The Geomancer's Compass Read online

  It would be one thing if it was just cultural, a case of going through the motions. That would have been quaint or charming or something. What bugged me was that she really seemed to believe she could stave off disaster only by observing these ancient rites. It was nuts. And I have to admit I have little tolerance for stupid people, not being one myself. That my beloved A-Ma (because I really did love her) should act like a stupid person, especially when I knew she was not one, was super-annoying.

  “Anything you may think you’ve seen, A-Ma, there’s a scientific explanation for,” I told her. “Besides, even if there were devils, what would they be doing at an old man’s funeral?”

  Now, here comes the “oh snap” moment. Are you ready for it?

  “They are here to attack The Grandfather,” she said. “He was their enemy in life and now they want revenge. He made them wait a long time and they are very angry at him.”

  Now, The Grandfather had been around my whole life, but to tell you the absolute truth he hadn’t seemed like a person so much as a family heirloom, something that was taken out and dusted off and prominently displayed at the head of a table or in the place of honor at some ceremony. His English was heavily accented, despite his having been born in Canada, and in any case he rarely spoke, at least in my presence, and then in such a hoarse whisper that it was difficult to make out what he was saying. It was like his words were trying to escape through a tangle of barbed wire clogged with debris. I had always assumed he was senile. How could you be that old and not senile? But senile or not, he hadn’t seemed like the sort of person anyone or anything would target for attack. What would be the point?

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “You knew him only as a very old man,” said A-Ma. “Past his prime. Believe me when I tell you that in his day he was a fierce warrior, and devils are bound and determined to get him now, when he is most vulnerable.”

  “Vulnerable? He’s dead. What does he have to lose?”

  “His body may be dead, but his soul is not at rest,” she said. “It is neither here nor there. It is confused. When it is in this state, it may become lost, perhaps forever.”

  “OK,” I bargained. “Let’s say that devils are gunning for The Grandfather’s soul – I’m speaking hypothetically here – then why the streamers? Are devils scared of streamers?” An image of little red devils with horns and barbed tails and pitchforks, cowering before a paper streamer, popped into my mind. I laughed. “Because anything that’s scared of a streamer … well, that’s not something I’d lose a lot of sleep over.”

  “You see the holes in the streamers?”

  I squinted. Sure enough, the streamers were pierced with many tiny holes. “Yeah? So?”

  “The devils must pass through each one of those holes to get to The Grandfather. Like running a gauntlet. The Chen boys are keeping them busy, distracting them …”

  One of the boys stomped. “Yow,” he yodeled.

  “See? He just crushed one.”

  Exasperated, I closed my eyes and fell back against the seat. “That’s totally crazy.”

  “Crazy?”

  “As in: can you show me where it is written down that a devil has to pass through holes in order to get to its victim?”

  “Devils are just as bound by custom and tradition as we are.”

  “Not.”

  “They are.”

  “Oh, come on, A-Ma. Are you saying there’s some sort of rule book governing how devils and human beings interact?”

  “There is an understanding …”

  “The representatives of mankind and the devils’ union sat down and wrote up an agreement – devils could attack people, but only after they’d passed through x number of holes …”

  “Miranda, don’t be disrespectful. I said there is an understanding. A cosmic understanding.”

  “Oh, A-Ma, admit it. Even if there were devils, what could they do to hurt The Grandfather? He’s dead. Surely he’s beyond help or harm.”

  She shook her head. “That is not true, granddaughter. Remember that although the many worlds of incarnation make up the foreground of existence, in order to have a foreground you must also have a background – the space between worlds, the place we call the Bardo.”

  Whoa. The Bardo? What on earth was she talking about?

  She tried a different tack. “Think of the night sky, Miranda. The stars are the many worlds and the Bardo is the night sky, in which the stars hang. The Grandfather’s soul is now in the Bardo, the space between his death and his eventual rebirth into a different form. How a soul fares in the Bardo will greatly influence the form his rebirth takes. That’s why we will hold a prayer ceremony for his soul every ten days – so that he will be reborn into this world and not one of the other worlds. If the devils turn him into an iau-kuai, however, all our efforts will be in vain.”

  “Into a what?”

  “An iau-kuai. A powerful monster.”

  “Like they can do that.”

  “Well, they can. I know you think I’m a foolish old woman, but there are many things you don’t yet understand.”

  “How you can believe in devils and monsters? This is the twenty-first century, not the Han dynasty.” I paused. “So, what do these iau-kuais look like?”

  “Like a seething whirlwind of teeth, claws, dust, and rags,” she replied. “They have fierce orange eyes that glow like embers. Sometimes they make terrible booming noises like something you’d hear in space; other times they squeak like bats. They blow about the earth, gobbling up their victims.”

  “And how do they kill these victims?”

  “Why, they frighten them to death,” A-Ma exclaimed. “Wouldn’t you be frightened if you saw such a dreadful creature?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “If such a creature existed. WHICH IT DOESN’T.”

  Later, at the grave site, a pair of The Grandfather’s red silk embroidered shoes, his glossy black skullcap, and a pair of hand-carved wooden chopsticks were burned in the brick funeral burner, along with a big basket of yellow and white holy paper.

  “Why are they doing that?” I asked.

  “He will need a few things in his new life,” A-Ma said. With a straight face.

  The air grew thick with the odor of incense and the smell of burning Chinese herbs and roasted meat – a white Cadillac heaped high with roast chickens and a whole roasted pig and wooden baskets of oranges and apples had followed the funeral procession to the cemetery. Women went through the motions of wailing and shrieking (it was expected that they do this, especially given The Grandfather’s great wealth – the richer the deceased, the louder and longer the wailing); boys set off firecrackers and men banged on gongs and drums – to scare off demons, of course. All that shrieking and carrying on was giving me a massive headache, that and the fact that my mom had braided my hair way too tight.

  A-Ma tugged at my elbow. “See that little Guan boy?” She glanced pointedly beyond the holy burner to a cluster of bushes in which six-year-old Nigel Guan stood, trying to look nonchalant, as though he were not, in fact, peeing. “A ghost will follow him home and torture him with illness. Mark my words.”

  “Demons. Ghosts. I thought this was supposed to be an auspicious day,” I grumbled.

  “That only means that there are no monsters about. As for evil spirits and ghosts, they are always with us.”

  I snorted.

  A-Ma frowned. “I can see them,” she said. “One day you will see them too. They are all around us. They are everywhere.”

  I didn’t believe her, of course, but it still creeped me out. What was with her? I wondered. For some reason she was pulling out all the crazy old-school Chinese stops today – all directed toward me. And so intense. Why did I have to accompany her? I wasn’t the boy. I wasn’t the Chosen One.

  The Taoist priest circulated among the mourners, passing out poot jai gou, steamed cakes made of red dates and glutinous rice flour. Poot jai gou falls into the same food group
as moon cakes – the dense, sticky, sketchy tasting food group. When the priest got around to me, I tried to say no, but A-Ma insisted I take one. She watched me like a hawk while I ate it, and afterward made me stick out my tongue to prove I had swallowed the nasty mess. “Red wards off evil spirits,” she lectured me, waggling her finger. “Always remember that.”

  “I thought red was a happy color,” I grumbled. Under my breath I said, “Make up your mind!”

  Later, when the wailing had stopped and everyone was packing up to go home, A-Ma and I were standing at the head of the grave, looking out at the Pacific. Mom was with the rest of the family, some distance away, out of earshot. That’s when it happened, when A-Ma told me what she had started to tell me that day in the living room, what Mom didn’t want me to know because she thought I was too young. Taking me by the arm, she drew me near. “You don’t think there are evil spirits?” she whispered. “Look at our family if you want proof of their power and their hatred toward us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean it,” she warned. “Look. Look at them, Miranda.”

  I glanced around the funeral party.

  There was Dad. Five years ago he had been struck by lightning on a golf course. As a result of this, he was, as Mom put it, “a shattered man.” He sat at the side of the grave, twitching occasionally and mumbling, in a lawn chair brought for the purpose. It was lucky that we were rich because the doctors couldn’t tell us whether Dad would ever work again or be the way he was before the accident – strict but kind of goofy too, always telling what he called Dumb Dad Jokes and tickling you.

  My five-year-old brother, Liam, was nestled on his lap. Liam was … well, Liam was pitiful. I don’t know how else to say it. Limp and small for his age, he had trouble catching his breath, which meant he couldn’t play or go to a normal school or anything. He always looked kind of blue, and his life was a round robin of respiratory therapy and oxygen treatments and visits to doctors who couldn’t figure out what the problem was.

  Beside Dad stood Sebastian, my ten-year-old brother, who for some reason nobody could explain was losing his eyesight and, beside him, looking drawn and exhausted, Mom. She had felt mysteriously tired for the last couple of years and lately had begun to experience muscle pain in many parts of her body – neck, spine, shoulder, hips, and ankles.

  And of course there was Auntie Ev, my father’s sister, wheelchair-bound, and her son Brian – the one who should have accompanied A-Ma in the lead car. Powerfully built and with extreme hair, Brian had severe dyslexia – try as he might, he just couldn’t learn to read. He also had ADHD – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder – which meant that he couldn’t sit still and had the attention span of a Mexican jumping bean. He was four months my senior. At that moment he was darting around the cemetery, staring uncomprehendingly at the writing on the headstones. He was probably trying to find his father’s grave. Auntie Ev’s husband, Phil, had been killed in a freak accident two years earlier. A falling icicle had pierced his jugular vein when he was walking home from the hospital where he was a surgeon. As for Auntie Ev’s other children, Oliver and Aubrey, they were not at the funeral. Eighteen-year-old Oliver was being treated for agoraphobia – a fear of going out in public – at a private clinic on the Sunshine Coast, while sixteen-year-old Aubrey was being intravenously fed at an exclusive eating disorders clinic in Victoria. When she had entered the clinic two months earlier, she had stood five foot eight and weighed eighty-four pounds.

  “A lot of bad things seem to have happened to us lately,” I admitted. “But things are going to get better. I know they are. They just have to.”

  The old woman rolled her eyes heavenward and shook her head. “Miranda, you surprise me. As bright as you are. So it’s really never occurred to you that the Lius might be cursed?”

  Talk about coming from left field. “Cursed?”

  “Cursed.”

  “As in The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb cursed?”

  She nodded.

  “Wow.”

  I noticed that Mom was watching us. She did not look happy. Frowning, she bent down and said something to Dad, who blinked up at her, his face slack. Then she walked over to where we stood. “What are you two talking about?” she asked suspiciously. “Mother Liu?”

  “Such a good concentration of cosmic breaths here,” replied A-Ma, a little too quickly. “The excellent yang of that hill behind us, the way the chi flows … naturally, Miranda thinks it’s all bunk. Don’t you?” She looked pointedly at me and I understood that I was being invited to conspire with her against my mother.

  “Honestly, A-Ma,” I managed. “Cosmic breaths?”

  “Well, I for one know that The Grandfather’s spirit will be happy in this place,” A-Ma concluded, giving me the tiniest little smile by way of condoning my treachery. “He should give us no trouble. Not like the other one.”

  “Mother Liu.” The warning in Mom’s tone was unmistakable.

  “Other one?” I asked. “What other one?”

  Mom went into hyper-bustle mode. “Come, Mother Liu. Come, Miranda. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. And it’s time for Liam’s physio. Chop-chop.” Taking A-Ma by one arm and me by the other, she marched us toward the white cavalcade of cars with a look on her face as grim as the Reaper’s.

  And that was that.

  Only it wasn’t.

  Three years later, Mom called me in Calgary and told me that A-Ma was dying and I’d better get myself home fast, because she didn’t have long and she’d asked for me. “There’s something important she wants to tell you.”

  “What? What could she want to tell me?” I begged.

  The news that A-Ma was sick, never mind dying, had sent my brain into complete free-fall. How could my grandmother die? She had always been the strong one, the rock, our island of calm, the fixed star by which we navigated our various leaky boats. I couldn’t conceive of a world without her in it. I didn’t want to even try.

  “How should I know?” Mom said shortly. I could tell from her tone that she did know, that she was lying. She always sounds angry when she’s lying, like she’s mad that she has to and it’s somehow your fault. “I’ve booked you out of Calgary on Air Canada flight 225, leaving at 6:20 tonight. Can you make that?”

  I glanced at my watch. I could barely make out the time through the tears welling up in my eyes. It was 4:50 in the afternoon – cutting it close. “Yeah. I guess. Sure.”

  The reason I was in Calgary was that I’d scored this wicked internship at CanBoard for the summer. CanBoard was the Canadian division of WorldBoard International, a consortium that had set out at the end of the 1900s to build a planetary infrastructure for associating digital information, tools, and services with a location, a person, or thing. In other words, Augmented Reality, or AR, where 3-D virtual objects are integrated into a real environment in real time. Totally, and I mean totally, cutting edge.

  So I’d been living on my own out in Alberta for the past couple of months – well, on my own in a dorm, which is a little scary and lonely when you’re sixteen and come from a big, tight-knit family, but also deeply cool, although it would have been cooler if I’d actually had any friends.

  I realized Mom was still talking. I heard the words but I wasn’t processing their meaning. My head was a jumble of thoughts about A-Ma, about my little, beautiful grandmother. I refocused with difficulty. “Don’t go back to your dorm,” Mom was saying. “Go straight to the airport and you’ll make it in time. Are you listening? Take a cab.”

  Later, just as the sun was beginning to set over the jagged, snowcapped peaks on three sides of the city of my birth, my cab pulled up in front of the house on Pender Street. No sooner had it stopped than the big front door opened a crack and Mom waved me in. She must have been watching from the window.

  I paid the cab driver, then bounded up the front steps and into the house. “Mom!” I hadn’t seen her since I had left for Calgary. Before the internship, t
he longest I’d ever been away from home on my own was a two-week computer camp. Seeing her, being home, I realized how much I had missed her. Seizing her hand, I squeezed it hard.

  She gasped and pulled her hand quickly away.

  “Oh.” I said, remembering and wincing. “Sorry.”

  “No, honey, that’s OK. Really.”

  What I’d forgotten was how hypersensitive she had become over the last few years. Practically any physical contact hurt her; we hadn’t hugged for a long time. I could remember a time when she played tennis and was a champion swimmer. I could remember lots of hugs. But her sickness had eroded her the same way wind and water carve out shores and canyons – slowly, steadily, but most of all relentlessly. If you could hate a disease, I hated this one, whatever it was. It had taken the body of the mother I remembered, of the mother who could have been, and left in its wake one that was little more than the sum total of a thousand tiny points of agony. It was like she was its prisoner and it was never, ever going to let her go.

  “Where’s Daddy?” I asked, although I knew the answer already. He was doing what he always did: sitting in what used to be his home office, staring at the Window Wall – this huge TV taking up an entire wall that he had installed just before his accident. Not watching it. Staring at it. With empty eyes.

  “In his office. Why? Do you want to see him?”

  I shook my head quickly. What was there to see? “Maybe later.”

  No need to ask where the rest of them were. Sebastian was at some camp for blind kids up in the Interior and, by this time of day, Mom would have already strapped on Liam’s mask nebulizer and helped him put on his chest wall oscillation vest for a long night of assisted breathing. As for the others, Auntie Ev had been dead for going on two years now. She had spent the last year of her life in bed, unable to lift her head off her pillow, begging for someone to kill her. It was pretty awful. My cousin Aubrey was in rehab for her eating disorder again – the last time I saw her, you could have threaded a needle with her – and Oliver was still at the clinic on the Sunshine Coast, which was sort of ironic since he never went outside. Only my cousin Brian was still a going concern. His combo of dyslexia and ADHD had made school difficult for him, but he had discovered a talent for torturing trees and had found a summer job he liked working for a commercial bonsai grower.