Hour of the Rat

CHAPTER ONE

I SERIOUSLY NEED TO get out of Beijing.

There’s the fact that the air is trying to kill me. No joke. The American embassy over in Chaoyang does readings of the air quality in Beijing, since the Chinese government doesn’t, or won’t reveal the results anyway. A while ago it was so polluted that they ran out of normal descriptions and came up with one of their own, so what went out over Twitter was that the air was “crazy-bad.”

Thanks, guys. Remind me not to breathe.

There’s also the fact that it’s been another long winter, and while you think I’d know what’s coming after three years, it still takes me by surprise: months of wind so cold and dry that sometimes I feel like I’m breathing razors. Now that it’s the last day in February, temps are getting up above freezing at least, but it’s still the kind of cold that settles into your bones and makes my leg ache even more than it usually does.

My apartment’s comfortable. There’s a central furnace that controls the radiators in the living room and the two bedrooms; the enclosed balconies provide a buffer against the chill. I broke down and got a cheap flat-screen at Suning, and I have a stack of DVDs from my favorite DVD store off Andingmen, every American movie or TV show you could want. I’ve got take-out menus from half a dozen restaurants, and right at the end of the alley there’s a great jiaozi place and some snack stands, plus there’s a tiny store about the size of my bathroom that sells toilet paper and Yanjing beer and a bunch of snack foods, including my favorite spicy peanuts, that’s just across from the entrance to my apartment complex.

So it’s not like I really have to leave my apartment all that much right now. Or go very far if I do.

It’s just that I can only take so much of my mom without a break, and I’ve about reached my limit.

“Ellie, do you know where’s the best place for me to find peanut butter?” she asks from the doorway to my bedroom. “And chocolate chips?”

“Any of the foreign supermarkets’ll probably have them,” I say. I’m sitting on my bed with my laptop propped on a pillow on my legs. I don’t really look up. She’s always asking questions like this, and I admit I tune them out a lot of the time.

“Really? Because I went to… what’s the name of that French one? Carrefour? And they had peanut butter, but it was chunky and I need smooth. And I didn’t see any chocolate chips at all.”

“I don’t know,” I mutter. “You could always buy chocolate bars and hit them with a hammer.”

“I guess I could.”

Now I do glance away from my screen. There’s my mom, her streaked, bleached hair rising in a halo of static, wearing a Sunrise T-shirt (I’VE FOUND MR. RIGHT AND HE’S PERFECT! ISAIAH 62:5) and sweats, solid through the middle like a pound cake, the bramble-rose tattoo above her elbow sagging a bit, which is what happens to a tat inked twenty-five years ago.

“Aren’t you cold?” I ask, because even with the radiators on I’m wearing a sweatshirt.

She snorts. “Not right now. I’ve got my own heat.” She mimes fanning herself. “Hot flashes.”

Like I needed to know.

“The thing is, I want to make my special chocolate chip cookies for Andy,” she continues, cheeks flushing.

And that’s when I know I’ve got to get out of Beijing: That nice Mr. Zhou next door has become Andy.

Given my mom’s track record with men, no good can come of this.

“Maybe try Walmart,” I mutter, and turn back to my laptop.

I LOVE MY MOM.

Seriously, I really do. She did the best she could do with raising me, which maybe wasn’t always very good, but she comes through when it counts, like after I got blown up in the Sandbox, for example, leaving my leg busted in too many places to count and the rest of me not much better.

It’s just that a month now, living in my apartment in Beijing? That wasn’t what I had in mind when she said she wanted to come and visit me.

“Just to see how you’re doing,” she’d said, “since you don’t have time to come home.”

This of course was a lie on my part. I didn’t want to come home. Long story.

After a couple of weeks, where I did my best to show her the tourist sites-the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall, the Silk Market for fake Prada, and the world’s largest IKEA store-she showed no sign of going anywhere, other than to the guest room in my apartment by the Gulou subway station, which used to be my office. I finally asked, “So, Mom, when’s your flight home again?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s really up to you.”

“What about work?”

“Well…” She hesitated. As I recall, she twisted her hands together. “The job didn’t really work out.”

IT’S NOT HER FAULT, I tell myself now. She worked hard for years. It’s not her fault that the US economy is in the toilet, that she’s fifty-one years old and no one wants to hire her for anything. Not her fault that Refinancing Roulette didn’t pay off. The condo was a shithole anyway. Sometimes it’s even sort of cool having her here, like when she makes tacos, cooking being an activity at which I suck.

But I seriously need some away time from her right now.

“Don’t talk to me about Jesus,” I said about three days after she got here, Jesus being one of the things that we used to have in common, but that pretty much got blown up along with the rest of my life, in Iraq. Mostly she’s been pretty good about it, but every once in a while Jesus slips out.

For example: “You know, that nice Mr. Zhou next door belongs to a church. And I think it’s Christian, more or less. They worship Jesus anyway. He invited me to attend their service. Would you like…?”

“No thanks.”

Like I’m going to go to some weird-ass Chinese underground house church, featuring Brother Jesus Christ of the Righteous Thundering Fist, or what have you.

Like I’d set foot inside Sunrise, for that matter.

Sunrise is the church that my mom and me used to go to in Arizona. It’s a big church, in this fake-adobe complex that always reminded me of an Indian casino. But I still used to believe in it all. Take comfort in Reverend Jim’s air-conditioned sermons. Snap my WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? rubber bracelet against my wrist when I needed an invisible helping hand.

When people talk about how your faith gets tested, they always say that trials make your faith stronger. What they don’t say is that sometimes faith just dissolves like desert sand between your fingers.

“Do you feel like going to Walmart?” my mom asks. “You know, you could use a few things for your kitchen. You don’t have a single spatula.”

It’s fucking cold outside, and so far the lack of a spatula does not seem to have negatively affected my life. “Sure,” I say anyway. “Just let me finish some emails.”

I should get out of the house, I tell myself. Two P.M. and I’ve done nothing today but sit on my ass, surf the Net, drink coffee, and eat spicy peanuts and shrimp chips.

It’s right about then I hear the underwater gurgle signaling that a contact of mine has signed onto Skype. I don’t bother to look who it is. I do have a couple of emails to answer: a request from a San Francisco gallery for a couple of Lao Zhang’s paintings to exhibit for a show titled A Remix of Progress: The Disjunction of the Status Quo; somebody named Vicky Huang representing some Chinese guy I’ve never heard of, Sidney Cao, claiming he’s a big art collector who wants to arrange “a private viewing” of Lao Zhang’s work, and Lucy Wu wanting to know if I can make her opening in Shanghai on March 12. I guess I should do something productive today. That is, other than buying a spatula.

I decide to answer Lucy first. Sure, I’ll go to her opening. She usually has good wine, and maybe she can explain to me what “the disjunction of the status quo” means.

Besides, Shanghai would be getting out of Beijing, right?

That’s when the Skype phone rings.

I switch windows. It’s my buddy Dog Turner calling.

“Hey, Baby Doc!”

“Hey, Dog. Hang on a sec. Lemme put on my headset.”

Dog twitches on the screen while I untangle my iPhone earbuds.

“Lookin’ good, Ellie,” he says.

“You, too.”

He doesn’t, really, but what am I supposed to say? Even with the low-res camera on his computer, I can see the indentation in his skull where the RPG hit. If he sat farther back from the camera, I’d see the arm that wasn’t there, but frankly, I’d rather not. I think about that too much, and my own arm starts to hurt, and my leg, which pretty much hurts all the time, although I’m getting better at ignoring it. Thanks in part to the fresh supply of Percocet my mom brought me. When I asked her about it, she just giggled and said, “Well, I still have friends.”

In the aquarium light of the computer screen, I see Dog twitching in his chair. Spasms cross his face like sudden ripples on a still pond.

“What’s up, man?” I ask. “How’s the family?”

“Mostly good.” His mouth twists.

“Mostly?”

“Kids are good. Wife… I make her crazy.” He grins lopsidedly. “You?”

“Fine,” I say.

I know something’s up with him. We’re buddies and all, we keep each other posted, but it’s not like we talk all the time. It’s hard for him to talk, for one. The TBI, the traumatic brain injury, really fucked him up. Plus, there’s the whole thing where we messed around back in Iraq, and even though it didn’t really mean anything, I still feel a little weird talking to him too much when he has a wife and a couple of kids. It’s almost worse since he got hurt in Af-Pak, because I wish I felt comfortable talking to his wife. Like, if the situation were different, I could say, “Hey, Natalie, what can I do to help?”

Which is pretty fucking stupid, actually. Because there’s nothing I can do to help.

“Lookin’ good, Ellie,” he repeats.

“Thanks.”

“I want…” He screws up his face again. “I need… I have this…”

I wait.

“My brother,” he manages.

“HE’S IN CHINA, SOMEWHERE,” Natalie explains. She’s taken over for Dog, who got all agitated when the words he wanted wouldn’t come. “We got a postcard a month or so ago from some place called… Yang shoe?”

“Yangshuo?” I guess.

“I don’t know.” She rolls her eyes, impatient. “Someplace with weird-looking mountains.”

She’s a San Diego girl, I know. A couple years older than me. Thin and tan, with that whole “I jog and do yoga” body and the beginnings of hard lines on her face: around her mouth, outlining her cheeks.

“Probably Yangshuo.”

“Whatever.” She heaves a sigh. “The thing is…”

She glances over her shoulder. Dog is there, hovering, scooting around in an office chair like it’s a bumper car, occasionally waving at the screen.

She runs her fingers through her highlighted hair. “He wants Jason to come home.”

“So why doesn’t he?”

She pauses. Looks sideways for a moment. “Jason has some problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“He’s…” Her voice drops. “He’s not stable. He’s on meds. And we think maybe he went off them.”

“Meds for what?” I ask. “What’s the diagnosis?”

Not like I’m an expert, but when I trained to be a medic, we covered the basics.

“I…” She hesitates again. “Manic depression. Doug doesn’t like to-”

“What?” Dog says. “What don’t I like?”

“He’s a little in denial,” she whispers. “But it’s made Jason… He’s acted out before. We’re just worried about-”

“It’s FUBAR!” Dog shouts in the background. “Jason’s not a head case!”

“Okay, okay,” I say. “So you don’t know where he is?”

“No.” She glances over her shoulder at Dog, then back to me. “I know it’s crazy, even asking you. I tell him China’s got a billion people or whatever, but he won’t… he won’t listen.”

“Doesn’t fucking hurt to ask,” I hear Dog say.

I think about it.

“It’s not totally crazy,” I say.

OKAY, THE ODDS AREN’T great. But it’s not impossible.

Here’s the thing: China is a big country. Huge. With more than a billion people.

But most of them are Chinese.

There are a lot of Westerners who live here, for sure. And tourists. I don’t know how many, but enough so that in most popular tourist places it’s not like a Westerner is a total Martian or anything. In Beijing no one notices or particularly cares. Yeah, some old auntie might remark to her buddy on the neighborhood committee, “Hey, laowai laile!” but it’s hard to keep track when there are so many of us.

That said, someone is still watching.

Places like Yangshuo, a major hub on the banana-pancake backpacker circuit, known for its weird, beautiful mountains, “quaint” villages tucked along rice paddies, rivers where you can float down a bamboo raft, sucking down beer-yeah, lots of foreigners go there, for sure. But they tend to congregate in certain establishments.

It’s possible I could find someone who’d seen Jason. Who maybe had even hung out with him. Who might have an idea where he is.

WHAT I SAY TO Natalie and Dog is, “Yeah, it’s pretty much a long shot. But, you know, send me whatever you got on him and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks,” Natalie says, brushing her hair out of her face again, which I think she’s doing because she’s tearing up and she doesn’t want me to see. “Thanks. It means a lot to Doug. I know you guys are friends. I mean, I know…” She blinks rapidly. “He’s said a lot of really nice things about you.”

“Heh,” I say. “Doug’s a good guy.”

There is a long and somewhat awkward silence. Natalie stares into the webcam, blinking now and then. In the background Dog scoots up to the screen on his office chair, puts his only arm around Natalie’s shoulders, and squeezes.

“I’m an asshole!” he says, grinning.

JUST TO CLARIFY, IT’S not because I feel guilty or something that I am thinking about helping Dog out. It’s because you help your buddies. That’s just the way it is. You help the people who were there for you, is all. And Dog… well, yeah, he’s kind of an asshole on the one hand. On the other, he was a buddy to me during my first duty assignment in Iraq, in Mortaritaville. I was as young and dumb as they came, nineteen years old, a good Christian girl.

Maybe he acted like a friend primarily to get into my pants, which I gotta say worked well for him. But when I think about those times now, mostly what I remember is that he was still my friend.

Plus, Yangshuo is supposed to be beautiful. And warm. As mentioned, it’s ass-freezing cold here in Beijing, and the air is “crazy-bad.”

Then there’s this: “Ellie, are you ready to go to Walmart?”

Here’s my mom, hovering in the doorway, with a stout Chinese guy standing slightly behind her, his hands clasped in front of him like he’s a singer in a choir waiting for his cue.

“Do you mind if Andy tags along?” my mom asks, a little hesitantly. “He needs a few things.”

“Yes.” Andy nods vigorously. “Socks. And candles.”

“Sure,” I say. “Fine.”

I insist we take a subway there, even though Andy claims to have a car and my mom doesn’t understand why we don’t just cab it-“But, honey, the taxis are so cheap here!”

“Because if we take a cab, we sit in the same fucking traffic as everyone else, that’s why,” I say, not for the first time. “And people here drive even worse than in Phoenix.”

Plus, I still don’t like riding in cars very much. I’m better about it than I was, but I don’t like being stuck in traffic, a sitting target. That’s how you get blown up. Outside the wire you haul ass.

Okay, I know where I am and that I’m not going to get blown up in a Beijing taxi, probably. Sitting in traffic just makes me nervous sometimes.

We pass the random bronze statues of little kids playing on the dead grass, the tiny kiosk where the guy makes jianbing, which is sort of a Beijing breakfast burrito and one of my favorite foods ever, and trot down the long staircase to the subway.

“Yi zhang piao,” I tell the attendant behind the Plexiglas window. I have my yikatong card, but my mom hasn’t taken the plunge, so I buy her tickets whenever we go someplace. It’s like neither of us wants to admit that she’s staying here.

“Anal constriction,” Andy says in English, carefully sounding out each syllable. “Anal constriction is key.”

“Oh, really?”

We put our bags through the X-ray machine that no one pays attention to and head down another set of stairs to the platform. It’s not too crowded this time of day. We line up at the shortest queue I can spot, toward the back of the train. I watch the ads for banks, cell phones, and real estate flicker on the dark wall across from us.

“Yes,” Andy says. “Anal constriction. And denting naval.”

“It’s a part of the religious practice,” my mom explains. “Kind of like tai chi.”

“What does this have to do with Jesus?” I mutter.

“Brother Jesus wants us to be happy,” Andy explains. “With anal constriction, you can say good-bye to sad feelings. And take back your youth.” He turns to my mom and smiles. “Increases staying power.”

She blushes a little as the rush of warm air from the inbound subway hits the platform.

And this is another reason I need a break from my mom: the longer I’m around her and Andy, the more I feel like a pissed-off teenager. As opposed to, you know, a pissed-off twenty-seven-year-old.

BY THE TIME WE return from Walmart, with chocolate chips, spatulas, peanut butter, candles, and socks, there’s an email from Natalie with an attachment: a photo of Jason.

I stretch my bad leg out on my bed, battered white MacBook propped on a pillow on my lap, and open the attachment.

He’s a kid. Younger than me. Longish brown hair. Full cheeks and a backpacker beard. Pretty brown eyes, almost toffee-colored, with flecks of gold in them. A soulful expression, like the dude should be playing an acoustic guitar at some college open mic night or maybe pulling espressos at the local coffee joint.

“What do you feel like for dinner, hon?” my mom asks. “Maybe tacos?” She holds up an avocado. “Look what I found at the Carrefour!”

“Sure. Sounds good.”

I go back to my laptop. I have the usual pileup of email in my inbox to deal with.

There’s a knock at the front door.

My mom glances over her shoulder and pads off to answer.

The water guy, maybe? Though he usually comes in the early afternoon. The security door to the building is always propped open till later in the evening, so it could be anybody.

I hear a man, his words too faint to make out. And then my mom.

“Ellie,” she says, a flat note to her voice. “There’s two policemen here to see you.”