The Worm in Every Heart

I wrote this speech out last night, and rehearsed it several times in front of the bathroom mirror. I wonder if it sounds rehearsed. Does calculated artifice fall into the same general category as outright deception? If so, Ellis ought to be able to hear it in my voice. But I don’t suppose she’s really apt to be listening for such fine distinctions, given the stress of this mutually culminative moment.

“I won’t say you’ve nothing I want, Ellis, even now. But what I really want—what I’ve always wanted—is to be the seller, for once, and not the sold. To be the only one who has what you want desperately, and to set my price wherever I think it fair.”

Adding, with the arch of a significant brow: “—or know it to be unfair.”

I study her battered face. The bruises form a new mask, impenetrable as any of the others she’s worn. The irony is palpable: Just as Ellis’ nature abhors emotional accessibility, so nature—seemingly—reshapes itself at will to keep her motivations securely hidden.

“I’ve arranged for a meal,” I tell her. “The menu consists of a single dish, one with which I believe we’re both equally familiar. The name of that dish is the Emperor’s Old Bones, and my staff will begin to cook it whenever I give the word. Now, you and I may share this meal, or we may not. We may regain our youth, and double our lives, and be together for at least as long as we’ve been apart—or we may not. But I promise you this, Ellis: No matter what I eventually end up doing, the extent of your participation in the matter will be exactly defined by how much you are willing to pay me for the privilege.”

I gesture to Huang, who slips a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. I tap one out. I light it, take a drag. Savor the sensation.

Ellis just watches.

“So here’s the deal, then: If you promise to be very, very nice to me—and never, ever leave me again—for the rest of our extremely long partnership—”

I pause. Blow out the smoke. Wait.

And conclude, finally:

“—then you can eat first.”

I offer Ellis the cigarette, slowly. Slowly, she takes it from me, holding it delicately between two splinted fingers. She raises it to her torn and grimacing mouth. Inhales. Exhales those familiar twin plumes of smoke, expertly, through her crushed and broken nose. Is that a tear at the corner of her eye, or just an upwelling of rheum? Or neither?

?

??Juss like . . . ahways,” she says.

And gives me an awful parody of my own smile. Which I—return.

With interest.

* * *

Later, as Huang helps Ellis out of bed and into the hospital’s service elevator, I sit in the car, waiting. I take out my cellular phone. The master chef of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant answers on the first ring.

“How is . . . the boy?” I ask him.

“Fine, tai pan.”

There is a pause, during which I once more hear music filtering in from the other end of the line—the tinny little song of a video game in progress, intermittently punctuated by the clatter of kitchen implement. Laughter, both adult and child.

“Do you wish to cancel your order, tai pan Darbersmere?” the master chef asks me, delicately.

Through the hospital’s back doors, I can see the service elevator’s lights crawling steadily downward—the floors reeling themselves off, numeral by numeral. Fifth. Fourth. Third.

“Tai pan?”

Second. First.

“No. I do not.”

The elevator doors are opening. I can see Huang guiding Ellis out, puppeting her deftly along with her own crutches. Those miraculously-trained hands of his, able to open or salve wounds with equal expertise.

“Then I may begin cooking,” the master chef says. Not really meaning it as a question.

Huang holds the door open. Ellis steps through. I listen to the Gameboy’s idiot song, and know that I have spent every minute of every day of my life preparing to make this decision, ever since that last morning on the Yangtze. That I have made it so many times already, in fact, that nothing I do or say now can ever stop it from being made. Any more than I can bring back the child Brian Thompson-Greenaway was, before he went up the hill to Wao Ruyen’s fortress, hand in stupidly trusting hand with Ellis—or the child I was, before Ellis broke into my parents’ house and saved me from one particular fate worse than death, only to show me how many, many others there were to choose from.

Or the child that Ellis must have been, once upon a very distant time, before whatever happened to make her as she now is—then set her loose to move at will through an unsuspecting world, preying on other lost children.