The Year of the Hydra

by William Broughton Burt

  I said yes.

  Always say yes.

  Lillian knows nothing of this particular matter, despite her charming approach to wondering what I’m thinking, which is to suck it out of my brain with a Dyson DC07 vacuum. Co-semi-existent is the word her shrink prefers to codependent in our case, and he’s one of the few who’s gotten it right. Imagine being tethered for life to someone no more free than yourself to be the sum of her constituent parts. You’re walking around in each other’s genomes. You’re entangled kite strings on a March afternoon. You’re the funhouse mirrors minus all the fun. You’re the whipping boy and the whipping post, oh such a fine story for olives and toast.

  It’s the right moment.

  I slam down my longneck on the plastic table cover, and the waitress’s head swivels. At the same instant, the old man looks up from his noodles, and Fermat attempts to turn over in his grave but lacks the requisite smooth muscle mass. Only zippered teenager doesn’t stir. I lift the envelope and give the expensive paper stock an appreciative sniff. Mitsumata, I decide, though the weight is a bit more Schurman. I may yet discover that I am lucid-napping in my garage apartment in Memphis, nothing at all in my hand but my favorite constituent part. But it seems so real. We all live within the flickering shadows of Plato’s cave, or at least time-share with the Wilsons, wondering whether we out-picture the picture or the picture out-pictures us, as though it matters one way or the other at the end of the billing cycle. All is tethered. All is other than. Something somewhere rears its head, or nine of them, and not one of us is free to not taste its sour breath in our mouths. Screw Fermat. He invented something that fits absolutely nowhere, whereas—and here is the juicy nougat center or so it seems after those warm brown bottles of pi—I fit everywhere.

  Especially naked.

  One yank on the silk pull-thread, and the envelope parts effortlessly, revealing a single tri-folded page. No check. No tickets. No gift certificate to Luby’s. Just a single folded sheet of paper which I pop open. One sentence in twelve-point Courier New:

  “China is no longer safe for you and your sister.”

  I wave for my check. It’s pointless, I know, to consider such matters within the context of a moment no more finely textured than this—the word brackwurst suggests itself—but at this juncture, one hypothesis seems difficult to dismiss. China may no longer be safe for myself and my sister.

  Chapter Eleven

  Don’t give the Chinese money. They’ll build something hideous. It’s like giving money to Elvis, only worse because you can ignore a pink sofa. Try ignoring a pink sixty-three-story building. With fins. You look up and say to yourself man anything with that much chrome should come with AM radio. But there are dozens of structures in this brave new city that if erected in the States would result in angry citizens’ committees. But what can you expect from the people who invented Stir Fried Pork with Egg and Black Fungus? Welcome to Shenzhen, pronounced roughly sun zun, the city hailed by the Limey Guidebook as “a soulless assemblage of obscene architecture and Chinese camp.” But every country should have an Orlando.

  I’m journaling on a plastic park bench in Dongmen Shopping District, which is best described as six hundred acres of convoluted shopping malls and department hives that offer up all the expensive crap that modern man can’t possibly live without, from ugly German stereos to TVs too large to deliver without a crane. Twenty-three years ago, there was nothing here but a sleepy fishing village and an uncanny silence. This whole fuchsia and chrome skyscraper-ripped conglomeration of greed portals—China’s first Special Economic Zone—popped up like a bad mushroom in 1980 and shows no signs of relenting. Yesterday I stopped at a random street corner and looked up, wondering how many under-construction high-rises I could count from that spot.

  Twenty-two.

  This plastic bench is imprinting my ass with longitudinal bars, making me feel uncomfortably like Old Glory, but it’s not yet time to meet Arnie for a late breakfast at the restaurant of our too-expensive hotel. I shift my position diagonally on the plastic bench and go for something more along the lines of the Union Jack.

  It burns when I pee. I thought you’d want to know. The meds were indeed inside my wool socks. Thought I’d pass that nugget along, as well. The cast comes off my right hand in three weeks. Thanks for asking.

  At nine in the morning, Dongmen Shopping District looks like Coney Island in February, so boarded up and grease-mucked you’d swear it would take a league of men in white spacesuits to re-open it. But an hour from now, yawning nineteen-year-old women with orange hair will throw open garage doors and drag loudspeakers outside, and food vendors will begin whacking chicken, beef, and pork, and the smells of overheated woks will begin to compete with the seasoned yowl of the sidewalk. By nightfall, Dongmen will be a tornadic frenzy of buying and selling, over-amped music blaring from every other storefront, women with megaphones hyperventilating beside bins heaped like Iowa haystacks with rayon fashion knock-offs from Hong Kong, and throngs of shoppers, mostly girls in threes and fours, will choke every avenue of escape. Or so it may feel if you are fresh from a village whose entire nightlife centered around one thirty-watt bulb in a grocery store half the size of your too-expensive hotel room.

  I think I know why it burns when I pee.

  There are probably eleven million people in this town, though officially it’s a third that number. So splendiferous are the get-rich tales erupting from this semi-tropical jewel of a city that the government has surrounded Shenzhen with a very substantial electrified fence, a modern-day Great Wall against China’s restless hordes of toothless ex-farmers. In the coming decade more humans will be drifting into Chinese cities with a bedroll and a sack of turnips than live in most countries of the world, and all I can say is, the Party had better come up with a war to send all these Wangs and Fangs to, or somebody’s looking at one ugly electric bill.

  Unable to tolerate this plastic bench a moment longer, I rise and it kisses me goodbye. I wobble past the hocking and farting old men of morning, carefully dodging the yellow-brown gobs that, on high acid days, are capable of dissolving closed-cell polyurethane on contact. I check in all directions for signs of red-stockinged men, evil twins in epaulets, Mormons with satchels, and all such. None of the above, but the day is young. I turn toward my too-expensive hotel and breakfast with Arnie.

  Understand, the Chinese don’t spit for effect alone. Regular vehement hocking is considered crucial to one’s internal wellbeing. And it really builds the abs. Most health-conscious Chinese begin each day by stepping out into the syrupy air of morning to dredge up as much sedimentation as their tragic lungs can afford and directing it downward, preferably at some living thing, be it a rhododendron or the neighbor’s three-year-old.

  Say what you will, Shenzhen has actual birds. Living ones. And cartoonish palm trees. And a sky. It also has the same red taxis as in Beijing—I was hoping for something in a powder blue. Shenzhen features the same basic odor package as Beijing, I find, minus the ageing. The latter has had thousands of years for that distinctive munge to cross-reference and micro-acclimatize and just generally become disgusting.

  Shenzhen just needs a little time.

  After the late breakfast with Arnie, the plan is to take a city bus to Lil’s apartment, on-campus at her school, and help her hang the living room curtains. My sister says the other tenants—most of the thousand-plus employees of the school live on campus—amuse themselves by pressing their noses against her living room window, cupping their hands for a better view.

  “See,” I told her. “They love you already.”

  “Then why are they laughing?” asked Lil.

  “They’re a happy people.”

  True, actually, despite every reason to the contrary. Even the overburdened, under-sighted, and massively guilt-tripped schoolchildren of this country, their spindly legs bearing forty-pound book-bags hither and yon, seem to be perfectly well-adjusted. We are Chinese, seems to be the basic reasoning, so what could be so
bad? I could provide a short list but why spoil a perfectly good mass delusion?

  I definitely know why it burns when I pee. It’s the how I haven’t figured out. She never had her pants off, for the love of Mike. We seem to be looking at a case of immaculate contagion here. That’s unless those two nice policemen were kind enough to night-deposit something I’ve yet to recall, there to silently accumulate interest.

  Nah.

  After I help Lillian with the curtains, Tree will arrive for a highly anticipated and well-overdue séance. “I can’t promise,” she has said, “to produce Truman, or Schuman, or anybody else. Spirit is what it is, and it gives what it gives.”

  It’s the new material, the shall-we-say bordello papers, that have reacquired the good doctor’s interest. Save the world, beware chartreuse and purple, hang garlic and dried mice around your neck—Tree eats that stuff up. My own interest lies more along the lines of fresh pages of high-quality prose, and I don’t intend to leave my sister’s apartment without them, whatever I have to night-deposit or where.

  I round a corner and my too-titanium hotel swings into view. The prospect of a late breakfast with Arnie doesn’t particularly beckon. This chrome-sunglassed veteran of unnecessary wars and I have yet to discover anything in common beyond country of origin, number of toes, and acquaintanceship with Lillian—for whom I suspect this man of certain stirrings. At the thought, I shudder so hard that I almost lose a contact. Anyway Arnie invited me, which assumedly means he’s paying.

  A valet opens the too-grandiose door, and I enter a hotel lobby brimming with the usual white faces. Lil and Tree have already moved to their appointed schools, but most of the other fifty-odd American teachers still giddily await placement. This many Americans in a single spot constitutes a micro-culture, a floating suburb of Cincy complete with sporty shades, khaki shorts with too many pockets, and far too many sentences ending “sucks.” You also hear a lot of “sucks ass” from the young American women but only those who smoke cigarettes, which is a correspondence some psycho-linguist should definitely burrow into. Most of these teachers aren’t actually teachers but college kids with a healthy sense of the absurd. There’s also the middle-aged contingent consisting of Tree, Lil, Arnie, and one brassy, whiskey-voiced woman—I believe she’s from Sphincter, Ohio—who last night decided to take on the whole hotel staff because one of her placemats was missing. She’d bought a matching set of four in Dongmen Shopping District, and by God one of them was gone. If she’d screamed at those people another eleven seconds, I’d have emerged from my room with a throat lozenge and a Chinese dime and said, “Here, go buy seven more just like it.” But I’m always thinking of ways to be helpful.

  I walk past the hotel business center where a gaggle of Americans waits to use one of the three computers. Unable to sleep last night on my too-billiard-table bed, I downed the two complementary beers in the mini-fridge and took the elevator down to the business center to see if the net was up. It was, more or less. Table Tennis Weekly was available in nine languages. There wasn’t a whole lot else. In China, every international news site is blocked roughly one day in ten. The only news you can reliably get is government-penned and thus peppered with happy lies that absolutely everyone sees through. The Chinese know about government censorship and find it more or less agreeable. You develop a sense of things after a while. If the article says thirty-seven people died in the mine explosion, you pretty much know that the number was around a hundred. When you read that tens of thousands of rural health clinics are initiating vigorous education campaigns concerning STDs—I read such a story in yesterday’s English edition of the Beijing Daily complete with photos of triumphantly beaming doctors and nurses—you pretty much know that Chinese dicks are rotting off by the boatload and no one has a clue what to do about it. I don’t know why that image comes to mind just now.

  Anyway, after perusing Table Tennis Weekly in the morning’s wee hours, I checked my three email accounts and discovered fresh mailings from Miriam, each with the same basic thrust. Magazine Mariposa requires another article on Chinese ink painting, and fast—not that I wrote the first one. I lifted most of it from a museum brochure. I’m that kind of writer. And yes, Miriam, there’s more where that came from.

  There was also an email from Jeremy, a drinking companion back in Memphis who wants to know where I’ve vanished to. I owe Jeremy a bit of money, but he knows I’m good for it. Besides which, who ever had his nose slit open by someone named Jeremy?

  That particular financial setback, if you must know, came on the heels of a truly ugly one that occurred in a poorly decorated and altogether humorless game room in Tunica, Mississippi, and certainly they have noticed that my front porch is accumulating newspapers. And then there’s the really painful part. Just as I was about to pay off Jeremy and the game room, I was nailed for forty-nine large ones. Forty-nine thousand dollars in a single night, and this wasn’t to a drinking buddy or a poorly decorated game room but some pitted-faced guy from Kansas City named Louie. I kid you not. His name was Louie. Somebody named Louie will take your whole nose home as a trophy. He’ll give it to his dog for a chew toy. And that’s just a Louie from Gainesville. This came to pass during the aforementioned night of the gilded invitation and the limo driver and the improbable window of circumstance. I may or may not have mentioned the glass-topped table in the rear of the limo and the small lacquered box filled with—I think it was Twenty Mule Team Borax. By the time I arrived at the party, I was beyond intimidation by Jehovah or his big brother, tossing the gilded invitation to the three gym rats guarding the grand entry, sweeping a goblet of wine off a silver tray beneath the Chloe Sabine iron candelabra, and striding through the over-tanned crowd in search of the gaming table that I could smell as clearly as though it were stapled to my philthrum.

  Unfortunately, I found it.

  Now I’m thinking maybe I should look into a loan consolidation. They can take a little out of my check each month. Miriam actually does cut me a monthly check, though why anyone would put me on straight salary is beyond both B.F. Skinner’s comprehension and my own. I haven’t made a deadline since James Taylor had a hairline, and I find myself increasingly drawn to the repugnant theory that Miriam must have some kind of thing for me.

  Before returning to my too-firm bed in this morning’s weensy hours, I took a moment to net-search everyone’s favorite cuddly, the Hydra, which besides the whole nine-heads thing also turns out to have a bit of a breath problem. One whiff of the Hydra’s breath and you run with the dogs of Hades. All told, not the kind of enemy you’d choose even if you’re Hercules, not that I’m concerned about Hydrangea Laboratories. All we have here is a normal everyday profit-making enterprise with a black-box government contract or twelve, and if the Mancer twins provide somewhat cleaner data than the Sullivans or the Spullivans or the Stooligans, of course they’re going to apply a teensy bit of pressure till it becomes massively clear to them and anyone idly watching that the Mancers are not going to do the locomotion. Which, happily, is the case.

  No sooner do I push through the doors of the too-expensive restaurant than I’m hit in the face by a sour blast from Kenny J’s saxophone. I’m momentarily blinded. All I can see is the fleeting image of the ooze dribbling from a brass spit-valve.

  “So,” announces Arnie’s voice, “what does Lillian think of her apartment?”

  “It’s air-conditioned,” I reply, eyes slowly adjusting. Finally I make out Arnie, his usual mirrored aviator shades in place. The booth where he sits almost has room for one of my knees.

  “Want a menu?” asks Arnie.

  “Coffee,” I say, struggling to seat myself.

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “I just like saying it,” I tell him. “Order me a pot of tea at least as black as yours, though that may require steeping a pair of army boots for a fortnight. So, tell me. How are you exactly?”

  “What’s a fortnight?” asks Arnie.

  “In Britain, two weeks. Everywhere
else, fourteen days. You aren’t actually considering it, are you?”

  “Considering what?”

  “Soaking the boots.”

  Arnie stares at me for a moment then turns away.

  This is starting out well. Maybe I should tell him straightaway where my sister has moles and skin tags. Then again, that may intensify his stirrings. Another shudder goes through me. That’s two shudders inside twenty minutes. I haven’t come this close to an aerobic workout since being thrown off the high-school basketball team—something to do with shaving points in return for old copies of Tease magazine.

  The teapot arrives, and I request a few additional teabags. You don’t usually get bags in this country, let alone a pot, but rather a chaos of tea leaves floating at the top of a half-molten cellophane cup. Once the tea cools, you take tiny sips and spit the leaves across the room like everyone else.

  “When does the cast come off?” asks Arnie.

  “Three weeks. And yes, it itches, but that’s what chopsticks are for.”

  Arnie points his aviator shades at me. “I met my headmaster yesterday. Total military freak. Reads the Tom Clancys in English as soon as they come out. When he found out I was a pilot, right away he’s all over my ass about the P-3 deal.”

  I give Arnie a blank look.

  “The P-3 deal,” he says. “The spy plane the Chinese captured. Happened a couple of years ago.”

  “Sorry to hear about it.”

  “They tried to force down one of our recon planes,” he says. “Assholes sideswiped it. Their plane crashed. Ours managed to land at a Chinese airfield. It was a huge mess.”