The Year of the Hydra

by William Broughton Burt

“You seem to have a lot of small misunderstandings,” said Lil. “Are you watering my plants?”

  “Every day,” I lied.

  I told my sister about the large animal droppings in the American Teacher’s Kitchen. I could hear her shudder.

  “Take care of it, please, please, please?” said Lil. “You know I can’t deal with mice.”

  I told her we aren’t looking at a mouse. “From the scat, I’d place it somewhere between a mature wolverine and a very young yeti.”

  “Kill it,” said Lillian, who was once arrested protesting animal testing in the manufacture of baby wipes.

  “Consider it dead,” I told her. “I got a New Years present from that girl you tutor.”

  “Which one?”

  “Pie face. When she smiles, her eyes disappear.”

  “Oh, Nancy Drew. What did she give you?”

  “Some kind of bell-pepper plant. I put it in the kitchen window.”

  “It’s about the New Year,” explained Lil. “In Guangdong Province it’s customary to buy a plant that symbolizes the kind of year you want to have.”

  “I think I’m leaning toward a bell-shaped year,” I replied. Actually that particular plant, said Nancy Drew, represents the woid. I think she meant the world.

  “Gotta go,” said Lil.

  “Already? You haven’t said a word about world peace. Or asked about Arnie.”

  “Arnie’s an asshole,” said Lil, “and there is no world peace. Our secretary of state is at the United Nations right now giving a slide show on Iraqi weapon plants. The war’s a fucking done deal. The White House is just greasing everybody for it.”

  Which is only considerate, if you’re asking me. Lil told me that anti-war demonstrations are going on everywhere in the woid. “I’m helping with the one at Overton Park this weekend, which is why I gotta go. Love you, love you. Kiss, kiss.”

  So began the day. And the year, though not the real one.

  I’m now engaged in coaxing breakfast out of Lillian’s postage-stamp kitchen, which consists of a water boiler, a rice cooker, and a combination refrigerator/clothes-washer. I’ve learned that I can dump some oatmeal into the rice cooker—Lil discovered actual oatmeal at the nearby supermarket, which looks like an eight-story ‘58 Studebaker running a little hot. Anyway, what I do is put the oatmeal into the rice cooker along with water and a dash of salt, then break a couple of eggs on top and forget about the whole thing for a while. When I think to go back and check, voila, an Iraqi chemical-weapons war chest.

  Tonight I accumulate field notes. At nine o’clock this evening, I will put a sweater under my jacket and take to the streets with a hundred fifty thousand euphoric Chinese, which is sure to either illuminate or eliminate me. I’m definitely ready for one or the other. I never dreamed I’d be in this wacked-out country for six months, nor did I pack for same, and frankly it’s beginning to wear on me. But returning moneyless to Memphis doesn’t seem like much of an option. That hypothetical publishing deal with the gaudy up-front money seems now to be finally and permanently dead. I did make one more lame-ass attempt at finishing The End of Day myself, but it dipped rather badly among the various dip slopes, and the publisher-to-be informed Bernie that they were moving on to other projects, and all I can say is, I wish that ill-humored casino would do the same. And that former drinking buddy of mine is still sending me emails with subject lines like WHERE R U??? Say nothing of that Louie guy from Kansas City with the nose collection. That I haven’t heard from him at all strikes me as slightly ominous. I don’t know why some people can’t just make a fresh start. And I don’t know what came of all that China is no longer safe for you and your pet hamster business. No follow-through at all in this country. I’ve seen more commitment among hedgehogs.

  The oatmeal’s beginning to boil. I unplug the rice cooker and take a look inside. I’ve seen a lot worse. I break Lil’s last two eggs over the top, yellows running generously and eggshell bits mixed in, all the usual, and close the lid.

  Arnie keeps inviting me to a brothel he’s discovered in Shikou (rhymes with jerko). It has a bowling theme. Pin-girls in black lingerie help you in and out of your green-and-tan bowling shoes. But that kind of evening requires actual money, and I’m waiting for this hook-nosed Bellamy guy to come up with what’s now nearly a thousand bucks. He tap-dances all over the office every time I bring it up. He’s got the top hat, the cane. This guy and Shirley Temple would make a really mean pair. Meanwhile I’m rationing my meds. I catch myself slipping little double entendres into the new textbook. Marvelous veiled sexual references and political commentaries that I’m sure no one will ever pick up on. But I’m fine. Really.

  Tomorrow I get to eat my fill at a wedding in the Chinese countryside, courtesy of a golden lovely whom I recently came upon, though not literally, at an English salon. Read: cheesy night school with door prizes where a down-and-out American can pick up the occasional half-pocketful of yuan, if not the stray wedding invitation. The golden lovely calls herself Phoebe. No Chinese can resist an English name. Did you know that during the last decade of his life, Dung Xiaoping went by Chester? Of course, Phoebe is married to some guy with more money than Slim Whitman, but you expect that with a woman like Phoebe who could be the most beautiful Chinese woman I’ve ever seen, beginning with the Manchurian cheekbones and ending more or less everywhere else. A little pallid for my blood—which constitutes the Asian definition of beauty, as you may know. Half the ads on TV are for skin-whitening creams. Phoebe wants me to experience a traditional Chinese wedding in the countryside. I think you know what I want to experience.

  First I have to survive tonight’s mass celebration, whose purpose I fail to understand on even the most basic level. Why, for example, is the new year so widely assumed to be an improvement over the old one? Given that the world has been around for roughly thirteen billion years, if each in turn were even marginally superior to the former—wouldn’t this be, like, a really fun place by now?

  Look at last year. If I remember right it was the Year of the Moose. The high point of the Year of the Moose I don’t expressly recall, but the low point was definitely the bust of my sister’s apartment for marijuana that nobody ever found. Yes. The police. Raided. This apartment. There was a loud knock at Lil’s door, and when she opened it there must have been twenty men on the balcony waving papers and badges and so forth. This is from Lil’s account. By the time I got here, all the unis were gone, thank God, and the Xanax had taken hold. Lil, well sedated, told me that the English-speaking cop had apologized a lot and said noh-koh-tics about a thousand times while the other men turned the apartment inside out. The headmaster of the school showed up with a few unis of his own, and there was a lot of shouting and finger-pointing. In the end, they found nothing. Not even a dirty ashtray. Lil said the cops looked genuinely bewildered. Deep bows. Lots of groveling. The headmaster followed them all the way to the gate, shouting insults for the benefit of the hundreds of employees gathered around.

  That happened on a Friday. Lillian refused to leave her apartment till Monday, on which day she was openly stared at by everyone, down to the gardeners. Same thing Tuesday. Wednesday she was old news. So it goes.

  That sentence appears in Slaughterhouse Five one hundred four times.

  On Thursday, Madam Wu brought Lil a pan of boiled dumplings and a shopping bag containing something she’d found in her linen drawer. A plastic bag containing roughly two ounces of marijuana.

  They flushed it.

  All of it.

  My sister badly wanted to blame the entire episode on me but couldn’t quite construct how. Finally I was able to persuade her that some impaired Chinese detective was trying to make a name for himself. What better bust than a busty blond who stands twice the desk sergeant’s height? Tragically for him, when it came time to plant the evidence, there was a mix-up and why don’t they number the floors in this building?

  Could be true for all I know. I don’t think so. I think somebody wants us out of Chin
a. I’ve narrowed it down to the US Department of Defense and a nine-headed serpent in need of a breath mint, neither of which should constitute much of a problem, as I see it.

  I asked Tree to accompany me to tonight’s Spring Festival Celebration, but the girl’s booked solid. One family’s taking her to the flower market this morning, another has her booked for lunch, and tonight she sings “Rock of Ages” onstage at a gala for school administrators and displaced Mongolian yak breeders. You should hear Tree sing. Really. Girl’s as fortissimo as she looks.

  Moose wasn’t a bad year for Tree Carter. To begin with, she resembles one. She’s let her hair grow out, and it’s, like, forming stray antlers and standing stones and such. To no one’s surprise, it didn’t take Our Tree-ness long to win over her headmaster, the faculty, the kids, the displaced yak breeders, just generally everyone west of Puget Sound. Teachers from all over the province are visiting Tree’s first-grade classroom. She’s been on the evening news twice. Of course she’s also pumping out her weekly radio show via the portable personal medical device. “China is filled,” she trumpets to the world, “with the most amazing Indigo children. I’ve never seen such beautiful and intuitive children in all my life. They’re teaching me.”

  Meanwhile I teach myself how to eat unsalted egg-drop oatmeal from a rice cooker while plotting the murder of a very young yeti. Get well soon, Mom. And Happy New Year, though not the real one.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “You know this thing, Yellow Fever?” asks Phoebe, her perfect features glowing in the dash lights.

  “Yellow Fever?” I say innocently.

  “Is get some Chinese woman. Every man have this fever when come to China.”

  I give a glance to the woman behind the wheel, dazzlingly demure in her black silk dress and silver earrings. Phoebe Sternbaum, born Lian Li Hsu, returns the glance and her eyes hold mine for a moment, seemingly soaking up my admiration. I do love a woman who can enjoy her own beauty.

  “Why you no date some Chinese girl? You no like?”

  Phoebe likes to flip the ends of her questions tauntingly. Before I can reply, she continues, “I tell my friends better just marry some poor Chinese man. Americans so charming, take you so good places, have so much money you think why not just marry him but then you find out the problems. If he is Chinese, you just do something, just argue or you change it but if he is American—”

  Phoebe doesn’t finish her sentence. Just as well. I massage the smallest finger of my right hand, which aches in the predawn chill. I don’t think the bone was set right.

  I hope all this vehicular bonding time won’t be wholly given over to discussion of Phoebe’s foundering marriage. Hubby is an East Coast biz-wiz by the name of Harold—she calls him Hah-row—who it would seem is making a rather poor show of it.

  “We eat something Guangzhou,” Phoebe says listlessly. “Banquet is two o’clock, so we eat something now, buy you beef and noodles, make you strong like Chinese farmer.”

  Beef and noodles before dawn. Such a good idea.

  She seems to read my mind. “I think you just like my husband, eat only American breakfast, don’t like how I cook it, hire some woman make his eggs and toast so expensive.”

  I wait, expecting more.

  At last Phoebe sighs and says, “When I meet Hah-row, we just dance all the time, always go out somewhere, go Vermont see the leaves so beautiful, go everywhere, I think how can I be so happy. And he is also believe this too, so he say marry me, marry me.”

  Phoebe shoots me a cool look. “Later American husband just unhappy, go back America, leave her look like stupid idiot. Hah-row say, no, no, never leave you, never leave you. I tell him if we have some baby, I never give him the divorce. He say okay. Chinese boy or girl look so white don’t have American father here always have the terrible life, is why I ask you Yellow Fever. American man get this so bad, every Chinese woman know.”

  Again I find it safest to say nothing at all. Meanwhile the Buick seems to be entering the ragged outskirts of Guangzhou. The eastern sky is taking on a vague off-green, or maybe it’s just me. I made it to bed around two o’clock.

  “Two years after we marry,” continues Phoebe, “I get phone call some girl want speak Hah-row say she his fiancé, who you. I tell Harold just get out, but he wait until I am weak so stupid tell me all of these stories, so many promises, so charming like before so I believe him. Then I am pregnant. My husband so angry, say I do on purpose don’t speak to me for a month. When our daughter born, Hah-row so happy love her so much buy everything get American papers for our daughter, take her everywhere, don’t even care about me, just have the girlfriends make me so goddamn crazy.”

  With a jolt, the Buick stops before a rough-looking roadside café. Phoebe switches off the engine and gazes at me. “So many things I don’t understand. You American man, maybe you understand for me.” Her eyes search mine for a moment. I hope they don’t see just how well I do understand.

  Back in the Year of the Moose—I think it was actually the Horse—I encountered a tribe of Sino-Tibetans, the Mosou, with the good sense never to entrust a man with anything more ethically complicated than operating a shovel. Mosou women own everything, make all the decisions, and rear the children collectively. Men play musical instruments and lift heavy objects. There’s an important yearly festival among the Mosou when the women pray for good health for the men and the livestock. I don’t know why that comes to me just now.

  Inside the café, a woman in a gauze mask swipes at our table with a dirty rag. When she walks away, Phoebe says, “That girl worry about all the sick people Guangzhou. You know this? Everybody talk about this, so many sick people nobody know why.”

  The waitress returns with molten chrysanthemum tea. Just behind her, a sizable rat squeezes its belly beneath the buffet counter. Guangdong Province, of which Guangzhou and Shenzhen are a part, is nothing so much as a squalid tropical soup with eighty-eight million people and as many pigs and domestic fowl standing in their own shit, and nobody knows why so many people are sick.

  “Those men Japanese,” Phoebe whispers, her eyes sharpening. “Hate Japanese.”

  I wait until Phoebe has ceased staring before turning casually to view four well-dressed men at a booth, obviously capping a long night of drinking. One of the three is lighting the wrong end of his cigarette. His friends try to notify him, but the man thinks they’re pointing toward our table. His filter ablaze, he turns to give Phoebe a long, curious gape, and his friends laugh merrily.

  “In Nanchang,” Phoebe tells me through her teeth, “Japanese kill fifteen thousand Chinese, no reason why they do this, rape the women then kill them, now same men come back here for the vacation, buy some poor Chinese girl beat her kill her have the good time again.”

  I take the smallest possible sip of my molten chrysanthemum tea. Phoebe’s Han ancestors slaughtered eleven million people when they took over Beijing. I decide not to mention that just now.

  The beef and noodles arrives in a steaming broth reeking of MSG and wild onions. I push it as far away as possible and reach into my shirt pocket for a fresh installment of ma huang. I think I downed eight caps when my alarm sounded this morning at four. Again, I’d retired at two. Chinese New Year, it turns out, is a quarter of the world’s population milling about pointlessly while vendors hawk paper-maché rams and a PA system plays “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”

  “Need eat very fast,” says Phoebe, checking the time on her phone. “Go meet groom’s party at nine, go steal the bride.”

  “Steal the bride?”

  She smiles. “Is the Chinese country wedding. All the men beat on the door, say give her to us but the mother just say go away, groom say oh I love her so much always be good to her, he put some money under the door but not enough, this go on for long time. The family just say okay too quick mean they don’t love the daughter, always make it hard, he have to answer ninety-nine questions. Groom have to say what her favorite song, favorite color, name of her firs
t doll, so many questions, other men try help him but nobody know, all the women just laugh.”

  I’m thinking I would have taken fewer wives under this arrangement.

  Phoebe’s eyes go to my face. “You think Chinese people so silly. I think American people so serious. You so serious,” she scolds. “Always think about something, never call me on the phone, why?”

  I shift uncomfortably.

  “You need buy phone,” says Phoebe. “You have some problem, you can just call me. I tell you this before, why you no do this?”

  I pretend not to hear.

  “You just like make me angry,” says Phoebe. “What if I so angry just leave you here Guangzhou?”

  She stares, waiting.

  I massage my crooked finger once more. Women enjoy going after me from time to time, preferably with the aid of a lawyer. Phoebe likes to make me smile, or imagine she has, then jeer, calling me a big important man who doesn’t like to be seen smiling.

  “You need see doctor, break this again,” says Phoebe, frowning at my misshapen finger. With a sigh, she returns her attention to her beef and noodles. I’m keeping a wary eye on mine. I think it may be inching closer. My other eye meanwhile enjoys the sight of Phoebe Sternbaum cooling her broth by blowing across the trough of her ceramic spoon. Hers are strong artist’s features, lips full and poetic with little upward arrows at the philthrum. The four Japanese men are staring at her as well. I wonder for a moment at how deftly Asians sort out nationality at a glance, identifying Koreans, Japanese, and Thais as readily as I might Swedes, Turks, and Irishmen.

  “How much you pay?” asks Phoebe, examining the jade ring on my left pinkie. It doesn’t represent world peace. Actually I got a very good deal on the ring, and I tell her the price.

  She shakes her head. “Is terrible price. Is not real jade. You no want beef and noodles?”

  “I’m letting it cool.”

  Phoebe checks the time on her phone again. “I call my daughter six-thirty tell her I love her, she so funny all the time tell me Mommy Mommy I love you I love you.”