“And this guy was razzing you about it?”
Arnie shrugs. “So we have spy planes. Everybody has spy planes. What pisses you off is when somebody like China or North Korea scrambles jets to force you down. They’ve been doing that since the fifties. They put one plane under your wing and another behind you, missiles locked on. When you hear that whoop whoop whoop in your headphones?” says Arnie. “I’ll tell you something. Recon suddenly means reconsider.”
I comment that the dirty commie reds probably want to reverse-engineer our technology, and Arnie laughs. “The Chinese have military technology we can only dream about. They caught Russia in a weak moment and bought a shitload of their SU-30s. Best fighter plane in the world. And they’re about to launch an Aegis destroyer. You see that in the papers?”
I shake my head.
“And a manned spacecraft,” says Arnie. “Pure military mission, no matter what they call it.”
And you wondered what they were going to do with the thirteen million we gave them for Yao Ming.
“Napoleon was right when he called China a sleeping giant,” Arnie tells me. “He said, ‘Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world.’ Bitch is awake, man.”
“I didn’t know Napoleon spoke English.”
Arnie gives me a look. “It’s a translation.”
More teabags arrive on a saucer lined with tangerine sections. Eyeing one of the latter with something approximating hunger, I extract a set of wooden chopsticks from my pants pocket. The slippery plastic ones provided by restaurants are useless. At about the same time comes a sound not unlike the mating cry of an all-in-one copy machine. Arnie pulls out a cell phone. “Quick Comebacks,” he barks into the phone. He listens for several seconds then says, “Yeah, well, you and Elmer Fudd seem to have more in common than your neck size.” A moment later, he says, “Unh,” and hangs up.
Turning to me again, Arnie says, “I guess you know that we’re going to war with Iraq. American boots in Baghdad by the end of the year. Write it down.”
“And our excuse will be… ?”
“Chemical weapons, probably. Of course, it has nothing to do with that. The plan was in place five years ago. Clinton wouldn’t sign off, or we’d be in Iraq right now.” Arnie levels his twin mirrors. “If we controlled Baghdad and Tehran, the world would instantly be a better place.”
“World peace through American strength?” I say. I know the catch-phrases.
“Here’s the question,” says Arnie, rolling his shoulders. “With no Soviet Union anymore, what’s our place in the world? Do we sit on the sideline, or do we see to it there are no more Soviet Unions?”
“Which we would accomplish how, exactly?”
“It wouldn’t be easy. Easy means staying home and minding our own business. Easy means keeping our allies happy and placating our enemies. Problem is, that policy has already resulted in two world wars that we didn’t start but had to finish.”
I set down my personal wooden chopsticks. “Let me get this straight. What made the Soviets so bad was that they invaded and occupied other countries and installed puppet governments. So what we’re going to do to prevent that from ever happening again is to invade and occupy other countries and install puppet governments.”
“That kind of distorts it, actually,” says Arnie. “Obviously there’s a fine line, but somebody’s got to walk it. Who’s it going to be? Do we leave it to the Saddam Husseins? History says—”
Again Arnie lifts his trumpeting phone. “Quick Comebacks,” he barks. A few seconds later, he says, “Forgive me, but your actions speak so loudly that I can’t quite hear your words.” After muttering, “Unh,” he hangs up.
“Good line,” I say.
“Thanks,” says Arnie, suppressing a smile.
“You make money like this? Supplying people with comebacks?”
Arnie nods. “You know how it is. You can never think of what to say till an hour or two later. My service cuts lag time to less than a minute. Where were we?”
“We were walking a fine line,” I say. “You know, my fifth-grade teacher said there’s one thing that makes us different from the bad guys. They believe the end justifies the means. We don’t.”
The mirrored shades lock onto my face. “I don’t want to argue with your fifth-grade teacher, Julian, but I’ll say this. Actually I’ll ask this. If you can prevent the next world war and you don’t, how do you live with yourself?”
I have my methods.
Arnie and I decide on the breakfast buffet, which is mostly unrecognizable pastries and even less recognizable fruit. There’s also a congealed pile of scrambled eggs, a haystack of boiled greens, and something more or less resembling hash-browns.
No grits.
Arnie and I dine in relative silence, thank God. I think I just quoted my fifth-grade teacher. Actually my fifth-grade teacher was pretty hot. Mrs. Culpepper. She had two tight sweaters, the lilac one and the pink one.
Ah, the pink one.
Ignoring Chinese etiquette, Arnie and I split the tab. I yank a few colorful currency notes from my wallet. The blues, I’ve noted, have a picture of two women with scarves tied over their heads. The orange ones feature a lone crane standing in a bamboo grove. I think that means a blue is worth two oranges.
“Give me another blue,” says Arnie, making a small pile of bills at the center of the table. As always, we leave no tip. In China, your waitress will chase you down the street to return any and all gratuities. The first time that happened, I thought I’d been nailed for stealing the little packets of soy sauce. In my hotel room, I add them to hot water and pretend I’m drinking coffee.
As Arnie and I part in the hotel lobby, he suggests we do the clubs sometime. “I’ve found a cool Triad club in the Shikou District,” he says. “They love Americans. They take you straight to the back room.”
Where I assume everyone’s learning macramé.
Arnie asks for my cell number. I tell him I don’t do telephones.
“Why not?”
“I don’t like them.”
“Name three things that you do like,” says Arnie.
I stare at him.
Arnie places a cigarette in his mouth. “What can I say, Julian? You’ve got a bit of a negative attitude. I’d get that phone if I were you. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re not in Memphis anymore.”
“In one week,” I tell him, “I will be.”
I’ve been saying that for three weeks. I’m going to keep saying it. Sooner or later, it’ll be true.
Chapter Twelve
Following my sister’s instructions, I exit Bus 101 at the edge of vast and charmless Lichee Park with its ranked, filed, and popsicle-identical lichee trees. To my surprise, there’s also a huge expanse of actual lawn grass, upon which wander various disoriented locals. Along the broad sidewalk, meanwhile, a row of downcast men slump cross-legged behind hand-lettered cardboard signs that go into great detail about, it would appear, some very sad stories. Passersby idly browse the signs, smoking, hocking, farting, all the usual.
It’s interesting actually. Here you’re talking to a Chinese gentleman over dinner about, say, the recent death of your mother—wishful thinking there—when Hong Dong Wong looses a multisyllabic jet of colonic gases requiring six or seven seconds of your rapt attention. At which point Hong breaks into a bright smile and says excuse me! and just like that, everything is fine. Excuse me! erases the entire event. So you go on to describe your tearful tribute at Ma’s memorial service, during which entire interval Hong is straining visibly, ripping the air four, five, six additional times while chewing his food with his mouth open and emitting little involuntary urps. Not to worry though. Again Hong utters the magic words and everything is once more perfectly fine. It’s wonderful. If you say excuse me! afterward, you can cornhole Granddad at the dinner table over Hay Wrapped Fragrant Ribs.
Before I’ve covered much of Lichee Park, a freakish wind rises up and the sky darkens. September is typ
hoon season along the South China coast. Nothing severe enough to require mass evacuation, thanks be unto God, as how exactly does one evacuate fifty million people who don’t know how to form a line?
And no, I’m not anti-Chinese. I’m anti-human.
Present company excepted.
Just past Lichee Park, I have been alerted, awaits the grandly arched gate of Shenzhen High School of Electronic Excellence upon whose campus my sister will both live and toil over the course of the next ten months. Tree has been placed at Primary School Focus Youth Shenzhen, a half-hour bus ride across town. Tree, too, will abide on-campus and from there covertly satellite-feed New Age gabble to a meaning-starved world. I’ll meanwhile spend the next several months being wined and lined by the plethora of Hollywood studios soon to be jockeying for film rights to The End of Day. I may do the screenplay myself. I haven’t decided.
Sci-fi author Bi Yu Nu, by the way, didn’t show up for the debut of A Room of Eyes. Tree says he lives anonymously in Beijing and writes under a pen name. Only his secretive London publisher knows how to contact him. Doubtless, Bi fears arrest. His stories are considered counter-revolutionary even today. The government permitted only two screenings of Eyes, one in Beijing and one in Shanghai, which of course only added to the general frenzy. Tree wasn’t able to get within a block of the theater. I intend to remember every bit of this when it’s time for advance publicity for The End of Day. Widespread disapproval has always been golden, but actual governmental sanctions? How do you put a price on that?
Bi’s next project is rumored to delve into what really happened in Atlantis, which island continent, if you believe what you hear, sank to the bottom of the sea some twelve thousand years ago due to poorly thought-out applications of technology and the unavailability of annotated Bibles. I think Bi’s title will be A Room of Floating Atlanteans.
Now entering the cartoonish forest of identical lichees, I ask myself what manner of room I seem to be meandering into now. The gust of wind and its accompanying cloud have vanished as quickly as they appeared. I give a glance in each direction but discover nothing overt, no synchro-stepping women beneath identical umbrellas, yet I do feel somewhat odd. Tree likes to say I’m the most second-sighted of the three of us, were I to actually see everything that I see but then I’d find it quite difficult to not know everything that I know, and as I know something that I don’t yet agree to see, I’m left to drink a lot. Says she. Lillian, it now comes to mind, has promised me a glass of decent English gin before this evening’s séance.
I’ve no idea what Tree is talking about. Alcohol is an attribute of the blood, right along with platelets and colorful corpuscles. If it makes the liver work a little, well, what is a liver for? I find that alcohol supplies a willing predicate for whatever the subject, and it’s just such a grammatical sabbatical that each day requires at a certain point, sometimes early, sometimes late. Say what you will, alcohol frees the spirit to soar like an eagle among the chair legs and dust bunnies, revealing human dignity to be more or less the rag that it is. Is alcohol a crutch? I just wish it were a better one. I am a man moving through life on two shattered knees.
Pay no attention, by the way, to anything I may have let slip about unexpected limousine rides to exclusive neighborhoods, there to fail dramatically at stupid math games. When under duress, I am apt to lie and quite badly, even to myself. I’m at least as likely to have lost that money down a pant leg. Make no mistake. If I had, in fact, stolen into the midst of a secret society of lewdly moneyed gamblers, there’d have been no one in that room who could have topped me. I’m not joking when I say that. I should be joking when I say that.
Tree says all my problems go back to primordial misbehaviors in a distant galaxy where even now my face is displayed in post offices from asteroid belt to icy outer-orbit satellite. Could be true, for all I know. But as no extradition agreements currently exist between those jurisdictions and these, I find the discussion both moot and bothersome. I’m more interested in focusing on primordial misbehaviors of the here and now.
Through the thinning lichee forest before me comes the hum, then the roar, of high-speed multi-lane traffic. I find myself standing before a twelve-lane. On the other side is the arched gate of what appears to be an institution of mid- to lower-learning. That huddle of tall grimy buildings would be Shenzhen High School of Electronic Excellence. About three blocks from where I stand is a concrete pedestrian overpass, but that’s quite a stroll from here. I give another long look to the sizzling traffic, composed mostly of boxy Chinese-made trucks en route to Hong Kong. Gazing at the school on the opposite side with something that almost approximates longing, I ask myself what’s happening to me. I’m still registering an odd feeling. It’s almost as though I’ve seen this charmless and butt-ugly place somewhere before. Only not before. After. Maybe after I kill myself trying to cross this twelve-lane. Ah, the traffic seems to have thinned just this moment. As running seems an absurd idea, I decide to saunter.
Take me.
As usual, nobody takes me. But by the time I’ve sauntered all twelve lanes, I know something about Chinese air horns and four-character Mandarin salutes. Ears ringing slightly, I arrive at the gate of Lil’s school and tiptoe past a uniformed guard asleep in a wooden chair. Beyond the guardhouse, I aim myself at a tenement building described by Lil as “five stories of bathroom tile in powder blue and pink. You like actually can’t miss it.” No, but I’d like a second try.
I pass an empty school cafeteria, its rows of wooden chairs bottoms-up on long tables, the scent of chlorine wafting through the open windows. Last night Lil and Tree took me to a formal banquet. I had to borrow a tie from Arnie. But nine free courses are nine free courses. The wait staff was really on top of levels, making it impossible for anyone to know how much they were drinking, and along about course number seven things began to get really unsightly. I found myself talking spiritedly to both the nineteen-year-old Lutheran at my left and the elderly non-English-speaking gentleman across the table. I think the Lutheran and I were discussing Affine Geometry, or I was anyway. All I remember clearly was his way of smiling generously until I spoke, at which point the smile faded as though someone had drawn off a pint of his blood. He began every declarative sentence with actually and ended each interrogative with or. Nice Lutheran. The elderly non-English-speaker and I were discussing armpit sex. Or I was.
Lil and Tree were seated all the way across the dining hall, but I could hear them more clearly than my own thoughts. Lil and Tree do not attend a party. They are the party. By the final course, every man in the room was huddled around their table toasting The Splendid Large American Bosom of Woman and Humour.
During the rounds of drunken toasts that capped the evening, I was handed a business card by a man with a hooked nose and tiny black-rimmed spectacles. He called himself Bellamy. Bellamy’s publishing company could use a proofreader for its latest English text, he informed me in very decent English, the clear implication being that unless I turn out to be wholly illiterate I can have as much work as I want, off-site, and get paid in fat pink hundred-yuan notes. I told Bellamy I’d call Monday. Between now and then, I need to learn how to make a phone call. It seems to require expertise in the use of scratch n’ sniff phone cards. I also need to get into a cheaper hotel. After paying four dollars a night in Yunnan Province, I can’t quite see a hundred and four. Besides, they steal your placemats. And don’t restock the mini-fridge with complimentary beer.
Arriving at the stairs of Lil’s pink-and-powder-blue tenement building, I pause to gather my strength. Lil has warned that visitors often become confused because the stairs meet the building midway between floors, so how exactly do you count them? I want fourth floor, room three. How complicated can it be?
Instantly I’m puffing. I really have to cut back on the r-and-r.
There’s one really scary half-memory from last night’s banquet. I’m standing close enough to the brassy whiskey-voiced woman to measure her goiter. She’s ad
vocating yanking the arms and legs off Saddam Hussein with four Abram M1-A2 tanks because we didn’t get around to doing it in the last war. This is before we confiscate his placemats of mass destruction, or maybe it was the other way around. I think I advocated more armpit sex. It probably wasn’t much of a conversation.
Finally, panting furiously, I knock at a metal door marked with a Roman 3. Nearby along the clothesline-strewn balcony, two small children stare at me. I stare back, and they vanish into a curtained doorway.
The door pops opens and I’m surprised at the sight of a graying Chinese woman in powder-blue cat’s-eye glasses. After a moment, she points to the ceiling and says, “You go up. Okay?”
“Oh, sorry,” I say, backing away. I’ve met the illustrious Madam Wu who, Lil has told me, occupies the room directly below hers and so gets to meet everyone in search of the American Teacher’s Apartment.
More climbing. More puffing. More knocking.
“You’re here!” Lil says brightly. Her air conditioning hits me like a Midwest snowstorm. “Did you see all the commotion on the street?” asks my sister, securing the steel door with her hip.
“Commotion?”
“They must have finally taken him away,” says Lil. “A man was knifed right in front of the school. Isn’t that nice?”
I tell her I’m sorry to hear it.
“You almost couldn’t walk for the crowd,” says Lil. “Murder must be, like, really big news here. Isn’t it a misdemeanor now in Memphis? So, what can I get you to drink? I have everything.”
“You promised me a nice English gin,” I remind her, “and I’m here to collect it.”
“Sour? Light on the sugar?”
I nod. “I just met your Madam Wu.”
Lil titters. “‘You go up, okay?’ Isn’t she precious?”
My sister begins making noises in the kitchen. I claim one of two uncomfortable chairs at the settee by the window. No roach electrocution device.
The Year of the Hydra Page 13