Neon Lotus (16 page)

After that,
they passed trucks frequently. Common Good did not speak to her again for
perhaps an hour, and then he bade her to stay silent and quite still. ‘This is
the checkpoint.”

He came to a
complete stop. Marianne hugged her knees up to her chest and tried to make
herself small.

“I’ve only
entered this gate a thousand times,” she heard Common Good say. “And every one
of those times, you’ve been here to take my card and make sure that I’m who I
say I am. Will you never trust me?”

A thin voice
replied, “On the day that I trust a Tibetan, he will rob me, cut my tongue out,
and shoot me in the back.”

“But I’m the
governor’s own prospector!”

“All the
more reason to keep a close eye on you. Take your card.”

Common Good
muttered his thanks and the jeep lurched forward. Marianne stifled a curse as
she banged her head against the side of the car. Sounds of traffic were all
around, in particular the groaning whine of the huge trucks. She looked out
through a slit near Common Good’s shoulder, where she had seen nothing but the
sky for hours. Now she saw buildings crowding out the light of late afternoon,
tall windowless structures the color of rust, caught behind fences fringed with
barbed wire. She saw mountains of broken rocks and steep conveyor belts
carrying buckets of earth up into the dark mouths of factories. She saw no
people though she heard them all around her, crying out, coughing under clouds
of dust, protesting angrily in voices that sounded like unoiled machinery.

The
buildings closed in, no longer factories now but homes—or so she thought. They
were tall as the factories, also windowless and corroded, but people lived on
the catwalks and rooftops. Ladders angled everywhere; sheet-metal walls had
been peeled back to form jagged doorways into darkness. She felt her shock turn
to sadness, and memories came to her of other days in Tibet. These were not
fragments from a prior life, but merely remembrances of photographs she had
seen of old Tibetan towns, whitewashed buildings, trapezoidal windows trimmed
in rainbow hues. She had not thought any part of Tibet could be so crowded.
After weeks on the plains, she felt claustrophobic here in the warrens of the
Mines of Joy.

She pulled
the tarp over her face like a veil and mourned the passing of the old ways.
They would never come again. Even if Tibet regained its independence, the
people would have to find their way through an utterly changed world. But who
among them could have remembered the old days that lay so far behind?

The jeep rolled
to a halt. Common Good flung the tarp aside and leapt out of the car. She had
expected daylight, not the darkness she found. Sitting up she saw that they
were inside a tall building, the walls and ceilings obscured by shadow. Other
jeeps, some dismantled, were parked about the place. She got out of the jeep
gingerly; her joints ached from the confinement.

“Quickly,”
said Common Good. “This way.”

Slinging a
knapsack over his shoulder, he headed across the gloom toward a rectangle of
space even darker than the rest of the garage. It was a door. He fumbled along
the wall, then cursed.

“The light’s
burnt out. Give me your hand.”

He led her
into the dark passage. “Stairs here, step up. Now a turn to the right. Here we
go. Not far now. Step down.”

She saw a
thin frame of light just ahead. He released her hand. She heard a loud creaking
as the lines widened to silhouette an opening door. He leaned out into
daylight, looked both ways, then beckoned to her. She hurried after him into a
narrow, stinking alley between high walls of metal. A few faded prayer flags
flapped overhead; she guessed they were illicit, but she couldn’t imagine an
inspector coming here. Common Good rushed down the alley to another door, which
he quickly unlocked. Marianne heard a barking dog, a child beginning to wail.
She started

to look back the way they had come,
but Common Good seized her wrist and pulled her inside.

The door
banged shut. A dim light glowed in one corner of the room, which was crammed
full of crates and electrical junk. The cramped walls were no more than
splintered screens made out of dismantled wooden crates; they rose perhaps
seven feet high and then ended. Above the walls was darkness. Looking up, she
saw chinks of light high above, and shadowed shapes that were difficult to
identify.

“Some tea?”
Common Good asked.

“This—this
is your home?”

“Lavish,
isn’t it? I have one of the larger apartments, being the governor’s man. I got
first pick when they emptied this plant. The town keeps moving, you see, to
follow the veins of ore. It leaves a trail of wreckage and abandoned factories
behind it, but they come in handy as long as our population continues to grow”

“Can’t you
spread yourselves more thinly? There’s so much land around you. . .”

He shook his
head, laughing. “Yes, but it would be harder to keep control of us that way,
wouldn’t it? Such is life in the Mines of Joy.”

He started a
fire in a small stove, then filled a kettle from a distillation tank that
occupied one corner of the room. Setting the kettle on the flames, he said,
“I’ll go get her now.”

Marianne
nodded. “Please do.”

Common Good
disappeared into the space between two walls and she heard him moving off into
the distance. Sinking down on a cushioned crate, she watched the fire for a
moment; then she glanced up at the emptiness above.

Those
shadows . . . she could see now that some were moving.
Suddenly a flame sprang to life high above her, throwing its bluish light on
several faces huddled close together. She realized that she must be looking up
through the mesh of a catwalk on which a family was encamped.

Dizzy, she
had to look down again. What kind of privacy did Common Good have? Why didn’t
he spread a tent of cloth over his walls?

Of course,
she realized, the darkness of the factory provided a great deal of privacy. She
could hardly see a thing of the people above her.

Her host
reappeared, wide-eyed, rushing into the room. “I don’t understand—”

Marianne
knew, even before he spoke, that the woman was gone. As she started to her
feet, there was a loud rapping on the metal door.

Common Good
pushed her into the darkness between two of the screens. She found herself in a
dim, confusing corridor made of partitions set in a zigzag path. She stepped
back farther into the dark, then turned through the first available opening.
There was no light but she could hear every sound in the room she had left
behind.

“Yes?”
Common Good said.

“Open
quickly,” came a muffled voice. “It’s Munpa.”

As the door
screeched open, a bit of light slanted briefly over the top of the screens
where Marianne hid. It went out again once the visitor was inside.

“You’re
wondering where she is,” said Munpa.

“Who? I
don’t—”

“You’re in
trouble, Common Good. I came to warn you. The inspectors were looking for you
this morning. I knew they wanted that woman you’ve been hiding. Don’t act
stupid now—we’ve seen her from above.”

Marianne
glanced up at the dark catwalks, the flickering lights. She wondered if the
people in the heights were watching even
now,
gazing down at them with great owlish eyes.

“The
inspectors?” Common Good said. “They found her?”

“No! We saw
them coming and we carried her away. We have her now. But you know they won’t
stop looking for her; and they’ll want you too.”

“She’s with
your family?”

“Yes. I want
you to come talk to her. She’s a madwoman, isn’t she? Is that why you brought
her in? It was a kind thing to do, Common Good, but you could very well die for
it.”

Common Good
said nothing for a moment. “It was kind of you to rescue her, and equally
dangerous.”

“Well . . . we’re
all in this together, aren’t we?”

“Ah, Munpa,
this is terrible. Do you think—?”

“Sh!
Listen.”

Marianne
listened to the silence but heard nothing. Munpa’s ears must have been sharper
than her own. Then she heard a tiny crackle of static and an even tinier
voice—like the buzzing of a fly trapped in a corner of the other room.

“They’re
coming back,” Munpa said.

Common Good
said nothing.

“Did you
hear me? We must get out of here.”

“But Munpa,
I can’t. . . .”

“Lock the
door, damn it. We’re not going out that way. How do you think we got your
madwoman out of here?”

She heard
Munpa coming down the hall, passing the room in which she hid. “Come on, Common
Good,” he said.

Seconds
later, a shadow stepped in next to her.

“You heard?”
said Common Good. “We can’t stay here.”

“I heard,”
Marianne whispered.

“Who’s
that?” said Munpa. He appeared in the doorway, a short wiry man with hair that
glinted silver in the dim light. “What’s going on here? Not another one! Common
Good—”

“Explain
later,” said Marianne. “Let’s
go
.”

Munpa shook
his head and went back down the hall, deeper into the warehouse. Marianne
followed right behind him. Suddenly Munpa stopped and reached up into the dark
air. His hand closed around a glinting bar which he drew down to the level of
his waist. She could vaguely see a hanging ladder.

“You first,
then,” he said to her. “I’ll have to steady it for the two of you.”

She grabbed
the rung, stepped onto it, and boosted herself up into space. The bars of the
ladder were hard plastic, but the rest of it was rope; her weight should have
sent it swaying through the dark, but Munpa anchored it from below.

“Now you,
Common Good,” came Munpa’s voice.

Below her, a
second weight dragged on the ladder, straightening it for her. She climbed more
quickly now, and as she went she thought to look up.

Above was
nothing but darkness; the few faint lights she had seen before were all
extinguished now. For a dizzying moment, she felt as if she were hanging head
downward, dangling into a pit. Then she heard a loud pounding from below.

 “Open up!”
came a muffled cry. The pounding continued. Suddenly, a ray of light shot
through the depths of the factory, as if a dull beam had been switched on. The
door to Common Good’s apartment had crashed inward.

She froze,
gripping the ladder in fear, unable to climb, unable to look away. From above,
Common Good’s ramshackle home looked like a cluttered maze. Shadows blocked
the doorway momentarily as four figures burst into the place.

The ladder
lurched a final time and began to sway. A hand grasped her ankle.

“Climb!”
Common Good whispered.

She took a
deep breath and tore her eyes from the scene below. Reaching for the next rung,
she pulled herself up.

Sounds of
destruction clamored under her heels. She glanced down and saw that the
inspectors were probing the angles of the maze with flashlights. She waited for
one of the beams to fly upward and catch the three of them there, helplessly
strung across space. The searchers began to kick down the walls. The crude
wooden screens toppled like dominoes.

“Stop that,
you idiot!” someone shouted. “He could easily hide beneath a mess like that.”

She didn’t
want to wait for the lights to catch them. She climbed higher and higher, her
eyes on the few specks of daylight that peeked through the factory roof like
distant stars. The darkness robbed her of any sense of proportion. She put out
her hand again—

And strong
fingers caught her wrist.

“Quickly!”
said a woman’s voice above her.

Another hand
grasped her shoulders and pulled. For a moment she lost her foothold on the
ladder and was left hanging in space. Then the hands dragged her onto a steady
metal surface. She clung to the thin mesh as if it were solid ground, grateful
for any stability. She lay there panting, trying to make no sound, until she
felt a body next to hers. Common Good whispered, “Sonam Gampo?”