Helene smiled at Nathan from across the street as she waited for the traffic light to turn green. Her eyes on him made his pulse sharpen its beat. They had met less than a year ago when she was on assignment in Beijing with the WHO during an unnatural spike in rabies cases. Nathan had stepped in as her interpreter during her chaotic introduction to Chinese hospitals and spent the next few
days shadowing the most alluring doctor he’d ever met. But when her scrutiny was deemed too meddlesome, she was sent away permanently. Before leaving she’d tasked Nathan with the responsibility of finding out what was being kept behind locked doors, and he had uncovered the story of his lifetime. But then had been forced to desert his apartment lease and leave the Chinese capital in order to preserve his own safety and write the story. Running to Geneva, instead of home to the US, had been solely in pursuit of the woman he’d fallen so desperately head over heels for.
Now that alluring doctor was dashing across the street to meet him at The Great Wall of China for a late-lunch early-dinner. The January wind blew her dark hair across her face as she ran, a few strands sticking at her mouth as she laughed at him. “Why do you wait outside?” she asked with a smile, “It’s freezing!”
He would have waited much longer to see her run toward him as she just had. He pulled her close and buried one hand deep into her wavy dark hair, the other slipping inside her coat and around her waist. He kissed her lips, as he tipped her slightly back in a Gregory-Peck-level embrace, her nose frosty cold against his cheek.
“Is it cold?” he murmured into her ear, “I hadn’t noticed.”
She laughed at his cheesy line and pushed him away. “We must eat!”
How he had convinced a woman as beautiful as her to be with him was still an unsolved mystery.
“What’s this?” Nathan asked. When they had taken off their coats and sat down, Helene had handed him a paper bag. The restaurant was mostly for takeout, but a couple short booths were wedged up next to the window, a mere feet from the register.
“A present,” she said, beaming.
The shape and feel gave it away as a book. He opened the bag.
“Xiao Bo Illustrates the Art of War,” Nathan read, raising one eyebrow, “compiled by L. H. Draken, illustrated by A. Kuusk.”
“It made me think of you,” Helene smiled.
Nathan studied the cover and turned it over. It showed a Chinese boy with a Ming-period warrior’s helmet riding on the back of a dragon that wrapped around the book’s spine and onto the back cover.
“You saw a small Chinese boy, riding a dragon bareback like a cowboy, and thought of me?” Nathan smirked, one corner of his mouth drawn up as he held back a laugh.
Helene shrugged, turning her eyes down to the plastic photo-menu of dishes. “Perhaps you need to adopt a more tactical approach to your issue with China.”
“My issue with China?” Nathan asked, letting the book rest against the edge of the table. “What issue is that?”
Helene looked up from the menu and reached for his hand. “Something’s wrong, Nathan. Most mornings, I wake and the sheets are drenched in sweat. If I wake when you have one of your nightmares, I’m afraid to move for fear you’ll attack me as one of the Chinese secret police.” She kept his hand in hers, but looked back at her menu, avoiding his eyes, “I’m afraid Nathan. Things aren’t okay. You had to leave China for safety, and I’m glad you did. But you’re not a runner. I am happy you’re here. But you haven’t left those dragons behind.” Nathan looked down at the book. He ran a thumb over the watercolor image of the dragon and became suddenly aware of his heel unconsciously bouncing his knee under the table. He noticed the black sludge at the lower periphery of his vision that still threatened to rise and drown him. His hand released Helene’s and slid under the table to press his leg down to stillness, hoping he could steady himself before she noticed his nervous tick. He looked at the book in his hands but saw instead the frozen grass of the day before. The dinner booth had turned into the park bench and he was slipping back to that moment of death. He risked a glance at Helene, and was relieved to see her looking at the menu. He was grateful for the privacy of a moment without her attention.
“My next assignment has come through,” she whispered hoarsely. She swallowed after she spoke, as if wishing she could let her words fall inside her and be lost.
Nathan looked up.
“I have a flight for tomorrow evening. They wanted me to leave tonight, but I convinced them to allow me a bit of time extra.” She drug her eyes slowly back up to Nathan. Her large brown eyes were as beautiful as ever. “I’m sorry,” she was saying, but Nathan barely heard it. He shot his attention back down to the book, his knuckles whitening as he gripped it, the black tar inching up along the bottom line of his vision. He had not found a way to tell Helene about his episode in the park, ashamed by his weakness and afraid of his mental instability. He needed her desperately, but couldn’t bare the idea of her seeing him so weak.
He knew she was right–things were off but he didn’t know how to hold his life together. A week ago they’d been walking hand-in-hand through the Park of the Reformation and he’d been overwhelmed with the feeling of relief that he was in the sane banality of Europe, sun on his face, Helene by his side. But only a few days later he’d nearly died on a park bench in nearly the same spot.
“You know how my work is. My assignments are almost always short notice like this.” She spoke as if justifying the news, as if needing to defend what they had both been waiting for—the call that would tell her a ticket was booked and she had a plane to catch— the sword of Damocles which dangled over every moment together, ready to drop in an instant and destroy their simple little life. It had fallen.
It had been luck that she was even in Geneva when Nathan had come to find her. It was her job to respond to viral outbreaks and emergencies whenever and wherever on the globe they might occur. Her office was a tent in a refugee camp, or a poured-cement structure wallpapered with black mold in the slums of a remote city. Her closet was organized in capsule wardrobes, each complete and ready to be grabbed and bagged, depending on the needs of the most likely destinations. She was an expert at leaving.
Nathan said nothing. He wasn’t angry, and he didn’t wish for an apology. They had been granted a surprise honeymoon period these last weeks and, like every honeymoon, it was doomed to end. But it wouldn’t end with rent bills, or forgotten items from the grocery list. Maybe they would never be blessed with such simple domestic troubles. She would never be home long enough for them to reach that stage of commonplace comfort.
But the idea of her leaving him at this moment, when the ground of his sanity was calving away beneath him, was causing his temples to bead with sweat.
Nathan forced his hand to release its death grip on his knee, willing his leg to settle just as a man dying of hypothermia tries to will his shivering into submission. He opened the book and flipped through the first pages, stopping at a picture of Xiao Bo stealing a baozi bun from his grandmother’s kitchen counter. He read the accompanying lines: “In chaos, there is opportunity.”
Nathan closed the book and slid it to the end of the table, making space for dinner.
“We knew this was coming,” he said, doing everything he could to make his voice stable. He wasn’t sure if he had already said that, or if he was repeating her words, or if he’d said it in his mind and only just now voiced the thought. “You do important work.” His words were emptily gallant. He wasn’t really so selfless. On his best days, he was proud that she was so committed to such demanding and thankless work. But just now he was desperately jealous of all the people whose needs trumped his own. And worse than his jealousy was a new realization. Her time spent in Geneva was the exception rather than the rule. Geneva was for her only the black web of a trampoline—it was a bouncing-off point, not a return to rest. Which begged the obvious next question: Why was he in Geneva? He spoke none of the languages of Switzerland, and had no job or long-term visa. There was no reason for him to be here, if she wasn’t. She had anchored him for a moment, but he genuinely questioned whether he’d be able to hold onto any sort of mental peace with her gone. He felt safer in Geneva than he’d felt in Beijing, but would he still without her.
A young Vietnamese girl appeared to take their order.
“Kong Bao Tofu,” Helene told the girl, “et thé vert.” Green tea, Nathan knew.
Nathan ordered the same dish, and a beer. When the girl left the table, he slipped the book back into its paper bag and set it on the booth next to him. He would strategize his attack on life later. For now, he would will the tar down long enough to spend these last moments with Helene before she was off again. And when she was gone, he would face the black nemesis alone, not even questioning the fact that he would soon succumb to it’s suffocation. He was no more safe than a bail jumper. Eventually, his psychosis would catch him.
But now, he was eating with Helene.
***
In the movies, before the sweetheart marches off to war, or the young lover leaves for a far-flung university, the doe-eyed couple always memorializes their last night together. They share a candlelit meal and bottle of chianti at a red checkered table, or walk arm in arm in matching trench coats through a foggy London street, or drive out to their spot above the town, where lights twinkle below like fallen stars.
In the real world, it is precisely during these last, most precious moments, when the ugliest arguments raise their nasty heads from the underworld. The pests that were lulled to sleep by the nightly lullaby of “perhaps-later”, now rise up, terrorized that their five minutes on the stage of relationship drama might pass them by. They are determined to have out with that hard discussion, guaranteed to end in a fight. Procrastination is their opium, and when the endless timeline is cut to a finite future, they emerge, crazed from withdrawal, to make their nasty voices heard. The discussions that should have begun voluntarily are now forced to the forefront with the same resistance and ugliness of a rockstar, finding his M&Ms improperly sorted in the bowl of his hotel room.
And so it was, as Nathan and Helene tried to enjoy their last dinner for who knows how long, in their favorite Chinese diner, that things started to fall apart.
“And is Marc joining?” Nathan asked, trying to find refuge in the details of her trip. Marc was a fellow WHO team lead who Nathan had met a couple times since arriving in Geneva. He liked him. Marc was small and happy, and always seemed like he was only pausing for a moment before he was off to run up a mountain. Nathan had only ever seen him in high-efficiency outdoor clothes. He wasn’t sure if the man owned anything else.
“Marc’s wife is pregnant again,” Helene said with a dismissive shake of her head. “Annette is due any minute, so he won’t be joining.” Marc and Helene were often partnered for the same assignments. He had a knack for coordinating the nuts and bolts of a health emergency—sourcing medicines and making sure necessary equipment would arrive with them. Her specialty was interpersonal—convincing the locals to trust them and buy into procedures that could save their villages, even when they might go against cultural custom. They were the “shoot ‘em up and bag ‘em” team, Marc had joked when Helene introduced Nathan at a Christmas party a few weeks before.
Marc was the optimist, but his humor was of the gallows sort. Helene could convince a young mother whose newborn baby was certainly going to die that she was one of the good people. But when the patients were out of sight, she could be cold, in the way that people who see the malevolent side of nature too often have to be.
“Pregnant again?” Nathan asked.
“He already has two children. The last thing the world needs is more humans.”
Three didn’t sound unreasonable to Nathan, coming from a family of three children himself.
The waitress who had taken their order now came with their drinks. Nathan whispered a ‘thank you’, but was too distracted by Helene’s last comment for the arrival to pull his attention.
“I suppose you could argue that some places are at capacity, but Europe has an aging population. Presumably there is space for more European babies.”
“European babies create a substantially higher cost to the environment than those in the developing world. One European baby alone will create a mountain of seven thousand nappies before it’s potty trained. They’re an environmental disaster.”
Nathan leaned back against the high booth back and crossed his arms over his chest. “A European baby is an environmental disaster?” he repeated, “Where does this line of reasoning take you? Shall we line up all the women of Europe and sterilize them, so they don’t continue populating the Western hemisphere?”
Helene gave a cynical laugh. “Of course not. Europeans just don't need to produce any more children than are here already.”
“Half the world isn’t starving the way it once was. Median household income has grown at a significantly more steep curve than population growth, especially for what we used to call third-world countries. It’s not just a few guys getting richer—the world as a whole is becoming wealthier. Why should Europeans not be allowed to have families and preserve their own culture and family lines?”
“If you had my job, you wouldn’t be so optimistic. Maybe fewer babies in Africa are dying of malaria and tape worm, but ebola, genocide, and wars are hardly better alternatives.”
Nathan ran a finger along the top edge of the book, wiping away the invisible dust. China’s economy had opened up in the eighties with a surge of prosperity, and it had succeeded in lifting millions out of poverty. He had been there as a child, accompanying his father on his directive to open a modern western-medicine style hospital in Guangzhou, just as change was gaining momentum. When his family returned to the States in the early nineties, cats and rats were no longer being sold in markets as foodstuffs as they had been when they’d arrived.
“I’m happy for Marc,” he said, trying to close the subject on a happy note. He didn’t want to pick a fight and this misalignment in paradigms wasn’t going to be shifted over one dinner. Why should this dinner have to be sacrificed?
“His wife is so clever,” Helene continued, clearly not done with the topic. “You know she turned down a position at Le Monde, because she wanted to stay here in Geneva and start a family? So now she writes a blog for La Tribune de Geneve online.”
“Being a mother is an important job. Civilization sort of depends on it. And she gets to do both.”
Helene huffed. “But she has a degree. A real job. She’s a journalist. And a good one. But a part-time job isn’t enough for her to write what she should be covering. Not every woman needs to have children.” She pulled a pair of throwaway chopsticks out of the holder on the table and tore away the paper wrapping.
“She’s keeping a foot in the game, and it’s probably only for a few years before the kids are off to school.”
Helene rolled her eyes. “Children are great. But she doesn’t have to have them.”
“You mean people with loads of education, who are leaders in society, shouldn’t be burdened with children? Only those without university degrees or good jobs should be left to the task?” Nathan was slightly surprised. At the same Christmas party where Nathan had met Marc, he’d also met many other successful women with impressive careers as lawyers and executives who spoke of their children in the same breath as their careers. It seemed very common for Swiss women to have good careers and manage a family.
“Every level of society needs to share the burden of having children,” she said with a sigh. “But children aren’t in my own future.There are more than enough people around to ensure the survival of the species. I don’t need to add to the chaos.” She picked up her small porcelain glass of green tea and took a long drink, turning her gaze outside as if to indicate she was finished with the topic, literally looking for new diversions.
Nathan’s gut knotted up. Everyone has an image, conscious or unconscious, of their future life, be it ten, fifteen or fifty years down the road. Up to now, being a father and having a family was something he had taken for granted as being part of his future. Coming to Geneva and being with Helene had been an unconscious move to make that trajectory align to their future together.
The question of children had been precisely the precipitating factor to end his first marriage, five years before. In a twist of irony, it had been his ex-wife’s desire for a baby that had made him realize the unsustainability of their relationship. But he did want kids. And Helene’s decided opinion against the idea made him realize how strong an assumption it was for him.
Helene fiddled with the tips of the still conjoined wooden chopsticks in her hand. “I like my life as it is. It took a lot of work to get here and I don’t want it to change. I don’t want a promotion that will give me a desk in some Genevan office building.” She snapped the wooden chopsticks apart, the finale to her life statement, “I wish to change nothing.”
The waitress materialized with two portions of Kung Pao Tofu and rice. Both Helene and Nathan leaned back as she set the dishes on the table. It was a practical movement, but one that seemed to symbolize the retreating of their respective camps on opposite sides of the battlefield.
Nathan didn’t wish to argue with Helene. It seemed wrong to try and change her opinion, when it was something she’d so clearly decided, before him. But there was something cynical in her reasoning that made him sad. She had devoted her career and her life to helping humanity. Yet her outlook on the state of human existence was so dark and incongruous with her work. If humans were in such overabundance and so bad for the Earth, what was the point in rescuing them from malaria and bubonic plague? Surely the sympathetic thing, by her logic, would be to let them die early at the hands of nature and avoid prolonged suffering.
Nathan was studying the plate of food in front of him while he thought, too distracted to begin his meal. Helene was already picking away at her plate. “It’s nice to know someone will be in the flat while I’m gone,” she said, using the arrival of their food to return to neutral ground. “It’s depressing to come home when it’s been empty for weeks or months. I’ll be glad to come home to you, whenever this project is done.”
Nathan nodded. So she did like humans, he thought.
“I’m glad you came here,” she said, looking warmly at him and reaching across the table to take one of his hands, his chopsticks still not broken apart to begin eating.
Nathan could feel the tension in his neck returning with the promise of a migraine. He had about forty-five minutes before it overpowered him.
He slid his hand away from Helene and plucked a chopstick envelope from the holder, removing them from the sleeve and breaking them apart.
“Je t’aime,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
That night, while Helene slept in the warm covers of the duvet, Nathan slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb her, pulled on a pair of jeans and went to the living room with his computer. Despite his insomnia, he liked the feeling of having Helene in the apartment with him. The companionship of another human witnessing your presence was stabilizing, and the idea that in a few hours she would be gone was causing acid to build in his stomach. For the moment, she was asleep in the other room, but the apartment already felt foreshadowed with emptiness. Was this how it would always be? Her showing up for a couple magical weeks, then disappearing again for months at a time, leaving him to keep the apartment warm until she appeared again? He loved her. But that wasn’t the relationship he wanted.
Nathan sat on the couch, his bare feet up on the edge of the coffee table, his laptop glowing brightly on his lap. He clicked on the mail icon and opened his inbox. There, at the top of his unread mail, was a message from Dr. Zheng.
Chapter 9
Nathan blinked. It couldn’t possibly be the same Dr. Zheng that he had met in Beijing with Helene, months ago, the director of the medical school’s research. As a successful opinion journalist and blogger, Nathan received a fair amount of mail from innocuous unknown sources—people inviting him to guest post on their blogs, news agencies replying to queries about possible articles. But from a Dr. Zheng? It was too coincidental. He clicked the email.
Dear Mr. Troy,
I think you will not mind the presumption of my contacting you. As a journalist, you are easily obtainable.
Nathan felt a shiver snake down his spine. Of course his contact info was public, but the implication that he was readily available, as if the Chinese Communist Party had a beacon in his computer that they constantly tracked, was chilling. The reach of the Chinese secret service was a black box, even for Chinese civilians. The fact that the very devices he used to work and contact his whole world were all produced in China did nothing to assuage his fears of Chinese cyber surveillance.
Given our past interaction, I have no doubt that you are aware of a recent story, published in the New York Times, of Chinese research into genetic engineering and the weaponization of CRISPR technology. Your name was not on the piece, nor that of Dr. Li Jun, but information in the article makes it impossible not to believe that either you, or he, or both were linked to the piece as ‘unnamed sources’.
Nathan swallowed hard, the pressure around his skull constricting further. In a moment, his head would feel as if it were grasped between the angry jaws of a Chinese dragon. His article had made it back to China, apparently. He read on.
Perhaps contrary to your expectation, I was not angry reading the piece, but sorry to learn about the tarnishing of a noble department within the Ministry of Science and Technology. Dr. Li Jun took sensitive information, to which he had access to via the Ministry of Defense, and weaponized it to use against his fellow citizens.
Nathan almost smiled. ‘Fellow citizens’ was not a term Han Chinese would generally use for their Uighur cousins in the West. Dr. Zheng was clearly trying to build diplomatic bridges.
Given your media connections and prior exposure to the incident, I have convinced comrades who deal with media oversight to grant specific permission allowing you to return to China on an exceptional visa, with the intent of giving you a full tour of our research facilities where Dr. Zhi is doing his laudatory work, and demonstrate to you first hand the research we are funding in the express pursuit of bettering future generations immunity and lowering vulnerability to dangerous diseases and pathogens. It is my opinion that you would be a most valuable asset in reporting the noble work Dr. Zhi does, and would be best positioned to share our work in a special article to be published, through our own connections, with the Western world.
I’m sure you can appreciate what an exceptional opportunity this is for you, and what a departure it is from normal procedure. Given the importance of my department’s work in CRISPR applications I think it is a necessary measure.
Nathan stared at the words, not believing what he was reading. Was this a prank? Had somebody opened an email account under Dr. Zheng’s name and tried to spook him? He hovered his mouse over the sender’s email. He copied the email to a new web browser and googled it. To his surprise, it directed to a faculty page on a legitimate looking Ministry of Science and Technology website.
They wanted him to return to Beijing, and they thought he would accept being used as a pawn to clear their name and create a campaign to whitewash their nefarious research. Now that they were exposed in the western press for the crazy—evil, if you weren’t afraid to use the term—research they were developing to poison distasteful Uighur minorities, they thought they would be able to just fly him back and convince him to sugar coat their work under the guise of humanitarian work.
The nerves at the base of Nathan’s skull were on fire. The migraine had taken complete hold and the contrast of the flaming bright screen in the dark room was killing his eyes. He shut the laptop and slowly stood up, making his way to the freezer in Helene’s kitchen where a set of ice packs were kept permanently on-demand for just this need. He grabbed a kitchen towel draped over the edge of the sink, took a pack out of the freezer and made his way back to the couch. His head was paralyzing both his ability to sleep and think. He lay down, wrapped the ice once in the cloth and laid the pack on his forehead. He reached a blind hand out and grabbed the petite book with a two-inch spine he knew to be on the coffee table—a hardcover copy by the Marquis de Saud. He’d never read the book, nor had any intention of reading the book. Like the ice packs, it had been purchased secondhand for just such a purpose. He lifted his head and slipped the book, standing on it’s spine, to the base of his skull so it would pinch into the nerves that refused to release. He relaxed, slowly allowing his head to weigh fully against the book’s rigid spine.
Nathan was aware that at some point Helene had gotten up, but the stirring quieted only a few minutes later. At least it was his perception. He was too tired to pull himself out of sleep. When he did finally wake, he realized she had put a blanket over him on the couch. Then his eyes fell on a piece of yellow paper on top of his laptop. He reached out a hand and took the note.
I took the flight this morning after all. I’m sorry. Call Marc and Antoinette. Perhaps this isn’t the life you want. I’ll miss you, <3
A phone number was written below the message.
He withdrew his hand and let the message fall to the ground, then turned over on the couch and pulled the blanket up over his head, the small hardback had fallen from under his neck and now dug into his shoulder.
In case you didn’t catch the shameless marketing, The Art of War, with Xiao Bao is a real book I produced with a deeply gifted illustrator, Anastassia Kuusk. If you need a small gift this holiday season, let me recommend it.
I edited and put it together, funded partly by money people gave me when my second son was born. I didn’t need a high chair or baby clothes, being the second son, so… I paid for illustrations to make him a book. (Of course that’s hyperbole. I needed nappies. Everyone needs nappies. As this precise chapter spells out—)
But I put that book together for both my boys with a dedication which is relevant to both Nathan at this stage of his adventure and to my sons as they become men.
I wish I could protect you from the dangers of life — from the evil and destructive forces that only want to tear you to pieces. I wish I could cage the dragons and capture the monsters that want only to attack when you feel weakest.
But I can’t.
And I don’t think that is my job, as your parent. But I can make you strong. I can prepare you to face the dragons, I can teach you the skills that will make you a formidable force.
I will shield you from the world while you’re too weak to encounter it, and expose you bit by bit as you become stronger and more capable of engaging. Until hopefully one day, you wont need my protection, and you will leave my home to fight dragons and protect the vulnerable yourself. Because the dragons will come, bigger ones than we’ve ever seen, and we will need warriors like you. So when they arrive, I hope you are honest, and brave, and prepared to stand and meet them.
It was hard to write this last chapter about Nathan. It was hard even to come back and edit it. We’ve all been in this position, where you are scraping the bottom, and the people you thought were there to support you are evaporating. Part of what makes it feel like you’re bottoming out is exactly that you feel alone. Sometimes life demands we get through alone. But we’re not supposed to face these moments without anyone. I really think one of the darkest lies about existence is that we’re alone.
…and on that cheery note… it’s the holidays. Perhaps think of those people who might be struggling and reach out. Send a text. Get coffee. Share a good story ;)
And as always, keep in touch!