Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  “I’m innocent.” You had to say that if anyone asked.

  “Yeah, the illumination of your halo is absolutely blinding. I know you’d rather have a rich husband to bail you out, but I brought you this.” He opened a bag and produced three spiral notebooks, one yellow, one red, one blue, and a box with a silver pen inside. “From Zoe and me. Great works have been written in longhand, you know.” He slid them into the metal drawer that a guard inspected before Ming could retrieve them.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Tell me how you are. Tell me really.”

  “Oh, fine, a bit dopey. Zoe dragged me to a clinic in Harlem. She’s convinced I turned into a drug addict in Sunshine Village. I’m taking a mild dose of clonidine.”

  “I wish I could help you.” She meant it.

  “She wants to help me now! Ha!”

  That night Ming drew lines and arrows in the blue notebook. She fashioned them as pathways, tracing the stories Jeff had told her about his movements since he’d arrived back in New York and taking Lulu to stay with his sister, Tracey, in Short Hills, New Jersey. Ming drew Jeff’s path in a continuous pencil line, with Lulu’s running parallel in short dashes, like two opposing I Ching modalities.

  In Chinese characters she composed the scene that Jeff had described—a family dinner with the toddler eating organic macaroni, and the adults dining on some gourmet dish. Tracey’s husband had talked through the whole main course about his technology business that was on the brink of going public, then made fun of a Democratic politician—knowing Jeff would fume, but happy to test the endurance of his houseguests. Jeff had taken the bait and called his brother-in-law a fucking dumbass.

  Lulu pushed her food around with a fork while Tracey apologized for not having chopsticks. Eventually, the brother-in-law turned to Lulu and asked loudly, “Good? You like the chicken? I’m sorry, I don’t know Chinese. You want more? Uno mas?”

  And Lulu, seizing upon her limited English vocabulary, replied, “I have rich friend in New York. He comes long way, like me. From Sunshine Village.”

  That night, according to Jeff, Lulu crept into the study where Jeff slept on a fold-out couch. “Not in my sister’s house,” he protested when she tried to caress him. “I’m sorry,” he told Lulu. “It’s too much. You need a man who can take care of you.”

  Lulu had sat up and sobbed, but said in a rigid, defensive voice, “I know one. He imports Sichuan opals and jasmine tea.”

  The next morning a man in a BMW came for Lulu, and no one had seen her since. Jeff had left his sister’s McMansion and now occupied a corner of a friend’s row house in Astoria. He spent his days taking photos of the neighborhood and its inhabitants and surfing the internet.

  “What’s this?” Rosa asked, flipping through Ming’s notebook. “I speak’a ze Chinese, you know. ‘And there was his giant cock, and I couldn’t help myself. He was wanted in every state but I loved him…’”

  “Aw, go on, leave her alone,” Delia said, glowering at Rosa. Shortly thereafter, Delia positioned herself on Ming’s bed. “They’re auctioning it. Shit. My ranch near Sedona—I did tell you about my ranch, didn’t I? The rocks there are the deepest red you ever saw. Full of heavenly energy, and as remote as remote can be. Wish you could go there, sweet Ming. I’m going somewhere new when I get out.”

  Ming developed a habit of writing late at night, an hour after lights out. She would wait until Delia’s feet hung limp over the top bunk—she was too tall to curl up like a fetus without her knees hanging off the center—and that was when she’d start writing, a faint hallway light guiding her along the page. One night in late September, she scrawled a few lines, then a shadow distracted her. Beside her bed was a scrawny little mouse. The creature waved its tail up from the left, then down to the right, as if it were trying to form the character ren—person. Its eyes had a golden glow.

  Ming scrambled to the edge of her bunk. “Say something!” she whispered in Mandarin. It poked at its mouse-groin with a forepaw. “God damn it…!” At Ming’s exclamation, it bared its rodent teeth and scampered off into the dark.

  “China Doll was speaking Chinese in her sleep last night,” Delia remarked the next day.

  The next night a furry tickle roused Ming from sleep.

  “Someone’s gonna throw a shoe at you,” she warned.

  The mouse fixed its golden eyes upon her, scampering close to her ear. Squeaky words rasped from its mouse-sized larynx. “Buy ranch….”

  “Ranch?”

  “Se…don…ahhh.”

  Sedona, yes!

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Zoe pushed button number seven. “A mouse was in the cell,” Ming said on the phone, with a particular emphasis on the word “mouse.” She didn’t give Zoe time to ask if the mouse had said anything. Or explain why he didn’t come to see his almost-wife.

  The apartment was already starting to feel cavernous, though Billie had only begun to take things to the thrift shop. She had checked listings and called realtors in Brooklyn, Queens, Inwood, and as far as the beginning-to-gentrify Yonkers. Everything cost more than she could afford. The real Brennan Leichtling invited her to stay at their sprawling estate in the Hamptons for a while, and Billie figured she’d go, abandoning the kids in Harlem.

  “What else can I do?” she asked Zoe, as if pleading for forgiveness. “I’ll walk on the beach and think about suicide and I’ll jump in, maybe. Maybe someone will give me thousands of dollars to start a theatre up there.”

  Zoe accompanied her mother to Fairway, and it felt like a pilgrimage, going to the market that they had considered theirs for so long. Walking along upper Broadway, they scanned faces that seemed full of anticipation. They eyed the restaurants and hardware stores, the Starbucks and the banks, the shoe stores and the Barnes & Noble—as if they were taking notes on a civilization about to perish. Teenage girls emerged from Sephora holding their faces to the sun to show off sparkle makeup. Young mothers in yoga pants pushed strollers, loaded down with organic groceries. Old couples carried Zabars bags and argued over where to go next.

  “These people are us and we are them,” Zoe mourned. “Except they all have apartments they can afford, somehow.”

  A middle-aged man walking with a little boy cast a long look at Billie. Before the eviction notice Billie would have fluttered her lashes. She’d had one date since she’d thrown Rafael over that Thursday after Labor Day. Zoe had watched the battle from a corner. It had started with the man of many transformations alluding to his ex-wife.

  “Funny, at the party you said your wife was dead.”

  “Awww. She’s dead to me.”

  “Who the fuck are you? What am I doing with you? I like to think I’m ageless, but you know what? I’m way too old for a guy who can’t decide if he’s divorced or killed his wife or whatever your problem is. In a movie this would be the part where the woman says I’ve been faking all my orgasms. Absolutely no one says that in real life, but you know? It’s like there’s no ‘there, there’ in your head. No coherent thoughts, no depth. It’s like you’re some kind of incomplete sketch, and maybe the master copy is hanging on a wall a million miles away.”

  But that was all before the registered letter.

  The landlord offered a temporary reprieve; Billie could stay until the end of the year. But she was purging things as if preparing for her death. The good furniture went into a Manhattan Mini Storage space; her one thread of hope was that someday she’d reclaim it.

  “Might as well kill myself,” she muttered through a haze of cigarette smoke. “You know, I always wanted to be a bulwark, to give kids in Harlem something to aim for. The doors of my glamorous paid-for theatre penthouse would be open, and ‘inside everything’s beautiful.’”

  “Cabaret.”

  “Can’t you say it like you’re actually talking about a cabaret, rather than a coffin?”

  “I’m supposed
to be married,” Zoe moaned. “I’ve never finished anything.”

  “Zoe darling,” Billie replied, stamping out her cigarette. “You’re supposed to be the sane one. When was the last time you got up at sunrise and did your kung fu?”

  “Qi gong.”

  “You don’t have to be miserable, and you don’t have to be broke. You speak another language. You ran a company.”

  “What does an ABD do for a living in America?”

  “Does that stand for ‘Awfully Boring Despairing Damsel’? I didn’t raise you to wait for a man who isn’t there.”

  Riverside Park, three blocks away, was a place where Zoe used to jog along the Hudson and feel thrilled to be alive. When her mother pushed her, Zoe strolled down the old riverfront walk, past the dock where it segued into a newer walkway. An elderly couple threw breadcrumbs to pigeons. Joggers passed her in a heave of sweat and panting breath. Even in the park no one looked idle; they were New Yorkers bracing themselves with the giggly morning breeze for a day of auditions, or nursery school, or a deal, or a date.

  In spite of herself, she stopped in a grassy place beside a rock formation, stretched into the warrior pose and did battle with the breeze. School bells had rung and commuters had poured into the subways by the time she turned into the apartment walkway. She rode the elevator—working at the moment—with two women she’d never seen before. They pressed the button to the seventh floor. One was heavily made up, and her younger companion, about Zoe’s age, was bursting with a radiant pregnancy, flaunting a diamond even bigger than Zoe’s Sichuan opal. “My husband’s a lawyer, and he works so late we thought why not live near the office instead of in Greenwich,” the radiant mother-to-be was boasting.

  “You’ll love this neighborhood,” the older woman gushed. “It’s a nice walk to Lincoln Center. And you have such interesting neighbors in this building. There’s a Broadway actress, there’s a Columbia PhD who spends a lot of time in China…”

  I’m a poor academic, can you lend me $100,000 to get a friend out of jail? Zoe squeezed her lips together to stop herself from uttering the words, all the way to the sixth floor. In the kitchen that would soon not be hers, she held down the button on the coffee grinder, blasting the beans as if she were digging up the sidewalk. Billie sat watching, still in her white nightgown. You could have played a realtor in real life and made enough money to stay here, it occurred to Zoe. When she spoke, though, the words that tumbled out were, “Who is my father? Is his name Malcolm?”

  The flames in Billie’s hair seemed to flicker on the spot. “What the hell, I’m about to be homeless and my one and only daughter hates me. I saw a vision once.”

  “No doubt you were stoned out of your gourd.”

  “Do you want to hear this or not?” Billie glared, and Zoe raised her palms in mock surrender. “I told you about the guitar-playing half-wit? Well, that was…him. Yes, the name you said. You have his complexion and his profile, but my brain. Anyway, I had a vision of a creature who told me that my child was going to save the world.”

  “I’ve lived my whole life under a delusion. What was Malcolm’s last name?”

  “I saved you from him! He would have been a bloody awful father. You’re giving me a migraine!” Billie stormed back into her own room.

  That evening, Zoe huddled in her chrysanthemum room idly watching a movie on her old computer, one of the many releases she’d missed while she’d been occupied with trying to save the world, when her mother made a grand entrance.

  “Zoe,” Billie’s voice sounded like the cry of a wounded sparrow. Her hair was tousled, her eyes bleary. “I have something I want to show you.”

  Billie handed Zoe a dusty envelope with paper inside and a separate letter on lilac stationery, folded in thirds and cracked with age. The faded handwriting on the envelope was lean and angular. It was addressed to Billie Austin at an apartment on East 3rd Street. The postmark designated it came from Grass Valley, California, in January 1976. In the upper left hand corner was the name M. Samuelson.

  The one-page letter inside began with: Dear Billie (aka Red, My Virgin Mary).

  Guess you never thought you’d be hearing from me, and can’t blame you if you burn this. But don’t think I didn’t think a lot about how I could fix things. But let’s be real. How long were we going to live on this vision that came to you in the night? I’m not good for much when it comes to growing up and being a husband and a father. But I guess that’s proof to both of us, I’m not Mr. Fix It after all. I’ll never forget you. Malcolm.

  The other letter was written in a hand Zoe knew well. It was dated two days after the date on the envelope.

  Malcolm: Since you didn’t even provide me with an address to write to you, I’m just pretending I know where you live, so I can stick this in the mailbox with a bomb inside. I hope someday you will understand how stupid I feel now, to think that I—who gets standing ovations in New York—could have ever been in love with a guy who tried to kick my baby. You are evil, Malcolm Samuelson, and you tempted me like the Devil that night, with your damn electric blue eyes and your hint of exoticism. Truthfully, it was like we were dancing on the moon, looking down at the lights of Manhattan and the universe was banging cymbals and blowing trumpets in a Wagnerian score just for us. I thought at the time if I die tomorrow I’ll at least have known the rapture.

  Billie’s letter went on for eight pages, and didn’t have a finite ending, just a paragraph that said: This baby really kicks—maybe she’s trying to get back at you. I ask myself every day what I’ll do if the baby looks like you or has traces of your Persian mother and all I can think is I’ll just consider you a gorgeous spirit that never lived, and this an immaculate conception.

  “Malcolm Samuelson.” Zoe uttered the name and felt the walls of their soon-to-be-lost home tremble.

  

  Somewhere across the Pacific Ocean and three thousand miles off the coast of China, Zoe’s fiancé—or one-minute-short-of-being-husband—had recently inhabited a dungeon where rats and spiders were his masters and the rice gruel tasted like a broth of human shit. The Chinese government had re-opened its most secretive corners and filled them with prisoners whose heinous crimes included questioning a governor’s motives, carrying a protest sign, writing an essay citing evidence that someone had bribed a mayor to obtain a contract, and running a business that didn’t offer fifty percent of its equity to the provincial minister of industry. One of the most prominent among these prisoners, William Kingsley Sun, was, like others incarcerated on vague, trumped-up charges, uncertain of his crime.

  “Congratulations on your new career as martyr,” he whispered to himself.

  The healthier among his dungeon mates also conversed with themselves; a sign that mental gears were still grinding.

  “Thank you, but what went wrong with the middle ground? We weren’t decadent. We weren’t cynical,” he muttered back.

  “You think the whole world wants to drink fine wine and talk about ideas?”

  William closed his eyes and imagined the smooth sweetness of icy champagne and his would-be wife. “We were presumptuous, maybe. Everyone wants to be on top whether they understand ideas or not.”

  “Some people will even be martyrs to be on top.”

  “If my mortal body dies here, perhaps a few might remember me as a hero, but I won’t do anyone any more good.”

  “Quite so. That is the height of arrogance, of course, to see yourself as so important.”

  “Arrogant, you say? If that’s my only flaw—”

  The voice in his head was persuasive, and William had decided that, in fact, he had bigger things to do than be a martyr. He calculated he’d been in the lao gai for about three weeks at that point, long enough to describe the inhumanity to the world beyond. Now it was time for someone to take his place as prisoner William Kingsley Sun. The guards counted inmates every morning and every night,
and a missing body would mean protracted torture for all those left behind. He could fake William Kingsley Sun’s death, but that would prove problematic when he wanted to appear in the outside world.

  William searched his head for hairs—fewer of them now—but in the dark of night he pulled one out, chanted, and a figure that looked just like him appeared. “You can have your Simon face back someday when we get out. It’ll be an untroubled, handsome visage. I’ll make all this up to you,” he promised his copy.

  “Yeah, you’re going to have to make me king of something for a century. Oh yes, I’ll sleep in the bowels of hell for you, my master and creator. I will swallow my own gall bladder to taste bitterness. But at a price—you’ll owe me a solid gold Rolls Royce, champagne, and lobster tails every day for fifty years, ten beautiful women every night, even if they’re fucking cunts like the ones in New York.” Then Sun Two bent his head and wept. “I’m going to be the part of you that never goes away,” he said. “You can hide me but I’ll come out and turn your happy home with a wife and kids upside down, just because I can.”

  William abandoned his copy to the cell in spite of the threats, because he had no choice.

  The inmates, who lived without expectation, were not the least bit surprised that a business leader known in the outside world for his charisma—a man who might have riled the other prisoners to storm down the walls—would slink silently through his workday. The prisoner named William Sun began to look like a faded facsimile of himself, with eyes like doorways to a vacant building. To inquiries, he might mutter, “I’m just a copy of William Kingsley Sun, don’t bother me.” He wasn’t the first natural-born leader to lose his will in a lao gai.

  The immortal himself, after weeks of nothing to eat but shit-infested gruel, his legs stiff from the chains, kicked up his heels like a faun and leapt over the land mass. He had many destinations to traverse, starting with Beijing. There, as an invisible presence in the room, he observed a meeting of powerbrokers who looked simultaneously smug and scared as they exchanged views about how China needed a bold new vision. He followed twelve dignitaries and their bodyguards to a meeting on the executive floor of Plenette-Leuter China, where twelve government officials and twenty top executives, some from the US, talked about the importance of inoculating the population with a vaccine that had been developed to treat depression, but would be just as effective at warding off all fears of a deadly strain of bird flu that had made headlines in recent weeks.