The Black Isle (59 page)

Issa clutched my arm. “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t know what to say in return, so I gave his arm a squeeze. I refused to look him in the face, refused to acknowledge that this murderer had also been my friend.

I let go of him and gave him the umbrella. It was the cue. He began to cross the bridge, slowly. At the other end, Kenneth began walking also, just as cautiously. I held my breath like a nervous mother, impatient for my children to settle their playground spat. Let both boys be softened by this heartless rain. If there had to be brutality, let it come from above.

Pulling my hood over my wet head, I waited. As both men neared their meeting point, the thin black line where the lips of this cantilevered beast kissed, I turned to leave.

I couldn’t bear to watch, or even hear them argue, not that I could have heard a word through the storm.

But I did hear something. A loud
clap
, as if the thunder god had intervened to end their quarrel. It was followed by a second bang, sharper, louder.

When Issa dropped his umbrella, I knew this to be no act of God. He collapsed quickly, uttering something I couldn’t catch.

I ran along the bridge until I came to his body, doubled over on the ground. The umbrella was bobbing, shuddering on the wet road. I kicked it aside.

Blood poured out of him. The rain spread it so I couldn’t tell where he’d been hit. He was bleeding, it seemed, from every pore. His eyes were open, blinking, in shock. He’d been anticipating a duel, but not like this—silenced even before the match began.

Seeing this scared old man, my long lost friend, I sank to my knees and held his shoulders. I found the hole above his left ear, the blood nearly black, the brain matter throbbing. The other shot had pierced his chest. It was over. I lowered him gently back onto the ground and stared at Kenneth, who stood like a statue a few feet from us.

“You snake! Am I next?”

He dropped his umbrella and raised both palms, to show me he wasn’t armed, that it wasn’t he who’d fired the shots—as if this made his hands any cleaner. He lifted his face to the sky, drenching his hair, soaking his cheeks. Enacting a self-baptism—but for whose benefit? He already had the face of the damned.

Behind him, two figures in black raincoats slithered away in the dark. Elite army snipers, no doubt.  

“We do not negotiate with terrorists,” said the prime minister. “We
cannot
.”

He walked toward me. My eyes followed the glinting gold Rolex on his left wrist—a maddening sight amidst all this blood. When he got close enough, I lunged for it, trying to wrest it from him and hurl it into the rushing waters below.

My hands slipped. Blood, even in the rain, remains slick. He kicked me in the chest like a cur. I fell back into a puddle thickened with Issa’s blood.

In that moment, the rain seemed to lift at the prime minister’s command. At the north end of the bridge, where he had been standing earlier, I saw a ghost. Not Issa.

A dog-headed man, his face slick and black.

Then in a flash—nothing.

The prime minister kept winning, election after election. The people loved him. And why not? He kept the Isle clean, safe, well lit. He uprooted the jungles, vanquished the terrorists, and sucked dry the swamps. He gave everybody what all reasonable people wanted—honest work, affordable food, a roof over their heads, and the freedom to buy whatever they desired when they weren’t working, eating, or sleeping. Eventually, even his opponents came to accept that material comfort wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

When the Isle became too limited to fulfill his ambitions, the prime minister didn’t tow it away to better climes, as he’d once blithely promised. He’d learned to love the strategic importance of being where all the world’s trade passed and instead sculpted the Island to his own will. By filling in the sea with sand and concrete, our Prospero widened his canvas, rounding out its southern coast until our diamond-shaped Isle became a fat-bottomed teardrop anchored in the waters of the Pacific.

As surveyors scrambled to chart the Island’s expanding boundaries, the prime minister laughed and went on building. He scorned all clichés. Instead of erecting shrines to himself like so many of his peers in the postcolonial world, he continued to deploy sleight of hand—humility, in adherence to his own vaunted “Confucian values”—and let prosperity itself become his monument.

By the early 1980s, Geneva was finally within sight. In spite of his cruelty to me and all those he’d felled along the way, I was proud of his accomplishments. He had reinvented the Isle.

I was a beneficiary of the new order, after all. I liberated Li from Woodbridge and brought him home to live with me. This move was possible only because of the generous pension accorded me by my years at the National Library and, above all, my earnings from my days as the government’s ghost-hunter. On the Black Isle, to this day, it pays to retire as a good civil servant.

Li and I spent our days like a quaint old couple. On the rare occasions my young neighbors glimpsed us shuffling off together to the nearby 7-Eleven, they took him for my husband. I never bothered to correct them. Though we were barely sixty, the new generation treated us with the veneration reserved for those in their seventies or eighties, the result, no doubt, of my white hair and the moral education classes the prime minister instituted in all the schools. Nobody stared at Li for being soft in the head—they took his sloppy grin as the expression of a sage.

At home, Li watched television for much of the day, thank heavens. I admit I was a terrible companion and abandoned him in front of the set whenever I could. I had long since grown tired of his stories about our sisters and Shanghai. He could sit in front of the telly forever, giggling at cartoons and cowering from the casual violence of a show like
Dallas
. But the programs on Japanese war criminals, which I could never stop myself from watching, always left him shrieking and sobbing. Early in his stay, it occurred to me that his wit might be magically restored with a sip of my blood; he refused. But other than these outbursts, Li was as passive and easy to care for as a cat. If I placed a glass of milk before him, he drank it; if I led him to the bath, he removed his clothes. Whenever he was troubled by some fugitive thought in the middle of the night, morphine did the trick—for him and for me.

I spent my days like any other retiree spared the time-draining commitment of grandchildren: grocery shopping, tending to the upkeep of my apartment, reading voraciously, and enjoying French chocolate and cognac of a startlingly high quality, thanks to Kenneth’s lenient import laws and low taxes. Best of all, early every morning before the humidity became intolerable, I took long walks in the Isle’s famed Botanic Gardens, always stopping by the lake with breadcrumbs to feed the black swans.

More years passed, and the Isle continued to thrive.

Unlike my fellow citizens, I did not think the prime minister a deity. I’d had the disadvantage of having known him when he was merely a man. And unlike them, I chose not to close my eyes to his tactics. In the pursuit of a wholesome, family-first culture, he barred anything he associated with “the flesh trade”—everything from Tunisian belly dancers, once a popular attraction at hotel lobby bars, to any Hollywood movie that showed women taking off their tops. To stem the influx of “antisocial, hippie values,” he banned not only long hair on men, but also the music of male musicians sporting haircuts longer than a pageboy, the likes of Mozart and Beethoven excepted.

“We do not negotiate with hippies,” I could almost hear him saying in his stern campaign warble, followed by the humbler addendum: “We
cannot
negotiate with hippies.” Like most Islanders, I had internalized his sermons. I could conjure up his voice and put imaginary words into his mouth:

“As a society in transition, we will not take our survival for granted. We
cannot
. We must constantly be vigilant of the tiger behind the door.”

Or:

“We do not tolerate free speech here because we
cannot
afford it. Look at America, the so-called freest nation in the world. Look at the murderers, drug dealers, and rapists prowling her streets. Is it really freedom if you can’t even walk home at night without fearing for your life?”

The Islanders seemed not to mind the way he shredded their cultural life. After all, he made them, and a multitude of foreign corporations, rich. The teardrop island, once so tattered, need weep no more. Unless, of course, one was given to littering, spitting, or jaywalking, in which case there were plenty of reasons to wail, including public humiliation, imprisonment, and multiple whacks on the derriere by the government’s official cane.

The prime minister’s frenzy for neatness culminated in the installation of urine detectors in all public elevators. This was how they worked: The doors locked in the offending party, and come the next morning, the guilty person’s mug would be splashed across the
Tribune
. Front page, no less. Naturally, this unique punishment received mocking editorials in foreign newspapers, but the detectors quickly won me over—for there are few things as revolting as being trapped in a moving box sloshing with a drunkard’s midnight piss.

Peace and prosperity left most people content—even the old rebels. I never heard a peep of complaint from Cricket, who had leapt from being the Isle’s soft-drink king to an emperor of real estate. He’d apparently made his fortune the old-fashioned way—buying low, selling high. He was honest and above-board, for all I knew, with his two wives, multiple houses, and an infinity of children. I saw him in the papers time and again, a Mandarin dumpling with cigar, pipe, and sometimes both.

As for the prime minister, he and I proceeded on parallel tracks, never speaking, never meeting. But I knew we were both after the same thing—to free ourselves of ghosts, even if we meant it very differently.

For my part, I was all for ensuring that my dear brother met with a peaceful death—insomuch as the end could ever be kind. I wanted him to feel no need to return to his old places ever again. I’d seen how our sisters were trapped in their private diorama, forgotten yet not protesting, as meek as two dormice in the bear’s claw of fate. I didn’t want that same class of eternity for Li. He’d already lived much of his life as a lost soul, squiring the same old thoughts round and round his head. It’d be only too cruel if he had to spend his afterlife as one, too.

I watched his flesh sag and his joints grow weak—a mirror of myself, I’m loath to say. Through love and neglect, especially neglect, I tutored him to let go of the world and its cares, of old Shanghai, and especially of me.

The last thing I wanted was to find him in my home after he was gone.

LI DIED
on July 31, 1990, a few days shy of our sixty-eighth birthday.

Our parting was peaceful. One afternoon, he simply fell asleep and failed to wake up. People always seem surprised to learn it’s possible to die of pneumonia in the tropics, but it is. Pneumonia’s not picky.

A strange thing, to outlive your twin. It’s as if you’ve either been given a reprieve, and for that you warily give thanks, or that you’ve taken more than your fair share from the communal storehouse, and for this you bear great guilt. Then there’s the troublesome thought you must try to disguise: You are relieved to have him gone.

On our birthday, a surprisingly cool Tuesday, I took his ashes in a plastic bag and embarked on what I decided would be my last walk around the Black Isle. I was now ready to leave everything behind, for there’s nothing lonelier than standing in the land you once loved only to find no trace of what you’d first loved about it. It’s easier to live some other place, in a featureless void even, where you may reassemble all your cherished memories, free of the intrusive taint of the now.

I had to leave.

But before that, I took my final stroll along the grand avenue spanning from Tanglewood to the city. Kenneth’s handiwork was everywhere—he’d dug up its huge, spreading rain trees and replaced them with canals. So instead of shushing leaves, birds, and cicadas, all I could hear now was nonstop pounding from the city as construction hurtled ahead on his underground transit project.

Still I toured my Isle with a proprietor’s right, scattering parts of me, in the dusty form of my lost twin. It’s animal instinct, I think, this compulsion to mark the places you’ve been, even if you never intend to return.

Walking through the city, I gazed upon shopping plazas and gleaming office blocks where once had been mass graves. Even the worst plots had become desirable. Where the Rat Brigade warehouse once stood, the discotheque Opium now flourished. Old clients had stopped heeding my warnings. Perhaps I should have been firmer—less laissez-faire, more Kenneth Kee.

Where others saw a glittering skyline, a Manhattan of the East, I saw nameless tombs writ large: Redhill, Wonder World, the Metropole, even the eccentric Troika restaurant—all casualties, RIP. Chinatown was Chinatown in commercialized nostalgia only. Our row of tenements in Bullock Cart Water had been “restored” by engineers in an apparent tribute to calamine lotion and the neighborhood repeopled by youngsters who considered themselves bohemian, by which they meant they drove to their jobs at city hall in Alfa Romeos rather than Honda Accords. As for the World’s Busiest Airport, inaugurated with fighter jets trailing pink smoke, I saw what lay beneath its concrete runways: the beach where martyrs, murderers, and a love-mad octopus once roamed.

Everywhere, there were cameras monitoring what I did, at street junctions, outside public loos, at the registers of every shop and cafe. I had to hold back my urge to wink at them, a private greeting to the man I knew to be the ultimate owner of all these eyes—my long-lost friend, Mr. Prime Minister.

Of course, not everything was new. The spirits had returned to the city and grown defiant, roaming the squares where even the brightest lights blazed. Displaced from their places of rest, they spent their days gliding through shopping arcades and riding in taxicabs, just like everybody else. I could tell them apart only by watching closely—the dead’s distinguishing trait being envy. They were, after all, second class.