“I should go with that Hong Kong businessman.”
“But you don’t want to leave him.”
“I’ve been with him for ten years! Ten years! I was once a girl who didn’t know anything, and now… I’m nothing but a cheap whore!”
“You want another ten years just like these?”
“Big Sister… I’m pregnant.”
Big Sister Shen is quiet for a moment. “Is it his?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell him. You’re bearing his child. You cannot be a whore anymore.”
“He’ll tell me to abort it. This is not the first time. Big Sister, I’m getting old. I want to keep this child.”
“Then keep it.”
“He’ll kill me. He will.”
“He won’t,” I say.
Hearing your own voice from the air as well as the headset is a very odd sensation. I’m standing at the door to the room, watching a surprised Snow Lotus turning to look at me. Her face is as smooth as porcelain, except for her swollen, bruised right eye. My fists are squeezed so tight that the nails puncture my skin.
Here’s my plan. Even though it’s against my original aim, I have to admit that it’s the most likely to succeed.
Her husband is addicted to gambling. He’s also like every other gambler under the sun: superstitious. We need to allow him to make a connection between his child and good luck. For my child. My heart feels a tinge of bitterness.
Every morning, Snow Lotus will mumble a string of meaningless numbers as if talking in her sleep.
Her obsessive husband habitually seeks inspiration for his bets from anything, whether it’s the colors of the Teletubbies or the phone number on advertising brochures. Then he’ll discover that she’s mumbling the winning lottery numbers from the day before.
Snow Lotus will tell him that she had a strange dream: she dreamed that a beautiful rainbow-colored cloud floated out of the east and drifted into her belly.
After seven days of this, we’ll come to the best part of the show.
My professional skills will finally come into use. I’ll arm Snow Lotus with wireless earbuds and augmented reality contact lenses. But the key will be a special black unitard. At first glance, it looks like regular long underwear, but specially designed fibers will deform and harden when electrically charged, resulting in precisely defined areas of tension and force, strong enough to stop a bullet.
With the addition of an array of electrodes and a communication chip, I can turn the unitard into a remote-controlled puppet suit, allowing me to pose the wearer in any position.
“Why do you want to help me?” Snow Lotus asks. She still thinks that men are only interested in her body.
“For karma.” I laugh. Big Sister Shen often says this to her customers. With the remote control, I direct the unitard-wearing Snow Lotus into various sexy poses.
“Without any clothes, I can pose even better.”
I lower my head, pretending not to hear. I continue to fiddle with the controls. Suddenly, like a warm cloud descending from the sky, two soft, pale arms are wrapped around my chest. Her voice is against my back, fills my chest, my heart, my lungs, flows up my spine into my eardrums. The voice seems to come from the bottom of my heart, and also seems to come from very far away.
“Thank you,” she says.
I want to say something, but in the end I say nothing.
Big Sister Shen and I are seeing what Snow Lotus is seeing.
After the dim stairs, we come to the familiar pale yellow apartment. The man named East is sitting in front of the TV, watching horse races in Hong Kong, cursing all the while. Snow Lotus walks into the kitchen, preparing to make dinner.
The picture suddenly becomes still. Then a man’s two arms are wrapped around her breasts, like the way she had held me.
“Don’t,” she says.
The man does not answer. The picture suddenly shakes, and now her face is close to the faucet, her head lowered into the sink. The faucet is on, and the water rises, covering the vegetables and the fruits before draining into the overflow hole with tiny bubbles. Now the picture begins to shake rhythmically. Then come the heavy breathing, sighing, and the occasional moaning.
I can turn off the video and audio feed, but I don’t. I observe all this almost grimly, experiencing a mixture of anger, jealousy, and disgust churning slowly in the pit of my stomach until they merge into a single feeling. I struggle to imagine what Snow Lotus is feeling, especially since she is not making a sound, not a single sound, while all this is happening under the gaze of two outsiders.
Finally she finds some relief. She closes her eyes.
In the semidarkness, blurry patches of light penetrate her eyelids and tremble lightly. A hand is on my shoulder. It’s Big Sister Shen. She sees and knows all.
We wait until midnight. I can hear even, rhythmic snores coming from next to Snow Lotus. I lift her left hand, indicating that I’m ready. She clears her throat in response.
Now begins the fake séance.
I manipulate the puppet suit and lift her legs high up; then I make her torso rigid and drop her legs, using them as a lever to lift her upper body off the bed. I let her body drop, bouncing her legs even higher. Switching thus between potential and kinetic energy, the rigid body of Snow Lotus soon behaves like a coin striking hard ground, quickly bouncing and making a frightening ruckus against the bed.
“What the fuck is the matter with you? It’s the middle of the night!” The man named East, rudely roused from slumber, feels for the bedside lamp and turns it on. Then, with another great noise, East is bounced off the bed onto the floor.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” His curses are full of fear and shock.
As she continues to bounce, Snow Lotus’s body seems to no longer be restrained by gravity. She is like a puppet pulled up by invisible strings. Up, down, up again, she springs from the mattress. For a moment, she seems to be floating in air. The yellow ceiling comes closer, and then recedes, like some kind of breathing membrane. The edges of our vision show signs of barrel distortion as the membrane relaxes.
“That’s enough.” Big Sister Shen puts a stop to my madness. Our goal isn’t to scare this man away.
I have to admit that controlling Snow Lotus’s body is addictive, as though it compensates for something subconsciously.
The amplitude of the bounces lessens. Snow Lotus’s body is once again quietly lying in bed. I relax the fibers in the puppet suit. Now she is spread out like a floppy corpse.
Just like we planned, she begins to cry. Babbling incoherently, she describes her nightmare and the strange news.
“It… it says that if we take care of it, it will repay us, like with those lottery numbers…”
“Who is it?”
“Your child.”
The man gets up from the floor. His face is wooden, as though he has been overwhelmed with too much information. He holds in his hands a fruit knife that he grabbed from somewhere. Approaching Snow Lotus, he caresses her belly, and then lifts his head to gaze into her face. Under the warm glow of the lamp, this seems like a happy scene from a soap opera. Next will come the promise to welcome new life, followed by the deep kiss of love.
The glimmer in his beautiful eyes suddenly turns cold, dark, like a pool of black water.
“The doctor told me that my sperm is no good.” Slowly he rubs the flat of the knife across her belly. “Now tell me whose bastard this is. Then get rid of it.”
“It’s yours.” Snow Lotus’s breathing is now very rapid. Her voice trembles on the verge of tears.
“You think you’re the Blessed Virgin Mary? You fucking whore!” He slaps her hard. The picture tilts. The dressing mirror shows two silhouettes. The composition is perfect in the dim light.