Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  She watched him discover other delights of urban living in the twenty-first century. He liked to skid in his socks along their hardwood floor and laughed every time they rode an elevator. “Doesn’t anyone ever try to take it through the roof and past the clouds?” he asked.

  There were also nights when he would come into Zoe’s bedroom just to talk. Her double bed had a billowy duvet, inviting as a cloud, and her kimono with the embroidered dragon hung on a peg and seemed to say come hither. They would talk about everything and nothing—of economic equality, of the almond undertones of a Pinot Grigio they’d discovered, and of her impending orals. He read through more of her books and told her what had really happened, and she could tell he thought he was persuading her not to bother with going back. She had to tell him, on a night in late April, that Professor Engelhorn had e-mailed her with a date and time in mid-May.

  She told him, that night, that Professor Engelhorn had provided the money for her to be here in the first place, and that he just might be her father.

  “It’s just a blip in eternity.” William dismissed Professor Engelhorn with a wave of his hand. “Why does it matter who your mortal parents are?”

  “It just does. I’m in time. I like my mortal life.”

  William leaned back in his chair; Zoe had insisted they sit in chairs rather than lounging on her bedcover. “Do you know what the human tragedy is?” he asked.

  She loved his oratory style, the way he paused just long enough to make you curious. “We have our old savage instincts, but our brains can contemplate infinity. And so we confuse the two. We think we’re not safe from the long winter unless we hoard up an infinite supply of salt-cured mastodon meat, or for modern humans, money. Humans all think they want something specific, but ultimately they want infinity, and seduction is a way of capturing infinity; as is losing oneself in art or poetry or music.”

  William poured them another glass of wine each, bought with credit cards since wine was expensive in Beijing.

  “Did I ever tell you about the argument I had with Adam Smith?” he asked as he handed Zoe a glass, fingers brushing hotly against her own. “He had a habit of watching the rich from our hole in the clouds, claiming that people approved of the rich, that their finery commanded attention, and that the less fortunate sought to emulate the wealthy. I countered that it was the not the rich that people so admired, but their things, their diamonds and gold, and their landscaped gardens. Adam often commented upon how, despite their riches, these individuals were truly unhappy, and none of their worldly goods gave them the serenity they ultimately craved.”

  “Wouldn’t we all be serene if we didn’t have money worries weighing us down like a ton of bricks?”

  “No,” William said thoughtfully. “It’s the absence of passion that weighs us down.”

  Zoe allowed her shirt to slip, baring the curve of her shoulder and upper arm.

  “You always made yourself a challenge to anyone who wanted you,” William said, his voice husky. “Took me twenty years to win you over. And once we had a fight and it took a hundred years to get you back.”

  Zoe lay awake that night, not for the first time, aware from the light beneath the door that William was also sleepless, no doubt working on the software. If the absence of passion weighs you down, would the triple pursuit of romance and paradise and my orals lift me up? Whatever the consequences, she decided, it would be better than this raging insomnia, which had become a metalcore band of a zillion hormones banging through her limbs.

  She opened her door, found him at the laptop, beckoned, and he followed on cue. In her room she took his face in both hands and claimed his lips in a most carnivorous way. Clothes fluttered to the floor, and he spread her across the bed, painting abstract swirls across her body with his tongue.

  So this is what it means to lose your head, Zoe thought.

  In the hours that followed, they seemed to float supine above the bed; then with her lover in a headstand; then with her legs wrapped around his neck; finally, she saw only the night sky and celestial blue-white sparks. It felt as if they had opened a secret door to a place far above New York or Beijing or Sunshine Village, and she felt right at home.

  After that, he moved into Zoe’s bedroom. They giggled together, and fondled each other while the triumvirate—Ming alongside them—imagined aloud and William wrote code that would make their visions real. Somehow Ming’s presence made it seem believable, as if she were the medium between the concrete world and the labyrinth expanse somewhere beyond.

  Yet, there were possibilities that one member of their trio might imagine and the others disdain, or possibilities that two might embrace and stack against one. In the second week of May, just two days before Zoe was scheduled to leave for New York, Ming said Tom had told her that he and Han were cooking up a few elements of the Sunshine Village deal themselves. “Han wants to fire all the people who work for the company and make it all high tech.”

  “So what happens to Tang Fei?” Zoe asked.

  “Could be the best thing for him, once he learns enlightenment,” William told her.

  “You’re supposed to be a benevolent leader!”

  “Why do we even have to worry about Tang Fei?” was Ming’s contribution. “Why do we even have to go back to that damn village? At least Zoe gets to go to New York first! I’ll never get to sit on a bench in Prospect Park and write poetry again.”

  “You can take a vacation before we go underground,” William offered.

  “Underground?” Zoe asked that with alarm. It wasn’t a word he’d used before. .

  He nodded. “I’ll have to build a place for the computer system where no one can find us. The earth is pliable in Sunshine Village. I’ll dig a bunker, and we’ll spend most of our time down there, running things in secret. I can, uh, have someone who looks just like me running the company, all very low profile. Just for a few years by your mortal calculations..”

  “Whaaattt?” Ming apparently hadn’t known about it either. “Bad enough that we have to be in the fucking village, but I was thinking that somehow we could turn it into a showplace for enlightenment, not just a hole in the ground. You’re going to make me lose my mind!” Ming clapped her hand over her own mouth—much like the way her father was always slapping himself—and burst into tears. When Zoe tried to embrace her, Ming pushed her away and ran out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her.

  Zoe and William spent the rest of a steamy afternoon wandering around coffee bars Ming liked, hoping to find her. Outside the sixth café, after three hours of fruitless searching, drizzle poured down upon them. They sought refuge in a gazebo in a park a few blocks away. In the adrenaline-fueled search for Ming, Zoe had said nothing more about her own horror, but in the gazebo, with drizzle turning to sweat-like rain, she said, “Did you think my orals were going to be some kind of vacation, and then we all go into hiding?”

  He shrugged in a defeated way. “I somehow thought you’d come back with a thousand-year-old view of things.”

  A vaporous silence fell upon them. “Ming and I are mortals. We have just one shot at youth, as far as we can tell. We never thought we’d have to be martyrs to save the world.”

  He shrugged again.

  She told him this could be the end of their plans, and they said nothing to each other as they walked back to the apartment under a cheap umbrella that he bought from a street vendor. That night William huddled over the computer while Zoe lay awake, wrapped in double quilts against frigid air conditioning.

  When daylight came, Zoe rose in a mechanical way, went to the park, and practiced her kickboxing. William didn’t look up from his work. She wandered for a while, thinking. When she came back, Ming was in the kitchen, making coffee. Her clothes were rumpled and her hair hung flat. “I was with Tom, but then he had to go home,” she told Zoe. “It must be awful to be in a marriage where you feel stuck with each othe
r.”

  The three of them sat together around the kitchen table.

  “I was thinking about something,” Zoe said. “I like Ming’s idea that we make the village some kind of showplace. Why shouldn’t the company we take over be the model for an enlightened company? Why don’t we get out and be part of it? We could make it a place where people can come from all over the world and learn to transcend earthly problems with exercises in cultivating conduct. Do you think they could stand the crappy weather?”

  Ming shook her head. “I was thinking about that all night too. Can’t we set up a place somewhere with decent weather?”

  “Maybe,” said William, looking sideways at Zoe, “the weather will change. But if you’re visible, you’ll make enemies.”

  “We’ll have a lot of people who love it,” Zoe insisted. “A counter force.”

  “Professor Engelhorn would like to know about it,” Ming offered. “If we made Sunshine Village a showplace for human rights, he’d want to come and see it.”

  “This isn’t entertainment for the enlightened, or a much-acclaimed new book for Professor Charles Engelhorn,” William thundered. “It’s a top-secret experiment in evolution. If anyone dislikes anything about it and figures out that we’re the ones behind it, we’re finished.”

  And so, the next day he watched Zoe close her suitcase and prepare her carry-on, jammed with books to study for her orals during the flight home.

  “If I have to do this by myself, you probably won’t see me for many years,” he told her. “I’m going to be awfully busy.”

  “Why don’t you think about our way then?.”

  “You’ve always been bossy.” His fiery eyes devoured her. “But if you marry one of your self-important academics or your rape-the-world MBA boyfriends and you have three kids, and if I come out from underground and decide I want companionship and live out this incarnation with someone else, just remember this is a short life in the grand scheme and we’re going to be together again.”

  She had booked an open-ended return ticket because there was always the chance they’d postpone the date for her orals or that Billie would beg her to stay. Now her plans were open-ended forever.

  New York, when she arrived, felt small—cozy and suffocating at the same time. Spring dogwood bloomed on the side streets, and the pansies in window boxes were beginning to wilt in the early heat. Billie looked older than Zoe had expected, her back starting to curve, and new wrinkles evident in the pouches beneath her eyes.

  Zoe called Jeff, who answered the phone with a rant about a gallery owner in Chelsea who had told him his work was groundbreaking and strikingly contextual, but hadn’t called him back all week. She had dinners and lunches with old friends. Every conversation seemed to hold an undertone of hysteria, as if the world might blow up or her friends might strike gold, and the suspense was eating their hearts away. Her closest friends, including Jeff, found a moment to grow solemn and say “I hope you’re okay about Danny.” He was engaged to Liesel Morgan. It felt like an out-of-body experience to think of Danny. If Danny had a chip, it occurred to Zoe, he’d throw his finance career aside and write novels. She wished she could say that aloud.

  Professor Engelhorn—not quite as tall as she remembered him—asked a million questions about Sunshine Village. Amidst his book-lined walls, he looked like the ruler of a fiefdom of only two hundred square feet. He was full of tales of department gossip. He mentioned a former student by the name of Andrew or Adam, who had run off to Dubai with two chapters written—ABD. All But Dissertation. It sounded like a condition treatable with psychotropic meds. This man who might be her father would be proud of her only if she aced her orals and completed her dissertation that Zoe understood with every reflex.

  The day finally arrived, and Zoe sat in Professor Engelhorn’s expansive office facing a committee of three gray-faced men, including Professor Engelhorn, and one prematurely gray-haired woman. She heard her own voice—like an actor playing at being a graduate student—describing the life of Goujian. She recited a brief introduction, a historical accounting familiar to everyone in the room, of the ancient monarch who was reduced to rags after a rival state conquered his, but all the while he waited until the time was right to resurrect his benevolent reign. Zoe acknowledged, in a voice she scarcely recognized as her own, her own agreement with the theory that Goujian’s humiliating defeat and rise back to power were part of the very fabric of Maoist China.

  “That theory has received a lot of popular adulation,” Professor John Volk replied. “But you make this sound like such a literal interpretation. And how are you so sure it was Mao who believed that and not just some latter-day followers?”

  “Mao told the revolutionary troops that they should remind themselves of Goujian sleeping on brushwood and tasting his own gall bladder, and that this was how they should know how much hardship one must endure in order to rise up and win.”

  “And how is one to determine that?” asked Professor Volk, raising his eyebrows in disbelief.

  Zoe inhaled obligatory humiliation, because she couldn’t tell them the full truth—that she’d heard the account from someone who’d watched it from a cloud in the heavens.

  “Every single Chinese person or movement has been using that story for centuries, to define their particular tale of rising up from defeat and conquering their enemies,” another professor chimed in. “It is the eastern tale of the meek inheriting the earth, is it not?”

  Zoe reminded herself that she did know some things. “Mao was no exception, despite the fact that he thought he was ridding the world of old beliefs. You can start a revolution and claim everything is going to be different but really, how do you ever make things different unless you put a chip in everyone’s brain that reconfigures their worldview?”

  Two hours and innumerable questions later, they sent her out to tremble in a chair. After what seemed like eternity, though she saw it was actually just over forty minutes, Professor Engelhorn called her back in, and they told her she had passed.

  That evening Zoe had many drinks with her friend Sara.

  “You know, Volk and Engelhorn have hated each other for years,” Sara told her. “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but Volk told people that Engelhorn gave you the money to go to China—implying, of course, that he gave you special treatment for being a pretty female student. For Engelhorn’s sake, you have to do a knock-their-socks-off dissertation. We like Englehorn, don’t we? A lot more than that asshole Volk. Pity if an Engelhorn protégée doesn’t come through. Don’t look so scared. You’re gonna do it.”

  Zoe had three years to finish her dissertation.

  I’ll start first thing in the morning, she resolved. She lay on her bed in the little room that had been her sanctum for so long, in the place that was home as long as they didn’t get evicted. Every one of her belongings had its place. The top shelf of the bookcase held a box with faded qi gong certificates; the bottom, dusty Mandarin textbooks and yellowed novels about girls who loved their horses. A ladybug crawled across the headboard. “Show your man face or get out,” Zoe commanded, but it took no notice.

  The next morning, so early the campus was nearly empty, she went down to the fourth level sub-basement of Butler Library, and began reading through a collection of Lin Biao papers. After hours of scrawling notes about plenary sessions on the production of military equipment, her shoulders ached, and as she leaned back, closing her eyes and stretching her arms and legs.

  “Zoe….” Someone was whispering her name.

  She opened her eyes and there was William. She leaped up to embrace him, feverishly pressing her lips to his. He tasted like a plum that wasn’t quite ripe.

  Then he pushed her an inch away. “You’re a beautiful woman. The goddess of academia.” His voice was as resonant as a symphony, and his eyes were a flickering fire. Zoe felt warm, imagining she could be desirable even in her old jeans
and sneakers, her hair in a careless ponytail. “But I promised I’d be an upstanding gentleman. Let’s go for a walk, shall we?”

  It was early afternoon and the campus was full of playful sunshine. William stared at two giggly undergrads, welcoming spring in skimpy tee shirts and miniskirts. Something struck Zoe.

  “You’re not William. You’re one of his copies.”

  He giggled in a sheepish and most un-William-like way. “I’ve been hibernating hundreds of years, but the master called me up because he often needs to be in at least two places at once.” His eyes drifted to another co-ed with long legs. “The master knew you would see the difference.”

  “You call him ‘master’?” Zoe tried not to laugh.

  “I’m my own man. It’s not nice to make fun of me,” William-copy protested.

  “Well, if you are your own man, you’ll need your own name. I’ll call you Sun Two.”

  “Whatever. I have a message for you. The master wants to talk to you but doesn’t want to leave messages on that talking machine in case they are intercepted. He says, ‘I love you. Please come back. I can’t do it without you and Ming. We’ll do it your way, and I’ll make it work. The company has already burned through their New Icarus loan, and the takeover is coming the first week in July, so we have to make haste.’”

  There is, she thought, a great universe beyond these old bricks.

  Chapter Ten

  In early July of that year, close observers of private equity placements—a rarified breed attuned to fleeting movements in the bush—could spot a short piece of business news on the Chinese Internet. New Icarus Capital had bought the controlling interest in a state-owned enterprise in Sichuan province, which they were renaming Sunshine Group, paying an unspecified sum. Insiders knew the word “unspecified” meant a deal no bigger than a sparrow’s footprint.