He waved away the apology. “I’ll save you the newspaper.”
The elevator hadn’t worked in months, so Natalie walked up the stairs, her laptop bag slung over her shoulder. The stairway was stiflingly hot, with a smothering stickiness that weighed on her like stones. She had to stop to catch her breath several times on her way up. Maybe I should quit smoking. She liked smoking—the ritual of it, the offering of cigarettes, the shock some people showed when they saw a young American who smoked. But she didn’t much care for the way she got out of breath these days when she climbed stairs. After the stairway, the heat of the open day was a relief. She went out onto the roof. The neon sign that topped the hotel was dark. There was a chicken coop up here, and a tiny raised garden with garlic and chives, and some sort of cabbage. She could see Foshan spread out around her. The building across the street was a bombed-out shell. The Americans didn’t send bombs to the coordinates of the hotel where she was staying, because they knew this was where the westerners stayed. She hadn’t notified them she was staying here, but they undoubtedly knew anyway. And they certainly knew about Sam.
Her phone rang. “Natalie Brenn,” she said, picking it up.
“Nat! Is this connection better?”
“Yeah, I went up to the roof. I swear the military is doing something that’s screwing up everyone’s satellite signals but theirs. What’s up?”
“The story you just sent got all garbled. Can you try again?”
“Sure.” Natalie had brought her laptop to the roof, and sent the story again. “How’s things?” she asked while it hummed.
“Like usual. Hey, your father called. He wants you to call him. Actually, he wanted your phone number—”
“You give it to him, I will fly over to Taiwan just to kick your ass.”
“I believe you, Nat. Don’t worry. Anyway, he wants you to call. It sounded like it might be important, a family emergency or something.”
Nat checked her watch. “It’s the middle of the night there. I’ll try to remember to call once he might possibly be up.”
“Good. Okay, your story made it through. Thanks. Keep your head down.”
“How ’bout I start by getting off the roof? Talk to you later.”
The sun was setting. She looked out over the shattered city at the swirls of pink on the horizon. Somewhere in that direction was her father, still trying to convince her to live her mother’s life.
On the eastern horizon, she saw a dim flare of light. Artillery. The dim, shadowy piece of herself, the part of her that refused to believe in the Huntington’s diagnosis and everything it meant, shuddered. Time to go downstairs. She picked up her phone and her laptop and started back down the stairs.
*
One of the hotel staff met her at the bottom of the stairs. “Miss? There’s a message for you.” Her first thought was that her father had tried calling the hotel, but the message was handwritten, in an envelope stamped with a holographic red seal. She looked it over; it was the chop of the man she’d interviewed that day.
Inside, the message said simply, Your presence is requested ASAP, and an address.
Outside, she could see a Peacekeeper on patrol. Its head swiveled back and forth as it walked; she could almost hear the faint whirr from where she stood. She looked at the note again. She’d have to walk past the Peacekeepers to get there.
Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. There’s a person looking back at me. Gabe. He’s not going to shoot a gweilo, even if I’m out past curfew. She looked at the note again, then headed out.
Natalie knew that the Peacekeeper outside the hotel had probably been assigned there to protect her and the other westerners at the hotel. She gritted her teeth as it passed. One of its metal parts needed greasing; she could hear squeaks as it walked, over the whirr of its servomotors. It turned its head to look at her, and she forced herself to make eye contact, or what passed for eye contact with a din bou bing. It paused and looked at her a moment. Somewhere in North Carolina or Texas, a soldier was seeing her through the Peacekeeper’s eyes. Gabe, she whispered to herself. Why do these frighten me so much when nothing else does? They’re not going to kill me. If anything, they’ll think they should protect me.
“I don’t recommend going out right now, Miss,” the Peacekeeper said. Coming from a young man’s throat, the words probably would have sounded gruff, and maybe a little patronizing. Coming from the Peacekeeper, they sounded half-man, half-mechanical, and made every hair on her body stand on end. “I heard there’s something planned tonight. You’ll be safer in the hotel.”
“Thanks for your concern,” Natalie said, and started again.
The Peacekeeper stretched out an arm to stop her, and she dodged aside to keep it from touching her. “You should go back to the hotel.”
“Are you going to make me?”
The Peacekeeper lowered its arm. “No.”
“Then thank you for your concern, but I’m going out.” She continued down the street.
The address was a former factory, now dark and empty. The doors were locked. She checked the note again and sighed, then decided to wait a minute or two.
A car pulled up: a big, old-fashioned one with heavy tires and dark windows. The rear door opened. “Natalie?”
For a moment she hesitated, but this sort of adventure was why she was here in the first place. Her pulse began to race as she climbed into the back seat.
*
The people inside the car wore scarves tied over their faces. Natalie could tell that two were female and two were male. They spoke to each other in rapid-fire Cantonese and Natalie could catch only sporadic bits of it. They were trying to make sure she hadn’t been followed; Natalie didn’t think she had, but she kept her mouth shut, knowing that she might hear something useful if they assumed she couldn’t understand them.
They drove into a shipping warehouse, the concrete floor bare. One of the men took out a bulky device that looked a bit like the scanners they used at airports; he ran it up and down her body, then over her belongings. A shout in Cantonese, and he turned to look at her accusingly. “That’s my laptop,” she said, pointing. “That’s my voice recorder, and that’s my phone.”
More Cantonese; this time she couldn’t understand it at all. The voices rose in pitch. One of the men took out a tire iron and picked up the laptop; she gasped and started forward to stop him, then fell back as he turned on her, tire iron in hand. She held out her hands, trying to look nonthreatening. “It’s going to be hard to do my job without that computer.”
As if he hadn’t heard her, he knelt on the ground with the computer, slammed the edge of the tire iron into one of the drives, and pried open the plastic shell. Computer innards spilled across the ground; there was more shouting, and all but one red plastic square was swept into a plastic bag and handed to her. Meanwhile, the man with the tire iron smashed the red square like a cockroach, breaking it to bits. He left it on the floor. Then he ripped the battery out of the sat-phone and handed that, and her voice recorder, back to her.
I have another battery back at the hotel. I can always phone in my stories. Natalie took a deep breath, though fear was fragmenting her thoughts and making it hard to concentrate; her hands tingled from it. They want me to tell a story or they wouldn’t have given me back the voice recorder. One of the women blindfolded her; when the car swerved, she sprawled into the woman’s lap.
After another quarter hour of driving, the car slowed. Natalie felt the car bump over something, then cruise slowly, endlessly to the left. Then the woman removed her blindfold and everyone climbed out.
They were in an underground parking garage, lit dimly with emergency lights. One of the men went over to a door, and knocked on it. Natalie heard rapid Cantonese, and then the door swung open. He gestured for her to go in.
She went through the door into a stairwell, and then up the stairs. The man guiding her switched on a flashlight. She caught a glimpse of two men near the door, guns slung over their shoulders
. The stairs were hot and airless. At the hotel, she at least knew how far up she’d be going, but here she had no idea; they went on and on. “I need to rest a minute,” she gasped after fifteen floors. The man didn’t respond, so she tried Cantonese. “Need rest.”
He hesitated, then stopped and let her sag against the wall for a few minutes. “It’s not far now,” he said in Cantonese, speaking slowly. “Only five more flights.”
“Five? Can manage.” She straightened up.
“No, go ahead and rest.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered her one.
“I been thinking, should quit,” she said, taking one.
“You should,” he said, handing her the lighter. “Filthy habit.” He grinned. They smoked in the hot, dark stairwell for a few minutes. He dropped the butt on the floor when he was done with his. “Ready?”
They went up five more flights, and then he knocked on a door. “I’m here with the Gweilo,” he said.
The door swung open, and she was met with a blast of cold, crisp air; it took her breath away, like stepping from a rainforest to a snowstorm. She hadn’t experienced proper air conditioning since coming to Foshan. The hotel had air conditioners, but running them took power, and power took propane, and propane was scarce. The Americans were supposedly allowing in a limited supply for hotels like the Golden City, but no doubt the hotel found it more profitable to resell it than to use it.
She stepped into the chilly air. It was going to be miserable going back into the heat, after this, but she might as well enjoy it while she had it.
The air conditioning might be running, but the lights weren’t. She followed her guide with the flashlight down the hallway. This was an office building, and no one had looted it—at least not yet. The office at the end of the hallway had a folded antique screen like one of the screens from the art shop, and a faint light that let her see someone sitting behind it.
Her guide stepped forward and saluted, saying something in Cantonese that she didn’t catch. Then he turned to her and said, “Chen Zoeng Gwan.” General Chen. He pointed at the screen. “He invites you to sit with him, and offers an interview. You may switch on your voice recorder.”
She switched it on, then sat in the chair that the guide offered her. “General Chen, I receive honor you talk to me. Your beautiful language, I sorry to abuse. Please give me patience.”
There was a rumbling laugh from the other side of the screen. “Don’t worry, young lady. I am a very patient man.”
She had expected him to sound old, but his voice was youthful, despite him calling her “young lady.” He spoke slowly and clearly. She thought he probably spoke English far better than she spoke Cantonese.
“Your people destroy my laptop,” she said. “Hard now to send story home.”
“I apologize for that,” he said. “It contained a homing beacon placed there by your government. Perhaps they thought you’d find me. I trust your newspaper will be able to send you a replacement. Shall we start the interview?”
“Tell me,” she said, her pulse settling down for the first time since she’d climbed into the car. “Why you make rebellion against Chinese government?”
*
Hua Chen was a good interview subject. Natalie had found that Chinese government officials were offended by hard questions, but Hua Chen remained polite and conscientious. When the interview was over, her guide walked her back down to the waiting car—a different one—and blindfolded her. The humidity had come down over her like a sodden wool blanket as she stepped out of the air conditioning, and her shirt clung uncomfortably under her armpits.
When she reached the hotel again, it was night. She retrieved the extra battery for her sat-phone from her room, then climbed the stairs to the roof, and called her editor to dictate the story and request a new laptop. Then she went downstairs to her room and dropped the phone, the recorder, and the remains of her laptop beside her bed.
Something was lying on her bed, waiting for her: The New York Times. Clipped to it was a note: You never returned, so I sent you the paper when I finished with it. I hope to see you later. —Sam
With a pleased sigh, she lit a cigarette and sat down to read the paper.
The war was on the front page today; apparently the Americans had arrested some high-up person from the bun gwan, a young woman. Though it didn’t sound like they actually had her in human hands yet—she was in the custody of Peacekeepers when the story was filed. Other major news involved a bad accident on the New York subway, a flood along the Mississippi from the spring thaw, and a forest fire. She read every word, even the filler pieces about two-headed turtles and an increase in rural crime.
Then, under Health News, she saw:
Researchers Announce Cure for Huntington Disease
She carefully set down her cigarette and leaned closer. What?
The medical researchers were at the University of Michigan. There had been treatments announced before, but most—at best—only slowed the progression of the disease. They didn’t stop it. Huntington’s had become almost unknown thanks to genetic testing, anyway, so it wasn’t a research priority. But the researchers had been studying Huntington’s because of some optimism that this treatment could also be used for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients. They focused their research on Huntington’s because the protocols allowed faster testing when the patients were going to die without it. And it had worked. On every patient. Completely halting progress of the disease, but also, apparently reversing it, even in one patient who had been within a year or two of death when the therapy started.
I’m not going to die anymore.
Distant artillery made the hotel shake.
Well, unless I get killed.
She stubbed out her cigarette.
*
She was tired from her day’s adventures, but the news had wound her up again. She left everything but the paper, went out to the patio, and ordered a brandy, or failing that, whatever alcohol they had available, palatable or not. Sam came out minutes later; she wondered if he had a window overlooking the patio and had seen her. She didn’t care. It would be nice to have the company.
“Good afternoon?” he asked, offering her a cigarette.
She started to wave it away, then took it. Her hands were shaking. “Very productive,” she said.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
She started laughing. “Yeah, I guess I did. The Other Me.”
Sam gave her a mildly startled look and lit her cigarette. “Surely you’re planning to explain that,” he said.
“I have Huntington’s disease,” she said. “It’s a rare genetic disease, carried by a dominant gene. If you have it, you have a 50% chance of passing it on to your kids, if you have any. And you’ll get Huntington’s disease when you’re fifty, or forty, or thirty—younger than your parent got it, usually. And then you die. It’s incurable. Was incurable. It’s a nasty death, too. Woody Guthrie had Huntington’s—he’s the one the most people have heard of. It starts with little moments of clumsiness—the same moments of clumsiness everyone has, but when you have Huntington’s, they start coming more and more often. Eventually you develop severe dementia. People usually end up dying of pneumonia.”
Sam sat back with his cigarette and his own brandy. “No wonder you spend your time in war zones, hoping to get blown up before it comes to that.”
She laughed, shakily. “Yeah.”
“Have you always known you had the gene?”
“My father wouldn’t let me get tested until I was eighteen. When my birthday got close, he tried to talk me out of it. He thought I should make my own choices, not let the disease make them for me. But I had already planned two different paths. If I were negative, I would go to college, get married, have kids, a normal job, a normal life. If I were positive—I wanted to become a foreign correspondent, work in war zones, take risks. Because why not? I might as well.”
“So the ‘other you’ is the one who tested negative.”
>
“Right.” Natalie spread out the newspaper. “Did you see this article?”
Recognition flashed in his eyes. “Oh. Oh, yes. Was this the first you heard about it?”
“They almost found a cure back when my mother was dying. I’ve tried to avoid all the ‘cure is just beyond the horizon’ stories ever since.” She glanced again at the headline, her finger tracing the H. “It was harder to avoid the Huntington’s stories back before I came to China.”
Sam looked up at her. “Well, Ms. Brenn, it seems your sentence has been commuted and the governor has offered you a full pardon. Do you think you’ll go to Disneyland?”
“I never wanted to go to Disneyland.” Natalie looked Sam up and down, then stubbed out her cigarette and finished her drink. “I was thinking, if you were at all interested, that I might start by getting laid.”
*
Sam’s room was warm and stuffy. A single suitcase sat on the dresser. He turned down the sheets, then turned to give her a somewhat perplexed look. “Natalie, you’re a very attractive woman. But I don’t know that I’ve ever had someone proposition me so directly before and then wait for me to make the first move. Do you have any condoms?”
“I have an implant.”
“An implant, but, er.” He looked at her questioningly. “Have you ever had sex before?”
“Well—no. I didn’t want to take any chances. I didn’t want to pass on my personal Ace of Spades. My mother conceived me by accident.”
Sam nodded, still looking oddly uncertain. She finally grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled his face down to kiss him. His kiss was tentative, almost hesitant. Natalie realized that she wasn’t really sure what to do next. Take off her clothes? Take off his clothes? People do this sort of thing all the time. There’s probably some protocol I’ve never learned.
Her pulse racing, she unbuttoned the first button of his shirt.
Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories Page 3