The Trail to Buddha's Mirror (24 page)

Marvel thought it was funny, but Old Man got pissed off, yelled at him, and took away the bucket on the old “use it or lose it” theory, Neal supposed. And he supposed that the stench he made was his only form of vengeance, and maybe it would provoke them into killing him, which seemed like a decent option by the end of the second week. Because by the end of the second week he had given up all hope of escape or rescue.

He tried to fight it at first, tried to make himself eat, even though every mouthful meant another spasm of dysentery. He tried to make himself at least sip on the weak tea they gave him, because he knew he was getting dehydrated and that was what would kill him first, but each sip was like liquid flame, and there was that day—which day was it? how many rice bowls?—when he soiled himself and just lay there sobbing while Marvel danced around beneath him mimicking his sobs between peals of laughter and cries of “Red Kryptonite! Red Kryptonite!” and Old Man screamed at him. That was when Neal stopped eating, and the next day he stopped even trying to drink, and started the conscious process of dying. He thought about Li Lan and Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and where were they now? He thought about Simms, the incompetent son of a bitch, and then about Joe Graham.

Then he started crying again. Please, Dad, come get me. Dad. Come get me. Please.

The diarrhea stopped, because there was nothing left, and the cramps became worse. The dry fire in his stomach wrenched him upward like an inchworm crawling. The fevers came and hit him hard, twice a day. He shook with cold, the chains between his hands rattling like Marley’s Ghost, his teeth chattering. He felt as if he were being poked with thousands of icy needles. The fever would suddenly stop, and he would be rewarded with unconsciousness. The dry heaves and cramps were his alarm clocks, and the cycle would begin again, and after a while he lost track of time because there were no rice bowls to count anymore.

So he wasn’t sure when it was that Honcho showed up and threw the fit. Neal was lying in the cave, racked with cramps, when he opened his eyes and saw Honcho standing on the ladder peering at him intently. Honcho grunted with disgust, got off the ladder, and began screaming at Old Man, punctuating his major points with kicks at Marvel, who scrambled into a corner and huddled up. Honcho kept putting the boot into him as he argued with Old Man, who didn’t take the diatribe passively, but also came over and started kicking the kid.

Honcho came back up the ladder, grabbed Neal by the back of the neck, and lifted him into a sitting position. Then he launched into what seemed to Neal like a critique. He jabbed his fingers at Neal’s ribs, pointed at his eyes, and then pinched his own nostrils and made an exaggerated snorting sound. He let Neal drop, came back down the ladder, and pointed back up at him and asked what sounded like a single question.

Neal didn’t need to be a Chinese language scholar to know what the question was: Who’d want to buy a piece of shit like this?

I would, Neal murmured. I have at least eight thousand pound sterling in a bank in London, boys, and if you’ll take me back to my hotel, I’ll write you a check. And I won’t stop payment, I won’t. I promise. We can go to the bank together and cash it. You can have it all, guys.

But Honcho went on like he didn’t even hear him, like Neal was just moving his lips and babbling. Honcho pointed to Marvel, and then back to Neal and asked another question, something like: Maybe you’d like to trade places with him?

Honcho leaned over and slapped Marvel in the face a couple of times and then issued a general order: Take care of the merchandise!

He slammed the door on the way out. Old Man started to grumble, relieved his frustration by slapping Marvel, and then sent the boy out. Marvel came back a few minutes later with a large bowl of water and a rag. It took him a long time to wipe the encrusted filth off Neal. He was careful about it, turning Neal over as gently as he could and wiping Neal’s forehead when the cramps hit.

In the meantime, the old man swung into action. He dug around under his
kang
and came out with a lamp that looked like a large sterno stove, a long-stemmed pipe, and a tin cigarette case. He lit the lamp, and when he had a nice glow going, he used a long needle to spear a tiny ball of opium, a blackish green nugget. He held it over the burning lamp.

Fondue, Neal thought. Hell of a time for fondue.

The old man screamed at Marvel, who scrambled down the ladder and stood in waiting. The old man ignited the opium, stuck it into the pipe, and handed it to Marvel, who climbed back into the loft and held the pipe to Neal’s lips.

“Kryptonite?” Neal mumbled. He brushed the pipe away.

“Kryptonite,” Marvel said, and pushed the pipe back to Neal’s lips.

“Red Kryptonite or Green Kryptonite?”

“Green.”

“Okay, then.”

Neal took a short draw on the pipe as the old man fried another ball of opium. Marvel went back down and fetched in the pipe and went back up to Neal.

“Flash,” said Marvel.

Neal didn’t fight the pipe this time or the next. The fourth time Marvel came with the pipe, Neal reached up for it and held it to his own lips.

Neal floated to the ceiling and then through the roof. He drifted up over the Walled City into the blue sky and then he flew right into Li Lan’s painting, the one on the mountainside above the abyss. He sat down with Li Lan on the precipice and looked down at the other Li Lan in the canyon beneath them.

“I found you,” he said.

She set her brushes down and took his hand. “No,” she said gently, “I led you here.”

“Why did you leave me?”

“I knew you could fly.”

He felt the tears well up in his eyes and then spill over onto his cheeks. It felt good, so good to cry, and he let the tears pour into his open mouth and they tasted sweet, and she must have known that because she took a single tear with her tongue, swallowed it, and smiled.

He recognized her then.

“Kuan Yin,” he said. “You are Kuan Yin.”

His eyes flooded with more tears and she lapped them off his face. She opened his mouth with her tongue and drank more tears as the sky became a brilliant blue and she took him inside her and gently rocked him. She wrapped her hands around the back of his head and pushed his mouth to her nipple and fed him. She softly chanted his name and the pain receded and then it was only pleasure, only pleasure, only pleasure, and then she was weeping and he soothed her straining neck with his lips as the wet and warmth of her moved on him. And then her reflection floated up from the abyss and reached out her hand and Li Lan took it and held it tightly and drew her reflection into herself and Neal saw his own reflection in the mists below—his eyes sunken, his face pale with pain and hunger—and he reached out and took it and drew it into himself and then they were all together, all inside each other, and they fell off the edge of the cliff and into the mists.

11

Xao Xiyang took a deep drag of the cigarette, stubbed the butt out in the full ashtray, and lit another one. It was a deep character flaw, he knew, that anxiety made him chain-smoke. He should meditate instead, or do t’ai chi, but he lacked the patience. Another character flaw.

Besides, his smoking made the interior of the limousine smell bad. His late wife had complained about it constantly—it had been one of the many running jokes they shared—and he felt a quick stab of sorrow that she was not there to nag him about it.

He looked out the window at the wide boulevard. His was one of the few automobiles among the thousands of bicycles, their bells jingling like an immense flock of chirping birds. The car came to a stop at a four-way intersection in front of a traffic island on which a white-uniformed policeman waved his arms and did a showy pirouette to face a new stream of traffic. Behind the officer loomed a gigantic billboard picturing a young couple beaming at their baby. Their single baby. It was a boy, Xao Xiyang observed. In the birth-control propaganda, the one child was always a boy. Not so in life, thought Xao, whose wife had given him two beloved daughters, no sons.

The officer spotted the official limousine and hurriedly stopped the other traffic and waved it through. Normally, Xao would have told his driver to wait, but today he was in a hurry. On most other days he loved to linger on Chengdu’s wide, tree-lined streets, to get out of the car and walk the sidewalks, look over the shoulders at the many artists who painted the flowers, the trees, and the pretty old buildings. Or perhaps stop in at one of the many small restaurants and sample some noodles in bean paste, or tofu in the fiery pepper sauce that was the city’s specialty. Sometimes he would stand and chat with the crowd that inevitably formed around him, listen to their concerns, their complaints, or maybe just share the latest joke.

But there was no time for joking today, he had no appetite for noodles or tofu, and the only painter that concerned him was the one he had code-named China Doll. She had—unwittingly—left a mess behind her in Hong Kong, a mess that threatened to ruin his entire plan, the one he had worked on for so many years. Ah, well, he reminded himself, she was still something of an amateur, and amateurs will make mistakes. But still their mistakes must be made right.

She had done well, however. She had made her way through and brought her package with her to Guangzhou, where his secret ally controlled the security police. Despite his eagerness to see her, and finally to meet the scientist she had brought with her, he had let them sit hidden in Guangzhou until it was safe to bring them into Sichuan.

He had thought that would be a matter of a few weeks, but then the trouble started in Hong Kong. Who would ever have thought there would be so much commotion over one young man? So many people looking for him, making so much noise. If that noise reached certain ears in Beijing … well, he wouldn’t let it, that was all. He would take the necessary steps, had taken the necessary steps, and that, after all, was the best way to set one’s anxieties to rest.

He looked out the tinted windows at the neat row of mulberry trees that lined the road. Soon the pavement would end, and the road would turn to that deep red earth so distinctive of Sichuan. Already he was seeing the signs of the countryside: peasants laboring beneath shoulder poles, cyclists maneuvering bicycles heavily laden with bamboo mats or cages of chickens—even one with a pig tied across the rear hub, children riding on the necks of their buffaloes, urging them off the road toward the rice paddies.

The sights raised his spirits, reminding him of the ultimate aim of all his planning and plotting. Beijing would doubtless call it treason, would give him the bullet or the rope if they caught him, but Xao knew that his treachery was the most patriotic act of a patriotic lifetime. May the god we don’t believe exists bless Li Lan, he thought. She has brought us the scientist—the expert—and with his help these children riding so happily to their chores will never know the suffering their parents did. They will never be hungry.

If you want to eat, go see Xao Xiyang, he thought, mocking himself. Well, the great Xao Xiyang had better clean up this mess in Hong Kong, clean it up before those red ideologue bastards in Beijing use it to gain the upper hand again. Use his disgrace to embarrass Deng and tie his hands.

He used the cigarette butt to light a fresh one. He told his driver to speed up and then sat back to think.

It took an hour to get to the production team headquarters. His car had been spotted and the word of his arrival had preceded him. Old Zhu was standing in the circular gravel driveway to greet him. Old Zhu, the production team leader, was only thirty-three, but he looked old. Xao suspected that even his schoolmates had called him Old Zhu. Old Zhu was impossibly earnest. He cared about only one thing: growing rice. And in China, Xao mused, that
would
tend to make one old before one’s time.

Xao got out of the car and greeted Zhu warmly, trying to head off the rapid-fire bows that were Zhu’s habit.

“Have you had rice today?” he asked Zhu. It was the traditional Chinese greeting, asking if the person had eaten. It was not always a rhetorical question.

“I am full, thank you. And you?” asked Zhu, managing to get three bows into his answer.

“I can never get enough of the rice grown by the Dwaizhou Production Brigade.”

Zhu flushed with pleasure and led Xao into a two-story stone building that served as a meeting hall, recreation center, and hospitality suite. They went into a large room that had several large round tables and bamboo chairs. On one of the tables were a pot of tea, two cups, two glasses of orange drink, four cigarettes, and a small stack of wrapped hard candies. Zhu pulled out a chair for Xao and waited until he was seated before taking a chair himself. Then he poured tea into the two cups and waited to hear the purpose of the chairman’s visit.

Xao sipped his tea and politely nodded his approval, provoking another blush.

“Your figures for this quarter,” he said, “are excellent.”

“Thank you. Yes. I also think that the brigade has done well.”

“Of particular satisfaction are the figures from the privatized land.”

Zhu nodded seriously. “Yes, yes. Especially in pigs, a bit less so in rice, but overall we are very pleased.”

“As well you should be.”

Xao took a swallow of the hideously sweet orange drink and forced himself to smile. He lit two cigarettes and handed one to Zhu.

“I think,” Xao said, “that we shall be making further advances soon.”

Zhu stared at the floor, but Xao could see the excitement in his eyes.

“Even so?” Zhu asked.

“So … if I were able to give you a certain rare resource, you feel you would be able to make good use of it.”

Zhu didn’t hesitate. “Yes. Oh, yes.”

Xao was surprised to feel his heart pounding. Such was the state of paranoia in their people’s republic that he even hesitated to trust Zhu, Old Zhu, the ultimate farmer, the man he had watched repair tractors as if he were operating on his own children, the man he had seen thigh-deep in the paddies teaching the old ones better ways to harvest, the man he had seen weep over the arrival of a shipment of fertilizer.