Rock Paper Tiger

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

TREY CAME HOME five months after I got blown up. He was still a soldier, so he found an apartment for us near his base, in one of those sixties or seventies tilt-up complexes with parking underneath, held up by skinny metal poles. Before that, I’d been living with my mom, which hadn’t worked out too well. It was a long way to the VA Hospital from where she lived, and every time I rode in a car I worried about getting blown up again.

Trey’s and my apartment was pretty basic, a cheap, two-bedroom place with shiny beige walls and pressboard wood paneling. Minimally furnished, half from Wal-Mart, half from thrift stores. It was clean, at least, thanks to Trey, who, whatever other shitty things I could say about him aside, was always neat and tidy and made the bed every day-well, he made it on the days I’d get out of it, at least.

The one thing I insisted on was a high-speed Internet connection. I’d gotten kind of hooked on Web surfing during my recovery. It was an activity that pretty much fit my level of concentration, which is to say transitory and fragmented. Plus there was always the possibility of some kind of connection. That one of my buddies would write me. That dog Turner, or Kim, or Mayer. Pulagang or Torres, Palaver or Madrid. And then I could write back. And we could maybe talk about how we were feeling and what we were going through, but we could still hide, from each other and the world.

We had about six months together before Trey was redeployed. That time was okay. We were both trying. I went to the base for physical therapy, three, four times a week. I wasn’t ever going to be a hundred percent, but the PT helped, and it gave me something to do. Trey kept the house clean, brought me little presents now and again.

But it seemed to me that we had a lot of silence between us. Because what we had in common was the war. Was Camp Fucking Falafel. And neither one of us wanted to talk about that.

It was like before, where we’d fuck and not talk about it. Except that the fucking part, which was one thing we really had going for us before, wasn’t the same. I was still pretty messed up, and Trey would treat me like a piece of spun glass, because he never knew what was going to hurt me.

I didn’t like leaving the apartment. Hated having to do pretty much anything. Shopping, forget it. I’d get too nervous. Paying bills, hated that. Taking out the trash, could barely manage it. Doing dishes, making the bed, no way. Too much effort.

Though I liked going to the base, actually. I liked entering through a guarded gate, liked being protected by razor wire and guns. Seeing guys in their battle dress, seeing Humvees, going to the PX; all that stuff felt familiar. Safe.

Just throw in some mortars and IEDs, and I would’ve felt right at home.

TURNS OUT I’M going to have to pay Chuckie some real money in addition to a virtual turtle shield. “Not for me,” he insists. “For some other guys.”

I’m not thrilled about somebody else being involved with this. “What other guys?”

“Some other guys. Don’t worry. They do this all the time.”

“I’d have to give them my password?”

“Soon as they finish, you can change it.”

“I don’t know.”

At that, Chuckie takes a big swallow of his Cleaning Flavor beer and shrugs. “Maybe, if this is too much trouble, we should not do it.”

I’m tempted to agree with him. Give some stranger my password? Maybe I should forget the whole thing and run like hell to Outer Mongolia. I could live in a yurt. Ride camels.

Chuckie must see the doubt on my face, because something shifts in his. Maybe he’s thinking about that turtle shield slipping from his grasp.

“Look,” he says, “these are okay guys. Friends of mine. You can come meet them. Bring them some Jack Daniels or something. You’ll see.”

“Okay,” I finally say. “Okay.”

I ride with Chuckie on the back of his moped, which can’t go very fast with the two of us on it, so at least it’s not too scary. We stop at a little 24-hour market run by Koreans, and I buy a bottle of whiskey. Then I hang on to Chuckie’s waist, and we ride down Taiyuan’s wide coal-choked streets.

Eventually, we come to what looks like an older area of town: random twisted pipes, rusting oil cans, and busted chairs piled in front of cement and white-tiled-front buildings, cracks and holes in the Day-Glo-colored plastic signs, everything greasy with black grime. There’s a night market here, tumbling out of an alley, a burst of music and noise, sizzling meat and garlic.

We drive around the back of the market. Chuckie parks the bike and locks it to a rack. Trash spills out of bins. There’s one pathetic sodium light over a doorway, bathing the entrance in a sickly yellow glow.

“This way,” Chuckie says, and he leads me through the door and down a flight of stairs.

In China they don’t believe in lighting hallways unless they have to. Apparently we’re supposed to make our way here by the light that seeps out from under the doors of the occupied offices. Or, given the hour, we aren’t supposed to be here at all.

But here we are.

At the end of the hall is a double door. Chuckie raps his knuckles on it a couple times. After a minute, the door opens. A skinny guy wearing a stretched-out V-necked undershirt, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, claps Chuckie on the shoulder. “Hey,” he says. “What’s up?”

“Not much.” Chuckie gives a nod in my direction. “Li Ke, this is a friend of mine, Yili. She has a little problem. Maybe you can help her.”

Li Ke nods noncommittally, and we follow him inside.

It’s a big room, divided into cubicles, maybe a hundred or so, and at first I’m thinking particularly sleazy Internet bar, because every cubicle has a computer with a guy sitting in front of it, and there’s a lot of noise from various games: music and combat sounds and animated screams and laughter. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air; there are junk-food wrappers and soft-drink bottles lying on the ground, and the place has this funky smell of smoke, sour sweat, stale grease, and mildew.

The weird thing is-and it takes me a few minutes to figure this out-nobody looks like they’re having any fun. They’re just sitting there in front of the terminals, hollow-eyed and bored, punching keys and toggling joysticks like they’re transcribing medical records or something.

Meanwhile, Chuckie leans in close to Li Ke’s ear and explains my problem.

Li Ke shrugs. “Sure,” he says. “We can do that.”

He pivots and heads down an aisle, taps a guy on his back, mutters some explanation, and points in my direction. The guy stands, sees me, smiles in an embarrassed way, and nods at me like a bobble-head doll.

“What is this, Chuckie?” I ask in a whisper.

“Gold farm,” Chuckie says tersely. “They play for you. Kill monsters. Get you gold and spells and treasure. Then you can move up levels.”

Okay. I try to wrap my mind around this. “So, they play as me? As Little Mountain Tiger?”

Chuckie nods. “Right.”

“And they do this for a living?”

“Sure. Lots of rich players want to move up fast, go on better quests, without taking the time.” Chuckie snorts. “It’s cheating, I think. People with more money, they don’t have to work. Have these guys farming for them. Get high-level spells and weapons, and they don’t earn them at all.”

“So, how do you know these guys?” I have to ask.

“I do some server work for them,” Chuckie mumbles. “But I play my own game,” he adds defiantly.

Li Ke slouches toward us. “How soon you need this?” he asks.

“Soon,” I reply.

“So, we can put both shifts on it,” Li Ke says with a shrug. “Maybe take three days.”

Shit, I think. Shit, shit, shit. I told the Suits I’d have something for them in four days. This isn’t going to work.

I stare at the young guy Li Ke tapped to work on my job, pounding down a Stalking Tiger Energy Formula, the Chinese equivalent of a Red Bull. In the cubicle next to him, a man sleeps with his head resting on his keyboard, mouth open, snoring as easily as if he were in a luxury suite at a Hilton.

What choice do I have? I’ll just have to stall the Suits, somehow.

“Okay,” I say. “How much?”

I HANG OUT a little while longer with Chuckie and Li Ke and one of the game farmers who’s going to kill monsters for me, a guy named “Leopard,” drinking shots of the whiskey I bought, in an unoccupied cubicle by the back door. All around us, bored, pasty guys kill low-ranking monsters, farming for virtual gold.

“Hey, Chuckie,” I say, after I get a little drunk. “You’re a good friend for hooking me up with this.”

Chuckie shakes his head. “Not so good. I run away and hide.” He takes a swig of whiskey, then shrugs. “I’m just… a dickhead.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I am.”

“You’re not. Look. You don’t know me that well. I could be a spy, or a foreign splittist, or something.”

He looks at me. “Are you?”

“No,” I say with a sigh. “I’m… another dickhead. I mean, a female one. Whatever that is.”

“What can you do?” He sounds agitated now. “They have all the power. All the money.”

“Yeah.” I think about the Suits. I think about Harrison Wang, that huge penthouse suite, the statues and paintings. Must be nice, having that kind of money. Enough to insulate you from some of the bullshit.

Chuckie pours more whiskey into my teacup and then his own. We sit in silence while Leopard and Li Ke play some kind of drinking game with a pair of dice.

“Hey, Chuckie,” I say. “If I wanna e-mail somebody, and I don’t want them to know where I am, what’s the best way to do that?” I’m thinking: proxy servers. I’ve used them before when I wanted to surf someplace the Net Nanny doesn’t like, but the ones I know don’t work any more. The Great Firewall finds them, blocks them, then new ones pop up. Like the Chinese government is the little Dutch Kid, and the Firewall’s a leaking dike.

Chuckie thinks for a minute. Then he reaches into his shoulder bag, into one of the compartments, grabs something small, and puts it in my open hand, gently closing my fingers around it.

“Fuck the authority,” he whispers gleefully.

AFTER THAT, CHUCKIE offers to drive me back to my hotel. I hesitate, because by now I feel like I owe Chuckie bigtime, and I don’t want to put him out. Plus, the moped is pretty uncomfortable. But there aren’t any cabs around, and besides, this is the first time since all this shit started happening that I haven’t felt alone, and all of a sudden I realize that I don’t want that to end.

Fuck the authority!

Chuckie seems to be in a similar mood, because he’s singing this cheesy Communist Youth anthem I recognize at the top of his lungs as we swing too wide around a corner; the back tire skids a little, but we don’t fall, and we are both laughing our asses off, and for whatever reason I start singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and we both laugh at that too.

“No, no, wait, I got a better one!” I manage between giggles. “Welcome to the Hotel California!”

“Such a nice surprise-” Chuckie sings.

“For your alibis!”

Finally we pull up in front of the Good Fortune Guest House.

I swing my bad leg over the rear tire, clutching Chuckie’s shoulders for support.

As my foot touches the ground, the air around us turns bluewhite.

Headlights.

I blink. Make out a car parked just up the block, nearly hidden behind its high-beam curtain.

“Ellie, get back on!” Chuckie whispers. “Let’s go!”

“No,” I say before I can stop myself. Because it’s not fair for Chuckie to get dragged into my shit. Because the two of us on a moped can’t outrun a car.

Because the only chance I have right now is to get back in the Game, and I can’t do that without Chuckie.

The car doesn’t move.

“Take care of Little Mountain Tiger for me,” I say. “It’s really important.”

Chuckie hesitates. “This isn’t right,” he whispers.

“It’s okay. Come on, I’m a foreigner. Worst thing that could happen is they kick me out of the country.”

Or it’s the Suits, and then I don’t know what the worst thing that could happen is.

I steady myself. Chuckie’s still sitting there on his moped, the engine firing like a badly tuned lawn mower.

“Just don’t go home tonight, okay?” I say, my voice cracking. “Go someplace else for a couple days.”

I think, that’s what Lao Zhang said to me, and it didn’t do me much good.

Walk away. Walk away now.

That’s what I do.

Behind me, I hear the moped stutter, rumble, and recede.

I am bathed in light as I walk into the Good Fortune Guest House.

Inside, sitting on the gray upholstered couch, are two Chinese men in suits. One short, one tall. Neither of them wears a tie.

The shorter one rises.

“Ellie Cooper?”

I nod.

“If you could come with us.” He smiles. “Just to have some tea.”