Haunted Legends (32 page)

•  •  •

When my mother tells the story, she says, “The foxes haunt the country like memory. They are unrelenting and hard. They are calloused beasts.”

When my father tells the story, he says, “The foxes are warriors. They are timed and tempered.”

•  •  •

When you become infected with the disease, you know it immediately. Even though nothing happens for the first thirty-six hours—its incubation period—you know it. It’s as though there’s a sudden lucidity, an onset of self-understanding and self-realization, and it’s as though all the mistakes you’ve ever made in your entire life simultaneously play around you, like a series of three-dimensional films playing all at once and you are both subject and viewer. Then, you know your death is coming. And you know that it’s going to be brutal.

•  •  •

Khanh was a good boy. He was a diligent student, he worked hard, he loved his parents, he was never lazy. Often, when school was let out, he would run home to cook dinner for his parents. Even after dinner, he would insist on washing the dishes. Of course, his mother wouldn’t allow this.

After dinner, Khanh would go back to his room where he’d study until his eyes could no longer focus. Even then, he would try to forge on for just another hour or two to maximize his time. He was the perfect Vietnamese son.

•  •  •

When my father tells the story, he says, “It was the disease that impregnated these women with a rage so powerful that they manipulated reincarnation to seek revenge.” When my father tells the story, he says, “These seven women will not stop.” He says, “Women, especially scorned women, can never recover: they will never be sated.” It’s hard to estimate, he tells me, but these women—these foxes—they’ve probably destroyed scores of villages, but because they are so thorough, it’s impossible to know how many for sure. He says it could be hundreds. Maybe even thousands, but one thing is for sure, these foxes are real and they will keep on killing.

When my mother tells the story, she says, “It was the colonizers’ cruelty that made the women come back as foxes.” She says, “As long as Vietnam remains under the colonizers’ rule, the foxes will continue to try to break down anything they build.”

My mother isn’t political, but she’s telling a story so it’s OK.

When my mother tells the story, she explains, “The foxes have been doing this for as long as Vietnam has been colonized.” She says that they’re systematic about it, that they go from village to village, killing and destroying, that they’re building up an army. My mother says, “They’re not going to stop. They’re never going to stop.”

•  •  •

For thirty-six long hours, you have to relive the most painful times of your life. During this time, you have perfect memory—every color is the exact shade it was, every hair is in place—and you watch yourself stumble, you watch yourself fail, watch yourself suffer, you watch yourself knowing everything that will happen, everything that has happened. It’s the embarrassment, the pity that kills you. You wish yourself death, but it isn’t that easy.

During the incubation period, the disease makes you believe you’re living the past all over again. You walk through the past in the present, such that you collide your present body into a building that exists today but you still continue walking, continue your course of motion as though the building is not there because from where you stand—in the past—it isn’t. Those who are lucky walk into the ocean and drown themselves before the real pain of the disease starts. Most are not lucky. They end up with bruises, broken legs, and missing organs.

•  •  •

The fox is a hunter. She is a sly creature. She is beautiful and elegant.

•  •  •

One man, while reliving the murder of his wife, stabbed thirty-eight people, killing nearly half of them. He would have been tried and hung, except that everyone knew he had been merciful, killing those people so quickly and efficiently.

•  •  •

The only survivors were women, pregnant women. The women didn’t even realize they were pregnant though. The disease had dissolved essential portions of their brain. One woman had no hippocampus; another lacked the entire frontal lobe of her brain. These women were a sight, nearly nine months pregnant and they could hardly walk, not because of the bulge of their bellies or the strain on their backs but because the disease had degenerated their legs such that they resembled the stalks of bok choy. The disease tattooed their skin with large purplish blotches and patches of acne that swelled under heat.

•  •  •

It was the colonizers who first realized these women were with child. The colonizers, being infinitely wise in their understandings of the world, once they realized that these women were pregnant, quickly ascertained that it was the disease—the devil—that had impregnated them.

•  •  •

But the fox can also be sexy. She can be svelte, her fur smooth. The fox has human eyes—compassionate and, sometimes, quite passionate indeed.

•  •  •

When Khanh was a little boy, he’d beg his mother to tell him ghost stories, the kind that would make a boy never be able to sleep because of the fright, but she wouldn’t indulge him. She told him the truth is always scarier than fiction, and she told him that this very village, the one he was sleeping in right now, had a history to it that would haunt even the bravest little boy so strongly he would never be able to sleep again.

Taunted, Khanh asked for more, but his mother said, “Soon, my dear son. You’re too young now, but soon enough, you will go to school, and I won’t be able to protect you, even if I wanted to.”

And it was true. She wasn’t able to protect him at all.

The disease starts in the brain. If you’re lucky, the disease will eat away the right part of the brain to cut off your senses. But most people aren’t so lucky.

Once the disease is fully incubated, it attacks the skin. The disease manifests itself at first as a simple freckle or mole and within a minute or two the spot begins to burn. The sensation feels something akin to a little fleck of acid on flesh. Once one spot appears, ten more do too. Then, a hundred. Until you’re covered with these tiny blood-filled freckles, each one burning with an icy intensity, that point where hot turns cold turns indescribable pain. But it doesn’t stop there.

The disease keeps these spots far enough from each other to keep the skin from sluicing off, and although you try to scrape your skin away,
mutilation doesn’t help. The burning burrows, until you can feel it in your muscles, these tiny pinpricks, and then in your bones. It’s quite possible you can even feel it in your heart and brain, although there’s no evidence to prove this either way.

Once the pain finds its way to the bones, the marrow begins to expand and contract, making the bones themselves elastic, and you can’t walk. But you can’t lay still either. The pain is too much for even the strongest of men to endure, and even then, the disease won’t let the body die. It lets people writhe on the ground, and from afar, you could see inside their emaciated frames, and a slight pulsation: the bones breathing.

•  •  •

When I was a little girl, my parents used to tell me to behave or else the foxes would come eat me. Of course, I never doubted it and that scared me into good behavior. The thing is that my parents never stopped warning me about the foxes. To this day, my parents remind me the foxes are always nearby, that I can never escape from them, that it only takes them seeing me once for them to remember me forever. It’s their sense of smell, they say, but deep down, I think we all know it’s something much more sinister than that.

•  •  •

But of course, the foxes don’t eat little kids. They don’t care about them at all. These foxes, they’re not really foxes. Yes, they take the form of the fox, they look like a fox, they press their bodies against the ground flat before pouncing on prey like a fox, but don’t be deceived. These foxes have the disease in them. It’s the disease that killed their whole village so long ago, the disease that just won’t leave this place alone.

•  •  •

The colonizers were ruthless. When the seven surviving women emerged from the wreckage of dead bodies, the colonizers strapped them down to clean them, to see what was beneath all that crusted blood and dirt. And maybe it was because neither understood the language the other was speaking, but the women and the colonizers screamed hell until finally the women were gagged. Then, they were blindfolded. Then, they were whipped. Then, they were raped. Then, they were cleansed. And then, the cycle started all over again until the colonizers were sated. Then, these women—these seven strong women who survived the deadliest disease the earth ever saw—were
hanged, and even after they were dead, the colonizers did not stop with the torture.

•  •  •

When my father tells the story, I’m safe. My father says, “The foxes would never be interested in you. What they want most, these foxes, is to find a good father for their children. They want a man who will not kill them, one who will not be murdered by disease, and every day, they search for him, and luckily, my little girl, you’re not a man.”

When my mother tells the story, though, it’s quite a bit different. Sure, it’s mostly the same. There’s disease and colonizers, murder and foxes, but in her version the foxes are much more vengeful. She says, “It’s because of everything they’ve had to endure.” And even though she insists that Vietnamese people, especially the women, can endure much more than anyone else and not complain or even hold grudges, what these women experienced deserved revenge. She says, “Even though Vietnamese people are not ones for violence, when pushed to a certain limit, it would be stupid—it would be suicide—not to push back.”

•  •  •

Khanh studied by candlelight not because his family didn’t have electricity—because they did and he actually used that artificial light for illumination—but because he preferred to use the candle as a marker for time. Every night he would go through exactly three candles before going to bed. Before studying, he would place a sheet of paper around the middle of each candle to account for each of his six subjects. He was a dedicated student, but even more than that, he was dedicated to his parents, as all good Vietnamese boys are. He studied, not for himself, but for them, so that they would be proud to brag about his diligence.

•  •  •

When my mother tells the story, she says, “The foxes want Vietnam to remain stagnant. They want things to be as they were in the past. They are selfish and close-minded.”

When my father tells the story, he says, “The foxes are trying to save Vietnam from falling under the weight of desire.”

•  •  •

The foxes work as a group. Even though we can’t hear or understand their language, it’s evident that there must be a language because these foxes move
as a singular force. Their movement is choreographed. It is an epic ballet where hundreds die for them to circle just one person, the one they want to claim as their own. And then, of course, another fox is born.

•  •  •

After the bodies were cleared, the colonizers modeled their new village after their homeland, which happened to be monarchical and capitalistic. This was handy because they—the colonizers—were the new monarchs. They were the rulers who should never be questioned. Even after the foxes had killed all the colonizers, even after generations of people had come and gone, the village never went back to that ideal restful collective.

•  •  •

The day Khanh’s mother heard that the foxes had resurfaced, she knew they were coming for her son. It was not her maternal pride. It was instinct. She knew her son, so diligent and handsome, even though he had his small flaws, was the greatest boy born in the village in years. This was when she made her plan. She went to see all the other women in the village. She gave them cakes and sticky rice. She gave them any of her small treasures, if only they would promise to help her. The foxes were infamous. She knew they would come and they would kill everyone, and the only way any of them could survive was if they pushed back, hard.

•  •  •

After the disease enters your bone marrow, then things get really ugly. Once the marrow becomes elastic, it pushes against the hardened calcium of the bone until it begins to crack, but because of the disease, the bone can’t quite break. Instead, the bone unwraps, layer by layer, but the layers are not clean. They splinter, the bones force their way to the surface, to the air, to breathe. You still don’t die. Even then, you survive to suffer further.