The Invisibility Cloak

by Ge Fei

  She went on to tell me that most of the residents in their neighborhood only stayed there on the weekends. The houses next to hers remained totally empty during the week; in the evenings the whole valley grew as dark and hollow as a tomb—it felt very eerie.

  I could hear a touch of fear in her voice.

  Finally she said, “If you really can’t stand my face I can cover it.”

  •

  After she hung up, I gazed out at that rare, pristine Beijing sky for a long while. For some reason, I felt a stinging sensation in my nose, and couldn’t help but weep.

  11. THE 300B

  THE FOLLOWING afternoon, I called a moving company.

  On December 31st, in the early hours of the morning, I moved to Sleeping Dragon Valley.

  That evening, I drove back to Shijingshan and dropped the apartment key into my sister’s hand. She didn’t ask where I was going; she just cried and tried to hug me.

  I backed away.

  In October of the following year, I became the father of a beautiful baby daughter. Her mother and I never married. I didn’t even know her mother’s real name. She told me I could call her whatever I wanted. I tried calling her Yufen, which she actually answered to quite happily.

  I once asked her if Ding Caichen had been part of the mafia. She replied equivocally, saying that whether he was or wasn’t didn’t matter; what mattered was that he was dead. Forget about him.

  “But how could a mafioso be forced to commit suicide?” I continued.

  “It only goes to show,” she said, “that there are forces in this society more terrifying than the mafia. Ding Caichen was no match for them.”

  As to what those “terrifying forces” might be, I couldn’t begin to imagine.

  One day I pestered her to tell me her story. Where did she come from? How did she end up in a place like Sleeping Dragon Valley? Her accent sounded southern. She became evasive, avoided my gaze. Finally she sighed and gave me an elusive reply: “There’s really nothing to tell—I was just one of Ding Caichen’s hostages.”

  “You mean you were kidnapped?” I asked in shock.

  “So were you, weren’t you?” she mockingly replied.

  I didn’t know what the hell she meant. She seemed to be suggesting that I had been kidnapped and held hostage myself, but how could that be? Nothing had been wrong with me; I did what I needed to do, as a free man.

  Now, when we do it together (what you’d rather call “making love”), I no longer need to hide her face with a pillowcase. Yet I still know next to nothing about her. Any information relating to her and her background has been strictly censored, just as her natural beauty has been censored by her mutilated face.

  On one occasion, I stealthily searched the entire house, looking for photographs of her. I really wanted to see what she looked like before her injuries. My efforts were in vain.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she comforted me. “The day our daughter grows into a woman, there I’ll be. How she’ll look is exactly how I used to look.”

  Sometimes I’d talk to her about my mother. I’m not sure why, but the two times I brought up my mother’s prediction, it seemed to depress her, and she grew quiet. I thought the subject annoyed her. That couldn’t be it, though, because this past November, as our daughter approached her first month, she asked me if we could take the baby to my mother’s grave. She wanted to pay her respects to the old woman.

  That put me in a quandary, actually. Not because I didn’t want to take her. As you know, after my mother died, my sister Cui Lihua took care of all the arrangements. I didn’t know where my mother had been buried. Naturally, I’d never admit that to my wife. Nor could I think of any way to find out other than calling my sister to ask. I couldn’t sleep at all that night. As dawn broke, I tiptoed downstairs and shut myself in the closet by the kitchen to phone my sister.

  When my sister heard my voice, she didn’t say anything but just started to sob. On and on she bawled, until she could finally stop, whereupon she began to whine for me to come home immediately. I asked her about Ma’s grave but she paid me no heed. She only repeated her demand, over and over, that I come home as soon as possible so she could cook me fennel dumplings. As if all she owed me in this lifetime could be boiled down to a plate of fennel dumplings. I could feel myself about to cry. Only after my sister made me swear on my life to come home within the week did she tell me that Ma was buried next to our father at the Gold Summit Garden on Jade Spring Hill, not far from the Sleeping Buddha Temple. Take the 375 bus to Red Flag Village, walk through the cemetery gate, take the left-hand pathway to the top of the hill, then turn around and go back down—to the seventh row of headstones, sixth one across. She had planted a ginkgo tree in front of the grave earlier this year.

  Two days later, the weather clear and calm, we took the baby to the cemetery. My wife wore a scarf wrapped tightly around her head. She told me this was the first time she had left Sleeping Dragon Valley since coming to Beijing. We stopped at a flower shop by the Summer Palace where she bought my mother a large bouquet of white calla lilies. She carefully placed the flowers in the back seat of the car, and as she took the baby from me, she remembered something. Touching my arm, she softly said, “Shouldn’t we get something for Papa as well?” I liked the easy, affectionate way she said “Papa.” She got out of the car again, ran into a shop, and returned with two bottles of Cowshed Mountain white liquor for my father.

  Our daughter thought everything at the cemetery utterly fantastic. She climbed the hill in a carrier strapped against her mother’s breast, kicking her little legs and exclaiming “Oh—oh—oh!” The late autumn scene preserved an exaggerated stillness; the sky above the treetops so blue it caused dizziness. After we paid our respects, with no one else around, we didn’t bother to cut the stems off the lilies one by one. Observing the slender, ink-black ginkgo tree, I felt a twinge of regret—maybe I should’ve been a bit more open and agreed to take my sister with us.

  My wife, clearly in a good mood as we ambled back down the hill, suggested that we find a place to have lunch and then go for a stroll around the botanical garden next to the Sleeping Buddha Temple. I readily agreed. But upon exiting the public toilet at the gate of the cemetery, I changed my mind. I told her that I had an upset stomach, and that we should head straight home.

  I knew the look on my face must have been frightening.

  I tried my hardest to control my anxiety and calm down a little, but the effort just made my anxiety worse. We got in the car and I drove like one possessed, settling into the fast lane and leaning on my horn the whole way home.

  The whole ride I waited for her to ask me what was wrong. Had she done so, I would have told her everything about the text message I had received in the bathroom. But she just kept playing with the baby, seemingly oblivious to my changed mood. In that respect, she had a lot in common with Yufen.

  Two hours later, I parked the car at the edge of the lot at the Sleeping Dragon Valley community center. The China Construction Bank ATM in the parking lot informed me that Ding Caichen’s remaining two hundred and sixty thousand yuan had been paid in full to my account.

  The story of Ding Caichen’s death always seemed suspicious to me. I had tried several times before to coax my wife into revealing anything. But after that message dinged in from the bank, I was a little scared to bring it up.

  “If you want my opinion, I think it’s a good thing,” my wife said one evening, as she patted the baby to sleep. “That two hundred and sixty thousand is yours by contract. You didn’t steal or extort it, so we have no reason to be afraid. As to whether or not the man’s really dead, you don’t need to worry about it.”

  She was right, of course, but for the next three months I couldn’t shake the image of Ding Caichen, coffee cup in hand, jumping off the top of a skyscraper in Dongzhimen. I couldn’t bring myself to spend a single yuan of the money.

  Every so often I’d complain to her that we couldn’t live with this confusion
for the rest of our lives. Although things were really great between us, I still felt lost, as if everything in my life were ambiguous. Could we really continue in this way?

  My wife invariably responded with a smile and ended with another question. “You should understand that nothing in this world is ever truly clear. If life is crazy, let it be crazy! If you tried to live every single detail of your life with perfect clarity, you surely wouldn’t even make it through the first day. Try to be perfect, and where’s the fun?”

  •

  I carried on with my amplifier business.

  My client in the Brownstones apparently had enough of his KT88. He asked me if I could build him a 300B instead, preferably with specialty-molded Level 3 Western Electric tubes, if I could find them. I tried to persuade him that the 300B really didn’t match his Acapella speakers, but this angered the good professor, who ordered me to “Just shut up and do it.”

  Which I was all too willing to do, of course.

  The day I brought the machine over, the professor sat, once again, at his kitchen table, this time lecturing his wife the volleyball coach on the awful condition of society. You know: corrupt social morality, destruction of irreplaceable traditions, the spiritual backbone of community broken by egotism and greed, and the rest of that bullshit. He concluded with the nugget of wisdom that no Chinese in today’s society could possibly live a truly satisfying life. His wife, obviously tired of listening to him, sat hunched over at the table with her eyes lowered, unresponsive, texting furiously. Embarrassed at being ignored in such a way, the professor fell back on that old rhetorical figure which he still and used which I hated so damn much: “Am I right?”

  I looked up at him from my work, and set down my screwdriver. Then I stood up, hitched up my pants, and said in a tone that surprised even me, “Do you mind if I contribute my thoughts to this one? If you could just stop nitpicking and dissecting every little thing, if you could learn to keep one eye closed and one eye open, and quit worrying about everything and everybody, you might discover that life is actually pretty fucking beautiful. Am I right?”