Hour of the Rat

CHAPTER TWELVE

TURNS OUT WE’RE WAITING for a tractor.

I sit on a little plastic stool beneath a blue tarp, in one of the makeshift workshops where they’re dismantling monitors, and I try not to breathe too much. One of the workers brings me a Coke from someplace, which I figure is probably safe to drink. I wonder why they’re being so nice to me, but all I say is, “Ganxie nimen”-Thank you very much-and use the Coke to wash down a Percocet. I know sometimes I take the things when I’m really stressed out or just because it feels good, but right now I take it because I’m fucking hurting.

What the fuck was all that? I try to think, but it’s hard, it’s like my thoughts are tangled up in barbed wire, my head throbbing with the pain in my leg.

Something’s going on with New Century Seeds. I’m as sure as I can be about that without actually knowing what it is. And it’s easy to figure that the guys who attacked me are connected to that. But I can’t know for sure. With all the unrest going on, maybe they’re just touchy about having foreigners around.

Maybe there’s something they don’t want me to see. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be about New Century Seeds.

While I sit, I try to boot up my laptop. Turns out it really is my laptop, but the casing is cracked, and when I power it up, there’s some sad whirring and then nothing but a grey screen.

The kid who retrieved it sidles up to me. He’s… I don’t know, maybe twelve? Skinny like the couple who rescued me. Oversize head. Bucktoothed. Wearing sneakers a size too large, laces flapping.

“Broken?” he asks.

I nod.

“Pingguo?” Apple?

“Shi.” It’s an old MacBook, a white plastic slab that’s taken all kinds of abuse and still works. Well, up till now.

“Can I?” the kid asks, reaching out his hand.

Sure. Why not? I hand him the laptop.

He opens it. “Late 2006 one. I can fix,” he says solemnly.

“Really.” I’m skeptical.

“Really!” He makes a fist and thumps his skinny chest.

Right about then the guy with the brick shows up in a tuolaji. It’s this crazy farm vehicle, a cross between a truck and a tractor that looks like it’s built out of scrap and rubber bands: two-stroke engine mounted in the front, thrusting out over two small wheels, a little truck bed in back, with a long, skinny metal beam connecting them, like it would snap in half if you jumped on it hard, something a kid would build out of Legos. The engine turns the front wheels by what looks like a giant vacuum-cleaner belt. The guy steers it with these long handlebars, his seat a cracked green vinyl cushion.

“Lai, lai!” he calls out. Come, come!

“My parents,” the kid says, pointing at the woman who helped me and then the guy on the tractor. “I fix the computer for you. Okay?”

“Maybe later,” I say. I mean, it would be nice, but I’m not about to leave my laptop with this kid, even if it is just so much electronic junk, like everything else here.

The kid turns to his mom, rattles off something I don’t understand. She replies, and I don’t understand her either.

“Okay!” he says to me. “Later. I fix it.” The kid grins. “We have parts.”

SO HERE I AM sitting in the back of the little truck bed, which I’m guessing recently transported chickens, with the woman, whose name, I think, is Lau Mei Yee. Aside from the fact that I have a hard time understanding her Mandarin, the engine on this tractor is so loud that it’s like rounds of gunfire, shot off fast and right next to my ear.

“He is a good doctor!” she shouts. “Wa Keung see him before. My husband. And Moudzu, our son.”

“Oh. What was wrong?”

“Feiyan,” I think she says, which means pneumonia. And she says something else that might mean bronchitis, which I know only because I got that the first winter I lived in Beijing.

Now that the Percocet’s kicked in, I’m thinking there isn’t much point in seeing the doctor. What’s he going to say? Oh, your leg’s fucked up. I mean, what else is new?

But they picked me up in their tractor, you know? So I sort of feel obligated.

It feels like we’re going farther out into the country, which is fine with me, because I want to get as far away from that fucking place and Mr. Piggy and his thugs as I can. They have to be his thugs, right? Probably not a coincidence that I go looking for New Century Seeds, mention “David,” and people try to beat the shit out of me.

Or it’s just how they welcome foreigners who might be journalists or environmentalists in these parts.

I lean back in the little truck bed and think, Okay, this is now officially above my pay grade.

We’ve rumbled into another village-or city, I can’t tell which. Slightly less electronic crap lining the road. Open storefronts with things like tractor parts and hardware, sacks of fertilizer, feed. A farm town.

“Zai zheli,” Mrs. Lau says, pointing to a two-story, white-tile-faced storefront with red banners above the entrance and a white canvas curtain with a red cross hanging in the doorframe.

Wa Keung stops the tractor, and Mei Yee helps me out.

I stagger onto the curb, stumbling and almost falling against her, as Wa Keung pulls away. I guess he has to find tractor parking.

The inside of the clinic has smudged whitewashed walls, cheery health posters with cartoon doctors dispensing advice and pills. It’s a small room, stuffed full of about two dozen people sitting in plastic chairs, a dozen others leaning against the walls, waiting.

“I really feel better,” I tell Mei Yee. I don’t feel like waiting in this airless little room. Some of these people look really sick. There’s all kinds of coughing: horrible, phlegm-filled fits that sound like death rattles. Some of them are skeleton thin, pale. Others have barrel chests, bloated bellies. I remember enough of my medic training to make good guesses on some of them, but it’s not exactly a shock that you’d have a lot of respiratory and heart disease here. Have to figure the cancer rates are pretty high as well. And the kids. I don’t like seeing the little kids, their heads too big, their ribs jutting out, their skin tones pale and jaundiced.

“The doctor knows you are coming. You don’t have to wait long.”

Now I really want to leave. When you’re a military medic, one of the things the training emphasizes is triage: You sort the casualties according to priority for treatment. Treat the serious first, leave the less urgent for later, and if there are too many patients, put aside the ones who who’ll probably die or take up too much time to save.

There’re all kinds of people here who need help more than I do.

I open my mouth to object, and as I do, a door opens and a woman comes out with a clipboard. She’s middle-aged, stout. Takes a quick look around the room and waves in my direction.

With Mei Yee’s help, I hobble over, face burning red, not wanting to look at the people who’ve been waiting in this room for God knows how long, who are really sick, who might be dying. They don’t complain, don’t stand up and yell and demand an explanation. They just sit, or stand, and wait.

It’s not right, and it’s not fair. But I go anyway.

The clinic isn’t big. There’s a short hallway. On one side a room about the size of the waiting area with a half dozen beds in it, all occupied. On the other side, a couple of closed doors, and then one that’s open, an exam room from the look of things.

A middle-aged man wearing a white coat sits on an adjustable stool there. When he sees me, he rises. His hair is thick but shot with grey. His eyes have dark pouches under them. He gives me a nod of a bow and smiles, indicates a padded table. I get myself on it, with a little boost from Mei Yee.

“Hello,” he says in English. “I am Dr. Chen. I understand you have some leg injury.”

I nod.

“If you can… take off the trousers, I can have a look.”

I feel myself flush. I don’t like people seeing my leg. I don’t like looking at it myself. But that’s why I’m here, right?

He steps out of the exam room. I’m hoping he’s going to help someone else. The middle-aged woman with the clipboard comes in. I unbutton my jeans. She helps me get them off, me gasping from the spasms that travel from my ass down to my toes.

After she drapes a sheet across my lap, the doctor comes back in.

He bends his head over my leg, studying the ridged white scars, the withered dent in the quad where a chunk of muscle is missing.

“Ah. You have an old injury?”

“Yeah,” I say. “There’s a rod in there, in the femur, and some screws.”

There’s also a wicked-looking, purpling lump on the side of my leg, above my knee.

“How did this happen?”

I shrug. I don’t want to get into it. “Accident.”

Mei Yee launches into an explanation in the local dialect. I can’t understand it, but she pretty much acts it out for him, holding an imaginary rod in her hands, swinging it down, so I guess I’m busted.

“Ah. I see.”

The doctor probes around the area with his fingers, and he’s gentle enough, but I feel these weird electric shocks, almost, sparking up and down my leg.

“We don’t have X-ray here,” he finally says. “For this you must go to county hospital. But I think first ice, raise up. We can put on, the… the…” He can’t come up with the word he wants. “The bandages. To… to tighten it.”

“Compression bandage,” I supply.

“Yes, yes. This. But I think also you should take a rest. Try not to stand or to sit too much. Instead to lie down and raise up. And to walk now and again, for preventing… the clot.”

“Okay. Sounds good.” Like I needed a doctor to tell me any of this.

“Because… the blow maybe hit the… the screw you talk about. Can maybe cause a problem. You must take care.” He gives my leg a final look. “This was bad injury, before.”

“Yeah,” I say.

They have me lie down on one of the beds with a big ice pack on my leg for a while, and in a way I’m glad that the lady next to me is too sick to feel like talking much, because I sure don’t feel like talking to anyone. After that the woman with the clipboard wraps a compression bandage around my thigh and fits me with a pair of crutches, so I guess the visit isn’t a total waste of time. I also get a bunch of pills, which I put in my backpack and probably won’t take, given that I’m not sure what they are or what they’re for, and the quality control of Chinese medicine, like a lot of things in China, is kind of variable.

Plus, they probably aren’t painkillers.

Then I get the bill-a hundred yuan, about fourteen bucks. I pay it, plus “a charitable contribution to village health” of another hundred kuai, thank the doctor and the woman with the clipboard and crutch it outside, the coughs from the people in the waiting room following me out onto the cracked concrete slab.

Mei Yee waits for me there on the nonexistent sidewalk, texting on her phone.

“You better now?” she asks.

“Yue lai, yue hao.” Getting better and better.

“Wa Keung come and pick us up. Take to our home.”

“You’re too polite. It’s not necessary. I should go back to Shantou.”

She covers my hand with hers. “Come to our home. Have a rest.” She grins at me, her smile revealing tea-stained teeth. “Moudzu can fix your computer.”

AND THAT’S HOW I end up in the back of the tractor again, this time with my leg propped up on a couple bags of fertilizer. I really don’t want to go to these people’s home, but I can’t think of a polite way to refuse, especially after all the trouble they went to, saving me from getting my ass kicked and all.

Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to try to find out a little more about what’s going on around here.

I know I should just give up on this whole thing. Haul my gimpy ass back to Beijing and… I don’t know, deal. With the business I can’t run. With my mom, who’s going to see me on crutches and freak out or, alternatively, is so busy practicing navel denting with Anal Andy that she won’t even notice.

That’s the thing. I like having a mission.

Yeah, it’s helping a buddy, but it’s more than that. It’s having a puzzle to solve. Having something to do. Something that matters.

And maybe they’ll have beer.

YOU CAN STILL SEE some of the original structure of the Laus’ farmhouse: blond brick with the texture of sand, crumbling in places, peaked grey tile roofs. Concrete smooths over the brick on a couple of the walls, and stuck on the walls here and there are little block-shaped rooms made out of cement, with flat tin roofs. Topping off the whole thing is a satellite dish, which I’d bet is aimed toward Hong Kong. There are outbuildings, sheds and a barn, and though it’s getting dark, I can catch glimpses of fields behind the house, other farmhouses in the distance.

“Welcome, welcome,” Mrs. Lau says, clasping her hands, her head bobbing up and down.

I shake off her offer of help and manage to hop over the beam across the threshold with the aid of my crutches. I’m thinking I can get by with just the one of them, really. My leg hurts, but it feels better than it did. Give me a couple of days and I’ll be as good as… well, as good as I was before this happened.

Inside, the main room has battered whitewashed walls decorated with posters, mostly of Chinese folk figures: the woman who holds up a lantern in one arm and a rabbit in the other; a big, red-faced dude with a fancy outfit and a sword; plus a print of the Mona Lisa. In some places the flooring is old stone-who knows how old? I can see the wear from centuries of footsteps. There’s a battered wooden table and a couple of chairs; a newish-looking TV across from a couch; a refrigerator; a water dispenser next to that; and a chest of drawers that’s painted white with gold trim and curlicues, with books stacked on top of it. I glimpse the kitchen off to one side, one of the add-on rooms, and a tiny bedroom, the entire space taken up by quilts and whatever kind of mattress is beneath them.

“You like to drink something? Some tea? Coke? Maybe beer?” Mrs. Lau asks.

Score.

“Thank you, I very much like to drink beer.”

I settle myself on the couch.

“Wa Keung and I make dinner,” she says after opening a bottle and pouring a measure into a plastic cup.

“Please don’t go to any trouble.”

“Just something simple. Wa Keung is very good cook. Better than me. You want to watch TV?”

“That’s okay.”

She switches it on anyway. Oh, great, a Chinese soap. Cue the giggling ingenue and the inevitable crying child. I dig into my backpack for a Percocet. It’s been… what? A couple of hours since the last one?

“Moudzu!” Mei Yee yells. “Come in here!”

Moudzu emerges from a room across from the bedroom.

“You can fix the computer?” she asks.

He grins and nods. “Sure. Very easy. I already get parts.” He stands there in his outsize sneakers, waiting for me to hand it over.

I’m not crazy about letting him have my laptop, but if he can really fix it, maybe it’s worth the risk. I try to remember: Is there anything on the hard drive that might get me in trouble? Anything about the Great Community? I’m careful about how I log on, using the VPN and all, but maybe there’s some cookie, some hidden file, something that you could find if you copied the hard drive and dug deep enough.

“Do you need to take it someplace?” I ask.

“No,” he says, his grin getting broader. “You want to see? I show you.”

Better than watching TV, I guess. I push myself to my feet with one of the crutches, grab my cup of beer in my free hand, and follow him.

Moudzu’s lair is one of the newer additions: a spare concrete block. But that’s not what I notice when I part the curtain made from a patterned sheet and peer inside.

It’s dark, lit up by battered computer monitors and a bunch of blinking diodes, from modems, from power strips, from who knows what. The computers sit on a makeshift desk consisting of a detached door propped on top of crates against one wall and another ad hoc desk made out of a shipping crate against the other. One monitor has a game going on, explosions and flashing swords, another a series of chats against a background of noisy, cluttered Flash animation-for some reason a couple of cartoon rabbits drinking cans of cola. There are anime and gaming posters on the wall that I can just make out in the dim, bluish green light. Books are piled everywhere there aren’t computers or pieces of computers. Between the desks and the bed, there’s about six inches of clearance through which to walk.

Moudzu switches on a lamp that shines down on the larger, door desk. Aside from the two monitors, there are a bunch of electronic parts and components, a couple of portable hard drives, and what I think is an internal one, some circuit boards, rectangles of RAM. Now I can see that the crates holding up the door are subdivided into plastic bins, like they had at the workshop that was New Century Seeds, with additional bins beneath the desk.

Moudzu rummages around and holds up a small Phillips-head screwdriver. “I can fix.”

I am a little fuzzy because of the Percocet and the beer, not to mention the fucking weird day I’ve had, and also maybe a little more euphoric than I should be to make a decision like this, but as I try to think it through, I figure there’s really no way these guys can know who I am and what may or may not be on my computer.

“What do you think is wrong with it?” I ask.

“Motherboard. And you need new screen.”

I watch for a while, sitting on the bed with my bum leg stretched out under the smaller desk, the one made from the shipping crate, Percocet spreading through my veins and nerves and muscles like warm, narcotic honey, as Moudzu expertly takes my laptop apart, removing a series of tiny screws with his magnetized Phillips head, lifting off the top case, and sticking his fingers in its electronic guts. The scents of garlic and scallions and meat drift in from the kitchen.

Moudzu retrieves a pencil-thin soldering iron from one of his bins.

“So you like computers,” I say by way of small talk, an activity at which, admittedly, I suck.

He nods, focused on the components strewn across the desk, the soldering iron in his hand.

“Is this the kind of work you want to do in the future?”

He smiles but doesn’t look at me, touches the tip of the soldering iron to a coil of solder and the edge of a circuit board. “Not only this.”

The smell of singed metal fills the room. He holds the soldering iron down a moment longer to seal the connection, lifts it up with a flourish.

“I want to be like Steve Jobs,” he says. “Make new Apple. Something better.” He grins. “Maybe I call my company Peach.”

AFTER THAT IT’S TIME for dinner. Too much food, which happens just about anytime a Chinese person invites you to his home and which always embarrasses me. Dried noodles with meat and spices, chicken in bean sauce and ginger, fried rice cakes with shrimp, pumpkin stuffed with sweet taro, and a lot of vegetables. Wa Keung must have picked some of this up while I was at the doctor’s; they couldn’t have made it all so quickly.

“Really good,” I say, and it is.

“We grow a lot ourselves,” Mei Yee says. “The rice and the vegetables. We also have chickens and a few pigs.”

Wa Keung shakes his head. “But crops don’t grow the way they used to. In the southern fields, many things die or don’t grow right. We had eggplant last year, and most of them were shaped strangely. Couldn’t sell them. Afraid to eat them.”

“What do you think causes it?” I ask, although of course I already know the answer.

Wa Keung snorts and laughs. “The workshops, of course. The pollution. They were supposed to clean it up in Guiyu, but all they’ve done is move it to other places, closer to us.”

“People get sick now, all the time,” Mei Yee chimes in. “Everyone knows someone with cancer. Everyone.”

Great, I think, looking at the delicious food on my plate. Who the fuck knows what’s in this stuff, how safe any of it is?

I eat it anyway. You know, to be polite.

WA KEUNG POURS A round of baijiu, for everyone but Moudzu. Clear grain alcohol, ranging from pretty smooth to furniture-stripping, depending on how much you spend.

“Drink, drink,” he says, noticing my hesitation. “A little bit is good for you. Anyway, you cannot drink the water here.” He waves at the dispenser by the refrigerator. “We have to spend money on water from out of town.”

I sip. The stuff burns my throat.

“We’ve had enough,” he says. “The guy, the one who hit you, his bosses-they take people’s land. Beat people. Poison our crops. Get rich and give us nothing. That farmer, the one who bombed the government offices in Fujian, he had the right idea.”

He pours himself another shot of baijiu and tosses it back.

“Yeah,” I say. “I can see why you’re angry.”

“So you’re a reporter?” he asks. “An environmentalist?” I shake my head, reluctantly.

The disappointment shows on both his and Mei Yee’s faces, though they quickly cover it up with smiles.

I had a feeling, you know? That they didn’t just rescue me and take me to the doctor and stuff me full of food and have their kid fix my computer because they’re nice people, though they seem nice enough. They’re looking for justice, for someone to pay attention to their problems, for things to be put right. I don’t know how much news coverage even does for situations like this, but sometimes, if the central government’s sufficiently embarrassed, sometimes the problem gets addressed.

And then moved somewhere else, out of sight.

“Why you come here, then?” Mei Yee asks flatly.

“Looking for the brother of a friend,” I say. I tell them the story and pull out my photo of Jason.

They haven’t seen him.

“Environmentalists come all the time to Guiyu,” Mei Yee says. “Not so much out here.”

“I understand,” I say. We sit in silence. Wa Keung drinks more baijiu. I have another glass of beer.

Then it occurs to me: These guys are farmers. They grow things. Like, from seeds.

“Ni zhidao Xin Shiji Zhongzi Gongsi?” I ask. Have you heard of New Century Seeds?

Wa Keung frowns. “Sure,” he says. “Sure, we just plant some.”

I TELL WA KEUNG I can walk, and I follow him outside with the aid of my crutch-between the Percocet and the beer, I’m feeling pretty good.

We go out behind the house, and Wa Keung points to a paddy cut into the hill that I can just make out, water glinting under the moonlight.

“Rice,” he says. “First time I try this kind. Sprouting now. Seems good enough.”

“So it’s just normal rice?” I ask.

“No, they say it’s special kind. They tell us in conditions like this it grows better than normal rice.”

“Conditions like what?”

He turns his palms skyward and spreads his arms. “Like all of this. The pollution. The bad air and dirty water and poisoned earth. They say the rice will still grow, no matter what.”

Prickles rise on the back of my neck. I’m not even sure why. I mean, rice that can grow in bad soil, that’s a good thing, right?

“No matter what? How can it do that?”

“Not sure. They say it’s ‘scientific process of development.’ ” Wa Keung shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’d rather grow same rice we grow here for generations. But last year’s crop hardly worth growing. Old rice can’t live here anymore.”

There’s something buzzing in my head, about Jason, about him being into the environment, about a seed company in the middle of a toxic-waste dump.

Jason may be off his meds, but something’s not right here.

“Do you think this new rice is safe?” I ask. “My meaning is… if it can grow in these conditions…”

Do you really want to be eating something that can grow in poisoned ground?

He shrugs. “Who can say? Nothing is safe here. But we still have to make money. We have to eat. What choice do we have?”

Wa Keung drives me in the tuolaji to a bus stop in the town where I saw the doctor, where I can catch a bus back to Shantou. He and Mei Yee made the polite offer that I should stay at their place for the night; I just as politely turned it down. I’m not the person they hoped I was, and they’ve already done enough for me. Besides, I want to get back to Shantou, to my hotel, to my own room and my own bed, temporary as it all is.

Before I go, Wa Keung tells me a little more about the New Century “Hero Rice” seeds.

“They say you can’t save seeds and grow from them the next year,” he tells me. “That you need to buy the seeds each time.”

“That sounds a little complicated,” I say.

“Maybe it’s not true. Maybe that’s just what they want you to think, so they can make more money.” He grins, and for the first time I can see that he’s Moudzu’s father.

“Rice is rice,” he tells me. “If it isn’t processed, you can grow it. Of course we’ll try to use what we grow. Why should we pay them over and over again?”

We go into a little shed tacked onto the main house, stuffed with random junk-a broken chair, a stack of empty plastic buckets, a battered suitcase-and he aims a flashlight to show me the bag the rice came in, which they’d been using to store some of Moudzu’s computer parts. It’s a couple feet high, white woven plastic with a red, gold, and black stencil on it of your basic Chinese proletariat hero thrusting a hoe into the air, rice growing triumphantly in the background. NEW CENTURY HERO RICE! it says, in Chinese and English.

Is this some kind of joke?

Wa Keung dumps the components out onto the floor-a bunch of old keyboards, mostly.

“Here,” he says, folding the bag up and holding it out to me. “You can have it if you want.”

I stuff it into my daypack.

“Do you know any reporter?” he asks, “who maybe is interested in our story?”

“Maybe,” I say. I’ve met a couple anyway. “When I return to Beijing, I can ask.”

He smiles and nods, but I can’t tell if he believes me. I don’t know if I believe myself.

The other thing I do before we leave is pay Moudzu some money for the parts and trouble he took to fix my laptop. Because, what do you know, it boots up fine now.

“You should get new one,” he informs me solemnly. “This one very outdated. Most people don’t bother to fix.”

“True,” I say. “True.”

I TAKE THE BUS back to Shantou and a taxi to my hotel, the Brilliant Star Inn. I’m managing with one crutch and trying to juggle the other as I enter the minimal lobby: a small room with a red-cushioned couch framed in fake chrome; a glass-door cooler filled with water, sodas, beer, and energy drinks; shelves with sundries for sale that are mostly packaged underwear and Pringles chips and, with a nod to Shantou’s international reputation, radio-controlled crawling soldier toys and Barbie rip-offs called Spank Me Girl!

Behind a reception counter covered with walnut-grained plastic veneer is a friendly hotel worker representing the colors of the Brilliant Star posse-a bright yellow jacket with purple stitching that claims her name is LATOYA.

“Oh, are you hurt?” she asks. “Do you need help?”

I manage a smile. “I’m fine. Thank you.” I gesture toward the cooler. “But I’ll take two bottles of beer.”

She insists on carrying the beer and my spare crutch up to my room, which is on the third floor. “Did you have an accident?” she asks. “Do you need a doctor?”

“A small accident. I already saw a doctor. Thank you.”

Truth is, once I hang the Do Not Disturb sign on my door, lock it, and gingerly position myself on the bed, which is your basic cheap Chinese-hotel “Is this a mattress or a sheet of plywood covered by a polyester pad and a sheet?” kind of deal, I realize that I feel pretty crappy. I mean, I’m used to my leg hurting. It hurts a lot of the time. But this is on a different level, the kind of pain I felt years ago, when the injury was fresh. And my chest hurts, too, and my throat, and the insides of my nostrils, like everything’s been rubbed with sandpaper and bleach. And I wonder, how the fuck do people live in that place? People like Wa Keung and Mei Yee and Moudzu? How do they get up every day and do what they have to do? How does a kid like Moudzu believe he’s going to become the next Steve fucking Jobs?

I crack open a beer and I drink, thinking sometimes it’s better not to know how the world really works. The less you know, the more you can pretend that you have a shot of beating the odds.

I lift up my bottle of Kingway beer. “Go Peach Computers!”

That makes me laugh. I laugh and laugh, and then I pound a few more slugs of beer. I’d open the other bottle, but it’s all the way over on the desk by the TV, and I don’t think I can go that far.

At some point I manage to put the empty bottle down on the pressboard nightstand and turn off the light.