They tried to kill me on the bus. Poison gas. A cocktail of fumes and freezing cold air. You could feel the vibrato on everyone’s nose-hairs. Engine dead. Keys gone. The door lingering ajar. The driver must’ve done the job and left the gun behind, so to speak. Wasn’t he wearing sunglasses and steering us all through the dark? I was on a crazy leg of travel going 48 hours nonstop, rushing to prevent an assassination in Tibet. The constant inhalation of carbon monoxide left me fatigued and my senses dulled. The overnight bus to Lijiang was ripe with foot odor and tinged with a faint humidity I found disturbing. The bus dropped us off in the middle of nowhere. I was expecting the gates of an ancient city spreading open to the dawn. Instead all I saw was a vacant lot, orange streetlights, and a blue sunrise revealing only a colored fog. Passengers stumbled sleepily into the chilly morning finding their way towards headlights. I saw their faces chortling merrily as they rode past in shotgun. As the last man got off the bus, I started to panic. Where are you going? Let me go with you! Don’t leave me here!
I was in the middle of the parking lot. A shroud of mist covered the exits. Suddenly, a white van pulled up in front of me. The sliding door flew open. Orders were barked and I felt myself being yanked into the van. The van peeled out of the parking lot. I heard the ominous door slamming shut behind me. My captors wore matching ruby-red goose down jackets from some factory that pumped them out by the billion. I was seated in the back seat of the van with an agent on either side of me. A third, the leader, addressed me in Mandarin. They were going to harvest my organs. My hands were tied! They were using an ancient snake technique using my own pressure point system against me! I soon felt the wool cap slipping over my eyes, to keep my head warm, preparing me to meet Mr. Hypodermic.
I heard the sliding door open again. I was pushed out onto the gravel. Speeding off, the van disappeared into the morning dust as I removed the wool cap from my eyes. I turned and saw the gates of Old Town glowing in the rising sun. I knew without being told that I had arrived in Lijiang.
As I walked through the gate, the sun trickled over the stone walls and illuminated the alleyways. I felt as though I had entered a dream. Everything was made of stone and wood. Streams cut along the sides of the street and glowed with goldfish and aquatic greenery. The sun rose and sparkled over a bridge which arched in a scene of fantastic ancient Chinese buildings with stone-shingle roofs. Everywhere you listened was the sound of a babbling stream. You could look and see clouds of goldfish and birds chirping and the morning market beginning to bustle with women dressed in similar azure garments.
They seemed to be elements of another time. Or were they acting? I couldn’t be sure, but surely my man was here sprinkled among the falconers, a bearded man with leather chaps who appears as if he has just strolled off the mountain of time. Or perhaps he’ll be one of the ex-revolutionaries smoking cigarettes and offering children pony rides. The assassin or informant, or whoever I was to meet, may also be hidden among the women and girls in their homespun dresses and bonnets the color of sky singing traditional folk songs in the square.
From a tea house overlooking the great expanse of stone-shingled rooftops, hills, and evergreens, I saw golden flashes of late-November willows among the old streets and a great snowy-white mountain in the distance beyond the walls of Old Town. There, where the mountain sat, was the West, and beyond that, Tibet, where the signs were telling me to go. Something big was going to happen. Something frighteningly deep. An abyss ready to open. One hundred million bodies on the ground. I stumbled upon a bike shop and saw the sun descend upon a rusty black steed. The name on the bike was “Excalibur.” Could there be a clearer sign?
“Pump it up,” I said to the shopkeeper, who I both pitied and envied in his cheer. He had no idea of the coming storm.
I flew through endless fields of grain; the mountain was a beacon of white. There was no turning back. The time to turn back was yesterday. Would I see my own face blown off by the spiral of a sniper’s bullet? Would the little fragments twirl in the bright blue sky before landing in the soft grass and spraying the earth red? Would I lie down in golden fields, searching for Eternal Spring? Voices and laughter echoed from down the road. I skidded to a stop.
My heart raced in the stillness, the twitter of a thousand opining birds senseless in the afternoon sunshine. The village was abandoned. Perhaps it was never really there. Like a nuclear holocaust years after, the forest recaptured human memory and absorbed it with her tendrils, flowers grew out of broken glass, and barbed wire made love to vine. Three boys knelt in the middle of the road shooting marbles, looking like they were from the days of revolution. The red bandanas hung from their necks like dripping blood.
“Ni hao!” I called in an attempt to not freak them out.
“Hello! Hello!” they called out merrily in echo, and my heart froze. My face was stunned. How did they know?
They vanished into the wind, laughing like ghosts.
“Come back here!”
I dropped the bike and ran, but they were already gone.
The trees thinned and I arrived at a clearing. I paused and took in the surroundings. There was something vaguely familiar about it. Something inordinately strange. There was no one there. Not a single resident or passerby. No builders or overseers. Just the half-constructed mass of gravel alleys and buildings being put together like a puzzle from the lumber waiting about in piles. But I’d seen this before. I’d been in this town.
Suddenly I understood. I walked up in shock to the nearest structure and scrutinized the door frames and stared open-mouthed at the empty rooms inside. The window frames were like empty jigsaws; the sitting rooms were ready for decor. All of the building materials were made to look rustic and old, perfectly deconstructed, this Disneyland still in skeletal form. I threw up water and gasped out, “Those crazy bastards! They’re building a new Old Town!”
Click.
“You wouldn’t listen, would you? You couldn’t keep your nose where it belonged,” I heard a familiar voice saying behind me.
I whipped around and saw Jack dressed up as a yak herder with a long fake beard, chewing a dried yak penis like an old cigar, a black pistol in his hand aimed right at me.
“You thought you were going to move to Old Town, didn’t you?” Jack jeered. “Disappear from the world and live like a yak herder?”
I dry-swallowed.
“Just tell me one thing, Jack. How much of this is real?”
“You’re projecting meaning onto matter, Sam! Nothing is real! Only what you believe! These buildings are nothing but wood, just as you and I are a spiral of molecules. We die now, we die a hundred years later, it makes no difference.”
“You’re starting to sound like your friend, Hey.”
“You’re not supposed to say his name,” Jack said automatically, and then caught himself with a scornful smile. “So you met the White Jesus, did you?”
“It’s over, Jack. I know everything about R.E.I.N., Point Omega, and the Tibetans. Your friend told me you were planning to get a little work done. What’s the matter, Jack? Feeling insecure? You always were one for the enhancements, but whatever upgrades they’ve got waiting for you in Thailand won’t save you this time. I’d spend my money elsewhere if I were you. A lawyer for starters, considering you’re about to be locked in a military prison for the next century.”
“Oh, Sam,” Jack simpered, shaking his head. “They pumped you full of intuition and forgot all the sense. Think, Sam! Think! Wherever you go, I go. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“Yeah,” I growled, steel-faced. “You suffer from separation anxiety.”
Jack groaned in frustration.
“You just don’t get it yet, do you Sam? Don’t you ever look in the mirror and wonder why you don’t recognize your own face? Doesn’t it seem strange to you that you barely remember last week, let alone your entire life? Killing you will be an act of mercy. Kind of takes the fun out of it. But don’t worry; I’ll take care of that girl they’ve got waiting for you in Thailand. Surprised, Sam? You thought I didn’t know? I know everything. We’re connected, you and I.”
“You son of a bitch, if you touch her. . .”
“The irony is that when she sees me, she’ll think I’m you. Now why would that be, Sam? Hmm? And these pills they keep giving you. They’re for what exactly? To keep you in telepathic communication with the Motherboard? Wake the hell up, Sam. I’m being your friend here. Interpol’s got you so blind you can’t even see the obvious. Remember, Sam? The cold metal table. Lasers burning your genitals. A face you’ve never seen before staring right back at you.”
I tried to keep him talking, edging toward a pebble I could kick up right into the hole of his gun, making him backfire.
“For your information, I stopped taking my pills weeks ago. Flushed them back in Beijing. You think I didn’t know I’ve got a brain implant? We’re both trapped souls, Jack. Who are we kidding? Tracked no matter where we go, recording all we think and say. You’ll never stop running, just so you know that, and it’ll be me that gets you. No one else. Just me.”
“That’s funny. I seem to be the one holding destiny in my hands,” Jack smirked, his eyebrow twitching. “This time I’m just going to kill you. I thought about relishing the moment, but I know you, Sam. Soft as you’ve become, I’ve learned not to romanticize the end of our special relationship. After this, I’ll finally be free. Free of you, Sam. Did you think you were the only one who wanted freedom? How incredibly arrogant and self-centered of you! With you gone, I’ll be one archnemesis lighter; my subsequent success in this global conspiracy will push me further into the dark world, and I’ll escape the arms of international justice and even the public eye; I’ll somehow go on living out my days carrying out other missions, even as my personal life crumbles into disarray and my relationships suffer because of my endless lies on top of the soul-deadening decay that comes with the compromise I have made with the devil himself. Well, that’s the way it goes,” Jack concluded, cocking his pistol. “Goodbye, Sam.”
Before Jack could fire, a black sedan with tinted windows bowled him over, tossing him into the air like a rag doll. Jack hit the gravel with a sickening thud and rolled down a ravine and was washed away. The black sedan crashed into a tree. I stood in shock at the smoldering wreckage only for a moment before ducking behind a bush to get a better view.
The door popped open and a morose-looking Chinese woman in an all-black skirt and blazer with smart-looking heels and black frames stepped out of the car. On the other side, a little more gingerly, a Chinese version of David Duchovny removed himself from the wreckage.
“Nice driving, Mo-dah,” I heard the woman saying.
“I toh you, I cannot steer you give me blowjob!’
They seemed completely disinterested in the vehicular manslaughter they had just committed. Perhaps Moulder was coming right at that moment and missed the impact.
“What so important, Suk-Li? There no signs of paranormal behavior. Just another housing development.”
Chinese Scully stood in vantage at the edge of a cliff, looking past the ramshackle expanse of stone-shingle roofing to the glimmering rows of solar paneling. Her deadpan voice fluttered, “No Mo-dah. This not just another housing development. This an American suburb in China.”
Sneaking closer through a tangle of foliage, I saw what appeared to be a UFO landing in the valley. The organism remained contained, but it was ready to spread across the Chinese landscape, crawling with condominiums and flamboyantly curved streetlights, spotless sidewalks, and perfectly manicured lawns. The whole scene was ripe for anxiety pills and dog-walking. Midrange luxury sedans were sitting in driveways; the condos were painted a chic Heather gray. I covered my mouth to keep from screaming.
“The American dream live in China now.”
As Suk-Li completed her analysis, a drone hovered above a dog taking a shit on the sidewalk.
“We always become like our enemies in the end,” Moulder mused.
The two suits stood in silence as I stealthily made my exit.
I sat lotus-style in a pagoda staring at the reflection of the snowy mountain on the lake, searching for that feeling of oneness, that feeling of division gone, the overwhelming sense of liberation and clarity and rebirth that is the epiphany I am still waiting for once I know for sure that Jack is dead. But Jack’s not dead. He can’t die. Wherever I go, he goes. I can feel him looking through my eyes.
The young cyclist sitting across the way laughed happily as he turned the pages of Spider-Man. He leaned back, bringing the comic up to his face and became the face of Eddie Brock, half-consumed by that insidious bluish-black slime, that alien parasite that can bestow unthinkable power. The laughter of schoolgirls echoed in the distance. A young boy and his monstrous bodyguards, two Tibetan mastiffs, looked out across the sparkling lake.
“He’s going after her,” I heard myself utter, rising in a daze. “He’s going to pretend to be me. But why would she believe him unless. . .”
The cyclist turned the page and like a mirror, I stared at Sam’s reflection with Jack’s dark eyes.
“We switched bodies,” I whispered, haunted, and stumbled off. The cyclist lowered his comic book and gave me a goodbye smile, the whole lakeside ablaze in orange and pink light. I tripped off the pagoda into the fire-burst of golden autumn and orange down the stairways to a blinding sunset where yellow leaves floated upon the mirror of water at my feet. I crossed a bridge in the middle of the lake. The trees stood like black figures on the shining horizon.