Oz Reimagined Part 12

Dorothy couldn't believe it. Everyone knew where Kansu Road was. "It's in the native city, where there was a large rally today, and the police came to break it up."

"I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about."

Dorothy suddenly felt very tired and alone. She tried not to cry.

Beini looked at her more intently. "Ah, you are a child of the Veiled Shanghai. That is why you're afraid."

"What do you mean?"

"There are two Shanghais, one on top of the other. The Shanghai you're from, the Veiled Shanghai, is inhabited by different people, possesses different wonders, and is filled with unfamiliar sorts of machines. It occupies the same s.p.a.ce as our city, but a thin veil hides you from us, and us from you. Yet what happens in one Shanghai seems to affect what happens in the other.

"What I do know is that here the night is longer and darker, and the old magic is still strong, the magic that had filled the port with lines of qi and crisscrossed the land with currents of power long before the foreigners came and paved it over and covered it with their steam engines and electric automata."

Dorothy was frightened, but she tried not to show it. She looked over at the bus again and saw that in place of the trolley poles, the bus now sprouted a big chimney. This wasn't the vehicle she was familiar with, but a new machine powered by white steam and black coal.

"Oh dear," she said. "How will I ever get home?"

"I don't know," Beini said. She looked thoughtful. "Once in a while we get a visitor from the Veiled Shanghaiabut who knows, perhaps you were sent here for a reason, for yuanfenaI believe if you want to go home, you must go see Oz."

"Who's Oz?"

"The Great Oz is the most powerful magician in all of Shanghai. He lives in the Emerald House, in the middle of a green park."

"How do I get there?"

"You follow the road of yellow brick."

Dorothy looked down, and she could indeed see yellow bricks embedded here and there in the cobblestones, forming a trail that led out of the square into a dark side street.

Beini bent down and picked something out of the broken Panopticon. "Here, take these." She handed two silver coins to Dorothy, each showing the profile of a bald man.

"The workmen who installed the Panopticon left these coins, the dayang, to appease the Chinese ghosts haunting those who disturb their rest. The coins have some charm a.s.sociated with them, and you might as well keep them in your shoes for luck."

"Thank you," said Dorothy. She took off her shoes, put one coin in each, and stepped into them. "And now I'll be on my way."

"Merci, merci!" the children called after her.

"Be safe," Beini said, and she held her hands together and said a benediction for Dorothy.

The glow of the lone streetlamp soon faded behind her. After a few minutes of gingerly walking in the dark, Dorothy emerged from the narrow, quiet residential street into a wide avenue, filled with rushing people and cars and loud noise and bright lights and wonders Dorothy had never seen.

In the center of the street were columns of cars sporting large, chrome boilers. Alongside them were rickshaws. But many of the runners before them were not people at all, but man-shaped machines with legs and torsos of iron. Neon signs flashed and blinked everywhere, and vendors in kiosks hawked strange new machines and promised magical results. The strikes in Veiled Shanghai were definitely not taking place here.

"I'm certainly not on Kansu Road anymore," said Dorothy to herself.

Ahead of her, she saw a boy about her own age, tall and gaunt, with a head of messy blond hair and ill-fitting clothes that hung loosely from his frame like a scarecrow's, arguing with a bakery owner in English.

"Get away from here! Go on, shoo!"

"I did everything you asked today. You promised to pay mea""

"You stupid boy! I told you to keep an eye out for those dirty urchins, and you ended up giving them free food!"

"But you told me the buns were going to be thrown out!"

The owner slammed the door in the boy's face.

Dorothy walked up.

"h.e.l.lo, I'm Dorothy," she said, also in English. After a pause, she added, "That man was mean."

The boy looked away. "You saw that? They used to call me Freddie back home in Iowa, but here, everyone calls me Scarecrow, on account of my looks. My pa always said that I had no sense, got no brains, and whipped me for it. Seems like I'm always doing something wrong, making people mad."

"If you gave food to hungry kidsa"and I think I know some of those kidsa"you couldn't have done anything wrong."

Scarecrow smiled. "Thanks. You got anything to eat? I'm starving."

Dorothy realized that her stomach was growling, too. She rummaged about and found that she still had some peeled carrots stuffed into the pockets of her dress. She took two out and handed one to Scarecrow.

He and Dorothy both thought these were the sweetest, juiciest carrots they'd ever had.

"You live near here?" Dorothy asked.

"Sort of." Scarecrow scratched his hair. "I sleep pretty much wherever. I ran away from home because being whipped hurt, and I wanted to see the world, learn some sense. I shipped out of San Francisco as a stowaway on a steamer bound for Shanghai. After I landed, I woke up in the morning and the ship was nowhere to be found. Then I just kind of stuck around. What a strange city."

Sounds like you came from the Veiled Shanghai, too, Dorothy thought. "Think you're learning much?" Dorothy asked.

"I don't know. The things I've learned so far don't seem to make the world any easier to understand."

Dorothy nodded vigorously. "Sometimes the more I find out about the world, the more confusing it becomesa"like tonight."

Scarecrow laughed. "Yes, exactly. Where are you going?"

"I'm going to see Oz, a great magician." Just saying it aloud made it seem less ridiculous. A place that could make carrots taste so good must have some strong magic in it. "I'm lost, but Oz, who is very powerful, will get me home. He can make anything happen."

"A great wizard? He must be pretty wise then. Maybe this Oz will make me less foolish. Can I come with you?"

The road of yellow brick turned into a dark alley with no lights at all. The shadows seemed to hide unseen monsters, and the two children slowed down, their hearts pounding.

"Let me walk in front of you," Scarecrow said.

"Aren't you scared?"

"I'm too stupid to be scared." Scarecrow tried to laugh at his own joke, but his voice came out shaky.

"Hold my hand," Dorothy said. "We'll walk together."

After their eyes adjusted, they could see that the yellow bricks cast a faint glow, like a trail of breadcrumbs in a dark forest. They gladly followed it.

A loud creaking came from off to their right. Both stopped.

"What was that?" Dorothy asked.

"It sounded like an old rusty hinge," Scarecrow said.

"Or a man groaning in pain," Dorothy said.

The noise came again. Cautiously, the two moved to the right, tracking the source of the noise.

The side of the alley opened up, and the lights from the sleepless and glamorous heart of the city spilled over and fell against the ground in front of them. They found themselves picking their way across a junk heap, filled with wrecked cars, old, hulking machines with rusting gears, piano wires, and broken wrought-iron fences.

The noise came again, much louder, and the children found themselves staring at a giant iron statue of a man, easily twice as tall as a real man and covered in rust. As they stared at it, the statue's head moved, and it groaned as the old gears lurched and ground against each other.

"It's an automaton," Dorothy said, wonder in her voice. She had read about these in the adventure stories found in the pulpy magazines that the bolder girls sometimes brought to school. But here, in this other Shanghai, they were real.

More grinding and creaking noises filled the air as the automaton continued to turn its head toward Scarecrow and Dorothy and then toward his feet. Following his gaze, Dorothy saw a tool chest filled with steel wool, metal polish, and a can of oil.

"Let's get to work," she said.

Dorothy and Scarecrow began by removing the rust from around the automaton's mouth and oiling the hinges.

"Thank you," the mechanical man said. Now that he could move his mouth, he sounded more like a man than a machine.

"You're welcome," Dorothy said. "What shall we call you?"

"My friends always call me the Tin Woodman, even though I'm made from steel and chrome, not tin."

As more and more shiny skin emerged under the scrubbing hands of the children, the Tin Woodman told the children his story: "I was once a lumberjack in Manchuria. A j.a.panese company came and hired me to cut down trees. I was the strongest and the fastest.

"One day, the company brought a new machine into the woods. It belched smoke and steam, and it ran on treads. It looked like a giant crab with two huge axes as its claws.

"WUMP! WUMP! It would cut down a one-hundred-year-old tree in five blows.

"*Finally,' the foreman told me, "*here's someone faster, better than you. The Iron Lumberjack is the height of j.a.panese technology, and it will put you out of a job.'"

"I was about to get married, and my bride-to-be's face turned ashen. I had promised that I'd provide her a good home.

"I went up to the foreman and challenged the machine to a compet.i.tion. We would see who could cut down ten trees faster.

"I don't think I've ever worked as fast as I did that day. By the time I finished the tenth tree, my arms felt so rubbery it was like they had no bones left in them. That's how rubbery they were. But the machine had been finished long before. Exhausted and disappointed, I let my hand slip, and the axe lopped off my feet and lower legs. I fainted from the pain.

"By the time I woke up, I was a useless wreck of a man. And my bride-to-be had already become engaged to the foreman.

"I left my home on a handcart, pushing the wheels with my hands, and moved a thousand miles to Shanghai, where they say wonders never ceased and anything you desired could be found. I begged for food in the streets during the day and sought out doctors to see if anything could be done.

"Then, one night, I seemed to have entered a part of the city I had never seen before, darker and more dangerous. I met a workshop full of engineers who told me that sure, they could give me what I wanted.

"They attached steel legs to me so that I could walk two hundred miles a day without being tired. I was so happy with the legs that I had my arms cut off and replaced with these mechanical ones so that I could chop down ten trees in a row without being winded. But that was still not enough. I had my face, my lungs, and my stomach replaced so that I could eat coal and breathe steam and give power to all of my limbs. Finally, I replaced my heart with an iron pump so that I could stop feeling the pain of a broken heart.

"I could now do the work of ten men without ever tiring. I thought I finally had what I wanted. I had become the strongest and fastest again, a machine. Like so many others in the city who had gone down this path, I worked and worked and thought about little else. I was happy.

"But one day, while I worked at a shipyard, I saw a pair of lovers kissing. They were so sweet and so happy, and I realized that I could feel nothing at all. All the power in the world meant nothing without a heart.

"I stood still and stopped working, and before long my joints started to rust and fuse together, and soon I couldn't move at all. The shipyard owners left me here for sc.r.a.p, and if you hadn't come along, I don't know how much longer I'd have waited."

"Come along with us then," Dorothy said. "We're going to see the Great Oz, who can make any wish come true. He'll get me home."

"He'll give me some sense," said Scarecrow.

"You think he'll give me a heart?" asked the Tin Woodman.

"It's worth a try," said Dorothy.

The road of yellow brick now pa.s.sed through a neighborhood full of the sort of places Dorothy had been told to avoid: dark houses with red lanterns hanging outside their walls, halls full of loud men shouting as they played cards and argued about money, pavilions with no signs except hanging banners painted with poppy flowers.

As the three turned a corner, they saw a door open up, and some people inside pushed a large man out. He fell facedown into a puddle in the street without moving, and the men inside the house closed and locked the door behind him.

Dorothy hurried over and tried to drag the fallen man out so he would not drown. But she could not move his frame.

"Help me!" she cried to her companions.

Scarecrow wasn't much stronger than Dorothy, but the Tin Woodman easily lifted the large man out of the puddle and sat him down gently so that he leaned against the wall of the house he had been thrown out of.

"This is an opium den," said the Tin Woodman. "He's an addict, and there's nothing we can do. They probably threw him out because he could no longer pay."

"There must be something we can do for him," said Dorothy.

The Tin Woodman considered. "Perhaps I'm too quick to dismiss him." He hung his head. "If I had a real heart, I would be more compa.s.sionate."

"Why don't we get the opium out of him so that he's clean?" said Scarecrow.

"I don't think that's a very good idea," said the Tin Woodman. "If it were that easy, opium wouldn't have claimed so many lives."

"I don't have much sense," admitted Scarecrow. "That is why I come up with ideas like that."

But Dorothy didn't think it was such a foolish idea. She remembered Aunt En, who believed in the traditional ways, once telling her that ants belonged to the element of fire and were a good cure for any poison, which belonged to the element of wood. Uncle Heng had told her that this was an old wives' tale, but in this Shanghai, where magic was alive, maybe it would work.

She took some sweet carrots out of her pocket and began to chew them into a paste. Then she spread the paste all over the bare arms and face of the unconscious man.

Soon, ants, enticed by the sweet smell of the carrots, crawled out of the cracks in the walls and began to bite the sleeping figure.

"I hope the poison from the opium will leave with the bites," Dorothy said, her hands squeezed into tight fists.

The large man began to thrash and curse, and Dorothy and Scarecrow jumped back, frightened. But the Tin Woodman held the man down as he continued to scream and fight and the ants went on biting him. The Tin Man kept his eyes averted because he thought the expressions of pain on the man's face would make him queasy, and he tried to keep his touch gentle so that the man did not suffer needlessly.

Eventually the ants had removed every bit of sweet carrot from the man's body and left, and the large man sat up by himself, looking amazed at the three strangers around him.

"Thank you," he said. "For the first time in a long while, I feel awake."