I swallow hard.
After staring at me for a moment, the man sets down the joint and produces, sequentially, a roach bearing the words “Workers of . . ,” a quarter-ounce bag of crap marijuana, an irregular cake of hashish, a small grey nugget of opium, and a torn, defiled book of the maxims of Mao Zedong. The bag also contains some crumpled photos of Mao lifted from a trash can.
Another long gaze.
Unhurriedly the grey-haired man returns each object to the bag, zips it closed, and places it on the desk between us.
“Mr. Mancer,” says a mild voice, its accent both British and Chinese, “do you know how old that girl is?”
A bit hoarsely, I reply, “No.”
“Thirteen,” he says, his gaze fixed on me.
My throat tries to swallow again. It lacks the spit.
The officer says, “You seem to be having a good time in Dali. Would you say that’s so?”
He waits. I don’t know how to answer.
“No?” he asks evenly. “Is there something additional we can do to make your stay more enjoyable?”
“Uh, if I may,” I manage, “I’m a writer for an American magazine. If you’ll just call Miriam Goldfarb at—”
“Oh? You’re a writer?” he interrupts. “What is your assignment here in Dali?”
“Actually, I’m researching China’s ethnic minorities.”
He stares, unblinking.
“I know that sounds a little funny,” I say.
After a moment, the officer replies, “No, that’s not funny. I’ll tell you what’s funny. That thirteen-year-old girl has been charged with prostitution. She’ll remain here until she reaches fourteen years of age. Then she will begin a prison sentence of ten years. In a Chinese prison, Mr. Mancer, life expectancy is a little more than eight.”
I avoid his gaze.
Abruptly the officer sits back. The chair squeaks. “I am married to a Bai woman. They were once a very strong people, the Bai. So were the Naxi, and the Dai, and the Mosou and the other peoples in these mountains. They received everything they needed from the lakes and the forests. Then outsiders came with their tourist money. Their drug money. Their sex money. Now these same people are criminals and drug addicts. Their children have HIV. That girl you were with tonight? I know her family. Her father has a drug habit. He sold his daughter to that—”
“That place,” he says almost too softly to hear.
The grey-haired man picks up the ziplock bag, gazes at it, then sets it down again. “There’s no need to call your magazine. Someone has already spoken to me concerning your… situation.”
I look at him blankly.
“In any event, my government doesn’t approve of placing Americans in jail for anything short of axe murder.” He looks up at me. “Do you plan to murder anyone with an axe, Mr. Mancer?”
He awaits an answer.
My “no” is almost inaudible.
The officer gazes at me, nodding slowly for what seems a full minute. Finally he rises and leaves the room. The ziplock bag is still on the table. I can’t bring myself to look at it. A few minutes later, two bronze-skinned policemen enter and lock the door behind them. They aren’t smiling.
Except for the little red book and its endearing photos, everything in the ziplock bag is forced up my ass. The next thing I remember is the long, bitter struggle to awake. Slowly, by awful degrees, I realize that I am sprawled on the bed of the Marigold Suite, my right arm twisted beneath me. It is hours before I understand anything. I understand now. I understand now.
The young man across the aisle has finished with the sunflower seeds. He wads the brown paper bag and tosses it out my window, missing my nose by an inch. The two Mao-capped men are leaning against each other, asleep. I no longer feel that I’m drawing closer to anything.
My hand is throbbing viciously. I grope for the tin of aspirin that may be in my left pants pocket. It isn’t there. Adjusting my posture, I try digging in the right pocket with my left hand. It’s impossible. Exhausted, I give up.
If only I could stop thinking about her. Could stop catching the scent of her or imagining that I do. Soon I’ll put some distance between myself and this degradation. I’ll cease to know quite so clearly that I have failed even my lowest instincts and, without some stranger’s intercession, would be utterly and finally undone. It’s a situation. I’ll arrive in another town. I’ll locate my meds. I’ll find my equilibrium. I’ll shower all this off me. I’ll walk into a Western medical clinic smelling of honest wood alcohol and have this throbbing horror of a right hand properly X-rayed and set. I’ll produce field notes with tidy vertical margins and clear pronoun reference. I’ll vanish without a trace into Julian Mancer.
Refocusing on the tin of aspirin, I decide to search my backpack. Sighing, I snake my good left hand into the nearest pocket of the backpack. The hand closes around an unfamiliar shape, and I pull out a butane lighter imprinted with the image of Quan Yin, Goddess of Mercy and Inflammable Petroleum Byproducts. “You come here receive the teaching,” I was told in a paint-flaking temple. “Quan Yin give this teaching to you.”
I stare dully at the lighter.
It begins to rain. The passengers scramble to throw the bus windows up. They’re laughing, giddy from the negative ions and the sudden burst of activity. The bus reaches the end of the fertile valley and hurls itself up the side of a mountain. The pavement changes from blacktop to a noisy pebbled concrete. Through my window, I look down on a churning mist denser with each switchback. We are leaving the place where we have been. Maybe that’s the same as going somewhere.
Chapter Eight
It’s not as though Joseph Campbell wasn’t alert to the situation. Though a lesser one than you might have guessed from the boring pants and wheezy voice that something short of fraichement coupe was going on here, but believe as you must. We are each free to choose our own décor, our most representative room in which to die our death, and die it we do. Just don’t undershoot the landing strip. The hissing serpents and run-afoul seraphim of deepest night retreat not before our misunderstanding, friend. All is other than. All is deeply rooted in a foreign soil.
Which is to say, I still don’t know where my meds are. I’m increasingly loathe to look for them, actually, as my fingers have tired of the same stuttering zippers, the same dutiful snaps, only to discover once more the forlorn and ill-loved items encountered before. Syzygy. That’s what the zippers say to me of late. I don’t know what it means.
Dawn is Lijiang. That much seems clear enough. The first rays over Eastern Mountain hit this tangle of stone and weathered pine planking at just the right angle to deepen every shadow and roughen every texture, adding a cast of pink to the chiseled stone and dabbed plaster of an ethnic village in many ways unchanged for eight centuries.
Just this instant, the sun is high enough to roll the morning chill into little whorls of warmth, inducing mini-slumbers as I curl around my cup of yak-butter tea at this rooftop café of no name. I’m awaiting my guide and interpreter, Zhu (pronounced Jew), a tall, somber widower who late yesterday promised me a competent doctor for my right hand. “Is best doctor Lijiang,” said Zhu. “We go very early. Dr. Wang always so busy.”
British travel writer Bruce Chatwin once stopped in Lijiang to see a doctor. Suffering from appendicitis, Chatwin was given poisonous mushroom spores to inhale. The appendix got better. The rest of him died. It’s probably a good thing I’m not that kind of writer.
Trotting to my table, my young waitress poses a question in Mandarin with great formality. I nod agreeably, and off she goes. I wonder what I have just agreed to. Hopefully nothing to do with mushrooms.
The café of no name is, in fact, no café at all but the rooftop of the Yu family’s ancestral home overlooking Lijiang’s dense quilt of grey-tiled roofs. As the Yus’ gate opens upon the most frequented foot route to a park of eight-hundred-year-old cedars, it was a simple enough matter to place a hand-lettered sign at the gate offering tea and pastries.
Now when a stranger wanders into their courtyard, as have I, Grandmother Yu looks up from her gardening, takes note of you, and shouts to the granddaughter who comes running, tying on an apron and pointing to the narrow staircase. But not before you have glimpsed a centuries-old rhythm of living and read the silent messages of worn stone and unplaned pine, the clutter of often-used things, the three birdcages of tiny flutterings, the slowly turning wheel of morning chores, the self-renewing drama of anthropos muddle-os, the hero’s journey sans hero.
I take a look at my swollen right hand and ponder the likelihood of our Dr. Wang’s having an X-ray machine. As likely, he’s just received word of the thermometer.
At least my thinking has cleared a bit this morning, or so I self-congratulate as I lift the broad-handled ceramic cup and note its gloss finish. Granddaughter Yu brings me a croissant hard enough to produce a thunk as it hits the plate, over her shoulder the eighteen-thousand-foot preponderance called Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Such a charming name for a volcano whose next stirring will cheerfully cook everyone here alive. You feel the threat with your eyes closed.
My good left hand trembles a bit as it lifts the ceramic cup.
Syzygy is a dangerous word. All those consonants and not a single standard American vowel. Thunk I find much easier to be around.
This particular tea¬—of Tibetan origin, as are most things Naxi—contains egg, ground sesame seeds and walnuts, and milk of yak. My hand trembles again as I set down the cup, and I wonder how long before the analgesic properties of certain recent excesses wear off entirely and what exactly happens to me then. Reasonable question, as I see it, but before I can conjure a suitable answer, a navy baseball cap pulses up the narrow stairs, followed by an unsmiling face behind thick glasses. This would be guide and interpreter Zhu.
Reaching my table, Zhu says, “Hello. Please we go now.” He declines to sit, preferring to wait dolefully at the head of the stairs as Granddaughter Yu runs to fetch my change.
My legs are a bit wobbly as I rise to follow my guide into the street. Right away I’m panting two and three strides behind Zhu as we press through the charcoal smells of morning. I fight the urge to look over my shoulder. Just because someone in red socks is following you doesn’t mean you have to turn and look at him.
Yesterday I was certain I’d spotted Ana Manguella in a street market. A blanket-wrapped woman, her face turned away, was buying fruit, and from the thick ponytail and my own fusty mind, she was exactly Ana until she wheeled, revealing a face something like a knee. We were put together once, a crisp voice once told me. It can happen again. And Mao’s missing testicle may materialize in my left shirt pocket.
Zhu and I skirt around a pile of lime that has caught fire at center. Unhurriedly three construction workers carry buckets of water from the river. As each bucket is dumped onto the pile, a burst of steam erupts, hissing and popping violently.
Just to be sure, I check my left shirt pocket. No testicle.
Zhu leads me across an arched bridge of cut stone. To know Lijiang, Zhu has told me, kneeling at yesterday’s dusk to touch a paving stone, one must know Five Flower Stone. Centuries ago Naxi stonemasons used the pebble-studded rose granite to lift their village from the mud, stone-channeling the Jade River into canals that reached every home, installing waterwheels and self-brimming public wells, laying streets and bridges smooth enough for wheeled carts, even creating a system of locks that make it possible still to flood and scrub down entire sections of Lijiang. All of this was constructed without mortar, resulting in a city all but earthquake-proof, scarcely noticing a seven point two a few years back.
At just past seven, Dr. Wang is in. I pay the receptionist the two point nine yuan required for an office visit—less than twenty-five cents. Following Zhu into a large frumpy office, I discover an old man behind a cluttered desk beneath two vast unscreened windows open to the busy sidewalk, the passersby practically close enough to donate blood. Behind the desk, Dr. Wang is preoccupied with opening a fresh pack of Hong Ta cigarettes. I study the smooth-skinned face beneath the blue Mao cap. Wild salt-and-pepper eyebrows flare two and three inches from his brow, the scattered chin whiskers every bit as seditious. You can’t look at Dr. Wang and not think wizened. As though hearing the thought, he glances up and points to a chair. Unhurriedly the doctor lights a cigarette, sits back, and gives me a calm, appraising look.
Zhu seats himself at my left and says in a hushed voice, “You can ask Dr. Wang something. I tell you the meaning.”
“I have a broken hand,” I say irritably.
The doctor says something.
“Dr. Wang ask,” Zhu translates, “what is happen to your hand?”
I turn to look at Zhu. “I broke it. I have a broken hand.”
Zhu translates timidly, taking forever. I survey the office, hoping to discover something recognizably medical. Aside from the stethoscope around the doctor’s neck, this place could be a really bad church rummage sale. On one table is a fishbowl filled with dried insects. Next to it is an unstrung tennis racket.
“Would you please ask the doctor if he knows how to set a bone,” I interrupt Zhu. “Has he ever done it before?”
Zhu is speechless for a moment. Finally he says, “Yes, Dr. Wang is know.”
The doctor guffaws and blows Hong Ta smoke toward the ceiling.
Patience gone, I place my right elbow on the cluttered desk, hold up my rutabaga of a right hand for Dr. Yang to see, and rotate it slowly for full effect. Even the people on the street are getting this.
“Please tell Dr. Wang,” I say carefully, “that I broke my smallest finger, and possibly one or more bones of the palm, two nights ago and therefore must have the bones set immediately or they will heal improperly. Can you translate that?”
Zhu sets his feet carefully on the floor and begins in earnest. I fall back in my chair, my beleaguered heart hammering, meanwhile pretending not to notice the two adolescent girls seated half-inside the windows, listening. A very thin man stands near them, studying me. I can’t see whether he’s wearing red socks.
As Zhu rattles on, Dr. Wang sets down his Hong Ta, takes a sip from the spout of a brass teapot, and hurries around the desk to grab my left wrist. Immediately, a frown. He’s checking the three pulses. Ah. So much better than an X-ray.
Dr. Wang sticks out his tongue. I return the favor and he examines my tongue with an expression of distaste. Now he’s dabbing at my chest with his stethoscope.
Zhu asks, “Do you have the high, uh, high…”
“Blood pressure?” I say. “No, but I can feel it coming on.”
Dr. Wang goes back to my pulses, still scowling.
“Dr. Wang say your heart is like a very young man.”
“Clean living,” I reply.
Now the doctor’s fingertips are probing beneath my ribs. I feel that he’s half-inside my body cavity.
“He say something is make the liver tired,” reports Zhu. “Also say something is on your head.”
“I’m sorry?”
“On your… thinking,” says Zhu.
“On my mind?”
“Yes. Something on your mind.”
“There’s always something on my mind,” I inform him.
When Wang hears the translation, he stops examining me. Speaking to Zhu in a near-falsetto, he returns to his chair.
“Dr. Wang say,” Zhu translates, “this is why your body have the problem. Stop the problem in the mind, is fix the problem in the body.”
I look from face to face. “I have a problem with the body because I fell off the damn bed.”
Zhu stares at me for what seems a full minute before breaking into peals of laughter. His laugh is eerily like that of Desi Arnaz.
Wang leans across the desk, eager for the translation. When he finally gets it, he begins slapping the desk, his wheezy laugh almost inaudible. On cue, the girls in the windows practically fall into the office laughing. Now they’re telling a couple of other people. A crowd is forming.
> I look down at my throbbing hand. I’d have been better off wrapping the goddamn thing in frozen fish.
Finally, Dr. Wang says something to Zhu, who’s wiping his tears on a rag from his pocket. Zhu blows his nose twice before continuing. “Doctor say, if no problem is in the mind, why you do this to yourself?”
I look across the desk. Wang, no longer laughing, stares awaiting my answer.
I sigh. It’s a long story, okay? Forcing a smile, I say, “Well, it’s done now, isn’t it? Why don’t we just concentrate on fixing it?”
After the translation, Wang answers listlessly, lighting a second Hong Ta from the first.
Zhu says, “Doctor say, no fix your hand today. Give you some kind of tea, some kind of leaf make your hand go small. Bone is stay very soft.”
I give Wang a glance. I feel mushroom therapy coming.
Now the doctor speaks at length, shrugging his shoulders with every other sentence, pausing once or twice to sip tea from the spout of his dirty teapot. The half-dozen people at the windows are leaning in, holding their collective breath. It must be quite a speech.
Finally Zhu turns to me. “Dr. Wang say fix the problem too quick like put bone together wrong. Is need keep soft. Is need—” Zhu pauses to search his mind for appropriate words. “Is need fix the mind or next time break the neck of your head.”
I’m still forcing a smile. “But it isn’t easy to fix the mind.”
As this is translated, the doctor’s face seems to expand in surprise. Now he chortles merrily. The people in the windows think it’s pretty funny, too.
Zhu translates, “Many things not so easy. You want the advice, Dr. Wang tell you something very true answer.”
I close my eyes for a moment and try to focus. Forget the people in the windows. Forget the swollen hand. Forget everything except what these two men are struggling to offer me. When I open my eyes, I find them moist. “Please tell the doctor that I am a very sad man. So sad that I’ve no idea how I remain alive.”
The Year of the Hydra Page 9
