The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

  Ming Kai had never even been to Elijah’s office. He had seen him in it, since his office was at the very top of the factory, and Elijah always seemed to be at one of the windows, looking down at his workers with his hard, cold stare. But today Ming Kai went up, and he knocked on the door until he heard Elijah’s voice: “Enter!” he bellowed, as though he were a king.

  Ming Kai shuffled in and waited for Elijah to look at him. It took a minute or two. Elijah had a stack of papers on the desk in front of him—invoices, order forms, payroll—and he was going through each and every piece of it. He did not become who he was by trusting someone else to do even the menial task of bookkeeping. But no one could ever have done it as well, because it was more than just a job for him. It was his life.

  “Yes?” he said. He still didn’t look up. “What is it?”

  “It is this,” Ming Kai said.

  Finally Elijah looked. Ming Kai had something in his hand, but Elijah couldn’t see what it was: it was so small it hid behind Ming Kai’s skinny old fingers.

  Elijah sighed. “Well? What the hell is it?”

  Ming Kai showed him. It was an old, gray worm. It looked starved, even dead. It only moved when Ming Kai gently touched it with the tip of his finger.

  “The worm is sick,” Ming Kai said.

  Elijah almost laughed. “You see all this work I have to do, Ming Kai, and you interrupt it to bring me one sick worm?”

  Ming Kai shook his head. “All the worms are sick. The trees, too: they are dying.”

  “All of them?”

  Ming Kai nodded.

  Elijah looked away from the worm, from Ming Kai, as if his eyes were tracking down a thought, an idea—a solution. Beneath the two men, the sound of the factory and its whirring machines seemed to diminish a bit. But maybe that was their imaginations. “Well,” Elijah said, finally. “Cure them.”

  “I cannot cure them,” Ming Kai said.

  Elijah looked into Ming Kai’s eyes. He knew what was in a man’s heart just by looking. This is how he had become who he was: by seeing what was in a man’s heart, and taking it from him. “Can’t—or won’t?”

  “Maybe I can cure them,” Ming Kai said. “But I want—I need—something in return.”

  “Oh? And what would that be?”

  Ming Kai stood very tall then, and his face turned very serious. “An apology.”

  “From me?” Elijah said. “For what?”

  “For ruining my life,” Ming Kai said.

  Elijah straightened a stack of invoices that looked about to fall off his desk. “What’s done is done,” he said. He had moved on; this conversation was over. “Nothing I say can change anything now. I can’t help you, Ming Kai.”

  But Ming Kai persisted. “All I want from you is this,” he said. “Not money. Not land. You can have everything. Nothing has to change. Just to say to me you know what you did, so I am not alone in knowing this. Tell me you are sorry and I will fix the worms.”

  Elijah sat down in his huge desk chair. There was no bigger chair in Roam. It was made of birch and oak and the weathered skins of animals he had killed—bears, deer, a couple of rabbits—and stuffed with down. In it he looked miniature, like a little boy, but no one told him this. No one ever told him the truth: he thought he looked powerful. Elijah put on a pair of glasses and picked up a red ink pen and began going through his invoices, initialing the bottom of each page as he read through it. He had initialed thirteen pages before he looked up again and saw Ming Kai still standing there, waiting. Then he looked back down and initialed the next page, and the next.

  “Then it is over,” Ming Kai said, setting the old worm gently on top of the stack of papers. “The worms will die, Elijah McCallister,” he said. “And without the worms, so will everything else.”

  “Don’t you dare threaten me!” Elijah said. “I know you—you wouldn’t dare!”

  He walked around his desk and grabbed Ming Kai by the shoulders. “You!” he said. “You! I should, should—”

  But before he could finish the sentence, he gasped, choked, and fell to the floor. Ming Kai calmly watched him fall. Then he sighed, took a deep breath, and knelt beside him. He paused, bent closer, as if listening for something. “What?” Ming Kai said into the silence. “What did you say?” He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Nothing. Just as I thought.”

  Then, with a few hard thumps to his chest, he saved Elijah’s life. But now it was only a matter of time.

  As Elijah died, so did Roam, and not over the course of months or even weeks—but days. It was as though the town were not merely his invention, his creation, but actually him, that they were connected somehow by an invisible artery, the art and the artist one. He developed a malaise so consuming and heavy he felt it inside of him, like a tumor, and he attempted to have it pressed from his body by something even heavier. He lay on his back and had a large plank placed on top of him and then rocks placed on top of that until he couldn’t breathe. Finally, he prayed. Nothing came of that, either.

  For years Roam had been usurping the world around it like a hungry machine. Even after the town became a town, with its stores and bars and whorehouses—along with the homes, some of the nicest with golden commodes—the construction continued. Pointless structures were built, huge empty warehouses, beautiful roads to nowhere. But after the worms died all of that stopped. The Chinese—and they were still coming by the boatload—suddenly found themselves with nothing to do. Most disappeared into the forest. Many of the whites stayed, however, as did the combos. They didn’t know who or what they would be outside of Roam.

  The factories produced not a skein of silk ever again. This is how they learned: Roam was and always had been at the mercy of an insect.

  One month to the day after saving his life, Ming Kai made the trek from town up the hill to Elijah’s mansion. He entered without knocking and walked slowly up the winding staircase to the bedroom. The desiccated body of Elijah lay barely breathing in the huge bed, tiny, hardly a smear of life left in it.

  Ming Kai stood beside the bed and looked down at him. Elijah was only fifty years old, but he looked twice that.

  “There is nothing left, Elijah,” Ming Kai said. “Nothing for me, nothing for my family. We are going. We leave today.”

  “Have you ever thought,” Elijah said, and then he stopped to breathe. He couldn’t speak above a whisper. Each word he spoke took a day off his life. But his eyes still glittered with bitter amusement. “Have you ever thought how, if I hadn’t been in China on that day, or you had stayed at home to play with your real children, none of this would have ever happened?”

  “I have thought of nothing else.”

  But even so, Ming Kai had grown to love his replacement family in a way that surprised even him. He dreamed of his true wife and sons, and wondered what became of them. He imagined beautiful lives for them, even though he knew that no such thing was possible without a husband, a father. He longed for them in the way any man with a heart would have longed for them.

  Ming Kai took Elijah’s hand in his own.

  “My replacement wife tells me, ‘Forgive him.’ She says it is the only way to take back my life. But everything bad that happened to me happened because of you. Everything. Yes, I should forgive you. It is what a stronger man would do. But I can’t. I won’t. Not if I live to be a hundred years old.”

  “We made something beautiful, Ming Kai,” Elijah said.

  “This town was cursed from the beginning.”

  “It was you who cursed it!”

  “No,” Ming Kai said. “You cursed it when you brought me here, when you took me away from my home, my family. When you made me hate you.” He shook his head. “And yet I love you, too, which is strange to me.”

  But why waste his breath? Ming Kai thought. This man would never change. He moved to leave, but Elijah wouldn’t let go of his hand. He held it more tightly than a dying man should have the power to do.

  “Die with me,” he said. His voice hissed. “I
t’s only right. We made this town together. Every nail in every board. Even the combos: we created a new kind of human being. Together. We should die together, too. It’s you and me, Ming Kai. You and me. It always has been.”

  Ming Kai shook his head. “This is not how I want my life to end,” he said. He still had much to live for. He saw a world beyond this one. Elijah didn’t want Ming Kai to have a life at all.

  Slowly, Elijah’s other hand rose, shaking from the sheets, and as it did Ming Kai saw in it a gun, a pearl-handled gun with a long black barrel. Elijah pointed it at Ming Kai’s chest. Ming Kai only smiled.

  “A worm is born a worm,” he said. “Then it becomes a moth. It is born twice. It has two lives. We should all be so lucky.”

  Elijah fired, but his hand was swaying back and forth so, like a weather vane in a high wind, that the bullet missed Ming Kai and lodged itself into the far wall. Ming Kai stood, staring at the man he loved and hated more than any other man in the world. Elijah fired again, and the shot broke a window. Ming Kai bowed, turned, and walked away, slowly, bullet after bullet flying past him. Elijah fired until there were no more bullets left, pulling the trigger long after Ming Kai was gone, the click of the hammer against the empty chamber matching his own heart’s last beats. When his last concubine discovered him the following day, she took his withered body to the town square where his body was burned in a fire so glorious it’s said its flickering fiery tongue warmed the moon.

  Ming Kai didn’t see his old friend burn: he was long gone by then and vowed that he would never return. He made a new home for himself in a valley, a valley that turned out to be not that far away from Roam, though it may as well have been on the moon. But as the years passed—and many years passed—Ming Kai thought more and more about Roam and the life he led there, and he visited it in his dreams, and he talked about it, talked until he could talk about nothing else. The stories he would tell! The golden world his memory created! What a paradise it was. His great-grandson Markus listened to the old man tell these stories, and he believed them; this vision of a better life, far away from the sad, secluded valley where he had always lived, possessed him. He would go there one day, he told himself. And he would take these stories with him.

  JONAS,

  PART I

  Dripping wet, the girls left the cart on the porch beside the broken swing and walked into their home. The house was decrepit: every year another piece of it fell apart, or was blown off in a wind—shutters, drainpipes, window trim; much of it hung from the sides of the house as if by invisible screws and nails. The lawn had become as wild as any forest; still, the entry hall had a ceiling as high as some of the buildings downtown and a magnificent winding staircase: a penniless drifter would feel like royalty walking down that staircase. The house had a sitting room, a living room, two dining rooms—one meant to be used and one not to be—one and a half kitchens, ten bedrooms, four full baths, and a run for the dogs (if they’d had any); the backyard was half the size of McCallister Park, where the swing set and seesaw and gazebo were. Everything was in a state of such disrepair that men from organizations who concerned themselves with such things had visited the girls and made ominous warnings about the town’s ultimate responsibility for their safety—it had come to that—and would, if improvements were not made, be forced to take such action as was necessary.

  The dead, though—the ghosts who had taken up residence in the abandoned residences around town—saw things differently. The house to them was less a real house than a symbol representing the McCallisters’ (and, by extension, Roam’s) gradual deterioration, a deterioration that was inevitable. The rose gardens grew wild, the kudzu swallowed the dying oaks, and the lawn itself took on water when it rained until the water never went away and a small pond formed, a place where the neighborhood children came to fish with their homemade poles, kids Helen chased away.

  Rachel had taken only a few steps inside before she stopped. “Someone’s here,” she said.

  Helen nodded. “Jonas, probably.”

  “Smells like a car engine,” Rachel said. “And drink.”

  “Definitely Jonas.”

  Jonas was the man Helen let come around, and he’d been coming around for years. Rachel didn’t like him much, and Helen didn’t like him much, either. But liking the man you had around and liking having a man around were two different things. He was sprawled out on the green love seat, his ropey arms resting across the top and his legs spread so far apart it was like he was daring you to throw something at him. He used to work on cars, and still could, but now there were so few cars left to fix he just took the broken ones apart and sold their insides to the occasional lumberjack who came through. He wasn’t much, but he could take Helen’s mind off of things. That was enough.

  “I ate that ham sandwich in the crisper,” he said. Helen could see a little mustard yellowing the corners of his mouth. “It was just a half, and kind of stale. Hope that’s okay.”

  “That was Rachel’s lunch,” Helen said.

  “I’m not that hungry,” Rachel said. Her voice was even softer now than it usually was, and she turned her blushing face away, as if to avoid his gaze, as if she could feel the eyes of Jonas burning into her.

  “I’ve been wrestling with a radiator all morning,” he said. He was chewing a piece of gum. Jonas could make one piece of gum last all day—probably had it tucked in his upper lip while he ate Rachel’s sandwich. “Man works up an appetite wrestling a radiator. Then I spent some time with Digby over at the tavern.”

  “She said it was fine, Jonas,” Helen said. “Everyone knows what an appetite you have.” Here is where she would have winked at him, normally. One of the nice things about having a blind sister is that it was a little like having a child: you could say things that went right over her head because she couldn’t see to make the connection. But Helen didn’t wink; she was still upset by what had happened outside. How could Rachel believe, even for a moment, that she could live without Helen? Jonas winked, though, and licked the mustard off his lips. Then he let his left hand nestle snugly into his crotch, staring hard at Helen, zeroing into her eyes until all he could see were her pupils. “You two are wetter than a fish.”

  “You surprised us,” Helen said.

  “Good surprise, I hope,” he said.

  “I asked you to call first.”

  “Same difference,” he said. “You know you’d just say to come on over. Or not. Then I would anyway. I thought we could work on your car.” Winking again.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And?”

  “Well. It does need work,” she said.

  “Okay then.”

  But that was enough of that. Helen didn’t want to talk to him any more than he wanted to look at her, because he was as stupid as she was homely. She sometimes imagined what a baby of theirs might be like, and when she did she almost cried.

  “I guess I’m going to my room,” Rachel said. She reached out with her right hand and found the butterfly-backed chair. Her north star. Rachel was able to negotiate around the holes in the floorboards, knew which doors were frozen at angles, skipped over the slats in the stairs that couldn’t bear the weight of even her slight frame. The winding staircase did not make her feel like royalty; she felt like a mountain climber descending a precipitous slope.

  “Sounds like fun,” Jonas said, running his fingers along the sofa’s knotted weave, looking at Rachel up and down.

  Helen saw him. “Stop it, Jonas,” she said.

  “Stop what?” said Rachel.

  “Nothing,” Helen said. “Nothing.”

  Helen shook her head, trying to clear it. That Rachel could even think of leaving her stirred up the darkest place inside of her, that place she’d discovered the rainy day she’d been brushing her sister’s hair, the day they switched faces.

  “I have an idea,” Helen said to her. Her voice was unbelievably bright and buoyant and cold. “Actually, Rachel had one.”

  “I did?” Rachel said. r />
  “You said you want to see what it’s like to be on your own,” Helen said. “Remember?”

  “No, Helen. I—”

  “That’s what you said, Rachel. You said, ‘I’m a grown woman.’ So be a grown woman. See what it’s like. It’ll make me happy if you are, that’s for certain: my life would be a great deal easier if I didn’t think I was going to be babysitting you for the rest of it. Jonas and I are going to go out for a while. We’re going for a ride. You stay here. See how you like it without me.”

  “Don’t be mad at me, Helen,” she said.

  “Who said I was mad?”

  “I only want you to be happy.”

  “If I were you I wouldn’t worry about me,” Helen said. She kicked Jonas, who immediately stood. “I’d worry about you.”

  As Helen walked past, Rachel reached out for her, but Helen was just out of reach.

  “I love you,” Rachel said.

  Helen stopped. When was the last time she’d heard Rachel say this? It didn’t matter: today she was as hard as stone. “Of course you do,” Helen said.

  Jonas followed Helen out the back door like an old dog, trailing a few steps behind. She gave him the keys. Helen could drive, but she liked it better when Jonas did, so she could roll down the window and let the wind blow against her face: on some days, when the air had that cool layer beneath it, there was nothing better than that feeling. Rachel always sat in the backseat, as quiet as a mouse.

  He started the car up and backed it out of the drive and into the road.

  “What was that about, with you and Rachel?” Jonas said. “Is she going to be okay?” He paused, carefully putting together the words of his next thought so as not to enrage her. “It’s just—it wasn’t nice, the way you said what you said.”

  “I’m messing with her,” she said, “the way I do. It’s a joke, okay? She’ll be fine. We won’t be gone that long. Just long enough for her to see what it might be like for her without me.”