When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

  “It’s clean,” she said. “Haven’t had the money for anything new in quite some time.” She paused. “What are you?”

  I considered lying. I could have called myself a courtesan, a prostitute, or a dancer, and most people would have been none the wiser. But there was a deep intelligence simmering behind her eyes that I dared not deceive.

  “A Fox,” I said.

  “I thought so,” said she. “You know I’m mad, don’t you?”

  My turn to be bewildered. The parameters of human insanity never made much sense to me.

  “Have you come just to keep me company or are you here to cause mischief?”

  Her forthrightness was terribly disarming. I began to fear I’d made a serious mistake. Had she been a Taoist priest I would have left as soon as possible, keeping my eyes open for ropes or knives or poison pills in the meantime. Not to mention bottles with good stoppers on them, as I’ve heard plenty of stories of bearded men smelling rankly of their own skin and bones still having the power to reduce foxes to trails of grey smoke and force them down the necks of bottles. Once the fox smoke was inside, these old codgers would seal the bottle over with a bit of pig’s bladder. Hardly an ending I could go to with pride and dignity.

  I had come up against a difficulty, you see – one my mother had warned me of in her final admonishment before I left the den forever. “Male scholars and Taoist novices are ideal for haunting. Young female corpses are suitable for animation. Old priests will do you in. If you must take on this lifestyle,” she had said, “remember these few simple things.”

  In the company of this young nun, not yet two dozen years old, what could I expect? She had the eyes of an old woman. I had thought that at most she might have glanced through a few scrolls of the Taoist teachings on sex and immortality, but I now suspected she’d mastered a legion of spells that would make her an opponent to be reckoned with, should she choose to take an adversarial position.

  But I wasn’t looking for an opponent. Opposition was never something that interested me.

  She was still waiting for an answer.

  “Just to keep you company,” I said.

  Her eyes shot briefly to the corner of the room, and as they did, a faint light flared there, revealing what rested on the stone floor: a row of brown glass bottles and a pig’s bladder all grey, shrivelled, and wrinkly like a discarded womb.

  “You needn’t lie to me. I know why you’ve come.”

  It was a clear declaration of war. I suppose I resented it. For the first time I was forced to stare my true nature in the face. It had been easy to pretend that my pursuit was merely an act of love, and she, a Taoist priestess, of all things, should surely have a little patience with illusions. But my hundredth birthday was coming and this was more than a mere haunting. She knew it and I knew it.

  “Just remember it was you who brought it to this,” I said.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “What do you know of the future?”

  “That you shall die and live again through me.”

  She got up, went to the corner of the room, and picked up one of the brown bottles. I flinched, but she didn’t pay me any heed. From a cupboard above them she took two cups and set them on the table. She tilted the bottle into the cups and from its mouth, to my utter surprise, since I was almost sure the bottle had been empty, flowed a stream of wine, red as pig’s blood. I looked at the brimming cups dubiously. My cousin was poisoned by an aspiring Taoist priest and I was reluctant to drink.

  “What are you afraid of?” she asked. “You have just said that I will die and you will live.” She drained her cup in a single draught and I followed her.

  Soon we were both warm and glowing from the inside. Though she poured continuously and generously from the bottle, the wine still flowed.

  When the candle had burned down to a stump and the wick was beginning to sputter in a pool of wax, she rose and went to the cupboard in the corner. She took out a piece of paper, laid it on the table, and with a sharp butcher’s knife cut it into the shape of the moon. This she pinned to the wall above the table. She sat down and refilled my cup and her own. Presently, the room was bathed in a cool silvery light. We could imagine ourselves as two sages sitting by the river in the moonlight.

  She picked up a chopstick and flung it at the paper moon. It seemed to sail into the distance, tumbling over itself as it flew through the air. It smacked against the surface of the moon. Something came rolling back – a barrel-shaped drum. And then, turning through the air as the chopstick had, a drummer, growing larger and larger as she approached. Drum and drummer slid across the table and tumbled onto the floor. The drummer first picked herself up and then the drum, drew a stick from her side as one would a sword, and began to beat. There was the sound of horses. It surrounded the temple as though the entire imperial cavalry had suddenly taken a great interest in our little soirée.

  The Poetess saw the terror in my eyes and laughed. “They will come,” she said, “but not yet.”

  I hadn’t been watching the moon. It had swollen to twice its original size and was getting bigger. Its curved surface jutted prominently towards us, no longer a flat piece of paper but a burgeoning satellite. It swelled and swelled until it filled our entire field of vision and pushed us right up against the walls of the temple. The sound of galloping horses crashed in our ears the whole time. Then the temple was gone and we were perched precariously on the lip of a moon turning slowly through space, with the sound of heaven’s cavalry in our ears. I am afraid of heights and have a tendency to motion sickness. I clung for dear life, although had we fallen, I don’t know where we would have fallen to. There was nothing but dark sky out there, not even a single star. I was mesmerized by the sound of horses. I didn’t expect to see them, but then there they were, kicking up great clouds of dust on the horizon. They swept over us. Miraculously, neither of us was trampled to death. I raised my head and breathed in the air of the future.

  “This is a prophecy,” she said. All around us in the field, men and horses lay dying. Severed limbs, crumpled bodies, and unattached heads such as I had often seen at the execution grounds in my youth rolled about here and there. Some of the faces could have been those of the villagers of nearby towns. Some were strange – broad and bearded like those of the horse sellers in the Western market. But still we clung to the now grassy, bloody surface of the planet like cicadas clinging to a leaf, with the dark sky turning below us. From a dead man’s chest a lotus flower sprouted. A young woman stepped out of it and danced gracefully as a reed in the wind. A soldier came and picked the flower and put it through his buttonhole. The dancer fell down and shrank to the size of a cricket.

  “Hmmmph,” said the Poetess.

  I lost my grip on the planet and tumbled through the sky, turning over and over. I thought I was going to be sick, but then I landed smack on the cold temple floor. It nearly knocked the wind out of me. When I caught my breath, I looked up to see her crossly removing the paper circle from the wall and crumpling it into a ball.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Everything they did and none of it matters.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When I was very young, all the non-Chinese religions were made illegal in an attempt to keep foreign influences at bay. The Manicheans and Nestorians, the Mazdaists and the Buddhists, all had their temples forcibly closed and their priests and nuns turned out onto the streets. But they didn’t forbid the breeding of horses.”

  “What have horses got to do with it?” I asked. I like horses. I like their brown eyes and the way steam rises from their nostrils as they graze in the fields on cold days.

  “Horses are war machines.”

  “Is that what we saw?”

  I recalled that the dancing girl had had bound feet like the dancers I had once spotted during Autumn Festival.

  “And the man who picked the flower?”

  “Did you notice his ghostly complexion? A man from the city of canals
even farther to the west than the Island of the Dead.”

  “How will it turn out?”

  She knelt and picked a chopstick up from the floor.

  “You will find out,” she said, and pointed to a mat in the corner where I could spend the night.

  There was nothing familiar about the woman who sat beside the only unoccupied seat in the bus from Seattle to Vancouver – the last leg of Artemis’s journey back from Asia. The woman’s black hair was shaved to within a millimetre of her scalp. Her black leather jacket, worn soft at the elbows, sat loosely around her shoulders. Her eyes were hard but unfocussed and acknowledged no one who came down the aisle.

  Artemis was tired, since she had not been able to sleep at all in the whole nine-hour stretch returning to Seattle from Hong Kong. She eased nervously into the empty seat. Her limbs were still cramped from the plane ride, her eyes hazy with the confusion of day turning to night at the wrong hour. She did not look at the woman again, although curiosity burned down the outside of her right arm, the insistent desire to scrutinize more closely. After half an hour on the darkening road, she ventured to turn her head. The hard eyes were closed, the woman leaned back in her seat. Through the corners of her eyes Artemis explored the woman’s face. It was familiar. Jowly.

  “Mercy!”

  The woman opened her eyes. She looked at Artemis. A little light of recognition flickered in the depths of her pupils and then vanished. “Everyone calls me Ming now.”

  “Ming?” The name jarred her as familiar, but she wasn’t sure why.

  “It means ‘bright.’”

  “Like shimmering. Shimmering Ming.” Artemis grinned.

  “Laugh if you want. A lot has happened since we used to talk.”

  “You look so different. When did you cut your hair?”

  “After … what happened. You never came to see me.” With this accusation, an intimacy swung between them like the pendulum of a clock.

  “I did. In the church.”

  “But you didn’t really want to know what I was going through. You couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

  “You weren’t exactly friendly yourself.”

  The bus pulled in to customs. The driver instructed everyone to pick up their bags and walk through the customs building. He would meet them on the other side.

  After the hypnotic darkness of the road, the lights inside the customs building were strident. The passengers lined up behind two booths. One of the customs officers was a white man in his fifties, heavy and smelling strongly of drugstore deodorant. He had probably been doing this since he was twenty. He pumped the questions out brusquely, not for a moment doubting his ability to inspire terror.

  “Where have you been? What was the purpose of your visit? How long were you there? What is the total value of the goods you purchased in the U.S.? Are you bringing any restricted substances into Canada?”

  The other customs officer was a young woman, sturdy-looking in her blue uniform. It was she whom Artemis and Ming chose, and as she questioned them one after the other, she smiled with the conspiratorial smile of someone who understands this ordeal the same way they do. Artemis paid a small amount of tax on the two suitcases she carried, jammed with an assortment of clothes and electronics.

  The line-up was dwindling when the older officer ordered everyone out of the waiting room and back to the American side of the barrier where they were to wait until further notice.

  “What’s going on?” Ming’s eyes darted about nervously.

  “Drugs,” said a bored man in a plaid lumberjack shirt.

  “What kind?” asked Ming.

  “Who knows? Who cares?” said the man. “They probably found a roach on the floor and feel like having a little excitement tonight.”

  The customs officer crossed over to the corner where the driver stood talking quietly with the newlyweds who had been sitting in the front seat. He consulted with them briefly. There were hisses and occasional gruff, cynical laughter. The bus driver gesticulated in an exaggerated way that betrayed his nervousness.

  The customs officer walked back towards the quiet crowd. The man in the lumberjack shirt looked so bored he might pass out at any moment.

  “You and you,” said the officer, pointing at Artemis and Ming.

  “What?” said Artemis.

  They stepped into a long narrow room behind translucent glass. It was empty except for a computer terminal and a long steel counter.

  “We’re not travelling together, you know,” said Ming. “We just met.”

  “Just get into the room.”

  They stepped in.

  “Bags on the counter.”

  Artemis put down her knapsack. Ming hoisted her small black suitcase onto the counter. “You first,” the officer went on, looking at Artemis. She unzipped the suitcases and unpacked them, item by item: a battery-operated clock, cheap cotton underwear, T-shirts, a padded vest, jeans, spare glasses, a note pad, a small radio, a toiletry bag containing soap and toothpaste, and sanitary napkins wrapped in discreet pink plastic, which the officer poked through with an annoyed look on his face as though she were subjecting him to some kind of unreasonable farce.

  “You next,” he grunted to Ming. Ming’s eyes were glazed with bravado, or was it fear? What if she really was guilty? Artemis thought to herself for a moment. Ming unzipped the suitcase. A black leather portfolio lay across the top. The rest seemed to be clothes. The man opened the portfolio and roughly fingered photographs in heightened primary colours, pictures of women’s bodies savaged and strewn across a landscape of steel railings, barbed wire, and smashed concrete.

  “What are these?”

  “I’m an artist,” said Ming.

  The officer shook his head with the tired disgust of a man who has seen it all. “I’ll hang on to this.”

  “You can’t. Those are my originals. I’ve got negatives in there.”

  “Unpack the rest of your bag.”

  She turned it over. Jeans, T-shirts, sweaters, socks, and underwear tumbled out onto the table. The man rifled through them, and then undid the zippered pocket at the top. Inside was an envelope full of receipts and a package of cigarette papers.

  “These wouldn’t be for rolling joints, now, would they?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So you smoke roll-your-owns, then?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Better show me the tobacco, then, or I won’t believe you.”

  Reluctantly she reached into the inside pocket of her leather jacket and produced a ziplock bag stuffed with fresh tobacco. The officer opened it, pinched up a bit and smelled it. “Good American tobacco, this is. You wouldn’t happen to have disposed of the tin and tried to avoid paying duty on it, by any chance?”

  Ming was about to shake her head.

  “Don’t lie to me, now.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “Pack up,” he said, “and go see the young lady at the counter outside. Here’re your photographs. You know there’s a fine, don’t you, for evading the proper payment of customs duties?”

  She started to stuff her clothes back into the suitcase.

  “And when you’re done, go back to the waiting room with the others. No one is getting out of here until someone fesses up.”

  Ming lingered at the other customs officer’s counter for a long time, sorting out what she owed. The bus driver and the burly customs officer had returned to their mumbling corner and Artemis was sitting slouched in one of the uncomfortable blue plastic bucket seats when Ming came back. A small man with a pock-marked face and ice-blue eyes strode over to where the customs officer was standing. The bus driver quickly rounded up the other passengers and herded them onto the bus.

  “It had to be one of you, or else him,” said the lumberjack shirt in that same bored voice. “I was wondering how long it was going to take.”

  In the photograph the fabric was unreal. Artemis’s cheek pressed tight against Diane’s in a gesture of sisterhood. The now-v
anished smocks clung to their bodies the way bright wings cling to the strange carapaces of the white moths that flapped against the window. Eden had gotten the photograph published in some upstart art magazine. She was staying with him while she looked for part-time work and a place to live, and geared up for her fall classes. She slept on the couch in his living room. He wasn’t around much, which was just as well. She liked her solitude.

  In her absence, Eden had become quite the urban socialite. His walls were plastered with photographs of interesting people he had met or solicited, drag queens in outrageous feathers, actors, models, street kids with long unhealthy faces and wild hair, mimes, jazz musicians, buskers, leathermen, jewellery vendors, boy prostitutes, video artists, performance poets, an English PhD who could crank cappuccinos faster than anyone he had ever seen, a fourteen-year-old girl with studs in her tongue. He had gone into a hospital emergency ward for a few nights in a row and photographed bleeding accident victims, a man who had lost his eye in a fight, an anorexic girl who was so thin you could see the sharp borders of her eye sockets and cheekbones, a young man with lesions on his face who refused any emotion but mirth, a woman whose legs had been claimed by cancer. There were photographs of animals too. He liked strays, especially the injured kind. There was a dog with only one ear. There was a cat that was so fat its head had almost disappeared inside its body. Over the summer, an elephant had escaped from its trailer waiting for the circus’s stint in town to end. Its act had been banned as a result of protests by animal rights activists. It must have been bored, waiting out the week while its human counterparts monopolized the ring. Somehow it got away, and Eden had photographed it wandering lonely and out of place under the Burrard Street Bridge. The shot had been taken from above, probably with a telephoto lens, so that you could make out only the round body, the triangular head. Trunk and legs were obscured in the downward gaze. A bright blanket in patchwork colours hung lopsided off its back.