Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  Two days later the invisible man sat in at television studio as the premier of China broadcast a live address. The premier told his people that the government was ready to protect them from a bird flu epidemic. The camera cut to footage of wasted, deathly ill people hooked to tubes and ventilators. The premier assured his people that a certain heroic pharmaceutical company was working with the government and starting the very next day would provide free inoculations for all, across the entire country.

  The unseen immortal flew to hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai, and many cities north and south. Not one had patients dying of bird flu; the wasted bodies in the television footage were digitized images. The same images were now appearing in posters, internet ads, and television announcements, urging the public to get their shots. He observed, also that the share price of Plenette-Leuter tripled in a week.

  While the immortal was in Beijing he also found Mr. and Mrs. Cheng, looking stooped and troubled, moving into an apartment near Han. In his invisible presence, he witnessed a series of discussions between son and parents; Han had sold their company because it was time for them to retire, time for a filial son to look after them, time for him to take them to a nearby clinic for their bird flu shots. Mama and Papa Cheng didn’t so much protest as look disappointed, as if they knew their son was saying all the right things but the words were counterfeit.

  The invisible William somersaulted through the sky to Sunshine Village. He tumbled through a cloudbank and landed in the peasant hamlet, where weeds grew outside the pastel stucco houses and wound their way around foreclosure signs. A bulldozer detonated the earth in an empty lot; an adjacent sign announced the new development of luxury condos. The rice paddies were similarly lifeless, the seedlings strangled by wild dandelion, the once-neat rows now neglected. His own house, too, was gone, luxury condos under construction on the site. Good thing he’d thought ahead and had Sun Four cover up the secret passageway just before his wedding. Along the cliff, he found a crane and a shopping mall coming up, polished pavement covering the ground even where the giant Buddha had been, and a sound-and-light show taking place in the cave.

  He searched for Jing Yin’s whereabouts and found no sign of her at the old Kwan villa, which had a real estate sign out front announcing “Sold!” It was an easy feat, of course, for an invisible being to hack into the computers at the real estate office, and there he found the name of the seller—Bradley Kwan. The dead man had a new address in Chengdu.

  He found Bradley very much alive in a spacious apartment there. Oblivious to an unseen presence in her new home, Jing Yin sat slumped on the couch, her eyes obediently glassy, a Band-Aid on her upper arm. Everyone got a Band-Aid after the vaccine.

  In a rote voice, she asked her father, “Do you have money?”

  “Some,” said the man who was no longer dead.

  “Can I have a new iPhone then? And I couldn’t possibly go to school without a Louis Vuitton bag…”

  That same night the man of seventy-two transformations returned to Sunshine Village, where he sat on the condo construction site and shed tears for all the work that was now undone. But he had a mission, and he must not give up on human nature’s ability to evolve. From the secret entry in the forest he crept down to the bunker, where he found his thirty-one computers intact. He extracted the data to an external backup drive, then smashed all thirty-one computer screens and buried the remains. Perhaps in another millennia an archeological crew might puzzle over the significance of this shrine.

  Then it was time to leap across the Pacific and go to his co-conspirators. Sun Two had told him of their whereabouts. Whether Zoe still loved him or not, she was walking around with the key to civilization. But he decided it would accrue good karma to check in on Ming first. And as it happened, karma seemed to visit him instantly; as a scrawny mouse within the Tombs, he eavesdropped on Ming’s cell mate when she met with her lawyer, he viewed the specs on her foreclosed ranch in Sedona, Arizona, and he listened to Delia try to ply Ming with the fantasy of buying her ranch at the upcoming auction. It was a property with much to offer, he decided.

  Though he wished he could clean up first, he was going to have to enlist Zoe now that he had a plan. As an invisible human form, he reached the Upper West Side in one swift leap. A neighborhood that seemed designed for lives filled with words and music, he observed. A luminous October sun lit up the nineteenth-century edifices with their scrubbed bricks and lacquered doors.

  At the address he’d committed to memory, William rang the bell for the apartment labeled “Leichtling.” When there was no answer, he sidled in behind another resident and flew up six flights of stairs.

  If Zoe was home and in the throes of passion with someone else, he decided, she would know only that a gnat had whizzed by. In that particular life form he slipped through the keyhole into her apartment. He found a home that was eerily empty; boxes were strewn about the living room; there were no dishes in the drainer; the teakettle was stone cold. He did, though, catch a whiff of peach mango in the bedroom with chrysanthemum colored walls. He would stay invisible and wait until she came back, he decided. He would write a note, and when she came home she’d find it and know he was about. A legal notepad sat right there on her desk. It was turned to a page with the words Suzanne Hirsch and Benefit with a phone number, all in a handwriting that made his heart turn a somersault of its own. Other notes on the same page seemed to refer to job applications; she’d written Translator and underlined it, beside the name of a person and a company.

  Beside the legal pad, he noticed a cracked and yellowed envelope addressed to Billie Austin.

  A hero doesn’t snoop, he told himself. But he was looking for clues to his darling’s whereabouts, wasn’t he? He began to read.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Zoe was seated in a hospital room. Around her were a dozen actors and actresses, playwrights, singers, make-up artists, and yoga instructors. They occupied chairs, leaned against the windowsill, or sat cross-legged on the floor. All gazed upon the woman who lay in the bed, unaware of anything—Billie, her hair spread across a pillow, her eyelids translucent and closed. A tube fed oxygen through her nose, and a needle filled her veins with nutrient components.

  Grandma Austin, who had arrived from Mississippi the day before, held one of Billie’s hands tightly within her own, her chestnut eyes alive with sorrow. Jeff shifted about in a corner, and the real Brennan Leichtling busied herself arranging flowers. Others provided explanations to new arrivals: “A frigging SUV. The driver kept going but somebody actually saw the whole thing and gave the police the license number.”

  “Did they catch him?”

  “They charged him with felony hit and run.”

  Zoe hadn’t told anyone about the letters Billie had shown her. Or how she’d come out the next morning wearing a diaphanous white dress and no makeup.

  “I think I’ll take a walk to the river,” Billie had said, with an English tilt to the word walk. Zoe had had a sudden image of Virginia Woolf walking into the River Ouse, but Billie wasn’t wearing an overcoat and had no pockets to fill with stones.

  She just needs air, Zoe had told herself. Billie had taken along a shoulder bag, with her wallet and identification, even a card that said In case of emergency notify—.

  “Your mother’s SAG insurance will cover two weeks of hospital care, but I’m afraid there’s a pretty big deductible, and the doctor thinks she needs at least a six-week stay in a rehabilitation facility. After that she can go into a nursing home. You’ll just have to spend down all her savings, then she can get on Medicaid,” the head nurse told her.

  “That’s our health non-care system, for you,” Jeff contributed. Then he turned to someone who’d just come in. Zoe heard him delivering the account she’d heard a million times now. “The driver was depressed after his wife left him and he’d been downing sleeping pills with vodka. You know what the motherfucker told the police?
He was late for his men’s sensitivity group and he didn’t realize the light had changed.”

  Later that day a massive bouquet of yellow roses appeared in the doorway. Zoe saw gangly legs and polished loafers below the flowers, and as he entered the room she saw that Charles Engelhorn was the bearer. While someone found a space amongst a dozen bouquets and someone else proffered a chair. Professor Engelhorn sat down and leaned against the bed railing as if he aimed to stay for a long time.

  He was still there when evening descended and someone suggested Zoe and Grandma go home and gets some rest. “I knew her a long time ago. I’d like to stay a while,” the professor told them. And before they left he said, “My brother in Boston is a neurologist who specializes in brain damage. I think I should talk to him.”

  In the apartment, Zoe and Grandma set out old family porcelain and decanted Chinese takeout food into the flower-pattern bowls.

  “Tell me about that nice man, Charles, with the doctor brother,” Grandma said.

  “I have it on good word that he wanted to marry Mom and be my father once upon a time. But now I know who my real father was. Mom was madly in love with some guitar playing—” Zoe felt her throat thicken and her eyes prickle with tears. “He tried to kill me before I was born.”

  “Oh, honey.” Grandma patted her hand.

  “Charles was in love with her, but she laughed in his face.”

  Grandma nodded. “Billie always did have a bit of a cruel streak. She asked me once, ‘Mother, why doesn’t God just get rid of people who are ugly or boring?’ When she grew up and had you, she called us and said, ‘the baby cries. I can’t stand these smelly diah-pers.’ So we took you in.”

  “She told me you didn’t approve of her life.”

  “Yes, I’m sure she remembers it her way. When you turned five she came and begged us to give you back and your grandpa gave in. You seemed like you knew you had to be an interesting little person to your mama. Oh, sweetie. Do you want to come stay with me?”

  “No,” something whispered. Zoe was sure a voice had said that.

  “Goodness, I didn’t think we ate that much.” Grandma surveyed three bowls with nothing left but rivulets of sauce and slivers of onion.

  “I’ll clean up,” Zoe said, and Grandma went into Billie’s bedroom, moving as if a thick cloak of sorrow were weighing her down.

  Zoe poured the remaining wine into her glass and left it on the table while she carried the dishes into the kitchen. When she returned, the wineglass was empty.

  “A truly enlightened man would help with the dishes,” she said aloud.

  She waited. The room was still. “I’m going to take a shower,” she announced. Her words kind of echoed, mocking her certainty that she wasn’t alone. She took her time in the shower, then wrapped herself in her old blue kimono from Chinatown, and floated on a waft of peach-mango soap into her bedroom. She hadn’t been in there yet, all night. The room felt alive. That was when she saw that there was a note on her desk, in Chinese characters—Darling, I’m here waiting for you.

  “Show your face,” she called out.

  The visible transformation appeared in the chair beside her desk, sitting with one leg crossed casually over the other. “Needless to say, I eavesdropped on your dinner. I’m very sorry about your mortal mother,” he said. He was the very picture of a man who’d escaped from hell, with raccoon circles around his eyes and unruly hair thinned on top. He was dressed in clean but faded scrubs, a blue shirt and drawstring pants; he must have stolen them from the penitentiary after he visited Ming.

  Zoe flew to him, and they somersaulted onto her bed, body heat as florid as a summer garden, glorious infinity melting all thoughts of hospital and prison walls. Except that, after they made love, William held her left hand to his face and stopped.

  “Where’s your ring?” he asked.

  “In a bank, in a safe deposit box. For safety. ”

  “I suppose the bank is closed at night.”

  “Of course. We can go there first thing in the morning.”

  He shook his head. “Way too late. It’s Wednesday. Lots to do. I’ll tell you as it unfolds.” He sank into on her pillow, battling the urge to sleep. Zoe, on the other hand, eyed her computer.

  “I have something important to show you,” she announced.

  “Letters? I came and looked for you…” William confessed. “And I saw them.”

  “Look at this.” Her computer was still on, just in idle. “Malcolm Samuelson is a common man with a common name, but I found something on Google.”

  What she showed him was a web page with a banner advertising Malcolm’s Auto Repair. Beneath were the words: Need a tune-up? Overhaul? Emergency? 24/7 emergency towing. Malcolm will fix it all 4 U. In the center of the page was a photo of a cinderblock establishment, and in the left-hand corner were directions to an address in Edgewood, New Mexico. Half a mile past the First Baptist Church, 300 feet from Taco Bell.

  In the lower right hand corner was the photo of a man with a gray ponytail and wiry build. He wore a black cowboy shirt with embroidered swirls that, upon close inspection, turned out to be tiny guitars. Malcolm had electric-blue eyes and laugh lines deep as canyons. The cleft in his chin matched the proportions of Zoe’s own.

  “I found the site, and that was precisely when the phone rang. It’s like he hit my mom with a bolt of fate.”

  “Edgewood, New Mexico,” William read aloud, caressing her shoulder.

  “Edge of nowhere. I could have come from a village full of the ghosts of cowboys and Indians, like a parallel life to Ming’s.”

  “New Mexico is on the way to where we’re going. Did Ming tell you about Arizona?”

  “Arizona?”

  “There’s a property auction going on Friday. There’s a ranch with a starting price at half the market value. Good soil for digging underground and the nearest neighbor is two miles away. Zoe darling, the key to the deposit box please? I’ll go get your ring, then we can fly before dawn…”

  Zoe retrieved the key, and he was off, a butterfly zooming out her window. She couldn’t sleep, so she trolled through pictures of mystical red sandstone formations and thick pine forests around Sedona, Arizona. She checked her e-mail. Suzanne Hirsch had sent a message about the gala dinner to raise money to address the plight of William Kingsley Sun, Chinese political prisoner. “Everyone wants to support human rights in China again,” Suzanne’s message gushed. “I’m so happy to be able to make this happen.” And then, a new message, composed at an insomniac hour, from Charles Engelhorn: My brother would like to conduct tests at his hospital in Boston, and we can arrange to transfer Billie there, but the hospital wants to know about your insurance.

  He signed it Charles.

  How would she ever pay for special care? She was pondering hospital expenses when a force pounded against her window. Zoe opened it to an invisible gust which then materialized into a man in sweaty prison scrubs. He opened his right palm to reveal the opal ring, casting prisms against both of them.

  “You’ll need to wear it,” William insisted, slipping it on her finger. “And you’ll need some nice clothes. And your passport. We’re going to Bermuda.”

  “How am I going to fly that far?”

  “Inhale conduct. You can do it.”

  She dressed up in a silk blouse, trousers, and pumps. Then they stood together on the balcony, amidst the potted asters. The sky was just beginning to grow a lighter shade of nighttime black.

  As she inhaled, a shift occurred below her feet, the ground transforming from a solid surface to something invisible and infinite. Nothing but clouds above and an inky ocean below, and a hand boosting her that seemed less like flesh than an endless current. When she stood upright again, she was breathless. William stood beside her, barefoot and sweaty for a moment before his corporeal form disappeared.

  “I’ll be with you,
” he whispered, invisible now, “but best that no one see me. You look fine, just a little windblown. Rich people with offshore bank accounts get to be windblown and eccentric.”

  Zoe entered the marble lobby of an offshore bank, where two guards asked for her security code. An invisible hand guided hers, punching twelve numbers into a keyboard. A third guard, a woman, took her down a series of steps to a subterranean vault, to a safe deposit box not much bigger than the one where she’d stored the ring. With the invisible hand guiding her, she pressed a miniscule lever on the side of her opal ring that lifted the stone. Beneath the opal was a tiny plastic card, which the hand helped her hold up to the scanner beneath the deposit box handle. Gears whirred, and the door opened.

  Zoe gasped involuntarily. A creature grinned at her from the darkness—a stuffed monkey, all of six inches high, with a Sichuan opal around its neck. Next to the monkey was a manila envelope.

  “Thank you. I’ll take it with me,” she said to the guard.

  The two of them flew back, William grasping the monkey toy and the envelope, over the tempestuous waves of the Atlantic, through fiercely whipping winds—a flight that lasted forever and yet no more than a second. They landed on her balcony with a thud that shook the rail and sent flowerpots crashing to the floor.

  “Work on slowing down before you land,” William murmured in her ear, disheveled but triumphant. It was just after ten a.m. Grandma had left a note on the kitchen table: I see you’ve gone out. Glad you’re getting back to your morning exercises. Take your time. I’ll be at the hospital when you get there.