We enter the crowded lobby of a second hotel. Same frustrated hordes. Same story. No certificate, no room. I check the key display behind the desk. Some two dozen electronic keys are hanging there. “Let’s go,” I say.
I tell Phoebe to instruct Ma to find us a funkier hotel, preferably one unauthorized to serve foreigners. Ma replies that he can’t remain in Beijing much longer, as his license isn’t valid here. We encounter a multi-story hotel with rusting fire escapes and a faded plastic sign, and I say, “Here.”
“Ma say he can’t wait,” reports Phoebe as the taxi stops.
“Fine,” I say. “Ask him how much.”
As Phoebe negotiates, I drag a sleepy Ling from the backseat. Next thing I know, Phoebe, Ling, and I are standing on the sidewalk and Taxi 117 is disappearing down the street.
“What happened?” I ask.
“He no want money,” says Phoebe. “Just laugh.”
“Just laugh? What did he say?”
“Chinese expression,” she replies, trying to arrange her hair. “Is better talk like duck than just give some old shoe. We go inside.”
Mechanically I follow Phoebe and Ling into a small lobby. This is a zero star hotel, but the lobby is filled with men, many of them shouting at the two grim-faced desk clerks. Even here, it’s no health certificate, no room. Phoebe looks at me wearily. Most of the rooms are empty, I note, scanning the key display behind the desk. The keys are the old-fashioned metal kind, and all the available rooms are located on the upper floors.
“Follow me,” I say.
In the general bedlam, no one notices that Phoebe, Ling, and I exit the lobby by means of the carpeted stairs.
“Ju? What we do?” says Phoebe.
“We’re checking in.”
We’re all panting by the time we arrive on the fifth and topmost floor of the hotel. The air is stale. I lead the way to the room farthest from the stairs. Good, I think, examining the lock. Room 513 has been jimmied on more than one occasion.
I go through my wallet. There’s nothing remotely resembling a credit card. I recall that Phoebe has none, either, my having deposited them in a post box. Now my hands come across something. It is a glossy image of Guan Yin, Goddess of Mercy and Illegal Hotel Room Entries. Is for make the miracle, I was told at Lijiang train station. Or maybe just don’t do nothing. The card is very worn now, the inner metal core exposed at one edge.
I insert the card between the door and the frame and try to slide it past the lock. Nothing.
“Shit,” mutters Phoebe, looking nervously up and down the empty corridor.
“You can relax,” I tell her. “There’s no one on this floor or the floor below us.”
I try again, this time simultaneously rattling the loose knob. The lock pops open. The door falls opens with a dry groan. We three gaze into a dismal but tidy room. An ancient window air-conditioner. Two double beds. A roach electrocution device. No settee by the window. It’ll do.
Ling runs past her mother to leap onto one of the beds. She doesn’t even bounce once. Phoebe still stands worriedly in the hall. I pull her inside and close the door.
“Keep the door bolted,” I say to her. “Keep the curtains closed. Don’t go anywhere and, for God’s sake, don’t call anybody. Take this money. I’ll be back after I take care of—”
“You not coming back,” says Phoebe, turning away.
“I’ll be back.”
“You not coming back,” she says again.
“Fine. Have it your way.” I place a stack of banknotes on the bureau. “If I’m not here by nightfall, wait as long as you can, then—”
Phoebe grabs the money and flings it into my face. “You just want get Beijing,” she shouts. “Now you Beijing, leave me, leave my daughter, don’t even care what happen.”
“Could you possibly say that a little louder?”
Phoebe hisses something in street Cantonese.
“Whatever,” I say, bending to pick up the cash.
Now she’s kicking at me. “Just like my husband!” accuses Phoebe, still kicking. “Just like all the men, lie me, lie my daughter, lie everybody.”
Ling, sprawled on the bed, begins singing to the ceiling.
I decide to leave the money where it lies. Backing toward the door, I see Phoebe fall onto the other bed, sobbing. I glance at Ling. She’s still singing. She’s also holding a scrap of paper in her hand, holding it out toward me. I walk to her and take the worn, folded piece of paper from her hand. Opening it, I discover several handwritten Chinese characters. I’ve seen this note before.
“Ling?” I ask. “What does this say?”
She doesn’t answer. Now I recall that Ling is a preschooler. “Phoebe? What does this say?”
She’s too busy sobbing.
“Phoebe.”
Still crying, Phoebe snatches the note from my hand and gives it a look before tossing it. “Just say please help this person so much.”
I bend to recover the scrap of paper. It’s all coming back to me now. Again I see the smiling young couple in the Beijing moonlight, the pretty face with the determined expression, a law student with a passion for women’s issues. This shelter begin help all the women children of the abuse. I’m watching a delicate hand scrawl a note of introduction for me, a note that I’ve never quite brought myself to throw away.
“Where did you find this?” I ask Ling.
“In the hall,” she says to the ceiling.
I pat my pocket to make sure my titanium-covered journal is still there.
“Okay, change of plans,” I announce. “Phoebe, I want you and Ling to go to the university lunchroom today with this note and ask for this woman.”
Phoebe, blowing her nose, doesn’t respond.
“Are you listening? There’s a girl who works at the lunchroom. I want you to give her this note and tell her about your problem.”
Phoebe turns to face me. “Lunchroom girl? How some—”
“Just give her the note, okay? If you won’t listen to me, listen to your daughter.”
Phoebe glares at me. “Why my daughter know something you no tell me?”
“I didn’t tell your daughter anything.”
“Then how she know?”
I shrug. We both turn to gaze at the five-year-old on the bed singing softly to the ceiling.
Phoebe shakes her head. “Sometimes this girl worry me so much.”
I hold the note out to Phoebe, and she stares at it.
“I take this,” she says, “you not come back.”
“That could actually be a good thing,” I say. “A lot of people are looking for me. Sooner or later they’ll find me.”
I set the note on top of the TV. With a sigh, I step over the multi-colored bank notes and open the door. Before I can close it behind me, I hear Phoebe’s sullen voice.
“Trouble,” she says. “When I first see you, I know this.”
I take one last look at Ling, her plastic make-up mirror in her hand. I’d thank her. I’d thank both of them if I only knew what for. Reluctantly, I close the door behind me.
Chapter Fifty-Three
This zero-star hotel has only one exit. Fortunately the lobby is too chaotic for anyone to notice me descend the stairs and slip out the double doors.
On the sidewalk I stretch out my stride, putting as much space as possible between myself and a certain woman and her daughter. That’s the better part of the current plan.
In fact it may be the entire current plan. The only other thing that occurs just now is the one most likely to get me tied to a chair somewhere. That would be appearing at the razor wire-swathed gate of the Peoples’ Beijing SARS Treatment and Quarantine Hospital with an earnest expression and a nice bouquet.
Actually there is one other idea that occurs, but I’m determined not to acknowledge it. The Temple of Heaven Park and its Circular Mound Altar are so close now they’re speaking to me with each step. Not that I’m listening. I’ve half a mind to show up at that Irish bar on Third Ring Road
, assuming it would be open at this, or any other, hour. Not that Ralph O’Malley would likely constitute much in the way of substantive aid, but I don’t know anyone else in Beijing. As for now, I’d feel considerably less conspicuous inside a taxi, whatever its destination, if only this broad, empty thoroughfare offered one. I think I’m reasonably near a subway station. Reaching an intersection, I peer in each direction, distracted somewhat by a persistent tinny screeching approximating the human voice. Finally turning to glare in the direction of the sound, I encounter a most unwelcome sight. A singing condom machine. Half-panicked, I scan the streets for additional troubling signs. I find them.
Strung along the sidewalk are three women beneath three parasols. Five, no, but we take what we can get nowadays. Beyond all possible doubt, mere seconds from now, those women’s steps will fall into perfect sync and I will vanish into the maw of a room with neither a view nor room service.
I dash into the nearest shelter, the open door of a shop. It turns out to be an herbal pharmacy, a crowd of women pressing against a counter behind which white-clad pharmacists scoop medicinal herbs onto old-fashioned scales. I pretend to read a poster on the wall, a government-issued one that goes into some detail about how, in a moment of madness, one might wash one’s hands. I study it for a full minute, hoping that the incoming penetration might find someone else to skewer, the last thing I’m needing right now being a fresh complication.
Finally, timidly, I peek outside the door. The street is relatively normal, all except for one thing. As my eyes tip up, I notice that the multi-story building across the broad avenue is topped by a series of red plastic Chinese characters, each erected on a rusting balustrade. The penultimate character is missing, and I stare at this display with some displeasure. Déjà vu was never very high on my list of favorite things. In most instances, the event wasn’t all that much fun the first time around. Yet I’ve no question that I have looked upon exactly this sight before. I believe it had something to do with a very menacing red toadstool and a room composed of eyeballs and not a whole lot else.
There’s nothing to do, I decide, but follow the rabbit. My eyes still on the too-familiar rooftop, I exit the pharmacy and trace the sidewalk in a direction that would provide the remembered angle of view. This requires turning a corner, then another, which places me on a quite narrow street with no view of the building at all. Still, the angle should be more or less correct now. I begin backing across the street, and a truck, horn blaring, nearly runs me down. As the truck barrels away, I note that it is an orange seafood-delivery truck. License tag 999-333. I turn to examine the nearby street number. The nearest doorway is ninety-nine.
That’s so nice.
Crossing the street, I tiptoe in vain. Were I a couple of floors higher, I think I’d be gazing at that storm-damaged rooftop from roughly the same perspective as I recall. Turning, I discover that I’m standing beneath a broad third-story balcony, perhaps that of an apartment, judging from the draped ferns. The anonymous building offers no other balconies, just the one. That’s a bit odd. In Chinese cities, it tends to be either hundreds of apartments or none at all. Someone of means, it seems, has created a solitary domicile above a street of anonymous offices and warehouses. My curiosity piqued, I drop my gaze to street level. Directly beneath the balcony and its ferns is a steel door with neither buzzer nor intercom.
I look about the street for pebbles to toss. Nothing. Backing up a bit, I see that one of the sliding glass doors of the apartment is open. I consider shouting something, but what exactly does one shout? Hello in the apartment? Throw down the chocolate? Ever occupied while stabling? Cupping my hands, I call out the only words likely to stir a response, the words once shouted at me during a too-close encounter, not that I’ve a clue what they may signify.
“We are the Hydra!”
No reply. After a long moment, I shout again, more insistently, “We are the Hydra!”
Still nothing. I glance nervously up and down the street. All is cemetery still. I let a full minute pass before cupping my hands, taking a deep breath, and shouting, “We are the Hydra! Couldn’t be prouder! If you can’t hear us, we’ll yell a little louder! WE ARE THE—”
The steel door below the balcony motors slowly open. Once fully open, it stops and I gaze inside a tiny foyer containing only a metal ashtray attached to a wall, above it a wordless no-smoking sign¬.
A bit nervously, I step inside and the steel door motors closed behind me. An elevator begins to descend noisily. While I await its arrival, I look about for some clue as to where I am. There’s nothing to see. I check inside the ashtray. No sign that it’s ever been used.
The door of the elevator opens. I step inside. There’s no button to push. The door closes on its own, and the elevator ascends to what seems to be the third floor. I watch the door open upon a cluttered room that doesn’t quite qualify as either apartment or office. Clearly someone spends a lot of time here. I’m gazing into a large, unkempt workspace with a broad balcony dotted by potted ferns—beyond which is exactly, precisely the view I recall.
I step inside the room. The elevator door closes behind me.
Separating the workspace from the balcony is a wall of glass and two tripod-mounted telescopes aimed at the heavens. I also take note of a row of ceramic pots, some of them bearing a low-growing cacti fully appearing to be lophophora williamsi, better known as peyote. Several other pots offer fully mature marijuana plants, and my eyes admire the heavy, drooping buds. Now I notice a cluster of small aquariums in a dark corner of the room, each bristling with variously hued mushrooms. I ask myself whether I might arrange to sublet.
Along every wall of this room are shelf after shelf of books and beneath them worktables bearing new and old computers and countless sticky notes, some of them faded. There’s also a scanner, a laser printer, a microscope, an electron microscope, and a tray of dried mushrooms. Various messy notebooks lie open. An overfull trash can is surrounded by paper wads.
Aside from the bookshelves, nothing at all adorns the walls of this anomalous space with the exception of a single publicity poster proffering the words, “A Room of Eyes, by Bi Yu Nu.” I step closer to study the poster and its illustration of an all-enclosing wall of eyeballs. Somehow I manage not to shudder.
“How did you find me?”
I turn to face a doorway where an elderly Chinese man sits in a wheelchair. Despite the deep lines of the pallid face, the man is robust. His most arresting feature is the matching pair of almond-shaped eyes, shockingly large and bright with a sickly yellow.
“That,” I reply, gesturing toward the view beyond the balcony.
“That?” says the man.
“The view,” I say. “I’ve seen it before.”
Using his large hands to maneuver the wheelchair to the center of the room, the man stares at me, unblinking. There are green flecks in the enormous eyes. I was wrong about the color. Not a sickly yellow, they’re a dull gold.
“Ah,” says the man. “You were lying on a bed in a dark room. You were protecting your right arm. Before you ran away, you saw something and now that something has brought you here. Amazing.” He rolls a little closer. “Positively amazing.”
“You’re Bi Yu Nu,” I say.
The old man scowls. “My name is the least important thing you could possibly be asking me right now.”
“You’re right. Would you have a spot of English gin? Never mind. I don’t drink.”
“I know you’re one of them,” says Bi harshly. “Do you know you’re one of them?”
I look around. There are no chairs in the room. I lean against one of the worktables and reply, “My name is Julian. Thanks for asking. And that’s okay, I prefer to stand. One of whom?”
“The reason I know,” he continues, “is because I am repelled by you. Aren’t you by me? You can be completely honest.”
“If we’re being completely honest,” I say, “you could use a housekeeper. And I’ve no interest in you at all.”
“Did you learn nothing at all in the Room of Eyes?”
“I learned to never again eat the whole mushroom. I think I may have also stumbled onto an interstellar neural network, if that’s what you’re gesturing toward.”
Bi nods slowly, measuring me. “That’s how they found this place, you know. This planet? They found it through that network.”
“Who’s they?”
“Whose name were you shouting on the street a moment ago?”
“The Hydra?” I say. “That’s a mythical creature from very long ago and therefore not on my current list of worries.”
“The Hydrae, plural,” replies Bi, “is a nomadic hominoid race from elsewhere in this galaxy. They are obsessive colonizers and interbreeders. The story of Hercules and the Hydra arose from early encounters between our race and theirs. They come in pods of nine. Thus, the nine heads of the Hydra. Now you’re going to ask me why they are obsessive colonizers and interbreeders.”
“Not really, but you go ahead.”
Bi seems to warm to the subject. “The Hydrae are exquisitely murderous by nature, specializing in their own family members. It seems to be the pheromones that set them off. The more identical the genetics, the more agitated they become. You know the story of Cain and Abel? Hercules’s murder of his family? Those aren’t just stories.”
Bi and I share a gaze. “So the Hydrae’s only means of averting extinction,” I venture, “is to put as much space among themselves as possible? That’s why they’re colonizers?”
Bi nods. “As soon as a healthy male reaches adulthood, he’s sent away as part of a nine-pod composed of as dissimilar genetics as possible, making it less likely that they’ll tear each other to pieces before their work is accomplished. That work is interbreeding, crossing themselves again and again with more docile hominoids wherever they find them.”
“I gather their success here has been somewhat mixed.”
“There’s been some progress. Genocide is slowly giving way to domestic battery. The Hydrae seem to be reasonably encouraged. They return here every few thousand years to tweak the genetics.” Bi rolls his chair a little closer. “Did you know your father?”
The Year of the Hydra Page 50
