What We Were Promised

by Lucy Tan

  “If that’s the one you want to see the most, then yes, we should go there first.”

  The absence of the rest of the family never felt so significant as when they were in a throng of strangers. It felt as though there was nothing preventing them from being carried off by the crowd, from choosing to become strangers themselves. Lina watched sweat collect at Qiang’s temple and slip down around the back of his ear.

  When it became clear that neither Wei nor Karen was coming to the Expo, Lina knew that she could make no excuses—today was the day she would have the conversation with Qiang. Qiang, too, seemed to sense that something was coming to a head, and this mutual knowledge made them shy around each other. More than once that morning, he’d averted his eyes as soon as she caught him looking over at her.

  Lina wished he would help her out a little. She wished he could overcome whatever fear or guilt Wei had instilled in him that first night on the balcony and remember that he had an obligation to her too. All those years ago, he had let his loyalty to Wei determine the course of the rest of their lives. Though he’d come all this way to finally reconnect with her, he seemed in danger of repeating the same mistake again.

  As they boarded a crowded shuttle bus headed in the direction of the UK pavilion, Lina found herself pushed up against him. At close range, he had the sweet, peppery smell of scallions snapped at their roots. At even closer range, he smelled like Wei. The familiarity of this caught Lina off guard, and she tried to back away, but there was no space to back into; for a moment, they struggled against each other. He maneuvered his arm around her head so that he could grasp the overhead handle, and in this new position, Lina found herself staring into the face of his watch. Where had he gotten such a thing, and why did it excite her so much to wonder about it?

  “So many goddamn people. Fan si le,” Qiang muttered. She could hear the damage that cigarettes had done to his vocal cords over the years. Each time the bus made a turn, it took all her focus to swing her weight the other way.

  As the bus picked up speed, their attention turned to the pavilions outside: Lithuania, Spain, Poland, Turkey, Namibia. They varied in shape, size, color, and materials. Some resembled museums, others adventure-park rides, others transportation hubs or UFOs. Lina thought back to that day by the lake when Qiang predicted that they would travel together. We’ll go to Africa. And Spain, and America. You know where I want to go most? The United Kingdom. I want to touch the queen’s hat. Wouldn’t that be funny? Who could have imagined that they would find themselves touring the world like this? She almost laughed aloud. It was ridiculous but true; they were acting out the life they would have had together in the simulacrum of the Expo grounds.

  At their destination, they stepped out into the unobstructed glare of the morning. The sun felt so loud, it stood in for conversation. They walked down the newly paved pedestrian pathways and soon arrived at the UK pavilion, a structure so gray and spiked that it looked like a porcupine stuffed into a box. The Seed Cathedral, it was called. Each spike was a fiber-optic rod that jutted out from the center and moved in the wind; the combined effect was of a dandelion gone to seed. The rods housed different species of seeds at their interior ends, representing the United Kingdom’s commitment to the environment.

  “I don’t see the end of the queue,” Qiang said. “Do you?”

  A line of people wrapped around the side of the pavilion and continued past the Polish exhibit, then disappeared down another roadway in the opposite direction of where they had come.

  “Tian a. Let’s go up front and ask them how long the wait will be.”

  At the pavilion entrance was a scrawny Chinese youth wearing a white UK Pav polo, a headset, and a battery pack clipped to his waist.

  “Excuse me, how long is the wait at this point?” Lina asked.

  “About four or five hours,” he said.

  “Four or five—how can that be? How is anyone supposed to see more than one exhibit if they all have a four- or five-hour wait time?”

  “They aren’t all this long,” he said, squaring his shoulders and lifting his head proudly. “The UK pavilion is popular. We’ve been interviewed by CCTV five separate times. I think that’s the most of any pavilion.”

  “Look,” Lina said in a low voice, trying for flattery. “You’re the guy at the front, so I’m guessing you’re the one in charge. We’re willing to make it worth your while.” She opened her purse.

  “No, no, I can’t do that.” He eyed her bag nervously.

  “One thousand yuan,” Lina said, but the attendant pretended not to hear. He was looking around to be sure no one else had seen her gesture.

  “Come on, Lina, let’s go.” Qiang pulled on her arm, but she held her ground.

  “What do you say, young man?”

  Still, he didn’t look her in the eye. Finally, he wiped his brow and muscled some brightness into his tone. “At the Polish exhibit the wait is only two or three hours!”

  “That was a good effort,” Qiang said as he led Lina away. “But it was never going to work. You can’t ask the guy in front. They put him there for two reasons. One, he speaks the best English. That means his parents are rich enough to send him to a good school and get him tutoring. Two, he doesn’t take bribes.”

  They had started back toward the bus stop, but Qiang now motioned for her to follow him around to the far side of the pavilion. The Seed Cathedral had a rear door that opened onto a raised platform where visitors stopped for a final photo. Viewed from just the right angle, the pattern of the Union Jack could be seen in the fiber-optic rods. Past this, the guests exited through a ramp that led back into the park.

  “We want someone with low responsibility,” said Qiang. “Someone who got this job because a family member knew someone, not because he did well on the interview.” He nodded toward one of the staff members stationed at the corner of the raised platform, a man about twenty years of age. He was pudgier than the first, and his hair was cut in the style of a J-rocker. His head was lowered, so his eyes were covered by his bangs. This, they discovered as they came closer, was because he was looking at the cell phone he held surreptitiously at thigh height.

  “Him.”

  The word sent a thrill through Lina’s neck and arms, igniting a part of her that had been dormant for years—the need for something to happen. When she approached, the young man looked up right away. He knew immediately what she was after. They had exchanged barely a few words before he agreed to the thousand-yuan price—half now, half later.

  “I can only do it when we’re close to closing,” he said. “Meet me here at ten thirty. You’ll have only half an hour, but it’s not big in there. It will be enough time to see everything.”

  “Thank you,” Lina said. She had recently adopted the habit of carrying around bank envelopes full of cash expressly for this purpose. She opened one of them now and counted out five hundred RMB. Then she bent down to wedge the cash beneath the base of a crowd-control stanchion near the security guard’s feet.

  Although they had spent almost every waking hour together since Qiang’s arrival, Lina had not been able to forget that he was just a visitor in her life. But now, as they turned away from the security guard, she felt she had just experienced what it might be like to be a permanent fixture in Qiang’s world—how it must feel to be his wife.

  They spent the next hour walking through the joint-Africa pavilion—a long rectangular construct, the outside of which was painted to resemble an African sunset. Inside were individual stalls where taxidermied animals were on display alongside blown-up, mounted photos of indigenous plant species, basket-weaving techniques, and more. Lina and Qiang sampled Ugandan coffee and then walked over to see Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of a female hominid found in Ethiopia.

  “There she is, the one who’s traveled farthest to get here,” Qiang said.

  “Through centuries,” Lina agreed.

  “It feels a little like we’ve traveled through time too, doesn’t it?” he
asked.

  Now, she told herself. Ask him now. This reference to the past was as close to an opening as she would get. But when she looked up at him, he was reading the exhibit’s placard, as though he hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary. She changed her mind, and they walked on.

  The middle of the pavilion was made up of nothing more than a marketplace of wares. Vendors sold leather wallets, braided bracelets, pins, magnets, and enameled keychains. Lina had doubts about the origins of these trinkets—she would not be surprised if they were to turn a corner to find Expo interns picking MADE IN CHINA stickers off the merchandise. She tried a different opening.

  “Do you remember that ivory bracelet you gave me?”

  “Of course!” Qiang said, his eyes regaining their childlike twinkle. Lina had seen him share a look like that only with Karen, and she was encouraged by it. “Do you still have it?”

  “No. It was stolen from me recently. One of the maids took it.”

  “Wah…shi ba. That’s a shame. I would have liked to see it.”

  Lina must have appeared visibly pained, because Qiang said quickly, “But now look at you. You have everything. I bet if you wore a different bracelet every day, it would take a year to get through your jewelry box, am I right?”

  These words only hurt her further. Here she was, trying to connect with him, and he insisted on making her out to be just some rich man’s wife. It dishonored the history of their friendship and the hungry way they had tried to understand each other as children. A humid gust of wind moved through the pavilion’s open doors, and Lina could feel her hair lift from the base of her neck.

  “Come on,” she said. “Take out that map again. Let’s figure out where to go next.”

  Because they knew most of the afternoon would be spent outside waiting in lines, Lina and Qiang chose to queue up outside pavilions with interesting exteriors. The Polish exhibit, for example, was made of plywood and perforated in a pattern of a folk-art design to resemble traditional Polish paper cutouts. It was so finely done that the structure seemed light enough to be carried off by the wind. Inside the Ireland pavilion, they walked through corridors full of LED lights, one of which was designed to re-create the experience of being caught in an Irish rainstorm. The American exhibit looked like a cross between an airport and a car dealership. It had big gray walls both inside and out, doors made for giants, and frigid air-conditioning. Lina and Qiang sat through a brief video of President Obama and ethnically diverse citizens saying hello in different languages. After that, in true American-theme-park fashion, they were shown a 4-D animation of a girl planting a flower, complete with a “rain shower” that left their shoulders and cheeks damp with mist manufactured from an unseen source overhead. After the video, they were hustled through a roomful of advertisements for the corporations that had paid for the exhibit. All in all, Lina told Qiang, it was the most accurate representation of America that she had ever seen.

  The temperature had dropped with the sun, and now there was even a light breeze that moved across the Expo grounds. Just like that, the entire day had passed. Soon they would be getting in the car to go home, and Lina was still no closer to addressing the unsaid. Each opportunity that went by had made it more difficult to raise the topic. Besides, what if the conversation ended with him asking her to be with him? Did she trust herself to say no? Having Qiang here in the flesh instead of in her mind meant that he had to exist in the same world as Wei and Karen. The separation between desire and consequence that Lina had thus far been able to maintain would disappear. To do anything with Qiang other than exactly what they were doing—which was nothing—would jeopardize her life with her family, and that was out of the question. Maybe it was too late for explanations. Maybe the better thing to do in this case was to let the matter go and take Qiang’s visit at face value: a long-lost brother reentering their lives. No more, no less.

  The crowd had thinned a little, but it still took a while to get back to the UK pavilion. When it finally came into view, they found that each rod of the Seed Cathedral was aglow, and the entire structure looked even more psychedelic than it had in the light of day.

  Their co-conspirator at the British pavilion must have seen them coming, because by the time they approached, he was already shaking his head.

  “I said ten thirty. It’s ten forty-three. I was going to let you in through the back entrance, but now they have someone stationed there to make sure that no one who leaves goes back in. They’ve stopped letting people through the front altogether.”

  “Can’t you talk to the other guards?” Qiang asked.

  The guard shook his head. “The British have strict policies. I can’t risk it.”

  “Boss, please. We have Expo tickets only for today—it’s the only day we can see it. And we’ve already paid you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “If it were anyone but Jeremy standing there.” He gestured toward the double back doors, where the man who had originally been guarding the front entrance was now stationed.

  Lina was unwilling to leave but didn’t know what else there was to say. She wanted to kick herself for not keeping a closer eye on the time.

  “Where do those stairs lead?” Qiang suddenly asked, pointing to a barely visible stairwell at the perimeter of the site.

  “That’s the staff entrance.”

  “Mind if we use it?”

  The guard tossed his hair out of his eyes, considering.

  “It’s pretty high traffic down there. You’ll probably get tossed out as soon as you open the door.”

  “We’ll take our chances.”

  The man looked from Qiang to Lina and back to Qiang. Then he acquiesced with a nod of his head. “Fine with me, but I don’t know you. Welcome to the UK pavilion. Huan ying nin.” With a laugh, he stepped back to let them through.

  The stairwell was so completely shrouded in the shadow of the Seed Cathedral that it was a mystery how Qiang had even spotted it. Lina followed him, keeping one hand on the banister and stepping as carefully and lightly as her shoes would allow. At the very bottom he paused, waiting for her to catch up. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  A situation like this was exactly the sort of thing Lina sometimes imagined when alone in her room at Lanson Suites. Trespassing in the name of adventure, slipping into the kind of life that marriage to Wei had not allowed. But now, as she stared over Qiang’s shoulder, watching his hand on that doorknob as he waited—for what, she didn’t know; probably some signal discernible only to a miscreant’s sixth sense—she was suddenly embarrassed to find herself there next to him. What they were doing struck her as foolish.

  Qiang opened the door.

  The corridor they entered was lit on either side with blue runners that spanned the length of the floor. The only open door they passed revealed an employee break room filled with lockers, notice boards, and a few folding tables. They could hear music and people speaking to one another in Chinese coming from deep within the pavilion. When they got to the end of the hallway, they stopped and listened. A few women were in the next room, counting off the end-of-day administration duties.

  “It sounds like one big room in there—an open-plan office space or something. We’re just going to have to walk past like we know where we’re going.”

  “Wait!” Lina said. “I don’t like this. Let’s go back.”

  “Mei wenti. Just follow me.”

  “I’m not joking. Come on.”

  “It’s not a big deal. They’re office workers, they won’t care or even notice.”

  “Qiang.”

  “Lina.” His eyes had that steely, reckless look she remembered from when they were young.

  If you don’t jump in the lake, I’ll push you in.

  If you do, I’ll kill you.

  You’ll have to catch me first.

  Before either of them could say anything more, the door through which they’d come opened. From where they stood halfway down the hall, they could see the man with the J-rocker hair
come through, calling to someone over his shoulder. Lina felt a hand on her arm, and the next thing she knew, she was being pulled into a darkened room.

  Room was a generous description; it was more likely a storage closet. When she took a step back, her heel met the edge of something squat and heavy. She careened backward and caught herself with one hand, knocking something hollow-sounding onto the floor.

  “Are you okay?” Qiang whispered. He yanked her to her feet.

  “You’re crazy!” Lina felt around for her handbag, which she had dropped in the process of trying to catch herself.

  “Stop moving, will you? You’re going to knock something else over.”

  “I’m getting out of here.”

  “No, xu, wait. I hear people. Just wait a little bit.”

  They both fell silent and listened; they could hear footsteps passing both in front of the room and coming down a far set of stairs. From the right wall of the storage closet came the sound of lockers being opened and shut. They waited. Lina could not tell how far Qiang was from her but could feel the heat coming from his body. This was as alone as they had ever been, aside from that last night by the lake. If he turned toward her now, there was no telling what she might do. Lina felt prickles along the back of her neck.

  “Ni hai hao ba?” Qiang whispered. “You’re breathing funny.”

  “There’s not enough air.” She realized then how shallow her breath had become.

  “Hao le, hao le, just hold on. Sit down here—”

  “No, it’s too hot. I—”

  “Wait—”

  But Lina had already wrenched the door open and flung herself into the corridor. She felt her knees hit the floor. Through her gasping, she listened for the sound of someone coming toward them, but no one did. The dull flashes that had been clouding her vision disappeared as the blue lines of light along the floor came into view, seeming brighter than they had before. There were no other sources of light, and aside from the faint humming of a fan or refrigerator, there was silence.