The Girl with Ghost Eyes (16 page)

She looked up at me. I was still holding her shoulders. Her face was wet with tears, and her nose dribbled. She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I can do that.”

She led me into her sleeping chambers. I looked at the spacious room, the large soft mattress, and envy stopped my breath. Dr. Wei had enough money that he and his wife could sleep in separate rooms. I grew up sharing a small room with my father; it had two cots, a table, a stove, and some shelves made out of scrap wood. My idea of home was a room where there were no chairs. There were workers in Chinatown who lived close together like fish in a net, twenty or thirty men in a single apartment. I was amazed to see that Mrs. Wei had a room of her own.

She reached inside a closet and withdrew a small wooden chest. Within the chest there were gongs and strings and colorful strips of cloth, long sticks of incense, ornate bells and thick candles, packets of herbs and balls of powder. She took an indigo strip of cloth and tied one end around the doorknob. She held onto the other end.

I watched her set up an impromptu altar, stacking two empty crates. Their open ends faced us; the altar had two stories. She walked to the door and placed a length of bamboo over the frame. “Copper girder,” she said, and there was pride in her voice. She walked back to the altar. She placed another length of bamboo on top of the boxes, and said, “Iron girder.”

This was not so different from Dao magic, I thought. Then, taking a bamboo spike in one hand, she pushed back her sleeves and began to shake. Spasms moved across her body. Every part of her, arms and legs, twitched like a man in agony. I watched her tremors in horror. “Stop this, Mrs. Wei,” I said, but she continued to convulse.

Her eyes were open. They stared blankly and were clear as glass. She grunted, over and over, rhythmically, as one might sound while being beaten. She shook, but it looked almost as if something was shaking her. Her loss of control was absolute. She twitched all over. “Stop this now, Mrs. Wei,” I repeated.

Still grunting, she gouged at her arm with the bamboo spike. “Stop this!” I cried. She yanked the spike back and forth along her arm, and ribbons of blood began to appear. Simply watching it made me feel violated, like Liu Qiang cutting my stomach. What kind of magic demands its practitioners to degrade and harm themselves? “Stop this now!” I shouted.

And then it was done. Her fit of spasms died down, her grunting came to an end. Her eyes returned to normal, as though a fog had cleared. She smiled at me and I found it ghoulish. “I needed to attach my bridge to the world of spirits,” she said.

“Then you should find a different way.” I felt scorn harden in my voice. “A clean way.”

Her smile vanished, and now she pursed her lips. Shaking her head, she took the other end of the indigo cloth and tied it to her altar. The cloth stretched out between the altar and the doorknob. I gasped.

“The altar,” I said. “You tied your altar to the world.”

Her square-jawed face broke into another creepy smile. “Yes, I suppose that is what I did. This is a spirit bridge, Li-lin. The altar is the center of my power, and the spirit bridge is the path I follow when I want to bring my power with me to the world of spirits. But you can see that, can’t you?”

I nodded, and then I caught myself. I had just admitted that I had yin eyes. Somehow I had begun to trust this strange woman, and I didn’t think I wanted to.

She shook her head, and her bamboo earrings shook with her, making a faint clatter. “My mother would have been so happy to train a girl with your gift.”

I stared at her, and then it all hit me like a fist, all the isolation, the misery, the freakishness, that came from being what I was. “A gift?” I cried. “Having yin eyes is a curse. My condition loses face for my father, brings shame upon his ancestors. I see monstrous spirits all around me, and I can never shut them out, no matter how hard I try. I see loneliness and pain and anger where they’ve been festering. I’ve tried every possible remedy to get rid of this ‘gift.’ I drank water infused with talismanic ashes every day for over a decade and still my yin eyes afflicted me. A woman with yin eyes will lead a painful life. It is no gift.”

Mrs. Wei’s eyes were wide, and she shook her head. “There are so many worlds,” she said. “China and Gold Mountain. The Hanzu and the rest of us. Men and women. The spirit world and the world of the living. Where do you belong, Li-lin?”

Nowhere
, I thought, but I said nothing. I belonged in my husband’s home. That should have been my life, wife of a great man and mother to his sons. But he was gone, and my world went with him.

She sighed. “Here, Li-lin. Watch what I do next,” she said, and her hands moved deftly over the spirit bridge. She made finger gestures that reminded me less of Daoist shoujue and more of sewing. With delicate motions, her fingers found wisps in the air, so slender that they were nearly invisible. There were three wisps. She wound them around her fingers until they were tightly coiled, then she took a firm grip on the wisps with her other hand. She yanked her hands apart, and I heard the faintest of snaps.

“There,” she said. “The spirit darts are no more.”

The ending of the ritual had been simple and straightforward. Like a punch.

“I need to go,” I said.

“Will you …” she said, and then she trailed off. “What are you going to tell my husband?”

I gave her a long look and considered what I should say. “Nothing,” I said. “Not now. But if you ever hurt anyone again, I will tell him, and I will tell everyone what you’ve done.”

She nodded. Not meeting my eyes, she untied her spirit bridge from the doorknob.

16

Evening had fallen by the time I left the infirmary. I thought about Mrs. Wei. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the people of Chinatown are not a single people. She might be alone like me, practicing a magic that had no place here, but there was a difference. She could stop being what she was. She could remove her bamboo earrings, but I could not remove my yin eyes.

My father’s eye was waiting for me on a staircase near the infirmary. I lifted him up onto my shoulder and then I started to walk the three blocks toward my home. While I was walking, I filled the little spirit in on all the things I’d learned.

“A Kulou-Yuanling,” he said. “That sounds bad.”

I nodded my agreement. “Tom Wong is making a show of power,” I said. “He considers Bok Choy a threat to the Ansheng tong, and he thinks his father hasn’t been strong enough to stop him. So he’s going to demonstrate a kind of power that has never been seen in Chinatown before. He’s been gathering corpses from the abandoned mines, and probably from other places too, and tomorrow night he and Liu Qiang will raise a Kulou-Yuanling.”

“But that would be madness,” Mr. Yanqiu said. “A monster like that could destroy half of Chinatown.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s what they want. They’ll aim the Kulou-Yuanling at the streets that belong to the Xie Liang tong, and it will demolish everything. Tom will aim it at the businesses that defected from the Ansheng tong to the Xie Liang. The Kulou-Yuanling will demolish buildings, devour men, and leave others destitute.

“There will be no Xie Liang tong anymore,” I continued. “Everyone will be clamoring to earn Tom’s favor. He thinks his father’s 438s will see the wisdom of his ways and they’ll make Mr. Wong step down. He thinks filial piety is an antiquated notion, just another of the old ways that must be changed.”

Somehow my father’s eye managed to give a sigh. “But there are people outside Chinatown, aren’t there? Lots of them. They won’t just sit back and tolerate some giant monster running loose in their city.”

“It will start a war,” I said, “and that’s exactly what Tom wants. The corpses will be stacked half a mile in the air.”

Mr. Yanqiu stroked a tiny hand along the place of his absent chin. “And he’s doing all this for power.”

“For power, and revenge,” I said. “I don’t think Tom has recovered from Rocket’s death any more than I have.”

“Yes,” the eyeball said, choosing his words with care. “Will you tell me about that?”

We had arrived outside my father’s temple. Mr. Yanqiu wouldn’t be able to enter. “Let me get you a cup of tea,” I said.

The eye looked at me with a gaze like iron. “I would love a cup of tea,” he said, “but when you get back, I would like it if you would tell me about what happened.”

I sighed. I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to think about it. But my husband’s death had started Tom Wong on this path, and I needed to understand Tom if I intended to fight him. “I will tell you, Mr. Yanqiu,” I said. “I promise.”

I went inside and began to prepare two cups of tea, one for me to drink, the other for the eyeball to soak in. I kept my emotions distant while the water heated. I didn’t want to feel the pain again. I didn’t want to talk about the day Rocket died, so I made my feelings go numb.

When the tea was ready, I brought it outside. I sat down on the front step and leaned my back against the brick wall. I pushed one of the cups over to Mr. Yanqiu, and he climbed inside, bathing with a contented look. “Are you ready to talk, Li-lin?” he asked me.

“It was just two years ago,” I began. “Rocket was the tallest man in Chinatown, and his martial arts were beyond compare. Even his magic was amazing, since my father had ordained him to the Seventh. He had never learned any English, which made him ‘a real man of China’ in my father’s eyes. He worked as my father’s assistant. Early every morning he and I would climb to the roof of my father’s temple and watch the sun come up. I was so happy. We were saving money to move to Berkeley, where Rocket was planning to open a Daoist temple of his own.”

I looked away. The silence was painful. As it stretched on, I found myself wishing I hadn’t started to tell the story. But I do not hide from monstrous things. “One day some white men came to Chinatown. They had worked at a boot factory, but the factory shut down and they all lost their jobs.”

“So they blamed the Chinese competition,” my father’s eye said, fitting the pieces together. “They must have come to Chinatown looking for trouble.”

I took a sip of my tea, and nodded. “They were harmless, really. They just knocked men’s hats off their heads, or pulled on men’s queues. They were bullies, stupid bullies, but that’s all they were. Tom Wong went to find some constables. And Rocket walked up to
the men.

“There was a hat lying on the boardwalk, where the men had knocked it off of someone’s head. I can still remember the look on my husband’s face. He was pretending to be a fool. He said, ‘Look, someone lost a hat!’ And then he bent down to pick up the hat, and he deliberately made his ass into a target. One of the men tried to kick him, but he stepped out of the way, as if by accident. The man fell. Still pretending he didn’t know what was going on, Rocket put the hat on his head. One of the men tried to knock it off, but Rocket moved out of the way, again making it look like an accident. Over and over, the men tried to knock the hat off my husband’s head, but Rocket remained just out of reach, bobbing and ducking and dodging. He never even tried to strike back. Dozens of men crowded around, watching. Rocket was playing. But the men were humiliated. The crowd was laughing at them.

“The men grew angry. They started throwing punches but they still couldn’t hit him.” I sipped more tea, and the memory of that day went on in my head, unfurling like a long prayer scroll. “One man tried to hit him but he bobbed to the side, and the man wound up punching his friend in the face. He broke his friend’s nose.

“The men were completely unprepared. Rocket was younger, stronger, faster, more agile, and better trained. They never stood a chance. Without even striking anyone, my husband wore them down and battered them. One of them pulled out a hunting knife and Rocket pinched his wrist and disarmed him.

“I loved him so much in that moment,” I said. “I was so proud of him. He defeated four bullies without ever resorting to violence. He stood there over the exhausted men, holding the hunting knife, and I thought he looked like a xiashi, a knight from the old stories.

“That was when Tom Wong returned with the constables. They took one look at the scene, a man with a big knife standing over four men who looked like they’d been thrashed, and the constables pulled out their pistols, and they started to shout at him to put down the knife, but they were shouting in English, and Rocket, he …”

“Had never learned English,” the eye finished for me.

I started to sob. I cried like I had so many times since that day. It felt like there would never be an end to all my weeping. My father’s eye spoke soothing words but they were incomprehensible to me.

I could not bring myself to tell the rest of the story. I remembered how Tom stood there shouting for the constables to stop, people were shouting at Rocket to put down the knife—but some were shouting in Guanhua and others in Yue and there were the dialects of Fujian and Wu, some with a Taishanese accent. Rocket stood there in the cacophony of shouting voices, comprehending nothing. Then thunder struck. The first bullet hit him in the shoulder, spinning him sideways. The second took him in the stomach.

The next thing I remembered, he was prone on the ground and I was holding his hand. Dr. Wei was on the other side of him, speaking slow and calm words that made no sense. Rocket looked in my eyes. There was a little blood around his lips, but he tried to smile. “Li-lin,” he said. “Did I …?” And then he spoke no more.

The constabulary was quick to issue a formal apology. The constables who shot him came to his funeral, bringing flowers. Flowers have no part in our customs. We wailed and burned paper offerings at my husband’s grave, while the policemen stood there, awkward, with their arms full of flowers and their eyes full of regret.

The bullies came to speak with me later. They offered to do labor for me for free. They brought wood for the stove. They brought me chickens from their yards. I refused them, I refused everything, but I knew their remorse was genuine.

It was a cruel, ugly, stupid world that slaughtered my husband for no reason, and left me with no one I could hate for it.