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.”
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