Beijing Smog

by Ian Williams

  “Hey guys, you won’t believe this, but there’s a shop here selling canned clean air. No kidding. Says they come in different flavours.”

  “No way,” said Wang. “How does that work?”

  Liu said he wasn’t sure, but guessed you just sniffed it to get a reminder of what real air tasted like.

  Wang said that was really cool and what did real air taste like? He said that maybe that was a business they should get into.

  “It must be a gimmick. It can’t be for real,” Zhang said. “No way. It must be a scam.”

  And Wang said, “We should definitely get into that.”

  Zhang Jun, their other roommate, was a tall, darker boy, who was the same age as Wang. He was now bent over his smartphone playing a card game, occasionally flicking back his hair, which hung down almost to his eyes. He switched from time to time to a dating app, on which he appeared to have found a match.

  He told Liu and Wang the match was stunning, but he thought the photograph might be a fake because everybody faked their photographs.

  His was a random picture he’d lifted from a magazine, some minor television celebrity. He said he couldn’t possibly meet the girl, even if she wasn’t a fake, because then she’d know he was.

  “So what’s the point?” asked Wang.

  And Zhang said the fun was in finding the match, not meeting her. That would be far too embarrassing. Best keep it online.

  In The Moment On Time that passed for serious conversation. The few words spoken were usually ignored. For the most part Lily’s customers lived in the world beyond their screens, fingers and thumbs frantically working their keyboards.

  Mostly they communicated in grunts, without ever looking up, preferring to send each other text messages, even when they were sitting around the same table.

  Wang found a bunch of angry posts about a reality TV show, some sort of talent contest, that had been pulled from air after a record three million people voted for a woman dressed as a duck singing a cheesy old Chinese love song and dancing with her pet dog.

  That had attracted thousands of comments asking what had really upset the authorities, the duck or the vote? One posting had a photograph of China’s Communist Party leader alongside the duck woman and with a caption, “Who got the most votes?” It was quickly deleted by the censors, but only after Wang had shared it.

  Then the internet went down.

  There was a collective groan across the coffee shop. A flustered-looking Lily immediately pulled the power lead out of the router, thinking that rebooting would solve the problem.

  She knew her customers would suffer most things in silence. The coffee machine going down, the hot water heater for the tea, even the heating. But a temperamental internet link was something else. She suspected they’d probably drink dishwater just as long as they could get online. The mood could quickly turn ugly. It could trigger a rebellion, especially as a new coffee shop had just opened around the corner, claiming to have super super-fast broadband, whatever that meant. They’d even hired a couple of kids to hand out flyers right outside The Moment On Time before Lily chased them off with a torrent of abuse and a couple of well-aimed coffee cups.

  Lily rarely lost her cool, but she knew what was at stake, and she rushed around offering free drinks and assurances that her internet outage was just a teething problem with a new router that really was much faster than anything anybody else could offer.

  Wang took a pen out of his pocket and began to doodle on the cream-coloured shade of the lamp on the table in front of him, mostly calculations about the number of Star Wars caps they should ask Fatso to make for their online shop in order to at least break even.

  Throughout the coffee shop the lampshades had become canvases for drawings, ramblings and other graffiti, usually to pass the time while the internet was down.

  As the outage continued, and lacking anything better to do, more conversations broke out, a low-level murmur across the room, that was so unusual that Lily looked up too, momentarily neglecting the router that she was still trying to nurse back to life. She had the internet provider on the phone now, and was following instructions that made little sense to her.

  Wang asked his roommates whether they’d heard anything about graduate job fairs coming up, since they were getting close to that season. And Zhang said no, he hadn’t seen any schedule.

  “But don’t hold your breath,” said Liu Wei, who was staring at the dead screen of his laptop, as if by concentrating hard enough he could bring the internet back to life. “Don’t expect so many jobs this year. And starting salaries will suck because of the economy.”

  “The economy seems to be holding up,” Zhang said. “They’re predicting six percent growth this year. I read it online. Not as good as before, but still pretty healthy.”

  “My dad says it’s all made up,” said Liu. “They say whatever figure they want to say.”

  Wang nodded. Liu’s dad was some big-shot government official. Liu had once boasted that he advised the Prime Minister on economic stuff. He’d know.

  Zhang looked back down at his dating app, which was still showing no signs of life. He was the more academic of the three, which is to say that he mostly attended class and did the work assigned to him. He was smart in a nerdy kind of way. His grades were scarily good, and he could find his way around computers like nobody else Wang knew.

  Wang thought again about his parents. The guilt returned, as did the itchy knee and the trembling foot. The internet was still down, but he was able to access the draft reply to his mother and the only two words he’d so far managed to write: “Hi Mum”.

  Then he went back to her original nagging messages. How could he answer her questions about the non-existent jobs and girlfriend without digging himself deeper into a hole? He was twenty-two years old, but his mother was treating him like one of the children at the kindergarten where she taught in the far northern city of Harbin. Perhaps it was best to ignore her, at least for now. Or blame the weather. Tell his mother that his girlfriend hated the cold, and he’d have to postpone the visit until the summer. But then she’d offer to come to Beijing. She’d done that before.

  And Harbin was cold. Very cold. To him, it made Beijing seem like the tropics.

  Both of his parents were from the same small town in the more temperate south of China, where they’d met and married young. Pretty much as they assumed Wang would too. They’d moved to Harbin when Wang was eleven. It had been a sudden, abrupt move. They’d never told him why, but his father had a teaching job in Harbin’s Communist Party School, one of a vast network of schools run by the Party for its members.

  His father had never really explained to him what he did at the school, what he taught, not talking about it much, though Wang had never really asked. It just didn’t seem that interesting.

  He closed the draft message without adding anything to it, and told his roommates that he’d decided to study in America.

  “You know air pollution is killing 4,000 people a day in China. Lung cancer rates are soaring. The soil’s toxic too. And imagine what that does to the food. Northern China is becoming uninhabitable,” he said.

  Zhang said he’d read online that Delhi was now worse than Beijing for smog, and Wang said that didn’t make him feel any better, and was that even possible?

  “And how are you going to pay for that, for America?” Zhang said.

  “Our businesses will come good, you’ll see,” Wang said, not sounding particularly confident.

  Lily then came off the call with the technician and rebooted the router again, having put in the new settings. The internet came back to life.

  “We’re up. We’re back online,” she shouted, with a mixture of triumph and relief.

  There was brief applause, then silence, just a hardly noticeable clicking and tapping of keyboards. A silence so
sudden and abrupt it was as if somebody had flicked a switch, as they all went back into their online worlds.

  Zhang re-opened his dating app, with its gushing profiles of would-be matches, which he thought were mostly as fake as his own. A world of make-believe.

  Liu opened an online share trading account he’d just set up, which he was beginning to think was much like that too. Except real money was at stake.

  Wang went back to his Gasping Dragon account to which he shared a video of a man from Nanjing who was living like he was a goat, crawling around and bleating like one and eating grass. Then he posted pictures from the coast, a beach near Tianjin where the bay had been taken over by green algae and kids were swimming in the stuff, looking like sea monsters. Maybe they were monsters. He shared that thought too, together with a stick alien wrapped in green slime beside a statement from the local Communist Party leader pledging to clean up the beaches.

  But he soon got bored, and he said to his roommates, “I’m going to see Fatso about the Star Wars caps.”

  And Liu said, “Good luck with that”, knowing the big man would be less than happy with all the unsold masks. “Tell him we need them by Monday. If he’s still talking to you.”

  Wang crossed the now-packed Moment On Time coffee shop, down the narrow wooden staircase, through the clothes shop and out onto the street, where a light snow was falling.

  He walked past several noodle stalls and a newspaper kiosk, where he could just about see the seller swaddled in a thick coat and scarf behind piles of magazines. On the road in front, a taxi driver had his bonnet open and was trying to return some life to his crippled vehicle, cigarette hanging from his mouth.

  There was a high-pitched siren and flashing lights ahead of him, where a barrier came down across the road. A train was coming.

  He took cover under the awning of a mobile phone shop close to the barrier, and while he waited he went back online, returning to the crumbling temple, dodging and for the moment outrunning a pack of crazed zombies.

  The train passed and the barrier was raised. Wang crossed the line and entered a narrow alleyway full of parked bicycles, which he somehow navigated without taking his eyes off the screen of his smartphone, where he was still keeping the zombies at bay, ducking through doorways and down steps that disintegrated beneath him.

  Fatso’s door was squeezed between a coat shop and a packed dumpling store, a lunchtime crowd spilling out into the alley. A woman swore at Wang as he almost knocked a box of steaming dumplings from her hand. He didn’t hear her. Didn’t even notice. Because the zombies were now closing in and he was trapped, tangled in creepers and dense undergrowth on a path that went nowhere.

  He used his right elbow to press the buzzer on Fatso’s door, his fingers still working the screen. There seemed no way to escape the wrath of the zombies.

  Nor of Fatso.

  Wang was jolted back into the real world as Fatso answered the door with a look that was every bit as scary as anything Wang had been running from in the game.

  “What do you want, Wang?” said Fatso, wearing just a soiled vest in spite of the weather and lighting a cigarette.

  “I need to talk to you about caps.”

  “And I need to talk to you about those fucking masks.”

  – 7 –

  The Colonel

  The server said she was sorry about the smog, but didn’t he think it was kind of moody. She asked Chuck Drayton whether he was enjoying the view, if this was his first time in the city, and did he know they’d just been voted the coolest bar in Shanghai.

  To Drayton that was four questions too many, and as for the cool bit, that would usually be good reason to avoid the place.

  So he ignored the questions and just ordered another mojito because that seemed like the kind of thing you drank in a bar like this, telling her to go easy on the sugar this time, and where was the change from the last one. Lost in the smog maybe?

  The view didn’t really exist, at least not like the one on the back of the menu, Drayton wondering how long they had to wait for a clear day like that.

  Still, the server had a point. It was moody.

  The bar was at the top of one of the tallest and swankiest hotels in the city, at the northern end of the Bund, looking directly across at the skyscrapers of the Pudong financial district on the other side of the Huangpu River, with the Bund way below to the right, with its sweep of old buildings. Ships moved slowly along the river in-between. He could barely see them, but the deep guttural blasts of their horns penetrated the bar and provided for Drayton a welcome break from the dreary soul music.

  The Pearl Oriental TV Tower, at the centre of all the Pudong glass and metal, was lit up like a Christmas tree, changing from blues to yellows and pinks. Its massive spheres sparkling like disco balls. It was dusk, and the lights were fuzzy through the smog. The whole sky above seemed to glow.

  Drayton took his drink and climbed a spiral staircase to a circular outdoor terrace on the very top of the building, where he took a stool at a tall table near the wall. He reached in his pocket for his pollution mask, but then changed his mind, figuring that probably wasn’t the coolest thing to wear in a cool bar, that it didn’t really go with the mojito.

  He’d have to suffer.

  The terrace had a series of high tables next to small open pavilion-like structures with padded seating on the floor. Tall heaters were sprinkled around the terrace, and at the centre of it all a steaming Jacuzzi, in which three girls lounged, bubbling champagne in hand. Which got Drayton smiling. In the middle of winter, for fuck’s sake.

  It was early evening, but the terrace was busy, small groups mainly, young and straight from work, hunched over their smartphones.

  But one group was different. There were around twenty of them, celebrating, spread over two of the pavilions and several tables, which were weighed down with bottles of champagne and expensive spirits. They’d been there most of the afternoon. Kids mostly, late teens, early twenties Drayton guessed. Flash, expensively dressed and loud.

  Drayton opened the camera on his iPhone and took some photos of the view: Pudong, the Bund, the river, a panorama, during which he lingered on the party crowd, on a boy with spiky gelled hair and dark glasses who appeared to be at the centre of it all, and on an older man who looked strangely out of place, but who from time to time would place a paternalistic hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  One of them shouted, and they all raised their glasses.

  “Huizhi. To Huizhi.”

  They knocked their drinks back in one. Drayton noticed that two kids appeared to be sleeping in one of the pavilions. Another was throwing up.

  They then struck up a heavily slurred rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, and the boy at the centre of it all raised a champagne glass, took a lengthy gulp and climbed fully clothed into the Jacuzzi followed by two of the girls. The older man smiled, an awkward smile, and sipped from a small porcelain mug. He was drinking tea.

  Everybody was taking photographs of the Jacuzzi, so Drayton joined in too, taking a couple more of the older man for good measure. Getting a closer look, and thinking how formal and stiff he looked beside the kids.

  The birthday boy climbed out of the Jacuzzi and the whole group gathered round; time for a birthday photo, looking for a server to take it for them. But the server had gone downstairs for a mop to clear the puke. So Drayton volunteered. Allow me. Taking photo after photo as smartphones were handed his way.

  Ending with several more on his own phone.

  A glass of champagne was thrust into his hand.

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome. Happy birthday,” he said, raising the glass, clinking it with the boy called Huizhi, and then looking directly at the older man. He was medium height, mid-forties Drayton guessed, maybe slightly older, with closely cropped ha
ir. Military-style. It was the shape of the face, a long thin face, showing no emotion, that was most distinctive. Just like in the fuzzy computer photograph of the guy poking around in the maestro’s laptop.

  Only he didn’t look much like a hacker, not like Drayton imagined one anyway.

  Then the man looked straight at Drayton, and for a moment the two men locked eyes before both looked away.

  Drayton retreated to his table and then back down the spiral staircase to the downstairs bar, which was inside and warmer. He took a seat where he could watch the staircase.

  The mojito had been too sweet again, so he decided to order a beer because they couldn’t mess that up. The server from earlier started to make her way over, then thought better of it, leaving him to a miserable-looking guy with a face that said he didn’t give a shit about the view. Which was absolutely fine by Drayton.

  “Thanks,” he said, when the beer arrived.

  “Quite a party upstairs.”

  The server nodded, saying nothing.

  “That Huizhi, quite a character. Comes here a lot, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” the server said, no longer mute. “Chen Huizhi. He likes to party.”

  “Rich kid, hey?”

  The server didn’t reply, just looked around the bar. They were all rich kids.

  The smoke in the bar was almost as thick as the smog outside. Another government smoking ban failing. Nobody was about to tell these kids to take their habit outside.

  Drayton had quit smoking a couple of years earlier, and now he hated it with all the zeal of a religious convert. But all the same this was another of those little acts of defiance of the rules that he found mildly encouraging, just like the smartphones at the maestro’s dreadful concert.

  He paid for the beer, then opened an air quality app on his iPhone, so he could see what he was breathing. There was a ton of these to choose from, but the one he liked best was called Airpocalypse. It was funny, somehow finding plenty of humour in the disaster that was Chinese pollution.