The Gilded Age - By Lisa Mason Page 0,57

from Jessie’s obsession with female nudes. Here Oriental couples copulate on mountainsides, by brooks, in barnyards, in the midst of battlefields strewn with bloody corpses. Zhu knows from her t-port training that the European erotic art of the fin de siècle seldom shows the Caucasian man explicitly engaged in carnal pursuits. Asian art, apparently, doesn’t have a problem with that.

She hears whispers, soft laughter. Slowly—feeling just like the country bumpkin she actually is six hundred years in the future—she turns away from the pornographic scenes. Now she faces golden-skinned girls lounging about in embroidered silk robes of scarlet or black, the half-open robes showing plenty of décolleté and leg. They wear thick white pancake makeup, glossy black eye paint, vermilion lip paint so shiny it looks like lacquer. Their shiny ebony hair is impeccably styled in astonishing waves and winglike coiffures.

Dolls. They look just like Chinadolls.

A black door maid in uniform serves plum wine, coconut pastries, bits of meat or fish wrapped in wontons. A portly gray-haired gentleman relaxes in his shirt and vest on a scarlet velvet divan, drinking and smoking, snacking on the hors d’oeuvres as he makes his selection from among the Chinadolls. Zhu glances at him. Oh, no! Could that be Mr. Heald? Jessie will be miffed! She keeps her head down. He can’t possibly recognize her in this getup, can he? She pushes the spectacles up her nose again, peers at the girls more closely.

“Wing Sing?” she says in a husky voice. “I want to see Wing Sing,” she repeats to Miss Selena.

“She right there in front of your face, brother cousin,” Selena says sarcastically. The madam points to a girl. “You pay five dollar now.”

Zhu pulls out more coins. She goes to the girl and anxiously studies her. White makeup is spread so thickly over her face, red lip lacquer defines her mouth so falsely, her hair is so bizarrely styled that Zhu isn’t sure it’s the girl she’s searching for. After that dirty little face, that disheveled braid? She’s not sure, at all. The girl barely looks human, let alone sixteen years old.

There’s a ping inside Zhu’s forehead, and the strange events of the day fast-forward through her memory in a kaleidoscope of images—Daniel stalking her, Daniel making love to her. The sign on the cigar wagon changing—she’s sure it changed!—and the driver of the wagon, first skinny, then stout. She herself in a long silk dress nibbling on buttered toast. And now this, the girl who is the object of her project, dolled up beyond recognition.

Reality changing. Reality changing right before her eyes. And she’s aware of it. She’s seeing it!

“Wing Sing?” Zhu whispers. “May I speak with you?”

This fantastic creature called Wing Sing shrugs disdainfully. The other girls giggle and whisper, their dark eyes darting back and forth. The gray-haired gentleman—it is Mr. Heald—yawns, exposing his big yellow teeth, and holds out his goblet for more plum wine. Wing Sing dutifully takes Zhu by the hand and leads her upstairs to her bedroom. She lies down on the bed like a mannequin and awaits her fate.

Zhu closes the door and locks it with the flimsy little chain lock that could easily be kicked apart by someone wanting in. She takes off the fedora, shakes out her hair, takes the spectacles off her face, and reveals her eyes, gene-tweaked green. “Hi. Remember me?”

The girl sits up. Her painted mouth drops open, her painted eyes widen. “Oy! Jade Eyes?”

“Thank goodness! Don’t yell. Call me ‘brother cousin,’ okay?” Zhu breathes a sigh of relief. “So you do remember me?”

Wing Sing nods—at least that part of reality hasn’t changed--and glances fearfully at the door. “Sure, I remember you.” Someone listening at the keyhole, apparently.

Zhu pulls the girl to the farthest corner of the room. They crouch on the floor beside a chamber pot.

“Are you all right? How are they treating you?”

As if it isn’t obvious how the madam is treating one of her girls. But Wing Sing says, “I do okay, Jade Eyes.” In fact, she looks well-fed, healthy, even sleek beneath the doll mask. No bruises, as far as Zhu can see. No disease. Not yet. “Chee Song Tong pay much gold for me,” she says, glowing with pride. “Miss Selena treat me nice. I lucky. I sign good contract. One day I go home.”

Go home. Yes. Zhu has got to get this girl to the home, to the Presbyterian mission where she’ll be safe. But how, now that she’s working at Selena’s? How,

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