Multiplex Fandango (18 page)

Everything was now in full view. The sky behind the tree was a rusted yellow. The ground beneath it was a deep green, with white and gray jutting bone. The tree itself was deep black, like the cloth she wore, and vaguely man-shaped, arms outstretched becoming limbs, and sprouting red leaves the color of the money envelopes she’d receive every New Years. The round red leaves seemed to drip from the branches, never quite falling.

And hanging from the tree were things that were too many to count, light brown, clinging with their tails, their pinchers click-clicking madly.

And they clicked until their incoherence melted and she understood the message.

***

She jerked awake to the sound of a helicopter. It roared low, north of her. She lurched to her feet, letting the cloth slide down her body. She was naked beneath. What had happened to her clothes? Strangely, it didn’t matter. She had the cloak and wore it like a second skin.

Her face pulsed with pain. She’d ceased trying to touch it, the spikes irrevocably sunk into the skin of her lips, her cheeks, her neck. She’d never thought that she’d become used to it, but in the last few days she’d become used to so many things.

A strip of fabric had been tied around her lean waist beneath the now ankle-length cloth that served as her only cover. Hanging from this strip were more cactus pads, already cooked and softened, a dead rattlesnake with a bite torn from behind its head, and a hand that had a tattoo of a star between the thumb and forefinger. She remembered the cactus pads. They’d become a staple, sustaining her with their watery green flesh. She also had a flash of a memory of the snake, when she’d
run
on all fours to catch it. But how she’d come by the hand she had no idea, and why it only had three fingers, she was at an even greater loss to answer.

Her eyes followed the helicopter as it swept the length of the fence, its spotlight roving in great, searching arcs. She’d kept the twenty-foot-tall divide on her left for a full day as she’d sought a way through. Here and there she’d spied a camera, and once she’d seen a man standing on the other side, as if he were on a ladder or a ledge, a rifle in his hand, pointing in her direction. But she’d always kept far enough away that they couldn’t get to her.

***

Her eyes caught everything in freeze-frame simplicity, even the puff of smoke from far across the sand as it exited the barrel of the rifle. The bang was an afterthought, punctuating the round roaring through her brain, sending her into a dead fall. She felt both surprise and the recognition of the inevitable, then she felt nothing at all, until the scorpions brought her around once more.

Dimly she knew that what she’d always wanted was on the other side. She had a place reserved in the American Dream and a bill to pay whether she was able to make it there or not. But it had become less of a drive and more of a memory of something she’d never had. Instead, another choice had come to her, one that resided at the base of the tree.

The noises of the scorpions now spoke volumes to her
—
each click-clacking a memory, a dream, a favorite food, a perfect morning, her mother’s laugh from before she knew the truth, the roar of evening traffic outside her Harbin apartment’s window and even her father’s smile before she was the counterfeit daughter, all coming together combining into a chitinous opus of her life. They communicated in a language that was at once harsh and beautiful, entreating her to sit beneath their tree, to join them, to listen to their story of her life, of other lives, of everyone’s life.

And she wanted to.

She wanted to go there. She wanted to change her direction, to change her mind, just as she’d hoped her father had changed his mind in the face of the execution squad, realizing that he really did love her and not just because her becoming
precious
had given him a chance to have a son.

The helicopter’s spotlight arced towards her. She pulled the folds of the cloth over her head and turned away. It would never see her. It never did. All it ever saw was the darkness of the desert. It never realized that there was intelligence here. It never realized there was something different. It roared off into the night, leaving her alone and wanting the scorpion song once more.

How was it she’d gotten there before? Why couldn’t she go there now?

Then she saw them: six Mexicans picking their way carefully through the cacti. The one in front used a walking stick to prod the ground in front of him while the others held onto the pack of the person in front of them, moving carefully in line. She wasn’t aware that she’d already selected the one in the middle until she heard herself growl.

Then she was off and running on all fours. Her arms and legs somehow conformed to allow her to move swiftly, like a feral beast. When she struck, she screamed.

***

“Why is it you want to leave?” the Snakehead had asked.

“Does it matter? I thought you only wanted my money.”

He smiled. “It matters,” he’d said simply.

She’d thought for a moment as the memory clouds in her mind roiled. “All my family is dead,” she finally said.

“Your father was executed. Did you learn what he did?”

She remembered how her mother had screamed at him as he’d been taken away.

“Just as well. So why did you leave?”

“Too many memories. I want to move to a place where I have no memories.”

“Is that why you chose
America
?”

“It seems to be where everyone wants to go.”

“
America
has its own memories. It’s a land of desperation. You know about desperation, don’t you?”

She’d nodded.

“Then you understand that you might be going into a place with its own memories.”

She’d shrugged. “Anything is better than what I have in here,” she’d said, stabbing at her head with her forefinger until it left a red, round mark.

***

She dragged the young man away, moving swiftly through the brush. With both hands gripping his head, she chewed on an ear as she ran, the rest of him hanging limply behind her. He tasted of fear, and she found herself licking the salt from his skin.

The others shouted for her to stop. They started to run after her, then crashed to a stop as they saw her horrific visage.

She laughed into the night as she ran, ignoring the others. A howl escaped her lips. She felt all
-
powerful, stronger than the strongest of them, her hunger for their memories driving her on. Like a ghost, she was eager to feed on fear.

One threw something at her and still she ignored them… for now. She might return, once she’d fed. By their crying and their screams, they probably tasted just as sweet.

Like that irreversible moment when she’d set fire to her mother as she’d sat drunk and rambling on the kitchen chair. Her mother’s eyes had shot open when her
precious jade
had poured the rest of the liquor on her and lit her afire. Her nightclothes were engulfed almost too quickly for her to hear her daughter scream, ‘
Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you keep it all to yourself? Why did you let him make me her?’

But even if her mother had heard, her only answer was a single quick scream. The fire ate her from the outside in, its ravenous destructive force too furious for any words that could be comprehended. Still, Bao-yu had clapped joyously at the way her mother’s legs and arms had curled into themselves, twisting into an origami farce of retribution and remembrance of how things should have been, much like she imagined her father’s body shriveling as he lay charcoaling in the prison’s incinerator.

She spied the helicopter again. It was coming back, swinging low over the ground, its light searching and roving. She suddenly felt vulnerable, knowing that if the light found her that everything would change. She dropped the young man and loped off into the darkness, the snake, pads and hand flopping against her legs as she ran. Cacti stabbed her, adding their spines to the hundreds of others that now sprouted from her skin.

She found a low place near the base of a rock. She flew into it, rolled herself in her cloak, and hid beneath the fabric. The sound of the helicopter came near. She could almost feel the light creeping across the desert, searching, seeking, hunting for her. Then suddenly it was there. Although the fabric was impervious to anything, she’d left a single imperfect seam where the ground met the cloak near her feet. She stared at the blinding white that seeped in and…

T
he
storm
returned. The spinning, snapping, clawing clouds of light and dark, each whirling like a flock of birds, flipping, turning, twisting, biting. But the dark cloud was so small now it was virtually non-existent. It fought only when it had to, pausing to fight only as a strategy to allow it to try and escape. Soon the light took it from the sky and broke it into a hundred pieces, the darkness scattering across the desert. Then the white flock merged into a single entity and flew towards her. It came fast and hard until it struck, exploding in a cascade of light and sound until she was all but blind.

***

Then there was nothing for awhile except the memory of her father and how he used to come into her room at night. She never knew when it started. She was too young to notice. But when she was five and a thunderstorm raged outside, it was his face that would light with every crack of lightning. His glare was one of abject hatred, something he’d mastered when she was born. After that she watched him watch her every night, sometimes wide awake until one of them was forced to give up in the wee hours of the morning.

And everything might have even been fine until he touched her.

His stubby hands grabbed her neck hard. He’d been drinking and snot bubbled in his nose from the effort to kill her. Somehow, she’d managed a gurgling scream. Her mother came flying into the room, smashing him with a chair.

‘
Why did you have to live!
’ he’d shouted as he was led away. ‘
Why couldn’t you have stayed dead
.
I never wanted
—
’

The rest was lost as another chair crashed into his back.

Bao-yu
never spoke about it with her mother and never wondered what her father had never wanted, because the answer was too easy. In
China
, jade is as common as gravel.

***

Bao-yu crawled through the desert, seeking the girl as a plant would seek water. The girl was transfixed on a map. She stared at it for long moments before she wadded it in her fist and slapped her side in frustration.

What Bao-yu saw made her heart stop. The girl’s hand held a star-shaped tattoo just like the hand hanging from Bao-yu’s hip. What were the odds of such a thing unless… she searched blindly beneath the cloak and felt the hand. She felt its thumb and three fingers. She remembered now that she’d eaten the finger, not because she’d been hungry but because it had been so pretty. The nail had an echo of a picture on it, something like a bird, a black bird. She couldn’t help herself.

Just to be sure, she lifted her cloak and checked it, and sure enough, it was the same as the one the girl had. Could it be possible? Then the girl began to cry, and Bao-yu remembered that it was at that moment when she’d attacked the last time. It had been perfect. The girl’s guard had been down, and she’d crept up behind her, leaped upon her back, ridden her to the ground, then slammed her head into the ground over and over until blood flowed from the ears.

As suddenly as she remembered it she was there, the finger in her mouth as she chewed greedily, eager to make that small beautiful piece a part of her, as the girl’s head bled into the desert sand.

***

Then once more came the sound of the helicopter.

***

And Bao-yu murdered the
Laoren
.

***

And she killed her mother.

***

And the American border guard killed her with his rifle.

***

And she ate moldy rice inside the cargo container.

***

And the helicopter came.

***

And the snapping
,
snapping
,
snapping of the scorpions serenaded each transition, each memory, each remembrance and reliving of something that had gone on before. Everything happened again and again, but this time when the helicopter came, she did not run. She held fast, the cloak draped over her arms, snarling into the sky, her visage that of a white-skinned, hungry, two-legged beast, cactus spines poking from every inch of skin, blood dried and crusted in rivulets along the contours of her hard, lean body.

And this time when the light found her, it pierced her, sending its pure arctic beams through her until she was gone, gone from this world and returned once more to the grotto where the tree grew and the scorpions hung and the green grass greeted her. She breathed deeply and smelled the sweetness of
baozi
, then saw that there upon the grass was her body, laying as it always had, resting forever beneath the shade of the scorpion tree.