The Year of the Hydra Read online

  That same unbidden thought, completion, returned yesterday at a street market where I stood waiting to purchase four brown-dappled bananas. All at once the fruit merchant experienced a whole-body spasm that could have been Drunken Fruit Merchant Kung Fu before raising something to my face. It was a squealing rat impaled on an ice pick. I’m afraid I didn’t show the proper appreciation. Everyone else within earshot chuckled happily as the rat did the eeek-ing upside-down death dance.

  China’s the endgame. I’m pretty clear on that. I’m just not sure what game it is we’re into here.

  Go toward the light. Moth-like I allow myself to be drawn toward a luminescence beyond the trees, one more felt than seen.

  Daddy was an anonymous sperm donor. Which I’m quite sure is the first line of at least one country song. It was Father dearest who provided the identicon and myself with our slightly different spins, our delightful little quirks, our semi-imprisonable offenses against norms and memes and baas. As how could those qualities have possibly flowed from dread, cold, and unimaginative Mother? Cue the cellos.

  I start across a broad, empty plaza, all the while picturing Lillian hunched over her survival Mandarin notebook in the Roach Electrocution Suite, a burning cigarette in each hand and another in the ashtray. I went through hell to get that woman off cigarettes. Absolute. Hell.

  On balance, I suppose I owe Lillian a lot. When we were scarcely more than babes, my sister came to the place where I was—just out there somewhere—and brought me in for a landing in consensus reality, or I’d probably be in What’s What rather than Who’s Who. My twin sister imagines that she still caretakes me, and I humor her. “Have you taken your meds, dear?” she asks offhand. Yes, dear. Thanks for caring, dear. See you in the glow, dear.

  Beyond this dark plaza is a shadowy grove of trees pierced by a faintly glowing walkway. Entering, I shudder for no particular reason. As though one needs a particular reason in this twenty-five-dynasty-old city. That includes the commie one that’s going end-of-life as we speak. Which is to say, there are considerably more dead people in this town than living ones.

  As a child in Memphis, a place most rich in unnatural death, I had my occasional little problem with bumps in the night before learning that I could exit the glow anytime I wished. Then at age twelve I discovered the liquor cabinet above the fridge and learned to exit a lot more than that.

  Nothing much goes bump in the night anymore. Except for the occasional doorframe. Thanks for asking.

  While we’re passing along deep soul secrets, there’s a small gambling addiction I’d like to own here. Though I’m not the least attracted to sports betting, nor the standard fifty-two-card deck, let alone anything directly or indirectly involving a revolving wheel, there is one particular amusement that does address me in a siren’s wail in one or another of my weaker moments. The result is the occasional financial quandary such as the current one—easily resolved once I obtain that final chapter.

  I enter a tunnel of trees that becomes a tangle of handlebars. Parked jammed and stacked all around me, some of them two and three high, are more bicycles than could possibly exist. I’ve stumbled upon the world’s bicycle graveyard. Either that or I’m drawing closer to one of this campus’s four flood-lit gates.

  A noble number, in its way, Four. Stodgy. Pointy-headed. An excellent basis for tables and chairs. I stopped at four marriages because of the importance of stability in an often unsteady world. Not to mention the many problems awaiting at Five and Six. I should explain that there was no television in our home during the tender interval between Lillian’s bringing me in and my acquisition of the liquor cabinet. My chief means of engagement during those years was to disappear into math. I was pretty good at it.

  We arrive at the West Gate and we are impressed. Each of Peking U’s grandiose and lavishly turned-out portals is manned twenty-four-seven by uniformed guards, their primary duty being to intimidate bicyclists into dismounting as they closs the threshold where a young Mao Zedong once strode, Das Kapital beneath his arm. Mao worked at the campus library, there to discover the diverse worlds of ideas obtainable from books he would later find occasion to burn, actually padlocking the four gates of this university that now honor the memory of his footsteps.

  My belly tightens as I scuttle past the guards. Why does Beijing need so many gates and guards? A casual stroll anywhere in this town requires passing through all kinds of portals of permission. I suppose it goes back to the days when Beijing was composed of hutongs or professional neighborhoods. You had one called Woodcutter, another called Wash Clothes or Wet Nurse or Make Soup, which may explain all these walls and gates. Or maybe the government just likes the idea of being able to lock Beijing down anytime they feel like it.

  Nah.

  Just beyond the spotlights of the gate, I’m swallowed by the swirling chaos of the street, the beeping and br-rr-ringing menagerie of bicycles and motorbikes and flat-bed trikes and all their weird hybrid children. And always the teeming footsore hordes, the dull faces and sightless eyes, the over-brimming kiosks and pee-smelling paving stones of a thoroughfare as broad as a city zoo and pointless as a chicken yard—all of it lit by the ugly brown-out haze of what the Chinese call public lighting. Beijing isn’t much brighter by day. On cloudless days you still can’t find the sun. You can scarcely see buildings two blocks away.

  This town likes to go for forbidding Albert Speer-like scale, but you never quite leave the funky ferment of the stained little alleyways where shirtless old men sleep upright in wooden chairs and summer-sweet scents of simmering noodles and open sewers cavort with those of old fruit stalls and one-legged beggars and half-rotted mops. Everywhere you’ve got the violent collision of a millennia of failed ideas in urban planning and three millennia of no planning at all.

  But what’s this? Across the broad boulevard are the paired lions and bobbing red lanterns of what seems to be the buffet place. Encouraged, I head for the double doors. They are flanked on either side by four red-uniformed women. Again I feel my belly tighten. Why does Beijing need so many doors and red-uniformed women? I brace myself and at half a furlong all eight girls explode with greetings, throwing open the double doors and inundating me with forward-leaning giggles that practically become kisses. Cringing, I enter a crowded restaurant practically as rich in noise as in cigarette smoke. Clawing my way through those and the syrupy aromas of courses five through nine, I ascertain that our buffet place is in fact a lunch buffet place, and here it is nearly eleven p.m. Back out I scuttle, shrinking back from the red-clad octa-girlie gauntlet just outside the doors.

  Skulking south along whatever lu this is, I begin scouting for a picture menu taped to a window. Failing a buffet place, the next best option is a picture-menu place. Otherwise you’re reduced to pointing toward someone’s plate and saying that.

  Beijing passes before me like a cough-syrup dream.

  Just one more deep soul secret and I’ll be finished owning for the night. Sometimes Tree’s cheek-kisses come a little close to the corner of my mouth and I find myself transported to a climax beech forest on the second day of spring. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have Dr. Shatrina Carter figured out even on the most basic of levels, but listen to me. Whatever’s brewing within the hormonal soup kitchen of that Hummer body of hers I’d like to have in smokable form. Radio listeners the world over are in love with Tree Carter on the basis of purr alone, and many of those careless enough to take a hit of her pheromones are discovered three months later unshaven and bad-smelling wandering Highway 277 outside Wichita Falls.

  Two men dodder arm-in-arm along the sidewalk, their newly lit cigarettes glowing brightly. One of them is singing “Yesterday Once More” at the top of his one good lung, cigarette bobbing in time.

  Ehhh-veee sha-ra-ra-raaaaaaah…

  This afternoon along this same stretch of sidewalk, I encountered five women beneath five black parasols, spaced as regularly as Magritte’s derbied Englishmen. For one or two eerie moments, the
y walked in perfect sync and I knew I’d just wandered into some other room. Sure enough, not three minutes later I encountered the singing condom machine. Five women. Five parasols. Beware.

  Then, I haven’t taken my meds today.

  It’s all rooms, you know. One moment you’re in this one. Next you’re in that one. Before me now, for example, sprawls a vast intersection where several hundred Chinese surge at eight curbs, daring the multi-lane traffic to show the least sign of hesitation. Do I even want to cross here, I ask myself forlornly, peering in one direction and the other. No matter. Soon the traffic lights will change and so will everything else. There’s little to be done about it.

  The lights do change and I allow myself to be swept along by a human tsunami that engulfs a wooden cart and the hunched man laboring behind it. Next category, one hundred points. Things your sister has whined you into going out for. Two hundred points. Dishes you cannot place anywhere on the USDA food pyramid. Five hundred points. Chinese words that mean something / anything as long as it’s dead. Suddenly appear the headlights of left-turning taxis, their horns blaring. Pedestrians scatter in every direction, but I continue my arrogant saunter.

  Take me.

  The traffic lights glow a unanimous green now and little commuter cars begin honking at my ankles like so many enraged geese. To hell with them. I’m walking here.

  There are nearly four million cars in Beijing and not a single old beater among them, for the simple reason that there were no passenger cars at all in this country until very recently. Boxy trucks, yes, and medieval buses and comical donkey-ish agricultural vehicles, all of which are still available for view.

  Chinese eighteen-wheelers have fourteen wheels. We’ll let that serve as your introduction to Chinese logic.

  I make it to the other curb. Nobody ever takes me when I say take me.

  But we find ourselves in another room. Suddenly everyone is wearing polyester pajamas. Little kids are pedaling plastic trikes and women are ballroom dancing to boom-boxes and old men are hocking and spitting at one another’s feet. Somehow I have entered a residential area. No bobbing red lanterns. No basic food groups.

  But wait. My eyes catch sight of a string of weather-skewed lanterns sagging in a nearby alley. We seem to have discovered a second- or third-tier restaurant of some stripe. We begin walking purposefully toward imagined scents of shark’s fin and cow’s spleen and piggie index finger. I don’t care if this place offers up leg of librarian, I’m going in there and coming out with little white boxes.

  Inside our eatery are dismal smells of overheated peanut oil and under-cleaned ashtrays. The waitress gives me a gape as she scurries to deliver longnecks to a table of rowdies. We may actually be talking tier number four here. I scan the tables for something / anything dead but discover only beer bottles and smoldering butts.

  Suddenly a voice in my right ear. “Excuse me. May I be of assistance?”

  Though the accent is West End, London, I turn to encounter the smile of a Chinese man in his forties.

  “The score of the Braves game?” I say. “Games, actually. It’s a twi-night doubleheader. Or maybe you could help me order a little take-out?”

  The stranger laughs apologetically. “This is only a neighborhood restaurant. Not very good I’m afraid. I just come here for the soup. Very good for the health. Please allow me to show you a more splendid place.”

  Herding me back onto the street, the stranger says, “There is a restaurant close by that’s very famous for Peking Duck. Do you like Peking Duck?”

  I lie. What else can you do when the man’s national dish eats like a Rockport soaked in bacon drippings? So far, my favorite Chinese dish would be Egg Foo Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

  The stranger leads me across the same street I just floated my very life to cross. He hands me a business card. “My name is Chen. If you ever need anything, anything at all, call me. I will be happy to help. Please, where are you from?”

  Ah. The first of the three splendid questions. Next comes: how long have you been in China, followed closely by: what do you think of China. I provide the usual antiseptic answers and Chen celebrates the fact that I arrived here on an auspicious day. “This is very lucky for you. That day is Cowherd and Weaving Maiden Festival. You have heard of this?”

  I haven’t heard of this.

  “There is a legend about this day,” says Chen brightly. “Very long ago, a lonely girl just worked at her weaving all the time. The heavenly father took pity on her and sent her across the stars to marry a cowherd boy. They were very happy together but unfortunately the girl neglected her weaving, so the heavenly father sent her back home, saying you can visit your husband on the seventh day of the seventh month. Ever since, on that night many birds fly together and make a bridge so the weaving maiden can walk across the sky to visit her husband.”

  Chen turns to beam at me. “Now Chinese women celebrate this night by climbing a hill to offer flowers to the sky.”

  I stare at him. I’m still waiting for the lucky part. I’m also beginning to suspect this man of taking me back to the house of eight hi-theres. Eight is not my favorite integer.

  “Personally,” I tell Chen, “I would call this a rather unhappy story.”

  He laughs. “I think also. This is why only women go to the top of the hill. The men think this is not such a good deal.”

  Chen knits his brow and sucks his teeth. Among the Chinese this means I-am-now-thinking-very-deeply. A Chinese may also place one hand near his mouth and say, “Nigga, nigga, nigga,” which means there’s a word on the tip of his or her tongue. Don’t try this in Memphis.

  “But maybe every romantic story is also very sad,” says Chen, “like the play by William Shakespeare.”

  “Romeo and Juliet?”

  He nods eagerly. “I think everyone enjoys this play so much because of the suffering. It is the same in life. The love is only as great as the suffering, like in the story of the weaving maiden. For three hundred sixty-four days, nothing but suffering. Then one night of love and—” He beams again. “All was worth it!”

  “That goes a long way toward explaining Chinese novels,” I tell Chen, gazing dejectedly ahead. He is taking me back to the house of eight hi-theres.

  As though sensing my urge to bolt, Chen seizes my arm. “This restaurant I think will be more to your enjoying.”

  Again at half a furlong the double doors fly open and eight identical women explode into scarlet delight. When I open my eyes once more, we are inside the restaurant. The noise and smoke are even denser than before. Now ten minutes of intense negotiations—this is ordering in China—and Chen asks if I’d like to take a seat.

  “I’d like to take a beer,” I reply, a bit dazed.

  We claim the only available table, still covered in mountains of dinner detritus, the wooden chairs still warm. Chen orders two bottles of Hsingtao. “How long will you be in China?” he asks politely. That would be splendid question number four, unless it comes after how do you like Chinese food.

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “I may decide to travel a little.”

  “Oh! You must see Xi’an and Yunnan.”

  I’ve no interest at all in Xi’an and its one thousand terra-cotta whatevers, but for some reason my ears prick up at the other mention. “Yunnan?”

  Chen gestures toward the far end of the restaurant. “Yunnan Province. Southwest. Very far from Beijing. Yunnan is—what is the word? I think frontier.”

  “China has a frontier?”

  Chen watches me jot a note in my titanium-plated journal and says, “May I ask what you do, Mr. Mancer?”

  “I write.”

  His posture straightens. “Ah. You are here to write about China’s economic growth.”

  “I’m not that kind of writer.”

  Chen thinks for a moment. “Then you are here to write about preparations for the 2008 Olympic Games.”

  I shake my head.

  “I think you are being very modest,” says Chen wit
h a smile. “Probably you write some very famous books in the USA.”

  I picture my three very famous novels in discount bins, their upper right-hand corners missing. Shaking my head, I close my journal but don’t yet put it away.

  “Please,” says Chen, “what are you writing about now?”

  “Actually I’m here to visit my sister.”

  After what seems a cool silence, Chen offers his pack of Panda cigarettes and I shake my head. Unhurriedly he lights up then smiles. “I think my countrymen will find your journal very interesting.”

  “Oh?” I say.

  “We Chinese are very affected by the written word. To study the old books is considered the greatest thing a man can do.”

  Three uniformed Chinese did, in fact, take a very keen interest in my journal just this morning. I don’t think it was because they were very affected by the written word.

  “In America,” I say, “a book is just an opinion. That makes an old book somebody’s outdated idea. You know something else? It’s a little smoky in here. My nose hairs are beginning to smolder.”

  “Why don’t we wait outside?”

  “Why don’t we wait outside?”

  Chen and I push through the doors, and all eight uniformed girls gush a cathartic farewell. It’s all I can do to keep from cold-cocking the nearest of them.

  Chen and I cast about for an appealing place to drain our beers. Finding none, we turn to face each other.

  “May I ask what you do, Mr. Chen?”

  With a slight bow, he says, “I teach International Politics at Peking University.”

  “As soon as you understand America’s foreign policy,” I say, “I hope you’ll explain it to me.”

  Chen laughs politely. “Fortunately American foreign policy is very easy to understand. Have you read Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century?”

  I look away. “Missed that one.”

  “Every American should read this,” says Chen. “It describes your country’s global policy very clearly.”

  “So,” I say, “what is my country’s global policy?”