The Black Isle (12 page)

As I dismounted my bicycle, my father sank to his knees and lowered his torso, bit by bit, until his forehead kissed the ground.

The kowtow. I’d never seen it performed before and instantly understood why—the nakedness of the subjugation was excruciating. I burned with shame and fury. Why this mortifying gesture when money should have sufficed? How would he ever gain the respect of our workers again? How would
I
? Father, the defeatist! If there’s anything I despise in a man it’s this kind of weakness.

I was about to flee when Mina’s father cleared his throat. He pointed one languid finger in my direction. One corner of his mouth rose to form a lewd, lopsided smile. He muttered something that made Father pull himself off the ground. Sweeping the dust off his hands and knees, Father stole a furtive glance at me.

The old man’s lips moved again: “Your daughter—pretty girl.”

He beckoned to me in a way that made my hair stand on end: fondling the air as if squeezing an invisible peach. I pretended I hadn’t seen him and leapt onto my bicycle. As I sped away, I heard him ululate like a hyena, each laughing cluck rising in pitch and derangement.

Evidently we would not lose those workers, after all. But forgetting that insidious old pervert was another matter. I cringed at the memory of Father’s kowtow.

Hurrying home, I noticed something I must have passed hundreds of times but never fully registered: a black wooden shrine hidden along the outer edge of my lobe. Its presence surprised me because I had ordered all shrines moved to the recreational area. As I neared, I realized that my first impression was wrong. This was not a shrine but a hut with a large, rusted padlock on the single door. No windows or any other opening. The woodworking was superior. It had none of the splinters so common in up-country huts. It was free of lichen and moss, again odd in this supremely humid landscape. The whole structure seemed designed to vanish into the night, yet I felt a tug of the familiar.

My mind was too preoccupied with the day’s disturbances to give it further attention. Later, I told myself, later. Sunlight was fading rapidly, as it does at the equator. I rushed back to the house.

That night, my left cheek wore a purplish bruise where Li had punched me. I said nothing to Li or to Father. Did he even notice my face? Around midnight, in my bedroom, I heard a distant roar from the plantation hives, followed by a fit of joyous drumming. Mina the Milkmaid’s child was born.

Soon an admired relative would “open” the newborn’s mouth by dipping a gold ring in honey and placing it in the baby’s mouth until he or she began sucking it. The idea was that the child would magically absorb some of the traits of the ring bearer. For the baby’s sake, I hoped this sponsor wasn’t Mina’s father. I now understood why Li had found him so infuriating. The man had the air of a deposed king plotting his way back to power. The lewd gesture he gave me betrayed a chilling lack of restraint.

The drumming didn’t die down for hours. I was finally drifting off to sleep when my door creaked open. Someone was entering my room. Instinctively I reached for the knife by my bed, but it was just Li, in his pajama bottoms. Through the scrim of my mosquito net, I saw tears glinting in his eyes.

I stayed under the covers because, like him, I slept topless.

“I’m sorry.” He walked over and lifted up an opening in the net. “I promise I’ll never hurt you again.” The ferocity of the day was no more. This was a chastened boy.

I let him touch my cheek so he’d know that, although he had hurt me, the injury wasn’t serious or permanent. I didn’t hold a grudge—my anger had already been shunted toward Mina’s vile father.

“I can’t sleep,” Li said. I knew what he meant. I, too, often had trouble sleeping because I’d grown accustomed to the warm lump next to me.

He climbed into my bed, the way he’d done a thousand times when we were children in Shanghai, on the boat, in Bullock Cart Water. It was the most familiar thing in the world. I turned to my side, but Li, instead of turning his back to me, faced my spine and wrapped his arms around my bare waist. He sank his face into the back of my neck; I felt his every breath. It was a surprising comfort. I closed my eyes.

We lay like this for a while before he spoke again. “You’re my best friend in the world.” I knew he meant it.

“You’re mine.” And I meant it. We really had no one else.

“We’re bound, aren’t we?”

“Yes. We’re bound.”

“Forever?”

“Forever.”

He gave the nape of my neck a little kiss. “Your skin’s so soft.” When I showed no objection, he grew braver and gave it a longer kiss. And then a longer one still, until his mouth ranged up and down my neck and onto my shoulder. My flesh tingled and I let out an involuntary whimper—which we both took to mean approval. He moved his hands up toward my breasts and I felt the first prickles of shyness.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he whispered in my ear. “I promise.”

I relaxed and let him explore. It was erotic, yes, of course, yet also spiritual—I was being embraced by my other half, my missing half. When he touched me, I felt complete. He draped one leg over my thigh and pressed himself against the small of my back so I would know his desire was urgent. When he reached down the waist of my pajamas, I found myself sliding up to meet his fingers, inviting them to venture further. Without discussion, we removed our pants. I swooned when I saw the full extent of his love for me, but that feeling soon washed into many others, equally pleasing, equally intense. Our movements felt dreamlike, as if we were both really asleep.

In bed together, we were freed from the soul-deadening quotas of the plantation world. None of the daytime rules applied, yet our connection was made stronger precisely because we spent our lives under those constraints. Instinctively, we did whatever felt good, wonderful, ecstatic. Rubbing, pinching, licking, the tickling of a sensitive spot with a kiss of air—everything but the act itself, which both of us, even in our hallucinatory state, knew was a bigger step than we were prepared to take.

Eventually I rolled over and met my brother head-on. He looked handsomer than ever—the handsomest boy I’d ever seen—and my heart was filled with joy that I was the one he’d chosen to love. That I was the one he’d chosen to explore and conquer.

We remained in each other’s arms until sunrise. But instead of feeling sapped from the lack of sleep, I felt nourished. Love nourished me.

At the flag raising, we resumed our usual, chaste positions and sang our anthems, for Father’s benefit. But the ceremony now felt like a hollow, childish pantomime, much more of a sham than it had always been. I also noticed, for the first time, how ridiculously small my uniform looked on me. Even after letting out the hem completely, the pinafore still stopped short of my knees, and the area around my chest was a very tight fit. After securing the flag, I shot Li a secret smile and hoped Father wasn’t watching from the window. He wasn’t. Li returned my smile and when I went back to my room to change, he followed me. Without bashfulness, I removed my clothes in front of him, and without bashfulness, we entwined again, kissing as if the ten minutes we had before the workday began were the last ten minutes we would ever have.

The following three nights, Li continued his visits, and each night, we danced closer and closer to the precipice from which we knew there would be no return.

“I don’t think I can hold back any longer,” he gasped between kisses.

He raised himself over me and we knew the precariousness of our situation.

“No, don’t move.” He pinned my arms down. With a look of torment, he began nuzzling my neck until he could formulate his thoughts. “We can’t go on like this. You’re driving me mad. I feel like I’m about to burst.”

“Then burst.”

“But I want to be inside you…Don’t you want me inside you?”

“Yes, I do, but…”

“But what?”

“It doesn’t feel right…” I meant morally. Physically I knew it would feel divine.

“You moan when I touch you.” He brought his lips to my breast and let his tongue run across my nipple. I whimpered. “We are meant to be together, you and I. We’re two halves. You know this.” He licked his way down my chest to my abdomen, which he teased with small pecks before plunging his mouth between my thighs. I moaned loudly this time and feared that Father would hear us. But Li kissed me until I was brought to delirium. He only stopped when he knew from my tremors and the arch of my body that I was completely his. “I love you. I promise I won’t hurt you.”

He launched himself back up and was again atop me. This time, he pried my thighs apart with his knees. The coarseness of his movement stunned me.

“No!”

Everything from here on unfolded with disorienting speed, like falling back to earth after an opium dream. I tried to push him off me, but he was too strong. I tried to slap him, but his face was buried in my neck. I kicked at his legs to no effect. Finally, as a last resort, I forced my hands between us and gouged my nails into the part of him that only minutes before I had kissed.

Li hissed like a wounded beast and leapt from the bed, almost tearing down the mosquito net in his retreat. “You tricked me!” He raised his hand to strike me but held back, remembering his promise. He glared at me in silence for a minute, seething, then grabbed his pajamas from the floor and stumbled away. His door slammed.

I lay in bed, sobbing. Had I done the right thing? His body had felt so
natural
against mine, and I could not deny my desire for him. I wanted to experience the act; I was ready for it. My body was more than ready. But I knew that my first lover shouldn’t also be my…Then again, we weren’t like other brothers and sisters. We were two halves, incomplete on our own and whole only when together.

I woke the next morning sapped. Unnourished. Unloved.

For the first time in three years, I couldn’t summon up the energy for flag raising and decided then and there that I would abolish the practice. When I went to fetch my bicycle, I realized that Li had already gone on without me.

I did not see him again until dinnertime, picking at the vegetable curry he normally devoured, his face clouded over with bruised pride and self-hatred. Father didn’t seem to notice anything different—insolence was insolence to him—but I registered all the minute changes. I slid my foot to Li’s under the table. He didn’t pull away, nor did he respond.

That night, I brooded. Had we brought ourselves to the point of no return? Had I really tricked him, as he’d put it, led him on? Thinking back, I realized it often had been my hands that did the exploring, my moans that egged him on. But still, we’d begun in unison, hadn’t we?

Exhausted by worry, I finally drifted off.

Sometime later, I felt a weight on the bed behind me. How long had it been there? Also present was the dense, coppery odor of wet soil.

“Li?”

No answer. Still half asleep, I tried to turn and face him, but was pushed facedown on the bed with an unfamiliar roughness.

“Stop it, Li!” I thrust my foot back, but there was nothing where I should have felt his legs. I could not turn my head either. This couldn’t be my brother, could it? Someone was applying pressure to the nape of my neck, and my arms were pinned down. I reached out for my knife but my fingers grasped at nothing. I was paralyzed.

A pair of hands tore down my trousers. I tried to scream but another hand, a very cold hand smelling of fresh mud, clamped itself over my mouth. My assailant remained invisible, yet his moves were anything but amorphous. When my pants tangled around my ankles, he impatiently ripped them apart. Freed of them, he splayed my legs wide and forced my face into the pillow so deeply I could barely breathe. It was a measure of my childish delusion that even in this position, I believed I would somehow be able to fend him off—with my rage, with my wits, with the sheer force of my will. I was, after all, different. Special.

I felt his full weight on me and tried to buck.

But my body was crushed. I was being buried alive. My lungs ached from the lack of air; it burned just to inhale. I told myself to surrender. There would be less pain if I surrendered. This was the end.

My ignoble end.

Then, all of a sudden, gasping madly like a near-drowned girl, I realized that the devil—and his nauseating smell of moss and earth—had bolted. He had left me stripped bare, shaking, in tears—but intact.

In taking me to the edge of doom and setting me free, he was taunting me with his strength and his mercy, as if to say,
I don’t need your permission. I can claim you whenever I want.

A trickle of red ran down my left thigh. My monthly visitor had come a few days early.

At breakfast, Li shot me a warm, conspiratorial smile. I left the table without a bite.

“What’s the matter with you?” Father asked, with his usual abrasiveness. “By the way, I have something to tell you two.”

I didn’t wait to hear it.

Li tore after me and stopped me by the bicycles. My reaction to the sight of him, the smell of him, was physical. I was shaking. I couldn’t look him in the eye.

He reached for my arm but I pulled away before he could taint me. “Let’s forget the whole thing and be friends again.”

“Friends?” I was ashamed that my voice sounded so thin.

“It’s just as hard for me.” There was something uneasy in his manner. Guilt? Shame? “But we’re stuck here together. So we should at least try to get along.”

“You promised you wouldn’t hurt me.”

“I did—and I haven’t.”

Liar.

“Because of what you did to me—”

“What
I
did to you?”

“—we can never be friends.”

“Wait!”

I didn’t wait. “Stay away from me.”

Riding off, I wandered aimlessly around Blood Hill, anything to delay facing my workers. I had to keep moving until the shaking stopped. The night’s bleeding, too, had left me pale and exhausted. My authority was integral to my work—it was all I had. I refused to let them mock me the way they had mocked Father. Already the bruise on my cheek from the other day had caused some of my girls to titter. I pretended I hadn’t noticed, but of course I had—and it stung.