by David Kuhnlein
The Great Wall was constructed not only to fortify the country’s defense but also to epitomize a division between heaven and earth. Any speaker of the native tongue who set about challenging this metaphor, jeopardizing Shih Huang Ti’s domain, corporeal or divine, would be banished to the remote wilderness outside his kingdom. A fleeting nuisance of a dream had emphasized the fact that words were yet another equalizer between royalist and peasant. Thus whim transmuted into law.
Although dress, makeup, and private formalities distinguished Ti from his subjects, the first emperor, self-anointed, continued increasing every discrepancy. Subjects had to be very clear about which side of heaven they were on. Not only by which side of the wall they lived but proven with talk and posture. Like royalty before him, most days he sat around drinking tea, practicing martial arts, and tugging on his robe. Peasants shimmered beyond lines of heat, laboring over rows of crops, overtaxed merchantries cultivated into a measly life.
Liu, his translator, spoke many languages other than his own, but had been limited, of late, to hiding them behind Emperor Ti’s orders.
“The wall,” Ti addressed Liu, “is it complete?”
Liu nodded, lips pinched in.
“Good.” Ti shut his eyes and drew from a pipe. “The wall is complete,” he asserted, as if this phrase somehow correlated to the lives and labor spent in construction. When he laughed, flecks of seaweed and mapo tofu ricocheted off his velvet armrest. Hir mirth petered to a sneeze.
“Send for the herbalist.”
Liu bowed and scurried off. Alone in the room, lightheaded and pale, Ti noticed how light seemed to dance against a sloped angle of doorway – as if in some cosmic battle with the space it occupied. A mosquito flew into the room and blended into shadow.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said, partly to himself, partly to the bug. Liu returned with the herbalist. Ti excused the herbalist from the room. Liu poised himself to hear his master. He opened his mouth without a sound, then shot: “Do we have enough bricks to make another wall?”
Without hesitancy, Liu shook his head.
“Hmm. Come with me.”
Ti tugged Liu through a courtyard, the quickest route to the wall, and ran his hands along thin spaces between stones, tracing lines. It looked like he was discovering the characters of an ancient language and casting them to life with a finger.
“Ah ha!” Ti exclaimed. “Liu, come look.”
There was a small hole where a mosquito could have gotten through. Ti explained that he’d need some time to come up with a decent solution. Liu bowed and followed him back into the palace. The herbalist sat waiting in a vestibule, arranging potions and herbs in small jars, rapt for any call to service. The hall darkened. The sun seemed much brighter in Ti’s youth. It had grown old with him. Mirrored ornaments were installed in all the rooms he frequented – still an insufficient haze. Darkness abbreviated the hall, abridging Ti’s mind. A varying shade may not have given rise to such visions. Last night he’d dreamt of creatures with nothing for a face except glowing teeth, chewing and swallowing everything in their path.
“If I cannot make the wall fit the kingdom, I’ll bring the kingdom to me. An identical wall. Inside my room.” The herbalist gave Ti something for his sneeze: a cylinder filled with murky fluid, moon phase inscribed from when the plant was harvested, flecks of gold on a black surface. He arranged for skilled builders to begin work at sunrise.
One of his wives, perhaps the loveliest, arrived to accompany him. The way she crested the doorway reminded Ti of the mosquito, her intonation a flitty zip, veiled in what piqued him. As her gilded robe fell, he recalled an emotive lunar warmth. Her touch erased his thoughts. The air wept with their friction.
He stood. Moonlight swept across his distended abdomen. Above the wall were stars, but he wished that they were brighter, sharp enough to blind him from the meager offerings of this world.
The sheets were fragrantly writhing. He cursed the woman inside them. She chirruped at a dream. Was she committing the sin of grinding her teeth?
Plenty of Blue Lotus Flower for a strong batch, which he mixed with wine, further potentiating the herb: an aphrodisiac at a low dose, a paralytic at a high one. He let the liquid sit overnight. He barely slept.
In the morning, they fed each other slices of fruit, disrobed, danced in the dawn light. They drank the concoction just after breakfast. He offered her more and more until she’d had most of the carafe.
Liu entered with a small note asking Ti when he wanted the builders to start.
“I’ll signal you.”
***
Ti’s Om Mani Padme Hum mantra was a flourishing power wielded over the women he wanted. Men, too, found themselves of a comprised sovereignty when he warbled his solace. This personal interpretation spliced OM – the universal drone, sometimes elongated to the three-lettered AUM, representing forces that create, sustain, and destroy – and (likewise) HUM, bookended by tri-level force, while the meat MANI PADME was commonly thought to mean “the jewel in the lotus flower.”
Before he was emperor, on a trip away from the palace, pleasuring himself outside a female diplomat’s room, not having a spare cloth to catch his lifeforce in, he shot it, with a muffled grunt, into his cupped left palm. As the silvery fluid glittered in moonlight, an answer arrived: “sometimes I put my jewel in her lotus flower, sometimes you eat it from the palm of your hand.” A kernel – the seed from which grows a forest – began to sprout. His onanistic act surpassed the mantra: he came creation, sustained it as it swirled in moonlight, and, by slurping down the evidence, destroyed the world. He was the universe tasting itself. He didn’t care if this experience was a drop of poison in the well of existence. He’d never felt more satiated than he did that night. Even the woman who had finished changing and had blown the candle out beyond the threshold had ceased to matter to Ti.
***
His wife draped her delicate body in one of Ti’s large robes and sat on a meditation cushion. He laid on the floor before her and saw the reflection of his teeth in how wet she was. She pulled the robe over her head, trapping the sweet scent of their union beneath. Ti kissed her goodbye. She nodded off, spine held rigid, vertebrae like a string of pearls dangled from heaven.
Ti signaled Liu. The builders began mixing mortar, quietly laying bricks in a small circular pattern around his unconscious wife. Ti observed through a crack in the door. The world was sealed about his proxy. He touched himself beneath his robe as the bricks encased her. They rose, slow, past her hips, then chest. The robe heaved steadily. He whispered to her in a language lost inside his kingdom as he sealed himself out of it, on purpose, mind whining fast as a mosquito’s wing. To be free, Ti needed to be lost in shadow. As requested, they left a small mouth-shaped gap where her lips would be once the robe fell.
______
David Kuhnlein is the author of Ezra's Head among other books. His fiction has been featured in NOON, Socrates on the Beach, Hobart, and others. He hosts a reading series at Cafe 1923 in Hamtramck, Michigan.
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