House of Many Gods Read Online Free

She had run away. She had left suddenly, taking nothing, not even her child
.
    Now, in the ethers of morning she wakes, feeling the city outside waiting to offer itself to her as raw material from which she continually constructs her new identity. She hears a man in the bathroom rinsing his razor, calmly encasing it, then gently slapping his cheeks with cologne. She starts to rise, to greet the day, and the past comes rushing in. As if it has been lying in wait, as if it were not behind but in front of her
.
    A gauntlet of sunlight on her arm inflames an old surfing scar. Even now she feels the surfboard crack, waves taking her down, the mean, contentless undertow. Someone humming in the kitchen below, slapping around in amphibian slippers, summons up old sweet-faced aunties with a buttery caste to the whites of their eyes. Memories persist with relish, with ingenuity
.
    Sometimes near the wharves of San Francisco, old fishermen with crooked gaits conjure old tū
tū
men back home dragging their rotting nets out of a sunset. Urchin street dogs bring memories of Digger and Squid, brave huntinghounds with long, rough tongues. Winds blow and it is still the sea she inhales, tossing her dreams of an arid coast, a child’s plaintive calling
.
    Some nights she feels that the man asleep beside her—the whole city—sees right through her. In a flash of insight people see she is a woman who has run, who has shed everything, and so she has no background and no worth. Sometimes she hates the city, hates the people born there, who are part of its history. And she hates how the city made her pay before it allowed her entry
.
    She lies back in her bed recalling those early days, though she never quite remembered the first sight of the bridge, or the
Lurline
entering the harbor, or the skyline of San Francisco. What she remembered was how, at that moment, she had felt grateful for not having had a happy childhood. Whatever happened next, she was not a lamb being led to slaughter
 …
    W HEN THE
L URLINE
HAD DOCKED, SHE FOUND HER WAY TO C HINATOWN , the only place she could afford until she got her bearings. Down narrow streets of sterile, asphalt frightfulness, she saw people cupped in the shadows like effigies. Then gold shops, pagoda’ed temples. An old woman in slippers dragged a promethean handbag while beside her a barefoot child thriftily carried new pink rubber boots. Ana stepped from a bus into a slippery tide of discarded shrimp heads, the sound of wind chimes, odor of burning incense. Then she had relaxed somewhat: Things looked so familiar she could have been in Honolulu.
    In broken English, a vendor had offered her a mushroom big and virile as a steak. Or, dried camel eye from some doomed caravan traversing ancient spice routes. Dong Quai for “happy womb.” She moved on, struck by the smell of singed ducks hanging in doorways, the offal of rabbits being disemboweled on-site. An amber hand waving the blue meat of monkey.
    Streets were almost suffocating, but with a redemptive squalor, a sense of hustle, of focus, immigrants struggling toward better lives. Here and there the old and the new world meshed, the 1960s moving in. Young Asians in blue jeans slapped fresh paint on storefronts. A couple flew by on a Harley. But then across the street, old men squatted, throwing dice, and in an alley a child emptied its bladder into an abandoned shoe.
    She bought a slithery square of barbecued mock meat and a bag of moist, pink
li hing mui
, and gazed at cheap curios and smiled. Even litter on the ground seemed beautiful. Even tiny women in doorways, hurling bright balls of spittle into open drains. Passing a barrel of fresh pig’s feet,Ana had suddenly slowed down, remembering midwives bringing bouquets of pig’s feet with which they had made soup to shrink her womb. She remembered how, after childbirth, they had tenderly kneaded her belly. She put those thoughts away.
    Light rains began to fall, undyeing Chinatown as colors ran