Chapter Thirteen

Lillian just called to say she’s ringing in the New Year by admitting our mother to Baptist Memorial Hospital of Memphis—or is that ringing out the old? Anyway it’s just Chinese New Year, not the real one. We’re now entering 2003, the Year of the Ram. Fortuitous perhaps for the Dodge Truck Division. The rest of us will have to wait and see.

“There’s no other way I can leave Memphis,” said Lil’s voice on her bunny phone. My sister’s bedroom telephone is pink and shaped like a young rabbit. You speak into its little rabbit ear. “Golden Acres isn’t set up for really sick people, and Mom’s really sick, okay? She’s literally green.”

Vital signs are stable, said my sister, but our mother’s weight is dropping like a semi-precious stone, and she has no aura at all. It’s a good thing Lil went. I’m sure I wouldn’t have known what to do. Some withered someone is curled on a bed. And she’s green. So I’m holding down the American Teacher’s Apartment, where Lil’s plants need watering and her pirated DVDs need watching, especially the three dirty ones. I have the whole dorm to myself actually. Because of Spring Festival—a colloquialism for Chinese New Year—Shenzhen High School of Electronic Excellence is shut down like Enron. Everyone is out visiting relatives. Chinese ones, most probably.

“You know,” I told my sister, “it’s possible that Mom’s just checking out.”

“Yes, that’s possible,” replied Lil, “but since she can’t tell us that, we have to assume that she wants to live—and that’s just the kind of statement I’d expect from you. Throw her off a bridge and save the money.”

“Did I say anything about a bridge?”

“I wish you’d settle your Mom issues before she—”

“What? I can’t hear you for the fireworks.”

“I said, you’d better settle your Mom issues before she crosses over. You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”

“Write down her meds,” I said. “I’ll go online and see what does what. It’s always the meds.”

“How are yours holding out?”

“Fine,” I lied. “And you can stop reading me.”

Lil let a moment pass before saying, “Who’d want to read you? Anyway you’ve been blocking me since forever. You have your own personal Great Wall now. I hope you’re happy.”

“I’m always happy,” I said. “I’m a happy guy. So, you plan on making your flight this time?”

“Can’t. I’ll have to fly out Saturday.”

Lillian’s trip to Memphis was supposed to be four days, including eleven-hour time differential, date change, New Year, wormhole, whatever. It’s now seven days and counting. Not that I really care. My sister’s apartment beats the altogether out of mine. I have a key to a one-room cold-water flat with a view of the hiney of a dumpster. Really. There’s a rusty crack near the bottom of the dumpster where brown ooze drips out.

Hiney.

The flat belongs to my employer, the snappily-named Shenzhen Textbook Publishing Company, from whom Bellamy swears I’ll get a paycheck any day now. He’s been saying that for over a month. I’m starting to make excuses for not returning his discs.

I bet he has copies.

Credit where it’s due, Bellamy scored me some antibiotics or I’d be peeing from my navel by now. He also turned me onto ma huang, which I find really hits the mark when you don’t skimp on the dose. Weight loss has nothing to do with it. Ma huang is about diamond-studding the moment.

“Somebody came here looking for you,” Lil told me on the phone. “He said something about you owing some money.”

“Who was he?”

“How many people do you owe money to? I told him to never come to my house again. I think he was from one of the casinos.”

“Small misunderstanding. Forget about it.”

“You seem to have a lot of small misunderstandings,” said Lil. “Are you watering my plants?”

“Every day,” I lied.

I told my sister about the large animal droppings in the American Teacher’s Kitchen. I could hear her shudder.

“Take care of it, please, please, please?” said Lil. “You know I can’t deal with mice.”

I told her we aren’t looking at a mouse. “From the scat, I’d place it somewhere between a mature wolverine and a very young yeti.”

“Kill it,” said Lillian, who was once arrested protesting animal testing in the manufacture of baby wipes.

“Consider it dead,” I told her. “I got a New Years present from that girl you tutor.”

“Which one?”

“Pie face. When she smiles, her eyes disappear.”

“Oh, Nancy Drew. What did she give you?”

“Some kind of bell-pepper plant. I put it in the kitchen window.”

“It’s about the New Year,” explained Lil. “In Guangdong Province it’s customary to buy a plant that symbolizes the kind of year you want to have.”

“I think I’m leaning toward a bell-shaped year,” I replied. Actually that particular plant, said Nancy Drew, represents the woid. I think she meant the world.

“Gotta go,” said Lil.

“Already? You haven’t said a word about world peace. Or asked about Arnie.”

“Arnie’s an asshole,” said Lil, “and there is no world peace. Our secretary of state is at the United Nations right now giving a slide show on Iraqi weapon plants. The war’s a fucking done deal. The White House is just greasing everybody for it.”

Which is only considerate, if you’re asking me. Lil told me that anti-war demonstrations are going on everywhere in the woid. “I’m helping with the one at Overton Park this weekend, which is why I gotta go. Love you, love you. Kiss, kiss.”

So began the day. And the year, though not the real one.

I’m now engaged in coaxing breakfast out of Lillian’s postage-stamp kitchen, which consists of a water boiler, a rice cooker, and a combination refrigerator/clothes-washer. I’ve learned that I can dump some oatmeal into the rice cooker—Lil discovered actual oatmeal at the nearby supermarket, which looks like an eight-story ‘58 Studebaker running a little hot. Anyway, what I do is put the oatmeal into the rice cooker along with water and a dash of salt, then break a couple of eggs on top and forget about the whole thing for a while. When I think to go back and check, voila, an Iraqi chemical-weapons war chest.

Tonight I accumulate field notes. At nine o’clock this evening, I will put a sweater under my jacket and take to the streets with a hundred fifty thousand euphoric Chinese, which is sure to either illuminate or eliminate me. I’m definitely ready for one or the other. I never dreamed I’d be in this wacked-out country for six months, nor did I pack for same, and frankly it’s beginning to wear on me. But returning moneyless to Memphis doesn’t seem like much of an option. That hypothetical publishing deal with the gaudy up-front money seems now to be finally and permanently dead. I did make one more lame-ass attempt at finishing The End of Day myself, but it dipped rather badly among the various dip slopes, and the publisher-to-be informed Bernie that they were moving on to other projects, and all I can say is, I wish that ill-humored casino would do the same. And that former drinking buddy of mine is still sending me emails with subject lines like WHERE R U??? Say nothing of that Louie guy from Kansas City with the nose collection. That I haven’t heard from him at all strikes me as slightly ominous. I don’t know why some people can’t just make a fresh start. And I don’t know what came of all that China is no longer safe for you and your pet hamster business. No follow-through at all in this country. I’ve seen more commitment among hedgehogs.

The oatmeal’s beginning to boil. I unplug the rice cooker and take a look inside. I’ve seen a lot worse. I break Lil’s last two eggs over the top, yellows running generously and eggshell bits mixed in, all the usual, and close the lid.

Arnie keeps inviting me to a brothel he’s discovered in Shikou (rhymes with jerko). It has a bowling theme. Pin-girls in black lingerie help you in and out of your green-and-tan bowling shoes. But that kind of evening requires actual money, and I’m waiting for this hook-nosed Bellamy guy to come up with what’s now nearly a thousand bucks. He tap-dances all over the office every time I bring it up. He’s got the top hat, the cane. This guy and Shirley Temple would make a really mean pair. Meanwhile I’m rationing my meds. I catch myself slipping little double entendres into the new textbook. Marvelous veiled sexual references and political commentaries that I’m sure no one will ever pick up on. But I’m fine. Really.

Tomorrow I get to eat my fill at a wedding in the Chinese countryside, courtesy of a golden lovely whom I recently came upon, though not literally, at an English salon. Read: cheesy night school with door prizes where a down-and-out American can pick up the occasional half-pocketful of yuan, if not the stray wedding invitation. The golden lovely calls herself Phoebe. No Chinese can resist an English name. Did you know that during the last decade of his life, Dung Xiaoping went by Chester? Of course, Phoebe is married to some guy with more money than Slim Whitman, but you expect that with a woman like Phoebe who could be the most beautiful Chinese woman I’ve ever seen, beginning with the Manchurian cheekbones and ending more or less everywhere else. A little pallid for my blood—which constitutes the Asian definition of beauty, as you may know. Half the ads on TV are for skin-whitening creams. Phoebe wants me to experience a traditional Chinese wedding in the countryside. I think you know what I want to experience.

First I have to survive tonight’s mass celebration, whose purpose I fail to understand on even the most basic level. Why, for example, is the new year so widely assumed to be an improvement over the old one? Given that the world has been around for roughly thirteen billion years, if each in turn were even marginally superior to the former—wouldn’t this be, like, a really fun place by now?

Look at last year. If I remember right it was the Year of the Moose. The high point of the Year of the Moose I don’t expressly recall, but the low point was definitely the bust of my sister’s apartment for marijuana that nobody ever found. Yes. The police. Raided. This apartment. There was a loud knock at Lil’s door, and when she opened it there must have been twenty men on the balcony waving papers and badges and so forth. This is from Lil’s account. By the time I got here, all the unis were gone, thank God, and the Xanax had taken hold. Lil, well sedated, told me that the English-speaking cop had apologized a lot and said noh-koh-tics about a thousand times while the other men turned the apartment inside out. The headmaster of the school showed up with a few unis of his own, and there was a lot of shouting and finger-pointing. In the end, they found nothing. Not even a dirty ashtray. Lil said the cops looked genuinely bewildered. Deep bows. Lots of groveling. The headmaster followed them all the way to the gate, shouting insults for the benefit of the hundreds of employees gathered around.

That happened on a Friday. Lillian refused to leave her apartment till Monday, on which day she was openly stared at by everyone, down to the gardeners. Same thing Tuesday. Wednesday she was old news. So it goes.

That sentence appears in Slaughterhouse Five one hundred four times.

On Thursday, Madam Wu brought Lil a pan of boiled dumplings and a shopping bag containing something she’d found in her linen drawer. A plastic bag containing roughly two ounces of marijuana.

They flushed it.

All of it.

My sister badly wanted to blame the entire episode on me but couldn’t quite construct how. Finally I was able to persuade her that some impaired Chinese detective was trying to make a name for himself. What better bust than a busty blond who stands twice the desk sergeant’s height? Tragically for him, when it came time to plant the evidence, there was a mix-up and why don’t they number the floors in this building?

Could be true for all I know. I don’t think so. I think somebody wants us out of China. I’ve narrowed it down to the US Department of Defense and a nine-headed serpent in need of a breath mint, neither of which should constitute much of a problem, as I see it.

I asked Tree to accompany me to tonight’s Spring Festival Celebration, but the girl’s booked solid. One family’s taking her to the flower market this morning, another has her booked for lunch, and tonight she sings “Rock of Ages” onstage at a gala for school administrators and displaced Mongolian yak breeders. You should hear Tree sing. Really. Girl’s as fortissimo as she looks.

Moose wasn’t a bad year for Tree Carter. To begin with, she resembles one. She’s let her hair grow out, and it’s, like, forming stray antlers and standing stones and such. To no one’s surprise, it didn’t take Our Tree-ness long to win over her headmaster, the faculty, the kids, the displaced yak breeders, just generally everyone west of Puget Sound. Teachers from all over the province are visiting Tree’s first-grade classroom. She’s been on the evening news twice. Of course she’s also pumping out her weekly radio show via the portable personal medical device. “China is filled,” she trumpets to the world, “with the most amazing Indigo children. I’ve never seen such beautiful and intuitive children in all my life. They’re teaching me.”

Meanwhile I teach myself how to eat unsalted egg-drop oatmeal from a rice cooker while plotting the murder of a very young yeti. Get well soon, Mom. And Happy New Year, though not the real one.