After the Dragons

by Cynthia Zhang

  “Hey, Mom,” Eli says, settling against his pillows. “Did you decide on what to get for the baby shower?”

  “I’m leaning toward a mix of small things, some clothes and maybe one of those slings. Don’t try to distract me, though — you know that doesn’t work on me. What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “Such a lawyer,” Eli sighs. His mother shrugs, unrepentant. Well then. No getting around it now.

  “Mom?” he asks, smoothing the blanket on his lap. “Do you remember the friend I talked about before?”

  “The one you were trying to help? Did something happen, Eli? Is everything okay?”

  “No,” he says, shaking his head, “it’s not that — nothing’s changed. It’s just — when I said he was my friend, I wasn’t being completely honest. I mean, we are friends — I think we still are, at least. But when I said friend, I didn’t mean just as a friend, but as — as … a boyfriend.”

  They haven’t discussed labels, and Eli has a suspicion that Kai isn’t the type for such sentimentally sticky terms as ‘boyfriend.’ But it’s the closest term he can think of right now, the clearest and most concise way to sum up these feelings — attraction, affection, mingled exasperation and apprehension — between them. And it is important, telling the first person besides Kai for the first time, to be as clear as possible.

  Part of Eli wants to close his eyes, avoid the moment the realization sinks in, but he doesn’t. Can’t. His gaze is glued to his mother’s face and every minute flicker of expression there.

  Seven thousand miles away, his mother sighs, adjusts her position in her seat. “Oh, Eli. Sweetheart. Baobei.” One hand reaches forward, stroking the screen. “What’s his name?”

  Eli swallows, the lump rising unexpected in his throat. “Kai. Xiang Kaifei.”

  “And he’s a nice boy, Kai?”

  “Not really? He’s stubborn and sarcastic, and sometimes he’s a confrontational asshole just for the sake of it — idiot tried to fight a street vendor because he was selling dragon skin. It wasn’t even real and Kai’s maybe one hundred and fifteen pounds, but he was ready to hit him for it. He’s not nice, but … he’s good, Mom. Grandma would have liked him.”

  His mother smiles. It is her mothering smile, the same expression Eli remembers from a childhood’s worth of grazed knees and formless nightmare fears: soft as blankets, warm as the honeyed milk his mother made for sleepless nights. “I’m sure she would, Eli. I’m sure your dad and I will too, if you decide to introduce him to us. Was that what you were so worried about, baobei? That I wouldn’t approve because he’s a boy?”

  “That’s part of it, but not all of it.” Eli sighs, rubbing the heel of a hand over his eyes. “He’s sick, Mom. He has shaolong, and he’s not getting help, and I keep trying to get him to do something, but he won’t listen. He doesn’t think there’s anything he can do. I mean, I get it. It’s his life, and I can’t barge in and force him to do what I think is right — and even if I did, who knows how much it would fix anyway?” Eli swallows, forces himself to breathe. “I’m not naïve. I know the treatments are still incredibly basic, won’t cure him or maybe even do anything at all. But I can’t watch him do nothing. I can’t do that again.”

  Eli remembers his grandmother’s gaunt face on a phone screen, serene as she asked about his classes, extracting a promise from him to visit soon, maybe that summer if he could. He remembers the glare of his computer screen at 3:00 a.m. as he scoured medical articles and forum discussions, searching for something, anything that might help when both the Western and traditional medicine had stopped working. Then, finally, the small box mailed to his dorm room, books and photos and his grandfather’s old pocket watch, mementos and trinkets bundled together to my dearest grandson —

  “Do you know,” his mother says, choosing her words carefully, “when your grandmother first told me she was going to stay in Beijing, I was furious. We tried not to do it too much around you, but we used to argue a lot, your grandmother and me. It started when I was a teenager, but we never quite stopped after that. So when she told me that no, she wasn’t coming back to America, it felt a little like that — like I was seventeen again and too young to understand how the world worked.”

  She shrugs and smiles, half rueful, half nostalgic. “Feeling like that, I reacted a little like a teenager would. I regret that now. I still don’t know if I should have pushed harder to get her to leave Beijing, but I regret not being kinder. Your grandmother was old, and the disease was advanced when she got the diagnosis. If she didn’t want to spend her last months in waiting rooms and doctor’s offices — well, I should have tried to understand that.”

  “It’s not the same though. Kai’s my age, and he isn’t — it isn’t that far, with him. There’s still time.”

  On screen, his mother taps her fingers against one cheek as she thinks. “You said that he won’t get help. Do you know why that is?”

  “Because he’s a stubborn, self-destructive fuck?” Eli asks, before remembering who he’s speaking to. “Sorry, Mom, but it’s true. He hasn’t even told his family because he thinks they don’t need to know, because his mom’s not going to worry when he drops off the map for months on end? And Kai’s not stupid, not usually at least, but every time I try to bring it up, he gets so stubborn. We got into a fight about it last week, and we haven’t talked since. Really talked I mean, not awkward small talk and hellos when we see each other. If it’s going to be the same arguments over and over again, then I …”

  “Then it’s hard to know if you want to keep on trying,” she finishes. “If it’s worth it, when nothing seems to change. I know, baobei. I know.”

  Knees pulled to his chest, Eli nods. “I don’t know what to do. If I can do anything that would help.”

  “You’re helping now though. With the research you’re doing right now and the fact that you so obviously care about him. I think you’ve been doing more than you give yourself credit for.”

  “But it’s not enough. Not if nothing’s going to change and Kai will still — if it’s not going to help, then it’s not enough.”

  “No,” his mother says. “But that’s the way with anything worth doing, isn’t it? You work and work, and there’s always a risk of whether it’s enough or not, of whether any of this is going to make any difference or if it’s just months sunk into another hopeless case. But you do the work. Because it’s what you can do. Because you may never know if it means anything, but on the chance that it does, you can’t live with yourself if you don’t try, can you?”

  Long seconds pass, the only noise between them the whir of computers and the almost inaudible sound of ragged breathing.

  His mother’s lips are pursed when Eli finally collects himself enough to look up again. “Eli,” she begins, then stops. She looks like she wants to say something, but then she exhales — a long, steady breath — and gives him her softest smile. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

  Eli nods, trying to smile even as he wipes his eyes. “Yeah. I will. Thanks, Mom.”

  The ceiling is blurry when Kai wakes up, sheets sweat-sodden and head pounding with the percussive force of a brass band. His throat feels like it’s been scraped with sandpaper. He aches, a full-body bruise feeling Kai recognizes as the telltale sign of a fever.

  “Fuck,” Kai moans, covering his face with his hands. Even that movement hurts, pain a sharp spike flashing behind his eyes. Hungover and sick — of course. Just his luck.

  From her place atop the bedframe, Mei leans down to nose at his hair. “Shh,” Kai tells her. “It’s okay, it’s all right. Go back to sleep, baobei.” Mei grumbles but lowers her head, wings shifting as she curls into the shape of a cozy baozi.

  Eyes closed, Kai tries to wait out the pain and fall back to sleep. But his head throbs and the sunlight filtering through the window is unrelentingly bright. He’s still dressed in his clothes from last night, sweat and grime clinging to his sheets and his skin.

  His body protests as he
forces himself out of bed, but Kai manages to stumble to the bathroom somehow. He stands in front of the mirror, propping himself against the sink as he waits for his breathing to slow.

  Halfway through brushing his teeth, Kai hits some oversensitive part of his mouth and starts coughing, a fit that sends his toothbrush clattering to the tile, stomach lurching into his throat as he struggles for breath. It takes a while, but it passes, leaving Kai with nothing worse than tear-blurred vision and a throat so raw it hurts to breathe.

  Nothing too out of the ordinary then.

  It would be easier, Kai thinks bitterly as he spits blood into the sink, if he followed Eli’s advice and got actual treatment instead of subsisting on aspirin and hope. But that would mean seeing a doctor — would mean going to a hospital and letting them put his name and identification number into a database, irrevocably tying him to this diagnosis. Making it all, in some crucial way, inescapable. Real.

  Eli thinks he is stubborn and self-destructive, a self-righteous idiot willingly walking toward martyrdom. Kai knows better. People have always seen the anger and combativeness and thought bravery, but that is only a portion of the truth. Kai has no trouble confronting bullies or calling out cruelty, has been doing so since he was a child. But he has fears, the same as everyone else.

  Something cool nudges at his hand. When Kai looks down, Mei is perched at the edge of the sink, head tilted to one side as she stares at him, pupils so thin her eyes are almost pure gold. Kai sighs and lifts her onto his shoulder, murmuring apologies for worrying her as he wills his hands to stop shaking and his heartbeat to calm.

  Staring at his reflection in the mirror, a splotchy stranger with hollow cheeks and red-rimmed eyes, Kai can’t imagine why Pao — why anyone — would want him.

  He has enough sense and energy to fill up a water bottle and knock back an aspirin before sinking face-first onto his bed, a pillow pulled over his aching head to muffle the pain as Mei carefully licks at his face. The pillow doesn’t help much, but it’s the illusion of control — of doing something to manage the damage — that he’s after.

  The route to Kai’s apartment is a litany of streets and side alleys Eli could navigate in his sleep. Eli steps off the train, and then muscle memory takes over until he’s sprinting up flights of creaky stairs.

  “What,” Kai says, struggling groggily to sit up in bed as Eli enters, “why are you — how did you get in?”

  “Spare key,” Eli says, trading his sneakers for house slippers. He’s winded from sprinting up the stairs, but the adrenaline keeps him rushing forward. “Not that I needed it; you left the door unlocked. Mr. Lin said you texted him that you were sick, and he told me to make sure you were still alive.” Pulling a chair over, Eli places a palm on Kai’s forehead, marveling at how steady his hands are. From her place beside Kai’s pillow, Mei slits open one eye, then closes it again. “Fuck, you’re burning up.”

  “I normally am. It’s a side effect of chronic disease.”

  “God, you’re insufferable, you know that?” Even so, there’s a part of Eli that’s heartened by it — if Kai has energy to snark, he can’t be that ill. Still, shaolong makes gauging that tricky, the variable of innately elevated body temperature playing havoc with what constitutes dangerous. “Your medical supplies are in the top left shelf, right?”

  “Yeah,” Kai sighs, seeming to accept defeat as he sags back into his pillows. “I might be out of medicine, though. Human medicine, I mean.”

  “Of course you are,” Eli says, under his breath. The upper shelves in Kai’s kitchenette are a mess of bandages and tank parts, but there’s a thermometer in the meagre first aid kit in the back.

  39.2°C — high but not yet dangerous for a normal patient, so probably a mid-grade fever for someone with shaolong. A quick search proves his hypothesis right, and Eli can’t help the tidal wave of relief that washes over him as he skims the results. A normal cold, nothing more. Nothing to worry about. And even if autoimmune diseases made sickness difficult, turning simple fevers serious in the split-second of a blink, that’s no reason to assume —

  No, Eli thinks, interrupting that train of thought. Not the time for those worries and worst-case scenarios.

  “Stay here,” Eli tells Kai as he stands up, double-checking that his wallet is in his pocket. Kai glares in response, but it’s half-hearted.

  The nearest corner store pharmacy is a few minutes away, and Eli has to remind himself that it’s okay, it’s only a cold. Kai had been fine when he left and would be fine when he returned. Was fine, would be fine, will be fine.

  He gets a selection of basic cold medicine — ibuprofen, tea and other liquids, the awful but effective throat lozenges he remembers hating as a child — before all but sprinting out of the store, the teenaged cashier barely glancing up from his phone through the entire interaction.

  Kai is still in bed, scowling at the ceiling like it personally wronged him. It’s irrational, but Eli can’t help the wave of relief that floods him.

  “Here,” Eli says, placing the ibuprofen and a bottle of tea on the chair next to Kai. “Two pills every four to six hours, with water or tea. I bought some juice and other drinks, but I’m going to leave those in the fridge. You’re going to want to hydrate in general, though you should try to eat if you can. Speaking of which, I doubt you’ve eaten anything today, so I’m going to make some congee, okay?”

  Kai frowns at the items on the chair. “You don’t need to look after me.” He averts his eyes as he props himself up on his elbows. “I’ve gotten sick before. I know how to take care of myself.”

  “I’m bored and I don’t have anything else planned right now,” Eli says, deliberately light. “You’re a perfect distraction. Drink your tea.”

  “What are you, my mother?”

  “Someone needs to be,” Eli says, “and if you won’t let yours do her job, I might as well fill in.” The words are sharper than he intends and he regrets them immediately, but he doesn’t apologize. Won’t, not when there are three types of dragon food in the kitchen but barely more than a half-carton of eggs in the fridge.

  This time, it is Kai who looks away first. The guilt intensifies, a sharp, cold stab through Eli’s chest.

  He won’t apologize for it. It hurts, hurting Kai, but there is only so long anyone can walk on eggshells before something breaks, and Eli is tired. Has been tired, he’s realizing, for a long time.

  There’s a bag of rice, half-full, in the pantry cupboard. Eli busies himself with it: measuring out the rice, rinsing the grains under water, watching the dust rise to the surface, a thin film of white that dips and swirls with the jostling of the water.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Eli watches Kai drink his tea. Sitting in bed in a too-big T-shirt and Mei dozing curled into the crook of his neck, Kai looks so young, a silhouette sharp and stark in the sunlight pouring into the room.

  Eli looks away. Concentrates on chopping up the wilted green onion he’d found in the fridge before rummaging around Kai’s cabinets, where he manages to unearth a packet of zha cai and a half-empty bottle of Lao Gan Ma sauce. It isn’t much, but it will make the congee a little less plain.

  Eli cares for Kai — loves him, maybe, if he lets himself think that word, if it is not too early and melodramatic to think it. He wants to help. He won’t stop trying to help. But he’s starting to think they’re right, his mother and Mr. Lin and even Kai, damn the irony of it all. Kai isn’t his personal project, and Eli can’t — won’t — treat him like one, some tabula rasa on which Eli can put his displaced guilt to rest.

  But that doesn’t mean he can’t care.

  On the stove, the water boils. Eli adds the rice and green onion and salt to taste, turning the heat to a simmer before replacing the lid on the pot. Nothing to do now but wait.

  “Here,” Eli says, sitting down by Kai and opening up his laptop. “Do you want to watch something while it cooks?”

  In the silver stillness of predawn, Kai sits at the kitchen table, hand
s cupped around a mug of tea. Beside him, Mei perches on the windowsill, nose pressed against the glass as she surveys the awakening world outside. Though she stays silent, her tail betrays her, swishing as she watches pigeons rummage through overturned garbage.

  A piece of notebook paper lies on the table, words scrawled in Eli’s familiar chicken scratch. Morning labs — sorry I can’t stay, will try to stop by tonight. If you need anything, call me. The last two words underlined twice, as if Eli is trying to impress the importance of the message on him through sheer emphasis. In spite of himself, the too-early hour, and the lingering aches, Kai smiles at it.

  In Eli’s wake, the floors have been swept and the counters are all but sparkling, all the dirty dishes scrubbed and dried and neatly put away. There’s fresh water in Mei’s tank, fresh fruit and tofu in his fridge, and packages of ice pops and dumplings in the freezer. Kai had tried to refuse the groceries, but Eli had given him a look so flatly unimpressed that Kai’s teeth had clacked together as he shut his mouth. Perhaps it was the fever or the relief of seeing Eli after so many days of détente, but Kai had not wanted to do anything to risk the fragile peace between them.

  By all rights, he should have been furious — the presumption with which Eli had barged in, all unwanted good intentions and doctor’s orders high-handedness. Eli had been overbearing, but he had also brought Kai tea and made congee, kept him company even when Kai drifted off between episodes of American reality TV. For a few brief hours, it had been like a scene from childhood, staying home from school with a thermometer in his mouth and cartoons on TV as his mother made him soup and fussed over his temperature.

  It’s been a long time since Kai has spoken to his mother. Longer still since he last did so honestly, no secrets or pretense between them — not since his father’s death, maybe. Kai doesn’t regret it, the time he had spent forcing away the anger and grief so the endless sadness in his mother’s eyes might fade, but he wonders sometimes what their relationship could have been otherwise. One thing had rolled into another and then, with years’ practice, it had practically become a habit — lying about fevers and wrapping his own scraped elbows, hiding bruises under long sleeves and black eyes with stolen foundation.