The Year of the Hydra

by William Broughton Burt

  I can’t believe that I’m saying this. I check short-term memory to be sure. I’m saying it all right.

  “Something is… turned wrong,” I tell the two men. “I can’t feel anything. I drink. I snort. I smoke. I—”

  “You what?” asks Zhu.

  I enunciate the words carefully. “Snort. Smoke. Ganja. Shit. Spliff.”

  “You mean,” he asks in amazement, “some kind of drugs?”

  “Some kind of drugs.”

  Zhu’s voice is a little different as he translates. Dr. Wang’s face is impassive. Finally the doctor replies. Lots of words, lots of shrugs, lots of puffs on Hong Ta. The people in the windows are losing interest.

  “Dr. Wang is say,” Zhu tells me, “need to regulate the mind. Once mind is regulate…”

  Zhu drones on. I look at the doctor, who is still giving me this endlessly patient expression, yet I feel that he has yet to see me at all. I know perfectly well what’s going on here. Of the three people in this room, not counting those half-inside the windows, two are healthy, centered, well-balanced humans who inhabit their lives with simple, direct grace. Are you doing it wrong? Well then, begin doing it right. What could be simpler? And what could be more impossible for these two men to understand than human being number three, the one somehow removed from his offices, somehow outside looking in, gesturing to those inside and warm, saying how do I get in there? And they, in their innocence, their maddening ingenuousness, can only reply: why you’re just in here.

  The street is quiet as Zhu and I step out into the harsh sunlight. There’s no one in red socks. Zhu is darkly silent during the long walk to my hotel. At the construction site, the lime is no longer burning. Workers are mixing it with water and sand, re-laying Five Flower Stone over new sewer line. Walking ahead of us are two women with ponytails. Neither is Ana Manguella.

  I think there was once a time when things mattered. A boyish interval, an awkward interlude, less than a summer, more than a pity. I can almost remember the taste of it but could no more call it back than serve it on a wedge of rye, that too-simple and overly angular abstraction, virtue, which my sister clings to as to a porcelain doll while denying the smallest portion to me. Nor am I entirely certain that I would call it back if I could, just to see it perish once more beneath the bone-splintering press of the world’s baseline indifference. And my own. At times I feel its weight like a cement truck, the antipathy of this doomed race of smelly flesh-ripping monkeys whose deepest devotion is to the sniffing of paint cans. “I find that entirely offensive,” said Ana Manguella. “If you must know, it doesn’t become you at all.” Nor does the color orange. When she bid me farewell at the Guangzhou train station, the Englishwoman offered up a piece of advice, and my stomach drew in protectively. “If you really want to contribute something here, you simply must find a way to ground yourself. You could begin by taking off that moldavite. It’s from outer space, you know. I can’t imagine how you intend to accomplish anything at all here, Julian, when you’ve yet to acknowledge that you’ve arrived.” For a moment, the two cool eyes held me almost tenderly and I wondered how this woman could have known about the moldavite pendant hidden beneath my shirt. I felt a sudden urge to tear it off my neck and hand it to her, to wrap it in the cool porcelain fingers just to discover what moment it might bring to her face. I think I would’ve had she not so quickly turned away.

  I’ve no idea what I think anymore. I’ve yet to completely claw my way out of the stupendous stupor of two nights ago, let alone the teeming hideom of my days and nights since boarding a plane in Memphis with a quarter-formed apprehension and a half-pound of multi-grind. Here I am panting at ten thousand feet, my shattered right hand pulsing with each step, while the other clutches a bundle of pungent herbs wrapped in a Beijing Daily from eleven months ago.

  “I know sometimes is very hard,” Zhu’s hoarse whisper says to me now as he walks dolefully at my side. His eyes don’t rise to meet mine. “Sometimes I too feel this way. Don’t have the wife. Don’t have the job. Daughter go away. I start get old. Think about this only make me feel sad, so just get up, put on the shoes, go walk somewhere.”

  Zhu turns to peer at me, his eyes enormous in the thick lenses. “Julian, please don’t take the drugs. Just go out someplace. Go walk, talk to somebody have the trouble more than you. You feel better like me.”

  My eyes hold the melancholy face for a moment, unexpectedly touched by the concern of this gaunt man I’ll never see again. If only his kindness didn’t make me feel that much worse. Zhu and I continue up the hill, each of us gazing thoughtfully at Five Flower Stone as though at any moment one of us will say something encompassing. It doesn’t come.

  Chapter Nine

  This is the day it hits me square in the big American nose. I can feel it coming. I’m leaning into it, a lifetime’s experience having established just how long one can paddle blithely up de’ Nile before the crocodile surfaces beneath the boat. Whether that will turn out to have much or little to do with recent errors in judgment, as opposed to those of yore, probably matters not at all. It is, at least, a comfort to know that all I have to do is paddle a wee bit farther before the answers come quite obligingly to me.

  This is situational depression, I tell myself, abetted by the laconic three-day rain that has re-enlivened old Kunming scents and left my very soul to question what is sweat and what precipitation, what ambient hydrogen sulfate and what just the Kunming film.

  As the drizzle seems to have abated for the moment, I pause at a street corner to wrestle my double-jointed umbrella closed. Not easily done with one hand. As I struggle pitifully, a gap-toothed man in a Chicago Bulls cap studies my face from about nine inches away, as rapt and unselfconscious as if watching two dogs screw in the park. Now another man joins him, leaning forward seemingly to count my nose hairs. Now the two men turn to discuss.

  Kunming, one more horridly huge and hugely horrid Han city, is the capital of Yunnan Province and home to two million people innocent of additional options. It is home, as well, to a functioning X-ray machine. Thus, finally, three-plus days after one very nasty fall from grace, my right hand is now embraced by a white plaster cast as clean as the dreams of an unfevered child. No one has signed it. I feel so unpopular.

  Simple clean break, I was told, and thanks to Dr. Yang’s poultice, completely unknitted.

  As I cannot possibly close this umbrella and the gap-toothed fellow and his friend are too deep in conversation to assist, I give up and cross the intersection against the light, hopeful that my steps will bear me in the general direction of edible. The charcoal grill at the overcrowded and under-cleaned Kunming train station didn’t particularly beckon. Just beside the counter was a pile of garbage as high as a horse’s back. All around lay damp, miserable Chinese elbow-to-elbow on blankets and newspapers like war dead, most of them awaiting the same squalid train, a hard sleeper to Guangzhou outbound in two and a half hours. Until then, I get to skulk along these pitted and rain-fouled streets, clinging to my double-jointed umbrella and muttering Bro’ Foucault beneath my breath while scouting for a semi-hygienic restaurant or a particularly nasty massage parlor, whichever comes first. Not that I haven’t learned my lesson.

  Then, it may have been a situational lesson.

  It hurts, by the way. The hand beneath the handsome white cast. More so all the time, as my beleaguered liver seems finally to have cleared all traces of pain-dulling substances—which begs the question, why do I still awake each morning with no clue as to where I am, not even the continent whereupon I dip among these inimitable dip slopes. On this particular morning it was at least five minutes before I constructed a line of logic and ten before I was willing to buy in. Just because something runs in a straight line doesn’t make it true, no more than being unable to locate my meds for three consecutive days means they are lost.

  I wish I had a little more of that sticky black opium.

  A hard sleeper, I have learned, is a cramped bunkhouse on steel wheels. Th
ere are no assigned bunks, thus “boarding” is far too kind a word for what happens when the train hisses to a near-halt. Hopefully I’ll wind up with a lower berth with no all-night card games left or right—the players sit on your bed—and no additional war wounds. From Guangzhou I’ll take a first-class train to Shenzhen where Lillian and Tree now await placement for their concurrent one-year sentences in separate but equal high schools. There I shall inquire of the higher angels of Tree’s nature as to when and where I’m to receive that passel of pages that our little strumpet Truman seems now to be dangling, and for which I’ve evidently bartered my immortal soul. Personally I don’t care whether I’m to comfort the world’s chuul-ren or deliver them on a skewer. That New York publisher is practically panting for the final chapter of The End of Day and I’m at pains to come up with a fresh excuse for not delivering it. Meanwhile I’d do well to place another parcel of Chinese-y with Miriam and quickly, before she disremembers my airfare.

  Magazine Mariposa is a tax shelter for an arms manufacturer. Grenade launchers. I haven’t mentioned this to Lillian, nor should you. It’s a situation. Life’s full of them.

  And I should petition Bernie for another little bottle of syzygy. I mean another little bottle of meds. Bernie writes me the good pills, and I get him into the B parties in New York. Actually they’re the C parties, but Bernie doesn’t know that. Not that I’m particularly disturbed just this moment. Situationally depressed is all. One point nine, maybe one nine five, is all. The coping mechanisms kick in at two.

  This particular dreary stretch of Kunming seems long on butchers and sheet-metal shops and short on sanitary eating establishments, say nothing of particularly nasty massage parlors. I’d settle just now for a clean one. Chinese men are fond of paying young women to stroll up and down the backs of their legs—which explains the plumbing above Chinese massage tables, I’m happy to have learned. The masseuse clings to the pipes while making Wan Fan Shan squeal like a widdle pig. Afterward comes an hour of the most exquisite pressure-point torture followed by the kind of spirited steaming-towel rub-down that Chairman Mao preferred to bathing the last two decades of his life. Which is exactly the kind of vector Bro’ Foucault warned us about, not that we were listening.

  We should have been.

  Whether we hang our hat on circumstance or our balls out on chance, there’s still this seething background murmur that one can but notice between his/her little wheezes, his/her lame saxophone rationalizations while struggling one-handed with a two-handed umbrella. Or whilst going through the pockets of one’s backpack the thirty-third time, unsure whether, when last we triple-checked for the meds, they were there, clearly there, but we somehow failed to recognize them.

  I just spent an hour in a soggy internet café where I checked my various email accounts, alternative realities, faux realities, and all such like. They were all fine. Lillian notified me that Shenzhen has palm trees. A former associate reminded me that I owe him money. There was an email from Ralpho that provided a link to his article on “the real truth about globel [sic] warming.” Catastrophic climate change, says Ralpho, turns out to have less to do with petro emissions than biological ones. Human flatulence, we’re gradually learning, contains an organic compound that combines with elements of the upper atmosphere in a way that traps radiant heat like a black Lincoln Town Car. This information is being suppressed, says Ralpho, as there seems no real alternative to a massive die-off. So while the privileged few will hunker in their bunkers, the rest of us will be left to fart ourselves into oblivion. Happily, Ralpho’s article proposes a kinder solution, namely the establishment of two days per week—Tuesdays and Thursdays are suggested—when we all hold it. If everyone were to participate, emissions could be reduced by nearly thirty percent, which is not an insignificant amount. Refraining from the consumption of beans on those same days might go farther still, suggests Ralpho. Personally I think he was absent from school the day they taught Newton’s Fourth Law concerning the conservation of gaseous matter. Anyway, I’ve always held it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s my contribution.

  Good thing I was unable to close my umbrella. The low clouds are once more beginning to ooze, to the chagrin of my bladder which is nearing the point of no return. China has no public restrooms—none at all—thus, the defining sensation of being in this country is an unending sorrowful cramp in the midsection, and as I have left the train station a dozen blocks behind, it seems time to embrace an eatery.

  I pause amid the puddles to look both ways, and I briefly consider the three phone numbers moldering in my wallet. Please help this colorless foreign devil every courtesy. Too bad I don’t do telephones. Neither did e. e. cummings, as you may know. His feeling, and I understand utterly, was that if someone really wanted to speak to him, he had a front door with a serviceable bell. Still I can’t quite bring myself to throw those numbers away, nor the tattered note of introduction stuck fast to them. Tree would accuse me of harboring an intuition, but it’s likely more a case of undifferentiated fear. I’m less and less interested in separating these things out.

  Her Tree-ness is excited, said Lillian’s email, as the movie version of Bi (rhymes with pee) Yu Nu’s latest book debuts tonight in Beijing amid rumors that the author himself may appear, ending three decades of speculation as to his identity. As tickets are impossible to come by, Tree plans to be part of the mob in front of the theater. A Room of Eyes. That’s the title of both the book and the movie. I once visited a room constructed entirely of antonyms. Eyes, no. But there seems to be a room for pretty much everything.

  I pause in front of a small diner. It’s gloomy, fly-swirling, and oppressively wet, which probably makes it the finest restaurant in all of Kunming. Stepping inside, I find myself hydroplaning on deposits of cooking oil from the Xin dynasty. I steady myself on a table and its plastic cover, precipitating a sssschlllp sound when I peel my hand off. Taking a seat, I discover that the menu is just as sticky. I order a beer and a number-one, whatever that is, and mime to the waitress that I’d very much like to wash my hands.

  Follow me, she signals.

  I follow, grease-skating, through a tiny door and its frayed curtain into a wretched hole of a kitchen. Amid piles of unwashed pots and pans is a metal sink beneath a dirty rubber hose. The startled expression of the cook informs me that I’m the first patron to ever ask to wash his hands. My present needs call for an actual restroom, however, so I grudgingly produce the requisite word, the only Mandarin one I know.

  Follow me.

  Tree blames it all on little René Descartes. From the red tides of Tobago to the blue moons of Kentucky, from our tiny beads of sweat as we strain against the multiplication tables in fourth grade, to smart bombs that aren’t quite smart enough to not go off—it all goes onto little René’s account. The conquest of the world, he was told in a dream, was to be accomplished through number. Not integer, mind you. It was an angel who hot-whispered these flawed words, fluttering down to the edge of town to pop the clutch and send the world fishtailing into Act Three of either farce or tragedy, you choose. As though there remains much of a choice, dear ones. Neither x axis, nor y, let alone that zany z, proffers a place to lay weary head on cold night, you may have noticed—and where exactly do we go with these issues, having saved neither the original packaging nor the sales slip. But never mind. The waitress is leading me slip-sliding back through the diner and out once more to the sidewalk from whence I came. Giggling in the rain, she points across the street, forefinger indicating an entire hectare of jumbled doors and signs, not one of which even suggests a restroom, and I use my best Charlie Chaplin to complain about this. She just keeps giggling and pointing.

  Disgusted, I muck my way back inside to fetch my backpack and double-jointed umbrella, waitress all the while shouting insults at what appears to be a teenage boy asleep beneath a table. He emerges stupidly to fuss with his hair, which had evidently been a spiked Mohawk at some earlier moment of the day, now resembling nothing so much as a sun
-dried dead animal. The waitress, still yammering, shoves the boy toward me and a moment later I’m following him across the street.

  The rain comes down heavier. Torpid teen tosses his head, and the spikes send off shimmering arcs of droplets, thin rivulets meanwhile running down narrow neck to disappear beneath black vinyl to seek the earth’s center along the path of least developmental disability. He’s wearing forty zippers at the least. In front of each ear meanwhile hangs a thin lock of hair in hopeful suggestion of sideburns. Despite the downpour, he is stubbornly unhurried, sauntering, hands in pockets, and why hasten through a world wherein one moment you’re snoring beneath a table and the next leading a monochrome giant through the stinking rain, no difference between the texture of the day and that of your undies. Which I think speaks to the growing tendency among retirement-age banking executives to sniff their secretaries’ office chairs just after they’ve left in a good mood, for lunch. Marvel not that Bro’ Foucault says unto you: the world we view is nothing like the one we inhabit but only its shadow, a timid footnote to discourses among gods far too fair to imagine, nor do they imagine us save when in sudden and dire need of a little pussy wussy. All of reality, its flotsam and jetsam, its unsigned scorecards and unfinished masters theses, all of this improbable hurdy-gurdy oompah occurs not at center stage at all, nor even off-off Broadway but in some fly-swirling diner in a neighborhood where the taxis don’t slow down. Which perhaps puts it a little negatively. But I’m pushing a one point nine. Maybe one nine five.

  Obediently following zipper-boy into soggy alleyway, I’m careful to hold the double-jointed umbrella directly above the new plaster cast. Otherwise, I take it, we have so much oatmeal without any real description of a spoon. Abruptly the boy stops among chicken droppings and dog spare parts at the foot of an improbably massive staircase of rusted steel, at its top a moldering wooden third-floor balcony. He points toward the balcony, which features an anonymous door at either end.