“Life is crazy, isn’t it?” he said. “You know what could have saved my fund except I didn’t do it? I didn’t buy stock in Plenette-Leuter. Just two weeks ago, someone told me Plenette-Leuter had proprietary medical evidence that a global bird flu epidemic was on the way so they were stepping up production of the vaccine. All I knew at the time was this could be a piece of inside information so I resisted buying. I obeyed the law and so I missed out. Their share price has quadrupled since I got the tip.”
Zoe shivered. The empty ballroom was frigid.
“A global epidemic?”
“Yeah. And then when you said that tonight, about there being no bird flu, well, I thought maybe I’ll write a novel about a pharmaceutical conspiracy to brainwash little people all over the world, except it isn’t fiction and I don’t think it has a happy ending unless someone has a really powerful antidote. ” He touched her chin and held it up as if she were a kitten. “Would you consider being my muse?”
The only possible hope.
What she said was, “Didn’t you know? I’m going out west.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Do you think she jumped off the roof?” Jeff asked Ming. They’d lost sight of Zoe.
When they finally found her, she was wandering out of an empty ballroom. And who should be right behind her but Danny Hirsch. Danny hovered about Zoe and wouldn’t let go. The four of them got into a cab and went back to Zoe’s apartment. In the living room, Danny told them all that he’d decided to start writing a novel that might not be fiction at all.
“Whatever came over China, when all those business and financial leaders decided to be generous, that then gave them a reason to think of themselves as archangels who could do no wrong,” Danny pontificated. “We’re on a precipice now. I mean, what would you say if you were writing a novel about what happened? Are you writing a novel about China, Ming?”
“I’m writing a story that has to end with someone left to start things over,” Ming said. “If you have, say, a mad captain who rams his ship right into the great white whale, someone has to be a survivor who tells the story.” In the prison library she’d read all kinds of stories told by survivors.
“I beg to differ; it has to end with the power elite saying, “Okay now it’s time to crack down,’” Danny persisted. “That’s what those who believed in the New China experiment overlooked.”
“Maybe we’re in a war between good and evil and there’s no end, just one battle after another,” Ming countered.
“Whoooo, a pissing contest,” said Jeff.
Danny leaned close to Ming. “Tell you what. In fifty years let’s meet on the Upper West Side—or appoint our heirs to meet if we’re not around—and draw up a point-by-point review of where I was right and where you were right. I’m betting my list will be twice as long as yours but what the hell, we’ll let posterity be the judge.”
“Ouch, Ming doesn’t like to think about judges,” her husband muttered.
“Who’d have ever thought Danny would be the despairing one and me the one who believes you can improve humankind?” Ming whispered to Zoe later, after Danny finally left.
“I thought I’d given up, but I can’t afford to give up,” Zoe said. “There’s going to be a global epidemic if we don’t stop it.”
Jeff was still awake when Ming tiptoed back to the sofa bed. She didn’t feel like sleeping either. They had developed a kind of circadian rhythm together. They sat with their heads against the back of the sofa, his feet nuzzling hers.
“If I get locked up, you can go to Arizona with Zoe.” The offer made her feel a little bit heroic.
“Fuck. Why did you have to do it?”
In the lamplight she saw how his face hung, though he was weightless compared to the things she knew. A wild beast yowled in her head. “You know all my dumb erotic stories that you laughed at? I didn’t make that stuff up.”
“Of course you did.” He looked frightened, more than anything.
“You know how I was making money before?” He tried to drown her out but she kept talking. She told him about the man who wanted a golden bath. And the mere $150 she got for each trip to some hotel at the shabby edge of midtown. “Some of them said I could get more for this if I got my teeth fixed.”
“Noooo…” He stood up. She watched him open the door to the balcony and go out there. He was wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a tee shirt.
She fished his jacket and her own coat from the closet, then followed him out.
He didn’t put on the jacket. That’s hostile, she thought.
“This just gets better and better. Mom, Dad, this is my wife of sorts. She’s a professional whore.”
“You don’t have to tell them anything. I’ll be out of your life.”
“Did you have to tell me?”
She considered going out and wandering New York. Instead she crept into the bathroom and filled the tub. Wasn’t a hot bath supposed to be a form of rebirth?
At some point Jeff came through the door. The steam fogged his glasses. He sat on the rim of the tub. It was an old-fashioned clawfoot tub, in need of new enamel. In a couple of months some new tenant paying five thousand dollars a month or more would be lounging in this tub, or maybe in a renovated bathroom.
“I wish I could have helped you. Paid for your teeth I mean.”
There was no resolution.
In the morning, Ming woke to an empty space in the sofa bed. If he’s gone, that’s that. She closed her eyes again because she didn’t want to look and see if his clutter was still there. Her senses adjusted and she smelled something. Coffee. In the kitchen, she found Zoe and Jeff watching a news video on a laptop.
“Ming—you’ve got to see this!” Zoe was practically bouncing off her chair.
The president of the United States—a Republican who had been adamantly against legislation that he claimed would “force” Americans to have health insurance—was speaking. “I was wrong when I said freedom is all about choosing your health insurer,” he said. “Nobody chooses to get hit by a car and be rushed to the hospital. Some things aren’t meant to be profit-making. Patients should spend their energies combatting their illness and injuries, not fighting with the insurance company or worrying about whether they can afford treatment. I am committing myself to legislation that makes insurance available for everyone, where doctor visits and hospitalization costs will be funded by the federal government. I am going to push this bill through or I’ll pay these costs for the uninsured myself. What the hell, I’m a very rich man.…”
Zoe pulled Ming aside “It’s a gift,” she whispered in Mandarin.
“Ha, must be mind control,” Jeff quipped. “What do you think, wife? Pretty funny, me having a wife. Pretty funny word even. Life. Strife. Knife. Rife.” He gave Ming a sly smile that felt a bit like moving on.
They got a call that morning from Grandma. “Doctor Robert Engelhorn says the tests show Billie still has some potential brain function,” Grandma told them, her voice teary and exuberant at the same time. “We don’t know…but we’ll stay here a while and he says he’ll see what he can do. By the way, did you hear the good news about health insurance?”
The president’s about-face gave Ming’s high-priced attorney some brand new ammunition, too. A week later, he argued to a jury: “Ming Cheng got mixed up with a bad element because of a barbaric practice familiar to all in our country; a practice where the cost of essential medical care—like the replacement of rotten teeth and the associated dangers of gum disease—are out of reach.”
Ming watched the court reporter typing like her hands were made of lightning, and the jurors begin to shuffle out.
“Expect the worst, hope for the best,” said Jeff. The two of them, and Zoe, waited for more than three hours in a small room off the judge’s chambers. A court assistant brought them sandwiches and water.
A k
nock on the door. The jurors were back. Same serious faces, all checking her out.
The clerk, a thin young guy, picked up a piece of paper. “Count one,” he said.
The room spun around her.
He said, “Guilty.”
It wasn’t over. The judge said she could go home but she had to come back for sentencing next week. Ming’s world became narrow again. She walked across Manhattan, and almost the length of it. She even saw Charles Engelhorn, who came by one evening to visit Zoe and tell her he was going to Boston that weekend and would see Billie.
“It might seem preposterous, but I’m entertaining the idea that maybe the corporate leaders themselves started the New China, as a way of selling products, then raising the prices. It’s dumping consumer products to get people addicted to them,” she heard him telling Zoe.
“At least you’re not imprisoned in a coma,” Jeff said to Ming. He brought her little gifts, things she could stash away. A bangle bracelet, the complete collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems.
It was worse the second time, waiting and waiting and waiting in the judge’s chambers. Someone brought sandwiches again. Ming studied the sliced ham, the orange cheese, the three pickles in a triangle, like two wide eyes and pair of pursed lips. She tasted a pickle and the brine burned her throat.
“Oh my god!” Zoe read aloud from the news app on her cell phone. “‘Doctor Blake Gower in Ohio has reported a patient who recently traveled to China testing positive for bird flu. Doctor Gower has treated the patient with the bird flu vaccine that stopped the epidemic in China….’”
The knock came.
Ming’s lawyer was smiling.
A fog descended over her, but Ming thought she heard the words “suspended sentence.”
“The judge said you’ve already served a reasonable time,” Jeff explained, as if he were translating. “You’re on probation for the next year, but you can go anywhere in the continental US, without an ankle bracelet if you check in with your probation officer and your very law-abiding husband keeps an eye on you.”
From Ming’s Notebook
You’ll see. All our friends in New York will get jabbed with bird flu vaccine while they’re walking through a crowd. We’ve gotta stay out of big cities,” my husband said just now.
It’s a little past two in the afternoon. A while back we passed a sign that said “Welcome to Pennsylvania.” Zoe is driving, with Jeff in the front seat.
“This,” Jeff is saying, “is a car that can easily break down just outside a mechanic’s shop in New Mexico.” Zoe insisted we shouldn’t blow our money on a new car, so we got a 10-year-old Volkswagen Passat.
Zoe says she’ll think about it. She’s playing “Rhapsody in Blue” for the sixth time, so I know she’s already missing New York.
We’re fighting battle by battle. The Republican senators who suddenly agreed with the president on universal health care and passed an emergency bill have, by my count, brought us down to less than ninety spare nanochips against an infinite supply of the vaccine. Still, I’m writing a story that ends with the chips winning. It’s my tale against Danny’s.
“We’ll see tumbleweed,” says Jeff. I’m not sure what tumbleweed is.
There’s an eagle soaring over the highway. It swirls about, then flies off over a rolling green field. I tell Jeff and Zoe there’s an old Chinese proverb that goes: If you’re facing the right direction all you have to do is keep on walking. The afternoon sun has begun to ignite us through the windshield, and we’re headed straight into the blaze.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my publisher, Jaynie Royal, and editors, Teresa Blackton and Ruth Feiertag. And special thanks to many friends and colleagues who helped point the way: Geoff Fox, Peter de Lissovoy, and Dirk van Nouhuys of the Thoth Books Editorial Collective; Beth Neff of Sparklit; Sarah Stone; Janice Horowitz, who tirelessly read and critiqued my early drafts; Richard Bulliet; Sara Klatchko; Samantha Marshall; Raquel Scherr, the participants in Karen Braziller’s writing workshop; and the “Cheng” family. Also to my cousins Bill, Carlisle, Jane, John, and Ilya, who have always encouraged me to tell stories.
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