The Black Isle (47 page)

I found him traipsing around the garden in the hospital’s blue pajamas, sniffing at the hibiscus shrubs as if they were roses, when of course hibiscus gave off no scent at all. As always, my first glimpse of him was unnerving—a child’s exaggerated tics affixed on a grown man’s face. But I had trained myself to readjust my expectations, even to welcome his simplicity.

When he spotted me, he rushed over.

“I passed with flying colors,” he announced, flapping his arms like a bird. The armpits of his pajamas were drenched in sweat.

“Did you take an exam?”

“The test, silly!” He rolled up his left sleeve and showed off the bandage on his arm. “Miss Joseph says I’m not sick anymore. I have good blood now.”

I wondered if this was true or another of his fantasies. “How do you feel?”

He did a little soft-shoe, all elbows and two left feet, and spun a sloppy cartwheel that had him nearly crashing into three catatonic women in wheelchairs. He landed in a hedgerow of ixoras. A middle-aged nurse came running over, gesturing with a half-eaten ham sandwich.

“I can’t leave you alone for even one minute!” she barked, and then turned to me. “This one’s got so much energy we should be putting him to work. Always running all over the place. At night, when we do our rounds and don’t see him, we’ll come outside, and sure enough, he’ll be sound asleep on the grass.”

“Sorry, Missy,” Li told her, holding his hands behind his back, barely able to contain his mischievous grin. He called all the nurses Missy because it was what the older Cantonese patients called them—and because he knew this nurse in particular bristled at the term.

“Did he really take a blood test?” I asked the nurse.

“Yes, spectacular results. His blood count’s better than anybody’s. Probably explains his incredible energy.”

Li grinned. “I told you!”

The nurse gave him a pat on the back and went off to finish her lunch. I sat down with Li on a stone bench in the low-hanging shade of a rain tree.

“Oh, oh, oh!” Li leapt up. “I almost forgot to tell you. I talked to the twins.” He crinkled his index fingers. “Xiaowen, Bao-Bao, Xiaowen, Bao-Bao, Xiaowen, Bao-Bao.”

Those names. I hadn’t heard them in years.

“They came to see me.” He pointed at the gap between two red hibiscus bushes. “They were there!”

There was nothing there. But the space was just wide enough for two little girls.

“When did you see them?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I was sleeping and they woke me up. I was sleeping
inside
but they woke me up
outside
. They told me to tell you not to worry. They said they’re happy because they’re together.”

“Li…” I tried to tread gently. “Were they ghosts?”

“No!” He shrieked with laughter. “How can you say something like that?”

“How old did they look?”

He thought for a second. “Like you. They look just like you.” He nodded, reinforcing the memory. “Their arms are still furry, like when they were babies.”

“Did they say anything about Mother?”

“They built her a big, big house. It’s all completely white and there’s a rose garden and big, big fields and a maze. They said when we go and visit them, we can stay there. But they’re very busy now because they have to shake hands with everyone.”

“Did they shake hands with you?”

“Of course!” He heaved a grandiose sigh at my expense. “Don’t tell me you still think they’re ghosts. Only mad people can see ghosts,
jie jie
.”

He showed me his right palm—it was stained bright red with the juices of some stubborn alien bloom.

I couldn’t wait to talk to Issa, but ever since we returned to the city, he’d grown distant. Within a few weeks, he moved out of our Chinatown boarding house and into a hostel in the Islamic quarter at the other end of the city, saying he felt more comfortable being “among his own people.” Had this to do with the Night of the Burning Trees? Even Kenneth never seemed to know what he was up to half the time. Curfews and roadblocks made traversing the city an ordeal we all tried to avoid.

After several calls, Issa agreed to meet me in the Kandahar coffee shop by the white-walled Sultan mosque. His lodgings, he said, were close by. The colonials never came to these narrow, cobblestone streets, not even to gawk at the gold minarets and jade floor tiles of the celebrated old mosque. The lanes weren’t wide enough for cars, and colonials didn’t like being on foot in strange neighborhoods. Once here, I understood completely.

It was Friday, just after afternoon Jumu’ah. The curry and spice in the air made the day seem even warmer and stickier than it was, yet the men emerging prayer-fresh from the mosque wore long white robes. When several of these pious gents, many wearing the white skullcaps of the hajj, cast me poisonous stares, I realized that the streets in this section of town were segregated along gender lines; women were unwelcome on this one.

Their looks were still less hostile, however, than those from a quartet of Gurkha policemen stationed at the nearby cross-junction. Cops had become ubiquitous around the city since the emergency began. The four had their hands on their pistols, somehow perceiving my presence as a threat.

Before any of them could make their way toward me, I spotted in the crowd Issa’s long, gray mane and the pink scars on his upper arms. It was the first time I’d seen him in a short-sleeved shirt. He still looked like a pirate or genie, but Kenneth was right, there was now a bit of the old scarecrow about him, too.

“Iskandar!” I called.

He turned and smiled. “Welcome to the ghetto.”

What did the policemen and the devotees think of me now? Was it better or worse that I’d come to meet a man? Issa led me into the dark cave that was the Kandahar, taking a table in the corner.

“He knows,” I said when we sat down.

Issa nodded. “I suppose it was inevitable.”

“He wants us to work together.”

Issa laughed. “He wants to play us off
against
each other.”

“It’s nothing like that. We all want the same thing—the world wants the same thing. Let’s drive them out. They’re already itching to leave. They just need one final push. Small-scale, minimal fuss, maximum impact. It’s the time, Issa.”

We let my proposition hang in the air. He sipped his milk tea and I sipped mine.

“Tell me,” he said, “are you in love with him?”

The question took me by surprise. Was I? In any case, it was certainly none of Issa’s business, and I wasn’t going to let him change the subject.

“Don’t you want to take the Isle back?” I said. “I thought we want the same thing.”

He smiled. “Where you are correct is that I’m worried for the Isle. But what concerns me, perhaps just as much, is how you seem to have given him authority over you, letting him send you on little errands like this.”

“I’m here of my own free will.”

“He knows where I live. He knows how to find me. In fact, this is where he and I meet once a week. We were here just yesterday—at this very table, talking this over.”

So Kenneth had already arranged everything. Why, then, had he sent me here?

“Look,” Issa said. “I’m too old for his games. When I first met you, you were the most confident, headstrong young woman I knew. Very stubborn, I should say. And now…” He gazed at me with tender concern.

“I was a stupid child. Now I’ve found a cause greater than myself. Now I’ve found a way to be useful.”

“Cassandra,
you
are the one with the power, not him. Don’t ever forget that.”

We sat quietly for a moment. Once again, I was struck by how Issa seemed to have changed—from enigmatic, dangerous foe to sage uncle.

“Of course I’ll do it,” he finally said. “I’ve already told him I would.”

I must have smiled too happily, because he added, “It’s not something I agreed to lightly. And despite how he sometimes acts, I’m not his Caliban. So I want you to fully understand what you’re putting yourself into. You’re a commander, not his soldier. We’ll finish what we started in the jungle, but we can’t make the same mistakes. If we knowingly take innocent lives again—even one—we’ll pay for it later with our souls. We will become ghosts. Remember this.”

The thought sobered me up fast.

“It was arrogance on my part to have thought of the spirits as an army: They’re our equals. Yet when it comes to paying the price, it’ll be only you and me—not Kenneth—and it’ll be quite a price. As you know, things can go wrong. Many bomohs don’t survive more than one summoning in their lifetimes. We’re about to attempt two in less than a year.

“Assuming all goes well, you and I will be physically, mentally sapped for years. Years, Cassandra. Not just one or two, but five, six…I’ve seen men sleepwalk through
ten
years of their lives. You probably won’t be the same again. Your reflexes will slow; your mind will dull. It will age you. All that if it goes
well
. And if it goes badly, we die.”

On that bleak note, he shot me a quicksilver smile.

“Then, there’s the other price. Kenneth’s a very clever man, but he doesn’t have what you and I have. He could never do what you and I can do, and ultimately what he’ll feel, if we succeed, is that he owes us an enormous debt. And this will weigh on him. You know it will.”

I knew he was right. Already the Rolex around Kenneth’s wrist was a daily reminder of how much he was still in the Wees’ debt; it was his golden handcuff.

But could I live with myself if I let opportunity slip by, as I had before the war? The Isle needed me. The independence I’d fought all my life to win was now tied to the Black Isle’s fate. If I could bring freedom to all my fellow Islanders, what was losing a few years of my health? I would have lain down my life if it meant the Isle could finally be our own.

“Are you ready for the consequences, Cassandra?”

“You were just telling me not to forget how powerful I was.” I took his hand. “Teach me your chant.”

When people’s deepest instincts drive them to do something, it takes almost nothing to remove that last hurdle. The British yearned to leave. You could see it in their faces as they sat nursing their gin in coffee shops at noon, in the way they clutched their children at the taxi ranks. Who were we to make them stay?

There would be sacrifices.

There would be regrets.

But everybody stood to gain—Islander and British, living and dead.

A fortnight after our meeting, Issa and I defied the evening curfew and took the last trolley to Forbidden Hill, the site of my unfinished lesson years before and soon to be the new home, if the British had their way, of a luxury hotel.

Having discussed everything with Kenneth beforehand, I knew exactly the favors to ask of our underworld allies. Terrify the British, not kill them. Spare the children. Because the Brits were already jittery, grand gestures were unnecessary. Restraint was the key—cold spots, strange miasmas, displaced objects, doors and windows opening and closing on their own, things that might make them question their own sanity. We wanted to give the colonials a little push, but they had to believe they came to the decision to leave by themselves. We had to give them reason—and face.

I spent weeks perfecting Issa’s Arabic chant. He called it “singing,” and it was soon clear why. The “song” began as a Sufi incantation known as
dhikr
, composed of the various names of the Muslim god, which were joined by names of the saints and magical forebears from Issa’s Bugis ancestry. The recitation was for me less a test of memory than a test of will, because specific emotions had to be attached to each cycle of names—joy in the glory of life, grief at the transience of life, passion as a seeker, humility as a seeker. The goal was to repeat the cycle in such a seamless succession that they ceased to sound like names but full-bodied, poetic sentences, sentences so alive with feeling they would draw me into a trance.

“Think of each line of names as a fragrant garland,” Issa told me as I closed my eyes and began really seeing what he described. “Lay the garland of sorrow over the garland of joy, the garland of humility over the garland of pride, until you have a tower of wreaths high enough for the tomb of a king.”

My enchanted tower of wreaths was as real to me as any made of brick and mortar. And soon, before me, an avenue of more towers bloomed, the fragrant garlands proliferating without the slightest effort. I saw myself, tiny and inconsequential, in this floral corridor, and as I began walking, waves of emotion swept through me. It was not merely joy at the vibrant colors and smells of the flowers but an overwhelming awe at the beauty and the variation—the greatness—of life. This was followed by a supreme alertness to any petal or bud that was fading or had fallen to the ground, the sight of which drew me into a deep, aching sadness: Splendor can never be prolonged; the end always comes. To tame this grief, I had to bow to a higher level of awareness. My thirst for beauty and permanence turned at this point into a spiritual hunger, one that only knowledge of the truth could satisfy. Wisdom, when it arrived, was harsh; it told me to accept my own insignificance in the schema of all life. At this, I was once again in awe at the towers of wreaths before me, stretching out now in all directions.

After my lessons were done, Issa handed me a vial of what was clearly bone dust.

“As soon as you reach home,” he said, “sprinkle this across all entry points—doors, windows. This will keep them out.”

“Dare I ask
who
this was?” I said, examining the bottle.

“No”—he smiled, serious—“because I dare not tell.”

At the cemetery, I began chanting as soon as we arrived. There was no need to row or endure the badi and his games. I simply chanted for hours, until my throat was raw. With Issa by my side, I felt no worry.

Under the moonless night, I watched the spirits gather around Issa and me, entranced by the cadences of this ancient song. As before, I was struck by the mix of ages, races, and faiths of the dead, and the way they all lived side by side in this gloomy, gated plot. When all rose who could have been risen, I felt calm, completely at ease. I made my vow to my diverse constituency, repeating my message in the five languages I knew—English, Malay, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Mandarin: