I take a few steps closer. A couple of big black crows fly past, cawing like Edgar Allen Poe refugees.
The monk lifts up his head and opens his eyes.
“I went and ate jiaozi,” I type. “Now what?”
Monk of the Jade Forest doesn’t reply. He just sits crosslegged on his rock, blinking occasionally. I’m pretty sure my avatar can’t blink. He probably paid extra for that.
I’m starting to get impatient. “I have to go,” I type. “What do you want me to do?”
Finally, Monk of the Jade Forest rises from his granite meditation seat. “If someone invites you on a quest, you should accept,” he says.
“I already accepted this quest,” I type. “What’s it about? Can you tell me?”
“You’ll see. If you go further.”
With that, he makes a sudden pass with his hands and disappears in a swirl of green mist.
I stand there for a moment, and then I log out.
I’m pretty close to thinking this whole game is bullshit: some weird, twisted joke, like one of those performance-art pieces I never understand.
How do I know Cinderfox and Monk of the Jade Forest aren’t yanking my chain, having me run around for nothing? How do I know they aren’t the same person using different avatars?
And, if I’m going to indulge in paranoia, how do I know that they’re not steering me someplace I don’t want to go at all?
A quest. Great. The only invitation I’ve gotten lately is to Lucy Wu’s party at the Great Wall. I’m just supposed to go to her party and see what happens?
I track down Sloppy Song at the jiaozi place around dinnertime.
“So, Sloppy,” I say, filling up her plastic mug with Yanjing’s finest, “what do you know about Lucy Wu?”
Sloppy shrugs and spears a jiaozi. “Art dealer in Shanghai. Has a nice place near Xintiandi.”
“Do you know that for sure? I mean, have you seen it?”
“I haven’t been there. But I hear of her before.”
“Who told you about her?”
Sloppy frowns a little. “I forget. You know, everybody around here always talking about something.”
“She says she’s a friend of Lao Zhang’s from Suojiacun Art Camp.”
“Could be. Maybe he told me about her.”
We sit in silence and eat jiaozi.
“Did you hear about the party at Simatai Great Wall?” Sloppy asks suddenly.
“She invited me.”
“Me too.” Sloppy refills my beer. “Maybe we should share taxi,” she says casually.
I have no idea how to dress for “A Great Occasion” at the Simatai Great Wall. It sounds fancy, but Simatai is pretty rugged in places. I settle for basic black—black jeans, black shirt, black leather jacket, and my best counterfeit Pumas—and hope I’m not going to look too stupid among the “patrons of the arts” that Lucy Wu must run with.
I feel a little better when I meet Sloppy outside Comrade Lei Feng’s, as she’s wearing an outfit similar to mine.
It takes us about an hour by off-meter taxi to get to Simatai. We don’t say much during the ride, but then Sloppy’s never been the chatty type and, as mentioned, I suck at small talk.
I steal a glance at Sloppy now and then as we bounce along in our beater Jetta cab. Her attention seems to be focused on the landscape outside the car window. She’s always been friendly to me, in her sort of spacy way, and I assumed she and Lao Zhang were pretty tight.
Now I wonder. She was having dinner with Lucy Wu that night I met the Uighur. Lucy Wu, who shows up at Lao Zhang’s place at the crack of dawn with her very own key, who might be his old girlfriend but isn’t necessarily somebody he likes. Or trusts.
I know I don’t trust her.
And now, here’s Sloppy and me, both invited guests to Lucy Wu’s “Great Occasion.”
The taxi drops us off at the parking lot below the Wall. When I came here before, I humped it up the path to the Wall because I was too cheap to pay for the tram or a horse to carry me—and, also, I wanted to show that I could do it. That I could still walk up a hill if I wanted.
This time there’s no need to prove anything, because they’ve got it handled. There are actual horse-drawn coaches to take us up to the Wall, Mongolian-style ponies and carts.
Servers in black tie circulate with champagne and hors d’oeuvres while we wait for our coach.
Eventually it’s our turn, and we climb in and head on up to the Wall.
There’s a really funny sign along the way, one of those Chinglish efforts that totally cracks me up, telling you to “observe social morality, respect the olders, take good care of the children and be self-possessed.” When I was here before, there was a pack of local women hanging out by it, watching to see who was going up to the Wall, who might be likely targets for their souvenir books and postcards and lines about how poor they are and how they have no work and how they’re trying to educate their children, so won’t you buy a crappy book at an inflated price already?
But there are no local women sitting on the low wall by the signboard now.
Well, it’s after dark. Maybe they’ve all gone home to tend to their unemployed husbands and uneducated kids.
Glowing white tents are set up here and there atop the Wall. A band plays a mix of standards, rock, and jazz. Guests cluster around portable heaters outside the tents—a cold breeze blows from the north, from Mongolia maybe.
Sloppy and I climb out of our coach.
“I’m going to the bar,” I say. “You want anything?”
Sloppy’s attention is already fixed somewhere else, on a couple standing by one of the heaters, an elegant Chinese guy in a black jacket and a white, collarless shirt and a European woman wearing an ethnic Tibetan coat over a faded, frayed T-shirt.
“Oh, my god,” Sloppy says. “That’s Harrison Wang and Francesca Barrows.”
“So go talk to them,” I reply, having no clue who either of these people might be. “We’ll catch up later.”
Sloppy goes off to network, and I reconnoiter in search of the nearest bar.
I find it close to where the band is playing. To my untrained ear, they sound pretty good. The tune is some old standard, something out of one of those black-and-white movies where the actors are always calling each other “darling” and sipping champagne and martinis.
I stick to my usual Yanjing beer, tip the bartender, and go back outside to listen to the band.
“Oh, Ellie. I’m so glad to see you here!”
I pivot around, and there’s Lucy Wu, posed by one of the heaters, one foot pointed out like she’s waiting to have her picture taken.
“Hi, Lucy. Nice party.”
The two of us stand there for a moment, neither saying a word.
“Well,” she says, “I was just saying to some friends of mine that it’s past time for Zhang Jianli’s work to receive a serious public showing. It really is a pity that the art market in China is either too conservative or too busy chasing after trends to recognize quality.”
I don’t know if this is true or not, so I just sip my beer and nod. “Yeah,” I say. “Jianli’s really talented.”
She leans closer to me, puts a hand on my shoulder. “Ellie, I would be honored to show Jianli’s work at my gallery in Shanghai. I can promise him that I will be respectful of his artistic intentions and that, at the same time, I can give his work the exposure it deserves.”
“That sounds great, Lucy,” I begin, “but—”
“I know he’s out of town,” she continues urgently. “But perhaps, when you talk to him next, you might mention our conversation? I have a window in September. But I would need to book this fairly quickly.”
“Okay. If I talk to him, I’ll let him know.”
“I hope you will.” She clasps my hand. “I hope you’ll let Jianli know that I support him and his efforts.”
Is this some kind of code? Is she telling me that she’s part of the Game?
She leans forward, hand cuppe
d around her mouth, like she’s about to share a secret. I think: maybe, finally, somebody’s going to tell me what’s going on.
“The Chinese art market is crazy,” she says. “For a few years, people paid far too much for mediocre work. Now, with the economic crisis, the bubble has deflated. But smart investors know this is the time to buy work of real quality.” Then she actually does whisper: “I couldn’t believe it when I found out Jianli has no representation. Other artists of his caliber are millionaires! We could all profit.”
She gives me a quick hug. “I’d better mingle. Lunch next week?”
“Sure. Uh. Fine.”
After that, the only thing I can think to do is grab another beer. Okay, so Lucy Wu’s just an art dealer. Maybe. Who knows? I chug my beer and get another one.
I go back out onto the Wall. Push past a knot of partiers dressed in high-fashion skateboard gear. It’s getting loud. They’ve got a DJ and some light show on top of that, and gradually the whole party is morphing into some kind of Great Wall rave. I drink my beer. I’m wondering if I should find Sloppy and tell her that I’m bailing. I hate this repetitive music with its robotic drums, and I hate the strobing lights and all the couples laughing and stumbling and dancing, some twenty-year-old girl already puking on the historic pavement, and what did I find out from coming all the way up here? That Lucy Wu is really into Lao Zhang, which I already knew, and it’s either about his art or about something else.
Lucy Wu: Undercover Art Babe.
On the other hand, maybe she’s the best thing that could happen to Lao Zhang, somebody who appreciates his work and could help him profit from it.
Maybe that’s the help Cinderfox and the Great Society had in mind, getting Lao Zhang some money to get him out of whatever mess he’s in.
I start climbing along the Wall, away from the party and up the hill, looking for a quieter spot. My leg hurts. It’s a cool night, but I’m sweating. It’s really steep. It’s also not completely restored. There are places where the paving stones jut out, where the bricks have crumbled. You have to be careful. There are lights from the party that shine up this way, but it’s dark ahead. Security guards stand at what seems to be the party’s official perimeter. Beyond that is one of the watchtowers. I’m thinking that might be a good place to hang out for a while.
I’m not the only one who had this idea; a few other people from the party have drifted up this way. I stop for a moment and rest my hand against the weathered stone of the Wall. I can feel grooves in its surface, Ming Dynasty graffiti maybe. The last time I came up here, one of the village ladies pointed some out to me, before she started going on about how foreign friends are so generous, not like Chinese, and could I please buy her postcard book so she could feed her children?
“Be careful, Miss,” one of the security guards says as I pass. “Dangerous up here.”
I nod and keep going.
Inside the watchtower are a couple of local people, a man and a woman. She sits on a cooler; he squats next to her. They’re watching a battery-operated TV that’s playing a Chinese sitcom: I can tell by the frenetic yelling and the laughter. They look older than me in the flickering TV light: in their forties, I figure. But who can tell with people who have lived as hard as they have?
“Hey, Miss,” the woman calls out. “Have water? Beer? Postcards?”
“No, thanks.”
“Come on, Miss, postcards sell you cheap.”
What do I look like, an ATM?
I keep climbing. Maybe I can make it to the next watchtower. Maybe I’ll just turn around and find a cab.
About halfway to the next watchtower, I stop and lean against the Wall. I watch a flock of sparrows suddenly stir and rise up in a dark cloud over the valley below, twittering like some distant choir trying to get in key.
With the ambient light from the party and the light from the nearly full moon, I can vaguely make out the series of hills to the north that once formed the natural boundary between China and the rest of the world, the Big Outside, where the foreign hordes waited for their chance to conquer.
What happened was, the Mongolians and then the Manchurians who invaded eventually adopted Chinese ways and founded dynasties pretty much like the ones that had come before.
Funny, I think.
And then I hear: “Yili. Is that you?”
Guess who?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IN THE MILITARY, it’s always mostly guys, but Camp Falafel was like that to the extreme, because the majority of personnel there were combat infantry. There were maybe seven hundred, seven hundred fifty soldiers, and out of those, six women, including li’l ol’ 91-Whiskey, Health Specialist me.
I’d decided I wasn’t going to fuck around any more. I didn’t want to get the reputation of being a slut, as I was pretty sure Jesus would not approve, and I was really feeling the need for my best buddy Jesus by this point. I thought maybe I’d try hanging out with the girls for a change.
We bunked in two tiny cement slab rooms in the old Baathist barracks. My roomies were Pulagang, the laundry specialist, and Greif, the HUMINT linguist. HUMINT stands for “Human Intelligence.” One time I made a joke about how we should requisition more of that for Camp Falafel. She didn’t think it was funny.
In the other room were Torres, the admin specialist, Unit Supply Specialist Madrid, and Humvee mechanic Palaver. At times this got a little awkward for Torres, because Madrid and Palaver were big dykes and really into each other. They were nice about it, and discreet, which you had to be in our Army of One. None of us were of a mind to report it, though Pulagang bitched to me about them once, figuring that, as another good Christian, I’d support her in her certainty that they were both going straight to hell. “Yeah, I guess,” I said. I just couldn’t get that worked up about it, since my own salvation was probably in question too, given all the fucking around I’d done.
“There’s a prayer group meeting after chow,” Pulagang said to me and Greif when we were sitting on our bunks one night before dinner. “Why don’t you guys come with me?”
Greif hardly looked up from her laptop. “No thanks,” she said. Greif was a strange bird, even looked a little like one; she was small, spare, and brown, brown hair, skin tanned nut-brown to match. An E-4 Specialist, she acted like she wasn’t one of us. Which she wasn’t. The rest of us all came from the same support company, TDY’ed to fill in some holes for guys who got rotated out. Greif came from a different company and was “attached in direct support of” the combat unit to help out with the PUCs, speakers of even half-assed Arabic being in short supply. She spent her spare time studying her Arabic books and typing on her computer.
“Are you blogging?” I’d asked her once. I knew some guys who blogged back at my first FOB, in between crackdowns by HQ.
“Blogging?” She’d looked up at me, eyes magnified but still distant behind her non-regulation, wire-framed specs. “No. I wouldn’t do that.”
She’d turned back to her laptop without another word.
“How about you, Ellie?” Pulagang asked me now.
I hesitated, tossed my Beanie squid up and down a few times, watched the trickle of water from the marginal air conditioner run down the stained concrete wall. I didn’t really want to go. But I was thinking I should. Maybe just being around guys who were Spirit-filled would somehow get some Spirit back inside me.
“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”
The meeting was held in the MWR center—meaning “morale, welfare, and recreation”—which in our case was a sagging tent that smelled like cat piss and dust just past the hajji mart they’d let a couple of the locals set up. About a dozen guys, Pulagang, and me sat on folding chairs at the back of the tent, next to the sad collection of paperbacks and out-of-date magazines that some smart-ass had christened “The Library of Alexandria.” (I finally looked that up one day, because for months I’d had no clue what it meant.)
Anyway, Pulagang and me pulled up chairs in this circle of guys, and things got really
quiet all of the sudden, and I felt like I used to feel whenever I was trying to pretend that I fit in someplace: like I didn’t belong, and this was the last place I wanted to be.
“Why don’t we get started?” one of the guys said.
I focused my attention on him. Big guy, nice body, a sort of light behind his eyes.
“It’s great to see y’all here,” he continued. “’Cause you know, when Thomas Paine said ‘These are the times that try men’s souls,’ I’m pretty sure it was times like these he had in mind.”
He smiled. His voice was like chocolate. “I’m Trey Cooper. Why don’t the rest of you introduce yourselves?”
I felt filled with something, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Spirit.
AT FIRST, TREY and me just hung out together and talked. We talked about all kinds of stuff. About Christ. About our lives.
Or maybe he talked, and I mostly listened.
I remember one time, we were sitting up on a berm by the southwest perimeter, watching the sun set, chucking rocks at a storage shed.
“It’s tough, you know?” Trey said. He picked up a rock, considered its shape, and then hurled it at the shed, barely missing our designated target zone, the door. Still, the rock made a cool noise when it hit the corrugated metal. “It’s like, there’s my life in Christ, and there’s my life as a soldier. And they should be the same thing. But sometimes they’re just not.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure what to say. I would have felt kind of stupid asking something like “You mean the part where you have to kill people?” Because that’s not particularly Christlike, in my understanding; but it’s what soldiers do, by definition.
I focused on my rock. It was a nice smooth one. “Okay, watch this,” I said. I wound up and let it fly. I nailed the door.
“Good one!”
Trey picked up a rock from our pile, tossed it up and down in his hand. “It’s just the circumstances, sometimes,” he said. He stared at me, with that intensity that made me feel like he was reaching deep down inside me, like he could devour me whole, and I couldn’t do a thing about it. I wouldn’t have wanted to. “I know what we’re doing is the right thing. Protecting our country, helping these people… .”
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