by Brian Nelson
After the weapons trials, Meng had gone to Dagzê personally to witness the effects of the new virus. He had gone into the morgues, seen the sky burials, seen the trucks full of dead, and watched his doctors perform autopsies to confirm the efficacy of the virus. None of it aroused any empathy in him, only satisfaction. He was doing what a good soldier did: killing the enemy.
In his conversation with the personal secretary, the man had given him something else that he wanted, something that reminded him of how well they knew him. It was a gift he wanted even more than the promotion.
“The president would also like you to know that if you should choose to have another child, that child would receive all the benefits and privileges of a first child.”
Again, he had thanked the personal secretary profusely for the president’s great generosity.
Meng had married again, wed to a beautiful woman whom he loved half as much as his first wife. And she had given him a son, which had made all the grandparents happy. Yet, despite the blessing of a boy, he still wanted a girl. It was a dangerous desire, he knew, because the child would not be Lien, yet he wanted a girl all the same, so that he might love her as he had loved Lien.
He shook the memories from his head and turned again to the wall, to his new enemy: Admiral James Curtiss.
“How much do you know?” he repeated. “You know that we have the nanovirus. You know how we plan to use it. Okay, now I know that one of your spies is here. But tell me, Admiral, do you know how many spies I have with you?”
Chapter Four
January 27, 2025—Six weeks earlier
Nyingchi Prefecture, Tibetan Autonomous Region
The seventeen-year-old Tibetan boy awoke facedown in a ditch. Sand and dirt clung to the cuts and scrapes on his face. He started to get up, then thought better of it.
Everything hurt. He took a deep breath. That hurt, too. One of his ribs wasn’t right. No, definitely not. Each time he breathed, he felt as if he were being stabbed. He turned his head. More pain, but at least his neck wasn’t broken. Fingers, wrists, toes, ankles, knees—he tested them one at a time. As for his face, he didn’t have the courage to touch it. He knew that the news from his fingertips would not be good.
It took him several minutes to get up on his hands and knees and then to struggle to his feet.
He could see out of only one eye, and that eye told him it would be dark soon. That was one bit of bad news; the other was that they had taken his prison uniform, leaving him naked except for his underwear. Tibet in January. He needed to get moving, find shelter, or he would die. He could already feel a stiffness in the skin, a coming frostbite.
“Congratulations, Sonam, your reeducation is complete. We are going to release you.”
Released, and already facing death. Wouldn’t that be something! Surviving six months in Drapchi prison only to freeze to death. He imagined how it might play out. When the sun went down, it would soon drop below freezing. If he froze quickly enough, maybe someone would find his body come spring. Blue and stiff, yet perfectly preserved. He had heard of that happening to lost herders. But then he rejected the thought. The birds and mice would take care of him long before spring. You must have been a real son of a bitch in your last life, Sonam. But at least he was out. He would take death here in the cold over death in prison. Six months of forced labor, beatings, humiliations, endless study sessions of Communist verse, Mao’s “Little Red Book,” and the Tibet Daily. Forced to sing party anthems every dawn and before every meal. “Socialism is great; socialism is good.” Interrogated over and over as they tried to coerce him to turn in friends and relatives. “Atone for crimes with worthy deeds,” was the party slogan. “Inform on others, and you will be repaid with leniency.” He had not, although many had. Some even confessed to things they had not done, in the hope that it would reduce their sentence. That had been a grave mistake, because they then suddenly discovered that their sentences had been lengthened or that they faced execution.
He looked around. He was on an abandoned mining road in a valley with steep hillsides all around, dried-out grass, windswept junipers, and wilting buddleia. Nothing looked familiar. He could be anywhere.
Climb, he told himself. You have to figure out where you are. He moved uphill, but darkness was coming on quickly. The jagged summits to the east still caught the alpenglow, but where he stood was already deep in shadow. Every few minutes, he would look up to see the sunlight receding up the sides of the peaks—a solar hourglass—while the temperature steadily dropped. He crossed his arms over his chest. Another ten minutes’ walking confirmed his fears that the road was long abandoned—he came across a thirty-meter section that had been washed away by the rains. By the time he had negotiated the wash, the sun was almost gone from the eastern hilltops. He had covered pathetically little ground. He felt so small in this place where the mountains ran in indistinguishable rows across the top of the world. He could wander around for weeks and not see another soul. But he didn’t have weeks. He had perhaps a few hours. He kept looking up and up, watching the slopes of the nearby hills, searching their silhouettes for some peak or landmark that would tell him where he was.
Finally, the road rounded to the north, opening up his view to the west. Now he could see that the hill he was on was really quite small. Higher hills loomed in front of him, black and impenetrable, pushing his gaze up to the purple night sky beyond. Then he saw them: thousands of swirling shapes in that blue-black sky. Falling, spinning. A huge cylinder of dark angels, reaching ever up and up. There seemed to be no end to them. Only when his eyesight failed did it seem to stop. As he watched, he realized they all were slowly gliding downward as the coming night stole away the thermals that kept them aloft.
Simultaneously, he realized where he was; the dark angels were descending on his village.
“There’s a little surprise waiting for you at home. I hope your immunizations are up-to-date.” Laughing and snickering.
He was seized by a sudden panic, and what little store of adrenaline he had surged through him. He wanted to run, but he didn’t have the strength. He had to know what the Chinese had done. He had to know whether his father and little sister were safe. He had to know whether she was alive.
But walking was the best he could do, and even that was a struggle. Going downhill was fine, but uphill was torture. Every time he lifted his right leg a little too high, he felt the rib stabbing in his side. He was weary and hungry, and the strain from the exercise brought every bruise and cut to life, particularly on his face, which throbbed like a huge heart. And his brain was not working right, either, his lucidity coming and going like a camera that wouldn’t stay in focus.
“Your study group leader says you are completely rehabilitated. You are free to return to your family—if there is anything left of it.”
What had they done? He had prayed every day to be released, to return home to the small sheep farm, to help his father and sister, to return to her. Many times, he had simply given up hope, resigned himself to dying there in Drapchi prison like so many others. And now to be out, to be so close, yet … His heart ached at the thought that it was still not over. That he would arrive home to find that they had robbed him of much more than they had already taken.
“Congratulations, you are free to go—after one last thamzing, one last struggle session.”
* * *
Yéshé heard someone fumbling at his door, the sound of a key. How? Had some burglar found the spare key he kept hidden in the barn? And the dogs—why hadn’t they barked? He heard the door open slowly, tentatively. He sat up with a start. His heart, brought too quickly out of sleep and into fear, thumped like a drum. He grabbed the plastic flashlight and looked at it for a moment. He supposed he could use it as a club.
“Pa pha … pa pha.”
Now his heart really did skip a beat. The voice was weak but unmistakable. “Sonam!” he called. He had a
lmost given up hope.
He scrambled from the bedroom. There in the kitchen was a figure, shivering and much too small to be his son. The light of the flashlight danced over him, then held steady. Yéshé struggled to focus on what he was seeing; then his knees became like water.
He quickly grabbed the blanket from the bed and threw it over both of them and took his son in, held him close. The boy was so cold. Yéshé tried to send the heat of his body into him. Yéshé’s body knew how his son should fit against him. His skin had memory, of course, a memory laid down from every embrace since boyhood. But now his skin was telling him this was not his son—the body was too light, the face too swollen—and he had to fight an impulse to push this sick animal away.
“My Sonam, my Sonam,” he repeated, half to reassure the boy, half to reassure himself.
Be thankful. Just be thankful that he is alive, that he is finally home. But what have they done? He had to resist the urge to weep. Save that for later. Now is not the time.
He tried to see his son’s face, but the boy pulled away. “It’s okay,” he said. “Let me see. It’s going to be all right now.”
Slowly, the boy turned. He was barely recognizable. One side of his face, where it had been burned, had shrunk like an old apple, while the other side was cut and bruised and swollen—mangled as if by machinery—with splotches of purple and yellow, and a deep gash from jaw to temple. One eye was swollen shut, while the other was flooded red with blood. My boy, my beautiful boy.
It had been six months since they came for him. Three hours before dawn, as was their way, loading him into an army truck. Six long months, and Yéshé had feared that his son had been “disappeared” like so many others, like the Dhamdul boys, the town constable, and the Lhasa nuns. Now he was simultaneously elated and brokenhearted. But why had they beaten him so badly? Yéshé knew their ways, knew how some of the other prisoners had returned. And he had tried to prepare himself. But this was much worse than any beating he had ever heard of. It was another humiliation in a lifelong string of humiliations: that they should treat the thing he loved most in this life, one of his children, like a mongrel dog. They had even taken his hair. Tibetan men never cut their hair—only the monks when they took monastic vows. Long hair was a source of pride. The Chinese knew this, and it was one of their favorite ways to demean young Tibetan men.
He brought Sonam butter tea and some thenthuk soup. At first, the boy was too weak to hold the cup to his mouth, but then the yak butter started to do its work, and the boy was soon sipping it by himself. He sat by the hearth, wrapped in the blanket, the gold light from the fire softening the bloated profile of his face.
The old man went to his bedroom cabinet and got out the medical kit. From the kitchen, he took a stool, a cloth, and a bowl of soapy water. Sitting beside the boy, he began to clean the wounds. Sonam didn’t resist or even seem to notice—soap and water, soap and water again, the cloth turning reddish black from blood and dirt. Then alcohol, then honey on his burns. They had placed an iron on his face. He could see the telltale triangular shape and circles from the little holes that vented steam. He could tell that they had done it repeatedly, letting the wound heal a bit, then doing it again, coming very close to the eye. Yéshé worked for almost an hour. Sonam’s one seeing eye remained fixed on the fire, never moving, not even when his father pushed the fishhook into his cheek and began to stitch up the gash.
Finally, when he had finished, the boy spoke. His voice was pained and dry.
“Bhasundara?” he said, asking for his eleven-year-old sister.
“She is at your grandmother’s in Lhasa,” he replied. “She is safe.”
The boy asked about the vultures.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Just rest now.”
“I need to know, pa pha.”
“Tomorrow.”
There was a long beat of silence.
“Chodren?” he asked, looking straight into the fire.
The old man cringed, suddenly drained of energy. It was as he feared: the boy had been in love with the Khédrup girl. He had suspected it but had said nothing, knowing that if it was true, they would have to keep it secret. In Tibet, secrets could be deadly, and even the most trusted person could break under torture, condemning dozens of others, even family members, to terrible fates. Information was also currency. The Chinese paid handsomely for it, and many Tibetans were willing to sell it for profit, for favors, or to save their own skins. So the two had kept their relationship secret, rarely going out in public together and never engaging in the same protests. She had joined the Lhasa protests in 2021, gotten arrested, and had her blood taken. Sonam had stayed home. And although Yéshé and Sonam didn’t know it, that was the reason she was dead and Sonam was alive.
“She’s gone,” Yéshé said. “The fever took her … quickly.”
Sonam nodded and looked into the fire. Even now he would not let on that he had loved her.
Just be thankful, Yéshé reminded himself. Just thankful that he is alive.
Sonam saw his father bow and clasp his hands. The boy stiffened. He had so longed to be home, to be with his father and sister again. But the old man’s genuflecting changed that. It meant that he would do nothing. He would not get a lawyer to contest his son’s illegal detainment and torture; he would not go down to city hall and complain to the Chinese-appointed mayor. He would not go to Lhasa on the anniversary of the uprising. Instead, he would accept it as karma, part of his fate, something that had been decided since birth. Something he could do nothing about.
Sonam was sick of it, sick of his father and sick of his people for rolling over and letting themselves be subjugated by the Chinese. Hadn’t the Dalai Lama himself admitted that the nonviolent path was a failure, that he had accomplished nothing in his life to relieve the suffering of his people? Sonam felt the same way about his father: that he had wasted his life. In fact, three generations of Tibetans had wasted their lives. Seventy-five years of lying on their backs while the Chinese kicked them, a repression interrupted only by the occasional feeble protest or by a monk setting himself on fire. The whole time waiting—waiting for what? For the Chinese to suddenly realize their error? So sorry, you can have your country back again. For international sanctions against the Chinese? Another joke. No one was going to help them. They all were too afraid of upsetting the great economic behemoth. So what were they waiting for? To Sonam, it was just cowardice, because whatever they were waiting for, they were hoping it would come from the outside. Which was delusional. The change had to come from within.
“I don’t believe it,” he said. “Even now you won’t stand up to them?” He had meant to sound hard and defiant, but his voice cracked and the words came out as a supplication—the pleading of a boy much younger than he was.
The old man knew his son’s disappointment. It had been a growing wedge between them. “No,” he said. “I will not stand up to them—at least, not the way you want me to.”
The boy shook his head in disbelief, but Yéshé would not let this old argument separate them now. He embraced the boy again and he wept, letting some of his sorrow out. For several minutes, Sonam remained stiff, but his resolve was weak. He also felt ashamed. He knew it was a bad time to pick a fight. Yes, he hated that his father would not take a stand, but he also knew that he and his sister were the reasons why. The old man would do anything to keep them safe, and turning up his belly to the Chinese had seemed the easiest way to keep them from hurting his children.
Sonam gently patted the old man’s back, letting himself inhale the familiar smell of him, a smell of dry earth and smoke. “It’s just so hard,” Sonam said, his voice cracking again. “So hard.” Before he knew it, he was crying, too. Softly at first, but soon he was crying uncontrollably, the way a little boy cries. It did not last long. He simply did not have the energy for it.
Within minutes, he was asleep, snoring over his father’s
shoulder. The old man picked him up—much too easily—and carried him to his bed, tucked him in as he had when he was just a boy, and went to work. For now there was much to do.
His son had returned to him. It was a moment he had dreamed about every day for the past six months: the fantasy of seeing him in the doorway or coming up the road. Home. Where he belonged. But it was a bittersweet homecoming, because he knew that the boy couldn’t stay.
He could see the boy’s path clearly: he would continue to fight, and sooner or later they would kill him. He had seen it dozens of times with the boys and girls of other Dagzê families. But he could not let that happen to his son. That was what the Chinese wanted: to get rid of all the true Tibetans, all those who held on to their culture and would not be turned. That was why they had arrested Sonam in the first place: because they knew they hadn’t assimilated him. And that was why they had beaten him so savagely: because even in jail he had resisted them.
But there was something else he now realized—something important: an opportunity. The boy was literally unrecognizable. What was more, he would never look the way he had before. It was a wild idea, and it had struck him as he stitched the wounds and applied the honey. His son need no longer be Sonam. In fact, he need no longer be Tibetan. Perhaps, unwittingly, the People’s Liberation Army had given him a path to a new life.
He would have to leave as soon as he was strong enough—in a week, two weeks at the most. Yéshé could hide him for a time, claiming that he had not returned from prison, but the Chinese liked to keep tabs on former prisoners. And even though the guards had meant for him to die, they still had to report his release, which meant that a political officer would start coming around, looking for him.