China Mountain Zhang

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  I nod.

  We are back in the gold. Haibao clicks the black into the silver and we play them around the table. I play cautiously, trying only to deflect, never attempting to catch, and trying always to send the silver to the center, particularly after someone sends the silver at Liu Wen and before it has even begun to cross the space between them he reverses it right back into them.

  Finally by accident I send the silver into the golden ball. It has been in play a few times before but I have never even touched it. The long hair reaches for it and one of the other strangers tapps it away. Someone else jacks into our table as the golden ball is gliding past me and I feel everybody shift. It startles me and without thinking I reach out like a jai lai player and sling the ball my way.

  When it hits there is an explosion of feeling. For a moment I am the golden ball and the golden ball is me and I am jolted with pleasure. It is orgasmic and threatens to unlock my knees but before I can even react it washes through me and we drop out of contact. I blink and everybody grins at me. I look at them.

  Then I remember, “My point.”

  “Five points for a gold,” Liu Wen says.

  Back into the light, where I find my sensitivity is heightened. Now when the red or black balls come near I feel a tickle of sensation, with the golden ball it is even more definite. The silver balls seem colder. I become more aggressive in my play and catch the red ball twice. The explosion is less dramatic than the golden ball, and I remember to say, “My point,” each time.

  Only once am I hit with the silver ball, and it drains me, takes away the sensitivity, and I have the sense that what I have lost has gone into my opponent. Hungrily I play harder until I almost take the silver ball again, managing by sheer luck to deflect it into one of the strangers. He has been playing a long time, and I am jolted again by the power of what drains off of him.

  “My point,” I say.

  “My loss,” he says. Our eyes meet and he looks hungrily at me, and we drop into the light.

  I am more careful, made aware by my near miss, and manage to catch the black lacquer ball once. It is like the red lacquer. I catch the red lacquer.

  We drop out of contact.

  “My point,” I say.

  “Time is up,” Liu Wen says. “Nine points, you almost made it.”

  Time is up? “How long have we been playing?” I ask.

  “Two hours,” Liu Wen says. “That’s how much we paid for. If I had realized you had nine points I’d have fed you the tenth, just so you could see what it was like.”

  “Like the golden ball?” I ask, staring into the gold of the table.

  He shakes his head. “Different.”

  Better, I think.

  I look up from the gold. Already the others are back in contact, only Haibao, Liu Wen and I are out. Somehow I keep expecting to drop back in, but instead, they take off their contacts and I take off mine. My bare wrist feels cold in the air.

  I look at them, Haibao looks tense. Liu Wen looks like he always does. I am aware of perspiration on my neck, under my hair. I am even more aware of my aching testicles, and that I am tight against the seam of my pants. I feel as if I have been cock-teased for a couple of hours, which is precisely what has happened. But it doesn’t seem as if we have been playing for two hours.

  I lick my lips.

  “He did pretty well,” Haibao says.

  “Beginners luck,” Liu Wen says.

  I realize that Liu Wen paid for me. “Thank you for the game,” I say.

  “I love the way you talk,” Haibao says softly.

  “How do I talk?” I ask.

  “Your accent, the formal way you say things.”

  “Do I have much accent?” I ask.

  “It’s charming, exotic, and yet you sound so refined.”

  I thought my Mandarin was pretty good. I resolve to work on my accent.

  Liu Wen shakes his head, smiling. “I’ll see you two later,” he says and heads back towards another table. I follow him with wistful eyes, wishing to be back in the golden glow, although I ache.

  “He’s handsome,” Haibao says.

  “He could be,” I answer, “if he would bother.”

  “Come with me?” Haibao asks. Lai gen wo ma?

  Of course I will go with him. We walk through the godown to the back, where there is a narrow iron stair, and up above the lights he opens a door on a room like a coffin, a little more than a meter high, the same wide. It is only then that I realize why he has taken me here, that there is not another game at the end, or at least, only the old game.

  I laugh, although I am so aroused there will be damn little joy.

  He stoops and enters, and sitting on the mat says, softly, “Lai lai lai,” ‘Come, come, come. I stoop and follow him, kneeling in front of him, aware of my boots on the mat. I lean awkwardly forward, resting my hand on the mat next to his thigh, and we kiss. I tug gently at his pants and he raises his hips for me to slide them down. If there is a way to do this without a sense of interruption I have never found it. But then I kneel reverently and pay homage.

  And later, once, he asks me, “Why ‘ghost’?”

  “Waiguai,” I say, ‘foreign-devil’ or ‘foreign-ghost’. It’s the old slang term for a foreigner. Not very flattering. Like Westerners say ‘Slope-head.’

  “You aren’t a “waiguai,” he says, “you’re hauqiao.” Not a foreign ghost, but an overseas Chinese.

  That is what it says on my identification. I was certain my IDEX would be waiguoren but it says huaqiao. The flimsie they gave me indicated that my genetic mother may have been Philippine Chinese (the combination of my mother’s Hispanic genes and my father’s Chinese, I suppose.) Haibao doesn’t know that my mother is Hispanic-American. I do not mention it.

  “You look tired,” the doctor says in Mandarin.

  I am, I did not get much sleep the night before. It is Monday and I met Haibao for dinner last night-late because he had something he had to do before he saw me. I was jealous but did not ask.

  I am here for an examination, just to make sure that my new kidneys are working.

  “You are the first patient I have ever had who is the result of cosmetic gene-splicing,” she says. “It’s illegal here except for authorized disorders.”

  It is now at home as well. Except for things like Taysachs, Downs, Herodata’s Schizophrenia. She has accessed my deep records, I wonder if she will change my IDEX, but she doesn’t seem to think of it. I am jittery and nervous.

  The doctor is astonishing. Gone is the perfect, concerned woman I remember from when I was sick. She says the correct things, like ‘You look tired,’ but she says them with an air of detachment. I don’t answer her and it doesn’t seem to matter. She explains things, tells me how my kidneys grew, how the old ones are beginning to atrophy. She holds me off with her words. “If you experience any depression or anxiety these days you are welcome to come and talk with a counselor.”

  I nod unhappily. She is jacked in to my medical records. What does she find in my medical records that makes her think that I need counseling? Something from Baffin Island? Or perhaps my constructed genetic make-up is flawed and I am prone to system imbalances? She certainly does not want to counsel me. Why did I think her so wonderful?

  “Are you eating right?” she asks, and does not wait for an answer. “Still avoid things like beer and alcohol and not too much protein yet.” She stands. I stand.

  “Thank you Dr. Cui,” I say.

  It must be the unit that they used to keep me quiet. It must have encouraged me to trust my doctor, to assume that everything is all right.

  All my life, or at least since I was seven and got my jacks implanted, I have jacked in; in school, at work, to call a friend, to find out how much credit was on my account. But those are operations where the system is passive, where I draw on the information. In the West, active systems, systems that feed back into the human nervous system, are illegal. There are exceptions; the big kites that the pros fly, fo
r example; they feed flight information back to the flyer, but those are licensed. I’ve never been to the doctor and been jacked into an active system.

  Jianqiu, ‘Pressball’ is an active system, too. I know it is illegal, that’s why one doesn’t use one’s real name, although if the system records a trace they can identify our individual nervous system patterns. Still, that takes a lot of work, I suppose they’d almost have to know who we were first.

  Active systems are illegal, as everyone knows, because they can cause injury. And because they are addicting. I wonder if Jianqiu causes any sort of degeneration of my already taxed nervous system. There are certainly ways in which it is taxing. But I have no idea if I will ever play again. I’d certainly like to.

  Is that the definition of addicting? If so, duck is addicting because I’d also like to try Nanjing duck again.

  On Tuesday I have my engineering tutorial again. I cross the busy arcade and take the lift. I don’t know if we are going to bother with engineering again.

  “Lai, lai,” Haibao says absently, opening the door. He is not looking at me, and the flat is rose. He gestures and the lights come up. So I suppose we are going to work. We sit down and he sighs, sits for a moment as if too listless to bother before leaning forward to look through the book.

  It is quite a performance. But I’m not Liu Wen to make fun of it.

  “We don’t have to work this evening,” I say, “I can go back, we can work another time.”

  “No,” he says, “it doesn’t matter.” He pages through my book.

  “No, truly,” I say. “I’m doing better. It makes more sense these days.” This is the truth, although I have some questions I’d like to ask.

  He smiles. “You are always so polite,” he says, “are all American huaqiao so polite as you?”

  “Old fashioned, maybe,” I say, and begin to get up.

  He puts his hand on my arm. “Don’t pay any attention to me, Liu Wen doesn’t.”

  “Liu Wen knows you better than I do,” I say.

  To my astonishment his eyes fill with tears and he looks away. Then he stands up and walks to the window. He stands with his back to me and I wait, confused and alarmed. What did I say?

  He doesn’t say anything for awhile and I have time to feel uncomfortable. What should I do? I don’t know what to do so I sit and look at my engineering book, and then back at Haibao. I don’t hear any crying. His shirt is as bright as yellow lacquer and the nape of his neck is pale between his hair and the collar.

  “What’s wrong?” I finally ask.

  “A friend of mine is going to be arrested,” he says.

  Liu Wen? No it can’t be. I wait.

  He clasps his hands behind his back. “He is a teacher,” he says. “They are arresting him on a morals charge, but it’s more complicated than that.”

  I think, it always is. And I am relieved it isn’t Liu Wen.

  “I feel sorry for him,” Haibao says, “of course. They’ll send him to Xinjiang Province, to do Reform Through Labor. Do you know, if you misbehave in a labor camp, one of the punishments is to wire your thumbs together? They draw the wire very tight. It cuts off the blood. You have to eat rice out of a bowl like a dog, without using your hands. And then gangrene sets in and they cut your thumbs off. Or maybe you die.”

  What’s to say? At home they used to send people to the Corridor out west, convict labor. Now, sometimes they send them to Mars. Convict labor. Chinese citizens do not usually have much interest in going to the moon or Mars.

  “I think we are a disease in society,” Haibao says. “Bad cells. I think something has gone wrong with us.”

  “In my country there’s a bird that lays it’s eggs in other bird’s nests,” I say. “The other birds don’t know. They think this baby is their own. They raise it and feed it, in some ways it becomes almost a monster because it grows so large and demands so much. But eventually it simply leaves the nest, like any other bird. It’s not a monster, it’s really just another part of things. I think we’re like those baby birds. We didn’t ask for this, our parents didn’t ask for this. No one is guilty, just maybe unlucky.”

  “So you think that we’re accidents,” Haibao says. He sounds sarcastic.

  I shrug, even though he’s not looking at me. That’s what I think, and if he doesn’t, that’s okay.

  “I’m afraid,” he says. “If they interrogate my friend, they may arrest me.”

  I say delicately, “Perhaps you have a friend who can help you, someone who perhaps helped you transfer out of your teaching job… “

  “No,” he says curtly.

  It crosses my mind that if they arrest him and interrogate him, perhaps I will be arrested as well. But it seems too improbable to concern me.

  He is still at the window, looking out with the city as a back drop. This flat is like a theater for him, a shadow box for his own display. I get up and walk behind him, put my hand on his shoulder. He is trembling, like some small animal. I stroke his hair, he leans back against me and I wrap my arm around his waist. He turns his head so he is looking away from me and relaxes against me, his profile expressionless in the reflecting window. I tighten my grip, feeling his buttocks and back pressed against my stomach and groin, his fine skull under my fingers. Slowly the shaking subsides.

  There’s no doubt that his fear is real. But I cannot help but notice the flicker of the whites in the reflection of his eyes as he glances towards the window. He adjusts ever so slightly, improving the line, perfecting the pose.

  “Don’t worry, haibao,” I say, thinking how ‘seal’ fits him, how sleek both he and seals are, “you are a perfect picture.”

  He laughs, shakily. “You see through me.”

  I don’t really understand him at all, but I kiss his hair rather than answer, running my fingers across his chest. His pulse beats visibly in his temple.

  “No,” he says, chiding, “we must study engineering.” His voice is playful and so I pay no attention, sliding my hand under the waist of his tights.

  He sighs. “At least,” he says softly, “we must darken the windows.”

  “Oh no,” I say brightly, pulling my hand away, letting go, straightening his clothes like a mother with a toddler, “we must study engineering.”

  He growls at me, baring even, perfect little teeth like pearls.

  I laugh, “First we study engineering and then we screw.”

  He gapes, astonished. “Did I hear your right? The namesake of Zhong Shan, vulgar?”

  We do study engineering. I get my questions answered, draw out the session, teasing him, distracting him, pretending to be serious. It’s a little like pressball, everything done by indirection. When I think his attention is wandering I press my thigh against his. I bring him a beer, brush fingers when I hand it to him, reach over and drink from his without asking while I watch him over the rim, and he watches me.

  Finally I admit I have no more questions and kiss him. He grabs my hand and pulls me towards the bedroom, but I laugh and hang back, stopping him in the doorway where I press him against the frame, peal down his tights and go down on him there. He gasps, and laughs and swears at me, his hands wrapped rather painfully in my hair. Only after he comes do we make it to the bed.

  Late, he dozes next to me and my arm is draped over his chest. I look into the darkness. It is about one. Peter is at work in New York, joking with Rebecca, the girl who does all the correspondence and filing. Peter would be astonished and proud of me, to know I have done so well with Haibao. To see me thinking about someone else in this way.

  “A ministering angel,” he would say, “a regular Florence Nightingale.”

  Peter, who so often did the same for me.

  I am terribly homesick.

  Haibao helps me with my engineering, a classmate, Wai Ling Zhung Fan, graciously helps me with my engineering. Even Xiao Chen, who knows nothing about engineering, uses my notes to ask me about my engineering. The midterm examination is very difficult, I work until the e
nd of the hour and still do not get a real answer for question 6. I walk out despondent, knowing that I missed at least three questions completely, and parts of many others. For days I will not stop at the Professor’s office and look at the grades posted on a flimsie on the door. But the Professor’s office is next to my Practical Applications class (my tool handling class) so one day I simply go and look. And I have passed the engineering midterm with a score of 62 points out of 100 which on the grade curve is a 86%! I didn’t know there would be a curve! I thought a 62 would be a failing grade!

  Of course I go straight up to the arcade (the university is the base on which the four towers rest.) I take the lift to his flat and then stand outside his door in an agony of apprehension. I have never come on Haibao unannounced. And each day it is problematical as to whether Haibao will be pleased to see me or too despondent to care. Some days he is all wit and languid charm. Some days he is silent and withdrawn. Always he knows I am coming.

  I imagine him opening the door smiling. Open the door frowning. Someone else there.

  So I go back to the lift, take it back down and call from the arcade. I jack in and think the numbers in careful Chinese-the system will understand English, and thinking out the call in Chinese is not second nature yet, but it’s good practice to do everything in Chinese. Then there is a wait so long that I think he is gone. Perhaps in a meeting with his thesis professor? Not that I have ever seen Haibao work on his thesis, but then I’m never there during the day.

  “Wai,” he says, Chinese for ‘Hey’ and the way everyone answers the phone. No vid, sound only.

  “Venerable teacher,” I say, “this is your undeserving student.”

  “Who?” he says, he sounds as if he has just woken up.

  “Zhang,” I say. “It’s Zhang. Did I call at a bad time?”

  “Zhang?” he says. “No, you didn’t call at a bad time. What is it? Something wrong?”

  “No, I just wanted to tell you I passed my engineering midterm. And say thank you for your help.”