“Because this place is counter-revolutionary!” Mr. Wei said.
Baiyue covered her mouth with her hand. Jieling felt embarrassed, too. No one said things like “counter-revolutionary” anymore.
“This place! It is making things that could make China strong!” he said.
“Isn’t that good?” Baiyue asked.
“But they don’t care about China! Only about money. Instead of using it for China, they sell it to America!” he said. Spittle was gathering at the corner of his mouth. He was starting to look deranged. “Look at this place! Officials are all concerned about guanxi!” Connections. Kickbacks. Guanxi ran China, everybody knew that.
“So, maybe you have an anti-corruption investigation?” Jieling said. There were lots of anti-corruption investigations. Jieling’s stepfather said that they usually meant someone powerful was mad at their brother-in-law or something, so they accused him of corruption.
Mr. Wei groaned. “There is no one to investigate them.”
Baiyue and Jieling looked at each other.
Mr. Wei explained, “In my office, the Guangdong office, there used to be twenty people. Special operatives. Now there is only me and Ms. Yang.”
Jieling said, “Did they all die of bird flu?”
Mr. Wei shook his head. “No, they all went to work on contract for Saudi Arabia. You can make a lot of money in the Middle East. A lot more than in China.”
“Why don’t you and Ms. Yang go work in Saudi Arabia?” Baiyue asked.
Jieling thought Mr. Wei would give some revolutionary speech. But he just hung his head. “She is the secretary. I am the bookkeeper.” And then in a smaller voice, “She is going to Kuwait to work for Mr. Liu.”
They probably did not need bookkeepers in the Middle East. Poor Mr. Wei. No wonder he was such a terrible secret agent.
“The spirit of the revolution is gone,” he said, and there were real, honest-to-goodness tears in his eyes. “Did you know that Tiananmen Square was built by volunteers? People would come after their regular job and lay the paving of the square. Today people look to Hong Kong.”
“Nobody cares about a bunch of old men in Beijing,” Baiyue said.
“Exactly! We used to have a strong military! But now the military is too worried about their own factories and farms! They want us to pull out of Tajikistan because it is ruining their profits!”
This sounded like a good idea to Jieling, but she had to admit, she hated the news so she wasn’t sure why they were fighting in Tajikistan anyway. Something about Muslim terrorists. All she knew about Muslims was that they made great street food.
“Don’t you want to be patriots?” Mr. Wei said.
“You broke into my room and tried to steal my—you know that’s not a computer, don’t you?” Jieling said. “It’s a bio-battery. They’re selling them to the Americans. Wal-Mart.”
Mr. Wei groaned.
“We don’t work in special projects,” Baiyue said.
“You said you did,” he protested.
“We did not,” Jieling said. “You just thought that. How did you know this was my room?”
“The company lists all its workers in a directory,” he said wearily. “And it’s movie night, everyone is either out or goes to the movies. I’ve had the building under surveillance for weeks. I followed you to the market today. Last week it was a girl named Pingli, who blabbed about everything, but she wasn’t in special projects.
“I put you on the bus; I’ve timed the route three times. I should have had an hour and fifteen minutes to drive over here and get the box and get out.”
“We made all our connections,” Baiyue explained.
Mr. Wei was so dispirited he didn’t even respond.
Jieling said, “I thought the government was supposed to help workers. If we get caught, we’ll be fined and we’ll be deeper in debt.” She was just talking. Talking, talking, talking too much. This was too strange. Like when someone was dying. Something extraordinary was happening, like your father dying in the next room, and yet the ordinary things went on, too. You made tea, your mother opened the shop the next day and sewed clothes while she cried. People came in and pretended not to notice. This was like that. Mr. Wei had broken into their room with a gun and they were explaining about New Life.
“Debt?” Mr. Wei said.
“To the company,” she said. “We are all in debt. The company hires us and says they are going to pay us, but then they charge us for our food and our clothes and our dorm and it always costs more than we earn. That’s why we were doing rap today. To make money to be able to quit.” Mr. Wei’s glasses had tape holding the arm on. Why hadn’t she noticed that in the restaurant? Maybe because when you are afraid you notice things. When your father is dying of the plague, you notice the way the covers on your mother’s chairs need to be washed. You wonder if you will have to do it or if you will die before you have to do chores.
“The Pingli girl,” he said, “she said the same thing. That’s illegal.”
“Sure,” Baiyue said. “Like anybody cares.”
“Could you expose corruption?” Jieling asked.
Mr. Wei shrugged, at least as much as he could in the pillowcase. “Maybe. But they would just pay bribes to locals and it would all go away.”
All three of them sighed.
“Except,” Mr. Wei said, sitting up a little straighter. “The Americans. They are always getting upset about that sort of thing. Last year there was a corporation, the Shanghai Six. The Americans did a documentary on them and then Western companies would not do business. If they got information from us about what New Life is doing…”
“Who else is going to buy bio-batteries?” Baiyue said. “The company would be in big trouble!”
“Beijing can threaten a big exposé, tell the New York Times newspaper!” Mr. Wei said, getting excited. “My Beijing supervisor will love that! He loves media!”
“Then you can have a big show trial,” Jieling said.
Mr. Wei was nodding.
“But what is in it for us?” Baiyue said.
“When there’s a trial, they’ll have to cancel your debt!” Mr. Wei said. “Even pay you a big fine!”
“If I call the floor auntie and say I caught a corporate spy, they’ll give me a big bonus,” Baiyue said.
“Don’t you care about the other workers?” Mr. Wei asked.
Jieling and Baiyue looked at each other and shrugged. Did they? “What are they going to do to you anyway?” Jieling said. “You can still do a big exposé. But that way we don’t have to wait.”
“Look,” he said, “you let me go, and I’ll let you keep my money.”
Someone rattled the door handle.
“Please,” Mr. Wei whispered. “You can be heroes for your fellow workers, even though they’ll never know it.”
Jieling stuck the money in her pocket. Then she took the papers, too.
“You can’t take those,” he said.
“Yes I can,” she said. “If after six months, there is no big corruption scandal? We can let everyone know how a government secret agent was outsmarted by two factory girls.”
“Six months!” he said. “That’s not long enough!”
“It better be,” Jieling said.
Outside the door, Taohua called, “Jieling? Are you in there? Something is wrong with the door!”
“Just a minute,” Jieling called. “I had trouble with it when I came home.” To Mr. Wei she whispered sternly, “Don’t you try anything. If you do, we’ll scream our heads off and everybody will come running.” She and Baiyue shimmied the pillowcase off of Mr. Wei’s head. He started to stand up and jerked the boom box, which clattered across the floor. “Wait!” she hissed and untied him.
Taohua called through the door, “What’s that?”
“Hold on!” Jieling called.
Baiyue helped Mr. Wei stand up. Mr. Wei climbed onto the desk and then grabbed a line hanging outside. He stopped a moment as if trying to think of something t
o say.
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery,” Jieling said. It had been her father’s favorite quote from Chairman Mao. “…it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act by which one class overthrows another.”
Mr. Wei looked as if he might cry and not because he was moved by patriotism. He stepped back and disappeared. Jieling and Baiyue looked out the window. He did go down the wall just like a secret agent from a movie, but it was only two stories. There was still the big footprint in the middle of Taohua’s magazine and the room looked as if it had been hit by a storm.
“They’re going to think you had a boyfriend,” Baiyue whispered to Jieling.
“Yeah,” Jieling said, pulling the chair out from under the door handle. “And they’re going to think he’s rich.”
It was Sunday, and Jieling and Baiyue were sitting on the beach. Jieling’s cell phone rang, a little chime of M.I.A. hip-hop. Even though it was Sunday, it was one of the girls from New Life. Sunday should be a day off, but she took the call anyway.
“Jieling? This is Xia Meili? From packaging. Taohua told me about your business? Maybe you could help me?”
Jieling said, “Sure. What is your debt, Meili?”
“Thirty-eight hundred RMB,” Meili said. “I know it’s a lot.”
Jieling said, “Not so bad. We have a lot of people who already have loans, though, and it will probably be a few weeks before I can make you one.”
With Mr. Wei’s capital, Jieling and Baiyue had opened a bank account. They had bought themselves out, and then started a little loan business where they bought people out of New Life. Then people had to pay them back with a little extra. They each had jobs—Jieling worked for a company that made toys. She sat each day at a table where she put a piece of specially shaped plastic over the body of a little doll, an action figure. The plastic fit right over the figure and had cutouts. Jieling sprayed the whole thing with red paint and when the piece of plastic was lifted, the action figure had a red shirt. It was boring, but at the end of the week, she got paid instead of owing the company money.
She and Baiyue used all their extra money on loans to get girls out of New Life. More and more loans, and more and more payments. Now New Life had sent them a threatening letter saying that what they were doing was illegal. But Mr. Wei said not to worry. Two officials had come and talked to them and had showed them legal documents and had them explain everything about what had happened. Soon, the officials promised, they would take New Life to court.
Jieling wasn’t so sure about the officials. After all, Mr. Wei was an official. But a foreign newspaperman had called them. He was from a newspaper called The Wall Street Journal and he said that he was writing a story about labor shortages in China after the bird flu. He said that in some places in the West there were reports of slavery. His Chinese was very good. His story was going to come out in the United States tomorrow. Then she figured officials would have to do something or lose face.
Jieling told Meili to call her back in two weeks—although hopefully in two weeks no one would need help to get away from New Life—and wrote a note to herself in her little notebook.
Baiyue was sitting looking at the water. “This is the first time I’ve been to the beach,” she said.
“The ocean is so big, isn’t it?”
Baiyue nodded, scuffing at the white sand. “People always say that, but you don’t know until you see it.”
Jieling said, “Yeah.” Funny, she had lived here for months. Baiyue had lived here more than a year. And they had never come to the beach. The beach was beautiful.
“I feel sorry for Mr. Wei,” Baiyue said.
“You do?” Jieling said. “Do you think he really had a daughter who died?”
“Maybe,” Baiyue said. “A lot of people died.”
“My father died,” Jieling said.
Baiyue looked at her, a quick little sideways look, then back out at the ocean. “My mother died,” she said.
Jieling was surprised. She had never known that Baiyue’s mother was dead. They had talked about so much but never about that. She put her arm around Baiyue’s waist and they sat for a while.
“I feel bad in a way,” Baiyue said.
“How come?” Jieling said.
“Because we had to steal capital to fight New Life. That makes us capitalists.”
Jieling shrugged.
“I wish it was like when they fought the revolution,” Baiyue said. “Things were a lot more simple.”
“Yeah,” Jieling said, “and they were poor and a lot of them died.”
“I know.” Baiyue sighed.
Jieling knew what she meant. It would be nice to…to be sure what was right and what was wrong. Although not if it made you like Mr. Wei.
Poor Mr. Wei. Had his daughter really died?
“Hey,” Jieling said, “I’ve got to make a call. Wait right here.” She walked a little down the beach. It was windy and she turned her back to protect the cell phone, like someone lighting a match. “Hello,” she said, “hello, Mama, it’s me. Jieling.”
Aka St. Mark’s Place
Richard Bowes
Over the last twenty years Richard Bowes has published five novels, the most recent of which is From the Files of the Time Rangers. The novel Minions of the Moon won a Lambda Award.
His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, and elsewhere. The novella “Streetcar Dreams” won a World Fantasy Award. His story “There’s a Hole in the City” won the story South 2006 Million Writers Award for Fiction. His most recent short-fiction collection Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancies was published by PS Publishing in England in 2006.
Recent and forthcoming stories will be in Electric Velocipede #10 and Subterranean magazine, and Horror: The Best of the Year, 2006, The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, and So Fey anthologies.
Richard Bowes has lived for most of his life in Manhattan. Several of his recent stories have taken place downtown in the Greenwich Village and East Village of his youth, places that have changed drastically over the past thirty years but that live on, forever memorialized by Bowes’s vivid imagination.
Part One
Later in life Judy used other names. But she was Judy Finch when she was growing up on St. Mark’s Place, which is itself a kind of alias for the three blocks of 8th Street between Third Avenue and Tompkins Square Park.
In the spring of ‘65 she was fifteen and had what she thought of as her first real boyfriend. Judy was light-haired and blue-eyed. The boy who called himself Ray Light had dark hair, brown eyes, was almost a year older and a bit taller. But their hair was the same length and some days, without planning it, they dressed almost identically.
Sitting on a neighborhood stoop one sunny day they blended into each other, his head resting on her shoulder, her denim-clad legs draped over his, one passing their last cigarette to the other.
Ray Light was not his real name. He’d chosen it just after running away from home. When he talked about that, Judy saw him sitting on the edge of a loading dock in Ohio, waiting for a guy, any guy, to start him on his way to New York City. She thought that being able to do this was another sign that they were in love.
The thin, jumpy man who picked him up, before getting down to business, asked his name. Instead of boring Jonathan Duncan, which he’d been called since birth, out came Ray Light. Later it occurred to both Ray and Judy that this had been prophecy.
Ray came from a very nice suburb of Cincinnati. His family hadn’t expected a son who had long hair and wanted to paint, to dance, to play music. What he wanted to do varied from day to day.
When he talked about this, Judy thought his plans were kind of hopeless. She had some idea how these things worked. Her father was the conceptual sculptor Jason Finch. Her mother was the essayist and critic Anna Muir. She was goin
g to study acting.
Ray lived with a guy he called the Man who locked Ray out of his loft on 4th Street every morning as he went to work and let him back in when he came home. When she thought about his situation, something deep inside Judy ached.
Ray had just said, “I’m going to ask the Man to lend me the money to buy a guitar,” when she looked up and found this other kid standing there waiting for them to notice him.
“You got a light,” the kid asked and wiggled an unlighted Camel. Ray handed him matches and looked right into his face. Judy gave him the once-over.
He lighted up with a little flourish, handed back the book of matches, and said, “The name’s BD.” They told him their first names. He said he’d just moved into the neighborhood and wanted to know where he could hear music. They told him there were hootenannies in Washington Square and folk rock in little cafés in the East and West Village.
When he asked, “Is there someplace I can score grass?” they both shook their heads, and when he didn’t walk away they got up and did just that.
Later they compared notes and both knew immediately that this kid was from the halfway house. His institutional haircut, white T-shirt, sneakers, and jeans were like a uniform.
The halfway house on St. Mark’s Place near First Avenue was a place for teenage boys whose parents were enmeshed in the legal system or in the hospital or somehow couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of them. They followed a type—white, skinny, a little in shock—and they got held there until they could finish high school and go on to college or more likely go into the army. Vietnam was just starting to heat up.
“Is he a nark?” Judy wondered.
“If he’s not in the halfway house, he’s got one hell of a cover,” said Ray.
They walked by Judy’s place. Her father’s studio occupied the ground floor of a building on the south side of St. Mark’s near the corner of Second Avenue. The first floor had once been a barn when it was a tradesman’s house, and a horse and cart were kept there.
The barn doors had long ago been cemented shut and had windows cut into them. Her father used it as his studio.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 17