“Why does everything curve?” Fred asked Qi.
She shrugged and looked around as if trying to see what Fred was talking about. “Goats?” she ventured.
They came to a widening in one street, a square filled by an open-sided market in which a great number of stalls and tables were all roofed by tarps stretched over aluminum poles.
“Wet market,” Qi said. “Let’s get something to eat.”
She pulled him between rows of vegetables piled in mounds. Stacked in huge numbers were gorgeous eggplants, cucumbers, melons, carrots, and many other vegetables or fruits, quite a few of which Fred did not recognize and felt he had never seen before. These intensely colored glossy globes and cylinders exploded in his sight, deprived as it had been by the monochrome moon and their nighttime wander in Beijing. Orange, yellow, green, purple, red, everything vibrating with the intensity of its particular color. Qi stopped at one stand to buy a string bag, then some small oranges, then some green orbs Fred didn’t recognize. After that they continued into the wet part of the wet market, where water-filled plastic tubs held living fish and eels and crabs and shellfish and baby squid and every other variety of sea creature. Hanging over the tubs were wire baskets of live toads and turtles, and sitting on stools between these baskets were shopkeepers chatting among themselves or staring out at the morning. Fred saw clams and oysters in burbling clear plastic tanks, also shrimp or crayfish—scallops—seahorses! No doubt the live presentation guaranteed freshness, and was possibly a response to the food safety issues that he had once read still vexed consumers and government in China.
They passed through row after row of food, all unrefrigerated, all freestanding in the warm humid air. Skinned bodies of chickens, ducks, small pigs, lambs, unidentifiable animals. Was that the carcass of a turtle unshelled? A hedgehog? Rabbits? Whatever they had been while alive, surely most of this meat would have to sell this very day in order to be fresh enough to eat, or so it seemed to Fred. But maybe it would be. An ordinary Chinese city—did that mean two million people? Ten million? And they all had to eat. Suddenly the amount of food went from looking like far too much to nowhere near enough.
By the time they had finished crisscrossing the market, every animal and plant ever consumed by humans seemed to have made an appearance, filling one stall after another. Maybe it was Fred’s time on the moon, or his illness and incarceration there, or Qi’s hand crushing his now, or Earthly gravity, or simply his hunger—whatever the cause, the supersaturated colors all around him were pulsing harder and harder. Everything looked like it was bursting with itself. He felt stunned, crushed. He was hammered raw, and could barely make himself walk. Everything was pulsing.
Qi had stopped at half a dozen stalls and filled her string bag with various small purchases. Now she led him out of the market by a lane on its far side, then crossed a big street jammed with little electric cars and bikes, and took off down another winding street. On both sides of this street iron-railed balconies were frequently draped with drying laundry. Shops on the ground floor opened directly onto the street, which had no sidewalks. Just as bicyclists shared the big roads with buses and trucks, pedestrians here shared the narrow streets with shop inventories on tables and racks, also bikes attached to carts, creeping supply trucks, roving dogs, and old people seated on upturned buckets, talking things over as if seated in a kitchen somewhere.
At the end of that long winding lane they emerged into a green park, and Fred was yet again amazed. In the center of the park was a lake that looked like it could have been taken from a Chinese landscape painting. Ancient willow trees and pines stood on its grassy banks; an arcing bridge extended over a neck of water; some white herons high-stepped through reeds in the shallows, just offshore from people sprawled on picnic blankets.
In a grove of old plane trees across the little bridge, a big circle of people surrounded a group making music. When Qi saw that she pulled Fred toward it. They stopped at the high point of the bridge, where they could see that the lake and its surrounding ring of trees were backed by much taller concrete buildings; these were overtopped by construction cranes, busily lifting parts of even taller buildings into the sky. Higher still, in the distance past the cranes, a steep green mountain stood against a white morning sky, its ridgeline topped by three or four little pagodas. A thousand years of Chinese history coexisted in a single view.
Fred said, “Is this normal? Do all Chinese cities have parks and lakes like this?”
“A lot of them do, sure. Like anywhere, right?”
They crossed the bridge and joined the crowd ringing the musical group. The band consisted of about thirty people, most of them sitting on folding chairs or plastic boxes, and either reading music from spindly stands or playing without sheet music. All of them paid close attention to a conductor who stood before them waving his arms and singing. Many of the musicians played stringed instruments that looked like skinny cellos; most of these had two strings, which their players bowed enthusiastically. The musicians sitting closest to Fred and Qi blew into instruments that looked a bit like panpipes, but the pipes were arranged in rounded shapes like immense garlic bulbs, and had valves on them that looked like saxophone valves. Other instruments were also unfamiliar, and indeed when he finished looking at each player in turn, Fred had to conclude that he had never before seen a single one of the instruments being played. It was like the unidentifiable fruits or vegetables in the market. He had not known there were musical instruments unfamiliar to him. And as he listened to the sounds the players were creating, he realized that these too were new to him—thin reedy sounds, orchestral but not, and either dissonant or harmonic in ways as unfamiliar to him as the instruments. Foreign—even a bit alien. Fred leaned forward and stared, quivering with the intensity of his attention.
One row of the string players seemed to consist of disabled people, some with Down’s syndrome, it looked like, others deformed or odd in other ways, with open mouths, and gazes rapt to the point of glassiness. All the players appeared to be transported by the joy of creating music. It looked like this was the high point of their week, even their reason to live. Or possibly just a nice thing, a fun hour. He had no way of knowing. But his mother had made him take saxophone lessons and play in the school band, a very unsuccessful and brief experiment, thoroughly unpleasant except for the playing of the instrument itself, which, when in his room alone, he had liked. And now he found he wanted to try one of the panpipe things. He wanted to be able to play it like one of these players, or like John Coltrane would have played it. He studied the disabled players in their musical ecstasy. He could feel in his facial muscles that the expressions on their faces were like those on his own face when he was feeling good about something. He only had to give in to it, to release his resistance to it, and those same expressions would be on his face—when he relaxed, or felt happy, or even right now—that was his look, right there before him to be seen. His cheeks burned with some strange mixture of shame and affinity. He was so often amazed or stunned, so often moved by simple things, obscure things. He was more like these musicians than he had ever been like the people in his own hometown. As he felt the truth of that he clutched Qi’s hand. He was a stranger in a strange land. With his free hand he wiped away tears falling unexpectedly from his eyes.
She glanced at him, wondering. She squeezed his hand. “Here come my friends,” she warned under her breath.
A couple passed behind them and Qi followed them, tugging the stunned Fred behind her. Out of the park on the far side of the lake, into an alley, then into a shop selling all kinds of plastic household goods, bowls and cups and so on, stacked to the ceiling on every shelf and in every possible nook, such that one had to walk sideways to get between them. Then up a narrow staircase and through a doorway, with the door quickly closed behind them and some people from the shop. At that point Qi and the others fell on each other. She hugged each in turn, all of them talking at once.
Qi eventually stopped and said to them
in English, “This is Fred, he helped me get here. He was in trouble on the moon too.”
“Nice to meet you,” everyone said, almost in unison. They laughed at that; it was one of their first English-class phrases, they let him know, now finally put to use. For most of them it proved to be all they could say in English. Those who knew more invited him to sit down, asked him if he wanted tea. Their English was not as good as Qi’s, and seemed neither British nor American in accent, something more purely Chinese, angled a bit perhaps by the accent of whoever had taught them. Classroom English, used for a job, maybe, but never lived in. Suddenly Fred could hear better the fact that Qi had lived some of her life in English, and for quite some time too. Presumably in those Swiss boarding schools. An international person, a worldly person.
He answered their questions as best he could, feeling completely exhausted. He didn’t want to say he had been accused of murder on the moon; in this context it would sound absurd, horrible. Qi seemed to see this, and steered the conversation away from him and toward their next move. They were not to stay with these friends long; there were chaoyangqunzhong everywhere, they said, and Qi, they all agreed, was too beautiful to disguise. “Such fat cheeks, very easy for the facial recognition program!”
It struck Fred that although professional security agents could be made too frightened to hold on to Qi, these ordinary young people were willing to shelter her. Surely they too would get in trouble if found with her. Maybe it was the difference between helping her and holding her, but he wasn’t sure what to make of it. It didn’t seem like a good idea to ask about it, and in fact their frequent nervous laughter might be covering a certain speediness in them that gave away their fear. They would leave in five hours, they said, as they had made an arrangement with a boat that would drop by the city’s ferry terminal soon after that, and they had the terminal itself rigged for that hour. In the meantime, one of them said, with an uncertain look at Qi, their group would like to see her, if she would agree to it. She pursed her lips unhappily, then nodded.
They were led to the back of the room they were in, where a doorway let them out into an airshaft surrounded entirely by ancient brick walls. They descended a metal spiral staircase into dimness. There was scarcely room to fit between the central pole and the spiraling outer rail of these stairs, and the steps were triangles where even the outermost section was barely big enough to hold a shoe. Fred followed Qi down, feeling blinder and blinder as they dropped. It seemed to him as if they were descending many more floors than they had gone up.
At the bottom of the spiral stair a shaft of light pierced him, and he stumbled into a room. When his eyes adjusted he saw that the room was quite large—a basement storage room, perhaps, about twenty feet high and extending back into shadows some indeterminate distance. Very hard to see all the way, because the room was jammed with people. Fred’s stomach vibrated with the characteristic buzz of a Faraday security cage.
Most of the people in there were standing, others sat on boxes or on the concrete floor. Someone gave a wooden box to Qi, and she took it to one wall and stood on it, and the room went quiet. Everyone stared at her. Faces were rapt. Their expressions reminded Fred suddenly of the musicians by the lake. These people too were flushed and transported.
Qi said something in greeting and many of them smiled and nodded or even said something back. Then she snapped something, in that waspish way Fred was coming to recognize, and it took them aback; they swayed back on their heels, and after that were more rapt than ever.
And then Qi began to talk at speed. Her eyes blazed as she looked around the room, staring at them, her cheeks flushed. She raised a finger, pointed it at them. She was challenging them, Fred thought—but then she spoke even faster and said something that made them laugh, and after that she laughed too, and shifted mode; she was explaining something to them now, telling a story to make a point. Her hands held up her points, chopped them apart, wove them together, handed them over to her listeners. They were about equal numbers of men and women. They looked like they had been working hard that day, like they worked hard every day. They had come into this cellar tired, he saw, and perhaps hungry, but more hungry for her than for food. They could eat later. For now she was their food. Their eyes were devouring her. They were lit, and she was the fire. Fred felt it himself; normally he couldn’t read faces at all, and here he was reading her like a book, even as she spoke in a language he didn’t know. It was very much like hearing that strange orchestra, a deep stab of recognition and longing.
He couldn’t have said how much time passed as she spoke. Half an hour or maybe an hour. He was feeling the weight of Earth, he was hungry, thirsty, sandy-eyed, sick; he should have been sleepy; but he was transfixed. He was a little curious to know what she was saying, but then again, while seeing the situation as clearly as he was, her words were irrelevant. They might even have been a distraction. The form of the situation said more than the content. These were poor people, he thought, in a big city. That meant they were probably urban workers. They would certainly already know a lot about whatever Qi was talking about—they owned phones, they lived lives. Suddenly he saw it: everyone knew everything. Of course. How could it be otherwise? This was the world, people knew it. Even he knew it, and he didn’t know anything. So these people weren’t here for knowledge; they already knew. Eyes bright, watching her like hawks, they were hungry for something besides information. They wanted some kind of leverage, some kind of recognition or acknowledgment. Qi was giving them that.
Finally she ended things with a series of jokes. She laughed, they laughed. She promised them things, and made them promise her back. All this was so clear! Even in this singsongy musical language of theirs, so alien to him, with not a single cognate word he could understand, it was perfectly clear, right there on their faces.
She stopped with a little wave and their applause started with a short roar, then quickly ended. She got off the box and walked through the room, touching arms, shaking hands, nodding formally, hugging informally. She was moving, Fred saw suddenly, from woman to woman. She was finding the women in the room and giving them some extra moment of female solidarity, while always listening to whatever any of them said to her. The men could watch, that was all they needed to do now. They saw this on her face and stayed clear and watched, eyes gleaming. She got to choose who spoke to her.
This went on for another fifteen or twenty minutes, then her friends were guiding her toward the door, and Fred followed. Back on the narrow metal spiral staircase, climbing through the gloom between the walls. The weight of the world made Fred sweat and gasp as he lifted his feet and found the little triangles of corrugated steel, step after step. By the time they got back up to the room they had been in before, he felt utterly wasted. His head was swimming.
And yet there was no time to rest. They were given turns in a bathroom to shower and relieve themselves, and a young woman went in with Qi, presumably to help her get the cut on her back bandaged properly. Lots of laughter in there as they worked on that. A young man sitting next to Fred gave him an inquiring look, but Fred just shrugged. In the state he was in, Qi was far beyond his ability to explain, in any language except for that shrug.
She came out looking refreshed. They dressed her with a hat, wig, sunglasses, and a nighttime mouth guard. Fred they gave a baseball hat with a Yankees logo on it (his brother would be appalled) and another mouth guard, which he bit down on uneasily. It didn’t fit.
Downstairs on the crowded street, four of them jammed onto an electric cart meant for two and zipped out onto a larger street, into the city proper, into a traffic jam. It seemed to Fred they were headed south again, although in a city as twisted as this one it was impossible to stay oriented; it was just a feeling he had. It seemed to be midafternoon.
They rounded a turn and a giant building came into view, half of it hanging over the water of a hill-circled bay. The ferry terminal, it appeared. It had a big triangular roof slanting up and out over the water.
Its sides were covered by irregular metal circles, like bubbles of sea-foam, painted in colors that shifted as they got higher, from yellow to maroon to orange to blue.
The interior of this terminal turned out to be almost entirely a single giant room. Everything was built of either concrete or steel, both corroded by salt, so that like all the rest of the city, it looked both new and old at the same time. There were turnstiles as in a subway station, and also customs gates, as if they were at a border. But the gates were empty, and the turnstiles turned freely. Fred was curious about that, but he didn’t want to say anything aloud.
Then they were showing their wristpads to a pair of terminal employees, after which they descended stairs to a dock right at water level. On the other side of the terminal, a ferry as long as the building was being boarded by people on a higher floor, over a gangplank that was at least two stories off the water. They, however, stepped right onto a small boat with only a dozen seats, set on a single deck with a wooden roof and walled by salty glass, behind a wheelhouse where two women ran the craft. As soon as they were on board, joining what looked like a single group of other passengers, the boat cast off and grumbled away.
Fred turned and looked back. Palm trees bracketed the gigantic ferry terminal. Their boat’s top speed was putteringly slow. Late-afternoon sun glazed the air, and there was so much salt crusting the boat’s windows that they could see little more than impressionist shapes to the sides: other boats, either anchored or moving; a container ship in the distance; a lot of construction cranes on the shore they were leaving; jets taking off and landing at what had to be an airport, somewhere behind the buildings; green hills behind, lush with foliage, too steep to be built on. And then, as they motored beyond a building-filled promontory on the left, a city. A big city: like New York, or Oz, or Cosmopolis.
Red Moon Page 12
