Land of Big Numbers

by Te-Ping Chen

  She climbed up and Cao Cao buckled her in. The duo shot off across the main street again, her purple streaks of hair flying in the wind like flames. “This is great,” she said as they skimmed along the road, past the shop, the restrooms, and the fields of corn. “Actually, it’s better than flying,” she said. “I’ve been on a plane before.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “It’s like you’re sitting in a room the whole time,” she said. “You don’t really feel it. It isn’t like you’d expect.”

  “The party secretary said it was amazing,” he said.

  “The party secretary,” she said, “is an idiot.”

  When they coasted to a stop, she alighted daintily in her white heels. “Thank you, Cao Cao!” she said, and walked off, leaving him staring.

  Later that night, he and Anning lay in bed under their duvet, which had started life as a white blanket trimmed with pink flowers but had since gone gray with dirt and age. The moonlight spilled in from the window across the floor. Beside him, Anning’s snores vibrated the room. Cao Cao turned on his side and tried to make out her outline. In the darkness it was easier to pretend that neither of them had aged, that it was just the two of them, twenty years old and childless; life had yet to leave its scars on their bodies, they lay as pure and fresh as infants.

  He thought about what the girl with the purple hair had said to him about the party secretary, and the corners of his mouth moved. The next day, he thought, he would change the throttle. He would check the engine. He would make the thing fly, he thought. Next time, he wouldn’t invite anyone to watch.

  He closed his eyes, but sleep eluded him. Instead he lay on his back and carefully imagined himself walking through his storeroom, which held years of the village’s trash. He could see the woven plastic sacks that had held the grain that sustained them once in a year of disastrous famine. He could see the broken bicycle wheels of two different newlywed couples, betrothal gifts discarded after they’d outworn their use. He could see the extra pipe lengths from when the village got its first cisterns and a bag of rags his neighbor had given him, old clothes torn into strips after his girls had grown up and grown out of them.

  He saw them all, and in his head he rearranged them. There was a washing machine to be built out of bicycle wheels and pipes and the oil drum in one corner. There was a robot dog. There was a set of foam cushions he could turn into shoes that walked on water. There was a trash compactor he could build that would crush it all into tiny cubes that he would carefully stack, one by one, until they made a perilous tower that he could scale to the sky.

  On the Street Where You Live

  When I see him, the man with the meal cart is coming at me with a tray, creamed spinach, watery mashed potatoes, and a splatch of meat like a thick piece of rubber. I sit up obediently, straighten the front of my jumpsuit, and smile. I am an observer of your country, I am a great admirer of your country, I think, and surely he might, on this seventh day of days, take notice. “Hello,” I say, and wave my hand.

  I position myself in an attitude of readiness for conversation, but he simply slides the tray through the slot and moves on, pushing his cart.

  He is not singing. No one is singing. It is fetid and damp and grim, and yesterday I saw a rat, an actual rat, scurry across the corridor. If this were a movie the rat would be white as snow and there would be a dozen of them and they’d turn into horses, all ready and pawing and whining in their eagerness to pull a pumpkin turned carriage. If this were a musical I would lead our row in a soft-shoe shimmy, a graceful bow at the waist, a flick of the wrist.

  The only person in my line of sight is Bruce, though, who must be eighty pounds heavier than me and spends his time mostly staring at the walls in the cell opposite. Bruce is here for an ugly, brutal crime, and has no interest in dancing.

  But then, I am getting distracted, I am losing track of the thread. I have always liked that expression, the image that it conjures. I picture myself crawling about the mess hall (except there is no mess hall in this wing) seeking out its elusive, tapered end, making soft apologies, checking behind sneakers: “Sorry, sorry, excuse me, thank you, sorry.” That’s how long I’ve been in your country, I think—​apologies and gratitude spring forth from me at any opportunity.

  Thank you, sir, for the spinach and potato gruel and for this rubber.

  I had hoped, of course, to be of assistance to the police. I have made it my practice to study the law in any country I call a place of abode. I am an extremely educated man. I have two degrees, one of which is useless—​I am certainly no accountant—​and another, in design, which has served me in great stead. By the time I was twenty-nine, I had lived in five different countries: two as I was shuttled between different boarding schools in Europe, three more at the Hongxi conglomerate, a name that by now is surely familiar to you; perhaps it supplies your cable connection, or owns the local shopping mall. When I first joined, the company motto, We Bring You the World, seemed a comic overstatement; now as I sit here writing, it seems precise.

  I will tell you how I really met Perry. It was the end of the day, a long day, and when I came home he was on my front stoop waiting for me. No, not for me, exactly, but for Lisette. My Lisette. They had dated before and he’d come back to her old apartment, heart in his throat, hoping foolishly to see her. I told him he should have checked the address and slammed the door in his face. This country can be dangerous. He could have been armed. A man is very dangerous if he is armed and thinks you are keeping his beloved inside.

  “Blue eyes,” he’d said, shouting through the door. “Five-seven. She had glasses and dirty-blond hair.”

  How disrespectful to speak of her that way, I thought. So much shouting. And dirty-blond, what a choice of words! He surely wouldn’t speak of his mother that way, I thought. I turned the blinds and snapped them shut. Come back later, I thought imperiously. Come back never.

  It is true the apartment was not very nice. In Barcelona, I lived in an apartment that was on the eighteenth floor and had a black-and-white-tiled lobby and dormer windows bathed in sheer white fabric. There was a bakery below that served croissants warm and soft and many-layered as you pulled them apart, like the underbelly of a sea creature gently exhaling. There was a man and woman above me who periodically had exuberant, ceiling-thumping relations that made me blush. In Beijing, our apartment looked out over the wide gray mélange of the city from the twenty-seventh floor of a concrete skyscraper called Harmony Estates, with fake flowers in the foyer and white columns somewhat unexpectedly surging up from our front entrance.

  Lisette’s street was three miles from Atlantic City’s casinos and resorts, low-slung and crossed with saltwater breezes that left the hair and face sticky, all porches and driveways and scraggly lawns. Nothing special, but farther out, the city spruced itself up and suited me fine. Most weekends I took in a show: the high kicks, the high-singing warblers, all the jubilant notes. Strut, pose, rat-a-tat-tat! In America, neighborhoods like Lisette’s are the backstage; downtown is where the performance really happens. I liked knowing the backstage, too.

  Perry came back the next afternoon. He was sitting on my front steps and eating a sandwich wrapped in white butcher paper when I returned from work.

  “Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t sound sorry at all, just demanding. “I really have to find this girl. How long have you been living here?”

  I’d stopped a few paces away, looking around us. It was five o’clock, late-afternoon sunlight. There was the tinkling sound of an ice cream vendor down the block. Ms. Castle, who lives in the white house opposite, was eyeing us as she went to her car.

  “Not long,” I said defensively.

  “Her name is Lisette,” he said, as though I’d been asking after her. “She used to live here.”

  “So you said.” It had been a hot day at the park inspecting a river-rapids ride, our newest attraction, and I was tired.

  “I love her,” he said.

  “If you lov
e her, shouldn’t you have her telephone number?”

  “Not necessarily,” he said, and offered me a part of his sandwich. “Anyway, she isn’t picking up.”

  “That’s your problem,” I said, and went past him, shutting the door. I always liked that phrase, the neat apportioning of its logic.

  Perry kept popping up after that in the afternoons, sitting on my porch as though he genuinely had no idea of where else to go. Sometimes he rang my doorbell. Usually he was eating some kind of takeout: often it was a pastrami sandwich, occasionally orange chicken with rice. Did the man never eat indoors? Or was he just eating all the time? He didn’t look it. He had red hair and spidery freckles and was tall and very, very skinny. He had terribly, sharply flared nostrils, like a woman’s short skirt as it billows during a merengue.

  He was very insistent. Spoiled simpleton!

  I bet Perry would not have dared go on my ride. He would have gone instead for an old-fashioned roller-coaster, or hung around the concession stand, his beloved, lost Lisette beside him, tenderly ministering popcorn. He did not look like a man who could stomach life’s indignities, whether it was a closed door or an uncomfortable, vertigo-inducing passage through a birth canal.

  I’m talking, of course, about the Tunnel of Love. At the time I joined, Hongxi had just begun buying up film studios and shopping malls across the globe. Its owner, Kang Jun, was a glib, un­attrac­tive man who looked like a stretched-out toad with a surprisingly firm handshake. He had been in the military. He had known my father there, and that’s how I got this job. I think he’d assumed I was going to be a vanity hire, like so many of the others who went abroad. I flatter myself, except it is no flattery, that I surprised him.

  The Tunnel of Love was for a while the showcase in Hongxi’s newly opened theme park in the outskirts of Beijing. Now, of course, you see the ride copied elsewhere, but at the time you must remember it had not been done before. Riders were shrouded in plastic and blindfolded. They lay on gurneys and were strapped in. Then they were taken through a writhing, heated machine that would tighten around them in a fashion progressively more painful and uncomfortable, as they fought to reach the other side. On the way, shuddering and writhing through such contractions, they were submerged in a hot, viscous liquid that rippled all around them. The whole experience took six minutes. “Relive life’s original trauma!” was how we advertised it. “In birth, we find ourselves alive.” In English, when we opened the theme park overseas, the placard that greeted riders on the other side simply read WELCOME TO THE WORLD. In Madrid, it was BIENVENIDOS AL MUNDO!

  Some thought it was crude, of course, or tasteless. But you’d be surprised, the way some people emerged from it, weeping, others stepping out, blinking with wonder, as though they’d found a new courage to go on with life. Isn’t it the most remarkable thing, to remember where we came from? Isn’t that something we all secretly crave?

  * * *

  One morning, before work, Perry found me at the coffee shop. He lurched in and immediately sat down at my table.

  “I am really sorry to keep bothering you,” he said. His face looked red and flushed, his cheek creased from his pillow that morning. What an unattractive man, I thought. “I just need to find her, and I have no idea where else to go. She didn’t leave a forwarding address? Do you ever get any of her mail?”

  I looked at him, considered him. He was wearing a green sweater. He didn’t look like a madman. He looked like a man in distress. He also didn’t seem inclined to leave me alone.

  “How did you know her, anyway?” I asked. For a moment I closed my eyes and pictured her. She had very ordinary hands, Lisette, I remembered that: a little plump, a little fat, like sugar cookies that hadn’t been properly rolled out, and hair so fine it felt like water. She had a body that wasn’t extraordinary, a little squat. Big blue eyes, though, as blue as any starlet’s.

  “I told you, we dated,” he said. “Before I went to Abu Dhabi.” He was jiggling his knees now, looking anxious and hectored. He took a piece of biscotti off my plate without asking and nibbled it before realizing what he was doing and put it down, abruptly.

  “And?”

  “And nothing,” he said grumpily, as though I’d overstepped my bounds. “We got into an argument—​we stopped talking. But I’m back now, and I thought I might be able to make it up to her.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Four years ago,” he said. “I guess it’s longer ago than it seems.” He paused and eyed my biscotti again. “Are you going to eat that?” I slid the plate over to him wordlessly.

  “Lisette doesn’t live there anymore,” I said.

  “I got that,” he said. “I just wanted to know, do you have any of her mail or anything? Something that might have a return address, someone else who might know how to find her.”

  Finally I acquiesced. “Okay,” I said. “Come by tomorrow evening. I’ll take a look.”

  * * *

  My mother once told me that everything is an opportunity for self-improvement, and in prison I am wise to that fact, I am an eager pupil. In the mornings I fold my blanket into a fat, even rectangle and scrub my sink until it’s utterly blameless. I do push-ups and walk around my cell chanting, “What ho, what ho!” but softly, so the other inmates won’t object. The true measure of a man is how he responds to adversity, I tell myself. I am fit, polite, and neat. I am a good guest, good company.

  Today a guard brought in a new prisoner, his arms shackled—​best not to wonder about his crimes. He was a big man, with crude, tattooed dashes inked across his arms and thick black lines running jagged across his neck, as though his body were sewn together. It was so ugly, I couldn’t bear to look. It’s so ugly here.

  In the afternoons I sit quietly and think of Lisette. I know the science: if you do not regularly relive your memories, they will disappear, and so I sit and pore over them by the hour; it passes the time. Every few minutes, I change my posture, to stop my limbs from falling asleep.

  We met during my second year in the city. She was a not-very-competent receptionist in a doctor’s office and was studying Mandarin, which she was not very good at, either, but she’d turned up at a dinner a coworker was hosting and amused us all with her attempts to chatter away in the language, even as the rest of us were speaking English and had been schooled abroad, knew all the cultural reference points. I guess I stared at her most of that evening. It wasn’t that I thought she was particularly good-looking—​she wasn’t, especially. But I thought—​I don’t know how else to express it—​that she looked kind. She laughed a lot, and easily. It wasn’t until we actually became friends that I realized she was often very sad. America is like that, I must say, free and easy until you know better.

  In the months after that, Lisette and I spent long afternoons at her apartment. Sometimes we’d watch old films or I’d give her language lessons, sometimes I just watched her out of the corner of my eye as we read on separate couches, like a prematurely old married couple. The place was an odd jumble. One room held a substantial collection of stuffed animals that tumbled off the shelves: white bears with velvet skirts, a floppy-limbed frog, a menagerie of cotton batting and differently colored furs. In a half-whisper, as though anxious not to wake them up, she’d recite their names and brief biographies: this one a birthday gift from her stepfather, that one won while playing arcade games on a family vacation.

  “Don’t laugh at me,” she said. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.

  Before I met Lisette, America wasn’t what I’d imagined; it’s only natural, I expect. Everyone was friendly, but bafflingly so, as though each person had a series of invisible hedges around them that I didn’t know how to penetrate. Lisette was different, you see. She needed me, wanted me.

  Between periods of great buoyancy, she complained of phantom illnesses. A few months after we met, a man she’d been seeing had stopped calling, and as a consequence she had several weeks of unexplained pain in her side. It meant she called i
n sick, couldn’t leave her couch. It meant that I had every excuse and opportunity to come minister to her, which I did, enthusiastically. Twice I accompanied her to the emergency room when her symptoms worsened. Even then I already suspected there was nothing very wrong with her, but her eyes were squeezed shut in pain and she was gripping my hand and I could have sat there for hours more, the way she clung to me, hair slightly matted on her forehead like a child with a fever.

  I missed work and didn’t mind. After the Tunnel of Love’s initial success, Hongxi wanted me to design more rides; they’d sent me to Europe, to Australia. I’d had other ideas, lots of them. But all they wanted were flying ladybugs, Tilt-A-Whirls, and the like. I had no interest! These days an amusement park shouldn’t just fling people about on mechanical arms, I told them. There were new VR technologies that would allow us to conjure up any environment: a glamorous cocktail party, bullets whizzing on a battlefield, even (yes!) a bridal chamber. These days, people wanted more: to feel connected, to taste life deeply!

  Instead, after six years they moved me to a back office here in Atlantic City and gave me a new title, quality inspector, and I spent days in the field with a clipboard making careful ticks.

  Lisette had spark. I wanted to be around her all the time. I bought gifts that I pressed her to accept. I lent her money I knew she wouldn’t return. Late one night, when I couldn’t sleep, I parked outside her apartment and sat there for hours, show tunes on the stereo: “Are there lilac trees in the heart of town? No, it’s just on the street where you live.”

  One of my most treasured memories of Lisette was the day we were sitting on her couch, blue-and-red-and-white-flowered upholstery. I had a notepad on my knee, a few inches from hers, and was tracing out a set of characters.

  “Maotouying,” I read aloud.

  I watched Lisette’s lips, dry and chapped, form the syllables. The sunlight was bright and unkind, and the skin under her eyes looked like wrinkled crepe, but I didn’t mind. She was Eliza before her transformation, and I liked her better that way. It took a certain kind of man, I flattered myself, to see her potential.