The Year of the Hydra Read online

  The Hydra, you may recall, was a nine-headed monster that could neither be killed nor induced to vote split-ticket. Even Hercules was reduced to trapping the revolting thing under a rock. My hands begin to crumple the fax but instead return it to my pocket. I’ve a feeling this particular nine-headed monster isn’t going back under its rock quite yet.

  Chapter Four

  I discovered dominos at the tender age of two. There was a boxed set on a lower shelf in our mother’s living room. I’ll never forget the first time I dumped them onto the thirsty pine floor and heard that arresting clatter, that precise brilliance, each note exactly the same. The tiles themselves looked quite identical, each an elegant response to a single perfectly articulated idea.

  At last, I thought. Civilization.

  I seated myself and carefully lifted one of the glossy, impossibly smooth tiles and gazed into the eyes of a sinister reptile with oversized claws. It stood out, black on black, in relief. On the other side were white dots in two groupings, each dot identically recessed. I used the tip of a forefinger to explore one dot, feeling every detail of its contour. Surveying the other upturned tiles, I discovered that each tile was divided into two segments of equal measure, and the concepts half and double appeared in my mind. The tiles, I quickly gathered, varied one from another only in terms of the dots. The concept quantity appeared in my mind. In that singular moment, holding that first tile in my fingers, I knew I’d encountered the most perfect thing in existence. Platonic. Cold. Alien. Like myself.

  And it was clean. Very clean.

  It wasn’t long before Mother appeared in the living room and re-boxed the dominos—they fit the box exactly—and placed them on a higher shelf. But as small children go I was reasonably resourceful and soon was rising from my bed while the house slept to, with the aid of a broom and a bathmat, reacquire the dominos and continue my work in theoretical math. I learned to arrange the tiles in ascending and descending order, and to form number loops that fed one into the other, gradually evolving a personal understanding of mathematics that would result in failing marks in arithmetic in grades one through four. Fifth grade is when you realize that either you dumb it down really fast or you’ll never kiss a girl.

  By that time, I had acquired four boxes of dominos of my own and was combining them into arrays that required the entire floor of my bedroom. Unfortunately, there was no lock on my door and our mother was fond of trumping up reasons to impound my dominos while I was away at school. Still, I discovered that I could lie on my back on the pine floorboards and gaze upward to visualize the tiles floating upon the air, first along two-dimensional planes and then three. Just once, at age thirteen, shortly after my discovery of coffee, I successfully incorporated a fourth dimension. It was around that time that I encountered double dominos and, well, I didn’t kiss a girl until I was twenty. She was unconscious at the time.

  All of this eventually went into two papers, or all except that last bit, entitled The Nature of Integer as Revealed by Dominos, which was published but not widely appreciated, and Double Dominos as a Self-Enfolding Revelation of Implicit Order, which was neither appreciated nor published. All of which is a way of saying-without-saying there is a mental illness to which the genius is more susceptible than the fool. A wealth of them, actually, and I am prey to most—but to none quite so much as one.

  The vague smear of the moon makes an appearance low in the east, and a waiter materializes from the gloom to give my table a swipe. I request a glass of red in honor of the ghost of Li Bai (rhymes with be high). If anyone haunts the moonlit nights of Cathay, it’s the Bacchus-laureate of the High Tang dynasty who, it’s said, drowned one night trying to embrace the reflection of the moon on the water.

  Gotta know how to die.

  Personally, I’m feeling better all the time. My few days of sweats and tremors have passed, along with the whole jet lag thing. I think it was for the most part a case of too much railroad gin back in Memphis, which served as a port of refuge over the past eight or nine months of my life. Not Memphis. Railroad gin. Now it’s warm Chinese beer and metallic Aussie wine, and not in the trendiest of nightspots. This outdoor bar, roughly mid-campus of Peking University, is comprised of three unsteady tables, a few weather-ravaged wooden chairs, a refrigerator, and a dirty candle that sputters heroically as I ask myself what is keeping Her Treeness. It wasn’t easy scheduling this tête-à-tête without tête number three horning in. Lillian and Tree met at a prayer vigil on the original Harmonic Convergence, thereafter to harmonically converge at the hip. You get one, you get the other. I did manage to catch Tree alone this afternoon just long enough to cajole her into a little bonding time beneath the splendid sheetrock sky.

  The Cabernet arrives, and I hoist it to the indistinct moon, recalling Li Bai’s immortal words:

  Amidst these flowers, a jug of wine.

  I pour myself the cup of aloneness.

  Raising it high, I invite the bright moon

  Then turn to my shadow, which—

  “Hello, how ahhh you?”

  A polite distance from my table stands a smiling young couple, prodigious stacks of books beneath their scrawny arms. Chinese scholars, I’ve learned, take every opportunity to converse with Westerners, which is very flattering until they bring up Hemingway and Joyce and Keats and Elliot and Melville. These kids have not only read all the books you fully intended to, but quote from them and would like to compare their impressions with, mmm, yours.

  “Fine,” I tell them, “and you?”

  The young man replies, “Fine and you?” before catching himself. They both fan the air and laugh.

  I invite the couple to sit but they refuse, actually backing up a step. Both man and woman wear glasses, de rigueur for Chinese scholars, the most respected of whom have totally wrecked their eyes by fifth grade.

  We don’t use the word scholar in the States, and I suppose we shouldn’t. We have students, guys and gals in baseball caps who attend most of their classes, read half their texts and, as seniors, if faced with locating the university library, inquire at the student help desk. At Peking U, you can hardly walk for people studying. They’re on benches, bridges, boulders, every horizontal surface, slumped over their books or pacing feverishly, reading aloud to themselves. The closest American parallel would be a really serious gym, wordless people sweating at this or that machine, each alone in his pool of suffering. It’s scholarship as athleticism. Go into one of the buildings at Peking U and you’ll find a yellow butt in every chair, a jar of tea on every desk, and such rip-throat intensity you’re convinced that finals must be going on. Finals aren’t going on. Classes aren’t going on. This is summer holiday. You’re looking at Chinese scholars on vacation.

  From the smiling young couple, I learn that fall semester begins in two weeks. “We go home to visit only the short time,” the man tells me, “then go here again very quick.” Now he laughs apologetically. “My English is only reading. Very sorry.”

  “The economy is very… is very… ,” begins his companion, but she stalls out and laughs to cover her embarrassment. “I think the jobs in China is very few, and so many students.”

  “So many students,” echoes the young man, sucking his teeth.

  I nod amenably, as though I can fathom what it’s like to grow up in a place where even the arts are reduced to numbers and rankings. In China everything finally goes back to the number: one point three billion. You’ve got a quarter of the world’s population here trying to make a living boiling bird’s nest soup for one another.

  I’m handed two business cards. All Chinese students carry them, networking having been basically invented by this culture. The Mandarin word is guanxi, and success without it is wholly unimaginable. The young man, I learn, is an investment broker to-be. The young woman is studying law, specializing in women’s issues. I’m as unprepared for the one as for the other. Who’s going to drive the tractor, I want to ask.

  “My father,” she tells me, “is very important
in the Party. I can use my, mmmm, my in-fru-nace?”

  “Influence?” I say.

  “My in-fru-ance, I think, can help someone. Chinese women is so hard to have the life. I visit a women’s shelter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now I open here in Beijing.”

  “First shelter woman child in all China,” the young man says proudly. “Four beds.”

  I nod approvingly. Nine hundred million Chinese women and children and four beds. I hope they’re willing to share.

  Meanwhile, our budding social reformer pays for her meals by washing dishes at the university dining hall—a punishment from her father, who wanted her in business law.

  The smiling young couple inquires of my plans. I tell them I’m going to Yunnan. They seem as surprised as I to hear it.

  “Yunnan?” asks he. “Yunnan Province?”

  “You are going to Yunnan?” asks she. “That is my home province!”

  Apparently this is quite the coincidence, as they’re practically dancing around in circles. Before it’s over, I have three names and phone numbers of English speakers I’m to ring as soon as I arrive in the capital city of Kunming. Not quite satisfied with this, the young woman writes a formal note of introduction and signs it with a flourish.

  “This say, ‘Please help this person every courtesy,’” she smiles, presenting the note with a bow.

  Off go the two young scholars, waving emphatically. I give the note of introduction a dull glance before tucking it into my wallet. Who knows when a little guanxi might come in handxi? I toss down the last drop of my wine and glance left and right, hoping to catch sight of an approaching Shatrina Carter, who, I remind myself, was born three weeks late only to fall ever farther behind. Once she does arrive, I resolve quite firmly, either Madame turns out to be in the mood for a nice little séance or it’s going to get ugly out on the veranda.

  The indistinct, bitten moon has all but cleared the treetops. Again I lift my glass.

  …I pour myself the cup of aloneness.

  Raising it high, I invite the bright moon

  Then turn to my shadow, which makes of us three.

  Because the moon does not know how to drink wine,

  She has given me this shadow for company…

  Li Bai was a lonely man, a banished government official, and a drunkard. His good moments were private ones, small affairs with scraps of paper, graceless dances with luminescent bodies, failed encounters with reflections of reflections of light. I’m afraid I understand him too well. I wave for another red.

  Bernie says all my problems are the fault of acrid Mother, which is fine by me. Bernie, I should point out, is both my literary agent and my psychiatrist, which is a primary conflict of interest if ever there was one. I write best when least focused in consensus reality. It’s a situation. But Bernie doesn’t make me talk to chairs as though someone were sitting there, and I don’t report him to the Board of Mental Health Professionals for introducing me to Peruvian marching powder.

  The second Cabernet appears, and I glance about once more for Tree Carter before tipping the glass. Last night we tried out her mini uplink. Fired up like a champ. Tree’s shooting for live-feeding her first program three evenings from now. Not quite sure what the focus will be. I think she came here fully expecting to find Indigo children locked inside little cages like rhesus monkeys. She still harbors a fantasy of finding herself dining in the same restaurant as Bi Yu Nu, the shadowy New Age sci-fi king said to be sulking somewhere in Beijing. I tried reading one of Bi’s (rhymes with knees) stories. It was about a guy whose consciousness was stolen one morning by the air vent above the kitchen stove. He was frying two eggs, over easy, when he turned the vent fan on. Unexpectedly, it yanked his consciousness from his body and pulled it hurtling through the complex of ducts behind the walls of his seventy-three-story apartment building. The guy’s consciousness wound up lodged in a dirty air filter, one of those buck-fifty replaceable filters that had been ignored by the maintenance crew forever and a day. The last thing we see is a spider whose web is at the edge of the filter methodically mincing its way over.

  Tree did a whole month of radio shows on that story. A month.

  Incoming English. I look up to see Tree Carter fretting her way toward my table, my sister quite close at her side.

  “We were just kurbitzed,” says Lillian, her face flushed.

  “Lord God Almighty,” pants Tree, picking up one of the spindly wooden chairs and giving it a suspicious shake.

  “So sorry to hear it,” I say, waving for the waiter.

  I’ve learned it’s best to indulge the girls when they’ve been kurbitzed, a term coined by themselves to refer to engagements with non-friendlies of the other-than-physical variety. Lil and Tree once swore they’d been importuned for two and a half hours by tourists from a low-rent alternative reality with a fetish for human pancreatic function. I told them I was sorry to hear it.

  “Tree was walking me to the hotel,” says Lil, settling warily into one of the chairs, “and we decided to cut through the bamboo grove. Big mistake. There was something waiting in there.”

  “Will this thing hold me?” asks Tree, setting the chair down. It leans to the left like Michel Pablo.

  “Absolutely,” I say, still looking about for the waiter.

  “It was getting dark,” continues Lil, “and we feel this really creepy energy. We got out of there fast, man. Tree says we have to Center, Seal, and Clear.”

  I give Tree a scowl. I hate Center, Seal, and Clear.

  Borrowing a chair from the other table, Tree lowers herself onto both chairs at once. “This was no ordinary kurbitz,” she tells me. “Listen, we’re close. We’re close close. They’re getting scared.”

  “Is it the Three-three-three?” asks Lil, voice hushed. “Is that what’s got them spooked?”

  “The Three-three-three’s six months away, baby,” says Tree, mopping her brow with a hand towel from her purse. “Okay, here we go. Center, Seal, and Clear.”

  “Is this absolutely—” I begin.

  “Julian,” says Lil.

  “Yes, darling. Of course, darling. Baa-aaa, darling.”

  As one, we check the time on our wristwatches and remove them. Lil places all three at the far edge of a nearby table, hopefully out of range. We’ve cooked several perfectly good digital watches over the years, plus a couple of laptops and one digital pedometer—mine. Now we reach beneath our shirt collars and extract matching pendants of translucent green moldavite, and Tree takes them into her palm. The three jagged gemstones interlock perfectly, forming a single, almost egg-shaped stone, actually a shard of an enormous meteorite that struck Eastern Europe fifteen million years ago, give or take a three-day weekend. It took my sister six months of nagging to get one of those pendants around my neck. Now I can’t take it off without feeling a discomfiting drift into the reds.

  Now resting against our chair backs, Tree, Lil, and I exhale as one, close our eyes, and focus on the image of a sphere of green-tinged amber light that gradually grows in size till it encloses us.

  Her voice rich and rhetorical, Tree says, “We send a voice to the highest of our highest selves, and to those who work with us and through us on behalf of the brightest of the light and the lightest of the bright, and say be here with us now and help us in this which we do, Lord God Almighty Jesus.”

  Lil and I repeat, “Lord God Almighty Jesus.”

  “We go to the centermost of our centermost hearts,” continues Tree, voice rising, “to that place where we are the strongest and the purest, and call unto ourselves every soul part that has separated and wandered, diverged and divested, turned out and turned away, that we may be gathered and strong, all praise Aphrodite Aditi.”

  “All praise Aphrodite Aditi,” Lil and I say together.

  “Here and now we seal this space,” says Tree, “in all its dimensions and divestitures, its ways and means, its varieties and vagaries, its every turning and re-turning, that none may come unto us except he and sh
e who bear the light, to enter into and unto its glorious and glendiferous work, Immortal Soul of Emanuel Jeremiah Jerusalem.”

  “Immortal Soul of Emanuel Jeremiah Jerusalem.”

  I open my eyes to peek at Tree, her forehead glistening with sweat. A deep line forms between her eyebrows as she continues, “We now clear from our midst and our doing, clear from our comings and our goings, any and all who would by intention thought deed or deception, hinder harm or delay us in that great work which we embrace and which embraces us, Holy Lord God Nimbutsu Nimbutsu.”

  “Holy Lord God Nimbutsu Nimbutsu.”

  “Thanks be unto all who shine,” says Tree, “and all who shine and all who shine. Be it hereby and forevermore so.”

  “Be it hereby and forevermore so.”

  Jesus Jerusalem Jehosephat.

  “Give me my watch,” I say irritably, stuffing the moldavite pendant back into my shirt. My head hurts beginning somewhere around the nipples.

  All three wristwatches indicate that forty-nine minutes have elapsed. Time really flies when you’re casting out debils.

  I look at Tree. “I have a question. If this little ceremony works so well, why do we have to keep doing it? Especially as it takes actual time off our lives? Shouldn’t we be the most centered of all God’s children by now? And I’ve never replaced that digital pedometer.”

  Lil gives me a look.

  “Not that I really used it that much,” I add.

  Tree wraps me in her warmest smile. “We have to center and clear, again and yet again, because everything changes, Julian, including change itself. Sine waves within sine waves, nested one within another ad infinitum infinitum, each a footnote to evolution, revolution, devolution, and change.”

  I gaze for a moment at this wanked-out hoodoo of a second-day-of-spring woman with a voice like the right hand of God Almighty and an anterior like most people’s posterior. “That’s your answer?” I say. “Sine waves within sine waves? Wasn’t that the same thing you said when I asked who the bad guys are?”