The Year of the Hydra

by William Broughton Burt

  Who needs him.

  Funny thing. I’d never noticed before but each of the free samples has an H punched into it. Reading the packaging, I learn that my medication is manufactured by Harcourt Pharmaceuticals. Or maybe that isn’t a funny thing. I couldn’t quite bring myself to place one of them in my mouth. Instead I took another nervous and disorder capsule and a handful of ma huangs. The sample meds I tossed into a kitchen drawer except for one, which I placed on the TV beside Mom’s blood-pressure med. I’m going to pass both of them along to Bellamy’s brother.

  So began the day.

  For some reason, at mid-afternoon I’m following Marilyn up a stack of escalators to the sixth floor of Women’s World and into a three-acre wood of brassieres. I’m instantly on guard. There’s nothing a man can say in the brassiere section of a department store that isn’t exactly wrong. At least there’s no saxophone music. Yet. A saleswoman comes forward, and she and Marilyn speak at length while I pretend to be invisible, idly browsing the complete line of ladies’ undergarments in University of Alabama crimson.

  Roll Tide.

  According to Chinese thinking, there’s an increased susceptibility to ill fortune during one’s birth year. It helps to wear something red. Want to guess the age of your favorite Chinese human? When you see red undies on the clothesline, round your best guess to the nearest twelve.

  Two college-aged women walk past, and I’m surprised to see a “Peace” button pinned to the lapel of each. Lil tells me anti-war protests are worldwide this week. “Isn’t it amazing?” says Lil. “Eleven million people demonstrate for peace, and we’re just totally fucking ignoring it. We’ve become a nation so obsessed with vengeance that it doesn’t even matter who anymore. Did Iraq do Nine Eleven? Who cares? They’re brown people with their asses in the air. Go get ‘em. I have to really wonder how long before we go get China. They’re like this huge red vacuum-cleaner sucking up American jobs, and you know we’ve got to be fucking with them somehow. Remember the tobacco fungus in Cuba? That was us.”

  Actually, at the time I was remembering the raised ass of that itsy Chinese schoolgirl. I liked how her little pelvis tilted back as she dog-cussed that evil rice-eating motherfucker behind her. I also enjoyed how her upper lip flared at two precise points when she timidly approached my desk after this morning’s class as the other students swarmed the doors. “Can I talk to you?” she said. “God, I’m sorry. I guess I picked up that whole bad-mouth thing back in Westmont.”

  “You’re from Westmont?”

  That’s a suburb of LA. Not the best one.

  “Born in Westmont, lived my whole life in Westmont,” she replied, oozing gritty inner-city charm. “I been in China less than a month and this place is, like, playing with my head, man—I mean, Mr. Mancer. My daddy don’t speak a word of English, and I most definitely don’t speak no Chinese. Ain’t nobody I can talk to.”

  Her eyes reached out to me. Asian eyes. From a one-hundred-percent Asian face.

  “Who the hell are you?” I said.

  “Rui Long. That’s my name from my daddy’s side.”

  Rhymes with everyone’s favorite governor of Louisiana.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “My mama sent me here to live with my daddy. Ain’t seen him since I was six months old. So now I’m supposed to live with him. Whatever. Ain’t nothing I can do about it.”

  I think that would make Rui Long, while clearly underage in the United States, fully adult in China.

  I love numbers.

  The two women with the Peace buttons head for the escalators, and I note that neither is wearing a bra. Wrong floor, girls.

  Memphis’s big peace vigil is tonight. “We’re going to burn candles,” Lil told me this morning, “and envision a world where we can all sit down and discuss chemical warfare and genocide like civilized people.”

  “Burn one for me,” I told her.

  Actually I have my own little heart-project. Counseling displaced American schoolchildren IHW. In Harm’s Way. I told Itsy she can visit me at the American Teacher’s Apartment anytime she feels troubled. And it’s after dark. And that little purse of hers has a photo ID.

  The Women’s World saleswoman hurries forward with a boxed brassiere in bone white, and Marilyn fingers it with distaste. I’m keeping an eye on the escalator. When you think about it, what better place for a man to learn if he’s being tailed than on the sixth floor of Women’s World? If even one man dismounts the escalator and begins browsing the merchandise—see what I’m saying? Of course, Ralph O’Malley has more conspiracy theories than a flea has knees. And he uses there for their.

  The saleswoman runs for another bra and Marilyn checks her phone for messages. Bored, I lean against a counter of boxed pantyhose and try to recall the last time I slid a pair down a fair lady’s legs. Nothing comes readily to mind. My brand of woman goes in more for wool hiking socks. I sigh and loose my imagination, letting it settle once more on a warm Memphis night and a room full of my favorite rotating rockettes. It’s almost as though I were there in the Miles once more, browsing lurid limbs beneath the unhurried ooze of a muted trumpet. Even in my trance of the fourteen full rotations, I was more than aware of the purple light spilling through an open door at the rear of the room. Beyond that door lay the real attraction. Reluctantly I blew a kiss to the rosebud smile and sauntered toward the purple threshold.

  The dark silhouette of a man blocked my path. “Mr. Mancer,” I heard, “we weren’t expecting you.”

  “I wasn’t expecting myself,” I replied cheerfully, “but it’s awfully nice to be here.”

  “Do you intend to play?” asked the same voice.

  “Of course.”

  Always say of course.

  After a moment, the silhouette said, “This evening’s activities are underwritten by a Mr. Vionetti. He would like to know whether your… unique talents would place you at any unfair advantage. Of course, he trusts your candor completely.”

  Returning the black-out shades to my face, I said, “Please tell Mr. Vi—, uh—”

  “Vionetti.”

  “—Mr. Vionetti that my talents are far more meager than he supposes.”

  Bowing slightly, the silhouette stepped to one side. “You’ll find chips at the bar. Please take as many as you’d like.”

  “Thank you,” I said, hurrying on my way.

  As many as I’d like. I was once told I could take as many white-frosted cupcakes as I liked. I was eleven years old, and it was Jeremy Simmons’s birthday party. Yes, the same Jeremy. I liked twenty-seven white-frosted cupcakes. I could have stopped at liking fourteen or nineteen, but I didn’t particularly like either one of those number. Twenty-one was a fairly decent option, but it held resonances of both three and seven, each of them a prime that, when combined with my age at the time, formed further monsters. Twenty-two was even worse, and so it went. They pumped my stomach four times. I wasn’t crazy about that number, either.

  Suddenly Marilyn announces, “We can go,” and dashes past me. Following her toward the escalators, I note Marilyn’s not-altogether-bad legs. Solid. Functional. Blue veins clearly visible behind the knees.

  This morning I gave a call to Eisenhower, Marilyn’s old college roomie. Calls, actually. Dialing long distance is complicated here. Before finally connecting to Guangzhou, I roused a man out of bed in Bucharest. In the end, Eisenhower wasn’t able to offer much illumination vis-à-vis the Many Flavours Company. Foreign investors are buying into everything. Why not tobacco? “Is make money,” as she put it. And the rumors about naughty genetic experiments? “Everybody hear this, too,” said Eisenhower. “I don’t know.”

  I don’t know, either. Before hanging up, Eisenhower asked if I was “very love” Marilyn. When I replied in the polite negative, she said, “You come visit Guangzhou, I show you the good place eat sheep intestines.”

  But can I call her Ike?

  Marilyn stops suddenly to pinch a blouse, and I practically collide with her.
The blouse, I note, is identical to the one she’s wearing. Conservative to the point of nonexistent. Now something in a silky fire-engine red catches her eye, and Marilyn lifts the price tag then flings it.

  “So expensive,” she complains, heading toward the exit. “I too old buy beautiful clothes like some girl. I have the son, have to worry about everything.”

  Marilyn stops just short of the automatic glass doors and turns to stare at me. “You have son?” she demands.

  “No.”

  “Daughter?”

  I shake my head.

  Marilyn says, “You marry four times, no children?”

  “There are lots of Americans,” I tell her, “with four children and no marriages. It evens out.”

  We reenter the heat and glare of midday. Over her shoulder, Marilyn says, “I know what you mean, Ju-wen. Chinese have the expression, is like teach your grandmother drink eggs.’”

  “Nicely put,” I tell the blue veins.

  Marilyn and I round a corner, and a small shop comes into view. Inside, a teenage boy slouches in a folding chair. Above him is a sign I’ve seen all over Shenzhen. A drawing of a human face is dotted with red acupuncture points. I ask Marilyn about it.

  “Oh, this can take away,” says Marilyn, stopping to point out a mole on her right cheek. “Also take away the…” she points to her behind. “Something there hurt very bad. You have this?”

  I shake my head a bit too emphatically.

  Marilyn fires a series of questions at the young man. He answers listlessly. Again she points out the mole on her cheek. “He say this mean somebody want me be very unhappy,” she says. “I know is my husband.” Marilyn indicates a smaller mole beside her left eyebrow and says, “This one mean maybe some problem with health. This one good luck,” she says, pointing out a dot on the bridge of her nose. “He take off other two, forty yuan. You want ask him something?”

  “Something what?” I say.

  Marilyn speaks to the young man, who examines me from a distance. Now he’s speaking to Marilyn. I don’t care what he says. My face is spotless.

  “He say,” she reports, “you have the much trouble from women. Also somebody want steal your brain.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “How you say? Steal something inside. We say nao zi.”

  “Someone wants to steal my mind?”

  She nods. “He fix this for you. Fix the women too. Sixty yuan.”

  I look at the slouching teenager. That sounds like a lot of fixing for four bucks.

  I watch Marilyn take a seat. The sidewalk surgeon opens a tiny bottle filled with clear liquid, pulls a hooked needle from inside, wipes it once on a cotton ball and now sticks it into Marilyn’s face. She’s in agony. The boy pulls out the mole in about two seconds, wipes the needle on the same cotton ball, and goes after the second one. As Marilyn whimpers, he dabs something pale yellow—wood putty by the look of it—into the holes he’s made in Marilyn’s face. The whole procedure takes less than a minute. Before we’re out of there, another woman is in the chair. I watch the boy pick up the same needle, same bottle, same everything. All he changes is the cotton ball. I ask myself how many bits and pieces of other peoples’ moles are now inside Marilyn’s head. To say nothing of something-there-hurt-very-much.

  Really is like teach your grandmother drink eggs.

  As Marilyn convalesces dizzily, I buy us each an ice-cream sandwich, and she and I stand in the shadow of an florescent-orange skyscraper to eat them. Though we’re barely into the Year of the Ram, Shenzhen feels like midsummer Memphis.

  I gaze into the window of a pet shop and spot a stack of empty aquariums. I ask myself whether I might be able to persuade Ralpho’s mushroom spores to get happy in one of those things. All I really need is a dark corner, a little rice flour and a few weeks of wet weather. Failing the wet weather, I could just leave the top off the water-boiler for a few days. As I recall, the last time I ate a mushroom I became convinced I was a wealthy Republican philanthropist. I wrote a string of checks to front organizations for paramilitary groups I couldn’t possibly have known anything about. Fortunately, I later found out I’d written them all with my forefinger.

  I finish my ice-cream sandwich and use my bottle of Binihana purified water to wash it down. While I’m at it, I toss down three ma huangs and two nervous-and-disorder capsules.

  “You take some Chinese medicine?” asks Marilyn, still eating.

  “Relaxes me,” I tell her.

  “Only think too much,” she says. “Think all the time not good for health.”

  I nod. I visited Bellamy’s office yesterday and handed him the two recently arrived tablets, one marked R and the other H. I think way too much.

  Before I could get away from Bellamy, he reminded me that his company had provided me with a very fine dumpster’s-hiney apartment now going to waste. I reminded him that his company owes me a considerable amount of money. Now we’re both reminded.

  Oh. Word came this morning from New York. Someone has read The End of Day. Including my new final chapter. And has received it with some excitement. His name is Ahmed Massoud Monzur, and he represents the Going Downtown? Taxi Company. “I found the story lost inside of my cab,” Monzur emailed me last night. “At first I decide to just wait until somebody will call me first, then I open and read it. I can not [sic] stop. I think you are great writer and also very much disturb. Unless you don’t mind my say this to you, I’m so sorry but please to come get this very soon or eels [sic] I am afraid my family reads it too. That is all. Ahmed Massoud Monzur.”

  I have my blurb for the back cover.

  “We go Kuang now,” says Marilyn, tossing her ice cream wrapper onto the sidewalk. I try not to stare at it.

  Approaching the nearest escalator of the teeming five-story anthill called Kuang Electronic Emporium, Marilyn and I are instantly surrounded by five young men who whisper urgently, “DVD.” At the top of the escalator, we melt into a densely packed labyrinth of tiny overflowing kiosks. Marilyn, both arms wrapped tightly around her purse, bulls her way toward the second escalator. I follow, clutching the wallet inside my pocket. Three escalators later, we arrive at a tiny kiosk with a curtained rear chamber. There behind the curtain, Marilyn negotiating, I purchase two thousand dollars’ worth of software for roughly four and a half bucks.

  Screw Bill Gates. And his foundation.

  I also come away with a copy of the movie Cast Away. Here’s Tom Hanks stranded half a globe away from Memphis chatting with a volleyball. Ask me if I can relate.

  “Follow my blue veins,” says Marilyn, heading back toward the escalator. Or words to that effect.

  There are no privacy walls separating the squat toilets at Shenzhen High School of Electronic Excellence. Just by the way. I’m doubtless giving rise to a whole new round of speculation concerning the personal habits of Westerners. Do they all do it in plastic bags and carry it home? Why yes, we do. Thanks for inquiring.

  Morale seems to be tanking back at the English Department. The school has a new headmaster who, according to the latest roundup of murmurs, is not coming across with the little incentives the previous headmaster had dispensed rather freely. The new guy, Bobby has confided, seems to be a legitimately high-minded administrator, but what mere man can accomplish great things alone? Bobby didn’t answer his own question but only arched his graying eyebrows. Think all the grand thoughts you want, seemed to be the drift, but neglect your people and sooner or later your tofu is left out in the wind.

  As Marilyn and I ride the escalator back down to the street, I survey the multitude on their way up. In a moments’ time, I’ve count fourteen people wearing gauze masks. The government of this country has no clue what to do about atypical pneumonia, and nobody wants to be the one who says it. This stuff has spread to Thailand and Canada, and Beijing still hasn’t acknowledged that it exists. The World Health Organization is starting to really raise a stinky about it.

  Ana Manguella comes to mind. “Viruses are less
living things,” she said on a moving train, “than self-replicating codes that lack a braking mechanism. They just go on doing what they do, regardless of the consequences.”

  That tousled woman is just across the Sham Chun River in Hong Kong. I can’t believe I came away without her email address.

  “Oh, my God, it’s Julian!”

  Oh, my God, it’s Tree Carter! Beside her is a nondescript Chinese man bearing two shopping bags. After the usual preposterous hugging demonstration that Tree requires, I introduce Marilyn and greet Cangming Xu, whom Tree has briefly mentioned. Xu (sounds like shoe) helps with her website. We shake hands, and I notice his cheap plastic watch. Practically the same as mine, actually. You don’t find dime-store timepieces on Asian men. I also note his khaki trousers and cotton shirt, the sleeves rolled to just below the elbows. Add a loosened tie, and this man could be running for office in Nantucket. Xu’s accent is both Chinese and Australian. Tree has told me he’s a Shanghai native who spends his free time Out Back conferring with native seers.

  “We’re on our way to Kuang’s,” says Tree. “We need some software for the website. You wouldn’t believe what Mr. Xu is doing for my page, Julian. It’s incredible.”

  “How incredible,” I say.

  Actually, I’m not thinking very clearly. I may have done too much ma huang this time. My knees seem to be speaking to each other in Brazilian Portuguese.

  Marilyn poses a question to Xu in Mandarin. As he replies, Tree leans toward me and says, “We need to get Lillian back here as fast as we can, Jules. Something big’s going down.”

  “Tell Mom,” I say.

  “I think you know this is not about your mother,” says Tree.

  “Tell Lil.”

  “I’m telling Julian because Julian is the one who needs to hear it,” says Tree, fanning her smile with one hand. “It’s starting, okay? Whatever it is, it’s starting.”

  I separate my knees a little to cut down on the chatter.

  “You can count on me,” I tell Tree.

  “Listen, you need to sit down with this Mr. Xu. The man is amazing.”