Year of the Goose

by Carly J. Hallman

  This was a cruel joke, crueler than ever before. Compassion, empathy—these were vague concepts in my young mind, but here they grew even vaguer. Under my Buddhist robes, I was human, and when I stood there next to Dorjee, watching his expression waver between blankness and total breakdown, an anger sparked and burned inside of me. Forgive me, but I was nine years old and I couldn’t help but feel, standing there unsure of how to proceed, that Dorjee, in all of his weakness, in all of his unwillingness to stand up and fight, had brought this burden upon himself. It was only a joke, and I could see that. This twin was not dying, was not hurt, was not being crushed. The other twin was probably lurking around a corner somewhere, awaiting Dorjee’s reaction.

  It was only a joke. Everything they did to him, everything was only a joke.

  I wanted to shove Dorjee, shove him hard, tell him this, spit it in his face, shake him and demand that he remain stoic, that he not give them the show they wanted. But I remained frozen, and the “crushed” twin shouted out, “Look at me, I’m Dorjee’s father,” and Dorjee screamed, clutching his gut, and crumpled to the floor in a pile of snot and tears and hideous, twisted, unforgivable weakness.

  I never heard Dorjee’s family’s story from his own lips; I heard it only in rumor, in gossip, in hushed and knowing tones. Though I may not have been a genius, I was curious, nosy even. Not knowing every detail of a story was a form of torture, and perhaps because of my closeness to its subject, this one in particular haunted me in its ambiguity. So instead of driving myself mad with speculation, I filled in the blanks myself, so that I could easily watch the entire saga play out while I sat quiet in meditation.

  Dorjee’s father worked as a long-distance bus driver and his mother rode along, collecting tickets, attending to passengers’ concerns, and manning the bus’s onboard TV. The TV was her favorite part. She loaded karaoke video after karaoke video—she was a romantic at heart and impartial to syrupy ballads. Theirs was a nice bus, with rows of comfortable seats, so much so that passengers often slept for the duration of the haul and awoke refreshed, no achy bones or sore throats or stiff necks.

  The paths they traversed were bumpy, but Dorjee’s father was a skilled driver. Money was tight, but their little family scraped by. From the time he was a baby, Little Dorjee rode back and forth across a treacherous landscape—mountains that shot up like spikes from the earth, steep cliff drops, unpaved and under-construction roads—forming a strong stomach and an even stronger bond with his parents.

  One snowy January afternoon, with the sun burning in the sky and the white ground frozen below, while Teresa Teng wailed on about love as sweet as honey, their beautiful white metal bus careened off the side of one of those steep cliffs, rolled, flew, flipped, and came shuddering to a stop.

  The music cut out, the simple melody replaced by screaming, punctuated here and there by eerie silence—many sleeping passengers had simply not woken up, had eternally prolonged their slumber.

  My soul floated behind Dorjee’s eyes as they saw his father’s body crushed beyond recognition, flattened and bleeding and broken. My being inhabited his ears, assaulted by his mother’s wails as she tried to no avail to shake her husband’s corpse back to consciousness. There is nothing else to describe here. Beyond imagination, I truly saw, heard, experienced a scene so disturbing it collapsed under the weight of words.

  I sat in the meditation room with my legs crossed, flattened by the burden of my older brother’s karma, desperately clawing my way out from my own mind, my own creation—Dorjee’s reality. Let the thoughts come, and let them go too…

  Zhang Li cracked open her Coke Zero and said, “Yeah, there are always people like that. Bad-luck people. Like, there was this girl at my school when I was younger who had one nostril that was much bigger than the other. Really big. You could easily fit a couple of pencils up there, no joke. Everyone teased her for it, but they also whispered that she’d gotten that way because when she was little she’d hide out in the closet while her parents fought and shove things in her nose for comfort. And then that one time she got a marble stuck up there, permanently stretching it out. I don’t know. One time I called her some name, like booger-picker, something stupid that any primary school student would say. I feel a little bit bad when I think about it now, but at the time, even knowing the backstory, I truly felt nothing.” She took a slow sip. “People suck.”

  Lulu, sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaned forward and reached for her own soda can. “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t even know. Her grades were really bad, no wonder, so of course we wound up at different middle schools. I do think about her sometimes. I mean, if I met her now, I’d make an effort to be nice to her, you know? And sometimes I imagine running into her on the street or at a restaurant, and I imagine myself doing something nice, buying her a milk tea or something. It makes me feel better to think I’d do better. But I know it’s just ‘me now’ trying to forgive ‘me then.’ My daydreams don’t actually, like, help her or change the past or how the past affects her life now or anything, do they?”

  The turtle sighed. “Bad luck is an avalanche.”

  Lulu nodded, gazing out at the buildings and streets and cars and tiny ant people, sipping her drink, the bubbles stabbing her tongue. Remembering her manners, she lifted the turtle to give him a view too. Three sets of eyes sunk into the city scene, a bleak horizon, an impressionist painting behind a gray screen of smog.

  The daily life of a monk is one of routines, regimens, tasks. No one was exempt from caring for the grounds, and unlike many of the other boys who grumbled and groaned over words like “clean” and “mop,” I eagerly accepted any and all unsavory chores—sweeping, cleaning, scrubbing, washing, anything. I’d convinced myself that if I performed these useful domestic tasks with enough finesse, my mother might be drawn back, might see me as more than a baby bird with a hungry stomach and a gaping mouth, might bring me home.

  It was fanciful thinking, I know, but it was necessary. As I slaved over stoves and scrubbed between tiles, I dreamed up a million alternate realities, endless futures. In one, my sister raced up the monastery steps, her cheeks ruddy, her chest heaving, and fell to the landing, shouting, “Mom’s rich! She’s rich!” In another, the monastery caught fire and I emerged from the blaze, the wild flames, the collapse, and stumbled back to our family’s rented room, no richer, no poorer, but poised, at least, to start anew. My favorite fantasy, though, was this: my mother, overcome with guilt, retrieved me one afternoon, brought me home. I knew I couldn’t survive this world as a layabout, so I helped her with her various jobs, including milk delivery. Every day, we delivered to the many modest homes in our community, and then one day there was a new addition to the delivery list—an address a bit far from the others, but no matter, a new customer was a new customer, money was money. We walked, our steps uncertain, up a winding path to a grand house, grander than any house we’d ever visited, and my mother lifted her shaky fist and knocked at the door.

  We waited. Our lungs ballooned. We worried the wind might pick us up, carry us away. We waited.

  The light padding of footsteps.

  “Hello!” An old woman with a kind face peeked at us through the crack, swung the door open fully, and took the milk. She studied us then, a mother and a son, bonded by an almost palpable love. “Say, you look thirsty. Care to come in for a cup of tea?”

  My mother and I obliged, sat in overstuffed chairs with this old woman in her castle of a home, surrounded by beautiful paintings and museum-worthy artifacts. “I saved my treasures back in the fifties from the invading, looting Chinese by burying them.”

  Beauty buried in the earth, abandoned but always remembered, just like me.

  “I dug them up only a few years ago,” she added in a whisper, “when I finally knew it was safe.”

  As we gobbled down sweets and drank yak butter tea, she regaled us with the story of the PLA soldier she fell in love with and their ill-fated love affair, the misunderst
andings, the hole that remained charred in her heart; with songs and with poems and with old fairy tales, and we became so lost in their wonder that we didn’t have cause to daydream.

  At last, quiet reigned and the old woman swept the walls, the floors, with rueful eyes and said, “Please don’t mind the mess, it’s very messy and dusty, ay, and I’m very old and just can’t get around like I used to.”

  And my mother cleared her throat, gathered her courage, said, “You know, my son here is a very fine cleaner. He once cleaned an entire monastery.”

  And I hemmed and hawed, slipping into humility with ease, but the old woman saw through it, begged me to be her housekeeper on a very fine monthly salary. I accepted—oh, of course I accepted!—and my mother would quit working and my sister, now from a well-situated family thanks to me, would be able to marry any man in town, even the most handsome, maybe the man who ran the barber shop, maybe even someone from the wider world, maybe even a pop star.

  One afternoon I was sweeping the dining hall, reveling in that very magical daydream, turning it over and over in my head, when Dorjee trudged in and plopped down hard on the floor.

  “Move,” I cackled, poking him with the broom’s straws. “Don’t make this old witch chase you out of here, you little rat!”

  I hadn’t expected him to laugh at this—his sense of humor had weakened over the previous months, worn down by the teasing, no doubt—but I also hadn’t expected him to remain completely silent. He sat cross-legged, his elbows digging into his thighs and his chin cradled in his hands, staring down at the floor.

  And it wasn’t just lacking a sense of humor. He’d been acting more strangely all around, more forlorn, more prone to these long stretches of staring at nothing. He slept less and less, slipping from our room in the cover of night to pace the halls or study or do heaven knows what.

  I swept and swept, and he sat there, and the more I thought about, the more I sensed his uneasiness wasn’t rooted entirely in the twins. It had been two years already, and actually, if anything, the bullying was beginning to wane.

  No, this was something bigger, more profound.

  “Move,” I said again, this time whacking him in the back with the straws. A tiny statue on the floor, motionless.

  I didn’t know what to do with my thoughts, what to do with Dorjee, so I just swept around him, continued sweeping until I was finished. I stood for a moment, the broom in my hands and across my body like a shield, waiting for him to say something, to explain what he was doing, to utter anything, but he only sat there, so of course I walked away.

  I met Dorjee’s silence, his descent into solitude, with a mature level of acceptance. Perhaps he would come back around later, I reasoned, and I was relieved to be free of the daily burden of worrying about him too. Time passed, relieving me also of the burden of living so intensely in my daydreams. Freedom came with acceptance.

  Once I embraced the reality of my situation, life inexplicably improved. I received word that a chance encounter with a cook led my sister to love. She soon married this young man, and together they opened a successful restaurant in Chengdu. She mailed me a photograph of herself in front of the restaurant, a cozy little place with a red sign nestled in a row of shops. My heart could burst; I hardly recognized this woman with a face as round and fat and glowing as the moon. Soon, just as in my daydreams, my mother no longer needed to work—my sister sent plenty of money home. With more time to spare, my mother, healthier and happier, paid regular visits to the monastery, all thanks to my sister, who, when I was twenty, would get pregnant and send for my mother to join her and her growing belly, leaving me all alone in Lhasa.

  But let me slow down a bit and back up. As I said, although we still considered each other brothers, Dorjee had largely faded into the background of my life. My teenage years were full of laughter, studying, cleaning, writing, reading, music. I developed a rebellious streak, albeit as a follower, not a leader. I joined a few others, including those naughty twins who’d long ago lost interest in Dorjee, in sneaking out to visit a nearby Internet café. The twins’ father gave them money on the sly, and they generously dipped into their funds to pay the café’s owner for all of our Internet fees. A few boys had cell phones, but they weren’t very freehanded with them, so my youth existed largely in technological darkness. Computers illuminated my world. I scrolled through pictures, read news and short stories and discussions and arguments, played games, listened to music. One of the twins finagled a pair of headphones, which I borrowed to listen to pop, rock, and rap songs sung in Tibetan and in Chinese and in English and French too—I loved the way these foreign words sounded, beyond my comprehension and therefore easier to lose myself in.

  Although all of these major shifts were under way, much of that time seems blurry, lost to me now. Thus is the effect of routine.

  But I remember two moments with clarity.

  The first was when I was about fifteen. I’d just sneaked back into the monastery late, perhaps around midnight. My robes had gotten stuck on a fence I’d had to climb over and were torn. I crept down the black corridor toward Jinpa’s room. Torn robes became a common occurrence for those of us who sneaked out, and Jinpa, a natural entrepreneur if I ever met one, saw a hole in the marketplace and opened a robe repair side business. In exchange for his services and secrecy, he accepted cash and other valuable goods, including food. Lucky for me, I had a Watermelon Wiggler one of the twins had bought for me at the café tucked into my robes. I foolishly reached in and fingered the wrapper. Crinkle, crinkle, echoing in the halls. I winced and paused in my tracks, hoping no one had heard me. A low moan filled that pause. I squinted: darkness. I crept forward. Another moan. A door about a meter ahead of me to my right—a storage room for extra blankets and the like. I pressed my ear up against the closed door. I heard again an odd moan and the very quiet, very human rhythm of breath. I curled my fingers around the doorknob, listened. I don’t know what stopped me from turning it—as I said, I have always been very curious—but I removed my hand, retreated, and hurried to Jinpa’s room. He awoke when I entered—he always slept with one eye open these days—happily accepted his Bashful Goose snack, and skillfully mended my robe, not waking a single one of his snoring roommates.

  The second important moment, I was sitting under a tree, the sun hanging high in the noon sky, shadows short and stout. I was humming a song I’d listened to the night before and reading a literary journal I’d borrowed from one of the twin’s cohorts when a great commotion rose up from the monastery’s entry. I looked up just in time to see Jungney, a monk a bit older than us, maybe in his midtwenties, storming toward the gates carrying a small bag. Although we often sneaked out for our little visits to local Internet bars or restaurants, it was unheard of for any such visit to require a bag—it was too obvious, it would get you into trouble. And Jungney, he wasn’t one of us. He didn’t sneak out. It was midday. He wasn’t sneaking out. Something was amiss.

  My heart raced, absorbing the energy of late spring, of the sunshine, of the prospect of some drama, some excitement.

  Commotion drew more commotion as others, startled, ran out to see what the matter was. A voice shouted out to him, “Ay, where’re you going?”

  Jungney didn’t respond, just marched, his head high, like a stubborn soldier on his way to some doomed battle, not turning around, not giving us an answer. And then he was gone.

  Slowly, the intrigued monks reassumed their positions, and our gated world was once again one of peace.

  The others practiced martial arts, told jokes, napped, and I returned to my reading, an enthralling short story about a young man who was all set to travel to Beijing, work as a migrant, and earn money to pay for a surgery for his ailing father. But on the train to the capital, the young man’s bag, containing his phone and money and the address of the person he was to stay with, was stolen. He disembarked in the unfamiliar capital, his existence reduced to that of a beggar. He tried for jobs, but the bosses laughed in his unkempt
face. He subsisted off scraps. He pleaded with pedestrians for anything they could spare. His hair matted and dirt made its home in the creases of his skin. He lost his dignity, his mind. The story ended with him drifting to sleep beneath an overpass, still hundreds of yuan short of even a ticket home, the overhead bridge rattling under the weight of hundreds of crossing cars.

  I put the story down and I sat there for a moment, immersed in that ending.

  And then, from nowhere, from the ether from which all important realizations rise, it hit me in pieces: this guy, Jungney, was the one Dorjee told me he was going to study with on those nights he sneaked out. Jungney and Dorjee never interacted in daylight; they were not friends, no one would even know they were acquaintances. Dorjee wasn’t up all night studying—he was barely a better student than I was. Jungney was in charge of maintenance and had in his possession keys for all the rooms in the monastery, including that storage closet.

  And then it hit me all at once.

  “No way.” Lulu squirmed, toying with her hair. “Please tell me that kind of thing doesn’t happen there.”

  The turtle stretched his arms. “It happens everywhere, doesn’t it? No environment is immune to sick people.”