Chapter Twenty-Three

When I left campus at lunch today, Phoebe’s Buick was at the curb. The driver’s window motored down, and Phoebe said, “Why you don’t call me? I leave you two messages.” The dark shades concealed her eyes but not her implacability. I muttered an excuse, not a very good one even by my standards.

“I want to tell you something,” said Phoebe, “but not chase you around like some schoolgirl. You want talk to me, I eat dinner at Shanghai Hotel tonight. You come, you don’t come, I don’t care.”

Up went the window and off she drove.

Women. What can I say. Listen politely to one or two of their hard-luck stories, and you see what it gets you. Besides, I have plans tonight.

I’m standing outside the open doorway of the American Teacher’s Apartment, coddling my fourth gin sour of the evening and watching the sun put itself to bed in the pink hydrogen sulfide soup of the west. It’s been a day. After Lil’s four English Conversation classes—and my brush with Mrs. Sternbaum—I bused over to Primary School Focus Youth Shenzhen to help Tree with her balky satellite uplink. I carried along a few common fuses, which turned out to be all the situation required.

“Buy yourself a good voltage regulator,” I told Tree. “Chinese voltage is all over the place.”

“Praise Jesus Janus Aphrodite,” she cried. “I could see myself walking into the hardware store and asking for a satellite uplink. Sit yourself down. I’ll pour you some iced tea.”

I willingly pulled back a chair. Tree’s iced tea is not the typical exercise in prudery one encounters in restaurants these days but a liberally sugared and lemon-wedged delight of rattling ice cubes and wistful dreams of Old South front porches in late June. “I can only stay for a few minutes,” I told her. “I’m working on a little project in Lil’s kitchen. Making better use of the space.”

Much better, in fact. Last night I’d walked home from Studebaker Supermarket with a small aquarium, a pair of disposable latex gloves, some stainless-steel tweezers, a veterinary syringe, five glass jars with lids and a package of freshly milled rice flour. This evening’s plan involves hanging my strongest reading glasses on my nose, pulling the latex gloves onto my hands, lifting Ralpho’s spore-print delicately from its envelope with the stainless-steel tweezers, and injecting myself with the rice flour. Actually I need to check the online instructions once more, but with spring fast approaching with its daily thundershowers, how long can it be before mushrooms are sprouting from beneath my underarms? More than the usual number, I mean?

Tree took a seat at the table and I said, “So what’s the story with you and that Xu guy?”

“Mister Xu,” she replied crisply (still sounds like shoe), “has put my entire library of broadcasts on the website. You can listen, you can download, you can do anything you want. I’m extremely indebted to him.”

“I’d say,” I said, rattling my ice cubes, “that either the faint scent of romance is in the air or someone’s burning a truck tire. Tell me, dear. Does that wooden leg have any common household uses?”

“Mr. Xu,” said Tree, “may be the world’s number one authority on Chinese astrology and numerology. And he knows a great deal about the Fibonacci sequence—more, in fact, than you. You owe it to yourself to talk to him.”

“Ah,” I said, “Mr. Xu and Mr. Fibonacci have met.”

Fibonacci, for the uninitiated, actually Leonardo Pisano Bogollo, was the first modern thinker to notice that nature moves in predictable lurches. A typical seedling, for example, begins by making one leaf, then two, then three, then five, then eight, and so on, exactly the same sequence every time. What fascinated Fibonacci was that the next number always equals the sum of the previous two. This remains perfectly constant, even when the numbers reach into the hundreds of thousands. Not rocket science, perhaps, but pretty cool for thirteenth-century Italy.

Tree continued, “Our Mr. Xu has established absolute correlations between the Sequence and the development of human intelligence. His work shows that we are at the brink of a huge step forward. You know how when you plot the Sequence on the number grid, it makes a spiral?”

“I do.”

“And that the spiral exactly matches the growth pattern of a nautilus shell?”

“And a sunflower,” I said, “and planetary motions, and I think the national debt.”

“Well, Mr. Xu says there are very clear numerical landmarks that show where we are right now, and—”

“Which is where?” I interrupt.

“You know exactly where,” said Tree, feigning astonishment. “We are at the Three-three-three.”

I set down my frosted glass. “Tree. Listen to me. There is no Three-three-three in the Fibonacci sequence. I don’t know where you got that whole big wad of goo, but it’s something less than fully baked, if you don’t mind my saying. Besides which, Lillian is on the other side of the world and there’s not one thing we can do about it.”

“The devil may be in the details,” said Tree, smiling, “but the angel is in the intention.”

“I love all these little slip-joints in your theories,” I complain. “If something doesn’t tie together—hey, just insert a little Uncle Remus or nose hair of Nebuchadnezzar. Or better yet, conduct a little more in-depth research with our Mr. Xu and his wooden—what body part was it?”

Tree has another Mister back in Memphis, should you care to know it. Mr. Carter. I’ve never met the man, but Lil swears he’s a mortician. “Let the dead bury the dead,” Tree is said to have declared some years back when she picked up her purse and walked out on him. Evidently neither of the two seems capable of divorcing the other. Lil tells me they’re actually very close in their way.

I’m a senior Assumptionist nun in my way.

I throw down the last of my fifth gin sour, gazing at the grey-brown goo of a western sky that recently promised me a sunset. Hurrying to set the empty glass in the sink, I wheel and grab my keys. Darkness is setting in and I need to make one more run to Studebaker Supermarket. I’m a bit low on gin. And ma huang. And vermiculite, which is supposed to be good for really frisky mycelium growth.

Exiting the gate, I wave to the two guards—both of them are awake and wearing pants—and walk past the spot where Phoebe’s Buick intercepted me earlier today. I can’t help but skirt around it. I don’t know what’s with that woman. Or with me. The ground seems to have subtly shifted beneath my feet. I find myself wondering why men put up with the negativity of a Phoebe Sternbaum. It’s hard to say, but something seems to happen to a woman when she hits that spot around thirty-two, thirty-three, somewhere in that faded and jaded spot. She’s pissed about it and now her needle-like eyes are surveying the room in search of a man to blame it on. God help you if you happen to be sitting there. I don’t think I was really seeing that before I looked up to discover that lively little sprout of a Rui Long perched on the edge of the American Teacher’s Settee Chair.

So open. So pliant.

Not that I would place a mere teenager above a fully formed and self-arrived woman. What fully formed and self-arrived man would favor a sprig to a completely opened jasmine? A half-formed idea to a master’s thesis? A giggle-box to a fine cello?

I’ll let you know once I’ve thoroughly sampled each.

There was an article in a recent English edition of the Beijing Daily. A schoolteacher in Shaanxi Province was convicted of behaving in an untoward manner with one of his female students. The verdict came two days ago. They executed him this morning. I don’t know why that comes to me just now.

As usual, I avoid the busy intersection approaching Studebaker Supermarket, turning instead onto a narrow side street. The unceasing noises of the inner city retreat as I’m closed in by the small sounds of apartment life drifting from open windows. On weekend nights, there’s at least one major mah-jongg game in progress here, the tinkle of the tiles rising above the laughter of unseen women, their husbands away drinking beer at a neighborhood café. On this weeknight, aromas of dinner mingle with soft television sounds. As I turn a dogleg in the little lane, I’m surprised by the appearance of a surprisingly full moon between two high-rises. Asked Li Bai:

The bright moon, how long has it shone,

I ask the great sky, while lifting my cup.

I cannot name where in the Heavenly Palace

To place this miraculous night…

Or this untimely hard-on. I should never contemplate Rui Long as the moon is rising. Such a gem of a young woman and so in need of guidance. I admit I may have pushed things a tad during her first visit. In class today, Rui Long didn’t so much as make eye contact. Well, give her a few days to digest everything she’s going through just now. Soon enough, she’ll heliotrope back in the direction of her true support.

Suddenly behind me is the roar of an eight-cylinder engine, and I move to the right as garish high-beams flood the little lane. Beside me, a police car abruptly stops and a uniformed officer steps out of the passenger door to block my way. I look upon a stocky middle-aged man with an arrogant smirk and a stump for a right arm. He uses his left hand to open the rear door of the cruiser and motion me to get inside.

“English teacher,” I say, my thumb pointing toward Lil’s school. “Diplomatic Immunity. Facial hair.”

Ignoring my words, the officer spreads his feet, grabs me by the shirt collar, and yanks me forward while kneeing me in the groin. I bend forward with an ooof and he shoves me into the rear seat of the cruiser.

“American citizen!” I howl. “Magazine Mariposa! Best Southern Novel of 1999!”

The one-armed policeman seats himself beside me in the back seat, his dark eyes gleaming with menace.

“I swear to God,” I tell him, “I haven’t touched a hair on her head.”

“Put inside your arm,” says the officer.

“Put what inside my arm? Did you hear what I just said?”

He’s holding a plastic leaf-and-garden bag. “Put inside your arm.”

“Listen to me. Call Miriam Goldfarb at—”

The officer behind the wheel turns to backhand me hard across the face. Stunned, I don’t put up much of a fight as the one-armed man covers my right arm with the plastic bag, seizes my right hand with his unexpectedly powerful left, and forces it the wrong way. I bay like an adolescent Beagle hound.

“Is courtesy Mr. Piao Pin Tian,” he growls. “Correct ded.”

With a sudden and horrific yank, the policeman forces my arm even farther in the worst of all possible directions. I think I hear the tendon pop. Just as suddenly, he reverses direction and I hear both bones of the lower arm snap. One more jerk, and I feel the jagged bones rip through the skin.

The last thing I hear before passing out are the words: “Fourteen day you pay ded or fix other fucking arm, too.”