Julith Jedamus
The Girl with No Hands
Fire, the Adamant
Flour for Snow
Myles Zavelo
WINTER HEAT
Yuxin Zhao
towards a science of haunting
1.
Now, she no longer remembers whose idea it was that they should climb the chimney in the middle of the chemical plant: not just to climb it, but to turn the whole thing into a game, a competition. To pass time, near the end of an afternoon in early autumn. The weather was still sweltering in this part of the country. The tower had a height of 132 metres. There was a steel ladder attached to its outer surface. It led all the way to the top, disrupting the smoothness of the tower like a spine protruding from a dangerously thin body. They decided that they would time each other, to see who would be the fastest to reach the rough rim of the chimney’s opening. They drew lots, to decide the order. And so, up my mother went. The higher she climbed, the more the cityscape evaporated from her vision. All those low-rise residential districts melted away into a uniformed, blazing white light, and the square in the centre of the city quivered like water. Up there, every concrete shape collapsed, held together no more, as she concentrated on nothing but the burn of sun-beaten metal inside her palms, under her feet. Now my mother tells me that once she started she forgot about everything else, leaving behind her, even the faintest notion of trembling, its entire possibility. To tremble would have meant to fall. Not to fall to the ground, but to fall behind. She wanted, naturally, to be the first, to be faster than all the boys, those old schoolmates and new colleagues of hers with either too much or too little opinion, always based on an absolute non-understanding of anything. She says that, as she ascended, the air around her gradually dried up. It was as if she were surrounded by a desert, her young body a tiny droplet of rainwater, blindly climbing closer and closer to its eventual evaporation. But in the end, of course, she was the fastest of them all. Victory, as it happened, was a moment that passed through her almost too quickly, confirmed only by those few seconds when her fingertips paused on that bruising rim, before their immediate withdrawal. After that, all of a sudden, her feet were on the ground again. Once each person had gone up and down again, jointly they acknowledged verbally that she had been the winner. Then, they went their separate ways, because another working day had ended, and it was time to go home. Home was a place where my mother could tell no one about what she had achieved, because her own mother would have scolded her for climbing that high without any safety measure. So that was that.
By the time my mother passes this story on to me, the chimney has been demolished, together with the other parts of the chemical plant, and her mother has passed away too. She has long left that position at the plant to carry out the same job in many different locations within our city. I like to imagine her, my mother when she was not yet my mother, a young girl just graduated from college, with smudges of black and blue ink on her face, hands, and elbows from drawing and writing all day at her desk in the small office shared by every young engineer who had just begun their first job. For the past thirty years, my mother has designed countless pipe systems across the city. Ventilation, plumbing, central heating, air-conditioning, and the like: she has drawn large maps of the hidden paths, the veins that ensure a smooth circulation of liquids and gases on a daily basis. The image of my climbing mother, or a stranger, a young woman I would never know, has been communicated into my sense of the geography of the heart of our city. Sometimes when we walk past its original site, I have the feeling that we would again catch a glimpse of the chimney in the distance, and if we look closely enough, for long enough, we would see my mother, her muscles tense, face covered in sweat. I can’t help feeling this way, although my mother is actually walking right next to me.
2.
Twenty-four years before these young engineers climbed the chimney, six years before my mother’s birth, there had been an explosion. Not at this chemical plant, but up somewhere in the northwest part of the country, at the coal factory where my grandmother worked, also, at that time, as an engineer. While shovelling coal, one factory worker accidentally dropped his spade into the long, narrow tunnel, where freshly cooled coal powder flowed out in a steady stream, polluting the workers’ hands and faces until all their bare skin turned an inky black. The fine powder must have also rendered every surface slippery, so that one worker simply lost his grip on the spade, and it fell into the open mouth of the tunnel and disappeared. He and the other workers in his group stood there and watched; stood there waiting, even, because, for a couple of seconds, it seemed the most appropriate thing to do, waiting for what had been swallowed to resurface again, all by itself. When it did not, they discussed what to do. They attempted to discuss, anyway, for as soon as they opened their mouths the worker who had dropped his spade pushed the others aside and jumped into that tunnel without pause, as if the voices of his colleagues were nothing but a signal, the yelp of a starting pistol. And so they had to repeat the same thing: they waited for him to reemerge, unharmed, unfazed, with the spade in his hand. When it did not happen as they had hoped, one by one the other workers jumped into the tunnel as well, with their spades in hand
Once they had descended into the bottom, they saw that it was almost completely dark, as anyone would have expected. A warm, black wind kept blowing. Sometimes they felt that it was high above their heads, but sometimes it lowered, brushing past their ankles like water. Sometimes, the coal powder licked right at their eyes. They rebuked the worker who had dropped the spade. “What were you thinking?” they said. “You could have died! And what are we going to do now?” Now they were a total of ten workers with ten spades, some still shiny and sharp, some quite worn out. Maybe they ought to just try climbing the walls of the tunnel? It was not totally vertical to the ground; it was at an angle of about sixty degrees. Or, maybe they should stand on each other’s shoulders and form a human ladder, and if a couple of them reached the ground they could pull the rest out? But some were of the opinion that they should look for the alarm, because there had to be an alarm somewhere down here, that would have been the most natural arrangement, for no one could dig a tunnel without the vaguest anticipation that someone was destined to fall into it, some day, and also to survive the fall, thus rendering an alarm necessary. They had not reached a decision when all of a sudden, in the space above them, the explosion happened. At first, they didn’t realise what it was. They thought the tunnel had collapsed, which was not totally inaccurate, since all the bricks and concrete and mud shaken loose by the blast wave did bury the mouth of the tunnel, making each of their exit options impossible. It must have been induced by the compressed carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide in the air. Yet it still must have been incited by a spark. Where did that fatal spark come from? Was someone there, before the explosion, probably looking for them, wondering where they were?
Back then, cancer had just begun to crop up in the factory. Lung cancer, throat cancer, along with other more complicated and mysterious combinations without a proper name. My grandmother was planning on leaving the factory to return home, to her city, our city. She didn’t want to give birth to her child there, for fear that it could be contaminated right away, contracting something inside the hospital room. It didn’t help that she knew cancer didn’t quite work that way. There was talk amongst the workers about reporting the condition. But to whom? Every day at dinner she listened to her fellow engineers and friends discussing this, how they should pick a handful of trustworthy colleagues who were also eloquent writers, and together the group would draft a letter addressed, directly, to the president of the country. Who else? No one below that level would have been able to intervene, considering the scale, the seriousness, the number of people already knee-deep in sickness and without medical care. She sat there and listened, agreeing with them from time to time, but really her mind was on the child inside her body, nameless, sexless, yet to produce any foetal movement. Her child was keeping vigil, and resting her hands on her belly she thought, calmly, of the railway station not far from the factory, of those fast and slow trains passing through it day and night, some loaded with people, some with coal. They were set for every part of this vast country. One of them was bound to be heading to her city, and, one day, when she finally made up her mind, it would take them home.
On the day of that explosion, by dinner time, my grandmother and her friends had been informed that something was wrong. Workers scheduled for the next shift had seen the abnormal condition of the tunnel, and reported it to factory management. It was inferred, since all the workers on the previous shift had disappeared for no reason, with their meager belongings still in the dorm, that they couldn’t have made a collective escape; and, since no dead body had been discovered anywhere, they must be down inside the collapsed tunnel. It was unclear why they had would have entered it in the first place. According to the safety manual, such an action was strictly forbidden. They would be fined, of course, once they set foot on the ground again. But, before that, they had to be rescued. Those outside would need to dig the entrance open, and maybe throw down a rope with a basket attached, a large one, so they could pull the workers up one by one, even the injured ones. The managers acted fast. It was one thing for the factory to be alleged to have caused its workers cancer, but quite another to have allowed such an accident. A team of workers-turned-diggers were called together and given instructions as to how they should carry out the task with diligence and avoid further damage, so that no debris was to crash onto the heads of those workers at the bottom. It turned out not to be so hard. By ten o’clock that night, a path had been bored, and a rescue worker went down with a rope tied tightly around his waist, wearing a helmet and headlight. He found no one. No one, not a moving thing, or even an unmoving thing for that matter. No bleeding bodies covered in dust and the eternal coal powder, no body parts, no footsteps, no fluid that could be plausibly surmised to be sweat or tears of despair. No traces of those who must have been there. They had vanished, just like that.
3.
As she went into labour, my grandmother Yimei thought of those disappeared workers, from a clean hospital room in her clean, safe city, hundreds of miles from the tunnel that had mysteriously collapsed. It was the briefest of fleeting thoughts, for the pain had started, it had sprung on her with its excruciating weight, and for a second she believed she had stopped breathing. During labour, she struggled to banish my mother out of her like any number of things she had decided to discard: the coal factory, early signs of cancer, her parents, her husband, this many places and people, that much time. She had severed them from her body, turned away from the reservoir of her future. There was no way for her to know that, while she pushed and pushed, the group of workers was digging deeper and deeper into the earth, constructing their own secret tunnel underneath the one that had buried them alive. Between the time of the explosion and the arrival of the rescue team, the workers, with their ten spades, were able to dig through the first layer of hardened mud mixed with sand, dirt, coal powder, lichen and moss, worm their way into the ground one by one, and cover their tracks behind them. Once inside, the workers found it easy to continue digging. Their bodies piled on top of each other, guiding each other, every arm pointing another to the right direction, every leg holding another in place, and inside the earth it was silent, completely dark, so they closed their eyes, relying solely on their skin. It looked like they had morphed into a centipede. Or a bodhisattva with a thousand limbs.
Now, it is hard to say whose idea it was that they should stay underground, instead of waiting for someone to pull them out. Did it start as a game? To pass time? No: if so, they wouldn’t have bothered to patch up the mouth of their own cave. Most of those workers were in their late thirties or early forties. Except for the only woman, who had recently turned 48, they were all going through stubborn fits of wet coughing that placed certain doubts and fears in their minds. Five of them were locals, the other five from nearby or distant cities. During the first half of the 1960s, there was a vague idea in the consciousness of workers that the president of the country, or anyone at that level, could be reached through an open letter addressed to them, even if that letter was only posted on the notice board of one’s factory and nowhere else. In fact, it was thought that there were people whose job was to keep an eye out for these kinds of letters. But it was even better to mail such reports directly to the president. None of the workers pronounced their collective intention, for they had a superstitious worry that, once articulated, a spell would be cast, their plan would fail, and by the work of some miracle (or anti-miracle) they would find themselves back in the factory. Or, worse, they would get stuck among the rocks and die. So none of them spoke aloud about it, but they all knew: we will go and write ourselves the letter, the report, that summarises the disease-spreading conditions of the factory; we will travel towards the north, and only when we reach our destination will we re-emerge from this realm between the dead and the living.
Grandmother Yimei pushed, pushed some more, paused, cursed the doctor and the nurse, wailed in pain, and pushed again. As she dug her fingernails into her own skin, bruising her palms, almost drawing out blood, the ten workers, now six months into their journey, passed under her city by way of its fertile, damp, slightly sour soil. They proceeded blindly forward, passing under the hospital where in a small and humid room she lay, legs parted, deep in labour, and for the fleeting moment when their positions aligned, one on the fourth floor, the others 20 metres underground, a shiver drilled into each worker’s body, leaving their hands numb. They also smelled rain: not its possibility, but a downpour in its fullness, not yet wanting closure. And then, just as rapidly, that nameless trembling released them and disappeared. They continued on their way. Grandmother Yimei turned her face, drenched in sweat, and looked at her daughter.
A coincidence: Hangzhou was not located on the shortest route leading from Taiyuan, the city where the coal factory was, to Beijing. The workers had gone off that course because they figured that this part of the country, with little to no mining industry, would be safer for them to travel through. Whatever devices they were now equipped with they had come by while still officially within the borders of the coal factory. During those initial days, they found two compasses, two headlights, four flashlights, six lighters, one folding knife, and fragments of paper. Some bore the official letterhead of the factory. Some belonged to torn-up meeting notes and letters. Some were maps. Sometimes their hands also touched the bones of small animals, some with pieces of fur and swollen flesh still attached. It was also about deciding which senses and organs to prioritise, about what could and what could not be interpreted as food. They took the compasses and the knife, and, as they went on digging, they accumulated compasses so that one could confirm or put right the others. They ate and drank worms and beetles. Holding her daughter, Grandmother Yimei thought of them once again, not them specifically, but the factory as an all-encompassing, slowly deteriorating structure. They had found their way out of it, and she wanted to form a new name from her own name, for this tiny creature that had found its way out of her womb. She decided that my mother should be called Mei.T.C. Hell
Ritual poses
Colton Karpman (Founding Editor)
Editor’s Note
Dilara Koz (Art Director)
Em Bauer (Illustrator)
Isaac Zamet (Poetry Editor)
William McGuire (Prose Editor)