Year of the Goose

by Carly J. Hallman

  He tried not to concern himself with this, tried not to waste precious time wondering what would become of that old grinning face, those bowed legs, those rough, weathered hands.

  The world was full of ways. That old coot would find one.

  Wang shut the door behind him. A sliver of pale sunlight filtered in through the shed’s one tiny frosted glass skylight. “Kelly?” he whispered into the dingy room. “I’m leaving soon, forever, so I need to speak with you about something urgent.”

  “Oh, really?” a man’s voice replied. “Is that what you need?”

  Wang’s head turned this way and that.

  Singsong: “Yoo-hoo, I’m over here!”

  His gaze scaled the walls, traveled the floors, and finally, Wang located the voice’s owner. A man, perched on a haystack, one leg crossed over the other, spine erect, poised but casual, as though waiting for his maid to bring afternoon tea.

  “Are you Wang Xilai?”

  Wang felt his head move vertically on his neck. Nod, nod, and then an involuntary burp of questions: “Who are you? What the hell are you doing here? How did you get in?”

  The man smiled, revealing a straight line of bleached teeth. “Well, what kind of master spy would I be if I couldn’t pick a simple lock?”

  Wang gaped, whimpered, composed himself. “Where’s Kelly?”

  The man waved his hand. “Ah, don’t worry about that.”

  He spun around, eyes searching for his hostage until a realization hit. “Oh. Did the aliens send you?”

  The man squinted. “Aliens?”

  Want squinted back.

  “No,” the man said, uncrossing his legs.

  Wang squinted harder, his eyelashes obscuring his vision.

  Outside, there was a loud thud—the sound of something very heavy crashing to the ground.

  “Yes,” the man shrugged. “Sure, whatever you’d like to believe.”

  Wang walked over and sat beside the man on the haystack. He inched closer. He placed his hand on the man’s milky-white forearm. The man didn’t pull away, but smiled a pitiful smile, the kind of slight upward lip movement typically reserved for the very old and the very young and the very mentally deranged. Wang retracted his hand.

  “Now, Mr. Wang, I can’t for a second fathom that a man such as yourself—a rich man, a successful man, a man of power and means—might truly be happy in such a”—he traced his finger along the grime on the wall, frowned at his blackened fingertip—“forgive my language, but such a shit-hole.” He stood, his speech gaining momentum. “Now, I don’t know how you ended up here, though I imagine some rather dire and inescapable circumstances must have caused you to, shall we say, hit rock bottom. But what I do know is this—”

  Outside, there was a loud commotion. There was crashing, banging, screaming.

  “Mr. Wang, when I found Ms. Hui in this shed only a half hour ago, she was delirious, muttering about UFOs and humming to herself a song from the Broadway hit Annie.”

  “Tomorrow, tomorrow, you’re only a day away?” Wang sang.

  The man respectfully lowered his gaze. And that damn smile again. “Mmm, yes. And a sack of bones, she was. I imagine it was difficult for you to sneak into this shed the massive quantities of processed foods that once composed her diet without the neighbors growing suspicious. Honestly, she’s never looked so good.”

  Wang suppressed a snort.

  “Now I know, Mr. Wang, that you and that boyfriend of yours must have kidnapped her, dragged her here, drugged her up with heaven knows what—”

  There was another loud sound outside, something like fireworks, and then there were shadows flitting on the wall, shadows without a source.

  “We used a gu. I used a gu,” he said, and he wasn’t sure why he said it. “Mind control.”

  “Oh, perfect.” The man rubbed his palms together. They didn’t even make a sound, that’s how soft, how moisturized they were. “All the better to pin it on the witches then.”

  Wang felt dizzy. “What?”

  “Mr. Wang, your boyfriend, Stefan Ping, kidnapped Kelly Hui and conspired with those witches on the outskirts of town to keep her drugged and mind-controlled, so that they could throw the Bashful Goose company’s leadership into chaos and establish this awful commune in hopes of subverting the Chinese Communist Party. Did you know that those witches are Falun Gong practitioners? That they’ve long sought to overthrow Party rule? And did you know that the young woman they shack up with, Lulu Qi, is an avid supporter of the Dalai Lama and of the Tibetan independence movement? That she traveled to Tibet just last year to involve herself in an uprising?”

  Shadows appearing, swaying, disappearing.

  “I don’t think that’s—”

  “Your boyfriend, Stefan, in addition to drugging Kelly, also administered gus to you, betraying your trust and forcing you to lead this commune against your will. He coerced you into authoring a treatise. ‘We believe…’ Yeah, sure, we believe it’s all bullshit.”

  Wang tried again to interject: “But I wrote—”

  “Luckily,” the man went on, his voice booming now, “as the nation already knows from your bestselling memoir, you possess an unbreakable spirit, and after many months as prisoner, you managed to escape the gu’s influence by secretly vomiting it up. You broke free from Stefan’s reign of terror, forced your way into the shed, poured a cleansing herbal tonic into Kelly’s mouth to rid her of the gu’s last grip, and then you set her free.”

  Outside, there were howls, crackles, booms, pops. Kelly’s unmistakable banshee wail. A long-overdue wave of terror, of murder, of destruction.

  But he, in this shed, was safe. And he could stay safe.

  Shadows skipped, their dark limbs long, urging him a certain way.

  Wang turned the story over in his head.

  The man cleared his throat, ground his heel into the floor, inhaled through his nose. “Well, I suppose I’d better attend to whatever’s happening out there. There are only so many deaths we can attribute to suicide, you know—once the quota’s filled, it’s filled. And we need some of them to return, keep the gears turning, as it were. I’ll have to brief them, get them on board, but I’m sure with your help that won’t be a problem.”

  He strode over to Wang, still sitting on that haystack, and gave him a friendly slap on the back. “At midnight, we will alert the media. Stick to the story, Mr. Wang, and you will be rewarded. Your kingdom, as they say, awaits.”

  He turned, he opened the door, and he left, swallowed up by light.

  Behind him, the door creaked shut.

  On the wall, the shadow people, fully formed now, limbs and bodies and beating hearts, danced. And they danced. And they danced and they danced.

  There would be no spaceships.

  There would be an heiress to a fortune coming to, coming loose, and, with all her strength, tearing through the commune, shouting out her own name.

  Citizens would rush to their doors. “Is that—?” they would say. “No, it can’t be—” But they would know it could.

  There would be journalists pouring over the hills, with cameras and microphones, poking their snotty noses where they didn’t belong, asking honest questions, printing lovely lies.

  There would be police. There would be guns. There would be tanks.

  There would be a goose, emerging from the woods, eyes still aglow, honking and hollering. Running toward his old enemy, his new master. Soaring into her open arms.

  There would be no more dancing shadows, no more messages in dreams, no more stones crying to be overturned.

  There would be a young tycoon who would work forever to forget the look in his boyfriend’s sleepy eyes as the police closed in. A tycoon who would work ceaselessly to forget the words Papa Hui once spoke to him, to overlook the meaninglessness in all of this, to distract himself from the restless soul that resided in his hungry body. A tycoon who would henceforth serve as Kelly’s right-hand man, advising on a number of critical carbohydrate decisio
ns, retelling the same story again and again until he believed it, ghostwriting a stirring memoir of a reincarnated bird, reveling in riches yet unimagined.

  A young man who would never be abducted by aliens, but who would, indeed, be taken home.

  There would be a grand gathering of people around this young man and the girl and her goose. There would be a speech, a grand speech, that would be immortalized in poems and in jingles. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that’s right, the heiress herself has returned! The mandate of the goose is mine!

  There would be cheers. There would be sobs. There would be murmurings about the state of the heiress’s hair. There would be many ex-millionaires rushing home to charge their long-dead cell phones and to log on to the snail-slow Internet, to contact family about returning to their cities, to their companies, to their bank accounts. There would be not a word spoken about what frauds they’d all been, how poised they’d remained all this time to slip back into their old ways. There would be chauffeured Audis and Land Rovers and BMWs and Maseratis and Lamborghinis kicking up dust as they descended upon the once-tranquil valley.

  And there would be no enlightenment, no absorption into its warm white light, into the nothing, into the everything.

  There would be a man whose job was simple, to liberate the nation’s millionaires from their self-inflicted chains; a man whose task had been successfully completed and in minimal time. For him there would be congratulations, endless toasts over endless feasts, a promotion, a raise, an inexhaustible network of favors owed.

  There would be a young woman to whom this man would rush, issuing a warning to be gone before the police arrived at her cottage and to take those witches with her. But her sisters had already sensed something amiss, were already long departed. “Magic,” Witch Two told her, unbothered, untouched, as she stuffed the last of their books into her bag, “is always on the run.”

  A young woman who had chosen not to join them.

  Who had waited here for him.

  A young woman to whom this man would urge, “Go. Go now before it’s too late.”

  A young woman who, unsettled now, couldn’t quite bring herself to thank him for his mercy, his hormone-driven concern. A young woman who had truly believed that this man was someone he was not, that he was what she’d wanted.

  What she’d wanted, all she wanted, was something that would stick. A love that would last.

  To whom he would give a dismissive wave of the hand and speak the bitter words, “Please. Love is an illusion.”

  A young woman who had come to her senses, who had realized the truth about the red eyes in the woods—they had seen her, yes, but they would never know her. Who would spit in reply to the man, “No, you’re just an asshole.” Who would strut into the woods, disappearing into its thick of trees and bushes and roots and shadows, not to be seen again.

  There would be a nation that would speculate not for her whereabouts, cry not for her absence.

  There would be another way for her. She’d find it. She would.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, thank you, reader!

  I owe a great many more thanks, and so here we go, in list form…

  Chris Heiser, Olivia Taylor Smith, and everyone at Unnamed Press for taking a chance with this book.

  My family: Paula Hallman, the most talented artist I know. Scott Hallman, the glue that holds us all together. Shawn Hallman, a.k.a. Rock-N-Roll Jesus. Tristan Hallman, who will someday write a serious and respected journalistic tome and make me look a fool. Harpo, that little rascal.

  Paul “Moon” Harding, my life-partner-in-weirdness and co-creator of the Bashful Goose Snack Company.

  Mia and Bean-Bean, my familiars.

  My writing teachers at St. Edward’s: Beth Eakman, Doug Dorst, Dr. Mary Rist, Kelly Mendiola, Dr. Drew Loewe, Dr. Catherine Rainwater, Michael Barnes, and the late Marcia Kinsey.

  My students and professional contacts in Beijing, who taught me more than I ever deserved to know.

  Frey Miremadi, for friendship, café work dates, and Korean waffles.

  JY, for teaching me all about corpse walkers and Chinese magic.

  Zejian Shen and Claire Hsu for horror movies and cat photos.

  The authors and booksellers who very kindly wrote blurbs, including Annalia S. Linnan, Amelia Gray, James Fallows, Peter Mountford, and Mark Haskell Smith. I remain humbled.

  Additional thanks to Houston Holmes, Cherry Kow, Mary Ky, Caroline Morris, Sheryl & Ken Lehnig, Cherry & Frank Harding, Oskar Eastwood, Jemma & Simon Eastwood, Leslie Reese, Contina Pierson & Michael Graham, Lu-Hai Liang, Cassie Woods, Jena Heath, Bryce Pearcy, Mike Dardzinski & Echo Sun, Ivy Taylor, Lisa Marie Ivarra, Valerie Villarreal, James David Wade, Christian Brady Spence, Jimmy McGuffin, Katy Larsen, Sandra Jeffrey, Vincent Galbo, Christina Ayers, Virgenta Lane, Fei Dee Tsing, Jalesa Daniels Jones, Susie Celis, Harold Owens, all the APSA kids, everyone at GlobalTrack, and the whole AIFS 2006 crew.

  …And if I’ve foolishly forgotten to thank you, please forgive me and know that you’ve given me the perfect excuse to go write another book. I’ll get you next time, I swear.

  CARLY J. HALLMAN

  has a degree in English Writing and Rhetoric from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. She lives in Beijing. Year of the Goose is her first novel.