Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

In August 2020, Cora is working with a crime scene clean-up crew owned by one of the crew members Harvey Chen’s uncle. Dressed in hazmat suits, Cora, Harvey, and Yifei Liu clean out skull fragments of a woman named Yuxi He who died of a gunshot wound to the head in her bathroom, in Chinatown. They discover that Yuxi He was a doctor and wonder if she died by suicide. However, Cora reflects that this is the fifth East Asian woman whose bloody death they have had to clean up in recent times.

When trying to wash the bathroom, the crew discovers that the drain is clogged. Cora dislodges what she thinks is a hair ball stuck in the drain, only to discover that it is a bat. Remembering what Delilah’s killer called her, she feels nauseous and rushes out. Once the clean-up is done, the three of them leave Yuxi He’s house, attempting to avoid the reporters who crowd them for details. A reporter manages to catch hold of Cora, who immediately has flashbacks of the thin, white arm she remembers pushing Delilah into the train’s path. She dreams of this arm often, which takes the form of a white spider that latches its fangs into Delilah, in her nightmares.

Yifei manages to disentangle Cora, who rushes into Harvey’s truck. Yifei offers Cora a flask of alcohol once she is inside and Cora takes a swig, desperate to blur the memories of Delilah’s death and her fear that she will end up like Yuxi He herself.

Back home, Cora washes herself and her clothes multiple times over until she feels raw. Cora has always been an obsessively clean person, and the pandemic and its heightened hygiene requirements actually make Cora feels less strange—she is not worried about illness from germs as much as she abhors dirtiness. She lives on her own now, in an apartment in Chinatown that Auntie Zeng, Cora’s paternal aunt, helped her find after Delilah’s death; Aunt Lois and Cora’s father send her money, which helps with paying rent.

Once she is completely clean, Cora opens her fridge to eat something and panics when she discovers that an apple is missing. She has been missing small amounts of food lately, and she worries that she is either misremembering things, or that someone has been inside her apartment, which is worse.

Cora visits Auntie Zeng as it is the first day of “Zhongyuan Jie, the hungry ghost festival” (36). The unofficial reason for her regular, monthly visits are also so Auntie Zeng can determine whether Cora is alright and can continue living by herself. Auntie Zeng burns joss paper to placate the ghosts that are supposedly visiting earth for a month. She offers Cora some, implying that she ought to burn it for Delilah, but Cora ignores her.

Auntie Zeng reminds Cora to wear the jade bracelet she gave her, as Cora will need extra protection this month. She insists that she needs to burn something for her sister so that she doesn’t suffer and her ghost isn’t left “hungry.” However, while Cora is willing to do most of the things Auntie Zeng asks her to, including pretending to read Auntie Zeng’s “Ghost Month Guide” (43), she doesn’t want to talk about Delilah, and leaves in a haste. When she gets home, she discovers some joss paper that Auntie Zeng has slipped into her bag and throws it in the trash.

In an introduction addressing Cora and Delilah, Auntie Zeng explains how, on the 15th day of the seventh month, the “starving dead” emerge through a door with heavy tongues and needle-thin necks, with a hunger that can grow insatiably.

On Sundays, Cora attends church with Aunt Lois. Despite her reservations about this—especially during a pandemic—Cora goes because Aunt Lois writes her a check after every confession Cora makes, and this money goes towards paying off Cora’s student loans. Cora’s mother is currently in a cult to which she also gave away all of Cora’s college tuition fund, leaving Cora to depend on Aunt Lois’s generosity. While sometimes Cora fantasizes about becoming a “Good Christian Girl” (48) who marries and settles down, she also senses that when she prays in church, no one is listening. It is the same way she feels when she prays to Auntie Zeng’s gods.

The service is about forgiveness, and Cora remembers how, three months prior, her aunt had told the congregation that she forgave Delilah’s murderer. While she is in church and everyone around her is praying, Cora spots the shadow of someone standing in the hall, the silhouette stretching and warping, with the neck growing longer and thinner.

Later, when it is time for confession, Cora slips her “cheat sheet” towards the priest. The alphabetically typed list of sins was put together by Aunt Lois for Cora so she could just circle the relevant ones and discuss them during confession. Cora has circled three this time: Sacrilege, doubt of faith, and fearfulness. However, the priest is appalled by what he sees, and Cora realizes she is still holding onto her cheat sheet, which means she has given him something else.

What she accidentally gave him is a photograph of a woman with half a face lying on a bathroom floor, with her brains splashed around her. Cora recognizes the bathroom tiles as Yuxi He’s and surmises that Harvey’s EMT friend must have given him the photograph, which Harvey slipped into Cora’s bag, as he is sometimes wont to do. However, Cora usually shreds these photographs as soon as she spots them and wonders how this one got missed.

Aunt Lois is furious, especially as the priest yells at her to not let Cora return until she is ready to repent. She walks briskly ahead; Cora falls behind and accidentally bumps into a white man to avoid a delivery biker. Before she can apologize, the man rips off Cora’s mask and spits into her face before walking away. Cora collapses on the road in panic, and when her aunt comes back to get her, finds her frantically rubbing sanitizer all over herself. Aunt Lois urges her to stop and reminds her about forgiveness.

On Monday, Cora, Harvey, and Yifei are cleaning up Zihan Huang’s apartment, another Asian woman who has been murdered. While Cora is scrubbing, she discovers axe marks, and reflects how badly the murderer would have wanted to hurt Zihan Huang to have used an axe.

As the crew clean the slurry of ribs and tendons scattered around the floor, they hear a thumping sound in the air vents. It is another bat trapped inside, which Harvey accidentally kills when they set it free. The vent is filled with more dead bats, all their wings shredded. The crew discuss how someone put them inside, as the bats couldn’t have flown into the vent with damaged wings like these.

On Harvey’s suggestion, the crew hold a funeral for the bat he killed on a stretch of abandoned train tracks. The idea of sitting on train tracks makes Cora “want to peel her skin off” (68), and so she drinks with the others to get through it. Harvey thanks Cora and Yifei for agreeing to do this with him and attempts to flirt with them, but Yifei shuts him down.

Harvey confesses that the gore they have to deal with on the job doesn’t faze him; he grew up playing gory video games, and sometimes he feels like he cannot tell the difference between that fantasy and real life. Harvey implies that he played these video games when he “had to” stay downstairs in the basement when he lived with his father. When Yifei questions him about this, he refuses to answer, simply stating that he has no longer had to live with his father ever since his uncle came over from Shanghai.

Harvey asks the girls about their families in turn, but Yifei refuses to spill any of her family secrets, as does a distracted Cora. In the distance, she has spotted the silhouette of “a black hole of a girl in a dress, standing as if waiting for a train that will never come” (73).