When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

  Piss in the stone basin. Water on rock. The sound of a man pissing is always different from that of a woman. The water has farther to travel. Pissing away the world, the relief of it, to feel air travel to a forbidden place. I sat behind him listening, and an intimacy sprouted between us, green leaves shining in the sun, where before there had been only a tiny seed.

  As I offered him a bowl of water to rinse his hands, he splashed water in my face. Water on rock. Usually water is thought of as the female element, easily moved, slow to heat up and slow to cool. The old poets would have talked about the parting of clouds and the downpour of rain. But I will tell you simply it was not a passionate thing we did, but a thing of the grey space that comes before mourning and immense power. His hands were strong and his breath hot and vital and I could only hope that there would be no child this time.

  We walked back to the emperor’s rooms as though nothing had happened, but I knew that, for a while at least, the gods were scheming in my favour.

  As the old man breathed his last there was grief in the eyes of the crown prince, and that was how I knew I had him.

  After the old emperor’s death, all of his consorts were sent to become nuns at the Ganye Monastery.

  Just before I left, something happened that I think helped me later. A hairpin fell from the head of the prince’s wife, not yet declared empress, as she crossed the courtyard. None of her attendants noticed. I hurried to where it had fallen, a delicate thing of jade and gold pulsing with leaves and birds. I picked it up and turned it over once in my palm. It was still warm from the heat of her hair. At the risk of looking undignifed I scurried after them, saying as loudly as I dared to one of the attendants, “The empress dropped this.” I did not think she would be so easily flattered, but she turned to thank me and there was pleasure in her eyes.

  I was not afraid of the razor. My hair is thick and grows back quickly. The sun bled a quick red as I stood on one of the outer walkways of the temple and cut with sharp sewing scissors. A lifetime’s growth fell in snake-thick coils to the stone floor. I must have looked like a teenage boy gone mad before I stepped into the main temple where the head nun shaved off the last of the short pieces. I was very sure after that to keep my face clean. Without hair and without makeup, there is only one’s face to rely on. It had better be a clean, strong face.

  One of the sisters told me I had patient eyes. I smiled at her and said nothing. He came soon enough, the new emperor. He doubtless had many things to pray for. I was there to provide incense and a small torch to light it. He looked into my eyes once. I hope he saw more than patience.

  The stories came back quickly as the tide. I was pleased and relieved to hear them. It meant they were spreading like wildfire in the palace and would reach many helpful ears in no time. The emperor was infatuated with a young nun at the Ganye temple.

  It was his wife, now empress, however, who made the difference. She came to me disguised as a gardener under cover of night with a wig and one of her own robes.

  “Do you remember me?” she asked, so humbly I had to restrain myself from laughing. I could only nod in response. “The emperor takes no advice from me anymore. It is the concubine Xiao who dictates all policy into his flapping ears. I am afraid that soon it will be her, not him, who rules the empire. Nothing could distract him from her until he came here and met you. I think you have a duty to your country.”

  I took the wig and the robe and put them on. In the dark basin of water where I washed a holy face for the last time, I stared long and hard at my reflection and prayed for charm.

  She clasped my hand tightly as we hurried back to the palace. Later the legal concerns were dealt with, a little tricky because of my relations with his father and because I was a nun. I didn’t let myself worry about those too much. The emperor was a man who enjoyed all kinds of positions, who liked observers and mirrors. No wonder his empress had a hard time keeping him. The emperor probably preferred boys, soldiers or the sons of soldiers. We tussled through the night, all limbs and crevices, laughing like wild animals without worldly concerns.

  She laid two fabrics before me one day. “Which is finer?”

  “Neither is fine enough for you,” I said, “they are nothing but silk. You should ask the imperial weavers to weave threads of real gold into fabric for your use.”

  “And which of these hairpins?” She showed me four or five like the one she had dropped the day we first met, each one alive in translucent green. I chose one. “It’s yours,” she said.

  It was then I started listening to the walls. This is what they said:

  “The empress didn’t compliment my cooking.”

  “The empress said I was lazy.”

  “The empress said I have a dark face.”

  I still had an owl’s wings. I took these people under them and they told me things. Sometimes at night, his thick body glistening with sweat, the emperor would ask me for advice.

  “I am worried that the treasury is being depleted.”

  “Taxes should be decreased, people are starting to get restless,” I told him.

  “The empress says the same, except she worries about how the army will be able to maintain control if their budget is cut any further.”

  “She should talk, the money she wastes on fabric for her robes.”

  My son was born in the year of the Dog. His eyes were bright and he giggled when tickled. I knew a boy child would never love his mother. Horses would take him in search of money and power and he would forget about me soon enough. For all I knew, he might kill me before my time if he needed to discredit a rival by accusing him of some heinous deed. Still, I tickled him.

  She brought sweets when she came to see him, fat round cakes stuffed full of red bean paste and egg yolks rich and full as the moon. She went into the nursery to play with the baby and I could hear him laughing like a stupid hyena. Fickle, foolish child! I slipped into his room as soon as she was gone, checked the windows and doors, outside of which sat two silly fourteen-year-old maids who were supposed to be his nurses. It was only afternoon, but the room was filled with evening light. A thin breeze came through the gauze mosquito screen. With a thin dagger, I burst his tiny lungs and slipped out a side door.

  It is something I will never forget, and yet something I don’t quite remember. A lifelike dream to make fate go in the direction it was meant to.

  The emperor came to see me a short time later. I smiled at him and touched his face and held his cold hands in my warm ones. When he asked to see his son, his face was almost that of a child. Still holding his hand, I guided him past the nursery doors to where the child lay quiet as though sleeping. A red stain was spreading across his tiny back. I screamed only a second before the emperor himself opened his martial mouth and let out a loud bellow of grief. The two maids at the door could only say that the empress had paid the most recent visit.

  My wise husband had the murderer immediately stripped of her title and thrown in prison. I made sure, with a little help, that the concubine Xiao’s part in the whole affair did not go unnoticed. She soon joined the ex-empress in the dark cell. A familiar feeling of relief washed over me. The little girl who had languished in anonymity for fourteen years washed away with the tide. We made love under bright sunlight, surrounded by mirrors, and I became empress in the year 655.

  Little did I know then that he continued to visit these lowly nameless women in that hole of a prison where they lived. On a sentimental whim, he issued an order that they be released. Imagine, allowing cold-blooded murderers to wander the palace freely! My rage could not be contained. Fortunately, there were men among the prison guards who could move more quickly than the emperor’s plodding bureaucracy. They were only too happy to remove the prisoners’ eight unnecessary and meddling limbs and place the schemers in large clay jars. I heard it took them four days to die.

  “In the underworld, I will change into a cat!” This is what they told me the concubine said before she died. “And she will be a mo
use and I shall make a snack of her bones! “

  I ruled the empire on the whole with an even hand. Anybody will tell you that. Everything I did in my life was for the good of the kingdom. What we do in our personal lives does not matter so much, as long as it makes us happy. So what if I kept a pretty powdered boy running freely about the palace for my own pleasure? If there were fifty years between us it is because I was still a robust and healthy woman at seventy. I ran a tolerant but not undisciplined ship. The only thing I wouldn’t have in the palace was cats.

  Artemis threw a handful of bath salts into the water and undressed quickly. Her clothes fell in a heap. She lit candles and melted into the water. The heat drew memory, pus, and other bodily impurities to the surface, sucking them out like poisons from a wound. They say when a snake bites, you must suck the poisons out with your mouth and spit, being careful not to swallow. Just so with the expiation of memory. She closed her eyes against the soothing heat and the flicker of candle shadows against the wall, and felt Claude’s index finger tracing her collarbone on the last ferry of the day between T saw was sen and Swartz Bay.

  They had stood on the deck, the dark feeling strange and invaded by the light gushing from the windows of the boat, illuminating the crowd of travellers inside. The crowd was so brightly lit and clearly visible it was hard for the two of them to imagine themselves alone, except that the whole garden of stars blossoming above their heads assured them they were. Claude’s breath was a warm blanket enveloping Artemis like a cloak of invisibility. Out on the water, the Gulf Islands floated by like impossibly large animals, silent, breathing, and calm as the sea itself. In the distance, a ferry going in the opposite direction glowed with strident artificial light, illuminating the quiet sea. For a moment Artemis was drawn towards it, and she shivered. But Claude’s breath took her in gently and her hands were warm and quiet and slow as the ocean.

  Now, in the bath, she was afraid that the water might not wash the memories away after all, but fuse them to her bones.

  The trust between them had begun to decay imperceptibly. It started with the canoe that used to belong to Claude’s father.

  “My father’s a crochety old bastard,” said Claude. “Always yelling and scolding for the stupidest reasons. The only time I like him is when he’s in a boat.”

  They were on the beach at English Bay, unloading the old fiberglass canoe from the roof of Claude’s station wagon. “He’s a good boatman,” said Claude. “He used to fish and sail in all kinds of boats when he was a little kid in China. The old scumbag.” She hoisted one end of the canoe onto her shoulder and instructed Artemis to do the same.

  “You shouldn’t talk about your dad like that.”

  “Why not, the stingy old ratface? He was never very nice to me.”

  “Because … he’s your father.”

  “And loves his kids too, even though he’s mean as piss to us, the old badger,” said Claude, grinning, clearly pleased to have an audience for her inventive insults.

  They put the nose of the canoe in the water. Claude instructed Artemis to sit in front, then she pushed the boat all the way in and climbed into the rear seat, from which she steered with a deft hand. The sun was high and the water was calm. They paddled with a dreamy, gentle rhythm around the curve of the Stanley Park seawall.

  “You want to steer?”

  “Not really. I don’t know how.”

  “It’s easy. I’ll teach you. We have to trade places, though.”

  “So should we pull up somewhere?”

  “If we’re really careful we should be able to do it without having to.”

  “But we don’t have life jackets.”

  “Just turn around and come to the middle of the boat.”

  Artemis slid her paddle into the belly of the boat and turned, resting her weight on one knee for just a moment. The canoe listed heavily to one side. “This is too dangerous.”

  “No, it’s not. Come on.” And Claude counterbalanced her as she moved in the opposite direction towards the prow. Somehow, they changed places without the thing capsizing. “Okay, now just turn the paddle the direction you want to go.”

  “What do you mean? Like this?”

  “That’s right. Now let’s cross the Narrows.”

  “What if a ship comes?”

  “Don’t worry”

  One did come. It didn’t cut particularly close to them, but its wake was enough to set the little canoe bobbing crazily up and down.

  “Are you sure this is safe?”

  “Don’t be such a wimp. Aren’t you having fun?”

  They paddled along the North Shore and by mid-afternoon had made it to Lighthouse Park. It took a long time because Artemis’s steering made the boat fishtail back and forth, and Claude complained loudly. “Not so sharp. Your judgement isn’t so great, is it?”

  The water became choppy as the bay widened. Artemis got more nervous, Claude, more irritable. A speedboat flew by, tossing the canoe high in its wake. They didn’t tip, although Artemis would describe it later as “almost tipping.” She pulled in her paddle.

  “What are you doing, idiot? Steer!” yelled Claude. “Last time I take you out canoeing.”

  Artemis chastised herself for being so gutless. She decided that this would be a learning experience and steeled her nerves. If Claude noticed, she said nothing, but hurried Artemis along impatiently. By the time they got back to the car, the sun was going down and Artemis’s arms ached. She did not, however, want to admit this, being embarrassed about how little she could take. They lugged the canoe back to the car and hoisted it onto the roof. Artemis made space for her backpack and her wet coat in the back, thinking about a bath or margaritas on a sundeck somewhere. Then there was warm breath and gentle teeth along her neck and kisses in her ear, and a whisper, “Let’s go for drinks, I’m buying.”

  This was the first time, so Artemis didn’t think about it much, was merely glad that the strange unpleasantness of the canoe trip had vanished and that she was treasured again. They sat out under the last red rays of the sun in air that was, for perhaps the first time that year, balmy with the burnt-sugar smell of summer. They drank margaritas in childish flavours – blackberry, kiwi, and then watermelon – and talked about that first day in the rain. At the next table, drinking by herself, was a woman Artemis thought she recognized, but she couldn’t recall from where. Her hair was blonde with dark roots and she wore a single long sky blue diaphanous scarf around her neck.

  The dogs made it worse. There were only two at first, brother and sister with brown furry faces and pointy lopsided ears. Claude picked them up from the SPCA and called them Samson and Delilah. (Claude professed a secret passion for those old biblical movies that they used to show on CTV when she was growing up.) Artemis thought they should have Chinese names, especially since they looked so much like the street dogs she had seen in photographs of China: their tails curled over the top, almost making a complete spiral, the fur on their faces uneven and sticking out all over the place. But they were Claude’s dogs and those were the names she picked. These dogs Artemis did not mind. She would even say, if asked, that she liked them. They followed her around the apartment begging for food, and licked her hands when she held them out empty. It was annoying sometimes, but other times their simple-minded and unequivocal affection was a relief from the uncertainty she felt with people, even those she cared about, like Claude.

  The Rottweiler was another story altogether. His name was Uzi, but it should have been M16. God knows who had trained him, or for what, but it couldn’t have been anything very pleasant and apparently even for them he got out of hand. Claude found him at the pound, surprised that someone would discard such a fascinating and valuable beast. The pound people said that if no one claimed him that day, he would be put down. He’d been there a month already. Claude felt sorry for him and led him into her station wagon. He got along fine with Samson and Delilah. They ate together, chased each other around the small apartment, teased each othe
r with playful nips, yelped joyously, and slept in a heap under the kitchen table at night. Sometimes they slept with Claude in her bed, but not when Artemis was there.

  The big problem with Uzi was when he went out. He would fly off his choke chain like a hawk with metal clippers for teeth and shoot straight for the throat of any dog in his path. The list of dog owners to whom Claude owed serious apologies and boxes of chocolates for fear of being sued grew rapidly.

  “You’ve got to get rid of this dog,” said Artemis.

  “And then where will he go? Who will want him but me?”

  “He should be put down.”

  “You are so cruel. You would say the same thing about me, wouldn’t you?”

  And then one night, carelessly letting the screen door hang open as. she paused in the doorway to call goodbye, Artemis inadvertently let Uzi fly by. Like a shot he was out in the night.

  “How could you be so stupid? Have you any idea what you’ve unleashed?”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “You better get out there and start looking.” Claude grabbed the choke chain off its hook and pushed past her. Artemis followed, afraid that the night held something much worse than just a vicious dog.

  The look on Claude’s face was half scared and half furious when she came back to the house fifteen minutes later with the dog whining on a tight choke chain. Artemis stepped out of the darkness from the opposite direction.

  ‘T can’t trust you with shit,” said Claude. “Go home, why don’t you.”

  “I can’t,” came the raspy response. “I just missed the last bus.”

  “Jesus.” Claude walked back up the front lawn to the side of the house, while Artemis stood there, unsure of whether or not to follow. “Well, come on, then.”