“Gah!” Lame, lame, lame! “Fine. I’ll get back to you then, okay?” Zoe cut the call before she said something really stupid to Fee.
Chapter 9: Spencer
The LagNot phone app saved Spencer’s day, and probably his life. He woke up in the hotel room with just the edges of a headache left and no jet lag. It wasn’t even 3:00 p.m. Thank God for the twenty-first century.
Spencer rolled sideways and, sure enough, Mike was being mystical again. He sat on some sort of prayer mat facing the sun. Spencer knocked him over with a pillow. Strike!
“Damn it, Spencer!”
“Come on, man. Time to meet and greet.”
Various business groups in China wanted to license Warhawk’s hyper-realistic construct software or hire its realm design team. That was pretty much Mike, and lately, Spencer. Those meetings were salted across their schedule. Mike had blocked out a solid week at his monastery—he promised they had a full-bandwidth realm connection—and Ozzie’s sudden appearance would probably fill the rest of their time with various field trips. It was going to be a busy vacation.
He waited until Mike rolled up off the floor. “You shower after me, and don’t screw around. I’m starving.”
That got them to the girl’s room in record time, but it turned out they didn’t need to rush.
“Nǐ hǎo,” Kim said from around one bathroom’s corner. “Hello.”
“Ni hao,” he repeated, along with Mike in the main room and Tonya in the opposite bathroom. “Hello.”
“Nǎ lái de yùshì. Where’s the bathroom?”
“Hey,” Tonya said, “I thought that was gou tui zi?”
Kim replied, “Not really. The lady who got off her bicycle to stare at you pissed me off.”
“What’s it really mean?” Mike asked.
“Basically you’re calling them someone’s dog.”
The whole point of learning a foreign language was picking up chicks here and insulting people back home in ways they didn’t understand. It was much more important than finding a bathroom. “What’s the worst I can throw at someone?”
“Cào nǐ zǔzōng shíbā dài, but don’t use that one if you’re somewhere nice, or in a bar. You’ll probably get thrown out.”
“As if I can say that after just hearing it once. What’s it mean, anyway?”
Kim came out of the bathroom wearing slacks and a blouse, fastening her earrings. She was business casual at its finest.
“Fuck your ancestors. They worship family around here; it really is one of the nastiest things you can say to a Chinese.”
That one was worth remembering. “How’s it go again?”
“Spencer,” Tonya said as she came around the opposite corner, “stop learning how to piss people off and help me zip up.”
He always knew Tonya could clean up well, but wow. She’d really pulled out the stops with a long, tight white dress that had a vine thing printed over one side of it. “Sexy much, Tonya?”
“Shut up, you little saltine. Ozzie’s meeting us.”
“If you’re wearing that,” Kim said, “there’s no way in hell I’m wearing this. Be right back.”
As if it hadn’t taken long enough already.
“Jian dao ni, wo hen gao xing,” Kim called out from the bedroom. “I’m glad to meet you.”
In spite of the outfit reset, they still managed to set out early for dinner. Now that he’d beaten the hangover, Spencer could finally see what everyone had made such a big damned deal over when they landed. And the emphasis was definitely on big.
Calling Chengdu’s Century Global Center big was like calling Kim irritable. If it was a person, it would probably grab the word big by the throat, beat the crap out of it, and then throw it down the stairs.
The GC, as he’d taken to calling it, was enormous, gargantuan, a thing that could house half a dozen aircraft carriers inside it. It had more than four million square feet of shops, a skating rink, a water park—complete with its own beach—an entire university, China’s version of a Mediterranean village, and more than two thousand hotel rooms, all under a single glass-and-steel latticed roof. Spencer almost staggered into Mike looking up at it.
The GC even had its own sun. Really. It was a collection of special lights that kept the beach warm and bright twenty-four–seven. What’s more, the GC was really old, twenty years at least. New Shanghai had a center bigger than this.
Ozzie showed up with three bodyguards not long after they arrived at the restaurant. Kim’s kind of celebrity was cool and anonymous. Ozzie was famous in a more conventional way, and he graciously autographed whatever the hovering fans put in front of him. Eventually the bodyguards shooed them away.
Dinner started out as a study in intimidation. The entire wait staff had parked themselves five feet away from the table and just stood there. “Why’re they staring at me?” Spencer whispered to Ozzie.
Ozzie shook his head. “In China you signal when you need something. Much superior to the way Americans do it. Here they’re waiting on you. In your country, you end up waiting on them.” The food came out on big plates set on a lazy Susan in the center of the table. “We share our dishes, so everyone gets to try a little of everything.”
Whenever dad thought he could score with a Miss Arkansas runner-up, he’d always drag her and Spencer up to Little Rock and eat at places that didn’t put prices on the menu, so Spencer knew what silent service was. It seemed a little pushier out here for some reason, maybe because it was early and it really did seem like the whole wait staff had nothing better to do than stare at them. He wasn’t going to correct Ozzie, though. That would set him off for sure. But then again, maybe not.
Ozzie in person didn’t match what Spencer knew of him, not from Kim’s stories, and not from the reputation he had earned online. That Ozzie was obnoxious, more than willing to storm out of interviews. This guy was a star, at ease with his fame, charming the wait staff into occasional smiles.
But there was no denying it was Ozzie. Spencer had seen him at the top of podiums for years.
“So,” Tonya said after the bodyguards ushered some schoolgirls away once they’d gotten autographs. “Is shrieking and giggling the only way to get your attention?”
“Oh, far from it. Beautiful dresses and gorgeous smiles will do the trick, too.”
Oh, jeeze. “Get a room.” He crunched down on a double-fried shrimp and gagged. It was so spicy he had trouble breathing. “Mother f—” he gasped out, diving for his beer. “What the hell is that?”
“Huājiāo,” Ozzie replied.
“Sichuan pepper,” Kim translated. “And yes,” she said, eyes watering, “it is powerful.”
Mike ate absolutely everything they set in front of him without a cough or a sniff. Lucky bastard.
Spencer got out his phone while everyone discussed what dessert might look like. The neural interface let him gin up a question in Chinese about the nearest smoking spot. He showed the screen to one of the waiters. The other man nodded and motioned for Spencer to follow.
The area was next to dumpsters and what had to be the kitchen exit. One of the guys he’d seen busing tables leaned against a wall, puffing away at a cigarette.
Spencer opened his dinner jacket to get his pack, and the busboy saw his T-shirt underneath.
“Shinedown! Excellent, rock on!”
Classic rock always brought people together. They bumped fists.
“English?” Spencer asked.
He nodded. “Some. You ever been their realm?”
The accent was on the heavy side, but Spencer could understand him.
“Oh, hell yes.”
His name was Shan, and it turned out he was as big a fan of classic rock bands like Shinedown, Fall Out Boy, and Paramore as Spencer.
“How long you here?” Shan asked.
“A few weeks.”
“You never see real China in there,” he said, motioning at the back entrance of the restaurant. “That mall China. Give me phone number. I call you t
omorrow, we go see real China.”
“Rock on.” They fist-bumped again. Real China had to mean cute girls, cheap beer, maybe even more of that stuff he’d had on the plane. Sure, the hangover had been bad, but the buzz had been righteous. And gambling. He’d read about that. The poker games were epic around here, and lately the exchange rate had been running very much in his favor.
The vacation was definitely looking up.
Chapter 10: Tonya
For once she managed to wake up first. Back home Kim was always the one who showed up at Tonya’s door, coffee and donuts in hand, before they went out for one adventure or the other. But not this time, not this place. Tonya wanted to scatter Walter’s ashes at his family’s ancestral grave sooner rather than later, and then get on with the rest of the vacation.
A part of her wanted Kim along, but it couldn’t happen. Even this early public transport would probably be crowded. Besides, if Kim came, then Mike would be right behind her, and of course they all knew better than to leave Spencer on his own in a city this big. It would turn what she hoped would be a quiet, solemn moment into a circus.
Tonya left a note with her route, destination, and when she expected to be back, then sneaked out of the hotel room. A translation app helped her read the signs and another kept her on the correct route through the buses and subways of the city.
Kim rang her up when Tonya was about halfway there. “Is everything all right?”
She squeezed the bag of ashes through her purse while everyone else in the train car stared at her like she was a particularly disturbing sort of bug. “For certain values of okay, I guess.”
“Can I ask what’s going on?”
The question almost made her laugh out loud. Kim had never made learning about her past easy, so Tonya didn’t either.
“Yes.”
She let the silence extend as the subway left the station.
Kim clicked her tongue over the voice connection. “It really is annoying when I do that, huh? Okay.” She switched her accent and voice to sound like one of Tonya’s cousins. “What the hell is going on, girl?”
Talking to Kim would at least take her mind off the stares. “It’s about Walter’s ashes.”
The story helped her through the train ride, but when she got on the bus for the cemetery, an older Chinese man plopped down next to her and began babbling away. He wagged his finger first at her, then at all the other passengers.
She turned the phone’s ambient microphone on so Kim could hear, and then asked, “What’s he saying?”
“He’s telling everyone how fortunate you are to be so well fed, all because of China’s help. He thinks you’re from Africa.”
The well-fed thing was a bunch of crap. Tonya went to the gym every day to be sure about that. But she knew where the old man was coming from now. When the Live Aid name was revived to help relieve the most recent African famine, more than fifty years after the original, China did host the final third of the concerts. It was a truly global event.
She asked Kim, “How do I reply to him?”
“Turn the speaker on.”
When Kim’s voice came out of the hand-held portion of her phone, everything stopped. Literally. The bus driver pulled over to park, then came back to see what all the commotion was about. He was every bit as curious as everyone else.
The questions were fast and nonstop.
“What do you think of China?”
“How did you afford the air fair?”
“That’s an amazing translation program. How much does it cost?”
“Are you able to pay your rent?”
“What’s it like not being a true American?”
That one brought her up short. “Excuse me?”
He was a teenager in a school uniform. “Black people are not true Americans. We learned it in class. What’s that like?”
Being black in America meant she’d grown up set apart, pushed aside, working twice as hard to get half as far. She would’ve gotten a lot angrier back in the day, when she was younger and believed early Malcolm was the authentic one, not the post-Hajj version, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s books were tablets brought from the top of the mountain.
“Tonya?”
Kim’s voice brought her back. Everyone stared at her. It was one thing to understand her place in America, to accept the reality of it. It was another thing entirely to be called a fake anything. Being real was every bit as important to her as being faithful to God. The urge to turn her inner Angry Negro loose was hard to resist, but it would be useless to go badge-heavy on this crowd. Kim was having a hard enough time keeping up with the translation as it was.
“I’m just as American as anyone else back home. I’ve got a passport to prove it.”
One of the other passengers chimed in with, “But you’re not. I saw a documentary.”
Back talk of any sort always got under her skin. “Don’t you people have jobs? When does your class start? Why isn’t the damned bus moving?”
It was like she’d thrown a switch. They went back to their seats without saying a word. The driver started the bus up, and then pulled away.
“Oh, great,” she said to Kim. “I’ve pissed an entire bus full of Chinese people off.”
The old man sidled up to her and spoke in low tones. “I would like to apologize.”
“For what?”
When he flinched, she said a small prayer to get her pulse under control.
“We are not used to Americans, let alone black Americans.” He stood up. “We should teach the American a traditional song so she will not think badly of us.”
All at once, they did exactly that. This was supposed to be a private thing, sneak in and sneak out. Now she was in the middle of a folk concert. On a bus.
She learned Prince Bay Farm on the way to the cemetery. Sort of. Learning it phonetically wasn’t any different from learning a song in Spanish, or Japanese, or German. What mattered was it made the people on the bus happy, and the Lord knew after this tense trip she needed a little laughter, especially after she got off at the cemetery’s stop.
The biggest graveyard she’d ever seen back home was Arlington. What she stood in front of now made that look like a corner lot. Tonya felt small at the entrance.
Then she found the tomb.
Walter’s family plot was bigger than her living room back home. It may have been bigger than her whole apartment. It was completely paved with expensive-looking gray flagstones. A sculpture depicting a man on his knees presenting a sword to another man reclining on a couch was carved out of white marble, sited to the right of a black headstone. It was huge. And expensive.
At first all she could do was stand and stare at it all. Walter was a Chinese garbage man from a family so poor he was ashamed to talk about them. But the AI guide insisted this was the correct family tomb. She’d provided a DNA sequence to be sure.
It took more courage than Tonya expected to set foot in the thing. But this was Walter, the man who’d saved her. Compared to what he’d done for her, emptying a bag was easy travels. She’d looked up the ceremony on the plane ride over. Walter being Catholic meant she could leverage both traditions for something simple and elegant. After a little bit of incense and a brief prayer, Tonya got up and took Walter’s ashes out.
A strong voice shouted, “Tehing!”
The word didn’t make any sense, but the attitude of the little old lady who stood at the front of the plot did. She was so angry she shook.
Kim answered Tonya’s call right away but Tonya had to ask the old woman to repeat herself, which of course made it worse.
“You will not honor these people. I will not allow it. You are to stop what you are doing and leave. Now.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“You do not need to understand. You need to leave. This family was the lowest of the low, dogs only fit to eat shit. I will not have anyone honor their name. I would piss on their grave if the guards would let me. Do you hear me? They aren
’t worth spitting on!”
While Kim translated, two of those guards walked up behind the old lady. “Ma’am, we told you, you’re not allowed in here anymore.”
“What do you care? They stole my children! I have no one to care for me because of them! No one will mourn me, so no one will mourn them!” She turned to Tonya. “You will not mourn this family! You will never see your home ever again!” It was such an intense curse it rocked Tonya back on her heels. The old woman marched into the plot, heading straight for her.
One guard grabbed each arm and lifted the old woman off her feet. The ensuing struggle was filled with spittle and shouts. Tonya could still hear the curses after they’d hauled the woman out of sight.
A movement caught her eye. In the distance, a powerfully-built man in a plain black suit watched her intently. Now that she knew to look for them, she spotted two more. They were all far away, standing still enough for to her feel very much like a zebra who’d just seen lions.
Walter’s ashes could wait. So could saving money. “Kim, I’m not taking the bus back. Could you call me an Uber?”
Chapter 11: Kim
Watchtell’s fingertips dug flaming trenches into her back. He laughed because there was nobody to rescue her, nothing but cameras showing the world how vulnerable she was. Now everyone knew. Mike sat tied to a chair, watching what he did to her. Watchtell’s hands drew thick razors across her thighs as they worked inward.
She woke up gasping, drenched in sweat. It took a few seconds to remember where she was. A hotel room in Chengdu. The bed across from her was empty, but Tonya had left a note. Thank God she’d gone, and the guys were across the hall. It was humiliating enough to lose control of her dreams. Kim didn’t need any witnesses. Mike suspected she had a problem sleeping but, because their bedrooms were on opposite sides of the apartment, he was never sure. It was another thing she was helpless to fight or explain. It had to stop. What happened to her would not define the rest of her life. She was not a victim.
Kim just had no idea where or when the healing would start.
She had to keep going back to the world. Translating for Tonya’s side trip helped. Then Mike undid it all with his news about Zoe.
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