I’m actually a Rat, but no matter how many times Lao Zhang told me that the Rat is a good sign—“Smart, clever, not like Boars. Boars too trusting. Too idealistic. Better in this world to be a Rat.”—I didn’t want to be “Little Sewer Rat” or what have you. “Little Mountain Tiger” is based on the particular year, month, and day of my birthday, which happens to be a Tiger day. So that’s how I play, with faint tiger stripes accenting my cheekbones.
The scene shifts. I’m in an unfamiliar setting, nothing like where I last left off playing. I’m walking up a steep mountain path, animated pebbles crunching under my feet. Crows caw in the pine trees overhead. A warrior steps onto the path, Shao Wu of the Wounded Mountain. An NPC—a non-player character.
“Halt and state your allegiance!” says the text in the main chat window. You can play this game in Chinese or English, thanks to Babblefish translators.
I try to walk on by, and the NPC pulls out his sword.
I hit auto-attack. The music turns martial. We fight. I kill him and gain a few experience points. Then I keep walking.
I continue on the path and see, off to the left, a wooden building with a steep pitched roof and a sign whose characters I recognize: Cha Guan.
A teahouse.
I go inside.
More pipa music plinks in the background. Animated figures sit in booths at wooden tables, sip tea, play cards, eat watermelon seeds. A female musician sings a song about lovers who drown themselves in a hidden lake. I’m not sure who’s an avatar and who’s an NPC. It’s not that crowded. I walk slowly through the main room. Characters’ names appear over their heads in shimmering text as I pass. There’s some chatter about going to the market to purchase an Immutable Dagger and starting a quest on behalf of the Emperor for the Sacred Scroll of the Nine Immortals. No one engages me.
So where’s Cinderfox?
Finally, at the back, I see a male figure, hair and beard a dark, deep red, slanted green eyes. He does have a sort of foxy look about him. I approach.
“Hail,” I type.
Nothing.
I take a few steps closer.
“Hail,” I try again.
His name appears over his russet head: “Cinderfox, Son of the Boundless.”
“Greetings, Little Mountain Tiger. Glad you accept my invitation.”
I sit.
“Tea?”
“Thank you.”
After a moment or two, an animated serving girl appears, bearing a tray with a teapot and two cups.
Obviously, Cinderfox has way more pull in this game than I do.
“Jasmine? Dragon Well? Oolong?”
“Dragon Well,” I type.
Of course, the whole thing is ridiculous. I’m going to sit here and drink imaginary tea with a cartoon character?
The serving girl pours. We drink.
“Dragon Well is good choice,” Cinderfox types. “You gain wisdom and stamina from this.”
I check out my character inventory. My wisdom and stamina have increased by five points each.
“Why did you invite me?” I type.
“I think we should keep our business private. Now that you found me.”
Just like that, a bamboo screen surrounds our little table.
The chat window has changed colors. The banner now reads “Private Chat.”
“I make us anonymous,” Cinderfox types.
“Cool.”
“Have more tea.”
If I had the ability, Little Mountain Tiger would be squirming in her seat about now. I really don’t feel like wasting more time drinking virtual tea, regardless of what it does to my wisdom score.
But I go along with it. This isn’t my game.
“Okay, Cinderfox,” I type. “What is this quest?”
“Maybe this up to you.”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
“You Upright Boar friend?”
Upright Boar—Lao Zhang’s avatar.
“Yes,” I type.
“Maybe you can help.”
I lean back in my chair. “Who are you?” I ask.
“Upright Boar friend.”
“How do I know that?”
“You don’t.”
I stare at Cinderfox, who sits on the bench, expression unchanging, green eyes unblinking.
“What do you want?” I type.
“I want nothing.”
Very helpful. I’m sweating. I swipe my hand across my forehead.
“Help what?” I type. “Help in the game?”
A pause.
“Maybe not just game.”
I’m sitting there, my avatar on a bench in an animated teahouse, my butt on a crappy plastic chair in a Beijing Net bar, and I’m thinking about the Uighur and creepy John and the Suits and now this.
“What else?” I type.
“Help Upright Boar,” say the words about Cinderfox’s pixellated head.
Okay, I think. Okay. I’m chatting with some guy I don’t know, a guy who has my e-mail address, who invited me to go on a quest, and who says he’s Lao Zhang’s friend. I think of all those nights I used to watch Lao Zhang playing on his computer, and suddenly I wonder—what was he really doing? What game was he actually playing?
“Is he okay?”
“Right now, yes.”
“Can I talk to him?”
A pause.
“Right now, off-line.”
A long pause.
“Do you want to help?” Cinderfox finally asks.
Well, do I? That’s a pretty good question. Whatever Lao Zhang’s involved with, it’s already cost me plenty.
But is that really his fault?
After all, the Suits probably know about Lao Zhang because of me. Because of what I did.
What did you do in the war, Daddy?
“Yes,” I type. “I want to help.”
That’s when a couple panels in the bamboo screen slide back, and three new avatars enter our booth.
I look at the names above their heads. “Water Horse.” “Monk of the Jade Forest.” “Golden Snake.”
“Greetings, Little Mountain Tiger,” say the text boxes above their heads.
“Members of our Guild,” Cinderfox explains.
“Nice to meet you,” I type.
“Thank you for coming,” says Golden Snake, a female avatar with copper-colored scales that hug her body, merging into her flesh.
“Yes,” Water Horse (another female) chimes in.
Monk of the Jade Forest, a male avatar with jet-black hair and a green robe, sits down on the bench to Cinderfox’s left.
“We appreciate that you’ve met us here,” he writes. “And we are glad that you want to help. But you should know, we can’t guarantee that there’s no risk to you.”
Words appear over Cinderfox’s head so quickly that he misspells a few. “Not dangeros. We wont ask something like that. Just something you can do to hellp.”
“Cinderfox you shouldnt promise theres no risk,” says Golden Snake.
“If she wants to help, let her,” Water Horse objects. She’s dressed in silver armor, with a long, thick ponytail that falls down her back, practically to her knees.
“It should not be dangerous,” Cinderfox types.
“So, which is it?” I ask. “Dangerous or not?”
Another pause.
“Maybe we don’t know for sure,” says Cinderfox. “But shouldn’t be very dangerous.”
“If the risk bothers you, then you should not help,” states Monk of the Jade Forest.
“I want to help,” I type. I’m not sure that I do, really, but I don’t feel like backing down. The last few years, that’s all I’ve done, caved; and look where it’s gotten me.
Cinderfox stands up. “I invite you join our Guild,” he types. “Our name is the ‘Great Community.’ This is our sign.” He lifts his hand. Above the table, a shield materializes in mid-air, a golden, rough-edged crest with red characters in the middle:
I know these characters. “Da Tong
,” I mutter. The Big … Together?
Which I guess means the Great Community.
Cinderfox’s hand stays raised. Little sparks fly off it. The shield pulses above the table.
“You accept, you can find us again, always. Log on, choose Yellow Mountain Monastery for location. Use anon/group command. Only we see you that way. You decline, that’s okay. We go our separate ways.”
I hesitate for what feels like a long time.
You get yourself into some situations, you don’t know exactly how you got there, and you have no fucking clue what shit-storm’s going to hit you.
This time, I don’t have that excuse. I already know that whatever this is about, I am in way over my head. I’ve been in over my head ever since I ate dumplings with the Uighur dude.
I should just quit this game, leave this country, and try to figure out what to do with my increasingly fucked-up life.
But that’s not what I do.
“Okay,” I type. “Accept.”
“Welcome,” say my new circle of friends, their text boxes overlapping like a poker spread.
“So what do I do?” I ask.
A long pause.
“Go to where you eat jiaozi,” says Monk of the Jade Forest.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I KEEP THINKING, if that medic hadn’t been injured, I wouldn’t have gotten the transfer. No transfer, and everything would’ve been different. I wouldn’t be in this situation. Wouldn’t have the Suits and god knows who else on my ass. I would’ve gone home at the end of my deployment, gone to school like I’d planned to do when I joined the Guard, gotten a degree, gotten on with my life.
Or maybe not. Maybe I would’ve been killed instead of just getting blown up.
Who knows? It’s stupid to spend a lot of time thinking about what would have happened if things had been different. Things would have been different, that’s all, and you can’t change it anyway.
But sometimes I think there’s another life I could have had. Should have had. And maybe some other version of me is having it, like in some Sci-Fi Channel movie.
Which probably means it’s low-budget and lame.
The funny thing is, when I first got the transfer, I thought it might be good news, because the patrols were really starting to suck.
Like this one time, we were outside the wire on a cheesecake run, escorting a KBR truck that was transporting chow from our FOB to a small base about fifty clicks away, and we were almost there, the lead vehicle just rolling up to the gate.
“Creed’s a bunch of pussies,” the soldier next to me was saying to me. “You gotta check out System of a Down.”
That was when something exploded. It was so loud, it was like being on the inside of thunder. The left wheels of the Humvee lifted off the ground and fell back, bounced twice; metal spat against the hood and windshield like popcorn. Our gunner fired off one burst, two; somebody yelled into the radio; I smelled hot copper; and next to me, the soldier shouted, “Oh, fuck!”
Standard operating procedure is, you move out of the kill zone, set up a 360, a secure field of fire, and request a quick reaction force, because a lot of times a bomb is followed by small-arms fire, hajji trying to pick you off in the confusion.
I waited for the gunfire, but it never came. Everything settled down, like a spent cloudburst.
It was a suicide bomber, not an IED. He’d blown himself up too soon, with most of the damage hitting a blast wall. The KBR truck got dinged and broke an axle. The trucker had a thigh laceration that was bleeding a lot, so they radioed back for me to come and help.
I trotted up the street thinking, oh God, I am going to die, trying to keep low, ears ringing, the heat and the smoke searing my lungs.
“Fucking shithole,” the soldier jogging next to me said.
They’d put the base at the edge of a town, securing the perimeter by clearing out the buildings on the surrounding block and throwing up some blast walls and razor wire. The KBR truck sat crooked and smoking, partially blocking the entrance.
I put a pressure bandage on the trucker (who was doing okay for an overweight fifty-two-yearold with high blood pressure and a pack-a-day habit), and we got him on a gurney to take him to the aid station inside the base.
About a half dozen soldiers had gathered by the blast wall closest to the gate.
One of them, a buddy of mine, said: “Hey, Doc, check this out!” He pointed, grinning. “Way to go, asshole!”
What was left of the bomber was lumps of gore, splinters of bone, shredded clothes, a leg flung up against the blast wall, sneaker still on the foot.
“Where’s the other leg?” I asked.
“That’s not the good part,” my buddy said.
I looked where he pointed. There was a face lying a couple feet from the torso, peeled off from the skull like a mask.
“Too bad it’s not Halloween,” I said.
Even the trucker laughed at that.
Two weeks later, I got transferred to this new FOB because they were down a medic, who I later learned had gotten shrapnel in his head and throat from a mortar round. He didn’t die, though, and I heard he only drools a little, so consider him Private Lucky Motherfucker. Because this FOB just sucked. No mochaccinos there. The place was about the size of a football field, if that. Let’s call it Camp Falafel, which of course is not what it was called, because the U.S. Army prefers more serious names, like Camp Screaming Eagle, or Operation Enduring Kill the Stupid Rag-Heads. The base was built around an old Baathist government complex just outside of this provincial town that was a center of the insurgency, the insurgency that nobody wanted to admit existed back then.
In addition to what we called the Admin Core—offices, I thought at first—there were low, long barracks that used to house Iraqi soldiers. Republican Guards, I found out later. The existing buildings weren’t enough for us plus the prisoners that ended up getting detained there, so Camp Falafel had rows of tents as well.
Though I still rode along on supply runs now and again, I was mostly tasked to assist the physician’s assistant, Staff Sergeant Blanchard, at the aid station.
Blanchard was this tall, blocky guy with bad skin and birth-control glasses, those ugly-ass, Army-issue black-framed glasses that only look good on ironic alternative rock musicians, which he was not. The guy was a dick. He was always riding me, like I had no business hanging with the boys in a war zone. If I had been honest with him, I would have agreed. I didn’t want to be there.
But I wouldn’t admit that, because I wanted to do a good job. Instead, I just took all his insults, about how I couldn’t lift the gurneys because I was too fucking weak, how I was too fucking stupid to know what to do. Mostly he was pissed off that I wouldn’t sleep with him.
I hated being alone with Blanchard. I never knew exactly what he was going to pull, but I could always count on him to be a dick.
This was typical: One night when I was restocking the supply cupboard, he came up behind me and pressed himself against my back. I could feel his hard-on poking me. I really wasn’t in the mood.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey! What are you doing?”
“Nothing. I’m not doing anything. Just getting some Betadine.”
He had me pushed against the shelves, and his hand reached over my shoulder, toward the shelf that was right about level with my chest. I knew where it was heading.
I sidestepped and squirmed past him.
“Don’t be such a bitch,” he called after me.
Mostly we dealt with everybody’s owwies and boo-boos: sprained ankles, heat stroke, skin infections, dysentery, gastroenteritis, that kind of thing. Plus, given the age of some of the Guard, we had to treat high blood pressure, cardiac infarction, even a stroke. Then there was the soldier nobody knew, some specialist, who one day just blew his brains out. Who knows why? Nobody knew the guy. He arrived one day and, two weeks later, decided to kill himself. Pretty fucking inconsiderate of him.
Then there were the Iraqi prisoners. The PUCs. That
’s military-speak for “Persons Under Control.”
The PUCs would come in all kinds of different ways.
CHAPTER NINE
I TAKE THE train and then the bus to Mati Village, duffel slung over my shoulder.
If this is about Lao Zhang, then the jiaozi place the Monk has in mind is the one in Mati Village where Lao Zhang and I always go. If not, well, at least I can eat some jiaozi.
But maybe this is a really bad idea. If the PSB or whoever the fuck that John guy works for are watching me, if they’re looking for me, they must know this is a place I go.
If they find me, then what?
What do they want? What would they do?
Cattle prods, I’m thinking. They’ve got this thing for cattle prods, but that’s not going to happen to me, right? I’m a foreigner. They don’t do that shit to foreigners.
Don’t think about it, I tell myself. Just go eat some jiaozi.
I get to the jiaozi place right before it closes. It’s still pretty packed. I find myself a small table, stash my duffel on the chair opposite, and order up some jiaozi and a beer.
When the waitress brings me a tall, frosted bottle of premium Yanjing and a plastic tumbler, I stare at it for a moment. My mouth tastes like copper. I think about John handing me a bottle of Yanjing.
I fill up the tumbler and take a nice, foamy slug. It tastes good.
“Fuck you, John,” I mutter, lifting up the tumbler in a toast to the universe at large.
“Yili, ni hao.”
Standing in front of me is Sloppy Song, holding her thick braid in one hand, tugging on it absently like she’s trying to remind herself of something.
“Hey, Sloppy.” I indicate the chair. “You eat yet?”
“No, not yet. I work on new piece. No time to eat.”
“You want to join me?”
We shift the duffel onto another chair, and Sloppy sits down across from me. When my jiaozi come, I order another dozen and some side dishes too. The food’s dirt-cheap here, I’ve got a wallet full of cash from British John, and maybe it’s no coincidence, Sloppy’s showing up like this.
Sloppy sips her beer, tugs on her braid, and doesn’t say very much. We quickly eat the first bowl of jiaozi. Midway through the boiled peanuts and yuxiang-flavor pork, Sloppy lets go of her hair and asks: “Have you heard from Lao Zhang?”
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