The Wounded Muse

by Robert F Delaney

  His stomach churning with the acids of hunger, Dawei approaches Zhihong who’s tapping out a message as people rush around them. He is oblivious to the physiological reaction that his mere presence has triggered.

  “It’s been almost half a y…y…year.”

  Zhihong looks up.

  “Dawei! What…” He looks back in the direction of his two colleagues who are no longer in sight. He looks at Dawei again, confused, and then scans the crowd as if they’ll help to clarify what he’s seeing, as if he needs confirmation that he’s in Beijing and not Macau. “Dawei, what are you doing here?”

  Dawei knew his presence would be a shock but he had hoped for some hint of joy. A smile, at least. Something positive. Instead, he feels like he’s been punched in the chest, making it impossible to summon the breath for the obvious reply. To find you. To see you. To talk to you. “It’s been half a year.”

  “It hasn’t…” Zhihong looks again at the people around them and then at the security post he’s just walked through.

  Knowing exactly how many days have passed since the last time Zhihong visited him in Macau, Dawei wants to spit out the exact count. But again, the mixture of confusion and frustration in Zhihong’s stare creates an emotional front that Dawei doesn’t know how to breach.

  Zhihong grabs Dawei’s wrist and tries to lead him away. Dawei doesn’t move. He just looks at Zhihong while grounding himself onto the pavement under the soles of his worn-out shoes. He wants something, anything, from Zhihong before he will budge.

  “I waited for hours here yesterday and d…d…didn’t see you,” Dawei says, drawing strength from the ground he has secured.

  Zhihong clenches his fists and looks around again at the minions in motion, the security post, the commuters trotting to the street who are hailing cabs and those checking text messages as they head toward the subway station.

  “Dawei, I’m sorry it’s been so long.” He pauses. “You think I don’t care at all?” Zhihong stands, hands open, palms facing the sky to somehow prove his impotence.

  The question Zhihong asks doesn’t need an answer. It comes out full of anger directed at circumstance, not at Dawei, which gives him a sense of hope. But Dawei still wants more before he will budge.

  “I can explain what’s happened,” Zhihong says. “My department has been cracking down on expenses. They check everything. I can’t even steal an extra few hours to get over to see you.”

  In the silence that follows, Zhihong continues looking at Dawei. People walk around the two of them in the afternoon rush hour throngs. Zhihong seemed threatened by them before but now seems too lost in anguish, too tired and resigned, to care about who might bump into them.

  “Every time I go, I think I’ll make it over but I never get the chance. I understand this hurts you but you need to know that I’m just as hurt.”

  The anger drains from Zhihong’s expression, leaving only the sorrow that Dawei saw so often when they shared with each other the details and disappointments of their lives. Sorrow is their bond and, as long as the bond remains, this trip isn’t a waste of his time. He’d gladly return immediately to Macau if he could get some kind of commitment from Zhihong that they’ll be in each other’s lives somehow. The embankment, which now only reminds him of Zhihong, won’t sadden him as much if he knows that they will meet there again. For the first time since he stuffed his backpack and departed Macau, Dawei sees the possibility of a positive outcome. This is why movies have happy endings. They reflect life. People endure hardships and challenges, their faith is tested, and then they’re rewarded. No one can expect to arrive at his destination without knowing hunger or fatigue along the way.

  “Wh…wh…when do you think you’ll make it back to…”

  “Eh! Zhihong.” The voice cuts through the rough clatter of traffic and movement.

  A man who’s just passed through the bureau’s security gate, who is somewhere in his 50s and wearing a suit that looks sharper than the other bureaucrats, hurries up to Zhihong and grabs his shoulder. The gruff voice reminds Dawei of his father.

  “Eh, Zhihong, Where were you this afternoon? I was looking all over for you.”

  Zhihong turns to face the man with a smile and puts a hand on the man’s upper arm. The face-to-face positioning leaves Dawei blocked out of the interaction and he sees discomfort behind Zhihong’s smile.

  “Don’t worry, Gao Hua spoke to me about it. I’ll have the details for you tomorrow,” Zhihong says, scratching his brow.

  “Morning or afternoon?” the man asks as he pulls a pack of cigarettes out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket. “I have a meeting with the division head in the afternoon so I need it early, ok?” He offers Zhihong a cigarette and Zhihong declines.

  “No problem.” Zhihong says, keeping his back to Dawei.

  “Ok, see you tomorrow,” the man says as he turns to leave.

  Zhihong bids him farewell and then looks at the ground, rubbing the back of his neck. His phone rings and he pulls it out of the holster attached to his belt to look at the display.

  “Hey. Yes. In a few minutes. Yes, I’ll pick some up.”

  Zhihong puts the phone back into the holster. Slowly. And he doesn’t look up at Dawei.

  This isn’t like the movies. The silence is too drawn out. Characters should know what to say to each other. Or, in the middle of a sidewalk on a busy street in Beijing, they could at least smile. They shouldn’t miss a beat, let alone stand through an endless stretch of time during which dozens of people pass and Dawei becomes aware that the sun has moved behind the trees that line the street. The air is colder in the shade.

  “Dawei.” Zhihong breathes in and then sighs. Something about the exhale adds to the chill of the shadows.

  “Dawei, we can’t see each other in Beijing. Why did you come here?”

  That question again. Full circle. As if nothing in between had happened.

  Still looking at the ground, just inches from the spot that Dawei had claimed for himself, Zhihong reaches into his back pocket and takes out his wallet, grabbing several 100 kuai bills, the red ones, with Mao’s face beaming like it does in the portrait above the Forbidden City.

  “You need to go back to Macau. I can’t see you here.”

  “But wh…wh…when?”

  “Dawei, here’s 500 kuai. Get yourself back to Macau. I don’t know when I’ll get there.”

  SUNDAY, April 1, 2007

  The female officer recognizes Diane. She’s the same one who took the copy of Qiang’s expired ID card and disappeared into the back room of the PSB station the day before.

  In the morning sunlight flooding in through the windows, a janitor sweeps a couple of crushed cigarette packages and some small bits of detritus from the previous day into a pile.

  “Good morning,” Diane says. “I’m following up on the matter of my brother. Do you still have the documents I gave you yesterday?”

  “Please have a seat.”

  She steps into the back room. Diane sits and pulls her laptop from her briefcase, resuming work on a spreadsheet. The officer comes back out and takes her seat behind the counter.

  The morning rush hour traffic outside has slowed to a crawl and the agitated honking drowns out the buzzing tone of the fluorescent tubes that provide no more light than what’s coming through the windows. Three men wearing suits enter from the street entrance and approach Diane, two of them taking seats on either side of her. The third man, holding a fake leather file folder, stands. Their suits are dark. Two grey and one navy blue. No ties, plain shirts open at the collar like most other businessmen in the city.

  “Can I ask what it is you’re doing here?” asks the one on her left, a wiry man in his late thirties.

  “I’ve been trying to find out where my brother is. He’s been missing for a week and I think he’s been detained by the authorities.”

  “What makes you think that? Perhaps he’s gone away on a trip.”

  “I’m his sister. If he was going awa
y for two weeks, he would have told me. And I’m not stupid. Are you with the PSB?”

  “I have access to some information.”

  Diane sits quietly, staring at the wiry man for a moment.

  “Ok. I understand and I’d appreciate it if you could help me confirm what’s happened to my brother.”

  She reaches into her briefcase and pulls out another set of the copies she gave to the officer behind the counter and hands them over.

  “I gave these to your, well, I gave the same documents to the officers behind the counter yesterday. They haven’t been able to help me yet.”

  The man looks at the paperwork and then hands it over to the standing man who slides the documents into his file folder.

  “Come back tomorrow morning. I may know more about this then.”

  The three men wait until Diane leaves before they walk behind the station’s service counter and continue through the door on the back wall that leads to a conference room.

  “She’s going to continue with her inquiries,” the wiry man explains to the two others who are seated at a table. “The American journalist I told you about is communicating with another American journalist, one who was previously based here in Beijing and now lives in Washington, DC. This woman in Washington knows the system here fairly well and she’s advising him to make noise about this.”

  SATURDAY, April 7, 2007

  From Pierre’s balcony, the lights below dance like reflections on the surface of an endless lake. A front of southern heat and humidity mixes with the cool remnants of winter still in the ground, all refracted by dense particulate matter that’s been accumulating for several days. The Australian Merlot Jake has been drinking more quickly than he should helps to bring another layer of ethereality to the cityscape.

  The wine could use an ice cube but Jake won’t throw one in. It would mark him as the imposter he often feels he is, as telling as the rusting appliances in the front yard where he grew up or the old Pontiac Maverick that he inherited from an uncle who lost his driver’s license. The car’s transmission broke just a few months after he got it registered in his name and Jake left the vehicle to rot when he slipped away from Magnet Hill, Kentucky to attend university in Bloomington, Indiana. Under an ashtray full of squashed cigarette butts, he left a note for his mother and her boyfriend who were, at midday, sleeping off a hangover. In the note he let them know that he was off to college and would call once he got settled. Fifteen years on, he still hasn’t been in touch.

  From Pierre’s terrace, Jake can survey the distance he’s put between himself and the Kentucky bourbon, the watery Coor’s beer and the frozen TV dinners that would never be seen served at parties thrown by Pierre. From here he can see the headquarters of some of the companies and ministries he writes about and he can tell himself that he’s earned his position. He was happy to start covering finance and economics to escape Kentucky and ensure that he’ll never need to crawl back there. It’s not that Jake is ashamed of where he’s from. It’s more that he did nothing in particular, at least in terms of academic achievements or award-winning news reports, to secure his position in Beijing’s foreign press corps. Nothing that would explain the quick transition from Kentucky to parties attended by international business strategists and intellectual misfits from Oxford and Cambridge, versed in thinkers from Herodotus to Habernas.

  Instead, he charmed his way into this milieu. With a custom-tailored tweed jacket and a crisp oxford shirt, Jake drove 16 hours straight from Indiana for an interview with the administrator of a Princeton University study-in-Beijing program. He started by talking about the few months he spent studying in Anhui and how he cherished the tea pot his teachers gave him. Moving on, Jake explained how Kung Fu classes helped him cope with the homophobia, alcoholism, xenophobia and general bigotry of his hometown. The Princeton administrator was an academic, somewhere in his late 40s, who had spent years studying Eastern languages and philosophy. Sporting a bracelet of sandalwood beads and a small metal spike through his earlobe – and absent a wedding ring – he seemed to Jake as though he’d be open to possibilities. Throughout the interview, Jake played up his accent but was mindful of his vocabulary, referring to “life in more rural townships” and not “out in the country”, casting himself as the outsider who deserved a chance. He managed to get through all 800 pages of Jonathan Spence’s In Search of Modern China in order to show a degree of historical fluency.

  The other applicants, he bet, were all from the Ivy League and wouldn’t bother spending an afternoon, or even 15 minutes, stopping by the office to introduce themselves in person. With memories of the Tiananmen Square crackdown still fresh, American students weren’t clamouring to study in China in the early 1990s. For Jake, though, it was the most obvious place to go to reinvent himself.

  To help seal his acceptance, Jake used the word that academics love. Epistemology. After listening closely for an opening during the interview at Princeton, Jake dropped an idea about the “epistemological limits to cross-cultural understanding” and knew immediately from the administrator’s satisfied smile that he was on his way to Beijing.

  Jake learned other, simple linguistic tricks. Don’t say “What?” Say “sorry?” Say it with courtesy by raising the pitch at the word’s second syllable. Say it with a smile and with the mouth closed. He reminded himself that he doesn’t have “co- workers”. He has “colleagues”.

  And Jake had one final strategy to ensure his induction into a small corner of the Ivy League. He held eye contact with the administrator a beat longer than what would normally be appropriate, pairing the look with a slightly crooked smile, a stare that was at once challenging and inviting. Challenging as in: “Are you really going to kill my best option to get out of the Midwest?” Inviting as in: “Wanna fuck?”

  A few months later, Jake Bradley of Magnet Hill, Kentucky was studying Mandarin in the Middle Kingdom. The administrator added a handwritten note on the acceptance letter: “Hey Jake, yi lu shun feng. May the wind be at your back. Call me when you’re back in Indiana.”

  But he hasn’t been back to the Midwest since.

  Jake had spent years resenting his mother’s indifference towards him. She had laughed when, at eight or nine, Jake said he wanted to learn figure skating. Only girls and fags learn to spin on ice like idiots. She mocked the British New Wave music he liked as an early adolescent. Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club. To his mother, the only British bands worth listening to were Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull. Nothing compared to good old American Southern Rock, though. Tom Petty, Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd sang the background to Jake’s childhood. His mother played their albums on all occasions, anything from Christmas, when Jake might get a Tom Petty t-shirt as his gift, to the breakups with a series of her boyfriends, many of them accompanied by police officers responding to complaints from neighbours about his mother’s shrieks as she ordered another man out of the house.

  Jake never wore the t-shirts he got as gifts from Mom, something else that set him apart from the others in his school and neighbourhood. He couldn’t bring himself to wear them. This resistance had limits, though. He’d never broadcast his love for Duran Duran, on a t-shirt or otherwise, even though he couldn’t get enough of their 1983 album Rio. U2 and Pink Floyd worked, though. Loud and guitar-driven, these bands also clicked with the rest of Magnet Hill’s adolescents. His Aunt Tracy brought him t-shirts from the bands’ concerts and Jake wore them until they frayed.

  After many years, the sight of frozen dinners and the sound of Lynyrd Skynyrd no longer make Jake tense. He realizes that the frustrations of his early years fed his determination to go far. There’s always a limitation somewhere, though. Decades ago it was the Duran Duran t-shirt. Now it’s the ice cube he wants to drop into his wine.

  Most of the other guests at Pierre’s party are sipping champagne, chardonnay or cocktails mixed with vodka and one of the freshly squeezed fruit juices that Pierre’s housekeeper had laid out on a table on one side of hi
s enormous terrace. Not a moment passes without the sloshing sound of a bottle pulled from a sweating tureen full of ice.

  Inside, Pierre has double-high ceilings over a living and dining room area furnished with contemporary Italian furniture. A twelve-seater dining table consisting of a pane of glass supported by double-stitched, black leather straps supported internally by steel. It is elegant and simple, without any mechanism allowing it to contract because that would weaken the design. In a penthouse apartment, you don’t need to conserve space. Other guests are folding smoked salmon onto water crackers and Scandinavian rye crisps arranged artfully amid at least eight varieties of cheese, a balanced selection of hard, crumbly and soft.

  A grand piano sits by the picture window that looks out on the terrace. Having vowed to relearn the basics, Pierre has a young instructor whom he describes as ‘very cute’. Pierre offers such details with an arched eyebrow and a crooked grin, a tip-off to anyone paying attention that the piano lessons probably wind up in the master bedroom, up the stairs and behind one of the doors along a mezzanine lined with steel wire bannisters. It’s the highest point, atop the tallest apartment building in the neighbourhood of the China World Centre, where partygoers lucky enough to get onto the guest list assemble once every season – laughing, drinking, flirting and dishing.

  Jake sees Sugimoto-san step out onto the terrace. A logistics manager of some sort for Japan Airlines who arrived in Beijing two weeks earlier, Sugimoto is the evening’s sacrificial lamb, offered up by a few acquaintances at the fringes of Pierre’s social circle as a way to stay on his guest list. For anyone in the know, it’s basic social capital calculus: give Pierre first dibs on the new arrival and get regular invites to an event offering many more hook-up opportunities as, well as every other sort of networking from career development to hash connections.

  This is how Jake became friends with Pierre. He showed up as a plus-one with someone he’s since lost touch with. A few minutes after arriving, Jake pulled Pierre aside and told him about a newcomer to Beijing he met at Drag-on the previous night. “He’s cute, horny and into white guys. Would it be okay if I invited him up?” The transaction proceeded and turned into the longest relationship Pierre had since he moved to Beijing. It lasted nearly a week. Since then, Jake has had license to invite whomever he wants to Pierre’s parties.