Hour of the Rat

by Lisa Brackmann

  “Ni shi naguo ren?” the cabbie asks. Where are you from?

  “Meiguo.” I am too tired and too fried to have this conversation now.

  “Oh, American! I haven’t met Americans before. Not too many come here. Welcome you to Kaili!”

  “Xie xie ni.”

  “Every day is a festival in Kaili, have you heard that saying?”

  His accent has a lilt to it, like it’s Irish Chinese or something. Mandarin isn’t the native language here.

  “I haven’t. I don’t know very much about Kaili.”

  The cabbie grins. He’s a few years older than me, small, receding hair. “Then I’ll tell you, every third day is a major festival.”

  Good to know.

  MY HOTEL IS THIS cheap place that I’m guessing used to be government-owned, and maybe it still is. There’s thousands of hotels in China that look like this: chunky, maybe ten stories, faded white walls, long halls, broad wooden railings, gilt trim. Worn red carpets. The kind of place where there’s a piece of paper stuck on the door of my room that says, “HINT! Honorific Guest, please give the product cash to stage to take care of, before sleeping invite anti the lock the door lock, the door bolt comes the door bolt, close the window and put on to put the, otherwise, the risk is complacent. Camp Dish Guest House.”

  Inside, it’s two beds, a pressboard desk with a TV, an electric teakettle, and musty white curtains.

  Not bad for twenty-four bucks, I tell myself.

  I do what I always seem to do every time I find myself in a city I don’t know, half asleep and half hungover: throw my stuff on a chair, kick off my shoes, and collapse on the hard bed. Sleep.

  I WAKE UP TO gunfire.

  I’m on the floor before I know it, crouching by the side of the bed.

  Firecrackers. It’s firecrackers, dumbass.

  You’d think I’d be used to that by now, living in China, but they still get me every now and then.

  I haul myself to my feet and hobble over to the window. The firecrackers are still going on. Maybe a new business opened up. Maybe there’s a wedding. Maybe it’s part of today’s festival.

  I need to check out the places in Langhai’s video. See if anyone knows him. But first I need to figure out where those places are.

  I have to decide how I’m going to handle this.

  Lunch, I decide.

  MY HOTEL IS UP a little hill. I head down it. With my knit hat on and a sweater, I’m pretty comfortable. It’s funny, because Kaili looks like a lot of other small Chinese cities. A little run-down. Lots of concrete and red brick, round grey roof tiles. Maybe a few more trees. But there’s something kind of pleasant about it. I’m not sure what. It feels relaxed, I guess. Not so many cars. The air is clean.

  I wander down a narrow street with no sidewalks. There’s a market here, tables selling fruits and vegetables, meat, tofu, spices. Noodle stalls. I’m tempted to stop at one of those, but I keep going. I hear people talking, and I don’t have a clue what they’re saying. It doesn’t sound like Chinese at all. Kaili is the capital of the Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture—at least that’s what the book in my hotel room said—and I guess most of the people here aren’t Han.

  And then I hear this crazy music. It’s like … I don’t know how to describe it. Pipes. A drone. High-pitched women’s voices. I mean, I’ve heard plenty of Peking Opera, and it’s nothing like that. This slips into my head. That musician who used to live across from Lao Zhang back in Mati Village, he’d love this stuff, trance music, with a beat.

  As I approach the intersection, I see the parade.

  It’s not a big parade. Just a line of musicians and singers. The men are wearing, like, bell-bottomed pants with embroidered trim. The women, red-embroidered skirts and silver headdresses, big silver necklaces that drape over their chests like floppy collars. The men carry these pipes fringed with red yarn and ribbons, and the pipes are so tall that they brush the leaves of the trees.

  Is this the every-third-day big festival, I wonder, or just the normal daily one?

  I follow them.

  They go through a gate, weaving into a parking lot. I think it’s a restaurant. Or maybe restaurants—there’s more than one building. Lots of restaurants are like this in China, where you have different levels of service and price. Private dining rooms for special groups. Public rooms for everyone else.

  With the musicians and all, I’m guessing they cater to tourists.

  Straight ahead is a one-story building painted a kind of greenish turquoise, with a mural on the front that’s this psychedelic design of dragons and flowers, so intricate that it makes me dizzy.

  Or maybe that’s because I haven’t eaten.

  I go inside.

  YOU KNOW, THEY’RE PRETTY used to foreigners in most of the places I’ve been in China, but not here. Everyone stares. It’s like I’m some kind of celebrity or something, maybe the kind that gets loaded and ends up on the cover of the National Enquirer.

  Then the hostess, who’s wearing an outfit that looks like the female musicians’, except without so much silver, breaks into a smile. “Welcome, welcome!” she says, and indicates a table. “Qing zuo!”

  I sit. The other customers check me out. They seem friendly anyway. A lot of smiles. They’re small, most of them, short and trim. I never think of myself as tall or big, but here I am.

  “Rice wine.” The hostess has returned with a younger waitress in tow, who’s bearing a small clay jug and a cup, like a sake cup, on a tray. “Local specialty. Please, try a little.” At least I’m pretty sure that’s what she says. Her Chinese is hard for me to understand.

  I’m not crazy about Chinese wine, but I don’t want to be rude. “Xie xie,” I say. “I am interested in trying local specialties.”

  She pours me a cup. And it’s good. Kind of sweet, but not syrupy, and without the chemical burn of baijiu. “Very good to drink,” I say, and she pours me another one.

  Great. Is this one of those situations where if I don’t drink, I’m being incredibly impolite and they’ll hate me? Maybe I should go ahead and risk being hated, considering that I am on a mission here.

  I drink it. The mission’s not going to happen till after lunch, right?

  I have a fish with sour cabbage and pickles and sesame-flavor tofu, some more rice wine, and it’s all really good. A couple of guys at the next table ask me where I’m from. “Beijing,” I tell them. They laugh. “Your Chinese sounds like a Beijing person,” one of them says.

  What brings me to Guizhou? they want to know. Vacation, I tell them. “I’ve heard Guizhou is very beautiful.”

  Oh, yes, they tell me, and proceed to rattle off a list of places I need to visit: Xijiang Village, Langde Shang, Shiqiao, Zhaoxing Dong Village, some cave whose name I miss, and Huangguoshu Waterfall—“biggest waterfall in Asia.”

  “Many things to see in Guizhou,” one of them tells me. “You should stay here awhile.”

  I nod. But there’s not much chance of that.

  “I saw this video about Kaili,” I say. “Very beautiful places. If I showed you, could you tell me where they are?”

  I RISK SWITCHING ON my iPhone. The GPS is off, I tell myself. So is the Bluetooth, and I have a VPN installed on the browser. What are the odds that someone can find me, just because I turned my phone back on?

  I really have no idea. I never did figure out how the Suits kept tabs on me last year.

  Buzz Cut, though, he can’t know what the Suits know about me, right?

  Assuming Carter didn’t fuck me over.

  I’m suddenly feeling like drinking more rice wine.

  “Is that a new iPhone?” someone asks. “How much does that cost? Very expensive in China!”

  Another time, I’d maybe try to explain American cell phone company contracts, but not now. “I don’t know. It was a gift.”

  I find the video and play it for the crowd.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I SET AN ALARM, get up early, drink some coffee. Go dow
nstairs at 7:30 A.M. and meet the driver I hired yesterday.

  The places in the video, they’re all near Kaili, I’m told. Most of them famous, at least around here. Xijiang, the Thousand-Family Village. Shiqiao, known for its handmade paper. Other places whose names I don’t remember but that I have written down on a piece of paper.

  “Can we visit them all in one day?” I ask the driver.

  He looks at my list, compiled by the folks in yesterday’s restaurant. Frowns. “Maybe a day and a half.”

  “I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “We can try to hurry.”

  WE GO FIRST TO Xijiang. It’s a tourist trap, with a hundred-kuai entrance fee, but a beautiful one. Wooden buildings with carved doors and windows, rising up a hillside in layers, like a beehive. Wooden signboards shaped like butterflies. A quiet river winds through the center of town. Stone streets. Noodle stalls and souvenir stands. And ATMs and a place to buy phone cards. We enter at a long wooden bridge, grey roof tiles supported by wooden poles, carved beams, a balcony up on top, and are greeted by lines of old men and women, singing and playing pipes, offering shallow bowls of rice wine, which I’m wishing were coffee given how early it is. I have a cup anyway—you know, to be polite.

  I see a sign for a coffee place, but it’s closed.

  I wander around the town for a while, up the hill to the next level, until my leg starts aching, and then I sit and try to think it through. I watch a small group of Chinese tourists pass by, led by a guide wielding a pennant flag. Thankfully, no bullhorn.

  Would Jason be in a place like this? A Disneyfied Miao Minority village? With entrance gates and ticket takers?

  I know I wouldn’t be, if I were him.

  I limp down to the teahouse where the driver waits.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  WE DRIVE A WAYS. To Shiqiao, a village where they make paper by hand. The mountains look just like the video, I think. Jagged and draped with mist. Those white banners, whatever they are—grave markers? prayer flags?—they’re everywhere. Stuck into the earth. Tied onto tree branches. Some of them have red dots in the middle, the edges blurred by the bleed of the paint into the white.

  I walk through the main street of the village, green mountain rising behind it. It’s quiet. There are walls made up of unmortared, uneven grey brick. A satellite dish on an old tiled roof. New wooden houses here and there, with fresh window carvings. I can smell the wood sap. Bunches of yellow corn hang in the eaves. A rooster and chickens.

  I glance inside one wooden building with an open front. There’s a young guy in there, bending over scarred wooden troughs, and it smells like wet paste, like kindergarten. He’s making paper, I guess.

  No sign of foreigners, other than me.

  WE DRIVE UP MOUNTAIN roads. The air smells like pine and mist. Rice paddies spill in terraces below us. A lone peasant in a round hat ambles along the side of the road, carry pole with wire baskets full of cabbage on either end draped across his shoulders.

  I can’t really take it all in. All this … I don’t know, nature or whatever. Yangshuo was stunning, but not like this. Not wild.

  I keep expecting the director to yell “Cut!” and stagehands to drag it all away.

  We keep driving.

  We stop at a village. Have some late lunch. Women weave at this village, at handmade looms. They want to sell me cloth and silver bracelets. I buy a simple bracelet, to be polite. Out on the main street, there are men crouched by birdcages. “The birds fight,” the driver explains.

  I don’t really get this. They look like songbirds.

  “They take them out of the cages?” I ask.

  “No.”

  So … what, it’s a sing-off?

  I never do find out.

  Finally we come to a village that starts in a valley, winds up a hill. Wooden buildings, like Xijiang’s, but not as fixed up. Bunches of corn and peppers hanging in the eaves. There’s a fancy wooden bridge with three shingled roofs crossing a stream, and something that looks like a waterwheel made from bamboo and old logs. A few of those prayer flags, or grave markers, or whatever they are, stuck in mounds on the hillside.

  I recognize this place from the end of the video.

  “I want to take a walk here,” I tell the driver.

  I HOBBLE ALONG THE stone path. Shallow steps lead up into the village. Chickens and a dog and an occasional cat scamper by. But it’s very quiet. Hardly any people. An old woman who sits out on her stoop working on some embroidery. An old man smoking a pipe. Something snorts and snuffles in a shuttered, dark bottom floor of one of the old wooden houses. A pig? A crazy person? Who knows?

  Farther up the path, the village widens out into kind of a plaza. There’s a bunch of buildings, some in the familiar white tile and cement stained by green mold. A school, I think, and maybe a police station or a village government building. There’s a basketball hoop off to one side. Black-and-white paintings of Karl Marx, Mao, and Deng Xiaoping hanging on the two-story school building. Still no kids. It’s practically a ghost town.

  I keep walking up the path. I hear a couple drifting notes of a wood flute, shaky, like the person doesn’t really know how to play it.

  Here’s a brick-and-wood building with a cross on top. A Christian church, I’m pretty sure. Farther on, another plaza, surrounded by more wooden buildings, and wooden benches shaded by a peaked roof. There’s a pole in the center, with a carving of what looks like a cow skull stuck on top.

  “This is where they do the old dances,” someone says.

  In English.

  I turn, and there he is.

  Jason/David/Langhai.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  IT’S WEIRD SEEING HIM after all this time. His hair’s lighter than the photo I have—bleached, I guess, but cut short. He’s clean-shaven, and his cheeks have lost some of that fullness. He looks thinner and older.

  The eyes, though, they look the same, toffee-brown with those flecks of gold.

  “I’m Ellie McEnroe,” I say.

  “I figured.” He’s holding a wooden flute, and he uses it to gesture toward a bench at the far end of the plaza. “You want to sit? It’s a nice view.”

  “Sure.”

  I follow him over to the bench. He’s wearing jeans and a battered North Face jacket, probably counterfeit, though it’s getting harder to tell.

  He sits, facing away from the plaza. He’s right: The view is amazing. Below us is a valley. Terraced fields climb up the opposite hill, and they’re different colors, all these shades of green, some of them white, like maybe they’re planted with flowers. I can’t really tell from here. There are clumps of dark trees among the fields, a cluster of wooden houses. White smoke rises up from a controlled burn, meeting the white mist drifting down from the peaks. And those torn white flags on crooked sticks, fluttering in the breeze.

  “You’re a friend of my brother’s?”

  “Yeah. From the Sandbox.” I mean, he knows that already, right?

  “Why’ve you been looking for me?”

  “Doug asked me to,” I say. “He’s not doing so good. And he’s worried about you. He wants you to come home.”

  Jason makes a sigh of a laugh. “Yeah.”

  It’s almost like he doesn’t care. But I don’t know how much he knows, about what’s going on with Dog right now. If he didn’t get the email I sent, maybe none of it.

  He fingers the wooden flute. I hope he isn’t going to start playing it.

  “So … is he worse?” he finally asks. “Or is it just the same old tragedy?”

  I can feel myself bristle. It pisses me off, hearing him talk like that. What the fuck does Jason know about what Dog went through? About what any of us went through? Sitting on his ass in some coffeehouse playing his flute.

  “He’s in the hospital. He’s had some seizures. They’re not sure what’s causing it.”

  Jason doesn’t say anything. He’s looking at the valley below us. Maybe at the peasant in the field across t
he way, plowing through the mud behind a water buffalo. Just like they’ve been doing it for the last five thousand years.

  “And he wants me to come home. Why? So I can get what’s coming to me? Go to prison?” He laughs again, and now it’s hard. “He can go off to Iraq and Afghanistan and fight for oil or whatever. And that’s fine. That’s patriotic. Me fighting for the future of the planet? I’m some kind of deluded, stupid freak.”

  “He doesn’t think that.”

  “How the fuck would you know?”

  “Because he told me, dickhead,” I snap back. “He said he thinks the charges are bogus.”

  “That’s new,” he says. “I guess it’s true, brain injuries change your personality.”

  “God, you’re really a little turd,” I say, and I have to admit I’m surprised. I thought he was going to be different. You know, idealistic and all.

  I mean, shit. I nearly got killed chasing after this kid.

  “Yeah, that’s one of Doug’s nickname’s for me.” He grins slightly.

  “Fine, whatever. You’re fighting for the future of the planet. You still can’t go burning people’s shit down.”

  “Tell that to the people in Afghanistan we blew up with our drones.”

  “Okay, I’m done.” I stand up, slower than I’d like, waiting for the spasm in my leg to ease up so I can walk out of there.

  Mission accomplished. Fuck you, asshole.

  “I didn’t burn anything down,” he says suddenly. “We had a plant in our group. FBI or Eos security. I don’t know which. He got people pumped up. Kept pushing everybody. That night we went to the Eos facility, it was supposed to be a nonviolent action. Stickers and stencils. I still don’t know what happened. I think he set the fire himself.”

  “Burned down his own company’s lab? Destroyed company property?”

  “Sure, why not? It’s just one facility. They had all the data backed up. They do that, they can discredit the movement, put a bunch of us in jail, make everyone think it’s okay to treat Greens like terrorists—”

  I’m getting that hollow feeling in my gut again. The one I get when I’m hearing something I don’t want to hear, because I know it’s true.