The Year of the Hydra

by William Broughton Burt

  I give him a stare. “You’re talking about Bellamy.”

  Ralpho doesn’t reply.

  “Little round glasses?” I say. “Hooked nose?”

  Ralpho nods. “He uses lots of names. I’d be careful around him. Belongs to Wen Jiabao. Everything you say goes into a report.”

  As Ralpho finishes his cigarette, I try to think of a sensible question. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised about Bellamy. Lately he’s been pressuring me to move back to my dumpster’s-hiney apartment, whatever that’s about. Probably so his faction-mates can rummage through my underwear drawer every time I leave the place. I’m increasingly curious as to what Ralpho might know about a certain little corner drugstore called Hydrangea Laboratories, but my mouth can’t quite form the words. How do I know that Ralpho doesn’t report to the Venusians?

  The lonely life of a pawn. Monitored. Coveted. Just generally fussed over until things become tedious and it’s time to simplify the board.

  “So that’s it?” I say.

  “That’s it.”

  “What about Lillian?”

  Ralpho looks at me in surprise. “Don’t tell her. Don’t tell anybody. And for the love of God, don’t let your sister get on a plane to Beijing.”

  “I don’t feel so good,” I tell my glass of Hsingtao.

  “I’m not surprised,” says Ralpho. “They’ve been throwing everything they’ve got at you, pal. I have no idea what that means, exactly. Do you?”

  “How the hell would I know? I’m not trained in psychic warfare.”

  Ralpho eyes me appraisingly. “If I were you, I’d talk to somebody who is.”

  Chapter Twenty

  To my credit, I have refused all invitations from door-rapping chauffeurs, formally attired or no, since that mythical warm Memphis night. And I never proceed past the room of rotating boxes, no matter the wealth redistribution that beckons from beyond.

  Still I often find myself roiling once more within the smoldering Miles, those shadowy depths, the tastefully placed spotlights of that self-contained Eden that seemed to belong so fully and exclusively to me. I’m grateful those beautiful women had not been covered with coy metallic paint or pop-art images. No apologies whatsoever to art, whatever that is and whatever it’s worth. There is no meaningful aesthetic beyond a single woman at a single moment. Just put a light on her and shut the fuck up.

  The unmistakable star that night was a tight rosebud of a redhead with raging blue eyes. A breathless crowd stood as near as possible to the deeply-shadowed spot where this beauty, lit by two very thin beams of amber light, revolved slowly, her curves rising and falling seemingly of their own volition as successive wan meadows passed gracefully into and out of the light. Her folded white legs were short and shapely, one knee raised near the chest, the other turned out, her inner thighs spread as generously as a late-night banquet, emphasizing the broad, taut groin muscles and the rare delicacy they framed. When that platter rolled into view, soft oohs and aahs broke out, for, as the light swept across the red-haired woman, it was gradually revealed that hers was a lovely, full yet virginal vulva, its smile demurely closed within a fine auburn mist. One rotation of the box required three minutes. I stayed for fourteen rotations.

  I should have stayed all night.

  I received a reply from Miriam. Yes, one of the companies I mentioned, Harcourt Pharmaceuticals, does advertise in Magazine Mariposa. Heavily. I no longer know what’s worse, being paranoid or having actual evil plotters out to get me, but it seems we’re looking at one or the other.

  There’s a fresh email from Lillian. She’s going ahead with declaring our mother insane. “There’s no real alternative. Stuart says we can have everything signed in a few days. Then I’ll be on the plane as fast as I can. Promise, promise, promise!”

  I decided it wouldn’t hurt to ask Bernie to overnight me a bottle of meds. I can’t pay for it, but he and I go back a long way. Maybe he could also throw in a decent German-made pencil. Meanwhile, I’m writing with a bad gel pen and doing a Chinese herbal remedy for “the nervous of mind and disorder.”

  “Oh, Ju-wen, it’s you.”

  Marilyn stands before me, an over-full tray in her hands. I should have known better than to sit alone in the lunchroom. I’ve been going over my notes concerning a certain corporation with nine ugly heads and at least as many agendas.

  “Why, Marilyn. Won’t you please join me?”

  “Oh, I don’t want disturb,” she says, staring at my journal.

  “Not at all,” I say, flipping it closed.

  Marilyn places her tray opposite mine but refuses to sit. “You don’t have soup. I go get for you.”

  “I don’t want any.”

  “In China, we believe—”

  “I don’t want any.”

  Reluctantly she takes a seat. “Here, you can have mine.”

  “Marilyn, just eat your goddamn lunch.”

  “Ju-wen,” she giggles, “I think you always so naughty. Why you always so naughty?”

  “It’s my contribution.”

  The final word whistles handsomely, as my maxillary first premolar crown is once more out. Last night I was taking a bite from the tar-baby of all chocolate Buddhas—made in North Korea, if that tells you anything—and before I understood what was happening to me, Tar Buddha had yanked out the crown and it had fallen down my throat. Furious, I threw the remainder of the Buddha out the kitchen window. There’s now four hundred plus dollars in jewelers’ gold touring my upper intestine. The next few days will be existential, to say the least. I now carry a folded plastic bag in my pants pocket alongside my personal wooden chopsticks.

  I watch Marilyn lift a spoonful of soup and give it a timid taste, eyelids fluttering. Her face seems a little puffy today, beginning somewhere around the sandal straps. Her mouth looks like it’s worried about something. Marilyn’s upper lip makes a kind of beak when she’s worried.

  “Today my throat so hurt,” she complains. “Last night I have the window open. This I think make me very ill.”

  I watch her take a handful of hair and throw it behind her. Chinese women haven’t yet learned the toss-the-hair. “My son never like the soup, too, always fight so much with me, make me so angry. Don’t want to study the school, just watch the TV, go play with some boys. I think he just hate me.”

  Her eyes narrow. “I tell him I no make divorce, father make divorce, but he love his father so much. I wish go back my home Guangzhou, but just have the job here Shenzhen.”

  “You’re from Guangzhou?” I ask, re-opening my journal. “Have you ever heard of the Many Flavours Company?”

  Marilyn brightens. “Is make the cigarette. Everybody Guangzhou know this.”

  “Do they offer tours?” I ask.

  She looks puzzled.

  “Tours,” I say. “Tourists? Exit through the gift shop?”

  “Is just make the cigarette. Why you ask me this?”

  “I’m considering taking up smoking. Do you know anyone who works at Many Flavours?”

  Marilyn doesn’t, but I write down the name and number of a friend of hers, a Guangzhou manpower consultant who calls herself Eisenhower. “She went to school with me together,” Marilyn smiles, “is know everything about the factory Guangzhou.”

  I close the journal and watch Marilyn suck down her steel-belted Chinese cabbage. That’s more than I could do. I’m not looking forward to the afternoon. I have only one class remaining, but it’s on the dreaded fifth floor. Lillian was shocked to learn that she/we have classes on the top floor. “Oh, my God,” she gasped on her bunny phone. “They keep all the worst kids on the fifth floor. It’s like they’re trying to hide them. You better talk to Tree.”

  “I’m talking to Tree hourly,” I answered, not that it’s helping much. Mostly I get lectures on how poignant is my every moment with these precious and impressionable little divine masters in training. I don’t think Tree’s kids are passing one-liter cans of toluene along the back row. The afternoon clas
s was so bad yesterday I asked Joe about the school’s disciplinary policy. He smiled brightly and said, “You can do whatever you like.”

  The Splendid Make Vague Articulation of Inscrutable and Authority.

  I told Joe I’d just do whatever I liked.

  He liked this answer.

  “That means he doesn’t give a shit what you do,” said Lil, “so long as he doesn’t have to deal with it. Listen, there’s no disciplinary policy at that school. Everyone pretends there’s no problem, just like they pretend the students are learning. It’s a joke, Julian. You can’t take it seriously. Relax. Enjoy it.”

  Relax. Enjoy.

  Eisenhower’s phone number comes at a price. Before Marilyn leaves the lunchroom table, I find myself hooked into accompanying her on a shopping mission after school Friday. But she did supply me with one additional piece of information: the Many Flavours Company is rumored to conduct genetic experiments with tobacco strains more addictive than opium. I know a few hundred high-school students who’d like to volunteer as research subjects. When probed for more, Marilyn batted her eyelashes and bore her empty tray away with as much pelvic sway as she could muster.

  Throwing good time after bad, I waste another ten minutes staring at my scribbled, hatched, and crosshatched notes, whose lines and arrows describe a corporate structure not very unlike a Hydra in appearance. Eight affiliated companies—one of them the Many Flavours Company—encircle and feed into a central entity, Hydrangea Laboratories Inc., which one assumes is the head that does not die but only mopes somewhere beneath an igneous stone. I try to make all this add up to something, but it neither adds nor subtracts. Hopefully it doesn’t multiply. The lunchroom is practically empty when I rise to mope my way toward Lil’s lone afternoon class.

  At least I get to share an office with Bobby, who passes time between classes singing along with DVDs of the Peking Opera. His hands are flying around, his reading glasses sliding down his nose, his eyes pleading with the totally queened-out transvestite on the computer screen. The other teachers meanwhile pretend to prepare lesson plans, eyelids drooping as Bobby rises to his feet, issuing a mournful lament equal parts Lord Byron and Tammy Wynette. “Bobby I think is very happy today,” Trish deadpanned this morning. “Is almost destroy the light bulb.”

  It was Bobby who explained to me the school’s no-smoking policy. If you can call it that. Between classes, clouds of white smoke billow from the windows of the boys’ room on each floor. The corridors are open-air, so everybody can see it. The staff’s response? To never go near the boys’ rooms. By unspoken agreement, the male teachers use the john on the first floor exclusively, where students never go. It took some prodding to get this out of Bobby. No one else was present in the office, but he still lowered his voice to tell me, “Students are not allowed to smoke at the school. It’s a very serious offense. After only one violation, the student will be sent away permanently. Well, no teacher wants to have this kind of trouble. You will destroy his whole future. Maybe there’s bad trouble with the whole family because of this. And all the boys smoke, so what can anyone do? Already you cannot teach them. If you do not let them have their cigarette every one hour, maybe they will throw you out of the window of the school.”

  Made sense to me.

  Personally, I pee wherever I like, including on Joe’s desk. The first time I walked into an upper-story john, something like twenty-five cigarettes went flying into squat toilets, some of which were occupied. It didn’t take the students long to figure out the American Teacher doesn’t give a sweet-and-sour damn. Now they make jokes about me as I wizzle. I can tell.

  I suppose I’m in a mood. Not only is my life in jeopardy in more ways than Wiley E. Coyote knows anything about. Not only are Lil’s four and five daily English Conversation classes heading south like Sherman in early spring—the boys at the rear of the class are no longer even pretending; they’re playing cards and swapping Game Boys and I think toying with their little yellow give-the-happiness. Not only am I reduced to playing a daily round of Go Fish if I ever wish to see my maxillary premolar crown again. Not only is Marilyn clearly stalking me and I’ve agreed to accompany her shopping. Not only am I rationing my meds so severely I no longer remember why I’m taking them. Now Bellamy is threatening to take back my key to the dumpster’s-hiney apartment unless I return there.

  And then there’s the Ralpho material. Yesterday, as I put him on his plane, Ralpho leaned toward me and whispered, “They’re watching us right now, you know.” I think they were also smelling us right now. Ralpho was wearing an entire bottle of Old Spice.

  At the last moment, he asked me whether I might be able to hook him up with Tree. “Just to meet her,” he said bashfully. “I’ve listened to Shatrina forever, man. She was the one who first turned me onto how second-matrix birth issues tie into crude-oil prices. I’d never have made that connection myself.”

  “How did you know that Tree is Shatrina?” I asked.

  “The voice. There’s only one voice like that, dude.”

  I frowned, trying to recall a moment when Ralpho and Tree were in the same room. “Shatrina’s very busy,” I told him. True, actually. A Chinese friend is helping her upgrade her website, making all her old shows available for download.

  Also, Ralpho snores. Big surprise there. All things being equal, though, he left me with some Vietnamese mushroom spores that he described as really interesting.

  And then there’s the Lillian material. This morning she told me on the phone, “I’m kind of seeing somebody. We’ve gone out three times. He’s a tax accountant.”

  “How tall is he?” I asked.

  “Why is that always the first thing you want to know? Adrian is very sweet, and we’re having a very nice time together.”

  And stepladders are inexpensive.

  “Doo, what’s going on with you?” my sister asked before hanging up. “I know there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “There’s always something I’m not telling you, Lillian. It’s called healthy boundaries. You might look into that sometime.”

  I wanted to tell her to stop fooling around with lower story bean-counters and get her ample bee-hind back to Shenzhen, but I can’t quite dismiss the possibility that Ralpho could be right about not booking any flights right now. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

  She says one of Mom’s blood-pressure meds is in the mail.

  Entering Room 506, I toss the clipboard onto the desk and watch my afternoon class congeal before me like so much sleep-deprived yellow goo. Tree says the toughest time of the day is right after lunch. Personally, I’m ready, having recently downed enough ma huang to incapacitate a rhino, or at least help him burn off those unsightly love handles.

  Awaiting the bell, I watch one of the major fifth-floor warlords swagger into the room and drop into a chair at the rear of the room. I’ve learned this fellow’s given name is Bang, which rhymes with bang. He’s tall for a Chinese, maybe five-ten, which could explain the preoccupation with lunch-period basketball. Like most fifth-floor boys, Bang comes to class pumping so much adrenaline you could use him for a right-wing radio host. He seems to be going for the Japanese toy-boy look, with orange-tinted hair that flirts with his collar and describes little arrows before each ear.

  Today Bang occupies himself by flicking his fingers into the purse of the girl seated in front of him. She moves it to some other place, and Bang reacquires it, despite her best sullen efforts. Actually, the purse in question is the first I’ve seen on this campus. I’d assumed they’d long ago been banned, right along with lipstick, original thought, and B.O. There is no B. O. in this country. Thought you’d want to know. You can’t buy a stick of underarm deodorant anywhere in China. The girl with the purse is itsy small and quite possibly sultry beneath the baggy uniform. I’m surprised not to have noticed before.

  Finally the bell sounds, or rather begins. In China, school bells set in like a spell of weather. As I wait it out, Nancy Drew smiles too
thily up at me from the front row. That would be Lillian’s pie-faced private student, now my very own. At our recent tutoring session, Nancy Drew informed me that my country of origin is going to war with Iraq because our citizenry is too fat for the present continent. “Ev’ybody my school know this,” she said happily, grabbing my middle and giving it a few shakes.

  If she touches me again, I’m going to sit on her head till I hear it crack.

  Finally the late bell ceases and I draw a breath, but before good morning class can leave my lips, I hear these words snarled in perfect African American dialect:

  “You keep your fucking hands off my shit or I be on your ass like green on grass, you evil rice-eating motherfucker!”

  Everyone in the room turns to stare at the itsy girl seated in front of student Bang, whose eyes now regard her with astonishment. Itsy, fully turned in her chair, has morphed into something truly menacing, her mini-ass lifted off the seat as though she’s about to spring for Bang’s left-frontal inguinal node. As suddenly, this girl, fully Chinese in appearance, is back in her chair facing forward, eyes demurely down. The whole class gives her an elongated and approving, “OoooOOOOOOooooooooooh.”

  “Good morning, class,” I say, and everyone stands.

  I think I’m in love.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In this morning’s foggy, foggy dew, two packages arrived from the States. One, quite small, contained a sample of Mom’s blood-pressure medication. I gave it a sniff (no odor) and placed it on top of the TV to later pass along to Bellamy. The other package was from Bernie. Inside were ten free-sample packets of my medication. Cheap-ass Bernie wouldn’t put a bottle on my tab. Enclosed as well was a very nice letter on Bernie’s agency letterhead saying how much he’s enjoyed our professional relationship but he feels the need to yada-yada-yada.