The Girl with Ghost Eyes (25 page)

The scream spirit struck me like a hammer. It carried so much force. Being hit by a locomotive might feel like that. I went sprawling toward the edge of the roof, with black miasma clinging to me. The spirit billowed, swathed me in inky blackness. It burrowed into my mouth, my nostrils, my ears. I could not think. I felt darkness burning at my spirit like acid. My self, my soul, felt like it was being destroyed.

Unnatural quiet came over me, then darkness. I was inside the spirit now. It was dissolving my memory, my identity. Before long, I knew, I wouldn’t be able to recall my own name. I refused to scream.

24

No time. There was no time left. I was beginning to lose consciousness. The scream spirit was eating my memories. That profound darkness etched deeper into me.

Etched. Liu Qiang had cut a spell into the center of my stomach. My father had cut a spell into my left side. Now the scream spirit was erasing me.

I began to drive a fingernail into the right side of my stomach. The pain was sharp and sudden. I needed three words to find myself again once I’d been lost. I needed three characters carved into my skin so I could climb out of this pit. I needed Jing, Qi, and Shen.

Jing came first. Fourteen strokes for the perfected essence. I gouged it into my stomach. My fingernail met my skin with a biting pain. Then came Qi, ten strokes for the breath, the vital energy that moves in two directions through all living things. I drove my thumbnail into my skin, writing Qi. The pain made me squirm. Warm blood trickled out onto my fingers. Shen, the character for spirit, came next. I stopped. How many strokes did the character Shen have? It was a simple word, but somehow I couldn’t remember how to write it.

My mind felt hazy. I was feeling oddly relaxed, falling asleep. I lost track of whatever I’d been doing. My arm felt heavy. Soft, warm, and heavy. I felt it flop down at my side. It was heavy. I was tired. So tired.

Small and frightened. Memories flitted through my mind like minnows in a stream. So many memories. The sensation was of something sifting through me, of things being torn from my grip. But what? I felt a loss but I couldn’t remember what it was or why it mattered.

Ha, once there was a little girl. Singing a little song. Sing, sing, singing. Hahaha! Was that me? Ha. Father’s gaze hit me harder than a slap. “Where did you hear that song?”

“A turtle was singing it, Father.”

His eyes aimed at me, tense as arrows in bows, ready to shoot. “What kind of turtle was this, Ah Li?”

“It was a silver turtle. The kind that floats in the air. It had an eye in the middle of its face. It was pretty.”

He gave a tortured sigh. “It wasn’t pretty, Ah Li. It was an abomination. Do you see things like that often?”

“All the time, Father.”

He burned a yellow paper talisman, gathered its ashes, and stirred them into a cup of water. “Drink this,” he said. “It should blind your yin eyes.”

I drank the water. Gagged it down. He looked at me gravely, his face sharp as the point of an axe.

“You will drink talismanic water once a month, like a tonic, to keep you well.”

“Yes, Father,” I said.

He gave a quick nod. His right eye was twitching, moving, like it wasn’t part of his face at all. Looking at me, it said, “There are three treasures.”

But wait, no, that didn’t happen. That wasn’t what happened. I felt confused. His eye didn’t say anything to me. What had happened?

The ash-infused water worked. That afternoon I saw no spirits, anywhere.

That night, my father brought paper offerings to burn at the corner of Dupont and California. He carried an iron basket and a satchel of paper offerings. I followed close behind. The streets had never felt less haunted. I looked at the crowds of Chinese immigrants. For the first time I could remember, I saw no swirl of misty faces around any of them, even though the sun had set. My father’s spell had worked. Ancestors, ghosts, and goblins, all the creatures that come out at night, were hidden from me.

My father placed First Treasure at the bottom of his iron basket. First Treasure was coarse paper painted with purple and green stripes. Moving with the soft, rounded motions of a true taiji master, my father lit a match. He held the first of the Hell Bank Notes over the match’s flame. Fire took the printed sheet by inches. Each movement was perfect, because perfection mattered to him. When the bill had begun to burn well, he dropped the flaming bank note onto First Treasure. He lit another bill.

I had seen my father perform this ceremony before, many times, but the spirit world had always been visible to me. I’d watched my father’s performance and seen the spirits respond. This was the first time I’d ever watched him without being able to see the other side. My father had never seen the spirits mill around him, groping for money. He’d never been able to see the gratitude in their pale, no-longer-quite-human faces.

The meaning of my father’s actions changed. Seeing him like this reshaped my notion of my father as a man: unsmiling but generous, smoke and sparks swirling around him, he labored every night to bring riches to dead men he would never see. The depth of his devotion moved me. So much effort, so much sacrifice, and all of it on faith. He spent his life protecting the living, assuaging the dead, and at the end of the day he had no one to love him, no one but me.

I looked up. It was getting dark out. Fog and smoke obscured the streets. In the haze I saw something glowing. It was a rich amber glow. It came from a pair of eyes.

The water dragon was longer than a man’s height, but no wider than a man’s thigh. His fur glistened, blue and white, like foam on the sea. There was an unearthly beauty to his sea-blue mane. His whiskers streamed like a kite in the wind.

With a barking laugh, he peeled back and away, surging up off the street and into the air. He flew upward in coils and dove into the clouds. The fog twisted as it accepted him. He flowed into the clouds foot by foot until there was no sign of him but a glowing pair of amber eyes only I could see.

I shouldn’t have been able to see it at all. Not anymore. My father’s spell had failed.

I turned to face my father. Focused completely on his ceremony, he noticed no other world. He was proud of his work, proud of the perfect execution of his rituals. He started burning another thousand-yuan bill. It blackened into cinder. I witnessed the change. What had been paper was transformed, by fire, into a thing of spirit. It became real money in the spirit world. Ghostly arms reached out from the shadows to gather the wealth. I could see them.

Tears tried to come out of my eyes, but I held them back. I never forgot that moment, the fire and shadows, the magnificence of the water dragon, the paper-smoke smell of an older country’s magic. Watching my father, I knew to my core that I would rather live a painful life than tell him that his spell had worn off. My yin eyes had returned, and I was going to keep them.

At that moment I found my Jing. My refined essence.

Where am I? I wondered. I felt stronger. My legs began to twitch. There were people screaming all around me. Something was fighting me. And I had started to fight back.

A dark worm was eating my memories. I felt them go—a spring day, a cold morning, a conversation, an encounter. Gone. Snow fell over a village and something happened, but I forgot what it was. In the place of the memory, there was only haze. The steamer surged across the Pacific, someone said something, a barrel of rice began to bleed, and then fog rolled over the memory. I felt small losses as my history flitted away, an hour at a time.

Sparring with Rocket—no.

It couldn’t have that.

Not that.

His fist came flying at me. He could break bricks, my husband, yet I knew he’d never hurt me. I dodged his hammer-punch and spun to face him. I was too slow. His knee raised up to crunch my chin but somehow he stopped himself an inch away. I laughed and thrust both hands at him, gouging with my thumbs. He caught my hands, pressed them to his lips, and flipped me over. I landed rolling and sprang up to face him. His eyes were so soft, and his mouth was so serious.

He launched a forward kick at my stomach and I dove in below his leg, yanking back at his ankle. Somehow he dropped his other leg and used his arms to propel himself into a flying kick. Both legs hit me and we landed in a sprawling laughing heap. I wrapped my ankles in front of his neck and shoved him off, and in instants we were back on our feet. I wasn’t close to being his equal in a fight—no one was—but he was the greatest man I’d ever known, the greatest fighter, and I was going to make myself the best woman I could be. I was going to be a woman who deserved a man like him.

An eye was standing on the ground. “There are three treasures,” it said. I blinked. That wasn’t right. I looked again. There was no eye there, and there never had been.

I launched myself at the man I loved. My flurry of jabs and kicks forced him to take a step back, and then another. He smiled at me, impressed. His approving smile filled me with vigor, so I shot after him again. I was going to give him the best fight of his life.

I wouldn’t let go of that memory, the one time I ever fought Rocket to a standstill. The one time anyone ever did. Something was trying to take the memory away from me, trying to tear it away, but I refused to let it go. I held on with a kind of determination that only those who have loved and loved deeply could understand. I had lost my husband, but I would not lose the memory. Not that one. I dug in, and it felt as though a wind were pressing at me. For that memory, I would be a mountain against the wind.

The wind came to a stop. And with that, I found my Qi, the vital energy that animates the body and the universe.

I felt invigorated, stronger, and more certain. Voices were screaming all around me. I was in trouble, I knew that, though I didn’t know why. But I also knew that I was going to find a way out of it.

Suddenly, somehow, I was no longer inside the scream spirit.

I was lying on my back on the roof. The scream spirit was trying to climb on top of me again, a centipede of dark smoke.

And then the sky tore open and Father stood over it with a wooden staff.

25

The scream spirit unfurled in the air. Its dark wormy length shot out at my father, but he was ready for its attack. Even missing an eye, even recovering from severe injuries, he sidestepped the charging worm and struck out with his goosewood staff, gouging a massive wound along its side.

I pushed myself up to my elbows and watched my father fight the scream monster. It attacked him, he stepped away, he hit it again with his staff. With each strike the monster grew more enraged and more reckless. Then it died.

Near the mass of darkness, other men sprawled around. The hatchetmen were dead. Liu Qiang was dead. I looked at Father. “You did this?” I asked, and there was awe in my voice. “You did all this? Alone?”

He gave a curt nod and offered a hand to help me up. “Well,” he said, “not really alone. Your help was valuable.”

I flushed at the unexpected praise. “I did nothing important, Father.”

He flashed a fierce little grin. He looked immensely proud of himself. “Look behind me, Li-lin.”

A tall man was standing behind him. And my world turned upside-down.

“Rocket?” I said. Tears began to stream down my face. “Gods and ancestors, you must be a ghost.”

My father grinned. “Among Liu Qiang’s possessions, he had a number of books. One of them had a spell that allowed me to bring your husband back to life.”

“What are you saying?” I said amid sobs. “How could this be? Is this real?” I looked around me, at the rooftop. “Please let this be real,” I whispered.

“It’s really me,” said my husband, young and serious, handsome, caring, and concerned. My husband.

“Husband, I wailed at your grave for forty-nine days. I have cried myself to sleep every night for two years.”

“I am here now.”

My husband was alive. I couldn’t believe it. It made no sense. He died. His corpse was buried. His name was intoned with the ancestors. In a few months it would be time for us to unearth his bones and have them smuggled to China, where they would be buried alongside his ancestors.

I gazed in his face, the face of the boy who had always wanted to protect everyone, the face of the serious young man he had grown into. It was my husband’s face. I loved seeing his eyes and mouth again.

“How …” I began. “How can you be here, Husband? Long ago you should have drunk tea with Lady Meng Po. You should have forgotten me. You should have forgotten your life, and been born afresh somewhere else.”

He gave a brief sigh, as he had so often before. “The questions you ask are for philosophers to answer, Li-lin. If I were a wise man I could answer you, but I’m only a fisherman’s son who likes to jump and kick.”

I stared at him, tears welling in my eyes. These were my husband’s words, and I’d heard him say such things many a time. His face, his posture, his eyes, no different from the bold young man who loved me until the day he died.

I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. My husband had come back to me.

The next morning we climbed to the roof of Father’s temple and watched the sun come up. Purple and orange streaks painted the dawn sky, while I hunkered down in the security of my husband’s arms.

In the afternoon Rocket and I went to see Bok Choy, and he told me I’d been released from my contract. “I made peace with Mr. Wong,” he said. The two tongs worked together and created great prosperity in Chinatown.

Father found a spell that cured me of my yin eyes. Never again would I be afflicted with the horrors of the spirit world.

Rocket and I moved to a little house in South Berkeley. Every morning he held me tight while we watched the dawn break. The sun rose each day through wisps of fog, rising over the tall buildings of the San Francisco skyline. Each day’s light renewed the world.

One day Dr. Wei told me that my husband and I were going to have a baby. I was so happy. The man I loved was back in my life, and we were going to start a family. “I hope I can give you sons,” I said.