When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

  The mistress of the house is sitting in the courtyard drinking tea and eating pastries.

  “A few scraps for an old lady?”

  “You lied about why you wanted to come in. Go away before my husband catches you and gives you a good beating.”

  The second house on the edge of the village sits on a small plot of land. A few scrawny chickens scattered about the yard peck disconsolately at the limp earth, as likely to get a gullet full of mud as worms. For a moment, my mouth waters, more at the incredible good fortune of such an easy theft than at the kind of meal these birds would make. I coil my body, ready to spring, and then uncoil again, finding myself constrained by my own human limbs. I look at my hands, the well-articulated if warty fingers. The chickens will have to wait. I refocus my eyes and notice a woman who has been sweeping the walkway for quite some time. She is thin and her arms are knotted. She might still be young, but there are thick streaks of grey in her hair, sprouting wiry, a warning from the gods. Her face is pale and her eyes are flooded with muddy tiredness, like a river delta after too much rain. She sweeps in brisk, sharp strokes.

  “A few leftovers for an old woman?” I am careful not to come too close, in case she notices how ugly I really am.

  “Please,” she says, rushing to the broken wood gate to let me in. She takes me by the arm, oblivious to the smells of the forest in my hair.

  It is no warmer inside the house than outside, but she loads the stove generously with wood from an almost-empty woodbox. From a large basin she fills a kettle with water and sets it on top of the stove. She waves me over to a warm spot, and disappears back out into the yard. I gather my bones into the warmth, allowing my body to sink into it. From outside where the mountains have swallowed the bleeding sun there is the sound of chickens babbling terrified nonsense, then a sudden silence. She comes back in, holding in one hand a lantern that floods the room with warm yellow light, and in the other the limp body of a chicken. It seems even scrawnier than when it was alive. She sets the lantern on the table. In the yellow light, feathers rise in a cloud around her hands and scatter at her feet like dirty snow. Her fingers move in a rapid, even motion, as though she were playing some strange instrument from a place far away.

  The presence of a third party jolts me back. It is a tall woman, perhaps three or four years older than my host. Her hair is long and as black as the thick darkness gathering just outside the window. Her skin is smooth and translucent as a veil, but her eyes are lightless. I think I know her from somewhere, but I have never met a blind person before, so I dismiss the inkling.

  “Your sister?”

  “My late husband’s concubine. She’s blind.”

  “They say the blind sing beautifully.”

  “Her voice is otherworldly.”

  “How could your husband afford a concubine?”

  “He couldn’t. I stole my dowry back and bought her myself.” She smiles as she sinks the featherless chicken into the kettle of boiling water. As the chicken cooks, the blind woman opens her mouth and a lilting tune like a cascade of ripe fruit pours out.

  Although there are no spices in the chicken and rice she serves me, the intricate flavours of the blind woman’s song make these dishes suitable for much less humble immortals than myself. We eat quietly until the. dishes are half empty.

  “We don’t get many visitors here,” says my host.

  “You have been very generous.”

  ‘I suppose you don’t live in the village.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then you don’t know what they say about us there.” The blind woman kicks her under the table, accurately, by the look of things. “They say we murdered our husband.”

  “Did you?” I remember once coming across a man’s body in the dump, the head hanging at an absurd angle. Not being human, I wasn’t very much disturbed by him and continued scavenging.

  “What do you think?”

  “Don’t listen to her,” says the blind woman. “She’s so excited that we have a guest that she doesn’t know what she’s saying. Sometimes she gets a little silly after dark. She’s a great believer in ghosts. Go to bed, love, I’ll clean up.”

  “I’m not silly! That’s what they say. Go into the village and ask around if you don’t believe me.”

  “Just ignore her,” whispers the blind woman, and I could swear she’s winking at me. “Won’t you spend the night? I’ll make a place for you by the stove.”

  The younger woman goes to bed. I watch the singer moving about the room with the fluidity of intuition that no sighted person could match. She rummages through a chest for blankets, and as she begins the work of making a bed, I know why she seemed familiar. She is a well-practiced housewife. I want to ask her how she became blind, but don’t dare.

  “You married again,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Beg your pardon?”

  Of course she wouldn’t recognize me in my pimply body. “Weren’t you once married to a man named Tam?”

  “No.” Too sharp to be true. “Never.”

  But she doesn’t have to tell me.

  I let her finish making the bed. Filled with chicken, rice, and music, there is a warm lethargy curdling in my bone marrow. Sleep caresses my tired back for perhaps an hour or two, until I am awakened by the sound of two women breathing in unison. I smile to think of them curled together on the narrow bed in the other room. When they are finally quiet and their breathing evens to the pace of sleep, I slip under the door of the bedroom like a gas. They are a tangle of limbs, moist with sweat.

  I look at them as little as possible, to respect their privacy, as I approach the basin of water in which they have washed. It smells of sweat, wood, cut grass, smoke, chicken feathers, and roses. I blow on it once and a gold sheen ripples across the surface flickering seashell pink, blood crimson, midnight blue, peacock green, and then evens out again. I blow again and the water becomes viscous, pure gold but with the sticky, globby consistency of crude oil. I blow again and the basin is filled with small gold coins. Pleased, I revert to my four-legged self and leap out the window.

  Artemis could hear the music booming before she even turned the key in the lock of the little bachelor suite where she had lived for the last two years. With the music making its own company inside the apartment while she stood alone outside, she felt more than ever as though she didn’t really live here. It was a problem she never could describe to anyone how her own home never felt like hers. She was here almost every night now, as her nocturnal visits with Eden became less and less appealing. She would come in the front door and and wonder how to make it suit her better. It wasn’t so plain as to be impersonal. There was lots of light in the main room, which did triple duty as a place to eat, sleep, and live. It was dominated by a double futon that folded into a couch during the day. Over it lay a piece of Indian fabric in green and white. There were posters on the walls of bands that she listened to with no particular attachment. Cotton dhurrie rugs in blues and greens were scattered across the worn hardwood floors. But none of these things meant anything to her. She had them merely because she did not know what else to put there. The only thing about the place that she liked was the assortment of objects scattered across her window sill, largely the products of her secret heists, containers and fragments of things, like the fake box of the True Cross, the little ivory statuette she had bought the same day, a human shin-bone, pictures of an Asian family she had bought at a garage sale having no idea who any of them were, a small glass case with four brown, crumbling butterflies pinned to a green background she had lifted when the biology department was moving into new premises, a little pewter pillbox she had found with Eden one dawn in the ashes of a burnt house.

  It was odd to come back to hear the place come alive without her. The moment she opened the door, the smell of hot oil wafted out. In retrospect, she realized she should have been more worried. It could have been any stranger in her house. Soul n Soul was on full blast, and someone was frying shri
mp chips in the kitchen. Artemis dropped her knapsack and peered around the corner. Oblivious to her arrival, Diane was dancing and singing along with the tape as she dexterously wielded a pair of long chopsticks, moving from the pot of hot oil to the plate on which she was building a mound of large pink wavy chips layered with wads of paper towel to soak up the grease.

  “How did you get in here?”

  Diane danced over waving a fresh chip between her chopsticks and lowered it playfully to Artemis’s mouth. “Climbed up the trellis and came through the window. You should really get locks for them, you know.”

  “You climbed up the trellis?”

  “Those darn rose thorns got me pretty bad, but other than that it was easy.” She was clearly pleased with her own daring.

  Artemis was delighted in spite of herself. “You’re so crazy.” She slumped down at the kitchen table. Diane got a bowl, pushed some chips into it, and set it down in front of her.

  “Eden ever give you any of those pictures?”

  “Yeah, last week. There’s some for you too. I told him I’d pass them on.” She got up and fished them out of a desk drawer and put them on the table. “Watch out if your hands are greasy.”

  “I just want to look. Oh god, how goofy.”

  “It was kind of a goofy idea.”

  “I look like I’m in some kind of drag,” said Diane. She leaned over an image of the two of them sitting back to back smoking long white cigarettes like truant schoolgirls. “Do you know where he got those costumes?”

  “From his father.”

  “Does he have a lot of them?”

  “I don’t know. He says his father stashed a lot of stuff.” Artemis could not have said later why she didn’t tell Diane about Eden’s recent gift.

  “Bet they’re worth a lot of money.”

  Artemis noticed something flare in the kitchen behind Diane. “The oil!”

  Unattended, with the blue gas flame still raging beneath it, the oil Diane was using for deep frying had caught fire. The room filled with smoke. Diane rushed over to rescue it, jerking the pot off the stove. The burning liquid moved up in a long slow arc, slapping across her face. She dropped the pot automatically, her hand flying up to meet the burn. The pot fell over her, its contents splashing over her arm and chest and stomach. As she backed away from the stove, she slipped and fell to the floor. From the living room the music continued without missing a beat.

  Artemis was at the sink. With cupped hands, she splashed water over her friend.

  “You’re supposed to use cream or cold oil.” Diane’s voice came out a raspy whisper.

  “I’ve never heard that before.” Artemis continued to throw water over the human heap on the floor until a pool of cold oil and water spread around Diane on the cracked tile. “I’ll get you a towel. Do you think you need an ambulance?”

  “No, it’s not that serious.” Diane rose slowly, wincing when she accidentally brushed against the cabinets. She took the towel and dried herself slowly. “I should be going.”

  “You can’t be serious. You should see yourself.”

  Diane ambled over to the hallway mirror. She examined the long red mark down the side of her face. She pulled the wet sleeve of her T-shirt away from her arm, surveying the streak’s path down her shoulder. Water dripped from her hair and her clothes onto the floor. Artemis shut off the tape deck.

  The only clean clothes Artemis could find were a pair of jeans she could no longer squeeze into and a never-worn T-shirt her parents had brought back from a tour of China the previous year. They had offered to take her, but she had courteously refused, saying the trip did not interest her. They brought the T-shirt back anyway, with two stone dragons facing each other on the front, and the name of the tour company on the back. She pressed them into Diane’s hands and went into the kitchen to clean up and leave Diane her privacy.

  In the narrow kitchen, she mopped the wet oily mess off the floor and dumped the pot into the sink. She scraped the plate of soggy chips into the garbage. Then she poured glasses of 7-Up, took the undamaged bowl from the table and, balancing carefully, juggled all of this into the front room. The TV was on at low volume. Diane sat cross-legged on the futon, wearing the clean, dry clothes and swaddled in the depths of the quilt that Artemis’s birth mother had left for her.

  “Where did you find that?”

  “On the shelf in the closet up there. Is it okay?”

  Artemis had completely forgotten she had stored the thing in her place at all. Her adoptive mother had made her take it when she moved out, although mercifully allowing her to store the chest and padded jackets in the house. The smell of mothballs wafted around the room. It bothered her. It called up myriad things she had no name for, and didn’t particularly want to know about. But she couldn’t think of a way to say it so she just nodded her head. “Of course.”

  Diane pressed the play button on Artemis’s VCR, and Beineix’s Diva flashed on the TV screen. Wearing a transparent pink raincoat, the young Vietnamese thief Alba rollerskated around a steaming bathtub in the middle of a large warehouse.

  “Don’t you ever wonder who your real parents were?” Diane asked.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Not at all?”

  “I guess I’ve never really thought about it. I never knew them. They didn’t want me. So what’s to wonder?”

  “Don’t you wonder about where you came from, who your … people were?”

  “I know who my people are. My mother and father, Eden, you, my friend Mercy, I suppose, even if she drives me crazy sometimes.”

  “I mean the people who know your history. The people who will care about you even if they don’t know you.”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t think about it. Look, here’s some 7-Up. And these chips arse still okay.” She paused. “Things move and change a lot from generation to generation. I am no less who I am for where I’ve ended up.”

  “I just don’t understand how you can’t be curious.”

  In a different scene, wearing a white vinyl coat with huge buttons and high black boots, Alba walked into a record store. She carried a portfolio under her arm. She wandered down the middle aisle of the store, into the jazz section. Glancing furtively around to see that no one was looking, she slipped a record into the portfolio’s secret sleeve. Some honey-rich voice trapped flat against black vinyl. As she moved towards the door, the clerk asked to see her portfolio. He drew back the cover, revealing photographs of the girl, stark naked, gazing precociously into the camera as her black hair swirled about her. He turned through several similar images until, red-faced, he could look no more, and then handed it back to her, even though he was sure he had seen her slip a record somewhere between the heavy leather covers.

  In 1258, I fell in love with the Chinese princess who was sent as a tribute to the Prince of Persia. She let me touch her foot. I held it in my hand, fragile inside a tiny embroidered shoe, shorter than the length of my palm. The secretive shoe was enough to make me pack my bags and pursue her across the reaches of the new Mongol empire. She was interested in me, but not half as interested as she was in being tragic.

  When it was cold in the mountains, I blew warm breath into her hands. When it was hot in the desert, I blew cool air into her ears. We passed a carving of Buddha as big as a whole village. We passed dark caves where thousands of sutras were hidden. We were almost accosted by bandits except that I smelled them coming and rushed the whole retinue into hiding. After two years and the deaths of seven horses, we arrived at Jamal al-Din’s marvellous astronomical observatory at Maragha, perhaps six months from our destination. There were astronomers there from all over the Empire, some with strange pale faces and light hair, some with the bulky bodies and thick beards of the northern tribes, some clearly from the south, who were so small that beside them the little princess became a towering giantess. One of these small men sat down with us and late into the night explained the mathematics of the Cowherd and the Weaver. Everyone nodded of
f except me, being a nocturnal type myself and very much interested in the mechanics of the stars.

  The princess had long since become bored of our simple camaraderie. She talked passionately of her plan to run away. She would not meet this prince, never mind how much shame it might bring upon her father. The following evening she climbed the highest wall of the observatory and jumped. To her surprise and consternation, a young starwatcher below caught her. He thought a goddess had descended from the heavens. She had fainted dead away and thus could not inform him otherwise. When she came to perhaps an hour later, he was sorely disappointed to learn that he had caught not a goddess but a mere princess in his arms. In embarrassment, we cut our visit short and began the last stretch of our journey the following day.

  She decided she would settle for the melancholy life of a captive in a foreign land. It wasn’t as good as dying as it required considerably more patience. But when we arrived in the Persian capital almost a full three years after our departure from Khanbalik, the prince himself had passed away. His son was a practical man, more interested in silk, gunpowder, and paper than he was in women. The gift of a Chinese princess was refused. She was to embark for home as soon as fresh horses could be found.

  He told her about his evenings as if they were something magical, a journey into a forbidden country. It started after a man called Angel hanged himself. Eden had seen him just two nights before at the bar with his boyfriend. After Angel died, Eden started cruising the strip on Homer Street where young men sold themselves. He would go and talk to them, and sometimes they would sit with him in his car and touch him and not even charge, so Eden said, because he was young and handsome just like them.

  She saw them sometimes in the early evening before the sun went down, if she was walking up from downtown to cross the Granville Street Bridge. There was one who was there all the time. He was tall and lanky with a lean face and glazed eyes that restlessly scanned the street up and down. Intent on his work, he did not see her at all as she marched past, stealing surreptitious glances.