The Wounded Muse
Page 18
As he smiles, Jake clenches his teeth to flex his jaw muscles, making his face look more chiseled. He’s aiming for maximum impact to get the conversation going. The faster this transaction goes, the easier it is to keep second-guesses away.
“Wo jiao Jie-ke,” Jake says, holding out his hand.
“I’m George,” the guy says as they shake. He over-enunciates the R to a degree that confirms him as China born and bred.
“Hen gaoxing renshi ni, George. Ni zhongwen mingzi jiao shenme?” Pleased to meet you, George. What’s your Chinese name?
“Cao Zhi, but it’s fine to just call me George.”
“Jiao ni Cao Zhi shi mei you wenti de,” Jake says, making sure to play up the Beijing accent. It’s no problem to call you Cao Zhi
“Your Mandarin is pretty good. Where did you study?” George says in English.
Jake relents. It’s more important to keep the conversation flowing. He delivers the standard, self-deprecating introductory blather. He’s said it a thousand times. “I’ve been in China too long to speak Mandarin as badly as I do. Anyway, I studied in Beijing and Anhui,” Jake says in English.
George says something about a relative who’s from Anhui’s provincial capital, Hefei.
“Really?” Jake replies. “I spent two nights in Hefei visiting the family of my favourite teacher. They fed me so well, I probably gained five pounds that day.”
None of this is true but Jake knows that stories like this play well. It makes him more of a zhongguo tong – a relative of China, an endearing term that can help speed up the ceremonial positioning but which still keeps the outsider at a certain distance. Better than laowai.
George laughs. “I can tell you really understand Chinese culture.”
“Oh, just the surface really,” Jake replies. “There’s still so little I understand here. Nimen de wenhua zhen fuza.” Your culture is so complex.
“Ni tai qianxu,” George says. You’re too modest.
By turning the conversation back to Mandarin, Jake wins the opening round and now wants to see how far he can push.
“Xiang bu xiang gen wo yi qi hui qu wo de fangzi?” Want to go back to my room?
“Wow, that was fast,” George laughs. “Maybe, sometime.”
This might take more than an hour, Jake thinks, but no one else in the bar turns him on as much as George. So he sticks with it.
“Hmmm, sometime. I don’t know if you’re shooting me down or just playing with me.”
“If I said no, would you try your luck elsewhere?”
“No, because you’re the hottest guy in this bar. I can’t take my eyes off of you so I’m going to double down, as we say in English.”
George smiles and nods.
“So,” Jake continues. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“How about I buy you a drink, Jake?”
“Sure.”
“You probably do pretty well in gay bars all over Asia,” George says. “Blond hair and blues eyes go a long way in this part of the world.”
“Is that a compliment or a reproach?”
“It’s whatever you want it to be. I’m just not attracted to white guys.”
Sticky rice. There’s more of it around these days. Jake looks around the bar again and tells himself in consolation that there’s no other white guy around who could close this transaction.
“Right. I appreciate the honesty,” Jake says. “Do I still get a drink as a concession?”
“You get a drink and that’s all.”
“I’ve had worse disappointments in my life,” Jake says in his best attempt to appear unscathed. “Ones that don’t come with a gin and tonic as a concession.”
Gulping the remainder of his third drink and reaching for his jacket, Jake watches George chat with another guy at the end of the bar. Karmic retribution. How does the hook-up expedition square with the effort to free someone he cares about so deeply?
As he heads towards the door, Jake sees a white guy wearing a baseball cap and a hooded sweatshirt enter the bar. He looks like he’s mistaken the establishment for a sports bar. The guy also wears a pair of glasses with thick, black frames. As the new arrival scans the bar, Jake recognizes the slightly flattened nose and slight underbite. Another moment and Jake realizes the guy is Ross Andrews, McKee’s legislative director, and freezes. This should be an opportunity but something tells him to hold back. That something, he knows, is the unspoken understanding among gay men to maintain a discreet distance unless the social context assumes recognition is okay. The reflection on Andrews’ glasses obscures the direction of his focus but Jake can feel the eye contact the way dogs sense fear. Andrews casually turns towards the bar and pulls out his Blackberry as he settles onto a stool in front of it.
Jake decides to break the unwritten rules and kill two birds. He can use this as an opportunity for more leverage. If he plays this well, Jake will also get to fuck a war-mongering, hypocritical, self-loathing gay man. There’s something so perverse about swapping spit with the ideological enemy that Jake can’t acknowledge the risk he’s about to take.
“Howdy partner,” Jake says as he takes the stool next to Andrews who drops his head and lets out a quick chuckle.
“Hello, Jake Bradley. Fancy meeting you here.”
“Indeed. I’m guessing you didn’t wander in here by mistake.”
“I doubt you’re dumb enough to believe that. As you can imagine, I’m not out.” His tone once again serious, Andrew looks at his device.
“Guess what? I’m not either. My career would be over if anyone knew. It would be tough to build sources here.”
Not entirely true, but Jake needs to exaggerate his own vulnerability as part of the plan. In the distorted world Andrews inhabits, it’s probably believable that being gay would end a career.
“So we’re not here to socialize, are we Ross? We’re here on the prowl, right?”
“Yep,” Ross says, now finally looking directly at Jake.
“So let’s get out of here.”
In the dim light of the hotel room, Andrews is on his back. Jake slides his briefs down, letting Andrews’ dick spring out and smack against his lower abdomen with the strength of a sucker punch. Jake slides one foot between his guest’s legs to work the underwear completely off and then pushes the briefs onto the floor. He spits into his hand, begins stroking the shaft and rolls the palm of his hand around the head, making Andrews arch his back and moan. Jake crouches down like a cat and licks his Adam’s apple, then makes his way around to Andrews’ ear.
“You’re so fucking hot,” he whispers into it. “Hungry?”
“Oh, yesssssss.” Andrews breathes the words and then puts his forearm over his mouth.
As Jake wraps his mouth around Andrews’ dick, a flash lights up the room. At first, he thinks the light is some optical effect caused by the excitement. He remembers when he discovered masturbation in his early teens, his vision would sometimes white out and he’d get a sharp pain in his head at the moment of climax. At the time, he fretted that it was an indication of a brain tumour or some sort of hormonal imbalance. The problem dissipated after a couple of months and he forgot about it. Until now. This must be the same kind of phenomenon.
But Andrews jerks himself upright. He’s seen the flash also.
“What the fuck was that?”
Jake looks up and another flash lights up the room. This time, Jake sees that it’s come from a mirror that’s hung on the wall like a painting. As he looks toward the source, several more flashes burst from behind the mirror.
Shock sets in as Jake figures out what’s happening. The implications freeze him and he can’t move until Andrews kicks himself off the bed and scrambles for the briefs that Jake had sent to the floor a few minutes earlier.
“Holy fuck,” Jake says, still looking toward a mirror that continues squeezing off shots. “They’re getting photos of me to use as blackmail,” Jake says in a stunned whisper as though Andrews is no longer in the room.
Wit
hout thinking to put his briefs on, he picks up the room’s desk chair and walks toward the mirror. By the time he gets there, though, he realizes how dangerous it would be to escalate the situation with a vandalism charge. In any case, the images are already on some server far away from this hotel room. He drops the chair.
Andrews looks anxiously back and forth between Jake and the mirror.
“This is about your friend Kee-ang, right?” he says. “Or is this some kind of set up? Are you trying to bring me down with this? Are you trying to bring McKee down with this, you twisted fuck?”
Too stunned as he realizes how these photos, this chaos, may have undermined the effort to get Qiang released, Jake doesn’t answer.
“Hey!” Andrews shouts. “Answer me!
“My only motive, my whole life at this point, is about getting Qiang released,” Jake says, his voice trailing off as a sob wells up unexpectedly.
Jake swallows and shakes his head to push his emotions back down into the bile of his stomach, to dissolve them. This is not the time to appear weak. “My friend is gone, Ross. Why would I make this shit up? The letters. The documents. Think about it.”
Andrews is silent for a moment and Jake can see him thinking about all of the elements, putting them together and undermining the logic of his suspicion.
“Well, whatever’s happening here, now I’m wrapped up in it,” Andrews says, standing against the wall, next to the mirror. “Do you fucking understand?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Ross,” Jake says as he slides his boxer shorts up and then steps into his jeans. “But don’t you see, this is what we’re up against.”
Andrews hastily pulls his coat on while he steps into his shoes.
“So what do you suggest I do about this?” he says to Jake in a hushed but angry tone as though he’s trying to stay below the audio threshold of whatever recording device is monitoring the room. His brow is contorted into an angry stare. “You want my help and you get me into this shit?”
“What, do you think I planned this?” Jake spits back loudly, not caring who hears what.
Andrews just stares, mouth open and shaking his head, as though he’s about to lob more accusations but can’t get his thoughts together. “I don’t know what to think. I just gotta get the fuck out of here. Out of this room. Out of this city. Out of this fucking, fucked up country.”
He leaves without tying his shoes. The door slams, leaving Jake in half light and dead quiet, except for the sound of his breathing.
MAY, 2005
Halfway through a wad of Uyghur hash packed into a ceramic bowl, Jake sees the music pumping through his headphones. Pink Floyd’s “Sheep”. His head lolls from side to side along with the rhythmic bass line that carries the intro of rambling keyboard notes. When the song shifts into its frenetic violence, the sounds assemble into a scene and Jake slowly closes his eyes. Above a herd of terrified sheep running for their lives, a cartoon-animated Roger Waters descends like a surfer on a wave, carried by the sound of David Gilmour’s searing guitar riff. Brandishing a jagged knife, Waters falls onto the back of one of the animals with a scream. He rips open its throat just as Gilmour’s guitar slams out the first of the song’s cacophonic chords. Waters’ shriek breaks into hysterical, wide-eyed laughter as blood spews from twisted and severed arteries, splattering the singer’s victim and the other wooly white sheep running next to it, now more terrified than ever as the mortally wounded sheep stumbles and trips up the animals behind it. Continuing to laugh, Waters pulls above the herd, ready to repeat the kill.
A bloodletting of sorts, Jake sometimes sinks into hash-fueled ritual if he’s feeling bruised by a day in the newsroom and doesn’t have the energy to go out with friends. “Bodies” by Smashing Pumpkins, “Whichever Way the Wind Blows” by Bob Mould, “Come” by Fleetwood Mac. Voices and guitars unrestrained, with a fuck-everything approach that provides Jake with a release of the poison that builds up as his editors in Washington bear down on him like Roger Waters descending on sheep. Every currency policy rumour left unanalyzed is reason for punishment, even if the rumour is the same one that’s bubbled up twenty times in the past month.
The violence that’s meted out in these musically driven visions is more therapeutic than complaining to friends. They transport Jake as far away as he can get from everything he wants to escape. Away from the cadence of corporate spokesmen. Away from Hello Kitty and the hundreds of other smiling, massive-eyed anime characters the Chinese idolize as a subconscious escape from the disarray of a world in flux. Away from the demands for straightforward clarity in putting inherently irrational market sentiment into context, as if the context wasn’t vicious and incomprehensible enough. Away from government officials who regard Jake and all other foreign reporters as spies trying to spark a neo-liberal counter-revolution. Away from the constant construction noise that’s supposed to end by midnight but doesn’t because no one has the stamina to fight the interests backing redevelopment. And even further away from the Bible retreats, faggot jokes and appliance-strewn front lawns of Magnet Hill, Kentucky. An hour or so of smooth hash, a fine red win, and masterful classic rock is usually all Jake needs to slip away from all of these troubles.
Someone knocks but Jake doesn’t hear it right away. He’s constructing the final moments of carnage on the animated farm that John Waters is terrorizing. The music fades enough for Jake to hear the knock. His muscles lock. He wants to keep quiet because he’s not likely to know the person on the other side of the door. Anyone he knows would have sent a text message before showing up. The only tricks with his correct number are the ones Jake would be happy to have as a repeat. No one he’d want to see just shows up. Perhaps it’s building security. The public security bureau? But why?
Jake rises, scoops up the bowl, lighter and ashtray. Thinking whoever is knocking might still just go away, he tiptoes toward his bedroom.
The tapping on his door resumes. The bowl slides off the edge of the ashtray Jake is carrying and, slowed by the effect of the hash, he can only watch, in vivid slow motion, as the object falls to the floor and shatters into many pieces.
“Shit,” he whispers to himself as his heart revs.
He opens a drawer in the bureau next to him and drops in the baggie of hash and the ashtray. He then gathers up as many of the bowl pieces as he can with a few sweeps of his hand, walks to the kitchen and throws all of the broken ceramic mixed with bits of ash into a trash bin under the sink.
“Deng yi xia,” he yells. Just a minute. “Shi shei?” Who is it?
“Dawei,” says the voice on the other side of the door.
Jake is relieved. Of course. He should know by now who’s going to show up unannounced. The only person he knows without a cell phone. And he doesn’t need to worry about the smell. Dawei probably wouldn’t know what hash is, let alone care.
Maybe this time it will happen, Jake thinks as he grabs a wine glass for Dawei who had visited twice since they met in the elevator a month earlier. Hash heightens everything about sex. The hash has Jake feeling intensely horny and bereft of all inhibitions. He has enough wits about him to know that he may behave badly, but not enough to tell Dawei, politely, that he’s under the weather and that Dawei should probably come back another time.
Jake puts the odds on Dawei being gay at about fifty-fifty. There’s no outward indication other than the interest Dawei took in a complete stranger of the same sex at a time when foreigners were no longer a novelty on the streets of Beijing. Enough interest to show up for no apparent reason.
When Dawei arrived unannounced for the first time, Jake had just got out of the shower and was wearing a towel, an unplanned setup straight out of bad porn without Jake even trying to engineer it. So he decided not to change into clothes right away. With his hair damp and beads of water still on his skin, Jake gave Dawei a tour of his apartment. Dawei was quiet, except for questions at a few points, like when Jake showed him the guest room.
“Whose room is this?” Daw
ei asked.
“Just for friends who visit from out of town.”
“So most of the time, no one stays in here?”
“Correct.”
When he looked into Jake’s computer room, Dawei asked why his work equipment is in his home and Jake had to explain the difference between his own personal computer and the one he uses in the office he goes to every day in one of the two China World Centre towers.
The tour continued in the last room, the master bedroom, and Jake’s heart raced in anticipation of how the next few minutes would play out. Would Dawei be easy to talk into bed? Would he play coy like the Chinese who are still conflicted, the ones who seek out white guys for sex because that puts the entire scenario in a different context and makes it easier to think of the experience as a form of curiosity playing out in a world that doesn’t exist to anyone else they’d know.
Or maybe Jake is just dead wrong about this Dawei guy. The uncertainty makes things interesting and exciting because the encounter could end in a confrontation.
Once in the master bedroom, as Jake was ready to change, Dawei asked the last question of the tour.
“Don’t you have a wife?”
“I don’t have a wife and I don’t have a girlfriend,” Jake said as he casually removed his towel.
He looked away from Dawei to make his intent less obvious. Chinese don’t have the same hangups that Americans have about nudity but a dead-on stare might have been too much. Just as his arousal was beginning to show, Jake turned and rummaged around his underwear drawer and Dawei stepped into the bathroom.
“You have a shower on one side and a tub on the other,” Dawei said, his voice echoing off the glass and tile of the enclosed space. “Isn’t that kind of strange?”
“Um…I never use the tub,” Jake said, not really answering the question.
Then silence settled in, as he looked in the drawer at a stack of neatly folded Marks & Spencer boxer briefs he buys in Hong Kong and wondered what the next move should be.
“How much is your rent?” Dawei asked, souring the moment with one of those income-related questions that Mainland Chinese will always ask prematurely.