The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, page 15
* * *
When the show ended, Afong was light-headed, exhausted, grateful to have made it through the evening without breaking down. She stood next to Mr. Hannington as he worked the audience into a frenzy, shouting, “Now the time you’ve waited for is upon us. Ladies and gentlemen, who’s ready to get rich here tonight?!”
He went on about all the things one could do with a thousand dollars. Meanwhile his wife and Nanchoy walked up and down the aisles passing out pencils and slips of paper, collecting the names and putting them into Mr. Hannington’s top hat. Mrs. Hannington then giddily returned to the stage, enjoying the spotlight as she handed the hat to her husband. He dipped his hand into the crown and made a great show of mixing up the tickets as the audience fell silent and a pianist played a frenzied melody.
He drew out a slip of paper.
“It’s pronounced Hepworth!” a man shouted from the back and the audience tittered. “How much for the China girl?” another man yelled. The audience laughed, growing restless and rowdy, their high hopes on display.
Mr. Hannington held the slip high and the audience quieted. “Now is the moment you waited for, a dream of riches galore. I will now ask the Chinese Lady to do the honor of reading the winning name.” He handed her the slip of paper.
Afong took the paper and opened it.
She read the name Codhooker, then gazed out at the audience. She watched the swirls of cigar smoke, saw the eager, bearded faces, the stern men who were already spending the money in the storefronts of their imaginations. Smiling women clung to their husbands in eager anticipation. Afong looked to the back of the theater, beyond the standing-room-only crowd, beyond the glass ticket booth, beyond the city blocks, the brick buildings, smoking chimneys, the crowded harbor, out over the ocean, all the way to the shores of a home she knew she would never see again. Not in this lifetime. Then she looked down and saw Nanchoy on the steps leading up to the side stage, in his golden waistcoat, his hair slicked back, smiling. She looked toward Mr. Hannington, to Mrs. Hannington, who joined her husband on the apron of the stage. She was staring at her, mouthing something to Afong, motioning, admonishing her to read the slip of paper. They smiled, but their gaze, their intensity showed their impatience.
Afong looked down at the note in her hands.
She felt the eyes of everyone in the theater upon her.
“The winner…” Afong glanced up as everyone leaned forward in their seats. Many in the back rows stood up so they could hear.
“The winner…”
“Out with it, girl!” Mr. Hannington snapped.
“The winner is… Nanchoy Eu Tong.”
Afong smiled as she pointed to him.
He looked stunned, confused.
“No, no, no,” Mr. Hannington bellowed. “There’s been a terrible misunderstanding. She’s illiterate, she doesn’t know a thing that she’s saying.”
Afong crumpled the paper and dropped it to the floor as a handful of audience members began shouting. Men rose to their feet.
“Draw another name!” a man in the front row demanded. Others joined in, insisting that the Hanningtons pull another name from the hat.
Afong stepped back as the audience turned into a mob.
“If you’ll all just calm yourselves,” Mr. Hannington shouted back. “Is there a Mr. George Codhooker in the audience, he’s the name she meant to read.”
“It’s rigged!” one man yelled. Another shouted, “I want my money back!” Their voices joined a chorus of men and women, roaring with anger.
“Ladies! Ladies! Ask your men to settle down,” Mrs. Hannington hectored the audience as though scolding a group of misbehaving children. Her pleading was met with a ripe apple that bounced off her forehead. Her arms flailed as she toppled backward, falling like a tree, her head bouncing off the stage floor.
Afong backed away as she watched three men in the front row seize Nanchoy. Other men alighted the stage, demanding the money that was promised.
Like a ghost, Afong slipped behind the curtain and headed for the rear exit. She heard Mr. Hannington yelling, the rage in his voice ceasing, turning to fear, then to silence amid the sound of boots on the stage, the tumble of bodies, the smacking of fists on cheekbones. Afong left the theater and thought she heard Nanchoy pleading for help. She listened again for a moment, then closed the door behind her.
Afong hurried down the street, but all she could manage was an awkward shuffle, tripping, stumbling, falling to the wet pavement. She climbed to her feet and kept going, trying to run. People stopped and stared, they pointed at her clothing, her face, her features that set her apart from everyone else. A drunken man shouted, calling out to her. A group of women looked offended as they gasped at her presence. Even a freeman regarded her with bewilderment, raising his eyebrows and scratching his beard.
When she finally reached the boardinghouse, sweating and out of breath, she caught her reflection in the window. Her hair clung to her face, which looked pale, like ivory, a mask of carved alabaster. Her skin felt cold, clammy, her stomach turning. She walked through the door, startling two other residents, young men who were smoking pipe tobacco in the drawing room. Afong ignored them but could not ignore the smoke that made her nauseous. Her mouth felt dry as she climbed the stairs, went to her room, stepped inside, and closed the door. Dizzy, shaking, her hands trembled as she reached for an empty brass spittoon and dropped to her knees. She struggled to breathe for a moment, holding back, then her body seized and she expelled what little she had in her stomach. Her eyes watered and she smelled the sour spew as it splattered on the inside of the cold brass vessel, a wet, hollow ringing in her ears.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, Afong’s head cleared and her stomach settled enough for her to sip water and begin quickly packing her belongings. She tried not to think of what would happen to her at the hands of Mr. Hannington, though a part of her hoped they would just leave town as planned, leaving her behind. She heard a commotion in the hallway, and a female boarder shrieked as Nanchoy stumbled into Afong’s room. His face a swollen purple mess, dried blood caked beneath his nose, his ears, his mouth. He staggered in, one hand on his stomach where he pressed a silk handkerchief, now soaked with sanguine fluid. His hand was shaking as he collapsed on Afong’s bed. He struggled to breathe as he tried to move. He grimaced in pain, wheezing. He stared down as a bloodstain on his shirt, a red flower, the size of a fist, grew even larger, wet and sticky and smelling like an abattoir.
“What happened?” Afong asked, though she already guessed.
“The mob…” Nanchoy coughed up a dram of dark liquid that dripped down his chin. “They stripped off Hannington’s clothing, dragged him out to be tarred and feathered. He screamed that I cheated him. A white man, cheated by a Chinaman.” Nanchoy sucked in a deep breath. “Someone shot me.”
Afong shoved her remaining things into her bag. If they did this to Nanchoy, she worried what they might do to her.
“Please, Afong,” Nanchoy wheezed. “No one else would help.”
She opened her mouth to speak but felt a wave of nausea and rushed to the spittoon and threw up again, gagging, coughing.
Nanchoy tried to sit up but collapsed back on the bed, clutching his stomach and moaning, one leg dangling on the floor. “Don’t leave me… Afong. Please, find a doctor.”
Afong hesitated, catching her breath. Then she wiped her chin and stepped toward Nanchoy. She sat on the edge of the bed, reached as though she were about to caress his cheek, then she pulled the oyster knife free from the headboard.
She stood over him. Her hand shook as she gripped the knife.
He coughed again, looking up at her.
He spat blood on his shirt as he spoke. “You don’t even know… do you?”
Know what?
He smiled.
Know what!?
“You’re… pregnant, Afong,” Nanchoy gurgled, then spit up more blood. “I knew it. Mrs. Hannington too. Now you have to help me. We have to get married. Do you know what happens to women who have a child out of wedlock? You’re a foreigner. You won’t even find work as a wet nurse. You need me.”
She realized she was shaking. “I do not need you.” She heard a commotion in the hallway, doors opening, slamming, voices asking what’s the matter, others shouting for police or calling out for the woman who owned the boardinghouse.
Nanchoy closed his eyes as Afong raised the knife.
“Well then, you should know, that boy we wrote to, the one that you care so much about. He’s alive, Afong,” Nanchoy whispered, his breath becoming liquid. “It’s true. He was going to come find you.”
She froze, felt an ache in her chest.
“But”—Nanchoy struggled to swallow, struggled to breathe, struggled to laugh, as he fought to get the words out past his cracked lips—“I told him you were dead.”
Nanchoy opened his eyes and grinned.
Afong hesitated for a moment as though his words were picks, poking, probing, before finally unlocking the door to a place inside her where she closeted her rage, her hopelessness, the sorrow that was too frightening to let loose. When she looked into that place, she screamed and drove the knife into his chest, feeling it scrape bone.
The light went out of his eyes as he exhaled, a long, slow hiss, but his face remained stuck in that hideous smile, a rictus of contempt.
She pulled the knife out, dropped it to the floor.
She wanted to undo her entire life. She wanted to shake Nanchoy and make him undo what he had done. Then she noticed blood on her shoes, her fingers. She looked up and caught herself in the mirror, saw the reflections of people in the doorway behind her. Other boarders, wide-eyed, horrified, gasping through mouths that hung open.
She heard a woman whisper, “What happened to that poor man?”
Yao Han. Forgive me.
Afong snatched her valise, the tin cup she used for drinking. She slipped through the stunned gathering in the hallway, who backed away as though her misfortune were contagious. She found her way down the stairs, through the parlor, out into the street where rain was pouring from the sky. She limped away, soaking wet, freezing, sinking beneath the waves, drowning again, extinguishing once and for all the flickering candle of hope. She stumbled away from who she was, who she once wanted to be, disappearing into the dark night, vanishing from the newspapers, the headlines, forever.
12 Dorothy
(2045)
How are you feeling?” Dr. Shedhorn asked as Dorothy was being awakened and reintroduced to her surroundings. She looked around, disoriented, the room spinning.
“I think I’m going to throw up.”
She vomited what seemed like buckets of her childhood, turning her inside out, but instead of bile she expelled laughter and loneliness, joyful prose and faded obituaries, spotlight moments as the center of attention, and holidays spent alone, forgotten.
Eventually the room stopped moving.
“You’re taking to this treatment extraordinarily well,” Dr. Shedhorn said as she scrolled through the data retrieved from an array of monitors.
“You’re joking, right?” Dorothy asked, wiping her chin. “I haven’t felt this way since…” She looked down and touched her stomach, then looked up, mortified. “Since I was pregnant with my daughter, Annabel. I had terrible morning sickness.” Dorothy held her head in her hands. “No. No. No. No…” I can’t be pregnant. Not now.
“I’m not joking and you’re not pregnant, Dorothy,” Dr. Shedhorn reassured her. “I know this because we look at your bloodwork each week before treatment to be certain. You’re probably feeling this way because you’re more receptive to this than any of my other patients. Far more receptive. I used to do studies where patients would take microdoses of MDMA, which, therapeutically, is like putting your psyche under a microscope. But this is much deeper and sustained. Your brain activity is off the charts.”
“Why?” Dorothy asked, relieved, but also noting concern in the doctor’s voice, as though she were a mechanic who’d tuned up a car only to find it could now go three hundred mph. The performance was as impressive as it was potentially dangerous.
“I’m not sure,” Dr. Shedhorn said, hesitating. “Your right inferior parietal cortex, which is normally dormant during REM sleep, is fully active. In layman’s terms, most people are passive in their dreams. Yours, for some reason, are quite active.”
Active? Maybe that’s because my reality is one of abject passivity, Dorothy thought as she looked at the time.
* * *
Standing in the rain, Dorothy felt a bit better. She felt unmoored, but adrift on a calm sea. Which felt better than her years in therapy, sorting through the bits of her adolescence as though she were reaching into a bag of broken glass. To Dorothy, epigenetic treatment was more like young Alice stepping through the looking glass and everything on the other side was not just raw emotion that needed to be processed, but emotions laden with portents and meaning, then scrambled as though by the Jabberwock. Everything was poetry that only made sense nehw daer drawkcab.
When thunder rumbled in the distance, she gave up on Louis coming to get her and drifted in the direction of the nearest subway stop. She walked, trying to figure out a way to describe to Louis what she’d just been through. She imagined standing soaking wet, yelling at him, but even in her own daydreams she was left mute. Her mouth moving, her angry words unable to reach Louis as he turned away, his back toward her, as always, invested in something else, usually himself.
As she passed an alley, the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and she felt a tingling down her shoulder blades. She felt a wave of sorrow and shuddered. Her eyes felt molten even before she stepped back and peered into the narrow, garbage-strewn passageway with overflowing dumpsters, boarded-up windows, broken, rusty remnants of fire escapes, and potholes that were now puddles, shimmering with gasoline rainbows. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of urban Seattle was a rag doll figure of a woman, legs out in front of her, bare feet splayed like the broken hands of a clock, her arms resting lifelessly on the filthy pavement, thumbs out, palms up. The pose reminded Dorothy of a photo she’d once seen taken in the locker room of a losing football team. The skinny placekicker crumpled on the floor, back against the wall, catatonic with defeat, having attempted to drive the winning kick through the uprights only to have the ball sail wide right, costing everyone on his team the championship game.
Dorothy felt the cold rain running down her cheeks, her neck, saw the woman’s soiled dress, or what was left of it. Her hair a wet, matted carpet. Her tiny feet, having long since succumbed to a man-made shrivel. And there was blood and a foul odor, though neither deterred another homeless person who crouched over the woman, going through her belongings, or other figures who approached in the distance.
She felt her cell phone vibrate, glanced down, and read the text from Louis: Work ran late. I’m on my way. Did you pick up Annabel?
Dorothy groaned and ground her teeth. When she looked up, the woman in the alley had vanished. Everyone was gone, which Dorothy realized was an easy trick, considering none of them had been there in the first place.
* * *
“So, how was it?” Louis said in lieu of an apology for being late.
Dorothy closed the car door and grabbed a University of Washington sweatshirt that was lying in the back seat, something she could use as a towel to dry her face, her hair, as she sniffled. “Do you really want to know? Right now? Because we don’t need to talk about it if you’re just going to find something new to criticize.”
Louis looked surprised, taken aback for a moment. Hurt even.
That was one of Louis’s natural defense mechanisms, Dorothy realized. Obliviousness. Because he was chronically obtuse to her concerns, and his own failings as a partner and parent, whenever Dorothy pushed back, or in this case, snapped back, he’d often retreat into a shell of nescience. Dorothy grumbled as she watched him pout, licking his imaginary wounds. She knew that he must be replaying whatever had just happened. But instead of him being chronically late, forgetting to pick up their daughter, leaving Dorothy in the rain (again), she envisioned the story he was telling himself. He was now the victim in this tragedy, the noble partner footing most of the bills, his financial support an expression of his unselfishness. In his mind, she didn’t even appreciate him leaving his meeting and coming all the way to Ballard to pick her up.
Dorothy hated that in these moments she reacted emotionally and always immediately regretted it. She’d often wondered how simple life would be if she could be like others, feeling less, which seemed to afford those carefree people a respite from worry and the frustrating self-doubt that had plagued her for most of her life.
“The treatment was…” Dorothy searched for the words. “Exhausting.”
“Did it help at all?” Louis asked, momentarily letting go of his aggrievement to place his hand on top of hers.
Dorothy drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “I feel different. Unburdened, lighter.” As she said it, she realized she’d just thrown a softball pitch over home plate, giving Louis ample opportunity to drive one to centerfield. That’s your wallet that feels lighter. She imagined him sniggering, All for treating your unique combination of fatigue, depression, and gullibility. She added, “I guess I just feel okay.”
Louis shook his head as he drove through the rain in silence.
He never understood that to Dorothy, feeling okay after a lifetime of feeling everything—rage, grief, anxiety, sadness, confusion, disconnection, and longing—to just feel okay was as wonderful as it was unfamiliar. She felt intoxicated by normality. She tried her best to explain what happened while she’d been under, but the more she spoke, the more she shared, the more she realized she was singing a song with high notes that Louis was unable to hear. His frequencies were lower and he merely nodded, tuning the radio to the day’s financial report. The news was grim as the stock market had taken another huge tumble, machinists were on strike at Boeing, and Amazon had its customer database hacked for the umpteenth time. Plus, there was speculation that this year’s typhoon season could bankrupt insurance agencies in the Northwest whose actuarial tables had never been designed to account for 140 mph winds.
