Little Gods Read online

  Su Lan didn’t say anything when she saw me on the stairs. I followed her lead. Later, I boiled water so she could give you a warm bath. The next morning I woke early. The air was crisp and fresh, like it had rained, but it had not. Su Lan’s door was open, so I went in.

  She was sleeping. You were too, belly down on her chest. You were both naked. When I turned to leave she opened her eyes and spoke, a soft and pleading sound, the first she’d made since she returned.

  It won’t stop crying, she said. I want to rest, but it won’t stop crying.

  I thought she’d gone mad. I thought she meant you. You were not crying. You were fast asleep, and for a moment I wondered if I should take you away from her. You hadn’t even cried the night before, not while I bathed you and not while I slept (fitfully, listening). I remembered I had thought it strange, wondered if it was normal for infants to be so placid.

  Then I heard it, the sharp, shrill screams. They were coming from the window. I slammed it shut. It was no use.

  Outside, on the terrace, I counted four swallow chicks inside the nest. One egg had not hatched. The chicks were featherless, with translucent membrane for skin, beneath which could be seen webs of purple capillaries and the ridges of tiny bones, angular folds of what would become wings. They sat in a line and shrieked for food, necks stretched out, little beaks opening and closing like hands. Theirs was not a pretty birdsong. It was a call for attention—for survival, aggressive and loud. On the other side of the window Su Lan covered your ears. Through the glass, her figure and yours appeared warped, your bodies flattened and geometric and yet revealing layers, as if I were seeing you from many directions at once. That was when I realized—in the cavity of your distorted bodies—that her husband, your father, was not there.

  I went to the kitchen. I pulled out my chopping knife. Back on the terrace, with one hand cupping the grainy round bottom, I sawed the mud nest from the eaves. It felt like a ball of dirt. I grabbed my cane and went down the stairs again and out the door. In my hand the chicks continued to shriek.

  Along the stone wall surrounding the longtang are little holes that were once used for candles and oil lamps, and had since been filled with garbage and pieces of loose stone. I walked down the alley cradling the nest in search of one of these holes, and found one not too far from our building. I scooped out the filling and tucked the nest inside. When I returned to the terrace, the swallow parents were hopping about the window ledge squawking their own song of alarm. I threw some rice over the ledge in the direction of the nest and told them to go look over there. The swallows flew away.

  The next few days, between looking after your mother and you, I went to the nest once a day to check that it was still there. I counted the chicks: four, four, four. On the second morning I saw the parents perched nearby and sprinkled some more rice on the ground, a reward, and clucked to them of their cleverness.

  I don’t remember if it was the fourth day or the fifth. One morning I found the hole empty. The nest lay on the ground at the base of the wall. Beside it crouched an enormous black bird with blue and white underwings, a magpie, which pecked at the mud cone with its sharp hooked beak. The magpie pulled a chick from the nest and thrust its beak into the naked neck, then continued down the body, ripping open the stomach and extracting the entrails. It pulled out a second chick and a third, opening each body in turn. The chicks’ skin broke easily; the magpie’s head darted out and back, its black beak shining, not red with blood but blacker, almost blue. I could not tell if the magpie was eating or simply probing; it moved with disinterest, like an investigator sorting through a cabinet of evidence. It turned and looked at me with one beady black eye, then pulled the last chick from the nest. When it was done it trotted a few steps before flying away.

  I watched its shadow move over the wall. I had thought magpies beautiful once, had admired their long, graceful tails. I hadn’t realized how large they were.

  For a few more moments I stood there. Already the pulp of purple and gray at the base of the wall was barely distinguishable as baby birds. The only evidence that remained was eight little feet that hadn’t yet sprouted full claws. I was a girl again, I’d just caught a bird in my hands. That time, I had felt how delicate the tiny life was, had felt the thin warm skin against my own, and had imagined closing my hand tight and hearing the crunch of bones in my palm, the hot blood dripping through my fingers. Instead I fastened the bird in a pouch around my neck and painfully climbed a ladder to the roof. I crawled to the edge and slipped it back inside its nest. Sharp pain stabbed my hip, and on my way down I slid, kicking a few shingles and nearly falling off. You see, I’ve always had this limp, even when I was a small girl.

  I walked quickly back to my room, where next door Su Lan was still asleep. My hip ached.

  The magpie had looked at me in recognition; the magpie was myself, the girl I’d almost been. I had no doubts: it was I inside that tapping beak, I in the cold beady stare, I in the beats of the wing, in flight over the longtang wall. Since I was a girl I had known the fragility of life and the power to extinguish it in my own hands; I had no right to feel anything; not horror, not grief, not even surprise.

  In those days I found myself thinking often of the first time I had seen Su Lan, when she moved into the neighborhood a little less than a year before. She and her husband were strange newcomers—two intellectuals from the provinces, newlywed, young and fashionable—the longtang didn’t see many like them. In that first year, before what happened, they were spoken of with admiration and envy. Even I had felt that things were changing, that the course of possibilities was turning from one road to another.

  She had come first, a few days before she brought her husband. I watched her arrive in the morning, walking down the lane in a pale yellow dress and red high-heeled shoes, carrying a bucket of what turned out to be white paint. I was surprised when the stranger walked all the way to the end of the lane, and more so when footfalls made the back stairs creak. For many months the room next door had been vacant. I had spent the years after my husband’s death cultivating loneliness; I liked to think I was the one who had driven prospective tenants away.

  She was there to paint the room white. Not just the walls but the ceiling and the floor—she kept painting until she stood in a white box. If you squinted your eyes, the edges disappeared and the space looked like an empty plane expanding in every direction. I had never seen anything like it.

  There was something alarming about her. Even before she began throwing paint on the floor, her presence unsettled me, though I couldn’t say exactly how or why. She had this way of looking at things, an expression if you could call it that, with such focus and intensity you would think she was trying to bore a hole through with her eyes. She painted in ferocious but controlled movements. Barefoot, skirt tied above her knees, she pressed layer after layer of white paint onto the walls as if aiming to annihilate every trace of what had been there before.

  When she finished, she stood in the middle of the room holding the empty bucket, breathing heavily. The paint, still wet, gleamed. Later, when I went in and out of the white room, I would feel how even though the space now looked larger than it was, there was something oppressive about it, as if all the air had been squeezed out. But right then, containing just your mother, who stood there examining her handiwork, blinking with surprise and relief, the room looked brand-new. So did she. She walked out, cheeks red, eyes fresh, like she had been born in this field of blankness. Here I am, she seemed to say, starting my new life.

  She gathered her things and locked the door. When she turned and saw me watching, she gave me a long look, her expression startled but not unkind, and mumbled something before picking up her red shoes and turning to go. I think she said, You look like someone I’ve always known.

  Her feet were caked in a layer of dried paint. I watched their white soles pad down the stairs.

  It wasn’t until a few days later, when she returned with her husband and other belongings,
that I learned her name.

  This is Su Lan, her husband said, she forgets to introduce herself.

  If her husband noticed the recent paint job, he didn’t say anything. He opened the door, looked around, and said, Very nice! He ran his hand down Su Lan’s hair. Do you like it? he asked her. She kissed him on the shoulder. They looked very much like a young couple in love. As far as I could tell, he believed she was seeing the place for the first time.

  I nearly believed it too. She behaved so differently from the other time I’d seen her (now talkative, now effusive, the sullen intensity now dissipated into charm) that I wondered if she was the same person, wondered even if I had somehow imagined the events of the previous week. Had the room always been white?

  Su Lan was a physicist. It was possible she had an extraordinary mind. Certainly her husband thought it. In the evenings he could be heard addressing her, with admiration and a note of disbelief (she’s mine? she’s mine!), as my brilliant wife. Perhaps as a result, there circulated rumors in the neighborhood about where she had come from, how she had graduated first from the top university in the country, how she had been interviewed on a radio program featuring the brightest of her generation. She was pursuing an advanced degree in theoretical physics at Fudan University, where, it was said, her colleagues called her the Chinese Madame Curie.

  She was studying the behavior of the tiniest particles in the world—many trillion times smaller than a rice grain, she once told me in an effort to explain—the bits that make up everything we know. She was trying to tease out a mathematical principle that could describe their behavior, a principle that would hold even when applied to the behavior of their opposites: entire planets, entire worlds.

  According to Su Lan, in physics it is far easier to understand the behavior of massive objects than that of minuscule ones. You would think it should be the reverse, like how it’s more difficult to hold down a large man than to carry a newborn child. But then I thought of children, how they were more surprising and unpredictable than adults, and how as I aged, I felt I was settling into a rigid form, becoming if not someone I understood, then someone whose moods and reactions fell increasingly into patterns I could predict. I thought too of the stories in novels and history books I’d read, stories about nations and empires, stories that spanned centuries, how sometimes it was easier to imagine large pieces of land animating and moving against each other than to comprehend one day in my own insignificant life.

  Su Lan agreed. She said that when something was massive, we could still imagine it. Undoubtedly we simplified it, made it stupid, missed some important things. But imagining what we could not see? Where would we even begin?

  It was when she spoke of her work that the intensity I’d seen on the day she painted the room returned to her eyes; it was then that I could be sure she was indeed the same person. Her relationship to physics was not like a typical person’s relationship to their work. There was a religiosity in it, which is to say a dependence. In the weeks after she returned from Beijing with you, the weeks she spent strapped to her bed by weakness and grief, trapped in a language that could not, like mathematics, be manipulated into pattern or logic, she was lost. I’m tired, I’m very tired, was all she said. She spent her days half asleep but unable to reach a place of true rest.

  She never told me what happened in Beijing. The most she said was on a night she woke screaming from sleep. I had not thought hers a human cry; in my own dreams a scaled bird had stuck its black neck out from the fleshy earth, waking into existence. When I went into her room her eyes were two wide lights in the dark.

  That night, she spoke of a conversation she’d had with her husband, what I assumed was one of their last. It must be so terrible to see through everything, he had told her. She repeated his words to me in a fit of lucidity, nearly spitting:

  It must be so terrible to see through everything like you do. It’s a form of blindness, you know. It gives you an excuse to do nothing while feeling superior, when really it’s just selfish, which is another way of saying stupid, lazy, everything you say you hate.

  She turned the words over.

  He’s right, she said. He wasn’t right then—I didn’t see anything then—but now—now I see and it is terrible. I see skin and beneath it muscle and bone and organs, and beneath these, blood, water, mucus, filth. It is all so clear that I feel as if I can reach inside and wrap my hand around a vein, and it is all so, so ugly.

  A bolt of terror seized her and she became frantic.

  What if I never want to look again? she said. What if I turn away and close my eyes for the rest of my life?

  The next day she asked me to bring her a pen and paper, and wrote very quickly, her words running into each other until they filled the page. This was not the neat, controlled script that I had once seen in her notebooks, describing the behavior of those particles she studied. This handwriting was wild; the only words I could decipher were dear friend at the top of the page. She folded the letter and sealed it. The envelope was addressed to Beijing, to someone I didn’t know. A former classmate, she explained, someone she hadn’t spoken to in a long time, but who would do anything for her. She said this very confidently: He would do anything for me. She asked me to post the letter.

  Two weeks later, she received a response. She opened the envelope, read, and for the first time since returning, began to weep.

  After the letter Su Lan reverted to a near-mechanical state, becoming a collection of human components that did not quite add up to a person. She was neither happy nor sad. She was simply an observer—less than an observer. An observer with no stake but sight, who had lost her ability to care. I tried to engage her with small talk, with little stories I’d heard here and there, even with questions about the nature of things, hoping to startle her into scientific interest. It didn’t work. If she responded her answers were dispassionate, even mocking, so that when she spoke of gravity or refraction or the laws of motion she seemed to be saying underneath her words that the entire enterprise of knowledge was ridiculous. Often she simply ignored the question and said: It is better not to know, it is better to be innocent. Once I read to her a mathematics puzzle I’d found in the newspaper, a silly little problem involving marbles and a scale that seemed simple but had me thinking in circles for days without finding a solution. She listened, head cocked to one side, and said, The answer is nonsense and death. Nonsense and death until death. Then laughed, and brought her hand to her mouth.

  She had lost her instinct for science. I think this was more devastating than losing her husband. Without that desire to see through everything, she did not know who she was.

  It was only after she pushed everything present (including you) to one side and prepared to return to work that the spark of life returned. Time happened, I suppose. One day, two or three months after the event, she came to my room and asked what type of scale it was in that marble problem I’d found in the newspaper, the kind they use at the vegetable market, with a weight tied to one end, or a two-sided balance, like the scales of justice. Scales of justice, I said. She thought for a moment, then began to solve the puzzle out loud. The solution was quite involved (later I would not be able to re-create it), but as she presented it I followed each step with perfect clarity and ease. She asked if I could watch you for a few hours and I agreed. Soon after that I began to see her sitting at her desk, bent over the physics publications that had piled up and gathered dust, and soon after that, she returned to the university.

  Her eyes were no longer dull, her cheeks flushed in the heat. Urgency returned to her voice when she spoke of her research, and she was invested again in the pursuit of scientific truth. But something had changed. She was too invested. Whereas before she approached physics with a sense of delight and play—an innocence, as she might say—now she was severe, serious. She worked as if driven by a force outside herself, as if her life, or its vindication, depended on it. She frightened me.

  Watching you was boring. You slept, a
te, peed, pooped. While your mother taught classes and attended meetings at the university, I fed and cleaned you. When you were awake, despite the fact that you could not do much, you required a minimum modicum of attention, entertainment of some form or another so you did not start wailing, observance so you did not roll off the bed or otherwise harm yourself. I had not cared for a child before. The most similar thing I’d done was care for my husband in the years before he died, bedridden and also in need of feeding and cleaning.

  It is remarkable that you don’t remember me at all. For nearly two years, keeping you alive and placated occupied most of my days.

  I remember the golden yellow stink of your waste. I remember Su Lan bent over a metal tub in the mornings, squeezing the milk from her breasts before putting on her makeup and gathering her papers. I remember winter afternoons, in that season when the sun set before you expected it to, bringing with early darkness a sense of malaise and doom, when you nuzzled your head into my armpit and I felt for a moment that caring for you was not like caring for a dying man after all. That it was a comforting feeling to hold something so small and so alive.

  But I could not be perpetually charmed by your helplessness. I didn’t need to think hard to take care of you, but you still demanded a kind of attention that drowned out all my thoughts. The work was tedious and unrewarding. At the end of the day, my arms and back and thighs ached, my head was dull and exhausted. At night I slept like a rock.

  Around midday I took you on a walk around the neighborhood. This was the easiest way to quiet you for a nap. My uneven gait produced a rocking motion that without fail put you to sleep. Often on these walks neighbors would approach me to look at you. They commented on your looks or size, asking how old you were, if you cried a lot, if you ate and slept well, eventually winding to a comment about how they hadn’t seen your father around in some time. The brazen ones leaned in and said with false commiseration: What a shame, for that woman to enlist the services of a cripple.