It’s a quiet day in the park today, punctuated only by the rumbling of a cluster of thunderstorms hovering out east over the ocean. Some ground iguanas, imports that have escaped from a nearby reptile wholesaler, have colonized the area and now peek out of holes in trees and scamper across the ground as if their tails are on fire. Sometimes when I’m meditating, I can hear the sound they make as they pass over dried leaves. Perhaps because it’s a peaceful day and I don’t have to try so hard to get into a turtle trance, it takes a while for me to settle down. I guess it’s because just being there in the park is relaxing enough.
When I finally do achieve a different state, I find myself hovering over a crowded, tropical landscape. Traffic on a wide road below goes in two primary directions but is largely helter-skelter. There are small trucks and smaller cars and thousands of motorbikes. The presence of tuk-tuks, three-wheelers with bench seating behind the driver, tells me I’m in Southeast Asia. There’s a small lake nearby. I lower myself toward the water and find a group of beggars scattered about. They hold signs proclaiming, in English, that they are victims of Agent Orange. One of them has no legs. Another has no face—his eyes are missing, his ears are missing, there is a single hole where his nose should be, and his mouth is a thin, undersized line. A placard identifies the lake as the one airman John McCain parachuted into after his plane was shot down.
This is Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.
I return to the road. Traffic has jammed up near the lake. A small red pickup truck with its tailgate down stops quite near the water. I see a Styrofoam cooler in the back and notice the lid is ajar and moving. The beautiful, yellow head of a female Vietnamese box turtle appears. She looks around, sees the lake, and begins to clamber out. Her eight-inch-long shell is domed and keeled, and a rich brown in color. Her claws gain a purchase on the Styrofoam, and she pushes off the lid of the cooler and drops to the bed of the pickup with a thud. She’s on her back, displaying her short tail and a yellow plastron. She has some trouble flipping over, but eventually, uses the swell of the wheel well to set herself right.
“Hey,” I say.
She looks around and finally sees me. “Monk,” she nods. “How are you today?”
“I’m fine, thanks. What’s happening to you. What are you doing in the back of that truck?”
“Teaching you a lesson about freedom, I suppose. And about compassion.”
“Thank you. But who put you there?”
It takes her a few tries, but she manages to claw her way to the top of the wheel well, from which vantage point she can look around. “The driver caught me,” she says. “I’ve been so good at hiding in that pond, but he found me at last. Before today, he took my mother and he took my brothers and he took my father and he took my sisters. He has been the bane of our family’s existence for years. He and his friends have taken so many of us, I don’t know if there are any left at all.”
“Where does he take you?”
“I don’t know. None of us has ever returned to say. I fear the worst.”
“The soup pot?”
“I won’t speak of it. I refuse to accept that my entire family has met such an end. I just want to get away from your kind.”
“I’m different,” I say. “I’ve no desire to harm any living thing. I avoid stepping on ants. I don’t eat animals. I save spiders on my walls using teacups and saucers and put them outside. Okay, sometimes, I kill cockroaches, but I’m not happy about it and I’m not proud, either.”
The box turtle steps up from the swell of the wheel to the edge of the truck. She’s clearly weighing the height of the fall if she just jumps. She tears her eyes from the road long enough to give me an arch look. “I eat roaches,” she says. “They are a species of exception. But there aren’t so many around my pond anymore. My mother told me they used to be under every leaf and that they tasted delicious, but then, many years ago, the orange rain came, and they all died, along with every egg my mother laid for nearly thirty years. Now when I manage to catch and eat a roach, it tastes bitter.”
“Agent Orange,” I say.
“Do you know what I have to do now to get a decent meal outside the pond? I have to stomp the earth like my father taught me. Lightly, to imitate the rain and make the worms come up so I can grab them.”
The truck starts to move again, but not before the turtle scampers off the back and falls to the asphalt. I cringe, expecting her to be immediately hit by traffic, but if drivers here are accustomed to anything it is obstacles, so they swerve around her. I find myself yelling at her as I might an errant child.
“Are you crazy?!”
“I’m going home pond by pond,” she yells back.
Dragging her shell on the ground, she crawls with astonishing speed toward the lake. She makes it to the circumferential foot path and scampers past the beggars, aiming at the bulrushes by the pond.
“Almost there,” she pants.
I’ve heard turtle pant before, sometimes when male tortoises fight, sometimes during courtship, sometimes when chasing prey, and sometimes when afraid and rushing for cover. The driver of the red pickup truck, a rangy man wearing ankle-length trousers and a straw hat, leaps from his vehicle, shouts, and sprints off in pursuit.
“Don’t look back,” I warn her. “He’s coming.”
I try and trip him, but I can’t seem to have any effect on him. I don’t even think he sees me. Apparently, a feature of this lesson is that I’m there for the turtle but not for anyone else. She makes it right to the edge of the water and desperately shoves her forelimbs into the lake, but the man falls on her. A moment later he stands, both his shirt and hat soaked, and raises her victoriously aloft.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I tried to stop him.”
“I’ll escape however many times it takes,” she says grimly. “This isn’t over yet.”
The man runs back to the truck and tosses her into the cooler. He restores the lid, closes the tailgate, gets back behind the wheel, and drives off.
“Are you all right in there?”
“No, I’m not all right in here. I have no idea where I’m going and I can’t see anything and he keeps cold beer in here, so I’m freezing.”
“Who is this guy?”
“A hunter after the most lucrative prey. Turtles are big money, endangered species like mine all the more so.”
“This isn’t a third world country anymore. There should be better ways for him to earn a living than catching turtles.”
“He found our pond. He’s an opportunist. You all are.”
“I think that’s painting with a pretty broad brush,” I say mildly. “You can go with the flow and still have a moral compass.”
“We turtles don’t bother layering complex ideas onto the realities of daily life. We think it’s better just to live. Your kind is obsessed with accuracy, with measuring rather than just experiencing things. Each of us is fluid, ever-changing, and intensely unique. Why isn’t that enough for you? Why must you always take one step forward and two steps back? Why must you drag your feet and complain so much?”
“The turtles I talk to all seem pretty down on the human race,” I say.
“For good reason, wouldn’t you agree?”
The truck traces a Byzantine route through the city. The pursuit finishes at a dead-end alley up in the central business district. The driver parks in front of a small, one-story, concrete building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. I notice security cameras on all corners and by the only gate. The driver retrieves the turtle, now pulled fearfully back into her shell, and enters the facilities of a dealer in exotic animals.
I follow. The first thing that strikes me is the stench, which is part tangy urine, part pungent feces, and part coconut-fragranced disinfectant. Then there is the noise and movement. Monkeys scream, birds shriek, frogs croak, geckos chirp, fish jump, pangolins scratch, snakes slither, lizards climb atop their own dead, garishly colored newts paddle through fetid water, exotic rodents quiver inside paper towel rolls, and countless turtles splash.
The man in the wet straw hat exchanges the escaped box turtle for a thin wad of cash. Now she is in the care of the animal dealer, a diminutive man with a damaged eye riding low enough on his face to give him an unbalanced look. Bad Eye takes her to a room behind his office, places her on a metal table, pulls up a chair, and waits for her to come out of her shell. When she doesn’t, he leaves the room.
“Is it safe to come out?” she asks me.
“For a moment, yes.”
“Where am I?”
“You don’t know? You’re an immortal.”
“Sometimes your transmissions are in the form of telling, sometimes in the form of showing. I’m living this story right along with you.”
“In that case, I have to tell you I think you’re in a really, really bad place.”
“Do you think it might be the same place my family ended up?”
“I can’t say for certain, but I am afraid it might be.”
“And what kind of a place is it?”
I describe what I’ve seen while she has been in her shell and tell her what little I know about the trade of exotic species of animals. I speculate that she and the other creatures in this terrible building might end up anywhere in the world. I don’t sugarcoat what often becomes of victims so treated.
As if on cue, Bad Eye returns to the room in the company of a painfully thin and elegantly dressed woman in a Western business suit and high heels. The flower-pattern scarf at her throat is by a luxury Italian brand. She and Bad Eye converse in Mandarin, by which I divine she is high-class and Chinese. She picks up the box turtle and turns her over in her hand, assessing her weight. She pushes against the turtle’s rear leg with a finger and appears satisfied with the strength of the response. She hands over a wad of cash far thicker than the one Bad Eye gave the man with the straw hat. Bad Eye shakes his head. She adds a bit to the wad. Bad Eye shakes his head again. She adds a bit more. Bad Eye shakes his head and reminds her of the turtle’s exquisite rarity. She stares at the turtle for a moment, then withdraws all the money from the table and puts it back into her purse. She stands and goes for the exit.
Bad Eye follows her. Outside, he puts his hand on her shoulder and she turns and looks at the hand in distaste. He says okay and she gives him the money and takes the turtle. A taxi is waiting for her. She goes into it and so do I. There is a small suitcase on the seat. She opens it. The driver glances in the mirror and she tells him to put his eyes on the road. Inside the suitcase is a bronze turtle. She fiddles with it and it opens with a cleverly hidden hinge. It has a thin lining of lead inside. She places the real turtle on the lower half and closes the upper half to secret it away.
“I can’t see anything,” she says.
I explain where she is.
“Why would someone put a real turtle inside a fake one?” she wants to know as I describe her prison for her.
“The lead gives me an idea, but we’re going to have to wait and see to be sure.”
“I’ve seen plenty of fake turtles, but usually they’re made of plastic,” she tells me. “All turtles know plastic very well. Plastic bubbles live in my pond. Little crabs eat them. Little shrimp, too. And I’ve seen plastic bottles and I’ve seen plastic bags. One of my brothers got caught in a bag and we tried biting it off him, but it was too tough, even for four of us at one time. We watched him die, pushing himself around with that thing on his head for weeks. The worst of it was, he couldn’t eat and he couldn’t drink. Nobody could believe he suffered for so long. I can still hear his moans in my head.”
“If aliens ever come here from another world, they will probably think that the purpose of humans on Planet Earth is to take the remains of dead animals from the past, refine the sludge of them, and turn them into plastic,” I tell her. “Really, this big blue rock in space is just a plastic factory.”
As I suspected it would, the taxi heads for Hanoi’s Tan Son Nhat International Airport, and as it was with the hunter, the driver cannot see me; my presence is known only to the turtle. Once there, the Chinese woman checks in for a flight to Hong Kong. She heads for security. The x-ray screener tells her to open her bag. She does. He takes out the bronze turtle and examines it carefully. She taps her foot expectantly and tells him it’s a gift for a friend. He nods and puts it back into her suitcase.
“What’s happening?” the turtle asks.
“Did your mother and father explain warplanes to you? From the bad times?”
“Bombs,” she says immediately. It is the first time I hear fear in her voice.
“Yes, but not in this case. Not all planes are for war. Some are just to move people around. Sometimes we fly to see the people we love, sometimes we fly just to see new countries or to do business or to escape persecution.”
“I just need to get back to my pond.”
“I understand,” I say. “Anyway, you are about to get on a plane. You may feel a great sensation of speed, but the flying itself is quite safe.”
“This flying business is just a symbol of impatience,” she says. “You know that the biggest problem your kind have is that you feel you have to keep moving.”
“The human body was built to move.”
“Indeed, you have evolved to experience the world at a walker’s pace, not a jet pilot’s pace or a motorcycle racer’s pace or even at jogging speed. Anyway, I don’t mean move to find mates or find food or run from a tiger or move to strange, rhythmic sounds, which I have seen your kind do. I mean move for no reason. I mean move because you are driven by inner disquiet. If I had to guess, I’d say the problems of the whole world arise from your kind’s inability to stand quietly, without moving, for more than a few seconds.”
“Most people don’t care to, but I stand still daily,” I say. “It’s a quintessential Daoist practice and what led to me being able to see you.”
“I hope your standing still cures you better than the machines I’ve seen your kind carrying in their hands, always staring at them with eyes wide, looking for answers but finding none.”
The Chinese woman boards the flight and so do I. Perhaps because the cold cabin leaves her torpid, the box turtle doesn’t say one word to me during the two-and-a-half-hour flight. When the plane lands, the woman goes through immigration and leaves the terminal. A driver in a Mercedes-Benz collects her at the curb and she is whisked away to a palatial estate atop Victoria Peak, the posh location of some of the world’s most expensive real estate and a Hong Kong neighborhood I have watched become quite crowded and commercial over the years.
“The woman who bought you is about to take you inside a beautiful mansion. Her home, I think. I bet it has fantastic views of the city.”
“Is there a pond nearby?” the box turtle asks hopefully. “Do you see any of my family members? When will she take me out of this box? It’s hot and hard to breathe.”
“Soon, I’m sure.”
The Chinese lady leaves the turtle on the entryway table and walks to her bedroom. I follow. She unpacks her suitcase then passes through a spacious living room to a garden with a salubrious view of the city and harbor beyond. There is a pond here, in grand feng shui style. The fins of carp and the heads of turtles protrude from the water. There are also various box turtles on the basking rocks and on a narrow swale of leafy plants. These include Vietnamese varieties like my friend from Hanoi, along with rare ones from Hainan Island and from the tropical, southwest Chinese province of Yunnan. I harbor some small optimism that some of these turtles are my new friend’s lost relatives and look forward to a possible reunion. I try and talk to the turtles, but find I cannot. The lady looks at them with satisfaction, and returns to her bedroom, where she removes her makeup and her dress and collapses upon the bed.
Feeling the reluctant voyeur, I see she is not merely thin, but emaciated, her protruding ribs and sunken cheeks making that clear. Her ribs protrude, and gaunt, sunken cheeks confirm what I have suspected—she has cancer and it is advanced. After a short nap, she goes out to her turtle pond. She selects one of the turtles there, a male box turtle of the same species as the immortal still incarcerated in the smuggling container. She brings the turtle into the kitchen. A housemaid appears. The maid runs the faucet until it is steaming hot, then drops the turtle into the water. It comes out of its shell at once, desperately paddling to be free of the scalding bath. The maid produces a pair of poultry shears and summarily snips off its head. The eyes bulge in utter disbelief. The jaws work frantically. The cervical spine, white and twitching and dripping threadlike nerves, searches desperately for the body. The maid takes a few cuts of the meat of its forelimbs while it is still alive and sets them aside, bloody, on the counter. I have the impression that this meat will be used in soup later.
The maid turns off the tap and throws the turtle’s head into a trashcan under the sink. She takes a small saw from a drawer and uses it to separate the carapace and plastron. She scoops out the organs and cuts away the limbs. She pounds the shell with a mallet, reducing it to flat, wet chips the size of casino tokens. She wraps these chips in a cloth and pounds them some more. Once she has smashed the shell to small pieces, she puts them on a cookie sheet, places them in the central rack of the oven, and sets the oven to bake.
All the while her employer leans weakly against the counter, watching the proceedings, her energy apparently drained by her trip to Vietnam. Once the baking process is underway, she opens a cupboard door. Inside, I see row after row of tightly fastened jars, each brimming with blue-black, homemade turtle jelly, a combination of herbs and ground-up turtle shell, a traditional folk cure for everything from irritated skin and poor appetite to cancer. She opens one of the jars and smacks her lips as she consumes it, exhaling loudly after each spoonful. When she has had enough, she returns to the entryway, removes the Vietnamese box turtle from its lead case, and carries it out to the pond out back.
“Where am I now? What’s happening?” the box turtle wants to know.
I’m not sure how to play this. I’m not sure how much the immortal knows and how much she doesn’t. Each of these transmissions is there for me to figure out, and I decide just to follow my compassionate instincts on this one.
“You’re in your new home,” I say. “The place where your longing and pining and waiting is over. The end of your suffering. The place where all your dreams come true.”
“Oh, thank you,” she says sweetly.
A moment later, she sees the pond. She sees the clean, clear, slowly moving water, filtered and pumped to perfection. She sees the luxuriant shade of the philodendron plants and she sees the perfectly placed flat basking rock. She sees the heads of her brothers and sisters and the shell of her mother, too. She wriggles wildly in the Chinese lady’s hands until she is finally set free at water’s edge.
She swims immediately to her mother. Together, they emerge from the water and stand on all fours, necks extended, nose to nose.
“Where’s father?” she breathes excitedly.
Her mother blinks. “I’m not sure. He was here a few minutes ago,” she says.
A moment later, I’m back in the park. The thunderclouds are gone, but the air is still heavy.