LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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