After Lao Lu told me that, I worried about that smell every time I hung the laundry, every time I went into the garden to bury my eggs. I smelled camphor, cassia, dead leaves, and flowering bushes. But the day that I’m now talking about, I thought I smelled the Ghost Merchant, his fear of death, very strong, chili and garlic, maybe a little vinegar too. It was a day of great heat, during the month when the cicadas unbury themselves after lying four years in the ground. They were singing, the males shrieking for females, each one trying to be the loudest. I kept my one eye aimed toward the gateway, just in case the Ghost Merchant was in there, looking for his feet. I heard a rustling sound, dry leaves crackling, twigs snapping, and black birds rushed up out of the bushes and scattered in the sky. The cicadas fell silent.
My bones were trembling. I wanted to run away. But I heard the Ghost Bandit Maiden inside me say, “Scared? How can you be scared of a Punti merchant with no feet? Go inside and see where he is.” I was now both scared and ashamed to be scared. I carefully went to the gateway, peeked in. When the cicadas began to buzz, I ran into the garden, my feet crunching dead leaves. I darted onto the stone bridge, past the dry pond, over the hills rolling up and down. When the buzzing turned into clacks, I stopped, knowing the cicadas would soon exhaust themselves and fall quiet. Using their song, I ran and stopped, ran and stopped, until I was standing at the bottom of the hill big enough for a small pavilion. I circled its bottom when the clacking stopped, and stared at a man sitting on a stone bench, eating a tiny banana. I had never heard of a ghost eating a banana. Of course, since then, other ghosts have told me that they sometimes pretend to eat bananas, although never ones with lots of black bruises, which is what this man’s banana had.
When the man saw me, he leapt to his feet. He had a peculiar but elegant face, not Chinese, not foreign. He wore gentleman’s clothes. I had seen this man before, I was sure of it. Then I heard sounds coming from the other side of the hill, a loud stream of water splashing on rocks, a man sighing, feet crunching twenty seasons of leaves. I saw the flash of a silver-tipped walking stick, the hollowed face of the man who owned it. His hands were busy closing the many buttons of his trousers. This was General Cape, and the elegant man with the banana was the one-half man called Yiban.
Wah! Here was the man I had prayed would return to Miss Banner. I later prayed that he would stay away, but I must not have asked God that as many times.
Cape barked to Yiban, and then Yiban said to me, “Little Miss, this gentleman is a famous Yankee general. Is this the house where the God-worshipping foreigners live?”
I didn’t answer. I was remembering what the man who came back to Thistle Mountain had said: that General Cape had turned traitor against the Hakkas. I saw General Cape looking at my shoes. He spoke again, and Yiban translated: “The lady who gave you those leather shoes is a great friend of the general. She is anxious to see him.”
So the shoes with my feet inside led the two men to Miss Banner. And Yiban was right. She was anxious to see General Cape. She threw her arms around him and let him lift her in the air. She did this in front of Pastor Amen and Mrs. Amen, who although they were husband and wife never touched each other, not even in their own room—that’s what Lao Lu told me. Late at night, when everyone was supposed to be asleep but was not, Miss Banner opened her door and General Cape quickly walked from his room into hers. Everyone heard this; we had no windows, only wooden screens.
I knew Miss Banner would call the general into her room. Earlier that evening, I had told her Cape was a traitor to Hakka people, that he would be a traitor to her as well. She became very angry with me, as if I were saying these things to curse her. She said General Cape was a hero, that he had left her in Canton only to help the God Worshippers. So then I told her what the man who returned to Thistle Mountain had said: that General Cape had married a Chinese banker’s daughter for gold. She said my heart was rotten meat and my words were maggots feeding on gossip. She said if I believed these things about General Cape, then I would no longer be her loyal friend.
I said to her, “When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can you no longer be one?” She didn’t answer.
Late at night, I heard the music box play, the one her father had given her when she was a young girl. I heard the music that made tears pour from Mrs. Amen’s eyes, but now the music was making a man kiss a girl. I heard Miss Banner sigh, again and again. And her happiness was so great it spilled over, leaked into my room, and turned into tears of sorrow.
I
’ve started doing my laundry at Kwan’s house again. Simon used to take care of the wash—that was one of the nice things about being married to him. He liked to tidy up the house, snap fresh sheets and smooth them onto the bed. Since he left, I’ve had to wash my own clothes. The coin-op machines are in the basement of my building, and the mustiness and dim light give me the willies. The atmosphere preys on my imagination. But then, so does Kwan.
I always wait until I run out of clean underwear. And then I throw three bagfuls of laundry into the car and head for Balboa Street. Even now, as I stuff my clothes into Kwan’s dryer, I think about that story she told me the day I was so hopeful with love. When she got to the part about joy turning into sorrow, I said, “Kwan, I don’t want to hear this anymore.”
“Ah? Why?”
“It bums me out. And right now, I want to stay in a good mood.”
“Maybe I tell you more, don’t become bum. You see mistake Miss Banner do—”
“Kwan,” I said, “I don’t want to hear about Miss Banner.
Ever.
”
What power! What relief! I was amazed how strong Simon made me feel. I could stand up to Kwan. I could decide whom I should listen to and why. I could be with someone like Simon, who was down-to-earth, logical, and sane.
I never thought that he too would fill my life with ghosts.
T
he night Simon kissed me for the first time was when I finally learned the truth about Elza. The spring quarter had ended and we were walking in the hills behind the Berkeley campus, smoking a joint. It was a warm June night, and we came upon an area where tiny white lights were twinkling in the oak trees as if it were Christmas.
“Am I hallucinating?” I asked.
“Fireflies,” Simon answered. “Aren’t they amazing?”
“Are you sure? I don’t think they exist in California. I’ve never seen them before.”
“Maybe some student bred them for a work-study experiment and let them go.”
We sat on the scabby trunk of a fallen tree. Two flickering bugs were zigzagging their way toward each other, their attraction looking haphazard yet predestined. They flashed on and off like airplanes headed for the same runway, closer and closer, until they sparked for an instant as one, then extinguished themselves and flitted darkly away.
“That’s romance for you,” I said.
Simon smiled and looked right at me. He awkwardly put his arm around my waist. Ten seconds passed, twenty seconds, and we hadn’t moved. My face grew hot, my heart was beating fast, as I realized we were crossing the confines of friendship, about to leap over the fence and run for the wilds. And sure enough, our mouths, like those fireflies, bobbed and weaved toward each other. I closed my eyes when his lips reached mine, both of us trembly and tentative. Just as I pressed in closer to let him take me into a more passionate embrace, he released me, practically pushed me. He started talking in an apologetic tone.
“Oh God, I’m sorry. I really like you, Olivia. A lot. It’s complicated, though, because of—well, you know.”
I flicked a bug off the trunk, stared at it dumbly as it twirled on its back.
“You see, the last time I saw her, we had a terrible fight. She got very angry with me, and I haven’t seen her since. That was six months ago. The thing is, I still love her. But—”
“Simon, you don’t have to explain.” I stood up on shaky legs. “Let’s just forget it, okay?”
“Olivia, sit down. Please. I have to tell you. I want you to understand. This is important.”
“Let go of me. Forget it, okay? Oh, shit! Just pretend it never happened!”
“Wait. Come back. Sit down, please sit down. Olivia, I have to tell you this.”
“What the hell for?”
“Because I think I love you too.”
I caught my breath. Of course, I would have preferred if he hadn’t qualified his declaration with “I think” and “too,” as if I could be part of an emotional harem. But infatuated as I was, “love” was enough to act as both balm and bait. I sat down.
“If you hear what happened,” he said, “maybe you’ll understand why it’s taken me so long to tell you how I feel about you.”
My heart was still pounding wildly with a strange mixture of anger and hope. We sat in nervous silence for a few minutes. When I was ready, I said in a cool voice, “Go ahead.”
Simon cleared his throat. “This fight Elza and I had, it was in December, during the quarter break. I was back in Utah. We had planned to go cross-country skiing in Little Cottonwood Canyon. The week before, we’d been praying for new snow, and then it finally came in truckloads, three feet of fresh powder.”
“She didn’t want to go,” I guessed, trying to hurry up the story.
“No, we went. So we were driving up the canyon, and I remember we were talking about the SLA and whether giving food to the poor made extortion and bank robbery less reprehensible. Out of the blue, Elza asked me, ‘What do you feel about abortion?’ And I thought I heard wrong. ‘Extortion?’ I said. And she said, ‘No, abortion.’ So I said, ‘You know, like what we said before, about
Roe versus Wade,
that the decision didn’t go far enough.’ She cut me off and said, ‘But what do you
really
feel about abortion?’ ”
“What did she mean, really feel?”
“That’s what I asked. And she said slowly, enunciating every syllable: ‘I mean emotionally, what do you feel?’ And I said, ‘Emotionally, I think it’s fine.’ Then she blew up: ‘You didn’t even think about the question! I’m not asking you about the weather. I’m asking you about the lives of human beings! I’m talking about the real life of a woman versus the potential life in her womb!’ ”
“She was hysterical.” I was eager to emphasize Elza’s volatile and unreasonable nature.
He nodded. “At the trailhead, she jumped out of the car, really pissed, threw on her skis. Just before she took off, she screamed, ‘I’m pregnant, you idiot. And there’s no way I’m having this baby and ruining my life. But it tears me up to abort it and you’re just sitting there, smiling, saying it’s fine.’ ”
“Omigod. Simon. How were you supposed to know?” So that was it, I thought: Elza had wanted to get married, and confronted with the prospect, Simon had refused. Good for him.
“I was stunned,” Simon continued. “I had no idea. We were always careful about birth control.”
“You think she slipped up on purpose?”
He frowned. “She’s not that kind of person.” He seemed defensive.
“What did you do?”
“I put on my skis, followed her tracks. I kept shouting for her to wait, but she went over a crest and I couldn’t see her anymore. God, I remember how beautiful it was that day, sunny, peaceful. You know, you never think terrible things can happen when the weather’s nice.” He laughed bitterly.
I thought he was through—since that day he and Elza hadn’t seen each other, end of story, time for the sequel, me. “Well,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic, “the least she could have done was given you a chance to discuss the situation before jumping all over you.”
Simon leaned forward and buried his face in his hands. “Oh God!” he said in an anguished voice.
“Simon, I understand, but it wasn’t your fault, and now it’s over.”
“No, wait,” he said hoarsely. “Let me finish.” He stared at his knees, took a few deep breaths. “I got to this steep fire road, and there was an out-of-bounds sign. Just beyond that, she was sitting at the top of a ledge, hugging herself, crying. I called to her and she looked up, really pissed. She pushed off and headed down this steep wide-open bowl. I can still see it: The snow, it was incredible, pristine and bottomless. And she was gliding down, taking the fall line. But about halfway down, she hit some heavier snow, her skis sank, and she sagged to a stop.”
I looked at Simon’s eyes. They were fixed on something faraway and lost, and I became scared.
“I yelled her name as loud as I could. She was mashing her poles against the snow, trying to kick up the tips of her skis. I yelled again— ‘Goddamnit, Elza!’—and I heard this sound, like a muffled gunshot, and then it was perfectly quiet again. She turned around. She was squinting—she must have been blinded by the sun. I don’t think she saw it— the slope, two hundred yards above her. It was slowly tearing, no sound, like a giant zipper opening up. The seam became a crack, an icy blue shadow. And then it was snaking fast, straight across. The crack slipped down a little, and it was huge, glassy as an ice rink. Then everything began to rumble, the ground, my feet, my chest, my head. And Elza— I could tell she knew. She was struggling to get out of her skis.”
Like Elza, I knew what was coming. “Simon, I don’t think I want to hear any more of this—”
“She threw off her skis and her backpack. She was jumping through the snow, sinking to her hips. I started yelling, ‘Go to the side!’ And then the mountain collapsed and all I could hear was this train roar, trees snapping, whole stands of them, popping like toothpicks.”
“Oh God,” I whispered.
“She was swimming on top of the crud—that’s what you’re supposed to do, swim, swim, keep swimming. And then . . . she was swallowed up . . . gone. Everything creaked and settled, then grew absolutely still. I could smell pine pitch from the broken trees. My mind was going a million miles a minute. Don’t panic, I told myself, if you panic it’s all over. I skied down the side, between the trees where the snow was intact. I kept telling myself, Remember where she went under. Look for skis sticking up. Use one of your skis as a marker. Dig with your pole. Spread out in a widening circle.
“But when I got to the bottom, nothing looked the way it did from the top. The point I’d marked in my head, shit, it wasn’t there, just this huge field of rubbly snow, heavy as wet cement. I was stumbling around, feeling like I was in one of those nightmares where your legs are paralyzed.”
“Simon,” I said, “you don’t have to—”
But he kept talking: “All of a sudden this strange calm hit me, the eye of the hurricane. I could see Elza in my mind, where she was. We were so connected. She was guiding me with her thoughts. I shoved my way across to where I thought she was. I started to dig with one of my skis, telling her I’d have her out soon. And then I heard a helicopter. Thank God! I waved like mad, then two ski patrol guys were jumping out with a rescue dog and avalanche probes. I was so nuts I was saying how aerobically fit she was, what her heart rate was, how many miles she ran every week, where they should dig. But the ski patrol guys and the dog started going down the slope in a zigzag pattern. So I kept digging in the same area where I was sure she was. Pretty soon, I heard the dog yelping, and the guys shouting down below that they’d found her. That surprised me, that she wasn’t where I thought she was. When I got down to where the ski patrol guys were, I saw they had her top half uncovered. I was shoving my way through, sweaty and out of breath, thanking them, telling them how great they were, because I could see she was okay. She was there, right there, all along she’d been only two feet under the surface. I was so damn happy to see she was alive.”
“Oh, thank God,” I whispered. “Simon, until you said that, you know what? I actually thought—”
“Her eyes were already open. But she was stuck, crouched on her side with her hands cupped together in front of her mouth, like this, which was what I’d taught her to do, to push out an air pocket so you can breathe longer. I was laughing and saying, ‘God, Elza, I can’t believe you were calm enough to remember that part about the air pocket.’ Only the rescue guys were now pushing me back, saying, ‘We’re sorry, man, but she’s gone.’ And I said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? She’s still there, I can see her, get her out.’ And one of the guys put his arm on my shoulder and said, ‘Hey, bud, we’ve been digging for an hour and the avalanche was reported an hour before that. The most she ever had was twenty, twenty-five minutes tops.’
“And I yelled back, ‘It’s been
ten minutes
!’ I was so crazed—you know what I thought? That Elza told them to say that because she was still mad at me. I pushed past them. You see, I was going to tell her that I knew—I knew in my heart and my gut—how special life is, how hard it is to give it up, yours or anyone else’s.”
I put my hand on Simon’s shoulder. He was sucking in air like an asthmatic. “When I reached her,” he said, “I scraped out the snow stuck in her mouth. And, and, and—and that’s when I realized she wasn’t breathing, you know, she wasn’t really breathing into that little air space I had taught her to make. And, and, and I saw how dark her face was, the tears frozen in her open eyes, you know, and I said, ‘Elza, please, come on, please don’t do this, please don’t be scared.’ I grabbed her hands like this—oh God, oh shit, they were so cold—but she wouldn’t stop, she wouldn’t . . . She was—”
“I know,” I said softly.
Simon shook his head. “She was praying, you see, hands cupped together like this, the way I had taught her. And even though I already knew, oh shit, oh Jesus, even though I knew she wasn’t really saying anything, I could hear her, she was crying, ‘Please, God, please, please, please don’t let me die.’ ”
I turned away. My throat was making stupid noises as I tried not to cry. I didn’t know what to say, how to console him. And I know I should have felt horrible sadness, great sympathy for Simon, which I did feel. But to be completely honest, what I felt most of all was gut-wrenching fear. I had hated her, wished her dead, and now it was as if I’d killed her. I would have to pay for this. It would all come back to me, the full karmic circle, like Kwan and the mental hospital. I looked at Simon. He was gazing clear-eyed at the silhouettes of oak trees, the sparks of fireflies.
“You know, most of the time I know that she’s gone,” he said with an eerie calm. “But sometimes, when I think about her, our favorite song will come on the radio. Or a friend of hers from Utah will call right at that moment. And I don’t think it’s just coincidence. I sense her. She’s there. Because, you see, we were connected, really connected, in every way. It wasn’t just physical, that was the least of it. It was like well . . . can I read you something she wrote?”
I nodded blankly. Simon took out his wallet and unfolded a sheet of paper taped at the seams. “She sent this to me about a month before the accident, as part of my birthday present.” I listened with a sickened heart.
“ ‘Love is tricky,’ ” he read in a quavery voice. “ ‘It is never mundane or daily. You can never get used to it. You have to walk with it, then let it walk with you. You can never balk. It moves you like the tide. It takes you out to sea, then lays you on the beach again. Today’s struggling pain is the foundation for a certain stride through the heavens. You can run from it but you can never say no. It includes everyone.’ ” Simon folded the letter back up. “I still believe that,” he said.
I was desperately trying to figure out what the words meant. But my mind was churning everything I had heard into frothy gibberish. Did he read the letter to say that’s what he wanted from me?
“That was beautiful.” I was ashamed I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“God! You don’t know how relieved I am, I mean, being able to talk to you about her.” His eyes were shiny, speedy, his words spilled out with abandon. “It’s like she’s the only one who
knows
me, really knows me. It hits me all the time, and I know I need to let her go. But I’ll be walking around campus thinking, No, she can’t be gone. And then I see her, her same wavy hair, only when she turns around, it’s someone else. But no matter how many times I’m wrong, I can’t stop looking for her. It’s like being addicted, going through the worst kind of withdrawal. I find her in everything, everyone.” His eyes locked crazily on mine. “Like your voice. When I first met you, I thought it sounded a lot like hers.”