Chapter Twenty. Madam Butterfly
CHAPTER TWENTY
MADAM BUTTERFLY
The morning that Tian was to become Madam Butterfly, Adeline woke in her bed to a world of smoke outside.
The radio had been warning about forest fires in Indonesia so big that the haze was blanketing the region.
The smog was here now and clung to everything, turned the sky gritty.
The city, filmed in gray, had temporarily been put to sleep.
People must have been staying inside; there was no jackhammering, barely a roll of distant vehicles.
In here there was only the whirring of the fan.
Maybe the quiet was why Tian hadn’t woken yet.
Their legs were tangled beneath the thin blanket, but otherwise Tian was curled up almost into herself, hair mussed across the pillow.
Adeline looked at her, looked at the smog outside, and had the sensation that the world had rearranged itself while she slept.
The Butterflies had been waiting for an auspicious date for the ceremony and to get the word out to everyone.
So there had been several days of her and Tian just waking and trying to go about their business and ending up back with each other, the revelation of it all addictive.
Last night it had simply gone on, and on, and now her senses settled with a pleasurable ache and a deep roar in her ears.
Her fingers twitched, not knowing what to do with herself.
She had no frame, no script through which to map out the certainties of this new place she found herself in.
It was like being pushed from a river into the ocean, limitless and holding anything, and for the first time she understood why anyone might think about the future.
Tian’s eyes flickered open. She had such soft lashes, and she looked tiredly up at Adeline through them. “Hi, beautiful,” she said softly, voice roughed from sleep.
“Hi,” said Adeline.
There was nowhere to gather but their own living room, furniture pushed aside to fit all the girls in a tight circle.
In the old days, hundreds of brothers could come together for initiation and succession ceremonies in their large halls, in their desolate fields, in secluded forest places.
Now the cranes and bulldozers had cracked hiding spots open, and resettlement plans scattered the rest.
Still, the house seemed to know it had a higher purpose today.
A restless energy had filled it since Tian and Adeline woke.
Mavis was in the doghouse after she’d asked why they weren’t trying harder to find Pek Mun.
“You think she’s going to be a problem for me?
” Tian had asked, in a voice so dangerous that Mavis had backed down and no one had brought it up again.
They were all on edge, though, even as they were sent to fetch and set out various items required: a live rooster, among them; candles lit all around, together with censers of incense.
Now it was finally time and Adeline could not stop her heart in her ears, nor the sense that she could hear her pulse echoing in everyone’s chests.
The collective drum beat was nearly audible in the candlelit room as they watched Tian light a piece of joss paper and circle it around Adeline’s wrists and neck and waist, clarifying her in the sweet smoke.
It had to be obvious, what had changed between them.
Adeline’s skin prickled whenever Tian was near; even now, her body stiffened from the effort to not simply reach out and touch her.
But as of this moment they were not lovers.
Adeline’s blood held Lady Butterfly in it, and today Tian was taking the goddess from her.
Tian cleansed herself with a second burning talisman, each piece allowed to dissolve into its remnants in a pail of water. Then, smoothly, she unbuttoned her shirt and let it fall off her shoulders.
Tradition, for the conduit to display their vulnerability for the god.
Adeline understood it was done at the initiations as well.
But still, she would never be less enamored by the strong lines of Tian’s body around the softer curves of her breasts, the tapestries of ink, the realness of her.
Forget pledging; Adeline was a lover again, would never entirely be able to separate the two.
The rooster’s throat was slit. The only sound then was its blood dripping into a bowl, and still, pervasive, the thump thump thump of heartbeats that was undeniably audible now.
Into the bowl went vinegar and rice wine, and then a knife was produced.
Adeline would not be the only one to add her blood to the bird’s, but she had to be the first, and she could not do it by herself.
Because this was a ceremony of a replacing, not an offering.
This was what all the arguing and fighting had been for.
For Tian to slick the knife with fire, rest Adeline’s arm atop her own, and slice her thinly open.
Adeline looked up as the blood trickled down both of them into the bowl.
Tian’s gaze was fixed on her as well. All her life Adeline had never felt a part of something.
Here it was, despite her mother’s best efforts: the most visceral joining possible, each girl stepping up in turn to burn the knife, cut her palm, add her blood.
When they had all given, they had all agreed.
Tian cut both her own palms, then her tongue, and picked the bowl up.
Something had already begun to happen, though.
When she cut herself, nothing flowed. She didn’t flinch at the blade on the meat of her mouth, or the unnatural bloodlessness.
She lifted the bowl, shut her eyes, and drank.
Only a little, just enough to stain her teeth and lips.
But when her throat bobbed, the candles flared.
Adeline had envisioned herself playing a bigger part in this ceremony, after all the fighting that had been done over her.
But it became evident she, and every conduit that had ever taken a god, were merely vessels, and her only job now was to be emptied.
Meanwhile, incumbent, Tian set the bowl down, walked to the nearest censer, and began to pinch out the joss sticks one by one.
Smoke snaked between her fingers, but once again, pain seemed distant.
She took the candles next. They gasped out as she squeezed her fist over them. With each successive extinguishing, the room dropped a fraction further into darkness. Adeline was rooted to the spot.
When the last candle went out, Tian began to retch.
A new sensation bloomed in the pit of Adeline’s stomach.
It climbed its way up her, out of her. The invisible drum beat went louder, anxious.
Tian swayed, coughed, chest heaving. Her eyes rolled into their whites.
She was trembling. She was smiling, wider and wider at the ceiling, her mouth puckering at the corners.
With the pulse now came rustling. Tian’s butterfly tattoos began to bleed, glistening despite the dark.
The transformation happened in a snap. Tian’s back went ramrod straight, and the goddess had her.
Adeline felt a violent dislocation in her chest. Tian, no longer in control, turned her head.
Adeline looked into her clustered yellow eyes and finally felt a distant sense of alarm as a stream began trickling out her own body.
She recognized and did not recognize the girl she’d woken up to.
As the goddess moved, finally leaving her temporary vessel and accepting the proper tether, a departing vision of her unfolded in the back of Adeline’s mind.
A shimmering, burning thing with twin clusters of yellow cocoon eyes and hair like silk, a shifting-red dress that flared into wings.
The lips of Lady Butterfly stretched at all four corners in a spreading butterfly smile, and Adeline had the momentary thought that this was not a goddess at all.
Somewhere, in someone else’s order of things, Lady Butterfly was a demon of the highest order.
Perhaps, even, the demon in this one. Adeline had come to admit that Pek Mun’s version of the house fire was the only one that made sense. That her mother had been the source. Lady Butterfly had burst out of her and devoured her and the home she’d tried to build while neglecting her true loyalties.
And yet, looking at her, Adeline understood instantly that the gods were not bound to human natures, nor intents.
To compact with one—to be transformed by their power—was to accept their terms. This goddess in particular was fire itself, seeking passion, seeking fuel, seeking air, seeking to be felt and seen. A human could not attempt to cage her.
Adeline’s mother … Adeline’s mother had made a mistake.
Thought herself equal to the goddess just because she channeled her.
Forgetting that she was only one in a line of conduits, that the very nature of the oath itself had always been temporary.
Even now, with Tian’s anchoring tattoo staining red, there was the sense that Adeline’s mother was no longer relevant to the course of anything here.
Who had ever spoken about the conduit before her?
All that is done now, the goddess seemed to impart, nestling like an ember into Tian. Both of them together were incandescent. The sense of the world made form.
Adeline chose to believe her.
Twenty girls were listening to whatever was on the radio—some Cantonese song, when, where, and how would it appear?—and dancing and drinking and eating in the small restaurant they’d managed to clear out, and Adeline had the bizarre realization that she was happy.