Dragon Day (29 page)

He holds the kite out in front of him, slightly above his head. Waits for a gust of wind and lets it go.

It takes him a few tries to get the thing up in the air, but when it does rise, it's as easy and gentle as anything that's going back to where it really belongs.

Up in the air.

I watch it rise. Lao Zhang reels in the string to keep it from going too high too fast. So we can all see what's written on it.

对不起，原文已经被删除

It's the message you get when you're surfing the web here or following links on Weibo, and whatever you were looking for got harmonized. Censored.

And in English:

sorry, the original text has been deleted.

We all stand there watching. The kite bobs and weaves. It takes at least five minutes before a couple of those obvious plainclothes guys start pointing at the kite and yapping at each other about it. Like,
What do we do? Is this subversive? It
must
be, but we aren't exactly sure
why
it is.
One of them makes a call on his cell phone.

Then they march over to Lao Zhang and start asking him questions.

I watch him shrug. Continue to fly the kite. One of the plainclothesmen grabs the kite string out of his hands. Lao Zhang lets him. He knows it's over. The plainclothes guy reels in the kite. Snatches it out of the sky.

More plainclothesmen converge, along with a couple of actual uniforms. They're getting in Lao Zhang's face now, but he just stands there, all calm and Zen. Finally two of them flank him, grab his upper arms and frog-march him away.

I start to follow. I don't even think about it. Harrison clasps his hand around my wrist.

“Don't.”

I stop. “I know. But—”

“We'll try to get the plates of whatever car they put him in, so we know who has him,” Harrison says. “That's all we can do right now.”

He stares out over the square. People still fly kites. Take selfies. It's as if nothing happened at all.

Harrison takes me out for a late lunch and drinks at a
hutong
restaurant that serves Malaysian food. I don't eat that much. I tell him what happened with me and the Caos. I tell him I can't do this anymore. “I just need a break, that's all,” I say.

It's funny, because while I'm telling him all this, I'm not really feeling much of anything. I'm mostly staring at my plate of
nasi kandar
and thinking I should take it to go for later, because I can't eat it right now.

“Ellie.”

I look up. Harrison's expression is one I haven't seen on him before. He looks . . . I don't know. Sad. Concerned. Like he actually gives a shit.

“We can manage a break. Don't worry about that. Do what you need to do.”

I shrug. “Yeah. I will.”

“Just remember, you have a place here.” Then he does something really weird, for Harrison: he reaches out and covers my hand with his.

“What we're doing, it means something. It's important.”

I laugh a little. “Yeah.”

I stumble back to my apartment.

I'm thinking I'm not nearly drunk enough, all things considered. But I'm so far beyond tired that I don't even feel like drinking.

I'll take half a Percocet, I decide. Watch something loud and stupid on TV until I fall asleep. The way I'm feeling, it shouldn't take long.

Funny. The place looks so empty without my mom and Mimi. It's like I'm already gone. A ghost in my own apartment.

I pop open a Yanjing Beer. Collapse on the couch. Retrieve my Percocet stash from my daypack.

I open the bottle and tap a pill onto my palm. Think about it and tap a little harder. I keep doing that until I have maybe a dozen of them cupped in my hand.

I'm trying to calculate what happens if I take them all.

Would that be enough narcotic for me to just sort of
. . .
drift off? Or would I puke them up?

It's actually the acetaminophen you really have to worry about. That shit trashes your liver. So I take an overdose of Percocet, and maybe all I manage to do is blow out my liver and die a slow, horrible death.

“Fuck it,” I mutter. I pour the pills back into the bottle.

I drink my beer. I don't even make it to the end of the bottle before I sink down onto the couch and close my eyes.

What wakes me up is my phone ringing.

My hand finds it on the coffee table. As I pick it up, I try to remember which SIM card is in there. Is this the number the Caos have? Because I really don't want to talk to any of them right now.

Unknown number.

“Shit.”

I hesitate for a moment, and then I slide the bar to answer.
“Wei?”

“Ellie. It is John.”

I feel . . . How do I feel? It's nice to hear from him, I guess.

How much does he know about what happened today at Tiananmen?

“Did you hear? About Lao Zhang?”

“Yes. That's why I call.” A pause. “I think there is a way maybe . . . to . . . to
. . .
have an influence. Over his case. And yours.”

You know, seriously? I'm so done with this. I'm tired. If I'm not going to kill myself, then I just need to get away from all this bullshit. Go someplace peaceful. There has to be a place like that for me somewhere. Right?

“But
. . .
I need you to help,” John says. “And
. . .
you must be careful.”

I let out a sigh.

“Okay,” I say. “What do I have to do?”

Strawberry Crème, 11:30
p.m.

“Not really dangerous,” John told me. “I make sure to watch. But
. . .
maybe he'll be angry.”

“Maybe?”

“I take other pictures. But I cannot be seen. You just must take one. And he must know that you take it.”

I can think of a lot of ways this could go wrong, actually. But I've gotten to that place where I've already surrendered.

Whatever happens, happens.

Strawberry Crème is another one of these overpriced Beijing nightclubs that I've done my best to avoid since moving here. This one's owned by Russians. You know you're getting close to the club because there are all these billboards with Russian women on them, draped in furs and diamonds.

Inside, it's a lot of black and red and gold: a foyer with a huge Plexiglas escalator that has the mechanics exposed, as long and as steep as a ride down to a Beijing subway. Giant paintings line the walls in gold-painted frames, a lot of fake eighteenth-century European stuff: kings and queens and half-naked nymphs. When I get to the bottom of the escalator, there's more red-and-black wallpaper and giant paintings hung from the ceiling as well as on the walls, so if you look up, you'll get an eyeful of pink nymph flesh, plus gold and crystal chandeliers. Look down and you'll see black leatherette booths with gold studs, giant samovars and hookah pipes sitting on tables here and there, and a dance floor with a disco ball and a small stage where go-go dancers are gyrating around poles, vaguely in time to the earsplitting music.

I do some recon, a quick sweep of the floor, checking out the guests. Mostly Chinese men, some Russian men, and a bunch of European women, most of whom are . . . If I had to guess, I'd go with “paid girlfriend”—younger than the men, wearing micro-miniskirts, low-cut blouses, and stiletto heels. There's a lot of vodka being drunk here. There's a lot of drinking period—it's not even midnight, and I'm already seeing dudes spilling their shots and draping themselves on each other.

I'm walking past one of the booths, and who I actually notice first is a Russian-looking man—trim, bald, wearing an open-necked silk shirt and a thick gold chain, lifting his shot glass in a toast and draining it in one gulp. He doesn't seem all that drunk, though. Unlike the Chinese guy next to him, whose face is bright red and beaded with sweat.

Pompadour Bureaucrat.

I get out my phone and snap a picture. Even though John told me what to look for, seeing it in person is so much better than I ever imagined. His shirt's unbuttoned, revealing white tank-top underwear stretched over a potbelly. He's leaning back against the back of the booth and laughing. One of those girlfriends for hire sits on his lap. She picks up a shot glass brimming with liquid and presses it against his lips, until he opens his mouth like he's about to suck it down. Instead she slips a finger in his mouth, and he sucks on that. I take another picture. She withdraws the finger and tilts the shot glass against his lips, and he switches to the vodka.

Which is when the not-drunk Russian guy notices me.

“What are you doing?”

I lift up my hands. “Who, me? Nothing.” I quickly touch the photo to call up the sharing option and hit
message
. Type “
Z
” to bring up the contact number John gave me on the phone today.

“Just sending this to a couple of buddies.”

I hear a choking sound. It's Pompadour Bureaucrat, trying to uninhale his vodka.

“Ni hao!”
I say. “I am so looking forward to drinking tea with you again.”

I didn't think his face could get any redder. I was wrong.

He stands up, spilling vodka and knocking his temporary girlfriend onto the leatherette bench. “You! You, you
. . .
”

“Bitch?” I supply. “I get that a lot.”

He lunges across the table, toppling a whole bottle of vodka and several water glasses. “Give me that!”

I guess he means my phone. “Sure,” I say. “If you want. But that photo I just took? It's already gone.”

I'm so busy gloating that I don't notice the Russian muscle until he's come around from behind the booth and has fixated on me, like a leopard. Or a jaguar. Whatever.

Oh, shit. I pivot and make for the dance floor.

The music's pounding, Russian disco, blue and purple strobes flashing in time, and up on the stage there's a chick with a white fur bikini writhing around one pole and a guy wearing a leather Speedo hanging off the other. I push on through, holding up my arms and waving them in a way that I hope looks sort of like dancing, weaving to the back of the dance floor, Russian Muscle not far behind me, crashing into the dancers like a bowling ball hitting the pins.

“Ellie!”

A hand circles my wrist and pulls me forward.

John.

“This way.”

There's a door by the back of the stage. I plunge through it, led by John. A dark corridor. Then fluorescent lights, a glimpse of long tables and heaps of costumes, half-dressed women and men, the next act in the floor show. Past that, a long concrete staircase, lit by naked bulbs in iron cages.

I'm barely dragging my ass up all these stairs. “Come on, Ellie!” John says, his hand pressed against the center of my back.

“Okay. Okay.”

We get to the top of the stairs. John pushes against a broad door, and we both stumble outside.

Halfway down the block is a new silver Toyota, right wheels parked up on the curb. John jogs ahead, unlocking it with the button on his key. He already has the engine started when I open the passenger door and fall into the seat.

I don't even have the door closed when he peels away from the curb, right wheels hitting the street with a jolt that sends a shock up my spine.

I slam the door shut.

“Holy shit,” I gasp. “That was
. . .
awesome.”

John turns his head to me. He's smiling as wide as I've ever seen him smile. “Yes,” he says. “I thought you would enjoy.”

Chapter Thirty

★

“He was very
angry.” John tries to keep his serious face on, but the smile won't stop breaking through.

“I bet.”

We're sitting in a
jiaozi
restaurant on Andingmen, chowing down on dumplings and vinegar peanuts with spinach. It's two days since I saw Pompadour Bureaucrat at Strawberry Crème.

“I tell him you send these photos to some of your friends. But you say you won't put them on Weibo or send to newspapers and websites if he stops bothering you. And stops bothering Lao Zhang.”

“And?”

“Not sure,” he says, spearing another dumpling. “Of course, he cannot tell me what he decides to do. He already lose a lot of face to me.” The grin sneaks back. “But I think he will do as I suggest. This is a bad time to be accused of corruption.
Renrou sousuo
can cause him lots of trouble. He knows this.”

Renrou sousuo
, “human flesh search engine.” Chinese netizens sick of corrupt assholes, who'd really enjoy spreading Pompadour Bureaucrat's photo through every corner of the Internet.

“Does he know you set him up?” I ask.

John shrugs. “Maybe he suspects. But he cannot prove it. He saw you take picture. Not me.”

I get that hollowed-out feeling in my gut. I don't know exactly what power politics are like in the PSB and the DSD, but it can't be a good thing, having your boss or whatever he is to John suspect that you hold blackmail material on him. And being a guy who's done a bunch of things he hopes Pompadour Bureaucrat never finds out about.

How long can he walk this tightrope before he falls off?

“John
. . .
” I hesitate. I mean, who am I to give anybody advice about how to live his life? “I know you care about justice. About China
. . .
But working with guys like that
. . .
”

I'm probably going to piss him off. If there's one thing I know for sure now, it's that this guy has been on my side. But I still have to ask.

“How much of what you do is good?”

John chews on a dumpling, the muscles in his jaw working harder than they really need to. He swallows, like it's a hard lump to get down. “I don't know,” he says. “I try to do good things. And China faces threats. I believe this. But
. . .
” He picks up another dumpling, shaking his head. “What I do, some of it I don't like. Sometimes I think I do it because I don't know how to do something else.” He dips the dumpling in his soy/vinegar/chili mix, focusing on it like it's the important thing, as opposed to what he's talking about. “I don't know if you can understand,” he says.

“I think I get it,” I say.

After we're done eating, we hang out on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant for a minute to say our good-byes. I'm going to hobble home on foot. John either has his car or took the subway.

Either way, we're going in different directions.

“What do you do next, Ellie?”

“Get out of town for a while. Just stop
. . .
being in this place I've been in.” I shift back and forth from one foot to the other, trying to ease the spasm in my bad leg.

He hesitates. Slips his hands in his pockets. “Can I come and see you sometime? On your travels?”

I nod. “Sure. I'd
. . .
I'd like that.”

We stand there for a moment, as if we're trying to take the measure of each other. After all this time, I still don't really know him, what makes him go, where the anger comes from, why he cares about me.

That last one's probably the biggest mystery of all.

“I see you soon, Ellie,” John says. He turns and walks away, up the sidewalk toward the Second Ring Road.

Harrison calls me the next day.

“I've gotten all the footage from Zhang Jianli's performance,” he says. “We can have someone cut it together and start releasing it, if you believe the time is right.”

I think about John's and my blackmail project and whether publicizing Lao Zhang's detention would help that or hurt.

“Let's give it a few days. It's his piece. Maybe he'll get a chance to cut it together himself.”

I can tell there's a question Harrison really wants to ask, but he doesn't. “If you think so,” he says.

“Just so you know,” I say, “I'm leaving town on Tuesday.”

“Next week?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have a destination in mind?”

“Yangshuo for a couple of days. I might visit some friends who run a bird sanctuary there.”

“After that?”

“Maybe Yunnan. Somewhere the weather's nice and the air is clean.”

A pause. “How long will you be gone?”

“I don't know,” I tell him. “So don't wait for me. Do whatever's best for the foundation.” We've got this charity where we donate money to set up art programs for migrant kids. I'm on the board, but it's not like I run any of that. I've hardly paid any attention to it.

“And your other clients?”

His voice is gentle, but it feels like a slap. I don't want responsibilities. I don't want to be reminded I have them.

“Lucy can handle it for now.”

“All right. But you'll stay in touch. Won't you?”

“Yeah. Sure. I will.”

“You're sure this is all you want to take?”

I've gotten it down to a little backpack and a small duffel bag. “Yeah,” I say. “This is plenty.”

“Well
. . .
” My mom clasps her hands in front of her. “We can keep some things for you at Andy's place.” She turns to him. “Right?”

“Sure,” he says. “We have room.”

My mom's already picked over the kitchen and the DVDs. Most of the good kitchen stuff she'd bought anyway.

“Thanks. There's just a couple of boxes and some paintings.”

I made a deal with my landlady to sell her my TV, couch, and bed. “Very convenient for new renters,” she tells me. The rest of the furniture came with the apartment.

The framed paintings lean against the living-room wall. After a year of doing this art gig, I don't have that many pieces, just five, but I like them. Contemporary calligraphy, a take on a landscape, a satirical map-of-the-world print, a dreamlike image of a Red Guard on a swing, feet aimed at the clouds.

“What's this?” my mom asks. She's looking through the paintings, flipping them forward one by one.

I glance over. It's Lao Zhang's portrait of me, where I'm holding a scared cat and a snarling three-legged dog hugs my leg, against a backdrop of sand dunes and an exploding helicopter, and I look way stronger and smarter than I really am.

It's a cool painting, the one I care about the most, but I never hung it up. Who hangs up a picture of herself? That's just weird.

“Something a friend did,” I say.

My train to Guilin
leaves around 3:45
p.m.
from
the Beijing West Railway Station. I was going to take a cab—the
subway still doesn't connect up with the Beijing West Railway Station; it's supposed to happen later this year—but Andy offers to drive.

We're standing in my now-vacated apartment, the leftover furniture making it look like some kind of hotel suite where no one ever actually lived.

I start to turn him down, and then I take in my mom, who's hugging Mimi and telling her what a good dog she is.

“Hey, Mimi,” I call out. She perks up and scampers over to me. Stands on her hind legs and rests her front paws on my hips. I bend over and ruffle the scruff around her neck. She loves that.

I can't take Mimi with me. I really want to. A part of me feels like I need some living thing around me, who cares about me, and since I just can't deal with an actual person right now, a dog would be perfect.

But it's not fair to her. She'd have to ride on the baggage car of the train. I don't know if I could bring her to most hotels or hostels. And I don't have a clue where I'm going, after Yangshuo.

More to the point, I don't know if I'm capable of taking care of anything. I'm sure not good at taking care of myself.

“Thanks, Andy,” I say. “I'd really appreciate that.”

We get to the train station really early, because the traffic didn't suck as much as I thought it would.

“I can park car, we can wait inside with you,” Andy says.

“That's okay. Besides, Mimi wouldn't like it.” Mimi and I sit in the backseat of Andy's newish Hyundai. Her head rests on my lap. She knows something's up, and she already doesn't like it.

“I don't like it either, girl,” I murmur, staring into her gold-toffee eyes.

I think, Why am I doing this again? I can pretend it's just a vacation, but I know that's not what this really is. Why am I running away?

Because that's what I do.

Andy's gotten us through the tangle of cars and taxis over to the curb in front of the station plaza, up against a white traffic barrier, car horns going off in the haze of exhaust. Not a place where we can stop for long. Which is fine with me. I'm not good with long good-byes.

I get out. Lean in to give Mimi a hug and a scratch around the scruff of her neck. “You're a good dog,” I say. “Be good for Mom and Andy, okay?”

I close the car door carefully. She puts her paws on the doorframe and sticks her nose through the cracked-open window.

Andy's gotten my bags out of the trunk. He lifts the pack so I can put my arms through the straps. Places the duffel bag on my shoulder.

“Thanks,” I say. “And
. . .
thanks. For taking care of my mom.”

Andy frowns a little, as if he's mulling that over. “I like your mom very much. But I think
she
takes care of
me
.”

He reaches out and pats my hand. “You can come back soon.”

“Sure,” I say.

Two guys have trotted over. “Miss! Miss! Carry your bags?”

I shake my head. “I'd better get going,” I tell Andy. “See you soon. And keep me posted on the restaurant.”

I turn to go, and there's my mom. “Oh, hon,” she says, wrapping her arms around me, awkwardly, because of the luggage. I pat her on the back. I want to give in, to let go, to just be a kid and have my mom take care of me, like when I'd have nightmares and she'd come into my bedroom and sing me a song, read me a story.

But I can't. I don't know how. The shit in my head won't dissolve the way those nightmares did once the light came on.

“You're going to be fine,” she murmurs, like she was reading my mind. “It's all going to be fine.”

“Do not tell me God has a plan,” I snap.

She lets go of me. Puts her hands on my shoulders, gives them a gentle squeeze, and smiles. “I won't.”

The Beijing West Railway Station isn't one of my favorite places. A friend of mine once described it as “a Stalinist wet dream topped by a Chinese party hat,” this massive upside-down horseshoe flanked by wings with a pagoda on top that feels like an evil Transformer crouching on the landscape, ready to start stomping its way through Beijing.

The inside's not much better. Three pairs of escalators cordoned off by Plexiglas and giant chrome tubes, like some kind of factory conveyor belts leading us all to be processed. I ride up one to the second floor, where the departure halls are, staring up at the giant information screen, video ads playing in the central slab between the slowly scrolling arrivals and departures. I'm surrounded by bright lights, lit-up plastic signs, neon. I wander down the hall, thinking maybe I should buy some snacks for the trip. Maybe I should sit down and have a beer. I've got plenty of time. It's only two thirty.

Finally I spot my gate, about two-thirds of the way down
the hall. I glance inside. The waiting area is packed, as usual, the
rows of plastic chairs occupied, people squatting or sitting on their luggage in the aisles.

Maybe I'll store my bags in one of the lockers. I've got a soft sleeper; it's not like I'm going to have to fight my way onto the train for a hard seat.

“Yili.”

I turn, and there's Lao Zhang, wearing a white T-shirt and cargo shorts, like he always does when the weather's even a little warm.

I don't know what I'm feeling. It's like everything empties out of me.

“You're okay?” I finally ask.

He nods. “You have time for coffee?”

★ ★ ★

We end up at a McDonald's, sitting at a bright orange plastic table covered with a thin slime of grease and the smell of stale french fries.