“That’s fantastic news,” Eli says. In terms of medical research, Dr. Wang is right that a year’s time means very little — clinical trials alone can take six years, and that’s after all the work of discovering and developing a drug has been done. But a year’s funding means a year that Kai doesn’t have to wash cloth bandages between uses or hoard popsicle sticks and disposable chopsticks for makeshift splints, a year in which people with resources and real professional training can care for the dragons crowding Kai’s apartment. And sure, it would be only fifteen or twenty dragons at a time, but with dragons transitioning out of the program as they recover, how many would that be over time? After weeks of swabbing antiseptic over cuts and rubbing burning cream on blistered scales, it’s dizzying to think that this is happening, that the university has heard their scrabbled-together plans and is agreeing to make them real. Eli had hoped, of course, but those hopes had been faint.
He glances over at Kai. Asking Beida had been Eli’s idea technically, but it had always felt like it belonged to Kai — his cause and his dragons. Kai is still, his face wan. If Eli is dazed by Dr. Wang’s news, Kai looks like someone has kicked the ground out from under him. Kai, who lives so simply and quietly as to nearly disappear; Kai, who’s cut off contact with his family and friends, who avoids doctors and ignores the needs of his own body, whose only true tether to the here and now are his dragons.
Without that tether, familiar and steady, what does Kai have keeping him moored?
“Kai?”
“I’ll be right back,” Kai says, and then he’s gone, disappeared into the crowd.
Kai walks quickly and the park is teeming with people, but it isn’t difficult for Eli to spot him, a small, lone figure sitting at the edge of the man-made lake. With every step toward Kai, Eli is careful not to startle, not to broadcast his presence. “Are you all right?” he asks.
“Why are you here,” Kai mutters. His eyes are half-closed, and he’s leaning forward, arms wrapped tight around his knees.
A dozen potential answers race through Eli’s mind, movie-perfect declarations of loyalty and loneliness. I couldn’t just leave — you looked like you —
“I kind of had to find you,” he says. “I couldn’t let you run away, after going to all the trouble of getting you here.”
It’s the right answer, he thinks. Kai snorts at it, not quite amusement but appreciation nonetheless. He makes no move to stand up, and so Eli does not move either, only stands there, watching.
“It’s not a solution, you know,” Kai says, staring out across the water. “Maybe we help some dragons, but that’s not the real problem. We’re just treating the symptoms. Breeders who care more about profit than the actual health of their dragons, owners who’d rather throw out their pets than deal with the work of rehoming them, the fact that the world keeps getting warmer but companies are still dumping chemicals in rivers and drilling holes for oil and the government doesn’t care — we can’t treat that. Whatever we do, it’s a temporary fix, a fucking band-aid on a stab wound.”
“It’s a start.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It’s not,” Eli agrees. “But it’s something.”
A world away, a woman tugs at her boyfriend’s arm, coaxing him toward a family of ducks bobbing in the lake. Plump-cheeked children dart ahead of their parents in a makeshift game of tag, leaving a whirlwind of popsicle sticks and wrappers in their wake. Eli can hear the distant but rising swell of music signaling the beginning of Dr. Wang’s play. The cowherd and the weaver girl about to sweetly meet once again, unaware of the star-crossed tragedy awaiting them.
“Come on,” Eli says, putting a hand on Kai’s shoulder. Eli can feel the sharp edge of bone, the heat of Kai’s skin through his thin T-shirt. “We should see the rest of the festival.”
Kai doesn’t respond for a moment, and then he shakes his head. “I can’t do this,” he says. “I’m sorry, but — you should go back, but I’m not … I can’t be here anymore.”
There are a hundred things Eli wants to do, a million things he wishes he could say as he watches Kai, shoulders hunched and shadows under his eyes like permanent bruises. Knees hugged to his chest like a child, curled in on himself in an expression of the old, preconscious instinct that compactness equates safety.
“All right,” Eli says. “Let’s go.”
The route to Kai’s apartment is familiar, but the trains are crowded at this hour of the evening, so they walk most of the way. It’s a good night, the heat present but not oppressive for once. Past the busy main streets the side roads are empty, without children playing or families holding court outside. Kai is grateful for that. He’s grateful for many things: the relative coolness of the day, the dimness of the streets they are on, the distance from the Summer Palace with all its gold-gilt ostentation and crowds, and the way the stillness of his current environment, rundown though it is, nonetheless helps him breathe again. The fact that though Eli has seen Kai petty and confrontational and fending off an irrational panic attack in a public park, Eli says nothing, walks beside him without commenting or expressing concern.
Kai knows, when he sneaks a glance at Eli’s face, the serenity there is genuine — Eli is a terrible liar, even more so when he’s upset. But, as always, Kai has to wonder where that calm comes from. How, after all this, Eli is still here.
“Sorry I kept you from the festival,” Kai says. Someone’s used mattress leans against a wall, cockroaches scuttling in and out of torn fabric and exposed coils. “If you wanted to — if there was anything you wanted to see, you should go back. I can find my way to my apartment by myself.”
“It’s all right,” Eli says, and his smile, as always, is kind. “There wasn’t anything I wanted to do, anyway.”
That’s not the point, Kai thinks. He focuses on the slowed pulse of the city around them, the rare breeze in the air, the warmth of Eli close by if not quite touching.
“I know it’s not perfect,” Eli says after a while, eyes following the winking lights of an airplane in the in the sky as they walk on, “but it’s a good thing you’re doing. You’ll be taking dragons from the streets, and they’ll be getting proper medical care, maybe even homes later, if any of the students want to keep them. Because of you, Kai. You’re doing something good.”
“Right,” Kai says, shoulders involuntarily hunching as he frowns at the ground. “One thing. In a city where thousands of people starve each day.”
“It’s more than what most are doing.”
Under the glow of the streetlights, moths drift slowly upwards, floating motes of dust pulling inexorably toward the light.
Kai pauses to arrange his words. “It’s not that I don’t — I do appreciate it, everything you’ve done. Your professor didn’t have to do anything, didn’t have to hear us out at all. It is doing good, I know. But I’ve been doing this for so long by myself, and to have all this happen now, it just feels …”
“It’s all right,” Eli says. He places a hand on Kai’s back, tentative but warm. “I know. I don’t mind.”
You should, Kai thinks. What does it say about him that his reaction to good news is to wonder what it means for him, what it says about him and everything he’s been trying to accomplish? All those months scavenging supplies and eating instant noodles so he could buy bandages, those late nights spent covered in saltwater and blood as he tried to coax dangerously dry shuilong back to life — what does any of that mean, if help was always so close and so easy? How much more could he have done if he hadn’t been so stubbornly self-sufficient, if he hadn’t needed a project to anchor him in the face of uncertainty? How self-centered is he to wonder about this now, when there are so many more objectively important things he should be doing to prepare for what comes next?
What comes next?
What is he going to do once the work is over, when it is just him and the future in all its yawning emptiness? For all its fatality, shaolong progresses gradually. Will the rest of his life be a
nother five years of this, whiling away the days alone? Awaiting the inevitable?
Above them, the clouds darken.
“Sorry,” Kai says. There are cracks in the pavement, and he traces their patterns, the way the lines spider and expand through grey asphalt. “I should have warned you when we met. I’m not very good company.” It’s important that he apologize for this now, when the impulse to do it is still bright in his mind.
Eli’s smile is teasing, “I’ve known that for a while now, thanks.”
To the rude gesture Kai offers in response, Eli, the bastard, only laughs.
The silence, when it settles again, is a comfortable one. In the distance, a car alarm screeches to life, going off once, twice before stopping; above them, perched on telephone wires and rusted rooftops, cicadas buzz a slow, steady drone in the summer heat. In one of the apartments above them, a couple is fighting, raised voices audible even from the ground. The arguing figures are silhouettes behind a curtained square of light, puppet people acting out a shadow play. One figure — a man, Kai guesses from the silhouette’s height and the baritone pitch of the voice — raises his hands in the air, exasperated. The other figure, smaller and more feminine looking, leans forward until her face is nearly touching the man’s. Muffled accusations, agitated movements; glass breaks loudly enough that the couple pauses, pulling away as if realizing for the first time that their fight is being broadcast to the street below. The figures move into the apartment, shadows pulling themselves from the windows until all that is left is the white drapery, fluttering in the breeze of an unseen fan.
“Well,” Kai says, as the voices fade away, argument muted but no doubt still simmering, “that’s something I’m sure you’ll miss when you’re in America.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Eli says as he continues studying the apartment above them. “Boston in the middle of winter, I’m sure you could find similar scenes.”
“As bad as this though?”
“As bad as this,” Eli confirms, stepping forward so that their arms touch, the slightest hint of contact. “You know,” he says, fingers tentatively curling around Kai’s, “I don’t think America’s as great as you think. Poverty, inequality, police brutality, political incompetence, and apathy to it all — we’ve got the same problems there. Maybe not the same way you do, but people have a gift for being shitty no matter where they are. The US likes to make a big deal of how much more ‘democratic’ and ‘free’ it is, but when you look at what their governments actually do, America and China aren’t all that different.” There’s a quiet acceptance to Eli’s words that makes Kai feel suddenly guilty, aware of the unconscious myopia that has colored Kai’s interactions with him.
“I know,” Kai says, choosing his words with care. “I mean, I know that logically. People are always people, regardless of where they are. I read the news; intellectually, I know that the America you see in movies is the story it likes to tell itself, not the way it actually treats people who don’t fit its definition of ‘American,’ whether those people are foreigners or if they’ve lived there all their lives. But I’ve never been to America. Only China, and I can see what’s wrong here.”
“What if you could, though?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Visit America,” Eli says, kicking at something on the ground. “I know the process isn’t easy, but it’s not the moon, either — people go there all the time. And like I told you, my mom’s a lawyer, she’d know how to get you through the process. A lot of schools do semester or year abroad programs, and my mom’s has welcomed international students before. She knows about scholarships and what colleges want to see on applications. There might be some administrative issues with transferring credits and financial aid, but it’s not like you’re applying for a fellowship. Half my dorm did study abroad, and I don’t think their reasoning went far beyond ‘Paris is cool and I’d like to do cool things there.’ With more fluff about ‘forging international bonds’ and ‘expanding intellectual borders,’ but you get the point.”
Eli’s tone is casual, but nothing else in his stance is. Shoulders stiff and hunched, he shifts subtly from foot to foot, studying the pavement with too much interest for indifference.
“You’ve been thinking about this for a while, haven’t you?” The moment he says it, Kai knows it is true.
Eli shrugs, neither a denial nor agreement. “Does it matter? It’s a good idea.”
“Of course it matters,” Kai says, and despite himself, he can feel the anger coming back, a steady, familiar heat under his skin. “Rearranging my life behind my back — I told you I don’t want your pity, and I sure as fuck never wanted this, trying to make what you think are the best choices for me. For fuck’s sake, Eli, I live here — my family, my friends, everyone I’ve ever known is in China. My mother’s here, and you think I can just pick myself up and leave —”
“Can’t you?” Eli asks. “It’s not like she knows that much about your life.”
“So you think it’s better if I tell her all at once. Hello, Mom, I’m sick, gay, and in America.”
“I’m not saying that,” Eli says, and his frustration mounts as he drags a hand over his face.
Good, Kai thinks, all the politeness, all that fucking patience finally running out.
“But Kai, it’s been months, and you still haven’t told anyone, not your college or your friends or — or anyone. And I know you don’t like taking help, but you know you can’t go on like this forever —”
“So you’re saying I should do what instead? Leave my family, go to America with you to get this help you’re so insistent on offering, and for what? Another year, another few years, maybe ten if I’m lucky — but what then?”
“That’d still be something. You don’t know, Kai, medicine advances so rapidly these days. You’ve heard Dr. Wang say it a hundred times. You haven’t even tried — there are drugs, resources —”
“Resources that could be spent on more important things.”
“You’re important! Goddamn it, Kai, I can’t keep watching you kill yourself!”
A dark night, an empty stadium looking out onto other empty stadiums, carapaces still plastered with peeling advertisements from 2008. Beijing spread out beneath him, but no one close enough to see if he let himself fall, another tragedy in a city full of thousands of them. Blood in his mouth and the promise of death in his lungs, a weight pressing lead-heavy on his chest and pushing out any last air —
Kai pushes the memory away. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Isn’t it?” Eli’s voice is gentle, even as his words refuse to be. “Cutting yourself off from the world, refusing to get any help — what else would you call that, Kai?”
“You think it’s so easy,” Kai says, and he can’t suppress his bitterness now. “You Americans, with your self-help and therapeutic confessions — you think if you get everything out in the open, that solves it all, makes everything better because you say it out loud. All that talk about honesty, but you haven’t told your mother about us either, have you?”
“That’s not the same thing —”
“Isn’t it?”
“Kai,” Eli says, infuriatingly calm as his fingers close around Kai’s wrist, “this isn’t about me, and you know it. You can’t keep walking away from this conversation —”
“Can’t I?” A jerk back, pulling his arm out of Eli’s reach; a sharp turn, not away but toward, so that Kai stretches to his full height and stares into Eli’s eyes. “It’s a conversation about me, isn’t it? My life, Eli, my choice. You can’t make me your pet project because you feel guilty about something that happened to someone else. It’s not fair to you or me or your grandmother.”
Eli reels back as if he’d been slapped. “Is that why you think I’m doing this? That I’m here because of some sense of misplaced guilt?”
Kai shrugs, forces himself to hold Eli’s gaze. “Maybe not all of it, no. But in the beginning, when we first met … what else would you call it?�
� It’s the wrong thing to say, the wrong time and place to have this conversation, on a darkened side street with both of them at the end of their respective ropes, but Kai has never been good at either patience or tact. Kai’s chest hurts, an invisible weight pressing inexorably down on his lungs. For a second, he can’t breathe.
There’s hardness in Eli’s eyes, a flinty edge Kai has never seen before. It’s unfair how even now, standing in a garbage-strewn street with anger in every line of his stance, Eli is still so gorgeous, all strong jawline and long, dark eyelashes outlined against his face in the golden streetlights. Is this it? The tipping point, the moment Eli understands what Kai has been saying all along, that it’s all too much and that he isn’t worth it? Odd, then. He should feel vindicated, but all Kai can think about is how much he wants to draw Eli: sketch him in charcoal and ink and color his skin with thick rich oils, stencil the arc of Eli’s cheekbones across the stars so that months from now, Kai can look up and marvel anew at the fine geometry of his face.
Eli closes his eyes, inhaling, and it is gone, his alien anger passing as abruptly as it had appeared.
“It’s late,” Eli says. The statement perfectly level, perfectly reasonable. “You’re tired and so am I — we should be getting back. We can talk later.”
“Later,” Kai echoes — a promise or a goodbye, he isn’t sure.
6
The glare of the fluorescent lights is reproachful as Eli makes his way through deserted hallways, the clack of his shoes against tile echoing in the emptiness of the Natural Sciences Building. It’s late, the rest of his colleagues are either home or out for post-dinner drinks, but Eli doesn’t mind; he likes working nights, the particular sense of silent communion that comes with being alone in a building with only lab equipment and beeping machinery for company. It’s calming, the way his body falls into a familiar routine of PCR cycles and data entry as his mind floats above it, thoughts clearer in the near silence.
After the Dragons Page 12
