A World Named Cleopatra Page 11

  “We do this to show our kinsmen that shadows are not people, that they must be ignored, that they do not exist except as false visions inside our heads.”

  “But no one will pay attention,” Bao says. “They will see what they see.”

  “No,” says Giay. “They will see what they want to see, what they must see. Our burden is to lead them in the proper direction.”

  “And how do you know that direction?”

  Giay looks upward, as if to share a joke with heaven, and laughs. “Why, all the ghosts and spirits are shouting the correct answers. Every ancestor of every ancestor points out the same direction. Just listen to them. Look at them.”

  Bao looks around, and sees that some of the children are already miming Giay. They walk around as if they are blind. Their arms are extended before them. Nut-brown faces smile, as if the very young could reflect the very old. Bao can almost believe that Giay has taken them over, that he is hiding behind their dark eyes and baby faces. Then the adults, taking their cues from the children, become blind to moi. Soon Giay and Bao are the center of the group. Once again the village is its own world, governed by its own laws and spirits.

  “So you see,” Giay says, “the moi are easily defeated by the ghosts of our land. The village is as it was.”

  Giay and Bao lead the villagers away from the shadows of moi. The sun has climbed higher into the sky. Bao looks upward and gives thanks to the spirits that cluster about him, even though they are invisible. But he looks away from the sun, for Caesar is the blinding eye of God.

  The holiday is over. Magic must give way to work. It is time to return to hutches and fields and paddies. Bao looks past a row of hutches and imagines that even now women wearing loose trousers, conical hats made of silverleaf, and wooden clogs, are working in the rice paddies beside the dynobryon forest which climbs up the steep face of a mountainside. But somewhere in the mountains is the door-through-the-world. Giay claims it is a huge cave built by giants. He says that anyone who steps into the darkness of the cave will find himself back on Earth, the hell which burns forever in cold flames.

  Suddenly the sky darkens. Storm clouds appear like phantoms skating on blue ice. Thunder rolls in the distance. And the villagers run for cover. Bao looks around, sees only the familiar faces of village folk and the moi-shadows. Time seems to slow down as the world awaits a deluge. It is mua mura, the rainy season, a special time to reaffirm the sacred ties of family, neighbor, and clan.

  Then, an instant later, the world collapses. The village is attacked. Villagers fall to the ground as if play-acting. Drops of rain fall like tiny bombs. Mist seems to be pouring out of the ground. Every sound is magnified, as if in a dream, but there are only sharp screams and the crackcrack of rifles.

  Another instant and the village is afire. Hutches are burning, their woven bamboo walls and sarissa roofs swelling into flame, burning with a popping and cackling, as if ghosts and demons are laughing and mashing their teeth. Soldiers and fabers dressed in filthy green and brown uniforms run across the mud, then disappear in the mist. But the fires they set glow redly in the storm created twilight.

  Bao shakes his head, as if a dream could be broken or thrown aside by a simple gesture. Demons are running around, burning, shooting, raping girls and women in the open, in the mud and rain. But moi are also falling. Moi are killing moi, Bao thinks. They are only men, Bao tells himself, surprised that he is lying on the ground under cover of rotbush and crying vines. He tastes the bitter soil and wonders if he is hurt or dying.

  He watches the pregnant girl who had brought him his dinner being raped. Help her, he tells himself, but he is frozen. He cannot move a finger, and he has wet his pants. He cries, then breaks out of his fright, stands up, and rushes toward the moi and the shrieking girl. The girl stops screaming. Perhaps she’s dead, Bao thinks. He feels he is trapped in a dream of slow motion.

  He wrests the rifle from the moi and shoots the demon in the head. But it isn’t a demon, he tells himself. It isn’t even a man, just a boy with a shaved head. The girl beneath the dead moi does not move, does not even seem to notice Bao. Her hair is full of mud, and her face is bleeding. Bao sees that her nose is broken.

  Get out of here, he thinks as a fusillade of shots breaks the momentary calm. The air smells sour. The downpour is over. A light drizzle falls from an angry grey sky. Soon the mist will lift. Bao shivers and sees that his rain-soaked overshirt is spattered with moi blood.

  He stands up, looking for Giay, forgetting for an instant about the attack. But Giay is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he’s dead and demons have carried his body into the sky, Bao thinks. He dreams, then remembers where he is, and runs. He runs across the pebble garden and past burning hutches and trees, past the well-kept shrubs and Venus Mirrors which smell sweet and heavy. Dead bodies litter the ground. Bao hears commands barked in a familiar tongue. Don day. Durng lai. Tuan lenh khong toi ban. But the tones and accents are wrong. The words are slurred, as if spoken by drunken men.

  But Bao does not think about orders or bodies or burning hutches. He has forgotten Giay, the pregnant girl, the dead moi, the smells of death and feces and urine, the fusillades of shots, the rain, the mist, the screams. He thinks only of his family. Perhaps they are alive. His family had left the solstice celebration early. They did not even eat with their neighbors, for Giay had told them that Bao would lead the last prayers. From now on, Giay had said, Bao could have no family but the village.

  The sky begins to clear. The mist lifts, disappears as if it had never been.

  Bao runs blindly, and the universe lets him pass. He feels he has already lost his soul to some ma quy which is too powerful to be exorcised. He imagines that he is a shadow, no better than moi. Perhaps that is why moi can’t see me, he thinks. But he tells himself that he is being prepared for something else. Just as the ring was eaten by the sky when he was born, so must the path of his life be dark and difficult. But why must my path to the cross lead me home? he asks the imagined spirits of the air.

  He skirts the rice fields and smells the swamp-stink of stagnant water. He imagines that he has become two beings. One being watches the other. It talks, tells the other being that time is still passing. The other being listens and screams.

  Bao sees his house, a medium-sized hutch built of sarissa, wood, and mud. It overlooks a canal which irrigates the adjacent rice paddy.

  He runs across open land dotted with sarissa and Christmas memory. It has become a beautiful morning. The sun has burned away the clouds, the sky is a cool blue, and the sectos are buzzing as if to prevent the world from going dumb. Bao is trapped in a pastel dream where spirits rule kindly and the sun always shines.

  But when he enters his hutch, he finds his mother and father and sister hanging upside down from a ceiling truss. His mother and sister are naked. They are all bound with brown rope. And they are all, clearly, dead. Light beams cut into the darkness like yellow swords.

  He sits down on a woven mat before the hearth. Cooking utensils have been strewn over the hard-packed dirt floor. Bowls are broken, bark baskets torn apart. The cramped family room is heavy with body stink and the sweet smells of gravy-oil, moon cakes, sugarseed breads, bamba peels, glazed meat, shed yolk, roasted carryseeds, wine, and milk-liquor. Four places have been set before the hearth, each with wiping cloth, eating sticks, and a painted bowl. One of the settings is for the wandering spirit who brings good luck, long life, and happiness. Bao tries not to look at the wood-plank bed on the other side of the hearth. The reed pad is soiled with blood. But the altar is in its proper place against the wall. It seems that moi did not wish to antagonize the spirits of the hut.

  Taking the food sticks in his hand, Bao makes a blessing over the food and begins to eat. With every mouthful of festival food, he feels more removed from the apparent world of cause and effect. And he descends, as if through the scrim-layers of a gentle dream, to a synchronistic universe. He drifts backwards, only to be swallowed by the snake of time. Now he finds e
verything is just as it should be. He is in perfect harmony with ying and yang, the two opposing forces of the universe. He is easily transformed. He dreams that the universe is a wheel. Every event must repeat itself in slightly different form. Flesh and spirit are themselves movements of the great wheel.

  He watches as all the cycles reveal themselves. He feels possessed by Heaven’s will. I must remain here in this house, he tells himself. Then he prays to the spirits of the dead and the not-yet-here, to the monsters and ghosts of the past, and the growing spirit-creatures of the future. Bao sees only with his mind. He falls into his past, dreams that he is eating and talking with his family. He has captured all the familiar smells and words, all the textures of time past. If I can feel the past as the present, then I have turned the wheel, he tells himself. I have truly left this cycle and journeyed to a gentler time.

  But his eyes betray him. He finds himself staring at the dead bodies of his mother and father and sister. They have become empty husks; their spirits have escaped from their open mouths. Bao has not been watchful. He has lost their souls. They have drifted away to become ma quy.

  With a scream, he stands up and pummels his father’s corpse with his fists. He screams for death, for its bone-crushing touch, and hopes that moi will hear him and end his life right now. A timely death would be the perfect resolution. Perhaps he can still join the spirits of his family.

  Bao sits down in front of his father, then retreats into gentle dreams. He looks at his father’s upside-down face and imagines that the hutch is filled with sympathetic spirits. They make the air heavy. They smell of grass and sweat and night effluviums. They have the faces of his family.

  “Remain here,” says his dead father without moving his lips. Bao ignores the spirit-voice inside his head.

  It might be a demon or false spirit trying to trick him.

  “You must listen to your father,” says his dead mother. “Your path must end here. You must remain with us, for only through you can we have any spirit-life. You close the circle of our existence. Together, we are like the great wheel. We belong to you now. And you belong to this house, to the soil and the wood and sarissa, and to every ghost in the air.”

  Bao understands that death must not be an end, but a transition. He remembers Giay’s words: “Man is a breeze, stilled only by death. Then he becomes like the earth. But the earth is sacred and must be maintained by prayer. Each generation must sing the same prayers or our ancestors will be cut off from the world.”

  “You cannot leave,” says Bao’s father. “Your past and future lie here.”

  “You must provide for your ancestors,” says his dead sister. “When we are buried in sacred soil, we will not be able to follow you. You must not leave.”

  “You must provide,” sing the spirits.

  ‘“No,” Bao says to the dead. He steps out of the hutch and shouts, “Where are you, moi? I am here. Kill me.” The world whispers, but will not listen. Wind soughs through sarissa and highvine. Sectos chirp and buzz. A hipposaur lows in the distance.

  Bao walks away from the hutch and the paddies and the village. He does not look for cover. If moi cannot kill him, then he will find the door-through-the-world. He will enter the cave built by giants and descend into hell.

  He skirts the edge of Ban Dem Forest where spruce, pine, willow, and oak create a twilight world for sleeping demons and shadowy ghosts. It is as if the tall trees are waging a slow battle for space and light with the indigenous yellow-crawlers, flatfronds, and the weblike silverfrost. Bao’s feet pad upon a soft tuff which is a spongy mulch of dead leaves, crawlers, and rot. He cries, hacking out his pain and loss as if they are pieces of raw meat. The forest absorbs his noises. He retreats into the dark world of bough and leaf. The spirits of family and village cannot follow him here. They are lost to him forever. By simple intention, Bao has become moi. He has decided to die outside of the village. He has broken the circle and smashed the wheel. And like the circle, Bao is broken. One half of him is rage, the other half is quiet: ying and yang. The circle is true, even when broken.

  Dark forest gives way to scrub and mossy uplands. Bao detours around silvernets which have trapped small winebirds and silver flyers. Forest green has been replaced by the umbers and ochers of high ground. Swarms of smidgins darken the air like storm clouds. They fly toward Bac Mountain, to the door-through-the-world where all manner of beasts and Hell’s monsters are spawned.

  It is early afternoon when Bao reaches the crags and sheer rock faces of Bac Mountain. He begins his climb to the roof of the world. He has defected from the world of men. Here, among the mountains, he is less than a demon, more fragile than a ghost. He has lost past and future. All that is left to him is the constant present. But his soul cannot be confined in such a narrow place. As Giay had said, “The soul is a flower made of the very stuff of time. Its soil is the past, its air is the present, its water is the future. If we forget our past, or are blind to our future, then the soul wilts and dies. We become husks without hearts.”

  Bao climbs until he is exhausted. He has worked his way from ledge to ledge, foothold to foothold. The sun hangs in the clear sky like an angry eye. It watches Bao and saps his strength. There is no shade, no cover for a moi climbing into Hell. The world has turned to stone. Below him, the blue-black shadows are as tangible as the blades of butcher knives. Above him is the door-through-the-world.

  It takes him an hour to reach the stone lip of the cave. He crawls through a narrow passageway into darkness. Now he can die. The shadow-spirits can take him. He shivers, feels cold stone against his cheek. Gradually, his eyes adjust to the darkness and he sees stalagmite towers in the distance. The cave is aglow with a cold phosphorescent light. Bao imagines that he has come upon a subterranean city. The rainbow-hued stalagmites and stalactites might be the grotesque dwellings of the dead. He might be bathing in the cold light of Hell.

  “I am here,” he shouts, and his voice, carried by ghosts and demons, echoes through the subterranean halls. But the dead will not answer him. They mock him with his own words. He walks on, through the many chambers of the dead. He is soon lost in the caverns, some of which are completely dark.

  He loses his sense of time. He sleeps and walks and dreams. His hunger is a constant, a dull ache which he imagines to be his companion. He dreams of his father. He dreams of moi, the weapons of God. The caverns are full of scrabbling, chittering life. It is a dark universe of worms and clickers and scuttlers.

  Reptiles splash in unseen pools and bats shriek for lost spirits. White-winged moths fly overhead like ghosts floating in darkness.

  Bao dreams of bright light. He crawls out of the darkness, as if he is stepping out of time. He has smashed the wheel of his life. He falls and vomits. Demons rush out of his mouth.

  In his dream, the creatures stand above him and talk. He cannot understand their words. He wonders how long he has been in the caverns. He dreams of his village and begins to shake.

  But it is too late, Bao thinks. He is dead, just another moi. He dreams that his spirit has already become ma quy, a demon wanderer. He touches the edges of his dream and pushes toward the darkness that is either death or empty sleep…

  2

  Lying in a prone position, Bao Lam peered through a field glass at the valley below. It was as he remembered it, only more verdant and beautiful. The forests were in bloom, their colors so bright that they confused all sense of distance and space. Foreground and background seemed to bleed into each other. As he used to do in his childhood, he counted all the colors of choehoa—the pastel-tinted pseudoblooms. In his old language, the equivalent word for color was light-of-god.

  Below him, past the straw-colored rock, below the small brown fists of scrub, the land became a green mat of moss sloping gently downward to meet a forest of saucerleaves. Shiny green and yellow fronds swayed in the wind. Vines of silverglitter reflected the twelve o’clock sun, and Bao could make out a copse of redknob. He turned up the magnification to see if the
sweet-smelling plants had attracted any flyers. Seeing that the sticky knobs were covered with rotting carcasses, he quickly looked away. He remembered the stink, the, furrowed surface, the sticky ooze of redknob. He remembered the burning sores it had once left on his fingers.

  He searched the entire valley with his field glass, carefully scanning an area from right to left, raising the glass and scanning again. When he caught sight of a rice field, he stepped up the magnification and watched several women transplanting rice seedlings. The water reflected the bright colors of the world. Bao imagined that these women were dipping their hands into rainbows.

  Although Mun Village was well hidden, Bao knew its exact location. He felt as if he could see through the barriers of flora, past saucerleaves and silverglitter, past oak and yellow-crawlers and scatter bush and high sarissa, right into the sleepy little village which was its own world. This was the heart of Casca Mountain country. Bao knew that this hidden village would look like every other village he had passed through. It was as if he had spent his childhood and the long years of the war in the same village. It was a ching-game. He followed his programmed dreams, led dimsimple fabers, watched them die, won villages, lost villages, bid, slept, and fought. He had lost the past and future. He was a blind spirit submerged in a dead present. He had dreams and food and fabers. He was a child of the people.

  “Take your group around the ricefield and enter the village from the north,” Bao said to Le, one of his two command fabers. Le’s face had a different structure than the simple soldier: a high forehead and small crest, a flexible mouth that could form words and express basic emotion. “Call in, and I’ll follow with Chi.”

  Chi, who was a double for Le, remained beside Bao as Le rose and screeched at the company of fabers.

  The soldiers had grouped behind Bao. They kneeled, as if praying, their large yellow eyes looking blankly upon a world they were not engineered to comprehend.