Year of the Goose

by Carly J. Hallman

  “Look, I’m not going to bad-mouth your father,” Lulu said, gathering resolve from her memories. “So unless there’s another reason you’re here, maybe you should leave.”

  The girl stared intently, smugly even, at her iPhone screen. Lulu would have guessed she was now reading something, except that her eyes didn’t seem to be moving.

  “Um, hello?” Lulu smirked and then tossed her hands in the air in frustration. “Okay, all right, normally conversation goes one person says something and then the other person says something. But that’s fine. You’re just in my home, on my sofa, uninvited. It’s not like you have to respond to anything I’m saying.”

  Still, the girl refused to look at her.

  Well, this wasn’t working. Lulu shifted her weight, gnawed her lip, decided to play polite hostess—maybe this would throw the girl off a bit. “I’m going to get a Coke Zero out of the fridge. I have a few of those and some apple juice and water. Tea too. Can I get you something to drink?”

  Still not looking up from her phone, the girl said, “He’s trying to get me to go to school in America. Utah. I don’t want to go to Utah.”

  And there it was.

  “Why would I go to America? I can hardly speak English—I hate that stupid language—and my friends are here, and I’ve lived here my whole life, and there’s this boy I’ve been talking to—well, he’s kind of my boyfriend now—and it’s just stupid so I’m not going.”

  Lulu drew blood from her lip, licked it away—okay, but what did she expect her to do about it?

  The girl sighed dramatically and swiped at her phone. A full minute passed. A foreign sound—claws scratching against cardboard. Lulu glanced over at the box. She had forgotten the turtle was even here.

  “My name is Zhang Li, by the way,” the girl said, looking up for a split second. “I already know you are Lulu.”

  Lulu nodded, stepped into the kitchen, and opened the fridge. Save for the drinks, it was empty. It smelled stale. She crinkled her nose. The light was bright. She squinted. Why did this girl know her name? Little girls shouldn’t know about this corrupt mistress bullshit, should they? Why was she here? What did she want? Should she just call Official Xia and order him to pick the little brat up? Why wasn’t there any real food in her fridge? Shouldn’t she buy some proper ingredients and learn how to cook? What had she done with her life? What was she doing? Where had all of these years gone? What was there to her existence anymore beyond sleeping, watching DVDs, shopping, going on the Internet? Shouldn’t she learn something, or do something, or go on a trip or something? Shouldn’t she want to do those things? Where had her desire gone? Had she ever had it? She leaned headfirst into the fridge, breathing in the dank air. In, out. In, out. She exhaled one final time and removed two cold black cans.

  When Lulu returned to the living room, Zhang Li crouched on the floor, over the cardboard box, her tiny hand stroking the turtle’s shell. It was a sweet scene, and Lulu’s bones softened. She set the cans down on the coffee table next to the girl’s now-abandoned phone and knelt beside her. “It’s a turtle,” she said softly.

  “No shit.” Zhang Li withdrew her hand and glared up at her. “How retarded do you think I am?”

  Lulu wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to with such contempt—in fact, she wasn’t used to being spoken to at all these days. Her cheeks burned red. “Yeah, I don’t know why I said that. Sometimes I just say things.” She wrung her hands. “I’m not dumb,” she added. “Don’t think I’m dumb. I’m not.”

  Zhang Li, expression blank, stared at her.

  “I went to university. I studied economics.” She left out the part about dropping out, about becoming a keratin farm.

  “Wow,” Zhang Li said, focusing her attention back to stroking the turtle. “Cool story.”

  Lulu inhaled and gathered her long hair, pulled it to the side, let it fall over one shoulder. “Yeah, well. I know that probably doesn’t mean anything to you since you’re, like, still mentally a toddler, but when you grow up you’ll understand what a college degree means. That it takes a certain level of intelligence and dedication to achieve one and that only, like, ten percent of the world’s population possesses that rare combination.” Lying, acting like a mean high school girl, oh, she was becoming a better human being by the second. Her stomach lurched.

  Zhang Li rolled her eyes. “It’s more about luck and money, I think.”

  “I don’t come from money.” Out of control.

  “Well, you have money now. And I don’t think anyone would deny that you have incredibly good luck.”

  “Why are you here?”

  Zhang Li stared down at the retreating turtle. She knocked softly on its shell and then said, “Blackmail.” She inhaled sharply and then obviously rehearsed words tumbled from her mouth. “If he’s going to try to send me to America against my will, I’m going to publicly out him as a cheater and a corrupt bribe-taker. I have social media accounts. It’d be easy as that.”

  Lulu’s heartbeat quickened—take the man down and the woman always goes down harder. “Come on,” she said, choosing her words wisely, back in control. “Let’s be realistic here. I mean, what makes you think anyone would care? All officials are cheaters and bribe-takers. Not exactly newsworthy.”

  “Sure, but specific cases are. The public loves details. It makes things real. And what with all this Papa Hui stuff lately, everyone is on edge. The time has come for a change—that’s what everyone is saying.”

  “What, are you majoring in PR at middle school?”

  Zhang Li shrugged, removed the turtle from the box, and said, “We don’t have majors in middle school.” Then, not moving her mouth, she mumbled in a low voice something Lulu couldn’t quite make out. Lulu raised an eyebrow. Zhang Li, speaking loud and clear now, said, “Is there someone else here?”

  “No. Why?”

  Zhang Li squinted. “Who was that then?”

  “I thought you said something.”

  Zhang Li shook her head.

  They both froze for a moment, their eyes scanning the apartment. Lulu stood. Her palms and armpits went clammy. She eyed the empty Absolut bottle visible through the kitchen door—if she smashed it on the countertop, she could use it as a jagged weapon. She took a creeping step in its direction.

  That quiet, mumble of a voice spoke again. “Hello?”

  Zhang Li’s face drained, no color, only white. “I—I—I think it was the turtle,” she stammered, holding it up.

  Lulu spun around. “What?”

  And from out of its shell, limbs and a head now poked out, and two beady little eyes looked back at them.

  “My name is Kunchok Dawa and I was a monk in Lhasa and I died three days ago.”

  Lulu, dizzy, lowered herself to sit on the floor.

  Zhang Li sat beside her and placed the turtle again in the box. She stared down at it and then, overstepping the oddness of the situation with adolescent sarcasm, chimed, “Okay, yeah, and you came back as a turtle?”

  The turtle responded in a similar lilt. “Immediate availability was an issue. It was this or a dung beetle. We all make choices.”

  Lulu leaned forward. “But aren’t you supposed to come back as something higher? Like something not used in, uh, boner soup?” She whispered the last few words, worried about Zhang Li’s innocence.

  “I see no distinction between one living thing and the next.”

  Lulu met Zhang Li’s eyes and then leaned forward, resting her chin in her hands. “So, do you, like, have abilities?”

  The turtle cocked its head. “Sorry?”

  “What I mean is can you tell the future?”

  Zhang Li’s eyes flickered with interest. “Ooh”—she prodded the turtle’s shell—“yeah, can you? Am I going to have to go to America or not? Can you tell?”

  “Um, like am I one of those guys on a footbridge kneeling down with charts and telling every passerby with a coin to spare that they’re going to strike it rich and squeeze out a fat baby s
on?”

  Lulu nodded eagerly. “Yes, exactly.”

  “No.” The turtle smirked. “I’m a turtle.”

  Disappointment washed over Lulu. “I just wanted to know if I have one,” she heard herself say. “A future.”

  The turtle said, “Considering throwing yourself out the window, huh?”

  Zhang Li jumped to Lulu’s defense, strangely enough. “Well, if you really are a Tibetan, shouldn’t you want her to kill herself? Since she’s Chinese and all? And what about me? Do you want me to kill myself too?”

  The turtle opened its mouth to reply, but Zhang Li charged forward with no intention of slowing down her rampage of questioning. “How’d you get into a fully grown turtle’s body if you just died as a person three days ago?”

  The turtle sighed. “Sometimes, rarely, soul exchanges are permitted. Usually only in animal bodies and only in the case of an emergency.”

  Zhang Li pushed up her loose sleeves, which kept falling. “I thought you said all beings are equal or whatever.”

  “Yes, but it’s too complicated with human beings, too much paperwork if you will, and with people there are soul mates and emotional intelligence and any such number of complex matters to take into consideration…”

  What Lulu and Zhang Li didn’t know until now was that just a few days before—three, to be exact—in front of a monastery in Lhasa, Tibet, and after the morning prayers, two twenty-one-year-old monks, red robes doused in gasoline, shouted anti-China slogans and lit themselves on fire against the backdrop of a bluest blue sky.

  But of course they didn’t know.

  Three thousand kilometers away in bustling Beijing, not a word was spoken about the charred remains dragged off by the police, the internal memos, the routine of this chaos. Not a word, not a word, not a word…

  Until now.

  Lulu’s eyes widened. “Why’d you do it?”

  The turtle blinked. “Don’t get any ideas now. It’s not a pleasant way to go.”

  The girls sat cross-legged and side by side on the floor. They lifted the turtle out of the box again, and Lulu filled a bottle cap with a bit of Evian. The turtle lapped up the water appreciatively.

  “If you really want to know what happened, I’ll tell you. I need to tell someone. Being a turtle isn’t exactly conducive to telling stories, but I guess I can somehow talk and you can somehow understand me, so what am I even complaining about?”

  So he began.

  Where can I start but to make it clear up front that I’ve always been a bit of an idiot. Not a full-on running-around-the-village-in-my-skivvies-shouting-incoherent-manifestos kind of idiot, but no real genius either. Or perhaps it’s not so much stupidity; perhaps my real problem is laziness. Maybe not laziness per se—it’s more that I’ve just never been particularly interested in scholarly pursuits. No, I guess all I really mean to say is that I always just felt like there was something wrong with me, and my true problem was that I could never pinpoint what. It could just be a matter of suffering, original sin, whatever you want to call it. Maybe that’s all it is.

  You might think it difficult to suffer in Lhasa, that holy city, that untouched city, that mythical city of incense-smoky dreams. Where is there room for pain, you might ask, in prayer flags and decorative ceiling tiles and thangka paintings and streets brimming with pilgrims and monks? But the pursuit of peace has always given rise to the most violent of struggles. And anyway, this is not a story about finding peace—you’re not going to find that here. This is a story only of struggle.

  How I came into the monastery is vital to understanding how all of this came about in the first place. So maybe that’s where I should start. Forget everything I said before. My story begins here.

  If you are very young when your father dies, as I was, the primary tragedy lies not so much in the actual death, but in your total lack of memories. I was only two years old when he fell ill and three when he passed. I can’t remember his face, his voice, his character; all of that is lost. All I could ever summon was an image of his gentle, calloused hands; his bright white palms creased with dark lines. Lines like roads, like dead ends. That’s it. That’s all I have.

  My mother, by contrast, had endless reserves of memories—of the tunes he sang, of the cigarettes he smoked down to nubs, of the contours of his body and the left-right sway of his gait, of the meals she cooked and he consumed—but she was too strong, too busy to wallow. We were vulnerable then—our relatives old and dying in villages, and us in the city, left without a male to care for us, to protect us, to provide for us. So she plowed through each day like an ox. In addition to her daily milk delivery gig, she sold sweaters by the roadside, worked as a waitress, collected discarded bottles and food wrappers and newspapers for recycling, and occasionally hawked Buddhist trinkets in front of a popular temple. This was how she came to befriend an elder monk, a jovial geezer who puttered around, gossiping and swapping jokes with the vendors, and who eventually agreed to take in both myself and a disabled neighbor’s son.

  I recall clearly the day our mothers delivered us to our fate: A long walk. A biting wind. Cottony clouds strewn across a placid sky. The dry heaves and sobs of my seven-year-old self, petrified at being left in the care of utter strangers. Dorjee, our neighbor’s son—a sullen boy with sunken eyes. His silence, his stoicism, his bravery, I remember thinking at the time. I would soon learn otherwise. That he, with his fragile body and ever more fragile spirit, was as susceptible to weakness as anyone. But then: snowy peaks looming behind us; then, at that moment of abandonment, at that moment of handover to the gods, he glowered at his mother and spoke with a jarring lack of emotion, with a strength I’d never before witnessed: “See you later.”

  When it comes to friendship, children shun common ground—they don’t need it, no, not even a speck of its dirt! Unlike adults, they don’t demand complementary personality types and similar backgrounds and shared income brackets and what have you—such requirements are grown into, a coming-of-age gift from a judgmental world. For the very young, the mere fact of mutual existence is enough. Surrendered by our mothers to the same set of strangers, Dorjee and I naturally became best friends of circumstance. He, being a few months older than me, called me younger brother and I, being a few months younger than him, called him older brother. Together, we coasted into our new routines. We recited vows, studied, sat close in the prayer hall, devoured meals, and slept on adjacent bottom bunks in a dormitory room we shared with four other boys. Two of these boys, our respective bunkmates, were unremarkable—all quiet voices and furrowed brows, probably both from tragically poor families. The other two, a set of rosy-cheeked rambunctious twins, were another matter entirely.

  There are myriad reasons families send their children into the monastery. Some can’t afford to feed them and know that donning robes guarantees a meal ticket. Some are truly pious and sacrifice their sons to a spiritual path. A few others view the monastery as a last resort, a reform school, the only place that might be able to handle the destructive demons they somehow spawned. These twins, whose parents donated a large sum of money to get them in, were such a sad case.

  Here’s an example of their misdeeds. Very early one morning, on the precipice of dawn, I awoke to Dorjee softly crying in the bed beside mine.

  Groggy, I mumbled, “What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t answer, but pointed downward. Blurry, bleary, I rubbed my eyes: a dark patch on his sheets.

  “It’s okay,” I murmured. I used to wet the bed quite often when I was younger. My older sister would always change the sheets, get me into fresh clothes, comfort me with stories and melodious songs, lull me right back to dreams. “It’s best not to drink water so close to bedtime,” I added, as a word of advice for the future.

  Silent, urgent tears streamed down Dorjee’s face, and I was racking my brain for more comforting words when the twins burst in, one clutching a kettle and both spewing laughter. “You really thought you pissed yourself, didn’t you?! It was just
a little warm water!”

  Okay, so these kinds of pranks are to be expected from naughty children and, taken individually, are usually harmless, right? In this life, we each take our turn as victim; it’s one of many roles we must play. But the twins’ pursuit of Dorjee was so much more than that; it was unfair, bordering on absurd. It was every day. It was relentless. They hid squishy, stinky dog shit under his pillow; tied him to a tree, gagged him, and left him overnight; spread rumors that he was going to leave the monastery and undergo plastic surgery to become a girl; slipped a low-grade poison into his food, giving him terrible diarrhea.

  Beyond the question of how they got away with all of this—a question I don’t have an answer to beyond the obvious “they were well connected”—you might wonder why these two boys poured water on Dorjee’s bed but not mine. Why they dropped caterpillars into his tea flask but left mine untouched. Why they tripped him in the corridors and spooked him in the toilets and accused him of all manner of odd offenses, including farting in meditation and giggling like a pretty princess.

  One answer is: I don’t know.

  Another answer is: He was an easy target, the type of boy who tried so desperately to hide his vulnerability that he succeeded only in bringing it to the forefront.

  A better answer is: He was weak.

  Ha, but who isn’t? Aren’t we all but one heartbeat away from being no more? What is life by an in-vain attempt at distancing ourselves from our weakness, from the very flaw of being human? Your expensive car, those false eyelashes, that makeup, those designer clothes—aren’t all of these things and all of the things like them just protective layers, fortresses we build between ourselves and our frailty? And aren’t all of these things we acquire and these walls we construct to shield ourselves little more than illusions?

  The truest answer is this: Dorjee had no illusions about his weakness. There it was, and there he was.

  One summer evening after dinner, Dorjee and I strolled the corridors, practicing some tongue twisters an older monk taught us. Dorjee couldn’t quite get them right, and each time he missed a syllable we both fell into hysterics, collapsing into a heap onto the cool smooth floor. One of the older monks peeked out from his quarters, the whites of his eyes glowing in the dark, and shushed us, told us to go the hell to bed. This struck us as funny too, and as we raced away, we mocked in whisper his overly stern voice, his words. Laughter still dribbling from my mouth, I turned the corner into our room, into an odd sight: one of the twins flat on the floor, the bunk bed’s post “crushing” his stomach. Twitching in overzealous agony, flailing his skinny arms every which way, he gurgled spit bubbles. His lips opened to emit a moaning sound, but all I heard, from behind me, was Dorjee’s sharp gasp.