I feel myself gravitating toward one particular eye. I let myself be pulled by a single red-orange iris, perfectly round and seemingly feline. Before I can stop myself, I have zipped through its center into a passageway that narrows until I fear I will be crushed—before expanding into a completely articulated environment. I look around myself at a grotesque landscape of blazing colors never before imagined. I recognize nothing. Looking up, I see six or seven luminescent orbs adorning what seems a hazy, swirling sky. The body enclosing me is warm and ravenous and balanced on five legs. My shaggy head now stretches to nibble at the edges of a very bitter plant. At my center, I feel the churning of several stomachs. Now before me, erupting from a dark patch of pungent vegetation, is the penile shape of a russet mushroom. Beneath it spreads a vast underground webbing of branching white filaments that conduct thoughts and images in every direction at once, acting both as a wired network and an antenna array broadcasting and receiving at the same instant along an unimaginably broad bandwidth. Alarmed, I pull back. Again I am a single point at the center of the room of eyes. Where have I just gone? To where have I returned?
As though in reply, the undulating irises surrounding me flicker minutely, and within my mind appears an understanding. All is consciousness elaborated into form, into mineral consciousness and gas consciousness and light consciousness and vacuum consciousness and organic consciousness in unending variety, each an orifice of perception through which the all may know itself more completely—and each part may more completely know the all. To complete its awe and pleasure.
A bit more comfortable now, I examine my surroundings curiously. Instantly I know that this room of eyes is a living thing. Experimentally, I send my attention to its farthest edge and there encounter the inside of a very hard spherical shell. Without knowing how I know, I understand that the room is constructed of interlocking molecules so finely fitted that the resultant sphere is capable of resisting severe outer atmospheric pressures. I know, too, that along the inside of the shell are tiny embedded sensors that monitor outer conditions of moisture and temperature and the presence of certain organic compounds. The sensors require no energy to operate, as they draw upon the energy of that which they monitor. When the time is right, powerful chemical changes self-occur, increasing the inner barometric pressure until the shell bursts quite easily from within. I actually see this occurring all around me. I’m viewing a hologram of a bursting shell, countless organic compounds now rushing in from the outside, along with molecules of water. Now awakening are slumbering DNA spirals.
I realize that I am witnessing the life cycle of a single mushroom spore, a self-enclosed packet of potential so tiny and weightless that the weakest rising air current can lift it to the scantest outer reaches of any planet’s atmosphere, allowing it to escape into space. Yet so incredibly durable and patient that even lengthy interstellar travel scarcely registers. Impossible. Self-obvious. Hypothetical. Occurring before my very eyes.
We scour the galaxies, says a voiceless voice, waiting opportunities to be devoured, that we may merge our awareness with that of any willing life-form, speeding forward the evolution of gnosis.
Who is we? I wonder.
The reply is instantaneous. You may call us the Archaic Ones. This mushroom species has agreed to assist us in expanding our sphere of knowledge and influence.
The room of eyes goes silent. I’m feeling really creeped all of a sudden. This room is totally open, the door ajar to any form of life capable of munching a mushroom. At the thought, I sense the presence of certain eyes that wish to see without being seen. This thought seems to propel me in a certain direction, and I find myself pulled in the direction of a single dark, almond-shaped eye, eerily gold in color, which now opens wider as though in surprise at my approach. An instant later, I am passing along its line of sight, zipping along a corridor that narrows then opens unto a very unexpected scene.
I am inside a cluttered room filled with books and computers. One wall is entirely of glass. Through it I gaze upon a dingy cityscape beneath a blank sky. Atop a tall building across the street is a sign composed of red plastic Chinese characters on rusting balustrades. The penultimate character is missing. I look down at my body. I am seated in a wheelchair. In my lap is a white plastic bowl containing half a dried mushroom.
“Who are you?”
I feel these words leave my mouth, but it is not my voice that inquires. Frightened, I dart back into the dark corridor, and the cluttered room closes behind me, but not before I hear the same voice cry, “Wait! Don’t go! We are the Hydra! We are the Hydra!” Now I am vomiting in the American Teacher’s Bathroom, sweat dripping from the tip of my nose, nauseous tears pouring from each of my eyes.
No more. No more waves. No more dreaded spores of gnosis. I’ve had all I can take.
Again he finds himself stumbling into the kitchen, gazing mindlessly into the gaudily lit refrigerator, mouth parched. Impossible. Slamming the fridge door, he falls back onto the mattress to burrow beneath the covers, hoping against hope there will be no more. There he lies gasping, too sentient, too spent, defenseless before the hard lines, the iodine hate, of the woman’s face now towering above him. She is a closed circuit, self-complete, requiring nothing from him except his wrongness, his infallible weakness. Through the pasteboard wall come his sister’s sobs, dull, succumbing, and he feels again his horror, his shame at what he is. He hears again the tiny voice that once was his, pathetic, insufficient, wrong before it began.
Compassion opens within him like a terrible lake.
His love is so painful I fear it will kill me. Someone cries out. I sweat and pant and weep and beg for it to stop. No one here can bear it. I give up all my lives in the dark—except for that of the small boy. The underdeveloped, overgrown white worm of a boy who cannot protect his sister. I’m holding him close to me. I’m protecting him and telling him so. I’m sending him every shred of compassion this humid and twisted darkness affords. I strain to believe that need alone can carry these gifts to where he is.
Someone collapses, spent.
No more.
Now the small boy is older. The same woman towers over him, but not as high as before. Nothing she says can reach him now. His eyes are cool. He is a closed circuit, self-complete, requiring nothing from her except her wrongness, her unerring cruelty. Now there’s a glint of satisfaction in his pain. Suddenly I realize something else, and as I do, my breathing stops.
There is no sound of sobbing through the wall.
I open my eyes in the dark. All those years. Lillian struggled to keep me focused in sanity. Those same years, I absorbed her pain. Along with mine, I absorbed it deep into some night forest to be forgotten in the tangles of the madness, the willful drunkenness, the numbness and the rage. There was too much pain, too much pain, and once I knew that, it became my responsibility.
“You’ve got to feel,” I hear myself whisper hoarsely, my eyes closing.
The cool-eyed boy isn’t listening.
“You’ve got to carry your own sorrow, Jules, and let Lilly carry hers.”
No one hears. I am an infant incapable of lifting its head. I try to conjure my mother’s face. Any face at all. But there is no thread to follow. No place to hide. No match between what I am and what the world must be. Yet I feel something. There’s some vague something that I now grope toward. A pulsing warmth. Groping my way there, I finally arrive at…
A faraway hospital bed, at its center the wan and tortured form of my mother as a crone. I listen to her thin wheezing, and something unexpected begins to fill me. What is it? This foreign impulse? This unaccountable urge? To touch the thin skin of the pale forehead, to soothe something there, to offer a measure of rest to someone suddenly so like the small boy. Just a somebody. Just an anonymous dying somebody who never got what she wanted. Is this compassion, I wonder? Not for my mother. Just for this… person. Whoever she was. Whatever her sad story. Everybody has one. Everyone has one.
And then one day,
you never were at all.
I cry and I cry. I cry and I cry and I cry.
Somehow, by unseen degrees, a sense of rest seems to wrap itself around someone’s bones. Gradually he understands that he is enclosed. All this time. All this time I feared so that I was loveless. Now I know that love has been in me all along. As yearning. As sorrow. As ceaseless secret bitter longing. Driving me forward like… a hunger.
Slowly my eyes roll open. I feel a sensation utterly new to me. Something is opening. A primeval sense of… want. A decision to grow and to be. A feeling of writhing incompletion that summons: warm breast, cooing voice, plenty.
I am hungry.
I run a knife through a fresh apple, my fingers dripping with the juice, my mouth tasting its tartness even before I can lift it to my lips. Even the mist rising off it is a guilty intoxication, a sexual encounter. The first bite is so abrupt, so explosive, that I can’t imagine what to do. My teeth know: crush it very quickly. Get its slurry of nutrients as deeply inside as possible. Empty the mouth quickly for the second bite.
In exactly this way, three small green apples find their way inside me. I stand trembling in the kitchen, leaning against the sink, staring at the next bite as I chew the current one, juice dripping from my wrist, no thought in all the world but… apple.
The kai xin gou plant wilts on its windowsill. I lower my head for a closer look. To my surprise, a sprout has risen from the bottom of the crumpling bell-pepper thing. From the very center of the awful gash, the irreparable wound, the death of all promise—an optimistic two-inch sprout is now uncurling toward the light.
Light will someday split you open
Even if your life is now a cage
I lick my fingers and use a dribble of tap water to rinse them. Gradually I make my way outside to lean against the balcony railing to watch a sourceless pale grey-green spread itself across the sky. Two women and a man are exercising separately on the basketball courts below. Two white-over-blue girls walk, heads down, toward the classroom buildings. Beefy breakfast aromas drift from the dining hall. The fruit is slightly heavy in my stomach, but it has pushed back the mushroom onslaught for now. I may actually feel more grounded than in some time.
The phone begins to ring.
I ask myself whether I can deal with a telephone conversation right now. Deciding I’m most likely up to it, I pick my way carefully through the debris, following the trumpeting ring until I’ve discovered the phone under a layer of dirty clothes.
“Yes?” I inquire.
“Julian,” says my sister’s hushed voice. “She’s awake.”
Chapter Forty
“I stopped in to see her after work, just like always,” my sister tells me breathlessly. “I was sitting beside her and telling her about my day—I mean, who knows? People in a coma may hear every word you say. Anyway when I touched her forehead, her eyes opened and looked straight at me. It was so—”
“You touched hggg—” I begin before breaking into a jagged cough. Clearing my throat, I say, “You touched her what?”
“Her forehead. I was caressing her forehead. Why?”
“With your fingertips?” I ask hoarsely.
“Yes,” says Lillian.
“When was this?”
“Less than an hour ago. Why?”
After a moment I say, “No reason.”
A brief silence.
“Fuck you, too,” says Lil. “Listen, I don’t even care anymore. I just thought you might want to know. That’s all.”
“Lil… ,” I begin, not knowing where the words may take me. “Lil, something’s happening to me. I don’t really know how to talk about it.”
Silence from the bunny phone.
I clear my throat. “I know I haven’t been exactly open with you. It’s… uh… I just need some time, okay?”
When Lillian’s voice returns, it trembles.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how angry I am,” she says quietly. “You have shut me out so… totally. Here I am between my mute mother and my mute brother, talking and talking, and nothing’s coming back. You don’t want to take your medication? Fine. You want to fucking starve yourself? That’s excellent. You want some more time? Take as much as you want. But I’m not holding my breath anymore, okay?”
My turn to be silent.
“Two men came to see me,” says Lil.
My breathing stops.
“Exactly how long have you known about this?” she demands.
I lean against the settee table, and it almost tips over. “Uh, what exactly do you mean by ‘this?’”
“I cannot believe,” says Lil, “that you just said that to me.”
I’m suddenly aware of other listening ears besides those of my sister. Many of them. “Oh,” I say. “This. Everybody knows about this.”
“Everybody?” she says incredulously. “Everybody knows that you have met our father?”
“Umm…”
“Over dinner?”
“More like beers, actually,” I say, falling into the settee chair.
“Julian, I can tell from the sound of your voice that you are bullshitting me. Just like always. I am going to listen now, and you are going to talk, and you’re going to tell me the whole story about our father. And if you leave anything out—anything—I’ll. Never. Speak. To. You. Again.”
A salty taste floods my mouth. She means it. But what can I possibly say over the American Teacher’s Telephone? I only understand one thing. I must make it immediately clear that my sister knows nothing of what I know. And never will.
Swallowing hard, I say, “I have met our father, Lillian. And I’m not going to tell you about it. Not now, not ever. There’s a reason for that, and I’m not going to tell you that, either. Don’t ever ask again.”
I cringe. Now comes the sound of a hand being placed over Lil’s receiver. Muffled words are spoken. After a moment, I hear a man’s voice on the line.
“Julian?”
“Who is this?”
“This is Adrian McPherson, a friend of your sister’s. Lil asked me to tell you something.”
“Stumpy?” I say.
“Uh, Lil says she’ll be back there Sunday and will take over her classes Monday morning. If you could just relay that infor—”
“Back?” I interrupt. “Back here? In China?”
“Yes,” says the voice on the phone. “Your mother seems to have—”
“Put Lil back on the phone.”
“Uh, I was saying that your mother seems to have stabilized to the point—”
“Would you kindly put my sister back on the phone?”
“Uh—just a moment.”
More muffled words.
“Julian? Lil says that Tree can meet her at the airport. If you could just have your things out of the apartment by noon on Sunday?”
I’m beginning to pant. “You put my goddamn sister back on the phone, Adrian.”
I hear the receiver settle into the bunny cradle.
Chapter Forty-One
“It’s my fault,” I tell Tree, pacing in her kitchen. “I should have leveled with her a long time ago. I should have leveled with both of you. Now… I don’t even know where to start.”
“You can start by sitting down,” says Tree, stirring her tea. “You’re making me nervous.”
I pause in front of the fridge, which displays a new piece of kinder-art. Three crayon orbs are lined up in a row. Beneath them is scrawled, “8 + 9 = 13.”
“Monique,” says Tree with a smile. “My special little Indigo child.”
“Math whiz,” I mutter, resuming my pacing.
“Let me make you some of this chamomile tea,” says Tree. “It’ll calm you down.”
“I don’t want to calm down.”
It’s bad enough that Lil’s return flight takes her into SARS-riddled Hong Kong. Worse, it takes her there by way of a totally upside-down Beijing.
“You read the Beijing Daily this morning?” I ask Tree.
“You kno
w I don’t read newspapers.”
“Wen Jiabao just finished talks with the USA and North Korea. Now he’s—”
“Who’s Wen Jiabao?”
“The new Chairman Mao. He’s about to meet with the US again. Next it’s the Russians. The World Health Organization is demanding a meeting too. Beijing is very on edge right now, and I don’t like the idea of Lil flying right into the middle of it.”
Tree shakes her head. “I can’t tell the girl a thing. She just says, ‘I finish what I start.’ I told her, ‘Baby, it’s too crazy over here. Let Jules and me finish this up and we’ll all go to the Rendezvous and eat some barbeque.’ I couldn’t make her listen.”
My pacing takes me to the kitchen window. I gaze out at nothing. Velázquez said all the robotic little Dobbinses are on their way to China. Lurch, lurch. Maybe Lil’s flight will turn out to be entirely kinfolk.
“What’s got you so on edge, Julian?” asks Tree. “Sit down and talk to me.”
“Why is Xu coming over?” I grouse.
“He’s a friend of mine. Friends of mine come over.”
“Why now?”
“Mr. Xu is just back from Australia, and there’s something very important he wants to share with me.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Tree sets down her teacup. “Julian, sit down.”
“I deleted the novel.”
“Why?”
“Who is this ‘old friend,’ anyway?” I ask. “The guy pretending to be Truman? Why does he decide to send me a Southern Noir novel then decide not to? And then decide to again? Or whatever it is he’s currently deciding?”
“I’m not going there.”
I grab one of the wooden chairs, spin it around, and sit at the table. Tree’s eyes are on mine. “The government’s watching us, Tree.”
The Year of the Hydra Page 39
