The Year of the Hydra

by William Broughton Burt

  I mime the question, “Up then left, or up then right?”

  The teenager nods soberly and continues to jab his forefinger toward the balcony.

  Again, more emphatically: up then left? Or up then right?

  The boy continues pointing upward, and even shoves me a little closer to the staircase as though I don’t quite see it yet.

  With exquisite annoyance, I start up the metal stairs. Before reaching the top, I glance over my shoulder. Zippered teen is slouching away in the rain, having accomplished his worthy deed of the day. For a long moment, I stand panting just below the top of the stairs, looking out across the jumbled tiled rooftops of phantasmagorium eyesorium and suddenly it’s one of those unexpected crystalline travel moments. Annoyance gone, I discover myself panting above a sodden alley in Kunming, China, bladder cramping, raindrops tapping out an umbrella melody.

  For a moment everything is transfigured.

  Before leaving Lijiang, I convinced a reluctant Zhu to take me to the ruins of a Buddhist monastery on Paintbrush Mountain. “Is just some pile of stones,” said he. I told Zhu I was very fond of piles of stones. In truth I was tiring of the streets of Lijiang and its throngs of red-stockinged men with a hard-on for my best-kept secrets. Zhu and I endured a succession of mini-buses then a half-hour uphill hike through pine forest to… a pile of stones. I’m not sure what I’d expected. Wenfeng Monastery looked less like a historical site than a very recent demolition.

  “What happened here?” I asked.

  “Is Red Guard destroy it,” said Zhu.

  “Ah. El Cultural Revolution.”

  It wasn’t really a revolution, as you probably know, but a government-sanctioned lynch mob loosed against anyone / everyone whose thoughts were trending the wrong way. During the Cultural Revolution, a joke uttered over beers decades earlier could get you a life sentence. Having a brother-in-law who’d told such a joke could get you a public flogging. And if your next-door neighbor had laughed at the joke, you and he were forced to do the side-straddle hop.

  “Red Guard is destroy many, many place. I know this,” said Zhu. The eyes behind the thick lenses searched my face. “When I am a young man, I am Red Guard.”

  I turned to peer at my guide and interpreter. You don’t hear this admission every day.

  “I am nineteen years old,” continued Zhu, “and I think Mao is some kind of god. Everybody is believe this. All of the school is closed, so nothing to do. Mao is tell all the young men go do something. You can have this nice uniform. Everybody says just go burn some bad books, so I do this. I take the uniform. After we burn the books, now somebody is say go to some temple. We go there, burn the temple. Now somebody say this man is say something bad. Everybody go to this man’s house. Is very wrong but you cannot stop it. You say something, tomorrow they come drag your mother and father on the ground.”

  And force drugs up their cracks, or I miss my guess.

  With a sigh, I step from the wet staircase onto the wooden balcony and approach the door at right, my bladder so swollen that my teeth hurt. Turning the knob, I peer inside at a gray-haired woman silently leading some thirty others in Taiji. I close the door at right.

  The door at left is swollen from the rain. It drags as I push it. I peer down a dark hallway. The air inside seems oddly empty, no sounds at all nor any hint of the sharp odor that customarily announces a Chinese toilet. The building seems to be abandoned. Stepping inside, I find that the corridor extends in both directions. At one end is a large room suggestive of pointless meetings, at the other a row of doors, one of them partly open. I take a few steps and look inside the half-open door, discovering a janitor’s closet that features a low concrete basin designed to accommodate a mop. Actually this may be the finest public restroom in all of Kunming, I reason, approaching the mop basin and opening my fly. I wait for my cramping abdomen to unknot itself, gazing meanwhile at a three-pronged electrical outlet above the basin. Last night’s inelegant departure from the village of Baisha comes to mind.

  It wasn’t entirely my fault.

  Many Chinese hotels provide voltage adaptors, some of them—including the one in last night’s wayside inn—bearing inscrutable switches. I must have bumped it. Minor smoke damage was all, but management suggested that I continue my science experiments a little farther down the road.

  My first Chinese fire drill. What you’d expect, for the most part. Lots of discussion.

  Closing my fly, I reach for the faucet handle to rinse the mop basin and perhaps wash a little Kunming off my hands—and the handle breaks off in my hand. I stare at it for a moment then try to put it back on, and of course it doesn’t go back on. As I puzzle over this, a most unwelcome sound comes to my attention, that of a rain-swollen wooden door scraping against a floor, followed by two weighty footsteps.

  Faucet handle still in hand, I listen for what seems a long time, hoping to hear additional footsteps fade to some distant part of the building, but there is no sound at all. Gradually it registers that the person standing motionless in the entry is listening as well. Listening for me.

  I watched a television program in my room last night. Before the fire drill. I think it was a beauty contest. There must have been a hundred colorless Chinese women with long straight hair, all wearing the same white two-piece bathing suit. Each contestant walked to the front, bumped left then right, spun on the right heel, and walked away. It was the Miss Identical Pageant. Miss Instant Replay. Miss White Is Not My Color. Three-digit numbers had been pinned to the left hip of each contestant so they could tell themselves apart. Just look down at your number, honey. I don’t know who won the contest. There was a commercial break, after which a panel discussion appeared, government officials with reassuring smiles giving long, unhurried speeches that cascaded like mountain streams and fried lie detectors on the far side of Neptune. Maybe they were discussing how impossible it was to tell those women apart. That was when I first smelled the smoke.

  The heavy footsteps continue. Fortunately they lead in the opposite direction, toward the meeting room. There they abruptly stop. Call me psychic, but I’ve no doubt that those two feet will quite soon turn in this direction. There’s only a moment to act. Instead I luxuriate in the sudden silence, finding it more content-laden than I might have reasonably expected. I feel qualitatively different. I try to name the difference but discover that I can’t recall how things were before.

  Bad, most likely.

  A floorboard creaks and then another. At this, three realizations appear in my mind in no particular order. One is, I’m holding a faucet handle in my left hand. Two, I may have tucked my meds into my heavy wool socks, which I’ve had no occasion to wear of late. The third thing that occurs to me is that people in Westerns get out of situations very like this one by throwing an object, a rock or a stick, whatever comes to hand, thus creating a diversion that bad guys find irresistible, sometimes turning and firing two or three bullets in the wrong direction entirely.

  I toss the faucet handle through the open door.

  I once saw an actual crocodile surface no farther away than the end of this paragraph. Miriam had evidently decided that the most economical way to get rid of me was to assign an article on any endangered species capable of unhinging its jaw. I was dispatched to East Africa with a pad and pencil and a camera lacking a functional zoom. Unfortunately for both Miriam and the crocodile, I was neither paddling nor swimming at the time but on the deck of a forty-three-foot Bayliner, where I was receiving the attentions of a young woman very nearly capable of unhinging hers. All at once, the yellow eyes of the croc were clearly in view. I tilted my head to one side and said, quite sagely I thought at the time, “I wish I had a little more of that sticky black opium.”

  I watch the faucet handle crash against the side of the door frame, bounce a few times, and roll to a stop exactly at my feet.

  Could I do that again? I want to ask, but that would give away my location.

  As expected, the footsteps resume, aggressi
vely loud now and growing ever more so. I decide that the best idea is to panic and dash wild-eyed into the hallway where—

  I collide head-on with Julian Mancer. Our bulbous noses meet at dead-center of the hallway, and we each emit a surprised oomph. Panicked, I try to step around Julian Mancer, but the same idea occurs to him and we meet face-on once more. It’s the Keystone Doos. Finally, my mirror image turns away and flees toward the center of the abandoned building. I make for the fire escape, taking the rusting steps two at a time. Aiming myself in the direction of the diner, I make haste to put a little distance between myselves.

  I never knew how silly I look in epaulets.

  Chapter Ten

  My first encounter with music must surely have occurred very early on, monaural strains drifting into crib from kitchen radio, or however it was. I do recall one timeless moment—I was sitting on a chill black-and-white tiled floor—when I became aware of an active organizing principle materializing around my tenderest of regions and imploring them to surrender all notion of order and consequence unto an entirely novel scheme. The experience was too altogether abstract to do anything with except register a category of hoodoo later to be labeled music, or what I then supposed music to be. It was in point of fact recorded music, the experiential difference being roughly the same as that between eating a cheeseburger and eating a photo of a cheeseburger.

  I wish I were eating a photo of the number-one. As far as I can tell, it’s an omelet with a side of boiled dumplings. The brown bottle of beer that came with it was warm, but it was beer. So was the second one. The third one seemed to be kind of like beer, too. Numbers four through seven haven’t specifically registered, but my hands don’t feel quite so dirty now and I no longer feel bad about ignoring the phone numbers in my wallet.

  I think I’m adjusting rather well to what just happened in that abandoned building, whatever it was and whomever it happened to. You hear the occasional metaphorical reference to unexpected encounters with one’s evil twin, or dark side, shadow-self, whatever. I liked it better when it was a metaphor. This wasn’t even a real good simile. That was a person in there. I felt his nose against mine. I smelled his Altoid. Whoever it was, if not for the grey eyes, he would have been a better me than me. What remains unclear is whether I have just met my evil twin or he has just met his.

  I’m going to check my wool socks for those meds.

  There are stories about twins separated at birth and placed with families on opposite coasts, only to meet head-on as adults in circumstances as unlikely as today’s or quite nearly, thereafter to learn they’d both married a woman named Agnes with Rett syndrome. Still in all, having viewed Lillian’s and my birth records on more than one occasion, I think we can be relatively certain that our mother did not drop more than two offspring on the occasion of Lil’s and my birth. Which leaves us where?

  And then there’s the matter of the envelope.

  When I returned to this sticky table, awaiting me was an uncapped bottle of warm beer, a saucer of limp noodle crisps, a plastic jigger of soy sauce with enough MSG and corn sweetener to disable a nuclear submarine, and a sealed letter-sized envelope of exceptional quality with my name laser-printed across the front in twelve-point Courier New. I haven’t opened it. I’m waiting for the right moment.

  Zippered teenager is sleeping again, his upper body sprawled across a table. There’s something stuck in his hair. It looks like a price sticker. At another table, an old man buries his face in a bowl of noodles. He’s making more or less the same sounds as a Bangkok airport hooker with Rett syndrome.

  Chairman Mao once tried waiting for the right moment but found it entirely onerous. So many gratifications so near to hand, and here he’d survived the Long March for what, a grey wool suit? So, as his right hand stirred the egg-flower soup, the left one unbuttoned his fly and the misshapen map-of-China face twisted into something like an appeasing grin as the three young women across the table tittered uncertainly, still believing they were the Chairman’s ballroom dance partners for the evening—but where were the musicians? And why did the Chairman smile so as he lowered the warm soup bowl to his lap? And what did come first, anyway, the flower or the egg?

  But easy answers are for easy minds. This shadow was given me for company, not some other wastrel, and it is I who must sing that the moon may reel.

  …Because the moon does not know how to drink wine,

  She has given me this shadow for company.

  So let our mirth keep pace with the spring!

  I sing and the moon begins to reel,

  I dance and the shadow lurches grotesquely…

  I lift the envelope, and the world tilts a little to the right. Too thin to contain ready cash, I decide, which doesn’t preclude the possibility of a nice cashier’s check. Not that I’m ready to assume at this tender point that the current envelope connects in any way to that proffered in a Beijing steam brothel, but for a moment I let myself wonder just how well-financed this hypothetical research project might be, and whether the ethical pain associated with accepting money for something I’ve no intention of actually doing might not be easier to bear than that of swindling good prose from a dead queer, or at least giving it a really nice try before both knees are shattered with a corked Louisville Slugger in the warehouse district along Old Summer Ave.

  Good question, however lengthy, but one better suited to a mind that does not slip like a loose bicycle chain. I expect any moment to awaken from all this in a lumpy bed beside a barred window, trinket merchant nodding just beyond, no paired silhouettes of shoed feet at door, no horrors to recall nor fail to recall, no alternative selves to go bump in the broad and scent-enlivened afternoon, no Bro’ Fou’ theorems to boldly cast forth then methodically reel back in, nothing at all to hold on Tuesdays and Thursdays, nor any room of eyes to shed self-witnessed tears in statuary silence in that great getting-up morning fare-thee-well oh fare-thee-well.

  Lillian says Tree just broadcast her first radio show from Shenzhen. Shatrina informed a spellbound world that China is, as expected, the place where it all be going down, whatever it turns out to be. She said a lot of former Atlanteans are milling about here, hoping to avert the same kind of disaster as before. “Uh, Atlantis didn’t exist,” I told Tree not so long ago. “It’s been proven by plate tectonics.”

  “Everything existed,” replied Lillian, to whom I wasn’t speaking. “That’s been proven, too.”

  “You’re always talking about rooms, Jules,” concurred Tree. “There’s one for everything, right?”

  I told her I wasn’t sure about an Atlantis room, besides which wouldn’t you, like, need a lot of extra towels?

  “Pi,” I say to the waitress (rhymes with Bi) and she dashes to the kitchen for another brown bottle of warm beer while I return my attention to the disturbingly perfect envelope on the plastic table cover. Most likely there’s nothing inside but two plane tickets to Chicago and a gift certificate to Luby’s. To hell with these people and their shoddy recruitment techniques. Next time I squat a Chinese toilet, I’m quite sure that Jerry Scribner’s head will emerge from my ass to inform me that it was not he who chose this meeting place but if I would just excrete his briefcase, I might find that it contains a most interesting proposal.

  The last really interesting proposal I received came late yesterday as I bade farewell to Zhu just outside the Lijiang train station. He was still in his little pout and so avoided eye contact until the very moment of goodbye when, as he tucked my money into his wallet, he extracted a small card and handed it to me.

  “I carry this always to wait for some time I need it. I think you need it more.”

  I gazed at a purple and gold image of Guan Yin, Goddess of Mercy and Inflammable et cetera. She stood on a luminous cloud, the ribbons in her hair flowing in a breeze that I could not detect. On the reverse side of the card were three long strings of Chinese characters in the usual dull red. The card was stiff, as though a metal core lay beneath the high-gloss paper
, which was worn around the edges as though it had ridden in Zhu’s wallet for some time. For a moment, I was thrown back upon the careworn deck of cards with which my one grandmother had often amused herself at a folding table as I hovered out-of-body nearby, pondering Fermat’s Last Theorem and my own dread mortality.

  Zhu frowned at the card I cradled in my hand. “Is for make the miracle. Just put on your hand and ask the miracle something. My daughter give it on the Spring Festival some time. Every day I think don’t need the miracle today, maybe need it more tomorrow, so just go take the walk, do something feel better.”

  Zhu’s eyes met mine timidly. “You remember me same time you use the miracle, maybe make two miracle.” He shrugged. “Or maybe just don’t do nothing.”

  Returning his wallet to his pocket, Zhu pointed his baseball cap into the late afternoon sun and vanished in the glare.

  I think I over-tipped him. It’s so hard to know.

  Again I stare at the white envelope and wonder whether this might be the right moment. I hesitate, knowing all too well the consequences of drawing when holding might better serve. What nourishes one instant may very well kill you the next, which Fermat never understood and I learned only at great cost, humbled, hounded, and harried practically to the point of tears and only because of a boyish love for numbers and one or two bad spots of luck and having fallen in with the wrong crowd.

  Rich people who gamble.

  It was very nearly miraculous that I had gained access to that particular society of degenerates at all, but I tumbled through the sash of an improbable window of circumstance—a rich person who gambles having just passed out on his sofa, his last coherent words: you go. I thought he was proposing a discussion on the relative merits of inexpensive East European automobiles, but as the man fell to snoring I caught the glint of something metallic in his right hand. Curious, I extracted a handsome gold-inlayed invitation. The man’s name—I can’t recall it now—was engraved into the card, along with an address in Memphis’s most exclusive neighborhood. Okay, Memphis’s only exclusive neighborhood. There was also the current day’s date and the time 11 p.m. I looked at my watch. It was twenty till eleven. At that precise moment, a sharp knock came at the door where I discovered a formally-dressed limo driver. He glanced at the card in my hand and said, “Are you ready, sir?”