O-Lan sits watching. His eyes dart away to her narrow mattress with the pair of slippers next to it. A cardigan hangs from the bedpost, and, at its foot, there is an old blue carpetbag.
Ming takes one last deep breath and pushes back his chair. “Goodbye,” he says. He hurries out, slams the door behind him, and stumbles down the stairs, shaking, flushed with shame.
Ghost in the Machine
He lies on the bedspread in his old room, staring into the dark.
But not entirely dark. He hasn’t lowered the shade, and the moon, now only hours to full, shines in the window, lighting up the objects of the past, making them jump out at him. The posters on the wall. The old clock radio, a familiar hump on the bedside table.
His old room and the old moon that would be full at noon. Soon, the noon moon. The noon courtroom.
The fire escape to O-Lan’s room, steel-colored in the moonlight.
(Her canine tooth against the orange peel.)
(She is his father’s daughter, and very much like him.)
He now knows the facts. He alone knows the facts. He must call Jerry Stern; he’ll do it first thing in the morning. The moonlight falls on Ming’s old clock radio. (He hears, in his mind’s ear, the sputter of static, then the disc jockey’s twang awakening him in the winter morning dark. It’s the local pop radio station rousing him out of bed. He’s a freshman in high school, being woken in this room on the morning of a debate tournament. No, that was years ago. He lives in New York now.) Tomorrow the trial continues. He and Katherine, Brenda, and Jerry Stern are set to meet before the trial, at eight forty-five a.m. Ming checks his phone. It says midnight, but his clock radio says two o’clock. He must reset the radio.
In the quiet, he hears the neighborhood dogs barking one after another, yard to yard. Then a lone, nearby howl rises over the others. The howl picks up the thin hairs behind his ears; his cheeks grow cold, his fingertips sharpen against his palms. Ming frowns. The dog, seemingly loyal, bottomlessly hungry. The dog, like the sons, not as loyal as the man might think.
Ming turns on the old radio.
The click of the power, then volume. The radio spits softly, a low wet hiss and warble of waves unseen. He soothes the tuning knob between his thumb and forefinger, seeking a station. This knob requires him to turn smoothly, slowly, in order to catch hold. He wonders if the radio has stopped working. But after half a minute, he nicks a brief crackle of static; he rolls the dial back and forth over the place, searching for a catch. Back and forth. Another crackle of static. He rolls even more slowly, carefully, feeling for the place; and then, just when he’s giving up, the hiss ebbs, giving forth to a low hum. It’s a hum of medium register, full-bodied as a note from an alto sax, but not made of human breath; it is inhuman and as such comforting. He turns up the volume and the hum fills his mind, pushing away thought, pushing away movement. He lies clutching the bedspread, for perhaps five minutes, perhaps an hour, listening to the hum. Then a crackle of static sounds at the edges. Static, hum, static, hum.
A voice is coming in and out. Someone’s talking. Ming reaches cold fingers back to the dial, twiddles it, delicately, back and forth. He can hear, below the static, a voice he knows. He’s obliged, commanded, to bring it forth.
It’s a low, mellow voice, and strong, with a rich tone similar to his brother Dagou’s, and yet not at all, because of crags and furrows and a husky rasp of age, deepened and strengthened like a sixty-nine-year-old whiskey that has absorbed the smoke-blackened and gnarled wood of its container; because it stirs up a deep disquiet—no, a fear, so that he has to steel himself against it—a voice so familiar to him it seems to speak from some part of his own mind, and yet it is suffused, saturated, with an unknown country, another world. (A muddy village, a half-filled bottle of smoky oil above the stove. Stones in the river, a basket of fish curled and twitching in the stern of a boat.)
Fine hairs stand out on his neck. His body curls spasmodically on the bed.
Clearly now, the voice speaks. “The tail of fear is wagging the dog of the son.”
“Stop it,” Ming says.
“Fear, weakness, cowardice. You didn’t get that from me.”
“I said get lost.”
“You’re not happy to talk to me? After I worked like a dog, to feed you, to support you, to buy this house, with a room for you to study? You wouldn’t be a high-flying hotshot now without me, kid.”
(Mornings waking in this room, this chamber of stark loneliness and desolation. Dagou gone to college now, no more big, sweaty but loyal fool between Ming and the villagers. The crackle of the radio, the smell of an egg frying in oil. Beads of soy sauce sliding from the translucent skin, then the hot, sulfurous runny yolk curdling in his gut. Fear. Longing for the bus, the protection of the driver when they lived farther away from school, in the old apartment.)
Ming reaches for the volume knob, squeezing the voice back into the radio until the knob clicks. Silence. He curls on his side, relaxes, but keeps his eyes open watchfully.
He will not engage. He’ll climb into his hunting blind, although somehow he can’t climb now, cannot lift himself past the first steps of the ladder—his body has changed shape, and his four feet are on the ground. He wasn’t working for his father, he wasn’t exploited. He never worked for anyone except himself. (Those days of years ago. The runny egg yolk making a hot, sulfurous trail down his throat, curdling at the acid in his stomach. The walk to the distant, hostile middle school alone, the walk changing to a run, to flight, a daily race for survival through the neighborhood of villagers. Past the old butcher shop, with its odor of meat. The school. The bathroom with its metal door, the cold, wet throat of the toilet.)
Ming feels his forehead. He gets out of bed, shuffles to the bathroom, thrusts a washcloth under icy water, wrings it out. He returns to his room. He lies down and spreads the cloth over his eyes. For a moment everything is still. But then he can hear it again: the voice, at first unintelligible and yet fully familiar in its identity.
“This is FM 88.8. Chao Family Network.”
Ming puts his hands over his ears.
“Good night, good morning. Earth to Ming Chao, Ergou.”
“You don’t exist,” Ming says. “You’re dead.”
“Frozen, dead, buried. You all tried to kill me using different methods, like the way they tried to kill Rasputin. I survived.”
“Your death has been documented by the police. You don’t exist.”
“So easy to get rid of me. Just like closing a door, eh?”
“And you can’t be Dagou pranking me, messing with his radio. It was confiscated as evidence.”
“The old man is allowed to visit his favorite son.”
“I’m not your favorite.”
“That’s out of your control. You can’t choose my favorite. You, you’re my son, you’re my true inheritor.”
“I don’t—” Ming presses his hands to his ears. “Don’t want it!”
“But you are, I gave myself to make you. You can’t unchoose me.”