I hesitated, and she must have sensed it, because she said, “You’ve had a shock. Come on, I’ll take care of you.”
She said it so kindly that my throat closed up. I would really like that, I thought. For someone to pry open my tightly clenched fingers and take away the little glass bottle with a dead man’s finger in it. As we passed my stepfather’s store on Lahat Road, I bit back the urge to jump out, run home. I wanted my mother. Wanted to bury my face in her lap, feel her soft hand on my hair, and forget about everything but the two of us.
I didn’t want to think of Shin—of that pleased look on his face when he’d discussed my stepfather’s promise about my marriage. Isn’t it a good thing?
“All right,” I said to Hui. “I’ll go with you.”
* * *
In Hui’s rented room, I washed up and borrowed some pajamas. While I was cleaning my face off with cold cream, Hui came and sat on the dressing table.
“You all right?”
I nodded numbly.
“Go to sleep,” she said.
Hui’s bed was a narrow single, and as soon as my head hit the pillow next to her, I felt a heavy current dragging me away. A chilly paralysis seeped into my arms and legs. I tried to keep my eyes open, but I was falling. Dimly, I heard Hui saying something, but I couldn’t understand her. The current was far too strong. And so I fell down, down, deeper than the deepest lake, until I reached that place I was beginning to know so well.
* * *
This time, I stood by the sunny shore, my bare feet ankle-deep in the clear water. It wasn’t cold at all, just the same, dreamy afternoon heat that made the trees in the distance shimmer. And like before, I was lulled by the calm, though I was quick to step out of the water. That limpid, deceptively clear water that harbored a rising black shadow.
There was no one around, not even the little boy. Since I was here anyway, I set out to look for him through the waving grass, but when I got to the deserted railway station, there was no one to be seen. Nor was there a train, as there had been each time before.
Time stretched on—I’d no way of knowing how long. Anxiety gnawed at me as the sunlight remained fixed at an angle. I didn’t want to be stuck here. What had the little boy said? If I discovered his name, I could summon him.
“Yi!” I called softly.
The silence was unnerving me. I turned towards the other side of the platform, and there he was, standing right behind me. So close that he could have stretched out a small hand to touch my back. I gave a little shriek.
“You called.” He was looking very serious. No smile, no cheerful wave. Now that I examined him carefully, there were differences between them. Ren was taller, his face longer and more grown-up looking. A distance of perhaps two or three years separated them.
“I met your brother.”
He nodded warily.
“He got shot tonight.” Remembering the darkness and the swinging lantern light, blood blossoming over that broken body, my eyes filled with tears.
“I know. That’s why the train’s gone.”
The train that traveled on a single line, only in one direction.
The little boy climbed onto a wooden bench, and I sat down beside him. It was easier to talk this way. “You’re dead, aren’t you?” I said. “They said that Ren was an orphan—that his whole family had died.”
He turned his head away, that small round head that was now so familiar. Although he and Ren were disconcertingly similar, they were also different. Their mannerisms, their voices. I remembered the delighted look that Ren had given me just a few hours ago. How happy he’d been to see me, as though he’d been waiting for me all his life, and I felt like weeping again. “That’s right. I’m dead.” Yi’s face swung back to mine. It looked smooth and guileless, but I had the feeling that he was concentrating very hard. It unsettled me, how much younger he seemed than Ren, yet older. Perhaps it was the way he talked sometimes, like an adult.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He swung a small sandaled foot, frowning. “Nobody else has ever shown up the way you do. They all come by train. But you just … appear. That’s good, I think.”
“Why?”
“Because if you came by the train, you’d be like all the others. Like me.”
I was bursting with questions, but he glanced at me, shaking his head slightly.
“Is Ren going to die?”
“I don’t know.” That pensive look on his face. “The train’s gone. That means another one will be coming soon, but I don’t know who’ll be on it.”
“Is that what you did? You got off at this station by yourself?”
“Yes. A long time ago. We were twins, Ren and I.”
Twins. “Like Shin and me. We’re not really twins but we were born on the same day.”
“I don’t know Shin,” he said frowning. “He doesn’t dream like you.”
“No, he doesn’t,” I said slowly, remembering the paper amulet Shin’s mother had given him. A charm against nightmares to call the mo, that black and white beast of a dream-eater, to gobble them up. Though if you called the mo too often, it would also devour your hopes and desires.
Yi said, “So that makes four of us. Did you find the fifth one?”
“I think so.” I thought back to William Acton, and how Ren had said the Li in his name stood for ritual. Order. Something bothered me about it. Perhaps it was because he was a foreigner, and I couldn’t understand how he had a Chinese name.
“I told you, there’s something wrong with each of us. Things won’t go the right way.”
“What am I supposed to do? And what about the finger that Ren gave me?” I’d hidden it, rolled up in my bloodstained dancing frock when Hui was in the bathroom.
Yi sighed and swung his short legs. “That’s his master’s business. Do what you think is right.”
Alarm was rising in me, like a distant thin bell that was starting to ring. No, had been ringing for some time now, except I hadn’t been paying attention. “Look at me, Yi. Why aren’t you more worried about Ren?”
He hunched over, twisting his body away as though he couldn’t bear to look me in the eyes. All of a sudden, he was a child again.
“You’ve been waiting for him to die, haven’t you?”
That guilty, guilty look. The scrunched-up, miserable face, about to cry. I wanted to shake him, but I’d never touched him before. Not even that time when I’d been chased out of the water by the black shape in its depths.
“How could you?” I said bitterly. “Your own brother.”
He was bawling now. Shoulders shaking, fists curled into his eyes.
“I didn’t mean to. At least, not in the beginning.” Hiccupping. Smearing the tears across his face. “I love Ren. He’s everything to me.”
“Why did you stay then?”
He shook his head. “We’d never been apart before. And I knew he was miserable without me. How was he going to manage alone? So when the train crossed the river, I got out. This is the very first stop on this side. I’m sure there are better places farther in, but I didn’t want to go without Ren.”
“And so you stayed.” I looked hard at him.
“I wasn’t the only one. There are always a few of us who get off. You saw them before.”
I remembered the distant figures of people wandering this shore the first time I had drifted down the river.
“In the end, however, they all give up and go on. There’s no point, you see. From this side, you can’t call anyone over or talk to them.”
I watched him carefully. “But you could.”
He nodded. “We’ve always had this twin thing. When I got off the train, I found that I could still feel it. Very faint, like a radio signal. So I didn’t go on. Not as long as I could still sense Ren at the other end.”
He looked so small and pitiful: a child who’d been waiting for his brother for three years. Waiting alone, on a deserted shore. My heart went out to him, but at the same time, I knew that what he’d done was horribly wrong.
“I found that as long as I’m here, I can call him to this side of the river and then things happen to him. Accidents and stuff. Sometimes, I think I’ll get on the train and go away. But I always chicken out. I don’t want Ren to forget me.”
“I don’t think he’s forgotten you.”
But he wasn’t listening to me. “At first I thought I’d just watch and wait. Sometimes I can see bits of what he’s doing. Then I realized I’d have to wait a long, long time if it was going to be the rest of his life. And Ren is always changing. He’s growing up. One day, he’ll forget all about me.”
“So you tried to lure him over?”
Yi turned to look at me. There was such misery in his eyes I couldn’t be angry with him. “I thought we’d be happier together. But I’ve never managed to get him over. Not really. Though just the other night he had a high fever and he showed up on that sandbar.” He pointed to a thin sliver of white in the river.
“He wanted to cross over. He did! He even jumped in by himself. I was terrified because of the water. There’s something in it, that’s made so that people can’t swim back to the other side.”