched along until the light swallowed them up. But the end was the same. It was a beginning.
It gave Siew Tsin an odd feeling, standing there with the sea breeze in her face and her hand in the old woman’s. It made her feel like a child again.
“When I was little, I used to dream about falling,” she said. Her own voice seemed to come from far away. “I dreamt I fell from the sky, through the clouds, and it went on for a long time . . . I never hit the ground. I used to wish, when I woke up, that I could do it for real without getting hurt.”
“Yes,” said Lady Meng.
“Does it hurt?” Siew Tsin whispered.
“By the time they get here, everyone has suffered as much as they ever will,” said Lady Meng.
“Don’t I need to drink your tea?”
“Not if you jump,” said Lady Meng. “The wind takes your memories from you.”
“Will I meet her?” said Siew Tsin. “Will I meet Yonghua in my next life?”
“Listen,” said Lady Meng. “You will be born again. You will be a baby again. You will smile up at your parents again. You will feel the sun on your face again. You will be young again. Everything you know, you will learn again. You will find love again.”
She helped Siew Tsin onto the ledge. She was surprisingly strong for an old lady.
“This time, let us hope you will get to be old,” she said. “It is a great suffering to know youth only.”
“Goodbye,” said Siew Tsin.
“See you next time,” said Lady Meng, more accurately.
“Will you remember me when I come again?”
“Of course,” said Lady Meng. “I miss you every time.”
Siew Tsin closed her eyes and fell off the bridge backwards. She fell forever. The light on her eyelids went from lurid red to warm gold. The smell of seawater was taken over by rain and fresh air. The clouds came up to meet her.
She never hit the ground.
The Four Generations of Chang E
The First Generation
In the final days of Earth as we knew it, Chang E won the moon lottery.
For Earthlings who were neither rich nor well-connected, the lottery was the only way to get on the Lunar Habitation program. (This was the Earthlings’ name for it. The moon people said, “those fucking immigrants.”)
Chang E sold everything she had: the car, the family heirloom enamel hairpin collection, her external brain. Humans were so much less intelligent than Moonites anyway. The extra brain would have made little difference.
She was entitled to the hairpins. Her grandmother had pressed them into Chang E’s hands herself, her soft old hands folding over Chang E’s.
“In the future it will be dangerous to be a woman,” her grandmother had said. “Maybe even more dangerous than when my grandmother was a girl. You look after yourself, OK?”
It was not as if anyone else would. There was a row over the hairpins. Her parents had been saving them to pay for Elder Brother’s education.
Hah! Education! Who had time for education in days like these? In these times you mated young before you died young, you plucked your roses before you came down with some hideous mutation or discovered one in your child, or else you did something crazy—like go to the moon. Like survive.
Chang E could see the signs. Her parents’ eyes had started following her around hungrily, for all the world as if they were Bugs Bunny and she was a giant carrot. One night Chang E would wake up to find herself trussed up on the altar they had erected to Elder Brother.
Since the change Elder Brother had spent most of his time in his room, slumbering Kraken-like in the gloomful depths of his bed. But by the pricking of their thumbs, by the lengthening of his teeth, Mother and Father trusted that he was their way out of the last war, their guard against assault and cannibalism.
Offerings of oranges, watermelons, and pink-steamed rice cakes piled up around his bed. One day Chang E would join them. Everyone knew the new gods liked best the taste of the flesh of women.
