“That’s beautiful,” he said when I finally stopped. “What does it mean?”
“If I just translate it, it’s something like ‘Form doesn’t differ from emptiness, and emptiness doesn’t differ from form. They are both each other. And the same is true for feelings, perceptions, volition, and consciousness. They are all one.’”
He nodded, letting his eyelids fall. The way his brow furrowed with that deep crease in between told me that he really didn’t understand—that he was turning it over in his head now—but was too proud to say anything. Let’s just say it was a familiar experience for me, something to which I could relate.
“Let’s put it this way,” I said. I removed my hands from my robe, used them as tools. “Okay, so you said that in the past you really liked girls?”
Boss smiled, but he did not open his eyes.
“And girls are forms. They are beings. You can see them. But their forms exist in emptiness.”
The corners of his lips rose into a sheepish grin. “Yeah, I’ve met a lot of girls who live there.”
“Yes,” I said, laughing. “Okay, so say you have a girlfriend. And the girlfriend occupies that empty space in your heart, fills it up. But then the girlfriend leaves you, and the emptiness returns. Before the girlfriend left, when you were together, was there still emptiness in your heart? Yes, of course, that empty space still existed, but she just filled it for a time. But how about that emptiness now? Now that she’s gone, is there form there now? Yes, but not the form of a girl. The form of emptiness.”
Boss nodded, considering. I noticed movement from the other side of the room. Little Cancer had come in too. I didn’t know when, but there he was perched on the edge of an empty bed, listening intently. I gave him a grin, and then on and on I talked and talked, not recognizing these wise words that flowed from my stupid mouth.
The days and nights that followed passed in a blur of inventory and renovation and cleaning and booking and advertising, until at last, our big day was upon us. The workers had only just finished building the stage, and I frantically swept away the sawdust and other bits they’d left behind. Boss sprinted up and down the stairs, checking messages on his computer, making calls, testing the sound equipment. Little Cancer scurried about behind the bar. The sun dropped behind the mountains and the bar went from dim to dimmer. Boss flicked on the lights and loaded music on the speakers—Nirvana, of course. And we, the three of us, the core of us, waited silently to this sound track of mumbling, of heartache, of bliss.
It started with one lonesome patron, followed by another, and then a few others, and then: mayhem. Little Cancer and I stood sheltered behind the bar as the crowd swelled to enormity. Girls in false eyelashes and high heels; girls with shaggy haircuts and Converse sneakers; boys in dingy T-shirts; boys with perfectly coiffed pop-star hair. There were so many people, it was hard to remember the details of any of them, to remember which parts went to which. So that’s how I saw them: in pieces.
Boss cranked the music up. The band puttered on the stage, making final adjustments and tweaks. Little Cancer and I filled order after order, accepting cash, making change.
And in this chaos of limbs and flesh and smoke, there was only one person I saw in entirety, one person who was not just pieces: a girl with honey-brown eyes and dyed red hair.
“Gin and tonic!” she shouted, pushing her way through the hordes swarming the bar. She waved the twenty-kuai note she held in her hand. I snatched it and prepared her drink, an easy one, handing it to her only seconds later.
She took a sip of the clear liquid and made eye contact with me. The scene froze as I stared back at her. I don’t know how long this silent, motionless moment lasted, but I was jostled back when Little Cancer bumped into me while reaching for a box of orange juice.
The girl continued to stand firm, not backing away despite the many forceful bodies, the groping and grabbing hands. She performed an odd motion, a flick of the wrist. I looked to Little Cancer for help interpreting. He scowled in concentration, busy pouring drinks. The girl dug something out of her pocket—a cell phone. She waved it in the air. I could only barely make out her words. “I want to give you my phone number!”
My heart fluttered.
But I didn’t have a phone. I nudged Little Cancer. “Let me borrow your phone,” I whisper-shouted to him. He reached in his pocket and handed it over, his eyes still fixed on his work. I beckoned for the girl to slip under the bar to safety. She did and she programmed her number in, along with the name “Red Hair.”
Silently, she slid back under the bar and rejoined the crowd. I went to give the phone back to Little Cancer, but he was at the other end of the bar, busy with his mad science. I slipped his phone into my pocket for safekeeping and returned to serving the masses.
I poured and I mixed and I made change, and I thought the crowd would never relent, but when the band began to play, the human sea receded from the bar and swelled in front of the stage. Jumping, screaming, dancing, the room was in action, and the band played this song that went, Do you believe that the world lasts forever / or do you believe that the world will soon end?
It was loud, the loudest music I’d ever heard, chords and words blasting from the speakers, drums pounding, bass pulsing, and then, right in the middle of the song, everything went silent. Everything froze.
I located Boss’s face in the crowd. His smile had fallen, his mouth a dash. And he was taller. I scanned the room. Everyone was. I turned to Little Cancer, who for the first time all night looked directly back at me. He was taller! I cast my gaze downward. His shoes weren’t touching the ground—they were floating. I looked out again at the crowd. Not a single foot on the floor.
I blinked, thinking surely this must be a hallucination, surely this can’t be real. I looked down at my own shoes, both firmly planted, grounded. I looked out again—everyone else, their feet, their shoes, their bodies, were not.
There was a squeaking noise, high-pitched, the sound system squealing. I winced, my face screwing up, my eardrums on the verge of explosion, but everyone else maintained peaceful, empty expressions.
And then they all disappeared.
Lulu’s eyes widened. “What do you mean they disappeared?”
“Exactly that. One moment they were there, the next, poof, gone.”
I ducked under the counter and sprinted across the empty bar to the stage. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what had just happened. Shock. Pure shock. There was this whole world, all of these people in it, and suddenly all of it was gone.
I darted up the stairs, three at a time, to where we’d slept. No one. I ran back downstairs and outside.
A vibration in my pocket. I slipped out Little Cancer’s phone. The name “Mama Cancer” flashed up on the screen. I didn’t answer. What would I have said? Sorry about your tumor and everyone you ever knew leaving you, and, oh, hey, by the way, your son just disappeared before my eyes? I rejected the call and scrolled through the directory until I found Boss’s number.
A robotic female voice repeating over and over, “I’m sorry, but the number you’ve dialed is no longer in service.”
I tried again and again only to get the same automated response.
Red Hair. Red Hair. Red Hair. I scrolled and found her number too. But there was no answer. Her phone, it just rang and rang.
These familiar streets were dark. There were passersby, but no one I recognized. Strangers stared back at me with peculiar expressions, and it occurred to me then how pale and clammy I must have looked, how mystified, how insane. I trudged on, searching in vain for a familiar face. When I realized the pointlessness of my search and returned to the bar front a few short minutes later, would you believe that now the sign was gone too?
I stepped inside. The sound system was gone. The lights were gone. The bottles of alcohol were gone. Looters? I wondered. But how had they come and gone so quickly, and how had they done such a neat job of it? I reached into my pocket and clutched Little Cancer’s cell ph
one. It was real, what had happened. I knew it was real, had been, and I had these pieces of evidence to prove it.
I lumbered up the stairs and lay down on the bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I chanted the heart sutra, lost in its form, in its emptiness, until the sun came up, and then I noticed that all the beds save for the one I lay in were gone. At a loss for what to do next and not wanting to disappear too, I shot off in a sprint toward the monastery.
As I raced through those familiar streets housing all these unfamiliar faces, a great shift took place within me and I knew I desperately needed something to anchor me to my past. Remember Dorjee? Dorjee, my childhood friend, my brother. Through the gates I ran and I found him in the courtyard, sitting there, doing nothing, looking at nothing, same as always, as though nothing had changed.
“Dorjee,” I panted, my hands on my knees, sweat dripping down my forehead and neck. “I need to talk to you for a second.”
He didn’t look away from the ghost or whatever it was he was staring at, but I started in anyway, rehashing the whole story: the wandering, the bar, the dullness inside of me, the rock band, the cell phone, the people levitating and disappearing.
Dorjee, my big brother, my trusted childhood companion, didn’t scoff or laugh or even stoop to join me in my panicked state. He looked up at me with those piercing eyes, sunken deep within his head, and he told me, as matter-of-fact as discussing the weather, about what had happened to our city in the time I was away from the monastery.
There had been an incident, a drunken incident outside of a bar. Just some alcohol-fueled fight between two groups of men—one group Han, one group Tibetan. Rumor had it one of the Tibetans had said something blasphemous about Papa Hui’s ghost. Others said it wasn’t about Papa Hui at all, something about someone’s mother or girlfriend or the size of someone’s penis. It was hard to say what had truly happened and who was to blame, but when a Chinese police officer got involved, things careened in an ugly direction. Three young Tibetans were beaten to death and the others arrested. Tibetans young and old, but mostly young, awoke the next morning to this news with hangovers and hate-filled hearts. They took to the streets in protest. They burned down Chinese businesses, smashed car windows, used knives and fists. There had been riots, Dorjee said, an eerie waver to his voice. Hundreds, both Chinese and Tibetans, had been killed.
He went on and on, and I thought he must have been haunted by what he’d seen, by the senseless violence, and I thought, Dorjee, my reasonable friend, he is one who has suffered and one who has survived… and then I realized this wasn’t something he was talking about as a spectator, that this wasn’t something he was going to let go.
In case you’re wondering, yes, I tried to talk Dorjee out of it. I understood that his worldview was tainted by his own demons, by his own circumstance, by his own weakness. However, I knew too that I hadn’t suffered the same terrible fate that he had. That I had sought out my own causes of suffering and therefore had control over the consequences. That by contrast, suffering came to him uninvited, came in the form of blood and carnage and violation.
Where had I been in the days of those riots? I had been in that bar, but there wasn’t really a bar, was there? Why, I wondered, had the world spared me yet again?
He was going to self-immolate. He told me all the details in a whisper. He spoke with pride. I’d never heard him sound proud before.
I sank to sit beside him. I said, “No, no, don’t do it,” but my words of protest were weakened by the strong connection I felt to him. By my guilt. By the times I’d failed to intervene. I couldn’t help but think again about how I should have known there was something seriously wrong when he kept disappearing at night. That I should have known. That I should have opened that storage room door. That I should have said something. That I should have been a better friend to him after. That I shouldn’t have left the monastery. That I should have at least taken him with me. That I should have done my part to ease his suffering. My brother.
He smiled. “It is my fate,” he said. And as those words settled into my soul, he told me about something he’d seen on the street during those riots, about a Tibetan girl with dyed red hair who bravely dragged the bloodied body of a young Chinese man out of the sight of a mob that had momentarily lost interest in torturing him. The mob, he said, regained its interest quickly and soon began beating the both of them. He spoke of another incident of that same day: of a small body that reminded him of his own, lying on a car, bleeding out, repeatedly whispering the word “Mama.” He spoke of Converse shoes red with blood, of dingy T-shirts, of shaggy haircuts, of exposed muscle, of protruding bones, of bruised and broken skin.
A tear in his eye, and many more in mine.
“Don’t worry,” he said, patting my arm, making physical contact with me for the first time since our childhood. “We will return someday as brothers.” And I knew all was forgiven and, too, that there was no turning back.
There are these moments that pluck us from our lives, remove us from everything, set us back down in a different way. Revelations. Seismic shifts that change our way of thinking, that connect us simultaneously to the emptiness and to the form.
Sometimes these events appear magical; sometimes they’re perfectly mundane. But they never just happen; they never just come uninvited to us. We must take baby steps in their direction—we must find and walk their twisting paths. Eventually, sensing our effort, revelation, like a good and patient mother, will scoop us up. In her arms, we are warm, we are important, we are loved, we are everything and we are nothing too.
But we cannot live forever in the safety of these arms.
Revelation, that wise mother, sets us down, blows a kiss, send us on our way to once again wander those twisted trails. It costs us time and pain to sort out the details, the practicalities, that will help us make our way back into those arms. But this vigorous journey will someday be forgotten. We will remember only the light, the love. If nothing else, I can assure you of this.
I’ve recounted to you what I remember in my head, but stamped in my soul is the memory of that moment, that serene moment, in which I was held tightly; that moment in which everything floated, in which everything burned, in which everything but myself, my true and connected self, disappeared.
Into the emptiness, into the form, into the everything…
The turtle opened his mouth, but this time there was no voice.
“Hello?” Lulu’s voice trembled with desperation. “Hello?”
The turtle didn’t answer. It retracted back into its shell.
Zhang Li shot up to a stand, speaking in a shaky voice. “He needs us to find that phone. He left it at the monastery. He must have. We have to call that Red Hair girl, figure out where she went.”
“He already tried calling her, and she didn’t answer, so what’s the point?”
“No, it rang. Her phone actually rang, remember? If the phone was ringing, that means it wasn’t shut off or anything. It’s still on. She has it. It means that there’s still a chance she might pick up.”
“What if the people who beat her stole it? That seems pretty likely.”
Zhang Li shook her head. Her voice was higher, lilting. “Thieves don’t leave phones turned on. They turn them off immediately and then change the SIM card. Trust me, I’ve had two phones stolen before. And besides, in the turtle’s version of events, she wasn’t beaten. She just disappeared. That means she has to be somewhere then, doesn’t she? They all have to be.”
Lulu narrowed her eyes. She smoothed back her hair. She glanced at her car keys, dangling from the entryway hook. “What are you suggesting we do?” she asked, but she already knew the answer. She stood up, and the two girls, entering the warm embrace of some invisible arms, looked at each other for a very long time.
While Zhang Li was on the phone to her father, convincing him of the trip’s educational merits, Lulu pulled up to the intersection that started it all. The old woman hadn’t gone anywhere, was tapping on windows li
ke it was her life’s calling with a new turtle in hand. Lulu rolled down the window, shouted, “Ay, Aunty!”
The woman’s head whipped around. Lulu gave her a nod, and the woman hobbled over. Lulu slipped the turtle through.
“Thank you, Aunty,” she said. “But I don’t need him anymore.”
The light turned green. Lulu rolled the window up and accelerated. In the rearview mirror, she saw first her own face, her lips curled ever so slightly upward, and, beyond her reflection, the old woman, grinning, holding a turtle in each hand, her fortune doubled.
Zhang Li hung up the phone. She bit her lip. She spoke to the windshield. “I told him if he let me do this, I’d go to America.” She drew her hand to her face and bit at a hangnail. “We’re good to go.”
And they were off.
They drove for a week, through Inner Mongolia and Ningxia and Gansu and Qinghai, alongside freight trucks and bread-loaf vans and luxury cars.
And at last. The city was as the turtle had described, and they prayed and kowtowed in front of many shrines, ate in many restaurants, marveled at many sights. They slept night after night in a Chinese-owned hotel with scratchy sheets. They struggled, at times, to catch their breath.
They looked but didn’t see. They searched and found nothing.
Zhang Li’s father rang once, and then rang more and more, speaking of limited time—he’d booked her ticket. She had two weeks.
More days passed and still, they found no magical bar, no monks who claimed to know Dorjee or Kunchok, no sign of Boss or Little Cancer.
They grew tired. They grew weary. They grew bored.
Year of the Goose Page 21