Swamp Foetus (8 page)

No one.

No one at all, if he knew what he was doing.

He sang the first song. He threw himself into it so hard that by the end of the song he was on his knees, clutching the microphone with both hands, pushing every bit of air in his body into the notes. His glory had reached its crescendo. If anyone noticed the wetness on his cheeks, they thought it was sweat. He held the last note of the song for a full minute.

The crowd went wild.

It was time to fly.

He eased himself up, trembling, and went to the rear of the stage where the wires dangled. They glinted gold and silver and all the colors of the stage lights, thin as hairs but strong enough, together, to support a hundred and thirty-five pounds of him. He began attaching them to the hooks on his harness. When he came to the last wire, the one that supported the largest part of his weight, he glanced into the wings. The tech nodded, ready to pull him up.

He looped the wire around his neck and gave the signal.

1980

He got up and walked away from the piano to the window. Fine mist from the crashing of the waves on the rocks was hitting the glass—there would be a storm soon. He might sit by the long window and watch its glorious fury.

He returned to the piano and played a little more, a sprinkling, dancing tune that skipped across the polished floor. He rested his cheek on the top of the piano, loving its sleek coolness against his skin. His hand strayed to his throat and stroked the tight, shiny scar that stretched nearly from ear to ear. His fingers traced the jagged line of it. He remembered the relief he’d felt, waking after the hours of impossibly delicate surgery, when the doctor told him his vocal cords had been severed and he would never talk—let alone sing—again.

He sat at his piano for a while. Then, when the long, sweet sound of serenity had completely filled him, he went to the window to watch the storm.

(1985)

I hated Robert. He thought he was a Punk Rocker. He wore one pink hightop sneaker and one yellow, and he never washed his hair, so it stood up in filthy little twists all over his head. When I took him down to Chinatown, I was hoping I could get him drunk and sell him to some unscrupulous Chinese chef for big money. It’s said they use dead cats. Why not Robert Foo Yung?

He talked so much on the bus (about uninteresting things like the book of poisonous recipes he was writing) that we got off at the wrong stop and found ourselves in the porn district. The light of the setting sun was as red as desire. X’s paraded across every marquee. The poster girls’ nipples and lipstick had long since faded to a dusty orange. The signs and lampposts and even the square of sidewalk we stood on seemed to vibrate silently in the hellish glow, as if some enormous city-machine thrummed far below the pavement. “You’ve gotten us lost,” said Robert, licking his lips nervously, and then we rounded a corner and saw the pinnacle of Chinatown’s first gaudy pagoda rising above the city.

The streets of Chinatown thrilled me, but my excitement was spiked with a vein of clear unease. I sometimes wonder whether my large Caucasian presence was merely tolerated on the exotic streets, perhaps even found secretly amusing. At night the lights of Chinatown turn the sky bright purple, and the banners hung from balcony to scrolled balcony crack in the wind like shots, their messages unreadable (Good Health? Long Life? Get Fucked?). There seems always to be a smell of gunpowder and hot sesame oil in the air. The neon runs together in a blaze of colors, red and white and green and gold and azure, and if you should happen to arrive after dropping a nice hit or two of acid, all the spiky Chinese characters will jump off the signs and race round and round at a giddy speed, laughing into your mystified, unslanted, unblack eyes.

We stopped in front of a restaurant and considered having Dim Sum, but the menu was written in Chinese, all up-and-down. “Fried lice,” Robert translated, putting his sticky fingers all over the window glass. “Monkey brains in syrup. Eyeball pie.” He giggled. I noticed a crust of old lipstick in the corners of his mouth. Why had I brought him? Could I drag him into the shadowy serene interior of some temple, leave him sacrificed before a smiling golden Buddha?

A river of people flowed around us as we stood waiting for something to happen on the corner of two inscrutably marked streets. Most of them wore neat black clothes and neat black slippers, and were a full head shorter than Robert or I. The darker of the two streets was lit mostly with blue neon—the blue light is a universal advertisement for Chinese food, and a native far from home knows that where he sees it he will find the rice lovingly steamed, the pork pickle well-braised— and the glossily bobbing heads flickered with highlights of unearthly blue. I felt immense, pale, bloated. Robert was worse. He shifted from foot to pink-shod foot, muttering under his breath, twirling a matted lock of hair round his finger. His eyes had taken on the color of the night sky over Chinatown. One look into them and I knew tonight would be a hideous adventure that might never end. He had that wild empty glare he got sometimes, like his soul had gone out to party and left him behind and he was determined to catch up with it. Once when he had gotten that glare in New Orleans, we woke up three days later in a motel room that reeked of ash and sour vomit, wearing nothing but dirty underwear and beaded Mardi Gras masks.

But right now he only wanted ice cream. We huddled in a sweet shop, eating vanilla because the other flavors— lychee, almond, green tea—sounded too Chinese. Even the vanilla had a peculiar aftertaste, faintly oily but too delicate to offend. Beside us was a display case full of strange dusty-looking pastries: thousand-year-old eggs in sugared nests, squid jellies piped full of cream. The shop was lit by a single weak lamp behind a paper shade. In its dimness I made out only one other customer, a lone old man nursing a cup of tea.

Robert wanted to drink, but had spent our last money on the bus fare and the ice cream. We sat at the table trying to think of a way around our poverty, or straight through it if need be. “We could find some girls,” I said.

The very ends of his hair trembled. “Chinese girls? I heard that their, you know, their, you know...” His voice was loud and babyish.

I lowered my own voice almost to a whisper, hoping he would copy me. “Cunts, Robert.”

“...That they open sideways instead of up-and- down."

Most of Robert’s babble slipped past me, but not this. I stopped eating my ice cream and became lost in trying to visualize such an intriguing possibility. In my mind I could see the tantalizing orifice, but it remained mad deningly vertical; I could not make it turn sideways. Only when Robert poked me in the ribs did I notice the old Chinese man standing silently before our table.

He might have been three hundred years old. He might have been a Biblical king come out of the desert, with cold stars gleaming in his long black eyes. He might have been a bonsai tree, shrunken and gnarled, with skin the color of old wood. But he was well-dressed, I saw: a neat and sober black suit, a shirt so white it took on a faint silver glow in the dim light. A little beard grew under his chin like a goat’s, waggling when he spoke. “If I may disturb you?” He paused, then added, “Gentlemen?”

Robert was beyond speech; he just stared, his mouth open a little, a last trace of vanilla on his lips. The moment stretched out long, punctuated by the blinking of neon outside. On—and the inside of the shop was bathed in garish night rainbows. Off—and there was only the lamp behind its faded paper shade, and the soft web of shadows. At last my manners came back to me and I pointed at a chair. “Go ahead. Disturb us.”

He sat neatly, his hands folded before him. They were like old ginseng roots: long-fingered, tapering, dry. The beard waggled again. “You were saying you needed money for the night’s... ah... festivities.”

His perfect English suddenly annoyed me. I became tough, but suave; all I needed was a snap-brim hat and a pencil-thin moustache. “You want to give us some?” His eyes seemed to burn a hole through my facade. “Not give... not exactly. I am a businessman, you see, and I require a service. If I were to offer you five dollars each, might you be able to perform a service for me?”

“Five dollars!” Robert snorted. “We wouldn’t wash your chopsticks for five dollars.”

“I see,” said the old man. “And if I were to add that you might have unlimited use of a bottle of good cognac?”

Before Robert could say anything I leaned across the table and put my face right up next to the old man’s. “Just what business are you in, mister?”

The man paused. I saw neon flickering across his eyes. On—and they exploded with a thousand firework colors. Off—and they were flat black, the color of dynasties long fallen to dust, the color of Mystery incarnate.

“I am an undertaker,” he said.

It turned out that the man wanted Robert and me to keep vigil over the corpse of a middle-aged woman while he slipped out to drink with another undertaker. His apprentice was ill, he explained, and his parlor had already been broken into twice. Bandits came through the window and robbed the corpses of rings, watches, even—on one occasion—an artificial foot. I wondered who had wanted the foot, and why, and if the other undertaker was also abandoning his charges to go out drinking. At the back of my mind was still that disquieting image, the one I could not quite visualize.

Robert looked sidelong at me. It would be an easy ten dollars—if the old man’s story was true. Why would he trust us to watch over the corpse of a stranger, and a Chinese one at that? At worst the man might lead us to a secret slaughterhouse where we would be hung on hooks, bled dry by tubes of bamboo shoved beneath our skin, and sold as cheap sides of pork to the less reputable restaurants. At best, he might lure us to an opium palace where we would be used like other, choicer cuts of meat, kept blissfully stoned every hour. But if the old man was telling the truth, his cognac would give our evening a fast start. Robert stared at me: he would not refuse, so neither could I. “All right,” I said, and we followed the old man out of the sweet shop.

It was getting late now, and a party had begun in Chinatown. The street was a dazzle of lights, a feast of smells. Neon ran riot. Traffic signals stayed red or turned green, and cars inched along the narrow street flashing their headlights impatiently. Slabs of pork sizzled on a grill, oiling the air with the tender red scent of meat. I saw a row of ducks hanging in the window of a grocery, skinned, their eyes scooped out and their beaks tied shut with dirty bits of string. Below them was a porcelain bowl filled with what looked like thousands of tiny dried-up human hands.

The man led us down an alley, along a steep unlit back street where tough Chinese stood on the corner passing a pint of wine. We entered a high vaulted passage, then wound through a maze of corridors that opened onto a courtyard made of moonlight and stillness. Here flowed a small stream over rocks of luminescent alabaster. Here grew trees that seemed carved all in jade, each leaf, each twig. I looked up. The square of night sky above the courtyard was a deeper purple than we had seen earlier, a velvet hand cradling a cold slice of moon. We came upon an iron staircase that spiralled up into darkness. The old man beckoned to us, then began to climb.

We went down a long hallway lit by votive candles in wall-sconces. The tiny blue flames flickered sharply in one direction, then in the other, though I felt no draft in the hall. We passed a line of tightly shut doors and were admitted into the last one.

“This is my parlor,” the old man told us.

The room was wrapped in shadow. The darkness didn’t recede much when the old man pulled a silk cord; the only light in the room came from a lamp with a shade of heavy red paper, as dim as the one in the sweet shop.

The object of our vigil lay on a long red table near the window. Through the thick draperies I saw the neon of Chinatown still blinking, playing over the shroud. On—and each fold of cloth was full of a different color light. Off—and it was only wrinkled linen again, bone- white and shadow-gray, wound tightly around each hill and lump of the woman’s body. I stared at the blinking rainbow shroud, transfixed. Then I glanced up and saw Robert staringjust as fixedly at the large bottle of cognac the man had brought out from a hidden cupboard.

“Enjoy,” he said. “Gentlemen. And if the lady should become restless, you need only give her a sip of this.”

Not until he was five minutes gone did we realize that the undertaker had cracked a joke.

I kept vigil beside the shroud, swigging from the bottle of cognac whenever Robert offered it to me. I was already well along—a warm amber fire smoldering in my throat, a puddle of brains swimming pleasantly inside my skull. Robert sucked down twice as much cognac as I did. He roamed around the room looking at everything. He tried to peek under the shroud and see the woman’s face, but the cloth was tucked securely beneath the heavy head. The shroud molded the shape of the body precisely. After my fifth swig of cognac, an uneasy impression began to nag at me: the idea that there might be no corpse at all under that shroud, that the cloth might be like a decayed mummy’s wrappings, cradling only the memory of a body. Robert had once taken me to visit his parents’ house. He caught a big spider and put it in his mother’s microwave oven on a setting of 1 MIN—HIGH. When we took the spider out and broke it open, whatever innards it might have had were cooked away—not even a gummy residue of viscera remained. The body was only a dry chitinous husk. This was how I pictured the shroud—an empty shell wrapped around eternity.

Robert found a cache of morticians’ makeup in a drawer. The rouge came in a little gold compact with a vanity mirror inside, which I found obscenely funny. Robert began to smear the makeup onto his face: yellowish pancake base heavy enough to cover knife wounds or the purple discoloration of asphyxia, white eyeshadow that made his eyes seem to bulge out of their sockets, shocking pink lipstick. Then he reached into the makeup case again and pulled out a more interesting object: a porcelain pipe with a long slender stem of silver. It was empty, but the bowl was blackened with a sticky sweet-smelling residue.