After the Dragons

by Cynthia Zhang

  “All right,” he says, raising his eyes to meet Dr. Wang’s. “I’ll have to ask for a tour at some point so you can further explain your plans — a proper tour, I mean, and not Eli sneaking me in like some pet he’s smuggling into the dorms —”

  “Hey,” Eli protests. “It was you sneaking animals into your dorm, not me.”

  “But I don’t see any problems with what you’ve laid out,” Kai finishes, ignoring him. “In terms of medical testing, I’m not comfortable with the idea of sacrificing patients for some greater good, even if it’s standard practice. But they do clinical trials with experimental medicines on humans too, so if something similar was developed for dragons, with a focus on minimalizing risk relative to potential benefit — ‘health related, life entrusted,’ or the veterinary equivalent — I think that could be a good start. I’ve been doing what I can,” Kai says, nodding at the surrounding clutter of tanks and cages, “and it’ll be good to have proper supplies and funding.”

  Fond exasperation written across his face, Kai glances at Eli. “But if you want to get technical, Beida’s been funding this project for a couple of weeks now.”

  “It’s a deal?”

  Forearms on the table, Kai leans in. “The start of one, yes.”

  They shake on it.

  “Oh, don’t look so pleased with yourself,” Kai says, rolling his eyes at the expression on Eli’s face, “we haven’t done anything yet.”

  “Kaifei’s right,” Dr. Wang says, pouring herself another cup of tea. “There’s paperwork to do before we can formalize things, but this is something concrete to work on — and funding committees love concrete proposals.”

  She takes a meditative sip, hands encircling the cup. “It’s going to take a while before any kind of agreement. You know how committees are, couldn’t get a damn thing done on time if their lives depended on it. Until then, I’ll talk to my colleagues in veterinary medicine. They’re constantly complaining about how their students could do with more practice. In any case,” she says, smiling at that, “you’re both smart kids — we’ll figure something out, I’m sure.”

  “I’m not your tour guide,” Kai says, shading his eyes against the sun, “You can’t keep asking me to skip work to take you around Beijing.”

  “And yet you keep on accompanying me on these trips,” Eli says. In the blinding afternoon light, his skin is burnished bronze, his legs endless in a pair of green floral shorts. A pair of oversized sunglasses covers half his face, the sight somehow ridiculous and endearing at once. “Why is that, I wonder?”

  “You keep buying me things,” Kai says, considering the two ice creams Eli is holding.

  “It’s a hot day,” Eli says, handing one cone over. “Besides, I’m pulling you out of work, aren’t I? It’s the least I can do.”

  Kai rolls his eyes, but he takes the ice cream. It’s sesame and already melting, and he licks cream off his fingers before it can drip further down his hand. Eli smiles at it, fond and amused, and hands Kai a napkin.

  “Where to go, tour guide?”

  Unlike the nearby Jingshan or Beiha parks, Ritan is one of the less ostentatious national parks, but that does not mean much in Beijing. Even less so on a day like this: still summer, but cool enough that there are a significant number of locals among the normal crowds of tourists, Beijing families cautiously venturing out into the heat for brief vacations of their own. Greying men wearing Cartier watches and T-shirts emblazoned with the names of American sports teams walk past, their powdered middle-aged wives following behind with Louis Vuitton face masks and flowered umbrellas. Once in a while, one of them glances at the sky, the clouds gathering there providing a brief reprieve from the heat.

  Eli gathers their popsicle sticks when they finish, dropping them into a nearby trash bin. He’s smiling to himself. It’s different from the way he usually smiles out at the world, more reassurance of friendliness than a sign of actual emotion.

  Eli catches Kai staring. His smile widens, and Kai looks away.

  To distract from the flush he can feel rising, Kai asks, staring resolutely at his sneakers, “don’t you have a lab you need to work at or something?”

  “There are other people at the lab.” Eli says. “I’ve taken over plenty of shifts for them before; now I’m giving them the chance to repay the favor. Besides, half of the program is about being a cultural ambassador, making connections. I’m making up for lost time.”

  “And you’re doing that,” Kai says, “by walking around parks and buying overpriced ice cream from street vendors.”

  “Someone has to do it,” Eli says, shrugging. “Besides, the rest of them are usually either on field trips to ‘important cultural sites’ or out getting drunk and dancing at clubs. And well, it’s not exactly like I’m into bad baijiu and girls anyways.”

  “Because you don’t like girls.”

  “No,” Eli says, thoughtful. “I wasn’t sure I liked anyone actually, not in the way we’re talking about at least, but it turned out I was wrong about that too. It’s been interesting, these past couple of weeks. Not bad,” he says, smiling as he furtively squeezes Kai’s hand, once, before letting go. “Just interesting.”

  Interesting can mean many things, Kai knows from experience. He thinks of his high school classmate Linghu, who’d lost his scholarship and was practically disowned by his parents after he was caught kissing the school board director’s son, and of all the horror stories that had percolated through the informal queer student groups at Beishida. Eli, though — Eli has college professors for parents, lives in America where there are laws and marriage rights instead of mere decriminalization. Kai knows how little these things can matter, but he can’t help but hope, for Eli’s sake, that his case is different.

  “You know,” Kai says — because even if Eli has taken his recent self-revelations in stride, this is Eli’s first relationship and it is important to make this clear — “if you’re still feeling your way through things, we don’t have to do anything, all right? A lot of people seem to think there are things you have to do when you’re doing this sort of thing. But I’m not … if any of that makes you uncomfortable, then it’s not important, we don’t need to do it. Normal relationships and things you’re supposed to do — those don’t matter. Not as much as you feeling comfortable.”

  “Very eloquent. What, were you planning on propositioning me?”

  Kai kicks Eli in the shin, refusing to feel guilty at Eli’s look of betrayal. “I’m being serious here.”

  “So am I. Kai, I appreciate the thought, but you don’t have to worry. I’m not doing anything I don’t want to do. Besides,” Eli says, smiling at Kai, “I’ve got, what, at least fifteen centimeters on you? I’m not sure how you’d force me to do anything.”

  “Excuse you,” Kai says, scowling up at Eli. “I can and have fought men twice your height.”

  “That sounds anatomically impossible, but I believe you.”

  Kai goes for Eli’s shins again, but Eli dodges neatly out of the way. Kai scowls up at him; Eli smiles, sweet as sugar from his unfair height.

  “What about you?” Eli asks as they pass a group of grandmothers practicing tai chi. “How long have you known?”

  “Always, I think,” Kai says with a shrug. “It feels that way, at least. The same age most people start figuring these things out, I guess — twelve, maybe, thirteen? Definitely before I finished middle school, though.”

  “That must have been difficult, to know so young.”

  “It was, but it was good, in another sense. I didn’t have to go through too many years of pretending otherwise before I knew.” In a way, it had been a relief figuring it out, understanding the reason his classmates’ talk of breasts and women’s soft skin had never resonated with him. There had been loneliness, yes, and fear at first, but there had also been the certainty of knowing.

  “Does your mother know?” Eli asks.

  “No,” Kai says. “It was a few years after my father died, and my mother was
still not well, not herself. I thought she was busy enough, between her job at the paint factory and taking care of my sister and me. There was no reason for her to know. There’s no reason for her to know now.”

  “Do you want her to know?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I think so, yes,” Eli says, and his eyes are serious when he looks up from the ground, eyelashes long and outlined in golden sunlight. “Keeping all of that secret, all the time — that could be hard, sometimes. It would be for me, at least.”

  They can’t hold hands — not here, not this publicly — but they’re walking close to each other, fingers brushing more often than is coincidental. The ridiculous sunglasses sit atop Eli’s hair, oversized and gaudy in the way of cheap tourist plastic. A few curls flop over his face, partially covering one eye; Kai hesitates, then reaches up and brushes them out of the way. Lets his hand linger, skin against skin.

  A few children run past them on the path, and they break away, making way for them. Kai glances around, an old instinct — but no, no one has turned toward them, no one has noticed.

  Eli notices, of course — Eli’s always noticed, that’s the whole problem — and deliberately, he reaches over and brushes his hand against Kai’s. Smiles, as though he does not know how dangerous that expression is, the impossible things it does to Kai’s heart.

  “Hey, it looks like they’re about to race,” Eli says, tugging at his sleeve as he points toward the river, where several dragon boats are gathered. Bright scales are painted along the sides of the boats, and carved dragon figureheads bob in the water as if surveying the crowds. “Let’s go see who’ll win.”

  Kai glances over, sighs. “You know they’re a tourist trap, don’t you?”

  “Well,” Eli says, and it is ridiculous how bright his smile is, as if there is nowhere else he would rather be than here, the air sticky and thick around them, “I am a tourist, aren’t I? I should get to enjoy it.”

  A breeze is blowing through the willow copses, and a cool mist billows over from the lake. The meteorologists are predicting rain, the first in three weeks, and tourists are throwing rice into the water and leaving zongzi by the statues of the Great Ones. The Dragon Kings of the Four Seas gleam in the sunlight, and at their center the Yellow Dragon shines even brighter, tall and proud in his position as mythic ancestor of them all. Kai knows the statues’ polished appearance is only because of the tourists, visitors from the suburbs and Hebei come to pay their traditional respects, but he still lets himself be comforted.

  “Hey, hey!” a bare-chested man says, waving at them from his stall. His English is tourist-perfected, the choppy salesperson’s dialect of selling gaudy plastic to jet-lagged foreigners. There’s a small cage in his hand, several dozen more on a table inside the stall, a dragon in each — dilong, the small scavengers sold to children at summer fairs alongside turtles and goldfish. “Forty dollars! Take back, nice gift!”

  Eli glances at Kai, who only shrugs.

  “And how,” Eli asks in perfect Mandarin as he turns to the salesman, “would I take these back on the plane, exactly?”

  “You speak Chinese?”

  “I do,” Eli says. “I mean, at the least, I believe I do? Kai? What are your thoughts?”

  Kai cocks his head to one side, pretends to consider the issue seriously. “Now that I think about it, I think you do.”

  “Not a lot of foreigners can do it,” the salesman says, walking toward them. “How about that then? Special discount, 200 renminbi. Bring one home cheap for being so talented? Sold a pair off to a nice family in Australia — they went back with little presents for their children. Not lying, you can ask other people — lots of tourists come here, bring back pets for their friends.”

  “Thanks,” Eli says, “but I’ll pass for now.”

  “How about something else then, yeah? You go home, and you take something for your family or friends, yeah? You have a girlfriend? We can do her name in calligraphy, real nice too, take it home for her. Pretty thing for a pretty girl, yeah?”

  “Sorry,” Kai says, “but I don’t think either of us are interested.”

  “How ’bout Mom, then?” The man is hopping after them now, his smile wet and yellow. “We sell necklaces, purses — genuine leather, good stuff. Dragon skin too if you want something special, powdered scale cream that’ll do wonders for dry skin —”

  Kai moves without thinking. One moment, Kai’s watching a street vendor attempting to hawk goods to his amused American target; the next he’s rushing the man, face so close he can smell the tobacco on the vendor’s breath.

  “I told you,” Kai says, hands clenching into fists at his sides, “we aren’t interested.”

  The man is a full head taller than him, but Kai doesn’t care. If the vendor says a single word — if he tries to say anything, if he tries to touch him —

  “Kai?”

  Kai takes a deep breath, forces himself to walk away. Behind him, he can hear Eli apologizing to the vendor before hurrying after him. It only takes Eli a few strides to catch up.

  “You didn’t have to do that. It wasn’t real, you know.”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” Kai says. “No one would sell dragon skin for that price. He was still trying to pass it off, though.” And people would have bought it; that was the issue. Not all of them, but the more foolish or less demanding of them, those stupid enough to believe luxury could be bought on the streets or otherwise willing to settle for secondhand imitations of luxury, because there was a market for this, wasn’t there? No matter how illegal, no matter how cruel, there would always be a market for it —

  Eli’s hand is hesitant as it brushes against his, his voice even more so. “Kai?”

  He forces the anger down, forces himself to be steady when he speaks. “That man,” Kai says, and he’s proud of how calm his voice is, “didn’t know the first thing about dragons or taking care of them, and he thinks he can sell them off to tourists.” At the temple, the monks had told stories of the first emperor, how Heaven saw his noble deeds and so turned him into a dragon on his death. For centuries, it was said the people of his nation were the children of dragons, the dragons themselves the reincarnations of wise men and children yet to be born.

  And now here they were. A nation ready to skin and sell its children for money.

  “It’s not all their fault, you know,” Eli says as they make their way back to the main path. “A lot of these people, they’re poor, they have families, they’re desperate and they don’t know what to do. They just want to make money.”

  “Lots of people are poor. That doesn’t make them do anything.”

  “Kai, you can’t expect everyone to be an activist.”

  “Can’t I?”

  Eli says nothing, but rather than vindication, all Kai feels is hollowness. They’re still walking together, but there’s a distinct distance between them now, no easy banter or covert attempts at touching.

  It had been such a good day before this.

  “C’mon,” Eli says, already striding toward the next tourist attraction, a bronze bust staring past the flash of smartphone cameras. He smiles at Kai, a simultaneous peace offering and silent entreaty. “I need to get my cultural ambassador hours in. Tell me the history of this statue, tour guide?”

  When the rain comes, Kai is walking home, a plastic bag of cup noodles and prepackaged pineapple buns in one hand.

  Even as he curses and runs for cover, plastic bag held over his head a paltry cover, there’s a part of him that relishes it — the waterlogged squeak of his sneakers, the drag of soaked clothes against skin, the way the rain transforms the world into an impressionistic canvas of streaking watercolors. The itch in his lungs for once quiet, drowned by the roar of the rain. If he closes his eyes, Kai can almost imagine he is breathing in more water than air, suspended underwater for precious seconds stolen out of time.

  It doesn’t last long. The rain comes down hard and fast, tearing the leaves off trees and battering t
he dusty streets to a muddy froth, and then it is over, hot sun burning away the raindrops almost before they finish falling.

  Standing beneath the awning of a medicine shop with his hair plastered to his forehead and heart still thumping from the sprint to shelter, Kai catches his breath. Though the afternoon sun shines as harshly as ever, in the wake of the rain there’s a difference to the air. A clarity, if only temporary.

  It takes four knocks before Kai answers the door, and when he does, his face is drawn. His eyes say go away.

  “Hi,” Eli says. “Mr. Lin told me you would be here. Can I come in?”

  After a pause, Kai nods.

  Eli takes his shoes off, keeping his eyes on Kai all the while.

  “Kai?” he asks gently. “Are you all right?”

  In response, Kai points at a cloth-covered tank. Eli squats down, lifts the fabric from the tank. As the whirring of the fan cuts through the silence, the cloth flutters in the breeze, settling against the glass once more.

  “Today,” Kai says, not looking at the dragons. They’re so thin it hurts to look at them, skin dull and sagging over protruding bones. Patches of dried-out scales cluster like grey ashes, blood welling up from where scales have cracked or fallen off. “All today.”

  “Kai? Are you —”

  “There are so many of them,” Kai says, wearily resting his head in his hands. “I know there always are, all over the city. I see them all the time, and it’s fine, it’s all right most of the time, but this — right here, I swear to God —” Kai takes a breath, and then shakes his head. “I’m all right,” he says finally. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  Eli reaches for Kai’s hand; when Kai does not move away, Eli takes it and holds it for a long while.

  The sun is not yet up when Eli wakes, but it doesn’t matter; though his head aches with sleep deprivation, the prospect of more dreams is enough to keep his eyes open. Even so, visions of flickering red linger. There had been fire in every direction, ceiling beams crashing down in bursts of cinders as Eli searched for Kai or Mei or some sign of an exit. Trapped in their cages, the dragons had screamed and screamed, but when Eli reached out to free them the cages had stretched further into the depths of the blaze, the familiar space of Kai’s apartment warping into a dizzying kaleidoscope of disjointed hallways. And where was Kai? Where could he have gone and how could Eli have lost him? How was he supposed to find him now with the flames rising higher and the crackle of burnt and falling wood all around them —