After the Dragons

by Cynthia Zhang

  “Is that what you tell all your patients?”

  “No,” Dr. Wang says. “But it’s what you tell yourself, afterwards.”

  The flashing signs of the phone stores and the street vendors blend together far below them and Eli and Dr. Wang watch the sharp cacophony of light. Actual sound floats up slowly, a distant soundtrack not quite real.

  “He needs help, though,” Eli says, staring at the figures below. “It’s not too bad yet, but it’ll only get worse. He knows that. He has to know that.”

  “Maybe he does. Some people, though,” Dr. Wang says, “they’d rather not get help. They find it shameful, or they have families they need to support, or they would simply rather not spend a large portion of their remaining lives hospital bound. Retain some face in their last few years. You hear it from the older patients sometimes, the ones whose children bring them in. It’s hard, then, deciding what to do.”

  “And what do you do then?”

  “The best I can,” Dr. Wang says, tapping her cigarette against the railing. “That’s all you can do in the end.”

  In the daylight, unaccompanied by Dr. Wang, the shop is smaller than Eli remembers it, shabbiness cast into full relief. The tanks, luminescent in the darkness, are older in the light of day, glass scratched up and foggy with old water stains.

  When Eli steps inside, Kai is sitting cross-legged at the back of the shop, sketchpad open on his knees. He doesn’t immediately look up, but soon he notices Eli lingering by the doorway, hands behind his back as he studies a shelf of brightly colored pet toys.

  “Hello,” Eli says.

  Kai takes time to stand. “Hello,” he says, collecting his sketchpad under one arm — Eli catches a glimpse of blue wings and the edge of a building on the half-hidden paper. “I didn’t expect you here.”

  Eli shrugs. “I had fun when I was here before. I wanted to visit again.”

  “Ah.”

  Eli nods. The silence between them is palpable, awkwardness hanging in the air like smog in the sky.

  “If you’re here to pity me,” Kai says, “please let me know now, so I can leave.”

  It’s said in such a casual, calm tone, no flicker of emotion passing over his face as Kai politely meets his gaze. Eli wonders how Kai would have reacted if he’d gone the way he had originally wanted to, offered the idea of a clinical study or financial help, and is glad that Dr. Wang had persuaded him against it.

  “No,” he says. “I have an offer for you.”

  “An offer?”

  Eli nods. “Dr. Wang — when we came the other night, she was talking about starting a new program, one for studying draconic evolution and applying the results to human respiratory research. The department has a few dragons right now, as part of a collaboration with the Beijing Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center. Yun Yueli leads that project, but Dr. Wang used to be her mentor, so there’s a lot of student overlap between their labs. Dr. Yun’s focus is regenerative medicine, not dracology, and while the immunology department’s done a lot of poaching from zoology and vet med students, they don’t have anyone who specializes in dragons. If you’re willing to come in as a student employee, Dr. Wang and Dr. Yun said there’s room in the departmental budget. It wouldn’t be much — an hour once or twice a week, to check in and make sure that we’re doing everything right. You’d be paid for it, of course.”

  “Would I, now?”

  “One hundred RMB for each visit.”

  Kai raises an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of money for what I’d be doing.”

  “It’d be less than paying an expert to come in.”

  “Cheap labor. Ingenious.”

  “Something like that,” Eli agrees.

  Kai is somewhere far away, lost in a contemplation where Eli cannot follow. “Your professor’s lab,” he says finally. “What supplies does it have for the dragons?”

  “The usual, I guess,” Eli says, blinking. “Medicine, sedatives, food, different stuff depending on the age and requirements of the dragon … Why?”

  “Do they need all of it?”

  “The dragons come in and out on a rotating basis, but from what Dr. Wang’s said, they don’t seem strapped for supplies. Why?”

  “I won’t take the money,” Kai says, “but I’ll take the supplies.”

  Eli wants to ask what an ill college student would want with bags of grain-free pet food, but Dr. Wang’s words echo in his mind and he nods.

  “All right,” he says. “It’s a deal, then. What day would you want to start?”

  “Sunday’s fine,” Kai says, already turning back to his sketchpad. “Give me your number, and we can work it out from there.”

  3

  The water prices are rising.

  Drought has barely touched the richer neighborhoods, the fountains at foreign nightclubs still running and the flowers lush as ever on university lawns, but it is noticeable, nonetheless. In the hutongs and poorer neighborhoods, shirtless children streak down the streets, their mothers chasing after them in little more than their modest underwear, bra straps visible through thin undershirts. In many ways, it is more an economic issue than an environmental one, taxes for water and electricity curbing air conditioning for those who could afford it. But that does not make it any less real. Not for the grandparents hospitalized from heatstroke, the homeless amputees crouched in shopping malls for relief, the harried mothers with nothing but lullabies to soothe their crying children.

  And with the rise in prices, of course, come more dragons.

  In his apartment, window open to circulate air, Kai sits on a chair a few feet away from the kitchen table, staring at the open wire cage with the dragon crouching inside.

  He reaches for the syringe and canister of morphine next to him. In the cage, the feilong shifts, hackles rising as its eyes follow him, but Kai ignores it. It’s been four hours since he first lured the dragon out from the boarded-up shell of what was once a liquor store, and if it still hasn’t forgiven him for tricking it with fresh tilapia, there’s little sense in waiting longer.

  Kai pulls on his gloves — the worn pair he’d appropriated from a Beida supply closet — and stands up. Backed against one side of the metal cage, the feilong tenses, tendrils flattening against its head as it eyes him. For all the fury and grime, it’s a beautiful creature: long, proud neck and wide wings stretched nearly translucent at the top, scales a jade green rarely seen outside of captivity or Photoshop. Kai can’t imagine how much its owner must have spent on it; or why, having spent that money, they would unceremoniously throw the creature out. Beijing’s rich and sophisticated may hold little with folk tradition, but Kai had thought even they would balk at abandoning a creature traditionally associated with luck.

  The dragon shifts, crouched low as it hisses, teeth bared and spittle dripping down its chin. Ribs showing and one wing bent and streaked with blood, it looks nothing like a symbol of fortune and wealth. Right now, this feilong is just a hurt and frightened animal.

  In her cage, Mei chirps anxiously, wings shuffling together as she repositions herself on her perch. The other dragons are quiet, observing the drama instead of participating. Mei is friendly with new dragons, but she makes clear that Kai is her human. He has no doubt that if he let her roam free as he tended to the feilong, Mei would flare her ruff and hiss in a display that would best anything the weakened feilong could muster.

  “Easy,” he says, approaching the table where the cage sits, top open and a spitting dragon inside. “Shh, it’s all right, just let me have a look —”

  He lunges forward, stabbing the needle into one green flank; the dragon, just as swift, swipes claws down the length of his arm. Mei screeches, wings flapping against the bars of her cage, but Kai ignores her, focusing on pushing the plunger of the syringe down.

  As soon as he finishes, Kai drops the syringe, hissing as he pulls away, clutching his arm to his chest. The scratches aren’t deep, or even particularly long, but they will need to be dressed before he continues
— too high a risk of bacterial contamination, and he can’t afford that, not with his immune system overworked as it is. Grating as it is to remember, his body isn’t an inconvenience he can ignore anymore, not when shaolong means even minor injuries can spiral into feverish agony. A former adherent of mind over matter, Kai resents this new awareness of his body. But as with so many other recent changes, there is nothing to do but live with it.

  “I should have stolen some chloroform, too,” Kai tells the feilong as he bandages his arm. In response, the creature leans back on its haunches and hisses at him. From her cage, Mei hisses back, baring her teeth as she glares at the other dragon, pupils narrowed to black slits against gold irises. “Oh, hush,” Kai tells her, “I’m fine.” Melodramatic, all of them. Melodramatic and overprotective.

  He’ll have to get sedatives, Kai thinks as he takes the first aid kit from under his bed, the next time he visits Beida. Not chloroform, perhaps, but tranquilizers at least, if they have them. If not — well, he’s managed so far without them.

  Eli would find some way to get the supplies to him if he mentions it, Kai knows. Buying him lunches and bottled water, pretending he isn’t staring when he thinks Kai won’t notice … it would be sweet, the way he hovers, if Kai didn’t know Eli was watching him for signs of weakness.

  Kindness, he thinks as he presses the last bandage down. Objectively worry is not a negative quality; the presence of concern speaks positive things about Eli and his capacity for compassion. But Kai has never been good at accepting other people’s pity, kindness or not. Not when he was ten, standing under the summer sun in new shoes and a scratchy suit as he watched black-suited men lower his father into the ground, distant aunts whispering oh, how terrible, that poor woman, and those poor children … Not when he was fifteen, the provincial scholarship kid at his elite city high school, orientation not technically public but the knowledge of it present in everything he did, another barrier between him and his rich classmates. Certainly not now, twenty-one and living alone in an apartment for which none of his friends know the address, his phone number strategically changed and all social media deleted. Old life carefully compartmentalized and put away.

  Next to the cage, his mother’s latest letter sits, poached from his old dorm address. It’s unopened — Kai knows what it will say. Hello Kai Kai; how are you doing? How is the city? Xiao Xue is doing well in class. You don’t have to send money home; have fun! Don’t work too hard. Don’t go to bed too late and don’t forget to eat breakfast — I know you’re busy, but you’re not too busy for a few bites of congee. Let us know if you ever want to visit home, okay? We miss you.

  Kai knows it’s cowardice, not letting them know, but he can’t stand the idea of seeing the change in his mother’s and sister’s faces.

  Turning away, Kai sits down opposite the table again. The feilong crouches back in response, hisses at him — still hostile, but slower, less focused. The morphine is beginning to work, no doubt, and thank god for that; it’s nearly noon and Kai doesn’t have the luxury of hours to spend on a single stubborn dragon.

  Sedatives next time, though. Oral, if he could find them. Sedatives and arm guards, if he can find them.

  Eli calls his mother on Monday, the way he has every week since arriving in Beijing. Sitting on his dorm bed, he waits for the WeChat connection to stabilize, but then his mother is there, blinking at the phone camera.

  “Hi Mom,” he says, smiling as he leans back against the bedframe.

  “Hi to you too, Eli.” On the screen, his mother’s face is small, blurred as she shuffles back on their old couch. “How have you been?”

  “Good. Busy, but I’ve been good. How have you been?”

  “Completely bored, now that you’re gone. Your dad suggested I get a dog. One of those hypoallergenic ones, a Shih Tzu or poodle or doodle-whatever. I think I might actually do it.”

  “As long as you let me name it,” Eli says, smiling. His father lives in London now and has since remarried, but his parents remain one of the most amicably divorced couples he knows. It was hard on all of them in the beginning, but Eli suspects, sometimes, that the divorce had meant more to him than it had to them. As academics, perhaps they had been better at rationalizing the reasons for their split — differing goals, homesickness, his father’s self-admitted tendency for throwing himself into research at the expense of meals and soccer practices and bedtime stories. Seven at the time, Eli had only known that his father was gone. Now Eli can better understand his father’s anxieties over fatherhood and life in a country with no other family close by, but that seven-year-old’s hurt lingers, somewhere deep and immovable.

  “How’s the science?” his mother asks. “Discovered any cures for cancer lately?”

  “It’s been sciencey,” he tells her. For all her brilliance in other areas, his mother is a bit of a liberal arts cliché when it comes to his research: she knows that Dr. Wang does medicine and that his current research focuses on respiratory illnesses, and that is the self-admitted limit of her interest in specifics. “Curing cancer is still a work-in-progress, but I’m learning a lot. Dr. Wang took the lab out to dinner the other night and ordered a ridiculous amount of food, so I don’t think I’ll have to cook for a while.”

  “Fancy,” she says, smiling. “And the other students? Making any friends?”

  Eli isn’t sure how to answer that. It’s been a few weeks since Kai started showing up at the lab to check over Dr. Yun’s dragons, and Eli still can’t help being a little surprised each time he does. Even as Kai recommends changes in feeding and exercise schedules (“just because they don’t need to hunt for their food here doesn’t mean they should stay in their cages all day”), there’s still a feeling of transience to their meetings. Friendship requires voluntary enjoyment of each other’s company, and Eli can’t shake the sense that Kai, with his curt words and careful neutrality, is merely humoring him.

  “More or less,” Eli says instead. “Everyone’s nice, and we get along. But we’ve only known each other for a few months. We’re more coworkers than anything, so it’s hard to say exactly. I told you Mom, we don’t have that much in common. They’re much more about the alcohol and girls, and I’m … not.”

  “And thank God for that,” his mother says, so empathetically that Eli laughs. “Still, you should still go sometimes. Have fun. I won’t tell your father so long as you keep safe. And who knows, you could be a good influence on them, maybe.”

  “Babysit them, you mean?” Eli smiles, picking at a loose thread on his bedspread. “Somehow, I don’t think being designated killjoy is going to improve my popularity much.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” his mother says, smiling. “You’re responsible, baobei; people tend to appreciate that, even when they won’t admit it.”

  Eli isn’t sure he agrees, but he lets it go. Responsible is an odd word, a descriptor that’s been applied to him ever since he was a chubby-cheeked seven-year-old offering to help teachers clean up after art class. A good student, the responsible friend, de facto group project leader and designated driver — people have always offered these assessments with a faint tinge of awe, as though Eli is somehow exceptional for keeping appointments and doing what he said he would. Eli, for his part, never understood it. Someone had to wash the dishes and make sure there was Tylenol and coffee for post-party hangovers. If none of his friends were up to the task, why was it remarkable that Eli would volunteer?

  “You know,” Dr. Wang had said when Eli first told her about his offer to Kai, “you’re going to have to be careful.” It’d been such an incongruous response, the exact opposite of what a normal reaction to learning your employee had promised unlimited laboratory supplies to a total stranger, that at first Eli didn’t know what to say. Dr. Wang had smiled, her look sympathetic yet somehow bittersweet as she cupped her hands around a mug of tea. “You want to help, yes, and that’s understandable and laudable, but you have to remember that you can’t do everything. You can give him options, yes,
but you can’t make him decide. He isn’t your responsibility.”

  But if not mine, Eli remembers thinking, then whose?

  “How’s the weather?” his mother asks, the change in topic so abrupt Eli can tell it is what she has been waiting to ask all along.

  “Hot,” he says, shrugging. “Dry. Same as always. I’m wearing my mask, and the coordinators have trips out of the city every other weekend, so it’s all right, Mom. The news exaggerates.”

  “Hmm,” his mother says, noncommittal. It’s an old argument: she had never liked the idea of him going to Beijing in the first place, had refused to answer his calls for a month after he told her. Yet as much as the silence had hurt, a reminder of the silences that had permeated the house after first his father left and then his grandmother refused to return, Eli could not blame her for it.

  His grandmother, before she died, had asked to be buried in Beijing. The suddenness of her death meant there had no time to renew expired visas, so that while Eli sat the MCAT, his mother watched distant cousins lower his grandmother into the ground.

  “Mom,” he says, trying his best to project reassurance with his words and smile. “It’s all right. Everyone’s nice, and I’m having a good time, so you don’t have to worry, okay? We’re going to visit Jingshan Park next weekend. It’ll be a day trip and everything.”

  “Jingshan is still in the middle of the city. Not that much a change of scenery when you get technical about it.”