Dragon Day

Chapter Three

★

“I already told you. I don’t know where he is.”

Pompadour Bureaucrat leans back in his chair. He doesn’t sigh or anything like that. Just gives me a look over his steepled fingers before picking up his glass teacup and blowing on the steaming water, pushing around the leaves that float on the surface till they sink to the bottom.

“Nothing has changed?” he finally asks.

“No. Nothing.”

Which of course is a lie.

Like before, he’s interrogating me about Zhang Jianli-my former sort-of-not-quite-boyfriend and current client. Lao Zhang, who got into trouble with the government a year ago for having the wrong friends and creating a community that helped like-minded people find one another. “Government doesn’t care for it when too many people get together,” he told me once. As far as I know, he hasn’t actually been charged with anything. Not yet anyway. That isn’t how things work in China. First they decide you’re a threat. Then they find a label for it.

And also like before, I’m sitting in an anonymous room in an anonymous “business” hotel that reeks of stale cigarettes and fake-flower-perfumed room deodorizer. This time the hotel is somewhere in west Beijing, in Fengtai. I know this because of the billboard we passed that said, in English, welcome you to fengtai! leading example of an urban-rural integration district and an eco-friendly residential district. fully involved in the development of a brand-new city image of an environment-friendly beijing!

You’d think in a city like Beijing, Rising China’s capital, full of shiny new architectural wonders by famous avant-garde architects, high-speed trains and freshly built subway lines crisscrossing the city like a spider’s web, with luxury malls displaying endless amounts of Gucci and Prada and designer crap, that they would have worked a little harder on fixing the Chinglish.

Not so much.

I have time to be thinking all this because Pompadour Bureaucrat is fond of long silences as a part of his interrogation method. Like if he sits back and blows on his tea long enough, I’m suddenly going to break down and confess all.

I’m not naïve enough to think that’s all he’s going to do. At some point things have to escalate, right? And it’s not like I’m some badass who’s going to hang tough if things get really bad.

This is the second time Pompadour Bureaucrat and the Domestic Security Department have asked me to “drink tea”-that’s cute secret police talk for “interrogation, off the record.”

He did offer me actual tea, for what it’s worth.

I don’t know this guy’s name. I don’t know his title. I assume he works for the DSD, but for all I know, he could belong to some other Chinese security agency. It’s not like he’s going to show me his credentials or explain himself to me.

The only thing I know for sure is that he has the power to fuck with my life.

Now Pompadour Bureaucrat does sigh. A long exhale that sinks the remaining floating tea leaves. He’s a middle-aged dude with that swept-back, dyed-black hair that just about every Chinese official seems to favor, wearing a black suit, a white shirt, and a red tie with a pattern of white dots. More formal than the last time I saw him. Maybe he got a promotion. Maybe he’s inspired by the 18th Party Congress coming up, ’cause he’s dressed like every single one of those Standing Committee guys you see displayed in awkward lines in the official photographs.

I focus on the tie. If I stare long enough, the dots look like they’re moving.

“You know, your status here can change at any time,” he finally says.

Like before, he speaks to me in Mandarin. I don’t know how much English he understands, if any. My spoken Chinese isn’t bad, but I’m not sure it’s up to this.

“Wo zhidao.” I know.

I try to hide the shiver. Because he could just mean, We’re revoking your visa and kicking you out of the country. Which would suck. But lately I’ve been thinking about leaving anyway. It’s just getting too weird here.

But he could also mean, We’re throwing your ass in jail. An official prison or a black jail, off the books.

And that whole prospect, I don’t do so well with that.

“I can only tell you what I know,” I say. “I know Zhang Jianli’s email address. I already gave it to you.”

“But you manage his art.” He smiles, baring his teeth. “Hard to understand how you can do this without knowing where he is.”

We’ve been over this before.

“He left me instructions. It’s not so hard.”

“You sell his art, then.”

“I sold some art,” I correct. We haven’t sold a thing since February. When this whole “fun with the DSD” game started.

“You sell his work,” Pompadour Bureaucrat repeats. “Then how does he get paid?”

My heart thumps harder. This is a sensitive subject. “I just collect the money. He hasn’t taken any yet.”

A frown. “But this is a little strange. This is his money, after all. His work. He behaves… almost like a man who is no longer alive.”

Oh, shit.

I do not like where this is heading.

“All I know is what he told me. What I told you. He wanted some time away from Beijing, so he could work. Get fresh ideas. Too many distractions here.” I risk a tiny smirk, ’cause I just can’t help it. “See, he likes coffee. He’s not so fond of tea.”

I stumble out of there in the late afternoon, into the yellow-grey haze of a hot May afternoon. Smog mingles with the dust of a construction site, where this huge jackhammer thing rises like an insect on steroids above temporary metal walls covered with photo murals of new, modern China: sleek high-speed trains, spaceship skyscrapers, and, to show proper respect to tradition, and tourism, the Temple of Heaven.

I’m pretty sure it’s a subway they’re building. They’re building them everywhere. I wish it were done, so I could ride down some long escalator, past ads for Lancôme and real estate and cell phones and socialist modernization, into some shiny new train that would whisk me away, underground, below all the traffic and noise, and I’d emerge in my own neighborhood, safe at home, like magic.

Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen.

I limp past a yellow Home Inn and signs for some sports complex left over from the ’08 Olympics, and I can see a line of tall, straight trees in an empty field at the side of an expressway, maybe a ring road, but I don’t know which one, because I’ve hardly ever been to Fengtai before, except for the Beijing West Railway Station, a place I hate that’s hard to avoid: ugly Soviet mainframe built like a cheap brown suit topped with Chinese pagodas. I’m a lot deeper into Fengtai than that, though, right at the edge where it turns into crumbling old villages and farmland.

A taxi, I think. I need to find a taxi.

Either that or a drink.

I buy a bottle of Nongfu Spring water at a newsstand and take a Percocet.

I need them, I tell myself. It’s not like I’m some addict who just wants to get high. I’m in pain most of the time. The Percocet takes the edge off. I mean, what else am I supposed to do? I’ve tried acupuncture. It helps, sometimes. So does exercise, sometimes. Tried smoking pot or hash, which helps, too, but, you know, it’s technically illegal, and with the rising tide of shit I’m already in…

I feel like the little boat that’s about to get swamped.

I sit in the back of the taxi and tell myself to think about something else. Something that doesn’t make my heart pound and me break out in a cold sweat.

Like, what am I going to do when I run out of the Percocet stash that my mom brought me from the States? That’s really gonna suck.

Another good reason to leave the country.

If they’ll let me.

I stare out the window at the barely crawling cars on the Third Ring Road, at banks of skinny high-rises, whatever colors they once were bleached by smog, their rusting balconies crowded with laundry.

Well, at least they let me out of that cheap-ass hotel.

Another reason to leave: the fucking construction in my neighborhood.

This big stretch of Jiugulou Dajie is torn up, with temporary walls and those blue-trimmed white construction dorms and giant machinery pounding away at the earth, and I swear I feel like I’m living inside a fucking drum sometimes. Another subway line that’s going to hook up with Line 2 at my stop, Gulou, and while I’m totally in favor of subways, this is really starting to suck. All my favorite snack stands are gone, swept away for no real reason that I can see. I mean, they aren’t digging the line down there, I don’t think-they just decided to knock a couple blocks down because… I don’t know why. No one does. Shit like this happens constantly, and you mostly have to guess at the reasons, because no one is going to tell you or ask for your opinion.

’Cause if they had, I would have said, Whatever you do, keep that yangrou chuanr guy! He makes the best mutton skewers in Beijing! I used to love to watch him work, carefully dusting the chunks of meat with red spices, rotating them just so, and it was good meat, not some tiny, gristly hunks of who-the-fuck-knows-what animal. It was weird, because he was so into it, so happy doing this simple thing, it seemed like. I would stand there sometimes, waiting for my skewers, wanting to ask him, So what’s the secret of life? Because I was pretty sure he had the answer. Something to do with taking pride in doing simple things well or some bullshit like that.

Now he’s gone, and I don’t know where. I never had a chance to ask. No warning. I just walked down the street one day and all those guys were gone-all the stands in front of grey old hutong buildings, all those blackened metal grills, the little signs for chuanr made from tiny red lights on twisted wire frames. The old buildings, too. All gone. Replaced by temporary metal fencing, with slapped-on billboard murals of high-speed trains and the Temple of Heaven.

Fuck this, I think, unlocking my apartment door. If I can’t sell Lao Zhang’s artwork, I’m not going to make enough money to pay for this place anyway.

There’s an explosion of happy barks and yips. My dog, Mimi.

I open the door and she’s dancing around: a medium-size, long-haired yellow dog with a dark muzzle and a feathered tail. She sees me and puts her paws up on my hips, but gently, looks up at me with this Omigod, I love you more than anything! expression.

She needs a walk. I can tell. And in spite of the fact that there’s major serious shit I need to deal with, in spite of the fact that what I really want to do is drink two or three large Yanjing Drafts (because that’s what it takes to get any kind of buzz off the weak-ass beer here), what I decide to do is take the dog for a walk.

First things first, right?

We walk around the hutongs behind the Bell Tower a little while, past the community hospital and the police station hiding in the narrow alleys, by the industrial-looking grocery and butcher where everyone’s lined up at a window to buy fresh baozi, past a trendy-looking bar/restaurant where you still have to use the public toilet across the alley. Finally Mimi does her business (a two-bagger). “We’ll go to the Drum Tower later, okay?” I tell her. Lots of people in the neighborhood like to bring their dogs out to the plaza between the Drum and Bell Towers, but not until after dark, when all the tourists have gone. It’s a big problem here, finding any kind of open space where your dog can run around a little. Another reason to leave, I think.

But where would I go? This is the question that always stops me.

I’d better think about what’s on my plate right now, I tell myself.

So while Mimi sniffs at some interesting stains on a grey brick wall, I get out my iPhone. Stare at it. I don’t exactly want to send this email. I’m really not ready to deal with the person on the other end.

It’s not really a choice, I tell myself.

I launch the VPN on my phone, open up my email, and type: “Do you have time to meet?”