Ryan Graudin - The Walled City

The ambassador leans in to me. So close I can taste his breath. It’s heavy with ginger and sesame and honey. My stomach growls, but he doesn’t seem to hear it. He’s too busy touching, wreathing his fingers through my hair and pressing me closer against his chest and face.

This is what I do not miss.

My eyes are open and I stare past the silvering hair on his temple. There’s a shelf on the far wall filled with books I can’t read and the tough evergreen leaves of a plastic orchid. At the very end of the shelf is a statue of a golden cat. I stare at its green eyes and the characters on its chest — the ones Sing says are meant for good luck. I count the whiskers, again and again. There are twelve.

Twelve. Twelve. Twelve.

The number sticks in my head. Running over and over and over until it becomes only a single humming word, trying its best to distract me.

Twelvetwelvetwelvetwelvetwelvetwelve.

When he’s finished, the ambassador lies back on the bed, breathing like a horse that’s galloped five hundred li. His chest — pinched and taut like naked chicken skin — rises and falls in a maddened tempo. His cheeks are the same shade of red my roses were before they died.

I lie still, stare at the ceiling tiles. Whoever lived here before me painted tiny golden stars all over them. After so many months upon months of gazing, my eyes don’t need to be open to see them. I know their constellations better than the real stars, the ones Jin Ling and I used to watch through our bedroom window. The ones that crowned the mountains and showered light along the rice paddies. The ones that actually shined.

I watched them for the shimmer. Gems of silver and shiver and beauty. Jin Ling watched them for their names, their stories. When we were very young, our mother told us all she could about the stars. The White Tiger of the West, which rises when the ginkgo trees yellow and shed all their leaves. The Azure Dragon of the East, which crowns spring’s first shoots.

But my mother’s knowledge wasn’t enough for Jin Ling. She kept watching and wondering with a thirst I could never understand. Asking questions none of us could answer.

The times we felt the closest, the times our wonders collided, were when the stars fell. Jin Ling usually saw them first. Her eyes were quicker, cut light out of the darkness faster. Her breath would draw in, short and excited, and she would point to where sky met earth. Her other hand shook mine.

“Quick, Mei Yee! You have to make a wish!”

I always frowned and stared into the black. There were so many wishes locked up inside my soul. Picking just one seemed impossible. “I don’t know.”

My little sister sighed, in that sharp, dagger way of hers. “What’s the thing you want the most?”

I never knew. Instead, I asked the question back at her.

Her fingers tightened around mine, full of strength that always surprised me. “I wish we could be together forever. Away from here. Away from hurt.”

The ambassador drapes his arm around me, frightens off the memory of my sister’s voice like a feral cat. His heat is no longer startling. It’s everywhere, like a blanket, folding and pressing me together with its warmth.

We stay like this for a long time. Skin to skin under false stars. The ones that never fall.

I don’t believe in ghosts. Not like my grandmother, who knelt at our ancestral shrine every dawn with smoking sticks of incense folded in her palms and offerings of rice liquor and oranges tucked in her pockets. I always thought it was stupid, wasting fruit and good booze on the dead. Those who were long silent and gone.

He haunts me anyway.

My brother comes to me in dreams. It’s the same nightmare I have every time I shut my eyes. The “night that changed everything” loops on repeat. My brother’s voice rattles and stings, unchanged through all these years of death.

“Don’t do this, Dai. This isn’t you.” He’s always reaching out, clawing the edge of my hoodie. Trying to stop me. “You’re a good person.”

Then comes the blood.

There’s always so much of it. On my arm. On him. It pours and gushes in an unreal way. Like the old cartoons we used to watch where the red spurted out like a fountain. I try to stop it, holding his hand as he slips away. His final breath curls out into the winter night like an English question mark. Bad punctuation. It should’ve been a period. A solid end. Not like this…

I wake up, heart gasping and chest aching. There’s no blood on the dingy white tiles of my apartment. Just the marks I drew — charcoal and straight. The marks I’ve been erasing, day by day, with a smudge of my thumb.

I sit up, blink the terror of sleep from my eyes.

The world is unchanged. My scar is still here. My brother is still dead. I’m still trapped in Hak Nam, and there are sixteen lines on my wall. Telling me that soon — oh-too-soon — my time will be up.

Half of me doesn’t really expect the kid to show up. I lean against a wall across the street from Longwai’s brothel, counting the seconds with twitchy fingers. A yeti-size guard hulks by the entrance, watching me with slits of eyes.

I try to ignore him, focus instead on the paper lanterns over the brothel’s entrance. Their scarlet light melts into the dragon etched on the door. It’s the Brotherhood’s symbol: a beast the color of luck and blood inked on the walls of every building in Hak Nam. A reminder that they own everything here. And almost everyone.

The minutes stretch on, and I begin to think the kid I picked is too smart. He must’ve smelled trouble. My fingers are twitching faster than festival drums by the time Jin dashes out of the shadows.

Maybe it’s the bluish quiver of the streetlight hanging from the overhead pipes. Or the pieces of nightmare still crusting my eyes. Whatever it is, the kid’s face jars me. It’s so full of anxiety and angles. The perfect mix of worry and fierce.

Just like my brother’s.

“Something wrong?” Jin steps into the lonely slant of light, and the moment passes. My brother’s likeness slips, yanked off like a transparency sheet. It’s just this street kid in front of me now. Eyes hard with distrust. Arms crossed tight over his chest.

“Nothing.” I swallow back memories (I’m on a steady diet of force-fed amnesia) and push off the wall. “Let’s go. We shouldn’t be late.”

Yeti-guard steps aside, and the door to the dragon’s den yawns open. Traces of opium smoke — sweet, earthy, tart, and choking — roll down the hall, past rows and rows of shut doors.

I hold my breath and shuck off my boots, adding them to the neat line of slippers and leather loafers in the marble entranceway. Jin stops behind me, his mouth grim as he looks down at his own boots.

“Nothing will happen to them. If it does, I’ll get you new ones with my cut.” Promises spill out of my mouth just to get the kid moving. We’re already almost late, and I can’t afford Longwai getting suspicious. “Ones that actually fit.”

In the end, he takes them off. We move down the hall to the lounge.

The smoke is thicker here. Long couches form a ring around a rug. They’re full of Seng Ngoi’s finest businessmen, suits wrinkled and arms dragged to the floor by invisible opium weights. The place isn’t quite as fancy as I’m sure Longwai wants it to be. There’s a poseur quality to it, a faded-ness. One corner of the rug is frayed. There are smoke stains in the couches’ fabric. The red-gold wall tapestries all have loose threads. Before the night that changed everything, I would’ve called this place a dump. After two years of giant rats and streets paved with human shit, it looks like an emperor’s palace.