The Year of the Hydra Read online

  The Year of the Hydra

  By William Broughton Burt

  A deep bow of thanks to the beneficent people of Zhonghua, the Middle Kingdom.

  And apologies all around for my runaway narrator, whom I tried and failed to tether.

  –the author

  Part One: The Year of the Horse

  Chapter One

  “So?” says the beautiful woman with the steam iron. “What’s it going to be?”

  “I’m formulating a reply,” I say, stalling.

  “Formulate faster,” she says. “I always know when you’re hiding something from me.”

  “You’re steaming your bangs, dear.”

  Lillian lowers the steam iron. “Don’t tell me Hydrangea Labs called. They did, didn’t they? Why would those awful people call us completely out of the blue?”

  “They faxed,” I correct her. “And the sky above Beijing hasn’t been blue since the Ming dynasty. Good job, otherwise.”

  The money was attractive at the time. Researchers are always casting about for identical twins, say nothing of mixed-sex polar-body twins such as Lillian and myself, la crème de la crème of gender factor elimination and control group fulcruming and just general number cookery. So of course Lillian and I accepted the occasional dollar or two as research subjects during our lean college years, and when Hydrangea Laboratories stepped forward with an offer of nine dollars an hour each to do stupid telepath tricks, we bit hard.

  At the time, nine dollars purchased three monaural record albums of your choice. With her first check, Lillian purchased the complete works of both Liberace and Andy Williams, in stereo.

  I bought drugs.

  “What did they say?” asks Lillian.

  “To call Chicago.”

  Frowning, Lillian flips the blue silk dress she’s ironing. A Chinese bed makes for a very fine ironing board. An ironing board, conversely, is far too soft for a Chinese bed. And you can unstop an obdurate squat toilet with a small Chinese child. Not everyone knows that.

  “Are you going to call them?” asks Lillian.

  “Of course not.”

  “Good.”

  This hotel room is nearly identical to mine, down to the pink, peach, and gold color scheme, except for the roach electrocution device plugged in near the floor lamp. My room doesn’t have a roach electrocution device, thank God. I’d have tried making coffee on it by now. I smuggled a half-pound of multi-grind into this country, but there’s nothing here to brew it in. Tomorrow I’ll be dipping it like snuff.

  Beijing Telecommunications of Postal Sanitarium. That’s the name of my hotel. I think this place, mid-campus of Peking University where Lillian rooms with Tree Carter, is called Splendid Auspicious of Tubercular Travelodge.

  “How did Hydrangea find out where we are?” asks Lillian.

  I don’t roll my eyes. It requires an effort. “Our passports were just swiped at four airports in three countries, dear. There really are very few secrets in the world.”

  Especially with my sister around. I note with satisfaction that the inquisitive one has required an entire day to pick my brain about the fax from Hydrangea. Maybe putting garlic in my socks is actually working. And thus far she seems to have gleaned nothing at all of that nasty business with the singing condom machine earlier today.

  Best not think about that right now.

  The Year of the Horse is supposed to be about charging ahead with great and purposeful spirit. Deep into August, however, our 2002 seems to be veering.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” asks Lillian coolly.

  “You asked me to handle the research people,” I reply with equal aplomb. “So I’m handling the research people.”

  And absolutely nothing happened today directly or indirectly involving a condom-vending machine, singing or non-singing.

  I watch Lillian drape her blue dress over a hanger. She packed business this trip, meaning grey, blue, and white, the only colors my sister imagines she doesn’t look astonishing in. She’s wrong about the blue. Lillian still has the radiant thing going, the platinum mane and milk skin. We’re both more or less the same creature, one that doesn’t seem to be ageing in any particular hurry. Lil’s arms and neck are still long and slender, and when the sun catches the emerald in her eyes—no wonder the Chinese are driving their cars into lampposts.

  Slight touch of narcissism. My twin sister and I each stand one point nine three meters in height, which works out to six feet and four inches. When we decide to really light it up, say on Oscars night, she and I dress as one, down to our matching black-out shades and expressionless stares. The Mancer twins. Lillian and Julian. Identical in every way but sexual category. Very rare. Very sought after. Look for us between Madonna and Marilyn Manson in Who’s Who. I’m the one on the left.

  “Doo, would you be a doll and get us some take-out?” says Lil, spreading a white blouse across the bed. Doo is baby talk for Julian. Depending on the baby, I suppose.

  I tell her it’s out of the question.

  “Please please please?” she begs.

  I ignore her.

  Hydrangea Labs got their money’s worth. We were telling them what they’d had for breakfast. I sent and Lil received. She turned out to be especially clever at identifying postage stamps of the world. There was one streak where we were hitting very close to twelve hundred percent above random. After that, no more postage stamps of the world. Suddenly Lillian was being asked to describe the contents of filing cabinets and prison cells and missile facilities and leopard-skin panties and God only knows what. I was shunted off meanwhile to crude medical experiments I’d rather not recall in any detail. We were told it was all “hypothetical,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Then Bob’s Appliance Repair and Lawn Mower Emporium discovered a hypothetical listening device in Lillian’s toaster oven. We resigned at Hydrangea the following day, never to hear from them again until twenty-seven hours ago, going on twenty-seven point three three three.

  With a loud electronic click, the door opens and Tree Carter enters, wheezing heavily.

  “What did the doctor say?” asks Lil.

  “To stay close to the toilet,” pants Tree, dropping her purse onto a nightstand. In a single rolling motion, Tree casts her considerable mass onto the nearer twin bed. It doesn’t even flinch. You could play pocket billiards on a Chinese bed. And with a small Chinese child…

  “That’s all he said?” asks Lil. “Stay close to the toilet?”

  “That’s all he said. I told him I already had that part figured out. When do I get better? He said mmm very difficult know this.”

  Tree does a not-bad Chinese man for a three-hundred-seven-pound African American woman with a case of the canters. I found her weight online. Tree’s famous. Not in Who’s Who but famous.

  “I guess that’s why he’s a hotel doctor,” says Lil.

  Still panting, Tree shakes her head of close-cropped curls, and her ear hoops dance. “This mess is diabolical with a capital di-. A capital di-.”

  Tree is short for Shatrina. Shatrina is short for New Age radio diva gone totally mad on organic lettuce wraps and pickled pigs’ feet and books channeled from the left bank of the Milky Way. Her weekly talk show, Shatrina, is aired in over three hundred American cities and five foreign countries, counting the free state of Texas. Tree’s popularity is due less to the predictable line of New Age pap, I’d say, than to the woman’s voice which at most moments is an emphatic purr, sweet yet gritty like the honey at the mouth of the jar.

  “Qing’s revenge,” I say.

  Both women look at me.

  “Jia Qing was the emperor forced to sign the Unequal Treaties with the West,” I say. “In China, travelers’ diarrhea would be Qing
’s revenge.”

  “We’re so fortunate to know that,” says Lil.

  “Wasn’t my doing,” says Tree.

  All of this is Tree Carter’s doing. It was she who told my sister that their soul destinies awaited them in China, so of course they rush to sign one-year contracts to teach Conversational English to the young and post-commie at a Shenzhen public high school. “It’s about the kids, the Indigos,” Tree is fond of trilling. “China has gone totally Indigo, and those kids need our guidance now if they’re to guide us later.”

  If the authorities don’t seize Tree’s mini satellite uplink, she will feed her weekly radio show from Shenzhen. She got the uplink past customs by saying it was a personal medical device. If my sister could get her hands on it for one night, it would be.

  Tree says the soul destinies of all three of us await in China, mine included, not that I’d be caught dead or maimed anywhere near my soul destiny. I’m just here for the jet lag. And of course to watch over the girls as they settle in for their year of teaching abroad. It’s the least I can do.

  I shoot my sister a suspicious stare. I’m almost certain I smell cigarette smoke in this room.

  Actually I’m in Beijing because Miriam, my editor at Magazine Mariposa, wants something Chinese-y for September and I supposedly work for her glossy tax write-off of a haut prétention magazine. Miriam is dangling airfare if I produce two thousand words of Chinese-y before the September deadline which, factoring in the international date line, the eleven-hour time differential and the stray wormhole, I think was two and a half days ago. Too bad. I was just about to work up something on China’s singing condom machines. Melodies not maladies, something along that line.

  Okay, the real reason I’m in Beijing is I owe money to some people in Memphis, which is a long and tortured story but suffice it to say I could use a little financial aid just now, and only Tree Carter is in a position to provide it, which matter I hope to broach with her as quickly as I can wrest Her Tree-ness away from my sister for a moment’s time.

  “Lots of water,” I tell Tree.

  Without opening her eyes, she holds up her liter of Binihana purified water.

  “Good girl.”

  “Doo’s going for take-out,” says Lil, seating herself at an impossibly small desk, towering stork-like above her notes on survival Mandarin. “Please please please? Tree and I have a huge test tomorrow and you can see she’s in no condition to go anywhere.”

  “And I,” I reply, “am in no condition to order food in this country. I can’t even whistle in Mandarin.”

  “Buffet place,” says Tree, eyes still closed. “Outside the West Gate.”

  “Yeah,” says Lil, turning to bat her eyes at me. “The buffet place. Easy-schmeasy.”

  I mull this over. In Beijing, easy-schmeasy may require an hour and a half of perplexing, draining, and sweat-dripping toil, and finally outright begging—half the struggle is fighting your way forward through the mob. There are no lines here, no taking of numbers, no politeness at all among strangers. But the acrobats are outstanding.

  “Please please please?” says Lil.

  I mull a little more, asking myself which is likely to be worse, humiliating myself in yet another Beijing restaurant or remaining here while my sister goes through my head like it’s her sock drawer. Lillian was once quite free with remote viewing my journal before I got my hands on two leaves of a NASA-grade titanium alloy as light as aluminum and impervious as adamantium. This stuff is resistant to penetration of almost any imaginable kind, so I had a jeweler fashion the two leaves into a binder for my journal.

  Girl can’t get in.

  I turn to gaze at my stork of a sister at her little desk. Lil so resembles our mother that I sometimes catch myself staring, not that Mom and I were ever particularly close. The senility helps. Now that she has no idea who I am, she seems to like me a good deal more.

  Lil and I do seem to be ageing reasonably well, I reflect. Not a grey hair on either platinum head, nor a cavity in either chilly smile. Neither my sister nor I have ever so much as sneezed, when I stop to think about it, nor have we ever reacted in any way to the brute incursions of the sun. But who is without his or her little peculiarity? I once knew a woman with a dread of seeing her own feet. She was nearing thirty years of age and had yet to encounter them visually. I married that woman for some reason.

  Suddenly Lil draws herself taller. “Why am I suddenly thinking about vending machines?”

  I stand a bit too abruptly and lose my balance. I have to grab the floor lamp, which nearly goes down with me. Both Lil and Tree stare.

  “Anybody feel like Chinese?”

  Peking University is better by night, but outside Provo, Utah, what place isn’t? I feel practically at home within these seething shadows where lovers stroll and cicadas trill and utopian dreams molder beneath pressure of familial duty and sweet-and-sour exam scores. Curious how a windless summer night can transform a world-renowned university into a string of scruffy villages, randomly and dimly lit, un-weed-eaten, human infested, a slowly composting oasis of warm-beer–softened reflection within the glaring, blaring urban desert called Beijing. Unfortunately these collegiate meanderings have thus far produced no description of a gate nor even a real good screen door, East West North South Garden nor Pearly, let alone one with a buffet place.

  “Just get us something—anything,” was Lil’s injunction.

  “It better be good,” she added.

  “It better be dead,” said Tree.

  “It’ll be dead,” I assured them both, “if I have to kill it myself.”

  As I turn back toward the lotus pond, a cool breeze stirs the dank summer scents and I think Canadian air mass moving in before I remember where I am. The breeze against my cheek would be a postcard from Siberia, and I’d do well to read it. To winter in Beijing, I’m given to understand, one wears all one’s clothes and several members of one’s family, not that I intend to hang around long enough to find out. Once Lillian and Tree have concluded their two-week intensive in survival Mandarin, off they go to teaching posts in Shenzhen—and I return to my small nest in Memphis with a new ending for The End of Day, which I must now wheedle out of Tree Carter.

  That’s the title of my newest novel. The End of Day. I came up with it myself. The rest of the novel was channeled by Tree from the disincarnate soul of a late Pulitzer laureate with a lot of time on his hands and no way to order a martini. Like every other writer worth mentioning, the poor man was claimed by a wastrel’s death before he could deliver his best work, so would I please please please give it to the world beneath my own name, as my style of Southern Noir and his are all but indistinguishable—said he. A sly accusation, I believe. The thing is, this guy doesn’t even exist outside Tree’s general hoodoo-ness, and I have gambling debts in Memphis where aggravated assault is considered a form of aerobic exercise.

  Besides, this material isn’t half bad. In fact, it’s pretty good.

  Once more at the lotus pond, I study the approach of a sleeveless and bespectacled young man bearing a basketball beneath one arm. “Excuse me,” I say to him. “Could you possibly direct me to the West Gate?”

  The student, tall and broad-shouldered, points out an arched footbridge partially shrouded in willows. “West Gate closs the blidge. You see?”

  “The blidge?”

  He nods pensively. “Closs and just go some more. You see later.”

  “See later the glate? Closs first the blidge?”

  “Yes,” says the young man, nodding earnestly.

  “Who’s your favorite basketball player named Billy? Never mind. I have to go now. Best of luck with your studies.”

  “Thank you very much,” says the young man.

  “No, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “It’s you who are welcome, my friend.”

  I head toward the arched footbridge. Students. More worthless with each generation.

  I’ll be completely can
did about those twelve chapters channeled by Tree Carter. I could no more produce prose of that quality than poo brown-and-serve rolls. So why not be a good sport and present Truman’s best work to the world beneath my own name, thereby reaping the critical and monetary rewards that life has thus far so miserably denied? But I will not accept his title. I have my artistic limits.

  Dipping Between the Dip Slopes. That’s Truman’s title.

  Beyond all that and central to the current dilemma, said material stopped coming after Chapter Twelve of what is clearly a thirteen-chapter book. Just. Stopped. “Finish it yourself,” said Tree.

  True, I have three novels out there, the most recent of them named Best Southern Novel of 1999 by the Greater Birmingham, Alabama, Regional Library. “Focus inward on the native magic of your unique artistic voice,” said Tree. “Get off your ass and write,” said Lillian. So I got off my ass and focused on my native whatever it was and handed the result to my agent, Bernie, who instantly lined up a prime New York publisher who was not totally wild about the ending, beginning more or less with the first letter of the first word of Chapter Thirteen. All of which coincides very awkwardly with a personal cash-flow issue that we needn’t go into now but I, like, really need for Tree Carter to rediscover whatever snarly queer little splinter-personality it was that produced Chapters One through Twelve and pronto.

  The night before I left Memphis, I discovered a cricket’s head in my bed. Could have been a coincidence, but how do you know?

  Atop the arched footbridge, I pause to enjoy a moonlit vista of floating lotus pods in lurid, faintly pink bloom. Steadying myself against the wooden railing, I gaze straight up at the usual Beijing sheetrock and think completion. I’ve known all along that China is about completion. I boarded the plane in Memphis with a very clear sense that the various strands of my dishevelment were soon to meet in some kind of non-standard knot, hopefully sans the sort of pointless and painful catharsis I do my best to experience only when sleeping.