A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  They’d met on the north side, on Yanjiang Dadao, at the appointed place just above the lapping, iron-gray flanks of the Xiang River. Zhou was there at the Two Friends Café, drinking beer, watching the boats on the river with their lights under the star-strewn sky. For men like them it was the most natural thing in the world to embark on an important, serious adventure late at night, fortified by alcohol. They were always most precise now, lightest, most alert.

  And the night driving had been good. There were reasonable roads from here to Hengyang, then Chenxian, Shaoguan, Yingde, and finally Guangzhou. The two men had sailed, with good conversation and laughter. But mainly Zhou drove, and Bai slept, and thought. Everything depended on the next day, when he would run the last lap alone.

  Now, in the morning, the city of Guangzhou spread out many miles from its center. Its chalk-colored towers made deep canyons of its central streets and thoroughfares and shimmered in the southern light. The traffic condensed, slowing with every mile. By the time they reached the center of the city, they were rolling at a stop-and-start. Buses, trucks, cars, and taxis jammed the freeway. They got off at Jiefang Lu. Traffic was stopped here too. By sheer power of tonnage, Bai was able to push his way to the side of the road and let Zhou off. The bus hub was just on the other side of this block, and they both knew Zhou could go anywhere from here—back to Jingdezhen, or where he liked.

  “Thank you,” Bai said, and pushed a small folded wad of yuan into Zhou’s hand. Zhou protested, but of course took the money.

  “Good luck.” He climbed out and hopped to the ground, looking up at Bai’s thin face, his high hair, and his big, guileless mouth. “Level road.”

  “To you too,” Bai answered from the driver’s seat. “Put your heart at rest. I’ll get through.”

  To that Zhou raised a hand and turned and was gone, walking away even as he heard the big chuff of the engine shifting gears and then pulling out and roaring away up Liu Hua Lu.

  Zhou walked down the block to a concrete ticket office fronted by potted palms. He used a small part of the money Bai had given him to buy a ticket back to Jingdezhen.

  He sat in the waiting area a long time and then much later went out and climbed the three steps up to his waiting bus. He chose a middle row, a window. So much went on in and out of Guangzhou, so much that was illegal, that all the buses had security. Before they left, a uniformed employee got on and stalked up the aisle, videotaping every passenger.

  Zhou knew what to do. He knew just how to pull up his collar, lower his eyes to a book, or turn away, interested in something he glimpsed out the window at just that exact right moment. There had never been a discernible likeness of Zhou on any of these tapes. He was very proud of that. He knew the system well.

  She had barely had time to wash and get her clothes on when he came and knocked. She felt a jolt of gladness as she opened the door to him, and right after that came the natural flood of fear. Suddenly seeing him inches from her, seeing his white shirt open at the neck and knowing he’d come here for her to unbutton it and take it off, she felt unable to move at all.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Please. Sorry.” She stepped back.

  “You okay?” he said. His hand came out to her arm.

  She smiled. She felt altogether too shy to speak. “Yes. It’s just—you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t you have to go to work?”

  “I’m sick today,” he said. But he was smiling.

  “I see.” She felt his hands exploring the catch at the top of her braid, then sliding down to the end of the rope. He looped it around in front of her. She watched. He pulled off the elastic and started separating the strands.

  Then her cell phone went off. She worked it out of her pocket. “Wei.”

  “Wei. Fan Xiaojie,” Miss Fan. It was Gao Yideng.

  “Mr. Gao.” She looked down at Michael’s hands. She could barely breathe. “All is well?” she said into the phone.

  “Oh, beyond well, excellent, I should say. You did a fine job! But I must not detain you. I just want to tell you my driver will call for you this evening.”

  “Your driver?” She looked at Michael. “Thank you, but no. Please don’t send the driver.”

  He was perturbed. “Why?”

  “I’ll go myself.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m sure.”

  “If you say. But you are my guest! Well, good journey, then, Miss Fan. And thank you.”

  “Don’t be polite,” she said. They traded parting wishes and she closed the phone.

  His hands were higher. “Everything okay?” he said.

  “Yes.” She dropped the phone on the table. She felt like everything about her body was standing straight up.

  He came to the top of her head and unhooked her hair. It fell loose all around her, and her scalp tingled with the fine ache of unbinding. “That’s nice,” he said, looking across to her eyes, picking up the strands in front of her and lifting them back behind her shoulders. “Take your shirt off.”

  It took Bai a long time to get the truck out of Guangzhou. Freeway traffic rolled at a walk, but that was normal here in the morning. He stopped and started, the brand-new engine hot but humming well, and inched slowly through the ranks of tall buildings, once white, now grimy. It wasn’t until he made his way to the ring expressway, which led him quickly south to the city’s green suburban hills, that he could drive at a good speed. Here the road flew. Through breaks in the slopes he saw behind him, in his mirror, the forest of white rectangular blocks that was Guangzhou.

  He passed the exit signs for Guangcong Road, Guangshan Road. Now there were dull apartment blocks on either side of the road, along with truck yards, factories, little smokestacks belching. And then, just when it seemed to Bai that there was nothing here except trade, business, industry, and the beehives of living, a cleft in the hills would open and he’d see a green spreading valley under syrupy light.

  Closer to him, right by the road, brick-earthed banana plantations were scored with marching electrical towers, hauling their power loads away across the hills.

  He kept his eyes on the road. Something was happening up ahead. He braked. Flashing lights. Police cars. There was a man lying on the shoulder, an overturned cart near him. Bai could see his short-sleeved plaid shirt against the concrete. Blood spread in a puddle under his head. Someone knelt beside him, holding a towel to his head, shielding his face from the traffic.

  There were moments of danger, openings of danger; maws into which any passing man might fall, Bai thought: This was one. It had claimed another man today, not him. An omen. Two hands on the wheel, two eyes on the road. There ahead was his exit lane. He steered, and then he was sailing up and over, across a long steel bridge above the Pearl River.

  On the opposite shore he entered groves of lichi, with their fluttering almond-shaped leaves, and then tunneled through the township of Dongguan. Another exit, a turn, and he was entering the demarcation zone that separated Shenzhen, a Special Administrative Region, from the rest of south China. Shenzhen had different tax and banking structures, different accords with foreigners and different industries. Nevertheless, the flood of people and goods in and out of Shenzhen was heavy and unrelenting. Only a simple pass was required to get into Shenzhen, and this pass had been an easy thing for Bai to get. It was getting out of Shenzhen, and into Hong Kong, that was going to be hard.

  He pulled into the truck lane and slowed to a stop, to wait for this first checkpoint. He was high, up so high in this seat. He could be calm. This was easy. All he had to do was show the pass. It was a real one, acquired with good money and favors. They had no reason to question him. He’d show the pass, get into Shenzhen. One thing at a time.

  His turn at the gate. He nosed the rig forward, and when he stopped, the engine heaved up a big deflating sigh.

  “Papers,” the man said.

  Bai reached in the compartment easily, casually, t
ook out the folded document and handed it down. He watched as the man opened up the triplicate form, flipped through it. Then he tore off the bottom sheet, the blue sheet, and handed the top two sheets back up to Bai.

  Bai took them in a daze and set them on the seat next to him. He realized the guard was waving him out. Waving him into Shenzhen. He was in. Quickly he put the truck back in gear and eased out, onto the road, into the hall of mirrors, the crowded neighborhoods, the free-for-all of China’s number-one special economic zone.

  This part had been easy; it was only the beginning. He followed a long, dreary suburbia through the fertile Pearl River delta to the actual town of Shenzhen, which sat by the border. A generation ago it had been farms; now the road wound through patches of smoking industry, cut with blocks of apartment buildings, windows hung with flapping laundry. He crossed the town quickly, heading for the Border Administration Area.

  Here the hills beside the road looked dug out. There were piles of rock and rubble everywhere. It was as if this edge of the city had been forcibly scooped out of rock and planted. And then the road curved around the hip of a green cliff, and there, below Bai and spreading out forever, was the South China Sea, turquoise, brilliant.

  And further away, just there down the coast, he could see the hills of Hong Kong—green, carpeted with the white spires of success. His soul rose up in joy. He followed the signs for Huangang, the Immigration and Customs point for vehicles.

  Finally he came to the checkpoint. The uniformed man stepped up to the truck, and Bai handed down the packet of papers that he had assembled and for which he had paid so well. His mien was disaffected. It verged on boredom. He was careful not to overplay. He barely glanced at the uniformed man.

  But he felt the advancement of every second, every tick, every breath, as if they were random rising knife points. The guard rifled through the papers, checked that the overall package was in order, stopped here and there to study a page, pull his bushy brows down, scrutinize it . . . Bai felt like he was turning to liquid. He noticed his knees were not holding still. He pretended to fiddle with the radio.

  “Destination?” the guard said.

  “Hong Kong.”

  “Cargo?”

  “Chickens.” Bai set the station, turned the volume all the way down, and finally, unbearably, gave the guard his full attention.

  “Pull into bay number twelve,” the guard said.

  Bai nodded. Did his face show anything? No. Calm, a brief nod. But inside him every fiber was screaming.

  They were stopping him. They were going to search him.

  He threw the truck into gear and lurched forward. As he pulled away from the booth he saw the guard take out his cell phone and speak into it. Please. He sent a personal prayer to the god of fire and wind. He thought of the Long Zu Temple back home, all the incense he had lit there, all the fruits and fang gu he had left there at the altar. For almost a thousand years the god had protected men who lived for porcelain. Please. Slowly he rolled his sighing, huffing truck into bay number twelve.

  They lay back to front, him behind her, his arms around her and one of his legs between hers. She squeezed gently and he moved in answer. The only sound in the room was their breathing.

  She picked up his hand. There in his palm was the human ideogram. He needed love. It was easy to see. It was all over him, in the way he had moved his body, in the protective circle of his arms, in his mouth and the way he had buried himself in her.

  What should she keep from today? What to memorize? Already all the things they’d done were blurring. Maybe she could retain the smallest part of his hand, the mound below the thumb. There she saw the lines and creases, his spirit of life, his vitality. The glory that was in him when he chose to let it out.

  She would give him a memory room, of course, and a symbol to guard his door. The symbol would have to be a thing she really loved. None less than Thomas Aquinas had written: It is necessary that a man dwell with solicitude on, and cleave with affection to, the things which he wishes to remember, because what is strongly impressed upon the soul slips less easily away from it.

  Solicitude, affection; it should be something from art, or a line of poetry. She thought about what the Hanlin scholar had written after being sent south to Jingdezhen: Who knows about me? Yes, that would do, that could be Michael Doyle’s signpost. She pressed her back against the front of him. If only she could just stay here with him forever.

  He stirred, his fingers came around her face, and she twisted over like a snake. His broad-boned face was lax with happiness.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “More than. You?”

  “Yes.” She smiled. So intimate a while ago, and now so polite.

  “Did you?” he asked. She knew he was talking about coming. She could answer yes. She had learned that a lot of men couldn’t tell.

  “Because I didn’t see it,” he said.

  She pressed to him, her cheek against the reassuring terrain of his chest. It wasn’t easy for her, but it was a hard thing to talk about, especially with someone like him, whom she might never see again. Still, he had his arms in such a safe net around her. “It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Don’t tell me not to worry about it.”

  “I just don’t always.”

  He pulled her up until her lips were on his, and kissed her with the confident promise of a man who has already been inside. Then he moved to her ear and said, “What makes it easier?”

  She touched her hearing aids. “Taking these out.”

  “And what happens then?”

  Instead of answering, she moved against him.

  “Really.” He was fascinated by her. “That’s what you like?” He parted her legs. “Take them out, then.”

  “If I do I can’t hear you. We can’t talk.”

  “Take them out.”

  Lia lifted them out and put them aside, felt the inflating bliss of belonging. She let herself fall open, looking at him up over her on one elbow, his chest and shoulders, straight falling hair, the rhythm of his arm, the calm acceptance in his eyes. He bent to kiss her ears, in the tender part where her little amplifiers sat. Here, he seemed to say with his mouth, what else can I love about you?

  18

  At the border, Bai waited in the number-twelve inspection bay. He was dying inside. He would not show it.

  Three men walked over out of the gatehouse. “Xia che,” one of them barked, Get out. Bai complied. He snapped open the big shiny door, lighted on the ground, and held out his paperwork.

  The head man took it, read through it. He was studying every word. Time fell away from them, grinding seconds that felt like hours to Bai.

  “Destination?” the man said at length, even though there was only one possible destination from this checkpoint.

  “Hong Kong.”

  “Cargo?”

  “Chickens.”

  The man folded the paperwork and secreted it in a pocket instead of giving it back to Bai.

  Oh, that is not good, Bai thought in misery. That is very not good. You should not be keeping my paperwork.

  The man turned to the other two. “Kan kan yixia,” he instructed sharply, Take a look. He turned to Bai. “You, rest over there a moment.”

  Bai felt his whole body tingling with fear as he stepped back. Rest, right. But he obeyed and went to stand under the lit-up roof of the guardhouse.

  From here he watched the men gather behind the truck. If they found it, would they kill him? He calculated how much money he had stitched into the hem of his shirt. Not enough, maybe, for all of them. Better if he could get the head man alone.

  And then if that didn’t work . . .

  Anguish choked up in him as he watched the men yank open the truck’s great rear doors. Dry clouds of smoke billowed from the freezer.

  Here was Bai’s genius, come to life: two thousand pounds of cleaned, raw, frozen chickens, skins nubbly and rock-hard. He could see the men standing arou
nd looking at them, halfheartedly moving a few icy birds to one side or the other. The chicken feet were death talons, extended in clawlike despair, thousands of them. Their heads and sightless eyes were all frozen in mid-scream. Who would want to touch them? The men were talking back and forth. He could hear the elastic pinging of their Cantonese.

  Things had changed so much. Just ten years before, most goods were still being moved by sea. China’s porous coastline, and the near-infinite range of beaching possibilities in Hong Kong’s archipelago, had long made this the main modus of discreet shippers. But then there were the pirates to be dealt with. They were a nest of poison vipers on the sea. They murdered any who crossed them. And one had to pay them outrageously, no matter what.

  Modernization had altered the smuggling patterns. Now there were busy roads, and convoys of trucks bearing all manner of goods roaring back and forth, and a big, efficient machine for processing goods and people across this densely populated, heavily traversed border. Bai stood smoking, using his cigarette to control the tremblings in his hand—good, good, now they were arguing with each other. They seemed to be only moving the top layer of chickens around. They had no gloves. It was a job that became uncomfortable quickly, as he knew. As he had calculated.

  He drew on his cigarette. Now the voices of the two men had turned sharp. They were arguing. The third man walked back over. For a while he had just been listening. Bai was able to follow Cantonese only sketchily, but it sounded as if the odds were in his favor. He smiled, a small smile but a real smile that came up from inside him. His biggest test, his greatest portal. This took the ultimate in face and wits. To say nothing of power of mind.

  The third man opened the packet of papers he’d been holding and read through them again, scanning, checking. Bai held his cigarette tight. In time the third man finished reading and spoke peremptorily. He had a higher rank. Bai strained to follow them.