Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  Why did Sun ditch out on me? Am I past the point at which I can avoid getting cut to pieces? For a desperate moment, pure fear gives me an icy blue stare, and I breathe very fast, and my heart pounds in my ears, and I squeeze my eyes shut as hard as I possibly can. And then I send the fear away, and here we are again back where we were.

  Where I am seems at first to be in a casket, long enough to fit me with my arms stretched out above my head. I poke around with my feet and find walls above and beside me, so close that I can’t roll over onto my back. It’s not a casket, though, because the wall above me doesn’t have any play, like a lid might, and it’s definitely metal. The wall to my right is the same material, but the wall to my left isn’t really a wall at all, just an arrangement of scrap metal and wood packed in here to make me more unhappy.

  Then there’s the light. I squint my eyes open long enough to determine that it’s coming from a single white bulb up in front of me. I slither forward on my ribs until my hands hit a dusty metal grate. The spaces in the grate are big enough for my fingers to fit through and grip it, but it’s screwed tight. I open my eyes again, one at a time away from the light, and give them a minute to adjust. Then I sneak my gaze forward and see that the light is coming from a flashlight—a big rectangular one with a handle, sitting on the other side of the grate. The floor out there is reflective, maybe tile or linoleum.

  And that’s it. I nudge the junk to my left around with my elbow, but it doesn’t have anything to tell me. The urge to urinate begins a slow conquest of my headspace. I focus on listening, detect some unsurprising building sounds: a drippy faucet, the snap and buzz of a failing fluorescent light, the groan of a refrigerator. I close my eyes again and think about all the things I want to think about before moving on to the things I don’t want to think about. How long until hypothermia sets in? What am I even doing here? Dad should have planned better. And what if Sun—abruptly the cell phone pops into my head. I try again to squeeze an arm down my side, but it isn’t happening—the space isn’t tall or wide enough. I rock left and right on my thighs, but I can’t feel it there in my pockets.

  I run through plays in my head—flex plays, motion plays, inbound plays, pick-and-rolls. My arms are aching and so is my crowned molar. At some point I decide that peeing is a better plan than not peeing, so I do that, the warmth of my urine a momentary reprieve from the cold. I croak out a bellyful of hoarse sobs. This is the worst jam I’ve ever been in by a fat margin, and I have nobody but my own dumb ass to blame. I may be dead in half an hour, and all I can think of are some stupid fucking basketball plays? What a useless sack of shit.

  I came to Beijing thinking I’d fulfill Dad’s wishes and figure out who he really was. He’d sent Sun to look after me, so I didn’t even have to leave my comfort zone, the role of second fiddle. But all I’d learned about Dad was that he’d been lying to Sun, too. He’d been telling him that he’d have a life of his own, but even after his death, Dad was still making Sun do his dirty work. And Sun had really learned from the pro. We get in a jam and off he goes up the drainpipe to the roof, leaving me in the tattooed hands of a gang of drug-crazed street thugs.

  So here I am, the trusting fool, lying in a puddle of pee and waiting around for someone to drag me out and cut my ear off. And the person I was a fool for trusting was the person I loved most.

  I’m pottering down this path of self-disgust when someone kicks the grate.

  “Xǐngle ma? Did you wake up?” A deep, throaty voice with a southern Chinese accent.

  “Yes,” I mumble, opening my eyes in the same careful fashion as before.

  “It’s not very comfortable, is it?”

  I don’t respond, so the deep voice repeats the question.

  “No, it’s not very comfortable.”

  The voice chortles merrily. I hear screws turning, and then the light and the grate are both gone. Strong hands grab my wrists and drag me out of the tiny enclosure fast enough for my forehead and chin to scrape the metal frame where the grate was. The strong hands drop my arms and back away. I bend my elbows, bend my wrists, crawl up onto all fours and flex my joints around, which is painful but incredibly relieving. I look in front of me and my eyes travel upward: black boots, tight black jeans, and a black tank top. It’s the muscly dude with the fohawk. He’s got the snake tattoo on his right forearm and a cyborg geisha on his left.

  I stagger to my feet. We’re in a dingy industrial kitchen—lots of giant steel racks, huge refrigerator and freezer units. Most of the fluorescent tubes hanging in the ceiling fixture are dead. The drippy faucet is here, too, plinking into a deep rectangular sink with a heap of bloody towels piled in it.

  “You pissed yourself,” Fohawk observes.

  “You’re not wrong,” I say.

  “Fight?” he smiles suggestively, points his toes toward me, and tentatively raises his hands.

  I lower my eyes and shake my head. He makes a clucking noise, pulls a zip tie out of his pocket, and binds my wrists behind my back. “Down the hall, to the right.”

  His smile grows bigger as I turn my head to keep my eyes on him as I pass. The corridor is dark, wide, and worn. There’s a medical smell, something antiseptic, and under that the greasy odor of old machines. No windows or even hints of windows anywhere. Overalls is standing in the middle of the hallway, arms crossed and stance wide, in front of an open set of double doors with more stark light spilling out of it. Without changing his stoic-dipshit facial expression, he points me inward with his chin.

  He and Fohawk follow me into a cavernous room. It must have been a factory floor: shafts and belts suspended from high ceilings stretch away into darkness. Long tables with machines wilting on them line the floor in regular rows, except for the area immediately around us, where a number of the tables have been pushed into a vague semicircle around the double doors.

  There’s one table left in the middle, with a little laptop sitting on it, as well as my Nokia, disassembled, and Dad’s PPQ. Ouyang is standing behind the table, or rather leaning onto it, his chubby fingers splayed, his bald head sweaty, even though it’s pretty cold in here, too. In addition to Overalls and Fohawk, who are standing a few feet away on either side of me, two more members of the Ouyang punk posse lounge on one of the peripheral tables: one a lanky boy with three parallel lines shaved into the clipped hair above his temple; the other a snide-looking girl cleaning her nails with a hunting knife.

  Ouyang gives me a nice long glare. Then he gives the table a shove, finds himself upright, and waddles around it.

  “You’re Old Li’s son, aren’t you?” he says, in a tight, congested voice, like his larynx is fat, too.

  I say nothing. I expel fear from my face, look at the wall, devote my attention to the greenish-white hazmat suits hanging from a row of pegs there.

  “It’s okay, don’t say anything. That’s a dead giveaway! I’d recognize that superior air anywhere.”

  He comes to a stop a few inches away from me and bugs his eyes up into my face.

  “Think you’re better than us? Of course you do, you and your daddy. Living a nice life in the big clean USA. Retired. Retired.” He says the word twice, “Tuìxiū le. Tuìxiū le,” lingering on the singsong tone of the second syllable, soaking it with irony and bitterness. Then he barks a laugh and wheels away from me.

  “You like breathing that clean American air, don’t you?” He paces around, firing his questions loosely toward his lackeys, winning jeers and snorts.

  “Eat a little steak. Play a little baseball. Screw the tall-nosed, white-skinned cunts with double eyelids.” The peanut gallery howls at that one, though I’m not exactly sure what he’s talking about. Ouyang wheels back toward me, closes the distance between us in three heavy steps, and clubs me on the temple with the side of his fist.

  Pebbles explode behind my eyes, and I reel backward, sideways, trying to blink my head clear of the sting.

  “He still came to see us once or twice a year, acting all cheerful and handing out ca
rtons of Marlboros like it was still the eighties or something.” Ouyang sneers. He holds out his hand without taking his eyes off me. Fohawk hands him a rag, which Ouyang uses to mop the sweat from his forehead.

  “But he never wanted to have any real fun anymore—your fault, probably. You and your righteous white mama.”

  He wraps the rag around his right hand. He squints at me.

  “How old are you now—let’s see, you turned twenty-two in December, right?”

  He pops a jab at my left eye, does a little bob-and-weave to the further entertainment of the crowd, and then pops me another one as I attempt to roll away from his huge fist. Groaning, mumbling curses, I attempt friendship with the pain, treat it like a workout. Consider ways to steer myself toward unconsciousness or a quick death.

  “When we were your age, we used to fuck Manchurian whores together in the alleyway behind our favorite bar. Did your daddy ever tell you about that?”

  Just when I thought I was having a bad day. I glare up at Ouyang. He never mentioned it, but thanks for filling me in, bro. I really needed to hear that right now.

  “No, he didn’t, did he. You see?” He turns and addresses Overalls, who is in his signature impassive-asshole stance, his hands folded behind him. “Old Li liked to keep everything nice and separate for his little prince and princess.”

  Then he turns back to me and screams into my face: “So why the fuck are you here?” I keep my eyes down and don’t say anything. The others are quiet now, leaning in toward the six tense inches between his face and mine.

  “You don’t want to chat with me?” He hits me in the stomach this time, doubling me over and erasing my mind of anything except agony. “You want to go back into your little hole?”

  Left ear, right ear, stomach again, and then a kick in the shin.

  I look up at his blurry shape with what I hope is defiance in my eyes.

  “You’re pretty tough,” I say. “Why don’t we try it with my hands free.”

  “Ha! That would be very fair, wouldn’t it?” Ouyang cackles with genuine amusement. “What a great American idea. Okay, cowboy! A nice fair fight. Playing by the rules. It’s a great idea, especially if you wrote the rules. Ha!”

  He laughs again and takes a step back. Then he lunges forward and smashes his forehead into my face.

  I go all the way down, my head a swollen balloon of blood and nerves, threatening to pop. He puts his hands on his knees and grunts his way down into a squat.

  “You know he never loved her, right?” He says in a conversational tone. “She was just his ticket out of this country. Sure, he did a good job of pretending. That was his specialty. He hated it so much, here among the liúmáng, the thugs he was born with, his so-called brothers. He hated us enough to pretend to love that stupid Christian slut.”

  I spit teary, bloody phlegm onto the cold concrete and tell him that I hope his children are born without assholes.

  Ouyang sighs, dabs at his brow with his sleeve, and then grabs an awful lot of my neck in his paw.

  “It’s that motherfucker Flat Head Chen who put you after me, isn’t it?” he growls, pressing his thumb into my throat.

  “Who’s Flat Head Chen?” I manage to wheeze. It comes out of my mouth before I think twice. Ouyang recoils from me, and his caterpillar eyebrows pile toward each other.

  Then I hear an airy whine and a thunk, and his face goes blank as a narrow piece of wood pops out of his left eye—a knife handle. Ouyang reaches his hands up to the sides of his face. He wavers, then falls forward onto his knees, and I roll out of the way as he crashes to the floor.

  “Lǎodà?!—Boss?!” Overalls rushes to Ouyang’s side, but it’s too late: the fat bastard is dead. Just as Overalls cranes his head around in the direction the knife must have come from, I hear another whine and catch a flash of glinting metal in the air, and then there’s a handle sticking out of his face, too.

  “Fuck!” Fohawk exclaims generally. Halfway to Ouyang, he cuts for the table instead, dives underneath it, then reaches up and snatches the pistol just before a third throwing knife clatters off the tabletop.

  Nothing happens for a moment. Overalls is rocking back and forth on his back, taking shallow, wet breaths. The knife handle is sticking out of his cheek, close to his nose. As soon as he was hit, the two lackey punks dove under the table they were sitting on, and now they’re watching Fohawk for cues. I cozy up beside Ouyang so his massive body is between me and Fohawk, roll into a ball, and wriggle my bound hands past my butt and feet so that they’re in front of me.

  “Don’t move!” Fohawk shifts his eyes and the barrel of the PPQ to me. Then he hollers back into the network of hanging machines, “Sun Jianshui, you motherfucker! Give up now or I’ll shoot your foreigner!”

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  Now Sun’s voice comes from the opposite direction of the knives, and Fohawk whips the gun around.

  “Don’t fuck with me, little cat. I’ll blow his head off and yours, too! Throw down your weapons, and we’ll let you go.”

  “Maybe we can talk about it,” says the disembodied voice.

  Lying on my back, I reach over to Ouyang’s face and tug the knife out of his eye socket with my thumb and forefinger, unplugging a rivulet of blood that burbles down his temple and starts to pool around his head. I spin the little knife around and, squeezing the handle between my thumbs, saw on the zip tie until it breaks apart.

  Overalls starts to cry between his wheezy breaths. He reaches up to touch the knife handle, then pulls his hand away, screaming in pain.

  “Get out here where I can see your hands,” Fohawk calls into the darkness.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  Peeking over Ouyang’s body toward Fohawk, who’s still squinting over the gun in the general direction of Sun’s voice, I catch a movement in the shadows behind him. Then Sun pounces, flattening himself onto Fohawk’s back and knocking him to the floor. With one forearm braced against the back of his neck, he smashes Fohawk’s hand against the cement floor until the PPQ clatters away.

  The two others rush over as Sun wraps Fohawk up into a choke hold. The girl punk with the hunting knife doesn’t see me until I’m driving my shoulder into her ribs, knocking her into the boy, and all three of us go sprawling onto the ground. As she’s clambering to her feet with the knife in her fist, I lunge forward on my belly and thrust the throwing knife into her ribs. She screams, rolling onto her back and looking down in horror. I pop up onto my feet and kick the hunting knife out of her hand.

  “Don’t move! Don’t move! I’ll shoot you.”

  It’s the boy—he’s clutching the PPQ in his outstretched hands. Fohawk is out cold, and Sun is crouched over him, watching the boy attentively.

  “Stand over there. Put your hands up.” He looks about nineteen years old, and his chin is trembling to match his hands. Out of the corner of my eye I see the girl punk pull the throwing knife out of her side, groaning with effort as she does it.

  “Safety on,” Sun mutters to me in English.

  “What?”

  “Shut up!” the boy shouts. The girl climbs to her feet with Sun’s throwing knife, dripping with her blood and Ouyang’s, clenched in one fist.

  “Safety on. Gun won’t work,” Sun hisses between his teeth.

  “Ah.”

  “I told you to shut up!” the boy screams, and, squeezing his eyes shut, he pulls the trigger. His eyes pop back open when nothing happens, just in time to watch Sun whirl around and toe-kick the girl in the stomach so hard that my whole body winces. Two more kicks relieve her of her knife and her verticality. I turn back to the boy, who is frantically fiddling with the gun, close the distance in two quick strides, and tackle him to the ground. We hit the concrete and the gun skitters out of his hand.

  “Don’t kill me,” he sobs into my chest, making fists in front of his body, beneath my shoulders. “Don’t kill me, I beg you.”

  It’s over—the only sounds are his sobs
and Overalls’s shallow wheezing. He is warm and trembling beneath my body. I crawl off of him and puke expansively.

  26

  Are you injured?” Sun says, squatting on his haunches beside me and holding out a bottle of water.

  “No,” I croak.

  He turns his head to survey the carnage, then looks at me with his eyebrows raised in some blend of wonder and concern.

  “You were fast,” he says. “Your actions were effective. It could’ve been a lot worse.”

  I rinse my mouth with water and spit it out onto the floor. Sun nods grimly, then kneels over the sobbing boy and speaks to him in gentle tones.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. Would you please roll over?” He fishes around in his little black backpack and pulls out some first aid supplies and more zip ties—am I the only one not carrying zip ties around? I sit there, watching as if from a great distance, as he does a neat little bandage job on the girl punk’s stab wound. Then he hauls Overalls out of the fetal position, unceremoniously yanks the throwing knife out of his face, and rolls him onto his belly, eliciting a series of aggrieved gagging sounds.

  “There’s blood in your sinuses,” Sun says without emotion as he pulls a zip tie tight across Overall’s wrists. “Try not to choke on it.”

  When he’s done with them, he goes back into the backpack, pulls out two small digital cameras, and turns his attention back to me.

  “We have to move quickly. I’m guessing that Ouyang was working on Ice in this factory. You take video, I’ll take stills,” he says, tossing me one of the cameras.

  “Wait.” I squeeze my eyes closed for a moment, seeking words. “I need to ask you something.”