He had a fear that his life now was just an interlude of hui guang fan zhao, a brief moment before it all came back, worse. And for so long now he had been in this state by himself. He stared up at the digital floor numbers flashing, descending.
He stepped out the big front doors onto a busy boulevard clogged with traffic. All over him was a pall of thick, brown-tinged air, gritty with particulates whose names he knew by heart. He fitted on his headphones, dialed up Cheb Mami, and walked against the insinuating Algerian rhythm, a sound that first emerged in the port town of Oran in the 1930s and now was electrified into the modern world, pulsing in his mind as he descended into the subway station at Chongwenmen.
Bai stopped at a chicken farm outside of Changsha. It was a place where he had made an arrangement. He pulled into the dirt yard and right away caught the pungent scent of blood and slaughter. He’d picked this place over many others for its low prices.
He pulled up to the guard and handed down his paperwork. “Preorder,” he said. “Two thousand pounds.”
The guard with a round face and brushy stand-up hair took the lot number down and punched it into the computer. He squinted at the machine. His face was indifferent. “How are you going to pay?”
“Cash.” Bai counted out from a wad of bills.
The guard took it. “Gate forty-six,” he said.
Bai backed the truck up to the portal. He had already secured the central compartment where the art was stored. Now he opened the freezer in the back and stood to the side while young men, migrant workers, illiterates, faces dark from growing up outdoors, eyes leathered already at twenty, hands swathed in big rough gloves of undyed cotton, numbly packed a ton of frozen chickens into the back of his gleaming, purring, ice-fogging truck. The plucked, stiff carcasses made a stacked wall against the door. Bai watched, his dizzying ambition lifting him high and his cold death fear whispering to him from hell. He smoked to contain himself. When the men were done he tipped them and he drove away.
By that afternoon, Lia had ended up at a bar she knew on Dengshikou, called Counter Culture. It was one of the theme places that had become so common here as proprietors resorted to gimmicks to draw crowds. It had a sixties motif in the U.S. style, with psychedelic posters, a folkie jukebox, and black lights, none of which especially spoke to Lia. But it also had a pinball machine so light and hair-trigger it might have been brand-new, though it was definitely an antique.
She walked over to the corner, behind the tables, and got out her two-yuan coins. The machine was called DMZ, and its back panel had comic-book graphics of American soldiers slogging through a Vietnamese jungle. A little hip humor, she thought, not without edge. She dropped in the coins and felt the machine pop with a satisfying bass thunk as it credited the game. She leaned in, pressed the GO button, and slammed the first ball up the chute.
It rocketed up the side and exploded all over the lit-up bumpers flashing at the top. She used just enough shiver to keep the ball moving, high up, pulling it into pockets and then popping it out again to bounce off bumper pins and side flippers. Not thinking. That was what she liked. Keeping it in play.
She felt her cell in her pocket and was aware of how much she wanted it to ring. She got the ball over to the flippers and caught it, belayed it, held it while she took a long look at the board. This thing with him was only a brief meeting. Or maybe he liked her, but not that way. She stood rock-still and looked down at the perfect ball she held on her flipper, the color and glimmer of mercury, breathless and ready for the moment she would let it go. She could feel her phone against her leg. She did want him to call her, though; this was her true and hoi moon feeling. Maybe it was just a moment, but she felt connected to him. She just wanted to be where he was, and talk to him. She rolled the ball back, snapped the flipper in the middle of the right millisecond, and sent the ball out into its world of finite space.
Bai drove straight on to his first wife’s farm, the next place where he could safely park the truck. He roared into Daoqi Township, shaking with exhaustion, gripping the wheel at the sight of the familiar road at last. Those curves those passes those hillsides, unrolling in front of him, black road in the dissipating light… his steering slipped into unconsciousness. He’d lived here as a young man, newly married. The roads were better now, there were more buildings in the village, but it hadn’t changed so much. He circled the terraced paddies in full yield. He wound around green-tufted hills. It was almost dark. The world behind fell away in steps. At the bottom, barely visible in the shadows, ran a silver ribbon of river.
He climbed up and up and finally steered into a small valley: fields, gardens, and animals. Yujia lived here with her brother and his family. They worked the farm. He pulled into the driveway and parked under the mat-shed.
As he stepped across the mahogany earth, smelled the honeysuckle and the gardenia and the rustling wet bamboo, and saw the lit doorway across the packed barnyard ahead, he let joy overtake him. He strode forward, thinking of his wife’s round arms, her knot of dark hair, and the meal, spiked with fried hot peppers, she would prepare for him later.
His phone went off in his pocket. “Wei,” he said, stopping right where he was, his feet sinking in the animal-rich dirt.
“Bai,” said his friend’s voice. “It’s Zhou. Listen.”
“I’m listening.”
“They’re dead.”
“Who?” Bai had to say, though of course, he knew.
“Hu and Sun,” Zhou answered. “They’re dead. Shot.”
“When?”
“Today.”
A long silence hung between the two men on their palm-size satellite phones. Bai stared at the low, baked-brick, timber-raftered house against the Hunan hillside, the warm yellow lights already burning in its windows. Life was a gift. Never forget. Let the door open on a view of mountains. Hoi moon.
And later that night Zhou was to meet him to help him drive on south. He knew that now he had to at least give Zhou an opening, a chance to back out and still keep face if he did so. “Shall I still see you tonight?” Bai asked as if the matter were an offhand one.
“Of course!” Zhou said. “Don’t fear. You’ll see me. I’ll be there.”
In the end she had to wait until the next morning for Michael to call her. When her phone lit up she was still half asleep. She clicked in her hearing aids. She didn’t know who it was. “This is Lia,” she said in her best half-awake work voice.
“Where were you?” he said, and he sounded right next to her, right in her ear. “I watched for you to come back last night but you never came.”
“Hey,” she said, happiness rising in her at the sound of his voice. So here he was. “I was tired, I went right to bed when I came back. I was celebrating. The deal’s done!”
“Over?”
“Yes. Sold.”
“That’s wonderful,” he said. “That’s great for you. And it worked out?”
“Yes,” she said, “I guess it did.” Whether she’d missed something or not, it was over.