Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  Chapter Nineteen

  Four travelers adrift on the Long Island Expressway, in bumper-to-bumper traffic. “You could save the world from money to finance terrorism if you got a hybrid car,” Jeff told the Pakistani taxi driver, who ignored him and inched the car forward.

  “Didn’t she know she’d get caught?” Zoe asked.

  “Zoe, my love,” Jeff began, while Lulu frowned and Zoe sensed Jeff had meant to insult the woman who considered herself his girlfriend, “that’s only the beginning. Ming knew she might get arrested in America, but it was a better alternative to her possible fate in China. An American bedbug-infested cot surrounded by girl-thug rapists has nothing on a Chinese lao gai. Oh, sorry, that’s insensitive of me.”

  Certainly, William had escaped his mortal body, and was even now leaping across the Atlantic? Zoe tried to assure herself.

  Professor Engelhorn—even after all they had been through, she still couldn’t imagine calling him anything else—sat in the front passenger seat. “Well,” he offered, “you can all come to my apartment. I have room if you need to stay over.”

  They plowed through Harlem, where shirtless black men stood on street corners, dragging on cigarettes. The taxi stopped in front of a row of brick buildings adorned with griffin gargoyles. A cliff across the street wound down to Morningside Park, where birds tweeted and chirped instead of the exotic whistles of magpies and shrieks of starlings. Rap music blared from a car nearby. It felt like home.

  Professor Engelhorn’s apartment was cavernous, dark, and cool, as if it knew nothing of summer. Once, Zoe had imagined living in a place like this, with Chinese rugs and book-lined walls that proclaimed a home for existentialist theories and languages not our own. Yet this apartment had a despondent feeling and many layers of dust. Zoe left another message for her mother, then the four of them went to a nearby restaurant that served hamburgers, soy burgers, and salads. A rowdy group of teenagers with rings in their noses and gelled hair drank coffee and shared French fries at an adjacent table.

  “I thought people in New York would wear more evening gowns,” said Lulu.

  “Now is when she dumps me for a rich guy,” said Jeff.

  With no word from Billie, they went back to the dusty apartment. Charles directed Zoe into his sons’ room, and she scrunched herself into a twin bed beneath a Yankees pennant. In a just world, she’d have played with her two little half-brothers in this room. In a just world, she would wake up twenty years younger, sit down to a bowl of granola and soymilk, and say, “Good morning, Daddy.” After which, her father would walk her over to a playdate with another faculty kid, practicing the Mandarin words for tree, bird, and car on the way.

  “I can’t sleep.” In the dark, she heard Jeff’s voice. He sidled up next to her in the small bed, and Zoe could feel the clamminess of his skin. “I just can’t get over how weird this is,” he whispered against her neck. “The Dragon Lady and your William Sun Mung Moon both get arrested? I knew they were up to something diabolical. He even lured you into marriage too. Tell me, is he after your nonexistent fortune?”

  A mosquito buzzed around Jeff’s shoulder and he instinctively raised a hand to slap it away.

  “Don’t kill it!”

  “What are you, a bugs’ rights activist now? You know, I had the weirdest hallucination that night I got stoned with Engelhorn for you. Ming took me into some strange room with computers and numbers, where somebody was trying to control the world. I woke up later, outside, half-dressed. I hope she rots in jail.”

  “You’re sweating. And you don’t eat.” Zoe spoke with deliberation. “How much opium did you do there?”

  “Can I stay here with you and never come out?”

  The mosquito buzzed near Zoe’s feet.

  “I’m going to make a movie about a handsome, evil genius who hardwires brain chips and sends out technological whispers that say, ‘Share your money, make life fair!’ Oh, shit, we’re home and we’re fucking homeless. Can we start a revolution here? Penthouses for all the starving artists? Gotta work on that fucking slogan, millions for the masses, champagne for the civilizers.”

  “Calm down. Stop saying fuck.” Zoe stroked his damp hair. For the rest of the night, Jeff tossed and turned, threw out his arms, and kicked his feet, and didn’t seem to sleep at all. Eventually, Zoe felt her eyelids growing heavy.

  The next morning, the light warmed her face through a dusty Venetian blind. Jeff lay on his side, clutching his chest, his eyes fluttering in a half-asleep stupor. Her mouth felt bitter. She padded out, headed for the kitchen for water, but on the way she spotted Lulu in the living room, her face blotched and unhappy. She turned at the sound of Zoe’s footsteps, and got chatty.

  “That Charles, he’s nice. Doesn’t he have a wife and children? I saw pictures of big new skyscrapers in New York. Where are they? That’s where I want to live. Maybe I can get a job here, do you think? I’m sorry, Zoe, you must be so sad. Charles is looking for news from China online.”

  A little later, Professor Engelhorn shuffled into the living room, dressed but barefoot. “The Chinese authorities are blocking all news from Sunshine Village,” he announced. “The provincial governors are gathering there for a summit to discuss measures to stay competitive in the global economy while practicing sound environmental policies. How about some bagels?”

  Charles, Jeff, Lulu, and Zoe sat at a picnic table in the park and said little while they drank coffee from paper cups and ate warm buttered bagels wrapped in greasy white paper.

  “Butter—phew!” Lulu spat out her first bite.

  “Someone should start a business selling the delis cheap Chinese porcelain, instead of these landfill-destroying paper cups,” Jeff said. “There’s something you can do here, Lulu. Cheer up, you’re gonna be rich in America someday.”

  Zoe watched a pigeon alight at her feet, glancing at her with beady, indifferent eyes as it swooped down on a piece of bagel. Professor Engelhorn read a section of the New York Times, while Zoe scanned the headlines about a Congressman under investigation for ethics violations.

  The paper rustling ceased when the professor arrived at page five. “Oh god, Zoe. Look here. ‘The Chinese authorities said they had reason to believe that William Kingsley Sun, recently arrested entrepreneur who created a model village in Sichuan, had been supplying silicon dioxide to certain pariah countries in the Middle East. Codenamed Sand by the US military, the silicon dioxide substance can cause military hardware and other machinery to jam, engines to seize, and air filters to malfunction. An official from the Beijing government said they believed it was something enemy countries could use against the United States.’ It’s all fiction, clearly. But it looks like the notion of sharing corporate wealth has officially gone out of favor. I’m afraid William may be locked up for a while.”

  Professor Engelhorn’s cell phone rang just then. “Hello…are you all right?… yes, right here….” He handed the phone to Jeff.

  “Yeah, it’s me.” Jeff’s eyes narrowed, sweat beading on his forehead. “Uh huh… That’s a shitload of money. Got a sugar daddy you want me to call?” He hung up, rubbed his eyes and the stubble on his chin. “Ming, of course. She gets to talk on a pay phone for ten minutes every two hours. Get this, for the crime of telemarketing something bogus from some boiler room in Chinatown, they’ve set bail at $10,000 plus a $100,000 bond, because they figure she could so easily flee the country.”

  A few fat raindrops splattered into the paper cups, and Professor Engelhorn gave them a section of the newspaper to hold over their heads as they raced back to his apartment. Inside, Zoe pretended to read the paper, while Lulu flipped through year-old magazines, and Jeff stared out the window.

  “I have to do some work,” Professor Engelhorn muttered, and disappeared into his office. After what seemed like days, though, he rushed out with his cell phone live in his hand, playing its jazz-piano ringtone. Billie used t
o tell Zoe that in the days when telephones were mystery boxes without caller ID, she nevertheless always knew when a call came from an agent, or a man worth talking to. “The ring is the same, but there’s something you feel when it’s important—something that pounds at your heart and says this is about to be a day to remember.” Now Zoe knew it was Billie calling mostly by the bewildered look on Professor Engelhorn’s face. He handed the phone to her; he had come into the room to do that. Coward.

  “Baby!” Zoe’s could feel her heart lift at the sound of her mother’s voice. “I heard something awful happened in China? I met a guy this weekend and we were stuck in traffic for five hours—five hours can you imagine?—and there you were, just arriving back in town, trying to find your momma. Come home, baby, and bring your friends.”

  Charles the Chickenhearted walked with them as far as the street, where they all huddled beneath one big black umbrella, watching taxis stream by until finally one slowed down, the light on top illuminated in the dark.

  “Why don’t you come over for a while?” Zoe asked him.

  “Thanks, I’d really like to, but I’ve got work to do.”

  In the building that Zoe knew as home, the elevator sometimes worked. This wasn’t one of those times, and they had to climb six flights of stairs. It had been a grand building in the nineteenth century, with a wide staircase, but now Zoe—as she had always done after visiting friends whose homes had managed to stay grand—found herself counting every paint flake on the floor.

  “This is not as nice as the professor’s building,” Lulu observed.

  So now it’s okay to let me know I’m a financial failure, Zoe thought but didn’t say. She’d heard people make pronouncements on the value of homes and possessions fairly often in pre-New China times.

  When they finally made it to the sixth floor, they found Billie waiting in the doorway. She wore an orange and white sundress and white sandals, her face pink and her hair meticulously windswept. “My baby, look at you! I’m a mess, sorry—I’ve gotten so fat, my hair’s a disaster. Hello, I’m Billie, do you speak English? Jeff, my favorite boy—”

  Billie was not alone. In the living room, a man rose to his feet. “This is Rafael. Darling, this is Zoe, and Jeff and—what’s your name, dear?”

  That was when Zoe saw his face; the face that could have been the rock Buddha’s if the sculptor had finished it. Rafael was lean, his hairline slightly receding, and his demeanor one of European solipsism.

  “Have I met you before?” Zoe asked the revised work of art.

  “Rafael produces music videos,” Billie chimed in, wrapping her arms around the creature. “We met at a party in Greenport.”

  Jeff nudged Zoe and said, “He looks like a Eurotrash version of fucking Simon Sun.”

  Why, Zoe raged inside, couldn’t William have left Sun Two stewing in prison while he became a little creature with wings? But I sent him to check up on you, she imagined the real William replying. Someday they would have a big fight about it. She might be old by then. It might be in their next incarnation.

  Zoe sunk into a chair. Billie commanded center stage, as usual, while her audience chattered, ate, and drank in a semicircle around her. Somehow, her mother had produced a pitcher of margaritas and a platter of tortilla chips. Zoe could hear the rain outside slow to the kind of patter that brightened the plum blossoms in Sunshine Village.

  “Oh god, Zoe, your ring—it’s massive!” she heard Billie exclaim.

  “Two more seconds and Zoe would have been a married woman,” Jeff said. “We were living the American dream in China—the real one where you can be a respected artist and make a living. And then somebody decided they didn’t like it.”

  “Sunshine Village is…” Rafael began.

  “Yes… do tell,” Zoe moved closer to the imposter. “Where is William?” she hissed in his ear, in Mandarin. Rafael, startled, splashed his margarita over the couch.

  “Don’t worry; it’s had a million drinks spilled on it.” Billie was already there with a sponge.

  “My eight-year-old son,” Rafael said when he recovered, “is learning Mandarin. His class did a play about the Chinese Monkey King. His teacher said the Monkey King personifies the reckless instability of genius.”

  “Are you reckless and unstable?” Billie asked, batting her eyelashes. Good god, all it took was the presence of a man and Billie reverted to all the Southern belle ways she claimed she’d spurned.

  Zoe had had enough. She said goodnight, and, before anyone could stop her, turned down the hall into her room, with the walls she’d painted chrysanthemum years ago. She inhaled emptiness, meditating on a patch of peeling paint. The walls were cracking, but everything was just as she’d left it. She must have dozed, because sometime in the night a cry broke through a dream about floating on clouds—“Ooohhh…yes, oh yes!”

  “Does a listener, like an observer, equally affect the action according to the law of quantum physics?” Zoe asked aloud, hoping there might be a gnat in the room to hear her. She heard sighs in the next room, followed by silence except for the usual roar of engines and horns from the street outside. “People don’t change,” she said to the non-existent gnat, then sank into a sleep that felt like a black hole.

  Chapter Twenty

  Down near the bottom-most tip of Manhattan, about six miles from Zoe’s chrysanthemum bedroom, was a granite labyrinth of the Manhattan Detention Complex, though New Yorkers called it the Tombs. Everyone knew of it, though no one in Zoe’s orbit had ever set foot inside, until now.

  The walls, the ceilings, the doors, the tables, even the shower stalls were painted gray. The prison scrub suits were navy blue, some so laundered and bleached that they had also turned gray. Ming would observe the cracks in the gray walls and imagine monkeys leaping and a sun with rays around it.

  “They got some beastly ghosts in this room. Better make friends with them, China Doll,” her cellmate Delia said, languidly flipping her prematurely gray locks over one shoulder. Delia’s fingernails were three inches long and painted crimson. Vanity was all they had in the Tombs. In her second week, Ming let Delia paint her nails with purple and white stripes. Inmates earned twelve cents an hour to do the laundry, peel potatoes, or stack library books; they used their pennies to buy beads and nail polish in the commissary. In her third week, Ming dyed her hair auburn like Billie Austin’s, just for something to do.

  Delia was almost fifty and came from out west. She liked to talk and Ming was a good listener. Delia had left her first husband, not because of his cocaine habit, but because she’d caught him getting a blowjob from the drag queen at his Las Vegas club. She’d moved on to Arizona, where she used to coax brightly colored peonies, vibrant cactus flowers, and even healthy rosebushes out of the scrawniest seedlings. Delia’s flowers had bloomed so lush that they had hidden her cash crop for years.

  Three years ago, Delia’s luck ran out and the police busted her for her horticultural enterprise.

  “I should have known better. My customer said he had an aging mother with glaucoma, and he wanted five pounds. I should have known it was too much, but he knew all my regulars. The narcos get to know you real, real well.”

  Delia had been transferred from federal prison to federal prison for the past year—from Arizona to Florida, and now New York—and she’d just received a sentence of ten years, with the possibility of parole for good behavior.

  “My beautiful ranch and one hundred acres—it’s all going on the auction block if some dirty-finger cop don’t squat there himself,” Delia moaned.

  At first, Ming had thought she’d be better friends with Jennie, the butch with roan-colored skin and a trim Afro cut. Jennie had been the administrative manager of a medical clinic and was in for insurance fraud. People couldn’t afford the doctor if the insurance didn’t pay for their visit, she told Ming.

  “We’re all political prisoners,” Ming decl
ared, earning a dirty look from Rosa, like what do you know, Ms.-Attended-NYU-Business-School.

  Rosa, the fourth cellmate, had a father who’d beaten her often, for partying all night, getting bad grades, and dropping out of community college. “My daddy was, like, a busboy forever. I saw how people pushed him around, and I said, ‘I ain’t gonna be no servant.’” Rosa was twenty-one and had three children. She had been arrested for helping her boyfriend sell stolen car parts at his shop in the south Bronx.

  “What if you could live in a place where you could afford everything you needed?” Ming asked. Jennie threw three dead roaches at Ming’s bed to teach her not to indulge in fantasies.

  “I always liked the bad boys,” Rosa said. “I bet you went out on dates with good little business school boys with itty-bitty-eeny-meeny cocks. China Doll, you wanna bury them bugs and light a candle?”

  They all knew Ming screamed in protest if they tried to throw their regulation tennis shoes at scuttling vermin. She told them it was a religious thing.

  The inmates were allowed only one visitor a month—in addition to their court-appointed lawyer—excluding bugs, mice, or invisible men, though what, Ming wondered, could an immortal do for her now? During her first week in prison, Ming had waited for Zoe to come, hopefully with some magical access to the bail and bond that would get her out. But her former Sunshine Finance co-head was having her own crisis over money.

  “The landlord found out my mom isn’t Brennan Leichtling,” Zoe had wailed on the phone. “We got an eviction notice. I feel like Sunshine Village, all of it, was some bizarre dream. All except for the opal ring. Which is in a safe deposit box. I can’t walk around here flashing that thing.”

  Instead of Zoe, her visitor for the month was Jeff. He had stopped shaving and his hair stood out in greasy tufts. “How did I manage to marry a fucking rapscallion?” he asked from the other side of the glass. “I’ve always wanted to use that word but preferably while floating down a raft with Huckleberry Finn.”