by David Jurk
“Fuck me,” she said, and saw his eyes evade hers, felt him stay limp and useless in her hand.
“Not right now,” he muttered, and she pulled her hand out of his pants. And after that, neither had mentioned sex again.
She tired of texting friends – most of whom had mysteriously become very busy when word got out that they were in quarantine. As they entered the third week, she began thinking almost continuously of Lin – even began dreaming of her - and after two days and nights of it, in an agony of self-recrimination she gave in.
Hey, world’s still here girlfriend! How RU?
As she settled down to wait for the response, she was startled to see a message come back almost instantaneously.
Sorry, this subscriber has terminated services.
Not blocked her, not refused to respond; terminated. She tried calling; same thing. That was it, she had no other way to reach out to her, trapped as she was in this endless purgatory of quarantine. A black seed of fear materialized in the pit of her stomach and try as she might, she couldn’t seem to remove it, couldn’t spit it out.
How long would the Committee wait for them to show symptoms before they received a clean bill of health and could again go about their lives? Not that they had much to look forward to with no chickens or ducks to sell, but she wanted out of this house. Qiang couldn’t say. No one could say. She felt her mind being turned into mush.
And one morning when she awoke, she found Qiang already up and about and lay in bed trying to fall back asleep. Until she heard sounds that made no sense; animal sounds. Curiosity got the better of her; what the fuck was it?
She found Qiang in the second bedroom, where grandmother and Jiao slept, sitting on the edge of his grandmother’s bed. The crazy noises were from the old woman, who was wheezing like an old diesel freight train. Actually, now that she was in the room, she considered the sounds to be closer to the wail of a teakettle left too long on the heat. Grandmother’s breathing was like air being drawn through the eye of a needle. Her entire upper body strained up off the bed as she pulled impotently for breath. But forget it - no matter how she strained, the lungs just would not take in air.
Xiao stood in the doorway, watching this torture, her mind blank.
Qiang sensed her standing there and turned. His face was contorted.
“Xiao,” he cried. “She can’t breathe!”
“Did you call the doctor?”
He nodded wildly. “Yes, yes! He’s coming.”
They stared at each other. The black seed in her stomach grew, sending tendrils up her spine and along her neck. She shivered, shuddering from their touch.
“Do you think it’s the flu?” she whispered.
He began openly weeping and her eyes widened; in all the time she’d known Qiang, she’d never seen him cry. His face became like a little child.
“I don’t know,” he sobbed. A droplet of thin snot hung from his nose and she stared at it in horror.
By the time the doctor arrived, decked out in an isolation suit like he was visiting Chernobyl, grandmother was dead. The doctor, stupid in his uselessness, had told them she had suffocated, or maybe technically it was drowning. Who cared what did it? The doctor left and an hour later two men showed up and took the body. When Qiang wanted to know where they were taking it, they only shrugged. Or if they said anything, maybe they just couldn’t be heard through all the protective shit they were wearing.
A day later they pretty much ran out of food, and deliveries started coming in a box, left on the porch. Basic stuff, rice, pasta, tea, some really crummy packaged meals. An occasional soy steak. Milk and cereal for Jiao. She told Qiang to ask for some Vodka. She had to ask several times and finally speak sharply to him.
“They’ll never bring it,” he said. They didn’t.
And she was running low on pills; her Smile! and NightyNite’s were getting very low – what happened when they ran out? If they wouldn’t bring booze, could she expect any sympathy for pills? She really doubted it. The Committee were just a bunch of old pricks – she’d been saying that forever.
Three days after grandmother died, Jiao woke crying, struggling for breath, and died before noon despite all they tried. It was a repeat of what had happened with grandmother, only now it was little Jiao, happy, laughing Jiao – hardly a year old. Jiao, who now would not live even the hint of a full life, who’d not been given any chance at all. And as two men came for the body – the same men, different men, who could tell? – something came over Xiao; she felt the dark seed of fear within her transformed into something else, something cold and hard. It spread, taking root in her very soul, its tendrils reaching out, growing, wrapping around her heart. While Qiang was inconsolable, wailing and crying out to God uncontrollably and pulling at his hair and face, Xiao remained still as a stone embedded in deep, dry clay. Not a tear escaped her eyes, not a single drop of salty water. But inside her, the blackness grew and grew until she felt she was no longer Xiao, but simply a vessel, a container. The words of Li Chunfeng echoed in the darkness of her mind - the hand of she who carries death. And she suddenly knew that the blackness inside her was the red star itself, that it had penetrated her, overtaken her. She had been wrong all along; the red star was no omen to the world, it had arrived in the heavens for her alone, to claim her. Any notion that she had options, alternative paths to choose from – this was all illusion; she’d always belonged to the red star, she was its agent here on Earth and now her time had come. She had no choice but to carry out its will; the purpose of her very existence from the moment of her birth had been nothing other than to serve its purpose. And its purpose was entirely clear to her. As Li Chenfung had known centuries ago, she now knew.
As Jiao’s little body was carried away, sealed in plastic wrap as if she were an odd little bug to be displayed under glass, Xiao watched as if from a great distance, as though in a scene from a play; as though she were only an actress playing a mother with a dead child. And all the while she knew what her real role was, what she must do in this pathetic tragedy their lives had become, and she began to plan.
For the first time, she carefully observed the cordon around their house; the sloppy way the Committee had set up overlapping pylons emanating the infrared beams that isolated them from the world. She saw the guards in the drive growing bored, lax in response to the occasional stupid duck who wandered up from the lake, breaking the beams, setting off the alarm; watched as the third time this happened, he did little more than glance around back, returning almost immediately to the truck parked in their drive.
She watched as huge throngs of tourists, enjoying the mild winter, toured Poyang Lake in enormous hovercraft, sweeping over water, marshes and land – stopping just below their house to point out the huge flocks of wildfowl, the coves filled with beautiful winter flowers. And all through the daylight hours, she sat at the back window overlooking the lake, and watched the red eye swing by, low in the sky.
Gradually, she began accumulating things in a small backpack, as if planning a day hike. She kept it hidden from Qiang – not that he’d notice it anyway, as fucked up as he was. She put all the money she’d been squirreling away – her secret cache – in one of the outside pockets, counting it and considering her costs as she did. Thinking about it, she added a change of clothes and a camera. Then she just waited. She sat down as if she were Queequeg on the deck of that ship, awaiting the arrival of death. She tried to remember what he’d done while he waited – had he thrown bones? She thought of the Yarrow sticks. How very long ago that seemed.
And the waiting did bring death, though not for her. It was Qiang who complained throughout the afternoon of tightness in his chest, Qiang who by the time dusk fell struggled in the familiar dance, Qiang who died, tears streaming from his closed eyes. She had not bothered to call the doctor but sat with him, patient as a nun, stroking his face and neck with cool cloths.
When the stricture of his lungs truly began to torture him, he’d gasped out, “This is
it.”
She’d nodded, put a finger to her lips; save your breath. But he wouldn’t and swung his great big head back and forth on the pillow.
“Why?” he asked. His eyes were full of pain and fear; sorrow welled from them and she looked away.
What could she tell him? That why made no sense - that it all had been determined a couple thousand years ago when some weird guy learned to read the stars? So she said nothing, just kept wetting the cloth, stroking and wetting. And he didn’t have the breath left to talk after that.
After he died, she arranged his body neatly on the bed, not bothering to cover his face. She thought he looked pretty good, though his skin did go awfully pale. Still, it seemed a lot better like that - more peaceful - than when it had agony written all over it before he went.
She now had to do nothing but wait. Her moment would come a couple hours after dawn, as the guard was at his sleepiest, and just before the first of the hovercraft made its winter flower stop behind the house, everyone disembarking to walk amongst them, exclaiming at the delicate blossoms.
She sat through the night without lights, not sleeping, appreciating the still darkness of the house. Many things played across her mind, like YouTube videos, one after another. Streams, she thought, that’s it; streams from parts of her life. There’s the little girl playing, the young woman learning to fuck like crazy, the lover to Lin, the wife to Qiang, the mother to Jiao. All those streams, all those memories of her life; what did they mean now? Maybe they’d never even happened, maybe it was all an illusion, every bit of it. Everything she experienced was in her head – how would she even know?
Dawn crept through the house, back to front, and she waited. When she heard the distant whine of the hovercraft motors, she stood up and put on the knapsack. She glanced briefly out the front door, saw the guard slumped down in the seat, and went calmly to the back door and walked out onto the grass, closing the door behind her. The first of the pylons was ten meters from her; she could see the faint red curtain extending from just off the lawn upwards to three or four meters in the air.
She went to it, then walked slowly parallel until she found the depression in the grass where the bottom edge of the red glow stayed straight, leaving a little gap. Taking off the pack and lying on her belly before it, she pushed the pack through and waited. Nothing. She began crawling, thought she was golden, then heard the thrumming sound in the air as the beam caught her hip. She kept crawling, hoping that the sleepy guard would not bother looking for ducks. And no voice called out, no warning came.
She stayed on the ground, crouching low – just in case - in the damp grass, for at least half a kilometer. Behind a low bush, she stripped off the wet, muddy clothes and put on the clothes from the pack, standing and putting the camera around her neck, and the pack over her shoulders. Then, spotting her target, she strolled casually, all the while taking pictures with her dead camera and gradually merged together with the hundred or so people that had swarmed willy-nilly from the hovercraft. When the call came to board, and she had no ticket to show the skinny kid whose job it was to check, it took nothing more than a look of panic, the frantic patting of her pockets and a few tears to get on board. Well, that and the fact that she had no bra on and let the middle buttons of her shirt come undone. As the hovercraft rose and sped off toward the next stop, the kid was nowhere to be seen. She imagined him down below jacking off.
Several hours later, she waited in the train station in Jiujiang. It was very crowded; the whole city of five million was bursting at the seams, like every city in China. She waited on her feet, on the move, circling through the crowd deliberately, relentlessly. And when she was on the train, heading for Shanghai, she didn’t sit still there either, but strode up and down through every car, full of riders, front to back. She was animated, engaging. Here was a pretty young woman with nice breasts, a good shape to her, stopping and speaking with many men as she strode up and down. She leaned forward, exposing as much as possible, laughing and flirting into the faces of any that would glance her way.
And all these men, in turn, as they went about their time waiting on the train, spoke with others, nodding to their buddies – hey did you get a look at that one? Or as they rose to use the bathroom, or go to the snack car, bumped into others, shared the breath of the many hundreds on the packed train.
And finally, the train arrived in Shanghai, the most populous city on Earth, with its one hundred million people spread across many thousand li. And though Xiao did not, in the next week, meet even the tiniest percentage of them, she did her best. She walked the city day and night, rode its maglev trains; even as fatigue and hunger wracked her, she entered stores and businesses and restaurants, arenas and museums, even churches. She merged with every group she could find that had gathered in any strength; tourists, conventions, exhibitions, congregations. She spoke and laughed, she exuded an ultimate bonhomie; she was the embodiment of the social, outgoing Chinese.
So perhaps in this time she came within the breaths of a thousand, perhaps two thousand people - perhaps ten thousand; who knew? And these thousands, each of them over the next month or so of their lives, they also encountered many thousands, and each of those people many thousands, and on and on. And some of them, probably more than a few, travelled elsewhere in China; to Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Beijing, Wuhan, Chengdu, Tianjin – to many cities and villages both great and small and in each of these, as they arrived, contact between people exerted its unrelenting, unstoppable power. And some bought tickets on airplanes bound for other great cities of the world. These people flew, in a vast diaspora, to London and Paris and New York and Moscow and Cairo and Seoul and Los Angeles and hundreds of other places all over the planet.
At the end of that week, as she stood in the 3D-printed little plastic cube on beggar’s row along the Xhongxin Road, the grinding roar of the Pudong Airport Maglev Express train rushing by only meters from her, she sighed with tiredness and hunger. And as she did, she felt a quick, sharp stab of pain just beneath her breast and froze with it. She waited, then took an exploratory breath and felt again the sting, tight and painful. She set down the half-empty can of noodles she’d pulled from the trash bin near the train station, her hunger now of no importance whatsoever, and walked slowly to the filthy cushion she slept on and sat down, leaning against the rough wall of the hut to relieve the sharpness a bit.
All sound faded; she could no longer hear the noises of the poor around her; the shrieking, screaming, wailing, pleading, sobbing sounds of living that comprise the orchestration of humanity at its most base, at its very core. Already, the pugnacious noisomeness of being alive was receding, sucked away from her by some force of vacuum, as if she no longer qualified.
She knew if she went out the crawlway and found a gap in the racks of plastic cubes and looked toward the eastern sky, she would find the red eye. But there was no need to make that effort, no need to see it. The red star was there with her, inside her. Always and forever.
Reaching into the one pocket of her dress, she withdrew her one remaining belonging, a small porcelain dagger in a plastic sheath. She slowly withdrew it and testing its sharpness, pulled its point lightly across a fingernail, watching wisps curl up from it. Briefly, she considered pulling off her dress, but couldn’t find the energy, and so instead she sat forward and slipped the strap from her left shoulder, freeing her breast. Then she slowly leaned back against the wall, resting from the ever-increasing difficulty of breathing.
She idly looked down at herself, as if from a great distance, considering her breast, thinking that it had lost some fullness, observing that the brown aureole and nipple now seemed oddly accentuated. She ran a finger across her nipple, but could not feel it, and her fingers strayed to her collarbone. Walking her fingers down, she counted five ribs and found the gap between the fifth and the sixth and pressed a fingernail hard into her skin. Still, she felt nothing, but was satisfied to see a small crescent of blood mark the spot where her nail had penetrated.
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She took the dagger in her right hand and pressed the tip into the center of the little crescent, paused for an imperceptible heartbeat, then shoved the fifteen centimeters of porcelain into her flesh with all the strength she could manage.
There was strangely little pain; the primary sensation at first was one of pressure, as if her body was having trouble accepting this foreign thing inside her, resentful at having to make room for it. She stayed very still at first, not wanting to feel the knife blade within herself. But very quickly, her heart began to react; she felt it jump, it seemed to skip a beat or two, then pound wildly in her chest and as blood rushed from the wound, the pain came with it and she gasped and slumped down flat on her back, her hand dropping weakly from the hilt of the knife. Each breath now brought two kinds of pain and it grew just to the point of being unbearable, then began to ease.
The light in the cube, dim from the cheap translucent plastic, grew faint as the pain faded. She relaxed as she understood that the worst was over. She was only vaguely aware of the sensation of the knife embedded in her flesh and even the bite of the Python felt far away now.
As light deepened into a cone of blackness - broad at first on the periphery of her vision, but steadily narrowing, drawing in on her –her thoughts turned inward to the illusion of her life, the illusion of free will. What had her life meant, what had been the point of it?
And as she felt death come for her and gladly reached for it, gladly embraced it, her last thought was to wonder why - if it had all been written, all been foretold so very long ago – why was there such a thing as hope at all? Indeed, what was hope in anyone’s life, but barren islands of futility scattered across an endless ocean of sorrow?
CHAPTER FOUR
