Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  “Not really!” she shouts back.

  “But you like this place.”

  “Uh-huh. Follow me.” She takes me by the hand and leads me along the side wall to where it meets the stage. Then she turns around to face me and scoots herself backward onto the stage. She sits hugging her knees there in a little nook between the wall and the stack of massive speakers between her and the band. The speakers are angled out so nobody can see her. She inclines her chin at me, and I join her.

  We lose a lot of the high end sitting beside the speakers, but the bass is so huge and near that it feels like the barriers between my organs are dissolving and they’re all blending together into one superorgan. It’s far too loud to talk, too loud even to think, and all I’m left with is emotions and sound. We’re in a waterfall, we’re in a jet engine.

  Wei has her hood pulled down over her face, but after a minute she tips her head up to look at me. I meet her gaze. I try to say nothing at all with my face, just listen, but I find that she is doing the same. I watch as she looks from one of my eyes to the other and back again. Then she leans her head back against the wall behind us and closes her eyes. I do as she does and it all washes over me, washes through me. We are alone together and it washes over us.

  Even Dad’s fish could hide within their tanks, take refuge in a concealed pinch amid the coral. We both lived within boundaries, although Wei was aware of her prison, whereas I had been drugged into obliviousness, raised on a steady drip of attenuated reality, filtered and packaged, tailored to my little fish-brain. And even so I also feel that we are brilliant beings, our splendor unmistakable, undeniable, even while we huddle behind the speakers, as dense and nuanced as the plumage of the caged bird, the prismatic scales of the tropical fish in the tank. And our fetters as distinctively human as a wire cage or a glass box—no, more human, subtle and insidious: they intertwine us with the fate of men and of nations. Men and women. Nations and empires.

  The four tones cannot be sung, which means that it’s hard for me to understand Chinese songs, and we’re so close to the speakers that the band’s droning lyrics sound more like shapes than words. But I can clearly make out the words when they switch to simple English for the refrain:

  We don’t wanna play, we don’t wanna try

  We don’t wanna hope, we don’t wanna lie

  We’re gonna fly clear yeah yeah

  We’re gonna fly clear

  We don’t wanna click, we don’t wanna drive

  We don’t wanna fight, we don’t wanna thrive

  We’re gonna disappear yeah yeah

  We’re gonna disappear

  24

  Did you remember to put the battery back into your phone?” Sun says. He had been sitting at the kitchen table, losing a staring contest to Xiaofang, when Wei and I returned from Yugongyishan. We went to my room together and stuffed forty grand into his backpack. Now we’re in a taxi on our way back to Velvet to meet Feder. It’s pouring rain.

  “Yeah. And I got two more calls from that same number ending in 8998. Someone’s being really persistent.”

  “Can I have a look?”

  I pull out the Nokia candy-bar to show him.

  “Hmm. It’s a landline. You can tell from the number of digits. And it’s a good one. But I have no idea who.”

  “What do you mean, ‘a good one’?”

  Sun explains that people pay extra to have eights and nines in their phone numbers because bā (eight) rhymes with the first part of the word for “get rich” (fācái), and jiǔ (nine) sounds like chángjiǔ—“long life.” “So this number ending in eight-nine-nine-eight probably belongs to someone with good connections.”

  “I’m learning all kinds of things on this little trip.”

  “Maybe we are almost finished. Maybe you can go home after this.” Sun smiles without showing his teeth and pats me awkwardly on the back of the neck.

  “I hope so. My sister is pretty upset.”

  Sun nods. “You did not have to come here, but I’m glad you did.”

  “Thank you. I guess I’m glad, too.”

  “Because you got to play the no-games game?”

  “Ha. Sure, a tiny bit for that reason. But also, I had to learn the truth about my dad and what happened. I’m not happy about all this stuff, but I feel like it’s better to know than not.”

  “I understand what you mean,” Sun says. “But there are many things I wish I did not know.”

  There’s a weary note in Sun’s voice that catches my attention. In the thirty-six short hours since we arrived in Beijing, I’ve learned how foreign reporters dodge police tails and media watchdogs. I’ve seen how pretty Russian girls and Mongolian dwarves earn their keep in the shiny new Chinese economy. I’ve discovered how debonair gangsters like Ai pose as socialites while sending their assistants out on hidden-camera sexcapades. It’s a new world to me, revolting but also titillating.

  But for Sun, it’s just another couple of days at the office. Dad’s office. Which he had never been allowed to leave.

  “Maybe you feel that way because you didn’t have a choice,” I say.

  Sun knits his brow, weighing the idea in his head. “Perhaps you are right.”

  The taxi pulls up in front of Coco Flaire. We pay the driver and then jog-walk through the rainy parking lot to the back alley where Feder took us last night. Now that Sun has mentioned it, the idea of going home fills my head and lightens my step, even as the icy rainwater soaks my clothes. Reporting back to Andre, Jules, and Eli—mission complete, Dad avenged, time for tacos—sounds unbelievably fantastic. The mess of my enrollment status and the basketball team don’t seem so daunting now that I’ve smashed someone’s hand with a hammer. Blue skies and second chances. I want to go to the beach.

  When we come around the corner to Velvet’s back door, Feder is alone there, smoking a clove cigarette under the back-door awning. He sees us and smiles.

  “My boys! You did your errand, eh?” He throws his arms wide as if he wants a hug, but Sun doesn’t move and neither do I.

  “Yes, we did. Gregoire said he’ll do what you want.”

  “Konechno, konechno,” Feder mutters, glancing around. A hint of dread presents itself in my stomach. I follow his eyes and turn around to see Ouyang’s leather overalls dude leading half a dozen guys toward us from the direction we came. They’re soaked, too, and walking slowly. He’s carrying a machete.

  My eyes flutter wide, the hairs on my forearms stand up. I dart around Feder and try the door into the club, but it’s locked. When I turn back around, Ouyang’s guys have fanned out. I recognize another one of them from Ouyang’s posse, a shorter, muscly guy with a gelled fohawk and a black tangle of indecipherable neck ink. The other guys all look pretty rough, too. Everyone’s got a knife, a sap, brass knuckles. The rain shower fattens into a downpour.

  “Mā de, nǐ zhège piànzi—You’re a fucking liar.” Sun spits the words at Feder, the first time I ever hear him curse. Then he turns toward me—or rather, toward the dumpster next to me. He takes three quick steps, vaults up onto it, and then begins scaling a drainage pipe up the side of the building. He’s on the roof before Overalls has even reached the dumpster. I’m tempted to laugh at how easily he escaped until it occurs to me that I, Victor, have not. Wait, why didn’t Sun lay out some of his kung fu skills this time? Shouldn’t we have talked about what happens if people with machetes show up? I’m squinting up into the rain, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, doggedly refusing to look back down at the reality that awaits me. The dread metastasizes to my guts, my lungs, my spine.

  “I knew it!” Feder says to Overalls. “It is Sun Jianshui.”

  “You set us up,” I hiss at Feder in English. He shrugs and gives me a look that says, What’s a guy supposed to do?

  “You can come with me,” Overalls says to me in Mandarin. His machete is wet, rusty, nicked. My eyes crawl up the blade to the handle, the hand, and the wrist, which sports a winding snake just like Rou Qiangjun’s. Another member
of the Snake Hands Gang.

  “I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” I say. Sour rainwater runs down my face, into my mouth.

  The grin on Overalls’s face is the last thing I see before someone pulls a cloth sack down over my head. Two more someones grab my arms and start pulling me forward at a jog. Deprived of my vision, I trip and fall, and as I fall they let go of my arms and I scrape my palms on the asphalt, earning me a chorus of laughter and taunts.

  Lying on the ground, I rip the bag off my head only to find Overalls towering above me with a syringe in his hand. I try to roll away, but a boot catches me on the back of the skull. I cry Sun’s name at the rooftops, crawling with one hand, clutching my head with the other. All I want is to be left alone, to curl into a fetal position behind a dumpster. But then the boot presses into my back, pinning me to the ground, and I feel a pinch in my neck, and then everything goes red, and then everything goes black.

  * * *

  “Okay, explain,” Dad said. “This had better be good.”

  I was sitting backward in a kitchen chair, my upper body draped over the back of it. I wasn’t really drunk anymore, but I was exhausted, my mind scattered by fear and adrenaline. My clothes were wet from standing in the rain on the highway shoulder. Dad was pacing back and forth in front of me, his jaw working double time. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and he had just collected me from the San Dimas Police Station.

  “Go on,” Dad said. “I’m all ears.”

  It was still pouring rain outside.

  I started at the beginning, with the facts: A week ago, at an off-campus kegger, Andre had got the number of some girl on the Occidental dance team. Ashley. Then he called her to set up what he called a grown-up-style double date, basically a favor to me, Victor, the shy guy. We met Ashley and her friend, Tiana, for cocktails at a speakeasy-style bar in Eagle Rock. So far so good, right? But Tiana didn’t seem even remotely interested in me, and besides, none of the four of us really knew how to make conversation in such a polite setting.

  Dad gave a derisive snort. I was giving too much detail, loading him up with truth in order to slide in a lie. I didn’t really think it was working, but I had no Plan B, so I just kept on paddling my idiot canoe.

  We were used to standing around kegs, playing flip cup and quarters, that sort of thing. So we bought drinks to try and grease the gears a bit. Maybe we bought too many drinks. It seemed to work great on Ashley, who before long was speaking to Andre in a too-loud voice about her favorite Pixar movies while more or less pressing her body into his hands. But Andre wasn’t too busy with her to notice that Tiana was hunkered over her phone, exploring the bowels of Snapchat, while I hiccuped down into my ice cubes in solitude. So he got up and made some excuse about a team workout in the morning, and we left.

  I heard myself building Andre up in my story, showing Dad how considerate he was of me. Like I wanted to set him up for the truth, because I already knew he’d see through the bullshit.

  “Anyway, I wasn’t speeding at all. One of my taillights was out. Did the police tell you that? That’s why I got pulled over. Then the cop smelled alcohol, so he made me blow in the Breathalyzer. My driving was fine.”

  Dad stopped pacing and turned to face me. “Your taillight was out?”

  I held his gaze, I nodded blankly. “I had no idea. Anyway, that’s usually just a warning from the cops. And I was just barely over the limit for blood alcohol content. It was just bad luck, Dad. Really bad luck.”

  Dad squatted in front of my chair so that our faces were close together, almost level. “Why would you lie to me?” he said. He sounded genuinely curious, but also like he was asking himself, not me. “It’s not like you at all.”

  “I’m not lying.” The plaintive sound of my voice filled me with self-loathing. “It happened just like I told you.”

  Dad gave me a long look.

  “Okay, I was speeding a little. I was going five or ten over. But so was everyone else on the two-ten, Dad! It’s true what I said about the taillight. The officer didn’t give me a speeding ticket, did he?”

  “No, just a DUI,” Dad scoffed. Then he stood back up and resumed his pacing. “But that doesn’t matter. There’s more. Just tell me truth.”

  “I did,” I said. “I told you the truth.”

  He smacks the back of his hand, then his forehead. “Of course! You’re protecting your friend. It’s the only reason you’d lie to me. So what did Andre do?”

  I sighed. I’d doubted I’d be able to fool him, but I hadn’t expected him to get to the heart of the matter right away. He was still riled up, but his anger had taken a back seat to something else. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

  “Well, he didn’t do anything, Dad, it’s just that—you see, I—”

  He squatted on his haunches again and watched me intently, his lively gaze fixed on me like a spotlight. “Lái, shuō ba—C’mon, out with it,” he said. “I’m not going to spank you.”

  I flushed. “Andre was driving, not me. I told him I felt a little tipsy when we left the bar, and he said he was fine and took the keys. When we got pulled over, we swapped seats. It wasn’t his idea, it was mine. I knew that if he got a DUI, it might be on ESPN by now. It might really hurt his draft position.”

  Dad stared at me in amazement. “You swapped seats? How on earth did you swap seats?”

  I explained how I figured that the heavy rain and the dark tint Andre had added to his windows would prevent the cop from seeing us. Before we even came to a complete stop, I pointed out the greater risk that Andre was facing and suggested that we swap. I was already diving into the back seat as I talked him into it. As the cop was running my license plates, Andre managed to hoist himself into the passenger seat, and I scrambled forward into the driver’s seat.

  “It took less than a minute,” I said.

  That’s when Dad burst into laughter. “Quite the little criminal, you are. Jumping into the driver’s seat to take the heat for Andre. And this maneuver, it was your idea, not his?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  It was true, and I was proud of it. Even though it meant I had volunteered for three months in an alcohol-treatment program, six months with no driver’s license, and more than a thousand bucks in fines.

  Dad was still pacing around, and I watched as the rueful smile faded from his face, replaced by a vexed expression of deep contemplation. Finally, he stopped his pacing, pulled up another chair, and sat down in front of me.

  “Well, you’re old enough to live with the consequences of your decisions,” Dad said. “And I’m impressed by your devotion to your friend, and your cleverness—I really am. But Andre set up this date, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was something he wanted to do for me.”

  “But not necessarily something you wanted for yourself. And then, when the cops pulled you over, he let you take the fall?”

  “I told you, it was my idea, Dad.” I looked down. “I knew you wouldn’t understand. That’s why I lied about it.”

  That was when the phone started ringing in Dad’s office. It was well past midnight, but that wasn’t unusual. Dad often got calls from China at that hour—it was already tomorrow afternoon in Beijing. He glanced at the French doors to his office, hesitated for a moment, and then returned his attention to me.

  “No, I understand. I really do,” he said. “You have a pure heart, Victor. I’m just saying, in the future, there’s something you must remember: the people closest to you are the ones with the greatest capacity to hold you back. And they don’t always do it on purpose.”

  The phone had stopped ringing. Dad rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fingers and exhaled slowly. Then the conversation took a weird turn. For some reason, he brought up this thing we hadn’t talked about for a long time: my choice of college. He reiterated his opinion that maybe it would’ve been a good idea for me to go to Berkeley, a better academic option, where I had also been accepted.

  We’d been ov
er it a hundred times. I reminded him that I didn’t choose SDSU because of Andre. Berkeley hadn’t offered me a basketball scholarship. He knew how much I wanted to keep playing basketball. And if I had gone to Berkeley, it would’ve cost a lot more, and I’d have been a lot farther from home.

  The phone started ringing a second time, and again, Dad stared into his office. Without looking back at me, he said quietly, “Maybe it would have been better for you to be farther from home. To start on your own path, away from San Dimas, from Andre, from me.”

  I knew he’d be angry about the DUI. I was prepared for anger. I wasn’t prepared for regret. For rejection. Tightness spread across my forehead, and unwelcome tears sprang into my eyes. I looked away to hide them from him, but I couldn’t keep the hurt out of my voice as I asked him: Was that really what he wanted?

  The phone stopped ringing as the answering machine kicked in again. Dad sat still, alert, waiting to see if the caller would leave a message, but instead the machine beeped twice to indicate that the caller had hung up. Dad looked back to me, draped despondently over the chair back in my damp clothes, and sighed.

  “You can’t understand now, Xiaozhou, and that’s fine. You have lived life without the sort of difficulties that teach people to be wary of reliance on others. It’s a good thing. But my life hasn’t been like that, so let me tell you something that you may understand later, even if you don’t right now.”

  The phone started ringing for a third time. This time, Dad didn’t even glance at the doors to his office. He stayed fixated on me, his eyes filled with ferocity.

  “Just remember this, Xiaozhou. Yǒu shíhòu, qiān nǐ shǒu de rén yě shì zhàqǔ nǐ xuè de rén,” he said. “Sometimes the hand that leads you is also the hand that bleeds you.”

  25

  I wiggle my fingers, wiggle my toes, will blood into the frigid appendages of my body. I heave deep breaths to jump-start my lungs and diaphragm. Where am I? Wherever I am, it stinks of urine. I winch an eye open for a fraction of a second, then quickly give up on that idea. The white light above my head is too bright, the space is too tight, and I can’t change the position of my body. My clothes are still damp from the rain, so I must not have been unconscious for that long.