“The government is doing this because they know that men who can’t find wives are unhappy men. Angry men,” Hai whispered. “The Wife Riots in Chongjing rattled them. This is their solution.”
Hai was surprised Wei Bong, the ‘marriage counselor’, wasn’t in the bedroom with the newlyweds, providing sex lessons. He had barely left their side all day, and had arranged to return tomorrow morning. Yes, the government desperately wanted this program to be successful. But how could it? New Wives couldn’t bear children; they were hollow fillers. Absurd jokes.
“We should make love,” Yo Wen said. “The noise will give them privacy, so they can enjoy their wedding night.”
“It’s not a wedding night! He’s masturbating to a three-dimensional picture!”
“Don’t call it that! It’s New Sex.”
Yo Wen took his hand, pressed it against her soft, loose, old woman’s breast. Hai felt the warmth of it, felt the rubbery bulge of her nipple, and for a moment thought of Lin’s breasts. He pushed the image out of his mind, concentrated instead on his own hand, lit by moonlight spilling through the window. When had the skin on it become so loose and age-spotted?
The skin on his grandfather’s hands had been a tight weave of stiff white strips, like they were covered in melted wax, as he counted out yuan on the linoleum counter to pay for Hai’s comics. Burn scars. Back during World War II he’d opened a big steel door down in his company’s basement, where they were storing black market gasoline. The door had caused a spark, and his grandfather had spent a year in the hospital, getting scoured every day with steel wool to keep the burns from getting infected.
“The last wise man,” Hai muttered under his breath.
“What was that?” Yo Wen asked.
“Nothing.”
Through the wall, Lin whispered soothing nothings to his son.
* * *
When Lin plucked food from the bowls in the center of the table, there was a moment of transition when the illusion was not perfect. It was very subtle, just a little skip as a piece of virtual pork or pickled ginger materialized at the tip of her chopsticks, but Hai could see it. He also could see a slight skip in Lin, when she stepped through a doorway and the satellite began projecting her image instead of the communication cables that ran through their house, supplying them with three-dimensional TV and internet. He held on to these imperfections, a reminder of the chasm between what was real and what was a lie.
“Are you enjoying it, Jian? Your mother is such a wonderful cook,” Lin said.
Jian nodded without looking up.
Lin brushed strands of her long, silky hair away from her mouth, then took a bite. She sighed. “I’d so enjoy helping you mom, if it wasn’t for my—disability.”
That’s what they were supposed to call it—a disability. As if she were in a wheelchair.
“Oh, it’s fine,” Yo Wen said. “I enjoy cooking. And having your company in the kitchen is help enough.” She adjusted the flame on the ornate kerosene lamp she’d bought for the table just before the marriage.
“You’re so kind. How did I get lucky enough to become part of such a wonderful family?” She gazed lovingly at Jian, then at the rest of them one by one. A tear trailed down her cheek.
Jian stared at his bowl, and Ch’an’s nose was buried in his phone, but Yo Wen’s eyes teared up; she sniffed, smiling at her New Daughter.
Jian went out right after breakfast (probably to find more pills with his newfound disability money), and Ch’an went off to school, and then there were only the three of them. The two of them, and one adult video game.
They went shopping. Hai drove the old segway he’d bought years ago in the junk store, with Yo Wen and Lin sitting in the tow-cart, their feet dangling, the cart’s salvaged bicycle wheels wobbling crazily.
Again he was reminded of his grandfather, gripping the handles of his bicycle with his thick, numb palms, Hai clinging to the back of his windbreaker. It occurred to Hai that, being so wise, his grandfather must have realized that Hai had only been willing to put up with his rambling because he bought Hai comic books. It had never occurred to Hai to wonder what his grandfather got out of the exchange, but now he realized it must have been his company.
At a red light a mangy blonde dog trotted past them, stopped to pee on a street lamp, disappeared around the corner.
Hai would give anything to have five more minutes with his grandfather, who he was now certain had been the last wise man. He would know what to do about all this.
The light turned green and Hai continued, passing little shops, all crowded together one after another, an apartment atop of each one, the silver skyline of downtown Shanxi hovering beyond.
He glanced back to make sure Yo Wen was all right. How unlikely they looked together. Yo Wen, age spots at her temples like smudged thumbprints, frizzed white hair sticking out of a red wool hat. And Lin, looking like a woman on one of the billboards that towered above the streets, her face unlined and impossibly clean, her teeth white and straight, her eyes alert and happy. She was always clean, even walking in the rain. She was wearing pink shoes.
He parked the segway across the street from the grocery house. Crates of Bananas, plums, lichees covered the sidewalk as if they’d spilled out of the store, a red canopy shadowing the inside from view.
The women hopped off the cart. They were giggling like schoolgirls.
“My father had always dreamed of reopening his grandfather’s hotel, so, when I was eight, he quit his job at the Consulate, packed our whole family in the car and moved us to Gui Ling. The hotel was a shambles!” Lin waved her hands in the air; Yo Wen howled with laughter. “None of the plumbing worked, termites had eaten most of the wood...”
Yo Wen glanced at Hai, giving him that look that meant “See? She’s just like any other person.”
The shop owner and two other women hurried to greet Yo Wen and Lin. They were anxious to practice their skills, reaching out to pretend-touch Lin, fawning over her hair and her clothes. One woman thought to air-brush Lin’s hair in admiration and accidentally let the tips of her fingers sink right through Lin’s cheek. For a moment it looked as if her fingers had been amputated, then they reappeared. Red-faced, the women folded her hands behind her back and kept them there.
Lin lingered outside when Yo Wen went into the store. There were no communication cables inside.
* * *
Hai opened Jian’s bedroom door, looking for the keys to the segway. Lin stood beside the dresser in her underpants, a bra in one hand.
“Oh! Excuse me, please,” she said, reddening. She draped her free arm across smooth, white, apple-sized breasts. Her nipples were small and taut.
Hai closed the door, embarrassed and shaken. He had lingered a moment longer than was necessary; even now, he couldn’t help clinging to the image of Lin’s naked body. He hurried into the living room and sat in front of the television. Ch’an was watching a boxing match and playing with his phone. The boxers, bobbing and jabbing a few feet from the couch, looked to be about a foot tall, and they were slightly grainy, not nearly as realistic as Lin.
Hai watched the match, letting the embarrassment drain out of him.
“Shit,” Ch’an muttered, reacting to something on the phone’s screen, his head bowed. His dyed-white hair was so short in the back that the divot separating his head from his neck was visible. But it was long on top, like a neglected lawn.
Hai felt an imagined hand brush up the back of his own head, against the grain. His grandfather used to do that to him when he wasn’t looking. Hai would always jerk his head away and tell his grandfather to stop it. His grandfather would just chuckle.
Hai stared at Ch’an’s hair. He couldn’t imagine brushing it the way his grandfather had his.
“Who’re you talking to?” Hai asked.
“Just friends,” Ch’an mumbled. “Nothing.”
Well don’t let me interrupt you, Hai wanted to say. Rude little rabbit cub. Hai sighed. The room was quiet,
except for Ch’an’s tapping.
“Oh, baaalls,” Ch’an whined.
“What?” Hai said. Half of the words the boy spoke were bastardized English or Spanish. Hai knew the English word, but couldn’t imagine what it was meant to convey.
Ch’an just shook his head. He almost looked like he was going to cry.
“Come on, what?”
Ch’an started to answer, stopped, pressed the bridge of his nose. “My pop rating keeps going down.”
“What’s a pop rating?”
Ch’an snickered, shaking his head—a ‘what a stupid old man’ gesture. Hai saw more of them every day. In his grandfather’s time, elders were given respect. Not any more.
“There’s this net host called Raterunner where you can rate everyone, you know, on how much you like them. How popular they are. Kids with the highest pop ratings get all this great stuff sent to them for free, from companies who want other kids to see them using it, so they’ll buy it too.”
“You’re telling me there’s a number that tells you how much people at school like you?”
Ch’an nodded.
“What kind of world is this?” Hai wrinkled his nose, as if he were smelling the notion.
One of the boxers was down on one knee, clinging to the ropes. The other danced nearby, waiting.
“What makes kids popular?” Hai asked.
Ch’an shrugged. “Mostly clothes. Who you carry on with...who your parents are. But mostly it’s clothes.”
“I imagine it doesn’t help that your step-mother is a New Wife.”
Ch’an stared at him as if he’d just observed that rocks are hard.
“Is that why your pop rating is going down?”
Ch’an closed his eyes and rotated his neck; the rings scraped and clacked. “What do you think?”
Hai nodded thoughtfully. It had never occurred to him that Ch’an was as unhappy with the situation as he was.
“I don’t like it either,” he said. Ch’an looked surprised. He must have noticed that Hai disapproved of Lin; perhaps he was surprised that Hai had admitted it aloud, to him.
“Want to take a ride?” Hai asked.
The words echoed in his head, only in his grandfather’s voice. Want to take a ride? When his grandfather had said it, it had always meant Want me to buy you something? Hai could almost see him standing there, hands hidden in the pockets of his grey jacket, crooked yellow bottom teeth jutting in a pronounced underbite. Not many people had crooked teeth any more, or buck teeth. It took a lot of the character out of faces.
“What? Why?” Ch’an sounded annoyed. He went back to his phone.
“I don’t know. Is there anything you need?”
Ch’an stopped typing. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s something you need, that we could get.” Hai shrugged.
* * *
“How much are they?” Hai eyed the monstrous pants Ch’an was modeling in front of a tri-fold mirror. He had to shout to be heard over the so-called music, which sounded like two people having sex while fingernails scraped across a blackboard.
“Eight hundred.”
“Eight hundred? You must be joking!” The pants were inside out, with big external pockets that hung down to Ch’an’s knees. And they were backward—they zippered on his ass.
“Fine. Forget it.” Ch’an stormed into the dressing room. “I knew you were just bullshitting. Why’d I let you waste my time?” he shouted from inside.
“Do you have any sense of how much eight hundred is? I cut people’s hair for five days to make that much!”
“Fine. Just get lost, okay? If anybody saw me here with you, my pop rating would zero out.”
“Fine. I wouldn’t want to embarrass you!” Hai headed for the doors.
Fine, he heard his grandfather say. He stopped walking, stupidly thumbed through a rack of clothes. He couldn’t even tell if they were pants or shirts.
The last time Hai had seen his grandfather, they had an argument. He didn’t remember what it was about, but he was fairly sure it was the only one they ever had. His grandfather had said something like “Maybe I won’t take you to the store any more, how would you like that?” And Hai had said “Fine.” And his grandfather had said “Fine,” and walked away, and died of a heart attack a few hours later, in his little room in the back of their house that faced the alley, probably watching soap operas. When Hai heard, he sat in his room all day, looking at his comic books and crying.
A young woman wearing silver reflective sunglasses, strawberry-colored lipstick, and an orange scuba-vest was staring at him from behind the counter. She was beautiful, but he was sure she was real, because she looked conceited, and not terribly happy.
The only thing Hai liked about this store was the smell. It smelled like spring—blooming flowers and sprouting leaves. Not a sticky-sweet artificial spring smell, it really smelled like spring. It was probably to sell more clothes, but it was nice. Ch’an came out with the pants.
“Here.” Hai held out a hand. “Give them to me.” He took them to the counter and paid for them, peeling off bills. The woman with the sunglasses stared at the bills as if he were giving her cabbage; she would prefer he pull a phone off a utility belt and punch some numbers to pay.
He handed the bag to Ch’an, who said thank you and bowed slightly. Hai could tell that he was trying his best to say it nicely, without any sarcasm.
Ch’an asked Hai to wait while he ducked into the mall’s bathroom and put on the pants. Hai shoved aside the stupid proud feeling he got because he’d been the one who bought them.
A dozen smells wafted out of the stores as they passed—campfires... cucumbers... something animal, like puppies’ feet. It was one of the few new things that Hai actually liked. He mentioned it to Ch’an, but Ch’an didn’t seem to notice it, or just wasn’t interested.
Outside Hai was again assaulted with the steel and glass shine of downtown Shanxi: roads of new unbreakable plastic-looking material, sometimes stacked four and five high so you couldn’t see the sky; a building with towering glass walls filled with water, with colorful fish swimming inside them; pets on leashes that were not dogs or cats, or any animal Hai knew of. New Pets, but real. It all depressed Hai. It was like stepping into the future, only it was the present, and when Hai went home to his neighborhood, he’d be stepping into the past. It must be difficult for Ch’an, to live in the past, but go to school in the present.
On the way out of the subway they passed an old woman, her hair a shock of white, struggling to get up the long staircase. She leaned on the railing, resting every step.
“Hold on,” Hai said.
Ch’an, who was a couple steps in front of him, stopped.
“Come on.” Hai went back down, took the old woman’s arm. The woman looked at him, smiled, nodded. Ch’an stared like Hai had lost his mind. He fumbled with his phone.
“Take her other arm.”
Reluctantly, Ch’an complied.
At the top of the steps, the woman patted each of their arms, like a nanny consoling a child, and went on her way.
“What are you trying to do to me? My phone’s eye was on. My friends could have seen!”
“They saw you helping the old lady?”
“No, I turned it off as soon as you stopped. But they could tell what was happening.”
“Sorry. I know your pop rating is more important than that old lady not breaking her hip falling down the stairs. My mistake.” He couldn’t wait to get this selfish ingrate home. He’d just spent eight hundred yuan, and this was his thanks. How had his grandfather put up with it, buying him things and barely getting a thank you? Never a word, never a complaint until that last little argument.
Pants. Their lives revolved around wearing the right kind of zipper-on-the-ass pants.
Of course, his grandfather hadn’t thought much of his comic books. He’d always shake his head as he carried them to the cash register, saying “I don’t understand it, but if this is w
hat you want...”
“You eat much bitterness when you’re old,” Hai said.
“Yeah,” Ch’an said. Contempt and sarcasm saturated the syllable. Probably because of the old Chinese construction of the phrase as much as the sentiment.
“Just remember that. It may make sense one day.”
On the sidewalk in front of their apartment Ch’an went off to find his friends. Hai stared for a moment at the concrete wall of the building, chipped and scarred, at places worn down to the steel wire framing underneath. He opened the front door, calling “Hi ho” to let Yo Wen know it was him, as he always did. He popped his shoes off.
There was a woman sitting at the table, drinking tea with Yo Wen and Lin. She looked to be in her fifties, her hair greying. Hai didn’t recognize her.
“This is Chien-Ru,” Yo Wen said. “She’s an acquaintance of Jian’s.” Yo Wen did not look pleased.
The woman nodded, smiling. An acquaintance of Jian’s? She was a woman, and fifteen years older than Jian. It didn’t make much sense. A drug dealer? She didn’t look like a drug dealer. From the look of her clothes, she was even poorer than they were.
“Hello, father,” Lin said. Hai ignored her. Yo Wen kept telling him he was hurting Lin’s feelings by ignoring her, and he kept reminding her that Lin had no feelings.
He sat, and Yo Wen poured him tea. They exchanged polite talk until they heard Jian at the front door. Yo Wen stood, then Chien-Ru stood, so Lin followed suit. Only Hai remained seated, watching curiously, smiling inside at this strange and awkward scene. He thought he had figured out who Chien Ru was.
Jian went white when he saw Chien Ru. “Oh, hello.”
And in that moment Hai was certain. This woman was his lover! Twenty two years after Yousha’s death, Jian had met a woman. A real woman. She was old, and not good-looking, probably a widow, but still a woman. Hai was thrilled. Now they could end this charade.
The sores on his family were healing, Hai realized. First Ch’an, now Jian. His grandfather would be pleased.
* * *
“You’re a married man!” Yo Wen screamed as soon as Jian returned from wherever he had gone with Chien Ru. “She’s old and ugly! You have such a young, beautiful wife!” Yo Wen gestured toward Lin, who sat smiling at the table. It wasn’t a forced smile, or a jealous smile; it was just a smile. Her range of emotions was very limited.
Futures Near and Far Page 7
