A Cup of Light

16

Once Lia turned in her appraisal, she had to wait all through that day and night and until the next morning. Dr. Zheng negotiated. Apparently no pots questions arose, for her phone was silent.

The first morning she had gone out to pick up her dress. It was lovely; it molded to her exactly, and it was a mix of green and russet that brought her to life. She tried it on in the store and then she had to put it on all over again the second she got back to her room. After that she folded it away. It was a dress for an occasion.

There, in the room, she noticed a change on the TV. News, a cut-in; something had happened. She turned it up. Commentators were talking in hushed whispers while the camera showed an empty podium. Finally, the subtitle in English and Chinese: a joint statement by the Chinese Minister of Civil Affairs and the head of the Civil Aviation Administration of China. Two men came out. The Minister started to speak. She leaned closer.

“After careful study,” the Minister said, “the Civil Aviation Administration of China has determined that the crash of China International Airlines Flight Sixty-eight was an accident. It was a single-aircraft event with no complications or interferences from any ship, plane, or other conveyance; or any person or outside parties. The exact cause of the accident is still under investigation.” He gave a curt nod and then turned away; they both walked off camera. It was over. The screen cut back to the anchors, talking excitedly.

And she stood staring. So that was the official statement. That was the answer: an accident. Was this answer real or fake? And would all the ill feeling on the street now evaporate away? Until next time? She felt her usual stab of guilt at how little she really understood certain things here. There was only one facet of China she could fully and responsibly tackle; that was pots. Pots were celestial and endlessly varied and to do them justice took the full force of her mind.

The second morning she took a taxi up to Houhai Lake-just to be there, just to be near the pots-and sat outside, on a bench facing the lake. She watched pleasure boats on the far shore drift under the shade of overhanging branches. Snatches of conversation rose and fell behind her as people passed on the walkway. It was not until she had let go of waiting for it that her phone finally rang. “Wei.”

“Lia.” It was Dr. Zheng.

“Hey.”

“We have a close.”

“How much?”

“One hundred and twenty-six million.”

“What a deal for him!” she cried. “He’s so lucky!”

“Yes. Gao could have got more with multiple buyers. But he wanted it done and over. I don’t suppose we can complain.”

She returned the twinkle in his voice with her own. “No. I don’t suppose we can.”

“Lia,” he said. “Congratulations.” He let the word hang, warm with fondness.

She felt the filial satisfaction of pleasing him, the sense that all the world’s geometry was right, and she secure within it. “Thanks,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Thank you. Did you see the statement?”

“Yes! Yesterday.”

“Too late to send Phillip.”

“I guess so.”

And they both laughed at the same time, her glassy peal and his age-cracked chortle. “Ah, it’s well done. But you’re not finished. Your flight leaves for Hong Kong tomorrow night. You meet the pots there.” He gave her the locator numbers. “Your room’s at the Mandarin.”

“No problems with the flights, I suppose?”

“No,” he said. “All back to normal.”

“Okay, then.” What else could she say? That was it, she was leaving.

“And Lia?” Zheng said.

“Yes?”

“Good job.”

“It was just what I was supposed to do,” she said.

They clicked off and she put her phone back in her pocket. It was over. Why didn’t she feel any different than before? The water kept moving in front of her under the line of willows, the majestic, wind-ruffled pace of its surface unchanged. She had done it. She had wielded her principal sword-intelligence, memory, knowledge-and the deal had worked. It had come to pass. But pleasure boats still passed, the seasons advanced with every minute, and she was sitting alone on a bench.

After a time she walked back up to the road to get in a taxi. She could go somewhere and celebrate by herself.

Bai sat on an overturned metal pail beside his rig, smoking. He was parked in an empty drying barn in the countryside outside Wuhan. The arduous drive had brought him much of the way to Changsha, and here he rested. The arrangement had been made through Huang, one of his crew in Jingdezhen. Five hundred yuan for the use of the barn, no questions asked. He sat there with his cell phone on, waiting, smoking. When the deal was done they’d call him. Then he’d go further south.

In the meantime he reviewed every facet of his fiction: the false wall, the frozen chickens, all the documents.

He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. He thought about the manifest. There was a chicken cup there, one from the reign of Chenghua. Was destiny not smiling on him, to put one of the world’s eighteen cups in this shipment? Had he not just, by purest chance, managed to buy a copy of the Chenghua chicken cup so perfect, so bright in the firmament that only a few people on earth could separate it from one that was real? No one could say he had planned it. This was certainly luck. It was the will of heaven.

He had taken careful note of the cup’s location in the shipment. It was number four hundred thirteen, crate twenty-seven. He looked up at the truck speculatively. Should he switch the cups now?

Just then his cell phone rang. “Wei,” he said.

It was Gao Yideng. “The deal has closed,” he said. “You can leave. Zou-ba,” Go.

“Hao,” he agreed, and as he closed his phone and put it in his pocket he was already climbing into the back of the truck. Indeed he would go. First he had to take care of one small matter.

Late that afternoon Michael and An walked down the hospital corridor. The day had not been good. The head of their hospital was preparing a summary of the city’s public-health issues for the fall meeting of the National People’s Congress. The two of them naturally hoped lead poisoning would be included. But a few minutes in his office had suggested this hope was unrealistic. Not only were reports from every researcher and department head piled up on the desk, but the harried director had made a pointed reference to the need to avoid those issues that the leaders had already recognized, on which they had already taken action, however insufficiently, and about which they had made it clear they did not wish to hear more.

“At least he was straight up front about it,” Michael said later.

“That was for you,” An said morosely. “You’re a foreigner. Not expected to get it.”

“Wonderful. Insult to injury.”

“So let’s get something to eat,” An said.

“You always say that.”

“Exactly right,” said An. “What else? What better?”

“Not tonight for me, though, thanks. I’ve got something on.”

“You’re going to go see that woman.”

Michael smiled. An was right. He so liked it that she had come to his room the day before. He liked the way she just stepped in. He had awakened thinking about her and there she was. “I might call her,” he admitted.

“Ah.” An was staring at him, fascinated. “Well, good luck.”

“Bici,” Michael gave him back, Same to you, and they each grinned in good-bye. Their eyes met and exchanged an understanding of what had just happened in the director’s office; it was disappointing, but they’d go on working. An continued down the corridor and Michael turned to the elevators.

He pressed the DOWN button. He’d never worked in a hospital before. Always he’d been in institutes and research labs. It had been eight months now and he’d gotten used to the faint chemical smell, the constant disembodied voices, the hard fluorescent light. It felt different from when he was a patient himself. Now, in a dogged and unpleasant way, working here felt good to him. It neutralized his balance sheet a little bit. He’d seen things here; he’d seen children die. Nothing had ever affected him like that. He’d seen that the young ones died quickly. He’d heard the staff talk about it. When they were ready they let go. Not like adults. Adults took a long time. It was as if adults had built such a thick, petrified husk around them that this alone gave them the strength, the form to hold on. And by the transient revival that so often came to the dying, adults seemed to find a last little puff of life before the end. They had a term for it here at the hospital-hui guang fan zhao, the reflected rays of the setting sun. Children were lacking in this. They went quickly. He watched as the DOWN light came on and the elevator door slid open.

He had a fear that his life now was just an interlude of hui guang fan zhao, a brief moment before it all came back, worse. And for so long now he had been in this state by himself. He stared up at the digital floor numbers flashing, descending.

He stepped out the big front doors onto a busy boulevard clogged with traffic. All over him was a pall of thick, brown-tinged air, gritty with particulates whose names he knew by heart. He fitted on his headphones, dialed up Cheb Mami, and walked against the insinuating Algerian rhythm, a sound that first emerged in the port town of Oran in the 1930s and now was electrified into the modern world, pulsing in his mind as he descended into the subway station at Chongwenmen.

Bai stopped at a chicken farm outside of Changsha. It was a place where he had made an arrangement. He pulled into the dirt yard and right away caught the pungent scent of blood and slaughter. He’d picked this place over many others for its low prices.

He pulled up to the guard and handed down his paperwork. “Preorder,” he said. “Two thousand pounds.”

The guard with a round face and brushy stand-up hair took the lot number down and punched it into the computer. He squinted at the machine. His face was indifferent. “How are you going to pay?”

“Cash.” Bai counted out from a wad of bills.

The guard took it. “Gate forty-six,” he said.

Bai backed the truck up to the portal. He had already secured the central compartment where the art was stored. Now he opened the freezer in the back and stood to the side while young men, migrant workers, illiterates, faces dark from growing up outdoors, eyes leathered already at twenty, hands swathed in big rough gloves of undyed cotton, numbly packed a ton of frozen chickens into the back of his gleaming, purring, ice-fogging truck. The plucked, stiff carcasses made a stacked wall against the door. Bai watched, his dizzying ambition lifting him high and his cold death fear whispering to him from hell. He smoked to contain himself. When the men were done he tipped them and he drove away.

By that afternoon, Lia had ended up at a bar she knew on Dengshikou, called Counter Culture. It was one of the theme places that had become so common here as proprietors resorted to gimmicks to draw crowds. It had a sixties motif in the U.S. style, with psychedelic posters, a folkie jukebox, and black lights, none of which especially spoke to Lia. But it also had a pinball machine so light and hair-trigger it might have been brand-new, though it was definitely an antique.

She walked over to the corner, behind the tables, and got out her two-yuan coins. The machine was called DMZ, and its back panel had comic-book graphics of American soldiers slogging through a Vietnamese jungle. A little hip humor, she thought, not without edge. She dropped in the coins and felt the machine pop with a satisfying bass thunk as it credited the game. She leaned in, pressed the GO button, and slammed the first ball up the chute.

It rocketed up the side and exploded all over the lit-up bumpers flashing at the top. She used just enough shiver to keep the ball moving, high up, pulling it into pockets and then popping it out again to bounce off bumper pins and side flippers. Not thinking. That was what she liked. Keeping it in play.

She felt her cell in her pocket and was aware of how much she wanted it to ring. She got the ball over to the flippers and caught it, belayed it, held it while she took a long look at the board. This thing with him was only a brief meeting. Or maybe he liked her, but not that way. She stood rock-still and looked down at the perfect ball she held on her flipper, the color and glimmer of mercury, breathless and ready for the moment she would let it go. She could feel her phone against her leg. She did want him to call her, though; this was her true and hoi moon feeling. Maybe it was just a moment, but she felt connected to him. She just wanted to be where he was, and talk to him. She rolled the ball back, snapped the flipper in the middle of the right millisecond, and sent the ball out into its world of finite space.

Bai drove straight on to his first wife’s farm, the next place where he could safely park the truck. He roared into Daoqi Township, shaking with exhaustion, gripping the wheel at the sight of the familiar road at last. Those curves those passes those hillsides, unrolling in front of him, black road in the dissipating light… his steering slipped into unconsciousness. He’d lived here as a young man, newly married. The roads were better now, there were more buildings in the village, but it hadn’t changed so much. He circled the terraced paddies in full yield. He wound around green-tufted hills. It was almost dark. The world behind fell away in steps. At the bottom, barely visible in the shadows, ran a silver ribbon of river.

He climbed up and up and finally steered into a small valley: fields, gardens, and animals. Yujia lived here with her brother and his family. They worked the farm. He pulled into the driveway and parked under the mat-shed.

As he stepped across the mahogany earth, smelled the honeysuckle and the gardenia and the rustling wet bamboo, and saw the lit doorway across the packed barnyard ahead, he let joy overtake him. He strode forward, thinking of his wife’s round arms, her knot of dark hair, and the meal, spiked with fried hot peppers, she would prepare for him later.

His phone went off in his pocket. “Wei,” he said, stopping right where he was, his feet sinking in the animal-rich dirt.

“Bai,” said his friend’s voice. “It’s Zhou. Listen.”

“I’m listening.”

“They’re dead.”

“Who?” Bai had to say, though of course, he knew.

“Hu and Sun,” Zhou answered. “They’re dead. Shot.”

“When?”

“Today.”

A long silence hung between the two men on their palm-size satellite phones. Bai stared at the low, baked-brick, timber-raftered house against the Hunan hillside, the warm yellow lights already burning in its windows. Life was a gift. Never forget. Let the door open on a view of mountains. Hoi moon.

And later that night Zhou was to meet him to help him drive on south. He knew that now he had to at least give Zhou an opening, a chance to back out and still keep face if he did so. “Shall I still see you tonight?” Bai asked as if the matter were an offhand one.

“Of course!” Zhou said. “Don’t fear. You’ll see me. I’ll be there.”

In the end she had to wait until the next morning for Michael to call her. When her phone lit up she was still half asleep. She clicked in her hearing aids. She didn’t know who it was. “This is Lia,” she said in her best half-awake work voice.

“Where were you?” he said, and he sounded right next to her, right in her ear. “I watched for you to come back last night but you never came.”

“Hey,” she said, happiness rising in her at the sound of his voice. So here he was. “I was tired, I went right to bed when I came back. I was celebrating. The deal’s done!”

“Over?”

“Yes. Sold.”

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “That’s great for you. And it worked out?”

“Yes,” she said, “I guess it did.” Whether she’d missed something or not, it was over.

There was a long breath.

“I wanted to see you,” he said.

“Last night?” she said.

“Yes. And now. Could I come over there now?”

The sentence was simple, but his words had a kind of gravity that made everything exactly clear. She was silent a second.

He waited with her.

The words hung on her tongue, balanced, a long moment before she could say them. “All right.” But still a hesitation hung in the air.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s just… I got a deal.”

“I know. I’m glad for you! It’s great.”

“But now I have to go to Hong Kong. I’m obligated to see to the shipping. I have to leave.”

His turn for silence. Then he said: “When?”

“Tonight.”

“Oh,” he said. “How many hours?”

A giggle punched through her anxiety and suddenly she was laughing, and then they both were. “That’s so terrible,” she said.

“Not terrible. Wonderful. How many hours?”

She looked at the clock. “A lot, actually. Plenty.”

“Well,” he said.

She was aware of herself. Disparate parts of her felt joined for the first time in so long. “I’ll be here,” she said.