Year of the Goose

by Carly J. Hallman

  “And we allowed Witch Three’s ghost to guide our feet. Now she was the ganshiren and we were the corpses. Ho, ho, ho, ho. We stepped in sync, not knowing where we were going and—”

  “Not needing to know. We walked and walked until at last we reached this mountain. Insurmountable, it seemed, but we had a feeling in our bones, in our guts, that told us that the village commune lay just on the other side, that this climb would be well worth it.”

  “And when we finally reached the top, when we saw that we were correct, we were so excited, and exhausted, that we decided to just curl up in balls and roll down!”

  “Wheeee boy, that was fun!”

  “And, I swear, I heard Witch Three’s voice again as we rolled down. She shrieked, ‘Farewell, my loves! Your new sister awaits you on the other side!’”

  “I heard it too!”

  “We both heard it, and then we began to slow down, and that’s when I saw you and—”

  Just when Lulu had finally mustered the courage to open her mouth and object, to tell these witches that they had this all wrong, that she didn’t come here to join a coven, she came here to make soap and grow vegetables and inhabit happiness, or whatever it was these ex-millionaires did, Witch Two said, “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll teach you everything we know. When we’re done with you, your spirit won’t long for anything your mind can’t provide.”

  At last they reached the structure: a quaint cottage surrounded by a low stone wall.

  “Hey!” Witch One cried, releasing Lulu’s arm and hurdling over that wall. “Anyone home?”

  No answer.

  Witch Two released Lulu’s other arm and pushed the gate. It creaked open. She nodded, and Lulu followed her through. Lulu’s shoes sunk into the plush black dirt—the ground inside the wall was markedly different from that outside.

  Witch Two crouched down and scooped up a handful of soil. She spread her fingers, watched the clumps fall through.

  “Ah, perfect for growing flowers!”

  “Oh, for, uh, potions or medicines?” Lulu asked, half interested. She was more concerned with Witch One, who first pounded on the house’s front door and then, receiving no answer, threw her shoulder into it, forcing it open and making her way inside. “Should she be—”

  “Some of them we use for potions. But mostly they’re just pretty.”

  Witch One wedged the window open, poked her head out, and cried, “And they smell good!”

  Witch Two plucked a beetle from the dirt, held it in her cupped palm. It stopped moving and stood on its back legs, staring up at her and making a hissing sound. “We like flowers,” she said.

  “Lesson number one,” cried Witch One, her head now sticking out a different window. “Purpose is objective! It’s something we give, not something we get!”

  Witch Two set the beetle down. It scurried off, six legs in sync. She teetered to a stand and wiped her dirty hand on her tunic. “Ay, but she already knows that!”

  We of the Committee adopted an etic approach in our field research, observing the culture of [This Settlement] from afar over a two-week period. Although it would have been ideal, both anthropologically and socially speaking, to live among the ex-millionaires, we, as career academics, clearly lack the social graces, flawless skin, and cocky swagger necessary to have gone unnoticed among [This Settlement’s] elite population. Furthermore, we of the Committee would like to note that although our dear government leaders may have deluded themselves otherwise, we are ill equipped, as well as inadequately compensated, to partake in dangerous covert operations. Moreover, we must point out that nine-tenths of the Committee expressed their heartfelt discomfort at participating in group sing-alongs, of which in [This Settlement] there are many.

  In any case, from the safe distance of the small foothills on the outer edge of [This Settlement], we observed and noted patterns, anomalies, and other occurrences with the aid of binoculars and night-vision goggles and the sporadic use of a drone camera generously donated by Happy Mart Inc., where low prices are an everyday phenomenon…

  The cottage, empty save for a few sturdy pieces of furniture, felt as though it’d been custom designed for them: its fertile yard, its strategic location near the wooded mountain where medicinal herbs and roots grew in abundance, its three identical cots in the bedroom, its cozy brick fireplace, its long dining table ideal for spreading out and sorting through forest findings, and its bookshelves aching to be filled with tomes on divination and herbalism and fortune-telling and the I Ching.

  Despite their initial explorers’ enthusiasm, the witches insisted, for decency’s sake, on spending the first week camping outside the walls. Lulu hovered on the scene’s periphery, an observer to their small twig-fueled fire and message scrawled to the universe on a scrap of paper: If within one week this house’s owner doesn’t appear to claim it, we shall become its rightful tenants.

  Witch One fed the paper to the flames. The hungry blaze devoured their words; the edges curled in, the fire crackled, the wish turned to ash. The witches laughed. Lulu smiled. They danced. Lulu swayed. They blew kisses to the moon. Lulu hesitated—this wasn’t why she’d come here, was it? but, then, why had she come?—before muttering her resignation, diving in, puckering up.

  Their legs pudding, they collapsed to sleep on the firm ground, stars shining down upon them like night-lights in a child’s bedroom, comforting in theory but in actuality only illuminating danger’s lurking possibilities: monsters and bandits and wolves and worse.

  Still, they slept untouched, night after night.

  Twigs and leaves and even a few bugs made makeshift homes in Lulu’s tangled hair. She plucked out the intruders, placed them on the ground, wished them well. Once, she swore a caterpillar gave her an appreciative nod, but this might’ve been a product of her wild imagination, a delusion born of peculiar circumstance.

  She followed after the witches as they gave themselves daily to the mountain’s woods. They were enthusiastic teachers, filling Lulu’s head and heart with innumerable new nuggets. What relief not to retire from the day neurotic and insomniac, tossing and turning on some overly soft bed, legs twisted up in high-thread-count sheets. What relief it was to rest her head, heavy with information and ideas, on that terra firma, to drift contentedly into well-earned dreams.

  That week passed in a flash. No time to think; only to learn.

  On the seventh day, Lulu politely opted out of her lessons and ventured down to the valley, to the commune village, for the very first time. She met all these people she’d once read about in magazines and watched on TV, and she reconnected with a few she’d known in lives past. She dropped in on Stefan, so delighted to see her that he wept, squeezing her tightly. Friends new and old fed her homemade stews, shoved cups of mint tea into her dirt-caked hands, greeted and gossiped and sang.

  She asked everyone, but no one knew anything about the former occupant of the cottage on the mountainside.

  She returned. She ceded. She accepted.

  And on that seventh night, the witches and Lulu, repacked bags in tow, burst through the gate, glided across the garden, threw open the doors. They lined their shoes in the entry, hung their clothes in the wardrobe, beat the dust from the wafer-thin mattresses, wiped down the table’s unfinished top, unloaded their books onto the shelves, and burned sage, tearing through the house like banshees, crooning and shouting, hooting and hollering, clearing out any lingering spirits, making this house theirs, all theirs, making this house their home.

  Although its population has swelled in recent months, [This Settlement] does not suffer from the usual negative consequences linked to rapid urban development. Here, there are no cranes, no noisy building sites, no iron bars clanging against the ground, no jackhammers humming into the night. There are indeed new buildings, new structures, but they are constructed slowly, steadily, almost stealthily, all by hand.

  In [This Settlement], there are no legless beggars on the corners, no men squatting on the pavement praying for work,
no tenements where old Tibetan women stir simmering gruel atop hot plates. There are no banks, no monetary transactions, no indications of poverty or of wealth. Citizens farm their own food, make products by hand, and engage in occasional trade and barter.

  [This Settlement’s] streets play host to not one half-smoked Zhongnanhai cigarette, not one steaming pile of dog shit, not one discarded Bashful Goose Watermelon Wiggler cellophane wrapper, not a single hacked-out phlegm oyster. Each morning and evening, a brigade of citizen volunteers take to the streets to sweep and tidy what little mess there might be—a leaf here, a wind-surfing wadded-up tissue there.

  In our observations, we of the Committee noted not a single instance of shoving, belligerence, line cutting, or the similarly stress-induced behaviors so often exhibited in our great nation’s populous centers. During daytime hours, [This Settlement] remains peaceful, near silent. Citizens write, paint, craft, garden, and exercise, among many other leisurely pursuits. When they sleep, they leave doors unlocked, in case anyone need come or go, and they leave windows open, inviting the cool breeze and the fragrance of cherry blossoms to waft into their dreams, completely unmoved by the prospect of burglars, rapists, or machete-wielding murderers…

  And now, in the present, in the after after the after, Lulu dusted her hands on her tunic and set to work clipping the pile of laundry she’d just washed in the stream to a clothesline. She performed the movements with a precise, practiced rhythm—bend, lift, shake out, hold up, pin, repeat—and in this cadence, she found comfort.

  This was life now, this was life eternally: sun-bleached moments, serenity.

  She clipped the final sheet to the line, sat on a stone to rest her sore back, and gazed at the country cottage, her home. Framed within the window, the old witch sisters hunched over the table, shoveling porridge into their papery lips. Lulu smiled—a real family at last—and turned her focus to the mountain. Endless angles, views, landscapes—if she were an artist, this tiny world would be her muse—

  She sprung to her feet: movement at the base of the mountain. She squinted into the sun, shaded her eyes with her hand.

  It wasn’t uncommon to spot someone crossing the border to renounce his or her old way of living. New commune members arrived every day, but no one—the witches aside—had climbed and then descended this mountain. Most went around it, or approached from the other side of the valley entirely, where the mountains rose mildly, more akin to hills.

  This, this was uncommon.

  She blinked. A flash: her night in the forest; her moonlit wanderings; those red eyes.

  But this was only a man.

  He spotted Lulu, jumped in place, waved both of his arms over his head, and veered to the right, re-aiming his path toward her. His run was unsteady, desperate, flailing. Lulu wrung her hands. She looked down, hoping that when she raised her gaze, she’d be alone, a victim of illusion, of mirage.

  But this was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? This was the one obstacle in the way of total peace. This was what she’d soundlessly asked for from those red eyes. This was it.

  When she raised her head, the man was nearer still, more real, close enough that, with focus, she could differentiate his irises from the whites of his eyes. She rotated on the balls of her feet, abandoning the hand-woven laundry basket, and scrambled inside the gate, into the house. She slammed the door shut behind her. The witches, their porridge bowls put away now, looked up, startled, from their piles of herbs.

  “There’s a strange man out there,” Lulu said, floating outside herself.

  Witch One, reclining in her chair, said, “Mmm, yes, I had a feeling we’d receive a visitor today.”

  Witch Two murmured in agreement, nodded knowingly, drew a sprig of lavender to her nostrils, took a slow whiff.

  Lulu kicked a stray clump of coal toward the fireplace. “You didn’t think to mention that to me?”

  Witch One shrugged. “We thought you knew.”

  They often assumed she knew more than she did, felt more than she did, overestimated her limited abilities. Lulu ran her fingers along the spines of the books on the shelf. How could she make them understand? “He was heading straight for me,” she said, “a madman.”

  The witches didn’t respond. They tinkered with their sprigs and leaves and stems and roots, unconcerned, unbothered by her sweaty, unbridled fear. She paced the room, touching everything, and breathed in, out—trounced by a cocktail of panic and sadness, that all-too-familiar feeling she hadn’t felt in a very, very long time.

  Not a moment later, there was a knock at the door.

  In his essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” the great American capitalist-roader Andrew Carnegie famously set forth the notion that the wealthy bear a philanthropic responsibility to the society in which they live. The ex-millionaires of [This Settlement], who have presumably donated their sizable assets to charities and worthy organizations (Ed. Note: We of the Committee were unable to unearth actual records of any such donations) and adopted a back-to-basics lifestyle, must believe then that they are fulfilling their utilitarian purpose, contributing to a greater good.

  However, we of the Committee disagree.

  More than their money, our nation needs their presence. What right do these tycoons have to disappear, to leave us out in the cold? It is one thing to take their riches and flee abroad, where great freedoms and luxuries and breathable air await, but to renounce money’s religion and remain within our country’s borders?

  Audacious. Outrageous. Disgraceful.

  Think of the children, growing and aspiring to waste; of the skyscrapers, longing to be built and filled; of the corporations, never to be established; of the roads, crying to be driven on.

  Think of the people, without hope.

  In a country such as Canada or the United States, [This Settlement] might be named a model city, might be held in esteem as a national, or even international, example of the “right way to live.” However, we of the Committee fully support the scrutiny, disapproval, and distrust with which our dear government has elected to view [This Settlement].

  We of the Committee hereby recommend that the government and its affiliated entities sponsor the insertion of an undercover agent to attempt to break the town of its non-capitalistic habits, which are indeed harmful to the stability of the Party and the State…

  2.

  THE BASHFUL GOOSE DIARIES, SELECTED EXCERPTS, PART 1

  DEAR DIARY,

  Today, I begin anew.

  On the heels of a lifetime of caviar and private chauffeurs and riches beyond imagining, I have reached a new road, settled upon a new purpose: to serve the people.

  Yes, the people, who have wept and wailed for heroes lost. The people, who have suffered immensely, but who have labored onward, building a new future, which—judging by our past—will only be destroyed by some foolish future generation.

  Yes, the people, who labor on.

  Some may call their persistence stupid, indolent, foolish, idiotic, naive. Some may say that to press forward in the face of inevitable failure is indeed humanity’s biggest downfall.

  But, dear comrades, I propose now a different view.

  I cry, shout of the unbreakable spirit, of bravery unlimited! In a former life I might even have raised a glass: To the people! Who persevere! But no longer do I partake in drink, a bourgeois proclivity of intellectual life. No longer do I allow my petty physical desires to seize control of my prodigious Communist spirit.

  Today I am a new goose, born again to serve!

  But I digress. Allow me now to begin where everything should: at the beginning.

  The night before we were to be bid farewell, the sky drooped, weighty and wet, bloated with clouds, buzzing with electricity, with imminent thunder and lightning and rain.

  They’d transported our bodies from Wuxi to Beijing on military aircraft for a State-sponsored corporate funeral, the first of its kind. Under these special circumstances, authorities permitted Tiananmen to remain open through the
night, and many tens of thousands of mourners poured onto the square from the underground entrances, swarming like ants, holding vigil on the concrete.

  Some held signs. Some chanted slogans. Some delivered heartfelt speeches. Some stuffed Bashful Goose snack cakes into their traps. Some chewed slowly, deliberately. Others chewed quickly, their canines gnashing, their molars grinding. A few didn’t chew at all, swallowing their sorrow whole. Still others forwent the snacks and wept silently, fat-free, calorie-free, into their own arms.

  And oh, there was sobbing and moaning, weeping and wailing. Men and women alike pounded at their chests, fell to their knees, collapsed into heaps of pity and remorse and crumbs. This wasn’t only about a couple of dead bodies in caskets, just flesh after all, but about the hope that would be laid to rest with them. What man or women didn’t aspire to be, in some way, like Papa Hui? How glorious to be rich. How wondrous to be successful. And how virtuous, in the face of these coups, to remain humble.

  And now that I’ve painted the picture outside, let us move to Zhongnanhai, the top secret compound where our leaders live and sleep and dictate from on high and masturbate to thoughts of all the women who aren’t their wives, and where two gold-plated, silk-lined coffins rested, side by side, one bigger, the other smaller. The two sacks of meat and bones the coffins contained were to be pickled and placed in a state-of-the-art mausoleum at the Bashful Goose headquarters. But first, the mausoleum had to be constructed, and who possessed the mind to oversee such a precarious project but the man who lay in the coffin it would someday house? A conundrum indeed.

  Papa Hui, how the hungry nation longed for one more declaration, for one more day, for one more bite!

  Ay, all over the country, people cried, “Bashful Goose, come out, come out!” And what they meant was this: Papa Hui, come back to us, you kooky tycoon! Come back and tell us where to go from here!

  They were not calling for me, you see, but for my master.