Somewhere in the midst of these thoughts, Yin Yu leaves, returning with a silver bowl of water. I dip my hands in, and the blood that’s not mine washes away, swirling like phoenix fire to the bottom of the bowl.
I thought, at least here, I would be done with blood.
I pick up a linen rag and get to work. Try to right all the wrongs gashed deep into Sing’s skin.
“She’s lucky he didn’t use the knife,” Yin Yu says.
Lucky. I want to balk at the word, but I know the other girl is right. “Longwai wouldn’t mark her up. He wants to keep her working.”
The drug lord wants to squeeze as much profit as he can from a pretty face. No matter if it’s flushed with heroin highs. He’ll squeeze, squeeze, squeeze until nothing is left. Until she’s a husk.
That’s the way it always goes.
“Why did you do it?” Yin Yu whispers as she holds our friend steady. “Why did you have to run?”
No answer. Sing’s staring at the ceiling, eyes dull and vacant. I’ve never seen her so still before. As long as I’ve known her, she’s been a fireball of energy. Always telling stories, stealing cigarettes from clients’ coats, teaching us how to curse in clattering sounds she called English. Even in the morning, when most of us would steal some hours of sleep, Sing sat awake with a book in her hands. Reading.
Now the only signs that Sing’s still alive are the painfully slow rise and fall of her chest and bursting pink cheeks.
My hands move quickly, like hummingbirds. They fish a large piece of emerald glass out of Sing’s bony left knee. The blood there is starting to dry in crusts — making strange, snaking symbols across her very white skin. My rag, now sodden and pink, wipes them clean.
Neither of us expects her to speak when she does. “I had to see it.”
“See what?” Yin Yu doesn’t miss a beat.
“Outside. N-no more walls.” Sing’s words stick together, pull long like melted candy. Her voice is fuzzy and sweet and unfocused. Just like her eyes.
Yin Yu and I stare at each other. Then back at her. I don’t understand why these things are worth the gashes in her skin, the needle in her veins. Why she just threw her life away.
Yin Yu asks my question for me: “Was it worth this?”
Silence.
Somewhere, in a room far from here, there’s a scream. It dies as soon as it rises, stillborn. Somehow I know it belongs to Mama-san, though I don’t know how I’m so sure. In the two years I’ve spent in this place, I’ve never heard her scream before.
Sing’s not the only one who’s being punished. We’ll all pay for what she did.
Our friend’s eyes close — paper-thin lids fluttering like a pulse. I can tell by the way her head rolls back that the heroin is in complete control. A smile curls into the rose flush of her cheeks. It looks strange on her, framed by so much blood.
“The end is here,” she slurs on. “It’s beautiful.”
There’s a creep in her voice that makes my shoulders hunch. Yin Yu’s hands hold our friend tight. I unravel a long white strand of gauze and begin winding it around Sing’s raw pink flesh.
The doorway darkens with shadow. Mama-san’s face looks tight, tired. Her makeup is fresh — I’ve never seen her wear so much of it before. It isn’t hard to guess what’s hiding under so much powder and paste: the violet beginnings of a bruise, or maybe even the fresh ooze of a wound — remains of the master’s anger.
She’s still for a moment, filling up the doorway with her weary, false beauty. Those hard, hurt eyes study Sing: her bandaged arms, wild-nest hair, and wasted drug-haze face.
“They’ll catch you. He’ll always catch you.” Mama-san is still looking at Sing, but the words are meant for us. They’re broken, ground up finer than cocaine powder.
But when Mama-san’s eyes break away from our friend, as if she’s pulling out of a dream, she becomes her hard, unforgiving self again. “Leave her.”
We leave Sing lying half naked on the bed. Mama-san towers in the doorway, waiting until we slide past to shut the door and lock it into place.
“Both of you are to go to your quarters until further notice. Girls will only be let out to tend to their chores.”
Girls with more practical functions. Girls like Nuo, who lulls the master’s guests into a deep drug haze with her delicate zither strings, and Yin Yu, who lights pipes and fills glasses of plum wine at every snap of a finger. I have no chores to my name, which leaves me roombound.
“How long?” I ask.
“As long as it takes.” Mama-san’s voice snaps like a whip, lashing away further questions. “His memory isn’t short.”
I can’t stop seeing the master’s face in my thoughts. So stone cold and steady. So lacking fury. The face of a man long dead to any sort of forgiveness or mercy.
Mama-san’s right. We’ll be here for a long time.
Sing’s words loop through my head for hours. Over and over: the end, the end, the end. Their chill stabs my bones, makes my bedroom colder. I want to sleep, but every time my eyes close, there are visions of blood and needles. There’s no room for anything else.
I’m still shaking when Ambassador Osamu arrives.
I’m one of the lucky ones. Girls like Yin Yu are forced to take in three, four men a night. The ambassador is my only client. He pays our master dearly for the favor — to have me all to himself. I don’t know why he chose me out of all the girls. I just know that one day he stopped seeing the rest of them, and stopped the rest of the men from seeing me.
I’m exclusively his — cornered and prized.
The ambassador isn’t as terrible as the men who came to my bed before. He doesn’t hit. Doesn’t yell. Doesn’t look at me as if I’m gum to be scraped off the sole of his shoe. Instead, he tells me I’m beautiful. Every time he visits, he brings me flowers. Bright, sweet-smelling spots of cheer.
Today they’re nestled in his arm like an infant, violet petals standing out against the charcoal sleeve of his pressed suit. Neither of us says a word as he plucks the bouquet of withered roses from the vase. Petals flutter to the tabletop like dried-out pieces of parchment. With one vast sweep of his hand, the ambassador sends them to the floor.
He sloughs off his dinner jacket before he comes over to the bed, where I’m sitting. Shivering.
“I’m sorry I’ve been away for so long.” He sits and the bed shudders. The mattress slopes down under his weight, pulling me closer to him. The heat of his skin bridges the air between us, reminds me how cold I am. “I’ve been traveling for meetings.”
I try to smile, but there’s an impossible weight on my lips. I can’t stop thinking of the screams, the slurring words. All that noise from Sing’s mouth.
“What’s wrong, Mei Yee?” My name doesn’t sound like my name the way he says it. It took me many weeks to fully understand the strange chop of his foreign accent.
The ambassador’s dark eyes push into me. The concern on his face is real, shining through the slight wrinkles of his skin. The round cheeks and jaw that always remind me a bit of a panda bear.
His fingers reach out, resting just barely on my arm. Even that touch is searing. “You can tell me.”
What happened in the lounge explodes inside me. The words burst out. “One of the girls… she tried to run. The master had her punished.”
“And this made you upset?”
I nod. The question seems silly, but then again, he wasn’t there. He didn’t hear Sing scream. He didn’t soak up tributaries of blood.
“You shouldn’t worry. You’re a good girl. An exemplary girl. Longwai has no reason to punish you.” He pulls me closer, so our thighs are touching.