China Mountain Zhang

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  I have a counselor assigned to me. I am not certain how to feel about this. “Counselor,” I say, politely.

  She indicates a seat, not at the desk but at the flyspecked window that looks out on the street, and sits down beside me. “Tell me, just exactly what does an organic engineer do? Are you a medical engineer?”

  So I launch into a description of my training.

  “We’ll have to start looking around to see who could use your particular skills,” she says, thoughtfully. I suspect she still isn’t sure just what I do.

  “What kind of people do you usually place?” I ask.

  “Doctors and highly technical people like yourself.” She gets up, “I’ll need to get some information on the system.” I follow her over and we sit, she behind the desk.

  “How long does it take to place someone?” I ask.

  “That depends on what they do. A few months. Do you have a preferences as to what part of the country you’d work in?”

  “New York City,” I say.

  “East Coast,” she says, entering the information, “Northeast.”

  “I’d really like to stay in New York.”

  “Engineer,” she says, “you have a very specialized skill. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a firm in the city that is interested in you, but it’s not very likely.”

  “Do you mean I won’t be able to get a job?” I ask. “They offered me work in China.” Marx and Mao Zedong but I sound desperate.

  “You’ll be able to get a job,” she says. “Off the top of my head, I can think of two places that will probably be interested in you. One is in California, one is in Arizona.”

  “The Corridor,” I say. Baffin Island, only permanently.

  “They have a beautiful compound,” she says.

  She asks me to repeat my education, enters it all. I give her a rec with my resume and final project, my beach house, on it.

  I sense dislocation ahead. Moving. I feel so tired, life was a hell of a lot easier when I was just a job engineer, another dumb construction tech.

  What the hell am I going to do? All that time, Baffin Island, Nanjing. All that, so I can work in the Corridor? “Ah, if this is going to take a few months, can you help me get some sort of short term work, maybe as a construction tech? The only housing available is in Pennsylvania, and they told me it doesn’t have running water, so I’m living in a commune out in Coney Island and I have to help with the building maintenance.”

  “I’m sure you don’t need to be a construction tech,” she says, sounding a little as if I were research scientist who just offered to be a janitor. “Let me think about it and I’ll call you.”

  The ride out to Coney Island takes forever.

  All this time on my hands. When I finished the job on Baffin Island and passed my exams, I waited ten months to go to China, but I worked construction jobs for all but the last month. I don’t remember time hanging on me during that month. Since then I have been in China, always struggling to catch up, struggling with language, with taking three years worth of courses in two regular school years and a summer.

  China falls into two, neat halves-not chronologically, the first ‘half’ is really only about three, four months, the last ‘half’ the better part of two years. But there is Haibao, and then there is the time after Haibao, the white time. That’s the way I think of it, I don’t know why. Or rather, I know some of the reasons why, but they don’t seem sufficient to describe the feeling.

  The white time is crowded with activity. I have never studied so intently as I did in the year after Haibao died, I don’t suppose I ever will again. For a year I was this amazing creature, the envy of my classmates, Zhang, the huaqiao who destroys grade curves. I read the assignments, did supplemental readings. I got tutoring assignments because I discovered having to explain systems analysis to some Martian made it clearer in my own head (especially because Alexi had an agenda of his own, he asked questions that made me think about systems in different ways than the textbooks did.)

  I did it the way you’ll play solitaire for an afternoon, because the alternative was being alone with myself.

  The apartment is depressing. All that green. I try to read, but I start thinking about what I could do with it. On a job once, we used this sandstone flooring. The flat isn’t very big, the flooring wasn’t outrageously expensive and it would be better than bluegreen slip. I wonder what the subflooring is like.

  I shut off the climate control, open the door and put my new bed and boxes out in the hall and tear up a corner of the flooring. Underneath the flooring is hundred year old thinsulation and under that was chipboard. Imagine having so much wood you can use it as trash building material.

  “What are you doing?” Someone says from the doorway. It’s Yoni, one of the two people who chair the co-op’s managing committee.

  “I’m going to replace the floor,” I say.

  “You should have cleared it with the committee first,” he says.

  “I’ll pay for it,” I say.

  “That’s not the point. What if you get halfway through and stop. The co-op would have to replace the rest of it. You’re damaging the building.” He strokes his walrus moustache.

  “I’ll put some money in an zhuazhu account until I get it finished,” I say.

  “A what?” he asks.

  “Zhuazhu.” I say. I’m not exactly sure how to translate. “An account to hold money. A holding account. I’ll put the cost of replacing the floor in a bank account in the co-op’s name. When I’m finished, you can give it back. It’s what they do in China. Look at this, you know what’s underneath this floor? Chipboard.”

  “What’s chipboard?” he asks.

  “Pressed wood chips. Look at it.”

  He comes and crouches next to me. “Hey,” he says, “it’s kind of pretty. Do you think that’s under most of the floors?”

  I shrug. “Depends on how the place was put together, if this flat was remodeled. I’d say they have it next door, it looks like these two flats used to be one. See how it goes under the wall?”

  “Vanni might like this stuff on her floor,” Yoni says.

  “You have to seal it.” He wants to know why and I explain how wood is soft and damages. Then I explain about sealers.

  He goes next door and gets Vanni, my neighbor. It’s noon but Vanni is a bartender and at first she’s not at all thrilled about being woken up to look at her neighbor’s floor. She’s come by a couple of times to see what I was doing, she’s a little dark thing, not more than twenty-five.

  She crouches down sleepily. “There’s that under the blue stuff?”

  “Hard to tell,” I say, “but probably. These old buildings are like archeology, they come in layers.”

  “Hey Yoni,” she says, grinning, “do you think there’s another layer under that garbage I’ve got for plumbing? Some sort of decent pipes? Maybe copper?”

  “Most archeology is done on garbage dumps, isn’t it?” Yoni asks.

  “You mean under the garbage is more garbage. Rafael,” she says, “want to come rip up my floor? I can’t pay much.”

  “If I don’t get a job soon I’ll rip it up and if you’ve got chipboard I’ll seal it.”

  I don’t seal the chipboard on my floor. I knock out the dividing wall and repair the wallboard at the break, paint the walls white and then lay pale sandstone squares from somewhere out in the Corridor. The whole job takes six days, mostly because I don’t have much in the way of tools. I rent a cutter for four hours for the wall, and buy a little hand cutter to trim stone, but other than that the whole thing is pretty much done by hand. Once in awhile I find myself looking for shapes of states in the insulation and stone. Divining my future. Some people read tea leaves, I read building materials. The stone is a bitch to haul in, but when I’m finished the place is light and clean looking. Next job will be making the window bigger.

  For a few minutes I feel pleased with myself. I haven’t felt adrift all day, and sitting in this apartment I now
have a place where I can escape the oppressive shabbiness of everything.

  But hell, there’s not a lot to do. Watch my little vid. I have a kitchen table and two chairs, and a bed. Nothing to do but think about the interview and all the questions I should have asked. Why did I even bother to redo the place? I’m not going to live here. I’ve done it all for a stranger, who will probably hate it because there’s no bedroom. Time to get out, otherwise I’m going to brood myself into catatonia.

  I wander downstairs to see if Peter is in. To talk, to tell him about the interview.

  “Zhang,” Peter says when he opens the door, surprised. He doesn’t usually call me that. “Come in. How’s the place?”

  “Bucuo.” Not bad. “Mostly finished, you should come up and see it sometime when I have beer in the cooler. You busy?”

  “No, a friend just stopped by,” he gestures to come in.

  It’s the one who calls. He is short, short and tiny. Stringy. Definitely a flyer. “Hi,” I say, “I’m Zhang, or Rafael.”

  “I met you once a couple of years ago,” the he says, “Cinnabar Chavez.” He stands and offers his hand. “You and Peter were at Commemorative.”

  “I remember,” I lie. There were a lot of nights at Commemorative, a lot of flyers. But this time I connect, maybe it’s the last name. I guess the reason I didn’t connect before was that I had it in my head that he died. Obviously not.

  “Pijiu?” Peter says, elaborately casual.

  “Sure,” I say. It occurs to me that I’m not going to talk to Peter about what to do with my life. At least not tonight. “So you are Peter’s secret,” I say.

  Peter pops out of the kitchen, looking irritated. Somehow this delights me, makes me feel wicked. Peter ducks back in the kitchen.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Cinnabar says. “You and Peter have been friends a long time. Which do you prefer, Zhang or Rafael?”

  “Which does Peter call me?”

  “Mostly Rafael.”

  “Rafael is fine. Peter’s a good guy,” I say, “a good friend. The best.”

  “I can see that,” Cinnabar says softly.

  From the kitchen Peter calls, “What is this, my eulogy?”

  “Except, of course,” I add, “he thinks he’s everybody’s mother.”

  This strikes some cord in Cinnabar, he starts laughing. Peter comes out of the kitchen scarlet with embarrassment, silently hands me my beer, and glares at Cinnabar when he gives him his.

  “Don’t look at me!” Cinnabar protests, “I didn’t make him say it! I didn’t say a word!”

  I am in trouble. This job thing, I have too much time to think about it.

  I read and watch the vid. In the evening I walk on the boardwalk, sometimes late at night go back out and on Friday night I even end up underneath the boardwalk with a kid who looks seventeen but says he’s twenty. We’re at a stretch where the stands are boarded up for the night and there aren’t as many couples, but still, above my head there are the click-click-click of heels. The act is fast and depressing, sordid without being thrilling.

  I remember being a coney. Hawks seemed old.

  White time. Baffin Island time. Two weeks of my life slide by. A couple of evenings I go downstairs and talk to Peter and Cinnabar. Cinnabar is having a party, I agree to go to make Peter happy. Instead, the Friday of Cinnabar’s party becomes a landmark, a navigation point, something happening. It’s like a white out, where the wind is blowing the snow sideways, and the windows of the observation station might as well have been painted white. We came back from Halsey Station in one, using instruments to navigate. I got so disoriented I had trouble standing up when we got inside, I’d lost all sense of right and left, up and down.

  Then Cecily Hester from The Office of Occupational Resources calls. “I have lots of news,” she says. She is excited. “Western Technologies in California. They’re offering ninety-two hundred, but I think that’s low. It’s only to get you to come and talk to them anyway. And I think I’ve got you something to tide you over.”

  “In California?” I say stupidly. Ninety-two hundred? I made eleven hundred a year as a construction tech. Thirty-two in my year of ‘hazardous duty’ on Baffin Island. My father lives somewhere in California.

  “Right, Western Technologies. But the place that’s really going to be interested in you is New Mexico-Texas. That’s where you’re going to get the real offers. They’re both multinationals, with headquarters in the free economic zone in Hainandao. That’s why they can afford to offer the salaries. Of course, when your salary is paid by a free market corporation, you’re taxed. I imagine you’ve never been taxed. It’s a lot of money, thirty, forty percent, but that’s still a very good salary.” Comrade Cecily Hester smiles at me, “I’ve learned a great deal about Organic Engineers in the last three days, Engineer Zhang. There aren’t very many of you outside of China. It’s nice to see that you came back.”

  The braindrain to China. All the brightest and best go there. How funny that she lumps me in with molecular biologists who go to China to do grad work and never return.

  “Also,” she says, “Brooklyn College would like to have you teach an Engineering course. They were very excited when I told them you were in the city.” She looks thoughtful, “It’s a pity they don’t pay much, that would allow you to stay in the city. But they’re not going to be able to come anywhere sixty.”

  So much money. “Thank you,” I say.

  Cinnabar’s Party. I’m not sure I’m in a party mood. I’d really like to talk to Peter about this New Mexico-Texas thing, but I probably won’t get much chance. I have a bad feeling about this party.

  I decide to wear the black suit Haibao said was so conservative it wasn’t. I wonder if Liu Wen still plays jiaqiu, I never found out if he was arrested or if he escaped that night when the club was raided. If he did escape, I don’t know if he ever found out that Haibao was dead. What would they think of Liu Wen at Cinnabar’s party? Would they understand how decadent it was to be beautiful and appear to throw it all away?

  I take the train down to Brooklyn Heights where Cinnabar lives. Peter is helping to host so he’s been there all day. I carry beer, my contribution.

  Cinnabar lives in an old building, it was probably once a single family residence, now apartments. Cinnabar has the top two floors. The hallway is cluttered with kite frames, a bicycle, a couple of chairs turned on their sides. He’s a consultant for one of the companies that supplies kite frames. The door is open. Cinnabar’s place is pretty big, rather dark and cool. I haven’t been to many places the size of this, Cinnabar Chavez obviously does pretty well, but I’ve been to a lot of places that looked much the same, if smaller.

  It’s an old building, built strong and decaying slowly. Inside seems shabby and cheap. It’s not, not by New York standards, I know. (I think of the Wuxi complex, beautiful red tile roofs.) On one wall is a short vid loop. It’s a flyer hooking into a kite harness, talking to a kid on his crew. The flyer isn’t Cinnabar, although he’s hispanic. After a moment I realize the kid is, a young Cinnabar. There’s no sound, just this flyer jacking in, a real short clip of him taking off in an old looking kite with bright blue and violet silk. Then a clip of another flyer, probably Cinnabar, touching down in a kite with red silk. Then repeat.

  There’s music, that tinkly, percussion stuff for pattern dancing. I take my beer into the kitchen and stuff it into a cold box already full of beer and wine. Nobody’s dancing yet. I see Peter talking to a couple of people and say hello. I go back and get a beer so I have something to do with myself until I fit into the party. I see Cinnabar talking to another flyer, a woman with long crinkly hair, a red jacket and hips like a twelve-year-old. I don’t recognize many flyers, I know some of their silk colors and that’s all, and I haven’t been to a race since before China.

  Cinnabar doesn’t seem to have much furniture. Makes a great space for parties.

  I drink my beer and say hello to a couple of people I know from Peter’s bu
ilding. I end up talking to Robert, who doesn’t know anybody here either. “You’re in the building? How come I haven’t see you at the meetings?”

  “I’ve only been there a couple of weeks.”

  We make small talk. It’s eight-thirty, I figure I can sneak out at eleven, maybe ten-thirty.

  I glance around and to my astonishment make eye contact with the guy from the boardwalk, Invierno.

  “It’s the angel!” he says and saunters over.

  “Hey,” I say, delighted. “Are you a friend of Cinnabar’s?”

  He is, well not exactly, he’s a friend of a friend. “I almost didn’t come tonight,” he says.

  “I’m glad you came.”

  He knows a lot of people at the party. “The woman talking to Cinnabar? That’s Gargoyle, the flier. Only her name’s really Angel. And that guy over there? That’s Previn Tabat, the guy on the news.”

  He tells me that the flyer in the vid is Cinnabar’s elder brother, dead in a flying accident. He flirts with me. He flirts with Robert. He has large dark eyes and very long eyelashes. He’s dressed in his matador’s outfit again.

  “I haven’t seen you on the boardwalk,” I say.

  “I don’t get out too much.” He shrugs. “I work at a bank, I work weird hours in Routing.” Something about keeping track of credit.

  Robert drifts off while we stand talking. Invierno’s such a kid, full of himself, aggressive, almost obnoxious. But I keep finding him funny.

  “Dance with me,” he says. People have started dancing.

  “I don’t know how,” I say, amused.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true,” I protest, laughing. “I really don’t know how.”

  “I’ll teach you a pattern,” he promises, and taking me by the wrist, pulls me to the center of the room where we are most noticeable, and teaches me a pattern, a simple one. We dance and I think he’ll get tired of me, but he doesn’t. He changes pattern dancing into something baroque, to go with his Spanish clothes. He invests the steps with a stiffness, machismo. He holds my hand high and when he looks at me, he has veiled his eyes under those lashes. He looks like a willful boy who is sensitive to slights. And the more I laugh, the more he warms under the attention.