“I hope she answers,” he said.
A few minutes passed. It felt longer. The analyst sighed, wished for the millionth time that he was still a smoker. He wondered what Chan Qi was doing, and if she had any idea who he was, or any interest in someone working from inside the Great Firewall. He had been part of the Chinese security apparatus for his entire career; he had helped to build it. Now he was trying to change the system from inside, just as Chan Qi was from her different location. She thought she was trying to change it from the outside, but really as a princessling she was both. They were much the same in that regard. Inside and outside; and the liminal position was sometimes powerful, if always confusing. Sinology leads to sinocism, as the foreign analysts put it. And the situation across the country was growing untenable in certain respects. The global environmental disaster including the sheer lack of water in the ground, the exploitation of the migrants, the crisis of representation, all these had to be solved or the Chinese people would turn against the Party, and the chaos of dynastic succession would erupt again. In the information age, the globalization age, might it be possible for a new dynasty to come to power, not just in China but everywhere around the world, and without bloodshed? This was what they were in the midst of finding out.
Then, just as the analyst was concluding that Chan Qi wasn’t going to reply, characters appeared on the little screen.
What do you want?
He took a deep breath. How to say it?
We see clear signs that the security apparatus and the military are taking actions to preemptively crush your movement. Arrests have increased tenfold and most transport systems are being sharply curtailed.
Why is that happening now?
I don’t know. They must have seen signs.
He forbore to give her advice. He wasn’t sure what to say in that regard, and saying anything would very likely alienate her. She would only listen to advice that helped her organize her previous thoughts, whatever they were. You can’t push the river.
You’re sure about this? she asked.
Quite sure. Arrests are occurring even now. Travel is curtailed.
Okay, thanks. More later.
And with that she signed off.
The analyst sat back in his chair and heaved a sigh. He reread the transcript of their exchange, sighed again. If only a cigarette. No way to know what effect this would have. She had her resources, he had his. He could only do what he could do from his own position. The front was broad, the allies in a cause had to help each other—
Then the power went off, and the analyst was sitting in the dark. He muttered under his breath, turned on his wristpad’s light, looked around his room, which suddenly seemed smaller. A little cave under a mountain. A dark refuge in a dark time.
Noises came from without, the door burst open, powerful beams of light splintered his sight and cut the room into shards of black and white. He was seized by the arms and lifted into the air.
“You’re under arrest,” a voice said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
bei ai
Sorrow
Return to Earth: a journey in the bardo. Weightless and confined, sad and boring. His remorse was as deep as the starry space out the windows. He could not make himself read, nor watch movies, nor talk to his cloud audience. He couldn’t even think. After the usual crush of the rail launch, he could only float from bed to chair to bed, looking at status updates from the hospital in Beijing, each only a few characters long. Severe stroke. Sick; dying. Come as quick as you can.
His mind wandered, or spun feverishly, or went blank. Time passed.
He thought of his friend Zhou Bao, patiently watching the Earth rise, then hang spinning like a kind of clock, then set behind the white hills of the moon. So far from home, a friend. A man who could face misfortune with a brave spirit. You face it, you persevere. You enjoy Earthrise and write poems.
He made his way to a window and looked back at the moon, almost full now, almost as small as when it rose fatly over Earth’s eastern hills. So white, so dead. Thinking of Zhou Bao, he tapped out characters on his wrist. Then, thinking of Fred, he translated the poem into English, as a kind of exercise in friendship. Writing in English was hard, and he used an old Anglo-Saxon form, with a gap in each line, as a cover for his own primeval sense of the language.
The moon is death it will kill you
Bony dust on bony rocks
No trees no air no clouds no creatures
Nothing alive not even dirt
Harsh and sterile cold and bright
Look at it and tremble
You think you are an earthly person
You think you are alive
And in this moment maybe you are
But the moon teaches you
Another day will come
The ferry juddered violently down through the atmosphere, like the shooting star it so much resembled, then at the end of the fiery descent popped its parachute and dropped him and the other passengers onto the broad empty plain of the Bayan Nur spaceport. From there a big vehicle, with tires taller than a man, came out to the lander and they were helped up and into it. Again Ta Shu felt the wicked press of Earth’s gravity crush him to an invalid. The vehicle jounced to the terminal. There Ta Shu agreed to put on a bodysuit, feeling old and ashamed, even though most of his fellow passengers were doing the same. After the fitting he stalked over to the hyperloop train to Beijing, which was more expensive but slightly faster than flying. Off they went, almost all of them encased in exoskeletons, red-eyed and withdrawn. Back to Earth.
In the transfers between stations he focused on learning his suit and avoiding a fall, then sat down thankfully in each new train or tram car. Beijing shuffle, the whole population of the city seemingly on the move. When the subway cars ran aboveground he stared out the windows incuriously. Traffic bad as always. Sky still blue, still a surprise. Bikes with trailers still doddering along right in the middle of the crazy mash of vehicles. Amazing to see such foolhardy recklessness. No doubt whole lifetimes had been spent in that danger. No different from a sailor going out to sea. Dangerous, yes, but not automatically fatal. A mode of being. Suddenly he saw they were all like those bicyclists, all the time. Someday every one of them would get run over.
Finally he walked carefully into the hospital in his mother’s neighborhood. It was two and a half days since he had heard the news. They signed him in at the desk and led him up to her room. She had been found at home collapsed on the floor, they told him on the way. Apparently a major stroke. Never quite conscious since. It had happened just a couple of hours before he found out about it. Meaning three days had passed.
She was connected to monitors and had tubes in her nose. A nurse said to her, “Your son is here.” She cracked one eye, her right eye; her left side was paralyzed, the nurse told him. Ta Shu sat on a chair by her right side. Monitors blinked, machines hummed, nurses came and went.
At some point his mother regained consciousness. She looked at him curiously, as if uncertain of everything. He saw it in her look: she didn’t know who he was; who she was; where they were.
“Teshu changhe,” she said with some effort. Special occasion. Then she was out again.
After a while, Ta Shu slept in his chair. In the middle of the night some hospital noise woke both of them at the same time. This time his mother looked at him and whispered, “Why are you here?”
“You’re sick,” he explained. “I came as fast as I could.”
She slept again.
Sitting in the chair, in the bodysuit, in the heavy gravity but at the same time in some kind of vacuum of the spirit, he could not get comfortable enough to fall back asleep. Eventually he arranged two chairs to face each other, then curled up flat on them, head on one and feet on the other, pushing a button on the bodysuit that stiffened it so that it served as a kind of plank or basket to bridge the gap between chairs. That worked pretty well.
When he woke up again, a nurse was gently squeezing his
arm.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Your mother died a few minutes ago. We were out in the hall, at our station.”
He pushed the button that released his bodysuit to movement, stood at her side. There she lay in the hospital bed, looking as she had while sleeping, or indeed as she had for the past decade or more. Maybe more calm, more pale. He kissed her forehead, stood upright, left the room.
After all the arrangements at the hospital had been made, he walked the ten or twelve blocks to her apartment. There was nowhere else to go; he had lent his apartment to one of his show’s assistants while he was gone.
At his mom’s, everything was just as it had been during his last several visits. Twenty years and more she had lived in this crowded little pair of rooms. Now they were empty, and yet all her furniture and things vibrated silently around him, as if speaking for her. It was as if she were in the tiny bathroom and would call to him at any moment. Ta Shu? He could hear exactly how she always said it, the timbre of her voice, the rising intonation, the question that she put into his name every time she said it. Ta Shu?
Then it suddenly seemed he actually did hear it, right out loud in the air. He shuddered in the bodysuit. In fact the room was quiet. He thought about what it would be like if he really did hear her voice calling him from the next room, how it would feel to hear a ghost speak; suddenly he was scared to be alone there in her place with her gone. Then that wave of fear passed, and he knew he was truly alone there, that there was nothing to fear. There was only sadness.
He was going to have to empty the place. Give away the furniture, the clothing, the kitchen implements. Give things away or throw them away. She had kept such a lot of junk. But there were always people who needed such things. These things would live on in other lives. They lived longer than people.
Then there was a meow at his feet, and he groaned. Was this cat hers? Was it a neighborhood stray that she fed scraps to? He would have to find out.
He sat on her bed. The cat rubbed against his ankles. He got up and found some cat food to put in a bowl for it, and it ate hungrily, making a crunching noise that filled the apartment. He looked down at it. He was exhausted and wanted to sleep, but felt reluctant to get in her bed. He lay down on top of it in his bodysuit, napped until he got cold. Then he got up, went to the bathroom, started cleaning up. First himself, then the place. As he knocked around he thought of an old poem that had always impressed him, first of all because of its title, “The Rain Cleared and the Breeze and Sunshine Are Superb as I Stroll Outside the Gate.” By Lu Yu, Song dynasty:
Old Chang, sick three years, finally died;
Grandpa one evening went where he couldn’t hear us.
I alone, with this body strong as iron,
Lean on the gate, looking at green evening hills.
He found as he went through her desk and bedside table that she had kept little notebooks to write in. None of them were dated, and he couldn’t tell when she had written what. Some contained day poems, like the brief Buddhist things that widows had written in their old age for centuries. Most were filled with lists and brief notes to herself. Occasionally for a month or three she had written down brief accounts of her days, then she had appeared to tire of that and give up. One sequence of these diary notes had lasted longer than most, and by their content he saw that they came from the time right after his father had died. One line stuck him like a thorn:
Alone in the house. Must get used to it.
He stared at her crabbed handwriting. He saw how it must have been, and sat down in the nearest chair. A spasm of sorrow passed through him, followed after a while by a wash of relief, as he realized that his mom was now finally freed of the intense burden of staying happy after his father was gone. Twenty years of driven, relentless effort.
He sat there in the chair and thought about what a human life turned out to be. In the old days, women were said to go through stages—men too of course, but for women it was structured very particularly: milk teeth, hair pinned up, marriage, children, rice and salt, widowhood. Most of those stages were so social, so busy, every moment all entangled with people and work and talk; and then at the end suddenly there you were alone in a room, like a prisoner serving time in solitary. Just because of the passage of time, in the ordinary course of things. It was strange. He should have come home more often.
The old outskirts of Beijing were long gone, buried under the remorseless spread of the city in all directions. To the east the endless high-rises of Jing-Jin-Ji had replaced the mountains of trash where Ta Shu had once upon a time taken things to acquaintances he liked among the junk dealers who lived in the landfills they mined. Those people had built their shacks out of discarded materials, then as the landfills filled they had moved with them and rebuilt in the new sites. Now Jing-Jin-Ji filled all the gaps, making a supercity bigger than Luxembourg, bigger than New England. An early manifestation of the urbanization that was threatening to pave all China, then the entirety of planet Earth.
Now stuff like his mom’s had to be taken south to the Fuxing Garbage Station, where a big yard was home to giant sorting containers and compactors. So after first dividing his mother’s things into categories, Ta Shu did that.
The sorting itself was hard. First came things that could still be used by her neighbors and friends; that was a lot of it, thankfully. Someone volunteered to take the cat, which was a relief. But there was still so much that could not be given away, much less sold, not that he was in the mood to sell anything. The neighbors came in and took all the furniture, shabby though it was; also much of her clothing. A group of women friends came in and packed her underclothes in boxes to throw away, so that he wouldn’t have to. This was what happened when you didn’t have daughters. The little clothing that remained he gave to a local charity shop. Same with kitchen utensils and implements, although she had saved everything she had ever owned, it seemed, and there were cabinets filled with boxes containing broken dishes, woks, pots and pans, glasses and so on. These were dangerous boxes to fish around in, but he carefully removed everything of any value, and then was left with a few boxes of useless stuff. All junk, all trash; she had saved even her trash.
When everything was sorted into its proper category, he used his wristpad to rent a bike and trailer from a local line of them locked in a row, then tied the boxes of trash onto the trailer. When all was ready he headed south through the crowded streets toward Fuxing Road.
This slow pedal through the heavy gravity of his grief quickly took on the nature of a penance or a funeral march. Almost always when sadness came to him he felt it as an emptying out, a going away. Occasional stabs of sorrow struck, but mostly he was gone and did not feel things; that emptiness was his sadness. It always made him want to feel something, anything, because anything would be less sad than the emptiness. So sometimes he would inflict things on himself in times like this, do hard things like this bike ride through the insane traffic of Beijing, risking his life with every turn of the handlebars. It would have been obviously crazy if there weren’t so many other people doing it. Traffic on the smaller streets was still quite heavy, and small trucks and cars predominated everywhere. Often in the crush of gridlocked cars, people threading their way forward on bikes made better time. The vehicles on the streets were all electric now, which was good for the air but bad for safety; they made almost no sound, just a kind of singing hum that the government had ordered added to them, a hum that did not clearly Doppler its approach and departure as the old rumbling gas engines had. A very dangerous world, therefore, these streets. But that was just what he wanted, so it was perfect for his mood. Dangerous, dolorous, finicky, frustrating. Weave through the traffic jams, avoid being crushed like a bug under the big singing lorries, all carrying their goods and people around the infinite city. Ah Mother! He really should have come back more often. All his life he had been a wanderer, seldom going home; his dad hadn’t cared and so he hadn’t cared. But his mom had cared, and now here he was pedaling her sad
old junk to the trash heap. Sad, sad, sad. Maybe he was feeling it this time.
Then three or four near misses, with big trucks screeching their air brakes and sometimes shouting abuse at him, left him rattled and afraid. It was such a heavy world, and he did not actually want to get killed in this act of penance. His mother would not like that either.
By the time he got to the garbage station, he was feeling it would have been smarter to pay someone to take these things away. Even more so after pushing the bike into the Fuxing yard and finding that none of the junk dealers there were the ones he had known in the old days. Dustless garden, where to find? He thought of Fang Fei’s Chinese dream, up there on the moon; and here was the Chinese reality. That wasn’t fair, of course. No doubt there had been trash heaps and shambles and abattoirs in the Tang era also. But this one was huge, and smelled bad. It smelled of death.
Near the entrance to the yard there was a little operation that allowed you to put your trash into a compactor the size of a dumpster, reducing the volume and thus the fee charged to dump your stuff. Ta Shu parked his bike trailer in front of this compactor. He began to throw broken kitchen stuff over its metal lip into the maw of oblivion, methodically, as if doing any other chore. As he was emptying the last box, he heard coming out of the compactor the tune “Jin tian shi ni de sheng ri,” Today is your birthday. This startled him so much that at first he couldn’t comprehend it, he was confused; then he realized it was music-box music, that there must be a music box in the compactor—but no, not a music box—it was their old cake stand. There had been a plastic rotating cake stand that his mom had set under the cakes she would produce on their birthdays. The cakes would rotate on the stand while the tune played, and then they would cut up the cake and eat.
Ta Shu sat down on the ground next to the bike. Again he heard his mom’s voice, just as clearly as if she had called out. Ta Shu? He recalled a book he had kept for many years, a volume put out long ago by the government called Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts, a very slender volume, which had given him a lot of pleasure precisely because of that slenderness. Not very many stories to express that particular worthy theme, no indeed. Probably government bureaucrats had scoured the centuries to find that slim handful of tales, most of which had come from an ancient book called What Confucius Didn’t Talk About. Many of the stories involved defying ghosts, or finding they were not ghosts at all, or laughing at them, or, best of all, causing them to laugh.
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