Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  “I need a sharp object,” William said. “And just in case Grandma decides to come back, let’s go behind closed doors.”

  The monkey grinned at them. With a knife from the kitchen, William sliced its head off, then disemboweled its torso with one stroke. Buried in stuffing was a small plastic bag. William emptied the contents on to the desk—a cluster of miniscule translucent grains. Zoe counted ninety-seven of them.

  “We’ll have to save these for the most influential people in the world,” he said. “No more manufacturing facilities—all we have is this ranch, and that’s only if I can get out there before someone else buys it.”

  Zoe kept staring at the chips.

  “Open the envelope,” he said.

  Inside the envelope was a stack of papers and a plastic card, which he held it up as if it were the spoils of war. The card was from the bank in Bermuda, and the name on it was Zoe Austin. The papers were full of numbers—numbers that bounced off the page and boogied about her room, critical inspectors of her life. Nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine dollars.

  “All nines for long lasting fortune and a life of harmony, ” said William. “Of course it has earned interest. I only hope we have enough. Come, we have to go. We have to buy the place in your name, since both of your partners are technically in prison. We should go right now.”

  She kept staring at the numbers, and the mocking grin from the monkey’s severed head. “Where did it come from?”

  “A smart business leader puts something away for an emergency. I haven’t even told you what I saw in China.” He described to her, all the while glancing at her clock, the bird flu vaccine campaign and Jing Yin’s telltale bandage and how alive Bradley Kwan had been.

  Zoe suddenly felt damp and deflated. “About ten million dollars plus interest and ninety-seven chips are nothing against what China has.”

  “We have to try. We keep honing the program ’til we get it right. We thought everyone would want to be a civilizer, but turns out that what everyone wants is to be the star of their own movie, at least in their own microcosm. I say we go after ninety-seven top dogs and drill their brains with empathy and benevolence. Including the top dogs at Plenette-Leuter Pharmaceuticals, of course.”

  Zoe stared at the plastic bag and the subversive little miracles inside, then shook her head. “No more secret operations. It’s dangerous to play god. I guess Jeff did kind of have a drug problem, but I convinced him it was worse than it really was just because I wanted him to think he couldn’t trust his own eye.. I thought my mom should face the truth, and it sent her into such a trance she didn’t see the car coming at her.”

  The room reeled and something that had no name tugged at her. She saw her own hand reach to the plastic bag, she heard a voice asking, what would he do if there were no chips? She felt her feet rustling through the living room and out of the French doors. She held the bag precariously over an unbroken pot of purple asters and heard herself saying, “I bet these little miracles would make the flowers grow.”

  He was behind her. He shook his head and grabbed the bag of chips. Of course, she knew he was going to do that, didn’t she? “I can buy the place as your representative and I won’t use more than my third. I’ll be fair. If you change your mind you know where I’ll be. I presume there are lots of ways to transport yourself to Arizona.”

  With that, he took a deep breath and disappeared, a gust of wind somersaulting across the balcony and into the sky.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  She had tried to save people and instead destroyed them. Zoe thought of dying there on the balcony, waiting for winter. She thought of the man who’d given her this mortal form, the man who made his living off the pickings of the highway. Perhaps he thought she was already dead.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been out there when she felt someone shake her, but late afternoon sun illuminated the face of Jeff. Unshaven, a whiff of subways coming up from his shoes. Of course, he had a key from his time staying here.

  “Everybody was wondering where you were.” He pulled her up by the armpits. She tried to kick but felt too weak. “Your grandma’s going to be home soon. You want her to see you like this?”

  “I have the money to get Ming out,” she mumbled.

  “Then you better do it.”

  Jeff told her to take a shower, and knowing he was outside the door waiting gave her the strength to wash. When she finished, he followed her into her bedroom.

  “Whew,” he said, taking in the rumpled bed sheets, the room intoxicant with sweat and sex. “I won’t ask questions. Not married man Danny, I hope. Someone new? What the fuck is this?” He picked up the stuffed monkey’s severed head.

  “An old toy I found. I was in a bad mood and I felt like cutting someone’s head off.” The monkey head seemed to flash her a sinister grin. Then she showed Jeff the old letters. She even showed him the bank statement, saying it had arrived by mail. When Grandma came home, Jeff was sitting on the chair, Zoe on the bed, wearing her kimono.

  “Are you kids okay?” asked Grandma. She brought them sandwiches, as if they were indeed children.

  “I’m going to stay here,” Jeff told Zoe while they were eating. “On the sofa bed, of course. Who ever thought you’d be the crazy one?”

  Two days later, Jeff and a lawyer accompanied Zoe to the gray place. Morning ticked past noon. Finally, a prison guard brought Ming out. She kept her gaze on the floor, as if she’d lost the right to look anyone in the eye. Her hair hung with indecision, wiry ringlets sticking out amongst sullen strings. She wore an electronic ankle bracelet.

  That night Ming slept on the sofa bed, with Jeff. And the night after. Jeff began to mark his territory. By the end of the week there were two laptops, three cameras, and a cluster of found bottles and toy cars on the living room floor. They had three months yet before they had to vacate the premises.

  “You are quite the accumulator,” Grandma told Jeff, with a tight smile. Not being Southern, Jeff didn’t seem to understand that the laugh in her voice was a hint that he ought to straighten things up. “I even accumulated a wife.” He flashed Ming an uncharacteristically indulgent smile. But Grandma liked Jeff, in spite of his trove. Zoe could tell.

  Grandma didn’t ask where Ming had been, though Zoe could surmise by the faintly patronizing undertone when Grandma addressed their new guest that she considered this a worthwhile charity, putting up a wayward girl.

  The wayward girl asked Zoe to stay behind one morning when Grandma departed for the hospital and Jeff for a day of wandering. “You have to see this,” Ming said. She clicked on a Chinese website and pulled up a reality TV show entitled “The Kwans.”

  A camera panned to a man’s face: Bradley Kwan. The man spoke. “My name is Bradley. I had an argument with my wife one night. I killed her. I escaped from a vengeful mob. I did wrong. But everyone deserves a second chance.”

  The camera cut to a classroom, and zoomed in on Jing Yin. “She looks drugged,” Zoe observed. Another girl in the classroom whispered something to the girl across from her and they both giggled. When Jing Yin glared at them, the first girl said, “Ha ha. Your father is a murderer.” Jing swung a large designer handbag at her.

  In the next scene, the teacher was reprimanding the girl who’d begun the taunting. “Jing Yin is a little older because she dropped out of school, but her father makes a lot of money and someday you might work for them. No matter what he’s done in the past, if he’s making a lot of money, we should look up to him.”

  Ming clicked on another episode, in which Bradley and Jing Yin were having breakfast on a terrace high above Chengdu. “Isn’t it fun being rich?” Bradley declared. “If this show gets canceled, you know it’s the lao gai for me and planting rice for you.” He chuckled at his own joke, before the show cut to a commercial—for the Plenette-Leuter pharmaceutical company. Footage show
ed town after town where doctors and nurses were giving people free bird flu vaccines.

  “You see,” said Ming, “my country needs you.”

  “Someone is always going to undo what we’ve done.”

  “My lawyer thinks that when I have my trial they might not put me in prison, even if they find me guilty, since I’ve already done five weeks. So Jeff and I are going out west if it all works out.”

  “What’s that, gratitude?”

  Ming looked pensive. “As long as I’m with him, he won’t start blabbing about what he saw. So that’s my punishment—a life with Jeff. There are worse things. Sometimes I think I do love him. Don’t you want to go to Arizona? I, uh, told Jeff you bought the ranch and you need to get it ready, as a place for William to recover and write a memoir once he gets out. Actually, I’ll write his memoir while he saves the world. And Jeff and I might go on to California before he pokes around and finds out too much.”

  Ming and Jeff even told Grandma they were dreaming of going out west. “We’ll get a car and take the old Route 66,” Jeff said. “I’m going to make a road movie. We’ll stay in crumbling motels with flamingoes on the marquee and hope we don’t cross paths with some Billy Bob cowboy with a machine gun. Hey, Zoe, you’re the director, see, you have to come.”

  Zoe envied their ability to imagine a future. But even Grandma told her she should think about taking a trip with them. The doctors said it would be all right to send Billie up to Boston by air ambulance, and Grandma was planning to go with her. The insurance would cover part of the transportation, but Zoe began mentally putting aside funds.

  The day before they left for Boston, Professor Engelhorn was sitting at Billie’s bedside again, grading papers.

  “Are you thinking about your dissertation?” he asked Zoe that afternoon.

  “Everything changed.”

  “Yes, it changed and then it went back to being the same, or worse. Did you know Bradley Kwan isn’t dead?”

  “I heard.”

  “If I believed in crackpot conspiracy theories, I’d swear the leaders decided we’ll give the country a taste of freedom and equality and show them how human nature itself is what gets in the way of equality. But think about it. Maybe you just need a break, but you can re-apply and start over when you’re ready.” He looked at Zoe, then at Billie in her coma as if she had some kind of answer.

  “Or maybe you’d like to write a book with your husband when he gets out,” Charles went on. “Who better than William to raise awareness of all the ways this stepped-up hyper-capitalism is destroying human rights? It could even be the subject of your dissertation and if you did that, I’m sure you could get a good teaching job.”

  He talked as if he thought Zoe were still whole. She looked away for fear he might read her thoughts. She stared at the vegetative patient who had once been Billie Austin. An aide had cut her hair, and the tendrils on the pillow were mostly the color of ashes. Her Technicolor life had turned a grainy black and white.

  “I know, you have to get through Suzanne Hirsch’s benefit,” Charles said, smiling as if they were allies in the ordeal. “But if she helps get the word out, and gets you the funds for a high powered international lawyer….”

  Suzanne Hirsch’s William Kingsley Sun Defense Fund gala took place a few nights after Grandma left with Billie, two weeks before Thanksgiving, at the Metropolitan Club on the East Side. “Danny will probably be there,” Jeff reminded her. “With or without Liesel, did you know she’s about to pop their first heir?”

  “We need dresses,” Ming said. “You know, we could go to Bergdorf.”

  “Loehmann’s,” Zoe heard herself insisting. “Don’t think Suzanne’s friends won’t know it if we’re wearing Bergdorf dresses and whisper among themselves about how could we afford them.” How long had it been since she’d made an authoritative pronouncement? In the store, she convinced Ming to get a black dress instead of the blue one with the sexy cutout back. The backless blue dress was tarty, like a fashion statement Ming might have acquired from her cellmates. Zoe, the daughter of Malcolm Samuelson, with no fiefdom left to her name except Empress of Going to Loehmann’s, at least ruled her square inch of turf with good taste.

  On the night of the benefit, as they as they primped and zipped themselves into their designer-discount finery, Zoe stared herself down in the mirror. Her dress was deep purple satin, approximately the same color as the circles around her eyes. “I look awful,” she observed.

  “Don’t worry, you’re supposed to look bereaved.” Ming winced when Zoe put on the garish ring, though.

  Charles Engelhorn was also a featured speaker. He introduced Zoe, in fact. As the guests were finishing dinner, he stood at a podium and talked about lao gais he had seen ten years before and the underground reports that told him the dungeons were even worse now, with chain gangs forced to break boulders, often dragging companions who’d dropped dead of starvation. Behind Charles, projected on a screen, was a photo of William Kingsley Sun. His gaze seemed invincible, his eyes fiery. Zoe had taken the picture. She could feel the sinewy body that had held her just a few weeks ago.

  While Professor Engelhorn was saying, “It’s a great honor to introduce William Sun’s fiancé and one of my favorite students,” she observed Danny Hirsch strolling in late, without Liesel.

  Zoe made herself stand up to the microphone and step into character. “I feel William’s presence here,” she said. Except she didn’t, not in a literal way. She delivered the lines Ming had said would work, about how the man of the moment had been arrested just before the priest pronounced them married. “And that was the last time I saw him.” She spoke about the New China and how quickly the government had buried all traces.

  “We have it on good word, there’s no bird flu.” She heard gasps of astonishment or maybe skepticism. That at least she could do. “Those vaccines, I can tell you, are to brainwash the little people.” There might be executives from the Plenette-Leuter company in the audience, it occurred to her. Maybe they’d have her shot.

  “When influential people mention the name William Kingsley Sun to Chinese government authorities, the powerbrokers will know that William has powerful allies. I leave you with this thought: those who serve an authoritarian regime live in fear.” That was the note of hope; Ming had told her she had to end with optimism.

  “That was so moving,” someone said afterward, as Zoe floated through the crowd. Of course, they would say that.

  “Suzanne Hirsch is such a one-woman tour de force,” someone else effervesced.

  The mob blurred, except for someone just beginning to fill out into his grown-up self, his jaw a tad fleshier than she remembered, his hairline receding in slow motion.

  Danny kissed her on the mouth, then said, “So, you married a hero.”

  “We didn’t finish getting married.”

  “You look beautiful. A little too wise for your age, maybe. Have a drink with me?”

  Zoe looked around, wondering if someone was going to try to stop her. Even Ming and Jeff were lost somewhere in the traffic. At the bar it was hard to move without hitting someone’s elbow. She saw Danny whispering something to a bartender. Then he put his lips against her ear and said, “Come with me.” His breath tickled.

  He steered her into a smaller ballroom where gilt-edge chairs lay slanted against barren tables. A waiter, whistling and patting down his pocket, brought in a bottle of Van Gogh Blue vodka and a bucket of ice. Danny pulled out chairs,

  “I kind of suspected,” he said over the clink of glasses, “that you were going to do something bigger than a dissertation if you went off to the wilds of Sichuan.”

  She let Danny put his arm across the back of her chair. The tart taste of alcohol made her feel pretty again. She told him a tale or two from her life in the New China.

  “Civilizers.” He rolled the word around. “Did I tell you I’m quitting
the hedge fund world? I’m going to write a novel.”

  “How does Liesel feel about that?”

  “Awww, lemme tell you something about my lovely expecting wife. I haven’t told her yet. I just decided it when I saw you.” Danny was leaning close to her now. “Actually, it’s not my decision to quit. We had a bad year at the old fund. A bad two years, in fact. All our big investors have been taking their money out. Last year I put my own money in to keep the assets up. When you do that and you have another bad year you’re fucked. So I’m going to have to close down the fund. So I’ll have plenty of time to write a novel.”

  “I’m so sorry. But you can start over.”

  “I put in all my money. Liesel’s not into cutting back.”

  Zoe took a greedy sip of vodka.

  “You’re different, somehow. Did I say that? Not that I didn’t like you before, but I like the way you seem different.”

  Maybe she looked like someone in a position to lend him a million dollars?

  She could feel Danny’s eyes surveying her hair, then her shoulders and cleavage. No, he didn’t want her money. He was sizing up the body parts of Malcolm Samuelson’s daughter.

  “It’s getting kind of late,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m not worried. My wife isn’t worried. You know what’s really funny?” Danny drained his glass and poured more vodka for both of them. “I have an idea for a novel about China.”

  Then he kissed her with purpose. Was it possible to die of carnal starvation? Yes, but I can inhale discipline and fly. The daughter of Malcolm Samuelson reached for her immortal mantra just as Danny was kissing her shoulders and making his way to her breasts.

  She pushed him off with a gentle forward thrust.

  “Oh…” he said. “Presumptuous of me.”

  She held out two icy glasses, which they both sipped for a moment like cold showers.