Chapter Nineteen

Ralpho looks good. I ask him where he got the tan and he says, “Dalian. Over in Liaoning Province. Great beaches.”

China. Great beaches. I try to force those two concepts together in my head. I have to stop.

“Nice apartment,” says Ralpho.

“It’s my sister’s.”

I spit out the word sister as one might a bad wad of chaw. Lillian called before school this morning to say that not only can she not make it back here by tomorrow/Wednesday, it’s now looking like this weekend/whenever. They’ve put our mother in ICU. I think that stands for Insufficiently Continent Ungulates.

“You can have the box springs or the mattress,” I tell Ralpho.

“Mattress,” he says.

Men are so easy. We toss the mattress onto the floor and we’re done. Now we can go drink beer.

Except that Ralpho wants a quick shower first. I show him how to activate the pint-sized water heater at the ceiling of the bathroom, always good for a three-minute shower on short notice. I return to the American Teacher’s Computer and my pet research project.

Drugs that don’t make you high.

It’s one more way for the oil-rich to extinguish the last of our lights in as direct a manner as possible while charging us for it. Our mother is on four blood-pressure medications, three of which are guaranteed, given time, to turn her kidneys into kidney beans. And her blood pressure is still fucked. But the important thing is, the oil-rich are a hundred-plus dollars a month oil-richer from one woman’s blood alone, having expended nothing more than the trash from their refineries. The sweetest irony, of course, is that most of the illnesses these pills supposedly cure are caused by petro-pollution. Not to drop any bombs here, but you and I drive plastic cars to and from plastic homes, carrying plastic grocery bags filled with plastic-packaged and plastic-enriched foods that we’ve paid for with plastic. And you wonder why I’m so careful to maintain a healthy level of apathy.

Lil tells me, by the way, that she’s unable to provide a sample of Mom’s hormone replacement. “Her doctor’s a jerk. He says he’ll stop the paroxetine but won’t change anything else without written authorization.”

“What kind of written authorization?” I asked.

“Declaring Mom insane,” she replied. “I asked Stuart about it. He says it’s doable. I don’t know, man. That shit’s scary.”

I thought about Stuart’s handsome little retainer from Regis Labs and wondered what else he finds doable.

“Steal one,” I told my sister.

“Steal what? One of her meds? What the hell do you want with one of Mom’s blood-pressure meds?”

I finally convinced Lil of a contamination scare with another Regis product. Why not be on the safe side? It’s the same basic lie I’ll tell Bellamy’s forensic brother. Might Regis Labs actually be lacing our mother’s blood-pressure med with a subtle and cumulative toxin? Just to force the twins out of China? Highly doubtful. Just like every other truth in my life just about now.

“God, I’m missing China,” wailed Lil through her bunny phone.

“You’re what?” I replied.

“It’s the smells,” said Lil. “I don’t know. There’s something about the scents there. When that’s taken away, it breaks your heart.”

I suggested she find a dumpster to suck on.

After hanging up I spent half the night online trying to map myself and my sister onto whatever this multi-headed floral/chemical conglomerate is up to. I still can’t say what that might be. Hydrangea Labs has been investigated thrice for patent theft, each time inconclusively. A series of CEOs have come and gone, none of them leaving much of a mark. The company is consistently in the black while lagging considerably behind the obscene profits of the industry as a whole. Whatever Hydrangea’s game, good old American greed doesn’t seem to be much of a part of it. Which is suspicious if anything is.

Ralpho emerges from the bathroom reeking of Old Spice, his hair slicked back. He looks at me as though expecting a compliment.

“Your shower okay?” I ask.

“While it lasted,” says Ralpho. “I couldn’t do my cream rinse.”

“You ready to do some dim sum?”

“Yeah. Let me get dressed.”

It takes him thirty minutes. Finally Ralpho steps into his shoes and I grab my empty wallet—just in time to notice that a Chinese man is standing in the open doorway.

I gaze inquiringly at a perishingly thin man of at least seventy years, dressed in white leather loafers and an electric-blue three-piece suit with white piping. And a white fedora. No feather. He’s smiling at me.

“You’ll find Madam Wu downstairs,” I announce. “Please give her my regards and ask whether she’s checked the linen closet lately.”

“Mistuh Man-suh?” comes the reply. “I Mistuh Piao Pin Tian. Correct deds.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Correct deds,” he repeats. “Get the money.” Piao steps close enough to hand me a business card featuring purple Chinese characters against the lurid Kowloon skyline. There’s exactly one English word, in bright red. Collections.

“Correct deds some gentlemen USA,” says Piao. “Please pay money eighty-seven thousand dollar. You got?”

I look up at the frozen smile. There’s one tooth missing. “Eighty-seven thousand? Really?”

“Small correction fee.”

“You charge a forty-thousand-dollar collection fee?” I say, impressed.

Ralpho tosses Lil’s towel onto a chair. “Who’s the asshole?”

“Little misunderstanding,” I say.

Piao says, “You please pay money eighty-seven thousand dollar.”

“You please get the fuck out of here,” says Ralpho, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

My tongue plays nervously with the newly re-installed maxillary first premolar crown. It doesn’t feel exactly right. I think Dr. Xylophone put it in sideways.

“Look, Mister, uh—” I say, “I’ll call my friends back in the States and straighten this out. Understand? Make call? Tele-tele?”

“No more call,” says Piao, still smiling rigidly. “I correct ded.”

Ralpho steps forward and places his right palm over Piao Pin Tian’s smile. As I watch stupified, Ralpho backs the old man out of Lillian’s apartment and onto the balcony. No longer smiling, Piao grabs his now-crooked fedora with both hands and turns to run awkwardly in the direction of the stairs.

“You come here again,” Ralpho shouts after him, “I’ll throw you off the fucking balcony—and your cunt of a wife with you.”

Only now do I see the old woman waiting at the head of the stairs, a gauze mask over her face and a briefcase in each hand. Her eyes look frightened.

“Uh… ,” I say to no one in particular.

Ralpho dusts his hands. “Listen, man, I been through that collection shit. There’s stuff you just can’t put up with. You ready?”

Again I look in the direction of the stairs. Both deds-corrector and wife are gone. Suddenly I’m no longer so worried about the sideways maxillary first premolar crown.

On the bus, Ralpho is moody. After posing a few questions, I learn that he is freshly married. Ralpho says it like it’s a medical condition. The new wife is Chinese, twenty-nine years of age, a good speaker of English, and a salaried government employee. Altogether not a bad catch at all.

“And you’re looking for work down here?” I ask, surprised.

Ralpho fidgets uncomfortably. “If I find something here, she can put in for a transfer.”

Maybe I should put in for a transfer. It’s been my experience that debt collectors, like social diseases, have a way of coming back in ever more alarming forms. Could be I should meet Lillian’s plane with luggage in hand. I can tell her I feel a call to be at our mother’s bedside, so could she put my airfare on one of her credit cards for now? It’ll be a month before she discovers that my flight was to Amsterdam.

Arriving at one of Dongmen’s trendier dim sum restaurants, Ralpho and I claim a balcony table overlooking the street, and he nods approvingly at the view of the busy plaza below. “I didn’t expect to see so many people out,” he says. “From what you hear in Beijing, that pneumonia stuff has this whole province shut down.”

“I’m hearing the same thing about Beijing,” I say.

“Rumors,” replies Ralpho. “New one every day.”

“The big pastime around here is boiling vinegar. It’s supposed to disinfect the air in your apartment. If you don’t die from the fumes first.”

“Die?” asks Ralpho.

“Three so far,” I say. “People are sticking their heads into the pan and inhaling for ten minutes at a time.”

“Stupid fucking Chinese,” says Ralpho.

We select a few dishes from a rolling cart, and I pull out my personal wooden chopsticks.

Ralpho stares at them. “You carry your own?”

“Don’t you?” I say.

“Don’t they get… dirty?”

“I put them through the clothes washer every now and then,” I tell him.

Ralpho’s still staring. “That should work.”

“It has to work at least as well as whatever they’re doing in the kitchen.”

Ralpho examines his plastic chopsticks unhappily for a moment then shrugs and digs in. “How’s the novel coming?” he asks.

“Great,” I reply.

Bernie just asked me to send him another copy of the manuscript. He’d left his copy in the back seat of a Going Downtown? Taxi. Actually I’m surprised that he left the office with it at all, unless he’s using it to wrap fish.

The first round of dim sum is pickled something or other with something raw on top. The second round is boiled something or other with something fried on top. I’m learning about Chinese cuisine.

“How’s it going with the ETs and gun control?” I ask Ralpho.

He doesn’t look up from his dim sum. Wrong question.

A young woman passes our table in a sheer black dress, and Phoebe Sternbaum flashes through my mind. She did finally return my phone call. Twice. Now I’m the one not returning hers. After the wedding thing, we met once for lunch, but I don’t know. All she wants to do is rant about Hah-row and I haven’t been able to redirect her. I no longer attend Happy Learner English Salon. They’re slow payers and anyway I’m ineligible for the door prizes.

“You ever read the news?” asks Ralpho. There’s a little sauce on his moustache.

I shake my head.

“Saddam met a UN deadline today,” I’m told. “The White House was hoping he’d miss it. We want to stomp the living shit out of him, which I suppose we will anyhow.”

I refill Ralpho’s glass with Hsingtao before my own, following local custom, and ask, “Do you really think we’re securing the oil reserves to go after China and North Korea?”

Ralpho’s pale blue eyes grab mine. “Did I say that?”

“You wrote it in an email.”

He looks stunned. After a moment, he adjusts his glasses and shrugs. “That must’ve been before I found out it’s true.”

“So it’s true?” I say.

Ralpho sets down his chopsticks and lights a cigarette with dramatic lethargy. “You know me. I like to have a beer and bat the breeze. Sometimes I talk to somebody who knows a few things. Sometimes that somebody gives me a message to pass along to somebody else. I’m not here looking for a job, okay? My wife’s terrified of that pneumonia shit. I’d have to knock her out to get her on the plane.”

I gaze at Ralpho uncertainly.

“What I’m about to tell you,” says Ralpho, “stays here, at this restaurant. Don’t ask me about it later, especially at your apartment. Okay?”

“Someone’s sending me a message?”

Ralpho taps a nonexistent ash. “He’s an okay guy. If he says he’s doing you a favor, he’s probably doing you a favor. It’s kind of cool, actually. The Chinese are terrified of you. It has to do with the ESP stuff. Ever since you and your sister got here, China’s remote viewing program has been down. Can’t receive, can’t send. They’re trying to figure out what you two are doing.”

I’m still gazing uncertainly. “We aren’t doing anything.”

Ralpho nods. “We know that, but they don’t. Neither do the North Koreans. Here’s the thing. Everybody and his dog knows that you guys worked for that lab with the NSA connections. When they scanned your passports in Beijing, flags went up. Now suddenly China’s RV protocols aren’t working. You connect the dots.”

“I think that’s called jumping to conclusions.”

“They’re taking it pretty seriously.”

“Shit,” I say, falling back in my chair. “Good thing Lillian’s in Memphis.”

“That’s the other part,” says Ralpho. “When your sister left and you stayed, that kind of worried them a little. Maybe you two are constructing some kind of information pipeline. They’re trying to hack in now.”

I blink thoughtfully. “This is some truly amazing, paranoid… harebrained…”

“It’s the most bizarre thing,” says Ralpho a bit too happily.

“So what are we supposed to do?”

Ralpho sharpens the end of his cigarette against the ashtray. “Nothing. Stay put. Where you live is good ‘cause you’re surrounded by people and there’s guards. Don’t go anywhere alone. Don’t trust new people. Just hang tight for now. Our guys are keeping an eye on things.”

“Would you like to define ‘our guys?’”

“I’m telling you everything I can tell you. Just keep a low profile, okay? Especially for the next few weeks.”

“Why the next few weeks?”

“That’s the other, other part.” Ralpho shifts forward in his chair and lowers his voice. “There’s a lot of political shit going on in Beijing. It looks like a regime change. Three guys are jockeying for prime minister and party chairman. The smart money’s on Wen Jiabao, but it could shift in a second. The point is, everybody’s on edge. All the cliques suspect you and your sister of working against them because they know you aren’t working for them.

“When everybody’s on edge,” says Ralpho, pausing for effect, “people can get hurt. So, no sudden changes in habits. No plane tickets. No phone calls. Just sit tight till this thing blows over.”

“How long should that be?” I ask.

“However long it takes for China to get a new leader. And watch what you say, okay? You never know who you’re talking to.” Ralpho toys with his cigarette for a moment. “Like when some stranger steps forward and offers you a job, for instance. Don’t you wonder why?”

I give him a stare. “You’re talking about Bellamy.”

Ralpho doesn’t reply.

“Little round glasses?” I say. “Hooked nose?”

Ralpho nods. “He uses lots of names. I’d be careful around him. Belongs to Wen Jiabao. Everything you say goes into a report.”

As Ralpho finishes his cigarette, I try to think of a sensible question. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised about Bellamy. Lately he’s been pressuring me to move back to my dumpster’s-hiney apartment, whatever that’s about. Probably so his faction-mates can rummage through my underwear drawer every time I leave the place. I’m increasingly curious as to what Ralpho might know about a certain little corner drugstore called Hydrangea Laboratories, but my mouth can’t quite form the words. How do I know that Ralpho doesn’t report to the Venusians?

The lonely life of a pawn. Monitored. Coveted. Just generally fussed over until things become tedious and it’s time to simplify the board.

“So that’s it?” I say.

“That’s it.”

“What about Lillian?”

Ralpho looks at me in surprise. “Don’t tell her. Don’t tell anybody. And for the love of God, don’t let your sister get on a plane to Beijing.”

“I don’t feel so good,” I tell my glass of Hsingtao.

“I’m not surprised,” says Ralpho. “They’ve been throwing everything they’ve got at you, pal. I have no idea what that means, exactly. Do you?”

“How the hell would I know? I’m not trained in psychic warfare.”

Ralpho eyes me appraisingly. “If I were you, I’d talk to somebody who is.”