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 typhoon 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 advocating 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.

I finally made good on my smuggled half-pound of multi-grind, if you care to know. It occurred to me that one might simply use the hot water from the boiler/purifier—there’s one in every hotel room in this country—and strain the grounds through a paper towel. This is after you take the plastic bag from the waste basket, tear a hole in one corner, place the paper towel inside the bag and place the grounds in the paper towel. Next you hold the plastic bag above a bowl and, chanting, “Cof-FEE, cof-FEE, cof-FEE,” pour and watch with increasing anticipation as a liquid more or less the color of a reggae artist forms in the bottom of the bowl. Then you throw the liquid away and eat the paper towel.

Lillian’s new curtains lie spread across the double bed. Yellow flowers on an emerald field. I guess there was nothing in pink.

“Did you say something about coffee, dear?” calls Lil from the kitchen.

“No, I didn’t. I want a gin sour, light on the sugar.”

Through the front window, I see much of the campus, such as it is. Shenzhen High School of Electronic Excellence is composed of two five-story classroom buildings, an eleven-story office building, two concrete dormitories, and a regulation soccer field ringed by an asphalt track. Directly below the balcony are two tennis courts in a soft green. The office building owes to the fact that the school is fully endowed by China’s government-owned telephone company. The students here, mouth-breathers all we’re assured, will be fed into low-paying jobs at Wa Bell. Like all the other apartments on this campus, Lil’s is composed of a modest studio, a postage-stamp kitchen, and an abbreviated john. But there’s air-conditioning and an actual Western toilet—which the Chinese prefer, by the way, when and wherever they’re able to get their little bee-hinds onto one.

My sister returns with my drink and a green tea for herself.

“I can’t believe,” she says, squeezing into the other settee chair, “that classes start in two days and my boss doesn’t even know what classes I’m teaching, let alone when or where. I’ll find out when I walk in Monday morning. And I don’t get my own classroom. And I teach in a five-story walk-up with no heating or cooling. And the power has gone out in this apartment twice today. And anyway it’s the new moon, and you know how I always get.”

“I know.”

“And Tree says Mercury’s in retrograde, which just…”

I stop listening to my sister. Who over-sugared my drink. I’m anticipating Tree’s arrival and the subsequent appearance of everyone’s favorite world savior and lover of small children and randy lapdogs—whom Tree has not actually promised, but at least she’s willing to sit down and let her eyes roll back.

I can feel the weight of those new pages in my hands.

“. . . And I was promised I wouldn’t have to keep rolls or give grades, so now it turns out I get to do both, plus I have fifty kids per class, which if I teach fifteen classes is how many grades?”

“Seven hundred fifty,” I tell her.

If this gin is English, I’m Lithuanian.

“Seven hundred fifty,” says Lil. “And they all look alike, which I hate to say, but everybody wears the same uniform and has exactly…”

Again, I tune out my sister while maintaining eye contact, having learned years ago that Lillian equates being looked at with receiving attention. Frankly, I enjoy the sense of control, those nice secret serotonin puffs that come from successfully misleading my nemesis just a tiddly-tad. And honestly there are worse things than listening to my sister’s voice without following the strained lines of Lillian-logic. It’s a case of a seasoned musical instrument in the hands of a child. When my sister is really wound up, which is usually, her words tumble over one another in a mad unself-conscious dash, little gasps between. Pure proximal differentiation. I haven’t gasped since fifth grade. See earlier reference to lilac and pink sweaters.

Proximal differentiation, for the uninitiated, means that twins who grow up together polarize. One becomes the talker, the other the recluse. One becomes the achiever, the other the neuroser. Good twin, bad twin, basically. I’m holding up my end of the bargain.

“. . . Anyway, it’s a good thing I’m not freaking out,” says Lil, falling silent.

I reach for a reassuring tone. “It’s just the Chinese way of doing things, dear. You’ll get used to it.”

Lil looks unreassured.

Our Dr. Carter is facing the stray challenge, as well, I’m told. Tree has a PhD in Ed Psych, a string of publications, and a strong classroom background, so the headmaster of Primary School Focus Youth Shenzhen takes one look at her and assigns her to an office. Clearly here is a woman way too scary-looking to put in front of small children.

“Look at Tree,” I tell Lil. “They don’t want her anywhere near the kids, and is she freaking out? No. She’s just going to charm them all into submission.”

“If anybody can,” says Lil drearily, “she will.”

“And so will you.”

True, actually. My sister’s a charmer. More proximal differentiation.

Two neighbors’ faces appear in the window, hands cupped, mouths sagging open. After a glance at them, Lil says glumly, “Didn’t we read that the Temple of Heaven is the navel of the world?”

“The Heaven’s Heart Stone inside the temple, specifically,” I say, waving to the people outside. They wave back.

“Shenzhen is a thousand miles south of there. What body part do you suppose that would be?”

I take it for a rhetorical question.

Hanging the curtains turns out to be easy enough. First you drink the gin sour, then you complain of your aching broken hand. Then it’s a simple matter of watching your sister thread the new curtains onto the old rod. Outside meanwhile is an increasingly unruly mob of neighbors who cheer happily as Lil closes the curtains. At the same moment, the power goes off. Suddenly we hear the traffic on the nearby thoroughfare.

“Three times,” says Lil.

I picture three blackened farmers smoking atop Shenzhen’s electric fence.

Seconds later, the power returns. Again the roar of the air-conditioner consumes everything. I ask Lil for another sour, lighter on the sugar this time, and follow her to the kitchen. It’s too small for both of us, so I lean against the doorway to ask, “So, who was the dead guy?”

“Dead guy?” says Lil, slicing a lemon. “Oh, the dead guy. Nobody seems to know. All I can tell you is he wore red socks.”

There’s a knock at the door.

“Must be Tree,” says Lil, dropping the knife and hurrying past my stunned expression.

Dr. Shatrina Carter sweeps into the American Teacher’s Apartment. “Air conditioning! Ahhhhhgh! I’ve died and gone to heaven! And here’s my Julian!”

“No hugs,” I say.

She hugs me anyway, practically lifting me off my feet. While Lil shows Tree the apartment, I fill my glass with straight gin—Filipino, it turns out—while asking myself why anyone would want to find himself freshly murdered in broad daylight in front of the building where my sister has just opened her suitcases, say nothing of political affiliation, insurance plan, or stocking preference. Say what you will. Even in the basic Crayola box of twelve, red constitutes a mere eight percent probability, which begs the question: do rival groups now vie for the viewing grounds surrounding the lives of my sister and myself, and what exactly might that mean in terms of normalcy, privacy, and daily pursuit of dalliance?

A question for another time. A séance seems to be forming in the front room.

“You want to extinguish that drink, Doo?” says Lil. “Tree wants to get started.”

I down the gin and go into my bag for two freshly sharpened German number-two pencils and an official Gregg mini-steno notebook in institutional green. I’m not half bad at shorthand. A hundred eighty words per minute, depending on the minute. A hundred ninety when tipsy.

Tree wrinkles her nose. “I still smell alcohol in here.”

“I’ll light some incense,” says Lil.

“Incense contains saltpeter,” I inform her, “besides which, if the idea is to attract Truman, shouldn’t we be dousing ourselves with martinis?”

As Lady Shatrina arranges herself cross-legged on the center of the double bed, Lil and I pull up settee chairs at either side. In my lap are the two number-twos and the mini-steno, open to a fresh page. Across the top, in near-perfect Gregg’s shorthand, I write, “Chapter Thirteen” and stare fixedly at Tree.

Lil asks for my moldavite. I hand it to her. She places mine and hers in Tree’s palm where the third pendant awaits. Deftly, Tree arranges them into one roundish stone.

“Listen, Jules,” says Tree, closing her eyes, “I have no idea what this session is going to be about. I’m just willing. You say something new came in when you were out in the countryside. What involves you, involves all three of us, okay? I hope you’re beginning to understand that. You are in this country for a reason, Jules, just the same as your sister and myself.” Tree’s eyes slide open, and I realize that she’s been staring at me through the lids. “You decided to come here. Now you’re here, and it’s time you started to be here.”

I turn away from Tree’s gaze. When I glance at her again, the brown eyes are once more closed.

“We send a voice to the highest of our highest-most selves,” begins Tree, the mahogany voice deepening as it rises in volume, “and to all those who work on behalf of the brightest of the light and the lightest of the bright, and say be here now and help us in this which we do, Lord God Heavenly Jesus Uma Sofia.”

“Lord God Heavenly Jesus Uma Sophia,” drone Lil and I.

“Here and now, we seal this space in all its dimensions and times, ways, varieties and vacuities, expanses expressions and dominions,” say Tree, voice dropping still farther till it’s etching the floor tiles, “that no one shall come unto us now except that lamb of the immortal blessed dawn known to us as Truman—be he now present and accounted for, Holy Lord God Immortal Soul of Abraham Wagga Wagga.”

Lil and I look at each other. “Holy Lord God mmmm… Wagga Wagga.”

“Be it hereby and forevermore so,” says Tree.

“Be it hereby and forevermore so.”

Pulling myself a bit taller in my chair, I watch as Tree sinks into her signature trance by slow and, it would appear, tender degrees, dropping her head farther and farther till it hangs on the bone and her breathing becomes ragged.

It shouldn’t be long now.

I remember one stretch when Tree brought in a series of deceased professional wrestlers who’d entered the next world with serious maladaptations to soul-evolvement in the absence of leotards. Attachment, the Buddhists call it. The whole thing was touching, actually. I’ll never forget the moment when Minter the Tormenter first admitted he’d been dragged along the tunnel of light kicking and begging for his Capezios. Not that I’ve ever believed that Tree is actually bringing in spirits of the dead. But there was and is no better entertainment value in west Tennessee, outside the summer tent-revival circuit, than Tree’s channeling sessions, drinkable English gin or no.

Suddenly Tree rears her head. A frown-line forms between her eyebrows, and she opens her mouth to speak.

“Gweeeeetings,” caws Truman’s voice.

Oddly, Tree’s mouth did not move. Truman’s thin nasal voice seemed to have leached from some other place entirely. Tree opens her eyes in confusion, and we stare at one another.

“It’s twuuuue,” says Truman. “I have chosen another medium this time.”

Tree and I turn in the direction of Lillian, whose eyes are closed and lips moist and parted. “I come through Lady Lillian for a weeeason,” says my sister’s mouth. “Your doubts, Julian. Your doubts are holding everything back. All that must end here and now. Are you listening?”

“Write,” says Tree, jostling me.

I begin to transcribe.

“I’m just some fwaaaagment of Tree’s personality? Is that what you believe, Julian? And all those wonderful chapters. Do you think those could have come from just anywhere? You still believe that you’re in China for your petty personal weeeasons, but the time for doubting is over. The battle is joined. Your wake-up calls will no longer be gentle ones.”

“Awesome,” I say. “Now, about The End of Day? I think we were just beginning Chapter Thirteen.”

“I gave you the title of the novella.”

“Dipping Between the Dip Slopes is a title?”

“It’s allegorical,” says Truman.

“Allegorical is a nice word for that title,” I reply. “It happens that I’ve found a publisher very happy with The End of Day. Now if we can just—”

“You’ll get your final chapter, Julian. But first you must pwoove your intentions.”

“My what?”

“You will be tested, Julian. Be weady.”

“Wait. How about proving your intentions?” I say. “Give me a page. A compound sentence. A gerund.”

“Be weady, Julian. And remember. Beware the sheeeeen of the blue and the greeeeen.”

With a gasp, Lillian opens her eyes and says, “But Arnie, I hardly know you.”

Tree puts her hand on Lil’s shoulder. “Baby, you just channeled. You were beautiful.”

“I can’t believe it,” I say, slamming down my number-two pencil. At the same moment, the overhead lights blink and go out. The air-conditioner dies. Four times.

“We need you,” says Tree, looking straight at me.

In the semi-darkness, Tree Carter leans forward to gaze into my eyes. Her voice is soft. “Julian. We can’t do this without you, okay? I wish to God we could, baby, but we just can’t. No one can say what you’ll choose when the moment comes, not even yourself. But the moment’s coming, and you’ll have to live with your choice for a long, long time. Like you’ve had to do since the last time you chose.”

My belly tightens. I don’t know what Tree is talking about. And I do.

Lillian gives her head a shake. “Why do I have this sudden urge to visit death row?”

“Just be ready,” Tree says to me with a smile. “That’s all, baby. Just get yourself ready, okay?”

Who is this woman kidding? I was born weady.