The Dog (11 page)

It was Friday night and after dinner a pack of Claire's classmates were headed to the Kunlun. The Thai guys were rounding up people to hit the Globe Club out on the Third Ring Road. The stoners were going to the Red Dragon, and Claire heard Alicia say something about stopping by a dorm party at Beida before going to Maxim's. No one asked Claire to go anywhere.

The students departed in flights of three or four. Anticipating the moment of complete abandonment, Claire had pulled out her paperback copy of
The Fountainhead
, but she couldn't focus, and once she had the book out, she couldn't put it back, so she wound up moving her eyes over the page in a way that simulated reading, killing time until she was left at the table all alone. Not even Alicia had bothered to say goodbye. Stay cool, Claire thought, sit in and stay cool. None of it had registered with Teacher Wu. Claire was shooting daggers at him, but he didn't notice. He was useless. Empty, the cafeteria had all the ambience of a surgery theater, its zombie fluorescence glowing on the pots of plastic bamboo and assorted Chinese yard sale art catching dust in the corners.

Claire had had a talk with herself in which she'd acknowledged that, like a drop of detergent in a pan of greasy water, she'd succeeded in repelling every student at Capital Normal University School of Foreign Languages. She couldn't make herself any friendlier than she was, and, as usual, when it became apparent that she had opinions of her own, whoever she was talking to went in search of more compliant company. Claire didn't suffer fools gladly, and fools, for their part, tended to avoid her. As did the wise. And those of middling intelligence. She knew she could be brusque, but she wasn't combative, a word Alicia had swung at her like a mallet. Alicia was the combative one. A person who couldn't hold up her end of an argument wasn't worth talking to. Neither were backstabbers, and Alicia was a backstabber.

Claire had spotted Alicia as soon as they'd deplaned at PEK. She'd been impossible to miss. She was Chinese American and gorgeous and Claire could hear her voice clear across the gate, as though she were addressing the entire group from onstage, which annoyed Claire, and then everyone in the group had broken into laughter and Claire had felt like she wanted to commit a homicide. At the time, she was standing by herself because on the flight from Tokyo she had gotten into an argument with a grad student from Duke about Chinese policy in Tibet, and he'd accused her of being a contrarian and she'd called him a fat prick, and that, it appeared, had pretty much put her on social death watch. On the bus from the airport, Claire had watched Alicia, who was sitting at the back, surrounded by a bevy of suitcases, smacking her gum, staring into the middle distance like the air had done her wrong. Everyone else was looking out the windows. Claire could tell Alicia was one of those people who hardly bothered to breathe unless someone else was paying attention to her. This is a girl, Claire thought, with a trust fund and a shoplifting problem.

When they arrived at the dormitory and she checked the roommate postings, she nearly threw up. Of course the administration had stuck her with Alicia. Why wouldn't they? Claire thought. Just perfect. But she talked herself down and decided on the spot to make the best of it. That first night, they had stayed up late smoking cigarettes, Claire nodding along to Alicia's crystalline recollections of club shenanigans in the Meatpacking District, a crashed BMW on the Vineyard.

Wow, Claire said, wow, expelling jets of smoke through her nose. She hoped she didn't sound as bored as she was.

It's not like we're rich, Alicia said. You don't know rich if you think I'm rich. But Daddy does fine, she said, laughing so loud that Claire winced. Alicia declared her enemies to be numerous, which was why she'd come to live in exile in China. Even her best friends were assholes of the lowest order. Cretins, she'd said. I know that makes me an asshole, she said. But it's true. They're all assholes. Isn't everybody an asshole? she said, flopping back on her bed.

No way was Claire going to utter the polite answer, which was, No, you're not an asshole, I hardly know you but I can tell you're a good person, primarily because Claire thought Alicia was a spoiled bitch, an asshole if ever there was one. Instead, she decided to retaliate with some biographical information of her own, and Alicia propped her head up on her hand and looked irritatingly engaged, her eyes a little too fixed, her interest too measured, like the practiced sympathy of a grief counselor. She'd listened and nodded so intently that it had thrown Claire off a little. Claire wasn't sure why, but she'd even made up a story about having an affair with a professor back home. And that's why
I'm
in exile, she said.

Two weeks later, Alicia moved to a single room. It came out that she'd petitioned for a single the day after they'd arrived.

“It'll be good for both of us,” Alicia said to Claire. “Haven't you had enough of me? I know you can't stand it that I come in so late and bang around. And now you won't have to deal with my stupid-ass whining anymore. Win-win—you'll have a single!” She smiled like a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, and Claire had stood there thinking she'd believe in god if only he'd drop a Volkswagen on this horrible person.

“How? They won't let anyone switch. You have to cough up a kidney just to get a spare door key,” Claire said.

“I don't know. I asked. I thought it would be better for both of us.”

“No, you didn't,” Claire said. “What did you tell them about me?”

“Paranoid much?” Alicia said. “Christ. Don't get all weepy,” she said. “I'm just moving upstairs.”

“Why? What did I do?” Claire said.

Alicia gave her the grief counselor look. “It's not personal,” she said.

Bitch. That had been a month ago.

And now, here was Claire, finishing her meal alone, telling herself she was fine. Single. When she walked out the cafeteria doors, the pack of students milling around by the bike racks went silent.

“Oh, come on, people,” she said. She unlocked her bike, mounted up, and pumped across campus, cutting through courtyards and taking blind corners at suicidal speed, spouting a slew of bad Chinese at terrorized pedestrians.

Outside the front gates she swung into an alleyway bordered on one side by the college wall, a ten-foot concrete slab topped with broken bottles, on the other by a public bathroom, a long row of pit toilets attended by an ancient man on a folding stool. The alleyway jogged left at the corner of the wall and passageways branched off into the hutongs behind the college. The students had been warned not to use the alleyway as a shortcut to the market. Claire used the alley every chance she got.

Near the mouth of the alley she rattled past a cluster of brick hovels attached like barnacles to the college wall. Families squatted outside tending cooking fires and talking over chessboards. Children yelled at her. It occurred to Claire that Alicia would never take the alleyway. She would never experience this side of China.

It was here, Claire told herself, with the college behind her and the market ahead, that she felt most at home. She told herself she savored the taste of the unsettled air between the two arenas of existence.

At the edge of the market she dismounted. There was an hour of light left, and she could go east into the Chinese market or west into Uyghurville. Occasionally, as a test of her mettle, she ate in one of the restaurants there, and in her bag she was carrying a souvenir of her last visit, a kernel of hard brown hashish. She'd been saving it, hoping she wouldn't have to smoke it alone, entertaining the vague notion of casually mentioning to Alicia that she had it and just seeing what happened.

In the market, strings of lightbulbs hung between vendors' stands, snaking around skeletal trees and up electric poles. The street was choked with smoke, and she couldn't hear herself think for the cacophony of transistor radios, searing meat, motor scooters, the frenzy of vendors screaming into the crowd. Teenage lovers took advantage of the tight crowd to press against each other as they moved slowly up and down the road. Claire wondered what it said about the Chinese that at the end of the day they repaired to this clanging cowbell of a settlement to unwind. Scattered along the roadside like weeds, men seated on low stools sipped tea and played chess. A few stared off at nothing, puffed on pipes, and fiddled with their crotches. Beneath a loudspeaker blaring a tinny pop song, a sculptor worked dung into detailed miniature animals.

Claire felt like a snorkeler on the open sea. She couldn't read a billboard or a street sign and she knew just enough Mandarin to get by. But what she saw felt authentic, not like the pantomime that surrounded her back home. Here, there were dusky men perched atop motor trikes, buildings that fell apart before construction was complete, panes of glass peeling off skyscrapers and spinning down onto pedestrians. Swarms of bicyclists so thick she couldn't cross the street. Bread-box taxis held together with duct tape and spit. In a letter to a professor back home, she'd called it a human drama played out on a life-size stage. She'd been proud of that line. She'd seen couples in the park humping under blankets, crowds cheering bloody street fights, legless beggars trundling along on wooden pallets. Alicia had told her she had colonial fever.

*   *   *

She never saw the purse snatcher, though she was as obvious to him as a cinder block dropped into a pond. He was a pro, a shadow of a boy who existed between pauses in conversation, clinging to the underside of memory like a fly. She would have felt a dead weight in her chest if she had seen him. His hair fell in heavy ropes over his face, which was brown as old leaves and crossed with amber scars. Ten years old, he was wastewater wrung from the sponge of the world.

At the age of six he'd been grabbed off the street in Turpan and sold with a band of other children for seventy yuan a head to a dealer who transported them to Shenzhen and doubled his investment selling them to a gang. The men who ran the gang taught fast hands by placing the children in front of a pot of boiling water with a coin at the bottom. Failure to grab the coin got them a beating with a hose. After three years of picking at markets in Shenzhen, he'd managed to escape on a train to Beijing, and he'd avoided being absorbed into Beijing gangs mostly by good luck and a studied eye for kidnappers. He was a good thief. Confident, direct. It couldn't have been easier if Claire's pocketbook had jumped out of the bike basket into his hands, and with it hidden under his cotton shirt he slipped into a narrow gap between the foundations of two buildings.

He gouged the purse with a scrap of aluminum, forgoing the zipper for the pleasure of opening a hole of his own in the soft leather. With a satisfying pop it gave way: her wallet, two photos, a tampon, which he quickly unwrapped, tasted, and discarded, her student ID card, for which he had no use, a set of keys, a red pocket dictionary, a small tube of hand lotion that tasted like flowers and fish and which he drained in one gulp, followed by the ball of hash, which he swallowed whole.

In the wallet he found five 100-yuan banknotes, the most money he'd ever pulled at once. He rolled the banknotes into a tight stem and packed them into the channel between his gum and cheek. It was the safest place he knew. He could give a blowjob with the treasure secreted in his mouth, but if forced to present his backside and he'd hidden the money there, it would be lost for sure.

The thief slipped back into the market, passing within feet of Claire, drifting through the crowd like a leaf until fetching up on Sanlihe Street, a wide boulevard he had in the past avoided because the shopkeepers there cracked him on the legs with their brooms. But now it seemed to welcome him. This was as close to happiness as he'd ever been, this feeling of inner radiance spreading from his chest, warming his bones, and he began to imagine a future in which he would wear fine clothes and stride with intent through the crowded market. People would step aside.

Late that night, on a deserted street near the zoo, a pack of boys attacked him. He'd vomited out the hash by then, but its lingering effects made him an easy target. The other boys, too, had been in the market, hovering near the American, but this was a much safer play. One pried his jaws apart while another crammed a hand into his mouth. After they had the money, they beat him until he stopped struggling, and there he remained, on the cracked pavement, his lips moving wordlessly.

*   *   *

For a while, Claire stood at the edge of the market scanning the faces of passersby. A loudspeaker over her head was blasting Chinese opera, the wailing voice crackling and fuzzing against her eardrums.

Fuckers, she said. She didn't care about the money, but not having an ID was going to cause real problems. Traveling was out until she got a new one, and she had wanted to take a trip to Beidaihe to enjoy the last of the good weather, even allowing herself to imagine she might meet someone there. Behind her anger she slowly became aware of an expanding seam of loneliness, a black mood settling around her like fog.

She told herself to cut it out, that she was being stupid, that it was only a bag, but she took the long route back to the college, pushing her bike out to Sanlihe Street first, riding a mile out of her way, not even daring to look down the alleyway as she passed through the college gates.

The following Monday after classes, she paid a visit to Teacher Wu in his spartan office beneath the dormitory stairs. He was charged with tending the American students, an assignment a rising star in the English Department might have considered a temporary setback, at worst a character-building exercise, but that, in Wu's case, had precipitated the full collapse of his ambition.

He was young and opinionated, and had a habit of speaking out of turn in departmental meetings. His petitions to be allowed to return to teaching at the beginning of the next semester had been ignored, and though he tried to bear those rejections with the grim fortitude of a condemned man, he'd begun to believe that his reassignment had placed him permanently beyond redemption's reach. He had no real work to do. For the last two weeks he'd only been able to stare vacantly at the Scenery and Natural Wonders calendar hanging on the wall opposite his metal desk. With his head tipped slightly forward to accommodate the slope of the eave behind him, he chain-smoked and rearranged papers. There was a chair for students, though in the two months he'd been at his post, only Claire had visited.