Wild Thing: A Novel

by Josh Bazell

  We end up leaving the meth camp intact, possibly because Palin’s guards are embarrassed about not finding it in the first place.

  The whole incident reminds me of Dylan, and makes me wish I’d tried harder to find out what happened to him before we left Ford.

  I’m not saying the trip isn’t scenic. Early on the third day a pair of actual otters schools the boat I’m in, corkscrewing to stay on their backs and smiling right at me like a pardon from God. From some of the hills we portage over you can see trees and water to the horizon in every direction. A few of the lakes are big enough to have whitecaps, and being on them in a fog feels like being part of a Viking invasion of Avalon. Here’s a campfire under a starry sky. There’s a field of flowers. Here’s some more fucking rocks and trees.

  To be fair, there’s probably an aspect to the Boundary Waters you just don’t get when you’re in a group of forty-four people. There’s always a thumb on the lens, so to speak.

  Palin seems as interested in avoiding me during the trip as I am in avoiding her, but she also seems to legitimately enjoy being outside, and to be a good sport about the incredibly minor deprivations that do come our way. Tyson Grody too. He bops all over the place.

  Just about everybody seems to be in a good mood. People I meet by patching their blisters, like Mrs. Fick, or because we’re both pretending to urinate in the woods while setting waypoints on the handheld GPS recorders we’re not supposed to have, like Wayne Teng, I often end up sitting with for one or more legs of the trip. Barricaded in by the mounds of luggage, face-to-face with no one else to talk to, you can’t help but learn a lot about someone.*

  Mrs. Fick tells me a story she keeps saying she shouldn’t—with good reason, it turns out—but which I appreciate hearing. One of Palin’s guards tells me he and the others wear curly-tube earpieces because the tubes conduct sound from outside, so they don’t mute your ear. Then he tells me there’s a newer device that attaches behind your ear and transmits sound directly through your temporal bone, so it keeps your ear canal from being constantly eczematous from the curly-tube plastic, but it’s so expensive only real Secret Service guys get to use it. Which these guys aren’t. He even tells me the story of how he went from being in one category to being in the other, another thing I’m happy to listen to.

  But the story that affects me most—and the one I spend by far the greatest number of hours reviewing later, in the hopes of figuring out what the fuck just happened to us—is the one Wayne Teng tells me on the morning with the otters.

  EXHIBIT H

  Xinjiekou South Street, Beijing University

  Beijing

  Wednesday, 17 May 1989*

  “Wild Thing”—the Troggs version. Teng Wenshu drops it onto turntable one and brings the volume up just as Link Wray bangs to an end. “Wild Thing” is an annoying song to play, because two minutes and thirty-four seconds later you have to play something else, but it seems appropriate. The world has lost its fucking mind.

  Teng has today’s People’s Daily open on the mixing board, and unless he’s dreaming, it’s filled with photos of the protesters in Tiananmen Square. He’s looking at a two-page spread of students from the Central Academy raising a forty-foot Goddess of Liberty statue opposite the portrait of Mao at the Jinshui Bridge.

  Bracketing the photos—snaking through the entire giant edition—are articles about what an evil dickhead Mao was. The one Teng can see, about the Great Leap Forward, has the phrase “thirty million starved to death.”

  To Teng, whose parents were theater actors in Beijing before the Cultural Revolution, and lucky-to-be-alive subsistence laborers in a television factory in Xiaoqiang after it, the fact that Mao was an evil dickhead isn’t news. Neither is the fact that students in Beijing are protesting, or that the rest of the city is supporting them. Tiananmen Square is six kilometers south of here. His roommates have been going every day.

  But for the People’s Daily to admit shit like this? The Daily is the official newspaper of the Communist Party. It’s in homes in six hundred and fifty cities in China alone, and probably half that number again around the world. And yesterday you could have read it cover to cover with no idea that the protests—or the past forty years—had ever happened. Or that Mao was anything but a god.

  Plus, it’s not like the Democracy Movement has somehow taken over the People’s Daily. This edition is the paper as the Party allowed it to be. Which means the Party thinks it has already lost. Which means it has.

  It raises some interesting possibilities.

  So far, Teng has stayed the hell away from Tiananmen. It’s been one thing for his roommates, whose fathers are all Party members, to go, and to come back raving about the excitement, and the people bringing them food, and the sleeping side by side with girl revolutionaries in silk-scarf tents, talk about Heavenly Gates.* It’s been another for Teng to play that game.

  The possibility that Teng will someday become a lawyer and a Party member is the only hope his family has. His parents in Xiaoqiang are destroyed. His older brother, having been born while the city’s rotting central power plant was still dropping coal ash on the streets like snow, has the intellect of an eight-year-old. Teng, born two and a half years later—and a year and a half after the People’s Hydroelectric Plant of Sanjiangyuan came online, when suddenly there were a lot fewer babies in Xiaoqiang who looked like his brother—owes them.

  And it’s not like he hasn’t taken risks. For a year now he’s spent two hours every morning playing music vaguely evocative of the American civil rights movement on a radio station he rebuilt himself. Granted, the era of the American civil rights movement was also the era of Mao, and Teng tends to play the most inoffensively boring music from then he can find. Also granted, swapping the tubes out of an RCA 1-K Standard Broadcast Transmitter wasn’t much of challenge for someone literally born in a communal television factory—provided they were born after the People’s Hydroelectric Plant of Sanjiangyuan came online. But people have ended up on some pretty bad lists for less.

  And Tiananmen’s a classic bust, with an evil past. The place was built by Emperor Yongle, for fuck’s sake.* Even Deng Xiaoping got arrested there in his student days.

  Still, there’s an image forming in Teng’s mind he can’t quite shake.

  Teng’s radio station, though the size of a large closet and sweltering from the heat of the tubes—more reasons, probably, why the university stopped using it—has two working phone lines. And even if Teng’s never done anything with it beyond announcing song titles, there is a microphone here: a PB-44A from 1933, heavy as an iron.

  He could take to the air. Get news by phone from the Square, or from anywhere else the revolution starts happening. Send it back out with some Doors behind it. Become the voice of the student movement, influencing, if not the odds of victory—it’s too late for that—then the shape of whatever comes next.

  How risky would that even be? What are the chances there’ll be a crackdown now? How would one even work? According to the Daily, even the Beijing police are now on the side of the students. The Party would have to send in the Army—the People’s Army. Which would have to fight its way in from the outskirts of the city, while citizens lay on the pavement and turned over buses to stop its tanks and transports.

  And to what end? To continue making China, outside four favored cities, into a factory state? To keep the poor damned and Party members free to do whatever they want, to whomever they want, while setting prices for whatever they want to buy or sell? Who would fight for that?

  Plenty of people, he reminds himself. Corruption only bothers the people it holds back. And it doesn’t hold back everybody.

  Teng forces himself to imagine the consequences if he joined the movement and it wasn’t successful. If there was a crackdown, and the crackdown won.

  Let’s say he spent the next three weeks here in his studio, constantly relaying information. He’d be hoarse and hallucinating from the heat and lack of sleep by then, but probably a
lso elated. And let’s say the Party then sent in the Army—and that the world, for its own corrupt reasons, allowed it to do so. Teng would probably first hear the gunfire through the phone lines, doubting it was real. Then hear it on the streets as he was fleeing.

  Teng does his best to picture hiding out at a friend’s house in the northwestern suburbs, unsure whether what’s keeping him awake despite his exhaustion is that the high school next door is being used to extract confessions, and the screaming goes on all night, or that the reward for him is now a hundred thousand yuan, and the friend isn’t that good a friend.

  He tries to picture sneaking into a “confession class” for people whose crimes were less serious than his—something that itself could get him shot—just to get his passport stamped so he could buy a train ticket. So he could return home, a complete failure, to his devastated family in Xiaoqiang.

  What would happen then? He would be permanently unemployable, even by the television factory. He’d have to take on black-market technology work, which would require entirely new skills. Most likely computer skills, since doing maintenance on illegal computer networks—another thing that could get you shot—might be the only way to make enough to eat.

  Of course, if that happened, absurd as it is to think about, and Teng somehow survived, it’s true he might end up with some skills that were fairly unique. The ability to design and manufacture multi-protocol Internet routers, say. Or, when the state of the art improved some, single-protocol ones.

  If things went well, he might even end up with skills so unique that his usefulness—first to local Party members, then to Party members in Beijing, and eventually to China itself—would begin to outweigh his crimes. Who knows? Someday he might be able to operate openly, as the CEO of his own company. Called, say, Industrial Cao Ni Ma. And become so preposterously wealthy that—within twenty-five years of Tiananmen Square—he could turn down a ride to the International Space Station, not because of the money the Russians are asking but because his brother is afraid of heights. Or accept, just as casually, an invitation to hunt lake monsters in Minnesota during the only Year of the Water Dragon that will fall within his and his brother’s lifetimes.

  In his radio station, with its dusty, fragmenting cotton sound insulation, Teng mocks himself for being timid. None of that is ever going to happen. The People’s Daily has spoken.

  “Wild Thing” is coming to a close. In seconds the arm will skip, done.

  Instead of reaching for another single, Teng pulls back the sliders on both turntables. Hefts the microphone over from on top of the Ampliphase cabinet. Clicks the “on” button to test it, and hears it spark in his headphones.

  And, just like that, he joins the rebellion.

  24

  Lake Garner / White Lake

  Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota

  Still Wednesday, 19 September

  As soon as we land on the northeast shore of Lake Garner I take my pack around the corner of the woods to White Lake. Night’s falling fast—it’s two hours later than we made camp yesterday and the day before—and I don’t want people hassling me. Not even Violet. I don’t want to think about what I’m about to do any more than I have to.

  Past the spit of land that separates the northeast corner of Lake Garner from the south end of White Lake, I reach the start of the narrow, rocky beach that goes north along White Lake’s western shore. Dump my whole pack onto it.

  It’s already deep grays and shadows here. The wooded ground beside the beach rises steeply as it goes north, leaving White Lake at the bottom of what is essentially a zigzagging granite crevasse. As promised, the place is bleak.

  I’ve just gotten my wetsuit on when Samwise, Palin’s young relation, comes around the corner.

  “Are you going swimming?” she says, surprised.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “In White Lake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  I steal a line from Violet Hurst: “That’s where the monsters are.”

  She nods, confused. “Have you seen Bark?”

  “No. What’s wrong?”

  “She was on the boat with me and Violet, and when we were about to land she jumped out and ran into the woods, sort of like you did.”

  “You mean she came around here?”

  “No. We think she went straight up the hill.”

  Which is to say parallel to White Lake, but along the top of the cliff instead of the bottom, where we are. “I wouldn’t worry about her,” I say. “I’m sure she’ll come back. The dog’s dumb, but she does seem to like you guys.”

  Samwise looks worried, though. “Will you keep an eye out for her?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Thanks.”

  She leaves, and I pick up my fins and my flashlight.

  The water’s cold as shit, and through my diving mask, in the beam of the flashlight, it looks like vegetable soup. Motionless particulates everywhere. Outside the beam of the flashlight you can’t see anything but black.

  I should get out of the water and get dressed before Palin’s young relation Samwise tells anyone I’m here. I’m already starting to kick at things that are turning out to not be there when I shine my flashlight at my feet. The slasher-movie soundtrack of my breath through the snorkel isn’t helping.

  But there’s something I want to see first. I lift my head out of the water and kick over to the spit of land.

  Since Charlie Brisson turned out to be completely unreliable about his leg, I’ve been wondering how accurately he described the spit. Pretty accurately, I’m surprised to find when I reach it. The spit’s just slimy tree roots, with dirt and grass along the top like a buzz cut. With my mask back on I can see that the roots continue to spread out as they go deeper under water, presumably reaching the bottom somewhere below me, or even behind me, farther out into White Lake.

  I transfer the flashlight to my left hand and head for the far end of the spit, using my right hand to pull myself across the face of the root wall like it’s a horizontal underwater ladder.

  Small fish flash silver in the beam of the flashlight, eating at moss so fine it’s like green mist. None of them come out past the protective framework of the roots, though. I wonder if it’s possible for them to swim all the way through to Lake Garner.

  Then the flashlight catches something bright and big ahead of me.

  It’s a red-orange granite wall. Confused, I draw up and tread water.

  I’ve swum the entire width of White Lake, to the cliff wall on the opposite side. I passed the end of the spit twenty yards back—or what looked like the end of it while I was on land. Beneath the surface, it continues all the way across.

  I go back under. There are about six inches of water between the submerged part of the spit and the surface. The spit’s just as wide here as it was at the beach.

  Meaning that while White Lake and Lake Garner might share the same water, they are, in fact, separate lakes. Not to tiny fish that can swim through the barricade, maybe, but certainly to anything large enough to eat a human. To something like that, being at this end of White Lake would be like being trapped in a wicker bowl.

  Spooky. But at least now I can get out of here. As I swim back the way I came, I try to keep the checking of my feet with the flashlight to a minimum.

  Even so, I keep doing it, and one time when I do I see a big gray fin glance out of the light, two feet or so from my ankle. Skin that’s dull like suede but still slimy-looking.

  My mask is gone. My snorkel is gone. My flashlight’s gone. I’m just swimming like I’m falling off a building, not even breathing. Trying to decide whether to claw my way over the spit while I’m still at the submerged part or wait for some actual land.

  Then I’m on the slope of the spit—the real spit, the above-water part, fins off and gone, running up the ladder of roots, fully aware that if I lose momentum or miss a step I’m going hard into a bunch of spikes. Thrilled to be out of the water anyway. I reach the
grass. A tree trunk. Grab it and swing around it to a stop.

  Face-to-face with Violet, who’s walked out on the spit to find me.

  “Lionel—what happened?”

  I turn back to the water. Nothing. It’s still light enough to see the surface, but there’s nothing going on out there that can’t be explained by my twenty yards of freaked-out freestyle.

  “Did you see it?” I say.

  “See what?”

  I don’t answer her. I’m searching the surface.

  “Oh fuck,” she says.

  25

  Lake Garner / White Lake

  Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota

  Still Wednesday, 19 September

  “Knock knock,” someone says.

  I’m leaning against a tree I don’t remember leaning against. Out of my wetsuit, dressed, and supposedly helping search for Bark, but in reality having jumped at the chance to get away from everyone. Particularly Violet, who’s mad at me for not telling her I was going in the lake, and because she thinks I’m holding out on her about what I saw.

  I tried to explain: just because I saw something doesn’t mean it was there.

  “How are you? I’ve been looking for you.”

  Naturally, it’s Sarah Palin. Glassy-eyed and feverish, with a smile that flickers on and off. One of her security guards, with his back to us, moves into place down by the shore of Lake Garner.

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “I heard you saw it.”