by Greg Dragon
“Laptops?”
He shrugged.
“Will we stop there?”
Jian shook his head. “Not allow. We go on further to Baoyang village. You spend night with family, stay with Jian. Tomorrow, village have burial ceremony for dead. You stay in house. Then, next day, if okay, you go see train.”
* * *
Angel hadn’t realized at first that Jian meant for her to be excluded from the burial ceremony. “I’ll stay out of the way,” she promised, when he refused her request to attend. “No pictures. You won’t even notice me.” But despite her appeals, he was adamant that she remain out of sight during the entire observance. Furthermore, she was not to go anywhere near the makeshift morgue that had been set up on the outskirts of the village, at least until the day after. “Is not allow,” he told her. “Only yaschin allow during preparing bodies.” It was when he told her this last part that she finally understood the cultural significance of his request.
A couple years back she had traveled to Tibet to investigate an outbreak of pneumonic plague in one of the northern prefectures, and it was during her stay there that she became familiar with the Buddhist practice of sky burial. She had forgotten that many of these customs were shared in some form by the Mongols; indeed, the term yaschin — bone man or bone dealer — was the same one the Tibetan Buddhists had used.
The lamas taught that the body functions as a vessel for one’s consciousness, which transmigrates into another after death. Having outlasted its usefulness, the remains of the deceased are placed on a hill or mountaintop, where they are typically consumed by carrion-eaters, namely vultures. Thus, the body is recycled back into the earth while providing one final act of generosity to those still living.
It was the yaschin’s responsibility to prepare the body, sometimes hastening the defleshing of the bones by slicing into it beforehand with special knives, sometimes even going so far as removing the muscle and organs.
Days later, after they had been picked clean, the bones might be collected, then crushed into powder and mixed with flour to provide further nourishment to the animals. Sometimes this mixture was given to the yaks for feed.
No one else is allowed near the body during preparation, and even those individuals closest to the deceased are encouraged to keep their distance. This is because it takes a while for the spirit to accept that the body has died, and in such a vulnerable state, it longs to possess another and may attempt to enter a body already occupied. It is the monks’ job to help guide the spirits to their next home.
She remembered being initially appalled by the whole idea of excarnation, the body left on some exposed rock where it could be picked over by scavengers. The custom ostensibly fulfilled important spiritual functions, teaching that life is impermanent, and that we can still show generosity and compassion for all living creatures, even after death. She did not, however, share the lamas’ sensibilities.
But folklore and traditional practices oftentimes have their beginnings in worldly considerations, and, as she learned, it turned out that sky burial was no exception. In many areas where it is followed, timber for funeral pyres was scarce, and the presence of permafrost or shallow bedrock made excavating a grave impractical. These were things she could understand and accept.
Standing at the door of the family’s empty yurt and peering out into the silent village early the next morning, Angel realized that she truly was alone out here, and would be, at least according to what Jian had indicated, for nearly the entire day. The bodies would not be placed on the mountaintop until nightfall, after which there would follow a period of quiet mourning.
She wondered, had even the youngest, oldest, and most feeble survivors gone to pay their respects? It seemed they had. There wasn’t a soul left in the village.
But then movement caught her eye. A shadow passed between structures, the darkness rippling over the ground. Soon after, a dog appeared and trotted across the gravel ruts of the village’s main road. It paused a couple times to sniff at something and once to scratch its belly before disappearing further away. The animal was thin but healthy, not starved. She didn’t think she’d find any abused animals here, as it was not the custom of these people. Last night, for example, she had noticed a bowl set on the ground just outside the door. Empty then, it was now filled with a thin, bluish milk.
It had taken them longer to arrive to the village than Jian had calculated, even assuming he’d meant the full three hours his fingers had indicated. A flat tire and no jack for the spare had added to the drive, and it was only by incredible good luck that a farmer passed and helped dig a hole deep enough so that the offending wheel could be replaced. Then, another pothole had loosened the sole remaining headlight on the car, which started to wobble. Only then did Jian slow down.
By the time they saw the first buildings, rectangular mud and stone houses, night was fully upon them, and the headlight was pointing too far to the left to be of much use, like a lazy eye in a face where its twin had gone blind.
She caught glimpses of the yurts as they materialized out of the darkness, looking like giant squat mushrooms sprouting from a moonscape of scrub and gravel. She realized with a sinking sensation that these would be her accommodations for the next few days. Though she had roughed it before, she hadn’t expected it to be quite this rustic, even though Cheong had warned her as much, adding also that she should expect no cell phone service, no internet, and no espresso machines. In fact, there would be no electricity at all.
When she asked Jian to confirm all this, he nodded, but added, “All people working at Goh Li Xhia factory have phone given by company. No signal except in factory or city.” He shook his head, as if it were the most absurd thing he’d ever heard. It very well may have been.
Getting out of the car had not been easy for Angel. She was stiff and sore from the ride and the bruising she’d previously received in Shanghai, but she was grateful to stretch her legs. Her discomfort quickly gave way to wonder as darkness swept in to embrace them once Jian extinguished the headlight. The haze from the day had since dissipated, and the air was sharp and crisp, almost crystalline in its clarity. The wide valley glowed with a ghostly hue from the starlight above. There was something magical about the place which made the long drive almost worth it.
Jian’s family stayed up just long enough to meet her and answer a few questions, then the central fire was extinguished and everyone retired. Angel was given a spot on a carpet of yak pelts which carried a strong, though not unpleasant, musky odor. And though the ground was hard and the air frigid, she awoke the next morning warm and more refreshed than she had in a very long time. Her dreams had not been troubled. Her abused muscles felt better. And the wonderful aroma of yak milk tea filled the tent and woke her appetite.
Breakfast consisted of cheese and a dense, dry flatbread. Soon after, the family departed for the daylong ceremony, leaving Angel to fend for herself.
The rising sun was just beginning to breach the saddle between two low rocky hills rising a kilometer to the east, lighting them ablaze with a brilliant yellow glow. She wondered if that was where the villagers would go. Wherever it was, she knew that the charnel grounds would be among the holiest of places and probably kept secret from her. Their pain would be especially immense and raw at this time, given that so many friends and family members had been lost so tragically. The last thing she wanted to do was antagonize them with her intrusion. At the very least, it would close their minds to her as an outsider and prevent her from investigating the accident and looking into Cheong’s suspicion that it had been caused by the sudden spread of some mysterious new disease.
She had challenged this claim during the call from the house in Lyon. He deflected it by asking her what had changed her mind, and she muttered something about curiosity but didn’t bring up DeBryan’s video.
Now, standing here after her brief conversation that morning with Jian and his family, a medical connection made even less sense. If some sort of sickness had
swept through the train, then why hadn’t it spread after the accident?
The villagers likewise dismissed the idea, though for their own reasons. They believed the tragedy had been wrought because the Baarin had betrayed their own customs by going to work at the factory. “We herders, not making machines in modern factory.”
“And what about you?” she asked Jian. “Do you think those people died because they abandoned their faith?”
He didn’t answer her right away. She could tell that he had mixed feelings on the matter. On the one hand, he appeared reluctant to disagree with his family. There had been tension between him and his parents and siblings the night before, and Angel guessed that in their eyes Jian was guilty of a similar betrayal by leaving the village to live in the city to pursue a nontraditional path.
After some hesitation, he finally admitted that it could be possible that a disease might be to blame, and he gave as his reasoning the presence of men at the crash site dressed in special protective suits.
“You were there? You saw?”
“Jian not supposed to be. Villagers not supposed to.”
He described the suits as plastic and blue in color, covering the men’s bodies from head to toe. A small, clear plastic window permitted them to look out.
They were hazard suits, she’d told him. It was standard protocol, both to avoid contact with any harmful chemicals which might have been spilled, such as diesel or gasoline, as well as biological fluids. They also helped protect the integrity of the crime scene. It didn’t mean anything and certainly wasn’t proof of a biological agent.
“Besides,” she added, “if there really is some kind of disease, then why haven’t the yaschin shown any unusual symptoms? They would have had the most contact with the victims and thus been the first to be sickened.”
“Yaschin protected,” he told her. It was clear that, despite his break from tradition, he still clung to some of the old beliefs and superstitions. “Cannot get sick.”
It didn’t matter to Angel. Whether biological or not, she had come prepared. No way was she taking any chances. In her luggage was her own biohazard suit, and as soon as she could get to the accident site, she intended to use it.
Just in case.
Chapter Twelve
The traditional fur-lined yurts outnumbered by ten to one the smaller, newer rectangular mud and clay houses, most of which had been recently built on the encampment’s perimeter or along the road Jian had driven them in on and which Angel now walked. The dried mortar had been sloppily applied, with much of it oozed out like warm wax between the stones before hardening. A few of the houses were painted, but most were not. The yurts, in contrast, were clean and bright, the pelts painted white with simple geometric patterns of blue and gold.
Jian had told her that the village was growing, mostly from an influx of Baarin people from further west and north, and the newer structures were easier and faster to build. “Many elders not like them.” They worried that they would simply crumble and fall in a heavy rain.
According to him, the only cinderblock building in the area was the train station, and it was not considered a part of the village proper. It had been constructed about a half kilometer past the last home along the road, and could be found at the end of a narrow footpath worn into the ground by the feet of the factory employees on their daily trek to and from their commute. The trail bent around a pair of low slung hills, which hid the station from view.
Coming up over a rise, Angel spied the tracks for the first time, two sets of them. They ran along a raised seam of ground left to right, like an angry welt on the land. From her elevated vantage point, the rails appeared to slice through the grass with surgical precision, the thick, dark wooden ties suturing the edges together. It was an unending scar marring the flesh of the steppe.
She headed across the low scrub toward the stationhouse, mindful of the occasional yak patties and the numerous smaller piles of shiny black pellets, which she guessed were pika. Other than a few birds, she’d not seen any wildlife.
The morning breeze was still bitterly cold, raking its claws against her cheeks and bringing tears to her eyes. Where the sunlight could not reach the ground during its daily swing across the sky, shallow tongues of snow persisted. Elsewhere, tiny wildflowers were starting to bloom. Yet despite the chill, the short hike up the low rise winded her, so she unzipped her parka but left it on.
The station stood alone, maybe three or four meters off the tracks, a small concrete block of stolid gray and a matching roof of corrugated steel. The covering extended over an area of compressed gravel, providing protection from the sun and rain. She was approaching from the back side, in which a single wooden door gave entrance into the building and a lone window provided some light inside of it. As with the rectangular houses, the station gave the appearance of having been hastily built. Hardened mortar bulged from the seams, and the walls were left without adornment.
The door was unlocked. She stepped inside, found the room empty. The air was blessedly still but icy. The door in the opposite wall had been propped open.
The structure was little more than four walls and a roof. The floor was smoothed cement, clean except for a few concentric blooms of rust which had dripped from holes in the ceiling. There were no chairs, no benches. Not even a rock to sit upon.
Along the wall closest to the tracks, beside the second door, was a narrow shelf, and beneath it was a small package wrapped in paper and held together with twine. An army of Chinese characters marched over the wrinkled paper surface and tumbled over one side. Tucked beneath the string was a thin stack of mail. A lantern hung on the wall, and below it on the floor sat a can half filled with fuel.
She straightened up and looked around. The doubt was returning, and she wondered once again what she’d been thinking agreeing to come out here.
Cheong had tried to get her to commit to working for 6X on a more long-term basis, traveling to the other sites on the list for reasons he would only allude to but not provide any details on. He clearly expected her to do her own research. But she’d told him no. She was eager to get back out to Huangxia, though of course she hadn’t told him that and still had no idea how she would manage to do it. She owed DeBryan at least that much for the video he had taken. Coming here was a convenient launching point for another attempt at the island.
Or so she’d thought.
But now, standing out here in the grasslands hundreds of kilometers from the nearest airport and even further away from the coast, she felt more remote and separated from Huangxia than she’d felt when she was back home in France, as if that were even possible.
It came to her that it might have been Cheong’s intent all along, to get her out here and away from Huangxia, and the thought filled her with rage.
She circled the room again. There was nothing here for her to investigate, no clues, no one to talk to. No reason for her to be here at all. Yes, there had been a terrible accident and lives were lost. Jian had confirmed that much. It was surely a tragedy, but not one with a medical cause. There was no possible link to disease. How could there be? It was a waste of her time and Cheong’s money, if he were genuinely interested, to send her out here to look into it. What he needed, if he honestly wanted to know the truth, was a mechanical engineer, a railway safety inspector or accident specialist, not a medical expert. Someone who could spot a mechanical defect or sabotage.
With a shake of her head, she exited and circled the building. Some thirty meters up the track stood a small wooden shack, about the size and shape of an outhouse. A fuel tank, painted pastel green, was mounted on a short pedestal beside it, again on a base of poured concrete. Moving closer, she saw that a hose passed from the tank and into the side of the wooden structure. A squat chimney poked up out of the roof.
Angel unlatched and opened the door and found the generator she expected inside. It seemed a bit out of place, out here in the middle of nowhere, and something of a puzzle. What did it provide power for? The
re were no crossing lights here for the tracks, and she had not seen lights of any kind inside the station save for the gas lantern. Not even any electrical outlets. No gate or warning bell. No switching station. No need for power whatsoever.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she spotted a small shelf above her head. The space was empty, but using the light from her cell phone, she saw from the absence of accumulated dust the footprint of something which had recently occupied the space, an object several centimeters wide and a quarter meter long.
On the floor of the tiny shed, she found a loose power cord. One end plugged into a small voltage converter, similar to the one she had for her laptop, and this was in turn plugged into the generator. A second cord lay in a loose heap beside it, a communication cable by the looks of the free end. It trailed down the back corner and through the wall.
Angel carefully followed it along the gravel and over to the metal track, where it was tucked underneath the metal lip of the rail and ran back toward the station. She lost it when it disappeared into a plastic pipe into the ground, but regained it when it reappeared out of another plastic pipe at the base of the station where two walls joined. This she traced up into the eaves to where it finally ended at a small satellite receiver she hadn’t noticed before.
So, either Jian and Cheong had been mistaken about there being no mobile phone and internet service, or they had lied. She doubted Jian knew, but Cheong? The whole setup, from receiver to the generator itself, looked like a fairly recent addition, and perhaps Jian simply hadn’t been aware of it.
But that begged several questions. What happened to the wireless transmitter? What purpose did it provide and for whose convenience? Who had removed it and why?
Returning to the shed, she found a sticker attached to the electrical transformer. It was marked simply with the word QUANTEL and a serial number. Fumbling her phone out of her parka pocket again, her fingers now numb from the cold, she managed after a couple attempts to snap a clear picture of it. The name meant nothing to her, but she assumed it was a telecommunications company. She had some people she could send the image to who might know.
