Dragon Day

by Lisa Brackmann

  My stomach does a kind of flip. Part of me is mad, hearing him talk that way about Lao Zhang. Another part of me feels all teary, because, you know, I believe him. Which means he really likes me.

  Don’t go there, McEnroe, I tell myself. Just don’t.

  “I don’t want you making some kind of deal,” I say. “I mean, me for Jianli. I don’t want that.”

  “I know.” John rolls over onto his back. “Anyway, you don’t know where he is, no deal to make.”

  I lie there and think about what I’m going to say next. My heart’s pounding. Because I don’t know where he is, but I do know something.

  What I say is, “Why do they even care? He’s an artist. He’s not trying to overthrow the CCP. You know that.”

  “Maybe because his work has political theme.”

  “Come on, lots of Chinese artists do work with political themes.”

  John stares at the ceiling. “What they do with Zhang Jianli, it’s just a way to remind everyone who is master. Like with dog. With Mimi you have that leash, the kind you can let out and make long. Dog can run around. But you always can control. Can bring the dog back. She can only run so far.”

  Silence fills the room. There’s this big thing that we both know that neither of us is saying.

  So finally I say it.

  “What about the Game? Did you tell them about it?”

  The Game is a video game. Sword of Ill Repute. Kind of like World of Warcraft, based on Chinese mythology, with a lot of magic swords, wise dragons, and flying monks. Completely harmless, right? You create an avatar for yourself and go storm castles or whatever.

  Except Lao Zhang figured out a way to use the Game to talk to people privately. To organize.

  It wasn’t supposed to be anything political. At least that’s what Lao Zhang told me later. “The Game, it is another community. A place where you can express your personality, make friends, have common goal. No one say you have to go on quest, collect treasure. Instead maybe you can build something else. Make art. Talk about ideas. Use this Game to play your own.”

  Lao Zhang was Upright Boar. I was Little Mountain Tiger. Before the Game was compromised.

  John had been there, too. And I still don’t know the whole story. Whether it was all about spying for the DSD or if he really believed some of it.

  And right now … I don’t know if I want to know the truth.

  He lets out a sigh, a hiss between his teeth. “I had to tell them.”

  I guess I’m not surprised. I’m not even really disappointed. It’s what I expected.

  He turns to stare at me. His dark eyes look liquid, like water at night.

  “I tell them it’s just a game.”

  There’s this hard knot in my gut, and I feel like it’s uncoiling. I resist it. You can’t relax, I tell myself. You gotta keep your guard up.

  “Why?”

  “You need to ask me this?” He sounds pissed off.

  “Well … yeah.” I sit up. My tits are bouncing around, which I figure maybe is not best for a serious conversation, since John seems to find them distracting. I pull up the sheet. I’m a little cold now anyway.

  “Look, do I have to remind you about the night we met? About our first ‘date’?” I make the finger quotes. Because now I’m kind of pissed off. “Everything you told me was a lie, and then you just kept lying. So why am I supposed to believe you now?”

  At this he bolts up, tense and angry again, and I shiver a little and try not to show it.

  Sometimes I forget, he’s kind of a scary guy. And here I am in bed with him.

  “You and me, together like this, and you still think I lie to you?” He sounds insulted. Or like he can’t believe it.

  “I …” I take in a breath, and I ask myself, what do I think?

  I have no clue.

  I manage a shrug. “So we fucked a couple of times. You know what that means in my life? Either nothing or a great way to get screwed.” Tears are starting to dribble down my face, which makes me even madder. I throw off the sheet. Catch a glimpse of the familiar scars on my leg, the missing chunk of flesh, purple in the dim light. “I need to go.”

  John doesn’t say anything. He watches me pull up my jeans, fumble around for my bra, turn my T-shirt right side out. My panties I wad up and stuff in my pocket—I’ll throw them in my bag, wherever that is. In the living room, somewhere, with my jacket. My shoes … ?

  “Hard to find a cab now,” John finally says.

  “I’ll find something,” I mutter.

  “I’ll take you. Just to the subway, if you want.”

  I almost say no, just out of habit. But it’s closing in on ten thirty. I might not even make the last train home.

  “Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”

  He ends up driving me all the way back, in his nice shiny Toyota, because yeah, I missed the last train. As long as he doesn’t try to come upstairs, I think, as long as he doesn’t do that and my mom doesn’t see him, because my mom thinks he’s cute and nice and that I should be going out with him. Hah. She has no idea who he really is. I’m thinking about what he did to me the night we met, and what the fuck is wrong with me for ending up in bed with him not once but twice? That’s just beyond fucked up, I think.

  Though he did wash my dishes. And save my ass. And take care of my dog.

  At least he doesn’t talk on the long drive back. It’s like a replay of the last time, I think. We have some fun—I mean, it’s weird, but basically good. He acts like it’s a big deal. I get mad. He gets mad. Then we end up not talking to each other and finally go our separate ways.

  This is bad, I tell myself. I have to stop doing shit like this.

  We’re almost to my place, heading west on Dongzhimen, the red lanterns in front of all the hotpot restaurants on Ghost Street still lit, when John breaks the silence.

  “I will do what I can, about this situation.” He sounds formal. Like it’s the end of a business meeting or something. “Just remember what I tell you. Give me some time. Don’t look for trouble.”

  “I don’t exactly look for it,” I mutter.

  John actually snorts. “No. Always these troubles just find you.”

  I almost snark back. Yeah, like that whole thing with Lao Zhang and the Uighur and the Game was something I looked for. Like I wanted to get blown up in Iraq, or get involved in my ex-husband’s shit, or even come to China in the first place.

  But then there’s the other stuff, the stuff I did seek out, or when I stumbled on it, I didn’t run far enough or fast enough.

  Like I needed the buzz.

  “Believe me, I don’t want any more trouble,” I say.

  It’s not until John turns up Jiugulou Dajie, the main street that leads to the hutong where my building is, that I finally have to say it. I’m not sure why I feel like I do. Just … I don’t want to be keeping so many secrets anymore.

  “Zhang Jianli says he’s coming back to Beijing.”

  John’s head whips around, and he almost misses my alley. “What? You talk to him?”

  “Email.” Which is only sort of a lie. “I don’t know where he is. I really have no idea. But yeah, we email sometimes.”

  “Tamade.” Your all-purpose Chinese expletive. John scrunches up his face like he’s getting a sudden headache. “Why? Why does he come back?”

  “He felt bad I was having problems, I guess.”

  “He is here now?”

  “I don’t think so. Not that I know of anyway.”

  “If he is somewhere safe, he should just stay away.”

  “I know. I told him not to come. He won’t listen.”

  “Did you tell him what happened today?”

  I shake my head. “I tell him that, it’ll just make him come back faster.”

  We’ve reached the gate in front of my building, manned by the usual night guard, a middle-aged guy named Dongfeng with a thatch of greying hair and sleepy eyes who spends a lot of time playing Angry Birds on his smartphone.

 
“When he comes back, Yili, you have to tell me,” John says.

  “Why? So you can turn him in?”

  John stares straight ahead. “I don’t want to.”

  “But you will.”

  “Someone will.” He grinds the heels of his palms against his temples. Maybe he really does have a headache. “I have to think of way … think of way we can be safe.”

  “Who? You and me?”

  His hands drop. “All of us.”

  I almost believe him.

  “But mostly you.” Now he does look at me, but it’s so dark that I can’t really see his expression. “Because you have connection to Zhang Jianli, if they think you lie …”

  I shudder. And then I shrug it off. “They’ll kick me out of the country. Whatever.”

  “Maybe,” he says.

  Or maybe not.

  Getting kicked out of China could be the best-case scenario.

  “Maybe I can find out what they want from Zhang Jianli, what they say he did,” John says, and he’s making an effort to sound calm. Like it’s no big deal. “He is just an artist. Maybe it isn’t so bad.”

  I don’t know who he’s trying to convince: me or himself.

  “It doesn’t matter what he did.” Suddenly I’m so tired that I can’t even hold my head up anymore. “It’s whatever they want it to be, right?”

  Because if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that sometimes there’s no reason for any of it. Sometimes it’s just wrong place, wrong time. Somebody with power gets a bug up his ass. Like that musical where the hungry guy steals the loaf of bread and the cop gets the hard-on of all hard-ons over it.

  John rests his hand on mine, just for a moment, then pulls it away, like he’s embarrassed.

  “Try not to worry, Yili.”

  Right.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ★

  THIS IS THE kind of place I fucking hate.

  First off: I’ve been warned by Vicky Huang that where I’m meeting Gugu is going to be expensive.

  “Dress up!” she told me over the phone, and to make it abso-fucking-lutely clear I get it, she sends me a package via FedEx—clothes.

  Expensive clothes. Designer clothes. Armani and Marc Jacobs and Stella McCartney. I know this because I check the labels, also because you can just tell with expensive things, the way they’re cut, the way they feel.

  When I put them on, I can’t help it, I go to the bathroom to put on some mascara, see myself in the mirror, and think, Okay, I look kind of hot. We went through this whole thing before, how to dress me for my first meeting with Sidney, and the rule seemed to be if it costs a lot, it’s probably okay. This outfit looks pretty much like the last one: a black jacket, skinny low-rise pants, and a button-front shirt that’s pretending to be a men’s shirt, except it’s not (there’s more cleavage involved)—in black this time. “Slouchy boyfriend cut,” according to Lucy Wu, which is actually a real high-fashion description. Who knew?

  But you need to be careful accepting people’s gifts.

  Just go there, I tell myself in the subway. Meet Gugu. Meet this American guy. Try to get a read on his “moral character.” Pop smoke and go home.

  “There” is a Beijing club that I’ve heard of but had managed to avoid—Entránce.

  Entránce is in Chaoyang, near Workers Stadium, a part of Beijing that’s all wide roads and big buildings, nothing that really sticks in your head, except for things such as a huge neon sign for MY LIKE AESTHETIC PLASTIC HOSPITAL GROUP stuck on the side of a building that resembles a giant plastic footstool, like the ones you’d find in a preschool. The kind of area where crossing the street is a major hike because it’s six or eight lanes wide.

  Normally I wait for a pack of other pedestrians to cross with, safety in numbers and all, and I feel like they have a better sense of when it’s safe to go, given that traffic laws are still a little more theoretical than actual a lot of the time here, but it’s already 11:00 P.M., and there aren’t all that many people on the streets around here after the end of the business day.

  I hump it across, my leg throbbing. Not like I’m going to get a pain-free evening when I have to do something I really don’t want to do, right?

  I should have taken a cab, I think, except sometimes you can’t get a cab to drop you where you want to go because it’s too much of a hassle for them to turn around in the traffic, where so many streets have iron barriers.

  Cars speed by me, a couple of them making illegal left turns, and I grip one of those iron fences, waist-high, painted white, take a moment to wait for a gap in the rushing cars, to catch my breath. For some reason I’m thinking about this time in the Sandbox when I was the convoy medic and we were stuck because this bus had gotten blown up in the middle of the intersection, a couple of cars, too, and we couldn’t get through. So all of us stop, the Humvees, the KBR trucks in between. And we wait. And it’s so fucking hot, and I’m staring out a rippled safety window from the backseat of a Humvee at the busted asphalt and these painted cement buildings with rusted balconies. There are no people around. They’re out of sight, hiding. Waiting for something else to blow.

  Cross the street, desert queen, I tell myself. Nothing’s going to blow up here. I’ve had some bad shit happen in China, but none of it involved things blowing up.

  I make it across the street.

  From the sidewalk there’s nothing much to Entránce, just a sparkling white dome kind of entrance thing backing up against an anonymous wall of squat glassy buildings that occupy the block.

  Inside the dome is a metal detector flanked by two bouncers—a Chinese guy and a black guy, both with shaved heads and bouncer-size shoulders. Great. Now I have to worry if the titanium rod and screws in my leg are going to set off the fucking metal detector. Usually it’s fine, but every once in a while …

  “Private party tonight,” the black guy says in English. He has an accent, African, but I don’t know from where.

  “I’m invited.”

  Lucky me, I’m on the list, and I don’t set off the metal detector. I hobble over to the escalators heading down into the club proper, bass thumping louder as I descend.

  Someone could blow up Entránce and I wouldn’t be too upset.

  Everything’s all white, plastic, and shiny. A dance track shakes the floor, bass vibrating through my rib cage, the highs loud enough to cut glass. My ears already ring from getting blown up and all. I don’t need this.

  I find a cocktail napkin and tear off a couple strips, roll those up, and stuff them in my ears.

  There are two or three levels to the club, a main pit with a couple of bars and a stripper platform and pole in the middle of it all—I know it’s a stripper platform/pole because there’s a white woman, Russian maybe, wearing a fringed bikini thing and platform shoes, gyrating on it. Upstairs is filled with white egg-shaped booths wedged up against a Plexiglas wall topped with chrome. The guests are mostly young. They look like too much money. I’ve seen plenty of rich people in the art crowd, but this is different—more obvious bling—designer labels, the real thing, not shanzhai rip-offs, diamond-studded iPhone cases, outsize jewelry, and two-thousand-dollar watches. There are guys in white shirts and black jackets with headsets all over the place, keeping tabs.

  I look for where the headsets are clustered the thickest, figuring that’s where I’ll find Gugu and his inevitable posse.

  Sure enough.

  In the main pit surrounding the stripper pole, a waiter deposits an ice bucket of champagne in front of a group of guys. Yeah, there are women around, too, but most of them are on the periphery—chairs pushed back from where the men gather, talking mostly to one another. Glasses of red wine sit in ranks on an adjacent table.

  I recognize Gugu right off—Vicky emailed me his photo. Early twenties, wearing a two-hundred-dollar T-shirt under a military-style jacket, except the camouflage pattern is done in acid-bright greens and reds. Some designer bullshit, no doubt. He’s a pretty boy, long bangs hanging limply over o
ne eye like a teen idol, but when I look closely, I see Sidney’s bony nose and high cheeks. There’s a girl hanging on his shoulder who looks like she’s about sixteen, wearing a rhinestone-studded trucker cap with skull patches, ED HARDY embroidered in red on the brim. Next to her is another girl with pigtails who looks even younger, dressed in some kind of designer sailor suit—high-fashion anime.

  Sitting on the left is a white guy. Thirty-something. Maybe older. Dark hair, broad face. Good-looking, I guess. Heavy-lidded eyes, like he’s half asleep or drunk. Full red lips, curved in a slight smile.

  The “bad influence.” A guy by the name of Marsh Brody.

  I really don’t want to do this.

  “Introductions taken care of!” Vicky told me. “You just tell Gugu that Mr. Cao wants him to look at art, for museum project. It is his filial duty.”

  I mean, how lame is that?

  Especially because the whole museum thing was actually my idea—an art museum in Xingfu Cun, the ghost city Sidney Cao built.

  When I say the museum was my idea, what I mean is it was a line of bullshit I spouted to get myself out of a jam, nothing I’d thought of in advance or knew anything about or had any intention of doing. I was just trying to appeal to Sidney’s ego—“Do something for your legacy.” Meaning, So your three kids won’t just sell off your billion-dollar collection after you die.

  It worked at the time. I got out of the jam. But shit like this always comes back and bites me in the ass.

  Case in point.

  Gugu turns toward the girl in the rhinestone baseball cap, smiles, and pours her some champagne. Marsh leans back in his chair, watching the two, eyes at half-mast, still with that little smile. Sailor Girl drifts over to him, glass of champagne in one hand, cigarette in the other. He grins, reaches up, and puts his arm around her, hand brushing her sideboob. She perches on his lap for a moment. I can’t tell if she’s comfortable there or not.

  Just get it over with, I tell myself.

  But maybe have a drink first.

  I grab a glass of wine off the tray of a passing waiter and take a slug. Although I’m not the world’s most educated wino, I can tell this is pretty good stuff. It’s the kind of thing you get an education in, hanging out with rich people.