Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  She took a hit, then another, then said, “I really do have to go.” It seemed funny, somehow, that she would be standing there at the edge of the pine grove and there was Jeff, like an apparition. As a parting gesture she took his face in her hands and kissed him. She waited for him to leave. Dear Jeff, he knew they should be spending the next few hours laughing together.

  A wicked idea swirled through her head. There must have been a reason she’d worn this dress; she removed the sash, wrapped it around his eyes, and tied it in a figure-eight knot. “I’ll take you with me,” she announced. “But you can’t see anything.”

  “Is this going to be kinky?” he guffawed. “Hey, how about you and I get middle-aged together, and then old together?”

  Something giddy danced through her veins as she led him through the trapdoor and down the steps into the tunnel below.

  “You are a spy,” he prattled on. “Or you’re planning to kill me. Is this where William Sun Moon has his orgies?”

  “I show you, white man, the true mysteries of the Orient. Don’t take off your blindfold or you’ll be back in Brooklyn without a penny in your pocket.”

  “You are so cute when you talk like a sorceress whore.”

  Ming walked him past the computer console, where 2099 was blinking in steady beats about half a minute apart. She pressed the button, then drew Jeff onto the bed. “Wait here,” she told him, her voice a husky whisper.

  She made a strong chamomile brew with a generous dose of whiskey. Another number was blinking but at longer intervals. She zapped the number for a full minute, until it held steady. Then, with the screens looking stable, she peeled Jeff’s clothes off, massaging him all over with sesame-jasmine oil. She fed him sips of whisky, then pulled a thread from her dress and tickled his bare orifices.

  “Tiny butterfly tongues,” Ming whispered in his ear, as he shivered beneath the warmth of her breath, the fall of her hair upon his skin. “They are blue and white; they like the taste of you, but if white man looks they all shrivel into little shit pebbles.” It felt like coming home, in a way, to play this ridiculous sex game with Jeff, and his New China coiffed hair smelled downright scrumptious. She mounted him face-to-face; then, with his feet on the floor while she sat on him; then, she made him stand while she wrapped her legs around his torso. Finally, he collapsed in a poppy haze. Ming collapsed beside him.

  She had a dream about being on train, and when she opened her eyes, she didn’t remember where she was supposed to be. Jeff was making contented snoring sounds. Good heavens—she had lost her mind, bringing him down there. She shook him out of his slumber and helped him—blindfolded still—put his pants and shoes on and got him outside into the dewy forest.

  “What the fuck…and what’s the deal with all those computer screens and numbers?” he mumbled as she led him away from the trees and all the way to the river ledge, trying to make sure he wouldn’t find his way back.

  The blindfold must have slipped sometime in the night. “My head is killing me? Did you try to kill me? I had this dream that you and Zoe were taking over the world with computer screens. Don’t worry, though. All I want to do is take my pictures and have my life. Don’t tell me things I don’t want to know. I loved your hundred little butterfly kisses. You’re the best lover in the world when you want to be.”

  “Maybe it was another woman,” Ming said, finding her voice at last.

  “No, I know just the way you feel and smell.”

  “I must go, and you must go home or I’ll have to kill you.”

  She threw down his shirt, socks, and underwear, and took off at a run. She could hear him stumbling after her, but when she turned, she saw that he’d kind of collapsed below a grove of plum trees. Jeff would be safe; he’d wake up drenched in dew, he’d stagger home and doubtless hate her all over again. The thought made her shrivel inside, but she had her duties.

  Back at the bunker, Ming sat before the screens, the numbers quiet as the grave. She peered closely at 2099 and thought it did seem ever so faintly less green. The software measured conscious thought. Ming wondered how deeply it could penetrate the subconscious.

  

  A month before Ming and Jeff’s bunker tryst, Number 2099 was already growing restless. The air of Beijing was leaden with the summer heat, not as it had been in previous years when chemical compounds burned through your nose, but still, the heat of the devil. 2099 should have been in a mood to celebrate—he was about to close a deal he’d finagled with Jack Duffy. Plenette-Leuter China was in the home stretch of acquiring a controlling stake in 2099’s pharmaceutical client, which was itself on the verge of launching the perfect anti-depressant. Hardly anyone knew of the Chinese company—it operated a hundred miles west of Beijing and wasn’t listed on the stock exchange—and they were keeping the deal quiet for now, but the new formula had all the makings of a blockbuster drug. It was an intravenous solution instead of pills, and it contained a secret ingredient that would induce such a euphoria that people would line up to get it.

  It was a perfect deal except that Duff, as all of his associates called him, wouldn’t stop nagging 2099 about the labor costs. All that blather on Tiger News about the country going broke didn’t help. He had reassured Duffy that the workers made very little actual money, and that capital in circulation was good for everyone.

  Still, every deal demanded his negotiation skills in one form or another. Without some highs and lows, wouldn’t business be mon-o-tone-ous.

  Number 2099 was pleased when the right word came to mind. He didn’t know what else to do with the word, or how he might describe his life, or why he might bother. Yet an alien voice had been badgering him, insisting something was missing, and he knew it had to do with the spoils of power. Every time he thought he came close to figuring it out, a live volt shot through his head. He traced the confusion three years back, to one morning when he had woken with the strangest thoughts swimming through his head and the vague recollection of a bug scratching his ear. After that, 2099 had begun to understand that he had important responsibilities in New China; he started to read voraciously and began to socialize with a witty group of artists, filmmakers, and writers—all of whom had biting comments about popular culture, world affairs, politics, and economic theory.

  Number 2099 had always felt inadequate among the people who had witty, biting comments to make. He was good at golf, which he played periodically with a group of high-powered business men. Even his golf buddies, though, weren’t immune from the trends that seemed to be sweeping throughout New China.

  “I’m writing a novel,” one had confided. “I’ll bring copies next week so you can read it.” 2099 nodded, though he recalled a witty writer declaring that it was the mark of a true amateur to share his novel-in-progress to all; an amateur who sought nothing but assurance that he had a best-seller in his leaden prose and inane revelations. Something 2099 had come to realize in New China was that he adored novels. They made him believe that there was a story to tell in any life, including his own. The voice came after him again, whispering a persistent message in a language he could not yet understand.

  Number 2099 didn’t know quite where to begin but decided he might start with his own childhood. He could write a book about being young and horny. If others could do it, why couldn’t he, a powerful man who knew how to make millions? He had, after all, made both his mistress and his secretary scream in bed and rewarded them with jewelry afterwards, and even set his mistress up in a little business of her own. Both later deserted him—his former assistant was now studying gender politics, while his former mistress was off in some flight school.

  After two weeks of writing about a man a bit like himself, who was horny in youth as well as maturity, 2099 thought he had a moving story. He gave the story to his wife to read. He’d developed a new appreciation for her noble gaze and the way she listened when he pondered questions he couldn’t answer. He left the
room, but his heart drummed with expectation as she stared at the computer screen.

  She was still engrossed when he came back. He waited while she stretched, and turned and said, “The boys want one of these.” She tipped up her screen to show him an ecommerce site.

  “What did you think of my novel?”

  “Oh, kind of sweet,” she’d said with a smile and a shrug of her shoulders. She didn’t even take him seriously enough to say it wasn’t good.

  He lay awake that night, watching his wife sleep. Her skin sagged in spots, and the way she lay—with her left arm outstretched in his direction—seemed like a demand that she find him there. He remembered other women he’d known, and imagined other women he might someday meet, yet his emptiness seemed like a black hole in space.

  On a whim, 2099 tracked down his former mistress. She said he couldn’t come to her apartment. He told himself she was fighting temptation, and persuaded her to meet him in a café. At the table he’d caressed her hand, with her long red fingernails, and observed she was wearing a big Sichuan opal—way too commonplace a stone for a woman of her talents, he told her. She sipped from a teacup without touching her lips to the rim, and said she was engaged to a man named Tom who flew a shuttle to Sunshine Village. “He’s good friends with William Kingsley Sun,” she’d said with excitement. Just the week before she’d been down there and William—she called him by his first name—had told her all about the principal of a business investing its money back into society at large. Number 2099 had wondered—aloud—if she was in love with her fiancé or with that William Sun.

  Now, on a morning that happened to be just around the time William detected the slightly faded pixels, 2099 found himself in a sour mood, missing the simplicity of deal-making in the old days, when it was all about making money for your client and yourself. When he had these thoughts, he could feel his head vibrating and a bullet rattling around inside. The bullet kept rattling, all through dinner with Jack Duffy and his team that night.

  “This New China economy is doomed!” Duff thundered. “Who ever heard of a world where people are not driven by the prospect of making more money? How is it possible that the Chinese economy is doing better than ever when people are obsessing about their quality of life instead of about their bank accounts?”

  Number 2099 paid attention. Yet, as if he were viewing a split screen, he had a sudden recollection of construction workers employed at a site next to his office a few years back; they had all stopped working to stare at him when he exited his office in his glossy shoes and pressed suit. He’d seen the envy and hate in their eyes, and felt powerful. After all, he knew more about economics than these struggling workers. He was a walking incentive; they would work themselves to death to attempt to acquire what he had. It was a strange recollection, and as he sat with Duff, he felt the bullet rattle like sonar waves trying to map out every millimeter of his brain. If you laid the complexities of life end-to-end, 2099 considered, you’d have an array as infinite as the universe. Respect those complexities and don’t ever presume to solve them, ancient philosophers said. Perhaps he was a bit of a Taoist sage himself.

  Growth, growth, growth, Duff was expostulating. “I think we could get our share price up to $145 by next year. And $180 by the year after that. Yeah, I like the sound of $180.”

  After dinner they went to a tasteful nightclub, where a woman with a rich voice belted out big band songs in English and French, and a man in a tuxedo played the piano. 2099 ordered a bottle of champagne for the table, and when Duff and the other Americans finished it, another appeared. In old days the bottle would have been Cognac, which had always left 2099 feeling stuck together inside.

  Their waitress was young and told them she was going to be leaving the job to act in a play soon. She wore a slinky evening gown. Number 2099 wondered about the smoothness of her thighs beneath the fabric, hoping she’d say come see me on opening night. She didn’t. She had no need for him to pay her rent or set her up with a business; she’d probably think a little electric Alfa Romeo was just a showoff toy. There was nothing he could offer her.

  “You know…” Duff continued, putting his arm across the back of 2099’s chair. Americans did that, he knew—it made you feel like they loved you, like you were so important to them that they were about to ask you for a very large favor. “We just laid off about a thousand people at our plant in Ohio. We solved the problem with the rest. We just told them they’ve gotta take a pay cut and pay for their own health insurance. Our share prices went up the next day. You know what one of the Chinese guys here said? He said we should have told the insurance company we’re gonna give them a pay cut! Can you beat that?” Duff laughed so hard his pudgy cheeks shook. “The insurance company takes a pay cut! Sometimes, I swear, you Chinese sound like a buncha’ communists.”

  “I tell you,” Duff went on, “There’s a hedge fund on our ass back in the US. They’re asking me what’s with all this equal distribution shit in China? We’ve gotta get our share price up to $180 or the predators on Wall Street will eat us. Isn’t there anything someone can do?”

  The sonar bullet exploded in 2099’s head—as if it had accomplished its mission and was now done with him. He muttered, “excuse me,” and beat a path to the men’s room. Bending over a urinal, 2099 felt the nausea rise in his throat and expected to throw up.

  “Get my friend a whiskey straight up, no more faggot champagne,” Duff shouted to the waitress when 2099 returned to the table.

  “No, I’m fine,” 2099 insisted. He held his head up and tried to look like the kind of man that would appeal to a young actress, but the waitress brought him a whiskey and didn’t even glance his way as she set it down.

  “Maybe you could eliminate half the jobs in the company so that you’re producing half as much but showing twice the profit,” 2099 suggested. Another bullet exploded in his head, and he heard himself uttering a whimper, like a wounded dog. Duffy’s eyebrows knitted into concerned question marks. But as 2099 drained his whiskey he felt his mind begin to grow calmer. He observed pinpricks of light. He thought how infinitely complex the universe was and how much better it would be to master one little zillionth of infinity. Maybe he was kind of a sage after all, a sage at producing profits.

  Miles away, in Sunshine Village, the number 2099 flickered into a soothing liquid crystal display, one pixel paler than it had been before. This was the flaw in William Sun’s technology—the system couldn’t detect the brainwaves of a man who’d reverted to old beliefs and found true virtue there.

  “You know,” 2099 told Duff, “a few years ago we heard about a great new business model that was taking China by storm. It started with an obscure silicon company. The brainchild of William Kingsley Sun—you’ve heard of him, I assume?”

  Duff had indeed heard of William Kingsley Sun. It was a small matter to take Sun’s former sales manager, Tang Fei, on a golf outing and find out more. Somewhere near the sixteenth hole Duff slapped his underling’s thigh and exclaimed, “So, the Sunshine company makes loans! Do they have a banking license?”

  Now, Jack Duffy was a much subtler man than almost anyone realized. He spoke Chinese better than he generally let on, and he had committed to memory all of the Chinese laws that weren’t actually on the books, but which a business executive with good connections could have invoked if someone happened to get in the way of his company making money. And it was getting to be time for Duff to have one of his intelligence briefings with the Ministry of Industry.

  Soon after, Duff attended a garden party at the US Embassy. Someone introduced him to that professor who used to write op-eds about human rights in China, Charles Engelhorn.

  “You must be out of business these days,” Duff joked.

  “It’s a good feeling to have won the war and be in the country with the peace-keeping forces.” Smug, what else would you expect from these Ivy League intellectuals? Duff thought to himself.


  “And what about crime in New China?” Duff asked as he scooped up a spring roll from a roving waiter. “Like that village in Sichuan where the talk show host killed his wife?”

  “Sunshine Village.” Engelhorn nodded. “Yes, a student of mine is there, and she’s getting married to William Sun—” He stopped as if he thought he might have said too much. “And you, Jack, I hear Plenette-Leuter has done very well under your watch.” Duff detected suspicion beneath the Professor’s flattery.

  Before he could say more, a woman from the embassy exulted, “Jack, here you are!” and swept him away. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the professor talking to the guy from the New York Times, both of them looking in his direction. It was impossible to hide from the gossip that went around these Beijing ex-patriate circles; the expressions on their faces said “CIA” as if it were a bad thing.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In one part of Sunshine Village, Jeff was waking up beneath the plum grove. That same morning, Zoe was in the office, wondering where her co-conspirators were. William had woken at dawn, said to Zoe, “I had a dream something was going on in the bunker,” and hurried down there. No one knew where Ming was.

  Zoe filled in for William at a meeting with two entrepreneurs from Australia who had an idea to use nanochips for a process that would wring salt out of seawater inexpensively. Play the role, the executive of Sunshine Finance, she told herself. She enjoyed the role, in fact. It was like directing real life. When she sniffed the seawater sample they brought, it seemed to soothe away the fever that remained in her sinuses.

  The meeting ended, and still no sign of anyone. Time to go down.