Rock Paper Tiger

CHAPTER TWENTY

I’M SITTING ON a hard seat, drifting in and out of sleep.

It’s a ten-hour train ride to Taiyuan, arriving at 11:00 P.M. Hard sleepers are sold out, and I don’t want to pay for a soft sleeper when I’m not traveling overnight.

The open compartment is packed, as is usual for hard seats, with everybody and their xiao didi along with this crazy assortment of bags and boxes and suitcases crowding the aisles. People stand, squat, perch on the little tables, sit on their luggage. I’m lucky to score a seat by the window. Before long the compartment smells like cigarettes and stale sweat and shit from the squat toilet two rows away.

A middle-aged woman who’s traveling with a little kid sits across from me. Auntie obviously thinks this kid is the most adorable, talented ankle-biter ever, and okay, she’s pretty cute: red-cheeked, hair as black and shiny as obsidian, dressed in a pink jumper with little cartoon mice appliquéd on it.

It’s my fault for playing peek-a-boo with the kid. After that, Auntie offers me some of her sweet and spicy peanuts, and little Meihua climbs up on my lap, unafraid of close contact with the foreign devil.

“Meihua, don’t bother the foreign miss,” scolds Auntie.

“It’s not a problem,” I say, though to be honest, having her there is making my fucking leg hurt and I end up taking one of my last Percocets with a swallow of Auntie’s lukewarm tea. After that I hardly notice Meihua. I just doze, drifting in a warm, waveless sea.

We roll into Taiyuan as scheduled-one thing about China, the trains are nearly always on time. My leg buckles when I try to stand up; the muscles wake up like they’ve been lit on fire.

“You’re not well? Let me help.”

Auntie takes me by the arm and guides me down the train compartment’s steps, even though I’m only carrying my little backpack and she’s got a rolling suitcase, a giant shopping bag, and a shoulder duffel.

Since Auntie has her hands full, I take Meihua’s hand, and the three of us exit the train station.

Taiyuan smells like coal dust and is bathed in yellow light from the low-sodium street lamps. Taxis wait in line by the curb, the drivers mostly napping in their seats, a few smoking cigarettes and drinking tea in glass jars where it’s probably been steeping since this morning.

It’s not too late for the touts, though, and a bunch of them swarm me, not quite touching me but coming close, saying things like “Miss! Miss! Need good hotel? Nice price!”

“Stop bothering her!” Auntie snaps. She turns to me. “Where are you staying tonight?”

I make a noncommittal response. I’ll figure out something.

Auntie whips out her phone and starts rattling away in the local dialect.

“Okay,” she says when she gets off. “I have a nice room for you. Very good price. My friend is the driver. He comes in a minute.”

“You are very kind,” I say, “but-”

She pats my hand. “Don’t worry.”

This guy in a black VW Santana shows up, Auntie’s friend: middle-aged, skinny, face seamed by lines blackened by the coal dust, like he’s some kind of comic-book drawing.

“Please, get in,” Auntie says, gesturing toward the back seat, with its white seat covers. “We’ll take you to the hotel.”

I’ve had things like this happen to me before in China, but I only used to worry about stuff like, am I supposed to pay the driver? Am I going to end up in a hotel I can’t afford?

Now I’m thinking, what if they’re working for someone? The PSB or Creepy John?

She’s an auntie traveling with a little girl, I tell myself. They were already in the train compartment when I got there. Weren’t they?

Auntie gestures again toward the back seat.

I climb in. Auntie gets in front, riding shotgun.

Sitting in the back seat of the Santana, Meihua snoozing on my thigh, I stare out the window at the broad, anonymous streets of a city I’ve never seen. Auntie and the driver chat in the local dialect, and I can’t quite figure out what they’re talking about. “Foreigner,” I hear, and “money.”

Auntie turns toward me. She smiles, revealing a gold front tooth. Her eyes look like black stones behind her glasses.

Mouth dry, I keep my hand on the door handle.

After maybe a fifteen-minute drive, we turn down a narrow lane and stop in front of an entrance wedged between an office building and a clothing store.

A signboard in gold letters says “The Good Fortune Guest House.”

Inside, there’s a modest front desk that looks like it doubles as a bar, with stand-up ads for beer and Nescafé. Auntie negotiates with the clerk behind the counter, in spite of my protests that I can take care of it myself. “You know, some Chinese people try to cheat foreigners,” she whispers darkly. “They think all foreigners have money.”

A couple of minutes later, negotiations concluded, I show my passport to the clerk and am given a keycard to a room on the second floor. “Nice room, quiet,” Auntie says. “You won’t have any troubles here.” Then she reaches into her purse and extracts a card case. “You have any problem, you call me,” she says, pulling out a business card.

I take it from her in the polite manner, with both hands. I’m so embarrassed, I don’t know what to say.

“Thank you,” I manage.

Auntie smiles. “Welcome you to Taiyuan,” she says, beaming.

I make my way upstairs to my little room. Brown and tan walls, a hard, single bed, a window draped with blackout curtains, no fridge, just an electric kettle and a teacup.

But it’s mine, my own small, private space. At least for the night.

I brush my teeth with the hotel toothbrush and overly sweetened toothpaste from the miniature tube, spit out a few shed bristles. Then I take off my shoes, jeans, and bra and crawl into bed.

I probably shouldn’t feel so comfortable here, I think. After all, I gave the clerk my passport number. Assuming China’s got some central foreigner-tracking system, who’s to say that Creepy John won’t be knocking on my door tomorrow?

I have this sudden vision of him sitting on the edge of my bed in his faded Beijing Olympics T-shirt and cheap leather jacket, smiling at me.

It takes me a while to fall asleep after that.

In the morning, I limp downstairs and order up a double Nescafé, which should tide me over till I find some real coffee. Chuckie was always bitching about what a backwater Taiyuan is, but three million people live here-there’s got to be a Starbucks somewhere, or some Chinese rip-off version, Star Cup or Moonbucks or something.

Fueled by Nescafé, I smile at the desk clerk and go outside.

Pollution in Beijing is pretty bad, but Taiyuan puts it to shame. Everything is covered with a layer of sticky black dust; the sun struggles to shine through a greenish sky, and the air smells like chemical soup. A few years ago, Taiyuan was the world’s most polluted city. Now they don’t even have that distinction going for them; it’s maybe the fourth worst. What’s the point of that? No one cares about Number Four. You’re out of medal contention.

I find a coffeehouse, have a decent cup of coffee and a limp bagel, and then sit there for a while in a little booth by the window, watching people pass by on the grimy sidewalk, nurse a second cup of coffee, and try to figure out what I’m going to do.

I decide to call Chuckie. I step outside and find a public phone, duck into the egg-shaped booth, and punch in Chuckie’s number.

“Wei?”

“Chuckie? Shi nide lao tongwu.”

Your old roommate.

There’s a long pause. “Hey,” he says.

“Look, I need a favor.”

“Ahhh…” A longer pause. “Maybe not convenient now.”

“You owe me,” I snap. Truthfully, he doesn’t owe me shit, but it sounds good. “It’s nothing that’s gonna cause you any problems.”

Of course, I have no way of knowing if that’s true.

“Okay,” he finally says.

CHUCKIE AND I arrange to meet at a karaoke bar on the fringes of Taiyuan. Karaoke bars usually have a lot more than just karaoke going on. Prostitution, drugs, bribery-they’re the Amazon.com of vice. A lot of the time karaoke places are hole-in-the-wall joints, attached to hotels, next to restaurants and discos, set apart by the letters KTV outlined in neon.

This one is more ambitious. It’s called “The Parthenon,” and it looks like a Greek temple-that is, if the temple’s architects had dropped a lot of acid before they built it. Marble columns with flashing strings of green and red diodes snaking around them, naked statuary lit by colored spotlights, and a fountain that dances around vaguely in time to the latest Taiwanese pop blaring from the outdoor speakers.

I pay the taxi driver, thinking this might be an appropriate occasion for a Percocet.

Inside is a large main room, a dance floor encircled by booths, with a long bar cutting the space practically in half. Illuminated plastic signs at the back of the room, where the private rooms are, read KTV. It’s still early, and the place is pretty empty. The DJ plays Mandarin rap in a mash-up with the Carpenters. I decide it’s definitely time for that Percocet.

I’m supposed to meet Chuckie at the bar. I try the local draft, called “Yingze Cleaning Flavour Beer.” I’m a little disappointed that it tastes like any other bland Chinese lager.

I’m about halfway through my pint when Chuckie shows up.

“Hey, Chuckie. Hao jiu bujian.” Long time no see.

“Yili, ni hao. How’s it hanging?” he adds in English.

“Dude, you don’t say ‘how’s it hanging’ to a girl,” I say, exasperated. “Because you’re asking about, you know, which side of the pants your jiba and dan are hanging on.”

Chuckie’s face flames red. “Oh. I thought this was same as hanging out.”

“Well, maybe, sometimes,” I relent, because this really isn’t the time for me to try and upgrade his English slang. “You want something to drink?”

“Beer is good.”

I order two more.

“So, how’s Taiyuan?”

“Okay,” he says nervously. “Kind of boring.”

The beers come. I lift my mug. Chuckie lifts his in return, leaning back on his barstool and eyeing me over the mug’s rim.

“So, Yili,” he says. “You say you need some help from me. Right now, maybe it’s bad time for me. But tell me anyway.”

Good, he’s not in the mood for keqi hua either.

“Okay, here’s the deal. You know my character in Sword of Ill Repute? Little Mountain Tiger?”

Chuckie nods.

“Well, she got killed. I need you to help me bring her back.”

Chuckie takes a swallow of his beer, frowning. “So, that’s easy. You just have to play some rounds in Hell. Meet Horseface and Ox-head. You know how to do that.”

“I don’t have time.”

People are starting to arrive, groups of students and middleaged men accompanied by much younger women wearing stilettos and short skirts. I figure they’ll be ordering up the Courvoisier or Dom Pérignon or whatever overpriced bullshit middle-aged Chinese yuppie guys buy to impress their hooker girlfriends.

The music’s changed too: it’s harder-edged, faster, and the volume’s cranked up to the point where I start to get nervous. I chug the rest of my first beer and start on the second. I can do this. I just need to have the rest of this conversation, and then I can get out of here.

“See, Chuckie, the thing is, my character was a lot higher ranked than before. And… I kind of need her to be that highranked again, and right away.”

I can tell that Chuckie’s having a hard time absorbing this, considering that I’d never shown much interest in the game before. “What level?”

“Ummm… eight… I think.”

“Eight? But you only… you are just level one or two before.”

“Yeah. But, you know, I, um, played a lot after you left Beijing, and-”

“You can’t just become level eight after so little playing time,” Chuckie protests. “Takes maybe a few months of playing, and playing many hours.”

“Yeah… well… it just kind of happened.”

Chuckie stares at me, aghast. “You cheated?”

“No, I didn’t cheat. Somebody helped me out. That’s not cheating.”

“This is what ruins games!” Chuckie says furiously. “You can just buy what you want, not earn it.”

“Hey, you lent Ming Lu your whatever-the-fuck-level Qi sword! How’s that different?”

Chuckie slams his beer mug on the bar. “It was for specific quest! That is part of this game!”

“Okay, so this was part of a specific quest too,” I retort. “And things got fucked up, and they need me for this quest, and you gotta help resurrect me!”

“So, what kind of quest?” Chuckie asks.

Oh, shit.

Chuckie ran all the way to Taiyuan to get away from whoever was threatening him in Beijing. To get away from me. He’s not exactly thrilled to see me as it is. If I tell him any portion of the truth, he’ll probably bolt to Tibet.

But lying to him? I can’t do it. For one thing, I suck at lying.

“It’s important,” I say. “And it’s really better if I don’t tell you what it’s about.”

“I don’t understand,” Chuckie says with a frown. “If this is for the Game, you can tell me. Maybe I can help you on the quest.”

Is Chuckie a part of the Great Community? It would make sense. It’s his Game too.

But what if he’s not?

I take a deep breath. “I can pay you.”

Chuckie bows his head, practically resting his chin on his beer mug. I’m pretty sure he’s deeply offended.

“’Cause I got these cool weapons,” I continue. “This really tall staff that shoots Qi energy. And, um, this tortoiseshell shield. And I get those back once I’m resurrected, right?”

Chuckie’s head pops up. “Turtle shield? You got a turtle shield?”

“Yeah.”

“That protects against almost anything,” he breathes in wonder. “So, how did you die?”

“Nine-Headed Bird.”

“Ah.” Chuckie nods in sympathy. “Almost impossible to kill Nine-Headed Bird. You must use turtle shield and Mutual Rings, if you have them. And call for phoenix intervention.”

“Oh. Phoenix intervention. Forgot about that.”

I’m feeling a little calmer. Probably because the Percocet’s kicking in. “Look, Chuckie. You can have my turtle shield just as soon as I’m through with this quest. I promise.”

Chuckie sighs heavily. He doesn’t like it. But you know what they say: every man has his price.