Everyone has a cage and lives in it. The keys were buried a long, long time ago, swallowed by the Earth.
You cried when you were born because you knew this – but then you grew distracted and forgot. But are reminded from time to time by long lists, pain, birds, and your lack of wings. It is only when you die, when your bones and your bars are weakened and withered, that you can swing your chest open like a door, slip out of your skin as you would slip out of a coat, and rejoin the sky.
You see, time usually wins. It is the bigger cage.
Two women lie side by side in a room of dust. One old, one young. One on the bed intended for two, the other on a cot.
Their bones are like timber; their blood is thicker than oil. The younger lives in the cardboard boxes she sends home to her family; the older has long since fled from her body, but she returns to Taipei and the apartment once in a while to look at the pictures on the bureau.
The colored pictures are of grandchildren and great grandchildren, placed there by their subjects so that maybe she wouldn’t forget them because visiting once or twice a year isn’t enough. Those were long ago wishes – now, the old woman can grasp only the threads of voices, her eyes are foggy windows. There are only the occasional flickers: her eyebrows furrow when she is touched; her mouth will open with an effort, but that is all. For the thoughts and the words run too fast for her to catch. For the most part, she is vacant. She knows no one.
The only black and white picture, the only one she placed there herself, is of a wedding. Two bodies linked by the arm: a statue and his corpse bride. A tear of poison burns a scar down her face.
Determinedly tragic, many called her. “Overdramatic girls amount to no good.” Her father threatened her, her mother slapped her. So, when the question loomed large and foreboding over her, she said yes. “Yes, I will marry you.”
And the statue was never unkind to her, never raised his hand or his voice. His love just remained stuck inside his chest, until those moments when he would sneak out the backdoor and she would pretend not to see.
Why say yes you might ask? Why did he even ask? Indeed, the younger woman asked this many times, back when her employer could still hear and speak. “We are all trapped; you, of all people, should know,” the old woman would respond. There is not much satisfaction in getting an answer like that.
The young woman is dreaming. While she dreams she sees a woman – no, she is the woman – chased by a rabid man with desire like fangs. She moves through rooms configured like eternity. There is no beginning, no end, only the struggle. Endless walls made from boxes numbered one through infinity. Each box made from messages waiting for the teeth of a key and the freedom to unfold and stretch their papery wings. The woman longs to take one of the larger boxes by the handle and pull, lie down inside, and wait for her soul to go on. Her delivery. Or deliverance.
But the man is chasing her, and there is no time. He has a tin body painted with a uniform, an emperor’s little boy soldier. “Here”, the Rising Sun says, “take this gun and put the world in bondage. Fear nothing but the shame of death.”
The woman runs. Her body is a virgin lake with floating stars and dignified trees. Her body is a feeble white dress and whirring legs. She will run until she is caught, and after she is caught, her ghost will run on.
When she wakes, and her soul is in her body once more, she’ll be in the room that cannot breathe in.
The room whose fine clothes that have long since grown stale, generations out of fashion.
The drapes have shoulders, and those shoulders are drooping. They do their utmost to hang as sunlight pries its way between the stiffness of the fabric. The river of light, a forest of dried pussywillow and ancient oriental table legs, the open expanse of television; this has been her life the past five years, this stuffy room that she can never completely rid of dust.
A list of what the young woman must complete today: she must bathe her mistress in water precisely 38 degrees centigrade. She will place packaged foods, some soap, teabags and a shirt in a cardboard box and bring it downstairs to be shipped. Then, her body will growl at her to eat, but the food still needs to be bought. The dishes still need to be washed. The fan in the corner needs to be repaired. And all the while, the TV will speak and never grow tired, and she will look into the eyes of faces she does not know. Always on the watch. But he never comes until she is asleep.
Still for the most part, she bears the confines of existence well–far better than we ought to expect–with reluctance, of course, but also with a sense of quiet expectation. Time will barricade the past from the present, and the present from the future, by which her wings and her freedom will have been bought. For now, she needs only to follow the money. Move from here to there, do this or that. Let the days pile up. She slips into the crevices between the tasks and the hours, sending whatever money she catches home to Manila, along with the boxes and packages to which the ache of her being is confined.
Sometimes there is a response: a drawing, decorated with hearts, the stereotypical four-year-old representation of a house with massive flowers in the yard beside two immense bodies. Mother and daughter. Sticks for hair, stones for eyes. The young woman can feel hot little hands on her cheeks, the small body with the precious thumping in its chest, with skin so soft and vulnerable. The baby girl on her phone had teeth like little pearls and black hair that reached down her back. She was growing strong and healthy on the diet of her mother’s distant love and labor. “Umuwi ka na, Mama.”
“Soon, my darling, soon. Mahal kita. I love you.”
All the while, she tries not to think about Miss Lee. She calls her Miss Lee, and has called her Miss Lee throughout her employment. It used to make the wrinkles around the old woman’s eyes crumple into joy. Her smile was another pretty thing time had taken.
Miss Lee had done what the young woman has wished to do for a long time, and left the confines of flesh. But where is she? What is a body with no apparent soul, and why does it stay and pretend to live? Why does her heart not stop if she is no longer there?
A picture from the past that never made it to the bureau: a wooden stage, an audience poised, and a woman who was many women all in the same raucous evening. From under the blue headdress infected with charlatan pearls, an opera came fluttering and quivering like a butterfly.
After the blue headdress was the green bonnet. The unassuming frills trembled atop her distressed little head as she wept and pleaded, pacing the stage in ladylike distress with feet frightened of hurting the floor and a voice that bowed to the wood. She wore desperation and anguish, but she was dying to wink. She fell to her knees so that she might resist the urge.
In the black tricorn she was a pirate, with a leg that was chopped and wooden but utterly hers. Her eyes were shinier than freedom. Her voice was gruff like power.
When the clapping had run itself out, she found the man in the back and her money. It was a pitiful sum, but it fed her soul. “Thank you,” she said, “I’ll be back next week.”
And that was all.
Except, she was not back next week. She was wearing a veil and propriety before a very different sort of congregation. She was beaten down until she bore the son she would be remembered for.
The young woman tries not to look at the corpse bride. It all makes her want to cry. Skin once so soft and fresh hangs from the boney, jutting frame like chains. The seconds are slapped one on top of the other, like slabs of dying meat.
***
As broken birds flock to a tree, so the letters begin to fly jaggedly from the past to her hand.
The young woman is running again. The white dress flits through the galleries, a spirit with a perilous heartbeat and flesh made conspicuous in a world of darkness and sin. She recognizes her body splattered on the walls. Every gift her body has ever coughed up, mopped up with the soldier only moments behind, separated by seconds. His boots grind their presence into the post office floor. His uniform is an impervious wall, behind which it is difficult to discern whether a human being is hiding.
He does not bat a mechanical eyelash at the letters who beat their wings ferociously to reach the young woman. Beaks scratch at her innocent skin in desperation, warning of men who build staircases of bodies and step on their spirits so that they might plant a flag in the sky.
There is the Spaniard with his horse and his whip – the Conquistador who harvests humanity to feed his God in heaven, his king across the ocean, and the fatness of his own self. There are the liars with the banner of stars and stripes, who own freedom but keep it in a cage, only for themselves.
The souls of the conquered watch the birds fly free and know that they are somehow less.
Their letters chase the woman, and now they bring her down. They weigh on her – heavy as a million starving bodies – until she is their ghost, and her body drags to a halt because it is nothing in the face of a man with stupid faith and a weapon that turns bodies flimsier than paper. The past is never far away – it’s right here, right now. The soldier’s boots stop in front of her, and she closes her eyes, waiting.
Did she fall asleep? The earth has spun her back around to the same spot. The same sun has climbed, nonchalant, into the same sky, and here she is again, folding the laundry, dusting the China, changing the sheets, fighting her unending war against the dust. Like a rock in a river, she remains still despite the flow of time, stuck within all the motion, legs running to nowhere.
Only when the last line of her list is reached does she waver. She shrinks away from the mailroom floors below her in the basement and hides the back of her hands. There must be some other chore she can do instead, but the list is loud. And what is a body in the face of what ought to be done?
So, she marches downstairs to the designated box and removes from it a letter with no postmark. It perches in the palm of her hand, and the woman breathes easier knowing that this little paper bird is a gentler sort of friend. Still, she waits until she is back upstairs to open it.
The ink that curls into her name is still wet.
Conchita,
Thank you for watching over me until I am ready.
I suppose you have wondered all these years why it is you alone, why my children frequent my bedside only in a polite show of pity. At the core of their love, they despise me.
I allowed my eldest son to splinter under the weight of his birthright and let his younger brothers cultivate forests of spite. I told my daughters their failures didn’t matter because they were girls, afterthoughts. They think I cemented a stony husband and hence a stony father with my negligence, but they do not know I once sang opera, and my favorite hat was a pirate’s. I love them, and I love them all the same. I was confused in how to tell them, how to love them, for I have never been able to see past the walls of my own body or anyone else’s. That is why I have spent all this time away.
You and I are different. From different worlds and different time, and you are much stronger. Born into millions of possibilities. You have constructed a life and willingly locked yourself in it because of a little girl at home who is now able to go to school and wear clothes with no tatters or holes.
I have seen her, Conchita, and she is well, but she will not be a girl forever. Time will confine her in womanhood. I want you to go to her, but I do not have much to offer, I realize.
Only this: in the closet of this bedroom is my wedding dress, and in its hem. I have sewn all the money I saved from my performance days. It’s a meager amount, but you know that will make do.
Regarding the past, the villains who chase you, I am sorry for what you have endured.
All we are given in life are our bodies, and sometimes they have scars. I believe, however, that I have found a solution to your troubles, which brings me to the one last service I must ask of you. It is simply this: send this piece of paper home.
You will feel a lot lighter afterwards. And I will reconcile with time and my body, hence why this marks the end of your heavy list.
Miss Lee
Suddenly everything is swollen. Enlarged and obvious, and Conchita knows what must be done. She lies down as she has done thousands of times before, beside the body that must move on, and closes her eyes.
She is running in the dark void of the post office, never reaching, never arriving. She does not look back to see the soldier, and she does not bend under the flock of letters that still chase her, alighting on her body like an infection.
She can do this because she knows now that she does not need to breathe. So, she stops running and fulfills that other desire that has always been stifled behind mountains of flesh and rivers of blood. Choosing a box on the wall, she lies down in her casket.
What is the sky if not a question above our heads, heavy but light as air? It is every laugh a child has ever laughed, every tear a mother has ever wept. It is the world with the trees and the hills, and the bodies wiped away. It wears a pink flower for sunrise and a sundress for midday.Send me home. The letters follow Conchita, so does the soldier, but all disperse once she reaches the sky. Everything that is in the sky is part of the sky, after all. Conchita takes Miss Lee’s words. She lets them spill over and then watches them take flight.