Death of East

by Michael John Grist

  They nodded and laughed as though these were jokes, then in turn regaled Qor with tales of Maokai as a boy, of the time he ran naked through the streets screaming for chicken soup, the time he poured soap into the spa's only jacuzzi in the hopes he would make his own clouds.

  Throughout she smiled, and laughed, and said, "How do you do," and, "So nice to meet you." Maokai felt fit to burst with pride, smiling until his jaw was sore, until at last he and Qor found themselves in a quiet corner by the sauna.

  "You have many good friends," said Qor, her hand tightening on his arm. "You are a lucky man."

  His heart leaped at the contact, at her words. For a long quiet moment he looked out over the humming spa, working his tongue unstuck.

  "I know," he finally replied. "I'd forgotten that, until you came."

  She smiled. "As I had forgotten many things too, Maokai. Wondrous things." At his puzzled expression, she went on. "Look at this shrine, all these people, joined together. I haven't seen the like for so long, and you made it. I want to thank you."

  He flushed beneath her words, beneath her beautiful green eyes so focused on him. She truly looked a god. "I should thank you. I'd be dead if not for you."

  Her smile flirted. "Then we shall lay claim to the credit together, shall we not? I am happy to share."

  In that moment, surrounded by so many good friends, he knew he would never feel so happy again, would never dare so much. He leaned closer, touched her cheek with his hand, and pressed his lips to hers.

  Her eyes opened wide, and for a moment she did not respond. Then she was kissing back, warm and ecstatic, and it was everything he'd hoped for and more, her soft lips, the electric touch of her tongue, pulling him in to a warmth he'd never felt before, a belonging so strong it made it all worthwhile.

  Then it was over.

  A sharp barking shot burst through the spa, gunfire, and a sudden silence descended. Qor pulled back from him, her green eyes flashing wide with fear.

  "I must go."

  A voice augmented by a loudspeaker started barking orders over the frightened crowd, to surrender all video and tape recorders, to do as the authorities say. Maokai knew the voice at once, Shun Foy.

  Then Qor's cheek was on his own, her hair the heady scent of fresh river loam in his face, her warm breath whispering against his ear.

  "Don't fight them, Maokai," she said. "I couldn't bear to see you broken. Don't fight them when it will do no good." Then she was gone.

  Maokai stood a moment longer, recovering his senses, her words echoing in his ears. He was faintly aware of people around him being herded towards the exit.

  She had kissed him back. The most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, a god, had kissed him back, and now she was gone.

  He started after her. The crowd broke open for him and he passed among them, wading as through mud until the side entrance appeared and he thought he caught a glimpse of her dark hair bobbing away into the day.

  Then a blue-suited figure was before him, blocking the way. Maokai blinked, saw that it was Shun Foy, a sneer on his face and a dark government band about his arm. His flat palm was on Maokai's chest.

  "By order of the Party-" he began, but Maokai shut his mouth with a fist. He barely felt the impact, as Shun Foy dropped to the ground before him and he ran on, wildly scanning the hill down through the village.

  "Qor!" he shouted, running until another pistol-shot barked behind him, burst in his thigh, and he was on the dirt and rolling.

  A strange smell of fireworks filled the air. Someone twisted his arm up behind his back, while in the distance he thought he saw the green flash of Qor's eyes. He tried to call her name again but there was a knee in his back and he could barely breathe.

  He was jerked around, and Shun Foy's thin face filled his vision. Blood trickled down his cheek from a cut by his eye.

  "You idiot," his brother said, "you utter idiot fool. You've left me no choice." Then he hit Maokai with the haft of his pistol, into blackness.

  * * *

  He woke to a grey and water-damaged ceiling. Porous holes, the spreading stain of humidity, the smell of old plaster. A room, a cell perhaps.

  "Hello," he called out, but only muted echoes answered him. His head ached. Faint light glowed through a dull grey blind. He tried to get up, but found his arms and legs tied to the bed with cold metal cuffs.

  "Hello, Maokai," came Shun Foy's voice. A curtain drew back and bright light flooded in, silhouetting his brother.

  "Where am I?" Maokai asked.

  Shun Foy pulled a seat up by his side. His face was distant, glazed.

  "Peijun, in a prison hospital. You were shot for assault."

  "Shot?"

  "In the thigh. You're lucky to get any treatment at all, especially with our father a known traitor. If it weren't for me they'd have just cut off your leg and stuck a walking stick in the hole."

  Maokai tried to remember. He'd been chasing Qor.

  "Where's Qor?"

  Shun Foy laughed. "Your mysterious mud girl? She disappeared, Maokai, gone without a trace. Poof. Give up on that. You'll not see her again for a long, long time."

  "But I-"

  Shun Foy smacked him hard across the cheek, pointed in his face. "You should have listened to me! You should have come with me when I asked."

  Maokai looked up at him, blinking back tears.

  "They'll soon break you of that," said Shun Foy. "Like father." Then he stood up. "Goodbye, little brother. I expect I'll never see you again."

  * * *

  They kept him sedated for what seemed like weeks. He dreamed of Qor endlessly, but she was always running away.

  He woke once in a vehicle of some sort, maybe a train. Next he was lying on a spattered metal bench, in a dark and tiny concrete-walled prison cell, alone. There was no window, and the air stank of urine.

  A Party prison.

  It was cold. He called out, for Shun Foy or anyone. Soon enough the door burst open and three men rushed in carrying clubs. They beat his arms, legs and behind until his jaw ached from screaming. He begged them to stop but they ignored him, treating him like a piece of dough to be kneaded, continuing until he could no longer control his bladder and cold urine stung his legs, until his body quaked involuntarily on the cold stone floor. Then they stopped.

  He curled up and wept.

  "Shut up," they said, prodding him with their boot-toes. "It's night. Have some decency."

  Everything hurt. The door slammed behind them, and he was alone again.

  He sobbed all through the night, as the pain swelled up in waves. He could not stop it, though he clamped both hands over his mouth.

  At some point he slept, and felt Qor's warm touch at his back, perhaps even heard her soft voice, comforting him. He felt her soft fingers trace the map of bruises over his body, and he understood, this was what they'd done to his father. This was how they'd treated him, before they dumped him back at the spa, incontinent and barely able to speak.

  "Help me, Qor," he whispered, as tears ran down his cheeks. "Please."

  No answer came.

  When he woke the warmth was gone, leaving only pain, and the guards nudging him awake.

  "Soiled himself in the night," said one to the other. Their accents sounded strange to him, clipped and perfunctory. "Animals, these country rats are. Have to beat them into shape."

  He cowered at the thought of another beating. His body already groaned with deep black bruises.

  "Well, get up, rat."

  They poked him to his feet with truncheons, forced him over the room's threshold, then drove him down a long steel-walled corridor where strange faces leered at him from behind bars. In a featureless room they made him strip and blasted him with a high-pressure hose. They laughed as he tried to cover his nakedness. The pain made him want to buckle over, but he didn't dare disobey.

  When it was done they gave him fresh thin linens to wear.

  "And don't shit these this time, rat."

  Back do
wn the hall, in his cell, he lay on the floor and wept.

  * * *

  Days passed. At night he dreamed of Qor, but never so clearly that he could hear what she was saying. All he felt upon waking was that he was the fool Shun Foy had called him, he was the traitor, and the Party would break him just like it broke his father.

  Sometimes he woke from a dream calling out Qor's name; then the guards would come in and beat him. Every time he lost control of his body in the pain of it, every time he lay in piss all night, every time the same humiliating ritual followed the next day. He was a rat, they all said it, he was a rat with no pride at all.

  Weeks went by. He lost track of the progression of day to night in his windowless cell. Even thinking of Qor started to hurt him, of what might have been.

  He tried to kill himself, as he'd done once before. He leaped from the metal bench and landed head down on the stone floor, and this time there was no mud to soften his fall. His neck twisted, he felt his shoulder crunch, and a strange coldness spread through his left side.

  Then Qor came. He felt her at his back, her warm sun-dark hands on his skin, her eyes bright and green in the darkness. He wanted to tell her he loved her, wanted to hold her close, but all he could do was beg.

  She held him and rocked him through the night.

  When the guards found him groaning there in the morning, his neck twisted and piss and drool on the stones, they laughed. For a week he couldn't move his left arm and leg, and he wondered if he'd crippled himself for good.

  Gradually though, the movement came back. He thought a lot about Qor, running her last words through his mind, before she'd fled. 'Don't fight them,' she'd whispered, 'not when it will do no good.'

  Before it had seemed a kind of surrender, another kind of cowardice. Now, having surrendered everything a second time, he realized that it was not. It was a way to survive. It was the hope that some way, some day, the fight would do some good.

  He stopped lying in self-pity, and began to exercise his body and mind. He ran on the spot in his tiny cell, and found new ways to strengthen his arms and chest. While his muscles burned and he waited for the meager rice rations the guards brought, he etched his thoughts into the wall, scratches that were his father and Shun Foy, that were the mud girl, that imagined what he would do when released.

  At meal times he tried to amuse the guards by talking in a mockery of his rural accent. He said the most ridiculous things to make them laugh, and they did. He was the clown, the fool, but gradually the beatings in the night abated.

  Time passed. As the bruises and weight fell from his body, he dreamed of the mud girl again, though it was different now. She ran through green rushes along the opposite bank of the Yellow River, and he ran in tandem with her. They shouted across it to each other. He threw river-lilies into the current for her, and was certain that each time they drifted a little closer to her bank.

  "Qor," he woke, muttering as he rolled on the frigid stone floor.

  At the last, some four years after they imprisoned him, he was released.

  * * *

  He did not know the town. Passing by a new phone shop he looked into the dark glass and did not recognize his reflection. He saw a gaunt man, pale face shrouded with ramshackle black hair, inset with intense dark eyes.

  Like his father. Except where his father had been broken, he felt strong. He was ready.

  Inside the shop, they showed him how to use the screen, how to send a message to far away places. Carefully, obscurely, he wrote a message to the young blog-reporter who'd said the blogosphere loved him. Just one man, but it would be enough. It had to be.

  At the town train station, he found there were new lines in operation. Even in four years, the world had changed without him. He rode one with the pocket money the prison gave him, back to his brother's city, a journey of three days. There, the same old rusted bus took him to his village. On the bus, moving through barren rice paddies, he rode opposite an old man sucking apricots.

  "It's you, isn't it?" said the man.

  Maokai looked away.

  "Broke you, did they?"

  He watched the dry brown dirt pass by below.

  "They'll shut this route down next year," said the old man conversationally, between spitting seeds into his handkerchief. "Not a drop left. Hardly anybody's here now. Just the die-hards."

  Maokai didn't want to meet his eyes. He knew it was his fault.

  The old man grunted. They rode the rest of the way in silence.

  * * *

  The village was near-deserted. Walking up the dry hill-road to his spa, he felt the eyes of his old neighbors at their windows, watching him pass by. He didn't look back. He had nothing to say.

  Large silver pipes ran up the hill beside him like wisteria, the sound of water rushing within. He stood before the space where his spa had been, and felt nothing. He had already imagined what they'd done. He'd written the story of it a hundred times across the walls of his cell.

  An egg-like metal water tank squatted above the broken stubs of his spa walls, like an alien thing, Party-blue against the dusty grey of this dry world. His father's dream was gone, heaped in rubble at the side of the road, and with it the mud. He could feel the egg sucking the life out of the earth.

  A hefty man with dead eyes stepped out of a small security booth by the tank, his hand on the pistol at his waist. He said nothing, just eyed Maokai. Maokai dropped his gaze and walked back down the hill.

  * * *

  At the Yellow River he saw that two more factories had gone up on the far bank. This was progress and he'd welcomed it. The lilies by the riverside were dirtier than ever. The clump of huts he'd once knocked at were already abandoned, in the early stages of collapse.

  He walked up to the first. Its front door hung awkwardly on twisted metal hinges. Carved into the wood was a warning.

  "Two dead from river water. Do not drink here."

  He walked down to the waterside, knelt to smudge the black from the wilted lily petals, but no matter how much he rubbed, thick veins of it would not be moved. He realized then that the black was inside the flower, growing like a cancer.

  He had dreamt of this place so many times, of Qor on the far bank. In the last light of day he carved a message into the hut's door, beneath the warning about the poison water.

  "I came back, mud girl."

  As evening thickened to dark, he ransacked the little clump of huts until he found a rusted hoe. Then he set off for the village.

  * * *

  He arrived in the early hours of night. Standing near the bus stop, hesitant and nervous with several bulky plastic cases on the ground by his side, was the young blog-reporter.

  Maokai approached him, smiling, while the young man stared.

  "It really is you," he said. "You look so different."

  Maokai shrugged. "Four years in a Party jail."

  The young man nodded, and his eyes flickered side to side, as though Party officials might spring out on them at any moment.

  "We're safe here, for now," Maokai said. "Shun Foy would never expect me to come back. I can't speak for tomorrow though."

  "That's alright," the young man said. "I expected it. Shall we start now?"

  Maokai nodded, and watched as this blog reporter started to unpack the components of a bulky film-camera from his cases.

  "I haven't used this model before," he said, fumbling a tube for the tripod. "I had to rent it."

  "It's alright," said Maokai. He felt calm and composed. As the young man rigged a small lapel microphone, his hand was shaking. Maokai laid a hand over his, steadying it.

  "Thank you for coming. I know the risk you're taking."

  "Right, but I had to!" enthused the young man. "People have to know about this. They love you, the mud girl, all of it."

  Maokai smiled. They did a few checks for sound and video. This was it. Then he began, in that circle of streetlight, power brought by their country's progress.

  For four years in
prison he had practiced what he would say. Now the words flowed off his tongue like water in the Party's pipes. He told the story of his father, of the land-seizures that led to his charge of treason and years of torture in prison, that led to his death a broken man. He told Shun Foy's story, of fear, ambition, and anger at the younger brother who still held to the old ways. He told about the mud girl, how she had saved him and brought the water. He told his own story, of his four years of torture in prison, how he'd tried to kill himself and failed.

  Throughout, the blog-reporter hopped excitedly from foot to foot behind the camera, as the night skies gradually lightened around them.

  "Now," Maokai said, when he was finished, "you film what comes next."

  "What's going to happen?"

  "I don't know," said Maokai, "just be sure to run, when you get the chance."

  * * *

  Maokai walked up the hill to the squat water-tank, suffused with calm as the dawn rose over the distant karst mountains. They were still beautiful, like this, when the city's neon lights were dimmed by the sun. He heard the sound of the security guard's TV crackling with some foreign sports show. Closer, he slipped into shadow, readying the rusted hoe like a baseball bat. When he stepped out, the security guard had no time to react. Maokai hit him on the head and he fell unconscious to the ground.

  Maokai took his pistol and truncheon, and cuffed him inside his booth. He waved to the blog-reporter, then set to work with the hoe.

  Some time around sun-up he had pried open a crack in one of the big silver pipes. A rivulet of fresh water ran down the dusty street. By the time the sun was clear of the land, the crack was wider, and the water became a stream.

  The security guard woke up. He shouted threats. Maokai used his jacket for a gag, and went back to work.

  * * *

  As the day broke the few remaining villagers roused and gathered about in muttering clumps, pointing from the blog-reporter with his bulky camera, standing on a rooftop now, to Maokai. The old man from the bus was amongst the first of them.

  "Not broken then," he said loudly. "Mad. We'll all pay for this."