The Year of the Hydra Read online

  “And the Hydra would represent… ?”

  “Symbolically? Well, with all the new heads sprouting and so forth, I’d have to say the Hydra represents endless and pointless propagation. Horror, really. Look at modern corporations, which cannot die because they do not live, yet they’re everywhere, propagating endlessly, consuming everything in sight. A bit like cancer, really. Or a virus. You know, a virus is not a living thing in the classical sense, but more like a self-replicating code. But I’d rather hear what you think.”

  “All things being equal,” I say, lifting the nearly empty bottle, “I prefer not to. A little more all-weather motor oil?”

  Ana’s eyes hold mine for a moment. “You seem to have a bit of Heracles going yourself, Julian, if you don’t mind my saying so. That is, you possess a great deal of power, but you’re not quite present with it. There’s a curious disconnect. Actually I’m not sure what to make of it.”

  “It’s called apathy,” I tell her. “Very unpopular these days, apathy, but if humans had any less of it we’d have annihilated each other twelve times over by now. It may still be our last best hope. I’m ordering a second Zinfandel.”

  “Oh, no. I’m perfectly fine.”

  Waving for the waiter, I say, “Don’t worry. I’m entirely capable of drinking it myself.”

  “If you’re going to get drunk,” says Ana, “I’m going to smoke. Do you mind? You Americans are funny.”

  “Yes we are, and yes you may.”

  With a wooden match, Ana lights an oblong Gaulois and pulls on it with relish. After the second draw, she smiles and says, “So, why are you really in China, Julian?”

  I gaze at the woman across the table, enjoying the way she holds the cigarette between the bases of two fingers like a man, letting the ash grow.

  “Isn’t that something we discover later?” I say. “Why we really did this thing or that one?”

  “You’re hedging,” says Ana.

  “I’m a master hedger. It comes with being my sister’s brother. There’s no other way to have a moment’s privacy. To answer your question, I’ve no idea why I’m really in China, any more than I knew why I was really in Memphis. The more serious questions I leave to Tree. I carry the suitcases.”

  “Tree?”

  “Short for Shatrina. She says the three of us have been together hundreds of lifetimes, mostly in the galaxy Cetus, which geographically I think is somewhere near Orion’s left clavicle.”

  The waiter brings the second bottle and begins to open it.

  “So,” says Ana, freshly interested, “a three-soul group. And what exactly is a pod from Cetus doing on Earth just now?”

  I pause to absorb the fresh turn in the conversation. It’s not unusual to find myself in a dialogue I’d no intention of entering, often concerning beliefs to which I don’t subscribe yet which have a way of appearing in the mails nonetheless. There’s something about this woman. that tells me I’m already in the trap, and I’ve yet to so much as sniff the cheese. What am I doing on Earth now?

  I give Ana Manguella a cool smile. “Saving it, I believe.”

  “All of it?”

  I nod agreeably. “And why are you really in China, Ana?”

  “To meet you,” she says without missing a beat. Ana exhales a shaft of white smoke, gives her thick ponytail a toss and returns my gaze.

  I ponder her words for a full minute. I’d like to believe that this woman is coming on to me.

  “Might I ask,” says Ana, “what you and your friends are saving Earth from? Or is that a deep Cetian secret?”

  “Voice mail. Saxophone music. The whole tight-underwear military-industrial sort of thing. Which is to say, Tree doesn’t exactly know yet. Things are supposed to become clearer on the Three-three-three.”

  Ana gives me a blank look.

  “March third, 2003,” I say. “All threes. New Age Groundhog Day or something of the kind.”

  “A ceremony then? The three of you will perform a ceremony on the Three-three-three? Very thoughtful of you, actually, but would you mind telling me how—no, never mind. You’re just going to toy with me, and I’ll be bothered.”

  I lean closer. “Promise that you’ll be bothered.”

  “Julian, I wish you’d take our conversation more seriously or else say nothing at all. You toss these conflicting little snippets about and it’s all so clever, but you’re committed to none of it, which I find entirely offensive. If you must know, it doesn’t become you at all.”

  “Are we having a quarrel?” I ask. “I’d say things are moving right along, wouldn’t you?”

  “I think I’d like my check.”

  Setting down my empty glass, I give it a half turn and say, “Every argument makes an equal amount of sense within the context of its devices, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Julian…”

  “No, this is just getting good. It all cancels out in the end, don’t you see? Are we biochemical accidents in a blind and random universe? Obviously. Is there some kind of grand evolutionary scheme afoot in which we’re all invited to play a role? Obviously.” I shrug. “It’s just rooms. Alternative realities, faux-realities. People talk about what’s true and what isn’t, what’s crucial and what’s not, and there’s none of that. Situations arise and you choose a place to stand. There’s nothing more. Myself, I choose to stand where it’s most comfortable, thank you, preferably in the shade with a drink in my hand.”

  Ana takes a last weary pull on the Gaulois and puts it out. “So nice to hear it. Would you please ask for my check?”

  I exhale resignedly. “Okay, you’ve teased it out of me. I am the narrator.”

  Ana doesn’t respond.

  “Are you surprised?” I ask.

  “It depends on what you mean.”

  “I convey the experience stream. I see to it that all this will be remembered.”

  “But everyone witnesses reality, Julian,” says Ana.

  “Do they? Can you absolutely ensure that, were I not here to describe the dinner we have just enjoyed, it would be available for others to know?”

  “Thanks so much,” says Ana, lifting her purse, “for all that you do. Now—”

  “One more question. When I asked why you’d come to China, you said, ‘To meet you.’ What did you mean by that?”

  Ana very nearly blushes. “It seemed true enough when I said it. Sometimes I open my mouth and out it comes. Really, Julian, I’m quite tired. Would you ask—”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “No. Please don’t.”

  “It’s the custom,” I tell her. “You’re in China now. Best get used to it. When will I see you again, my dear? In the morning, perhaps, in front of the loo?”

  Ana rises and I with her. “We were put together once,” she says. “It can happen again.”

  “But just to be on the safe side, I’d like an e-address.”

  Her voice softens. “Julian, there’s no such thing as a safe side. You’re on Earth now. Best get used to it.”

  Chapter Six

  The first thing is, I purchased a copy of Mao’s little red book yesterday from the guy now dozing just outside my window at Dali Guesthouse Number Four. I’d seen the stack of rain-stained Condensed Maos from this lumpy bed whose window opens to the upper reaches of Foreigner Street where hemp halter blouses swing in a wind straight off Zhonghe Peak and a half-dozen trinket merchants nod off at most hours of the day.

  Second, there’s a badly broken bone in my right hand, and I’ve no idea why. From time to time, I gaze longingly at my backpack on the dresser, a full water bottle visible in one pocket. I’ve ached for a drink for hours, but my legs haven’t quite arrived yet. I don’t know where my wallet is, or my passport.

  I’d never gotten around to reading Mao, which felt increasingly wrong, as here I was writing articles on modern China—or fully intending to. I’m not that kind of writer. So I fed fifteen yuan through the steel bars of this window and received in return my own English pocket edition of
Quotations, whose frontispiece contains thirty-one pix of Glorious Chairman in wool hat, Glorious Chairman in bathrobe, Glorious Chairman in gray wool suit, on and on, the same face-splitting smile on every page.

  Someone’s knocking. At the room next door, I believe.

  I then passed another four yuan through the bars in exchange for a butane lighter that caught both the sun and my eye. The lighter bore the image of a slender, swaying woman, her colors iridescent in the bright midday. It was Quan Yin, Goddess of Mercy and Inflammable Petroleum Byproducts and spiritual matriarch to this atheistic patriarchy.

  The knocking continues. Finally the guy next door answers hoarsely. He and his companion have overslept, having spent the night alternately arguing, watching TV at maximum volume, and slamming their bed against our common wall.

  My eyes go to a scrap of cardboard in the wastebasket, and I ask myself once more whether I might fashion a splint from the cardboard and a few turns of dental floss—but how to tie the knot? It’s challenge enough just stringing subject and predicate together in my armored journal while awaiting the return of my legs, if indeed they come back this time. I keep thinking I’ll just this moment emerge from the gray-purples and shit-browns of this decidedly non-lucid dream and—

  And what?

  I often lucid dream, if you must know. I generally find it agreeable despite the sorting out process that accompanies re-entry. It may require a half-hour of tormented puzzlement to finally determine whether I’m in a room or a room. It’s nearly always one or the other.

  This particular habitation I call the Marigold Suite because of the yellow-gold–flowering plant erupting from a crack in the concrete just outside the door, beyond which a row of porcelain sinks and dim, flaking mirrors summon humorless men and women by dawn to comb and shave beneath a vanished sky. The Marigold Suite has a water boiler that doesn’t work and a reading light with no switch, though you can turn off the latter by yanking the in-series extension cords stretched knee-high all the way across the room—which I found strangely satisfying, as I did reading the hand-lettered sign on my bathroom door (“Keep the ground towel in order be careful for slippery floor otherwise accept the result”). Then there are the blue batik bedspreads tacked over the crumbling bedroom walls and the two used condoms stuck as though glued to the lower shelf of the nightstand. It all comes together in a statement of some kind.

  I was resting here yesterday, browsing my newly purchased Quotations and its thirty-one pictures of Cherubic Chairman, when I came upon two black-and-whites of a lean young Zedong, unsmiling, brooding, as though behind the broad, clear eyes, the inner landscape were already rent like the severely parted hair. Turning the pages, I watched the two hairlines recede ever farther. When I was a child, I couldn’t get past the ‘do and the mole. Now I couldn’t get past the ‘do and the mole and the smug self-delight, the pudgy, seemingly rouged relief-map of monstrous conceit that somehow passed for a human face. I saw all the Caesars in that face, I saw Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price, I saw the perfected Las Vegas Elvis of the final Babylon.

  I see that the trinket merchant has snored himself awake. As I watch, he takes a sip from his jar of tea, re-secures the lid, and rolls up a shirtsleeve, exposing a long line of junkie welts. He ties off with a woven belt and disinterestedly gives himself an injection. Within a minute, he’s nodding again.

  What really dotted the i for me about the Marigold Suite was the moment I opened my nightstand drawer to browse the tourist information, and there between the brochure offering tour packages up the Cangshan Mountains and the menu of the nearby treehouse café was a Polaroid taken in this room of a young Bai woman wearing pink bikini panties and a Mona Lisa smile. She’d been photographed lying on this bed. So much better than discovering the Gideon Bible, I noted, closing the drawer.

  I wish I’d left it at that.

  Now through the wall comes the day’s first argument from the couple next door. Mostly it’s the guy who argues. The woman just bleats every now and then. Now the TV comes on. It can only be a matter of time before the bed starts up. At one moment last night, they had it revving so hard that my bed was in motion, the in-series extension cords bobbing like a rope bridge.

  Neither of them uttered a sound.

  I lift my trembling right hand and take a good look at it. Could take Best Overall at the Iowa Rutabaga Show. What the hell is happening to me. I close my eyes and sigh. My legs will come back as they always do, and so will the memory of last night, at this point a badly haunted landscape of glimpsed grotesques. A woman pacing with an antenna-ed telephone. A recurring beeping sound. But the dots don’t connect.

  Head in his lap, the trinket merchant is in danger of tipping over. This corner of China, often called the Burma Triangle, was deeply invested in drug trafficking before Jessie James robbed his first train. It remains a clearinghouse for most of the world’s opium, flowing to processing centers in Hong Kong then shipping points in northern China—none of which I have mentioned to Miriam, telling her only that Yunnan Province is a treasury of one-third of China’s ethnic minorities and half of its remaining plant and animal species. Though the Han race accounts for ninety percent of China’s population, fifty-eight tribal peoples—conquered peoples, actually—still cling to their old ways along the indifferent borders. It’s a China I’d never thought to inquire about.

  From the first moment, the pristine peaks and pines of Yunnan Province have been a surprise, as have the hewn-stone villages and rippling rivers, the mingled Brazilian smells of horse shit and strong coffee in the alpine air, and the disparate strands of Tibetan, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Han traditions that weave a coat of many curiosities. Stepping off the train in yesterday’s dawn just outside Dali, I sensed all of that swirling in the chill mist and felt, too, the vague apprehension that I was drawing very close to something.

  That’s the third thing. I’m getting close to something. Or maybe I encountered it somehow last night. Maybe that was the problem.

  Next door, the bed is beginning to rev once more. Outside my window, the s-shaped fellow mimics Beijing politics by leaning ever farther to the right without quite falling over. I wonder if he has tied himself upright somehow. His tribe, the copper-skinned Bai, have hung tough in these mountains for millennia, even whipping the ass of Beijing’s imperial army seventeen centuries ago. The Bai still speak their Sino-Tibetan language, bear their woven baskets on their backs, and practice a casserole religion that simmers native polytheism, Buddhism and Roman Catholicism with a little yam and wild onion. Hopefully all this will come together in a magazine article of some stripe, as Miriam still dangles airfare by the finest of threads.

  I gaze achingly at the water bottle across the room. Everything sparkled with such promise yesterday when I tucked the book of quotations into my daypack and mounted a shaggy pony en route to Zhonghe Peak, two Bai guides leading the way on foot. It was to be a working day, one of clear-headed research beneath a cobalt sky, accumulating field notes with tidy vertical margins and clear pronoun reference. I would be proud of myself.

  As my pony traced the raw edges of Dali, the two men hollered helloes to distant farmers hoeing fields of corn, squash, and cabbage, my pony reaching for the occasional mouthful of a star-shaped leaf I was certain I’d seen before. True enough, cannabis sativa lined every stray ditch bank, providing new teeth for the old saw, “The sky was high and the emperor was far away.”

  At midmorning, the trail turned sharply upward into mature stands of short-leaf pine where muddy switchbacks led into a rude cemetery, slowly toppling east-facing vaults mutely awaiting the next sunrise. At the summit, a paint-flaking Buddhist temple offered a tilted, dizzying view of Dali.

  The temple I found to be entirely innocent of structural agendas, a definite comfort after Beijing and its many examples of intentional architecture. Lil, Tree, and I had toured one centuries-old Buddhist complex widely known for its thousand carved human figures, each expressing a different shade of emotion. I found that l
ess intriguing than the string of adjoining structures that led quite purposefully, I thought, to a hill’s summit. That series of structures connected the collection of carved figures to a ponderous hilltop tower that jutted skyward, topped by odd protruding masonry orbs that suggested clumsy antennas. It’s probably just me. In fact, I’m sure it’s me, but that place certainly looked the part of a brick-and-mortar broadcast station designed to depict and disseminate highly detailed information about the vagaries of human feeling.

  The earthling channel.

  Before heading back down the mountain yesterday, I joined my guides for a simple lunch of rice and veggies in the shade of a red masonry wall. Afterward, I had the guides arrange an interview with the head monk, a smiling old man with a silver crewcut. I dutifully jotted down his nonsense, the elder guide serving as interpreter. At one point, the guide registered surprise before telling me, “You come here receive the teaching. Quan Yin give this teaching to you.” At that, all three men gave me a significant gawk. Whatever. In truth, I was distracted by the memory of a certain star-shaped leaf. Clearly, additional field research would be in order once I touched back down on Foreigner Street.

  In this country, one joint equals a pistol bullet above the left ear, after which you are gutted like a pig, every transplantable organ is harvested for resale, and a letter is composed on a manual typewriter dunning your family for the cost of the bullet. Which is to say, pot-smoking isn’t particularly widespread. Personally, back in Memphis, I usually keep a small pinch on hand. I find it to be a great comfort during serious life crises such as waking up each morning. And later on, when the arc of the day has flattened out a little, say around two or three p.m., a puff or two oftentimes helps one regain the necessary traction. And then there’s the weary eventide and the often lonely bedtime experience, not to mention those nasty moments when one awakes in the horse latitudes of night. In general, I’d have to say that marijuana handsomely finishes the business that alcohol begins. Or is it the other way around?