When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

  When everyone in the room was sound asleep, we slipped in through the window. My cousin made me climb onto the woman’s bed with her and blow cool air into her nostrils. She coached me through the strange sounds of the magic words. The first time it didn’t work. I saw the boy stirring in his white cot and urged my cousin to abandon the project, but she insisted we try again. This time the woman vanished. My cousin, who was learning to see through walls, told me the woman was asleep in the cook’s empty quarters, muttering and thrashing in a most satisfying way. We hurried out through a crack below the wall, me first, then my cousin. She emerged without her tail, blood gushing from the place where it had been. The merchant’s son had chopped it off with one clean hack of the cleaver.

  “Hurry!” she cried.

  The merchant’s son had to go through the door to get out. We saw him coming after us, but by then we had a good head start. We got away from him, and hid in a bamboo thicket until we were sure he had gone home.

  After this incident I was much more patient and disciplined about my schooling. But my cousin’s tail never grew back.

  In late April, Artemis and Diane planned a trip to the fairgrounds of the Pacific National Exhibition for the rides, which Artemis hated. Diane really wanted to go and Artemis wasn’t sure whether her dislike of the place stemmed from a lack of heart or nerve. Diane said she had to stop in at her parents’ store, although Artemis couldn’t help wondering afterwards if the detour was not more for Artemis’s benefit than Diane would say. They got off somewhere on McGill and walked two blocks east and five blocks south, away from the water and the railway tracks. It was a hot day, and even though the streets were lined with thick chestnut trees and cedars casting a gentle shade, they sweated as they walked. The taps of Diane’s cowboy boots clicked against the sidewalk.

  “Wong’s Sundries,” the sign said, twice, once on the side that faced north and once on the side that faced west. On the north-facing side, there was a big gap between the first “s” in sundries and the rest of the word. In big red circles on either side of the name was the Coca-Cola logo. The old-fashioned, handwritten one, not the one with big chunky letters. It was hot inside the store, although not so bright as outside. Everything was dark-stained wood with a slightly reddish tinge. Thin streams of sunlight came in through the racks that partially obscured the windows. An old woman sat behind the counter, weighing spotty bananas for an old man in a suit. How he could bear it on a day like this, Artemis could not fathom. There was something wrong with the woman’s eyes because she seemed to be looking at the far wall inside the shop, even as she concentrated on the change. Artemis couldn’t remember what you call that, when the eye seems to be looking somewhere other than where it is. The woman wore a high-collared blouse with a small blue-and-grey floral pattern, Old World style.

  “Ma Ma,” said Diane, respectfully, and then to Artemis, “That’s my grandmother. Father’s side.” Diane waved Artemis to the back of the shop. Diane’s mother was in the storeroom cutting open crates of Kraft Dinner. Artemis stood in the doorway and smiled and said hello when the woman paused for a moment to nod at her. Diane reached into the back pocket of her cut-off shorts and pulled out an old Cancer Society envelope filled with cash and handed it to her mother. Her mother didn’t say anything, but put the envelope into the front pocket of her pants.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The PNE.”

  “Hm. What for?”

  “The rides.”

  Her mother didn’t say anything else then, but turned away and went back to opening the crates.

  My cousin, the one we called Stump Tail, was incorrigible. She returned to the merchant’s house without telling anyone and continued to terrorize the merchant’s wife. She made friends with a more established fox family in the neighbourhood and became drinking pals with the eldest son. Together they bothered several families in the district, stealing eggs and secretly swapping vinegar for wine.

  The merchant’s neighbour had a penchant for gambling. My cousin and her new friend stole into his house one night and wrote spells under his pillow. His gambling habit grew more intense. At first he enjoyed it, but one night, feeling a little queasy on account of something he had eaten, he attempted to stop early, only to find that his hands kept counting the chips and tiles and his mouth kept egging his competitors on. He played mah jong for seventeen days straight, neither eating nor drinking, until he died of exhaustion. My cousin couldn’t finish telling me the story, she was laughing so hard.

  But the next night someone sold poisoned wine to her new friend. The two of them were found in the garden the following morning, stretched out stiff and dead as boards.

  White banners with bold characters brushed on in thick China ink fluttered with the fury of ghosts agitating to be released from the poles to which they had been fastened. The wide gravel space on the edge of Chinatown was packed with Chinese people, black hair making an ocean. Many of them had white bands tied around their arms. There had just been a huge massacre of students in a square just outside the Imperial Palace in Beijing.

  The sun was bright, but it was cold for a day in June and Artemis hugged her jean jacket tightly to her body. The start-and-stop drone of the Main Street Skytrain station interrupted the man on the makeshift stage reading a speech in romanized Cantonese off a crumpled piece of paper. His accent was good, the accent of his childhood. She listened, letting the words flow through her, letting her body understand what her ears could not. When he finished, the lot filled with a genteel clapping that almost blew away in the wind.

  An Asian Studies professor took his place, cleverness gleaming from his egg-smooth forehead. He spoke confident Cantonese, unaware he was pitching his tones like an orchestra of tax accountants. She tried to imagine tanks rolling across the gravel here on the edge of Chinatown, but it seemed absurd. Not that something so disastrous couldn’t occur, only it might not happen here the way it does in China. Was that where the melancholy she sometimes felt came from? The possibility that she might not recognize an act of repression when it struck? Or did it come from tapping into a collective memory of all the deaths, abandonments, and slow stresses of war that have gone unspoken through the generations? Perhaps the precise stories and politics had been lost, but the emotional memory moves from one generation to the next as surely as any genetic trait. She imagined tanks rolling from the old Canadian National train station or across the power plant on the other side of the street. Rolling towards them, spitting, the plant going up in an orange burst, the thin blood smell of gunpowder, smoke billowing across the lot, and all these unfamiliar Chinese people collapsing around her.

  A woman with a tray of hot tea in white styrofoam cups worked her way through the crowd. Artemis’s throat dried in anticipation. A layer of cold fell over the crowd and she shivered. Someone draped a heavy black leather jacket over her shoulders. It was lined and the leather was soft and smelled of cattle, tanin, and fashion magazine men’s cologne. She noticed these things in an instant and let the warmth from the jacket seep into her goose-bumpy arms, still watching the woman with the tray of hot tea, before turning her face to the jacket’s owner. He was a tall man with chiselled features, skin the colour and luminosity of marble, brown curls strapped back into a ponytail, and eyes as green as bottle glass behind thick black-rimmed spectacles.

  His face was familiar. He smiled. “For a minute I thought you were Diane.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Yes, I can see that now. I’m sorry. Do you remember me?”

  “No.”

  “My name is Saint.”

  “What?”

  “Well, it’s St Clair, but everyone calls me Saint. We met at Diane’s, remember?”

  She looked at him slowly, his flushed cheeks and nervous eyes, and wondered how she could have imagined marble. “Oh yes, you weren’t wearing glasses before.”

  He extended his hand gravely, an oddly formal gesture after the laying on of the coat. His hand was warm
but unsteady. She moved to return the jacket, but he shook his head.

  Up on the makeshift stage, a Chinese-Canadian man with radio-perfect English pushed his glasses back up his nose. “As Canadians we should encourage our government and our media to condemn the barbarous actions of the Chinese government. Those of us who immigrated to Canada did so because of the long-standing tradition of democracy in this country. We have made Canada our home and poured our life’s work into increasing the wealth of our new country. Those of us who were born here have always had faith in our government. Now it is time for our country to do something for us.…”

  “They’ll be only too happy to, you know,” Saint observed.

  “What?”

  “Condemn the Chinese government. Politicians are always more than pleased to show how totalitarian other governments are and prove how democratic ours is. They love stuff about those nasty Communists.”

  “But don’t you think it’s important that countries keep an eye on each other for human rights abuses and stuff like that?”

  “Sure, but that’s not an objective thing in the context of Western imperialism in the Third World. They only tell the story in a way that gives Canada the moral high ground it can use to pressure for things that benefit Canada, and not the Chinese at all. Not Canada even, but white Canadian men of a particular class and occupation.”

  “I just don’t see what else the options might be. I mean, if they’re rolling in tanks and shooting people, what would you want our government to do? Pretend it wasn’t happening?” She couldn’t help but admire him for his ability to critique his own position, although she kept it to herself.

  “Of course not. But there has to be honest reporting the whole time. About what the Chinese are doing when they’re not shooting people. About genocides happening in Africa that we never hear about. Stories that don’t go on about the hypocrisy of their capitalism while saying nothing about ours.” He paused for a moment and looked down at her from those sea-green eyes. “This demonstration looks like it’s going to wrap up. Why don’t you come have a coffee with me and warm up? We could beat the crowd by leaving now.”

  She followed him through the ocean of dark heads across the gravel lot to the old Hong Kong Café with its high brown booths, arborite table tops, lime-green walls, low counters, and old-fashioned milk machines.

  “Coffee?” asked the old waiter, turning over the thick white cups with their green rims and sloshing it in almost before they had a chance to nod.

  ‘The apple tarts are good, if they haven’t run out,” said Saint. “So are the pork buns.” She noticed his irises were ringed with a strange pale light, which she found discomfiting, although she couldn’t have said why.

  “You come here often, hey?”

  “It’s a cool place. All the old Chinese bachelors have been coming here since the days of the Exclusion Act.”

  “Hey, Saint, you old sleezebag, is that you?” A woman’s voice came from the other side of the booth’s wall, behind Saint’s head.

  “What of it?” he demanded cheerfully as a grinning, square-jawed face popped up above the divider that separated the booths, leaning over Saint’s head and looking meaningfully at Artemis. A long black braid whipped up beside the face. It was the woman who had been carrying trays of tea through the crowds an hour earlier.

  “I’m surprised it took such a long time for a sophisticated white boy like you to figure out this was a good place to come.”

  “Who are you calling sophisticated? I just like the apple tarts.”

  “Hmmmm. That’s not what I hear.”

  “Yeah, well, what do you hear?”

  “You think your reputation doesn’t precede you?” She looked at Artemis the whole time she spoke. Artemis wasn’t sure whether she meant to be friendly or not. Then the woman gave her a slow wink, the co-ordinated kind, where nothing on the person’s face moves except for one eyelid going lazily down and up.

  “Artemis,” he said, letting his voice drop lower than normal, “I’d like you to meet Claude Chow. Claude, Artemis.”

  “Hi, sweetie,” Claude said, as if they’d been best friends forever.

  The waiter returned to take their order and Claude dropped back into her seat. Saint ordered two apple tarts, and Artemis asked for a bacon-and-egg sandwich that arrived in a very short time, on toasted white bread with the crusts cut off.

  “People always give me a hard time because of my father/’ said Saint. “These days, anyway. I don’t get it.”

  “What does he do, your father?”

  “He’s a collector.”

  “Diane told me, now that you mention it. What does he collect?”

  “He calls them artifacts. I wish he wouldn’t. Clothing, antique furniture, bowls, plates, sculpture. Anything, really. He’s got a big enough house he can collect anything he wants. He specializes in the Far East.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re not going to give me a hard time about it, are you? Of course, I could understand if he was stealing things, or depriving Eastern people of them in some way. But he buys them. He buys things people don’t want. Or, at least, things that they’re willing to sell.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t you have a position on it? Everyone else seems to.”

  When a fox is fifty years old, it acquires the ability to change itself into a woman. At a hundred it can assume the shape of a beautiful girl, or that of a sorcerer.… At that age the fox knows what is happening at a distance of a thousand miles, it can derange the human mind and reduce a person to an imbecile. When the fox is a thousand years old, it is in communication with Heaven, and is then called Heavenly Fox, J’ien-hu.

  – HSUAN-CHUNG-CHI

  I’m going to tell you the first story of my birthdays. Moon calendar birthdays. Soon I will reach my thousandth. A thousand years is a long time for a fox to live, especially now, in the age of science, when it is common knowledge that canine life-spans average less than twenty European-style years. It has been a long wait and busstop boring, especially for someone as restless as me. The worst part was the first fifty years, trapped in an aging dog’s body. My hair started dropping out in clumps when I was about twenty-eight. Even the most feeble rabbits managed to escape my dull teeth. I ate mushrooms and moss and grew as thin as a Taoist ascetic and bald as a human baby.

  My fiftieth birthday arrived in the cold dark, just when, hairless and blind, I thought I couldn’t hold on any longer. My birthday enfolded me in human arms and granted me the first of my transformative powers, the ability to change into a woman. But I was given no choice as to what kind of woman. I was given a body discarded by an older fox who had just passed her hundredth year. There was nothing wrong with her, really. She was as young as the smell of fresh rain and newly tilled soil, but had the face of a poisonous mushroom, red with white spots and spongy. Her hair roped like the matted old man’s beard that hung high and green in the leafless branches of swamp trees. Someone later said to me that there is nothing more beautiful than the modesty of the plain, but I think I had to live it first. In the meantime my sensibilities were driven by the same conceptions of beauty as everyone else’s. And there would be no bargaining for chickens in the day market with a face like this.

  At first, I refused to approach her. I stayed in my rickety canine body, so repulsed was I at the thought of becoming her. After a while, I discovered I could animate other corpses, but not for long periods of time and seldom on more than one occasion. In a more handsome body I could cause more trouble in a shorter period of time, so it was worth it. After a few winters had passed, however, my affection for her grew, the way the flavour of wood and sweet voices grows in young wine after it has been sitting in the barrel through the passage of several seasons. I discovered that she had a great capacity for mischief, or rather, my own was greatly increased with her as my disguise. Howling like an attic ghost, we frightened rich families from their meals and I ate better than I had in forty years.

 
My fur grew back, red and thick as butter, and my eyes glittered again like resurrected stars. She put on weight, although she never looked any healthier.

  A blood-hot day in summer. The air is hard to breathe and I am filled with a restless frustration that burns along my spine. Whether I take animal or human form, the mosquitoes hover about me. They bite. I think of each spot swelling as big as a second head and bursting with pus and infection. I think of scratching the itch right down to the bone. I gnaw furiously at a particularly aggravating one at the base of my tail, biting harder and harder, trying to push pain into clouding over the all-consuming itch. What finally distracts me from the itch is an idea. Turning it over in my head like meat on a slow barbeque, I sleep off the hottest part of the afternoon.

  The sun begins to drown in the liquid air, and the evening becomes cool enough to move through. I walk into the closest village, my unwashed hair smelling of complicated nightmares, and my red face puffy. My feet are bare and muddy and my clothes hang loose like scar tissue. I haven’t yet found a place to steal new ones that will fit.

  The first house on the edge of the village is a mansion surrounded by a high white wall. Beyond is a garden full of trees that can talk and flowers that smell of honey and spices. I speak to a man who guards the gate. He is small inside a clean but baggy uniform.

  ‘I would like to speak to the lady of the house.”

  “She’s too busy to speak to you.”

  “Then tell her that an old lady has a gift for her.” The man calls through the gate and another man peeks through an eye-hole. There is the whispering of leaves. The gate opens.

  The second man leads me through the garden and the trees chat noisily. He doesn’t answer them, and I don’t want him to think I’m crazy, so I don’t either.