Year of the Goose

by Carly J. Hallman

  The kids, forgetting their questions, burst into whoops and applause. They stood, wobbly on pins-and-needles legs, and made their way to the activity room, where Zhao was preparing that night’s film, Your Body and Global Warming. Kelly derived comfort from watching his methodical movements; it all appeared so normal, removing the disc from the sleeve, placing it in the flimsy drawer, pressing the buttons, adjusting the volume.

  The campers made themselves comfortable on the floor and stared up, mouths agape, at the screen. Zhao and Kelly sat beside each other in chairs at the back of the room, clinging to their ribs and guts, trembling, sweating.

  If you’re like most people, the narrator boomed, you probably think: What does my fat ass have to do with these burning rain forests? Monkeys screamed. Smoke rose. Indigenous people, thin arms flailing, fled. Images appeared on the screen of french fries, oil spills, whale blubber, billowing clouds of pollution.

  All was normal, but all was not normal. An uneasiness plagued the remaining campers—some rocked back and forth, some drooled, some wept quietly into their own hands, and one young girl, Camper Sixty-Eight from Suzhou, who always wore her hair in two knobby pigtails, began nervously gnawing at her own arm. By the time anyone noticed, the credits were rolling and she had ingested fifteen pounds of her own flesh. Surrounding campers, no longer distracted by the film, leaped up in panic, in disgust. Some slipped on the mixture of saliva and blood, and many others began tripping over the first fallen. Thinking quickly, Zhao clambered up on top of a table and out of harm’s way. He grabbed Kelly’s hand and yanked her to safety with him. Helpless, they watched from above. Campers attacked other campers. Campers attacked counselors, who attacked right back. Fat limbs and a few thin ones slipped and slid in every fathomable way and direction, at every fathomable speed. There were shouts, there were screams, there was chaos, and at the end of it all, only Zhao and Kelly, clutching their burning stomachs and cowering atop the table in the corner, were left alive…

  …or so they thought.

  4.

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FAT CAMP RUNAWAYS!

  THREE A.M. A CICADA CHIRPED. THE MOON SHONE WEAKLY, BARELY visible through a thick blanket of smog. Peng, one of two remaining campers at Fat People Fat Camp, jogged slow circles around the basketball court. He burned calories, and as he burned calories, he waited. A cicada chirped.

  From the darkness, a figure emerged. Peng stopped; his belly continued to jiggle. The figure—full, voluptuous, meaty—approached and wrapped its thick arms around Peng’s wide frame. It was Ming. A cicada chirped.

  Peng whispered into Ming’s ear, “In this material age, we can only hold each other.”

  Ming’s thin lips curled into a smile; Peng held her too closely to see this with his eyes, but he could sense it. The two bodies formed a single massive silhouette. Ming whispered into Peng’s ear, “If it were daytime, we’d blot out the sun.”

  A shrill whistle slashed through the thick summer air.

  Zhao shone his flashlight on the dark blot, revealing two faces, two connected figures, rolls upon rolls of fat. Zhao’s plastic whistle fell to his chest. Before he could speak, his cigarette dropped from the corner of his mouth. His phone vibrated in his pocket. He cast his eyes toward the ground, trying to catch the half-smoked cigarette before it went to waste, trying to see who was calling, trying to stop the drool from seeping out the whistle and leaving a sloppy wet spot on his shirt.

  A cicada chirped, and into the darkness, the full figures fled.

  Peng and Ming panted. They’d lumbered from the fat camp’s basketball court to Wuxi train station, a distance of three kilometers. Side by side, they leaned against the building’s wall and slumped down to sit on the concrete, four legs sprawled in opposite directions in a cellulite compass. Ming looked into Peng’s eyes. She said, in her gentle baby-doll voice, “Love is not a vice,” and she took his hand into her own.

  A legless beggar, riding a makeshift plywood skateboard, wheeled over to the pair. He offered a nod and said, “Ah, you must be the Fat Camp runaways.”

  Peng replied, “We are.”

  Ming punched Peng in the arm, unhappy with his disclosure. She didn’t know how the man knew who they were, why he cared; all she knew was that they had been running, running not to lose weight, but to save their own lives.

  The man nodded his head again, vigorous this time, and nearly lost his balance on the skateboard. “Media’s on alert. Camera crews are on their way.”

  Peng wiped his nose on Ming’s sleeve and eyed the man suspiciously. “How did you lose your legs?”

  “Factory accident.”

  “That’s a shame.” Peng jammed his fingers into his pocket to try to dig out some change, but before he completed the task, a massive gang of ill-groomed, dark-eyed people with cameras and camcorders and notepads and tape recorders appeared behind the beggar. He wheeled through their leather-clad feet and into what remained of the night’s shadows.

  “Why do you think China is facing this childhood obesity epidemic?” a voice cried.

  Flashes went off. White spots lingered in their fields of vision.

  Someone shoved a microphone into Peng’s armpit. “Who sent you to fat camp?”

  A photographer snapped a picture of Ming’s kneecap. “When will your wedding take place?”

  A reporter jotted down the words “plagiarism” and “dizzy.”

  A man adjusted his thick glasses and feigned concern. “How will you cope with the humiliation of being a fat camp dropout?”

  From the darkness, the legless beggar reappeared on his skateboard with a notepad, joining the rest, shouting, “What do you believe to be at the root of your weight problems?”

  ZHAO, YOU’LL DO ANYTHING FOR A LAUGH

  AROUND FOUR THIRTY A.M., KELLY, PHYSICALLY EXHAUSTED FOLLOWING what she claimed felt like a heart attack (and refusing, to Zhao’s simultaneous terror and relief, to seek medical attention), collapsed into a deep sleep on the office floor. Zhao, unable to even fathom sleeping with such a stomachache and with such adrenaline coursing through his veins, watched the rise and fall of Kelly’s chest until he could watch it no longer. He stood. He crept from the office and into the courtyard. He peered at the storage shed, barely visible under the dim lights. He felt drawn to it, like he’d left something there, lost something. He jogged over, opened the door, and felt around in the darkness. Pungent air, sticky-sweet, with overtones of old cheese, rotten eggs, dead blubber.

  Over the course of the summer, the employee must rehabilitate a minimum of two fat kids.

  He hadn’t caught them, those last two, those runaways, thanks to his mother’s ill-timed call. She’d woken from a nightmare and sent him a text message summarizing it after he’d failed to pick up. She’d dreamed that her dear son had gotten stuck in an elevator and that no one could get him out. Not an unlikely scenario in the grand scheme of the world, considering loose fire codes and bribery-aided inspections, but not here. He replied, “There are no elevators here. Go back to sleep,” and that was that.

  And now, this was this.

  He couldn’t locate the light switch—just flesh, hair, fat. What was he even doing here? In this shed, and in this job? His legs trembled and acid seared his stomach, and he longed to run away, or to vomit, or to die, but he remembered something his mother always said, one of a million things she always said: “Lose your mind, and that’s just fine. But lose your job, and you’ll lose everything.”

  He’d lost—well, given up—his job once before. And look where that had gotten him. He couldn’t risk his future yet again; he was too old, too ugly, too pathetic to take any more chances.

  That hope that had electrified his body when he was offered this position, when he signed that contract—that hope had abandoned him, left him for dead.

  If this contract is broken, a penalty of 100,000 yuan will be assessed.

  All he’d had to do was rehabilitate two of them. That was it. A 2 percent success rate. It should’ve
been easy.

  In his head he ran through all the ways to cover this up, to escape the crippling fine and assured career destruction, the government officials’ power-backed punishments, the probable jail time. He thought up places where he and Kelly could go into hiding, live out their days. Surely she had access to money, to plane tickets and phony passports. Maybe they’d get married. She wasn’t a knockout, but she wasn’t hideous either. She had nice hair. Maybe they could flee to somewhere in South America or Africa, or maybe Vietnam—yes, they’d blend in better there.

  Breath held hostage in his lungs, he traveled the walls, the air, with his hands, but still couldn’t find the light switch, only darkness. He gave up—what was he even looking for? what did he even want illuminated?—shut the storage room door and locked it, strode back to his office, stepped over Kelly and her puddle of drool, stared at his phone and wondered when it would buzz again, wondered when the two fat runaways would tell the world everything they knew. He waited, and as he waited, he smoked an entire pack of cigarettes, lighting each new one from the dying embers of the last.

  Hours passed. Dawn broke. Zhao stepped over Kelly to retrieve the newspaper from the doorstep, but there was no newspaper. This was modern times. He left the door ajar. A bird chirped. He turned on the computer and loaded his favorite news website, one he’d refreshed fifty times a day back in his golden era of unemployment. “China’s Fattest Couple!” read the main headline. He spat on the floor. His phone buzzed. He picked up. It was his mother. He listened, hoping for something new, something enlightening. She did not deliver. He screeched into the receiver, “I am at work! No, you absolutely will not fix me up with my own cousin! No!” He hung up.

  The phone buzzed again. Unknown caller. Either his mother had figured out how to block her number or… He picked up. The voice on the other end was low, decidedly not maternal. “Come to the Old Meeting Place Restaurant tonight at six.”

  Before he could respond, the line went dead.

  He set down the phone and picked up the empty cigarette box. He shook it, hoping for a miracle. He peered inside. Still empty. In a former life, he’d quit this disgusting habit. Who was he then? Who was he now? Was there any correlation? He stood, shut the office door, and unzipped his pants. He remembered the pretty waitress the night he’d signed the contract. Her plywood skin. Her thin limbs. No, he couldn’t. She was holy. He glanced over at Kelly, sprawled out on the floor, still snoring, her long hair a splattered halo—here was a woman right before him. Yes. He tried to make the best of it, tried to imagine what it’d be like to be with her, but the shrill voice of his mother echoed in his head, and his dick went limp in his hand.

  SHANGHAI IN THE AFTERNOON

  FOUR P.M. A CAR HORN BLARED. PENG AND MING HAD FREED THEMSELVES now not only from the camp and its overexcited counselors and under-flavored food, but from the media and its nosy reporters and their even nosier questions.

  Hand in hand, they wove through Shanghai’s traffic and skyscrapers and trees and crowds. They squeezed their eyes shut, and no one could see them. As the sun moved across the sky, their fame gave way to anonymity. There were new stories to follow: wars raging in far-off lands, and an old man who bit the heads off live chickens in Guangxi, and stock markets collapsing and recovering, and children in Yunnan who had been buried alive in their shoddily constructed school, and on and on.

  The sun set behind the smog, and the city lit up. Somewhere beyond the lights, they knew there were stars.

  They ducked into a restaurant in the French Concession. They ordered salads with dressing on the side. They ordered Coca-Colas. They ordered slices of cheesecake. They ordered french fries. They ordered hamburgers. They ordered escargot. They chewed and they smiled and they giggled, and all manners of things went into their mouths, but never once did a word come out.

  EXTRA, EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

  THE BETTER PART OF AN HOUR LATER, ZHAO MUSTERED UP THE COURAGE, or cowardice—whichever it may be—and clicked on the article, first examining the photograph of the blubbery couple stricken with deer-in-headlights expressions. He then skimmed the text, written in childish, tabloid-y prose… These two little whales escaped from a fat camp somewhere in Jiangsu or Anhui Province. They are deeply and obviously in love, and although they refused comment on wedding plans, by the looks of things, they’ll be eating their wedding candy soon enough. And what a massive load of candy it is bound to be!

  On the floor, Kelly smacked her lips and opened her eyes. She sat upright and slipped her phone from her pocket. Zhao couldn’t wait to tell her the good news, but he wanted to be sure of it first. So he read on. And on. Nowhere were there mentions of deaths, tasings, tramplings, drownings, beheadings. His heart fluttered. Why weren’t the little fatties talking? Why weren’t they telling the world what they knew? Could these kids truly be so selfish? Could it be that now that they’d escaped, now that they’d made it out alive, their only motive was to obtain and secure their own freedom? That all they wanted was to protect themselves?

  After a few final nods and smiles, they were off on an eastbound train. Their exact whereabouts are currently unknown, but they have certainly charmed our China on this day of slow news!

  Zhao came up for air, a giant grin plastered across his face, his stomach pain milder, his heart racing in a new direction, but Kelly was already gone.

  OUR DEAR HEIRESS MAKES HER ESCAPE

  A BLACK AUDI SCREECHED TO A HALT BEFORE THE CAMP GATES. KELLY, overnight bag in hand, hopped in, breathing a sigh of air-conditioner-induced relief.

  “Thanks for getting here so quickly on such short notice,” she said to the driver.

  He nodded at her in the rearview mirror. He said, “Of course.”

  This driver had been with her for two years. He had, in that time, done everything she’d ever asked. She knew that if she so ordered, he would have her at the international airport in thirty minutes flat; would drive her across the border into Tibet or Mongolia or North Korea; would, if she so ordered, probably even drive them both off a cliff. He was, after all, loyal in the way that only money could buy, and now she herself, for the first time, wasn’t.

  “Where to, Ms. Hui?” he asked, his gaze not leaving the road.

  She exhaled from her diaphragm and ordered the poor loyal bastard to take her to the only place in the world she wanted to go: Bashful Goose Corporate Headquarters.

  After a sepia-toned stop-and-go drive, she bid the driver farewell, slammed the car door behind her, and made her way through the grounds, marching through the bamboo forest, which led to fountains that shot up, synchronized to elevator-music versions of various Bashful Goose jingles, including one she herself, at age eight, had composed. As she walked, that now-familiar burning welled up in her abdomen, not unlike heartburn, but with bleak emotional over- and undertones.

  She rode the elevator up and up to the top floor.

  “Is my father in?” she politely asked Papa Hui’s receptionist, a thirtysomething woman with a sleek bob and a round face. She wondered if ol’ Papa had ever hit that.

  “He’s down at lunch right now, but he should be back shortly,” the woman answered in a cheery voice, and then looked back at her monitor—probably, Kelly thought, at some very kinky pornography.

  Kelly flipped her hair over her shoulders and, not bothering to turn to see if her assumption was correct, strode into her father’s office. She shut the door softly behind her, and then took a seat in his overpriced chair at his overpriced mahogany desk, dropping her bag down on the plush carpet. She settled in. Atop his desk sat two gold-framed photos: one of himself with his arm around Kelly’s mother on their honeymoon trip to Beijing, and one of him standing with the goose next to a small lake back in Old Watermelon Village. She picked up this second picture and traced her fingers along the goose’s neck.

  Thanks to that fateful encounter with that bashful goose, Papa Hui is now the richest man in China.

  Why, she wondered, in that story about the da
mn goose, why does he always attribute his success to that stupid animal and not to me?

  Don’t I owe the next generation something more, something better? Is there a kingdom I can build, he mused, worthy enough for this child to someday inherit?

  A voice outside. Footsteps. The door opening. Kelly fumbled to set the picture down, dove out of the seat, crouched below the desk, and as quietly as possible unzipped her overnight bag. She removed the cleaver, which she’d pried from the cook’s surprisingly strong dead hands, by its handle. She looked down at her own trembling hands, soft and weak, and wondered, for just a brief moment, if this was the right thing to do—but that wonder was almost instantly replaced by the thought of the many lives that could have been saved had she only done this sooner. She listened as the footsteps drew nearer (breathe in, breathe out), and then she jumped to her feet.

  I JUST FLEW IN FROM MACAU, AND BOY, ARE MY ARMS TIRED!

  ZHAO, WHO HAD BATHED IN THE GIRLS’ SHOWER ROOM AND CHANGED into fresh-ish clothes, strolled into the Old Meeting Place Restaurant. Its decorations were not ornate. Its walls were white. Its tile floor scuffed. Its tablecloths glowed an atrociously bright shade of yellow.

  A waitress, the same waitress who had waited on him at the other restaurant the night he’d signed the contract, the same waitress he had refused to fantasize about, appeared behind the hostess podium. She said, “Oh. Hello.”

  Zhao tried to hide his surprise, his pleasure that she’d remembered him. “You work here now? Small world.”

  “Jobs come and go,” she said with a smile. Then, back to business, she said, “Follow me, please.”

  Zhao obliged, simultaneously awed at this lucky coincidence and scared to death at the prospect of this mystery meeting. As he followed, he stared down at her legs and found comfort only in the tiny flexes of her calf muscles.

  The officials sat around the table, stern expressions painted on their shiny faces. Zhao mentally rehearsed his self-criticism speech and awaited the verdict, the scolding, the shame, the demand that he pay the 100,000-yuan penalty. Better, yes, than a death sentence, better than prison, better than becoming a media pariah, better than dealing with this joke of a legal system—but, still, maybe he should have run after Kelly. Maybe he should have fled toward whatever freedom she left seeking.