Aden Marshall Brande’s Neighborhood

Instruction can take several forms, but I've found modeling and repetition the most effective. Young children in particular learn by imitation—and so charming, the way Nary will fumble to upturn her jacket's collar, and the way it tends to frame the softness of her cheek and fragile jawbone. She follows the direction of my eyes, the gestures of my hand, and I may have caught her, once or twice, attempting to ape my expression. She's a natural mimic.

This, of course, will be far beyond her ability. But I want to acclimate her to these strange objects, these obtuse rituals. And so we're dressed for Sunday dinner—or at least Corbin and I are, both of us freshly shaven and dressed in pressed suits, and I'm sure that the half-Windsor knot like a noose around my throat is impeccable. Nothing out of place. The poised trappings of a child aristocrat can come later; I leave Nary, for now, in a simple dress colored like buttercream. A sugared confection. It complements her skin, which glows from her recent bath.

Corbin has set the table. Start small, with a simple family place setting. I don't even know if she's seen a fork, and stemware must be utterly foreign. There's a bottle of Burgundy Pinot noir, and we've been draining it a slow glass at a time. I've placed the tiniest amount in Nary's glass, but I don't expect her to like it. I sit beside her, with Corbin across from both of us, thoughtfully watching as I show her with exaggerated care just how to hold the knife and fork; the tenderness of the salmon filet causes it to melt at the barest pressure.

We've left Thelonius Monk playing in the background, low, soft. Nothing obtrusive. But let's affect her palette early—for clothing, food, music, for words and poise, for sights and smells. The lamplight falls soft and gold on the tabletop, the white linen cloth and the gleaming hardwood.

I take a taste; and it's good, damn good. I might prefer a Chateaubriand, but anything that bleeds trumps vegetable life; and salmon should be perfect for Nary. A new taste, but easy on the tongue, something that dissolves and nourishes her poor underfed bones. We'll make you strong, darling.

I cut another sliver, and cupping my palm beneath her chin, offer her the morsel on the fork's tines.

Corbin has been silent. It's only when he speaks that I realize he's been waiting for the right time and, not finding it, must break into the tableau with a calm, quiet dose of reality:

“Is there really time for this, Master?”

There's an ache somewhere in his voice. That's why I'm not angry. He wants there to be time enough, just like I do. The star is back again tonight, not some passing nocturnal fluke, and drawn curtains keep neither of us from feeling its weight. But I tell him:

“Of course there is. It's not the end of the world yet.”

I sense his nod more than see it, because my attention remains on the child.

And finally he asks: “More wine?”

still life with salmon, manet

herald

"What is he?"

Around them, the langauge spoken is predominantly Cantonese. Their table overlooks Victoria Harbour through the picture window, but Kim Kong Kea hardly notices the brilliant lights from Wan Chai or the slow progress of ferry boats across the black water. He drinks the Château Margaux slowly, mechanically. It is a formality, like shaking hands and the reserved pleasantries he exchanged with the Englishman before dropping the pretenses.

"The peasant mentioned seeing the wings of a crow."

"If he is who I believe," the other answers, his Cantonese meticulously unaccented, his tonal shifts pitch-perfect so that Kong Kea is momentarily surprised that a white-skinned gwailo could possess such fluency, "he is a devil we've sought for years upon years."  He smiles, and his broad hands are folded composedly on the table.  Kong Kea has payed for the entire lavish bottle, but the other has only taken a token drink.  A courtesy, polite.  Professional.

Good.

"Devil?" Kong Kea asks. That word again, devil: gwai.

"In the Judeo-Christian tradition, rather than the Buddhist.  'Devil'," he pronounces the word in English before switching back to Cantonese, "not a soul reborn in Naraka."

He is pale-haired, the British man, with chiseled features that defy age with their strong, clean angles. Thirty or forty. Blue-eyed, straight-limbed, his clothing handsome and impeccable without a trace of stiffness.  He is one of the outsiders remaining in Hong Kong after the decade-old exchange between Britain and the People's Republic.  Retreating to their ancestral places; leaving the land in rightful hands.

"You can kill him?" the aging man demands to know, his deep-set eyes sharp, and the frown that he cannot hide forms wrinkles of tension between his heavy brows and deep lines along his gaunt cheeks.

"Kill is not precisely correct.  But I can mete punishment and suffering upon his head." A pause. The outsider leans forward slightly, the cerulean gaze steady. Kong Kea misses the trace of intensity, the barely-perceptible hitch in the other's calm.  He is distracted, barely hears: "You said this devil is somewhere in New York—Manhattan.  And I understand that he has a child in his possession, and your son—"

A delicate muscle convulsively shivers with tension along the line of the pale man's jaw.

"The child is unimportant," Kong Kea says quietly but sharply. "Take her. I don't care. But I want something."

"What might that be?"

"All who meet him speak of his eyes."  He thinks of Sangha's ruined body, staring blankly at nothing.  With nothing.  "—I want you to bring them back to me."

take another step.

I'm two steps away from stepping over the edge

And getting lost in the great unknown.

Because one small step in the wrong direction

Is enough to shake the cornerstone.

Where ever I'm thrown, no matter where I end up,

It can't be any worse then here.

If we're being sincere, then tell me --

What else is there for me to really fear?

I'm two steps away from just killing myself,

Because I'm sick and tired of being the prey.

But when I'm dead, everything I've ever said

Will lose its meaning and fade to grey.

I'm not ready for that -- I'd rather counterattack,

Instead of leaving my song unsung.

Because I'm too young to die,

And I can never justify not breathing air into my lungs.

I'll take one more step until somebody stops me.

I'll take one more step until somebody stops me.

I'm two steps away from making somebody pay

For every time that I've been deceived.

How can I believe a single word you say

When I know you've got a card up your sleeve?

I might be naive but I'm still forced to believe,

That all the best in life is yet to come.

That's why I refuse to lose faith in myself,

Even after all the wrong that you've done.

I'll take one more step until somebody stops me.

I'll take one more step until somebody stops me.

("two steps," clawfinger.)

I did not expect her to understand a moment of it:

The ugly primate simulacra, which we'd stood and watched—before she'd turned those open, impossibly dark eyes of hers toward mine, and made me forget myself for a while.  And I doubted she perceived any significance to the mocked-up water buffalo and leopards and compact Asian elephants standing as the second-floor hall's centerpiece (decades-old taxidermed specimens from India, Burma, Siam with histories all their own), like taking a year-long walking tour through the nations of her home continent, seventy or eighty years removed in time.  Or the gargantuan, hundred-foot blue whale model under soft blue light: suspended from steel wire so that the impossible plasticine monstrosity seemed frozen while swimming a timeless ocean, with us sunk to the unfathomable bottom.

We merged from the museum and into the afternoon with eyes accustomed to the muted artificial twilight inside.  Sunlight, our natural enemy; necessary the way oxygen is necessary, even while it corrodes you from the inside.  Oxidization.  Rust.  That's what age is, that's what dying is—the air wearing you out, eating you away from the very innermost layers of your cells.  Without it, you could not live.  Without it, you might live forever.

I hid Nary from the sun, and I wondered if, with time, her dear skin will grow paler.  Sheltering her beneath the shadows of awnings and eaves as we passed beneath them, I wandered a few streets—strolled, with her insubstantial weight in my arms and the clutch of her little fingers prying at my collar and my jaw.  I thought of sunlight and air, and fevers and dying, and the fruit of the tree that they shall not eat.  When I found it, months ago, years ago, I can't remember—after I'd wandered the sear dusty landscapes of the Crescent for weeks on end, when I finally tracked Jophiel down to the wasted place she still guarded, abandoned by Father just as surely as I had been—

Nothing.  No Tree, no lofty branches, no forbidden fruit to pry the mortal shackles from around the Sons and Daughters of Man.

It's a rotten joke, but I can't help laughing.  You don't need cherubim and a burning sword to block the path back to the Tree of Life.  Just primitive irrigation techniques that poison the whole works over the ages with salination; Eden turns into one long, sterile stretch of salt flats.  The place where it all began, really, and it's as dead and ruined as a hooker's body in the gutter after she shoots up one needle too many.

I wonder if, after all, I can't find Fulcanelli—the Old Man, or the young woman, or whatever the hell he is now, and make him cook up a batch of panacea, crank out the Fountain of Youth.  Philosphers' Stone.  One just for her, because I won't need it, because I'll live forever, because I'm not exactly alive to begin with.  We all glutted on that Tree, that fruit, before there was a law forbidding it, before it possessed a form or a name; before we had our own names, and then lost them again.

But—

It wasn't a new idea, when it struck me as I stopped in front of a suitable-looking cafe for a quick lunch, something for me and Nary.  A theory, a hypothesis, an untested and untried dream.  I would have given it to Ophelié, my O—had she not lived according to her own ambitions, designs, methods; and now waits, my Eurydice, within far-distant marches, our borderland country.  But Nary is clay in a way that Ophelié never was—and why not, after all, mold it precisely as I see fit?  Do with her as I please?

Return the things that were taken away?

The essence of the Tree of Life lingers still, within me.

knowledge of good and evil

Linen and lace, cotton and wool.  Dresses and coats and little leather shoes, turning my Nary (nary a peep as she sleeps in the sprawling bed, a little-girl dome buried below the pale landscape of sheets) into a Victorian doll.  Porcelain touched and toned by Asia from ivory to pale sepia brown.

She drowses.  In the cool autumn light of morning, she looks healthier—her complexion more even, less ashen, and her breathing has settled into an easy, natural rhythm; not any longer the wheezing, hoarse little breaths that kept my eyes locked on her chest as I watched through the night, willing her not to stop.

Corbin has left the bags from Saks neatly arranged at the foot of the bed, along with little shoe boxes and hat boxes wrapped in thin lengths of ribbon.  Artful presentation, really.  And after I've peeled away the layers of crisp tissue paper wrapping, his taste will be impeccable, as perfect as if I'd taken her down Fifth Avenue myself, ushered her into changing rooms and stripped her down to her scrawny legs and bare feet, and wrapped her in foreign fabrics.  She'll be unused to the chill that has settled back into the concrete and the black-barked trees flanking every Midtown street, their branches reaching greedily skyward.  Pale golden-yellow, sunflower-yellow leaves splotched with fading green.  Too early for the deeper scarlets and russets, but those won't be far behind.

The ghost of her fever still lingers in my blood, but receeding even now—an alien microbe on this American soil that she has never known; or a curse that followed her across the empty expanses of sky and sea.  I cannot say, discern which.  But I've swallowed and gnashed it to nothing in my jaws; an appropriate exchange, because between her jaws, Nary's babymouth—

Just the barest hint of her adoration, and I'll be right as rain again.  This is what satisfaction feels like.  I'll watch and let her dream, I'll bask by the window and let the sunshine lie across my shoulders and back until she opens her eyes.  Then—a brand new, fine wooden hairbrush through her feather-silk hair.  I'll clean her teeth.  Wash her face with lavendar soap, rub my palms over the roughly-textured bar and scrub her cheeks.  Dress her.  Feed her breakfast, even place the spoon into her mouth.

Maybe there's something to Lilith's offer.  My own kind of child.  One more, among the unknown number of fruit that must have sprung from my twisted tree.  Somewhere in time, among the long procession of empires and slowly shifting continents.  Somewhere.

But then—I think, watching her sleep—what more do I need?