The Worm in Every Heart

Magic. Some might say it’s become my stock in trade—as a writer, at least. Though the humble craft of buying and selling also involves a kind of legerdemain, as Ellis knew so well; sleight of hand, or price, depending on your product . . . and your clientele.

But true magic? Here, now, at the end of the twentieth century, in this brave new world of 100-slot CD players and incessant afternoon talk shows?

I have seen so many things in my long life, most of which I would have thought impossible, had they not taken place right in front of me. From the bank of the Yangtze river, I saw the bright white smoke of an atomic bomb go up over Nagasaki, like a tear in the fabric of the horizon. In Chungking harbor, I saw two grown men stab each other to death over the corpse of a dog because one wanted to bury it, while the other wanted to eat it. And just beyond the Shanghai city limits, I saw Ellis cut that farmer’s throat with one quick twist of her wrist, so close to me that the spurt of his severed jugular misted my cheek with red.

But as I grow ever closer to my own personal twilight, the thing I remember most vividly is watching—through the window of a Franco-Vietnamese arms-dealer’s car, on my way to a cool white house in Saigon, where I would wait out the final days of the war in relative comfort and safety—as a pair of barefoot coolies pulled the denuded skeleton of Brian Thompson-Greenaway from a culvert full of malaria-laden water. I knew it was him, because even after Wao Ruyen’s court had consumed the rest of his pathetic little body, they had left his face nearly untouched—there not being quite enough flesh on a child’s skull, apparently, to be worth the extra effort of filleting . . . let alone of cooking.

And I remember, with almost comparable vividness, when—just a year ago—I saw the former warlord Wao, Huang’s most respected father, sitting in a Limehouse nightclub with his Number One and Number Two wife at either elbow. Looking half the age he did when I first met him, in that endless last July of 1945, before black science altered our world forever. Before Ellis sold him Brian instead of me, and then fled for the Manchurian border, leaving me to fend for myself in the wake of her departure.

After all this, should the idea of true magic seem so very difficult to swallow? I think not.

No stranger than the empty shell of Hiroshima, cupped around Ground Zero, its citizenry reduced to shadows in the wake of the blast’s last terrible glare. And certainly no stranger than the fact that I should think a woman so palpably incapable of loving anyone might nevertheless be capable of loving me, simply because—at the last moment—she suddenly decided not to let a rich criminal regain his youth and prolong his days by eating me alive, in accordance with the ancient and terrible ritual of the Emperor’s Old Bones.

* * *

This morning, I told my publicist that I was far too ill to sign any books today—a particularly swift and virulent touch of the twenty-four-hour flu, no doubt. She said she understood completely. An hour later, I sat in Huang’s car across the street from the corner store, watching “Mrs. Munro” make her slow way down the street to pick up her daily dose of slow, coughing death.

On her way back, I rolled down the car window and yelled: “Lai gen wo ma, wai guai!”

(Come with me, white ghost! An insulting little Mandarin phrase, occasionally used by passing Kuomintang jeep drivers to alert certain long-nosed Barbarian smugglers to the possibility that their dealings might soon be interrupted by an approaching group of Japanese soldiers.)

Huang glanced up from his copy of Rolling Stone’s Hot List, impressed. “Pretty good accent,” he commented.

But my eyes were on “Mrs. Munro,” who had also heard—and stopped in mid-step, swinging her half-blind grey head toward the sound, more as though scenting than scanning. I saw my own face leering back at me in miniature from the lenses of her prescription sunglasses, doubled and distorted by the distance between us. I saw her raise one palm to shade her eyes even further against the sun, the wrinkles across her nose contracting as she squinted her hidden eyes.

And then I saw her slip her glasses off to reveal those eyes: Still slant, still grey. Still empty.

“It’s her,” I told him.

Huang nodded. “’Fought so. When you want me to do it?”

“Tonight?”

“Whatever y’say, Mr. D.”

* * *

Very early on the morning before Ellis left me behind, I woke to find her sitting next to me in the red half-darkness of the ship’s hold.

“Kid,” she said, “I got a little job lined up for you today.”

I felt myself go cold. “What kind of job, Ellis?” I asked, faintly—though I already had a fairly good idea. Quietly, she replied:

“The grown-up kind.”

“Who?”

“French guy, up from Saigon, with enough jade and rifles to buy us over the border. He’s rich, educated; not bad company, either. For a fruit.”

“That’s reassuring,” I muttered, and turned on my side, studying the wall. Behind me, I heard her lighter click open, then catch and spark—felt the faint lick of her breath as she exhaled, transmuting nicotine into smoke and ash. The steady pressure of her attention itched like an insect crawling on my skin: fiercely concentrated, alien almost to the point of vague disgust, infinitely patient.

“War’s on its last legs,” she told me. “That’s what I keep hearing. You got the Communists comin’ up on one side, with maybe the Russians slipping in behind ’em, and the good old U.S. of A. everywhere else. Phillipines are already down for the count, now Tokyo’s in bombing range. Pretty soon, our little outfit is gonna be so long gone, we won’t even remember what it looked like. My educated opinion? It’s sink or swim, and we need all the life-jackets that money can buy.” She paused. “You listening to me? Kid?”

I shut my eyes again, marshalling my heart-rate.

“Kid?” Ellis repeated.

Still without answering—or opening my eyes—I pulled the mosquito net aside, and let gravity roll me free of the hammock’s sweaty clasp. I was fourteen years old now, white-blonde and deeply tanned from the river-reflected sun; almost her height, even in my permanently bare feet. Looking up, I found I could finally meet her grey gaze head-on.