Naomi Kritzer

by Monster (html)

  Monster

  — by Naomi Kritzer —

  No one at the Guiyang airport speaks English. I have the UTranslator app on my phone, and before I left my colleague Jeanine said that it had worked fine for her. But she’d also said she’d never had trouble finding an English speaker in China. And her trips were to Shanghai and Beijing.

  “I’m going to the Guizhou province,” I’d said.

  “Where?” she said, pulling out her phone to look up a map.

  “Like the Oklahoma of China,” I said. Southern-ish, rural, inland, poor. Not where the foreign tourists usually go.

  At the baggage claim, there’s a yellow lab sniffing bags, trotting happily back and forth along the conveyer belt as it snakes into the airport. The dog looks deeply pleased with his work, and I am startled to see him sit down on the belt next to a suitcase, which is the standard signal dogs give when they’re flagging something. I look around, wondering if I’m about to see an arrest. No one seems perturbed. Also, no one claims the bag; a short time later it winds past me and I see that its wheels are wrapped and it has no handle. The suitcase is a decoy, riding the belt endlessly to give the dog something to react to on days with no would-be smugglers. I wonder what they put inside it.

  My suitcase elicits no response from the dog. I’m irrationally relieved.

  In Guiyang, the responses from the UTranslator app get me a lot of very confused looks unless I keep it to single-word requests. “Bathroom?” gets me pointed in the right direction. “Newspaper?” gets me to a newsstand. Of course, all the papers for sale are in Chinese and I can’t tell which are going to be filled with news from Beijing and Shanghai and which might have local stories. I buy two papers anyway.

  “Where can I hire a car to take me to Danzhai?” is not a successful sort of query but “taxi?” eventually gets me to the right spot. It takes time to make it clear that I really do want to go all the way to Danzhai (it’s two-and-a-half hours away), but we finally set off.

  I didn’t sleep well on the plane, and I very much want to sleep in the car, but I’m too keyed up. I stare out at the wide smooth highway that tunnels straight through the hills and bridges the valleys, trying to catch glimpses of China beyond the guardrails, barely absorbing anything.

  All I want from the newspapers is the answer to one question: have there been any more bodies? I hover my phone over the characters, slowly parsing out headlines about trade agreements, a train accident, a pair of extremely old identical twins who are celebrating their birthday.

  “Why are you going to Guizhou?” Jeanine had asked.

  “Because no one I know has ever been there,” I said. This was a lie. I’m here to find Andrew.

  * * *

  I met Andrew my sophomore year of high school.

  I was a nerd, which back in the 1980s was the actual opposite of cool (as opposed to now, when it’s simply another variety of it). I spent middle school being bullied for my preference for books over people and sweatpants over jeans. Any time I stopped for a drink from the water fountain, my classmates would yank my pants down; the school administrators all insisted that if I just ignored them instead of crying, this would stop. When I started high school, I caved and started wearing blue jeans, even though I hated the way the waistband dug into my sides when I sat.

  Freshman year of high school, I spent my lunch periods eating with a few girls I called my friends, who’d more-or-less tolerated me in middle school. Sometimes we hung out on weekends at the mall, where the other girls would coo over “adorable” clothing and I’d self-consciously stroke the scratchy fabric and pretend I wished my mother would give me a clothing allowance instead of just buying me the same L.L.Bean turtlenecks again and again because she knew they had soft tags and I’d wear them.

  Andrew was in both my chemistry class and my precalculus class, and he noticed that I spent a big part of the day reading books under my desk. He started asking me each morning what I’d brought to read. Initially I wasn’t sure whether his curious tone was the fake-curious voice other kids sometimes used right before they turned into complete assholes. After multiple classes passed and he didn’t snatch my books away to wipe a booger on them or anything like that, I started feeling a bit less wary. My books were all science fiction, and all came from my neighborhood library, which mostly meant Isaac Asimov, Piers Anthony, and all the older Anne McCaffrey.

  “You should read this,” Andrew said one day, and handed me a paperback. “It’s mine. Don’t crack the spine. You’ll like it.”

  It was a copy of Neuromancer by William Gibson. The next day, I sat with him at lunch.

  * * *

  Danzhai Wanda Tourist Village is possibly the strangest place I’ve ever been.

  Everything around me looks quaint and old, but in fact it was built from scratch just a few years ago to showcase local ethnic cultures and attract tourists to the area. Local people are employed to wear traditional costumes, walk the street playing traditional instruments, make and sell traditional crafts. It reminds me of a Renaissance festival.

  Many of the women in traditional clothing are wearing silver hats with delicately formed butterflies on the top and a jingly fringe right above their eyes. Other women wear their long hair scraped up high into something almost like a bouffant, but with silver ornaments and oversized flowers pinned in. They wear beautifully embroidered jackets and skirts, and silver belts, and large silver necklaces that look like someone cut a circle and hammered the silver out into a crescent. Everything jingles as they move. I wonder if the metal jewelry is heavy, if the clothing is uncomfortable, how much is prescribed, and how much is left up to them.

  The men and women minding the shops are mostly wearing more ordinary clothes, although a few have the hairstyle with a smaller ornament pinned in. I can’t tell whether the tourists shopping in the stores are from other parts of China, or just other parts of Guizhou.

  UTranslate doesn’t work any better here than at the airport. Fortunately, the hotel has a sign in English over the door telling me it’s a hotel, and “Room?” is easy enough to understand.

  I know I’m not going to find Andrew today. It’s going to take time. Today my job is to check into the hotel, not nap, and adjust to the time change. This would all be easier if I’d arrived in early evening rather than midmorning. I resolutely leave my suitcase on the bed instead of lying down myself and go back outside.

  At the end of the street there’s a public square, and three young women have set up a table with carved drinking horns and little bowls of what I’m pretty sure is a potent alcoholic beverage. Two have the silver hats; the third has the hair ornaments. They are beckoning visitors over and feeding people the drink out of the horns. I am quickly jostled up to the front, where one of the women smiles and sings a song as she pours the drink into my mouth.

  You could poison a lot of people this way I think as I swallow obediently and then wonder what sort of person I am to even think such a thing. The alcohol is strong, and I hope it’s not rude if I stop drinking. The ladies don’t stop smiling when I pull my head back, so if I’m being rude, they’re too polite to mention it.

  I like meeting new people, one of the affirmations they made me repeat back when I went to therapy years ago, pops into my head. “Xie xie,” I say, the one word of Chinese I know: thank you.

  * * *

  “Thank you,” I said to Andrew when I gave him back the book. “It was great.” I’d brought along one of my own paperbacks to lend him, one I’d bought on my own rather than checking it out from the library—Startide Rising.

  “If you used a bookmark instead of putting your books facedown they’d last longer,” he told me when he finished it.

  “Sometimes I dog-ear the pages,” I said.

 
; “You do realize that makes you an actual monster.”

  “It’s my book! I can fold down corners if I want!” Sometimes I’d fold down corners just so I could easily get back to a particular page to reread it. I didn’t tell Andrew that I occasionally even did that with library books. Just the older library books I checked out again and again, though—especially the story collections from the bottom shelf. Not the new books.

  Andrew had a girlfriend, a goth girl named Nadine who went to the other school, and she had a whole cluster of nerdy friends. Suddenly on the weekends I had something to do, and when Star Trek IV came out I had people to see it with. Since none of us had much money, we spent most of our weekend afternoons haunting local parks or the family rooms of the kids with more absent parents. Having an entire group of friends was a shocking novelty to me. The friends I’d had before were willing to put up with how weird I was. Never before had I had friends who were weird with me.

  Andrew was my closest friend in the group: he loaned me books and comics, made movie recommendations. I rented Alien on video because he’d recommended it so highly. Also Blade Runner. He was brilliant but lazy, sliding by with adequate grades because he didn’t want to do the work. “High school is pointless,” he said. “I already know everything they’re telling us. There will actually be things for me to learn once I get to college.”

  There were a lot of on-again off-again romances in the group—two kids would get together, spend a couple of weekends holding hands (or making out while the rest of us yelled “get a room!”), amicably break up.

  When Andrew and Nadine broke up, Nadine disappeared from the group.

  Months later, I ran into Nadine waiting tables at a diner near the U. I was by myself, with a stack of books and homework and $10 for bottomless coffee and a big plate of fries. “Nadine!” I said, delighted, when she came to my table. “I haven’t seen you in forever!”

  “Oh, hi,” she said, giving me a faint smile. “Yeah, guess it’s been a while.”

  “How are you? I’ve missed you.”

  “You have? Huh, okay.” She took out her pad. “I’m actually working, so . . . do you know what you want?”

  I gave her my order and let her take my menu and tried to shake off my hurt feelings. She was busy; I was a customer; I didn’t want to be a pest. I spread out my Spanish vocabulary cards and worked on them as I dipped fries into ketchup one by one and ate them, flipping them around so I didn’t double-dip even though I was the only one at the table. She came around twice to refill my coffee and water, not making eye contact, and finally stopped, my mug still in her hand, and said, “Are you still hanging out with Andrew?”

  “Yeah,” I said, a little hesitant. He had a new girlfriend. Was she jealous? Was that what this was about? I wasn’t the one dating him. I wasn’t into him that way.

  “You know he has a dead rabbit in his freezer? Or did. He was going to dissect it.”

  Nadine clearly expected a response, but my main question was, was she saying he killed the rabbit or did he just find a dead one, because . . . I mean, we cut up animals in advanced biology. They were from a supply house, of course, not picked up off the street, but . . . I didn’t know how disturbed to be about the whole idea.

  “He wanted me to watch,” Nadine added.

  “Ugh,” I said, sympathetically.

  “He talked about wanting to know what everything looks like on the inside. Everything. Just . . . I don’t know, Cecily. Be careful, I guess.”

  “Is that why you disappeared?” I asked.

  She gave me a look that I couldn’t identify. Pity? Exasperation? “Yeah, Cecily,” she said, flatly. “That’s why I disappeared. Do you need anything else or should I bring you the check?”

  I had been planning to get a slice of pie, but there was something about Nadine’s glare that made me antsy. I decided to just go. “Check,” I said. “Thanks.”

  She took my money up to the register and brought me the change. “Keep it,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said, and put the change in her apron. And then stood there, chewing on her lip and staring at me. “Don’t be alone with him,” she blurted out, finally, as I started to gather up my books.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You just don’t want to be alone with him. Trust me.”

  I’d been alone with him dozens of times, and nothing bad had ever happened to me. “Okay,” I said, not arguing. “Thanks.”

  I didn’t tell Andrew I’d run into Nadine. The next time I wanted to get French fries and coffee and a booth to do homework while I was near the U, I chose a different diner.

  * * *

  To order in the Danzhai restaurants, I point at things other people are eating. I have a whole roast fish, still on the bone, in a rich sauce; I have eggplant with ground pork in a sauce that runs red with chilies and oil; I have plates of some sort of green vegetable that looks vaguely like turnip greens but with florets.

  Dozens of vegetables came from the same wild herb, Brassica oleracea; we selected for flowers to get broccoli, buds to get brussels sprouts, leaves to get cabbage, roots to get kohlrabi. If this is Chinese broccoli, which seems likely, that’s yet another cultivar of the same plant. I wonder how long it takes to go from B. oleracea to ornamental kale through old-fashioned trait selection. I eat it with chopsticks, thinking about what steps I’d go through to get from ornamental kale to cauliflower in a day, using gene editing. Leaves, flowers, color, roots . . . I wonder how much I’d forget to do, what the results would be. I can’t think of any new B. oleracea cultivars that gene editing has brought us—maybe because we already had every variation that seemed like a good idea to anyone, developed the old-fashioned way.

  We’ve always done this, some shadow in my mind whispers. I shake off the thought.

  When I eat at the hotel, I get the same waitress again and again, not because she speaks English but because she’s a little less easily frustrated by a customer who doesn’t speak any Chinese. “You should just bring me something you think I’ll like,” I tell her. “I’m not fussy.” UTranslate balks at this, so I try the word “anything,” and then “you choose for me,” with an expansive gesture.

  She brings me out a soup, with fish chunks bobbing in it and slices of tomato in a rich red broth. “Perfect,” I say, and she smiles back, clearly pleased with my reaction. A little while later she brings out a glass of black tea. The tea farm is somewhere near here, and I can see the leaves unfurling in the water like those children’s toys that go from a tiny little capsule to a full-sized giraffe-shaped sponge when you drop them in water.

  There is a theater in the tourist village that hosts a daily performance reenacting the legend of the Golden Pheasant Girl. This is apparently a well-known local legend. There’s a statue outside of a woman mid-transformation, and on a hill nearby there’s a metal statue of a golden bird. Actual male golden pheasants are very showy, with feathers shading yellow to gold to red. The females are the dull brown of most girl birds.

  I buy a ticket to the show. They gesture for me to wait and spend five minutes digging out an English-language program that includes a summary of what I’m about to watch.

  The buildings here are mostly unheated, and the theater is as cold as everywhere else. There’s a handy little plastic clapper on each armrest, though, so I can use that to applaud while keeping my gloves on.

  The stage itself has video screens built into the sides and along the back, which they use for some of the theatrical magic. There’s a lot of dance and song, puppetry, smoke effects. In the story, the people flee the losing side of a war, crossing a giant river, and resettle somewhere that they are safe but have no food. There’s a beautiful wedding sequence and then both the man and the women leave to seek out a magical tree that gives the seeds of every known plant.

  In the staging, the tree is silver and resembles the hats the women here wear; I’m not sure if those hats are supposed to symbolize the tree or vice versa because the program doesn’t tel
l me. Both the man and the woman reach the tree and are told that one of them will be given the gift of the seeds but the other will be demanded as a sacrifice.

  Both try to be the sacrifice; the man is pushed back as the woman’s sacrifice is accepted. She ascends to the back center of the backdrop and then raises her arms to be transformed into wings; lights, video, and flying wires are used to change her into the golden pheasant for the performance, although she looks rather more like a phoenix. The man, temporarily forgotten, regains the spotlight as she flies away and he’s blown back by the wind from her wings. Weeping, he takes the seeds back to his people.

  I find myself thinking about how you would transform a human woman into a golden pheasant with gene editing and wrench my thoughts away from that particular abyss. Instead, the ballet over, I find a shop in Danzhai that has newspapers and buy another stack, then take them back to my room and spread them out on my bed to hunt through for stories about bodies. This time I find one, but it’s a domestic murder-suicide in Xi’an and nothing about it sounds particularly mysterious. I wonder how much I’m missing just from UTranslate’s obstinacy.

  Combing through newspapers fills me with tension because it’s simultaneously passive and time-consuming. The whole trip is like that: passive and time-consuming, and I’m on edge, and don’t know what to do. They were so confident that Andrew would seek me out, if I came. I am less and less sure that they were right.

  When I check my e-mail one last time before I go to bed, I have an e-mail from a mysterious address that says, Just like the story, sometimes sacrifice is required, Cecily, if everyone else is to survive.

  I reply immediately: “Where are you?”

  * * *

  “Andrew? Andrew!”

  We were at Andrew’s house, in the family room, watching a James Bond movie. I remember it was a James Bond movie, but not which movie. His mother stormed in and furiously shut off the TV. “A C?” she snapped. “A C minus?”