Chapter Forty-Two

I never was much of a fan of Nine. For a while I tried convincing myself it was an upside-down six. How exactly do you trust a number that, multiplied by anything, reduces to nine? Seven times nine for instance is sixty-three, and six plus three equals nine. Any multi-digit number, meanwhile, when reversed and subtracted from itself always results in a number divisible by nine. Want more? There’s lots more. I once devised a base-eight mathematics so as never to see the abominable thing again.

So now we’re given to believe that nines are popping up in our composite reality like so many loaves and fishes, and all I can say is, when does the water turn to wine?

I’m kneeling in Lillian’s kitchen, using a chlorine powder to scrub away the Julian film, as it were. Meanwhile, a distant piano tinkles, or does that summon the wrong image? I’ve heard these same faint Joplinesque piano noodlings on other evenings and wondered whose fingers warm the keys, and whether a martini glass waits on a nearby napkin or across the room sits an old woman, her eyes focused on some other time, some other place. Like the mournful trombone of afternoon, it’s one more spoon to stir this soup of neighborhood sounds announcing the end of day, and loose, cigarette-tapping tales of remembered things.

From this spot in Lil’s darkening kitchen, I can gaze into a hundred windows, each one uncurtained and naive with trust. Sometimes I switch off the kitchen light and just stand here, scanning these collected volumes, hoping still to find some clue as to how it’s done, this living business that other people seem to know so much about.

Two men came today. It was the same two guys who replaced the bathroom door. This time they wanted to re-lay the buckled tile flooring. Fine with me. Reverse feng shui, says Tree. If your life can reflect your home, why can’t your home reflect your life? “Your grids are coming unfrozen,” she told me. “I see it in your face. You’re coming to life, baby.”

It hurts like hell when your grids come unfrozen, especially when you’ve recently stopped drinking railroad gin. All at once I can’t stand the thought of alcohol. The vaguest scent is enough to send me scampering to the squatter. It must have been that final evil mushroom that did it. Whatever it is.

Before the two workmen left, they put the mattress back on the box springs for me. I immediately went around picking up my clutter and ripping down what remained of the get-well art and just generally tidying up.

The place echoes now.

Everything here echoes with recollections of my tortured tenure at Shenzhen High School of Electronic Indifference. I just subbed my final three classes. Nimbutsu Nimbutsu Blind Lemon Jefferson. The students were in their usual Friday humor, i.e., utterly unaware that a teacher was in the room, so I decided against lengthy speeches. Let them figure it out for themselves when Lil shows up on Monday. In fact, it may be Wednesday before most of them realize it’s Lil up there. Anyway, I fully admit to feelings of both relief and, um, poignancy when the final bell sounded and I yelled, “Dismissed!” over the groaning of chairs. One learns to say dismissed at just the right moment, namely when the students rise to leave. It produces the illusion of being obeyed. Anyway, off they went and there I stood clapping chalk dust off my hands for the final time, thinking gee I wish I’d had sex with more of those girls.

The war’s over, by the way. Not that Iraq surrendered. There is no Iraq to surrender. We ran out of villages to overrun and were down to shooting the stray individual, so we decided to declare it over ourselves. Good move, I say. The folks back in Duluth like long undies and short wars. Uh, operations. Myself, I’m into really spiffy kitchens, as my sister is coming back and not in the best of moods.

I’m glad there’s a piano in this neighborhood and that it’s not too near. Until it’s named, a song is every song, a kitchen every kitchen, the faintly green-tinted night sky every possible sky. The pianist doesn’t play often, and I like it that way, standing here in Lil’s kitchen, hands wet, gazing out at the glows of kitchens across the way, monitoring the kai xin gou at the windowsill, its new leaflets patiently opening.

I’m not quite sure how I’ll replace all this once it’s gone.

I called her Lilly. When we were kids I called my sister Lilly.

“Oh? And how exactly did you arrange that?”

That’s what I said to Arnie this afternoon when he called to say he’d just been fired by his school.

“My boss called me into his office,” he explained, “and said all the foreign teachers in Nanshan District have just been released effective immediately. So how soon can I be packed? Of course, it only took a couple of phone calls to find out he’s lying out his ass. I’m being fired ‘cause I like to party in Hong Kong and he can’t stop me. But that’s the whole Chinese thing, right? Nobody cares that it’s an obvious lie, just so long as it greases things along. Whatever. I got a nice severance check and I’m headed for Bali. See ya.”

Arnie might run into Meng Xue Nong and Jiang Wen Kang there. They were mayor of Beijing and national health minister, respectively, until a few hours ago. I wonder if they were told that all the mayors and health ministers were being released effective immediately.

“This country seems to be really good at just two things,” said Arnie before hanging up. “Under-reacting and over-reacting. First there was no SARS. Remember? Now they’re shutting down restaurants and hotels. They’re quarantining international flights. They’re incinerating bodies without notifying next of kin. They’re even refusing to turn over the ashes. Do you know how many people have died from SARS? Total?”

“Not exactly.”

“Three hundred and seventy-two,” said Arnie. “You know how many have died from AIDS in the same period? One and a half million.”

It’s tough out there.

Arnie closed the conversation by telling me to take care of myself. I asked him what he meant by that.

“Eat more,” he said. “Think less.”

The American mantra.

I hung up the phone feeling an odd mixture of things. It was a little strange not saying anything about my own pending departure, but I couldn’t quite get it out. I haven’t told anyone outside of Joe. I don’t know what to say anymore. My grids are coming unfrozen?

The clock says it’s eleven. I decide to turn on the news. Anything for a little comic relief. The first thing I see is the mayor of Hong Kong and his deputies, all elbows and assholes mopping the floors of their offices for the benefit of the cameras. You think they didn’t get the message with the firings in Beijing? Next up is footage of beaming schoolkids holding up posters with helpful hygienic hints. One poster shows a man spitting on the sidewalk while a family recoils in horror. You can get a twenty-buck fine for spitting on a Chinese sidewalk these days. Just think of the revenue. Now we’re seeing various shots of the streets of Beijing, which looks totally dead. At a nearly deserted train station, passengers take turns passing through a temperature scanner. I switch off the TV. It’s time I got out of this country before someone forces me to floss.

At least we’re getting a few decent jokes out of this:

“SARS has a ninety percent survival rate. That’s a higher survival rate than just living in China.”

“People with SARS shouldn’t be ostracized. Many SARS patients live happy, productive lives for three days before their lungs fall into their underpants.”

“I’ve always said the Chinese can’t handle a crisis. Have you seen their fire drills?”

“Finally they’ve hit upon a workable method of population control.”

“So far, eight Canadians have died of SARS. With the exchange rate, I think that’s five Americans.”

And this verse, which borrows the melody of “When You Wish Upon a Star”:

When you kiss a girl with SARS

You’ll get pulmonary scars.

If you dare go French with her

Your note comes due.

When she sneezes, don’t inhale.

Send her greetings through the mail.

When you kiss a girl with SARS,

They’ll quarantine you.

I decide to take a late night stroll.

It’s Friday, thus all one point three billion Chinese are outside lolling, hocking, all the usual, many of them shirtless or in PJs, every one of them blissfully unaware of the obvious, namely that the world around them is coming irreparably unglued due in large part to themselves. With all the coal this country burns, China could almost be America the Sequel but for the uncanny contentedness here. All along the broad Friday night sidewalk, children scamper and gurgle and power plastic trikes, and clutches of women ballroom-dance in tiny white sneakers as their husbands stand together and congratulate one another on their acumen. Not a single serotonin uptake inhibitor among them. Not one.

I’ve said that China is a hard place to be if you’re Chinese, and by day it certainly is. Still one has to wonder at the unanimity these people must feel. To be both in and of a place of such monolithic self-same, to be swallowed whole by the enormity of this one thing that you are.

Chinese-y.

I turn into an unexplored neighborhood and enter the darkest lu I can find, hoping to get lost or at least mislaid for a while. I let narrow alley lead unto narrower lane, each open window a bit nearer my face, many of them emitting the hot-oil munge of course number six or seven, most emitting the cathode-ray glow of Big Brother’s face-splitting smile, at each tight corner a grotesque grocery of one bare bulb—all of it sewn tight with interlocked stitches into the vast sweet-toxic darkness by the knife-sharpener’s song.

Once, just once, I caught sight of the knife-sharpener himself. He walked beside an old bicycle with a grinding wheel mounted on the back.

I try to shake myself awake. I am so China-numbed that I can no longer see this place. If ever I truly did. Tree is always singing the praises of these people, telling me how long and how many amazing truths they’ve discovered. How gracefully they’ve learned to move through life. Could be she’s right. How would I know?

I mourn China already. I mourn the borrowed fourth-floor walk-up and its heavy-footed cross-breeze. I mourn the pert well-intentioned rappings at the hollow door, and my sister’s hopelessly estrogenic things strewn about. I mourn the window song, the teeming unhurried murmur of one more hour in one more Chinese day.

I mourn pie-faced Nancy Drew.

Well, almost.

One block from campus, I decide I’m not quite ready to return to my sister’s sad, echoing apartment. I take the scenic route through Lichee Park. Hands in pockets, legs a little heavy now, I pass through the broad meadow that by day is a weft of kite strings. I pause for a moment in a dark circular plaza, its polished tiles gathering every trace of light from the surrounding city. My last night in China, and there’s no moon to give me a shadow for company.

I’d completely forgotten, but today there it was on Lillian’s desk. Bobby’s translation of Li Bai’s signature poem. Not printed out but meticulously rendered by brush and ink on the handmade rice paper. At left were the original Chinese characters, at right the English words. I think I can recall them:

Drinking Alone in the Moonlight

Amidst these flowers, a jug of wine.

I pour myself the cup of aloneness.

Raising it high, I invite the bright moon

Then turn to my shadow, which makes of us three.

Because the moon does not know how to drink wine

She has given me this shadow for company.

So let our mirth keep pace with spring!

I sing and the moon begins to reel.

I dance and the shadow lurches grotesquely.

While I’m still awake, let us rejoice together.

Too soon each will go his own way.

Beloved friends, promise me

That we will forever dance, beyond all passion

And meet again far beyond the Milky Way.

Returning to Lil’s school through the dense lichee grove, I gradually re-enter the noise of the twelve-lane. Before I reach the thoroughfare, my eyes catch the flare of a cigarette lighter that illuminates a man’s face, and I stop in my tracks. That’s odd. In the momentary flare of the lighter, I saw a face with a hooked nose and a pair of tiny black-rimmed spectacles.

Retreating into a shadow, I spend a few minutes watching the orange tip of the cigarette as it swings up and down, and ask myself why Bellamy would be standing in the shrubbery opposite the entrance of Lil’s school. No reasonable answer comes forward. Bellamy, said Ralpho, belongs to the Wen Jiabao faction that suspected Lil and I of working against their interests. But Wen is no longer a Beijing wannabe. He’s the Premier of China. Wouldn’t that mean less generalized paranoia? Evidently not. The butane lighter flares again, and it’s definitely Bellamy’s face that checks the face of a wristwatch.

From my position in the shadows, the entrance to the high school is clearly in view, and a sudden movement at the gate catches my eye. I watch two men emerge from Electronic Excellence and walk briskly away. I’ve never seen either of them before. The moment the two are gone, Bellamy’s face appears once more, lit by the glow of a phone screen. He utters a single phrase into the phone before snapping it shut and turning away to disappear in the lichee shadows.