The Black Isle (2 page)

As he’d done countless times before, he fixes his sunken, rheumy eyes on me. His lips flex to reveal a mouth with small, jagged teeth. Still human, but only barely.

“You’re one of us now,”
he hisses, his voice thin, dry, snakelike.

I recognize the presumption of his claim. This is no invitation to join a club.

Before I can curse him, he vanishes, taking with him half the heat in the room and all the air in my lungs. My struggle to breathe only proves he’s wrong. I’m not one of them. I’m still alive.

Nine a.m., I grab the phone before the first ring ends. “Yes?”

The professor jumps in immediately, as if our conversation hadn’t been interrupted. “I want your story. I
need
it.”

Goose bumps scurry across my arms.

“In exchange, I’ll give you what you’ve been searching for.”

My heart almost stops. “I’m not searching for anything.”

“You’re hunting,” she says. “That’s what you do.”

“Miss Maddin.” I pause to steady myself. “Why are you so interested in my story?”

She thinks for a few seconds. “I’ve always had this need, you know, to dig beneath the surface of things. To uncover and protect the truth, I suppose, in places people never think to look. And to right wrongs.”

To right wrongs? Would she do that for me? “Where are you?” I ask.

“Ah,” she says, with the care of one who knows too well the world’s dangers. “Not far.”

Darkness is closing in. “You better hurry.”

The professor says she’ll give me what I’ve been searching for. Could she? I mean, how could she even know? Unless…And the ghost…

I take a tranquilizer and potter around—Nutella sandwich, undies in the wash, warm milk and prunes, my heart all the while going
pit-pat-pit-pat
. I try to revive myself with a nap. No luck. Before long, it is night again.

I pull open the bedroom curtains and gaze out. Lights dot the surrounding high-rises. Children, perhaps, talking to strangers on their computers. Confessing their sins. That the young keep vigil while their parents sleep—there’s poetry there, I suppose, although night is never really night here, not in the romantic sense anyway. The sky is an orange luminescence, the by-product of six thousand tower blocks and the metropolis that spreads itself yonder, the glimmering grids of one endless electric paddy field.

Darkness has long been extinguished in this part of the world. Some call it a compromise, others a blessing. There are millions of us, living in exactly the same apartments, under our shared tangerine sky. For years, I felt that this anonymity was the best fortress I could ask for.

But anonymity is not the same as annihilation. One is about the present, the other is about the past, and the two should never be confused.

You’re one of us now.

No! I’m still alive.

It is inevitable that my past should return. I’m an old-fashioned woman with an Old Testament faith in symmetry. What goes up must come down. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

The Professor and the Ghost. One telling me I’m disappearing, the other saying I’m already on the other side. Two faces of the same terrible coin.

The Professor…is it possible she could be my salvation? Will telling her my story save me from becoming one of
them
?

I must do it. It’s my best hope.

I root in the petticoat drawer for the voice recorder—a present to myself after watching a dreary Canadian film about Alzheimer’s that nevertheless made me quake—and slot in fresh batteries and tape. I trust the permanence of tape. They let words live on long after the air has died. My story shall survive. To prepare, I give my throat an antiseptic gargle: to ward off the rot of mendacity.

In the mirror, my blue teeth smile back at me.

Permit me to cast the first stones.

All my life, people have tried to erase me, in big ways and small, publicly and privately, thoughtlessly and with supreme, awe-inspiring malevolence. All my life.

But I refuse to let them win. They will not wipe me out.

I will not become a ghost.

THEY CALLED ME LING
. Names don’t come much more forgettable than that. And my story didn’t begin on the day of my birth, August 3, 1922. I was just a wailing blob that day, and thus no different from all other blobs in history that were pulled screaming from their mothers’ loins and then subjected to the universal rigmarole of walking and talking, eating and sleeping. I was told that I mastered those skills more quickly than most, so eager was I to win my parents’ affection as well as some invisible contest against time that only I knew about. But again, this precocity was far from a defining character trait. I was a young child. And babies are in general uninteresting people.

My real story began in the summer of 1929, on my seventh birthday. Or, more correctly,
our
birthday. I was older than my brother, Li, by four or five minutes, a race I won, I always believed, by being closer to the gate and not by the heartless bullying of my weaker twin as the midwife insisted. (Chinese midwives! Always rooting against girls!) I was undeniably a stronger baby than Li—I cried louder, kicked harder, weighed more—but I plead my case that in the womb, there was no pushing and shoving or malicious piggery. Of course, when Li emerged emaciated, his wail barely a whimper—and a boy, no less!—everyone listened to the midwife. They all blamed me.

As soon as we were born, my parents tried to counter the injustice. What happened in Mother’s belly was out of their purview, but so long as Li and I lived in their house, under their care, they would make it up to him. They always gave him whatever he wanted; he always got the first pick. From the moment the midwife washed the blood off her hands and wobbled down the stairs, it no longer mattered that I was the eldest. The roles were cast: Li was the hero. I was the sidekick.

By the time of our seventh birthday, Li had grown into a vigorous boy, a natural leader, taller than me by two inches. He led and I followed. He became my protector and benefactor. If he was offered a cream puff, he would ask for two so he could give me one. Soon I no longer had to fight or choose or pine. I got used to coming in second and began to prefer being his shadow—there was never any pressure to be original or brave. One should never underestimate the joy of being underestimated.

In looks, Li was nothing special, just your generic little prewar, middle-class Chinese boy in flannel shirts and corduroy shorts, always smiling, always smelling faintly of chalk. I had my hair in two pigtails and wore pinafores made of flannel and corduroy, surplus fabric from the construction of Li’s shirts and shorts. Neither of us had any distinctive features or battle scars; no stranger passing us on the street would stop to cry out in glee or in horror. We might as well have been invisible, as far as the wider world was concerned, two children drowned in an endless sea of black hair and narrow eyes. But to me, Li was the handsomest boy in all of China.

His things filled our house: model cars, dancing bears, books about planes and warships, many ordered from America. “What will I get for my birthday?” he’d ask, months before the actual day. “Anything,” was Mother’s invariable answer. “Anything your heart desires.”

This never became an issue until the day of our seventh birthday. I always took whatever they gave me, be it pencil case, scarf, or slippers, so I was never a problem. And until then, Li’s taste was conventional—our parents held boats, planes, and trains on reserve at the toy shop until he made up his mind—but for our seventh, he kept his request secret until the big day. I saw him go over to Mother and whisper in her ear.

“No,” Mother said definitively, and stormed up the stairs.

There were two ways of looking at Shanghai in those days. It was either the Pearl of the Orient or the Devil’s Den. There was no in-between; you belonged to one camp or the other. Our mother evidently belonged to the latter. She had been raised in a cloistered Suzhou compound by spinster maids who taught her to fear and loathe the outside world. Her fear was so great that it rendered the binding of her feet unnecessary—there was no risk she’d run off anywhere.

Shanghai only heightened her nervousness. None of the hedonistic thrills of big-city living for her. She was happiest in her dark little rooms, where she could pore over opulent catalogs, oversee the help, and fret in peace. Indeed, her unnatural pallor that came from staying indoors was considered quite fashionable. But there was a price to her agoraphobia. The feral love affair Li and I had with sunlight and nature caused her great anguish. It only proved to her that she had been inadequate in her job. What provident mother had children who needed to leave her house to seek fun?

That’s why she felt profoundly wounded when Li, for his seventh birthday, whispered these simple words: “Take us to the park.” She doubtless felt he was attacking her weakness with a son’s malice. Her “no” resounded through the house, the louder for being the only time he’d been denied.

Our home on Rue Bourgeat was everything that a good middle-class town house should look like, at least on the outside. It was in the French Concession, which telegraphed that we belonged in the happy bourgeois world of cosmopolitan Shanghai, and it had the requisite white walls, which proved that we could afford to hire painters to undo the darkening effects of the region’s inclemency. We even had a waist-high wrought-iron gate in the Kensington Gardens style, an ornamental barrier between our front step and the toothless kumquat and lychee vendors who traversed the dusty pavement. We cherished our borders. To the outside world, we were solidly, stolidly middle class. Within our walls, however, we were less complacent, a young family fraying at the edges as our financial situation grew grimmer and grimmer by the week.

In spite of our straitened circumstances, my parents retained domestics—two amahs, Sister Kwan and Sister Choon; a cook; and a part-time errand boy. I should also include the rickshaw coolie duo who served us exclusively on weekdays. Nothing would have gotten done if we hadn’t had help, for Mother wouldn’t leave the house and Father, a dreamy idealist, had so little interest in the physical world that he could barely remember the name of our street, let alone the location of the butcher’s or the spice shop.

As a practical concession, we leased out the servants’ quarters, and this little room was piled from floor to ceiling with low-quality women’s sandals (and their persistent tang of cheap tannin), overstock from Mr. Wang’s footwear emporium on nearby Avenue Joffre. Their space thus usurped, our servants slept anywhere they could come nighttime, on lumpy blankets by the dying embers of the kitchen brazier or crouched under the crook of the stairs, knees tucked beneath their chins to fend off the plague. Mother assured me that to the people of the lower classes, this was still rather luxurious. Most of Shanghai, she said, lived in rat-infested shantytowns on the banks of the muck-filled Suzhou Creek or were packed like sardines inside crowded junks where only the luckiest got to lie on straw mats.

We slept on the second floor. My parents had their own room, large enough to accommodate, aside from their featherbed, a brass chamber pot and a folding screen hand-painted with a hundred cranes in midflight. I know it was meant to be a picture of serenity, but it always filled me with panic to gaze at the screen—the cranes looked as if they were fleeing some sort of catastrophe, perhaps an earthquake or a prodigiously good shot. The elder two children, Li and myself, shared a small, nondescript room adjacent to our parents’, and our infant sisters, Xiaowen and Bao-Bao—strangely enough, also twins—slept in the hallway on a cot that had once belonged to a consumptive great-aunt. Nobody wanted to say that she died in that rickety thing, but the stains on the mattress seemed to me brutal evidence.

Hanging on the wall above the twins’ cot was an oil portrait of our parents on their wedding day, as wide as a broadsheet and nestled in a gilded frame. They were outfitted in the latest Western styles—he in a suit with a cravat, strangely dashing in his quiet way, and she in white lace, looking waxier than usual, as if she had been carved out of a huge candle and then dredged through powders and rouge. Her mind seemed to be elsewhere and her lips were crooked with a kind of half smile. An unhelpful aunt must have told her this was the proper way to pose. This image of Mother I found disturbing. Her eyes followed me whenever I crossed the hall, accusing eyes that seemed to know even before I did that I would someday disappoint.

Unlike her mother, who’d been a celebrated Suzhou beauty in a city famed for its beauties, Mother’s charms weren’t self-evident. There was a bit of the tadpole about her—bulging eyes, weak chin—and to disguise the fact, she spent hours arranging and rearranging her hair and face before every lunch or cocktail invitation. Much to the puzzlement of new friends and the exasperation of old ones, she nearly always decided at the very last minute that she couldn’t leave the house and would forgo the meetings. Friendships suffered, and so did her confidence.

Over the years, her fear and poor self-image had worked so well in tandem, each reinforcing the other’s sinister hold, that they completely crippled her social life. She turned her attentions by sad default to the running of the household, becoming a quarrelsome matron who rose at six and dressed for nonexistent balls, all for the purpose of ordering the help around. From the way she screamed at the amahs and steamed around the house, I sensed that her quirks frustrated her deeply. Her great concern was that our neighbors would never think of her as anything but well put together and of us as anything but angelic and that they’d never suspect the awful truth that we were, alas, a struggling little ragtag troupe headed by a pseudo-intellectual whose station in life as a schoolteacher meant that we’d never in a thousand years be rich.

Father plodded through his role as paterfamilias. I remember him as having a perpetually pursed mouth, his thin lips pressed firmly together lest the fried fish roiling in his gut came leaping out. The idea of family made him queasy in general, the reality of it even more so. He’d wring his hands like a woman whenever the twins started bawling; then he’d either go out for a long walk or put on a record—opera in German usually, a language he didn’t understand and therefore felt unburdened by. Looking back, I don’t think poor Father was ever prepared for the size of our household—not just the aggrieved, high-maintenance wife but also additional headaches in the form of four children and a rotating roster of resentful servants. This was a storklike gent who preferred to be left alone and might have been best suited to the life of a medieval scholar-prince, emerging from his pavilion once in a blue moon to stretch his skinny legs, stroke his beard, and sip Huangshan Mao Feng tea harvested by an obedient band of snow monkeys. Yes, in a different universe, Father would have been sitting atop a craggy mountain memorizing obsolete tracts on thousand-year-old scrolls instead of mopping up vomit or worrying about grocery bills.

It may surprise you, then, to hear that my parents were considered very much a modern couple. They had married out of choice, back when the rest of the continent still abided by matches devised by Machiavellian fathers and meddlesome aunts—two goats if you’ll take her off my hands, and all that. They must have once thought they were in love. Sadly, untutored as they were in the demands of romantic commitment, they’d each picked for themselves their worst possible match. Father ran cold, Mother ran hot, but their yin and their yang were grossly misaligned. Marital calamity has been built on far less.

That our parents made an odd couple was obvious even to us. Idiosyncratic, yes; inattentive, to be sure. Yet their odd union produced me, my twin, and the other twins. The baby girls Xiaowen and Bao-Bao made up for our parents’ character flaws twice over. Fuzzy of forehead and forearm, the pink-cheeked pair sang and romped around every day, satin ribbons fluttering in their hair. They were my mascots, my greatest allies in the house, and their presence made me infinitely happy. I convinced myself that they were the magical Peach Children of old folklore, with supple fruit flesh that made them seven and a half times more adorable than their human counterparts as well as impervious to all mortal danger, so long as they stayed together.

We all hold on to what we can, I suppose. In those days, I clung to the idea of the twins’ innocence and purity, and they clung to my legs as I prepared for school every morning, chanting in duet, “
Jie jie
, don’t go!
Jie jie
, don’t leave us!” They wanted to keep me at home with them, where they could shield me from danger with their downy little arms. I always left for school with a heaviness in my heart. They weren’t just blindly echoing Mother’s words about the dangers of the world. In their way, the twins were reminding me so I wouldn’t grow too bold and forget: I wasn’t the hero of my own story. Not yet.

Li went upstairs to find Mother. I followed. We whimpered and moaned shamelessly and found glee in it. Why did we persist in antagonizing her? Mother asked. Maybe in the autumn, she said, but not now. It’s summer. Who knows what deadly germs are lurking in the air? And, anyway, couldn’t we find our fun indoors?

So find our fun indoors we did, at least for a while. We were sufficiently unattended. Father was teaching school; Mother was shouting at the amahs upstairs. The cook was having her siesta, dozing upright in her rattan chair, and the errand boy, as usual, was nowhere to be found. Each potential deterrent thus accounted for, we crept into Father’s study—a room no bigger than a broom closet and even more cramped—and went to his precious goldfish. The pair were named Wu Song and Wu Dalang, after two brothers in Father’s favorite classic novel
Water Margin
. Li dropped ten garlic cloves into the water, which the goldfish pounced on with their greedy, sucking mouths. Then, with nervous titters, we waited.

As expected, the first bubbles emerged from Wu Song’s tail, his plumbing being quicker. These were followed by more robust ones that took both goldfish by surprise. Air shot out their rear ends, sending them forth like rockets. Luminous projectiles! Both fish banged their stunned faces into the glass. The bigger the emission, the stronger the collision.
Phoot! Thump! Phoooot! Thuuummp!
Li had fed them garlic many times before, yet they fell for the trick without fail, over and over. After a few minutes, the flatulence wore off, and Wu Song and Wu Dalang resumed their mindless circuits. It was as if nothing had ever happened. Li grew restless again.