Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (51 page)

When the sun goes down, I will go, as we all must go who are not Hungry or forgotten, to the place of my family home, and I will sit in the chair father has kept empty for me even though I am not an Ancestor, a chair he once cut down to my small size. I will breathe the steams of all that Mother has cooked, the rice and fruits and warm buns she might have made in the days before my brother went away. I will listen to the clatter of old, familiar plates and old, familiar talk, the grumbling and begging of an old familiar dog, if the dog still lives. And I will be able to watch Mother’s eyes and Father’s small smiles, and know that I was alive here once.

After that, it will be back to the City, where I am alone in the gray streets, in a strange, gray, crooked house I have built myself, waiting for the next scrap to come through my window. I can bear going back, though. I can bear almost anything, as long as there is a place to return to when the world opens again.

But if I am married, if the place I must return to is just another strange house…

To end my walking every year in a house with its own dusts, its own dim light, its own unfriendly smells, its living faces who would feel no more walking through me than they would passing through a current of cold air… it would only ever be like wandering.

I
won’t
be married, I decide now, as I pass through the scattered rice and withered peaches that someone has already left in the road for any passing Hungry Ghosts. I can’t be married. Married to whom? Who would marry me? I’m dead. I have been dead twice as long as I have been alive. I have never even been engaged. I am a thin, funny ugly girl even now. I do not know how to be a good wife. I do not even know how to be a good ghost. No other ghosts come to visit me. No one comes to drink tea in my gray little house. I am nothing. I am nobody. It is all I can do to hold my walls up, and to keep the Hungry from my door.

No, I won’t be married. Tonight as Father sleeps, I will talk to him. I will scream and tear my hair and beg him to let me stay behind the door facing the wall. And maybe today, on this day of ghosts, he will hear me. Until now, I have only ever come into my father’s dreams mute, unable to make even the smallest sound that might keep him from forgetting me in the morning. And I have never been able to come into Mother’s dreams at all, whatever she might say about her dreams of omen. But I am young for a ghost. I have time to learn how to make them hear me. And when I do, Mother will not dare to argue, even if she does find a some far-flung strangers willing to clear a place on their family altar for a dead farmer’s daughter.

Cheered by this thought, I turn my face to the sun, breathing the warm air in, breathing it out. It has been a long time since I breathed.

It is a quiet Festival day. There are no street operas, no parades for us ghosts to watch. Most of our neighbors have now gone away into the cities as my brother did eight years ago, leaving the shells of houses and farms, long ago stripped of roof tiles and fence-posts and anything else of any value at all. But monks still light small altars for us (how hard they chant to retrieve us all from Hell! I wonder what they should say if they saw where we really lived) and there are still enough households to send up comforting clouds of incense and food smoke, and the smoke of burnt paper.

Perhaps some of the paper offerings are for me, and I will go back to my gray house to find solid, bright festoons of flowers, or a chair or two to sit in. Perhaps by and by, I will be able to fill my house with shining lamps, and rugs, and ornaments, and then the great old Ancestors in their paper mansions will deign to drink my tea, and not pass me by with such stony faces. Probably not, but I find it is a nice daydream.

As the sun climbs, I stop and sit in a tuft of dry grass by a little inlet of seawater that still trickles in from the great ocean. There are some ghosts drifting up and down over the water, aimless, yet somehow preoccupied. Perhaps they drowned here. Or perhaps they are just Hungry, quenching their ghost-thirst where they can (most fresh water has either dried up or turned foul).

I keep my eyes on the water. If they are Hungry, I do not want to look at them. I meet enough of them in the gray streets, growling low in their throats as they think of tearing me apart for my food.

The inlet is the last place where my brother held me, covering my fevered head with droplets of salt water while he made crosses in the air and said Christian prayers from a book he had found. I wish l remembered what his hands had been like. But I remember only how black Mother’s eyes became after that, how hard her voice. She hissed and raged. She called him names I did not understand. She spat words I had never heard before, with hatred I never knew she had. And then my brother was gone, and shortly after, so was I.

Of course, now he is gone away from her, trapped in Peking with angry, hungry men who would do more than spit on him and his Christian book – who will tear him apart – and she cannot say he is dead to her without thinking how close he is to becoming a ghost. And there is no one to carry her worry and anger but my father. My father and I. I come here on this day to make sure my brother is not one of us. To make sure I do not meet him. I have never found him yet, in the City or anywhere else. And when I have learned to speak in Mother’s dreams, I will quell all her black worry. I will say to her, “Your son is not here. He is alive, and I am alone.”

I lose track of time, sitting there on the bank, not finding my brother’s ghost, and the sun is gone before I know where it goes. The inlet begins to fill with the lit paper boats and lanterns that are meant to guide ghosts here and back again. It is the paper that makes me realize. All at once, I understand just how my mother intends to find me a husband.

There is no time… there is no time. I only pray – if ghosts can pray – that I am not too late.

The Fisherman’s Boy once had an older brother and a name, and now he has neither. This is just how it happens, the Boy decided. When you have a brother, when you are one of two sons hauling in the fishing nets, your father must call you each something, so that you know when you are being called, or praised or punished.

But his brother, Tao, came to him one night, standing very tall, and told him that a brotherhood of great men had come to take Tao away with them to the city. These were powerful men, he said, part of a secret Society that would bring back righteousness and strength to this land. The Boy asked his brother where righteousness and strength had gone. “Are you
stupid
?” Tao asked him. “Do you not see that there is moral degradation and Christians and Imperialists and yang guizi
everywhere, bringing this drought down upon us?”

The Boy looked around him, but saw none of these.

“These brothers are of the highest discipline,” said his brother with shining eyes. “They keep the strictest schedule of prayers, and cleanse themselves with the most secret of rituals. They are invulnerable to all the foulest weapons of the foreigners and the Imperialists–”

“What about the yang guizi?” asked the Boy.

“Yes, yes, them as well! And when I am one of the Society, I will be invulnerable as they. Our father may be angry to find me gone in the morning, but he will know what I have done when I and my true brothers sweep this land, unable to be cut down.”

Tao spoke half the truth. Their father was angry in the morning, but he would never see his son sweep the land. Only a body, three weeks later, and a letter with no name that said the body was Tao’s. And a neat little hole where the bowels of the body had come out. The Boy used to wonder whose magic had failed, whether the Imperialists had found a weapon strong enough to kill even Tao and take the long life from his name, or whether his brother had become a shape-changer and left something else that was not him at all to die in his place.

By and by, though, it did not matter. Gone is gone, and now the Boy is the Fisherman’s only son. He must haul in the nets and mend them. He must gut the fish, and clean the fish, and make the fish into soup. The Fisherman does not need a name for him when the nets break or come up empty, or when the knife slips in his hand, or when the soup boils and burns. The Fisherman only ever says “You,” and so that is what he is called. “Come, you! Idiot child, what makes you so stupid?”

And the Boy answers always to himself, “I do not know what makes me stupid. I do not know what makes me anything that I am, except that perhaps I think too much about paper.”

Tao used to say that his little brother had a head full of paper, that he dreamed about paper instead of wealth or feasts or women. And Tao was right, the Boy decided. There is always paper, even when there is nothing else. Hanging like lanterns and flying like kites, and whipping around in dusty streets. Red paper, and yellow paper, and blue and green paper. Paper can be made into anything, can make whole worlds of anything, if you are patient and you collect enough: meadows of flowers, flocks of birds, fleets of ships, an entire province full of houses.

The Fisherman hated for his son to collect so much paper. In the weeks after the body and the letter with no name, the Fisherman would throw all paper into the fire. He would flatten the ships and houses, and scream and hit the Boy until he bled. He would ask why it was their fate to starve, why the lower realm had taken his good, strong son and left him only one skinny, brainless boy with dead-fish eyes and fumbling hands and a head full of paper. And when the Boy would answer that he did not know, the Fisherman would cover his face and go away to weep. In those weeks, the thirsty days were very thirsty, and the hungry days were very hungry.

And then one day, the Fisherman met a man who would trade him a pipeful of opium for a bowl or a teacup, or a polished stone figurine, or whatever else the Fisherman could find in the house. When the Fisherman has his pipeful, an empty net or even a broken one cannot anger him. He does not complain about burnt soup, because he almost never takes soup when there is any. He does not scream, or ask the Boy questions he cannot answer. He almost never stirs from his chair to go out onto the water. He only sits and watches the Boy shape his paper, making dreamy smoke rings in the air. Sometimes, if he has found nothing to trade, he will weep, and hit the Boy on the ears, and call out his missing son’s name – or the name of his wife, though she died years and years ago. But the whole house is a little less hungry when the opium smoke hangs.

The Boy goes out in the morning, now, with all his paper treasures, walking around and around until he finds somebody with food to trade. There are always people who want paper treasures to send to the world of the dead. Even in these hungry days, he can always find them. Perhaps because everything in these days is brown and withered (grass and people and blossoms on trees) the people will take away a little food from their bellies to feed their eyes with something bright. The Boy has no priest to bless them, but the people take them anyway, even if it is only to be kind. And whenever the Boy returns home with a dumpling or a peach or small bowl of rice, his father almost smiles.

Today, on the Festival of Ghosts, the Boy plans to bring home their ghost-day feast. Today, the air will be filled with the smoke of the things he has made.

In the morning, he fills his father’s pipe and leaves him in his chair to smoke, and he walks the six miles to the next village with all his most beautiful paper. He has thought of everything: paper chairs for paper tables, and paper vases for paper flowers, and paper pots and pans on paper stoves.

The sun is high by the time he reaches the first houses, but the air smells already of feast food being prepared, and everyone is generous to guests on Ghost Day. Already, a woman opens her door for a few bright paper flowers, and offers the Boy tea and a dumpling for his trouble. He has not eaten since yesterday, and he refuses only twice before he takes what she gives him and consumes it in violent bites.

After that, he is more polite. He does not accept so eagerly, and he tucks away some of what they trade him. Soon, he has bread and dumplings and red bean cake in all his pockets. But there are fewer people living in the houses than there used to be.

Eventually, he reaches a place where most of the houses stand empty on bare brown farms, and those who are at home do not look as though they wish to lavish more than a small meal upon the dead. The Boy sees many pale, unhappy ghosts drifting here and there, as he always does on this day, but he does not show them his wares: ghosts never have anything to trade themselves, and nobody living ever seems to know who he is speaking to.

At dark, long after the feasts are supposed to have begun and the offerings supposed to have been made, the Boy still has plenty of his paper, and nothing like a feast. He is invited in to eat by a few tired faces, as is proper on Ghost Day, but when he properly refuses, they make no protests, retreating into their houses to shut out the night. And so the Boy walks on, wondering what to do. He might return home to make boats or lanterns, but nobody will want more of those until fourteen days after the festival, when they say it is time to send the ghosts home again (though the Boy knows the ghosts are long gone by then).

It is only because he is thinking about making boats, and because he is passing by the only lighted house on that side of the road, that the Boy happens to spy the red envelope.

The Boy is stupid, as his father says, but he is not foolish, not greedy. He does not pick it up to take the money inside. Even a stupid man knows better than to go snatching up money he finds lying in the middle of the road on Ghost Day. Who knows what wandering spirit might have left it there, and to what purpose? No, no, this Boy only wishes to see if the envelope is made of good paper that might be re-used.

He has not held it in his hands for longer than a moment, when he sees her, rushing bright out of the darkness, a tiny, skinny girl of a ghost. She halts when she sees him, standing absolutely still in a way he has never seen a ghost do, and stares, eyes meeting his eyes. Until now, the Boy did not know that a ghost could feel dread. But she is so clear and plain to him, with her half-opened mouth, and her bright hands clutched to her heart, her eyes so terribly wide, blinking at the red envelope. It’s as though he has caused her a second death. “No!” he hears her say, clear as anything. “Please, no!”