The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (52 page)

The
fierce teenager whose name Zhu didn’t know kicked the girl, a knee thrust hard
into the captive’s belly. The girl doubled over, retching.

They
stormed down the stairwell, boots clattering, pregnant women screaming and
scattering before them, eyes bright with terror.

“What
did the old chairman say?” Zhu shouted at Sally. “You can’t make an omelet
without breaking some eggs!”

“Nah,
that’s too weak,” Sally shouted back, flushed and triumphant after her first
victim’s subjugation. They reached the door, Sally’s boot smashing the jamb
with a high sharp kick. “How about this, comrades? You can’t achieve negative
population growth without killing some babies!”

They
slammed through the door, which swung open to the right. A sentry posted inside
leapt off the stool she’d been sitting on and brandished it at them like a
tamer facing lions, but that’s all in the way of weapons she had. Oh, and a
whistle, which she jammed in her lips and blew, letting loose a piercing
shriek. Crowds of women cowered against the back wall. How stupid of them,
there was no other exit in the utility room. Newborns wailed, toddlers and
children who’d been brought along by their mothers screamed and cried. Zhu
smelled the stink of blood and baby shit and unwashed female bodies, a stink
that infuriated her. Selfish, greedy bitches, thinking only with their wombs,
oblivious of the world’s future, of the deprivation for all, of the potential
ruin they unleashed by the act of illicit procreation. And all in the name of
family, of Chinese tradition.

A
voice—hers—shouted, “You want tradition? We’re here to uphold a very old
Chinese tradition. Infanticide!”

She
pulled the handgun from beneath her right arm as a woman nine months pregnant
and her young son quailed on the concrete floor before her. The astonished look
on the woman’s face—that Zhu had pulled a gun on an unarmed pregnant woman and
her two-year-old son? Or that Zhu was left-handed?

Zhu
laughed wildly at the absurdity of her thoughts, but she didn’t shoot. A bullet
would have been too easy. She flipped the gun over, taking the barrel in her
fist, and slammed the grip on the woman’s shoulders, her back, her kidneys,
aiming for her belly. Her obscenely swollen belly. The woman crouched, wrapping
her arms around her knees, protecting herself and her unborn child. Her little
boy screamed and cried and clung to his mother while Zhu slammed the grip of
the gun,
whump, whump, whump.
And then she was beating the kid, smacking
the kid,
whump, whump, whump,
his little hands, his neck, his soft round
skull, his face canting back to look at her with wide green eyes, opaque with
incomprehension, his little mouth an O of shock.

*  
*   *

Is
he alive or dead?

That’s
all Zhu kept asking, all she wanted to know, after they arrested her, Sally
Chou, and the warrior women that night.

The
Changchi police stormed the clinic, and everything was chaos. Zhu couldn’t
remember much afterwards except the screams, the blood, the stink. The shock of
the little boy’s eyes, like cabochons of emerald. Of course the police beat her
on the way to jail and ripped off the black patch, forcing her into detox. She
lost consciousness. She didn’t feel any trauma till she lay in the cell in the
central women’s prison facility at Beijing, semicomatose for nearly five days
while an interrogator asked her over and over, “What is your name?” And then
the guilt, the horror, the shame.

Is
he alive or dead
?

The
media called it the Night of Broken Blossoms. Zhu’s face was featured in
telespace—the abandoned skipchild gone wrong. She never found out what happened
to Sally Chou. It was late June 2495 when her lawyer barged into the prison
cell, roused her out of an exhausted sleep, and said, “Listen up, Wong. I’ve
got a deal.”

Bang,
bang, bang
in the street.

Where
is she now? When?

San
Francisco, 1896, on the eve of Chinese New Year.

“I
am not a murderer,” Zhu says, collecting her feedbag purse. “Not even for the
Cause. A lot of things happened before that night. I was not myself. I never
meant to kill a child.”

“But
that night you attempted to do so,” Muse says. The monitor’s voice is cold.

“In
support of a law your cosmicists dreamed up.”

“Overpopulation
of the earth has been the most serious problem facing humanity’s survival and
global renewal since the brown ages.”

“Then
why is one little boy’s life so important?”

Muse
is silent.

“You
don’t want to say, do you, Muse? What
is
the value of a human life in a
world burdened with twelve billion people? In cosmicist theory, a human being
is no more important than an endangered butterfly. Who will be my judge and
jury?”

Muse
is silent.

Zhu
studies herself in the watery reflection of the nineteenth century mirror.
Is
he alive or dead?
Well. She’ll find out tonight at midnight. The t-port is
instantaneous, flinging her from this Now to her Now. There isn’t even
movement, not really. Tachyportation is a transmutation, not a traveling, and there
is no duration. A second seems to pass, but that’s subjective. A subjective
second and the void.

She
shudders when she remembers the void.

She
pins the aurelia on the collar of her gray silk dress. The final touch. She
stands at the threshold of her little bedroom for the last time, nostalgia
already leaking into her heart.
I’ll never see this place again.

She
hurries through Mariah’s parlor, into the hall, downstairs.

She
knows where to find Wing Sing so she can hand the aurelia over to the girl.
Where the most desperate streetwalkers go to ply their trade—the Barbary Coast.

*  
*   *

Zhu
hears shouts in the foyer, Jessie and Daniel. Now what? She tiptoes to the
bottom of the stairs, tries to sneak past them to the kitchen, and out the
tradesmen’s door. She’s got to go! But Daniel fastens his glittering, red-rimmed
eyes on her, seizes her wrist, and drags her into their altercation.

“Zhu
will stand me for the month, won’t you, my angel?”

“Hmph!
I’ll be damned if you’ll take the wage I pay my servant to pay
me,
”
Jessie says.

“It’s
her money after you pay it to her, now isn’t it?”

“She
and everything she’s got belongs to me.”

Zhu
gazes at Jessie, so like Sally Chou in her proprietary feeling toward her, and so
different from any woman she’s ever known, including Sally. The sight of her is
unsettling. As if reality is shifting, and shifting again. After the glamour of
the Artists’ Ball, Jessie looks sallow and bloated, her mouth pinched with
pain. She won’t listen to Zhu about the corset. She won’t stop guzzling Scotch
Oats Essence and champagne. Muse says Scotch Oats Essence is not only loaded
with whiskey but with morphine. Muse says the Queen of the Underworld is one
drink away from the grave.

“Let’s
hear what our Zhu has to say,” Daniel says.

“I
belong to no one, and I’ve got to go.” Her time in this Now is growing shorter.

“Never
mind her, she’s in one of her moods,” Jessie persists. “Mr. Watkins, I happen
to know you got money a-rollin’ in from your Chinatown slum, and you sold your
Western Addition lot, and you’re gettin’ the goods on Harvey’s Sausalito poolroom.”

“The
lawyers are breaking my back, and we haven’t even gone to court.”

“Sure
and it’s the lawyers, is it? If you want to go shoot your wad on dope, that’s
your biz. But I’ll not be stiffed by the likes of you.”

“When
I’m stiffing you, madam, you will know it.” His sarcasm doesn’t help. “I’m
telling you, my mistress will tide me over till next month, won’t you, Zhu?” He
seizes her arm and pulls her into the smoking parlor. “Now, listen, Zhu. I know
she gave you a raise. She’s paying you a pretty good wage, and all I need is. .
. .”

Zhu
closes her eyes. She’s choking—the air in the parlor is foul with old smoke.
His feverish whisper becomes a jumble in her ears, incomprehensible. Why was
she ever drawn to this man? How can she account for their mutual attraction,
dreadful as it is, except for the vast unseen patterns of pain and atrocity
they each have known in their separate lives? That’s how the cosmicists
think—correlations and correspondences are not random and not merely
synchronicity, but indicative of patterns, of the vast underlying energy flows
of space and time. Proof positive of the everpresent force of the Cosmic Mind.
Has she ever believed in cosmicist cosmology? Not really. But how else can she
account for her and Daniel?

“I
just need fifteen more dollars,” he’s saying. “What do you say?”

“I
say you’re killing yourself, Daniel. You’ll be dead before this year is out.”

“I
might as well be dead.” From his vest pocket he pulls out a clutch of fragile papers,
scrawled and blotched with ink. “I missed it. I missed it!”

Zhu
sighs. “Missed what?”

“Look.
Look at this! The Lumiere brothers, they did it. They figured out how to make
pictures move. I should never have left Paris. Damn Father and his petty
troubles! By God, I am such an idiot.”

“Oh,
right. You mean the movies.”

He aims
a sharp glance at her, stabs at the papers in his fist with his forefinger.
“Yes! They’ve invented a machine. They’ve actually shown moving pictures in a
theater. Rochelle wrote me. ‘A train charging down the track straight at you,
smokestack spewing like the wrath of God. Everyone screamed and leapt wild-eyed
to their feet.’ As if Rochelle could ever wax so eloquent. She probably got
that drunken poet to write this for her.”

“Refresh
my memory. When did this phenom happen?”

“Refresh!
Your memory!” He cocks his head at her. “Indeed, oh lady time traveler. After
Christmas, she says, at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines.” He
slaps his palm on his forehead. “How many hours I have wasted at the Grand,
sipping rainbow cups.”

“And
how many hours you’ve wasted in San Francisco, swilling rotgut, sniffing
cocaine, and shooting up morphine.”

“Don’t
go temperance on me.” He paces across the smoking parlor, growing more
feverish. “Well! The Lumieres are loaded. They threw money at it, there was no
contest from the likes of me.” He peers at Rochelle’s letter as if the ungainly
scrawl will reveal something more, something he overlooked. “Rochelle writes
that their box takes the pictures and projects them, too. By God, why didn’t I
think of that?” He whirls on her. “Why didn’t
you
think of that?”

“
Me?
“
Zhu sniffs. “That’s not what I do, inventing antiquated machines.”

“Oh,
indeed. Not so clever after all, are you? Well, of course, you’re a woman. As
good old Swinburne says, ‘The longer the hair, the smaller the brain.’” He
stuffs the letter into his pocket, his hands trembling. “I must see their
machine. I shall go to Paris at once!”

“Not
before you pay me what you owe me, buster,” Jessie says, standing on the
threshold, tapping her toe.

“Oh,
certainly, I’ll pay you. Take it out of my hide, madam! That’s all you sporting
gals ever think about, the filthy lucre.”

“And
all you fine gentlemen ever do is try to rook us out of it.”

Suddenly
Zhu can’t take it anymore. She can’t stand either of them, the tough madam or
the arrogant gentleman. Both of them so ignorant and set in their ways. And
there’s nothing she can do for either of them. Nothing. Without a word, she
flees the smoking parlor before Daniel can seize her arm again. She pulls the
veil down from the brim of her Newport hat, concealing her face.

“I’ve
got to go!”

“Hurry,”
Muse whispers.

Zhu
sweeps out into the night.

*  
*   *

“Jar
me, missy,” Jessie yells, dashing after her, “where do you think you’re going?”

Daniel
follows, pleading, “Come with me to Paris, my angel. We’ll invent our own
moving picture machine, you and I.”

“Lose
them,” Muse commands.

Zhu
picks up her skirts, dashes north on Dupont, crosses over at the Monkey Block,
and strides up the long incline of Montgomery Street, which looks gentle at
first but in fact is slow and cruel, making her breath catch and her legs ache.
Four bruisers in fishermen’s togs tramping along the sidewalk on the opposite
side of the street turn the corner when she does.
Nymphes du pave
stroll
past, fluttering their fans or smoothing rouge on their blistered lips. Bawdy
songs spill from saloon doors, rowdy shouts and the laughter of oblivion.

The
Gilded Age looks gentle at first, too. The polite speech and genteel manners,
the lovely long dresses and handsome cutaway suits, the golden glow of
gaslight, champagne on ice and terrapin in sweet cream. An age of huge
scientific and technological advancement, yet a much slower time before cars and
jets, freeways and computers, telespace and t-porting. But the Gilded Age is
cruel, Zhu knows that now. The rhetoric of social Darwinism lurks beneath the
polite speech, bigotry behind the genteel manners. Crippling corsets bind
women’s bodies beneath the lovely dresses and, in the dimness of the gaslight, you
can barely see the bruises husbands give their wives. Gentlemen eat and drink
and smoke themselves into early graves, and a blend of whiskey and morphine is
a medicine given children from a bottle with pink cupids on the label.