Rock Paper Tiger

by Lisa Brackmann

  What happens next is, the KFC people reach into their buckets and start throwing shit at the McDonald’s people. Something wings me in the ear.

  A drumstick. The KFC Army’s packing drumsticks.

  The McDonald’s invaders drop to their knees, like good infantry. The front line pulls out slingshots loaded with something. McNuggets, I figure out when one lands by my foot.

  “Hah hah HAH hah HAH!”

  KFC versus McDonald’s? On the Great Wall? Whatever. I push past the first line of Mickey D workers. “Yili. Yili, wait—”

  Something—someone—catches my sleeve, tugs it close, grabs my wrist. I try to pull away, but I can’t.

  “Yili—”

  I turn. It’s John, of course.

  He doesn’t look so scary now. He looks like the guy I met at the party: cute and kind of clueless.

  I know that last part’s a lie.

  I don’t fight him. Like I’m hypnotized.

  “I just want to give you my … my card,” John says, with that peculiar stress on the last word. “So if you have any problems, you can call me.”

  In his free hand, in fact, is a business card.

  I hesitate. I take the card and put it in my jeans pocket.

  “Thanks, John,” I say.

  I swing up my good leg, hinged at the knee like it’s been held back by a coiled spring, and kick him in the balls.

  He collapses like a deflated balloon, and I run like hell down the Wall.

  I stumble through the ranks of McDonald’s invaders, bumping shoulders with a cluster of art tourists dressed in groovy tees taking photos and videos of the performance. “KFC is by far the most popular fast-food chain in China,” one of them says. “McDonald’s market penetration doesn’t even come close.”

  Good to know.

  Ahead of me is a watchtower. I enter it. Here is the Chinese couple, watching bad sitcoms on their battery-operated TV, just like they were doing when I left them.

  “Miss,” the woman says, in desultory fashion, hardly looking up from her little screen, “you want postcards? Great Wall book?”

  “No!” I practically shout. And then I get an idea. “No,” I repeat, somewhat more calmly. “But I’ll tell you what. I’d like to see your village. No, really. Because I want to better understand the life of the common Chinese people.”

  The woman stares at me. I repeat the whole thing in Chinese. “I want very much to see your village,” I say again. “Tonight. And I am happy to pay you for it.”

  The woman turns to her husband, whispers something behind her hand. The husband looks up at me. Frowns. Because maybe this is trouble, and nobody can afford that.

  “You pay how much?” the woman asks.

  I END UP in an enclosed cart pulled by a motorcycle that looks like it’s vintage PLA, sitting next to the postcard lady. Her husband drives. My feet rest on top of a case of beer, my elbow’s leaning on a stack of Great Wall books, we’re careening along this crazy winding road, hurtling through the dark, and I’m pretty sure we’re all going to die, but that prospect isn’t bothering me much at the moment, for some reason. Maybe because of the Percocet I took.

  “Are you married?” the lady asks. “Do you have children?”

  I take a chance and turn on my iPhone for a minute—John found me even with the phone off, so who knows if it makes any difference?—and text Sloppy, telling her I found a ride and I’ll catch up with her later.

  Finally we get to their village.

  This is the weird thing about China: you can be in a city like Beijing, with every modern convenience, with skyscrapers and Starbucks and bizarre underground performance spaces, and then you can go a couple hours away and end up in some village that’s a throwback to the Qing Dynasty, except with satellite dishes and Internet connections and white-tile disease.

  Tongren Village is a pretty shabby old place overall, tucked away a few valleys over from the Simatai Great Wall. God knows what they do up here, aside from selling postcards to tourists, because the land looks hard, barren, like scratching out millet and winter cabbage would exhaust whatever life is left in it.

  My hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Liang, put me up in their tiny house, in their kid’s bedroom, which is sort of an alcove off the kitchen, and I guess their kid really is away at school, because she’s not around, and the parents are using the space as a storeroom for their books and beers and bottled water. One bare bulb lights the smudged, whitewashed room, which is decorated with a poster for some Korean pop star and an out-of-date calendar. The bed is a kang, but there’s no coal burning underneath to heat it up, so I sleep in the T-shirt, sweatshirt, and sweatpants Postcard Lady rounds up for me to wear, with every available quilt piled on top because it’s still cold up here in the late spring.

  For a couple of postcard hawkers, my hosts are hospitable folks. In the morning, they serve me tea and congee and a bag of shrimp chips for breakfast.

  I sit and eat, and Postcard Lady sits across from me and watches.

  “So, you aren’t married?” she asks.

  I can’t even get irritated, for some reason.

  “I’m getting a divorce,” I say.

  Postcard Lady shakes her head. “This modern life, it’s not well suited for family. So hard, to keep family together. Don’t you think so?”

  I stare across the little table at Mrs. Liang, at her weathered face and her stained-tooth smile and her counterfeit UCLA sweatshirt, and think about her kid, off at some boarding school, in pursuit of a life that doesn’t involve selling shit to tourists at the Great Wall.

  “I think you’ve managed it,” I say awkwardly.

  She giggles a little, pats me on the shoulder, and pours me more tea.

  After breakfast, Mr. and Mrs. Liang leave for the Simatai Great Wall. They won’t get back till after dark. I check out the village, walking along the one paved road that forms the center of town. Tongren Village has a market, a white-tiled municipal headquarters, a few vendors, elderly men and women selling baskets of candies and snacks. There’s a jiaozi place for lunch and a teahouse for after that. I sit in the teahouse and read this trashy suspense novel that somehow ended up at the Liangs’, try to lose myself in a world of terrorists and super-germs for a while.

  A couple of the locals come up and start conversations. They ask me the usual questions: how did I learn Chinese, how do I like China, what do I think of their village, am I married? I answer some, dodge the rest, smile, and drink tea.

  After that, I take a walk. There isn’t much to see, though I find a crumbling temple that seems almost abandoned, the washed-out red paint of its walls peeling off in chunks. On the gray wall beneath are faded characters, Cultural Revolution slogans, something about “smashing the Four Olds!” Flayed tires and cracked roof tiles are piled in a corner of the courtyard, and inside, the statue of Guanyin is missing an arm, its once-gaudy colors bleached to gray wood.

  It’s not a bad place, this little village in the shadow of the northern hills. It’s relaxing here. Quiet. I wonder if I could find some place to stay longterm. Hang out. Just live.

  I walk past an old house, its tiled roof peeking above a gray stone wall, chipped stone lions on either side of the wall’s red door. A scholar’s home once, or an official’s, it looks like. Maybe I could live there. Rent a room. My disability money would probably cover it. I could, I don’t know, read books. Take walks. Eat jiaozi.

  What would it be like, being someplace peaceful?

  I realize I have no idea.

  By now I’m really sleepy. No surprise, considering what the last couple days have been like. I decide to go back to the Liangs’ place for a nap.

  I walk up the dirt road that leads to the Liangs’, past a few silent farmhouses tucked among barren fields that back into the hills, the late afternoon shade spilling over the road like a veil.

  As the little house comes into view, I figure I’d better use the toilet before I go in.

  The Liangs’ bathroom is an outhouse above the
pigpen—a squat shitter, two blocks straddling a trench, with a gap between the wall and the floor on the downhill side. For me, with my leg, it’s a little tough, even with the iron bar protruding from the bricks to grasp, especially because I’ve got my backpack, and the additional weight of that makes balancing harder.

  As I squat there, clutching the iron bar, trying to breathe through my mouth, one of the hogs comes snuffling up to the gap below the wall, nosing at the run-off from the trench.

  Pigs eat shit. Who knew?

  I’m thinking maybe I don’t want to live in a peaceful rural Chinese village.

  As I’m thinking this and exiting the outhouse, I hear a car coming up the drive.

  Not a motorcycle cart, not a farmer’s blue truck. Something with a smooth, low-pitched engine and some horsepower.

  I duck back into the outhouse.

  Tires crunch gravel. The engine stops. A car door slams.

  Standing on the block above the latrine, I can just see out the ventilation windows that run along the upper wall of the outhouse. A black car—maybe a Lexus.

  A man approaches the Liangs’ door. Knocks. He’s stocky, broad across the shoulders, wearing a white polo shirt. Chinese, I think, but I can only see his back, his black, bristling hair.

  He jiggles the doorknob. Locked. Walks around to the side of the house.

  I duck down.

  I think about running, but how far could I get?

  The space between the outhouse wall and the latrine, where the trench runs down to meet the pig-pen. I scramble into it, then squeeze myself as far as I can beneath the floorboards next to the trench. The stench coats my nose and throat like liquid.

  One of the pigs sticks its snout under the wall and stares at me. Snorts.

  I stare back. Hold my breath. My stomach roils.

  Footsteps. The outhouse door creaks open.

  Bangs shut.

  The pig snuffles.

  A minute later, I hear the car start and then head back down the drive.

  I wait until I can’t hear the car any more, count to ten, and climb out, shaking so badly that I stumble at the outhouse door.

  I tell myself, maybe he had nothing to do with me. Maybe he was, I don’t know, the Liangs’ postcard supplier. In a black Lexus. Right.

  Inside the Liangs’ house, I change out of the muddy sweatpants and sweatshirt that the Liangs lent me, clean myself and my fake Pumas as best I can, and put on my party clothes. I don’t have anything else to wear.

  I leave the house key and three hundred yuan on the table and lock the door behind me.

  There’s no way of knowing which way the Lexus guy went, so the only thing I can think of to do is head toward the bus stop at the end of town. And here I catch a break: a mianbao, one of those little white vans shaped like bread loaves, idles roughly at the bus stop, letting off passengers.

  I approach the driver’s window.

  “Shifu, ni hao. I need to get to Beijing. Can you take me?”

  I’m not going to Mati tonight. They know where to find me there.

  The driver, round-faced and reeking of tobacco, shakes his head and taps out a last cigarette from his crumpled pack of Horse & Camels.

  “Can’t. They don’t let us drive mianbao in Beijing City.”

  “To Shunyi District; can you do that?” Shunyi’s just outside of Beijing proper. I can catch a cab or a bus from there.

  He takes a long drag on his cigarette and considers. “Keyi,” he says with a nod.

  We agree on a price and set off.

  I don’t know where I’m going to go from Shunyi. I’ll figure it out when I get there.

  I power up my iPhone and check for messages.

  A couple from Trey, which I ignore. Chinese text spam. And finally, a reply from Sloppy: “Hi Yili, Harrison Wang invite us two for dinner tonight. Can you come?”

  Harrison Wang. I don’t know who this is. Then I remember: some art guy Sloppy was all excited about meeting last night at Simatai.

  The dinner is at seven thirty, in Chaoyang District, which is northeast Beijing. It’s about four o’clock now. I’m wearing the same clothes I’ve been in and out of since the party, and my fake Pumas smell like shit. I don’t know what this guy actually does or why he might want to talk to me. I don’t know anything about anybody, when it comes right down to it. I think Lucy Wu wants to make money off of Lao Zhang’s art, but how can I be sure? I thought Sloppy was my friend, but how do I know that?

  Harrison Wang? No clue.

  I think I should just keep running. Go somewhere. Hide someplace.

  That didn’t work too well in Tongren Village, though.

  If they can find me no matter where I go, what difference does it make if Sloppy or Lucy or Harrison Wang is part of it? They’re going to catch up with me eventually. Whoever they are.

  It comes down to this: I don’t know what else to do.

  Besides, I’m hungry.

  “Okay,” I type back. “I might be late.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WE MET AFTER our shifts like we usually did, on the berm by the guard tower. It wasn’t yet dawn, and the air was shirtsleeve-cool, with a slight scent of rain. Trey was hyper, pacing back and forth, smoking cigarettes, jamming his hands in his pockets, then waving them around, like he was high on something, except I don’t think he was.

  “Ellie. I think we got the guy,” he said. “The one who’s been dumping mortars on us the last three months. I think we finally got him.”

  “That’s great, Trey.” I meant it. The mortars were why I was at this shithole in the first place, one of them having wounded my predecessor. Plus, the week before, a round had landed on our rec tent, taking out an exercise bike and the rowing machine, which seriously sucked.

  Trey flopped down on the berm next to me. “Yeah.” He tapped a cigarette out of the package and offered it to me, then tapped out another one for himself. “I feel like we’re finally getting somewhere,” he said. “You know? We take out this guy, he’s the leader—maybe we cut the guts out of this whole bullshit resistance around here. If that happens, we can finally get things running the way they should. Fix the sewers and the power plant, show the locals it’s all been worth it.”

  He flicked his Zippo to light my cigarette, but the wind came up, so he cupped his hand around mine to form a break, and I felt his palm on the back of my hand, and all of a sudden, neither of us gave a shit about the cigarette any more. We were kissing, sitting there on the berm, his hand on my back, on my tit, the beard coming in on his chin scraping against my lips, and I’m thinking, Hallelujah, fuck me now.

  Then he stopped.

  “We can’t do this,” he said.

  “We can’t?”

  “Not here.”

  I almost asked why, and then I realized that he was actually making sense.

  “Yeah.” I sat up, pulled down my T-shirt, and picked my cigarette out of the dirt.

  Trey stared at me. “We could go someplace,” he said. “If you want to.”

  “Yeah,” I said, staring back. “Yeah. I want to.”

  THE THING ABOUT Camp Fucking Falafel was that, unlike my first FOB, there weren’t a lot of places to go for privacy. My first thought was the laundry facility (seeing as how that had served me well back at the old FOB), but Trey had another idea.

  “People’ll be showing up at Laundry any time now. But there’s some rooms in the Admin Core nobody’s using.”

  I’d hardly ever been in the Admin Core: once when I got here for processing, and a couple times for mission briefings when I was subbing for Menendez or Hilliard, the medics who usually pulled the off-campus patrols. Otherwise, I didn’t have any reason to go there. My bunk was in an outbuilding, part of the old barracks, and so was the aid station.

  Trey took me to a wing I’d never been to, through an entrance guarded by a soldier I’d met a few times.

  “Hey, Morris,” he said casually. “You know Doc McEnroe, right?”

  “Sure,
” he said, trying not very hard not to stare at my tits.

  “I got a PUC problem she’s gonna help me out with. Off the books.”

  The soldier gave a half-shrug, like this was the last thing he cared about. And we went inside.

  You ever been in a place you know is wrong?

  I’m not going to claim I figured that out right away. That night, that early morning, it was just another Iraqi dump as far as I was concerned: a concrete-block maze that had been painted this sort of baby-food puke yellow, now scabbing over the walls like an infection, revealing the plaster and cement underneath. The lights were bare bulbs, sometimes encased in rusting metal cages.

  Trey and I walked down the hall, passing a couple of closed doors, then an open door into a room containing a bunch of battered file cabinets, where another soldier sorted papers. We crossed a wider hall. At the very end I could see a couple soldiers loitering by a door, laughing, giving each other shit. Then we turned down a smaller corridor. At the end of that was a staircase. At the top of that, another hall, this one with a wooden floor and baseboards and molding.

  Trey stopped at one of the doors and jiggled the knob. Unlocked. He opened the door, and we went inside.

  There was a desk and a couple chairs, like this had been somebody’s office. At the back of it was a narrow door.

  “It’s not much,” Trey said, in a hushed voice. “I wish I could give you something better.”

  It was practically a closet, with a cot stuck inside that took up almost all the room. I guessed whoever had worked here used to take naps or even spend the night. An old wool blanket was spread on top of whatever thin, lumpy mattress covered the springs.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “It really is.”

  We didn’t talk. He didn’t whisper how much he cared about me; we didn’t fall asleep and wake up in each other’s arms. We fucked until Trey came and I felt like my butt was bruised from the busted springs in the bedframe. I didn’t come, and neither one of us did anything about that.

  But it felt like what I needed right then.

  Afterward we lay there for maybe fifteen minutes, a half hour at most, smoking cigarettes and not saying very much.