After the Dragons

by Cynthia Zhang

  “Is there —” Eli says, then stops, starts again. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Kai glances up then, eyes catching Eli’s. “I’m sorry?”

  “I just …” Eli shrugs, not sure how to begin. “Everything you’ve been describing, the abuse, the cruelty — and it’s just you. You’re doing it all alone and … it’s not right. If there’s any way I can, I want to help. If there’s anything you need, if there’s anything I can do or I can get you —”

  “I’ve already been taking the supplies I need from your lab. It’s kind of you to offer, but it’s all right. I’m fine.”

  “But it’s not fair. You shouldn’t be the only one —”

  “Fair?” Kai asks, raising one eyebrow. “Of course it’s not fair. We’re in one of the richest cities in the world, and there are people starving in the streets, businessmen spending thousands of yuan to cheat on their wives and feeling generous for giving a few coins to a beggar. You think anyone cares about fair?”

  “You do,” Eli points out. “I do.”

  “Oh, good,” Kai says, “two people in a city of millions. Truly encouraging, I look forward to seeing how we single-handedly turn years of corruption and systemic injustice around.”

  “I’m not talking about that, though,” Eli says, leaning forward. “I’m talking about here and now, this one problem and what we can do to make it better. And it wouldn’t be impossible — it wouldn’t even be that hard. Dr. Wang is always talking about how much she wants to carry out more experiments but how the department is hesitant about the cost. But if we offered them this, a pool of subjects readily available for free —”

  He stops, aware of the odd way Kai is eyeing him.

  “Thank you,” Kai says. “Again, that’s kind of you to offer. But please, you needn’t bother.”

  “But it wouldn’t be a bother,” Eli says. “All I would have to do is ask Dr. Wang and I can’t see her saying no, not when it would help Beida too. It’d be so easy —”

  “Perhaps,” Kai says, shrugging. “But I’d rather do without any more of your charity.”

  “Charity? This isn’t about charity, or pity, or — look,” he sighs, running a hand over his hair in frustration as he stands up. “I’m just trying to help you —”

  “Are you?” Kai asks, eyes flashing as he stands up to match Eli. “Are you sure about that, really sure, that you’re doing this out of pure good will? That you don’t have some other motive, some other reason you’re here?”

  “I don’t —”

  “Are you sure?”

  Silence, falling like rain on concrete.

  They’re so close now, close enough that Eli can see the bloody dots from torn capillaries on Kai’s cheeks, the outline of each individual eyelash as it curls against pale skin. And suddenly Eli realizes the reason he had been so riveted the night of those fights, the reason he had come back to the store afterwards, the reason he had found himself lingering after each meeting, hoping for a word or glance more —

  They hold the gaze too long, and then Kai flushes, turns away.

  “Kai —”

  “Don’t,” Kai says, shaking Eli’s hand off his shoulder. “I think you should leave.”

  Eli stares at him.

  “Kai,” he begins. “I —”

  But nothing comes out. All language deserts him. No English, no Chinese — nothing now but a stop in his throat, a heaviness on his tongue.

  Kai’s mouth is set and his eyes are averted. But Eli waits, watching his dark eyes, the long lashes, the thin, delicate line of Kai’s neck. Watches, as if observing a science experiment, as red fans across his face, the flush blooming like the unfurling petals of a peony.

  Eli leans over. Slowly, carefully, telegraphing every movement so as not to startle, to give Kai time to change his mind and turn away, he brings his mouth down.

  Kai’s lips are dry when they meet his, chapped and harsh. Tasting of dried blood and unnaturally, feverishly hot.

  4

  Monday is a Public Wellness day.

  Mr. Lin texts him Sunday night: if I see you tomorrow, I’m firing you. It’s an unnecessary warning; like everyone else, Kai gets the alerts on his phone, and even if he hadn’t, the announcements blared from speakers in every public square. Dear citizens, tomorrow’s weather reports indicate high levels of air pollution. Sensitive groups should stay indoors, and all citizens are encouraged to reduce outdoor activity. Masks and other supplies will be available at all government health centers. For more information on how to locate your nearest health center, please visit our official website at w w w dot —

  A few months ago, Kai would have heard the alert, fished around his drawers for a face mask, and gone about his day, maybe stopped by Mr. Lin’s shop just to test the seriousness of his threat. Now, Kai closes the windows, sets up his government-issued air purifier and humidifier, and checks the Ministry of Ecology and Environment’s official Beijing app. One of the Ecological and Environmental Protection Mascots, a big-eyed cartoon character with a leaf in its hair and an oversized head topped with hill-like peaks, smiles cheerfully back at him, unrepentant in its abject cuteness. Purple Alert from 6:00-17:59, Red Alert predicted from 18:00-23:59. Working together, we stay safer! No chance of an evening reprieve, then — red might be more tolerable than purple, but Kai has learned from experience that it’s best not to test his luck on days like this.

  Kai refills food and water bowls, cleans cages, checks tank settings, and mentally organizes today’s adjustments: change the water for this tank, add more aquarium salt for this one, clean the filter for that one. Water is included in Kai’s rent, but between getting charged for anything above the municipal individual usage limit and the “Warning: Monthly Drought Quota Exceeded” notices his landlord has been passive-aggressively leaving on his door, Kai has learned to be creative about water usage. Librarians eye him and his oversized backpack suspiciously, but so long as Kai sticks to refilling water bottles in the bathroom and not stealing books, he can avoid their wrath. Besides, libraries are public facilities — Kai isn’t doing anything illegal, and certainly nothing worse than the downtown luxury hotels that blatantly flout drought regulations with their glittering fountains and lush watered lawns.

  There are no major injuries in his current group of rescues, so it’s a cursory round of making sure none of the dragons have pulled their stitches or tried to chew off their bandages. Kai supposes he could do laundry or tackle the water stains in his bathroom, but he’s already spent most of his morning running errands and he only has so much patience for housework. With all the immediate tasks done and the day stretching out before him, Kai drags out his canvas and easel, and settles into an afternoon of Public Wellness.

  He has a rhythm when he paints, a steady, three-step movement the brush follows as it moves across the canvas — one, two, three, stop. Stand back, look down, appraise the colors on the canvas. If necessary, dab the excess, add another touch of green or yellow. Then stand back again, brush at the ready, and one, two, three. One, two, three.

  It’s a learned routine, more than anything. When he was young, painting was a different kind of activity: all furious, messy strokes and a rush to get colors on canvas as they appeared in his head. “Careful,” his father had laughed, whenever he had caught him at it, sleeves rolled and paint flecked over his face. “Don’t want to ruin another shirt, do you? Don’t think your mother will appreciate that.”

  Now, however, Kai’s strokes are quick but deliberate, every move a small, ordered part of a larger whole. One, two, three. Father, mother, sister.

  Occasionally, he glances down at his sketches, wrinkled and leaning against the windowsill. Eli’s face looks back at him, eyes solemn and sincere from a panoply of paper.

  It’s stupid. He knows it is, had known it even as he found himself drawing the pictures — a thousand blurred drawings hidden in the back of notebooks and sketch pads, hastily shoved away whenever anyone approached. He’d been in relationships
before, even had a few almost serious partners between one-night stands and more casual flings, and yet he’d never been sentimental about them. Eli had kissed him, yes, but so have a half dozen straight boys—some under the influence of alcohol, others driven by simple curiosity. Eli is a foreign exchange student, by definition here only for a few months; the whole thing is ephemeral, with no chance of lasting longer than a summer —

  And yet Eli’s lips had been soft when they kissed, hands large but gentle as they moved up and down his back. His body was a warm weight against Kai’s as they lay facing each other on Kai’s twin mattress, talking late into the night. Kai wakes up warm most days, an inevitable side effect of a hot summer without air conditioning combined with his chronic illness, but it’s been a long time since he’s woken up with someone next to him. Asleep, Eli had looked so young, face free for once from the stubborn concern he wears in the stiff set of his mouth and the faint, ever-present furrow between his brows. In the pale-yellow light of morning, the day unfurling around them, it had been easy for Kai to push away his earlier irritation and read Eli’s concern as touching instead of condescending. Kai can take care of himself, has been doing so since he was a child, but there’s a small, childish part of him comforted by the possibility of not having to. It’s a pretty daydream, something to fold away and keep for rainy days. Kai isn’t naïve enough to mistake it for life.

  Kai swallows, then forces his focus back to the painting in front of him. One, two, three. Mother, father, sister. If he thinks of it in terms of technique, composition and necessary steps, he can push it away, the premature nostalgia driving him to do this, create some souvenir of what he knows is necessarily temporary.

  One, two, three. And then step back, gauge the play of color and lines.

  Warm tan skin and softly curling hair, high cheekbones on a long, sharp face. All the pieces that make up ‘Elijah Ahmed’ present, but something still missing, some ineluctable quality not yet captured in the strokes of oil on canvas.

  “It’s the eyes,” his father says from behind him. Kai is struck, as always, by how young his father is in these visions, face as yet unlined by the years of factory work that would eventually seep a cocktail of toxins into his veins. The company had paid the funeral costs, a kind of sheepish apology for causing his father’s death in the first place, but the damage had been too much for the morticians to fully fix. “The way he watches the world, quiet and careful, or the way he looks at you. You’re almost there, yes, but could you really leave it like that? Stop work on something when it’s so close to finished?”

  “Stop it,” Kai says, dipping his brush into a pool of white paint. “I know.”

  No response.

  And that, Kai thinks as he sits back, surveying the canvas in front of him, is just like his father — loving, encouraging, and yet enigmatic to the last. In death as in life.

  One, two, three. Mother, sister, mother.

  Kai stands back, squints at the canvas in the bright sun.

  Almost. But not quite.

  It’s late morning when the train arrives, screeching to a stop in a spray of dust. This far out from the city center, the sky is startlingly blue, the sun cutting a bright swathe through the summer air.

  The lone attendant leaning against a telephone pole looks up when he reaches the gates, meeting Eli’s nod with one of his own before returning to his phone.

  The grass crunches beneath his feet as Eli traces the worn path to his destination, a familiar sequence of left, right, then two more steps right, and then there, by the old gingko tree with the peeling bark. Without speaking, he stands over the familiar stone and plot of grass, hands in his pockets.

  “Hi, grandma,” he says finally.

  His grandmother’s tombstone faces him, silent as ever.

  There are peonies on the grave, red and still fresh; an old student or admirer he thinks as he picks them up, turning the flowers in his fingers. Even in Massachusetts, with her autodidact English thickened by a Beijing accent, his grandmother had had a way with people. She’d debated with his mother’s students and Oxbridge-educated colleagues with a confidence unhindered by her lack of anything more than a high school diploma and a handful of college credits. Years teaching high schoolers will make you good at projecting authority, Eli supposes. But even so, he’d always admired that about her, the easy assurance she and his mother exuded but which had somehow skipped over him. By all accounts, Eli had been an awkward, shy child, preferring to play by himself instead of with the other kids at daycare, and that tendency toward solitude had only increased with age. As in all things, his mother has been his staunchest ally, defending Eli against playground bullies and casually bigoted remarks from relatives with a ferocity that had been frankly a little mortifying. But there are times when Eli catches his mother studying him like a court ruling she is trying to unravel. His mother loves him; this Eli has never doubted. But he can’t help but wonder if she had anticipated everything that came with him. Letting go of his father had been a strategic choice, a mutual decision to salvage what was left of a once-warm friendship instead of becoming one of those bitter couples whose children silently wish for divorce. But Eli knows his mother had a steep learning curve in the beginning. She had been prepared to take on the world for him, but even she could not have anticipated all the ways it would come for them, a working single mother and a son whose dark skin provoked comments from strangers who assumed they couldn’t be related. She had done her best, tackling critical race theory with the fervor of an overachieving grad student. But in the end, there were some things theory could not prepare her for.

  A few leaves have fallen on his grandmother’s grave. Eli brushes them off with a hand and then stays there, squatting on his haunches in front of her stone.

  “Sorry I haven’t visited.” It feels a little strange, talking out loud, like acting a scene out from a movie, but no one is there to see him. He isn’t religious — none of his family has ever been — but he thinks there might be something to it, a chance that his presence here, his words out loud, might reach her. “Things have been … busy.”

  He can’t help but smile at how utterly inadequate that description is. Memories of the last week bubble up: scratchy sheets and cold tea, sharing space on furniture clearly meant for one and the unexpected pleasure of waking up against a familiar body in an unfamiliar bed. Kai smiling to himself in the morning light, and trying to hide it when he sees Eli watching; Kai’s hands as he pours tea, chapped and calloused and mapped by small scars but elegant for all that, fingers long and strong; Kai sketching under low light, frowning as he erases a line, sighing but capitulating as he tilts the paper for Eli to see, then tilts his mouth up for a kiss.

  Distinctly aware that he is remembering these things while in front of his grandmother’s grave, Eli forces his thoughts away.

  “I have some stuff for you,” he says, untying the plastic bag he brought with him. He takes the offerings out one by one, so that she can see. His grandmother had taught him this, when he was young and had watched her light incense in front of his grandfather’s shrine, explaining each item as she laid it out on the lacquer altar. Piles of doll-sized paper clothing and cardboard furniture, so that they would not want for anything in the afterlife; wine and sweets, so that they would not go hungry; incense, so that the dead could see that they were missed and hear the messages of those they had left behind.

  He hasn’t brought much joss paper with him. Despite her experiences with scarcity during the Great Chinese Famine, his grandmother had always been disdainful of a people who hoarded money as though banknotes were a talisman against misfortune. Banknote’s a piece of fancy paper, she’d told him once, talking about those hard years of hunger. You can buy rice with it, yes, but when there’s no one selling you can’t make soup out of hundred yuan notes. Given the popularity of joss paper, Eli doubts the afterlife has caught up with his grandmother’s peasant practicality — but perhaps it has, and billions of fake yuan are st
ill floating in the ether somewhere, useless to the dead. Either way, Eli has elected to bring laopo bing and hard sesame candy, a few of the foods she had enjoyed while she was alive. A few paper iPhones, printed off a library computer and cut out along blocky lines, because she had always hated smartphones when she was alive and he thinks she would enjoy the thought of him burning them here. Fresh flowers because no matter where his grandmother was, she had never been able to live without color.

  Finally, he lights the incense. The scents of jasmine and magnolia drift through the air as the smoke rises into the sky, a thin, shifting column of white. Attracted by either the food or the scent of incense, a small tianlong hovers above his grandmother’s grave. Its moss-green body with brown stripes camouflages the creature against the background of trees. Eli tosses a piece of pastry in the air, and the dragon catches it, chirping appreciatively before flitting away. Sitting cross-legged in front of his grandmother’s grave, Eli watches the incense smoke float heavenwards and wonders what messages are being sent to the dead. From wherever she is, does his grandmother hear his words, both the said and the unsaid? What would she think of him here, in her city with all his hazy hopes?

  “I met someone, actually,” he says, watching the sticks burn. “You and mom were always getting on my case about it, wondering when I’d finally meet a nice girl, and guess what? Turns out I wasn’t even into girls in the first place.”

  He laughs at that a little. It’s not funny, but he can’t help it, thinking of how many years it’s taken him to get here. While his friends had complained about curfews and the necessity of arranging clandestine meetings to see their girlfriends, his mother and grandmother had nudged him to talk with the nice Asian girls at community potlucks. Too serious, his mother had told him, and that’s good, sweetheart. We’re glad we don’t have to worry, but you need to learn to have a little fun. And he had tried — half curiosity, half obligation to some subconscious ideal of what teenage boys were supposed to like — but every experiment had felt perfunctory, kissing an action that never quite lived up to the movie adaption. It’d been a long couple years of basement make-out sessions and burning morning-after embarrassment, but some time into his second year of college, Eli had finally let it go. He’d settled somewhere between tentative asexuality and not the right person yet — a bit of a puzzling grey area, yes, but ultimately nothing to lose sleep over. When his housemates came stumbling home from messy breakups and ill-advised hookups, Eli had been sympathetic, pouring out coffee and nodding along to whatever complaints were the issue du jour, but there had always been a sense of distance, the feeling of watching everything happen through a pane of glass. A gap between himself and them, romance and all its Shakespearean passion a territory he had resigned himself to never quite understand.