Fiction: Loves Labors Won

Here’s an excerpt of a short story I’m working on.  Recently updated at 1:30am. Awesome!

The fortune-teller did a crappy job. It wasn’t totally her fault. I couldn’t recall the exact time of my birth, or even the general time of day, and as a Westerner, I didn’t have a Chinese name which could be deciphered. That didn’t leave her a lot to work with.

But I needed it. Or something, at least. Walking past the intricate pillar gates of LongShan Temple with their carved dragons, I’d been overcome with the desire to thrust forward on my knees and pray. Not pray for help, or forgiveness, or guidance. Just to profess the truth, and say “Yes, I’m totally out of control now.”

I fought the urge and instead ducked into the subway-like entrance of the temple area’s underground shopping complex, where I thought, what?, there’d be fewer people, anyways.

So, ambling around the well-kept tile avenues of crystal vendors, second-hand booksellers, and clairvoyants, I saw placards for divination and I just didn’t have any fight left. I chose a paper-paneled wooden door and slid it open half way to reveal a tiny office, which had just enough room for the fortune-teller, her desk, and a sagging stack of old books. She looked up with disinterested curiosity, as though I were a bird who landed too close to her seat at the park.

She looked like the sort of old Taiwanese woman I didn’t mind being around. She had a proud face, but without the rude thrust of someone who’d had to dust off that pride once too often (common here from the old days and their catalogue of hard bitternesses). In a simple brocade jacket, she wasn’t mounting some horrible attempt at remaining young. Nor had she any of the trappings of vain age - no gaudy, blocky rings, no burnished yellow gold bracelets, no claw-like fingers. She was, really, just a woman at desk, calm. This is probably why I found myself sitting there, getting divined. But, like I said, her reading was a disappointment.

She studied my hand for fifteen seconds and then said, “You’ll need to wait until you’re at least thirty to find love.”

“Is that all?” She turned to the computer at her side, and began manipulating drop-down menus on a crowded-looking piece of software. The program aggregated the yi-qing and god knows what other ancient texts. It looked like an html collage of tiny Chinese newsprint packed in her screen.

“What about work?”

“At least three more years there, too.”

“Fantastic.”

“Don’t get discouraged - you must toil for now.” You ever had someone give you conventional wisdom as if it were somehow an insight? It always inspires a great wave of pity in me, like that joke about the sad clown that goes to the doctor and gets told to go to his own show.

“Anything else?”

“It’s hard to read your face. Everything is different for foreigners,” she pulled a leather bound hardcover book from a groaning stack at her side, and showing diagram after diagram of stereotypical Asian faces reduced to unflattering line drawings, said “See what I mean?”

I frowned. I could have been rude, but why when I’d sought this out myself? Should she have turned me away at the door? “Sorry, I can’t do foreigners.” Right.

The truth is, my last oar had slipped out and sunk into the depths weeks ago. I sat waiting impatiently for any suggestion of the next wind’s direction. Any sign at all.

“I can tell from your teeth,” she went on, “that you had very good parents.” I considered this for a moment, hopeful. But that was all she had, that was it, and in response she was sitting stone silent, waiting for me to do the obvious thing and pay her.

I handed her a five-hundred dollar note - in the neighborhood of fifteen bucks - shook her hand, and climbed back out of her wood-paneled cubical.

The nest of cubicles that houses the licensed diviners was like nothing I’d ever seen before: immutable red signs, discrete, frosted windows, tight walkways with wood framed walls about six and a half feet high. It was how I imagined the love district in old Edo, only miniaturized.

It had been set up in an open plaza of the underground mall, and beside it the normal flow of of shopping went on. Or would go on if the place weren’t deserted. I returned briskly to the concourse. It had that timeless feeling fluorescent light gives off. All along the rim of the ceiling hung a long line of advertisements, like you’d see on the bus, only bigger. And there, wedged between longevity pills and a reputable, international bank, I saw her.

She was standing with the half-smile she had when forced to pose for pictures, something she hated. She’d been positioned between two men I didn’t recognize - a blonde foreigner and an unimpressive-looking Taiwanese guy - with her arms crossed over a grey skirt suit. Just barely in the foreground, like the lead singer of a band trying not to appear immodest.

She’d managed to find her way into a legal team, don’t ask me how. PR, maybe? But there she was, permed hair glossy, a fine dusting of makeup smoothing her features. Her eyes were fixed, and like they always seemed on film, looked into the camera almost frightened of what would happen. Her face, the depth of her expression, had wound up here, too, in the kingdom of last ditch efforts.

“Jesus,” I said to myself. “If one of us had died, at least there would have been a proper funeral.”