Pow!

POW! 41

The production of the opera From Meat Boy to Meat God nears its finale. The dutiful meat boy is kneeling on the stage, slicing flesh from his arm to brew for his ailing mother. She recovers but, owing to a prolonged state of exhaustion, starvation and loss of blood, he dies. In the last scene, a surreal dreamlike sequence, the mother reveals through her tears how she misses her son and grieves over his death. Then the meat boy, splendidly attired and wearing a golden headdress, appears, as if descended from a cloud of mist. His mother holds her head and sobs when they meet, but the meat boy consoles her with the news that the Celestial Ruler, moved by his dutiful act, has anointed him a Meat God whose domain is the world of meat-eaters. The opera appears to have ended happily but it has done nothing to dispel my feelings of desolation. The mother, still weeping, sings an aria: ‘Better to feed my son weak tea and simple food on earth than see him as a Meat God in a heavenly berth…’ The mist fades and the opera is over. The performers return for their curtain call (there is, of course, no curtain), and are greeted by sporadic applause. Troupe Leader Jiang rushes onstage to announce: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, tomorrow's performance will be Slaying the Wutong Spirit. Don't miss it.’ The crowd chatters noisily as it disperses. Now the food-vendors make their final attempts at a sale. ‘My daughter,’ Lao Lan says to Tiangua, ‘you can spend the night with us. Your aunt and I have made up the best room for you.’ An uncomfortable Fan Zhaoxia says: ‘Yes, come home.’ Tiangua looks at Fan with loathing but says nothing. She walks up to a lamb-vendor. ‘Give me ten kebabs and add plenty of cumin.’ Happy to oblige, the vendor takes out a handful of kebabs from a filthy plastic bag and lays them atop a charcoal brazier. He squints to keep the smoke from his eyes and makes a puffing sound with his mouth, as if to clear it of dust. Now that the crowd and the actors have dispersed, Lan Daguan mounts the stage, followed by a foreigner in gold-rimmed glasses. He strips naked to show off his erect penis. ‘Tell me if I was boasting!’ he says angrily to the foreigner. ‘Take a good look and tell me.’ The foreigner claps his hands and six blonde, blue-eyed naked women go up on the stage and lie in a row. Lan Daguan takes them one at a time, drawing yelps of pleasure all the way down the line. Six more women go up on stage. Then six more. And six more. And six more. And six more. And five more. Forty-one women in all. I keep my eyes on the tireless Lan Daguan as the combat rages on and watch as he, as if on cue, transforms into a horse. He whinnies loudly, showing off his powerful muscles and his strong limbs. Truly a noble stallion radiating vitality. A magnificent head, its perfect, pointed ears like cut bamboo. Bright, shining eyes. A small mouth below a large snout. A graceful neck lifted high between broad shoulders. A smooth rump, a tail raised captivatingly. A rounded torso encasing resilient ribs. Four slender, graceful legs with bright hooves that shine with a light-blue glow. He gives a rousing performance on the stage, moving from a trot to a gallop, dancing one moment and leaping the next, displaying every dazzling movement possible, demanding acclaim as the acme of perfection. Then comes the finale: Lan Daguan rises from atop the forty-first woman, seemingly coated with a layer of greasepaint, points at the foreigner with a single finger and says: ‘You lose.’ The man draws a fancy revolver and aims it at the horse's genitals. ‘I don't,’ he says and pulls the trigger. Lan Daguan thuds to the ground, like a toppled wall. At that same moment, I hear a loud crash and look to see the Horse Spirit crumble to the floor, now a mere pile of clay. And then the lights go out. It's the middle of the night and I can't see a soul. I remove my dark glasses and am treated to a resplendent night sky, with strange white figures a-dance on the stage. Bats fly in and out, birds in the trees flap their wings, the temple grounds are alive with the chirp of insects. Let me hurry and finish my tale, Wise Monk—

The moon was out in all its glory that night, the air was fresh and clean and the peach trees sparkled as if varnished. Even the mule's hide seemed to glow. We fixed an old wooden frame to its back, tied three cases of mortar shells to each side and then set the seventh case on top. The old couple took care of the cases as if they had been doing this every day. The mule bore its burden stoically, its fate tied to the couple, almost as if it were their son.

We left the peach grove and headed down the road towards the village. Winter had begun to settle in, and though there was no wind the moonlight brought a chill to the air; a layer of frost painted the roadside plants a pale white. Off in the distance, someone was burning dead grass, creating an arc of fire like a red flood engulfing a sandy beach. The boy they'd sent to fetch me, who looked to be seven or eight years old, walked in front of us and led the mule along. He had on a tattered coat that nearly covered his knees, secured at the waist by a white electric wire. Barelegged and barefoot, his head a mass of wild hair, he had the spirit of a raging prairie fire. What was I compared to him? A corrupt youngster, a shameful degenerate. Time to pull myself together. This was too good an opportunity to let pass. I had to fire these forty-one mortar shells on this lovely moonlit night, rock the air with a series of explosions and cement my status as a hero of my age.

The old couple walked beside the mule, one on each side to steady the cases. He was wearing a shearling coat and a dog-skin cap, with a pipe behind his neck, a quintessential old-style peasant. She'd once had bound feet—now freed—and each raspy breath that broke through the surrounding silence let us know how painful every step was for her. I walked behind the mule, vowing to model myself on the boy up front, the old man and the woman and the me of my childhood. On this night, walking amid the icy moonbeams, I would fire my forty-one mortar shells, explosions that would shake heaven and earth and bring life to a village as dead as a stagnant pool. And I would keep the memory of this night alive. One day Luo Xiaotong would become a mythical figure, his tale passed down through the ages.

And so we walked through the wilderness, followed by a variety of inquisitive wild creatures. They shadowed us warily, their bright eyes like little green lanterns, as curious as a pack of children.

The pleasant, melodic tattoo of the mule's hooves told us that we'd entered the village on its concrete roadway. There were a few gleams of light. The village was quiet, the streets deserted. A village dog cozied up to the strange animals following us but was sent yelping into a nearby lane with a bite. Moonlight made the streetlights superfluous. An iron bell on the tall scholar tree at the village entrance, a relic from the commune days, looked dark green in the light. Once upon a time its every peal had been a command.

Our entry into the village went unnoticed but we would not have been deterred even if it hadn't. No one would have imagined that our mule carried forty-one mortar shells; if we'd tried to explain, they'd just have been even more convinced that Luo Xiaotong was a ‘powboy’. In my village ‘pow’ also meant to brag and to lie. Children who boasted and who shot off their mouths were called powboys. That nickname didn't cause me any shame, though. It actually made me proud. Our revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen bore the resounding nickname of Big Pow Sun, though he'd himself never fired a gun. Luo Xiaotong was about to surpass Sun Yat-sen in that regard. The weapon was ready for action, carefully hidden at home where I'd babied it by restoring every part to its original condition. The shells seemed to have dropped from the skies, each smeared with grease, awaiting only a careful cleaning to shine. The mortar tube called out for the shells; the shells longed for the tube, just as the Wutong Spirit called out for beautiful women, who in turn longed for it. Once I'd fired my forty-one shells, I'd be a powboy of legend, a part of history.

An unlocked gate allowed us entry into our yard, where we were welcomed by dancing weasels. I knew that my yard was a weasel playground now, a place where they fell in love, married and multiplied in numbers sufficient to keep out scavengers. Weasels have a charm that women find irresistible; they make them take leave of their senses and provoke them into singing and dancing and, in some cases, even running naked down the street. But they didn't scare us. ‘Thanks, guys,’ I said to them, for guarding the mortar for me. ‘You're welcome,’ they replied. Some wore red vests, like runners on the stock-exchange floor. Others had on white shorts, like children at a public swimming pool.

First we took apart the mortar in the side room and carried the parts into the yard. Then, after leaning a ladder against the eaves of the westside room, I climbed onto the roof. The roof tiles on the neighbourhood houses glinted in the moonlight. I could see the river flowing behind the village, the open fields in front and the fires burning in the wild. I couldn't have asked for a more opportune moment. Why wait? I asked my companions to tie each part with a rope, and tie it well, so that I could then haul it up onto the roof. I removed a pair of white gloves from the tube, put them on and then swiftly reassembled the weapon; before long, my very own mortar crouched on the roof, gleaming in the moonlight, like a bride emerged from her bath and waiting for her new husband. Pointed into the sky at a forty-five-degree angle, the tube seemed to suck up the moonbeams. Several playful weasels climbed up beside me, scurried across to the mortar and began to scratch at it. They were so cute that I didn't stop them. Had it been anyone else I'd have thrown them off without a second thought. Then the boy led the mule up to the foot of the ladder and the old couple unloaded the cases, moving with precision and confidence. Even one shell dropped to the floor would have meant disaster. Each case was tied with rope; I hauled them up, one at a time, and then laid them out on the roof. That done, the old couple and the little boy climbed up to join me. The woman was gasping for breath by then. She suffered from an inflamed windpipe, and I knew she needed to eat a turnip to feel better. If only we had one. ‘We'll take care of that,’ one of the weasels said. Before long, eight little creatures scrambled up the ladder, chanting a rhythmic hi-ho, carrying a turnip two feet long and with a high water content. The old man rushed up to lift it from the weasels’ shoulders and hand it to his wife. Then he thanked them profusely, a manifestation of the common man's simple manners. The old woman broke the turnip in half over her knee, laid the bottom half beside her, took a crisp bite out of the top and then began to chew, suffusing the moonbeams with the smell of turnip.

‘Fire a round!’ she said. ‘Eating a turnip dipped in gunpowder smoke will cure me. Sixty years ago, when my son was born, five Japanese soldiers shot a mortar in our yard, sending gunpowder smoke in through the window and into my throat, damaging my windpipe. I've had asthma ever since, and my son was so badly shaken by the explosions and choked by the smoke that it weakened his constitution and killed him.’

‘The five men who did that got the death they deserved,’ continued the old man. ‘They killed our little cow, then chopped up and burnt our furniture to make a fire to roast it in. But it was only partially cooked, and they all died of salmonella poisoning. So we hid the mortar in the woodpile and the seven cases in a hollow between the walls. Then we escaped up Southern Mountain with our son's body. Later, people came looking for us, calling us heroes for poisoning the meat of our cow and killing five of those devils. We weren't heroes—those devils had had us shaking in our boots. And we certainly hadn't poisoned the meat. The sight of them writhing on the ground had brought us no pleasure at all. In fact, my wife, who was still ill, had boiled a pot of mung-bean soup for them. Usually that's a good cure for poison but theirs ran too deep in their bodies and they could not be saved. Years later, another man showed up and insisted we admit to killing them. A militiaman, he'd stabbed an enemy officer in the back with a muck rake while he took a shit. He'd then taken the man's pistol, twenty bullets, a leather belt, a wool uniform, a pocket watch, a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and a gold Parker pen, and turned it all over to his unit. For that he'd received a second-class merit award plus a medal he wore pinned to his chest and refused to take off. He told us to turn over the mortar and the shells but we refused. We knew that one day we'd meet up with a boy who'd fall in love with it and who'd continue the work we'd begun at the cost of our son's life. A few years back we sold the mortar to you as scrap because we knew you'd treasure it. Dealing in scrap was only a pretext for us. Our greatest desire has been to help you fire these forty-one shells, avenging what you lost and establishing your honoured name. Don't ask what brought us here. We'll tell you what you need to know, nothing more. And now, son, it's time.’

The little boy handed the old man a shell that had been polished to a high gloss. I began to cry, and waves of heat washed over my heart. Bitter hatred and loving kindness sent hot blood racing through my veins, and only by firing the mortar could I release what bubbled inside me. So I dried my eyes and composed myself, then straddled the mortar and, instinctively estimating the distance, took aim at the western wing of Lao Lan's house, about five hundred yards ahead of us. Lao Lan and three township officials were playing mah-jongg on a Ming Dynasty table worth at least two hundred thousand RMB. One was a woman with a large, doughy face, thread-thin eyebrows and blood-red lips—an altogether disgusting sight. Let Lao Lan take her with him. Where? The Western Heaven! I took the shell from the old man, placed it into the tube and gently let go. The tube swallowed the shell, the shell slid into the tube. The first sound was soft, muted—the sound of the ignited shell touching the base of the tube. Then a detonation that nearly shattered my eardrums drove the weasels scurrying in fright. The shell tore like a siren across the sky, blazing a tail through the moonbeams, and then landed exactly where it wanted. First, a bright blue light, then a deafening POW!

Lao Lan emerged from the cloud of gunpowder smoke, shook off the dust and sneered. He'd survived unscathed.

I adjusted the tube until it was aimed at Yao Qi's living room, where he and Lao Lan were sitting on a leather sofa, engaged in a whispered conversation about something shameful. Good—Yao Qi, you and Lao Lan can go meet the King of the Underworld together. I took a shell from the old man and let go. It screamed out of the tube, flew across the sky, tore through the moonbeams and then hit the roof of its target with a POW! Shrapnel flew in all directions, some into the walls and some up into the ceiling. One pea-sized sliver hit Yao Qi in the gums and he screamed in pain.

‘You'll never get me with one of those,’ sneered Lao Lan.

I took aim at Fan Zhaoxia's beauty salon and accepted another shell from the old man. That the first two had missed their target was a bit disheartening but I had thirty-nine to go. Sooner or later one of them would rip him to pieces. I dropped the shell down the tube. It flew out like an imp with a song on its lips. Lao Lan was sitting back in the barber's chair, his eyes closed, and Fan Zhaoxia was giving him a shave. His skin was so smooth you could wipe it with a silk rag and not produce a sound. But Fan kept shaving. Shaving. People talk about the pleasure of a good shave. This was obviously a very good shave, for Lao Lan was snoring. Over the years, he'd got into the habit of napping in the barber's chair. He suffered from insomnia; and when he did finally sleep he was visited by dreams that kept him from a deep sleep; the buzz of a mosquito was all it took to startle him awake. Sleep never comes easily to people with a guilty conscience—it's a sort of divine retribution. The mortar shell tore through the shop's ceiling and landed giddily on the terrazzo floor in the middle of a pile of prickly hair before disintegrating with an angry POW! A piece the size of a horse's tooth struck the mirror in front of the barber's chair; another, the size of a soybean, hit Fan Zhaoxia in the wrist. She dropped her razor and fell to her knees with a cry of alarm. The razor lay, cracked, beside her.

Lao Lan's eyes snapped open. ‘Don't be afraid,’ he consoled her, ‘it's only Luo Xiaotong up to his old tricks.’

The fourth shell was aimed at Huachang's banquet room, a place with which I was very familiar. Lao Lan was hosting a banquet for every villager over the age of eighty. It was a generous act and possessed of immense publicity potential. The three reporters I'd met were busy with their cameras, filming the five old men and three old women. In the middle of the table sat an enormous cake with a line of red candles. A young woman lit them with a lighter and asked one of the old women to blow them out. Possessed of only two teeth, she tried her best to do so as the air whistled through the gaps in her gums. I held onto the fourth shell a bit longer, worried about hurting the old villagers, but this was no time to stop. I said a silent prayer for them and spoke to the shell, asking it to hit Lao Lan on the head! To kill him and no one else. The shell screamed out of the tube, streaked across the river, hovered briefly above the banquet room and then plummeted. You can probably guess what happened next, right? Right. It landed smack in the middle of the cake. Most of the candles were extinguished, all but two. Rich, buttery frosting flew into the old people's faces and covered the lenses of the cameras.

The fifth shell I aimed at the meat-cleansing workshop, the site of my greatest pride and deepest sorrow. The night shift was injecting water into some camels, each with a hose up its nose, making them look as strange as a clutch of witches. Lao Lan was giving the man who had usurped my position—Wan Xiaojiang—instructions; he was loud but not loud enough for me to hear what he was saying. The screech of the departing shell drowned out his words. Wan Xiaojiang, you little bastard, it was because of you that my sister and I had to leave our village. If anything, I hate you more than I hate Lao Lan, and if Heaven has eyes, then this shell has your name on it. I waited till I had calmed down a bit, then took several deep breaths and let the shell slip gently down the tube. It slipped out like a fat little boy who'd grown wings, flew towards its designated target, burst through the ceiling, landed in front of Wan Xiaojiang, smashed his right foot and then—POW! His bulging belly was carried away in the explosion but the rest of him was intact, like the quasi-magical handiwork of a master butcher.

Lao Lan was blown away by the blast and I blanked out. When I came to, the wretch had crawled out of the fouled water he'd landed in. Except for a muddy bottom, he was unmarked.

The desk of Township Head Hou was the target of the sixth shell. An envelope stuffed with RMB was shredded. It had been lying atop a sheet of reinforced glass under which the township head had placed photographs of him and several seductive transvestites—memories of his Thailand vacation. The glass was so hard it should have caused an explosion but didn't. Which meant that that particular shell was a peace projectile. What, you wonder, is that? I'll tell you. Some of the men who worked on this ammunition were anti-war. When their supervisors were not looking, they pissed into the shells. Though they gleamed on the outside, the powder inside was hopelessly wet, turning them mute on the day they left the armoury. There were many varieties of peace projectiles; this was but one. Another variety was stuffed with a dove instead of explosives, while yet another was filled with paper on which was written: Long live friendship between the peoples of China and Japan. This particular one was flattened like a pancake; the reinforced glass was shattered and the photographs of the township head were sucked into the flattened shell, as clear as ever, except in reverse.

Firing the seventh shell was agonizing for me because Lao Lan was standing in front of my mother's grave. I couldn't see his face in the moonlight, only the back of his head, like a glossy watermelon, and the long shadow he cast. The words on the headstone I'd personally placed at her tomb recognized me, and her image floated up in front of my eyes, as if she were standing in front of me, blocking my mortar with her body. ‘Move away, Mother,’ I said. She wouldn't. Her silent miserable stare felt like a dull knife sawing away on my heart. The old man, who was right beside me, said, ‘Go ahead, fire!’ Sure, why not? Mother was dead, after all, and the dead have nothing to fear from a mortar shell. I shut my eyes and dropped the shell into the tube. POW! It passed through her image and flew off weeping. When it landed, it blew her tomb into pieces so small they could be used as road paving.

Lao Lan sighed. ‘Luo Xiaotong, are you finished yet?’

Of course not! I slammed the eighth shell angrily into the tube, which was turned in the direction of the plant kitchen. The shells were beginning to fidget after the failure of seven of their brethren. This one turned a couple of somersaults in the air, which took it slightly off course. I'd intended for it to enter the kitchen through a skylight, because Lao Lan was sitting directly beneath it enjoying a bowl of bone soup, very popular at the time as a tonic for vitality, plus a good source of calcium. Nutritionists, who blew hot and cold over such things, had written newspaper articles and appeared on TV, urging people to eat plenty of calcium-rich bone soup. Truth is, Lao Lan was in no need of calcium, since his bones were harder than sandalwood. Huang Biao had cooked a pot of soup with horse-leg bones for him, spicing it up with coriander and muttony pepper to mask the gamey smell, even adding some essence of chicken. He stood there with his ladle while Lao Lan dug in, sweating so much that he had to remove his sweater and drape his loosened tie over his shoulder. I tried to wish the shell right into his bowl of soup or at least into the pot. Even if it didn't kill him, the hot soup would scald him raw. But that frisky shell went right into the brick chimney behind the kitchen and POW!—the chimney collapsed on top of the roof.

For the ninth shell, I took aim on Lao Lan's secret bedroom at the plant. A small room attached to his office, it was equipped with a king-sized bed whose new and prohibitively expensive linen was redolent with jasmine fragrance. The room lay behind a hidden door. Lao Lan had only to lightly press a button under his desk for a full-length mirror on the wall to slide open and reveal a door the same colour as the wall round it. After turning the key in the lock and opening the door, another button was pressed and the mirror slid back into place. Since I knew the location of the bedroom, I made my calculations, figuring in the resistance of moonlight and the shell's temperament to bring the probability of error down to zero and ensure that the projectile landed smack in the middle of the bed; if Lao Lan had company, then the woman had no one but herself to blame for becoming a love ghost. I held my breath, hefted the shell, which felt heavier than its eight predecessors, and then let it descend at its own pace. It slid out of the tube in a bright burst of light, soared to the very heights, then plummeted smoothly earthward. Nothing marked Lao Lan's secret room more clearly than the satellite dish he'd illegally installed. Silver-coloured and about the size of a large pot, it was highly reflective. And it was those reflections that temporarily blinded the shell's navigational system and sent it careening into the plant's dog pen, killing or maiming a dozen or more killer wolfhounds and blowing a hole in the barricade. The uninjured dogs froze for a moment before leaping through the opening as if waking from a dream, and I knew that a new threat to public safety had just been introduced in the area.

I took the tenth shell from the old man, but my plan changed before I could send it on its way. I'd been aiming at Lao Lan's imported Lexus. The car was parked in front of a modest building; Lao Lan was sleeping in the back seat, his driver in the front. I planned for the shell to crash through the windshield and blow up in Lao Lan's lap. Even if it turned out to be a peace projectile, its inertia alone would make a nasty mess of Lao Lan's belly, and his only hope for survival would be a complete stomach transplant. But just before I fired, the car started up, drove onto the highway and sped towards town. My first last-second plan change momentarily confused me but my desperation spawned a new one. With one hand I adjusted the direction of the mortar and with the other I dropped in the shell. The subsequent blast blew waves of heat into my face and, given all the powder inside, turned the tube red hot. It would have burnt the skin right off my hands if I hadn't been wearing gloves. The shell locked on to the speeding car and, I'll be damned, landed inches behind it as a sort of send-off for Lao Lan.

The eleventh shell was slated for a longer journey. A peasant-turned-entrepreneur had opened a hot-spring mountain resort in a wooded area between the county seat and township village, a get-away spot for the rich and powerful. They called it a mountain resort but there was no mountain nearby, not even a bump on the ground. Even the original grave mounds had been levelled. A few dozen black pines stood like so many columns of smoke, obscuring the white buildings. I detected a heavy sulphur smell on my rooftop perch. Beautiful girls in revealing miniskirts greeted visitors as they stepped into the lobby. With the slightest touch on the loosely girded cloth belts the girls were naked. They had an affected way of speaking, like parrot-talk. Lao Lan frolicked in the pool with its Venus de Milo centrepiece. Then into the sauna to sweat; after that, dressed in a pair of baggy shorts and a short-sleeved yellow robe, it was into the massage parlour for a Thai massage. A muscular girl put her arms round him, and what ensued between them looked more like a wrestling match. Lao Lan, your day of reckoning has arrived. Freshly bathed, you'll make a very clean ghost. I dropped in the shell, and thirty seconds later it carried my compliments to Lao Lan like a white dove. This shell is for you, Lao Lan. Holding on to an overhead bar, the girl stood on his back as she shifted her hips back and forth. I couldn't tell if what he uttered were yelps of pain or cries of pleasure. But once again the shell went off course and landed in the pool, sending a geyser of water into the air. The head of the plaster Venus snapped off at the neck, bringing men and women running out of the dimly lit rooms, some wearing just enough to cover their embarrassment, others not even that.

Lao Lan, unmarked and unmoved, lay on the massage table, head turned to drink tea while the girl hid under the bed, her derriere sticking up like an ostrich with its head in the sand.

Lao Lan and the sex-starved wife of his bodyguard were playing the beast with two backs on Huang Biao's brick bed. In the name of good manners, this was not the time or place to fire a shell. But what a way to die. To leave this world at an orgiastic moment is the height of good fortune, and that was definitely too good for Lao Lan. Yet there was that thing about manners. Not firing was not an option, so I raised the tube's elevation slightly and fired the twelfth shell. It landed in Huang Biao's yard and made a crater big enough to bury a buffalo. With a cry of alarm, Huang's wife flattened herself against Lao Lan.

‘Don't be scared, little darling,’ he said with a pat on her behind. ‘It's only that little creep Luo Xiaotong playing games. You needn't worry. He'll never manage to kill me. With me dead, his life loses all meaning.’

Thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number, making it the perfect shell to send Lao Lan up to the Western Heaven. He was on his knees praying in the Wutong Temple, our temple. There's a legend that says praying to the Wutong Spirit can double the size of a man's penis. Not only that, it can make you a man of untold riches. Lao Lan carried a joss stick and a candle into the temple by the light of the moon. The place was rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of the hanged, which kept devotees from entering with their wishes, despite knowledge of its efficacious powers. But Lao Lan had more courage than most. Never imagining that ten years later I'd be sitting in this very temple, I went ahead and took aim at it. Lao Lan knelt before the idol and lit his joss stick and candle, the flames turning his face red as a sinister ‘heh-heh’ came to him from behind the idol. That sound would have sent shivers up the spine of most people and had them rushing headlong out the door. But not Lao Lan. He responded with a ‘heh-heh’ of his own and shone his candle on a spot behind the idol. Even I could see the five spirits lined up behind Wutong. The one with a horse's body and a human head was the best-looking, a colt, of course. To its left were a pig and a goat, each with a human head. To its right a donkey and the remains of an indeterminate creature. Then a hideous, frightful face appeared, and my heart lurched and my hands went slack as the shell slid into the tube. Off it went, straight for the temple, landing with a POW! Three of the idols were destroyed, leaving only the colt with the boy's head, a lascivious or a sentimental smile frozen on its face for all eternity.

Lao Lan emerged from the temple, his face coated with mud.

The Xie Family Restaurant in town was justifiably famous, near and far, for its meatballs. It was run by an old woman with her son and daughter-in-law; they prepared exactly five hundred of the beefy delicacies every day. Customers signed up a week in advance. What was so special about the Xie-family meatballs? Their unique flavour. And what made the flavour unique? The choice cuts of beef. But, even more importantly, the Xie family's meatballs never came in contact with metal. The meat was sliced by sharpened bamboo strips, then laid out on cloth-washing rocks and beaten with a date-wood club into a meaty pulp. Special millet crumbs were kneaded into the meat before it was rolled into balls and put, along with kumquats, in earthen jars to be steamed on trays. Then the kumquats were thrown out and only the meatballs remained, a true taste sensation…I hated the thought of destroying a restaurant which produced such delicacies, especially since old Mrs Xie was such a kind woman and her son a friend of mine. Sorry, Mrs Xie and my old buddy, but killing Lao Lan is more important to me. I dropped in the fourteenth shell. It sped off into the air only to run smack into a wild goose headed in the opposite direction. Nothing but bones and feathers were left of the bird while the shell was knocked off course and landed in a pond behind the Xie house, raising a column of water and turning at least ten big crucian carp into fish paste.

The township's most notorious female free spirit, whose name was Jiena but whom everyone called Little Black Girl, had a remarkable voice. Her songs had been broadcast daily over the loudspeakers in the days of the Cultural Revolution. A bad family background stood in the way of a splendid future, and she had been forced to marry a dyer from a working-class family. He went out every day on his bicycle to pick up clothes to be dyed. High-quality fabric was in short supply in those days, so young people tore up old white cloth and had it dyed green to resemble faddish army gear. Even caustic soda was ineffective in cleaning the green stains from the dyer's hands, and what that would have meant for Jiena's milky white breasts is not hard to contemplate. And so Jiena strayed from her marriage vows. Her relationship with Lao Lan went back a long time, so when he made his fortune she looked him up. I'd always liked this charming woman. She had a captivating voice, thanks to her musical past. But I could not let that stop me from aiming the fifteenth shell at her house, where she and Lao Lan were reminiscing, teary-eyed, over a shared bottle and indulging in pillow talk. The missile landed in an old dye vat, sending green dye flying everywhere. The dyer would not only wear the green hat of a cuckold but also live in the green house of one.

The sixteenth shell was supposed to hit the meatpacking plant's conference room but it was missing one of its wings and began to wobble in mid-air. It landed in Yao Qi's pigsty, killing the sow they had spoilt so badly.

The meat-inspection office was the recipient of the seventeenth shell. Chief Inspector Han and his deputy were lightly wounded. One piece of shrapnel, big enough to end Lao Lan's life, hit the model-worker brass medal, presented by the city officials and pinned to the left breast of his jacket. The impact sent him reeling into the wall. His face paled and he all but spat blood. It was the most damage any of my shells had inflicted on him so far; and even though he survived the blow it scared the hell out of him.

If any of the shells was assured of taking Lao Lan out it was the eighteenth—because he was standing in an open-air public toilet relieving himself, totally exposed. The projectile could easily slip through the gaps of the parasol-tree branches overhead. But then I was reminded of the hero from the old couple's village who had killed an enemy soldier while he was taking a shit—what a shameful way to kill a man. Killing Lao Lan while he was taking a leak would not bring me glory, and so I had no choice but to alter the course slightly and have the shell land in the nearby privy. POW! He was covered in shit. A lot of fun but a low blow.

After firing the nineteenth shell, I realized that I had just violated an international treaty. It landed in the township treatment room and sent glass flying everywhere. The nurse on duty, the lazy sister-in-law of the deputy township head, normally sat in a chair behind a patient spread-eagled over a table, arse in the air, ready to receive to an injection. When the mortar shell hit she was so frightened that she squatted on the floor and cried like a baby. Lao Lan lay in bed hooked up to an IV drip filled with artery-cleaning serum. The blood of people like him who feast on rich, fatty food sticks to the artery walls like glue.

Along with the municipalization of agricultural populations came the rise of rampant consumerism. A bowling alley had been built near the township headquarters. Lao Lan was a champion bowler, a master of strikes, despite his terrible form. He used a twelve-pound purple ball. Spurning an approach, he walked to the line, swung his arm and the ball, like a shell from a mortar, shot straight into the pins; they toppled over with cries of anguish. My twentieth shell landed on the bowling-alley lane. Smoke rose and shrapnel flew.

Lao Lan emerged unscathed. Was the son of a bitch wearing a protective talisman?

The twenty-first shell landed in the meatpacking plant's fresh-water well. Lao Lan was standing beside it gazing at the reflection of the moon, and I assumed he was musing over the story of the monkey that tried to scoop the moon out the water. I can't think of anything else he might have come out to see in the middle of the night. That well played a prominent role in my life, as you know, Wise Monk, so I won't go into that here. The moon was bright and pristine. When it fell into the well, the shell failed to explode but it did shatter the moon's pristine reflection and muddy the water.

Despite the twenty-first shell's failure to kill Lao Lan, his poise and aplomb had deserted him. Sooner or later an earthen well jar will break—it's inevitable. One of these exploding shells has your name on it and the Western Heaven awaits your arrival. Resorting to trickery, Lao Lan put on a worker's clothes and tried to pass himself off as one of the night-shift men in the kill room. What looked like an attempt to become one with the masses was in fact a ploy to save his skin. He greeted the workers, even slapped some of them familiarly on the shoulder, producing smiles from those favoured by such an unexpected but welcome gesture. At the moment they were slaughtering camels, those ships of the desert, dispatched in great numbers because their hooves were sought after at formal banquets on the tables of Han and Manchu diners. Camel was the ‘in’ meat of the day, as a result of Lao Lan's success in buying off several nutrition experts and local reporters who then published a series of articles extolling the virtues of camel meat. There was a plentiful supply of the animals from Gansu and Inner Mongolia, although the finest were imported from the Middle East. By this time the kill rooms were semi-automated. The animals were transported by hoists from the meat-cleansing workshop into Kill Room No. 1, where they were first washed with cold water and then subjected to a steam bath. Their legs flailed wildly as they hung from the hoists. Lao Lan was standing under one of the suspended camels, listening to the workshop foreman Feng Tiehan, when I seized the moment and dropped the twenty-second shell into the tube. Trailing a live wire, it flew to its target, exploding on the roof and severing the steel cable supporting the unfortunate camel. It plunged to its death.

The twenty-third shell entered the workshop through the hole opened by its predecessor and rolled on the killing floor like a giant spinning top. With no thought for his safety, Feng Tiehan threw himself at Lao Lan, knocking him to the floor and covering him with his body. POW! Blast waves and billowing gunpowder smoke swept through the workshop. Four hooves flew for a distance and then fell onto Feng's back, where they looked like frogs engaged in a serious discussion.

Lao Lan crawled out from under Feng's body, wiped the steel splinters and camel blood off his face and sneezed. His clothes lay in tatters at his feet; all that remained on him was a leather belt. ‘Luo Xiaotong,’ he screamed, picking up a rag to cover his privates, ‘you little prick, what did I ever do to you?’

You've never done anything to or for me. I took the twenty-fourth shell from the old man and dropped it down the tube. This would be my answer. Taking the same course as its two predecessors, it landed in the new crater. Lao Lan hit the ground and rolled over to take cover behind the camel carcass. The edge of the crater blocked splinters of shrapnel and saved him from injury. Some of the other men lay flat on the workshop floor but a few stood stock still. One especially brave man crawled up to Lao Lan. ‘Are you hurt, General Manager?’ he asked. ‘Get me some clothes,’ Lao Lan said. Hiding behind a dead camel with his bare arse sticking up in the air put him in a very sorry state.

The courageous worker ran into the foreman's office to fetch a set of clothes, but as he handed them to Lao Lan the twenty-fifth shell streaked towards him. With a burst of inspiration, he caught the flying missile in the heavy canvas clothing and flung it out the window. That action not only displayed how cool-headed and decisive he could be, but was also testimony to his superior strength. If he'd been a soldier during wartime, he'd have been a hero extraordinaire. The shell exploded outside the window—POW!

Before it was time to fire the twenty-sixth shell, the old woman hobbled up to me, took a piece of turnip from her mouth and stuffed it into mine. That was revolting, I don't deny it. But thoughts of how pigeons exchange food and crows feed their aged parents turned my revulsion into a feeling of intimacy. I was also reminded of an incident with my mother. It was back when my father had gone off to the northeast and Mother and I were dealing in scrap. We were taking a break at a roadside stall—she'd spent twenty fen that day for two bowls of beef-entrail soup for us to soak our hard biscuits in. A blind couple with a chubby, fair-skinned baby were eating at the stall. The baby, obviously hungry, was crying. The woman, hearing my mother's voice, asked if she would feed the baby. So Mother took the baby from her and a hard biscuit from the man, which she chewed into pulp before feeding him mouth-to-mouth. Afterwards she said: ‘That's what's called pigeons feeding each other.’ I swallowed the turnip the old woman put in my mouth and felt suddenly sharp-eyed and clear-headed. I aimed the twenty-sixth shell at Lao Lan's bare arse, but it was still in the air when the workshop collapsed with a roar. It was an amazing sight, like those demolitions you see on TV. The shell landed amid the rubble and knocked aside a steel beam that had pinned Lao Lan underneath, creating an opening through which he crawled free and once again escaped death.

I was beginning to get flustered, if you want to know the truth. The twenty-seventh shell had Lao Lan's bare arse in its sights once more. When it exploded, the blast sheared the roadside trees in half. But Lao Lan survived yet again. Goddamn it, what's going on?

I began to wonder if the destructive power of the shells had deteriorated because of their age. So I left the mortar and walked over to the ammunition cases to examine the contents. The boy was conscientiously cleaning the grease off each shell, which then sparkled like fine jewels. Anything that looked that good had to be powerful. So the fault lay not in the shells but in Lao Lan's cunning. ‘How am I doing, Big Brother?’ the boy asked. I was moved by his slightly fawning attitude and struck by how much he resembled my sister, even though one was a boy, the other a girl. I patted him on the head. ‘You're doing a terrific job. You're my number three artilleryman.’

‘Do you think I could fire one?’ he asked me shyly, after he'd finished cleaning the shells. ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Maybe you'll be the one to blow Lao Lan to bits. I led him over to the mortar, handed him a shell and said, ‘The twenty-eighth shell. The target—Lao Lan. Distance—eight hundred. Ready—fire!’ ‘I hit him, I hit him!’ the boy shouted, clapping joyfully. Lao Lan had in fact been knocked to the ground. But he jumped to his feet, panther-quick, and took cover in the packaging workshop. Tasting blood, the boy asked if he could fire another. I agreed.

I left him on his own for the twenty-ninth shell, which veered off course and landed in a pile of coal at the little train station's abandoned freight yard. Coal dust and gunpowder smoke blotted out great swaths of moonlight.

Embarrassed by this mistake, he scratched his head and went back to his cleaning station.

This gave Lao Lan time to change into blue work clothes, then stand on a pile of cardboard boxes and shout: ‘Give it up, Luo Xiaotong. Save the remaining shells for hunting rabbits.’ That really pissed me off, so I took aim at his head and fired the thirtieth shell. He sprinted into the workshop and shut the door behind him, thereby saving himself from injury once again.

The thirty-first shell tore a hole in the workshop roof and landed in a pile of cardboard boxes, shredding at least a dozen of them and turning camel steaks into a meaty pulp, then searing it in the superheated air. The smell of burnt flesh merged with that of gunpowder.

Lao Lan's arrogance made me lose my bearings, and I forgot to conserve my ammunition. In rapid succession I fired off shells thirty-two, thirty-three and thirty-four to form a tight triangular pattern, as taught in artillery courses. They did not succeed in killing Lao Lan, but they did blow up the packaging workshop just as an earlier shell had blown up the kill room.

The old man, like a child, asked to fire off a few rounds. I wanted to say no but he was my elder and the one who had supplied the mortar shells; I had no excuse to refuse his request. He took a position alongside the tube, raised his thumb and shut his eye to gauge the distance. This thirty-fifth shell would take out the guardhouse beside the main gate. POW! No more guardhouse. With shell thirty-six, the newly erected water tower. POW! An enormous hole opened up halfway down the tower, releasing a powerful jet of water. The world-renowned Huachang United Meatpacking Ltd lay in ruins. But then I realized that six of the cases now stood empty, leaving only the last one with its five shells.

Night-shift workers were running pell-mell amid the ruins, stepping in bloodied water. Some of the workers may even have been trapped in the rubble. A red fire truck, siren blaring, was on its way from the county seat, followed by a white ambulance and a yellow motor crane. Orange tongues of flame licked the air here and there, probably from torn electric wires. Amid the chaos, Lao Lan climbed up the rebirth platform in the northeast corner of the yard. Once the highest structure in the compound, now that the workshop and water tower had been levelled, it looked taller and more impressive than ever, seemingly able to reach the stars and touch the moon. You're encroaching on my father's domain, Lao Lan. What are you doing up there? Without a second thought, I fired shell thirty-seven at the platform, some eight hundred and fifty yards away.

The shell passed through the gaps in the trees and struck an enclosing wall made of bricks taken from gravesites. A fireball blew a hole in the wall. I'd once heard a story about something that had occurred during a tomb-opening campaign; I had not been born and was thus denied the opportunity to witness the madness. A crowd had gathered in front of an old tomb with statues of men and horses—Lao Lan's ancestral tombs—holding handkerchiefs over their noses as they watched men carry out a rusted piece of artillery. A specialist from the urban Institute for Archaeological Studies commented that he'd never seen anyone buried with a cannon. Which posed the question: Why here? No credible explanation had been offered so far. When Lao Lan mentioned the desecration of his family tombs, he was both aggrieved and bitter. ‘You bastards have destroyed the Lan family feng shui and made impossible the birth of a future president of the country!’

Lao Lan was supporting himself by a wooden post at the top of the platform as he gazed off to the northeast. That was where my father used to gaze too. I knew why—it was where he and Aunty Wild Mule had spent days of sadness and moments of joy. What right have you to copy him, Lan Lan? I set my sights on his back. POW! Shell thirty-eight took the top off the spire. He remained unmoved.

The unhappy boy did such a sloppy job in cleaning the thirty-ninth shell that, as he was handing it to the old man, slipped out of his hands and hit the ground. I yelled, taking cover behind the mortar. The shell spun round and round on the rooftop, then we heard a clank. The old man, the old woman and the young boy stood there transfixed, mouths agape. Damn! If the thing explodes here and sets off a chain reaction with the last two shells, all four of us are dead. ‘Hit the ground!’ I shouted but got no reaction from the frozen figures. The shell careened up to my feet as if it wanted to have a heart-to-heart talk. I grabbed it round the neck and flung it as far as I could. POW! It blew up down the lane, wasted. What a shame.

The old man handed me the fortieth shell as if it were a precious object. I did not need a reminder that, after this one left the tube, the end game of the battle against Lao Lan was upon us. I took the shell with care, as though I were carrying the sole infant heir of a hereditary line. My heart was pounding. Briefly reflecting on the first thirty-nine firings, I had to admit that failing to kill Lao Lan was mandated by the heavens; it had nothing to do with a lack of skill on my part. Apparently, even the King of Hell wanted none of Lao Lan. I double-checked the sight, recalculated the distance and reviewed the procedures. Everything was as it should be. Unless a force-three gale erupted while the missile was in flight or it was struck by falling debris from a dying satellite, unless something beyond my ability to predict occurred, this shell ought to land on Lao Lan's head. It would kill him even if it failed to explode. Just before letting the shell slide down the tube, I whispered: ‘Don't fail me, mortar shell!’ It flew into the air. No wind and no satellite debris. It landed on the tip of the platform and—nothing happened.

The old woman threw away what remained of her turnip, took shell forty-one from the old man and shouldered me out of the way. ‘Idiot!’ she muttered. Standing beside the mortar and huffing loudly, she dropped it in the tube. Shell forty-one fluttered out like a kite cut loose from its string. It flew and it flew, a lazy, distracted arc, on and on aimlessly, this way and that, like a young goat running amok. In the end it fell reluctantly to the ground about twenty yards from the rebirth platform. One second and counting, two seconds, three—and nothing. Damn! ‘Another dud.’ The words were barely out of my mouth, when POW! The air shuddered, like ripped cotton. A single piece of shrapnel, a little bigger than the palm of my hand, whistled through the air and sliced Lao Lan in half…

An immature crowing floats on the air from a distant village, the sound of one of this year's young roosters learning how to announce the dawn. I've welcomed the dawn with a narrative replete with artillery fire that has crisscrossed the earth with scars. During the course of my tale, most of the Wutong Temple has crumbled, leaving only a single column perilously holding up part of the dilapidated tile roof, now more like a mat screen against the morning dew. Dear Wise Monk, it no longer matters whether or not I renounce the world. What I want to know is: Has my tale moved you? What I hope you can tell me is: Is what Lao Lan said about his third uncle true or is it all a lie? Can you tell me, or not? The Wise Monk sighs, raises his hand and points to the road in front of the temple. I am surprised to see two processions. The one from the west comprises beef cattle in fancy dress, each with a big character written on its raiments, together spelling out slogans that oppose the construction of the Meat God Temple. There are exactly forty-one heads of cattle. They trot down the road and form a circle at our temple, with the Wise Monk and me in the middle. Daggers have been tied to their horns. Lowering their heads, they seem ready to charge, slobber snorting from their noses, flames of anger shooting from their eyes. The one from the east comprises naked women with big characters written on their bodies, together spelling out slogans that support the rebuilding of the Wutong Temple. There are exactly forty-one naked women. They run down the road, then mount the forty-one bulls like equestriennes and surround the Wise Monk and me. Scared witless, I take refuge behind the Wise Monk but even that is no guarantee of safety. Niang, help me…

Here she comes, followed by Dieh, carrying my sister on his shoulders. She's waving to me. Behind her come the lame and blind Lao Lan and his wife, Fan Zhaoxia, carrying the pretty little Jiaojiao in her arms. Then come the kindly Huang Biao and valiant Huang Bao. Huang Biao's pretty young wife is behind them, smiling enigmatically. They are followed by the swarthy Yao Qi, the corpulent Shen Gang and the hateful Su Zhou. My three meat-eating competitors—Liu Shengli (Victory Liu), Feng Tiehan (Ironman Feng) and Wan Xiaojiang (Water Rat Wan)—are next, followed by Lao Han, director of the United Meat Inspection Station, and his assistant Xiao Han. They are followed by the now toothless Cheng Tianle and Ma Kui, almost too old to walk. Behind them come the four skilled artisans from Sculpture Village and, in their wake, the old-school paper craftsman and his apprentice, who are right in front of the silver-lipped, golden-haired new-school paper craftswoman and her assistant. The foreman, Big Four, wearing a suit with the trouser legs rolled up, and his assistants follow them and are in turn followed by the old, nearly toothless master musician and members of his troupe. They come just ahead of the old monk from Tianqi Temple, with his wooden fish and his flock of semi-authentic little acolytes. They are followed by Teacher Cai of the Hanlin School and a group of her students. Behind them come medical-school students Tiangua and her sissy boyfriend. They are followed by the boy who polished my mortar shells and the chivalrous old husband and wife, then the crowds who showed up in the Meat God compound, on the highway and at the open square. Next come the photographer, Skinny Horse, and the video-cameraman, Pan Sun, and his assistant. They climb a tree with their equipment to record everything below. But there is also a large contingent of women, led by Miss Shen Yaoyao, followed by Miss Huang Feiyun and the singer Tian Mimi—I can't make out the rest, but in their finery they are like a gorgeous sunset. The entire scene is a painting fixed in time, as a woman who looks like she has just emerged from her bath, exuding feminine charms, her appearance five parts Aunty Wild Mule and five parts a woman I've never seen, splits the people and the bulls and walks towards me…