After the Dragons Page 3

  “That’s rather Jurassic Park, isn’t it?”

  “A bit.” Kai shrugs. “Reviving extinct species is illegal, so it’s mostly a bunch of Falun Gong mystics or quacks looking to scam tourists and anyone else stupid enough to fall for it. Once in a while though, you’ll get conspiracy theorists and mad scientist types who think that because origin myths say we’re supposed to be descendants of the Yellow Dragon, dragon medicine can give us the answer for everything from cancer to aging. Like how drinking tiger bone wine is supposed to make you more virile. Five thousand years of history,” Kai says, smiling thinly, “and this is what we have to show for it. All our ancestral animals hunted near extinction or bred into pets.”

  There’s nothing Eli can say to that, so he settles for watching Kai draw. A few feet away, a man prods his dragon back up from the ground, cursing violently as the crowd screams. On the notebook, Kai’s fingers tighten.

  “Come on,” Eli says. Kai glances up, eyes sharp but surprised. “Let’s go inside. You said the dragons get restless, right? We should check on them.”

  It’s dark inside the store. A few dragons chirp in protest when Kai flips on the light, but the room is otherwise silent.

  Kai glances around the shop, assessing the lines of cages and tanks. Then, without saying a word, he closes the door, slips his sketchpad under the front desk, and walks decisively toward the back of the shop.

  After a moment of hesitation, Eli follows. “Do you want any help?” he asks as Kai slips a thick, leather glove over one hand.

  “What, and have the whole shop escape? You can stand there, and if I need anything from the top shelves, you can take it down for me.”

  “I think I can pull that off,” Eli says as Kai steps toward a cage in which a blue dragon sits atop a pile of rocks, preening the scales on its back. Compared to the tianlong Eli sometimes sees clustering on rooftops and stop lights, this dragon is larger and sleeker, the size of a hawk with a narrow chest and long curving wings. Feathery frills circle the dragon’s head, giving an appearance halfway between a lion’s mane and an Elizabethan neck ruff worn by a draconic poet.

  Kai makes a high, clicking sound, and the dragon raises its neck toward him, imperious as a little monarch. “Hello to you too, your highness,” he says, unhooking the door and sticking his gloved hand inside. The dragon glances at the glove, then back up at Kai: and?

  Rolling his eyes, Kai takes a dead mouse from one pocket and dangles it in front of the cage. The dragon cocks its head to one side, politely uninterested. “Oh, come on now,” Kai says, shaking his hand. “Cixi, baobei, piece of shit, don’t be like that —”

  “Cixi? Like the empress?”

  “Just like the empress,” Kai confirms, eyes intent on the dragon as she gingerly steps onto his wrist to take a bite — the smallest bite — of the mouse. “Almost as bad as the human one, too. Bossy little thing,” he says, carefully lifting his hand out of the cage, spindly dragon and all. “Isn’t that right, princess?”

  In response, Cixi trills, licking her snout as she snatches the mouse and swallows it whole. Her eyes are tawny, and in the dim light, they gleam like gold coins against delicate whiskers and blue scales.

  “She’s beautiful,” Eli says, leaning forward. “What is she?”

  “A pain in the ass? Careful — this one does bite,” Kai warns as he hands Eli a strip of dried meat.

  Eli offers it to Cixi, who sniffs the jerky before deigning to take it from him.

  “In terms of breed, feilong, which goes a long way toward explaining the sense of superiority since they supposedly only appear to ‘great men’ in the wild.” Kai strokes her neck, Cixi leaning into the touch before snapping at his fingers. “Doesn’t do anything to explain the stubbornness or complete lack of manners.”

  “Like owner, like dragon, maybe?”

  Kai glances up, and for a second, Eli is unsure whether he’s earned the right to say what he did — but then Kai laughs, a short, surprised sound that turns into a wry smile. Eli can’t help smiling back. And then, with no warning whatsoever, Cixi swoops off Kai’s wrist and out the door, a glistening blue blur with Eli’s jerky between her teeth.

  “Oh, fuck,” Kai mutters before sprinting after her.

  Eli takes longer to recover, and then he’s racing after Kai and the escaped dragon.

  Cixi doesn’t go far — a few streets away, where the old buildings abruptly break into an abandoned park. Flattened soda cans and worn plastic bags litter the grass, the few trees skinny and newly planted, but it must be naturalistic enough for Cixi, who is perched on the highest branch of the tallest tree.

  They approach her slowly, Eli trying not to breathe too heavily. It hadn’t been a long chase, but he’s spent the majority of the last four years in labs and lecture halls.

  Kai is comparatively unruffled. “You’re taller,” he says. “You could try to climb up.”

  Eli scans the tree in all its slender height. Up close, the tree is both thinner and taller than it had looked from afar. “I’m pretty sure I’d break it.”

  “True,” Kai concedes. He frowns, watching Cixi preen herself. Reaching in his pocket, he takes out another strip of jerky, holding it between two fingers in front of him. “Come on,” Kai says, whistling as he dangles the meat in the air. In the tree, Cixi cocks her head, seems to consider the merits of descending. “Come on, you little shit, I don’t have time for this —”

  Her angle, as Cixi lands, is a little awkward, more a falling missive than a graceful plane; as Kai stumbles under her weight, Eli — before he can think — steps forward, one hand grabbing Kai’s arm to steady him.

  “Thank you,” Kai says, nodding as he briskly shakes off Eli’s grip. “It would have been fine, it happens all the time, but still —”

  But Eli is frowning at his hand as if it had been burnt.

  “Hey,” he says, “are you okay? You’re warm — I think you might have a fever or —”

  Kai stiffens and Eli realizes several things at once. The dryness of his skin. The warmth, vivid as an August afternoon. And in the low light, the flush in his face — had it always been that red? Had he just not noticed? — the spots of red, like bloody freckles on pale skin —

  Kai’s eyes widen, the faintest, briefest hint of anger showing through the shock. And then he turns, quiet as a shadow, and walks away.

  Eli can’t move. He’s unable to talk, a montage of images swirling through his mind: blackened lung tissues and the sharp sunken faces of stage four patients, the rows of medications that had lined his grandmother’s counter in video calls. Eli’s not stupid, he knows it’s unlikely, that there are a dozen other reasons for what he’s seen, what he thinks he’s seen —

  He’s worked with it in the hospitals before, seen dozens of second and third-stage patients flown over from Beijing and Delhi, and he knows this, is as familiar with this disease as if the symptoms were written on his own skin —

  Shaolong. Throat scorch. Caused by long exposure to poor air quality, especially common in cities with high pollution indexes and poor environmental regulations —

  The same disease that killed his grandmother.

  There was a time, immediately after diagnosis, when Kai thought about killing himself.

  After the months of coughing, the weeks of concerned teachers asking if he was all right, when he finally sat down in the doctor’s office, he had heard the words as if from far away — shaolong. Two characters, so often heard and said, and yet for all that, distant. Not here but somewhere else.

  Always odd, Kai thinks, when it happens to you. Before, reading about it in papers, seeing it on television — and then one day, without warning, you’re living that reality. His own name another series of pixels in the array of images comprising a death sentence. Shaolong: burnt lung. First documented case appearing in the 1990s, initially mistaken for emphysema before a doctor at Beida noticed the distinct patterns of tissue corrosion that would come to be the disease’s signature prognostic. A
ffecting a small percentage of urban dwellers, typically the old and sickly.

  Kai had never thought of himself as sickly. Not before. He’d been careful — followed all the health clinic pamphlet tips about using condoms and testing regularly, didn’t smoke or do drugs or leave his drinks unattended at bars. He’d been good, he thought. He should have been safe. He couldn’t have known that the danger would be in the air around him, every breath another inhale of slow poison worse than anything his roommates had ever smuggled into the dorms.

  After the doctors had finished rattling off their diagnosis — stage two though we’ll need more tests to determine a full treatment regime. Please make a follow-up appointment at the front desk — he had walked out of the clinic. Brushed off the nurses without hearing their queries, their “who are you looking for where are you going do you need help?” passing off him as though not they were not there.

  He doesn’t remember much of what happened after that. Only that his surroundings seemed suddenly comprised of too many colors, shining sickly like an oil slick or water running off loose scales. Somewhere, sometime, he thinks someone had called him; somewhere, sometime, he thinks he’d ignored them. Let his phone ring and ring, paying it as much mind as he did the street vendors with their paper-clip structures and paper games.

  Somehow, he’d found himself in Chaoyang, wandering the Olympic Green and the shadows of empty, indeterminate stadiums; somehow, he’d found himself on top of one, metal creaking beneath him as he clamored his way onto the edges of the roof overhanging the stands. In the distance, the Bird’s Nest loomed, a marvel of elegantly woven metal even after all those years. Kai had been too young to care much when the Summer Olympics happened, but he had heard his parents talk about it: the broadcasts full of fireworks and smiles, the child singers and performers from all the four corners of China. The million hazy faces of the foreign tourists, teeth white and hair golden in the click-click-click of camera flash light. He wondered what it must have been like then, paint still bright and now-empty stands full of millions. All that money and effort, whole neighborhoods torn down to make room for a new and brighter China — would it have been worth it, to be here for that one blaze of international glory?

  He looked down. A few streets over, groups of late-night pedestrians cluster around the glow of street lamps and late night mini-marts. Directly below, though, there is nothing but empty sidewalks and once brightly painted sculptures, now mere blurry shapes from Kai’s current height. What it would be like to fall, to throw himself off? How would his body look when it hit the ground? Red flesh bursting open like a too-ripe persimmon. Would it still be identifiable after that? He supposed it would be — there would be enough blood, enough fingerprints and peeling skin to find out who this corpse had once been. Would they care enough to do that for him, some dusty dropout with death in his lungs?

  He remembered thinking that, faintly comforted in the idea that at least his mother would never know. He remembered standing there, at the top of the stadium, for a very long time.

  It had been a Saturday night. No one would have noticed his disappearance.

  And then the dragons had come — one, two, a whole unlikely flock of tianlong, chattering in rapid dragon-speak as they flew around him. Green and brown and copper and a few rare darts of import blue — the largest of them barely the size of swallows, but as fierce as their larger ancestors and braver and more boisterous than any bird. A few, seeing him there, puffed out their chests at him, bared fangs as thin as needles; others, curious by this newcomer in their midst, perched on his shoulders, his jacket, the top of his head. A few nipped curiously at his hands; one or two stuck thin tongues inside his jacket. One licked at a cut on his hand from climbing up, the blood already dry. Its tongue was cool and wet against his skin.

  It lasted a minute, two minutes — tianlong were fickle creatures, the small ones even more so — and then they were gone, curiosity sated as they blew away with the breeze. Leaving him standing there, alone, feeling much lighter for the missing weight of thirty small bodies.

  Below him, the cool Beijing night and its inhabitants passed by — young mothers in high heels, green-haired boys defying death with cigarettes and skateboards, giggly schoolgirls wearing uniforms and their mothers’ lipstick. From up here, they were no more than pinpoints of pink, the outline of girls in cell phone light, but he knew how their faces would look up close, done-up and thin in the pale streetlight. The cloying sweetness of perfume hanging on their clothes, the way their laughter would sound, young and shrill and catching.

  He stood looking over it all.

  And then, carefully, he climbed back down.

  Dr. Wang invites the lab to dinner a week later and, try as he might, Eli can find no way of getting out of it.

  They end up in a private room on the fifth floor of a hotel, each plate setting laden with three plates and three glasses — water, wine, and delicate glasses for the deadly bottle of Maotai several of the international researchers had brought. Dr. Wang orders hot shaobing and Peking duck and jellied liangfen swimming in chili oil and vinegar, piling food onto the plates of the students within reach and scowling at the rest until they fill their plates as well.

  It’s awkward at first, language barriers and the inherent difficulty of the Beida/exchange student split, but the wine and the Maotai soon make themselves felt. Waitresses drift in periodically, and they find increasing inventive ways to make room on the table for steaming tureens of five-spice fish and dandan noodles. Tycho flirts with an undergraduate; Evangeline and Jiling, having made their way through most of the bottle of red wine they’d brought, are rapt as Dr. Yun — twenty-eight, witty, already an assistant professor and the subject of much student attention — describes her encounter with the novelist Mo Yan at Shandong University, long hands cutting patterns through the air as she speaks. At the head of the table, Dr. Wang shines her bright smile over the scene, a monarch ensconced among her self-chosen court.

  Eli, sensing that the serious toasting is about to begin, excuses himself to the bathroom. He closes the door behind him, careful to muffle the sound of his exit, before walking toward the floor’s back balcony.

  It’s hot outside, but after the aggressive air conditioning of the restaurant, it’s a pleasant heat. A few waitresses glance at him as they pass between tables and banquet rooms, but they otherwise let him be, no doubt used to the vagaries of foreigners and customers alike.

  Eli leans against the rail and closes his eyes.

  “There you are,” someone says from behind him. Eli turns, and Dr. Wang is there, a pack of cigarettes held loosely in one hand.

  “Wang laoshi,” he says, straightening. “Is there something you wanted?”

  “Something I want? Nothing more than the pleasure of your company. I know I’m your employer, but I do try to keep a basic interest in my researchers’ lives. The movies might love lone geniuses tinkering away in their labs, but most of us prefer a little more company than that.” She smiles, friendly and unassuming, an expression that makes it easy to forget her numerous scientific awards as well as her status as Eli’s boss. “You’ve been acting odd lately. Is something wrong, Eli?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Oh, come on, now,” Dr. Wang says, tutting. “You’re in a foreign country, you’re far from your friends, you don’t know anyone, and people stare at you in the street. How are you doing?” Dr. Wang proffers a cigarette; when Eli shakes his head, she nods. “Good. Ruins your lungs, smoking. My daughter calls it ‘the slowest form of premeditated suicide.’ But when everyone else does …” She shrugs, rueful.

  “If everyone jumps off a cliff,” Eli says, moving to make room at the balustrade.

  “True,” Dr. Wang admits, “but what sort of life would that be, without friendship? A life with integrity, Lanlan would say, but that’s why she works in nonprofits and I don’t. Now,” she says, taking a spot next to him and lighting her cigarette, “tell me, how are you settling into Beijing?”


  “I’m fine,” Eli says, shrugging as he evades Dr. Wang’s eyes. “I mean, there’s been a bit of an adjustment at times, having to find alternatives to Google and other websites I’d usually use, but it’s fine. I can handle it.”

  “Then what is it? Is it everything all right at home? Is it a girl? I’ll admit, I would expect that more from Tycho than you, but I suppose one can never truly predict young love —”

  “What? No, of course not, it’s nothing like that, why would you think — it’s not that,” Eli says, sighing. Below them, the pedestrians mill, mothers carefully guiding their children past bright storefronts and the clusters of chatting teenagers gathered in front of them. “It’s the boy from the store. Mr. Lin’s assistant.”

  “That young man? Kaifei, I think he said his name was?”

  Eli nods. “Xiang Kaifei. I was talking with him, and I think, or I thought I saw — he’s sick. Shaolong.”

  Dr. Wang leans against the balcony, taking a drag on her cigarette. “And?”

  Eli stares at her.

  “Yes,” Dr. Wang says, staring out toward the city lights, “I knew. Don’t look so surprised. I’ve done enough clinical work to see the signs. He hides them well, but they’re still there. If you know how to look.”

  “Then why didn’t you say something? He — that’s not right, he should be in a hospital. He should be getting help — there are free trials at Beida, we could have offered him a place —”

  “Do you think he would have accepted it?”

  Eli thinks of his grandmother, sipping tea and petting one of her innumerable cats as she told them the news over video chat. The terrible calm with which she preemptively answered his mother’s protests, telling her no, she would not be returning to the States to receive further care.

  “But,” he says. “We have to do something. We need to — he needs help.”

  “Perhaps he has his own reasons for not wanting help. Shaolong is a terminal disease, Eli. Perhaps not forever, maybe not even for long, but certainly for now. Yes, technically patients with stage one can live an almost ordinary life if it’s caught then, but it rarely is. By the time patients come in complaining about chronic coughing or shortness of breath, they’re nearly always at stage two at least, and disease progression accelerates from there. Even before oxygen masks and ventilators become necessary for sufficient airflow, patients know that treatment is less about a cure than slowing the symptoms. The question isn’t if but when and in how much pain.”