It’s psychosomatic, but Eli thinks he can taste smoke when he inhales.
He stumbles into the bathroom, bare feet slapping faintly against the tiles. Standing in front of the sink with his eyes closed, he splashes cold water over his face. When he finally opens his eyes, the water from his hair dripping down his forehead, he sees the blood on the sink.
Eli stares. Tries to imagine that it is something else — some trick of the light, a splotch of paint, or the result of a bite from Mei or another of Kai’s endless charges — but it is no use. The red remains, stark and half-dried, and Eli can’t help thinking stage progression and lung tissue and symptomatic.
Clutching the edges of the sink, he closes his eyes, counts to one, two, three. When he opens his eyes, the blood is still there.
Outside, on the balcony, Eli studies the view before him. There’s not much to see — Kai’s apartment faces out onto a row of grey apartment units, window blinds closed and occupants silent at this early hour. It is already a muggy, grey day, the way so many days seem to be in Beijing, but it is peaceful. For that Eli is grateful.
Eli takes a deep, slow breath, then straightens. Smooths his hair, rubs his hands to still their trembling. Kai’s apartment is on the eighth floor of thirteen, and below, a bald man loiters by the trash collection — Eli wonders if he’s maybe seen him before. Is he one of the loudmouthed old men who linger at the entrance to Mr. Lin’s shop? But then he is gone, and the street is empty again.
The sun, coming up, paints the sky in hazy pink.
Inside, Kai is in the same position in which Eli had left him, still asleep. He curls in on himself, as if protecting the rise and fall of breath in his chest. Deprived of his anger, Kai looks so small and so tired. In the dawning light, his skin is the color of washed-out moonlight, the hairs on the back of his neck gossamer strands, almost glowing.
Then, in this sleepy pre-dawn interlude, Eli is wrenched by an anger so violent it startles him. Fuck no, this is wrong. Kai is twenty-one — he should be out with friends or training with experts on wildlife rescue, not here, cooped up in an apartment with only piecemeal resources and a ticking timer on his future. But the anger subsides, leaving in its wake a desolate powerlessness. But what can be done?
Something, he thinks. He couldn’t be completely helpless. He wouldn’t be. There had to be something he could do to help.
When Eli’s grandmother died, no one had expected it. Oh, they’d prepared for it, in the way people prepared for retirement or power outages — something they knew would happen, yes. But even just before it happened, the prospect of his grandmother’s death seemed so firmly rooted to an unknown future as to be unreal. His grandmother had been sick for so long in a low-grade, chronic way that the disease had come to feel like stability, oxygen tanks and ventilation masks another background detail of video calls. She was sick, but she still made her own meals and watered her garden daily, still read the news each morning and took blurry photos of stray cats. She still engaged in the small, ordinary tasks that make up a life.
And then she had died. No ambulance called, no sharp turn in health or protracted hospice stay — his grandmother had simply gone to bed one evening and did not rise in the morning. Her cats’ wailing had been what finally alerted the neighbors. If his grandmother had lived alone or been a little less fond of her routines, how long would it have taken someone to notice, how long would she have laid there, cold and unmoving, before her landlord or a neighbor finally thought to check in?
On the bed, Kai shifts in his sleep, murmuring something indecipherable before falling still once more. Gently, so as not to wake him, Eli brushes the hair from Kai’s forehead, fingers lingering when Kai doesn’t stir.
Something. There must be something — anything — he could do, some combination of the right words and care that will compel Kai to accept his help. But as the sun rises in the sky and Kai remains soundly asleep, Eli can only sit there, hands clenched in the bedsheets.
5
Sunday morning. Hazy sunlight filters in through dusty glass as a new fan steadily click-click-clicks in one corner, interrupted only by the intermittent splash or rustle from the dragons in their tanks and cages. As he waits for the kettle to boil, Eli presses a cheek against the cool glass of the kitchen window and watches Beijing blur below. A few feet away, Kai sits on his bed, pillows propped behind his back. Mei is curled catlike in his lap, occasionally stretching her neck as something catches her attention.
There is, Eli has learned over time, a metric to the kind of kindness Kai will accept. Offer money, a meal at the noodle shop across from the lab, a water bottle from the pack of Nongfu Spring Dr. Wang keeps stocked in the break room for students, and Kai will bristle, draw back in a cold silence of affronted pride and stubborn self-sufficiency. Offer him supplies or water filters to help him take care of the dragons, however, and Kai will complain, but he will take them. Eli tries not to exploit this too much, but on a day like this, when the heat wraps around them like a blanket and Kai is so very quiet, he is glad that his flimsy excuse about optimal environmental conditions had been enough to let Kai accept the offered humidifier and new fans with relative equanimity. Even so, it’s hot, the kind of day that Eli has always associated with childhood — the dog days of summer, the last lazy afternoons before real life and school intrude again. In recent years, the summers have come earlier and lasted longer, so that instead of a few days of scorching heat it feels like Eli spends half of August hiding inside. And that’s in New England with air conditioning in his dorm — Eli can’t imagine how Kai has spent months in Beijing with only a cheap box fan for comfort. Willpower, Kai would probably say, one of those self-satisfied answers that always make Eli a little sad. Kai shouldn’t have to subsist on willpower, not when streets away condos are empty and unused.
Closing the curtains, he turns to Kai.
“Weather says it’s going to rain soon,” Eli says, sitting next to him. “Things might get a little better then.”
“They keep saying that,” Kai says. “But it never happens. It’s like they think if they keep repeating it, it’ll finally rain.”
“It has to rain some time. This weather can’t last forever.”
“Mm,” Kai says, neither agreement nor disagreement. Strands of hair stick to his forehead and his skin is faintly red, a flush Eli knows has only partially to do with the heat. Eli wants to lean over and smooth away the furrow between his brows, but he’s unsure how welcome the gesture would be.
In their cages and tanks, the dragons are dozing, ribs pressing in and out of sharpness with slow breaths. Eli pours tea for himself and Kai, nudging a cup toward Kai until he takes it and drinks.
“You know the story of Nezha, don’t you?”
“I think there was a cartoon version we watched in Chinese school once,” Eli says, putting the teapot on the kitchen table. “It was a long time ago though. Why?”
“It’s a pretty popular story,” Kai says. He reaches down to pet Mei, who is assiduously chewing on the hem of his T-shirt. “It’s a folk story,” Kai says. “Nezha was a folk hero, way, way back. Born into a royal family. His mother initially gives birth to a giant ball of flesh but Nezha comes out perfectly fine, apart from being able to walk from infancy. But that’s folk heroes for you. Grows up a mostly normal kid, except for the flying and other supernatural powers.
“A few years go by, and there’s a major drought. Crops are dying, the price of food is going up, people are starving. So they decide to hold a bunch of sacrifices to the dragon king, Ao Guang — this was back when there was less of a divide between humans and gods. And Ao Guang, because he’s been king for a long time and he’s used to getting what he wants, demands the people give him children to eat if they want it to rain. They try giving him rice, but it won’t do — he wants soft child meat, and he’s not the type to be satisfied when people don’t give him what he wants. So, instead of waiting for his subjects to change their minds, he gets one of his lackeys to kidn
ap some kids for dinner. They’re Nezha’s friends, though, and of course when Nezha finds out, he’s not happy. And, being the supernatural semi-demigod child he is, he decides to fight the East Dragon King.”
“Pretty understandable,” Eli says. He reaches for Kai’s hand, careful not to disturb Kai’s other hand as it strokes Mei’s smooth neck, and takes it in his own. Kai’s palms are dry and work-worn, but he has long, elegant fingers. Piano fingers, his mother would have called them. “He sounds kind of unreasonable, this dragon king.”
“He was a king,” Kai says, shifting away so that Eli has to stretch to reach him. “It’s what they do. If you’ve ever seen any of the Sun Wukong adaptations, there are a couple of dragon kings in those stories too, and they’re just as good at razing cities as the old European firebreathers were, just more bureaucratic about their destruction.
“Anyway, Nezha goes out to fight the Dragon King’s troops. It’s a long fight. Nezha’s this tiny kid flying around on his flaming wheels and thrashing the dragon generals with his magic sash. But at the end of it, he wins — no children get eaten, the people are freed from the tyranny of their old king, et cetera.”
“And they all lived happily ever.”
“Basically,” Kai says. “There’s a part later on when all the dragon kings get angry and Nezha has to kill himself to stop a mass genocide, but then he comes back later, so it’s fine.”
Eli isn’t sure how to respond. “That,” he settles on, “is a generous definition of fine.”
On Kai’s lap, Mei stands, arching her back in a stretch as she pads over to curl up with her flank pressed against his leg. Kai absently runs a hand down her spine, and Mei closes her eyes, settling into the sheets.
“So what?” Eli asks as he reaches over, gently scratching the area behind Mei’s frill; she leans into the touch, rumbling against his fingers. “You think we should start sacrificing children again if we want it to rain?”
“Of course not,” Kai says, rolling his eyes. He stands up and makes his way over to the lines of tanks. Frowns as he leans down to adjust several knobs, fingers tapping over the salinity dials before shifting them up. “It’s just a story; you’re not meant to take it seriously.”
“Ah. The cultural ambassador thing, then.”
“Exactly,” Kai says, adjusting the settings on the last tank. “Can’t have you go back to America like we didn’t teach you a thing about the local culture.” Shoulder bumping against Eli’s, Kai reclaims his spot on the bed, settling his head against the pillows. Eli hesitates, then moves closer so Kai’s head is resting on his shoulder. Kai doesn’t say anything, and Eli dares to put a hand on his head, gently brush Kai’s bangs from his eyes. “Anyway,” Kai says, closing his eyes. “It was just a story.”
It hadn’t sounded like just a story, Eli thinks. Old, hard gods and the price of water and kingdoms that would sacrifice their children for the hope of another day — it’s a familiar story, cousin to a litany of other stories across other mythologies. An archetypal legend, but no less true for its familiarity.
Kai is warm against him, too hot skin almost unpleasant in the sticky heat, but Eli doesn’t move. He studies the minute changes of expression across Kai’s face, the spray of red, almost freckle-like dots across one wrist.
“It’ll rain soon,” Eli says, stroking Kai’s inner wrist. Blue-green veins stand out against thin skin and Kai’s pulse is fast beneath Eli’s fingers, the sharp staccato beat of raindrops against a windowpane. “It will.”
It’s past sunset when the first bettors gather, a scraggly group of old standbys and swaggering newcomers ready to test their luck. All together, they total barely a dozen including spectators, not quite enough to justify the need for a referee. But midseason is always a slow time for dragon fights. Attendance will pick up toward the end of the season, Kai knows, when the points get tallied and the final competitors are squared away. Until then, it is a matter of sustaining interest. Mr. Lin is in the back of the shop, moving in a new shipment of tubes and aquarium filters, and so Kai sits at the counter, only half paying attention as he takes names and bets from the men gathered.
It’s one of the rare nights when Eli is not there, having gone to some formal dinner or gala with attendance so mandatory even he could not escape it. He had been apologetic when he left, and even as Kai assured him that it was fine, that he could survive a night alone, he had been privately grateful. As much as Kai appreciates Eli’s company, there is something oddly exhausting about being around him. Kai is technically younger by about a year, but he always feels so much older than Eli, with his unbridled earnestness and wholehearted belief in the ability of people to change. It’s a relief, sometimes, after an afternoon or evening with Eli, to go home or to Mr. Lin’s and let all his cynicism breathe once again.
Perhaps that says something about who he is as a person, Kai muses as he pulls his pencils out of his bag, laying them out in front of him. Perhaps it doesn’t. How much does his inherent goodness matter when he’s one person in a country of billions?
He leans his elbows on the counter, staring out at landscape before him. It’s the same view he’s seen every night at Mr. Lin’s — the lines of old shops behind them, the grey, thick air above. There’s something, though, in the way the lights flicker tonight, in the way they cast long shadows fluttering across the ground and blurring everything into impressionist streaks — it’s a thickness to the air that isn’t quite smog or heat or the ever-present scent of grease. Kai frowns, flipping his pencil between his fingers as he compares the sketch against his view of the shops before him, trying to tease out the invisible quality of the space. Perhaps if he darkened a line here, pressed a little harder as he shaded there, he could capture it.
His first year of college, Kai had taken an art class, partially out of curiosity, partially to stop his friends from telling him how much he ought to take one. It had been much what he’d expected — his classmates a mix of cooler-than-thou design students and politicians’ children who thought themselves artistic — but some of the exercises had been useful and he had liked the professor, a wiry, competent woman with calloused sculptor’s hands and a refreshing lack of tolerance for bullshit. It’s Professor Jing he thinks of as he smudges the charcoal along one sketched brick wall to better illuminate the fuzzy halos of the streetlamps. “Your art is technically proficient,” she had told him the last time they met, sipping tea in her office two weeks before the constant heat under his skin led Kai to finally visit the student health center. “It always has been — even as a first-year, your grasp of anatomy and attention to detail were impressive. But there’s something I can’t help but feel is missing, there’s something you’re holding back. Your work is good, Kaifei, but it’s static, neat. It’s pretty, but it’s not alive yet.”
Kai wonders idly, his sketched scene blooming out before him, what Professor Jing would think if she saw what he was doing now, the piles of sketches cluttering his table, the canvases lining his walls. He wonders what his mother would say. If she saw his art and knew anything of what it meant.
He had tried to call her the other morning. He had been meaning to for a while. Despite whatever Eli might think on the subject, Kai is not stupid; he knows how shaolong progresses, the inevitabile worsening symptoms. In stage four and late stage three, patients are usually housebound, toxin-induced coughing fits strong enough to cause fainting and heart palpitations. Compared to those cases, Kai has been lucky, symptoms primarily contained to shortness of breath and coughing more like asthma or allergies than shaolong. He can still walk upstairs and lift boxes with relative ease, and if he occasionally spits blood, he can treat it at home instead of surrendering to an interminable hospital stay. Kai is stable, unpleasant as that stability is. But he knows it cannot last.
And Eli had been right on another thing too: his mother deserves to know. However he might have justified it at the beginning, he knows it isn’t altruism that keeps him from telling her. It’s cowardice.
A few days ago, for the first time in months, Kai had called his mother. Punched in the familiar numbers in his new phone, and the call had been sent to voicemail, his mother’s tired but friendly voice telling him that she was busy but that he should leave a message. She would answer back as soon as she could.
Of course. His mother never answered her phone while she was at work.
He hadn’t left a message. He hadn’t tried again.
Kai frowns, tilting his head to view the drawing from different forty-five-degree angles, but the threads guiding him forward have vanished, the whisper that this line went there and that shape there now silent. It’s all right, though. He has the gist of it down, the bones of what he wants to create on this page; it’s only a matter of cleaning things up, figuring out where to go from there.
There’s a mood Kai gets into when he draws, a mood in which the whole world seems to fade away. It doesn’t last, and sometimes the art isn’t even good, but it’s always welcome. This mood is a part of why, he supposes, he’s been so productive this summer. Emerging from it is always a shock, and here, at Mr. Lin’s, even more so, with its noise and lights and sweat all crammed together, condensed into a panoply of sheer humanity.
After the Dragons Page 10