“I needed to make money and an old friend hired me,” she muttered, avoiding his gaze. “Why don’t you cheer me up and tell me about life in the 70s? Did you ever take a road trip? I had plans for one once, a long time ago now.”
“A buddy and I took off together on motorcycles our senior year in college; we only got as far as the East Village, though. We slept on the floor in somebody’s place—there must have been twenty other kids; some of whom were in a rock band. The whole building shook when they rehearsed,” Charles smiled in recollection. “My buddy got me stoned every day except I could only take about two hits before I started coughing. I even had a girlfriend, for a while.”
“Who was your girlfriend?”
“Oh, some ambitious girl just passing through.”
Ming rocked forward, almost cheerful with excitement. “What was her name?”
“Alicia. She was from Connecticut. She was shy like me, which made us gravitate together in that crazy stew. I saw her wedding announcement in the New York Times a few years later. Why are you looking at me that way?”
Might as well go for broke. “Did you ever know a girl named Billie Austin?”
Charles froze, his face flushing a deep red. “Yes, I…”
“Zoe Austin. Did you ever connect the two?”
Charles’s lips drew tight together and he rose abruptly to his feet. “I think it’s time for bed,” he said. By his tone, Ming could tell, he didn’t mean anything but sleep.
The next morning, Charles was already dressed when Ming stirred.
“Listen, I’ve got meetings.” He was clearly not inviting her along. “Then I’m going to meet with some historians at a retreat outside of Shanghai so we can plan a conference on New China.”
Charles Engelhorn had a fine grasp of Chinese etiquette, Ming thought. A polite escape, to a retreat she hadn’t heard a thing about. He even promised to transfer some money into her bank account. A very polite way of firing your casual labor.
Chapter Fifteen
I’m on my way back,” Ming told Zoe. “I’m on a train now. It’s all been so awful. Is Jeff still in Sunshine Village?”
Zoe didn’t want to talk to Ming about Jeff, who had sent his estranged wife an email several weeks before with a photo of himself with his arms around four pretty women, and the message: Greetings from a mile below heaven.
“And the weather’s awful here,” Zoe told her. “I’ve got a terrible cold. William’s sequestering himself, the roads are flooded, people are staying home, and the stores aren’t getting their deliveries. You might have trouble getting in.”
“I’m meeting Tom in Chengdu. I guess we’ll just have to wait it out.”
Tom? Zoe didn’t tell Ming that on several recent flights Tom had brought along a curvaceous woman from Beijing whom he’d introduced as his fiancé. Zoe had dined with the betrothed couple one night, and Tom’s
had talked all through dinner about her “self-actualization journey.” She had been an interior designer, and a wealthy man had set her up with her own business, but she’d woken up one morning feeling like she couldn’t breathe and told him she was giving it all up. Tom had looked fat with contentment.
“I’m sure the rain is all your fault,” said Ming on the phone.
“No doubt.” Zoe stifled a sneeze.
“You sound terrible. Get some rest.”
There were so many songs about rain. Love songs, protest songs, life in the rain. But songwriters didn’t write about the slimy roadblock in your nostrils, or the heat of fever making your bones feel as if they were breaking. Just four days ago, Zoe had inhaled wisdom, lifted off through the downpour, and saved a battered wife.
But then, of course, Zoe—Zenia—knew how to stop the rain.
She’d worked hard the last few months, side by side with William but resisting the electricity. Zoe’s grandfather, Grandpa Stork Austin, died in May, but Zoe didn’t even go back to Mississippi for the funeral. Though the musty smell of academia still wafted through the back of her mind, she had trouble remembering what it was like to examine little pebbles of history.
Jing Yin had been e-mailing regularly since her departure, saying in every message that she wanted to atone for her sinful ways. She’d sent a recording she’d made in the very targeted musical genre of Christian Peasant Rap. The lyrics referred to “the land” and to the “wayward soul that saw the light,” concluding with: “I am alone no mo’. I got Jesus as my bestie.”
“Jesus? That hippie self-promoter,” William had scoffed. “He got himself a great piece of real estate in the heavens, and he told me he’s never coming back. But, of course, people are free to join cults and free to love Bradley Kwan.”
William didn’t sleep anymore, as far as Zoe knew. His hair fell every which way, like sentries too fatigued to stand. He didn’t tell her exactly what he was doing.
June had brought a torrid spray each afternoon, and, by the second week of July, the rain was so fierce that it woke her in the night, tearing trees from their roots and leaving rocks and tangled branches at Zoe’s front door. The river rose to the cliff’s edge and puddled at the feet of the big stone Buddha.
The weather was not the only thing that raged that month. Five nights ago, Jing Yin had called, sobbing into the phone. “Zuo Yi? It’s my papa—he’s been stepped on like an ant all his life, and now that he has a little power, he is crazy. My mama tried to get away—he’s got her locked up in that house—and he said he’d kill her if she tries again. We’re all going to hell anyway, but can anyone help her?”
There’s no need for hell, Zoe wanted to say, though she had her own vivid pictures of Satan and fire and brimstone from Mississippi Sunday school.
A women’s shelter, just beyond Market Street, accommodated women from the village and villages beyond who’d fled their husbands. At the shelter they could take classes in house wiring, plumbing, business initiatives, and the marketing of handicrafts and homemade sauces.
“They’d take care of your mother there,” Zoe told Jing Yin.
“So she can learn how to market her own homemade pepper sauce?” the girl spat out. “Or fix the toilet?”
“So she can be independent,” Zoe said in defense.
“She’s gotten, uh, slow. She won’t try leaving again unless someone drags her out when he’s away, and he’ll find her and kill her if he knows where she is.”
Do good deeds, Grandpa Stork Austin’s voice whispered in Zoe’s head.
She put on her galoshes and slogged through the muddy path to William’s house. She found him, as usual, in the bunker. He was immersed in a computer program and looked up only to say “Everyone’s behaving, don’t worry,”
“I need your help. We’ve got to rescue Jing Yin’s mother.”
William turned from his console at last. He had a rainbow of circles around his eyes and stubble darkened his chin. It was not a small matter that she was proposing, Zoe knew. Bradley Kwan had the power to ruin people now. When a provincial police chief had dared to announce a crackdown on opium sales, a few days later on Tiger News, Bradley condemned his “corrupt practices,” and the police chief was now under investigation.
“Since the roads are flooded and the guards would hear a car, I was thinking we could fly there, and between us carry her out,” Zoe told him.
He agreed to meet her at four, when Bradley would be off at the studio. And so, in the forests behind William’s house, Zoe attempted to fly again.
She inhaled wisdom, though breathing felt like drowning. After five false starts, she felt her body rising into the pelting rain. The wind swirled, yet it seemed to carry her along.
At last, Bradley Kwan’s villa came into view, shrouded in sheets of gray, the grounds sodden. Through a window in the guard station, they saw two men in uniforms playing cards. The front of the house was quiet, the walkway l
ined with bushes sculpted into the faces of hideous devils. Two painted statues of naked warriors stood on either side of the door.
“I thought we’d banished bad taste for good,” William whispered. He grabbed her waist and soared to a sturdy tree branch overlooking the house. “Stay here,” he instructed. Zoe wrapped her arms and legs around the branch, shivering in the dampness. Suddenly a blue butterfly hovered beside her, then flew toward the house.
The butterfly found a window left ajar, and fluttered through McMansion-sized rooms that were mostly empty. It was a house without possessions, no books or sentimental treasures; life with nothing to show except the price of the real estate. In a vast room with a dining table, three triple-tier crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and at the end of the hall, the butterfly saw what made the crystals sparkle so. Yu Li stood at the top of a ladder, dipping a cloth into a cup of vinegar solution and polishing each crystal so vigorously that he could imagine a layer of skin being scraped away. A bruise bloomed beside her cloudy eye and a vacancy had settled in her clear eye. Yu Li sang as she worked—an off-key and incoherent song of dying in the Sichuan soil. Spying the butterfly, she made a hissing sound, spittle hurling through her teeth.
“Bug!” she slurred, in her rough peasant dialect, cocking her head slightly. Her peasant clothes had a waft of black magic, William thought.
To subdue a wife, you didn’t need leg irons, only an opium pipe.
“If you want to be free, follow me,” the butterfly whispered in her ear.
“Whaa??” Yu Li lurched back on her ladder, which teetered beneath her feet. William rapidly transformed himself into an invisible flying creature and swept the woman into his arms, out the window, and into the forest.
A dazed Yu Li found herself standing beside a path, swirling with the rush of rain, on the outskirts of the village. The tiny peasant woman gaped at Zoe, who arrived breathless as if she’d just come out of the woods.
Rubbing her good eye, Yu Li peered down at the muddy water that rose up to her shins and up again at the horizon, as if searching for visions more strange than those immediately before her. Uncomprehending and almost as small as a child, she let Zoe guide her through mud and water, squishing through back roads that might as well be canals, to a modest stucco house, where a bevy of women seemed to know just what to do, pressing her with hot tea and warm towels.
Zoe returned to the bunker mortal style, sloshing through the pathways, and by the time she arrived down below, she was shivering all over.
Sun Three, with his tidy hair and pale, puzzled eyes was at the console. He jumped when she entered. A copy who’d become capable enough to watch the computers when things were calm, but so shy he could barely even speak to her.
“Where is William?” Zoe demanded.
“He’s…he’s on a b-b-business trip.”
“Just like that?”
The next morning Zoe dragged herself into the Sunshine Finance office. William was not there. A pile of business plans awaited her, but the words and numbers danced across the page. She tried to rise from her chair but her limbs were like iron, her head a ball of fire. Her eyes began to weep with a life of their own.
“Are you all right?” the Sunshine Finance executive assistant had poked her head in the doorway. “You’ve got quite a cold.”
Zoe recalled that her mother would get dreadful colds, mostly when a callback hadn’t come. Billie would stay in bed for days with rheumy eyes and a crimson nose, the apartment stinking of eucalyptus vapors.
Zoe was still sneezing when William sauntered into the office the following day, sporting a ruddy glow and a new haircut.
“Did you have a nice vacation?” Zoe asked in a bleary voice.
“Very funny. Go home and take care of yourself. I’m working on something I want to share with you, but don’t come to me until you get the message.”
Zoe took his advice, leaving with business plans under her arm. She could work as well from bed. A day passed without a word or a sign from a butterfly. She even wrote a few pages of chapter two in her dissertation, though the words themselves felt musty. On the second day, the phone rang and interrupted her progress.
“Zuo Yi, I’m back!” Jing Yin said the rain had started to dissipate to the south in Liangshan, and the school principal had allowed the bus driver to take her home. “The road into Sunshine Village is like a river!” Jing Yin exclaimed. “We prayed, Zuo Yi, and a miracle blew my mama through the woods. The rain is getting tired of falling. I’m a peasant, I can tell these things. Come to the shelter? Mama’s safe, but she’s sick.”
When Zoe arrived, Yu Li was in bed, her face pale and chapped, her brown eye almost as vacant as the blind one. Jing Yin, looking older than her sixteen years, perched on the edge of her mother’s bed, a gilt-edged Holy Bible in Chinese in her lap.
“I keep telling her Jesus will guide her through,” Jing Yin said. “They want her to go to rehab. My father asked if I knew where she was, but I told him no.”
Zoe comforted both mother and daughter as best she could, though a fever rattled her brain. They all agreed Yu Li should stay in the shelter, where night duty nurses and police guards stood watch.
The rain in Sunshine Village was showing no signs of relenting when Zoe left the shelter that evening. We must write a program for Bradley Kwan, she thought. Injured creatures could become a deadly force.
“Zoe!” a voice called from the Nirvana Café.
She turned and saw Jeff, sitting at a rowdy table by the big window, Lulu by his side with a possessive arm around him. He introduced those at the table with him as Zoe apologized, between sneezes, for dripping on everyone. Jeff’s other companions were a group of performance artists.
They told her they were preparing a Sun Dance, a show that would present an antidote to the Raindance Party rhetoric. “Here’s a chair,” one of the performers said.
“Thanks, but I’m headed home.” Zoe felt simultaneously hot and cold and the thought of a cool jasmine beer made her head ache. “I’m not feeling well.”
“I’ll check on you later, okay?” Jeff called, as Zoe left, hunched beneath her coat against the rain.
She was half asleep in a hot bath when the doorbell rang. She slipped into her kimono. Jeff stood there. “You look awful,” he conceded as he shrugged himself out of his dripping poncho. “Do you want me to make you some chicken soup? The Dragon Lady emailed me, by the way. She hopes we can be friends. Can you imagine—after she fucked me over? I’ve decided to leave Sunshine Village, go traveling. I’ll have to tell Lulu she doesn’t own me, never thought I’d be the one to break someone’s heart. Why don’t you come with me?”
“Oh, I can’t. I’d love to, but I can’t.” Zoe sneezed again.
“Get into bed. I’ll take care of you. Of course, I’m soaked through, too. Does this fucking rain ever let up?”
Zoe put on sweats and gave Jeff her winter bathrobe. They curled up on her bed to watch a Hollywood comedy—just like the old days in Jeff’s New York dorm room. Thunder shook the walls, and rain pounded ceaselessly on the roof.
“You’re still hot. Even when you’re sick,” Jeff said. “Come see the rest of China with me.”
“I have a job here—I can’t abandon it. Don’t you want Ming to see that you’re a successful Civilizer with a girlfriend? Don’t you want to rub that in her face, even just a little?” The thought of Jeff leaving made Zoe feel abandoned. She muted the television, and as if to keep him there, began relating feverish tales about how Jing Yin’s mother had mysteriously escaped from the evil Bradley Kwan, despite her opium-induced haze, and was now suffering withdrawals in the women’s shelter, while her husband was issuing death threats and her daughter was trying to summon Jesus.
“Shit,” Jeff said. “What a fucked-up family. Maybe you should adopt Jing Yin. ”
Zoe, wracked by a coughing fit, was unable to
reply. Jeff massaged her back and shoulders, his fingers probing tightly wound muscles and tortured knots. Jeff’s body, leaning against her own, felt alien, scrawny; she longed for dexterous sinews, smelling of earth and fire. He rubbed a stiff spot on her spine and fever shook through her all over again, pouring out in tears that felt scalding.
“You’re not still crying over William Moony, are you? You can do so much better,” Jeff murmured. The softness of his words made her cry even more.
“Intervention time,” he went on. “I think you’re gonna have to quit this job. As long as you see him every day, how are you ever going to move on?”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can. What kind of weird spell does he have over you? Tell me. Otherwise, I’m going to have to start spying on him and see if he’s got some kind of secret nanochip he’s planted in your brain giving commands. Or some thousand-year-old aphrodisiac snake powder he slips in the water.”
She turned her tear-streaked face toward Jeff and kissed him lightly on the mouth, just to distract him. I’m as bad as Ming, leading him on like this. But Jeff forgot about snake powders and nanochips in an instant, and began to tug at her sweatshirt.
“Let me just make you happy,” she coughed out, pulling away from his hands. Ducking under the bathrobe, she tickled his hard-on with her tongue.
“Oooohhhh, baby!” Jeff moaned. “I could let you do that all night…”
Twenty minutes later, Jeff let out a long moan, squirted in her face, then, mumbling “best ever,” drifted off to sleep.
Thunder crashed like a thousand baseball bats against the roof. I’ll never get to sleep, I don’t deserve to sleep, Zoe thought. But, sometime in the night, a noise shook her awake. She tiptoed to a window, and, through a musky sky, a full moon grinned. A golden moon; in Manhattan the full moon sometimes hung bigger than life, as if it were preening for some Broadway director, but in Sunshine Village the craters looked deeper and darker, the man on the moon staring down with Svengali eyes. The peasants still warned against looking the full moon in the eye because it might hypnotize you.
Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization Page 23