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Forever Beneath

the Scorpion Tree



Starring Bao-yu as a stranger in a strange land



“Yet another reason why the decadent West should be avoided at all costs. What happens to our good comrade could happen to us all.”

– People’s Liberation Army Magazine



A Matte Finished Film





The tree spoke, fed by memories. Soon, it would flower and blossom, become that which it was. Until then, it would need those like her, those who were desperate, lost, hurt and forgotten; those whose memories could nourish back to health that which had been torn asunder by the unfaithful servants of a fickle god.

***

She huddled beneath a cloak as the storm raged above her, two spinning, snapping, clawing clouds of light and dark, each whirling like a flock of birds, flipping, turning, twisting, biting. One moment they came together in a heart-stopping screech, the next they separated, spiraling away in opposite trajectories, soaring as if they’d never encountered one another, and free to never again be confronted.

***

Her name was Bao-yu, which meant precious jade in her native language. Her father had named her when she’d been born and had thought of her as anything but precious while he’d been alive. Finally the police had come and taken him. Then they sent a bill for his death along with the bullet they used to execute him. Then her mother had died in a fire. It hadn’t taken long for Bao-yu to realize that she was no longer precious. After all, how precious could she be if everyone who’d ever known her had died?

Still, she was rare, all the more because she was lost in a desert far across an ocean. She was Chinese, and desperate, and running, and the Mexican desert was the last place she thought she’d ever be.

“¿Quieres un poco de agua?” the old man had asked, while they both huddled in the shade of a giant boulder.

She’d stared at him incomprehensively, not understanding what he’d said, her eyes darting from his mouth to his hands, well aware that if he tried to do something, she’d be ill prepared to stop him. But he’d noticed her fear and had pressed his hands softly against the air as if to say, I won’t do anything to harm you. She’d had little choice but to believe him. Other than the two young Mexican men, he was the only one she’d seen after the rest were killed. Plus, he was a Laoren, an old man, and of all the people she’d traveled with during the long journey from northern China, he was the least threatening.

Her journey had begun like so many others. With nothing to lose and little to gain by staying in a country where her value was marked in heads of cabbage, she sought out those who made it their job to transport people. They called themselves Snakeheads and had decades of practice ‘sliding immigrants under the noses of the fat Americans,’ as one had said. All she had to pay them was $23,000, or work it off in a factory north of Phoenix. $23,000. Might as well have been a million. One had to be desperate to embrace such a debt, because with the Snakeheads, the debts were mortgaged in blood.

***

She found the cloth partially buried in the middle of a dry lakebed. The ground around it was hard, flaking away like the scales of a carp. The prickly things that grew in the desert stopped to within a dozen meters, either unable to, or unwilling to grow any nearer. As she approached, she felt its pull, as if it knew she was near and was causing her to move closer. But that couldn’t really have been happening. After all, it was a desert night, and a cold American wind cut through her, like the Siberian winds of her youth. It was she who wanted the cloth. All she wanted was to be warm. She had to tug it free from the sand. Although the moon shone high above her, there was no reflection in the oily black fabric, as if it wasn’t even there. Or as she’d learn later, as if the material inhaled the light.

But all of these thoughts happened later… when she was in the crosshairs of the border guard, when she was about to die, when her entire world was about to change, like the night she learned that she hadn’t been the first born and the true value her father had placed on her head.

With shaking hands, Bao-yu wrapped the cloth around her trembling body. She didn’t even shake it clean and could feel the hard bits of sand and dirt pressing against her skin. She was thankful as she continued to shamble vaguely in the direction she thought was the way to America. She only stumbled once, a prickly cactus reaching out to jab at her legs. Eventually, when exhaustion overwhelmed her, she managed to find a low point in the ground that protected her from the wind. She curled herself into a ball and wrapped the cloth around her. She soon found sleep, and like she was once again in the womb, dreamed of what could be on the other side of the thin, pliable skein separating her from the rest of the universe.

***

Fifteen Chinese had been transferred from the shipping container. She’d lost track of the time the journey across the ocean had taken. All she knew was that when the doors had opened, the smell of clean air had made her weep with joy. The stench from the waste buckets was horrible, but nothing compared to the smell of the old woman who’d died on the third day.

Bao-yu had first smelled that smell when she was back in her home watching her mother make baozi with plum sauce. The sickly sweet scent always reminded her of childhood, even when she passed steam barrels on the streets of Harbin after her mother’s death. But the smell in the container had grown and deepened and became part of their every breath, reminding her not of something sweet, but of something dead. And when she’d been forced to use the buckets, she tried not to look at the body stuffed into the corner. She’d tried not to see the old woman’s ankles turn first blue, then black, then some color that blended too well with the dark.

They’d been separated into several moving vans. Hers was already crammed so full with equally terrified Mexicans that everyone was forced to stand. The truck ran hard up the side of a mountain, then back down the other side. To keep from breaking their necks, they were forced to hug each other, the van bucking and jumping over rocks and desert scrub, the metal walls anything but tender to their shoulders, elbows and heads. She’d lost count of the screams and shrieks, many of them her own, until the inevitable happened. The van rose one last time, then twisted in a way it hadn’t before, sending her and the others spiraling against each other in a free-for-all of broken bones and blood.

Through some laughable vicissitude of fate, she was able to crawl free, along with a pair of young Mexican men and an older Mexican man. The young men, who’d been traveling together, limped back the way the van had come. Bao-yu watched them go, then turned to follow the track north. She’d come so far and was loath to even take one backwards step. The Laoren followed her, and after a few hand signals, she allowed him to fall in beside her.

***

The storm buffeted the fabric as if it would tear it from her grasp. Screams of the dead and dying were born by the wind. Flashes of light and dark illuminated her dreams. The things that reminded her of flocks of birds had found each other once more, and they struck with thunderous crashes. Pieces fell away as the black flock grew smaller. Again and again the white flock attacked. Again and again pieces of the darkness fell to the earth. Soon all that was left was a single black bird-shaped thing, flying hard, darting left, then right, then swinging around in desperate geometric twists. But soon, it was overcome by the cloud of white, falling dead and lonely from the sky.

Then she saw the tree.

***

The smell of cooking woke her. She was starving. Laoren had a fire going and was cooking cactus pads on the ends of sticks. She held the fabric tightly around her, then hurried into the desert to find a place to use the bathroom. As she squatted, she stared at her fingers. She snapped them once, then twice. She remembered again the tree in her dream. There’d been a sound like the snapping of a hundred fingers. She remembered also that the ground around the tree was covered with bones. For some reason she smiled. And she held the smile all the way back to the fire.

Laoren held one of the cactus pads out to her. “Comer,” he said.

She stared at the cactus and the viscous spines. She knew he wanted her to eat it, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

The Loaren made a drama out of chewing daintily on his own cactus pad. They dripped with watery juices. Occasionally, he’d use his fingers to pull out the spines, which had loosened with the cooking. He tried twice more to offer her a cactus pad on a stick, but each time she declined. Finally, he buried his head to the task and began to eat.

She stood and walked into the desert a few meters. Absently she snapped her fingers as she once again saw the tree. It had a wide trunk and tremendous shade, like a giant, old jacaranda. Things hung from its branches that she couldn’t quite make out. She snapped her fingers again, then picked up a rock.

She returned to the fire and walked straight to the Laoren. He glanced up as she neared and offered her a smile. His lips were chapped. He was missing several teeth. Green pulp from the cactus dribbled down his chin. He seemed incapable of offering any offense, which was why it surprised her when she brought the rock around in a hard swing, catching him on the side of the face. Blood flew into the fire as his head rocked back. He brought his hands up to ward off the next blow, but it never came. Instead, she dropped the rock and ran. And as she ran, she hugged the cloth more tightly around her. It felt like the arms of her mother. And she spoke to it, crying.

***

He’d had the look of her father. Was that why she’d hit him? She couldn’t figure out why it was that she would do such a thing. She’d never hit anyone in her life, not even as a child. She’d wanted to sometimes, but she’d never once converted that thought to action.

She remembered when she’d been her most angry. It had been after her father had died and her mother had spoken to her in a whisper one evening after too much baijiou. The white liquor had loosened her tongue and unlevered something that had been held too tightly and for too long. Bao-yu had learned that she’d had an older sister who’d died. The death had been sad, but since Bao-yu had never known her, it was hard to feel the sadness her mother felt. But when she’d learned what her father had done, her anger had filled her.

Somehow Bao-yo made a circle and was once again approaching the fire. The Laoren sat huddled beside it, cradling his face in his hands. He heard her and turned, bringing up a hand to ward her off. Without even thinking, she ran towards him, snatched up the rock, and began to pummel his face and head. He screamed for her to stop, and tried to push her away, but he hadn’t the strength of her fury.

She swung with an emotion that had begun to grow the night her mother had told her she hadn’t been the firstborn. She’d been the second born and been left in a back alley to die, her father’s desperate response to China’s One-Child Policy, its exception to allow two children if the first was a girl, and his selfishness at desiring a son. But the true tragedy of that day wasn’t her own. Within six hours of her father abandoning her to the harsh elements of a northern Chinese winter, her sister was struck by a bus as she kneeled on the sidewalk to tie her shoes in front of their apartment building. According to her mother’s tale, her father had gone back to search for her in the alley, finally finding her swathed in dirty blankets, rescued by a homeless porcelain repairman and his family. It had cost her father a week’s salary to buy her back, but the alternative had been impossible to comprehend. After all, he was willing to accept the loss of one girl, but not two. And her name? Her f*cking precious name? She never did find out what she had been named when she was born. Instead, she’d been given the name of her dead sister. How precious could she really be if she was made of counterfeit jade?

She finally stopped swinging when Laoren’s face had gone to pulp. She could no longer recognize his features. Where his nose, eyes and mouth had been was now a topographical lesson in what stone could do to flesh. She squatted beside him. Absently she dropped the rock and grabbed one of the sticks of roasted cactus. She bit into it, suddenly ravenous. She didn’t even notice when the spines tore into her face. She was too intent on remembering her father, wondering what her sister would have looked like, and whether she would have traveled to America if she’d had a sister with whom to spend her life instead of being all alone in the northern Chinese city of Harbin.

She wondered what her name had really been.

***

The clicking drew Bao-yu through the darkness. She was surrounded by darkness. Before her was a portal of light. She walked towards it, but it didn’t seem to get any closer. Plodding, one foot in front of the other, plodding with her hands gripping the cloth, pulling it tight around her, plodding, as if it would take forever to reach wherever it was she was going. Then as suddenly as she’d thought about the tree, she was there.

The clicking was deafening. She tried to block her ears, but couldn’t because she refused to let go of the cloth. So her head wobbled left and right, first pressing into one shoulder, then the other, unable to find a place where the noise could be staunched. She scraped her cheeks where the cactus spines had found a home, sending shivers of pain through her lips. There must have been two dozen of them poking out of her. Odd that she’d never thought to remove them.

Everything was now in full view. The sky behind the tree was a rusted yellow. The ground beneath it was a deep green, with white and gray jutting bone. The tree itself was deep black, like the cloth she wore, and vaguely man-shaped, arms outstretched becoming limbs, and sprouting red leaves the color of the money envelopes she’d receive every New Years. The round red leaves seemed to drip from the branches, never quite falling.

And hanging from the tree were things that were too many to count, light brown, clinging with their tails, their pinchers click-clicking madly.

And they clicked until their incoherence melted and she understood the message.

***

She jerked awake to the sound of a helicopter. It roared low, north of her. She lurched to her feet, letting the cloth slide down her body. She was naked beneath. What had happened to her clothes? Strangely, it didn’t matter. She had the cloak and wore it like a second skin.

Her face pulsed with pain. She’d ceased trying to touch it, the spikes irrevocably sunk into the skin of her lips, her cheeks, her neck. She’d never thought that she’d become used to it, but in the last few days she’d become used to so many things.

A strip of fabric had been tied around her lean waist beneath the now ankle-length cloth that served as her only cover. Hanging from this strip were more cactus pads, already cooked and softened, a dead rattlesnake with a bite torn from behind its head, and a hand that had a tattoo of a star between the thumb and forefinger. She remembered the cactus pads. They’d become a staple, sustaining her with their watery green flesh. She also had a flash of a memory of the snake, when she’d run on all fours to catch it. But how she’d come by the hand she had no idea, and why it only had three fingers, she was at an even greater loss to answer.

Her eyes followed the helicopter as it swept the length of the fence, its spotlight roving in great, searching arcs. She’d kept the twenty-foot-tall divide on her left for a full day as she’d sought a way through. Here and there she’d spied a camera, and once she’d seen a man standing on the other side, as if he were on a ladder or a ledge, a rifle in his hand, pointing in her direction. But she’d always kept far enough away that they couldn’t get to her.

***

Her eyes caught everything in freeze-frame simplicity, even the puff of smoke from far across the sand as it exited the barrel of the rifle. The bang was an afterthought, punctuating the round roaring through her brain, sending her into a dead fall. She felt both surprise and the recognition of the inevitable, then she felt nothing at all, until the scorpions brought her around once more.

Dimly she knew that what she’d always wanted was on the other side. She had a place reserved in the American Dream and a bill to pay whether she was able to make it there or not. But it had become less of a drive and more of a memory of something she’d never had. Instead, another choice had come to her, one that resided at the base of the tree.

The noises of the scorpions now spoke volumes to her— each click-clacking a memory, a dream, a favorite food, a perfect morning, her mother’s laugh from before she knew the truth, the roar of evening traffic outside her Harbin apartment’s window and even her father’s smile before she was the counterfeit daughter, all coming together combining into a chitinous opus of her life. They communicated in a language that was at once harsh and beautiful, entreating her to sit beneath their tree, to join them, to listen to their story of her life, of other lives, of everyone’s life.

And she wanted to.

She wanted to go there. She wanted to change her direction, to change her mind, just as she’d hoped her father had changed his mind in the face of the execution squad, realizing that he really did love her and not just because her becoming precious had given him a chance to have a son.

The helicopter’s spotlight arced towards her. She pulled the folds of the cloth over her head and turned away. It would never see her. It never did. All it ever saw was the darkness of the desert. It never realized that there was intelligence here. It never realized there was something different. It roared off into the night, leaving her alone and wanting the scorpion song once more.

How was it she’d gotten there before? Why couldn’t she go there now?

Then she saw them: six Mexicans picking their way carefully through the cacti. The one in front used a walking stick to prod the ground in front of him while the others held onto the pack of the person in front of them, moving carefully in line. She wasn’t aware that she’d already selected the one in the middle until she heard herself growl.

Then she was off and running on all fours. Her arms and legs somehow conformed to allow her to move swiftly, like a feral beast. When she struck, she screamed.

***

“Why is it you want to leave?” the Snakehead had asked.

“Does it matter? I thought you only wanted my money.”

He smiled. “It matters,” he’d said simply.

She’d thought for a moment as the memory clouds in her mind roiled. “All my family is dead,” she finally said.

“Your father was executed. Did you learn what he did?”

She remembered how her mother had screamed at him as he’d been taken away.

“Just as well. So why did you leave?”

“Too many memories. I want to move to a place where I have no memories.”

“Is that why you chose America?”

“It seems to be where everyone wants to go.”

“America has its own memories. It’s a land of desperation. You know about desperation, don’t you?”

She’d nodded.

“Then you understand that you might be going into a place with its own memories.”

She’d shrugged. “Anything is better than what I have in here,” she’d said, stabbing at her head with her forefinger until it left a red, round mark.

***

She dragged the young man away, moving swiftly through the brush. With both hands gripping his head, she chewed on an ear as she ran, the rest of him hanging limply behind her. He tasted of fear, and she found herself licking the salt from his skin.

The others shouted for her to stop. They started to run after her, then crashed to a stop as they saw her horrific visage.

She laughed into the night as she ran, ignoring the others. A howl escaped her lips. She felt all-powerful, stronger than the strongest of them, her hunger for their memories driving her on. Like a ghost, she was eager to feed on fear.

One threw something at her and still she ignored them… for now. She might return, once she’d fed. By their crying and their screams, they probably tasted just as sweet.

Like that irreversible moment when she’d set fire to her mother as she’d sat drunk and rambling on the kitchen chair. Her mother’s eyes had shot open when her precious jade had poured the rest of the liquor on her and lit her afire. Her nightclothes were engulfed almost too quickly for her to hear her daughter scream, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you keep it all to yourself? Why did you let him make me her?’

But even if her mother had heard, her only answer was a single quick scream. The fire ate her from the outside in, its ravenous destructive force too furious for any words that could be comprehended. Still, Bao-yu had clapped joyously at the way her mother’s legs and arms had curled into themselves, twisting into an origami farce of retribution and remembrance of how things should have been, much like she imagined her father’s body shriveling as he lay charcoaling in the prison’s incinerator.

She spied the helicopter again. It was coming back, swinging low over the ground, its light searching and roving. She suddenly felt vulnerable, knowing that if the light found her that everything would change. She dropped the young man and loped off into the darkness, the snake, pads and hand flopping against her legs as she ran. Cacti stabbed her, adding their spines to the hundreds of others that now sprouted from her skin.

She found a low place near the base of a rock. She flew into it, rolled herself in her cloak, and hid beneath the fabric. The sound of the helicopter came near. She could almost feel the light creeping across the desert, searching, seeking, hunting for her. Then suddenly it was there. Although the fabric was impervious to anything, she’d left a single imperfect seam where the ground met the cloak near her feet. She stared at the blinding white that seeped in and…

The storm returned. The spinning, snapping, clawing clouds of light and dark, each whirling like a flock of birds, flipping, turning, twisting, biting. But the dark cloud was so small now it was virtually non-existent. It fought only when it had to, pausing to fight only as a strategy to allow it to try and escape. Soon the light took it from the sky and broke it into a hundred pieces, the darkness scattering across the desert. Then the white flock merged into a single entity and flew towards her. It came fast and hard until it struck, exploding in a cascade of light and sound until she was all but blind.

***

Then there was nothing for awhile except the memory of her father and how he used to come into her room at night. She never knew when it started. She was too young to notice. But when she was five and a thunderstorm raged outside, it was his face that would light with every crack of lightning. His glare was one of abject hatred, something he’d mastered when she was born. After that she watched him watch her every night, sometimes wide awake until one of them was forced to give up in the wee hours of the morning.

And everything might have even been fine until he touched her.

His stubby hands grabbed her neck hard. He’d been drinking and snot bubbled in his nose from the effort to kill her. Somehow, she’d managed a gurgling scream. Her mother came flying into the room, smashing him with a chair.

‘Why did you have to live!’ he’d shouted as he was led away. ‘Why couldn’t you have stayed dead. I never wanted—’

The rest was lost as another chair crashed into his back.

Bao-yu never spoke about it with her mother and never wondered what her father had never wanted, because the answer was too easy. In China, jade is as common as gravel.



***

Bao-yu crawled through the desert, seeking the girl as a plant would seek water. The girl was transfixed on a map. She stared at it for long moments before she wadded it in her fist and slapped her side in frustration.

What Bao-yu saw made her heart stop. The girl’s hand held a star-shaped tattoo just like the hand hanging from Bao-yu’s hip. What were the odds of such a thing unless… she searched blindly beneath the cloak and felt the hand. She felt its thumb and three fingers. She remembered now that she’d eaten the finger, not because she’d been hungry but because it had been so pretty. The nail had an echo of a picture on it, something like a bird, a black bird. She couldn’t help herself.

Just to be sure, she lifted her cloak and checked it, and sure enough, it was the same as the one the girl had. Could it be possible? Then the girl began to cry, and Bao-yu remembered that it was at that moment when she’d attacked the last time. It had been perfect. The girl’s guard had been down, and she’d crept up behind her, leaped upon her back, ridden her to the ground, then slammed her head into the ground over and over until blood flowed from the ears.

As suddenly as she remembered it she was there, the finger in her mouth as she chewed greedily, eager to make that small beautiful piece a part of her, as the girl’s head bled into the desert sand.



***

Then once more came the sound of the helicopter.



***

And Bao-yu murdered the Laoren.



***

And she killed her mother.

***

And the American border guard killed her with his rifle.



***

And she ate moldy rice inside the cargo container.

***

And the helicopter came.



***

And the snapping, snapping, snapping of the scorpions serenaded each transition, each memory, each remembrance and reliving of something that had gone on before. Everything happened again and again, but this time when the helicopter came, she did not run. She held fast, the cloak draped over her arms, snarling into the sky, her visage that of a white-skinned, hungry, two-legged beast, cactus spines poking from every inch of skin, blood dried and crusted in rivulets along the contours of her hard, lean body.

And this time when the light found her, it pierced her, sending its pure arctic beams through her until she was gone, gone from this world and returned once more to the grotto where the tree grew and the scorpions hung and the green grass greeted her. She breathed deeply and smelled the sweetness of baozi, then saw that there upon the grass was her body, laying as it always had, resting forever beneath the shade of the scorpion tree.

Bao-yu stumbled forward, as if she’d tripped from a great height. Her hands reached out to catch her fall and she saw that the cloak she’d used to wrap herself was only a few feet wide. It was tiny in fact, hardly enough to protect her from the elements. She fell into herself and pulled her hands together in the same manner as the body. She placed her hands under her cheek and began to merge with what she’d always been, the gentle breeze tickling her dead hair as the scorpions clack-clacked their song.

Like a living thing, the cloth crawled along the ground, over the bones of the others who’d come before, bringing other pieces of skin, fed by their memories. When the cloth touched the base of the tree, the limbs shook, and the scorpions went silent. Bit by bit, the cloth spiraled up the trunk until it found its place. Then for one brief moment the outline of the man who was the tree could be seen, his face half-missing, his neck gone, but most of the contours of his body intact. Then the cloth merged into the skin of the tree as if it were the skin of the being, returning the dark, beautiful face to whole perfection.

Then the tree sighed.

Then the scorpions once again took up song.

And the dark memories flowed free upon the land, eager to make whole that which had fallen, eager to make wrong that which was right. And with it came the tale of the fall, the attack of the light, and the fall of the dark.

And beneath the scorpion tree, Bao-yu dissolved ever-so-slowly, rising again and again in spirit to serve the tree, the memories of her earthly violence a constant reminder of the perfection of the inhumanity on which it fed, and her impervious link with the darkness she’d forever call home.



***

Story Notes: As you can tell, I’m big about stories dealing with identity and perception. We are who we are only because we believe it. What if our parents tricked us? What if there was something divine, such as the fallen angel, whose skin Bao-yu found half-buried in the desert, manipulating us? How terrible would we feel about the deceptions? This is what I wanted to write about and what better way than to have a Chinese girl, desperate to come to America, but so buried in the horrors of her real life to ever make it. This story was influenced by Cormac McCarthy. Some of the themes of man vs nature were inspired by his Border Trilogy, as was the harsh, almost alien visualization of the landscape. Perhaps a nod could even be made to Blood Meridian.