When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

  A tall woman with white-blonde hair nudged her arm and passed her a joint. Artemis was fairly sure it was the woman she had done makeup on for one of Eden’s first shoots half a year ago. She bobbed her head thank-you and took a drag.

  “Speak English?” the woman asked.

  She nodded, her lungs full of smoke.

  “I don’t think she understood me,” said the woman, turning to an equally tall, equally blonde friend.

  Artemis let the smoke out of her lungs.

  “Nee ho ma?” asked the woman politely.

  Artemis gave her a rude glare and walked off. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really anywhere to go. The small apartment was packed with people. She decided right then to take Marlina’s place.

  “You check everything out,” said Marlina. “Anything that doesn’t work, you let me know. My father-in-law will come and fix it.” Then, “Since you are Chinese I’ll let you have it for five hundred dollars, instead of five hundred and fifty.”

  “Five hundred? The old tenant told me she paid four twenty-five.”

  “Our expenses have gone up,” said Marlina’s husband, Feltham, clutching his cellphone. His grey wool pants were several inches too short, revealing grey socks sagging around skinny ankles. “You know, hydro and so on. You want it or not?”

  Joanne, the woman who moved in upstairs the same month, greated Artemis eagerly. She told Artemis she loved plants. She brought them from her previous apartment in long planters and placed them on her narrow balcony She pointed them out. There were salmon-pink impatiens, blue trailing verbena, and little purple clusters of lobelia cascaded through the wood railing. Beyond them, closer to the house, sat little terra cotta pots of herbs and foliage, and a porcelain planter containing a small kumquat tree. But that was where the niceties stopped. Joanne cultivated a tough-girl image, like Ming, only more successfully. Her hair had been shaved down to a blue-purple scalp. Thick rings of surgical steel shot through her lower lip and left eyebrow. A switchblade and a recipe for Molotov cocktails hung out of her back pocket. Oddly, she was also studying part-time to be a lawyer. “To beat those fuckers at their own game,” she told Artemis later.

  She warned Artemis about the landlords in a conspiratorial kind of way. “You be careful of those two. They’re pretty sly. And if they ever ask you about the two cedars out front, tell them you absolutely love them. I’m almost positive they’re scheming to cut them down.”

  When Eden jumped out of the cab of their rented truck, Joanne asked, “Is he your boyfriend?” Joanne helped him carry the couch through the narrow front door. Artemis invited her to dinner. Joanne offered to make sushi.

  They sat on the couch and used boxes for a table. Joanne rolled the maki expertly. Artemis laid out trays of take-out food they had ordered in: Singapore fried noodles, butterfly shrimp, almond gai ding.

  “I’m sure,” said Joanne, “that Feltham and Marlina have got something up their sneaky little sleeves. They ever try to pull a fast one on you, just let me know. I’ll straighten them out.”

  “Thanks,” said Artemis, not sure what else she could say. Eden tossed her a nervous look.

  “Landlords are scum,” Joanne continued, “all of them, doesn’t matter where they come from. Next time I move, though, I’m gonna make sure the landlord is white. At least I’ll be sure they understand the law, then.”

  Still no one said anything.

  After they were gone, Artemis settled into the place. She began to feel at home here, pots and pans in the cupboards, a bar of soap by the tub, housewarming flowers shedding petals all over the window sill. Ming had helped find furniture for her – in the alleys or discards from other friends. Eden brought an old black-and-white TV he no longer used. Candle wax collected in little solid pools on the counter and window sill, where she had stuck candles before dinner.

  The next morning, she went to the phone company, and that was when she found out about the phone bill. She owed over four hundred dollars that she knew she hadn’t charged. It could only have been Diane.

  She walked down the street to Eden’s house.

  Eden answered the door in his bathrobe.

  “I need to use your phone.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t last long out there on your own.”

  “Just let me use the phone.”

  “You know you don’t need to ask. Whatever’s mine is yours. What happened, anyway?”

  “Diane racked up a bunch of charges on my phone bill.”

  “What?”

  “Look, can I do this first and explain it to you after? Before I lose my nerve.” She tested her voice before picking up the receiver while Eden looked on.

  “What are you scared for? You should give her hell. She’s the one who should be scared.”

  “I know. I can’t help it. I don’t know why I feel this way.” She took a deep breath and picked up the receiver.

  “Hi, Diane. What are you up to these days?” She strained to keep her voice even, with the unfortunate result that it came out an octave higher than usual.

  “I’m working. In a department store. When did you get back?” Diane was unnaturally, unpleasantly calm.

  “About six weeks ago.”

  “I don’t talk to anyone about you unless they ask, you know,” Diane said. “And then I just say we lost touch.”

  “I don’t talk to anyone about you either.”

  “Is that right? Don’t pretend you don’t know what you did.”

  “What I did? Look, I’m calling you about a phone bill –”

  “Those dresses you stole.”

  “I didn’t steal anything. They were given to me.”

  “Don’t lie to me. Because I know.”

  She found herself wondering whether she had taken them without Eden’s knowledge. She closed her eyes, tried to envision him handing her the bag, to feel its live weight. For her trouble, all she felt was an inexplicably deep certainty that it had been a dream, that it hadn’t happened. She turned to him for reassurance, but he had left the room.

  “And I won’t even mention the business about Saint.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Just stay away from me, okay?”

  Claude came to visit, coming in from the October rain with a bottle of wine in one hand and a box of cake in the other. “Why did you move into a place that was for sale?” she asked.

  “I didn’t.”

  “But there’s a big for sale sign in the front yard. Aren’t you worried –”

  “It wasn’t there this morning,” said Artemis, looking out. Sure enough, there it was, stuck deep into the ground by a firm hand. “I can’t believe it. It must have happened in the last hour or two.”

  “You haven’t called me.”

  “Things have been kind of crazy.”

  “I was hoping you would call, that’s all.”

  “The move has been stressful. I have to go to school. And I just had this awful phone conversation with Diane.” She explained, slowly, hoping it had really happened the way she said.

  Claude shook her head. “Don’t worry. It’s not you that’s crazy. She’s the one with paranoid delusions. I call it victim one-upmanship.”

  “One-down woman ship.”

  They laughed until they both felt guilty and then Claude opened the wine.

  “What about your mother?”

  “I don’t know. It scares me. What if she’s like Diane? And also, my mother – the woman who brought me up – it makes her unhappy, you know? I know she’s a white woman, and maybe her motives for wanting me were a little questionable, but I don’t want to hurt her.”

  “You and your mother come from different sides of the fence as far as colonial history goes. It must feel weird.”

  “It doesn’t. It feels perfectly normal. I mean, it’s the only thing I know. And your mother?”

  Claude’s laugh was good-natured. “Touché. Still makes the best foie gras ever.”

  When Artemis pointed out the for sale sign t
o Joanne, Joanne didn’t say a word to her but picked up the phone to yell at Feltham. “How could you put the house on the market and not even tell me? You asshole. I’m going to take you to court.”

  “It’s all perfectly legal,” Feltham said. “Besides, we didn’t know when we rented to you that we were going to sell it.”

  “How could you not know? It’s been two bloody weeks. I’m calling a lawyer.”

  At seven-thirty the next morning the front windows of the house next door shattered. Bleary-eyed, Artemis looked out the window and saw that a demolition team had arrived and was busy swinging into the exterior walls. Upstairs she heard Joanne cursing them.

  “Those dickheads! Landlords and developers are all jerks! All of them. Capitalist pigs!”

  Artemis phoned the tenants’ rights association, but they said the for sale sign was legal, unless she had a lease, which, of course, she didn’t. The house next door sank to its knees.

  A yellow Miata pulled up and a man got out. He was tall with finely chiselled features and long dark hair. A blonde woman in a smart grey suit with wide cuffs on the sleeves and pant legs stepped out of the other side. Albert, the real estate agent, pulled up behind then. Marlina was with him.

  “I hope we’re not disturbing you,” said Marlina.

  The blonde woman walked up the front stairs. “Lots of potential,” she said.

  “You could say that,” said Artemis.

  Joanne was on the doorstep in a flash.

  Albert pointed out the new sink in the kitchen.

  “We could do a lot with it, don’t you think, Jane?” said the man.

  “Are you planning to renovate?” Artemis asked.

  “Yes,” said Jane. “I’m an artist. We could take down this wall and make a large studio.”

  “Albert told me yesterday,” Artemis said to Marlina, “that the new owners would almost certainly continue my tenancy. Doesn’t look like he worked too hard to find that kind of people.”

  Marlina didn’t say anything.

  “You know,” Joanne said to Jane, whom she had been trailing closely, “there are some structural problems. The roof isn’t too sound.”

  “Really?” said Jane.

  “Yes,” said Joanne. “Also, there are mice. The wind comes through the bedroom wall at night.” Jane didn’t say anything, so Artemis added, “Also, the plumbing isn’t in the best shape. The toilet overflows all the time, and the bathroom sink leaks.”

  Marlina gave her a remorseful look.

  Joanne kept going. “I noticed a couple of cockroaches yesterday. I wonder if there are any more?”

  Eventually the couple left. Albert, too, drove off with a worried look on his face.

  “You know, I really am sorry about doing this to you,” said Marlina. “We didn’t want to do it. My mother’s visa application was rejected, so we have to invest in a business in order to bring her here. This is the only way we can raise the money. She’s not ill yet, but she’s very lonely since my father died. I don’t want to leave her in Hong Kong all by herself.… Don’t tell my husband I told you this. He’ll be very embarrassed.”

  The red car that pulled up in front of the house later that evening looked familiar. A fancy new Camry with a fender job. This Camry was the sort of car a young bully businessman would drive – a man like Feltham. It was not Feltham who stepped out, however, but an old man with a stooped back. Out of the passenger side climbed a young boy, maybe eight or ten years old.

  Artemis didn’t answer the doorbell right away. But as soon as she did, the boy began his spiel, like a lesson he might recite for school: “I am the son of Feltham Chan. This is my grandfather, Mr Chan. He would like to give you something.” The old man said something to the boy in Chinese that Artemis didn’t understand.

  “Please do not tell my father,” said the boy.

  The old man handed her a thick envelope.

  “Mmm goi,” she said, badly, “thank you.”

  The man said something to her in Chinese and she replied, “Yes, I promise I won’t tell.” They went back down the steps and into the red car. Inside the envelope was five hundred dollars, in twenty-dollar bills.

  The next day Albert came on his own, with a South Asian family. When they were gone, Joanne hung a string of tiny Canadian flags across the porch. Unaware of its traditional use, she pinned Chinese “ghost” money to the front door with the side that said “Hell Dollars” showing. From her window, Artemis saw her write “No Pakis” on the bannister, but when she asked Joanne about it, Joanne she said it wasn’t her. “Maybe Marlina did it,” she said.

  But as it turned out, no one took an interest in the house until a few months later.

  I am haunted by the ghosts of the living.

  She is so quiet and contained. She does not know how restless her spirit is, how it waits for me at every street corner and sometimes starts out of doorways with famished eyes.

  There are days when her ghost won’t leave. Thirsty days when the wind is high and small vacuums all over the city suck words from people’s lips and spill them in the most unlikely places. She comes to knock over pots, push books from shelves, turn milk sour in its cardboard carton. She finds her way under the floorboards to make them creak, and inside walls where she scuttles like an army of rats. At least on those days she is too restless to touch me, although when night comes she refuses to let me sleep, flicking light switches or scattering rice across the kitchen floor.

  I rack my brains for stories to appease her, to entice a little peace, but they always end up different from how I intended. There are stories for beginnings and there are stories for endings. There are stories meant for healing and stories meant to cause harm. There are stories for explaining, meant to talk away the things that cannot be healed over. There are stories meant for company, when a pebble soul calls out into the empty, owl-less night. There are stories meant to quench the thirst of the heart. There are stories told by parents to children. There are stories told by children to parents. Family stories are especially strange because the louder they are told the less they are heard, the gap in interpretation between teller and listener often so wide as to be insurmountable. There are stories told by lovers. Sometimes they are instructional. Sometimes the stories are not told with the mouth, but with the whole body, arcing across skin, shooting history into veins. Stories set into motion the moment they spill, stories that cannot be turned back and started over. They can be told and told again, but with each telling an older rhythm reasserts itself and there is never any taking the story back.

  This is a story to be told with the weight of memory. It was told to me by a fox two hundred years my senior. This is how it goes:

  THE OWL

  My mother was an owl. She built a home in the dark and fed me live mice, all hot blood and crisp bones. That is where my passion comes from, the daily acquaintance with all that matters in the world, life and death and how easily one can spiral into the other.

  I was fourteen years old when I heard the emperor was coming for me. I pretended I wasn’t interested. The day his grand carriage rumbled down my street, I sat behind the flower-latticed window in the courtyard combing my hair. Usually, I never left my room without it being thoroughly coiffed and bound. I feigned modesty and did not look up, but my mother said he was frail as a chopstick.

  Grief over my sudden absence sent my mother flying high up into the trees from which she refused ever to come down, although at night I can still hear her combing her hair. Sometimes she weeps. But for me it was never a matter of sorrow. The strong lean horses that drew the carriage were a sign of good things to come.

  The emperor’s hands were cold and his body pale and wrinkled, but I basked in his love because it meant possibilities. He kept me company for a fortnight and then vanished into a political intrigue or the arms of another woman.

  I was fourteen years old when he abandoned me. I spent another fourteen years waiting for a second chance. There were many other young women to keep
me company but we were all competing for one thing and we elbowed each other mercilessly. How can I tell you of fourteen long years in one breath? The dull weight of them, one pressing into the next. Occasionally the emperor would find favour with someone I knew. It was a chance for the rest of us to mince her like the mice I longed for. A little taste of blood, hardly sufficient in the midst of all this timid food. Women would sometimes brush up against each other for comfort over the long nights in winter, women whose empty hearts could be filled for a moment with chaff or gold without having any idea of the difference. There was one who took my fancy for a brief time. Her hair was blacker than any I have ever seen, so black the moonless night hurt my eyes if I turned to it too quickly after breathing in her hair. I knew her only in the dark, beside the trickling of an artificial stream. As luck would have it, the emperor took an interest in her very shortly after I did, and, of course, there was no competition. She died from eating mouse poison concealed in a moon cake. Perhaps I had something to do with it, perhaps I didn’t. I knew better than to give over very much of myself to any of these women whose futures were not yet shaped, whose alliances I might want or have to shun on pain of death, and I wasn’t going to take any chances. What does it matter? History books will record that part of my life in one sentence if at all.

  The sky offered me a chance. The planet Venus appeared near the sun for a number of days in a row. The emperor was alarmed and asked the court astrologer what it meant. The astrologer told him it meant a woman would become emperor, taking the place of the sons of heaven.

  The emperor remembered me only on his deathbed. My name escaped his feeble lips like a whisper of something from boyhood. I don’t think he knew as he was dying that I dragged the last embers of life from his body into mine. They warmed me slowly, heat funnelling down my throat into the pit of my stomach. The fire fed on itself and grew so large I was afraid I could not contain it.

  The crown prince’s face showed concern, but I would not have called it a look of grief. Not then. There was something like triumph in his eyes. In the night an owl called and the prince said he needed to relieve himself and asked for a woman to attend him. I got up and followed.