Dream of the Blue Room (17 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

Near dawn, rain turns to mist. The sun appears, disappears. The ship wakes. We arrive at Yeuyang, where a day and night’s worth of activities have been planned. I go to Graham’s cabin. He answers the door in his bathrobe. He looks stooped, almost frail, and he is sweating. “I’m feeling very bad today,” he says, standing in the doorway so that I can’t enter.

“I’ll stay with you.”

“You should go into town. I need to rest.”

“Then I’ll sit by the bed, in case you need me.”

“Please,” he says.

“Okay. I’ll go to my room. You can ring if you want something.”

“No.” His voice is firm, almost angry. Then, more gently, “I don’t want you to see me like this. Not right now.”

“Okay.” I stand on my toes and try to kiss him, but I barely brush his lips with my own before he pulls away.

Since Wuhan, the ship has fallen into disarray. Yesterday’s breakfast trays line the hall, an abandoned housekeeping cart blocks the entrance to the stairs, and the stairwell is littered with empty Baiji Beer bottles. On the floating dock I find Dave and Stacy, talking quietly and sipping coffee from paper cups. When I approach, Dave lets his hand fall from Stacy’s shoulder.

An old bus picks us up at the docks and takes us over muddy roads until we reach the village. Storefronts stand so close to the road that we could easily reach out and shake hands with someone sitting at one of the many square tables along the street. Young girls and old women crush against the bus as it inches along, trying to sell us deep-fried dough sticks and pork dumplings. The air smells salty and sweet. My mouth waters. I press four one-yuan notes into the outstretched hand of a girl in a floral print dress, and she hands me six pot-stickers wrapped in a thin layer of paper. I share them with Dave and Stacy.

“Delicious,” Stacy says.

Dave wipes grease from his lips with the back of his hand. “Anybody thirsty?”

From another woman who walks alongside the bus, shouting, we purchase three bottles of orange drink, strikingly similar to the grainy, too-sweet Tang of my youth. Dave is sitting between me and Stacy on the narrow seat. I no longer begrudge her presence. In some way, she eases the burden of my guilt, makes it easier for me to go down this road with Graham. Despite the things she’s been through—the pregnancy, the addiction—there seems to be a hopefulness about her that I haven’t possessed myself for many years. Before Amanda Ruth’s murder, I felt every bit my age: eighteen. The world seemed like a thing to be discovered, it was easy to hope and dream. But something changed in me the moment I found out that she had died. It seemed to me that there was nothing left to discover. For many years after that, I felt that the one defining moment of my life had already happened, that other events would never hold for me any real sense of drama. Everything thereafter would be like a punch line delivered long after the joke was over. I have lived my entire adult life with a sense that the timing is all off.

We pass out of the busy town center, onto a rural country road. The bus stops. “Everybody off!” Elvis Paris shouts.

The driver opens the doors and we shuffle off the bus. Something feels wrong, vaguely sinister, and then I understand what has caught me off guard: an absence of sound, the first silence I’ve heard in this country. Even our tour group is hushed, as if we have walked into a trap, or some sacred place. The street, empty of vendors and bicycles, feels like a ghost town. I am reminded of Destiny, a small island off the coast of Georgia that is closed to the public and can only be reached by boat. In the seventies the island was home to a naval base and a community of 6,000, but a radioactive leak caused the entire place to be evacuated in a single afternoon. When I went there as a high school junior in 1988, it was with a boy whose father was in charge of making sure the island remained unoccupied. The post required him to live on the radioactive island, in a small wooden house on the beach. The boy and I took a motorboat from Briar Island over to Destiny and spent a couple of hours there, strolling through the deserted streets. Shop doors remained open, toys rusted in driveways, and through the windows of hundreds of identical white houses we could see the ordinary accoutrements of life caught at a standstill. Dishes set neatly for dinner languished under a thick layer of dust. Houses made of Lincoln Logs stood unfinished on the floors of children’s bedrooms. Newspapers lay spread over the arms of moth-eaten easy chairs. The boy told me that no one had died there, that the evacuation had gone smoothly and everyone had made it out okay, but I couldn’t help but feel the presence of 6,000 ghosts breathing through the thin walls of those empty houses.

“Jenny?” Dave says, touching my elbow. “You okay?”

I nod and send him a silent thanks with my eyes. It occurs to me that maybe this is all he needs—some slight indication that I’m losing my way, that I won’t make it without him—and that if I can give him this, not just now but forever, he’ll come back to me.

After a couple of minutes in disconcerting silence, a muffled noise approaches from somewhere down the narrow street—the faint sound of footsteps padding along the road, accompanied by the steady, soft beating of drums. The mist is so thick I can only see inches in front of my face. The drums become louder, and the shuffling of feet increases from a whisper to a rustle. Several figures appear, draped in white cloth. They move slowly, methodically, the hems of their long garments billowing as they walk. Were it not for the red cloth shoes that emerge and retreat, emerge and retreat, beneath the white cloaks, I might believe that these figures were not human at all, but spirits whose calling it is to wander the chilled streets of this silent town. They continue steadily toward the tour group, which parts to let them pass. It seems we are invisible to them. Beneath the rumble of the drums another sound begins to take shape—a low disturbing hum, as if thousands of invisible flies had descended. As the column progresses I see that it is not flies, but crickets, born along in bell-shaped bamboo cages by several young girls. The girls wear red fitted dresses and once-white shoes that have been stained to the dusty orange color of the road. Some of them carry colorful paper wreaths. Each girl looks straight ahead, as if entranced, her long dark braid twitching slightly with the motion of her spine.

A camera flashes, then another, and the figures continue to march, the thrum-thrum-thrum of the drums and the nervous hum of the crickets ascending into mist. Flash, click, hum. I imagine that when the photographs are developed, the videos slid into VCRs, there will be only a cool blue shading where these figures were, and the small crowd of tourists will look like lunatics, gazing intently at nothing.

“A funeral,” Elvis Paris proclaims through his megaphone, breaking the spell. “They will burn effigies to send with the deceased to the spirit world.”

I wonder where the body is. Has it already been burned? Several men and women bring up the rear of the procession, holding empty tin cans. They approach us, asking for money. “Guanxi for the spirits,” Elvis Paris explains. As the procession disappears up the narrow street, into the swirling fog, I see Elvis Paris negotiating with one of the tin can people. He takes a few bills from the can, then returns to us, smiling. “Next we go see tower above Dongquing Lake,” he says. “Much beautiful calligraphy there.”

Only then does it occur to me that no one has died; the funeral procession was arranged for the tourists. We have been fooled. I’ve come not to China, but to an amusement park version of the country. One result of the publicity about the Three Gorges Dam is that tourists are flocking here in unprecedented numbers to see the gorges before their disappearance. In response to the massive influx of tourism money, many of the towns and villages along the river have become stages on which a colorful comedy is performed. But I know that the real China lives behind this façade. For every staged funeral procession in which there is no body and no burial, no grieving relatives whose duty it is to send their loved one on to the netherworld, surely there is another procession that takes place when the tourists have left and the ship has gone. Surely, beneath the pithy melody that is the tourism trade, an ancient harmony hums: births, deaths, marriages, joy, sickness, jealousy, lust—all the messy stuff of the human condition, the adulteries and dirty dishes that do not make for good home videos. I long to see the true blood and bone of China, the hidden inner life. I owe it to Amanda Ruth to slip behind the curtain, find my footing, to walk beyond the props and stage lights and find out how the set is made.

Later, following a full day of shopping and eating, Elvis Paris rounds everyone up and raises his megaphone. “We take bus to traditional Mongolian dance!” he says. “We sleep tonight in traditional yurt!”

The ragtag band of soggy tourists cheers. No one seems to question the authenticity of this experience. We’re thousands of miles from Mongolia; there are no yurts here. But this is China Lite, and no one protests. The bus sputters, farting exhaust into the air, and everyone climbs aboard. Dave hangs back to let me get in.

“You go ahead,” I say. “I want to spend the night in Yeuyang.”

“Please come with us,” he says. I’m touched by the sincerity of his invitation, this new tenderness toward me, but I want to be alone.

Elvis Paris overhears. “Impossible,” he says, stepping between us. “No foreigner motels in Yeuyang.”

“That’s okay. I couldn’t sleep anyway. I’ll just walk around.”

“Cannot do that!”

“Why?”

For a moment he is stumped, but then it comes to him. “Too dark! You cannot see! You fall and break your arm.” He examines my arm with a great deal of concern, as if it is already broken.

“Thank you, but I’ve already decided.”

“This not good. You have problems with local authorities. Not normal for foreign woman to walk alone at night.” Now, I can tell he’s genuinely worried—if not about me, then about himself.

“I’ll be quiet. If the authorities question me, I won’t tell them I’m with the ship.”

He seems relieved, but not so relieved that he doesn’t argue with me for another ten minutes. The people on the bus are getting restless, though, and Elvis sees that he’s not going to change my mind. “Very strange,” he says, standing in the doorway of the bus. “No American woman ever do this. No Chinese woman ever do this. You come with us. Mongolian dances very beautiful.”

But the driver has had enough, and the bus pulls away, spattering mud up behind it. Dusk settles over Yeuyang. At outdoor tables, people talk and laugh and follow me with their eyes. I wander into the darkest alley I can find, away from the scrutiny of so many onlookers. The blue lights of tiny television sets flicker through the windows of bamboo huts and hutongs, centuries-old structures of stone and brick. Through the narrow doorways I can see into open courtyards. In one, a young girl is bathing by candlelight in a metal tub; her wet hair flows over the edge of the tub and touches the ground. Beside her an old woman dozes. In another courtyard a shapely woman bends over a basin, brushing her teeth. From some hidden room come familiar sounds—someone is making love.

All night long I wander. Gradually, the village drifts off to sleep. At some point I find myself on a hillside, walking between the terraced rows of a newly harvested paddy field. I take off my shoes, feeling cool mud between my toes. It reaches above my ankles, making a pleasant sucking sound as I walk. The fields look green and damp in the moonlight. I remember nights on Epson Downs Street as a child, how I would wake in someone else’s yard. Looking down I would see my yellow nightgown and know that I had been sleepwalking. In the stillness of the suburban night I felt a familiar panic. The smell of chlorine from neighbors’ pools tinted the humid summer air. Dogs barked. In the distance, eighteen-wheelers lumbered by on the highway. Crickets chirped, oak branches moaned, pool filters hummed, the summer night filled me with a secret longing and an unnamed fear. I raced in the direction of home, certain my bare feet left telltale prints in the neighbors’ lawns. In the morning they would wake, go outside to fetch their papers, and see the shape of my foot in their otherwise impeccable grass. I was sure they would call my parents, and I would be grounded for trespassing.

At some point I am overwhelmed by a desperate need for sleep. It is new to me, this longing, this feeling of my eyes sagging shut. My body aches with tiredness. I can think of nothing but sleep. At the edge of the paddy field I come upon a small square of packed red earth. I clean my feet and ankles with grass, pull my sweater tight around me and lie down on my back. The moon overhead is nearly round, the earth still damp from rain. Cars whisper on some distant road. There is the sound of night creatures, crickets, as loud as those of my childhood, their frantic hum playing backup to the silvering rush of the river. I feel an unfamiliar sensation in my brain—a shutting down, a slow and soundless closing, a relief, a deep and dreamless nothing. Sleep.

At dawn, emerging from the fields, I find myself in another, smaller village. The sun has just begun to come up, and the village is still damp from the night, flushed an orangey pink. Entering this place I feel as if I have been here before. The slope of the narrow street, the eaves of the houses casting shadows on the pavement, the sound of footsteps in an alley—a plastic shoe hitting someone’s heel, again and again and again—this rhythm I remember, this smell of new rain and old clothes dripping on a line. From out of nowhere, then, another familiar sound, the ringing of a telephone. I pass an alley and there, beneath the joined eaves of two houses, a young woman sits behind a table. In front of her there is a red rotary dial telephone, and beside that an oil lamp, its wick glowing orange. The young woman speaks into the phone, sees me, then hangs up, shouting something out to me.