NVK

by Temple Drake

  The two men shook hands.

  Jun Wei looked around. “No date?”

  “She’s in the bathroom—”

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Zhang.”

  He felt someone take his arm, and turned to see Naemi at his elbow, her eyes clear and dark, her hair all shining tangles. He stared at her in awe, but also in bewilderment. If it hadn’t been for the small red mark near the edge of her right eye, where she had struck the window when she passed out, he would have found it hard to believe that anything untoward had happened.

  Jun Wei was also staring, his mouth hanging open. Xiang Jin punched him in the ribs, but he didn’t seem to feel it.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Have your batteries gone flat?”

  Zhang smiled.

  “This is the most beautiful foreign girl I have ever seen,” Jun Wei said.

  “That’s very kind,” Naemi said in Chinese, “though you do make me sound a bit like a painting or a vase.”

  Jun Wei stared for a moment longer, in shock, then his head tipped back, and he laughed his eerie, silent laughter.

  Xiang Jin hit him again. This time he grunted.

  “Show some respect,” he said.

  She stepped closer, tilting her face up to his. “You show some respect.”

  Jun Wei might act indignant, but Zhang knew that he found Xiang Jin’s insolence and vulgarity provocative, in contrast to his wife, who had the build of a fridge, as Jun Wei liked to say, and the temperament as well, and who he kept in a gated residence on the outskirts of the city, along with his twelve-year-old son.

  The two couples moved towards the lifts that would take them to Peace Hall, the grand dining room and ballroom on the eighth floor.

  * * *

  —

  Towards the end of dinner, while coffee and liqueurs were being served, Zhang followed Jun Wei to the Nine Heaven Rooftop Terrace on the eleventh floor. Lighting a cigarette, Jun Wei told him Sebastian’s contacts had proved excellent. Sebastian’s Iranian supplier was government owned, and he was also on good terms with a prominent minister in Tehran. Between them, they ought to be able both to influence the bidding process and to agree on a pricing mechanism.

  “I knew I could rely on you,” Jun Wei said. “If this deal comes off, you’ll stand to make $10,000 a month, which is more than enough to keep your new girlfriend happy—who is stunning, by the way.”

  “You’re getting senile,” Zhang said. “Repeating yourself.”

  Grinning, Jun Wei lit a new cigarette from the old one. “Wasn’t there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

  Zhang outlined the problem his father had raised with him the week before, then he showed Jun Wei the photo.

  “I know this man,” Jun Wei said. “He works for me.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Your father should have come to me directly.”

  “It’s not the way he operates.”

  “I have great admiration for your father.”

  “Can you think of how we might resolve the situation?” Zhang asked.

  Jun Wei leaned on the black metal railings and looked out over the city. The drizzle had stopped, but the high-rise buildings of Pudong were veiled, all the different-colored neon lights blurring into one another, like melting water-ice.

  “There are perhaps ten or fifteen different ways,” he said at last.

  Zhang waited for him to elaborate.

  “Probably we shouldn’t kill him…” Jun Wei looked at Zhang across one shoulder, smoke trickling from his nose.

  Though shocked, Zhang merely shook his head. “Probably not.”

  Jun Wei held his gaze for a moment longer, then turned his eyes back to the view. Taking one final drag on his cigarette, he flicked it away into the air. “I could send him to Beijing.”

  “Not far enough,” Zhang said.

  “Manila, then.”

  Zhang thought about that. “How soon could you do it?”

  “Would the end of the week be soon enough?”

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “Of course.” Jun Wei’s voice seemed distant, almost misty, as if affected by the weather. “You’re my brother.”

  Relieved to have been presented with such a neat solution, Zhang put a hand on Jun Wei’s shoulder.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  On returning to the eighth floor, he was approached by a local politician who had once worked with his father, and it was several minutes before he could extricate himself. When he looked for Naemi, he was surprised to see that she was deep in conversation with Jun Wei. What did they have to talk about? He couldn’t possibly imagine.

  “Were you terribly bored?” he asked her later, as they took a lift down to the lobby.

  “No, not at all,” she said.

  He looked at her.

  “And even if I was bored,” she went on, “there was always the thought of being with you when it was over.”

  He smiled. She was reprising the remark he had made in the bar at the Park Hyatt.

  Once outside, they stood on the promenade, looking towards Pudong. To Zhang, it felt like a place where the scale of things had gone awry. Though the river was about five hundred meters wide at that point, the ships looming out of the drizzle often seemed disproportionately large. He put an arm round Naemi’s shoulders and drew her close as a tanker eased past, its hull vertiginous and grazed.

  “Will you come back with me,” he said, “or are you too tired?”

  “I feel much better now,” she told him.

  “You look much better. We don’t have to sleep together, though, if you’re not feeling up to it.”

  “Are you losing interest in me?”

  He smiled again. “That’s not possible.”

  Later, as they sat in the back of the Jaguar, he asked what she and Jun Wei had found to talk about.

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “Nothing special.”

  He didn’t believe her. He had seen Jun Wei lean in close to her, as if imparting a confidence, and a few moments later Jun Wei had laughed his strange, silent laughter. There had been an aspect to the conversation that seemed intimate, and secretive. It hadn’t looked like “nothing special.”

  The double row of white lights on the roof of the Renmin Road Tunnel rushed towards them, like a zip unfastening. Like something coming undone. It wasn’t late, but the road ahead of them was empty.

  * * *

  —

  His eyes opened. For a few brief moments, he had no recollection of what had happened the night before. Then he saw Naemi’s clothes on the chair by the window, and he remembered. The Business Awards dinner. The Peace Hotel. Where was Naemi, though? He went to his bedroom door, which stood ajar. At the end of a windowless passage, at floor level, was a horizontal strip of light. Someone was in the bathroom. He began to walk. A pulse was beating in front of his eyes. He seemed to be looking through dark water that was being shaken by repeated, powerful explosions. He couldn’t help remembering the state she had been in when he picked her up from the gallery in People’s Park. What if she’d lost consciousness again? What if she was dead? His thoughts were melodramatic, and unlike him. He hardly recognized himself. Oddly, though, he didn’t move any faster. When he reached the door, he didn’t think to call her name or knock. Instead, he gripped the handle and threw it open.

  Afterwards, he realized that what unnerved him about the moment when he appeared in the bathroom doorway was Naemi’s reaction—or rather, her absolute failure to react. She didn’t cry out, as most people would have done. She didn’t even jump. She simply turned towards him, her face absorbed, trancelike. He had the impression that he had disturbed her in the middle of something, though he couldn’t begin to guess what that might be. She was sitting on the edge of the bath, and ther
e was blood on her teeth, and on her chin. Blood slid down her arm, towards her wrist. She was naked. Hunched over. He tried to say her name. Nothing came out.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s only a nosebleed.”

  His spine curled, like a piece of paper tossed onto a fire. His skin felt cold. Her words fitted what he was looking at too loosely. Other words lurked behind them, in the shadows. He began to struggle for language of his own. It seemed important that he should speak.

  “I woke up,” he said. “You were gone.”

  “I felt it coming on. I should have told you.” She used toilet paper to wipe her mouth and chin. “I’m sorry.”

  She stood up and walked to the sink, where she ran the cold tap and washed the blood off her arm. The scar tissue on the inside of her elbow looked infected. Her forehead was damp with sweat.

  “I get nosebleeds all the time,” she said. “I always have. For as long as I can remember.” Her voice was calm and uninflected, like someone who was half asleep. She looked at him sidelong, across one shoulder. “Do I disgust you?”

  “No. The opposite.”

  She moved towards him, her face seeming to darken as she blocked out the stark white light above the sink. There were no other lights on in the room.

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  They kissed. There was the taste of blood in her mouth, warm and claustrophobic, and he began to feel giddy. The floor was tilting upwards. Either that, or she herself was tilting.

  She broke away. “I think I need a shower. Do you mind?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “You go back to bed. I’m fine now.”

  In the bedroom he stood at the window, staring down at Puming Road. He watched the gaps between the cars, noticing how they kept widening and narrowing. He imagined the gaps as objects in themselves. Alternate beings. Hidden entities.

  Somewhere far below, a siren ghosted through the night.

  When Naemi climbed into bed, her hair still wet from the shower, she wanted to make love. She kept murmuring his name. Her lips burned his skin. She seemed feverish, and he wondered, once again, if she was ill.

  Later, when he was dozing off, he thought he heard her say something else. “What was that?”

  “I love you.”

  The words had come from nowhere, and he was too taken aback to respond.

  “Did I say the wrong thing?” she murmured.

  “No,” he said.

  She began to tremble.

  He looked at her in the dark, but there was only the back of her head and the polished curve of her right shoulder. She was facing away from him. “Are you crying?”

  “Could you hold me?”

  He had imagined that he was beginning to get her measure—her insistence on privacy, her self-sufficiency—but this was a side of herself that she had not revealed, or even hinted at—until now. He took her in his arms and held her tight.

  “It’s all right,” he murmured. “Everything’s all right.”

  Her breathing slowed and deepened, as if she was sinking towards sleep. He had all kinds of questions for her, but they would have to wait.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, on Saturday morning, Naemi texted him to say that something had come up. She had to fly to London, she said. She would be gone for about a week, but he would be in her heart. He was disappointed, not least because it was almost Golden Week, which was a national holiday, and he had been hoping they might travel somewhere together—Lijiang, perhaps, with its magical Old Town and its complex history. He texted back, suggesting that he might visit her in London, but her response was not encouraging. It was a work trip, she said. She would have no time for him. He pictured her on the plane to London, the reading spotlight shining down on her, and people all around her in the darkness, sleeping.

  Later, as Chun Tao drove him to the Athens Palace, the bathhouse in the center of Pudong, he read her text again. You’ll be in my heart. He remembered how she had told him she loved him during the early hours of Thursday morning, and how she had asked him if he would hold her. She had seemed unlike herself, and he was still struggling to interpret her behavior as he walked up the wide steps of the bathhouse and through the lobby, with its faux-Greek statues, its ornate, gold-trimmed armchairs, and its ivory-colored grand piano.

  While he was undressing, his phone rang. It was Laser, asking if their practice session was still on. He told Laser that it was. Mad Dog had canceled their session the previous weekend—he’d had flu—but he had called Zhang earlier to say he was feeling better. For the next hour, Zhang moved between the Pool of General Flowers, which was heated to 44 degrees Celsius, and the cold plunge pool. Afterwards, he walked over to the massage tables, where a man with huge, muscular arms scrubbed him all over, removing the dead skin. Later, when he had showered, he went upstairs and lay on a bed in a darkened room. He slept for almost an hour. By the time he left the building, he felt much more relaxed, his mind cleansed of all anxiety and unease.

  As they drove to the recording studio, Chun Tao asked Zhang for some advice. It was his girlfriend, he said. She wanted to get married and have a child, but he wasn’t sure if he was ready.

  “Do you love her?” Zhang asked.

  Chun Tao nodded. “Yes.”

  “Then you have two choices. Either you give her what she wants, or you break up with her.”

  “I was hoping there might be another option.”

  “You can delay things, but only if you promise to give her what she wants in the end. If you stay with her, it’ll probably happen anyway. She’ll wear you down.” Zhang paused. “It may be what you want too. You just don’t know it yet.”

  Chun Tao nodded slowly.

  Zhang looked out of the window. Sichuan Middle Road. Though there was still some gray light in the sky, it seemed dark at street level. A girl drew alongside on a moped. She wore a pink crash helmet, and a small dog lay between her feet on a piece of carpet.

  “The trouble is, it’s hard to keep saying no,” Zhang went on. “ ‘No’ weighs a lot, like lead. It’s hard to keep heaving it into your mouth. But ‘yes’? It’s light as air. What’s more, there’s the reward of how her face will change when you come out with it—how you’ll suddenly be everything she hoped you’d be…”

  They had stopped at a red light, and Chun Tao looked at Zhang in the rearview mirror. “That’s amazing. Thank you.”

  In the silence that followed, Zhang felt a distaste for himself. Who was he to be offering advice? What did he know, really?

  A few moments later, they pulled up outside the alley where the recording studio was. Mad Dog was already there, leaning against the wall by the entrance in an old gray suit and a green shirt. He was smoking. Zhang opened the car door, and the smell of the Shanghai afternoon flowed in. Warm tarmac, fermented fruit. And drains, always drains. He paused, with one foot on the pavement, the other still in the car.

  “You know what, Chun Tao? Forget everything I said. It’s always a mistake to generalize.”

  Chu Tao turned and looked at him.

  “Except for the bit about yes and no. There might be some truth in that.” Zhang took out his wallet, peeled off several 100 RMB notes and held them in the gap between the two front seats. “You can have the rest of the day off. Take your girlfriend to dinner. Go dancing.”

  “You’re sure you don’t need me later?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Chun Tao got out of the car and opened the boot and handed Zhang his guitar. As Zhang walked over to where Mad Dog was standing, he heard the Jaguar pull away.

  Mad Dog took his cigarette from between his lips and looked at it. “How’s the girlfriend?”

  “She’s in London.”

  “Anything you want to tell me?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Ther
e’s a kind of immortality that originates in trauma,” Mad Dog said. “It’s known as an ‘awakening.’ I’ve been thinking about this in relation to your friend. I’ve been wondering if something terrible happened to her. That’s why she’s still alive—or appears to be. She wants justice or retribution. She cannot rest.” He looked at Zhang, then shrugged and threw his cigarette away.

  Zhang followed Mad Dog through the open door and down a flight of gritty concrete steps into the basement. A couple of young musicians sprawled on the battered brown leather furniture with Cyborg, the sound engineer who ran the place. They were drinking cans of Tsingtao.

  Cyborg looked around as Zhang and Mad Dog entered. “Your drummer’s already here.”

  While Mad Dog fetched his double bass, which he kept in a storage cupboard at the back, Zhang opened the door of the studio they rented. Laser was sitting at his drum kit, playing a game on his phone.

  “Lao Zhang,” he said. “I hear you’ve written a new song.”

  Zhang nodded. “It needs some work.”

  As he snapped the catches on his guitar case, an idea occurred to him. He asked Laser if he was coming for a drink after the session.

  “Of course he’s coming for a drink,” Mad Dog said, hauling his instrument into the room. “What kind of question’s that?”

  Laser grinned.

  Leaving the studio again, Zhang went back up the stairs to a place where he had coverage and rang his sister. When she answered, he asked if she would like to meet that evening.

  “I’m not sure I’m in the mood,” she said.

  And Zhang knew why. Jun Wei had been as good as his word. He had called Zhang to let him know that Qi Jing’s boyfriend was on his way to Manila. Later, Zhang had checked social media. On WeChat, Qi Jing had made several references to Chu En Li’s abrupt and unexpected departure. Zhang turned to face the stairwell wall. The white paintwork was grubby, defaced. Someone had written BEER & CHICKEN & ROCK & ROLL next to a heating pipe.

  “You might feel better if you’re out,” he said. “Otherwise you’ll just lie in bed eating sunflower seeds and watching bad TV.”