Year of the Tiger
Year of the Tiger
Lisa Brackman
An electrifying thriller debut set in modern China, in a world of artists, paranoid revolutionaries and government conspiracies…First she tried to start over. Now she’s just trying to survive.ON HER OWNEllie Cooper’s tour of duty in Iraq left her with a damaged leg, a faithless husband, and a desperate need to get away. In Beijing, she falls for charismatic Chinese artist Lao Zhang but, after the arrival of a mysterious guest, he disappears…ON THE RUNHer cheating husband, Trey, tracks her down to demand a divorce. But far more disturbing are the Chinese and American agents who begin to hound Ellie for Lao Zhang’s whereabouts.AND A LONG WAY FROM HOMEWhen things suddenly turn threatening, Ellie turns fugitive, convinced there’s a hidden agenda – one that involves something she should never have seen in Iraq – something that could get her killed. Now she’s alone, in a country she barely knows, falling down a rabbit hole of conspiracies from which she can’t escape…
Lisa Brackman
Table of Contents
Cover (#u2770dd7c-5511-5c2d-ae10-fd054382f2fa)
Title page (#u16b51334-3884-56cc-b5cf-95e0592a7fe4)
Chapter One (#u8880278c-5cc4-5a4d-b853-b08f14e91089)
Chapter Two (#u93caf774-34f5-53f8-bad7-ac4cb825d0c7)
Chapter Three (#uf70a0e11-a4af-5b06-a11d-123e3da2ee78)
Chapter Four (#udb827776-71ef-52a5-a052-a50d6d5129bd)
Chapter Five (#u30f1ba75-ec69-5ac9-b24c-89ee9ada130b)
Chapter Six (#u698f598f-85dc-5f7d-87c4-c9e38b1e106e)
Chapter Seven (#ufea104c5-f6d3-52aa-8217-0c42d5431c73)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise for Year of the Tiger (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
I’m living in this dump in Haidian Qu, close to Wudaokou, on the twenty-first floor of a decaying high-rise. The grounds are bare; the trees have died; the rubber tiles on the walkways, in their garish pink and yellow, are cracked and curling. The lights have been out in the lobby since I moved in; they never finished the interior walls in the foyers outside the elevator, and the windows are boarded up, so every time I step outside the apartment door I’m in a weird twilight world of bare cement and blue fluorescent light.
The worst thing about the foyer is that I might run into Mrs Hua, who lives next door with her fat spoiled-brat kid. She hates that I’m crashing here, thinks I’m some slutty American who is corrupting China’s morals. She’s always muttering under her breath, threatening to report me to the Public Security Bureau for all kinds of made-up shit. It’s not like I ever did anything to her, and it’s not like I’m doing anything wrong, but the last thing I need is the PSB on my ass.
I’ve got enough problems.
Outside, the afternoon sun filters through a yellow haze. My leg hurts, but I should walk, I tell myself. Get some PT in. The deal I make with myself is, if it gets too bad, I’ll take a Percocet; but I only have about a dozen left, so it has to be really bad before I can take one. Today the pain is just a dull throb, like a toothache in my thigh.
I pass the gas tanks off Chengfu Road, these four-story-high giant globes, and I think: one of these days, some guy will get pissed off at his girlfriend, light a couple sticks of dynamite underneath them (since they don’t have many guns here, the truly pissed-off tend to vent with explosives and rat poison), a few city blocks and a couple thousand people will get incinerated, and everyone will shrug – oh, well, too bad, but this is China, and shit happens. Department store roofs collapse; chemicals poison rivers; miners suffocate in illegal mines. I walk down this one block nearly every day on my way to work, and there are five sex businesses practically next door to each other, ‘teahouses’ and ‘foot massage parlors,’ with girls from the countryside sitting on pink leatherette couches, waiting for some horny migrant worker to come in with enough renminbi to fuck his brains out for a while and forget about the shack he’s living in and the family he’s left behind and the shitty wages he’s earning. Hey, why not?
I still like it here, overall.
I guess.
I’m just in this bad mood lately.
So I call Lao Zhang. That’s what I do these days when I’m feeling sorry for myself.
‘Wei?’ Lao Zhang has a growly voice, like he’s talking himself out of a grunt half the time.
‘It’s me. Yili.’
That’s my Chinese name, Yili. It means ‘progressive ideas’ or something. Mainly it sounds kind of like Ellie.
‘Yili, ni hao.’
He sounds distracted, which isn’t like him. He’s probably working; he almost always is. He’s been painting a lot lately. Before that, he mostly did performance pieces, stuff like stripping naked and painting himself red on top of the Drum Tower or steering a reed boat around the Houhai lakes with a life-size statue of Chairman Mao in the prow.
But usually when I call, he sounds like he’s glad to hear my voice, no matter what he’s doing. Which is one of the reasons I call him when I’m having a bad day.
‘Okay, I guess,’ I answer. ‘I’m not working. Thought I’d see what you were up to.’
‘Ah. The usual,’ he says.
‘Want some company?’
Lao Zhang hesitates.
It’s a little weird. I can’t think of a time when I’ve called that he hasn’t invited me over. Even times when I don’t want to leave my apartment, when I just want to hear a friendly voice, he’ll always try and talk me into coming out; and sometimes when I won’t, he’ll show up at my door a couple hours later with takeout and cold Yanjing beer. He’s that kind of person. He works hard, but he likes hanging out too, as long as you don’t mind him working part of the time. And I don’t. A lot of times I’ll sit on the sagging couch in his studio while he paints, listening to my iPhone, drinking beer, surfing on his computer. I like watching him paint too, the way he moves, relaxed but in control. It feels comfortable, him painting, me sitting there.
‘Sure,’ he finally says. ‘Why don’t you come over?’
‘You sure you’re not too busy?’
‘No, come over. There’s a performance tonight at the Warehouse. Should be fun. Call me when you’re close.’
Maybe I shouldn’t go, I think, as I swipe my yikatong card at the Wudaokou light rail station. Maybe he’s seeing somebody else. It’s not like we’re a couple. Even if it feels like we are one sometimes.
Sure, we hang out. Occasionally fuck. But he could do a lot better than me.
‘Lao’ means ‘old,’ but Lao Zhang’s not really old. He’s maybe thirteen, fourteen years older than I am, around forty. They call him ‘Lao’ Zhang to distinguish him from the other Zhang, who’s barely out of his teens and is therefore ‘Xiao’ Zhang, also an artist at Mati Village, the northern suburb of Beijing where Lao Zhang lives.
Before I came to China, I’d hear ‘suburb’ and think tract homes and Wal-Marts. Well, they have Wal-Marts in Beijing and housing tracts – Western-style, split-level, three bedroom, two bath houses with lawns and everything, surrounded by gates and walls. Places with names like ‘Orange County’ and ‘Yosemite Falls,’ plus my personal favorite, ‘Merlin Champagne Town.’
But Mati Village isn’t like that.
Getting to Mati Village is kind of a pain. It’s out past the 6th Ring Road, and you can’t get all the way there by subway or light rail, even with all the lines they built for the ’08 Olympics. From Haidian, I have to take the light rail and transfer to a bus.
It’s not too crazy a day. The yellow loess dust has been drowning Beijing like some sort of pneumonia in the city’s lungs, typical for spring in spite of all those trees the government’s planted in Inner Mongolia the last dozen years. The dust storms died down last night, but people still aren’t venturing out much. So I score a seat on the bench by the car door, let the train’s rhythms rattle my head. I close my eyes and listen to the recorded announcement of the stations, plus that warning to ‘watch your belongings and prepare well’ if you are planning to exit. All around me, cell phones chime and sing, extra-loud so the people plugged into iPods can still hear them.
The nongmin don’t have iPods. The migrants from the countryside are easy to spot: tanned, burned faces; bulging nylon net bags with faded stripes; patched cast-off clothes; strange, stiff shoes. But it’s the look on their faces that really gives them away. They are so lost. I fit in better here than they do.
Sometimes I want to say to these kids, what are you doing here? You’re going to end up living in a shantytown in a refrigerator box, and for what? So you can pick through junked computer parts for gold and copper wire? Do ‘foot massage’ at some chicken girl joint? Really, you’re better off staying home.
Like I’m one to talk. I didn’t stay home either.
When I’m about fifteen minutes away from Mati, I try to call Lao Zhang, thinking, maybe I’ll see if we can meet at the jiaozi place, because I haven’t had anything to eat today but a leftover slice of bad Mr Pizza for breakfast.
Instead of a dial tone, I get that stupid China Mobile jingle and the message that I’m out of minutes.
Oh, well. It’s not that hard to find Lao Zhang in Mati Village.
First I stop at the jiaozi place. It’s Lao Zhang’s favorite restaurant in Mati. Mine too. The dumplings are excellent, it’s cheap as hell, and I’ve never gotten sick after eating there.
By now it’s after six P.M., and the restaurant is packed. I don’t even know what it’s called, this jiaozi place. It’s pretty typical: a cement block faced with white tile. For some reason, China went through a couple of decades when just about every small public building was covered in white tile, like it’s all a giant bathroom.
The restaurant is a small square room with plastic tables and chairs. There’s a fly-specked Beijing Olympics poster on one wall and a little shrine against another – red paper with gold characters stuck on the wall, a gilded Buddha, some incense sticks, and a couple pieces of dusty plastic fruit on a little table. The place reeks of fried dough, boiled meat, and garlic.
Seeing how this is Mati Village, most of the customers are artists, though you also get a few farmers and some of the local business-owners, like the couple who run the gas station. But mostly it’s people like ‘Sloppy’ Song. Sloppy is a tall woman who looks like she’s constructed out of wires, with thick black hair that trails down her back in a braid with plaits the size of king snakes. Who knows why she’s called ‘Sloppy’? Sometimes Chinese people pick the weirdest English names for themselves. I met this one guy who went by ‘Motor.’ It said something about his essential nature, he told me.
Sloppy’s here tonight, sitting at a table, slurping the juice out of her dumpling and waving her Zhonghua cigarette at the woman sitting across from her. I don’t know this woman. She looks a little rich for this place – sleek hair and makeup, nice clothes. Must be a collector. Sloppy does assemblage sculpture and collage pieces, and they sell pretty well, even with the economy sucking as much as it does.
‘Yili, ni hao,’ Sloppy calls out, seeing me enter. ‘You eating here?’
‘No, just looking for Lao Zhang.’
‘Haven’t seen him. This is Lucy Wu.’
‘Ni hao, pleased to meet you,’ I say, trying to be polite.
Lucy Wu regards me coolly. She’s one of these Prada babes – all done up in designer gear, perfectly polished.
‘Likewise,’ she says. ‘You speak Chinese?’
I shrug. ‘A little.’
This is halfway between a lie and the truth. After two years, I’m not exactly fluent, but I get around. ‘You speak Mandarin like some Beijing street kid,’ Lao Zhang told me once, maybe because I’ve got that Beijing accent, where you stick Rs on the end of everything like a pirate.
‘Your Chinese sounds very nice,’ she says with that smug, phony courtesy.
She has a southern accent; her consonants are soft, slightly sibilant. Dainty, almost.
‘You’re too polite.’
‘Lucy speaks good English,’ Sloppy informs me. ‘Not like me.’
‘Now you’re too polite,’ says Lucy Wu. ‘My English is very poor.’
I kind of doubt that.
‘Are you an art collector?’ I ask in English.
‘Art dealer.’ She smiles mischievously. ‘Collecting is for wealthier people than I.’
Her English is excellent.
‘She has Shanghai gallery,’ Sloppy adds.
‘Wow, cool,’ I say. ‘Hey, I’d better go. If you see Lao Zhang, can you tell him I’m looking for him? My phone’s dead.’
Lucy Wu sits up a little straighter, then reclines in a perfect, posed angle. ‘Lao Zhang? Is that Zhang Jianli?’
Sloppy nods. ‘Right.’
Lucy smiles at me, revealing tiny white teeth as perfect as a doll’s. ‘Jianli and I are old friends.’
‘Really?’ I say.
‘Yes.’ She looks me up and down, and I can feel myself blushing, because I know how I must look. ‘It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other. I was hoping to catch up with him while I’m here. I’ve heard wonderful things about his recent work. You know, Jianli hasn’t gotten nearly enough recognition as an artist.’
‘Maybe that’s not so important to Lao Zhang,’ Sloppy mutters.
Lucy giggles. ‘Impossible! All Chinese artists want fame. Otherwise, how can they get rich?’
She reaches into her tiny beaded bag, pulls out a lacquer card case, and hands me a card in polite fashion, holding it out with both hands. ‘When you see him, perhaps you could give him this.’
‘Sure.’
What a bitch, I think. Then I tell myself that’s not fair. Just because she’s tiny, pretty, and perfectly put together, it doesn’t mean she’s a bitch.
It just means I hate her on principle.
I order some takeout and head to Lao Zhang’s place.
Lao Zhang’s probably working, I figure, walking down Xingfu Lu, one of the two main streets in Mati Village. When he gets into it, he paints for hours, all day, fueled by countless espressos – he’s got his own machine. He forgets to eat sometimes, and I’m kind of proud of myself for thinking of bringing dinner, for doing something nice for him, like a normal person would do. It’s been hard for me the last few years, remembering to do stuff like that.
Maybe I’m finally getting better.
As I’m thinking this, I stumble on a pothole in the rutted road. Pain shoots up my leg.
‘Fuck!’
I can barely see, it’s so dark.
There aren’t exactly streetlights in Mati Village, only electric lanterns here and there that swing in any good wind and only work about half the time, strung up on storefronts and power poles. Right now they dim and flicker. There’s problems with electricity sometimes. Not so much in central Beijing or Shanghai, but in those ‘little’ cities you’ve never heard of, places with a few million people out in the provinces somewhere. And in villages like this, on the fringes of the grid.
But the little market on the corner of Lao Zhang’s alley is decorated with tiny Christmas lights.
I buy a couple cold bottles of Yanjing beer (my favorite) and Wahaha water (the label features this year’s perky winner of the Mongolian Cow Yogurt Happy Girl contest) and turn down the alley.
Lao Zhang lives in one of the old commune buildings, red brick, covered in some places with red wash, surrounded by a red wall. The entrance to Lao Zhang’s compound has two sculptures on either side, so there’s no mistaking it. One is a giant fish painted in Day-Glo colors. The other is a big empty Mao jacket. No Mao, just the jacket.
Inside the compound are four houses in a row. Sculptures and art supplies litter the narrow courtyards in between. Lao Zhang shares this place with the sculptor, a novelist who also paints, and a musician/Web designer who’s mixing something now, a trance track from the sound of it, all beats and erhu. Not too loud. That’s good. Some loud noises really get to me.
The front door is locked. Maybe Lao Zhang isn’t home. Maybe he’s already over at the Warehouse for the show. I use my key and go inside. I’ll have a few jiaozi, I figure, leave the rest here, and try the Warehouse.
The house is basically a rectangle. You go in the entrance, turn, and there’s the main room, with whitewashed walls and added skylights, remodeled to give Lao Zhang better light for painting.
The lights are off in the studio, but the computer’s on, booted up to the login screen of this online game Lao Zhang likes to play, The Sword of Ill Repute. A snatch of music plays, repeats.
‘Lao Zhang, ni zai ma?’ I call out. Are you there? No answer.
To the right is the bedroom, which is mostly taken up by a kang, the traditional brick bed you can heat from underneath. Lao Zhang has a futon on top of his. On the left side of the house there’s a tiny kitchen, a toilet, and a little utility room with a spare futon where Lao Zhang’s friends frequently crash.
Which is where the Uighur is.
‘Shit!’ I almost drop the takeout on the kitchen floor.
Here’s this guy stumbling out of the spare room, blinking uncertainly, rubbing his eyes, which suddenly go wide with fear.
‘Ni hao,’ I say uncertainly.
He stands there, one leg twitching, like he could bolt at any moment. He’s in his forties, not Chinese, not Han Chinese anyway; his hair is brown, his eyes a light hazel, his face dark and broad with high cheeks – I’m guessing Uighur.
‘Ni hao,’ he finally says.
‘I’m Yili,’ I stutter, ‘a friend of Lao Zhang’s. Is he … ?’
His eyes dart around the room. ‘Oh, yes, I am also friend of Lao Zhang’s. Hashim.’
‘Happy to meet you,’ I reply automatically.
I put the food and beer down on the little table by the sink, slowly because I get the feeling this guy startles easily. I can’t decide whether I should make small talk or run.
Since I suck at both of these activities, it’s a real relief to hear the front door bang and Lao Zhang yell from the living room: ‘It’s me. I’m back.’
‘We’re in the kitchen,’ I call out.
Lao Zhang is frowning when he comes in. He’s a northerner, part Manchu, big for a Chinese guy, and right now his thick shoulders are tense like he’s expecting a fight. ‘I thought you were going to phone,’ he says to me.
‘I was – I tried – My phone ran out of minutes, so I just …’ I point at the table. ‘I brought dinner.’
‘Thanks.’ He gives me a quick one-armed hug, and then everything’s normal again.
Almost.
‘You met Hashim?’
I nod and turn to the Uighur. ‘Maybe you’d like some dinner? I brought plenty.’
‘Anything without pork?’ Lao Zhang asks, grabbing chipped bowls from the metal locker he salvaged from the old commune factory.
‘I got mutton, beef, and vegetable.’
‘Thank you,’ Hashim says, bobbing his head. He’s got a lot of gray hair. He starts to reach into his pocket for money.
I wave him off. ‘Please don’t be so polite.’
Lao Zhang dishes out food, and we all sit around the tiny kitchen table. Lao Zhang shovels jiaozi into his mouth in silence. The Uighur stares at his bowl. I try to make small talk.
‘So, Hashim. Do you live in Beijing?’
‘No, not in Beijing,’ he mumbles. ‘Just for a visit.’
‘Oh. Is this your first time here?’
‘Maybe … third time?’ He smiles weakly and falls silent.
I don’t know what to say after that.
‘We’re going to have to eat fast,’ Lao Zhang says. ‘I want to get to the Warehouse early. Okay with you?’
‘Sure,’ I say. I have a few jiaozi and some spicy tofu, and then it’s time to go.
‘Make yourself at home,’ Lao Zhang tells Hashim. ‘Anything you need, call me. TV’s in there if you want to watch.’
‘Oh. Thank you, but …’ Hashim gestures helplessly toward the utility room. ‘I think I’m still very tired.’
He looks tired. His hazel eyes are bloodshot, and the flesh around them is sagging and so dark it looks bruised.
‘Thank you,’ he says to me, bowing his head and backing toward the utility room. ‘Very nice to meet you.’
Chinese is a second language to him. Just like it is to me.
‘So, who’s the Uighur?’ I finally ask Lao Zhang, as we approach the Warehouse.
‘Friend of a friend.’
‘He’s an artist?’
‘Writer or something. Needed a place to stay.’
He’s not telling me everything, I’m pretty sure. His face is tense; we’re walking next to each other, but he feels so separate that we might as well be on different blocks.
A lot of Chinese people don’t trust Uighurs, even though they’re Chinese citizens. As for the Uighurs, a lot of them aren’t crazy about the Chinese.
You’re supposed to say ‘Han,’ not ‘Chinese,’ when you’re talking about the ninety percent of the population that’s, well, Chinese; but hardly anyone does.
The Uighur homeland used to be called East Turkestan. China took it over a couple hundred years ago, and now it’s ‘Xinjiang.’ For the last thirty years or so, the Chinese government’s been encouraging Han people to ‘go west’ and settle there.
The government takes a hard line if the Uighurs try to do anything about it.
Since the riots in Urumqi last year, things have only gotten worse. Gangs of Uighurs burned down shops and buses and went after Han Chinese with hammers and pickaxes. So much for the ‘Harmonious Society.’
This guy Hashim, though, I can’t picture him setting things on fire. He looks like a professor on a bender. A writer or something, like Lao Zhang said. Maybe he’s an activist, some intellectual who got in trouble. It doesn’t take much for a Uighur to get into trouble in China.
‘You should be careful,’ I say.
Lao Zhang grins and squeezes my arm. ‘I know – those Uighurs, they’re all terrorists.’
‘Ha ha.’
The other thing that’s screwed the Uighurs is that they’re Muslims, and you know how that goes in a lot of people’s heads.
The Warehouse is at the east end of Mati Village, close to the jiaozi place. It’s called that because it used to be a warehouse. The building is partitioned into several galleries and one big space, with a café in the corner. The main room has paintings, some sculpture, and, tonight, a band put together by Lao Zhang’s courtyard neighbor. The highlight of the evening is the end of a performance piece where this guy has been sealed up in what looks like a concrete block for forty-eight hours. Tonight’s the night he’s scheduled to break out, and a couple hundred people have gathered to watch.
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Well, you could say it’s about self-imprisonment and breaking free from that,’ Lao Zhang explains. ‘Or breaking free from irrational authority of any kind.’
‘I guess.’
‘Hey, Lao Zhang, nizenmeyang?’ someone asks.
‘Hao, hao. Painting a lot. You?’
Everyone here seems to know Lao Zhang, which isn’t surprising. He’s been in the Beijing art scene since it started, when he was a teenager and hung out at the Old Summer Palace, the first artists’ village in Communist China. After a couple of years, the cops came in and arrested a lot of the artists, and the village got razed. That happened to a lot of the places where Lao Zhang used to hang out. ‘Government doesn’t like it when too many people get together,’ he told me once.
Finally, Lao Zhang gave up on Beijing proper. ‘Tai dade mafan,’ he’d say. Too much hassle. Too expensive. So he led an exodus to Mati Village, a collective farm that had been practically abandoned after the communes broke up. A place where artists who hadn’t made it big could live for cheap.
‘You think they’ll bust you here?’ I asked once.
Lao Zhang shrugged. ‘Who knows? It lasts as long as it lasts.’
I have to wonder. Because even though Mati Village is pretty far away from Beijing proper, far from the villas and townhouses on Beijing’s outer fringes, people still find their way here. Foreigners, art-lovers, journalists.
Me.
And that Prada chick from the jiaozi place tonight. Lucy Wu.
‘Jianli, it’s been a long time.’ Lucy Wu smiles and extends her hand coyly in Lao Zhang’s general direction, having spotted us hanging out by the café, behind the PA speakers where it’s not quite so loud.
‘Luxi,’ Lao Zhang replies. He takes her hand for a moment; it’s dwarfed in his. He stares at her with a look that I can’t quite figure out. ‘You’re well?’
‘Very.’ She takes a step back, like she’s measuring him up. ‘I met your friend Yili earlier this evening. Did she tell you?’
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I forgot.’
Lucy giggles. ‘Not to worry. I knew we’d find each other.’
I watch them watching each other, like a couple of circling cats.
‘I’m going to get a beer,’ I say.
Back in the main room, muffled thuds come from inside the ‘concrete’ block (I’m pretty sure it’s plaster). Cracks appear, then a little chunk falls out, then more pieces, and all of a sudden there’s a hole, and you can see this skinny, shirtless man covered in sweat, swinging a sledgehammer against the walls of his prison. The room is flooded with a rank smell, which makes sense, considering the guy’s been in the box for a couple of days.
Everybody cheers.
I drink my beer. Grab another. The crowd starts to thin out around me. Show’s over, I guess. It’s been almost an hour since I’ve seen Lao Zhang.
I think about looking for him, but something holds me back. Someone, more accurately.
She’s got to be an old girlfriend. Except I couldn’t tell if he was really happy to see her.
‘Sorry.’
It’s Lao Zhang, who has appeared next to me, without Lucy Wu.
‘How was it?’ he asks.
‘Okay.’
He rests his hand on my shoulder. But it’s not a friendly gesture. I can feel the tension in his hand.
I look behind him and see Lucy Wu, standing over by the entrance to the video gallery, too far away for me to make out her expression, except I can tell she’s watching us.
‘Let’s go,’ he says.
We go outside. I start to turn down Heping Street in the direction of Xingfu Road, toward Lao Zhang’s house.
‘Wait.’
I turn to look at him. The frown from earlier tonight is back. ‘It’s better if you don’t come over tonight,’ he says.
I shrug. ‘Fine.’
I should’ve figured. No way I can compete with a Lucy Wu.
‘Here.’ He digs through his pockets and pulls out some cash. ‘Some money. For a taxi.’
I don’t take it. ‘Why didn’t you just tell me not to come?’
‘I didn’t think …’ He grimaces, shakes his head. ‘I should have. I’m sorry.’
I don’t know what to say. I zip up my jacket and wonder where I’m going to find a taxi this time of night in Mati Village. Down by the bus station, I guess.
‘Yili …’ Lao Zhang reaches out his hand, rests it gently but urgently on my arm. ‘Don’t go home tonight. It’s better you go someplace else. Visit some friends or something. Just for tonight.’
That’s when everything shifts. I’m not mad any more.
‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Are you in trouble?’
He hesitates. ‘You know how things are here,’ he says. ‘Anyway, it’s not the first time.’
‘Can I help?’
I don’t know why I say it. I’m not even sure that I mean it.
I still can’t see his face very well in the dark, but I think I see him smile.
‘Maybe later. If you want.’
CHAPTER TWO
There aren’t a lot of places I can think of to go in Beijing at one in the morning.
I tell the taxi driver to take me to Says Hu.
It’s eleven thirty now, and it’ll be dead by the time I get there in an hour and a half; I figure I can hang out, while British John closes up, and decide what to do next.
I forgot it was Karaoke Night.
People come out of the woodwork for this: expats from the Zhongguancun Electronics District, students and teachers from the Haidian universities, ready to get loaded and give us their best rendition of ‘You Light Up My Life’ or ‘Hotel California.’
When I walk through the door, the place is packed, and a rangy Chinese girl with dyed blonde hair is singing ‘My Heart Will Go On.’
I almost turn around and leave, but British John has already spotted me. He tops off a pitcher of Qingdao and comes out from behind the bar, beer belly leading his narrow shoulders, face permanently red from too much sun and alcohol.
‘Ellie! Good, you’re here. Rose didn’t show up. Boyfriend crisis. Stupid bint.’
‘I’m not here to work.’
‘When are you ever?’
‘Fuck you,’ I mutter. Maybe I’m late sometimes, but I do a good job for British John.
Some days it’s hard to leave the apartment, that’s all.
I pick up a rag and start wiping down tables.
Says Hu is an expat bar on the second floor of a corner mall next to an apartment complex, above a mobile phone store. It’s dark, furnished in cheap plastic-coated wood, with dartboards, British soccer posters, and jerseys on the walls. Old beer funk mixes with that bizarre cleaner they use here in China, the one that smells like acrid, perfumed kerosene.
I work here a few shifts a week. That’s plenty.
I don’t mean British John’s a bad guy. He’s not. He’s hinted about hiring me to run this place so he can start another business, making me legal and getting me a work visa, which god knows I need.
But doing this?
‘And my heart will go on and on!’
I duck behind the bar, pour myself a beer, and swallow a Percocet.
Between pouring drafts and mixing drinks, I think about what happened in Mati Village.
Lao Zhang has to be in some kind of trouble, but what? The central government doesn’t care much about what anybody does, as long as they don’t challenge the government’s authority. Lao Zhang’s not political, so far as I know. He doesn’t talk about overthrowing the CCP or democracy or freedom of speech. Nothing like that. He talks about living a creative life, about building communities to support that, places that encourage each individual’s expression and value their labors – the opposite of the factories and malls and McJobs that treat people like trash and throw them away whenever they feel like it.
Maybe that’s close enough to freedom of speech to get him in trouble.
But why am I in trouble?
You’re a foreigner, you cause problems, usually they just kick you out of China. Which, if I don’t get my act together, is going to happen anyway.
He told me not to go home tonight.
Maybe it’s not the government, I think. Maybe it’s gangsters. Or some local official Lao Zhang pissed off. A back-door deal gone wrong.
And then there’s Lucy Wu. Ex-girlfriend? Undercover Public Security Officer?
He should have told me what was going on.
My leg hurts like a motherfucker, even with the Percocet, so I start drinking Guinness, and I end up hanging out in the bar after we close, drinking more Guinness with British John, his Chinese wife Xiaowei, an Australian named Hank, and two Norwegian girls. One of them, the taller of the two who looks like a supermodel, is a bitch. She keeps going on about the evils of American imperialism. ‘It was American imperial aggression that created the desire for a Caliphate,’ and ‘The Taliban was a predictable response to American imperial aggression.’
British John keeps giving me looks, like he thinks I’m going to lose it.
‘Hey, we need more music,’ Xiaowei pipes up. ‘What should I play?’
‘You choose, luv,’ says British John. ‘As long as it’s none of that fucking awful Korean pop.’
Xiaowei pouts. She loves Korean pop, which as British John points out, really is fucking awful.
‘Reggae!’ shouts Hank the Australian.
‘It was America’s criminal invasion of Iraq,’ the Norwegian chick drones on. She’s kind of drunk by now, too. ‘Everyone involved is a criminal. You know, Falluja, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, these are war crimes …’
Hank and the other Norwegian girl, meanwhile, have gone over to the jukebox, draped over each other like partners in a three-legged race. ‘Redemption Song’ booms over the speakers.
‘These soldiers, they killed innocents, and you Americans call them heroes.’
‘Why don’t you just shut the fuck up?’ I finally say. I’m not mad. I’m just tired. ‘You Norwegians are sitting on top of all that North Sea oil or you’d be making deals and screwing people like everyone else. Plus, you kill whales.’
Supermodel straightens up. Actually, she looks more like a Viking. All she needs is a spear. ‘Norway contributes more percentage of its income to foreign aid than any other country. While you Americans –’
‘Oh, it’s wrong to kill whales,’ Xiaowei says, her eyes filling with tears. ‘And dolphins. They are so smart! I think they are smarter than we are.’
‘Darts, anyone?’ British John asks.
I end up crashing at British John and Xiaowei’s place, finally dragging myself off their couch the next day around noon to make my way home.
Of course, I run into Mrs Hua, who is hustling her kid into their apartment, him clutching an overstuffed, greasy bag of Mickey D’s.
‘Somebody looking for you,’ she hisses, her little raisin eyes glittering in triumph. ‘You in some kind of trouble!’
I roll my eyes. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘Foreigners,’ she continues. ‘In suits! You in trouble.’
I freeze, but only for a moment.
‘Whatever.’
I unlock the door and make my way through the living room, which is cluttered with all kinds of random stuff: books, magazines, dirty clothes, a guitar amp, and a cardboard standup figure of Yao Ming draped with a plastic lei. My roommate Chuckie has the blackout curtains drawn, and I can hardly see a thing, just Yao Ming, the red of his jersey blanched gray by the dark.
Foreigners in suits. It doesn’t make sense. How can Lao Zhang be in trouble with foreigners in suits?
Then I think: maybe it’s not Lao Zhang they’re looking for.
I’m not in trouble, I tell myself. I’m not. All that shit happened a long time ago, and nobody cares about it any more.
‘Cao dan! Zhen ta ma de!’
‘Chuckie? What?’
Chuckie bursts out of his bedroom, greasy hair bristling up in spikes, glasses askew, Bill Gates T-shirt about three sizes too big, knobby knees sticking out beneath dirty gym shorts.
‘That fucking bastard stole my seventh-level Qi sword!’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ I say. ‘Who stole your sword?’
‘Ming Lu, the little shits! I should go bust his damn balls!’
I try to picture Chuckie busting much of anything and fail. The reason I have such a good deal renting this apartment is that Chuckie gives me a break in exchange for tutoring him in English conversation. Sometimes I listen to him and think that I’m not really doing my job.
‘So … Chuckie … I don’t understand. This sword, I mean, it’s not a real sword, is it? It’s like … it’s part of the game, right?’
Chuckie stares at me like I’ve suddenly grown horns.
‘Of course it’s part of the game!’
‘So, um … if it’s not real, how did Ming Lu steal it?’
Chuckie paces around the dim, dank apartment, which I notice smells like some weird combination of sour beer and cement dust. ‘I lend it to him,’ he mutters. ‘I trust him!’ He slaps the cardboard Yao Ming for emphasis. ‘And that turtle’s egg, jiba son of a slave girl go and sell it!’
I had a lot to drink last night and I’m pretty sleep-deprived, so maybe if I had some coffee I could follow him a little better. Still, he’s talking about a virtual sword in an online game. How can I take it seriously?
Chuckie’s game is The Sword of Ill Repute, the same game Lao Zhang plays. That’s how I met Lao Zhang, actually, through Chuckie. Lao Zhang was throwing a party at this space off the 4th Ring Road, and he’d invited his online friends to attend. Chuckie hadn’t really wanted to go. He didn’t approve of Lao Zhang’s gaming style. ‘Too peaceful!’ he complained. ‘He don’t like to go on quest, just sit in teahouse and wine shop and drink and chat all the time.’
Me, I was tired of virtual reality and thought an actual party might be fun. I’d thought maybe I was going crazy, sitting in that apartment all the time. I was having a lot of nightmares, not sleeping well, and I needed to get out.
So we went to the party, which was at this place called the Airplane Factory (because it used to be an airplane factory). When we got there, a couple of the artists were doing a piece, throwing dyed red mud at each other and chanting slogans every time they got hit. A DJ was spinning tunes while another artist projected images on the blank white wall: chickens being decapitated and buildings falling down and Mickey Mouse cartoons. At some point, this fairly lame Beijing punk band played, though I had to give them points for attitude.
I wandered around on my own, not talking to anybody, because even though I’d wanted to come, once I got there I felt awkward and nervous, like I couldn’t have been more out of place. Eventually I saw Chuckie standing over by this installation piece, a ping-pong table that lit up and made different noises depending on where the ball hit. That’s where the beer was, iced for once, in plastic tubs.
Chuckie was talking to this big, stocky guy with a goatee and thick eyebrows, wearing paint-splattered cargo shorts, an ancient Cui Jian T-shirt, and a knit beanie. The guy had just opened a bottle of Yanjing, and instead of drinking from it, he gave it to me, eyebrow half-cocked, grinning. There was something about his smile I liked, something about how it included me, like we were already sharing a joke. ‘You’re Chuckie’s roommate,’ he said. ‘Chuckie says you’re crazy.’
That was Lao Zhang.
Now I’m thinking: talk about a pot/kettle scenario, ’cause here’s Chuckie, pacing around the living room, muttering about how some jiba ex-friend of his has ripped off his virtual sword.
Chuckie grabs his backpack and heads for the door.
‘Hey. Where are you going?’
‘Matrix,’ Chuckie mumbles.
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s where Ming Lu is.’
‘So, what are you going to do?’
‘Make him pay.’
‘Hey, Chuckie, wait a minute. Just … wait.’
He pauses at the door. ‘What?’
‘You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?’
Chuckie swings his backpack over his shoulder. ‘That Qi sword is worth 10,000 kuai! I’m going to make him pay me for it!’
‘You’re kidding.’
Ten thousand yuan is no small sum of money. It’s over fourteen hundred dollars. More money than I make in a month. More money than Chuckie makes a month doing his freelance geek gigs, I’m pretty sure. He’s a genius with computers, but he’s always getting canned for spending too much time online doing things he shouldn’t.
‘I don’t kid about this!’ Chuckie yells, wild-eyed. ‘I’m going!’
‘Hey, Chuckie, wait a minute. Deng yihuir,’ I repeat in Chinese for emphasis. ‘Was there anybody looking for me this morning? Some foreigners? In suits?’
Chuckie pauses by the door and frowns. ‘Oh. Some guys came by a couple hours ago. I said you weren’t around.’
‘What did they want?’
‘They didn’t say.’ He shrugs his backpack onto his other shoulder and opens the door.
‘Wait a minute,’ I say again. ‘What kind of guys?’
‘I don’t know,’ Chuckie replies, clearly frustrated. ‘Foreigners in suits, like you said.’ And he starts to leave.
‘Wait, I’ll come with you.’
I throw on some fresh clothes, replenish my backpack with clean underwear, which I always do in case I end up crashing somewhere else, which, objectively, happens kind of a lot. Then I grab my passport and retrieve the roll of cash that I’ve hidden in a balled-up T-shirt tossed in the corner of my tiny closet.
When I come out of my room, Chuckie is pacing in a little circle by the door, looking like he’s ready to bolt.
So am I. I don’t want to stay in this apartment. Not for another minute.
Matrix is a couple miles away, so we hop on a bus that’s so packed, I hardly move when it jerks and squeals and halts – it’s like I’m surrounded by human airbags.
Our destination is a couple of blocks from the bus stop, just east of Beida, short for Beijing University. Chuckie’s pissed off and walking so fast that I can barely keep up.
‘He’ll be there,’ Chuckie mutters, ‘that little penis shit. He’s always there right now.’
‘You don’t say “penis.’’’
Chuckie looks confused. ‘Penis means jiba, right?’
‘Yeah, but you should say, like, “fucking,” or “dickhead.” It sounds better.’
We pass the new Tech center covered with LED billboards and the latest weird-shaped mirror glass high-rise that resembles some gargantuan star cruiser squatting on a landing pad; practically everything they’ve built in Beijing the last ten years looks like part of a set in the latest big-budget science fiction movie.
Matrix Game Parlor takes up most of the ground floor of a six-story white-tile storefront that’s probably slated for demolition in the near future, since it must have been built way back in the eighties. It’s a maze of navy blue walls, computer terminals, and arcade games, and though most of the serious gamers are wearing headsets, a lot of the casual players aren’t, so there’s this cacophony of cartoon explosions and thumping bass lines and corny synthesized orchestras. Plus everybody’s cells are going off all the time with these loud polyphonic ringtones, and nobody talks quietly into their cells; they yell, like they don’t trust that the person on the other end will hear them otherwise, and I’m already thinking I want out of here. And even though they’ve passed laws in China against smoking in public places, everyone smokes in this place, so I’m following Chuckie through the maze and this blue smoke haze that’s lit up by neon screens and intermittent strobe lights, and I’m starting to cough. I always have a little bronchitis from the pollution here, and I just can’t handle the smoke any more.
I used to smoke. Everyone around me did back then. That’s what we’d do, me and my buddies, we’d smoke cigarettes and crack jokes to keep each other loose, just laugh at shit, you know? You had to laugh at all the shit sometimes.
Embrace the Suck, we used to say.
‘There he is!’ Chuckie hisses.
I recognize Ming Lu. He’s this short, fat guy shaped more or less like a dumpling with limbs and a head. Right now he’s sitting in front of a terminal littered with junk food, using a fancy joystick, probably his own, to manipulate his avatar. I figure he’s probably either killing or fucking someone, from the exultant expression on his face.
Chuckie grabs Ming Lu’s T-shirt by the collar and slaps him upside the head.
Ming Lu whirls around blindly, glasses askew, scattering his shrimp chips.
‘What –? Who –?’
‘You mother fucking dog’s bastard!’ Chuckie screams.
As I start to form a mental picture of that scenario, I lose track of the argument entirely. For one thing, the two of them are talking way too fast for me to follow, and Ming Lu has this Sichuan accent that gets pretty thick when he’s excited and being slapped around by somebody. For another, I glance over my shoulder and see, dimly through the smoke haze, two guys heading in our direction. Foreign guys in suits.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Ming Lu is babbling, ‘but I had to!’
I don’t think. I run.
I duck down an aisle, bumping into a couple of giggling teen girls with Go Gaiyuko backpacks. I turn a corner, slipping and sliding past a cluster of Dance Dance Revolution games, and I don’t even know why I’m running; I just don’t want to get caught.
Up ahead there’s a little hall where the bathrooms are. At the end of that, what looks like an exit. I run as fast as I can, praying under my breath that this isn’t one of those places where the emergency exits are locked so we would all die horribly if there were a fire, and hit the release bar on the door.
I’m blinded by daylight. I blink a few times. I’m in a little courtyard that serves mostly as a trash dump and a place to park bicycles and mopeds off the street. A few sad trees in crumbling concrete planters. An old-style six-story apartment building across the way. Laundry hangs from the cramped balconies; random wires crisscross limply from roof to roof. It’s oddly silent, except for a couple of chittering sparrows.
Then I hear a burst of dialog and music from one of the apartments; a guy bellowing about revenge against the Emperor, some cheesy historical soap on TV. ‘I’ll drink to his death!’ echoes in the courtyard.
That unfreezes me. I plunge into the apartment building, down the narrow corridor that leads past the stairwell, and out the other side.
I’m on a little street with no real sidewalks, a few small cars shoved up against the buildings amidst a tangle of bikes. An old man sits on a tiny folding stool by the nonexistent curb, mending a pair of pants, a few odds and ends for sale spread out on a blanket next to him: a fake Cultural Revolution clock, a couple DVDs, a blender. ‘You want?’ he says to me, holding up the clock, winding it up to show me how the Red Guard waves her Little Red Book to count off the seconds. ‘You want buy?’
‘Buyao,’ I say. I don’t want. I run down the street.
I don’t run that well because of my leg, but for once I’m hardly feeling it. I keep running. I pass more high-rises, Tsinghua University’s new science center, billboards, animated LED ads: giant stomachs, pills, and cars. Here’s the Xijiao Hotel. Okay. I know this place. I’m breathing hard and sweating. Now my leg really hurts, and my shoulders feel bruised from my bouncing backpack, which I should’ve cinched up, but I’ve gotten out of the habit. I slow down, wipe my forehead. I don’t see any foreigners in suits.
I’m by this little street leading into the Beijing Language & Culture University campus from the Xijiao Binguan that has small shops, restaurants, and stalls that live off business from students – places where you can buy cheap electronics, pirated DVDs, school supplies, tours to Tibet. And phone cards.
I stop and buy a hundred-yuan card for my phone, dial the number, scratch off the silver, and punch in the voucher code. I’ve got a string of messages waiting for me.
I’m still feeling exposed out here on the street. I decide to go onto the BLCU campus. I’m almost young enough to be a student. Besides, I dress like one: I’m wearing high-top sneakers, a long-sleeved snowboarding T-shirt decorated with flowers and snowflakes, and jeans, and I’m carrying a backpack. I blend in here, unlike foreigners in suits. I could be just another foreign student trying to better myself by learning Chinese. That’s what I was doing, not so long ago.
I head over to the Sauce, a coffeehouse that’s been on campus forever. It’s not bad. I stand in line behind a skinny white boy chatting up a cute Chinese girl, order myself a regular cup of coffee, and take a seat by the window. I stare down at the street, at the egg-shaped orange phone booths, at the newly green trees, and I check my messages.
British John, asking me if I can cover Rose’s shift for Karaoke Night. A bunch of text-message spam in Chinese, which I can’t read. Delete, delete, delete.
Then a message from Lao Zhang. ‘Yili, ni hao. I’m leaving Beijing for a few days …’ A pause. ‘I wanted to let you know.’ Another pause. ‘Anyway, see you later. Man zou.’
Go slowly. Be careful.
I start to delete the message, but my finger hovers over the key for a moment, and then I hit save instead.
Next message.
‘Hey, babe. It’s me.’
My heart starts to thud, and the bottom falls out of my gut.
‘Listen, I need to see you,’ he continues. ‘Right away. It’s important. Call me as soon as you get this. Okay?’
I stare at the phone. Fucking Trey. Why does he do this to me?
CHAPTER THREE
I call him, of course. I know I shouldn’t, but I do it anyway. I’m pretty sure I know what he wants, and I’m not going to give it to him. But I still call.
I hear that rich caramel voice in my ear. ‘Hey, babe.’
‘Hey,’ I say, trying to keep my voice flat. ‘What’s up?’
‘Listen, I need to talk to you. Can we meet someplace?’
I shrug. Like I don’t care. Like he can see me. ‘Talk to me now.’
‘Don’t be like that. Look, we need to get together.’ He sounds so sincere. ‘It’s important.’
‘I’m not signing anything, Trey –’
‘I know. It’s not about that.’
I let out a breath and stare out the window, look at the knots of students walking below me, talking, laughing. A couple arm in arm, the boy with spiked green hair, the girl carrying a stuffed toy backpack. They’re so cute. The little shits.
‘Okay,’ I finally say.
I’m making a mistake, I’m pretty sure.
We arrange to meet in a couple hours at a pub in Henderson Center on Jianguomen Dajie, in the heart of Beijing. I take the train, transfer to the Ring subway line, and get off at Jianguomen by the Ancient Observatory, this lopped-off pyramid of gray brick from the Ming Dynasty, now dwarfed by all the big buildings on Chang ’An Boulevard. ‘Vegas, with Chinese characteristics,’ British John calls it – glassy high-rises with green Chinese-style roofs perched on top, like somebody put tiny party hats on the heads of awkward giants.
Fucking Trey, I think, as I walk to Henderson Center. He’s probably lying to me. I’ll meet him, and he’ll try to talk me into signing.
He keeps threatening to file without me. Go ahead, I tell him. You do that, and it’s all coming out. Every bit of it.
You wouldn’t do that, he says. It’ll hurt you as much as it’ll hurt me.
At this point in the conversation, I generally laugh. Yeah, like I have as much to lose as you do.
But I know he’s right. I’ll never tell.
I would sign, though. I’d sign if he’d get me what I keep asking him for. But he won’t, and I don’t really get why.
Let it go, Lao Zhang keeps telling me. You don’t need him. You can figure something else out. You already crossed the river; why carry the boat up the mountain? Let it go.
But I can’t.
You could do it, I always say to Trey. Talk to your friends, the ones who can pull some strings. He just looks at me with those green eyes of his that shine like some kind of gem and says: I’ve tried, babe. I’ll keep trying, I promise. But we gotta get on with our lives, don’t we?
On this one point, I guess I’d have to agree with him. We really do.
It’s not like I want to be married to him any more.
Barton’s is the kind of expat place that’s pretty typical for Beijing, which is to say it looks like any chain place you’d find in the U.S.: a wooden bar with a selection of imported beer and liquor, red leatherette booths, high-def TVs playing sports. Today they’ve got a baseball game on, with promises of basketball to follow.
Trey sits in a booth by the window, taking in the view from the thirtieth floor, drinking a beer and eating fries.
I don’t like the way I feel when I see him. After everything that’s happened, I still feel it, and I can’t decide who I hate more for it: him or me.
Trey smiles when he notices me and half-rises to be polite. ‘Hey, Ellie,’ he says. ‘You look good.’
Bullshit, I want to say. I’m pretty sure I don’t look good. I’m sticky with sweat from my run through Matrix and coated with the general grime of Beijing. I slip into the booth across the table from him. ‘Hey, Trey.’
‘You have lunch? I was gonna get a burger. They make good ones here.’
‘Thought you were on a health kick,’ I mutter.
Trey grins and pats his gut. He’s got a bit of one, but it’s not bad. The truth is, he’s the one who looks good. His hair is buzzed close to his scalp, all the better to minimize his slowly receding hairline. He’s tan; his muscles strain the sleeves of his T-shirt. ‘Yeah, well, you gotta make exceptions sometimes, you know?’
I look away. I just can’t meet his eyes. ‘What do you want, Trey?’
‘Some lunch, right now.’ He raises his arm to flag down the waitress. ‘Xiaojie!’ he shouts.
The waitress – a cute little thing who gives Trey the eye – comes over. Trey orders his burger. I’m in one of those moods where nothing sounds good and I don’t know what I want, but I figure I’d better eat something. For one thing, Trey’s paying, and I like making him pay.
‘Spaghetti,’ I finally decide. The Chinese invented it, right? ‘And a Yanjing beer.’
‘No Yanjing. Have Qingdao.’
‘So how you been, Ellie?’ Trey asks, after my beer arrives.
‘Fine. You?’
‘I’m good.’ He stares at me with the utmost sincerity. ‘I really am.’
‘Glad to hear it.’ And then, because I can’t help myself, I say: ‘So, how’s … what’s her name? Ping Li?’
‘Li Ping,’ he corrects me. In point of fact, I knew that. ‘Or Lily, if you like. She’s good, Ellie. Really good.’
I nod.
Trey leans forward, his green eyes glowing. ‘She’s come to Jesus,’ he says huskily. ‘I feel like a part of me’s been reborn with her.’
I chug my beer. ‘That’s just swell, Trey.’
He shakes his head. He looks so sad. ‘Look, I fucked up. I could keep apologizing forever, and that’s not gonna make it up to you. You want to hate me; I get it. But don’t hold what I did against Jesus. It’s not His fault.’
While my loss of faith is not the last thing I feel like discussing, it makes the top-ten list for sure.
‘Why are we talking about this? I mean, what’s Jesus got to do with … with anything right now?’
‘Because He can help you.’ Trey reaches across the table, rests his hand on mine. ‘I know you’re hurting. You’re in the desert, Ellie. But there’s water for you. All you have to do is drink it.’
Oh, if I only could. If I could only sink back into that warm, comfortable place, back when I could feel that glow, that love, that connection and certainty.
And the thrill. That smell of his, the wedge of his triceps, the look in his eyes.
I can’t help it. I still want him.
‘You are so full of it.’ I yank my hand away. ‘What would Jesus say about you dumping me for her? About you fucking her when you’re married to me!’
‘We’re all sinners,’ he says intensely. ‘That’s the point. And I told you what the bottom line was for me. I need to be with somebody who wants to live a Christ-centered life. And you’ve left that, Ellie. You’ve left that, and nothing I can say makes a difference. So what am I supposed to do? I can’t live without it. I just can’t.’
For a moment we stare at each other.
‘Okay,’ I finally say. ‘Okay. We’ve had this discussion how many times? You wanna live with little Miss Come to Jesus, that’s fine. You wanna get divorced, that’s fine with me too. But you know what I want, Trey. You know it. Give me what I want, and I’ll sign anything you want me to sign.’
Trey leans back in his chair. ‘That’s why I wanted to see you. I think I got it figured out.’
At that moment, two things happen almost at once. Two foreign men in suits approach our table. ‘Mr Cooper, Mrs Cooper,’ one of them says in an American accent. They sit. And the waitress brings us our food.
‘Parma-san?’ she chirps.
‘Hey, guys.’ Trey flashes his smile at them.
I just sit there, staring at the mass of coiled noodles, which suddenly don’t look like something I much want to eat.
‘Mrs Cooper, sorry if we startled you earlier,’ Suit #1 says.
I don’t say anything. I twirl a forkful of spaghetti, and I eat it. Not bad, actually. Good noodles. ‘Yes,’ I tell the waitress. ‘Please bring parmesan.’
Suit #1 leans forward. He’s the younger of the duo, a wiry guy with wide eyes and an earnest expression. ‘We’re not here to cause you any problems.’
I take another bite of spaghetti. It tastes okay, but it’s going down like glue. ‘So why are you here?’ I ask.
‘Ellie –’ Trey begins, all concerned and placating, but Suit #2 cuts him off.
‘The Uighur. Hashim Abdullaabduzehim.’
I have to think about this for a moment. ‘Abdulla … ?’
‘Abdullaabduzehim,’ Suit #2 repeats impatiently. He’s a half dozen years older, a couple inches taller, and a whole lot bulkier than Suit #1, with heavy-rimmed glasses, a bristling mustache, and a scary edge. The bad cop, apparently.
I decide it’s best not to say anything. I focus on twirling the perfect forkful of noodles and sauce, braced against my spoon.
‘You met him, right?’
Why is it so hard to get the right amount of noodles on your fork? You either end up with a few pathetic strands or half the bowl.
‘I meet a lot of people,’ I finally say. ‘So what?’
Suit #1 puts his elbows on the table and leans forward. ‘Mrs Cooper, it’s very important that you tell us anything you can about Mr Abdullaabduzehim.’
‘Why?’
‘Mr Abdullaabduzehim is a known associate of Islamic extremists who plan to carry out attacks against American interests.’
‘Against people like your former comrades-in-arms,’ Suit #2 says. He sounds pissed. ‘If you still give a shit about them.’
I put down my fork. ‘You know what? Fuck you.’
‘Mrs Cooper …’ Suit #1 sighs. ‘I know you’ve had a rough time. We wouldn’t intrude on your privacy if it weren’t extremely important. Mr Carter here …’ He stares at me, those wide eyes of his suddenly seeming like a cartoon of sympathy. ‘Mr Carter gets impatient.’
‘Parma-san.’ The waitress has returned, with a little green can of cheese. ‘More beer?’
‘Yes, please,’ says Trey.
‘The Uighur,’ Suit #1 continues. ‘He was staying with a friend of yours, Zhang Jianli. An artist of some sort, right?’
I don’t say a word.
‘In Mati Village. You went to Mati Village yesterday. You spend a lot of time there.’
I drink some beer. I turn to Trey. ‘What have you been telling them about me?’
‘It’s not him, Mrs Cooper,’ Suit #1 says.
‘Who is it, then?’
He smiles. ‘We have an interest in Mati Village. A lot of interesting people go there.’
‘Listen, Ellie.’ Trey gives me a look, as warm as can be, like he really cares. ‘You help these guys, they can help you.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘They’ll set you up with a job – you won’t even have to go to work if you don’t want, but you’ll get your visa. So you can stay here after I leave, if that’s what you want.’ He stares at me, and those green eyes turn hard. ‘’Cause I’m leaving. I’m divorcing you, and I’m gonna marry Lily, and I’m taking her home to the States with me.’
I have to blink a few times. Because for a moment – and it’s the weirdest thing – I just want to cry. I know he doesn’t love me, and I don’t love him either. He’s a shit. A total shit and a hypocrite. Why should I care what he does?
‘Oh, I get it,’ I say furiously. ‘They promised you something, didn’t they? Like a no-hassles green card for your girlfriend.’
Suit #2 slaps the table. ‘This is a waste of time.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Suit #1 says calmly. ‘We just need to get things back on track. I’m sure that Mrs Cooper wants to help, and maybe we can help her with a few things.’ He turns to me. ‘You’re receiving, what is it, a seventeen-percent disability?’
I don’t bother to ask him how he knows that.
‘Seems a little low.’
‘That’s what they rated me,’ I say.
‘Those leg injuries looked pretty severe. And I don’t know why they turned you down on the PTSD. Obviously you’ve had significant adjustment problems. Working part-time in some dive bar in China – not exactly what I’d call a career choice.’
I really want to tell him to go fuck himself, but I don’t like being repetitive.
‘Look,’ I say, ‘I met a guy named Hashim, maybe for all of five minutes. The last thing I would have figured him for was a terrorist. He was just an ordinary guy. We said hello, we ate some dumplings, and that’s all I know about him.’
‘And your friend, Zhang, what’s his association? Have you heard him express any anti-American sentiments, or –?’
‘He’s an artist,’ I say with emphasis. ‘He’s not political. This Hashim guy was just a friend of a friend. That’s all.’
‘You’ve never heard him express any political opinions?’
‘No. We don’t talk about that kind of stuff.’
‘What do you talk about?’ Suit #2 interjects.
‘I don’t know … just … stuff. Movies. TV shows. Beijing traffic. He’s not political,’ I repeat. He just likes taking in strays, I want to say. But I don’t say it, because these two already think I’m some kind of psychotic low-life.
‘He’s your lover, right?’ Suit #1 asks casually.
I flinch. I hate that expression, ‘lover.’ Like this is some kind of fucking romance novel. ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business.’
‘I assume you know he sees other women,’ Suit #1 says.
I feel like I’ve been slapped.
‘So?’ I manage.
‘Well, I wasn’t sure how close you two were.’
I don’t say anything.
Suit #1 locks his eyes on mine.
‘I’m sure Zhang is a great guy. But he’s gotten himself involved with some questionable people. You’d be doing him a favor if you helped us with this.’
‘So, what is it you want me to do?’ I finally ask.
‘Are you in touch with him?’
I shrug. ‘No.’
‘But there’s a good chance he’ll contact you, isn’t there?’
‘What if he does? You want me to ask him about the Uighur?’
‘Well, it depends,’ Suit #1 says. ‘On what kind of relationship the two of you have. On the level of trust.’
Suit #2 snorts. ‘If Zhang contacts you, the main thing is, you tell us. If you can find out where he is, that’s a bonus.’
I lean back in my chair, push my fingers through my greasy hair. ‘And what? You’ll get me a Z visa? Up my disability? That’s a promise?’
‘We’ll do what we can for you,’ says Suit #1. ‘The more you help us, the easier it is to make the case. Being a pair of eyes for us in places like Mati … that could be very helpful.’
I gulp down the rest of my beer and stand up. I turn to Trey. ‘Tell Lily I said hi.’
‘Ellie –’ Trey begins.
Suit #2 stops him. ‘Let her go. She doesn’t want to help, it’s her loss.’
‘Mrs Cooper.’ It’s Suit #1. ‘If you hear anything, anything at all …’ He holds out a business card. ‘Call us. It’s very important.’
I stare at his hand, at the white card, the blue logo with the letters GSC.
Global Security Concepts. The company Trey works for.
I take the card and stick it in my pants pocket. I’m not going to give him the courtesy of reading it.
‘Here,’ Suit #2 says abruptly, thrusting his card at me.
Whatever. I take his too.
Then I leave. No way I’m paying for that lunch.
In the elevator, I lift up my hand to punch the button, and it’s shaking.
CHAPTER FOUR
Outside, the dust has kicked up, filtering the sun through a yellow haze.
I walk down Jianguomen. There’s a Starbucks around here someplace. I could get a cup of coffee. I fixate on that. A cup of coffee. I’ll get a cup of coffee and try to think. But I can’t remember where the fucking Starbucks is, exactly. It’s around here. I keep walking down the street. I just need to get a cup of coffee, and I’ll be able to sort all this out.
Tears run down my face. I’ll just blame the dust. Because the other stuff, I can’t think about that. Trey and his little ho’ girlfriend. Loves Jesus, my ass. The stuff he did … How can he talk about love?
And Lao Zhang. It’s not like I love him. What’s love, right? I thought I loved Trey, and how stupid was that?
But I like him. Lao Zhang’s a good guy. Maybe the Suits are telling the truth; maybe he’s fucking around, but so what? I never asked him not to. All I ever asked was if I could come over, and he always said yes. I think: all the time we’ve spent together, hanging out, it felt … comfortable. Like belonging somewhere. And now …
What’s he gotten himself into?
Then I think: it’s not the Chinese government that’s after Lao Zhang. It’s Global Security Concepts. Trey’s company. Not official. But they might as well be.
I know how those guys work.
How did the Suits find out about Lao Zhang?
I’m slick with sweat, like a fever’s breaking. They’ve been watching me, no matter what they said. They followed me to Mati. To Lao Zhang.
How long have they been watching?
Finally, I spot the familiar green-and-white Starbucks logo.
Inside, the air is perfectly conditioned, and they’re playing their latest retro Brazilian compilation; the baristas are smiling, the espresso machine hisses, and it smells like roasted coffee. They’re advertising Fair Trade beans and selling Starbucks Beijing coffee mugs. There’s a couple of tourists, a student or two, and a few local businessmen with pocket PCs and laptops.
I feel better already.
‘Yi bei benride kafei. Zhong.’
‘Room for cream?’ asks the barista. They all know the English for coffee words.
They give me my coffee of the day, size medium. I put the cup down on an empty table and go into the restroom to wash my face. Under the fluorescent light above the mirror, I can see where my tears have cut through the dust and soot of a Beijing spring day.
I look like shit.
I used to be cute. It wasn’t so weird that Trey wanted me, back in the day. I used to be fresh-faced and smooth and round. Nice tits. Good hair. Standard American Attractiveness Template.
Now? I have circles under my eyes, black ones, as dark as the Uighur’s. Crow’s-feet. Lines running down from my nose to my mouth, deep as slashes. Blemishes and brown spots on my face from the sun. I’m seven years older. And I’m not sure I’m any wiser than I was.
Fucking Trey. It’s his fault my life’s turned out this way. I was young and dumb, and I would’ve done anything he wanted me to. And he knew that. He knew that, and he crooked his finger at me, and I followed him.
Then I think: but you went. You didn’t have to. You should’ve known better.
But there’s nothing I can do about any of that now.
I wash my hands, my face. Go out and sit at my table. Sip my coffee and try to think.
They watch Mati Village, Suit #1 said. Who’s watching? Someone I know? One of the artists? A waitress at the jiaozi place?
I should call Lao Zhang, let him know these guys are looking for him. I get out my phone, and then I hesitate. The Suits never asked me for his phone number. I sip my coffee and think, they must have it already. And I think: how is that? I stare at my phone and wonder. They probably know my number. Fucking Trey probably gave it to them. Can they tap these things?
How did they find me earlier at Matrix Arcade? They didn’t follow me from Chuckie’s apartment, did they? So how did they find me?
Cell phones all have GPS built in. You can find people with GPS – that’s what it’s for, right?
I switch off my phone. This is crazy. They can’t just do that, can they?
I laugh in spite of myself. Yeah, right. They can do whatever they want to do.
Besides, this is China.
I stare at the iPhone. It was a gift from Trey two years ago: top of the line then, out of date now. He bought it in Hong Kong, unlocked, which is technically illegal, but everyone does it here because you couldn’t get iPhones legally in China until last year, and the legal ones cost a fortune.
How does this stuff work? If my phone is off, does that mean they can’t find me?
I almost get up and throw my iPhone in the trash. I want to hurl it across the room. It’s hard for me to stop myself, but the phone was expensive, and it’s got all my numbers and photos and tunes on it.
I think: it’s off. They can’t find me if it’s off.
Right about then a couple of students come in, two guys, Americans or Europeans. I can tell they’re students by the backpacks, the counterfeit North Face jackets, the perfectly broken-in T-shirts, the vaguely ethnic bead necklaces.
I think for a minute while they get in line. Then I stand up and say, ‘Duibuqi.’ Excuse me.
The two guys look at me. ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Do you speak English?’
‘Sure,’ one of them says. He’s wearing a Bob Marley shirt and a crocheted cap.
‘Great,’ I say quickly, ‘because I’m kind of in a bind. I really need to make a call and my phone died.’ I hold up my switched-off iPhone, which I figure looks pretty convincingly dead. ‘Do either of you have a phone? I’ll buy your coffee if I can make a quick call.’
‘You can use mine, no big,’ says the second guy, the one in the Bruce Lee shirt. ‘So long as you aren’t calling Mongolia or something.’
‘Nah, just Kazakhstan,’ I joke back.
The kid hands me his phone (a new iPhone, way cooler than mine). I quickly punch in Lao Zhang’s number.
‘Wei, ni hao.’ I talk in a low voice, as fast as I can. I’m hoping these guys are beginning Chinese students and won’t be able to understand me if I Beijing it up. ‘It’s me, Yili. I met two foreigners today,’ I continue in Chinese. ‘Americans. They asked a lot of questions about you.’
Then I’m not sure what to say.
‘Take care,’ I finally add. ‘Be careful.’
I hit the red button and hand the phone back.
‘Your accent is really good,’ Bob Marley T-shirt guy says.
They’re students, like I thought, just finishing their first semester at Beijing Language and Culture University. Mark and Jayson. ‘How long you been here?’ they want to know. ‘Where did you study Chinese?’ Before I know it, they’ve invited me to their dorm for a party tonight. What the hell, I think. Maybe I’ll go. It’s close to home, and I don’t know what else I’m going to do with myself.
We say our ‘nice meeting you’s’ and ‘later, dude’s,’ and I exit onto Jianguomen Road, heading toward the subway station. Maybe I’ll go to the Ancient Observatory. Climb up to the flat roof, pretend I can’t see the gaudy high-rises and ugly apart-ment blocks, and try to imagine what it was like when the Ancient Observatory was the tallest building around, looking out over a sea of peaked gray tile roofs. When you’d hear donkey bells and peddlers’ cries instead of car horns and screeching brakes.
I try to imagine it, but I can’t.
Jayson and Bob Marley T-Shirt guy’s party is pretty standard for a party in a foreign students’ dorm: loud music, tubs of Yanjing beer, people spilling out of one room into the hall and flowing into another. I catch the scent of hash, no doubt supplied by the local Kazak dealers, and over the din of the music make out English, Korean, German, and attempts at Chinese. I see a few people here close to my age, grad-student types, and I tell myself I don’t look that out of place.
I’m bored the moment I arrive.
I grab a beer, open it, find a clear space along the wall, and lean against it, wondering if I could find some of that hash I’m smelling. Kids bump past me, laughing, stumbling. I don’t even see Jayson or Marley T-shirt guy.
This is stupid, I think. Why did I come? No one’s going to talk to me, and I don’t feel like talking to anyone. It’s like there are these black waves rolling out from me, warning everybody off. Stay away. Don’t fucking talk to me.
‘Hello!’
I look up. Standing in front of me is a Chinese guy, thirtyish, wearing a cheap leather jacket and a faded Beijing Olympics T-shirt, the one with the slogan ‘One World, One Dream.’
‘So sorry to bother,’ he continues. ‘You are American, right?’
‘No. I’m Icelandic.’
‘Ice … ?’ he stammers.
For whatever reason, I suddenly feel sorry for the guy. He’s not bad-looking; he’s got that near-babyfaced handsomeness like Chow Yun Fat did when he was young, but he also has a slight stutter and this sort of clueless vibe, like he doesn’t know what to make of me messing with him.
‘Yes, I’m an American,’ I allow. ‘And you’re … Chinese, maybe?’
He grins broadly, revealing slightly crooked but very clean teeth. ‘Why do you say that?’ he replies, joking back. Maybe he’s not so clueless.
‘Just guessing.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, Chinese. I am even a Beijing native.’
I snort. Everyone claims to be a native Beijinger. ‘Right. And you were probably born just next to the Temple of Heaven.’
He gives me his squinty-eyed, puzzled look again. ‘No. Close to Da Zhong Si. You know Da Zhong Si? That Great Bell Temple?’
‘Heard of it,’ I say noncommittally. I’ve been there before, actually. It’s no longer an active temple, but instead a bell museum, with bells from all around China and the entire world. Cool place, if you’re into bells.
‘That Great Bell was once biggest in the world,’ the guy says, seeming enthused about playing Beijing tour guide. ‘But now no longer. Now is Zhonghua Shiji Tan. Century Altar.’ He speaks English carefully, laying peculiar stress on the first syllables of the words. ‘Made in 1999, for the, the … the new …’
‘Millennium?’ I guess.
‘Yes,’ he says eagerly. ‘Yes, millennium.’
He extends his hand. ‘I am John.’
I can feel the tendons and muscles as his hand lightly closes around mine. He gives my hand a quick, awkward shake and lets go.
‘Yili,’ I reply.
John beams. ‘Oh, I think you speak Chinese. Am I right? Are you a student here, Yili?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘This is my, my … alma mater. I still come back at times. I enjoy to meet foreign students. So that I can practice. My English.’
‘Your English is very good,’ I say, because it’s what you’re supposed to say, and I’m sure his English is better than my Chinese.
‘No, no, my English is very poor.’ He stares at me for a moment. There’s not a lot of light in the hall, and it’s hard for me to make out his expression.
Then he blinks and ducks his head. ‘Yili, can I fetch you another beer?’
I should say no. I should leave, go back to the apartment. Spend some time thinking about what I’m going to do with my life after Trey divorces me and leaves the country and my visa runs out.
I should think about going home.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’
Like I want to think about any of that.
In no time at all, John has returned with two cold Yanjings. He hands one to me with a small flourish, then holds up his bottle.
‘Ganbei,’ he says with a grin. Drink it dry.
We clink bottles and drink.
‘So, Yili, are you married? Do you have children?’
I try not to roll my eyes. Just about every Chinese person I meet asks me these questions.
‘Aren’t you gonna ask how old I am?’ I reply, as this is the inevitable third question in the ‘Way Too Personal’ trifecta.
John waves a hand. ‘Oh, no. I can see you are still very young. Maybe … not thirty?’
Actually, I’m twenty-six. ‘Just about.’
‘But no husband or children?’
‘No kids. Yes on the husband. But we’re separated.’
John shakes his head sadly. ‘This is the nature of the modern times, I think. The family life always suffers.’
‘Are you married, John?’
‘Me?’ For a moment, John looks uncomfortable. ‘No.’
‘Are your parents upset?’
Because if there’s one thing a Chinese son is supposed to do, it’s get married and have kids.
‘I just tell them to have patience,’ John says dismissively. ‘I am still the young man. I have … I have … benchmarks.’
‘Benchmarks?’
‘Of accomplishment. Before I am to have children. I have not achieved these yet, but I achieve them soon, I think.’
‘Oh,’ I say, and wipe my forehead. I’m already feeling a little buzzed. Not surprising, considering all I’ve had to eat today is a couple bites of spaghetti.
‘You see, it is hard if you are a young man in China and you are not rich,’ John continues, warming to his topic. ‘Because the Chinese women, they want a successful man. And they can choose who they want, because we have more men than women.’
He leans in closer to me. ‘Some Chinese women, they have second husband. Do you understand my meaning?’
‘Ummm …’ I think about it. Take another swallow of beer. ‘More than one?’
‘Not real husband,’ John confides. ‘More like … boyfriend. But these women, they have money. So they take care of boyfriend. Like concubine. You know that word?’
‘Sure,’ I say, finishing my beer. ‘My husband has one of those.’
‘Oh.’ I can see comprehension slowly dawning. ‘Your husband … he has …’ And here John ducks his head and sneaks a little grin. ‘The yellow fever, perhaps.’
‘Yeah, he’s fucking a Chinese girl,’ I snap, my knuckles whitening around the beer bottle, ‘if that’s what you want to know.’
John flushes red. ‘I am sorry. I just … I just made a bad joke. Please forgive me.’
His face is so open, so kind, that for a moment I’m flooded with guilt. And something else. Warmth, I guess. Just from having somebody be nice to me.
How pathetic is that?
I let out a big sigh. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath.
‘That’s okay.’
The weird thing is, suddenly it is okay. It’s been over between me and Trey for a long time. And considering what it is that held us together, the thing we really shared, maybe I should start being glad that it’s over.
Starting right now.
‘I’m sorry too, John. It’s just that I’ve had a rough –’ A giggle starts bubbling up from my throat. ‘A rough six years or so,’ I manage.
I want to laugh, and keep laughing, and never stop.
John grins back. ‘Yili, would you like another beer?’
Maybe I shouldn’t, because I pounded this one, and I’m already kind of loaded. But it feels good. I feel lighter somehow.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’
I lean against the wall and close my eyes. What would it be like, really being free from Trey? Just not caring about him any more. Not ever seeing him again or having anything to do with him, and not having that feel like some hole in the place where my soul is supposed to be, like the part of me that’s able to care about somebody else has gone missing.
Not ever thinking about those times again.
You’ll always think about those times, I tell myself. Always. But maybe, maybe you can think about those times and, from now on, they won’t hurt you so much. Those times, they’ll just be things that happened in the past, and that’s all.
‘Yili?’
I open my eyes. Here’s John standing in front of me, holding two bottles of beer. He’s actually pretty handsome, not really baby-faced; he has a strong jaw, bright eyes, light stubble on his chin. And he’s taller than I am. Solid, with some muscle. I think I can see the outline of his chest beneath the T-shirt.
One World, One Dream.
‘Do you feel okay?’
‘Sure. I’m just a little tired.’
John hands me a beer, already opened, like the last one. ‘We could go sit down somewhere,’ he says, ‘if you are tired.’
‘Okay,’ I say. I’m tired of all the noise, anyway.
We make our way outside. ‘I know a good place,’ John says. I stifle a giggle. Does he want to make out or something? I might be up for that. It might be fun, messing around a little. He’s cute, I’ve decided. I take another swallow of beer.
It’s a nice night. I’m warm enough with just my light jacket. John leads me down a bricked path that leads to a garden of sorts. I’ve been here before. There’s a fountain and a marble wall inscribed with calligraphy, the grooves highlighted by gold paint. Some fucking proverb about wisdom and self-cultivation, probably.
We sit on the stone bench by the fountain. I can hear the music from the party, but it’s so faint that I feel like I could almost be imagining it, making up music from the gurgle and flow of the fountain’s water.
‘This where you used to take girls?’
John grins slyly. ‘Sometimes.’ He takes a pull of his beer and leans toward me a little. ‘Do you have a boyfriend, Yili?’
‘Maybe. Sort of. I don’t know.’
‘What does that mean?’ John sounds curious. Like he honestly wants to understand.
I have to really think about it for a minute. I look up, through the haze of dust and city lights. Haloes surround the streetlights, the stars. It’s all so beautiful, in an ugly kind of way.
‘He’s a good guy,’ I finally say. ‘A really good guy. I like him. And I know he likes me. He’s nice.’
Then I can’t help it: I start laughing. ‘That sounds really lame.’
‘No, Yili, it doesn’t sound … lame.’ John has to work a little to get that last word out, like it sticks somewhere on the middle of his tongue. ‘But you say you don’t know about him.’
‘I mean, I don’t know …’
My head feels funny. The sound of the fountain thrums in my ears, or maybe it’s the music. I swallow some more beer. It goes down like it’s something alien, cold and coppery. ‘What he wants from me. I mean … we spend a lot of time together. But I’m not sure why.’
‘You think he wants you to do something for him?’
‘No. No, I …’ I squeeze my eyes shut. Everything feels funny. My eyes are too big; they’re sticking out, and I need to cover them up. ‘He’s nice,’ I repeat. ‘Maybe he just feels sorry for me.’
‘Yili?’ John says. ‘Yili?’
It’s too loud. I put my hands over my ears. ‘I feel kind of weird,’ I manage.
‘Are you ill?’ John asks anxiously. ‘Should we go to the doctor?’
‘No. No … I just …’ There’s a beer bottle in my hand. I’m holding it. It’s solid and cold, and I can feel the damp from the condensation. Like, the beer that’s inside the bottle wants to get out, and it’s squeezing through tiny holes in the glass. I take another sip. Free the beer!
‘Feel weird.’
‘I think maybe you should go home, Yili.’ He holds out his hand. ‘Come. I’ll take you.’
I stare at him. His eyes are bright, sparkling almost, even in the dark. I stare at his hand. It looks too big.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ I say.
‘Here.’ His hand reaches down. Finds mine. Closes over it, dry and hot, like some trespasser from the desert.
‘Stand up,’ he says.
I do what he tells me to. I don’t even think to argue about it. I stand up, and my bad leg buckles, and I pitch forward.
John catches me. I see his face as I fall; he looks surprised and almost embarrassed.
‘Sorry,’ I mumble. ‘My leg’s messed up.’
‘I’ll help you,’ John says. ‘Here, I take your arm.’
He has me drape my arm around his shoulders, and he threads his arm across my back and under my armpit. He won’t quite look at me, I notice. That’s funny, I think. Why should he be embarrassed? I’m the one who’s somehow gotten so fucked up that I can’t walk.
How’d that happen, I wonder?
It finally occurs to me, as we mutually stagger down the path that leads out of the garden and into the campus proper, that I’ve been dosed with something.
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Wait. I don’t wanna go with you.’
‘What, Yili?’
‘Let me go,’ I say. ‘Let me go. I just wanna … Let go of me.’
‘Yili, I think maybe you are a little sick,’ John says, sounding very sympathetic. ‘I help you to get home. That is all. You don’t need to worry about me.’
I don’t believe him. I try to pull away. The arm encircling me holds me tighter against him. We stumble down the walkway, through the quad of dormitories, past the take-out window of the Xinjiang restaurant where students line up for lamb skewers and sesame bread.
I should yell. I should scream. I should kick him in the nuts and run. But I don’t. I can’t. We keep walking, his fingers pressing hard against my ribs, until we’ve reached the campus gate, where teenage security guards in stiff gray polyester jackets stand nominal sentry.
‘Come on, Yili,’ John says. ‘This way.’
A shiny silver car waits for us on the other side.
CHAPTER FIVE
I picture the finger-shaped bruises John’s hand is making on my ribcage as he guides me toward the silver car. There’s a guy leaning against it, smoking a cigarette. John gestures angrily at him. ‘Off my car!’ he snaps.
‘Fuck your mother,’ the guy mutters. But he lifts himself off the car, takes one last drag on his cigarette, and flicks it into the gutter before ambling away.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Wait.’
‘Now, Ellie, you don’t want to talk to that guy,’ John chides me. ‘He is just some rascal.’
‘It’s all a show,’ I say, ‘isn’t it? That guy drove the car here.’
John does his best puzzled squint, but I’m not buying it any more. ‘Of course not. He is just some local rascal.’
‘But there’s no parking here,’ I say, and I’m feeling like this is maybe the most brilliant thing I’ve ever said.
John laughs as he opens the passenger door. ‘Oh, Yili! You are very funny. Now, get into the car.’
I don’t want to get in. I plant my feet, but I’m really messed up, and my leg isn’t that stable anyway, and John somehow knocks me off balance, and I fall across the seats, hitting my cheek against the gear-shift, and John swings my legs into the car and slams the door.
The car has an open moonroof. I stare up, trying to see through the haze to the stars.
The driver’s door opens, and John gets in, putting the keys in the ignition before his butt hits the seat. My head’s touching his thigh as the car pulls away from the curb.
‘Where’re we going?’ I mumble. My mouth feels like it’s full of stones.
‘I told you, Yili. To your home.’
I can’t even sit up. I just lie there, head pressed against John’s thigh, feeling his muscles bunch and relax as he brakes and accelerates. Streetlights pass over us.
I don’t know how long we drive.
Finally, it seems, we get somewhere. John rolls down his window, mutters something to another teenage security guard in a gray polyester jacket, I don’t hear what. I stare up through the moonroof. I can see the tops of tall buildings, satellite dishes, a square of sky. But no stars.
‘Here we are, Yili.’
He gets out and opens the passenger door. I lie there. I don’t think I can move. John’s face looms over me. ‘Oh, Yili,’ he says. ‘I think maybe you are very sick.’
‘I … I …’
‘Here. Take my hand.’
I try, feebly grasping at it like my fingers have gone boneless; they’re just these white worms, jellyfish fingers, waving around in a black sea.
John scoops me up, hands placed beneath my shoulder blades and butt, lifting me out of the car. My feet touch the ground but don’t want to stay there.
‘Here,’ John says. ‘I carry you.’
And he does. My arms circle around his neck, because they don’t know what else to do.
I rest my cheek against John’s leather jacket and close my eyes, lost in the rock and sway of his steps as he carries me along like I’m some little kid in her daddy’s arms. I catch his scent beneath the smell of cheap, tanned leather: sweat mixed with some bad cologne. I like the sweat better.
‘Yili,’ John says, his breath warm in my ear. ‘What is your apartment number?’
‘What?’
‘Your apartment number. What is it?’
I open my eyes, and it’s the weirdest thing: my apartment building looms above us.
Wait, I think. Wait. He doesn’t know my apartment number, but he knows where I live. That doesn’t make sense. How does he know where I live?
‘You told me this, Yili. At the party. Don’t you remember?’
Did I just say that out loud? I guess I did.
‘Twenty-one oh-five,’ I slur.
I just want to lie down.
I just want to go home.
We take the elevator upstairs. It’s empty, the tall stool where the fuwuyuan sits when she’s on duty unoccupied. I stare at it, the empty stool surrounded by mirror tile, fake wood paneling and fluorescent light, and try to conjure up some meaning to it, but I can’t.
Here we are in the foyer.
As John fumbles at my door (Does he have my keys? Did I give them to him?), I see a sharp beam of white light, and fucking Mrs Hua pokes her head out from her apartment.
‘What sort of things are going on now?’ she hisses. ‘This is really more than anyone should bear!’
John turns his head in her direction. ‘Your business ends at your eaves, old Auntie.’ The way he says it, so cold and matter-of-fact, would scare me – that is, if I could feel afraid right now.
Mrs Hua can. She pulls back behind her door. ‘Show some respect,’ she mutters as she slams it shut and locks it with both chain and bar.
John carries me inside.
He steps carefully through the maze of computer parts, the cardboard Yao Ming, the piles of clothes and books in the near-dark, the only light in the room what’s leaking in through the windows from a Beijing sky that’s never really dark any more.
‘Which room, Yili?’
Now, suddenly, I do get scared. ‘Chuckie?’ I say. But my voice is weak, weak like in a dream where you can’t cry out, where you can’t make anyone hear you. ‘Chuckie?’ I try again.
‘No one is here,’ John tells me. ‘Besides, you shouldn’t worry.’
He takes me into my room and lays me down on my futon. He doesn’t turn on the light, but the nightlight by the door has come on.
For a moment, he stands over me. His face is in shadow, but he’s staring at me, I can tell.
‘I am going to make you more comfortable,’ he says softly.
He kneels down by the futon. First he takes off my sneakers and socks, balling up the socks and putting them in the shoes, placing the shoes in the closet, lined up neatly.
Then he hesitates before reaching for the top button of my jeans.
‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘Don’t.’
‘Now, Yili, you cannot be comfortable in these.’
I can’t stop him. I can barely move. He unbuttons my jeans, lifts me up, and slides them over my butt and then off. He folds them up, looks around, and then puts the jeans on the room’s one chair.
He kneels down next to me again. His eyes fall on my bad leg, and he reaches out and lightly touches a place where two long scars cross, then the hollow from the chunk of missing muscle. ‘Oh,’ he says, in a curious voice. ‘You were badly hurt, I think.’
I bite my lip and nod. Tears stream from my eyes, and I can’t control that either.
He gives my leg a final, gentle pat. Then he reaches under my back, beneath my shirt, and unhooks my bra. He rocks back on his heels. ‘Yili, I have to take this off too,’ he says, with a trace of apology. Then he peels my shirt up and over my head. For a moment, the shirt catches on my chin, collapses on my face like a death-mask, and as I breathe in, the cotton sealing my nostrils, I think maybe it will suffocate me, and that’s what John wants to do to me. But no. He frees the shirt from my head. Turns it right side out, folds it, and lays it neatly on top of my jeans on the chair.
He turns back to me, smiling awkwardly. He pulls one bra strap down along my arm until it clears my hand. Then the other. He holds my bra in his hand, and for a moment he stares at my tits. Then he looks away and drapes the bra over the back of the chair.
I’m lying there naked except for my panties. I’m shaking. The room seems to vibrate.
John’s back is to me. He’s rummaging through the little dresser next to my closet. ‘Ah,’ he says, satisfied. ‘This is good.’
He has in his hands a large T-shirt. ‘I think maybe this will be comfortable for you.’
He puts it over my head, lifts me up a little, and I can feel the dry heat radiating from his hand pressed flat between my shoulder-blades.
After he gets the T-shirt on me, he finds the light blanket I use most warm spring nights and covers me with it.
‘Just a minute,’ he says, and leaves.
I lie there. The room is still vibrating, but not so quickly.
When John returns, he carries a glass of water and something wrapped in a dishcloth. He sits cross-legged by my head. ‘Here, Yili,’ he says. ‘Have some water.’
‘I don’t … You put something in it.’
‘Don’t be silly. You are sick. You need some water.’
He tilts up my head so I won’t choke and pours a little water between my lips. I swallow. He pours some more. It tastes good. Like nectar. Like something I need.
‘There. You see?’
When I finish, he smoothes the hair from my forehead. ‘I have some ice,’ he says, holding up the dishcloth. ‘Your face, it’s bruised. I think maybe when I help you in the car, I’m too careless.’ He puts the dishcloth against my cheek. ‘I’m sorry about this, Yili.’
I feel the cold seep through the cloth to my cheek, soaking into my skull and spreading through my head. Everything slows down.
‘That’s okay,’ I say.
John sits there quietly, holding the ice against my cheek.
‘Why you come to China, Yili?’ he finally asks.
I chuckle. ‘Trey. He got a job. I came with him.’
‘What kind of work does he do?’
‘Security consultant. For a big corporation.’ I laugh again. ‘Kind of like a really well-paid bodyguard.’
‘Really?’
‘Kind of.’ Of course, it’s more than that, really. Trey assesses threats. Looks for holes. Keeps people safe.
‘I see.’
I must have spoken out loud again, without meaning to.
‘And this pays well?’
‘It pays okay.’
John brushes a stray hunk of my hair off my face.
‘So, Trey, he does not work for American government.’
‘Big corporation.’ I laugh. ‘What’s the difference?’
John nods sagely. ‘You know, here in China, PLA, Peoples’ Liberation Army, owns many businesses. They hide this better now than before, but still it is this way. So maybe this is somewhat the same as America.’
This irritates me, and I’m not sure why. ‘It’s the other way around in America,’ I tell him. ‘Companies own the Army. They send us where they want us to go. To do their shit for them. So they can get rich.’
‘Ah. I see. So you are in the Army, Yili?’
‘I don’t wanna talk about it.’
‘Why not? It can be good to talk, I think.’
‘No. It’s not.’
But I can see it. That’s the thing. I can fucking see it. I don’t want to. I don’t want to see this shit any more. ‘Oh god,’ I say. ‘Oh, Jesus. Where the fuck were you? You fucking liar.’
John strokes my face, my hair. ‘Yili, I am sorry. I don’t want to upset you.’
I’m crying again. ‘Fuck you,’ I say. ‘You’re just another liar.’
He says nothing.
After a while, he gets up and leaves the room, closing the door behind him.
I lie there. I’m floating. I’m swaddled in clouds. I can’t move.
‘John?’ I call out. ‘John?’
He doesn’t come. I’m alone.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to. I hate myself. I want to die.’
‘Yili, why do you talk like that?’
‘John?’
Where did he come from? He crouches down next to me. Takes my hand. ‘Have some water.’
I drink. I drink like it’s somehow going to save my life. Like it will replenish everything I’ve lost.
I’m pretty fucked up right now.
John sighs. ‘This boyfriend of yours. I don’t understand. Why doesn’t he take better care of you?’
‘He’s busy.’
‘But this is not right,’ John states. ‘If you are together with him, he should take care of you. This is only proper.’
I stare up at the ceiling. Kaleidoscope patterns fold and unfold on the peeling beige paint. Like flowers in one of those sped-up nature movies.
‘I guess he’s not really my boyfriend,’ I say after a while. ‘I guess we’re just friends, that’s all.’
‘But friends take care of each other too,’ John says gravely. ‘Maybe this fellow, maybe he isn’t really your friend.’
‘He is,’ I insist. ‘He is.’
‘But he left you.’
‘He had to.’
‘Why?’
‘Because …’ I squeeze my eyes shut. Then I open them, because little armies keep marching across my eyelids, and I don’t want them there. ‘Because he had to.’
John sighs. ‘Yili, why are you so sure that this man is good guy? What do you really know about him?’
For a moment, I can’t think of anything at all. I stare at the ceiling. The peeling paint curls and uncurls.
‘Maybe he is okay guy like you say,’ John continues. ‘But maybe now he is mixed up in something that is bad.’
I turn my head to look at him. John stares at me intently, his eyes shining.
And it doesn’t matter how fucked up I am, how much bad shit I’m seeing in my head, and how scared I was before. I know exactly what this is about. He can’t hide it from me any more.
‘This is about the Uighur guy, right? You know what, John? You’re an asshole. You could’ve just asked me. You didn’t have to do all this. You didn’t have to …’
I can’t finish. I’m feeling this sob coming up from my gut, choking me. I want to scream; I want to hit something; I want to run and run and never stop. But I still can’t move. I lie there crying like a fucking five-year-old, and I hate myself for it.
John’s eyes widen, look away then look back, like he isn’t sure what to do now. ‘Yili, I –’
‘Shut the fuck up. I don’t care any more. I really don’t.’
I manage to lift my hand up to wipe my face. ‘You could have just asked me,’ I repeat. ‘And I would have told you. I don’t know anything. Nothing.’
Silently, John takes the damp dishcloth that held the ice and dabs my face with it, cleans off the tears and the snot.
‘Lao Zhang’s an artist. He’s got a lot of friends. People crash with him all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.’
I can’t keep my eyes open any more. I feel like everything’s dissolving into foam. ‘Just leave me alone,’ I mumble.
‘Okay, Yili,’ I hear John say from far away. ‘I let you sleep now. You’ll feel better when you wake up.’
Right, I think. Right. I’ll feel better.
CHAPTER SIX
What I remember most, from that first day in the sandbox, is how fucking hot it was, and how I was so thirsty because there wasn’t enough bottled water, and the donkey.
I was looking out the window of the Humvee, trying to make out the landscape through three inches of dirty glass, and it was almost like being under water. I saw desert: flat, endless scrub, different shades of dirt, an occasional clump of cinderblock buildings that blended into the gray dust.
We ground to a stop at the outskirts of some little town – just a crossroads and a couple of telephone poles stuck between mud-brick houses and a few painted cement storefronts. A truck was broken down in front of us.
Across from me, tied to one of those poles, was a donkey hooked up to a cart. Flanks crisscrossed by whip scars, ribs sticking out, head hanging down, like it’d had a lifetime of getting the shit kicked out of it.
‘Heard Hajji’s rigging donkey carts with explosives,’ the soldier next to me said.
I must have looked scared. I was scared. I’d joined the National Guard, not the fucking Marines. I was nineteen years old. I’d enlisted in the Guard after high school and trained as a medic. I thought I’d learn a skill, get some money for college. I didn’t think I’d be doing this.
‘Hey, it’s just a rumor.’ He gave me an awkward pat and stared out the window. A little gaggle of kids hung out by the block wall surrounding one of the houses, laughing, shoving, daring each other to approach us. A couple of them waved. Behind them I saw two women, dressed head to toe in black abayas, looking like some kind of flightless crows.
‘Most of these people are glad we’re here,’ the soldier told me. ‘You’ll see.’
I start to wake up, and I don’t know where I am. Behind my eyes, everything’s bright and yellow, and I’m filled with dread, because I don’t want to be there again, in that place.
Except … except … I miss it too.
I open my eyes. I can’t get oriented. The direction of my bed doesn’t make any sense, the wall is on the wrong side of the room, my head’s facing the wrong way, like I’m sleeping in the Bizarro universe. Then everything shifts into position, to where it belongs. I’m not over there. I’m lying on my futon in my little room in Chuckie’s apartment off Wudaokou Dajie.
I lie there for a minute, rubbing my face, which feels kind of numb. My eyes feel swollen. I close them. Start sinking back into sleep.
I feel my heart thudding too fast in my chest before I actually remember what happened last night.
Was it really last night? Did that really happen? I have this sudden flash of myself lying in bed, John taking off my bra. I shudder. I think I’m going to throw up.
I struggle to stand up, rising first to my knees, grasping the back of the chair. My limbs feel like they’re filled with sand.
As I brace myself against the chair and stagger to my feet, I see my jeans folded neatly on the seat, my shirt resting on top of that, my bra draped across the shirt like it’s some kind of post-modern window display.
The bra was on the chair back, I think dimly. That’s where John put it last night. He must have moved it.
I stumble into the bathroom, thinking I’m going to puke. But I don’t. Instead, I splash some water on my face. Stare at myself in the mirror. My eyes look huge. Everything still glows around the edges.
What the fuck did he give me?
Okay, I think, okay. Whatever that was all about, he’s gone, I’m here, and I’m okay now.
As I come out of the bathroom, I hear a lot of noise coming from Chuckie’s bedroom.
For a minute I just stand there, my heart pounding in my throat. I’m thinking, what if John’s still here?
But then I hear a crash that sounds like falling books, and Chuckie curses.
Okay.
I go back to my room and put on my pants – not the ones on the chair: I don’t want to touch that pile of clothes just yet. I wander out into the kitchen. Slanting yellow light comes in through the window. It’s past two in the afternoon.
I pour myself some water from the fridge. And notice something weird: all the dirty dishes have been washed and are sitting neatly in the dish rack.
Not Chuckie, I think. In general, Chuckie doesn’t do dishes. He lives on takeout. So do I. That’s about two week’s worth of dishes from both of us in that rack.
I shudder again and leave the kitchen.
Here’s Chuckie coming out of his room, carrying an armload of clothes and a duffel bag.
He sees me and jerks back like he’s stuck his finger in a light socket. Then he looks away.
‘What’s up?’ I ask.
‘Going home to see the family,’ he mutters.
‘Oh, yeah?’
Chuckie can’t stand his family. At least that’s what he always says to me. ‘They are just idiots,’ he complains. ‘Hopeless.’ And they live in Bumfuck Shanxi – nowhere Chuckie wants to hang.
‘For a little while. My mother says she wants me to come.’
I see his face. Pale. Scared.
‘You okay?’ I ask.
His eyes dart around like he’s being buzzed by gnats and can’t figure out where they’re coming from. He shakes his head, fractionally.
‘You wanna go downstairs, get a cup of coffee?’
He nods.
There’s this DVD store/coffeehouse in the collection of shops that make up the ground floor of the buildings facing Wudaokou Dajie. The coffee isn’t great, but it doesn’t totally suck either. I go there sometimes when there are no beans in the house.
Chuckie and I grab our coffees at the orange countertop and sit at a little round table by the window with a scenic view of the parking lot and the lovely four-lane thoroughfare that is Wudaokou. Taxis and private cars whiz by while knots of pedestrians make their way across the street like avatars in some Nintendo game, risking all to gain the treasure on the other side.
Chuckie rips open two packs of sugar and dumps them in his coffee.
‘So, what happened?’ I finally ask. ‘You get busted at the Matrix, or what?’
‘Or what,’ Chuckie says eventually.
I’m confused by this until I realize that he’s attempting to play with the language. ‘You got busted by somebody else?’
Chuckie doesn’t exactly nod. He stirs his coffee, catching sugar grit between the spoon and the side of the ceramic cup.
‘I am going to go home for a while,’ he says, not looking at me. ‘You should not stay here.’
It’s not his fault; I know it isn’t, but I’m still so angry it’s hard for me to speak. ‘Is this about Lao Zhang, Chuckie? Is it? ’Cause I haven’t done anything wrong. You know that.’
‘Meiguanxi.’ Doesn’t matter.
Neither of us says anything for a while. I stare out the window. Amid the taxis and cars and buses, a donkey cart piled high with bricks makes its way down the street, pausing for a minute so the donkey can crap in the gutter. The guy driving it, a peasant in patched clothes and a battered Mao cap, talks on his cell phone.
Huh. I thought Beijing outlawed donkey carts.
‘They want me to tell them everything about you,’ Chuckie says rapidly. ‘They want to know who your friends are, what you do, where you go. I tell them you, me, we just, we just …’ He trails off. His hands are shaking. ‘We just living, that’s all. Just living.’
Them.
‘Foreigners, in suits?’
‘Foreigners? Why should I worry about foreigners?’ he asks, regaining some of his typical bravado. ‘What can foreigners do to me?’
‘Nothing, I guess,’ I say, hoping this isn’t going to lead into one of Chuckie’s rants about China’s Hundred Years of Humiliation at the hands of foreign imperialists.
If it wasn’t the Suits, who was it?
‘This is China. Chinese people have stood up!’
‘So they were Chinese?’
‘Of course they were Chinese!’
Just like that, he deflates. When it comes down to it, Chuckie’s too much of a fuckup free spirit to make a good foaming-at-the-mouth fenqing.
‘Police, they say,’ he whispers. ‘But no IDs.’
He gets out a couple wrinkled ten-yuan notes and tosses them on the table. ‘My train leaves from West Train station in a couple hours. I better go.’ He looks away. ‘You should be careful, Ellie,’ he says. ‘You should not stay here.’
And that’s our big good-bye. I sit. Drink my coffee. Watch the passing scene outside the window. Wonder what the fuck I’m going to do now.
There’s a surveillance camera in the ceiling above the DVDs, one of those domed things that you see everywhere you go these days. Not just in China, in the U.S. too. For security, right?
I stare at the thing, at its unblinking black eye. Wonder who’s at the other end staring back.
They’re making tapes, I tell myself, to catch shoplifters. It’s not like there’s somebody watching me right now. Is there?
I pay for the coffee and head back upstairs.
Chuckie hasn’t taken a lot with him. The guitar amp, computer parts, books, and Yao Ming stand-up still clutter the living room.
I go into my little room. Stare at my narrow futon. Think I don’t ever want to sleep there again. Like I ever could sleep there without thinking of John, of lying there waiting for him to do whatever he wanted to do.
All of a sudden, I really want to pack up my stuff and get out of here.
I think about the logistics of this. I’ve got some clothes. A couple cheap pieces of furniture. My laptop. I mean, what the fuck do I have, anyway?
I open up the little cupboard by my bed. That’s where I keep my souvenirs. Things I thought I cared about.
Here’s a little Beanie Baby. A neon orange-and-red squid. I always loved that stupid squid. It’s just so funny. It makes me smile when I look at it. I throw it onto a pile of clothes to pack.
There’s a little jewelry box from Trey. I don’t have to open it; I know what’s inside: a gold cross necklace studded with tiny diamonds. He gave it to me a long time ago, right after we were married. I don’t wear it any more. I wonder why I’ve kept it.
I take the rest of the stuff out of the cupboard and dump it on the bed. A funny figurine Lao Zhang gave me, Mao as Buddha. A pennant from some soccer – oh, excuse me – football club called Arsenal from British John.
And here is that flat, hard box covered with dark blue flocking, about the size of a thin paperback. My service ribbons. My Purple Heart. I think: why did I bring this with me all the way to China? I don’t even want to open it. Why does it mean anything at all?
I throw it on top of the clothes. Because I still can’t bring myself to leave it behind.
I walk out of Chuckie’s place with a duffel bag and a backpack. That’s it.
By now, it’s close to five o’clock. I’m supposed to start work at Says Hu in an hour. I stand at the curb for a while, watching the cars and the buses and the people passing by me in this blur of noise – shouting in Chinese, horns going off, phones with their stupid ringtones, a loudspeaker blasting bad Hong Kong pop – and I think: I just want to be someplace quiet for once.
But for now? I might as well go to work.
I spring for a cab to take me the couple of miles to Says Hu, thinking I’ll get there early and have a beer.
The minute I walk inside, I can see that’s not how things are going to go.
British John is trying to pick a table up off the ground. It’s tilted on its side, one leg buckled under like it took a cheap cut block. A broken chair leans against the wall, beneath a dartboard.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Crazy night?’
‘Ellie.’
He crosses quickly to the door and locks it.
I stand there feeling the weight of the duffel bag on my shoulder.
‘Let’s have a drink,’ British John says quickly, grabbing a bottle from the bar.
‘Might as well.’
I pull up a barstool and throw the duffel on the floor and the backpack on top of that. British John pours us both shots of Jack and lifts his in a toast.
I don’t even like Jack Daniels.
‘What are we toasting?’ I ask.
British John shrugs. We clink shot glasses in silence. And drink.
‘So,’ I finally say, ‘you firing me, or what?’
British John shakes his head. ‘Ellie, it’s not like that.’
‘So what’s it like, then? Who came and talked to you? What did they tell you?’
I guess I’m pretty pissed off, because by the time I finish, I’m practically shaking.
‘First I thought they were Chengguan. Just the usual shakedown.’
Urban Management officials. A police force found in every Chinese city, mostly demobbed soldiers and thugs, officially in charge of keeping order on the streets, cracking down on illegal vendors and the like. They like beating on migrants and extorting whatever ‘fines’ they can extract to supplement their crappy salaries.
British John pounds his shot and then pours himself another. I can see the tremor in his hand, and it’s not from the booze. ‘I don’t know who they were. They asked a lot of questions. Gave me a number and told me to call them when you showed up. Told me I’d lose the business if I didn’t cooperate.’
‘I didn’t do anything.’ I hear myself saying it, and I have to admit, I sound like a sullen five-year-old.
‘It has to be something.’ British John sounds really frustrated. ‘Look, I want to help, but you’ve got to tell me what’s going on.’
I shrug helplessly. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s got something to do with Lao Zhang and some Uighur friend of his. But that’s all I know.’
British John tops off our shot glasses. ‘You can’t keep on working here,’ he finally says.
I toss down my drink. ‘Okay. Fine. Whatever.’
‘Ellie.’
I stand up. ‘What?’
British John reaches into the cash register and pulls out a wad of bills. ‘Here,’ he says awkwardly, holding it out.
‘I don’t want it.’
‘Don’t be a fucking stupid cunt.’ He slaps the money on the bar. ‘Take it.’
He has a point. I pick up the cash and shove it in my pocket. ‘Thanks,’ I mumble.
‘Look,’ he finally says, ‘just take it easy for a while. When this all settles down, you can come back.’
At that, I snort. ‘Yeah, right. Like I want to come back to this shitty-ass job.’
I shoulder my backpack and my duffel. British John comes out from behind the bar, wraps his arms around my waist, and hugs me close. ‘Try not to go to extremes,’ he says. ‘’Cause you have a tendency to do that, you know.’
I hug him back. ‘I’ll see you,’ I mutter into his shoulder. And then I turn and leave.
I start walking down the street, past a string of stores selling phones and MP3 players and cameras. I don’t have a clue what to do. I’ve got two sets of spooks on my ass, no job, no place to live, no husband, no boyfriend, and this stupid fucking duffel bag is cutting into my shoulder and making my goddamn leg ache, and I’ve only got nine Percocets left.
Maybe I should just book myself a flight to the States. What’s left for me here in China? Absolutely nothing.
But what do I have back there? My mom, and it’s not like I don’t miss her sometimes. She’d take me in, but how long would that work? Her life’s still bound up in the church. In Sunrise. And that’s pretty much the last place I want to be.
Sunrise, with its fake adobe buildings that make it look like an Indian casino minus the neon, which I guess works for Arizona, where I grew up. The auditorium, where the services are held with coffee and donuts and giant plasma TVs. At the bookstore you can get the latest Christian rock and hip-hop CDs, ‘WWJD?’ bracelets, T-shirts that say ‘Stoned Like Paul’ and ‘Yes, I am a Princess – My Father is the King of Kings!’ You can drop your kids off at the daycare center if you want while you go to an aerobics class. The minister, Reverend Jim, wears Hawaiian shirts and talks about joy and living in Christ and how to reach your professional goals, in a Christ-like way. Reverend Jim is big on reaching your professional goals.
There wasn’t much else to do where I lived, so I went.
Mom started going too, when she wasn’t working. She needed something – something that wasn’t work and wasn’t taking care of me in our shitty little townhouse down the street from the KFC. Christian parenting, Christian singles – all of a sudden she had this whole network supporting her. It was like she’d been falling and falling and had suddenly landed on this big, soft comforter held up by all these new friends, a place where she was finally safe.
How safe would I be in the U.S.? If the Suits are watching me … Would they really leave me alone if I went home?
Sometimes I miss having a weapon. Not my M16. What I want right now is a little M9. A nice reliable pistol. Because really, what’s the point? My life’s been a disaster ever since those times, and nothing’s getting any better. It’s just getting worse.
My steps have slowed down to a near shuffle.
Don’t cry, you stupid bitch, I tell myself. Nobody cares, and it’s not going to do you any good.
About the time I’m ready to stop walking, I find myself in front of a wangba, an Internet bar.
I guess I could check my e-mail before I go kill myself.
The girl behind the counter asks for my passport and then doesn’t want to look at it, telling me to write the information down myself. So I say I’m ‘Faith McConnell’ (my sworn enemy from middle school) and claim to be living in ‘Orange County,’ this suburban development that’s out by the Capital Airport, not the one in California. Being a foreigner, no one’s going to question me about that.
This wangba's okay, not too crazy with smoke and noise – it’s just a long room with rows of computers, a counter up front where you sign in and buy drinks and snacks from a glass-front refrigerator if you want. The décor is mainly beige, with the obligatory ‘New Beijing, Great Olympics’ poster that no one’s bothered to take down and a couple sad-looking potted plants here and there. Chinese and Korean students play games involving swords, explosions, and girls with big tits dressed in chain-mail bikinis; a middle-aged Westerner reads what he can access of The New York Times through the Great Firewall. Lately getting on news sites hasn’t been too much of a problem, but things like Facebook and Twitter and Blogger are blocked.
Like Lao Zhang said, the government doesn’t like it when too many people get together.
When I log in to my Web mail account, I’ve got over two hundred unread e-mails. Most of them are junk. Plus there’s my mom’s obligatory ‘Send this message to Five Angels you know’ e-mail and a couple of dirty jokes from her Christian friends. This is one of those things I’ve never understood. Why are Christians sending me dirty jokes about cowboys and nuns?
I delete all that, and I don’t forward my mom’s e-mail to five angels I know, because I don’t know any, and I’m probably going to hell anyway.
Halfway down the page is an e-mail from Trey.
‘Ellie, please turn on your phone. Call me. I know you’re pissed off, and I get that, but let me know you’re okay. Those are some heavy-duty guys – if you help them, they can help you. But don’t fuck with them. Okay?’
Like he really cares if I’m okay.
My finger hovers over the keyboard. Reply or delete?
I do neither. I go back to my inbox.
Now, here’s something weird.
‘An Invitation To Tea.’ The e-mail is heavy on the HTML, with graphics that look familiar.
‘The Sword of Ill Repute,’ it says on a banner at the top.
I scroll down, past a Flash animation of warriors swinging swords, pectorals bulging or breasts heaving depending on their gender.
‘Cinderfox, the Humble Servant of the Lord of the Boundless, requests the Swordswoman Little Mountain Tiger join him on a quest. We begin with a cup of tea at the Tears of Heaven’s Pass Teahouse. I will be there after four o’clock. I await your response.’
It’s Lao Zhang’s game, the one he’s so addicted to. Chuckie too. I’m Little Mountain Tiger. This is an invite for me to come and play.
I sit there for a moment. I haven’t played this game in ages. In fact, I’ve hardly played it at all. Chuckie and Lao Zhang, they’re serious players, high-level, not likely to pursue a lowly newbie with no points, no spells, no magic sword, and who doesn’t give a shit about it. None of their friends would either.
Lao Zhang’s screen name is Upright Boar of the Western Forest. Chuckie’s is Eloquent Evergreen Monkey.
So who is Cinderfox? And why did he send me this invitation?
Here’s the link to play, outlined in blue. I hesitate.
It’s Lao Zhang’s game.
I click on the link.
CHAPTER SEVEN
My first duty assignment was at one of the biggest forward operating bases in the Triangle. Life on the FOB was okay, in comparison to the alternatives. We had a PX, where you could buy toothpaste and iPods and tampons, a dining hall with a salad bar and a taco station, a little gym, air-conditioning some of the time, Internet connections. I could get a mochaccino in the morning if I wanted, before going out on patrol. That part sucked, though, and there was no getting around it. I was a medic, not some fobbit who never left the base. It was my job to ride along, in case somebody got shot or blown up.
You hear ‘patrol,’ and you’re probably thinking ‘combat’; we’re out there fighting bad guys. It wasn’t like that. I was part of a support company. Most of the time, we delivered supplies, guarded cheesecake for truck convoys run by private contractors like KBR, or escorted public affairs officers to some meeting with the locals.
The heat was like nothing I’ve ever felt before, like the sun and the wind were cooking me down to my bones, drying me out from the inside, and no amount of water was going to keep me from shriveling up into some girl-shaped piece of jerky. Everything was coated in greasy dust. I’d blow my nose and my snot would come out like it was just glue to hold the grit and dirt together. We were hacking this shit up all the time, always sweating, leaving stiff white salt stains on our T-shirts. With the women, sometimes you could see our tits outlined in white against the khaki. The guys loved that.
I fucked around a little. Not at first. At first it was like, ‘Let’s see who can freak out the good little Christian girl.’
Things like: ‘Hey, Baby Doc, check it out.’
I was checking my e-mail, and Specialist Turner was sitting at the terminal next to me.
‘What?’
‘Got some pics from home.’
I leaned over to take a look. On his screen, this big dick was pumping in and out of some porn star’s pussy, while another guy straddled her, his cock between her inflated tits, which she was squeezing together like she was playing an accordion.
I looked away. I wanted to say something funny or sarcastic or mean, like I didn’t care, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Aw, come on, don’t be such a bitch,’ Turner said.
I went back to my e-mail. My mom had sent me one about what religion your bra is (‘the Catholic type supports the masses, the Presbyterian type keeps them staunch and upright, and the Baptist makes mountains out of molehills’) that said I should send it on to anyone who would appreciate it.
Turner and I hooked up a couple days later, out by the laundry trailer, where there was a storeroom that was used for supplies. At night, nobody went there. At first, I felt pretty bad about it. Turner was married, had a kid, and I wasn’t supposed to do things like that. But there I was, lying on a pile of dirty sheets, my T-shirt and bra in a heap over bottles of bleach and detergent, my fatigues tangled up around my ankles.
‘It’s TDY, Baby Doc,’ he told me, sliding his finger in and out. ‘TDY doesn’t count.’
TDY means temporary duty assignment. It’s all been TDY since then, you know?
The game takes a long time to load, but it’s an elaborate game, and you never know what the Great Firewall is doing to your Internet connection here on any given day.
Finally, here’s the log-in screen, a vaguely Chinese landscape of misty, cloud-swaddled mountain peaks and pagodas. An animated warrior on horseback gallops across. Then the music comes on – a pseudo-traditional Chinese soundtrack with the mournful erhu and the twanging runs and staccato chords of the pipa, all with a heavy drum and bass backbeat.
It takes me three tries to remember my password, because it’s been a while since I played this game. When I get it right, my avatar, Little Mountain Tiger, pops up, non-magical sword in hand.
The Sword of Ill Repute is based on Chinese myth and legend – the Hong Kong movie versions, anyway. A whole class of characters comes from the twelve birth animals of the Chinese horoscope. Most people play as a variation of the animal from their birth year. So if you’re a Boar, like Lao Zhang, you have certain attributes based on your intrinsic Boar nature, plus others that have to do with the particular year you were born in, your elements, your rising sign, and so on.
I’m actually a Rat, but no matter how many times Lao Zhang told me that the Rat is a good sign –’Smart, clever, not like Boars. Boars too trusting. Too idealistic. Better in this world to be a Rat.’ – I didn’t want to be ‘Little Sewer Rat’ or what have you. ‘Little Mountain Tiger’ is based on the particular year, month, and day of my birthday, which happens to be a Tiger day. So that’s how I play, with faint tiger stripes accenting my cheekbones.
The scene shifts. I’m in an unfamiliar setting, nothing like where I last left off playing. I’m walking up a steep mountain path, animated pebbles crunching under my feet. Crows caw in the pine trees overhead. A warrior steps onto the path, Shao Wu of the Wounded Mountain. An NPC – a non-player character.
‘Halt and state your allegiance!’ says the text in the main chat window. You can play this game in Chinese or English, thanks to Babblefish translators.
I try to walk on by, and the NPC pulls out his sword.
I hit auto-attack. The music turns martial. We fight. I kill him and gain a few experience points. Then I keep walking.
I continue on the path and see, off to the left, a wooden building with a steep pitched roof and a sign whose characters I recognize: Cha Guan.
A teahouse.
I go inside.
More pipa music plinks in the background. Animated figures sit in booths at wooden tables, sip tea, play cards, eat watermelon seeds. A female musician sings a song about lovers who drown themselves in a hidden lake. I’m not sure who’s an avatar and who’s an NPC. It’s not that crowded. I walk slowly through the main room. Characters’ names appear over their heads in shimmering text as I pass. There’s some chatter about going to the market to purchase an Immutable Dagger and starting a quest on behalf of the Emperor for the Sacred Scroll of the Nine Immortals. No one engages me.
So where’s Cinderfox?
Finally, at the back, I see a male figure, hair and beard a dark, deep red, slanted green eyes. He does have a sort of foxy look about him. I approach.
‘Hail,’ I type.
Nothing.
I take a few steps closer.
‘Hail,’ I try again.
His name appears over his russet head: ‘Cinderfox, Son of the Boundless.’
‘Greetings, Little Mountain Tiger. Glad you accept my invitation.’
I sit.
‘Tea?’
‘Thank you.’
After a moment or two, an animated serving girl appears, bearing a tray with a teapot and two cups.
Obviously, Cinderfox has way more pull in this game than I do.
‘Jasmine? Dragon Well? Oolong?’
‘Dragon Well,’ I type.
Of course, the whole thing is ridiculous. I’m going to sit here and drink imaginary tea with a cartoon character?
The serving girl pours. We drink.
‘Dragon Well is good choice,’ Cinderfox types. ‘You gain wisdom and stamina from this.’
I check out my character inventory. My wisdom and stamina have increased by five points each.
‘Why did you invite me?’ I type.
‘I think we should keep our business private. Now that you found me.’
Just like that, a bamboo screen surrounds our little table.
The chat window has changed colors. The banner now reads ‘Private Chat.’
‘I make us anonymous,’ Cinderfox types.
‘Cool.’
‘Have more tea.’
If I had the ability, Little Mountain Tiger would be squirming in her seat about now. I really don’t feel like wasting more time drinking virtual tea, regardless of what it does to my wisdom score.
But I go along with it. This isn’t my game.
‘Okay, Cinderfox,’ I type. ‘What is this quest?’
‘Maybe this up to you.’
‘Don’t know what you mean.’
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Lisa Brackman
An electrifying thriller debut set in modern China, in a world of artists, paranoid revolutionaries and government conspiracies…First she tried to start over. Now she’s just trying to survive.ON HER OWNEllie Cooper’s tour of duty in Iraq left her with a damaged leg, a faithless husband, and a desperate need to get away. In Beijing, she falls for charismatic Chinese artist Lao Zhang but, after the arrival of a mysterious guest, he disappears…ON THE RUNHer cheating husband, Trey, tracks her down to demand a divorce. But far more disturbing are the Chinese and American agents who begin to hound Ellie for Lao Zhang’s whereabouts.AND A LONG WAY FROM HOMEWhen things suddenly turn threatening, Ellie turns fugitive, convinced there’s a hidden agenda – one that involves something she should never have seen in Iraq – something that could get her killed. Now she’s alone, in a country she barely knows, falling down a rabbit hole of conspiracies from which she can’t escape…
Lisa Brackman
Table of Contents
Cover (#u2770dd7c-5511-5c2d-ae10-fd054382f2fa)
Title page (#u16b51334-3884-56cc-b5cf-95e0592a7fe4)
Chapter One (#u8880278c-5cc4-5a4d-b853-b08f14e91089)
Chapter Two (#u93caf774-34f5-53f8-bad7-ac4cb825d0c7)
Chapter Three (#uf70a0e11-a4af-5b06-a11d-123e3da2ee78)
Chapter Four (#udb827776-71ef-52a5-a052-a50d6d5129bd)
Chapter Five (#u30f1ba75-ec69-5ac9-b24c-89ee9ada130b)
Chapter Six (#u698f598f-85dc-5f7d-87c4-c9e38b1e106e)
Chapter Seven (#ufea104c5-f6d3-52aa-8217-0c42d5431c73)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise for Year of the Tiger (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
I’m living in this dump in Haidian Qu, close to Wudaokou, on the twenty-first floor of a decaying high-rise. The grounds are bare; the trees have died; the rubber tiles on the walkways, in their garish pink and yellow, are cracked and curling. The lights have been out in the lobby since I moved in; they never finished the interior walls in the foyers outside the elevator, and the windows are boarded up, so every time I step outside the apartment door I’m in a weird twilight world of bare cement and blue fluorescent light.
The worst thing about the foyer is that I might run into Mrs Hua, who lives next door with her fat spoiled-brat kid. She hates that I’m crashing here, thinks I’m some slutty American who is corrupting China’s morals. She’s always muttering under her breath, threatening to report me to the Public Security Bureau for all kinds of made-up shit. It’s not like I ever did anything to her, and it’s not like I’m doing anything wrong, but the last thing I need is the PSB on my ass.
I’ve got enough problems.
Outside, the afternoon sun filters through a yellow haze. My leg hurts, but I should walk, I tell myself. Get some PT in. The deal I make with myself is, if it gets too bad, I’ll take a Percocet; but I only have about a dozen left, so it has to be really bad before I can take one. Today the pain is just a dull throb, like a toothache in my thigh.
I pass the gas tanks off Chengfu Road, these four-story-high giant globes, and I think: one of these days, some guy will get pissed off at his girlfriend, light a couple sticks of dynamite underneath them (since they don’t have many guns here, the truly pissed-off tend to vent with explosives and rat poison), a few city blocks and a couple thousand people will get incinerated, and everyone will shrug – oh, well, too bad, but this is China, and shit happens. Department store roofs collapse; chemicals poison rivers; miners suffocate in illegal mines. I walk down this one block nearly every day on my way to work, and there are five sex businesses practically next door to each other, ‘teahouses’ and ‘foot massage parlors,’ with girls from the countryside sitting on pink leatherette couches, waiting for some horny migrant worker to come in with enough renminbi to fuck his brains out for a while and forget about the shack he’s living in and the family he’s left behind and the shitty wages he’s earning. Hey, why not?
I still like it here, overall.
I guess.
I’m just in this bad mood lately.
So I call Lao Zhang. That’s what I do these days when I’m feeling sorry for myself.
‘Wei?’ Lao Zhang has a growly voice, like he’s talking himself out of a grunt half the time.
‘It’s me. Yili.’
That’s my Chinese name, Yili. It means ‘progressive ideas’ or something. Mainly it sounds kind of like Ellie.
‘Yili, ni hao.’
He sounds distracted, which isn’t like him. He’s probably working; he almost always is. He’s been painting a lot lately. Before that, he mostly did performance pieces, stuff like stripping naked and painting himself red on top of the Drum Tower or steering a reed boat around the Houhai lakes with a life-size statue of Chairman Mao in the prow.
But usually when I call, he sounds like he’s glad to hear my voice, no matter what he’s doing. Which is one of the reasons I call him when I’m having a bad day.
‘Okay, I guess,’ I answer. ‘I’m not working. Thought I’d see what you were up to.’
‘Ah. The usual,’ he says.
‘Want some company?’
Lao Zhang hesitates.
It’s a little weird. I can’t think of a time when I’ve called that he hasn’t invited me over. Even times when I don’t want to leave my apartment, when I just want to hear a friendly voice, he’ll always try and talk me into coming out; and sometimes when I won’t, he’ll show up at my door a couple hours later with takeout and cold Yanjing beer. He’s that kind of person. He works hard, but he likes hanging out too, as long as you don’t mind him working part of the time. And I don’t. A lot of times I’ll sit on the sagging couch in his studio while he paints, listening to my iPhone, drinking beer, surfing on his computer. I like watching him paint too, the way he moves, relaxed but in control. It feels comfortable, him painting, me sitting there.
‘Sure,’ he finally says. ‘Why don’t you come over?’
‘You sure you’re not too busy?’
‘No, come over. There’s a performance tonight at the Warehouse. Should be fun. Call me when you’re close.’
Maybe I shouldn’t go, I think, as I swipe my yikatong card at the Wudaokou light rail station. Maybe he’s seeing somebody else. It’s not like we’re a couple. Even if it feels like we are one sometimes.
Sure, we hang out. Occasionally fuck. But he could do a lot better than me.
‘Lao’ means ‘old,’ but Lao Zhang’s not really old. He’s maybe thirteen, fourteen years older than I am, around forty. They call him ‘Lao’ Zhang to distinguish him from the other Zhang, who’s barely out of his teens and is therefore ‘Xiao’ Zhang, also an artist at Mati Village, the northern suburb of Beijing where Lao Zhang lives.
Before I came to China, I’d hear ‘suburb’ and think tract homes and Wal-Marts. Well, they have Wal-Marts in Beijing and housing tracts – Western-style, split-level, three bedroom, two bath houses with lawns and everything, surrounded by gates and walls. Places with names like ‘Orange County’ and ‘Yosemite Falls,’ plus my personal favorite, ‘Merlin Champagne Town.’
But Mati Village isn’t like that.
Getting to Mati Village is kind of a pain. It’s out past the 6th Ring Road, and you can’t get all the way there by subway or light rail, even with all the lines they built for the ’08 Olympics. From Haidian, I have to take the light rail and transfer to a bus.
It’s not too crazy a day. The yellow loess dust has been drowning Beijing like some sort of pneumonia in the city’s lungs, typical for spring in spite of all those trees the government’s planted in Inner Mongolia the last dozen years. The dust storms died down last night, but people still aren’t venturing out much. So I score a seat on the bench by the car door, let the train’s rhythms rattle my head. I close my eyes and listen to the recorded announcement of the stations, plus that warning to ‘watch your belongings and prepare well’ if you are planning to exit. All around me, cell phones chime and sing, extra-loud so the people plugged into iPods can still hear them.
The nongmin don’t have iPods. The migrants from the countryside are easy to spot: tanned, burned faces; bulging nylon net bags with faded stripes; patched cast-off clothes; strange, stiff shoes. But it’s the look on their faces that really gives them away. They are so lost. I fit in better here than they do.
Sometimes I want to say to these kids, what are you doing here? You’re going to end up living in a shantytown in a refrigerator box, and for what? So you can pick through junked computer parts for gold and copper wire? Do ‘foot massage’ at some chicken girl joint? Really, you’re better off staying home.
Like I’m one to talk. I didn’t stay home either.
When I’m about fifteen minutes away from Mati, I try to call Lao Zhang, thinking, maybe I’ll see if we can meet at the jiaozi place, because I haven’t had anything to eat today but a leftover slice of bad Mr Pizza for breakfast.
Instead of a dial tone, I get that stupid China Mobile jingle and the message that I’m out of minutes.
Oh, well. It’s not that hard to find Lao Zhang in Mati Village.
First I stop at the jiaozi place. It’s Lao Zhang’s favorite restaurant in Mati. Mine too. The dumplings are excellent, it’s cheap as hell, and I’ve never gotten sick after eating there.
By now it’s after six P.M., and the restaurant is packed. I don’t even know what it’s called, this jiaozi place. It’s pretty typical: a cement block faced with white tile. For some reason, China went through a couple of decades when just about every small public building was covered in white tile, like it’s all a giant bathroom.
The restaurant is a small square room with plastic tables and chairs. There’s a fly-specked Beijing Olympics poster on one wall and a little shrine against another – red paper with gold characters stuck on the wall, a gilded Buddha, some incense sticks, and a couple pieces of dusty plastic fruit on a little table. The place reeks of fried dough, boiled meat, and garlic.
Seeing how this is Mati Village, most of the customers are artists, though you also get a few farmers and some of the local business-owners, like the couple who run the gas station. But mostly it’s people like ‘Sloppy’ Song. Sloppy is a tall woman who looks like she’s constructed out of wires, with thick black hair that trails down her back in a braid with plaits the size of king snakes. Who knows why she’s called ‘Sloppy’? Sometimes Chinese people pick the weirdest English names for themselves. I met this one guy who went by ‘Motor.’ It said something about his essential nature, he told me.
Sloppy’s here tonight, sitting at a table, slurping the juice out of her dumpling and waving her Zhonghua cigarette at the woman sitting across from her. I don’t know this woman. She looks a little rich for this place – sleek hair and makeup, nice clothes. Must be a collector. Sloppy does assemblage sculpture and collage pieces, and they sell pretty well, even with the economy sucking as much as it does.
‘Yili, ni hao,’ Sloppy calls out, seeing me enter. ‘You eating here?’
‘No, just looking for Lao Zhang.’
‘Haven’t seen him. This is Lucy Wu.’
‘Ni hao, pleased to meet you,’ I say, trying to be polite.
Lucy Wu regards me coolly. She’s one of these Prada babes – all done up in designer gear, perfectly polished.
‘Likewise,’ she says. ‘You speak Chinese?’
I shrug. ‘A little.’
This is halfway between a lie and the truth. After two years, I’m not exactly fluent, but I get around. ‘You speak Mandarin like some Beijing street kid,’ Lao Zhang told me once, maybe because I’ve got that Beijing accent, where you stick Rs on the end of everything like a pirate.
‘Your Chinese sounds very nice,’ she says with that smug, phony courtesy.
She has a southern accent; her consonants are soft, slightly sibilant. Dainty, almost.
‘You’re too polite.’
‘Lucy speaks good English,’ Sloppy informs me. ‘Not like me.’
‘Now you’re too polite,’ says Lucy Wu. ‘My English is very poor.’
I kind of doubt that.
‘Are you an art collector?’ I ask in English.
‘Art dealer.’ She smiles mischievously. ‘Collecting is for wealthier people than I.’
Her English is excellent.
‘She has Shanghai gallery,’ Sloppy adds.
‘Wow, cool,’ I say. ‘Hey, I’d better go. If you see Lao Zhang, can you tell him I’m looking for him? My phone’s dead.’
Lucy Wu sits up a little straighter, then reclines in a perfect, posed angle. ‘Lao Zhang? Is that Zhang Jianli?’
Sloppy nods. ‘Right.’
Lucy smiles at me, revealing tiny white teeth as perfect as a doll’s. ‘Jianli and I are old friends.’
‘Really?’ I say.
‘Yes.’ She looks me up and down, and I can feel myself blushing, because I know how I must look. ‘It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other. I was hoping to catch up with him while I’m here. I’ve heard wonderful things about his recent work. You know, Jianli hasn’t gotten nearly enough recognition as an artist.’
‘Maybe that’s not so important to Lao Zhang,’ Sloppy mutters.
Lucy giggles. ‘Impossible! All Chinese artists want fame. Otherwise, how can they get rich?’
She reaches into her tiny beaded bag, pulls out a lacquer card case, and hands me a card in polite fashion, holding it out with both hands. ‘When you see him, perhaps you could give him this.’
‘Sure.’
What a bitch, I think. Then I tell myself that’s not fair. Just because she’s tiny, pretty, and perfectly put together, it doesn’t mean she’s a bitch.
It just means I hate her on principle.
I order some takeout and head to Lao Zhang’s place.
Lao Zhang’s probably working, I figure, walking down Xingfu Lu, one of the two main streets in Mati Village. When he gets into it, he paints for hours, all day, fueled by countless espressos – he’s got his own machine. He forgets to eat sometimes, and I’m kind of proud of myself for thinking of bringing dinner, for doing something nice for him, like a normal person would do. It’s been hard for me the last few years, remembering to do stuff like that.
Maybe I’m finally getting better.
As I’m thinking this, I stumble on a pothole in the rutted road. Pain shoots up my leg.
‘Fuck!’
I can barely see, it’s so dark.
There aren’t exactly streetlights in Mati Village, only electric lanterns here and there that swing in any good wind and only work about half the time, strung up on storefronts and power poles. Right now they dim and flicker. There’s problems with electricity sometimes. Not so much in central Beijing or Shanghai, but in those ‘little’ cities you’ve never heard of, places with a few million people out in the provinces somewhere. And in villages like this, on the fringes of the grid.
But the little market on the corner of Lao Zhang’s alley is decorated with tiny Christmas lights.
I buy a couple cold bottles of Yanjing beer (my favorite) and Wahaha water (the label features this year’s perky winner of the Mongolian Cow Yogurt Happy Girl contest) and turn down the alley.
Lao Zhang lives in one of the old commune buildings, red brick, covered in some places with red wash, surrounded by a red wall. The entrance to Lao Zhang’s compound has two sculptures on either side, so there’s no mistaking it. One is a giant fish painted in Day-Glo colors. The other is a big empty Mao jacket. No Mao, just the jacket.
Inside the compound are four houses in a row. Sculptures and art supplies litter the narrow courtyards in between. Lao Zhang shares this place with the sculptor, a novelist who also paints, and a musician/Web designer who’s mixing something now, a trance track from the sound of it, all beats and erhu. Not too loud. That’s good. Some loud noises really get to me.
The front door is locked. Maybe Lao Zhang isn’t home. Maybe he’s already over at the Warehouse for the show. I use my key and go inside. I’ll have a few jiaozi, I figure, leave the rest here, and try the Warehouse.
The house is basically a rectangle. You go in the entrance, turn, and there’s the main room, with whitewashed walls and added skylights, remodeled to give Lao Zhang better light for painting.
The lights are off in the studio, but the computer’s on, booted up to the login screen of this online game Lao Zhang likes to play, The Sword of Ill Repute. A snatch of music plays, repeats.
‘Lao Zhang, ni zai ma?’ I call out. Are you there? No answer.
To the right is the bedroom, which is mostly taken up by a kang, the traditional brick bed you can heat from underneath. Lao Zhang has a futon on top of his. On the left side of the house there’s a tiny kitchen, a toilet, and a little utility room with a spare futon where Lao Zhang’s friends frequently crash.
Which is where the Uighur is.
‘Shit!’ I almost drop the takeout on the kitchen floor.
Here’s this guy stumbling out of the spare room, blinking uncertainly, rubbing his eyes, which suddenly go wide with fear.
‘Ni hao,’ I say uncertainly.
He stands there, one leg twitching, like he could bolt at any moment. He’s in his forties, not Chinese, not Han Chinese anyway; his hair is brown, his eyes a light hazel, his face dark and broad with high cheeks – I’m guessing Uighur.
‘Ni hao,’ he finally says.
‘I’m Yili,’ I stutter, ‘a friend of Lao Zhang’s. Is he … ?’
His eyes dart around the room. ‘Oh, yes, I am also friend of Lao Zhang’s. Hashim.’
‘Happy to meet you,’ I reply automatically.
I put the food and beer down on the little table by the sink, slowly because I get the feeling this guy startles easily. I can’t decide whether I should make small talk or run.
Since I suck at both of these activities, it’s a real relief to hear the front door bang and Lao Zhang yell from the living room: ‘It’s me. I’m back.’
‘We’re in the kitchen,’ I call out.
Lao Zhang is frowning when he comes in. He’s a northerner, part Manchu, big for a Chinese guy, and right now his thick shoulders are tense like he’s expecting a fight. ‘I thought you were going to phone,’ he says to me.
‘I was – I tried – My phone ran out of minutes, so I just …’ I point at the table. ‘I brought dinner.’
‘Thanks.’ He gives me a quick one-armed hug, and then everything’s normal again.
Almost.
‘You met Hashim?’
I nod and turn to the Uighur. ‘Maybe you’d like some dinner? I brought plenty.’
‘Anything without pork?’ Lao Zhang asks, grabbing chipped bowls from the metal locker he salvaged from the old commune factory.
‘I got mutton, beef, and vegetable.’
‘Thank you,’ Hashim says, bobbing his head. He’s got a lot of gray hair. He starts to reach into his pocket for money.
I wave him off. ‘Please don’t be so polite.’
Lao Zhang dishes out food, and we all sit around the tiny kitchen table. Lao Zhang shovels jiaozi into his mouth in silence. The Uighur stares at his bowl. I try to make small talk.
‘So, Hashim. Do you live in Beijing?’
‘No, not in Beijing,’ he mumbles. ‘Just for a visit.’
‘Oh. Is this your first time here?’
‘Maybe … third time?’ He smiles weakly and falls silent.
I don’t know what to say after that.
‘We’re going to have to eat fast,’ Lao Zhang says. ‘I want to get to the Warehouse early. Okay with you?’
‘Sure,’ I say. I have a few jiaozi and some spicy tofu, and then it’s time to go.
‘Make yourself at home,’ Lao Zhang tells Hashim. ‘Anything you need, call me. TV’s in there if you want to watch.’
‘Oh. Thank you, but …’ Hashim gestures helplessly toward the utility room. ‘I think I’m still very tired.’
He looks tired. His hazel eyes are bloodshot, and the flesh around them is sagging and so dark it looks bruised.
‘Thank you,’ he says to me, bowing his head and backing toward the utility room. ‘Very nice to meet you.’
Chinese is a second language to him. Just like it is to me.
‘So, who’s the Uighur?’ I finally ask Lao Zhang, as we approach the Warehouse.
‘Friend of a friend.’
‘He’s an artist?’
‘Writer or something. Needed a place to stay.’
He’s not telling me everything, I’m pretty sure. His face is tense; we’re walking next to each other, but he feels so separate that we might as well be on different blocks.
A lot of Chinese people don’t trust Uighurs, even though they’re Chinese citizens. As for the Uighurs, a lot of them aren’t crazy about the Chinese.
You’re supposed to say ‘Han,’ not ‘Chinese,’ when you’re talking about the ninety percent of the population that’s, well, Chinese; but hardly anyone does.
The Uighur homeland used to be called East Turkestan. China took it over a couple hundred years ago, and now it’s ‘Xinjiang.’ For the last thirty years or so, the Chinese government’s been encouraging Han people to ‘go west’ and settle there.
The government takes a hard line if the Uighurs try to do anything about it.
Since the riots in Urumqi last year, things have only gotten worse. Gangs of Uighurs burned down shops and buses and went after Han Chinese with hammers and pickaxes. So much for the ‘Harmonious Society.’
This guy Hashim, though, I can’t picture him setting things on fire. He looks like a professor on a bender. A writer or something, like Lao Zhang said. Maybe he’s an activist, some intellectual who got in trouble. It doesn’t take much for a Uighur to get into trouble in China.
‘You should be careful,’ I say.
Lao Zhang grins and squeezes my arm. ‘I know – those Uighurs, they’re all terrorists.’
‘Ha ha.’
The other thing that’s screwed the Uighurs is that they’re Muslims, and you know how that goes in a lot of people’s heads.
The Warehouse is at the east end of Mati Village, close to the jiaozi place. It’s called that because it used to be a warehouse. The building is partitioned into several galleries and one big space, with a café in the corner. The main room has paintings, some sculpture, and, tonight, a band put together by Lao Zhang’s courtyard neighbor. The highlight of the evening is the end of a performance piece where this guy has been sealed up in what looks like a concrete block for forty-eight hours. Tonight’s the night he’s scheduled to break out, and a couple hundred people have gathered to watch.
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Well, you could say it’s about self-imprisonment and breaking free from that,’ Lao Zhang explains. ‘Or breaking free from irrational authority of any kind.’
‘I guess.’
‘Hey, Lao Zhang, nizenmeyang?’ someone asks.
‘Hao, hao. Painting a lot. You?’
Everyone here seems to know Lao Zhang, which isn’t surprising. He’s been in the Beijing art scene since it started, when he was a teenager and hung out at the Old Summer Palace, the first artists’ village in Communist China. After a couple of years, the cops came in and arrested a lot of the artists, and the village got razed. That happened to a lot of the places where Lao Zhang used to hang out. ‘Government doesn’t like it when too many people get together,’ he told me once.
Finally, Lao Zhang gave up on Beijing proper. ‘Tai dade mafan,’ he’d say. Too much hassle. Too expensive. So he led an exodus to Mati Village, a collective farm that had been practically abandoned after the communes broke up. A place where artists who hadn’t made it big could live for cheap.
‘You think they’ll bust you here?’ I asked once.
Lao Zhang shrugged. ‘Who knows? It lasts as long as it lasts.’
I have to wonder. Because even though Mati Village is pretty far away from Beijing proper, far from the villas and townhouses on Beijing’s outer fringes, people still find their way here. Foreigners, art-lovers, journalists.
Me.
And that Prada chick from the jiaozi place tonight. Lucy Wu.
‘Jianli, it’s been a long time.’ Lucy Wu smiles and extends her hand coyly in Lao Zhang’s general direction, having spotted us hanging out by the café, behind the PA speakers where it’s not quite so loud.
‘Luxi,’ Lao Zhang replies. He takes her hand for a moment; it’s dwarfed in his. He stares at her with a look that I can’t quite figure out. ‘You’re well?’
‘Very.’ She takes a step back, like she’s measuring him up. ‘I met your friend Yili earlier this evening. Did she tell you?’
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I forgot.’
Lucy giggles. ‘Not to worry. I knew we’d find each other.’
I watch them watching each other, like a couple of circling cats.
‘I’m going to get a beer,’ I say.
Back in the main room, muffled thuds come from inside the ‘concrete’ block (I’m pretty sure it’s plaster). Cracks appear, then a little chunk falls out, then more pieces, and all of a sudden there’s a hole, and you can see this skinny, shirtless man covered in sweat, swinging a sledgehammer against the walls of his prison. The room is flooded with a rank smell, which makes sense, considering the guy’s been in the box for a couple of days.
Everybody cheers.
I drink my beer. Grab another. The crowd starts to thin out around me. Show’s over, I guess. It’s been almost an hour since I’ve seen Lao Zhang.
I think about looking for him, but something holds me back. Someone, more accurately.
She’s got to be an old girlfriend. Except I couldn’t tell if he was really happy to see her.
‘Sorry.’
It’s Lao Zhang, who has appeared next to me, without Lucy Wu.
‘How was it?’ he asks.
‘Okay.’
He rests his hand on my shoulder. But it’s not a friendly gesture. I can feel the tension in his hand.
I look behind him and see Lucy Wu, standing over by the entrance to the video gallery, too far away for me to make out her expression, except I can tell she’s watching us.
‘Let’s go,’ he says.
We go outside. I start to turn down Heping Street in the direction of Xingfu Road, toward Lao Zhang’s house.
‘Wait.’
I turn to look at him. The frown from earlier tonight is back. ‘It’s better if you don’t come over tonight,’ he says.
I shrug. ‘Fine.’
I should’ve figured. No way I can compete with a Lucy Wu.
‘Here.’ He digs through his pockets and pulls out some cash. ‘Some money. For a taxi.’
I don’t take it. ‘Why didn’t you just tell me not to come?’
‘I didn’t think …’ He grimaces, shakes his head. ‘I should have. I’m sorry.’
I don’t know what to say. I zip up my jacket and wonder where I’m going to find a taxi this time of night in Mati Village. Down by the bus station, I guess.
‘Yili …’ Lao Zhang reaches out his hand, rests it gently but urgently on my arm. ‘Don’t go home tonight. It’s better you go someplace else. Visit some friends or something. Just for tonight.’
That’s when everything shifts. I’m not mad any more.
‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Are you in trouble?’
He hesitates. ‘You know how things are here,’ he says. ‘Anyway, it’s not the first time.’
‘Can I help?’
I don’t know why I say it. I’m not even sure that I mean it.
I still can’t see his face very well in the dark, but I think I see him smile.
‘Maybe later. If you want.’
CHAPTER TWO
There aren’t a lot of places I can think of to go in Beijing at one in the morning.
I tell the taxi driver to take me to Says Hu.
It’s eleven thirty now, and it’ll be dead by the time I get there in an hour and a half; I figure I can hang out, while British John closes up, and decide what to do next.
I forgot it was Karaoke Night.
People come out of the woodwork for this: expats from the Zhongguancun Electronics District, students and teachers from the Haidian universities, ready to get loaded and give us their best rendition of ‘You Light Up My Life’ or ‘Hotel California.’
When I walk through the door, the place is packed, and a rangy Chinese girl with dyed blonde hair is singing ‘My Heart Will Go On.’
I almost turn around and leave, but British John has already spotted me. He tops off a pitcher of Qingdao and comes out from behind the bar, beer belly leading his narrow shoulders, face permanently red from too much sun and alcohol.
‘Ellie! Good, you’re here. Rose didn’t show up. Boyfriend crisis. Stupid bint.’
‘I’m not here to work.’
‘When are you ever?’
‘Fuck you,’ I mutter. Maybe I’m late sometimes, but I do a good job for British John.
Some days it’s hard to leave the apartment, that’s all.
I pick up a rag and start wiping down tables.
Says Hu is an expat bar on the second floor of a corner mall next to an apartment complex, above a mobile phone store. It’s dark, furnished in cheap plastic-coated wood, with dartboards, British soccer posters, and jerseys on the walls. Old beer funk mixes with that bizarre cleaner they use here in China, the one that smells like acrid, perfumed kerosene.
I work here a few shifts a week. That’s plenty.
I don’t mean British John’s a bad guy. He’s not. He’s hinted about hiring me to run this place so he can start another business, making me legal and getting me a work visa, which god knows I need.
But doing this?
‘And my heart will go on and on!’
I duck behind the bar, pour myself a beer, and swallow a Percocet.
Between pouring drafts and mixing drinks, I think about what happened in Mati Village.
Lao Zhang has to be in some kind of trouble, but what? The central government doesn’t care much about what anybody does, as long as they don’t challenge the government’s authority. Lao Zhang’s not political, so far as I know. He doesn’t talk about overthrowing the CCP or democracy or freedom of speech. Nothing like that. He talks about living a creative life, about building communities to support that, places that encourage each individual’s expression and value their labors – the opposite of the factories and malls and McJobs that treat people like trash and throw them away whenever they feel like it.
Maybe that’s close enough to freedom of speech to get him in trouble.
But why am I in trouble?
You’re a foreigner, you cause problems, usually they just kick you out of China. Which, if I don’t get my act together, is going to happen anyway.
He told me not to go home tonight.
Maybe it’s not the government, I think. Maybe it’s gangsters. Or some local official Lao Zhang pissed off. A back-door deal gone wrong.
And then there’s Lucy Wu. Ex-girlfriend? Undercover Public Security Officer?
He should have told me what was going on.
My leg hurts like a motherfucker, even with the Percocet, so I start drinking Guinness, and I end up hanging out in the bar after we close, drinking more Guinness with British John, his Chinese wife Xiaowei, an Australian named Hank, and two Norwegian girls. One of them, the taller of the two who looks like a supermodel, is a bitch. She keeps going on about the evils of American imperialism. ‘It was American imperial aggression that created the desire for a Caliphate,’ and ‘The Taliban was a predictable response to American imperial aggression.’
British John keeps giving me looks, like he thinks I’m going to lose it.
‘Hey, we need more music,’ Xiaowei pipes up. ‘What should I play?’
‘You choose, luv,’ says British John. ‘As long as it’s none of that fucking awful Korean pop.’
Xiaowei pouts. She loves Korean pop, which as British John points out, really is fucking awful.
‘Reggae!’ shouts Hank the Australian.
‘It was America’s criminal invasion of Iraq,’ the Norwegian chick drones on. She’s kind of drunk by now, too. ‘Everyone involved is a criminal. You know, Falluja, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, these are war crimes …’
Hank and the other Norwegian girl, meanwhile, have gone over to the jukebox, draped over each other like partners in a three-legged race. ‘Redemption Song’ booms over the speakers.
‘These soldiers, they killed innocents, and you Americans call them heroes.’
‘Why don’t you just shut the fuck up?’ I finally say. I’m not mad. I’m just tired. ‘You Norwegians are sitting on top of all that North Sea oil or you’d be making deals and screwing people like everyone else. Plus, you kill whales.’
Supermodel straightens up. Actually, she looks more like a Viking. All she needs is a spear. ‘Norway contributes more percentage of its income to foreign aid than any other country. While you Americans –’
‘Oh, it’s wrong to kill whales,’ Xiaowei says, her eyes filling with tears. ‘And dolphins. They are so smart! I think they are smarter than we are.’
‘Darts, anyone?’ British John asks.
I end up crashing at British John and Xiaowei’s place, finally dragging myself off their couch the next day around noon to make my way home.
Of course, I run into Mrs Hua, who is hustling her kid into their apartment, him clutching an overstuffed, greasy bag of Mickey D’s.
‘Somebody looking for you,’ she hisses, her little raisin eyes glittering in triumph. ‘You in some kind of trouble!’
I roll my eyes. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘Foreigners,’ she continues. ‘In suits! You in trouble.’
I freeze, but only for a moment.
‘Whatever.’
I unlock the door and make my way through the living room, which is cluttered with all kinds of random stuff: books, magazines, dirty clothes, a guitar amp, and a cardboard standup figure of Yao Ming draped with a plastic lei. My roommate Chuckie has the blackout curtains drawn, and I can hardly see a thing, just Yao Ming, the red of his jersey blanched gray by the dark.
Foreigners in suits. It doesn’t make sense. How can Lao Zhang be in trouble with foreigners in suits?
Then I think: maybe it’s not Lao Zhang they’re looking for.
I’m not in trouble, I tell myself. I’m not. All that shit happened a long time ago, and nobody cares about it any more.
‘Cao dan! Zhen ta ma de!’
‘Chuckie? What?’
Chuckie bursts out of his bedroom, greasy hair bristling up in spikes, glasses askew, Bill Gates T-shirt about three sizes too big, knobby knees sticking out beneath dirty gym shorts.
‘That fucking bastard stole my seventh-level Qi sword!’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ I say. ‘Who stole your sword?’
‘Ming Lu, the little shits! I should go bust his damn balls!’
I try to picture Chuckie busting much of anything and fail. The reason I have such a good deal renting this apartment is that Chuckie gives me a break in exchange for tutoring him in English conversation. Sometimes I listen to him and think that I’m not really doing my job.
‘So … Chuckie … I don’t understand. This sword, I mean, it’s not a real sword, is it? It’s like … it’s part of the game, right?’
Chuckie stares at me like I’ve suddenly grown horns.
‘Of course it’s part of the game!’
‘So, um … if it’s not real, how did Ming Lu steal it?’
Chuckie paces around the dim, dank apartment, which I notice smells like some weird combination of sour beer and cement dust. ‘I lend it to him,’ he mutters. ‘I trust him!’ He slaps the cardboard Yao Ming for emphasis. ‘And that turtle’s egg, jiba son of a slave girl go and sell it!’
I had a lot to drink last night and I’m pretty sleep-deprived, so maybe if I had some coffee I could follow him a little better. Still, he’s talking about a virtual sword in an online game. How can I take it seriously?
Chuckie’s game is The Sword of Ill Repute, the same game Lao Zhang plays. That’s how I met Lao Zhang, actually, through Chuckie. Lao Zhang was throwing a party at this space off the 4th Ring Road, and he’d invited his online friends to attend. Chuckie hadn’t really wanted to go. He didn’t approve of Lao Zhang’s gaming style. ‘Too peaceful!’ he complained. ‘He don’t like to go on quest, just sit in teahouse and wine shop and drink and chat all the time.’
Me, I was tired of virtual reality and thought an actual party might be fun. I’d thought maybe I was going crazy, sitting in that apartment all the time. I was having a lot of nightmares, not sleeping well, and I needed to get out.
So we went to the party, which was at this place called the Airplane Factory (because it used to be an airplane factory). When we got there, a couple of the artists were doing a piece, throwing dyed red mud at each other and chanting slogans every time they got hit. A DJ was spinning tunes while another artist projected images on the blank white wall: chickens being decapitated and buildings falling down and Mickey Mouse cartoons. At some point, this fairly lame Beijing punk band played, though I had to give them points for attitude.
I wandered around on my own, not talking to anybody, because even though I’d wanted to come, once I got there I felt awkward and nervous, like I couldn’t have been more out of place. Eventually I saw Chuckie standing over by this installation piece, a ping-pong table that lit up and made different noises depending on where the ball hit. That’s where the beer was, iced for once, in plastic tubs.
Chuckie was talking to this big, stocky guy with a goatee and thick eyebrows, wearing paint-splattered cargo shorts, an ancient Cui Jian T-shirt, and a knit beanie. The guy had just opened a bottle of Yanjing, and instead of drinking from it, he gave it to me, eyebrow half-cocked, grinning. There was something about his smile I liked, something about how it included me, like we were already sharing a joke. ‘You’re Chuckie’s roommate,’ he said. ‘Chuckie says you’re crazy.’
That was Lao Zhang.
Now I’m thinking: talk about a pot/kettle scenario, ’cause here’s Chuckie, pacing around the living room, muttering about how some jiba ex-friend of his has ripped off his virtual sword.
Chuckie grabs his backpack and heads for the door.
‘Hey. Where are you going?’
‘Matrix,’ Chuckie mumbles.
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s where Ming Lu is.’
‘So, what are you going to do?’
‘Make him pay.’
‘Hey, Chuckie, wait a minute. Just … wait.’
He pauses at the door. ‘What?’
‘You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?’
Chuckie swings his backpack over his shoulder. ‘That Qi sword is worth 10,000 kuai! I’m going to make him pay me for it!’
‘You’re kidding.’
Ten thousand yuan is no small sum of money. It’s over fourteen hundred dollars. More money than I make in a month. More money than Chuckie makes a month doing his freelance geek gigs, I’m pretty sure. He’s a genius with computers, but he’s always getting canned for spending too much time online doing things he shouldn’t.
‘I don’t kid about this!’ Chuckie yells, wild-eyed. ‘I’m going!’
‘Hey, Chuckie, wait a minute. Deng yihuir,’ I repeat in Chinese for emphasis. ‘Was there anybody looking for me this morning? Some foreigners? In suits?’
Chuckie pauses by the door and frowns. ‘Oh. Some guys came by a couple hours ago. I said you weren’t around.’
‘What did they want?’
‘They didn’t say.’ He shrugs his backpack onto his other shoulder and opens the door.
‘Wait a minute,’ I say again. ‘What kind of guys?’
‘I don’t know,’ Chuckie replies, clearly frustrated. ‘Foreigners in suits, like you said.’ And he starts to leave.
‘Wait, I’ll come with you.’
I throw on some fresh clothes, replenish my backpack with clean underwear, which I always do in case I end up crashing somewhere else, which, objectively, happens kind of a lot. Then I grab my passport and retrieve the roll of cash that I’ve hidden in a balled-up T-shirt tossed in the corner of my tiny closet.
When I come out of my room, Chuckie is pacing in a little circle by the door, looking like he’s ready to bolt.
So am I. I don’t want to stay in this apartment. Not for another minute.
Matrix is a couple miles away, so we hop on a bus that’s so packed, I hardly move when it jerks and squeals and halts – it’s like I’m surrounded by human airbags.
Our destination is a couple of blocks from the bus stop, just east of Beida, short for Beijing University. Chuckie’s pissed off and walking so fast that I can barely keep up.
‘He’ll be there,’ Chuckie mutters, ‘that little penis shit. He’s always there right now.’
‘You don’t say “penis.’’’
Chuckie looks confused. ‘Penis means jiba, right?’
‘Yeah, but you should say, like, “fucking,” or “dickhead.” It sounds better.’
We pass the new Tech center covered with LED billboards and the latest weird-shaped mirror glass high-rise that resembles some gargantuan star cruiser squatting on a landing pad; practically everything they’ve built in Beijing the last ten years looks like part of a set in the latest big-budget science fiction movie.
Matrix Game Parlor takes up most of the ground floor of a six-story white-tile storefront that’s probably slated for demolition in the near future, since it must have been built way back in the eighties. It’s a maze of navy blue walls, computer terminals, and arcade games, and though most of the serious gamers are wearing headsets, a lot of the casual players aren’t, so there’s this cacophony of cartoon explosions and thumping bass lines and corny synthesized orchestras. Plus everybody’s cells are going off all the time with these loud polyphonic ringtones, and nobody talks quietly into their cells; they yell, like they don’t trust that the person on the other end will hear them otherwise, and I’m already thinking I want out of here. And even though they’ve passed laws in China against smoking in public places, everyone smokes in this place, so I’m following Chuckie through the maze and this blue smoke haze that’s lit up by neon screens and intermittent strobe lights, and I’m starting to cough. I always have a little bronchitis from the pollution here, and I just can’t handle the smoke any more.
I used to smoke. Everyone around me did back then. That’s what we’d do, me and my buddies, we’d smoke cigarettes and crack jokes to keep each other loose, just laugh at shit, you know? You had to laugh at all the shit sometimes.
Embrace the Suck, we used to say.
‘There he is!’ Chuckie hisses.
I recognize Ming Lu. He’s this short, fat guy shaped more or less like a dumpling with limbs and a head. Right now he’s sitting in front of a terminal littered with junk food, using a fancy joystick, probably his own, to manipulate his avatar. I figure he’s probably either killing or fucking someone, from the exultant expression on his face.
Chuckie grabs Ming Lu’s T-shirt by the collar and slaps him upside the head.
Ming Lu whirls around blindly, glasses askew, scattering his shrimp chips.
‘What –? Who –?’
‘You mother fucking dog’s bastard!’ Chuckie screams.
As I start to form a mental picture of that scenario, I lose track of the argument entirely. For one thing, the two of them are talking way too fast for me to follow, and Ming Lu has this Sichuan accent that gets pretty thick when he’s excited and being slapped around by somebody. For another, I glance over my shoulder and see, dimly through the smoke haze, two guys heading in our direction. Foreign guys in suits.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Ming Lu is babbling, ‘but I had to!’
I don’t think. I run.
I duck down an aisle, bumping into a couple of giggling teen girls with Go Gaiyuko backpacks. I turn a corner, slipping and sliding past a cluster of Dance Dance Revolution games, and I don’t even know why I’m running; I just don’t want to get caught.
Up ahead there’s a little hall where the bathrooms are. At the end of that, what looks like an exit. I run as fast as I can, praying under my breath that this isn’t one of those places where the emergency exits are locked so we would all die horribly if there were a fire, and hit the release bar on the door.
I’m blinded by daylight. I blink a few times. I’m in a little courtyard that serves mostly as a trash dump and a place to park bicycles and mopeds off the street. A few sad trees in crumbling concrete planters. An old-style six-story apartment building across the way. Laundry hangs from the cramped balconies; random wires crisscross limply from roof to roof. It’s oddly silent, except for a couple of chittering sparrows.
Then I hear a burst of dialog and music from one of the apartments; a guy bellowing about revenge against the Emperor, some cheesy historical soap on TV. ‘I’ll drink to his death!’ echoes in the courtyard.
That unfreezes me. I plunge into the apartment building, down the narrow corridor that leads past the stairwell, and out the other side.
I’m on a little street with no real sidewalks, a few small cars shoved up against the buildings amidst a tangle of bikes. An old man sits on a tiny folding stool by the nonexistent curb, mending a pair of pants, a few odds and ends for sale spread out on a blanket next to him: a fake Cultural Revolution clock, a couple DVDs, a blender. ‘You want?’ he says to me, holding up the clock, winding it up to show me how the Red Guard waves her Little Red Book to count off the seconds. ‘You want buy?’
‘Buyao,’ I say. I don’t want. I run down the street.
I don’t run that well because of my leg, but for once I’m hardly feeling it. I keep running. I pass more high-rises, Tsinghua University’s new science center, billboards, animated LED ads: giant stomachs, pills, and cars. Here’s the Xijiao Hotel. Okay. I know this place. I’m breathing hard and sweating. Now my leg really hurts, and my shoulders feel bruised from my bouncing backpack, which I should’ve cinched up, but I’ve gotten out of the habit. I slow down, wipe my forehead. I don’t see any foreigners in suits.
I’m by this little street leading into the Beijing Language & Culture University campus from the Xijiao Binguan that has small shops, restaurants, and stalls that live off business from students – places where you can buy cheap electronics, pirated DVDs, school supplies, tours to Tibet. And phone cards.
I stop and buy a hundred-yuan card for my phone, dial the number, scratch off the silver, and punch in the voucher code. I’ve got a string of messages waiting for me.
I’m still feeling exposed out here on the street. I decide to go onto the BLCU campus. I’m almost young enough to be a student. Besides, I dress like one: I’m wearing high-top sneakers, a long-sleeved snowboarding T-shirt decorated with flowers and snowflakes, and jeans, and I’m carrying a backpack. I blend in here, unlike foreigners in suits. I could be just another foreign student trying to better myself by learning Chinese. That’s what I was doing, not so long ago.
I head over to the Sauce, a coffeehouse that’s been on campus forever. It’s not bad. I stand in line behind a skinny white boy chatting up a cute Chinese girl, order myself a regular cup of coffee, and take a seat by the window. I stare down at the street, at the egg-shaped orange phone booths, at the newly green trees, and I check my messages.
British John, asking me if I can cover Rose’s shift for Karaoke Night. A bunch of text-message spam in Chinese, which I can’t read. Delete, delete, delete.
Then a message from Lao Zhang. ‘Yili, ni hao. I’m leaving Beijing for a few days …’ A pause. ‘I wanted to let you know.’ Another pause. ‘Anyway, see you later. Man zou.’
Go slowly. Be careful.
I start to delete the message, but my finger hovers over the key for a moment, and then I hit save instead.
Next message.
‘Hey, babe. It’s me.’
My heart starts to thud, and the bottom falls out of my gut.
‘Listen, I need to see you,’ he continues. ‘Right away. It’s important. Call me as soon as you get this. Okay?’
I stare at the phone. Fucking Trey. Why does he do this to me?
CHAPTER THREE
I call him, of course. I know I shouldn’t, but I do it anyway. I’m pretty sure I know what he wants, and I’m not going to give it to him. But I still call.
I hear that rich caramel voice in my ear. ‘Hey, babe.’
‘Hey,’ I say, trying to keep my voice flat. ‘What’s up?’
‘Listen, I need to talk to you. Can we meet someplace?’
I shrug. Like I don’t care. Like he can see me. ‘Talk to me now.’
‘Don’t be like that. Look, we need to get together.’ He sounds so sincere. ‘It’s important.’
‘I’m not signing anything, Trey –’
‘I know. It’s not about that.’
I let out a breath and stare out the window, look at the knots of students walking below me, talking, laughing. A couple arm in arm, the boy with spiked green hair, the girl carrying a stuffed toy backpack. They’re so cute. The little shits.
‘Okay,’ I finally say.
I’m making a mistake, I’m pretty sure.
We arrange to meet in a couple hours at a pub in Henderson Center on Jianguomen Dajie, in the heart of Beijing. I take the train, transfer to the Ring subway line, and get off at Jianguomen by the Ancient Observatory, this lopped-off pyramid of gray brick from the Ming Dynasty, now dwarfed by all the big buildings on Chang ’An Boulevard. ‘Vegas, with Chinese characteristics,’ British John calls it – glassy high-rises with green Chinese-style roofs perched on top, like somebody put tiny party hats on the heads of awkward giants.
Fucking Trey, I think, as I walk to Henderson Center. He’s probably lying to me. I’ll meet him, and he’ll try to talk me into signing.
He keeps threatening to file without me. Go ahead, I tell him. You do that, and it’s all coming out. Every bit of it.
You wouldn’t do that, he says. It’ll hurt you as much as it’ll hurt me.
At this point in the conversation, I generally laugh. Yeah, like I have as much to lose as you do.
But I know he’s right. I’ll never tell.
I would sign, though. I’d sign if he’d get me what I keep asking him for. But he won’t, and I don’t really get why.
Let it go, Lao Zhang keeps telling me. You don’t need him. You can figure something else out. You already crossed the river; why carry the boat up the mountain? Let it go.
But I can’t.
You could do it, I always say to Trey. Talk to your friends, the ones who can pull some strings. He just looks at me with those green eyes of his that shine like some kind of gem and says: I’ve tried, babe. I’ll keep trying, I promise. But we gotta get on with our lives, don’t we?
On this one point, I guess I’d have to agree with him. We really do.
It’s not like I want to be married to him any more.
Barton’s is the kind of expat place that’s pretty typical for Beijing, which is to say it looks like any chain place you’d find in the U.S.: a wooden bar with a selection of imported beer and liquor, red leatherette booths, high-def TVs playing sports. Today they’ve got a baseball game on, with promises of basketball to follow.
Trey sits in a booth by the window, taking in the view from the thirtieth floor, drinking a beer and eating fries.
I don’t like the way I feel when I see him. After everything that’s happened, I still feel it, and I can’t decide who I hate more for it: him or me.
Trey smiles when he notices me and half-rises to be polite. ‘Hey, Ellie,’ he says. ‘You look good.’
Bullshit, I want to say. I’m pretty sure I don’t look good. I’m sticky with sweat from my run through Matrix and coated with the general grime of Beijing. I slip into the booth across the table from him. ‘Hey, Trey.’
‘You have lunch? I was gonna get a burger. They make good ones here.’
‘Thought you were on a health kick,’ I mutter.
Trey grins and pats his gut. He’s got a bit of one, but it’s not bad. The truth is, he’s the one who looks good. His hair is buzzed close to his scalp, all the better to minimize his slowly receding hairline. He’s tan; his muscles strain the sleeves of his T-shirt. ‘Yeah, well, you gotta make exceptions sometimes, you know?’
I look away. I just can’t meet his eyes. ‘What do you want, Trey?’
‘Some lunch, right now.’ He raises his arm to flag down the waitress. ‘Xiaojie!’ he shouts.
The waitress – a cute little thing who gives Trey the eye – comes over. Trey orders his burger. I’m in one of those moods where nothing sounds good and I don’t know what I want, but I figure I’d better eat something. For one thing, Trey’s paying, and I like making him pay.
‘Spaghetti,’ I finally decide. The Chinese invented it, right? ‘And a Yanjing beer.’
‘No Yanjing. Have Qingdao.’
‘So how you been, Ellie?’ Trey asks, after my beer arrives.
‘Fine. You?’
‘I’m good.’ He stares at me with the utmost sincerity. ‘I really am.’
‘Glad to hear it.’ And then, because I can’t help myself, I say: ‘So, how’s … what’s her name? Ping Li?’
‘Li Ping,’ he corrects me. In point of fact, I knew that. ‘Or Lily, if you like. She’s good, Ellie. Really good.’
I nod.
Trey leans forward, his green eyes glowing. ‘She’s come to Jesus,’ he says huskily. ‘I feel like a part of me’s been reborn with her.’
I chug my beer. ‘That’s just swell, Trey.’
He shakes his head. He looks so sad. ‘Look, I fucked up. I could keep apologizing forever, and that’s not gonna make it up to you. You want to hate me; I get it. But don’t hold what I did against Jesus. It’s not His fault.’
While my loss of faith is not the last thing I feel like discussing, it makes the top-ten list for sure.
‘Why are we talking about this? I mean, what’s Jesus got to do with … with anything right now?’
‘Because He can help you.’ Trey reaches across the table, rests his hand on mine. ‘I know you’re hurting. You’re in the desert, Ellie. But there’s water for you. All you have to do is drink it.’
Oh, if I only could. If I could only sink back into that warm, comfortable place, back when I could feel that glow, that love, that connection and certainty.
And the thrill. That smell of his, the wedge of his triceps, the look in his eyes.
I can’t help it. I still want him.
‘You are so full of it.’ I yank my hand away. ‘What would Jesus say about you dumping me for her? About you fucking her when you’re married to me!’
‘We’re all sinners,’ he says intensely. ‘That’s the point. And I told you what the bottom line was for me. I need to be with somebody who wants to live a Christ-centered life. And you’ve left that, Ellie. You’ve left that, and nothing I can say makes a difference. So what am I supposed to do? I can’t live without it. I just can’t.’
For a moment we stare at each other.
‘Okay,’ I finally say. ‘Okay. We’ve had this discussion how many times? You wanna live with little Miss Come to Jesus, that’s fine. You wanna get divorced, that’s fine with me too. But you know what I want, Trey. You know it. Give me what I want, and I’ll sign anything you want me to sign.’
Trey leans back in his chair. ‘That’s why I wanted to see you. I think I got it figured out.’
At that moment, two things happen almost at once. Two foreign men in suits approach our table. ‘Mr Cooper, Mrs Cooper,’ one of them says in an American accent. They sit. And the waitress brings us our food.
‘Parma-san?’ she chirps.
‘Hey, guys.’ Trey flashes his smile at them.
I just sit there, staring at the mass of coiled noodles, which suddenly don’t look like something I much want to eat.
‘Mrs Cooper, sorry if we startled you earlier,’ Suit #1 says.
I don’t say anything. I twirl a forkful of spaghetti, and I eat it. Not bad, actually. Good noodles. ‘Yes,’ I tell the waitress. ‘Please bring parmesan.’
Suit #1 leans forward. He’s the younger of the duo, a wiry guy with wide eyes and an earnest expression. ‘We’re not here to cause you any problems.’
I take another bite of spaghetti. It tastes okay, but it’s going down like glue. ‘So why are you here?’ I ask.
‘Ellie –’ Trey begins, all concerned and placating, but Suit #2 cuts him off.
‘The Uighur. Hashim Abdullaabduzehim.’
I have to think about this for a moment. ‘Abdulla … ?’
‘Abdullaabduzehim,’ Suit #2 repeats impatiently. He’s a half dozen years older, a couple inches taller, and a whole lot bulkier than Suit #1, with heavy-rimmed glasses, a bristling mustache, and a scary edge. The bad cop, apparently.
I decide it’s best not to say anything. I focus on twirling the perfect forkful of noodles and sauce, braced against my spoon.
‘You met him, right?’
Why is it so hard to get the right amount of noodles on your fork? You either end up with a few pathetic strands or half the bowl.
‘I meet a lot of people,’ I finally say. ‘So what?’
Suit #1 puts his elbows on the table and leans forward. ‘Mrs Cooper, it’s very important that you tell us anything you can about Mr Abdullaabduzehim.’
‘Why?’
‘Mr Abdullaabduzehim is a known associate of Islamic extremists who plan to carry out attacks against American interests.’
‘Against people like your former comrades-in-arms,’ Suit #2 says. He sounds pissed. ‘If you still give a shit about them.’
I put down my fork. ‘You know what? Fuck you.’
‘Mrs Cooper …’ Suit #1 sighs. ‘I know you’ve had a rough time. We wouldn’t intrude on your privacy if it weren’t extremely important. Mr Carter here …’ He stares at me, those wide eyes of his suddenly seeming like a cartoon of sympathy. ‘Mr Carter gets impatient.’
‘Parma-san.’ The waitress has returned, with a little green can of cheese. ‘More beer?’
‘Yes, please,’ says Trey.
‘The Uighur,’ Suit #1 continues. ‘He was staying with a friend of yours, Zhang Jianli. An artist of some sort, right?’
I don’t say a word.
‘In Mati Village. You went to Mati Village yesterday. You spend a lot of time there.’
I drink some beer. I turn to Trey. ‘What have you been telling them about me?’
‘It’s not him, Mrs Cooper,’ Suit #1 says.
‘Who is it, then?’
He smiles. ‘We have an interest in Mati Village. A lot of interesting people go there.’
‘Listen, Ellie.’ Trey gives me a look, as warm as can be, like he really cares. ‘You help these guys, they can help you.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘They’ll set you up with a job – you won’t even have to go to work if you don’t want, but you’ll get your visa. So you can stay here after I leave, if that’s what you want.’ He stares at me, and those green eyes turn hard. ‘’Cause I’m leaving. I’m divorcing you, and I’m gonna marry Lily, and I’m taking her home to the States with me.’
I have to blink a few times. Because for a moment – and it’s the weirdest thing – I just want to cry. I know he doesn’t love me, and I don’t love him either. He’s a shit. A total shit and a hypocrite. Why should I care what he does?
‘Oh, I get it,’ I say furiously. ‘They promised you something, didn’t they? Like a no-hassles green card for your girlfriend.’
Suit #2 slaps the table. ‘This is a waste of time.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Suit #1 says calmly. ‘We just need to get things back on track. I’m sure that Mrs Cooper wants to help, and maybe we can help her with a few things.’ He turns to me. ‘You’re receiving, what is it, a seventeen-percent disability?’
I don’t bother to ask him how he knows that.
‘Seems a little low.’
‘That’s what they rated me,’ I say.
‘Those leg injuries looked pretty severe. And I don’t know why they turned you down on the PTSD. Obviously you’ve had significant adjustment problems. Working part-time in some dive bar in China – not exactly what I’d call a career choice.’
I really want to tell him to go fuck himself, but I don’t like being repetitive.
‘Look,’ I say, ‘I met a guy named Hashim, maybe for all of five minutes. The last thing I would have figured him for was a terrorist. He was just an ordinary guy. We said hello, we ate some dumplings, and that’s all I know about him.’
‘And your friend, Zhang, what’s his association? Have you heard him express any anti-American sentiments, or –?’
‘He’s an artist,’ I say with emphasis. ‘He’s not political. This Hashim guy was just a friend of a friend. That’s all.’
‘You’ve never heard him express any political opinions?’
‘No. We don’t talk about that kind of stuff.’
‘What do you talk about?’ Suit #2 interjects.
‘I don’t know … just … stuff. Movies. TV shows. Beijing traffic. He’s not political,’ I repeat. He just likes taking in strays, I want to say. But I don’t say it, because these two already think I’m some kind of psychotic low-life.
‘He’s your lover, right?’ Suit #1 asks casually.
I flinch. I hate that expression, ‘lover.’ Like this is some kind of fucking romance novel. ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business.’
‘I assume you know he sees other women,’ Suit #1 says.
I feel like I’ve been slapped.
‘So?’ I manage.
‘Well, I wasn’t sure how close you two were.’
I don’t say anything.
Suit #1 locks his eyes on mine.
‘I’m sure Zhang is a great guy. But he’s gotten himself involved with some questionable people. You’d be doing him a favor if you helped us with this.’
‘So, what is it you want me to do?’ I finally ask.
‘Are you in touch with him?’
I shrug. ‘No.’
‘But there’s a good chance he’ll contact you, isn’t there?’
‘What if he does? You want me to ask him about the Uighur?’
‘Well, it depends,’ Suit #1 says. ‘On what kind of relationship the two of you have. On the level of trust.’
Suit #2 snorts. ‘If Zhang contacts you, the main thing is, you tell us. If you can find out where he is, that’s a bonus.’
I lean back in my chair, push my fingers through my greasy hair. ‘And what? You’ll get me a Z visa? Up my disability? That’s a promise?’
‘We’ll do what we can for you,’ says Suit #1. ‘The more you help us, the easier it is to make the case. Being a pair of eyes for us in places like Mati … that could be very helpful.’
I gulp down the rest of my beer and stand up. I turn to Trey. ‘Tell Lily I said hi.’
‘Ellie –’ Trey begins.
Suit #2 stops him. ‘Let her go. She doesn’t want to help, it’s her loss.’
‘Mrs Cooper.’ It’s Suit #1. ‘If you hear anything, anything at all …’ He holds out a business card. ‘Call us. It’s very important.’
I stare at his hand, at the white card, the blue logo with the letters GSC.
Global Security Concepts. The company Trey works for.
I take the card and stick it in my pants pocket. I’m not going to give him the courtesy of reading it.
‘Here,’ Suit #2 says abruptly, thrusting his card at me.
Whatever. I take his too.
Then I leave. No way I’m paying for that lunch.
In the elevator, I lift up my hand to punch the button, and it’s shaking.
CHAPTER FOUR
Outside, the dust has kicked up, filtering the sun through a yellow haze.
I walk down Jianguomen. There’s a Starbucks around here someplace. I could get a cup of coffee. I fixate on that. A cup of coffee. I’ll get a cup of coffee and try to think. But I can’t remember where the fucking Starbucks is, exactly. It’s around here. I keep walking down the street. I just need to get a cup of coffee, and I’ll be able to sort all this out.
Tears run down my face. I’ll just blame the dust. Because the other stuff, I can’t think about that. Trey and his little ho’ girlfriend. Loves Jesus, my ass. The stuff he did … How can he talk about love?
And Lao Zhang. It’s not like I love him. What’s love, right? I thought I loved Trey, and how stupid was that?
But I like him. Lao Zhang’s a good guy. Maybe the Suits are telling the truth; maybe he’s fucking around, but so what? I never asked him not to. All I ever asked was if I could come over, and he always said yes. I think: all the time we’ve spent together, hanging out, it felt … comfortable. Like belonging somewhere. And now …
What’s he gotten himself into?
Then I think: it’s not the Chinese government that’s after Lao Zhang. It’s Global Security Concepts. Trey’s company. Not official. But they might as well be.
I know how those guys work.
How did the Suits find out about Lao Zhang?
I’m slick with sweat, like a fever’s breaking. They’ve been watching me, no matter what they said. They followed me to Mati. To Lao Zhang.
How long have they been watching?
Finally, I spot the familiar green-and-white Starbucks logo.
Inside, the air is perfectly conditioned, and they’re playing their latest retro Brazilian compilation; the baristas are smiling, the espresso machine hisses, and it smells like roasted coffee. They’re advertising Fair Trade beans and selling Starbucks Beijing coffee mugs. There’s a couple of tourists, a student or two, and a few local businessmen with pocket PCs and laptops.
I feel better already.
‘Yi bei benride kafei. Zhong.’
‘Room for cream?’ asks the barista. They all know the English for coffee words.
They give me my coffee of the day, size medium. I put the cup down on an empty table and go into the restroom to wash my face. Under the fluorescent light above the mirror, I can see where my tears have cut through the dust and soot of a Beijing spring day.
I look like shit.
I used to be cute. It wasn’t so weird that Trey wanted me, back in the day. I used to be fresh-faced and smooth and round. Nice tits. Good hair. Standard American Attractiveness Template.
Now? I have circles under my eyes, black ones, as dark as the Uighur’s. Crow’s-feet. Lines running down from my nose to my mouth, deep as slashes. Blemishes and brown spots on my face from the sun. I’m seven years older. And I’m not sure I’m any wiser than I was.
Fucking Trey. It’s his fault my life’s turned out this way. I was young and dumb, and I would’ve done anything he wanted me to. And he knew that. He knew that, and he crooked his finger at me, and I followed him.
Then I think: but you went. You didn’t have to. You should’ve known better.
But there’s nothing I can do about any of that now.
I wash my hands, my face. Go out and sit at my table. Sip my coffee and try to think.
They watch Mati Village, Suit #1 said. Who’s watching? Someone I know? One of the artists? A waitress at the jiaozi place?
I should call Lao Zhang, let him know these guys are looking for him. I get out my phone, and then I hesitate. The Suits never asked me for his phone number. I sip my coffee and think, they must have it already. And I think: how is that? I stare at my phone and wonder. They probably know my number. Fucking Trey probably gave it to them. Can they tap these things?
How did they find me earlier at Matrix Arcade? They didn’t follow me from Chuckie’s apartment, did they? So how did they find me?
Cell phones all have GPS built in. You can find people with GPS – that’s what it’s for, right?
I switch off my phone. This is crazy. They can’t just do that, can they?
I laugh in spite of myself. Yeah, right. They can do whatever they want to do.
Besides, this is China.
I stare at the iPhone. It was a gift from Trey two years ago: top of the line then, out of date now. He bought it in Hong Kong, unlocked, which is technically illegal, but everyone does it here because you couldn’t get iPhones legally in China until last year, and the legal ones cost a fortune.
How does this stuff work? If my phone is off, does that mean they can’t find me?
I almost get up and throw my iPhone in the trash. I want to hurl it across the room. It’s hard for me to stop myself, but the phone was expensive, and it’s got all my numbers and photos and tunes on it.
I think: it’s off. They can’t find me if it’s off.
Right about then a couple of students come in, two guys, Americans or Europeans. I can tell they’re students by the backpacks, the counterfeit North Face jackets, the perfectly broken-in T-shirts, the vaguely ethnic bead necklaces.
I think for a minute while they get in line. Then I stand up and say, ‘Duibuqi.’ Excuse me.
The two guys look at me. ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Do you speak English?’
‘Sure,’ one of them says. He’s wearing a Bob Marley shirt and a crocheted cap.
‘Great,’ I say quickly, ‘because I’m kind of in a bind. I really need to make a call and my phone died.’ I hold up my switched-off iPhone, which I figure looks pretty convincingly dead. ‘Do either of you have a phone? I’ll buy your coffee if I can make a quick call.’
‘You can use mine, no big,’ says the second guy, the one in the Bruce Lee shirt. ‘So long as you aren’t calling Mongolia or something.’
‘Nah, just Kazakhstan,’ I joke back.
The kid hands me his phone (a new iPhone, way cooler than mine). I quickly punch in Lao Zhang’s number.
‘Wei, ni hao.’ I talk in a low voice, as fast as I can. I’m hoping these guys are beginning Chinese students and won’t be able to understand me if I Beijing it up. ‘It’s me, Yili. I met two foreigners today,’ I continue in Chinese. ‘Americans. They asked a lot of questions about you.’
Then I’m not sure what to say.
‘Take care,’ I finally add. ‘Be careful.’
I hit the red button and hand the phone back.
‘Your accent is really good,’ Bob Marley T-shirt guy says.
They’re students, like I thought, just finishing their first semester at Beijing Language and Culture University. Mark and Jayson. ‘How long you been here?’ they want to know. ‘Where did you study Chinese?’ Before I know it, they’ve invited me to their dorm for a party tonight. What the hell, I think. Maybe I’ll go. It’s close to home, and I don’t know what else I’m going to do with myself.
We say our ‘nice meeting you’s’ and ‘later, dude’s,’ and I exit onto Jianguomen Road, heading toward the subway station. Maybe I’ll go to the Ancient Observatory. Climb up to the flat roof, pretend I can’t see the gaudy high-rises and ugly apart-ment blocks, and try to imagine what it was like when the Ancient Observatory was the tallest building around, looking out over a sea of peaked gray tile roofs. When you’d hear donkey bells and peddlers’ cries instead of car horns and screeching brakes.
I try to imagine it, but I can’t.
Jayson and Bob Marley T-Shirt guy’s party is pretty standard for a party in a foreign students’ dorm: loud music, tubs of Yanjing beer, people spilling out of one room into the hall and flowing into another. I catch the scent of hash, no doubt supplied by the local Kazak dealers, and over the din of the music make out English, Korean, German, and attempts at Chinese. I see a few people here close to my age, grad-student types, and I tell myself I don’t look that out of place.
I’m bored the moment I arrive.
I grab a beer, open it, find a clear space along the wall, and lean against it, wondering if I could find some of that hash I’m smelling. Kids bump past me, laughing, stumbling. I don’t even see Jayson or Marley T-shirt guy.
This is stupid, I think. Why did I come? No one’s going to talk to me, and I don’t feel like talking to anyone. It’s like there are these black waves rolling out from me, warning everybody off. Stay away. Don’t fucking talk to me.
‘Hello!’
I look up. Standing in front of me is a Chinese guy, thirtyish, wearing a cheap leather jacket and a faded Beijing Olympics T-shirt, the one with the slogan ‘One World, One Dream.’
‘So sorry to bother,’ he continues. ‘You are American, right?’
‘No. I’m Icelandic.’
‘Ice … ?’ he stammers.
For whatever reason, I suddenly feel sorry for the guy. He’s not bad-looking; he’s got that near-babyfaced handsomeness like Chow Yun Fat did when he was young, but he also has a slight stutter and this sort of clueless vibe, like he doesn’t know what to make of me messing with him.
‘Yes, I’m an American,’ I allow. ‘And you’re … Chinese, maybe?’
He grins broadly, revealing slightly crooked but very clean teeth. ‘Why do you say that?’ he replies, joking back. Maybe he’s not so clueless.
‘Just guessing.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, Chinese. I am even a Beijing native.’
I snort. Everyone claims to be a native Beijinger. ‘Right. And you were probably born just next to the Temple of Heaven.’
He gives me his squinty-eyed, puzzled look again. ‘No. Close to Da Zhong Si. You know Da Zhong Si? That Great Bell Temple?’
‘Heard of it,’ I say noncommittally. I’ve been there before, actually. It’s no longer an active temple, but instead a bell museum, with bells from all around China and the entire world. Cool place, if you’re into bells.
‘That Great Bell was once biggest in the world,’ the guy says, seeming enthused about playing Beijing tour guide. ‘But now no longer. Now is Zhonghua Shiji Tan. Century Altar.’ He speaks English carefully, laying peculiar stress on the first syllables of the words. ‘Made in 1999, for the, the … the new …’
‘Millennium?’ I guess.
‘Yes,’ he says eagerly. ‘Yes, millennium.’
He extends his hand. ‘I am John.’
I can feel the tendons and muscles as his hand lightly closes around mine. He gives my hand a quick, awkward shake and lets go.
‘Yili,’ I reply.
John beams. ‘Oh, I think you speak Chinese. Am I right? Are you a student here, Yili?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘This is my, my … alma mater. I still come back at times. I enjoy to meet foreign students. So that I can practice. My English.’
‘Your English is very good,’ I say, because it’s what you’re supposed to say, and I’m sure his English is better than my Chinese.
‘No, no, my English is very poor.’ He stares at me for a moment. There’s not a lot of light in the hall, and it’s hard for me to make out his expression.
Then he blinks and ducks his head. ‘Yili, can I fetch you another beer?’
I should say no. I should leave, go back to the apartment. Spend some time thinking about what I’m going to do with my life after Trey divorces me and leaves the country and my visa runs out.
I should think about going home.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’
Like I want to think about any of that.
In no time at all, John has returned with two cold Yanjings. He hands one to me with a small flourish, then holds up his bottle.
‘Ganbei,’ he says with a grin. Drink it dry.
We clink bottles and drink.
‘So, Yili, are you married? Do you have children?’
I try not to roll my eyes. Just about every Chinese person I meet asks me these questions.
‘Aren’t you gonna ask how old I am?’ I reply, as this is the inevitable third question in the ‘Way Too Personal’ trifecta.
John waves a hand. ‘Oh, no. I can see you are still very young. Maybe … not thirty?’
Actually, I’m twenty-six. ‘Just about.’
‘But no husband or children?’
‘No kids. Yes on the husband. But we’re separated.’
John shakes his head sadly. ‘This is the nature of the modern times, I think. The family life always suffers.’
‘Are you married, John?’
‘Me?’ For a moment, John looks uncomfortable. ‘No.’
‘Are your parents upset?’
Because if there’s one thing a Chinese son is supposed to do, it’s get married and have kids.
‘I just tell them to have patience,’ John says dismissively. ‘I am still the young man. I have … I have … benchmarks.’
‘Benchmarks?’
‘Of accomplishment. Before I am to have children. I have not achieved these yet, but I achieve them soon, I think.’
‘Oh,’ I say, and wipe my forehead. I’m already feeling a little buzzed. Not surprising, considering all I’ve had to eat today is a couple bites of spaghetti.
‘You see, it is hard if you are a young man in China and you are not rich,’ John continues, warming to his topic. ‘Because the Chinese women, they want a successful man. And they can choose who they want, because we have more men than women.’
He leans in closer to me. ‘Some Chinese women, they have second husband. Do you understand my meaning?’
‘Ummm …’ I think about it. Take another swallow of beer. ‘More than one?’
‘Not real husband,’ John confides. ‘More like … boyfriend. But these women, they have money. So they take care of boyfriend. Like concubine. You know that word?’
‘Sure,’ I say, finishing my beer. ‘My husband has one of those.’
‘Oh.’ I can see comprehension slowly dawning. ‘Your husband … he has …’ And here John ducks his head and sneaks a little grin. ‘The yellow fever, perhaps.’
‘Yeah, he’s fucking a Chinese girl,’ I snap, my knuckles whitening around the beer bottle, ‘if that’s what you want to know.’
John flushes red. ‘I am sorry. I just … I just made a bad joke. Please forgive me.’
His face is so open, so kind, that for a moment I’m flooded with guilt. And something else. Warmth, I guess. Just from having somebody be nice to me.
How pathetic is that?
I let out a big sigh. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath.
‘That’s okay.’
The weird thing is, suddenly it is okay. It’s been over between me and Trey for a long time. And considering what it is that held us together, the thing we really shared, maybe I should start being glad that it’s over.
Starting right now.
‘I’m sorry too, John. It’s just that I’ve had a rough –’ A giggle starts bubbling up from my throat. ‘A rough six years or so,’ I manage.
I want to laugh, and keep laughing, and never stop.
John grins back. ‘Yili, would you like another beer?’
Maybe I shouldn’t, because I pounded this one, and I’m already kind of loaded. But it feels good. I feel lighter somehow.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’
I lean against the wall and close my eyes. What would it be like, really being free from Trey? Just not caring about him any more. Not ever seeing him again or having anything to do with him, and not having that feel like some hole in the place where my soul is supposed to be, like the part of me that’s able to care about somebody else has gone missing.
Not ever thinking about those times again.
You’ll always think about those times, I tell myself. Always. But maybe, maybe you can think about those times and, from now on, they won’t hurt you so much. Those times, they’ll just be things that happened in the past, and that’s all.
‘Yili?’
I open my eyes. Here’s John standing in front of me, holding two bottles of beer. He’s actually pretty handsome, not really baby-faced; he has a strong jaw, bright eyes, light stubble on his chin. And he’s taller than I am. Solid, with some muscle. I think I can see the outline of his chest beneath the T-shirt.
One World, One Dream.
‘Do you feel okay?’
‘Sure. I’m just a little tired.’
John hands me a beer, already opened, like the last one. ‘We could go sit down somewhere,’ he says, ‘if you are tired.’
‘Okay,’ I say. I’m tired of all the noise, anyway.
We make our way outside. ‘I know a good place,’ John says. I stifle a giggle. Does he want to make out or something? I might be up for that. It might be fun, messing around a little. He’s cute, I’ve decided. I take another swallow of beer.
It’s a nice night. I’m warm enough with just my light jacket. John leads me down a bricked path that leads to a garden of sorts. I’ve been here before. There’s a fountain and a marble wall inscribed with calligraphy, the grooves highlighted by gold paint. Some fucking proverb about wisdom and self-cultivation, probably.
We sit on the stone bench by the fountain. I can hear the music from the party, but it’s so faint that I feel like I could almost be imagining it, making up music from the gurgle and flow of the fountain’s water.
‘This where you used to take girls?’
John grins slyly. ‘Sometimes.’ He takes a pull of his beer and leans toward me a little. ‘Do you have a boyfriend, Yili?’
‘Maybe. Sort of. I don’t know.’
‘What does that mean?’ John sounds curious. Like he honestly wants to understand.
I have to really think about it for a minute. I look up, through the haze of dust and city lights. Haloes surround the streetlights, the stars. It’s all so beautiful, in an ugly kind of way.
‘He’s a good guy,’ I finally say. ‘A really good guy. I like him. And I know he likes me. He’s nice.’
Then I can’t help it: I start laughing. ‘That sounds really lame.’
‘No, Yili, it doesn’t sound … lame.’ John has to work a little to get that last word out, like it sticks somewhere on the middle of his tongue. ‘But you say you don’t know about him.’
‘I mean, I don’t know …’
My head feels funny. The sound of the fountain thrums in my ears, or maybe it’s the music. I swallow some more beer. It goes down like it’s something alien, cold and coppery. ‘What he wants from me. I mean … we spend a lot of time together. But I’m not sure why.’
‘You think he wants you to do something for him?’
‘No. No, I …’ I squeeze my eyes shut. Everything feels funny. My eyes are too big; they’re sticking out, and I need to cover them up. ‘He’s nice,’ I repeat. ‘Maybe he just feels sorry for me.’
‘Yili?’ John says. ‘Yili?’
It’s too loud. I put my hands over my ears. ‘I feel kind of weird,’ I manage.
‘Are you ill?’ John asks anxiously. ‘Should we go to the doctor?’
‘No. No … I just …’ There’s a beer bottle in my hand. I’m holding it. It’s solid and cold, and I can feel the damp from the condensation. Like, the beer that’s inside the bottle wants to get out, and it’s squeezing through tiny holes in the glass. I take another sip. Free the beer!
‘Feel weird.’
‘I think maybe you should go home, Yili.’ He holds out his hand. ‘Come. I’ll take you.’
I stare at him. His eyes are bright, sparkling almost, even in the dark. I stare at his hand. It looks too big.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ I say.
‘Here.’ His hand reaches down. Finds mine. Closes over it, dry and hot, like some trespasser from the desert.
‘Stand up,’ he says.
I do what he tells me to. I don’t even think to argue about it. I stand up, and my bad leg buckles, and I pitch forward.
John catches me. I see his face as I fall; he looks surprised and almost embarrassed.
‘Sorry,’ I mumble. ‘My leg’s messed up.’
‘I’ll help you,’ John says. ‘Here, I take your arm.’
He has me drape my arm around his shoulders, and he threads his arm across my back and under my armpit. He won’t quite look at me, I notice. That’s funny, I think. Why should he be embarrassed? I’m the one who’s somehow gotten so fucked up that I can’t walk.
How’d that happen, I wonder?
It finally occurs to me, as we mutually stagger down the path that leads out of the garden and into the campus proper, that I’ve been dosed with something.
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Wait. I don’t wanna go with you.’
‘What, Yili?’
‘Let me go,’ I say. ‘Let me go. I just wanna … Let go of me.’
‘Yili, I think maybe you are a little sick,’ John says, sounding very sympathetic. ‘I help you to get home. That is all. You don’t need to worry about me.’
I don’t believe him. I try to pull away. The arm encircling me holds me tighter against him. We stumble down the walkway, through the quad of dormitories, past the take-out window of the Xinjiang restaurant where students line up for lamb skewers and sesame bread.
I should yell. I should scream. I should kick him in the nuts and run. But I don’t. I can’t. We keep walking, his fingers pressing hard against my ribs, until we’ve reached the campus gate, where teenage security guards in stiff gray polyester jackets stand nominal sentry.
‘Come on, Yili,’ John says. ‘This way.’
A shiny silver car waits for us on the other side.
CHAPTER FIVE
I picture the finger-shaped bruises John’s hand is making on my ribcage as he guides me toward the silver car. There’s a guy leaning against it, smoking a cigarette. John gestures angrily at him. ‘Off my car!’ he snaps.
‘Fuck your mother,’ the guy mutters. But he lifts himself off the car, takes one last drag on his cigarette, and flicks it into the gutter before ambling away.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Wait.’
‘Now, Ellie, you don’t want to talk to that guy,’ John chides me. ‘He is just some rascal.’
‘It’s all a show,’ I say, ‘isn’t it? That guy drove the car here.’
John does his best puzzled squint, but I’m not buying it any more. ‘Of course not. He is just some local rascal.’
‘But there’s no parking here,’ I say, and I’m feeling like this is maybe the most brilliant thing I’ve ever said.
John laughs as he opens the passenger door. ‘Oh, Yili! You are very funny. Now, get into the car.’
I don’t want to get in. I plant my feet, but I’m really messed up, and my leg isn’t that stable anyway, and John somehow knocks me off balance, and I fall across the seats, hitting my cheek against the gear-shift, and John swings my legs into the car and slams the door.
The car has an open moonroof. I stare up, trying to see through the haze to the stars.
The driver’s door opens, and John gets in, putting the keys in the ignition before his butt hits the seat. My head’s touching his thigh as the car pulls away from the curb.
‘Where’re we going?’ I mumble. My mouth feels like it’s full of stones.
‘I told you, Yili. To your home.’
I can’t even sit up. I just lie there, head pressed against John’s thigh, feeling his muscles bunch and relax as he brakes and accelerates. Streetlights pass over us.
I don’t know how long we drive.
Finally, it seems, we get somewhere. John rolls down his window, mutters something to another teenage security guard in a gray polyester jacket, I don’t hear what. I stare up through the moonroof. I can see the tops of tall buildings, satellite dishes, a square of sky. But no stars.
‘Here we are, Yili.’
He gets out and opens the passenger door. I lie there. I don’t think I can move. John’s face looms over me. ‘Oh, Yili,’ he says. ‘I think maybe you are very sick.’
‘I … I …’
‘Here. Take my hand.’
I try, feebly grasping at it like my fingers have gone boneless; they’re just these white worms, jellyfish fingers, waving around in a black sea.
John scoops me up, hands placed beneath my shoulder blades and butt, lifting me out of the car. My feet touch the ground but don’t want to stay there.
‘Here,’ John says. ‘I carry you.’
And he does. My arms circle around his neck, because they don’t know what else to do.
I rest my cheek against John’s leather jacket and close my eyes, lost in the rock and sway of his steps as he carries me along like I’m some little kid in her daddy’s arms. I catch his scent beneath the smell of cheap, tanned leather: sweat mixed with some bad cologne. I like the sweat better.
‘Yili,’ John says, his breath warm in my ear. ‘What is your apartment number?’
‘What?’
‘Your apartment number. What is it?’
I open my eyes, and it’s the weirdest thing: my apartment building looms above us.
Wait, I think. Wait. He doesn’t know my apartment number, but he knows where I live. That doesn’t make sense. How does he know where I live?
‘You told me this, Yili. At the party. Don’t you remember?’
Did I just say that out loud? I guess I did.
‘Twenty-one oh-five,’ I slur.
I just want to lie down.
I just want to go home.
We take the elevator upstairs. It’s empty, the tall stool where the fuwuyuan sits when she’s on duty unoccupied. I stare at it, the empty stool surrounded by mirror tile, fake wood paneling and fluorescent light, and try to conjure up some meaning to it, but I can’t.
Here we are in the foyer.
As John fumbles at my door (Does he have my keys? Did I give them to him?), I see a sharp beam of white light, and fucking Mrs Hua pokes her head out from her apartment.
‘What sort of things are going on now?’ she hisses. ‘This is really more than anyone should bear!’
John turns his head in her direction. ‘Your business ends at your eaves, old Auntie.’ The way he says it, so cold and matter-of-fact, would scare me – that is, if I could feel afraid right now.
Mrs Hua can. She pulls back behind her door. ‘Show some respect,’ she mutters as she slams it shut and locks it with both chain and bar.
John carries me inside.
He steps carefully through the maze of computer parts, the cardboard Yao Ming, the piles of clothes and books in the near-dark, the only light in the room what’s leaking in through the windows from a Beijing sky that’s never really dark any more.
‘Which room, Yili?’
Now, suddenly, I do get scared. ‘Chuckie?’ I say. But my voice is weak, weak like in a dream where you can’t cry out, where you can’t make anyone hear you. ‘Chuckie?’ I try again.
‘No one is here,’ John tells me. ‘Besides, you shouldn’t worry.’
He takes me into my room and lays me down on my futon. He doesn’t turn on the light, but the nightlight by the door has come on.
For a moment, he stands over me. His face is in shadow, but he’s staring at me, I can tell.
‘I am going to make you more comfortable,’ he says softly.
He kneels down by the futon. First he takes off my sneakers and socks, balling up the socks and putting them in the shoes, placing the shoes in the closet, lined up neatly.
Then he hesitates before reaching for the top button of my jeans.
‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘Don’t.’
‘Now, Yili, you cannot be comfortable in these.’
I can’t stop him. I can barely move. He unbuttons my jeans, lifts me up, and slides them over my butt and then off. He folds them up, looks around, and then puts the jeans on the room’s one chair.
He kneels down next to me again. His eyes fall on my bad leg, and he reaches out and lightly touches a place where two long scars cross, then the hollow from the chunk of missing muscle. ‘Oh,’ he says, in a curious voice. ‘You were badly hurt, I think.’
I bite my lip and nod. Tears stream from my eyes, and I can’t control that either.
He gives my leg a final, gentle pat. Then he reaches under my back, beneath my shirt, and unhooks my bra. He rocks back on his heels. ‘Yili, I have to take this off too,’ he says, with a trace of apology. Then he peels my shirt up and over my head. For a moment, the shirt catches on my chin, collapses on my face like a death-mask, and as I breathe in, the cotton sealing my nostrils, I think maybe it will suffocate me, and that’s what John wants to do to me. But no. He frees the shirt from my head. Turns it right side out, folds it, and lays it neatly on top of my jeans on the chair.
He turns back to me, smiling awkwardly. He pulls one bra strap down along my arm until it clears my hand. Then the other. He holds my bra in his hand, and for a moment he stares at my tits. Then he looks away and drapes the bra over the back of the chair.
I’m lying there naked except for my panties. I’m shaking. The room seems to vibrate.
John’s back is to me. He’s rummaging through the little dresser next to my closet. ‘Ah,’ he says, satisfied. ‘This is good.’
He has in his hands a large T-shirt. ‘I think maybe this will be comfortable for you.’
He puts it over my head, lifts me up a little, and I can feel the dry heat radiating from his hand pressed flat between my shoulder-blades.
After he gets the T-shirt on me, he finds the light blanket I use most warm spring nights and covers me with it.
‘Just a minute,’ he says, and leaves.
I lie there. The room is still vibrating, but not so quickly.
When John returns, he carries a glass of water and something wrapped in a dishcloth. He sits cross-legged by my head. ‘Here, Yili,’ he says. ‘Have some water.’
‘I don’t … You put something in it.’
‘Don’t be silly. You are sick. You need some water.’
He tilts up my head so I won’t choke and pours a little water between my lips. I swallow. He pours some more. It tastes good. Like nectar. Like something I need.
‘There. You see?’
When I finish, he smoothes the hair from my forehead. ‘I have some ice,’ he says, holding up the dishcloth. ‘Your face, it’s bruised. I think maybe when I help you in the car, I’m too careless.’ He puts the dishcloth against my cheek. ‘I’m sorry about this, Yili.’
I feel the cold seep through the cloth to my cheek, soaking into my skull and spreading through my head. Everything slows down.
‘That’s okay,’ I say.
John sits there quietly, holding the ice against my cheek.
‘Why you come to China, Yili?’ he finally asks.
I chuckle. ‘Trey. He got a job. I came with him.’
‘What kind of work does he do?’
‘Security consultant. For a big corporation.’ I laugh again. ‘Kind of like a really well-paid bodyguard.’
‘Really?’
‘Kind of.’ Of course, it’s more than that, really. Trey assesses threats. Looks for holes. Keeps people safe.
‘I see.’
I must have spoken out loud again, without meaning to.
‘And this pays well?’
‘It pays okay.’
John brushes a stray hunk of my hair off my face.
‘So, Trey, he does not work for American government.’
‘Big corporation.’ I laugh. ‘What’s the difference?’
John nods sagely. ‘You know, here in China, PLA, Peoples’ Liberation Army, owns many businesses. They hide this better now than before, but still it is this way. So maybe this is somewhat the same as America.’
This irritates me, and I’m not sure why. ‘It’s the other way around in America,’ I tell him. ‘Companies own the Army. They send us where they want us to go. To do their shit for them. So they can get rich.’
‘Ah. I see. So you are in the Army, Yili?’
‘I don’t wanna talk about it.’
‘Why not? It can be good to talk, I think.’
‘No. It’s not.’
But I can see it. That’s the thing. I can fucking see it. I don’t want to. I don’t want to see this shit any more. ‘Oh god,’ I say. ‘Oh, Jesus. Where the fuck were you? You fucking liar.’
John strokes my face, my hair. ‘Yili, I am sorry. I don’t want to upset you.’
I’m crying again. ‘Fuck you,’ I say. ‘You’re just another liar.’
He says nothing.
After a while, he gets up and leaves the room, closing the door behind him.
I lie there. I’m floating. I’m swaddled in clouds. I can’t move.
‘John?’ I call out. ‘John?’
He doesn’t come. I’m alone.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to. I hate myself. I want to die.’
‘Yili, why do you talk like that?’
‘John?’
Where did he come from? He crouches down next to me. Takes my hand. ‘Have some water.’
I drink. I drink like it’s somehow going to save my life. Like it will replenish everything I’ve lost.
I’m pretty fucked up right now.
John sighs. ‘This boyfriend of yours. I don’t understand. Why doesn’t he take better care of you?’
‘He’s busy.’
‘But this is not right,’ John states. ‘If you are together with him, he should take care of you. This is only proper.’
I stare up at the ceiling. Kaleidoscope patterns fold and unfold on the peeling beige paint. Like flowers in one of those sped-up nature movies.
‘I guess he’s not really my boyfriend,’ I say after a while. ‘I guess we’re just friends, that’s all.’
‘But friends take care of each other too,’ John says gravely. ‘Maybe this fellow, maybe he isn’t really your friend.’
‘He is,’ I insist. ‘He is.’
‘But he left you.’
‘He had to.’
‘Why?’
‘Because …’ I squeeze my eyes shut. Then I open them, because little armies keep marching across my eyelids, and I don’t want them there. ‘Because he had to.’
John sighs. ‘Yili, why are you so sure that this man is good guy? What do you really know about him?’
For a moment, I can’t think of anything at all. I stare at the ceiling. The peeling paint curls and uncurls.
‘Maybe he is okay guy like you say,’ John continues. ‘But maybe now he is mixed up in something that is bad.’
I turn my head to look at him. John stares at me intently, his eyes shining.
And it doesn’t matter how fucked up I am, how much bad shit I’m seeing in my head, and how scared I was before. I know exactly what this is about. He can’t hide it from me any more.
‘This is about the Uighur guy, right? You know what, John? You’re an asshole. You could’ve just asked me. You didn’t have to do all this. You didn’t have to …’
I can’t finish. I’m feeling this sob coming up from my gut, choking me. I want to scream; I want to hit something; I want to run and run and never stop. But I still can’t move. I lie there crying like a fucking five-year-old, and I hate myself for it.
John’s eyes widen, look away then look back, like he isn’t sure what to do now. ‘Yili, I –’
‘Shut the fuck up. I don’t care any more. I really don’t.’
I manage to lift my hand up to wipe my face. ‘You could have just asked me,’ I repeat. ‘And I would have told you. I don’t know anything. Nothing.’
Silently, John takes the damp dishcloth that held the ice and dabs my face with it, cleans off the tears and the snot.
‘Lao Zhang’s an artist. He’s got a lot of friends. People crash with him all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.’
I can’t keep my eyes open any more. I feel like everything’s dissolving into foam. ‘Just leave me alone,’ I mumble.
‘Okay, Yili,’ I hear John say from far away. ‘I let you sleep now. You’ll feel better when you wake up.’
Right, I think. Right. I’ll feel better.
CHAPTER SIX
What I remember most, from that first day in the sandbox, is how fucking hot it was, and how I was so thirsty because there wasn’t enough bottled water, and the donkey.
I was looking out the window of the Humvee, trying to make out the landscape through three inches of dirty glass, and it was almost like being under water. I saw desert: flat, endless scrub, different shades of dirt, an occasional clump of cinderblock buildings that blended into the gray dust.
We ground to a stop at the outskirts of some little town – just a crossroads and a couple of telephone poles stuck between mud-brick houses and a few painted cement storefronts. A truck was broken down in front of us.
Across from me, tied to one of those poles, was a donkey hooked up to a cart. Flanks crisscrossed by whip scars, ribs sticking out, head hanging down, like it’d had a lifetime of getting the shit kicked out of it.
‘Heard Hajji’s rigging donkey carts with explosives,’ the soldier next to me said.
I must have looked scared. I was scared. I’d joined the National Guard, not the fucking Marines. I was nineteen years old. I’d enlisted in the Guard after high school and trained as a medic. I thought I’d learn a skill, get some money for college. I didn’t think I’d be doing this.
‘Hey, it’s just a rumor.’ He gave me an awkward pat and stared out the window. A little gaggle of kids hung out by the block wall surrounding one of the houses, laughing, shoving, daring each other to approach us. A couple of them waved. Behind them I saw two women, dressed head to toe in black abayas, looking like some kind of flightless crows.
‘Most of these people are glad we’re here,’ the soldier told me. ‘You’ll see.’
I start to wake up, and I don’t know where I am. Behind my eyes, everything’s bright and yellow, and I’m filled with dread, because I don’t want to be there again, in that place.
Except … except … I miss it too.
I open my eyes. I can’t get oriented. The direction of my bed doesn’t make any sense, the wall is on the wrong side of the room, my head’s facing the wrong way, like I’m sleeping in the Bizarro universe. Then everything shifts into position, to where it belongs. I’m not over there. I’m lying on my futon in my little room in Chuckie’s apartment off Wudaokou Dajie.
I lie there for a minute, rubbing my face, which feels kind of numb. My eyes feel swollen. I close them. Start sinking back into sleep.
I feel my heart thudding too fast in my chest before I actually remember what happened last night.
Was it really last night? Did that really happen? I have this sudden flash of myself lying in bed, John taking off my bra. I shudder. I think I’m going to throw up.
I struggle to stand up, rising first to my knees, grasping the back of the chair. My limbs feel like they’re filled with sand.
As I brace myself against the chair and stagger to my feet, I see my jeans folded neatly on the seat, my shirt resting on top of that, my bra draped across the shirt like it’s some kind of post-modern window display.
The bra was on the chair back, I think dimly. That’s where John put it last night. He must have moved it.
I stumble into the bathroom, thinking I’m going to puke. But I don’t. Instead, I splash some water on my face. Stare at myself in the mirror. My eyes look huge. Everything still glows around the edges.
What the fuck did he give me?
Okay, I think, okay. Whatever that was all about, he’s gone, I’m here, and I’m okay now.
As I come out of the bathroom, I hear a lot of noise coming from Chuckie’s bedroom.
For a minute I just stand there, my heart pounding in my throat. I’m thinking, what if John’s still here?
But then I hear a crash that sounds like falling books, and Chuckie curses.
Okay.
I go back to my room and put on my pants – not the ones on the chair: I don’t want to touch that pile of clothes just yet. I wander out into the kitchen. Slanting yellow light comes in through the window. It’s past two in the afternoon.
I pour myself some water from the fridge. And notice something weird: all the dirty dishes have been washed and are sitting neatly in the dish rack.
Not Chuckie, I think. In general, Chuckie doesn’t do dishes. He lives on takeout. So do I. That’s about two week’s worth of dishes from both of us in that rack.
I shudder again and leave the kitchen.
Here’s Chuckie coming out of his room, carrying an armload of clothes and a duffel bag.
He sees me and jerks back like he’s stuck his finger in a light socket. Then he looks away.
‘What’s up?’ I ask.
‘Going home to see the family,’ he mutters.
‘Oh, yeah?’
Chuckie can’t stand his family. At least that’s what he always says to me. ‘They are just idiots,’ he complains. ‘Hopeless.’ And they live in Bumfuck Shanxi – nowhere Chuckie wants to hang.
‘For a little while. My mother says she wants me to come.’
I see his face. Pale. Scared.
‘You okay?’ I ask.
His eyes dart around like he’s being buzzed by gnats and can’t figure out where they’re coming from. He shakes his head, fractionally.
‘You wanna go downstairs, get a cup of coffee?’
He nods.
There’s this DVD store/coffeehouse in the collection of shops that make up the ground floor of the buildings facing Wudaokou Dajie. The coffee isn’t great, but it doesn’t totally suck either. I go there sometimes when there are no beans in the house.
Chuckie and I grab our coffees at the orange countertop and sit at a little round table by the window with a scenic view of the parking lot and the lovely four-lane thoroughfare that is Wudaokou. Taxis and private cars whiz by while knots of pedestrians make their way across the street like avatars in some Nintendo game, risking all to gain the treasure on the other side.
Chuckie rips open two packs of sugar and dumps them in his coffee.
‘So, what happened?’ I finally ask. ‘You get busted at the Matrix, or what?’
‘Or what,’ Chuckie says eventually.
I’m confused by this until I realize that he’s attempting to play with the language. ‘You got busted by somebody else?’
Chuckie doesn’t exactly nod. He stirs his coffee, catching sugar grit between the spoon and the side of the ceramic cup.
‘I am going to go home for a while,’ he says, not looking at me. ‘You should not stay here.’
It’s not his fault; I know it isn’t, but I’m still so angry it’s hard for me to speak. ‘Is this about Lao Zhang, Chuckie? Is it? ’Cause I haven’t done anything wrong. You know that.’
‘Meiguanxi.’ Doesn’t matter.
Neither of us says anything for a while. I stare out the window. Amid the taxis and cars and buses, a donkey cart piled high with bricks makes its way down the street, pausing for a minute so the donkey can crap in the gutter. The guy driving it, a peasant in patched clothes and a battered Mao cap, talks on his cell phone.
Huh. I thought Beijing outlawed donkey carts.
‘They want me to tell them everything about you,’ Chuckie says rapidly. ‘They want to know who your friends are, what you do, where you go. I tell them you, me, we just, we just …’ He trails off. His hands are shaking. ‘We just living, that’s all. Just living.’
Them.
‘Foreigners, in suits?’
‘Foreigners? Why should I worry about foreigners?’ he asks, regaining some of his typical bravado. ‘What can foreigners do to me?’
‘Nothing, I guess,’ I say, hoping this isn’t going to lead into one of Chuckie’s rants about China’s Hundred Years of Humiliation at the hands of foreign imperialists.
If it wasn’t the Suits, who was it?
‘This is China. Chinese people have stood up!’
‘So they were Chinese?’
‘Of course they were Chinese!’
Just like that, he deflates. When it comes down to it, Chuckie’s too much of a fuckup free spirit to make a good foaming-at-the-mouth fenqing.
‘Police, they say,’ he whispers. ‘But no IDs.’
He gets out a couple wrinkled ten-yuan notes and tosses them on the table. ‘My train leaves from West Train station in a couple hours. I better go.’ He looks away. ‘You should be careful, Ellie,’ he says. ‘You should not stay here.’
And that’s our big good-bye. I sit. Drink my coffee. Watch the passing scene outside the window. Wonder what the fuck I’m going to do now.
There’s a surveillance camera in the ceiling above the DVDs, one of those domed things that you see everywhere you go these days. Not just in China, in the U.S. too. For security, right?
I stare at the thing, at its unblinking black eye. Wonder who’s at the other end staring back.
They’re making tapes, I tell myself, to catch shoplifters. It’s not like there’s somebody watching me right now. Is there?
I pay for the coffee and head back upstairs.
Chuckie hasn’t taken a lot with him. The guitar amp, computer parts, books, and Yao Ming stand-up still clutter the living room.
I go into my little room. Stare at my narrow futon. Think I don’t ever want to sleep there again. Like I ever could sleep there without thinking of John, of lying there waiting for him to do whatever he wanted to do.
All of a sudden, I really want to pack up my stuff and get out of here.
I think about the logistics of this. I’ve got some clothes. A couple cheap pieces of furniture. My laptop. I mean, what the fuck do I have, anyway?
I open up the little cupboard by my bed. That’s where I keep my souvenirs. Things I thought I cared about.
Here’s a little Beanie Baby. A neon orange-and-red squid. I always loved that stupid squid. It’s just so funny. It makes me smile when I look at it. I throw it onto a pile of clothes to pack.
There’s a little jewelry box from Trey. I don’t have to open it; I know what’s inside: a gold cross necklace studded with tiny diamonds. He gave it to me a long time ago, right after we were married. I don’t wear it any more. I wonder why I’ve kept it.
I take the rest of the stuff out of the cupboard and dump it on the bed. A funny figurine Lao Zhang gave me, Mao as Buddha. A pennant from some soccer – oh, excuse me – football club called Arsenal from British John.
And here is that flat, hard box covered with dark blue flocking, about the size of a thin paperback. My service ribbons. My Purple Heart. I think: why did I bring this with me all the way to China? I don’t even want to open it. Why does it mean anything at all?
I throw it on top of the clothes. Because I still can’t bring myself to leave it behind.
I walk out of Chuckie’s place with a duffel bag and a backpack. That’s it.
By now, it’s close to five o’clock. I’m supposed to start work at Says Hu in an hour. I stand at the curb for a while, watching the cars and the buses and the people passing by me in this blur of noise – shouting in Chinese, horns going off, phones with their stupid ringtones, a loudspeaker blasting bad Hong Kong pop – and I think: I just want to be someplace quiet for once.
But for now? I might as well go to work.
I spring for a cab to take me the couple of miles to Says Hu, thinking I’ll get there early and have a beer.
The minute I walk inside, I can see that’s not how things are going to go.
British John is trying to pick a table up off the ground. It’s tilted on its side, one leg buckled under like it took a cheap cut block. A broken chair leans against the wall, beneath a dartboard.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Crazy night?’
‘Ellie.’
He crosses quickly to the door and locks it.
I stand there feeling the weight of the duffel bag on my shoulder.
‘Let’s have a drink,’ British John says quickly, grabbing a bottle from the bar.
‘Might as well.’
I pull up a barstool and throw the duffel on the floor and the backpack on top of that. British John pours us both shots of Jack and lifts his in a toast.
I don’t even like Jack Daniels.
‘What are we toasting?’ I ask.
British John shrugs. We clink shot glasses in silence. And drink.
‘So,’ I finally say, ‘you firing me, or what?’
British John shakes his head. ‘Ellie, it’s not like that.’
‘So what’s it like, then? Who came and talked to you? What did they tell you?’
I guess I’m pretty pissed off, because by the time I finish, I’m practically shaking.
‘First I thought they were Chengguan. Just the usual shakedown.’
Urban Management officials. A police force found in every Chinese city, mostly demobbed soldiers and thugs, officially in charge of keeping order on the streets, cracking down on illegal vendors and the like. They like beating on migrants and extorting whatever ‘fines’ they can extract to supplement their crappy salaries.
British John pounds his shot and then pours himself another. I can see the tremor in his hand, and it’s not from the booze. ‘I don’t know who they were. They asked a lot of questions. Gave me a number and told me to call them when you showed up. Told me I’d lose the business if I didn’t cooperate.’
‘I didn’t do anything.’ I hear myself saying it, and I have to admit, I sound like a sullen five-year-old.
‘It has to be something.’ British John sounds really frustrated. ‘Look, I want to help, but you’ve got to tell me what’s going on.’
I shrug helplessly. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s got something to do with Lao Zhang and some Uighur friend of his. But that’s all I know.’
British John tops off our shot glasses. ‘You can’t keep on working here,’ he finally says.
I toss down my drink. ‘Okay. Fine. Whatever.’
‘Ellie.’
I stand up. ‘What?’
British John reaches into the cash register and pulls out a wad of bills. ‘Here,’ he says awkwardly, holding it out.
‘I don’t want it.’
‘Don’t be a fucking stupid cunt.’ He slaps the money on the bar. ‘Take it.’
He has a point. I pick up the cash and shove it in my pocket. ‘Thanks,’ I mumble.
‘Look,’ he finally says, ‘just take it easy for a while. When this all settles down, you can come back.’
At that, I snort. ‘Yeah, right. Like I want to come back to this shitty-ass job.’
I shoulder my backpack and my duffel. British John comes out from behind the bar, wraps his arms around my waist, and hugs me close. ‘Try not to go to extremes,’ he says. ‘’Cause you have a tendency to do that, you know.’
I hug him back. ‘I’ll see you,’ I mutter into his shoulder. And then I turn and leave.
I start walking down the street, past a string of stores selling phones and MP3 players and cameras. I don’t have a clue what to do. I’ve got two sets of spooks on my ass, no job, no place to live, no husband, no boyfriend, and this stupid fucking duffel bag is cutting into my shoulder and making my goddamn leg ache, and I’ve only got nine Percocets left.
Maybe I should just book myself a flight to the States. What’s left for me here in China? Absolutely nothing.
But what do I have back there? My mom, and it’s not like I don’t miss her sometimes. She’d take me in, but how long would that work? Her life’s still bound up in the church. In Sunrise. And that’s pretty much the last place I want to be.
Sunrise, with its fake adobe buildings that make it look like an Indian casino minus the neon, which I guess works for Arizona, where I grew up. The auditorium, where the services are held with coffee and donuts and giant plasma TVs. At the bookstore you can get the latest Christian rock and hip-hop CDs, ‘WWJD?’ bracelets, T-shirts that say ‘Stoned Like Paul’ and ‘Yes, I am a Princess – My Father is the King of Kings!’ You can drop your kids off at the daycare center if you want while you go to an aerobics class. The minister, Reverend Jim, wears Hawaiian shirts and talks about joy and living in Christ and how to reach your professional goals, in a Christ-like way. Reverend Jim is big on reaching your professional goals.
There wasn’t much else to do where I lived, so I went.
Mom started going too, when she wasn’t working. She needed something – something that wasn’t work and wasn’t taking care of me in our shitty little townhouse down the street from the KFC. Christian parenting, Christian singles – all of a sudden she had this whole network supporting her. It was like she’d been falling and falling and had suddenly landed on this big, soft comforter held up by all these new friends, a place where she was finally safe.
How safe would I be in the U.S.? If the Suits are watching me … Would they really leave me alone if I went home?
Sometimes I miss having a weapon. Not my M16. What I want right now is a little M9. A nice reliable pistol. Because really, what’s the point? My life’s been a disaster ever since those times, and nothing’s getting any better. It’s just getting worse.
My steps have slowed down to a near shuffle.
Don’t cry, you stupid bitch, I tell myself. Nobody cares, and it’s not going to do you any good.
About the time I’m ready to stop walking, I find myself in front of a wangba, an Internet bar.
I guess I could check my e-mail before I go kill myself.
The girl behind the counter asks for my passport and then doesn’t want to look at it, telling me to write the information down myself. So I say I’m ‘Faith McConnell’ (my sworn enemy from middle school) and claim to be living in ‘Orange County,’ this suburban development that’s out by the Capital Airport, not the one in California. Being a foreigner, no one’s going to question me about that.
This wangba's okay, not too crazy with smoke and noise – it’s just a long room with rows of computers, a counter up front where you sign in and buy drinks and snacks from a glass-front refrigerator if you want. The décor is mainly beige, with the obligatory ‘New Beijing, Great Olympics’ poster that no one’s bothered to take down and a couple sad-looking potted plants here and there. Chinese and Korean students play games involving swords, explosions, and girls with big tits dressed in chain-mail bikinis; a middle-aged Westerner reads what he can access of The New York Times through the Great Firewall. Lately getting on news sites hasn’t been too much of a problem, but things like Facebook and Twitter and Blogger are blocked.
Like Lao Zhang said, the government doesn’t like it when too many people get together.
When I log in to my Web mail account, I’ve got over two hundred unread e-mails. Most of them are junk. Plus there’s my mom’s obligatory ‘Send this message to Five Angels you know’ e-mail and a couple of dirty jokes from her Christian friends. This is one of those things I’ve never understood. Why are Christians sending me dirty jokes about cowboys and nuns?
I delete all that, and I don’t forward my mom’s e-mail to five angels I know, because I don’t know any, and I’m probably going to hell anyway.
Halfway down the page is an e-mail from Trey.
‘Ellie, please turn on your phone. Call me. I know you’re pissed off, and I get that, but let me know you’re okay. Those are some heavy-duty guys – if you help them, they can help you. But don’t fuck with them. Okay?’
Like he really cares if I’m okay.
My finger hovers over the keyboard. Reply or delete?
I do neither. I go back to my inbox.
Now, here’s something weird.
‘An Invitation To Tea.’ The e-mail is heavy on the HTML, with graphics that look familiar.
‘The Sword of Ill Repute,’ it says on a banner at the top.
I scroll down, past a Flash animation of warriors swinging swords, pectorals bulging or breasts heaving depending on their gender.
‘Cinderfox, the Humble Servant of the Lord of the Boundless, requests the Swordswoman Little Mountain Tiger join him on a quest. We begin with a cup of tea at the Tears of Heaven’s Pass Teahouse. I will be there after four o’clock. I await your response.’
It’s Lao Zhang’s game, the one he’s so addicted to. Chuckie too. I’m Little Mountain Tiger. This is an invite for me to come and play.
I sit there for a moment. I haven’t played this game in ages. In fact, I’ve hardly played it at all. Chuckie and Lao Zhang, they’re serious players, high-level, not likely to pursue a lowly newbie with no points, no spells, no magic sword, and who doesn’t give a shit about it. None of their friends would either.
Lao Zhang’s screen name is Upright Boar of the Western Forest. Chuckie’s is Eloquent Evergreen Monkey.
So who is Cinderfox? And why did he send me this invitation?
Here’s the link to play, outlined in blue. I hesitate.
It’s Lao Zhang’s game.
I click on the link.
CHAPTER SEVEN
My first duty assignment was at one of the biggest forward operating bases in the Triangle. Life on the FOB was okay, in comparison to the alternatives. We had a PX, where you could buy toothpaste and iPods and tampons, a dining hall with a salad bar and a taco station, a little gym, air-conditioning some of the time, Internet connections. I could get a mochaccino in the morning if I wanted, before going out on patrol. That part sucked, though, and there was no getting around it. I was a medic, not some fobbit who never left the base. It was my job to ride along, in case somebody got shot or blown up.
You hear ‘patrol,’ and you’re probably thinking ‘combat’; we’re out there fighting bad guys. It wasn’t like that. I was part of a support company. Most of the time, we delivered supplies, guarded cheesecake for truck convoys run by private contractors like KBR, or escorted public affairs officers to some meeting with the locals.
The heat was like nothing I’ve ever felt before, like the sun and the wind were cooking me down to my bones, drying me out from the inside, and no amount of water was going to keep me from shriveling up into some girl-shaped piece of jerky. Everything was coated in greasy dust. I’d blow my nose and my snot would come out like it was just glue to hold the grit and dirt together. We were hacking this shit up all the time, always sweating, leaving stiff white salt stains on our T-shirts. With the women, sometimes you could see our tits outlined in white against the khaki. The guys loved that.
I fucked around a little. Not at first. At first it was like, ‘Let’s see who can freak out the good little Christian girl.’
Things like: ‘Hey, Baby Doc, check it out.’
I was checking my e-mail, and Specialist Turner was sitting at the terminal next to me.
‘What?’
‘Got some pics from home.’
I leaned over to take a look. On his screen, this big dick was pumping in and out of some porn star’s pussy, while another guy straddled her, his cock between her inflated tits, which she was squeezing together like she was playing an accordion.
I looked away. I wanted to say something funny or sarcastic or mean, like I didn’t care, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Aw, come on, don’t be such a bitch,’ Turner said.
I went back to my e-mail. My mom had sent me one about what religion your bra is (‘the Catholic type supports the masses, the Presbyterian type keeps them staunch and upright, and the Baptist makes mountains out of molehills’) that said I should send it on to anyone who would appreciate it.
Turner and I hooked up a couple days later, out by the laundry trailer, where there was a storeroom that was used for supplies. At night, nobody went there. At first, I felt pretty bad about it. Turner was married, had a kid, and I wasn’t supposed to do things like that. But there I was, lying on a pile of dirty sheets, my T-shirt and bra in a heap over bottles of bleach and detergent, my fatigues tangled up around my ankles.
‘It’s TDY, Baby Doc,’ he told me, sliding his finger in and out. ‘TDY doesn’t count.’
TDY means temporary duty assignment. It’s all been TDY since then, you know?
The game takes a long time to load, but it’s an elaborate game, and you never know what the Great Firewall is doing to your Internet connection here on any given day.
Finally, here’s the log-in screen, a vaguely Chinese landscape of misty, cloud-swaddled mountain peaks and pagodas. An animated warrior on horseback gallops across. Then the music comes on – a pseudo-traditional Chinese soundtrack with the mournful erhu and the twanging runs and staccato chords of the pipa, all with a heavy drum and bass backbeat.
It takes me three tries to remember my password, because it’s been a while since I played this game. When I get it right, my avatar, Little Mountain Tiger, pops up, non-magical sword in hand.
The Sword of Ill Repute is based on Chinese myth and legend – the Hong Kong movie versions, anyway. A whole class of characters comes from the twelve birth animals of the Chinese horoscope. Most people play as a variation of the animal from their birth year. So if you’re a Boar, like Lao Zhang, you have certain attributes based on your intrinsic Boar nature, plus others that have to do with the particular year you were born in, your elements, your rising sign, and so on.
I’m actually a Rat, but no matter how many times Lao Zhang told me that the Rat is a good sign –’Smart, clever, not like Boars. Boars too trusting. Too idealistic. Better in this world to be a Rat.’ – I didn’t want to be ‘Little Sewer Rat’ or what have you. ‘Little Mountain Tiger’ is based on the particular year, month, and day of my birthday, which happens to be a Tiger day. So that’s how I play, with faint tiger stripes accenting my cheekbones.
The scene shifts. I’m in an unfamiliar setting, nothing like where I last left off playing. I’m walking up a steep mountain path, animated pebbles crunching under my feet. Crows caw in the pine trees overhead. A warrior steps onto the path, Shao Wu of the Wounded Mountain. An NPC – a non-player character.
‘Halt and state your allegiance!’ says the text in the main chat window. You can play this game in Chinese or English, thanks to Babblefish translators.
I try to walk on by, and the NPC pulls out his sword.
I hit auto-attack. The music turns martial. We fight. I kill him and gain a few experience points. Then I keep walking.
I continue on the path and see, off to the left, a wooden building with a steep pitched roof and a sign whose characters I recognize: Cha Guan.
A teahouse.
I go inside.
More pipa music plinks in the background. Animated figures sit in booths at wooden tables, sip tea, play cards, eat watermelon seeds. A female musician sings a song about lovers who drown themselves in a hidden lake. I’m not sure who’s an avatar and who’s an NPC. It’s not that crowded. I walk slowly through the main room. Characters’ names appear over their heads in shimmering text as I pass. There’s some chatter about going to the market to purchase an Immutable Dagger and starting a quest on behalf of the Emperor for the Sacred Scroll of the Nine Immortals. No one engages me.
So where’s Cinderfox?
Finally, at the back, I see a male figure, hair and beard a dark, deep red, slanted green eyes. He does have a sort of foxy look about him. I approach.
‘Hail,’ I type.
Nothing.
I take a few steps closer.
‘Hail,’ I try again.
His name appears over his russet head: ‘Cinderfox, Son of the Boundless.’
‘Greetings, Little Mountain Tiger. Glad you accept my invitation.’
I sit.
‘Tea?’
‘Thank you.’
After a moment or two, an animated serving girl appears, bearing a tray with a teapot and two cups.
Obviously, Cinderfox has way more pull in this game than I do.
‘Jasmine? Dragon Well? Oolong?’
‘Dragon Well,’ I type.
Of course, the whole thing is ridiculous. I’m going to sit here and drink imaginary tea with a cartoon character?
The serving girl pours. We drink.
‘Dragon Well is good choice,’ Cinderfox types. ‘You gain wisdom and stamina from this.’
I check out my character inventory. My wisdom and stamina have increased by five points each.
‘Why did you invite me?’ I type.
‘I think we should keep our business private. Now that you found me.’
Just like that, a bamboo screen surrounds our little table.
The chat window has changed colors. The banner now reads ‘Private Chat.’
‘I make us anonymous,’ Cinderfox types.
‘Cool.’
‘Have more tea.’
If I had the ability, Little Mountain Tiger would be squirming in her seat about now. I really don’t feel like wasting more time drinking virtual tea, regardless of what it does to my wisdom score.
But I go along with it. This isn’t my game.
‘Okay, Cinderfox,’ I type. ‘What is this quest?’
‘Maybe this up to you.’
‘Don’t know what you mean.’
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Lisa Brackman
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Триллеры
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 18.04.2024
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О книге: An electrifying thriller debut set in modern China, in a world of artists, paranoid revolutionaries and government conspiracies…First she tried to start over. Now she’s just trying to survive.ON HER OWNEllie Cooper’s tour of duty in Iraq left her with a damaged leg, a faithless husband, and a desperate need to get away. In Beijing, she falls for charismatic Chinese artist Lao Zhang but, after the arrival of a mysterious guest, he disappears…ON THE RUNHer cheating husband, Trey, tracks her down to demand a divorce. But far more disturbing are the Chinese and American agents who begin to hound Ellie for Lao Zhang’s whereabouts.AND A LONG WAY FROM HOMEWhen things suddenly turn threatening, Ellie turns fugitive, convinced there’s a hidden agenda – one that involves something she should never have seen in Iraq – something that could get her killed. Now she’s alone, in a country she barely knows, falling down a rabbit hole of conspiracies from which she can’t escape…