The Invisible Valley

by Wei, Su; Woerner, Austin;

  Bliss. Pure bliss. It had been a long time since Lu Beiping had had so much fun. He gave his cattle exotic foreign nicknames—Jesus, Abraham, Julien, Vronsky, Rudin, Natasha—harvested at random from the Russian and European novels he loved to read, plus his Bible Stories anthology. In those days this was a provocative thing to do, and he felt a secret thrill whenever he belted those awkward syllables. Move it, Raskolnikov, rattle your hocks! he’d shout as he brandished his switch at the moseying black bull. Quit mucking around in that ditch, Emma! he’d bark, gripping a shrub while he tugged the spotted heifer up the slope by her single curly horn. Of course Alyosha was his favorite, with a lean, colt-like body, a noble red-brown face, and a white stripe running down his nose; Lu Beiping imagined him as the Lord of the Cattle, his clairvoyant animal familiar. And the gaunt-faced, sinister old bull who always wandered off to graze in secret he knew as Judas, the Horned Betrayer, and regarded warily.

  Adam and Eve didn’t join the roster till much later, after some alert bystander had reported Lu Beiping’s suspicious naming habits to the goose-stepping Sergeant Fook. One evening, Fong, feigning casual interest, strolled over to the corral, pinching her nose against the smell. He’d had no contact with her for almost a month, but the company beauty queen was coquettish as ever. In her usual tone of fakey, theatrical awe, she asked him why his herd of Bible characters was missing Adam and Eve. Did this omission have some special significance?

  —JUDAS! he bellowed to the Betrayer, who was lingering stubbornly outside the gate, causing Fong to hop back with a shriek. He laughed darkly. Special significance? he said. Well, you know, over there Adam and Eve came first, before Jesus and Judas. But on this side of the world, Jesus and Judas will be long dead before we have an Adam and Eve.

  —What . . . what . . . Fong stammered. What do you mean? Stop being subversive!

  —So report me. Go rat me out to your friend Fook, maybe he’ll put a big gold star on your Party rec.

  He hadn’t even taken off his boots and already she was hightailing it away.

  Screw it, he thought. Who cares?

  The truth was, Lu Beiping cared far too much.

  Several weeks ago he’d gotten intel from Chu that at a meeting at battalion HQ not long after Lu Beiping had started on as cowherd, Fong had solemnly announced that Sergeant Fook would be her Party Entrance Recommender.

  See no evil, hear no evil. It was time to put himself farther out to pasture.

  At the third bend of Mudclaw Creek he built himself a crude hut and cattle corral. It took an extra half hour each way to get the animals out to decent grazing, and on this pretext he’d suggested to the foreman that he corral them in the hills, so they wouldn’t defatten on the trail. He’d even live there himself, he offered, so he could keep a better eye on the cattle, monitor the corral count. Good man! the foreman said with a grin and extra emphasis on the “good,” sounding like a general in a model opera. Good man! Is this your personal contribution to Operation Red May? Wish they’d sent us more fine pups like you! Lu Beiping listened expressionlessly as the foreman lauded his initiative, feeling like he’d just fulfilled some secret wish on the foreman’s part. In the past, during the winter months, when the grass near camp became too thin to sustain the herd, the company herdsman often corralled the animals in the hills, so there was precedent for Lu Beiping’s request. But now—the foreman eagerly concurred—what with all the hubbub clearing bush for Red May, the animals were skittish and grazing poorly, so it made perfect sense for Lu Beiping to move into the hills early this year. He told Lu Beiping to get rice and cooking oil from the quartermaster, pick up a barn lantern, slicker, flashlight, and extra work clothes at the storehouse. Don’t think you’ll need a flintlock, he said. We used to give one to the Gaffer but there’s nothing to shoot at on the mountain now but hogs and rabbit deer. Don’t you believe that nonsense about the Snakeweird.

  There they stood, the foreman and his ghost son-in-law, shooting the breeze in broad daylight in front of the camp gate, as if there were nothing at all shady about this arrangement.

  Two days later, the foreman sent a team of workers with an oxcart full of thatch to make some much-needed improvements to Lu Beiping’s hut.

  —Damn it, same pot gets a different handle, groused the Gaffer, toiling in the rubber groves, to anyone who would listen.

  Dreamless Vale, Lu Beiping wrote in his journal. This was on his third day living alone in the hills. He’d christened the gully with this florid name mostly as a counterweight to fear—to the awful, nameless fear that these wilds had woken in him.

  On the first night, the jungle revealed its terrifying true face. First, there was the silence, a huge, all-encompassing silence that slid shut over him like an iron lid. Actually, the jungle at night was filled with noises: the moaning of the wind, the shrieking of birds, the howling of wild animals, the buzzing of insects; but together these added up to a single, oppressive silence. Every sound threw the silence into sharp relief, added another kilogram to its steadily accumulating weight. As the silence grew heavier, deeper, thicker, acquired mass, volume, and density, an irrational fear seeped out of Lu Beiping’s bones and hardened around him like a shell. (When you’re so afraid that you no longer know why you’re afraid, that’s true fear, Lu Beiping said to Tsung, years later.) By day, flanked by his brawny bulls, he could fancy himself intrepid; but at night, the fear that lay coiled inside him would slither out ready to swallow him whole. Every rustle in the forest was a raiding party sent in advance of silence. Light the lamp and it became a malevolent ghost’s eye, staring at you; snuff it, and darkness fell over you again like a vast, wet, moldy-smelling curtain, suffocating you—sometimes Lu Beiping actually felt short of breath. He sat bolt upright in his hut, which was open on four sides, with just a low wall separating him from the elements, unable to sustain a supine position for ten minutes, much less sleep. Whistling, singing, going for night strolls were all futile distractions. Every rustle, every cheep was a knife blade on his nerves. He tried to avoid brushing anything with his frigid toes and fingertips; his extremities had become conduits through which fear could flow, and the slightest movement might swell its influx. For several nights he could do nothing but sit against the corner post next to his bed, clutching his sheet, clenching his teeth, his eyes squeezed shut, waiting for morning to come. The only thought that warmed his cold, muddled brain was a keen sense of nostalgia for his bare board bed back in the re-ed dorm. If it hadn’t been for the gentle murmur of the cattle chewing their cud in the corral next door, soothing his nerves and bringing him back to reason, he’d have screamed, leapt up, and beat a hasty retreat back to camp.

  Driving cattle by day, driven by fear at night—it strained him to the point of exhaustion. Then, when he had finally mastered fear, boredom became the greater enemy. When you were around other people, boredom was an accent, a quarter rest in the march of daily life; but when you were alone with a herd of cattle, a mountain, and a vast, dark forest, it became an all-enveloping medium, like air. A mind needs an Other in order to exist, an object to reflect back its own consciousness and feeling; otherwise, herding cattle is boring. Cooking is boring. Making faces at the creek is ridiculously boring. Masturbation is boredom pushed to its final, empty extreme. After each of these desperate episodes he’d hit himself, curse himself, sink into a deeper funk. Isolation and boredom were a slow burn, withering him, wasting him, emaciating him. He needed activity; he needed talk; he needed a sense of mission. He needed to rescue himself. With mock formality he laid out a Cattleherd Five-Year Reading Plan, forcing himself to read his books according to complex schedules broken down by page, line, hour, and minute, all the while taking notes. His dwindling journal entries took on a new form: catalogues of elaborate sobriquets for every single plant, animal, or object in sight, chosen with far more painstaking thought than he’d given to his cattle’s foreign nicknames.

  For example. There was that huge
gorgontree at the head of the trail, the most frequent source of nighttime creaks and rustles. Probably because it stood on an exposed rise, the slightest breeze would send it into a disheveled frenzy. This was the Tree That Dances in the Wind. On sunny days, down by the creek where he cooked and bathed, he noticed four or five blue dragonflies always flitting around him, and he would whistle to them, start conversations with them, imagining them to be emissaries of the shadow kingdom sent to keep a lonely ghost husband company. These, he decided, were the Blue Dragonflies of Fate. In the thick, clammy evening air he’d sometimes catch whiffs of a keen aroma given off by some jungle plant, making his hair bristle; this was Nerve Perfume. And that strange sound that he heard from time to time, both during the day and at night, whose source he could never ascertain—it wasn’t a bird, nor was it the call of any mammal he’d ever heard; more than anything it sounded like a baby’s wail, but hoarse and alto, calling up memories of sad, wizened infants he’d once seen on a school field trip to an orphanage—this, he concluded with a shiver, was the Child Crying from Beyond the Grave.

  In the end, it was with music—with his little Dunhuang harmonica,

  its tin surface etched with two flying nymphs—that Lu Beiping vanquished boredom and fear. After the first few sleepless nights he began to achieve a kind of mental discipline that allowed him to face the darkness without quailing. First, after bathing in the creek and spreading fresh straw for the cattle, he’d turn on his transistor radio and listen to shortwave broadcasts from one of the foreign stations that did Chinese-language programming. Then, by the light of the hurricane lantern, he’d read his books, jot notes, write in his diary. Finally, when his eyes began to smart, it was time for Harmonica Hour, unshakable as the daily trumpet practice that his musician dad had imposed on him when he was a kid. He’d pick up the instrument, draw a deep breath, and pause, waiting for a lull in the jungle’s racket; then he’d blow a long G major chord, sustaining it till his lungs gave out. Like a boomerang the merry tone sailed out, rebounding off the bowl of the Mudkettle and arcing back into the gully, glancing off the water’s surface, ricocheting between the cliffs. A one-note phrase became a symphony of lapping echoes, the sound filtered by the night air to an aching, crystalline purity. Warbling glissandos, ululating arpeggios—Mudkettle Mountain was his own experimental speaker box. The ethereal sounds he’d once conjured from homemade subwoofers welded from spare parts, to the oohs and aahs of friends, couldn’t compare in the least with the Mudkettle’s enormous natural amplification system. While in the mood, he’d play through all the Soviet songs that kids back then knew by heart; then, from the depths of his memory, he’d dredge up tunes to nursery rhymes his parents had sung—Mama hen, mama hen, lay me an egg; the rain, the rain, it falls and falls, old ladies carry parasols—and perform them all, from beginning to end, in varying concert order.

  Thus, with the help of his harmonica, Lu Beiping learned to converse with the mountain. His dejection at losing his girlfriend and having to marry a ghost, the gloom of his dreary new jungle exile, his feverish adolescent wants and nameless night fears, his unmoored feeling of isolation and helplessness; all these were held at bay by the harmonica’s piping voice, a sound blissful as skating by moonlight, cool as ice cream; they were gathered up in each inhale, expelled in each exhale, and one by one quelled, extinguished.

  It was by chance that he discovered the tobacco patch.

  Before long his Cattleherd Reading Plan had sprouted a complication. Ever since he’d moved into the hills he’d been curious about the distribution of trees throughout the jungles of the Mudkettle. That shadowy stand across the creek from his hut—was it first-growth forest, or second-growth? If it was first-growth, why were there no tall trees? If it was second-growth, why was there no trace of human labor, just dense thickets of cane and fern and jungle grass and impenetrable walls of wild banana trees? The epiphyte clinging to the tree above his head—was it a vine, or a tree itself? The bottom half looked like a vine, but the upper half was woody, like a tree. Was it an epiphytic tree growing on an epiphytic vine? Or a tree-vine hybrid? And why was this slope covered with conifer trees that looked like they belonged in a temperate northern forest? As he drove the cattle through these incongruous pines, he concluded that he needed a book on botany so that he could better appreciate the strange wilderness into which he’d been flung.

  This meant a trip back to camp to rummage through the books he’d packed when he’d been downcountried. Surely he’d brought a plant-identification handbook—one on tropical plants would be best. But no. Sadly, he’d neglected this area of his library. The best he could find was a thin pamphlet at the bottom of the crate printed by the Revolutionary Committee of the South China Institute of Agricultural Sciences, part of the pre-departure PR packet they’d been issued: Industrial Crops of the Tropics at a Glance. Yes, here was a half-page insert titled “forest resources,” listing tree species along with distribution, use, identifying characteristics, and medicinal properties (this was probably intended for barefoot doctors). He stuck the pamphlet in his bag along with a couple more novels, remembered the night’s chill and grabbed a sheet and a change of clothes, then hurried out the gate and up to the trailhead, where he was immediately buttonholed by Choi, the notorious gossip from squad 7.

  —Mercy me, mercy me, Choi tittered, her quick eyes taking him in: It’s a crying shame to see a nice city boy like you get caught up in such a shadowy affair. Crossed!

  She curled her lip in the direction of camp. He wasn’t sure if she meant this exclamation as a curse or an expression of pity. He was numb to the topic of the ghost marriage by now, did his best to deflect Choi’s platitudes (You look so thin, friend, you must be wasting away up there!) and was about to bid her good-day when she grabbed his wrist, pulled him into the trees, yanked his head down so his ear was level with her lips, and murmured:

  —Poor thing, she really was crossed.

  He stared at her, and wanted to ask her what she meant, but she thrust him away and dismissed him with a flick of the fingers.

  —Go on. Get yourself as far away from here as you can.

  After he’d gone a pretty good distance he glanced back through a gap in the hills and saw that Choi was still standing at the edge of the rubber grove, warding him off with an outstretched hand. He dug out his pitiful brochure and started filling the holes in his knowledge of tropical botany. Parrot camphor, deer plum, lyre tree, flowering pear . . . it was hard to imagine this somber sylvan congregation going by such fanciful names. Ah, it said these were rare tropical hardwoods, traditionally offered as tribute to emperors. Nut palm, hogbark, graywood, gooseberry . . . these were the commoners, whom he stood a better chance of getting to know; it said they often grew in large stands. Maybe that was a difference between tropical rainforests and temperate woodlands; here, you never saw large stands of anything, it was all mixed and motley, trees of every stripe crowding cheek by jowl. The rarer the tree, the less likely you’d find it among its own kind. That was one lesson from his remedial botany class, perhaps. He meandered through the forest, glancing back and forth between the trees and the list in his hand, but all the while a small voice whispered in the branches brushing past his ears: Poor thing, she really was crossed . . .

  Damn it, he thought. All this nonsense about ghosts and spirits is really starting to go to my head.

  A moment later he heard a swishing sound far off in the trees. He stiffened. No, it was nothing. The jungle was a sea of strange noises, he’d drive himself nuts if he gave too much thought to any of them. He tried to scatter his attention, focus on anything but that soft swishing noise intruding stubbornly at the edge of his hearing. But amid the soughing, creaking, rustling, plopping, gurgling, whirring hubbub of the jungle, the swish-swish-swish of human footsteps persisted, intermittent but unmistakable to an ear sensitized by long weeks of isolation and silence. And they were growing louder, getting more distinct; in fact, they were hu
rrying now. Yes—they were coming directly toward him! The hair stood up on the back of his neck, and his heart started to race.

  When you’re the only person for miles around, the silence can be terrifying. But when you think you’re the only person for miles around, then the silence is broken by the sound of another human being—that’s doubly terrifying. For weeks he hadn’t encountered another living soul in this dark expanse of woodland, besides his cattle—who could this be, then? (Or rather, what could it be? A wild animal? A ghost?)

  Doing his best to stay calm, he slipped into the trees and padded stealthily toward the source of the sound. But when he ought to have been just feet away, the sound ceased, then whatever it was turned tail and scampered away like a spooked deer.

  A flurry of pitter-pats dwindled into the forest, like an animal fleeing on tiny hooves.

  Lu Beiping swept back a curtain of creepers and tore after the sound, his fear forgotten. In the middle of a weedy, sun-dappled clearing he stopped—for a moment he’d glimpsed, disappearing into the trees at the far edge of the clearing, the unbelievable figure of a naked boy. The boy’s bare back had a strange metallic sheen, like armor, but there was no mistaking it: that was a human being, a child, buck naked, skin tanned to the shade of copper.