“So… after lunch. Can we go there?”
Because, yeah. I just have to push it.
He closes his eyes and does that little grimace I’ve come to know so well. “Why?” he asks with a sigh.
I shrug. “Just… because.”
The truth is, there’s no real reason I should go at all. I just want to see what he’ll say. Maybe I want to make him mad, I don’t know. So he can turn me down and I can go back to a safe distance, where I don’t have to trust him.
“Okay.” He picks up a mouthful of spinach and peanuts with his chopsticks. “We can make up a story to tell them, I think.”
Well, shit.
Turns out her place isn’t that far from the restaurant. It’s right near the Line 13 qinggui stop for Da Zhong Si, the Big Bell Temple, which John once told me was near his childhood home. I never did find out if that was the truth or not. I did visit the temple once. It’s now a “bell museum.” The front courtyard selling souvenirs: bells and Buddhas, T-shirts, kites, and toys. The temple’s surrounded by a forest of tall, skinny high-rises painted in this color scheme of yellowish cream and brick red that you see everywhere in China, built a couple decades ago and now washed over with grey grime and black soot.
We drive in John’s silver Toyota, down a major road, three lanes each side. Pass this giant… I don’t know what it is. A shopping center? Multistory pink walls and green tubular trim, an entrance resembling part of a mammoth Lego set. The whole building looks like it’s surrounded by scaffolding, some kind of metal latticework to hold up huge signs for products I’ve never heard of.
“You really grew up around here?”
John nods, scanning the road for something, an address maybe. “Different now,” he says. “Used to be farms not far from here. Fields.”
We turn right. A smaller street than the near highway we were just on, only four lanes across. Blocks of high-rises with businesses on the first few floors that face the street. The usual stuff. Electronics and cell-phone stores. Restaurants. Barbershops, some of which are sex joints. All lit up by the afternoon sun, filtered through a yellow-grey haze.
“I liked playing in the fields,” John says suddenly. “We had all kinds of games. Mostly Chinese Red Army against the Japanese devils. Of course the Red Army always wins.”
We turn down an alley. To the left there are steel barriers marking off a small parking lot, I guess for the high-rises in front of and behind it.
“Here,” John says.
He shoehorns the car into half a space by driving the front wheels up onto a curb. We get out.
It looks like a pretty nice complex, actually. A few trees that aren’t dying, a couple of stone benches beneath them in a little quadrangle in the center of a cluster of apartment buildings that look to be twenty or so stories high. The exteriors stained and speckled with black grime and trickles of rust. Closed balconies where the windows are permanently fogged by the pollution. But, you know, nice.
John looks at something on his phone. “This one,” he says, pointing to one of the buildings that fronts the sidewalk.
We go into the lobby. It’s not bad. Finished granite floors, wood-grain wallboard, a little flat-screen TV beaming ads between the brass-trimmed elevators, a couple of decorative plants.
John’s studying the mailboxes that line the wall across from the elevators.
“Looks a little pricey for a fuwuyuan,” I say. “Even one who’s working for a high-class caterer.”
I’m thinking maybe Wang Junyi has a little business on the side.
John nods. Looks at his phone again. “This house number… not here.”
“What do you mean?”
He points at the mailboxes. “All the numbers have floor, then house number. So tenth floor, house number five, is 1005. Her number is 41.”
“Maybe it’s the first floor?”
“No. First floor start with ‘one.’ And no floor has forty-one apartments.”
“Huh.”
I think about what this might mean. Maybe she gave her employer a fake address?
John meanwhile strides to the lobby door and heads outside. I follow him as he approaches a stout older woman in a dark blue smock and pants who is slowly sweeping the cement path with a straw broom. “Laodama,” I hear him say. Auntie. I hear bits and pieces of the conversation, John asking about the apartment number, about Wang Junyi. I hang back, listening to the cars honking on the street behind me, to a thin stream of music, some Chinese pop with a high-pitched chick singer, and I feel a sudden shiver in the warm, yellow afternoon. I don’t know why.
“Hao, hao. Xiexie ninde hezuo.”
Thanks for your cooperation.
When he reaches me, his expression is neutral. “Okay,” he says. “I know how to find her place now.”
We walk around the building. A narrow alley runs along one side, the ragged cement blackened with soot and worn-in grease, from the Xinjiang restaurant next door, I’m guessing. I can smell the roasting lamb and charcoal and lighter fluid.
There’s a heavy steel door, painted beige and dented in places. John opens it. He doesn’t wait for me to go first. Instead he steps inside, holding the door open but standing in front of me like a shield.
I cross the threshold. He lets the door close behind me.
We’re at the top of a stairwell. Unpainted cement, lit by a single fluorescent bulb. John points at the stairs.
We go down a flight, pass the first landing we see, and head down the next flight. Long, steep flights. When we get to the bottom, I figure we’re two stories below the first floor.
There’s a corridor, harshly lit by a couple more fluorescent lights in bare, rusting cages. Seeing them reminds me of something else, a place I was at back in the Sandbox, a place I never want to see again but still can’t get out of my head.
Some people can just forget shit. Why can’t I?
“Something wrong?”
I wipe my forehead. It’s covered in sweat. “No. Just hot down here.”
Pipes run along the ceiling, water pipes that drip, plus electric conduit and tangles of loose, frayed wire. There’s a sign next to a junction box warning of danger, with a little black silhouette of a man getting zapped by a black lightning bolt.
We walk a ways. On one side there’s more machinery: boilers and stuff, I guess, plus a jumble of crates and dusty boxes, mopeds and bikes. On the other it’s flimsy wallboard, interspersed here and there with those dented blue tin panels they use to make temporary fences at construction sites. We turn right, and then it’s wallboard and blue metal panels on both sides.
I catch the sweaty scent of hot, packaged noodles before I really get it.
“People are living down here, right?”
John nods. “Rat tribe,” he mutters.
I don’t know if it’s an insult, calling them that: the legions of Beijing’s workers who serve and cook in the city’s restaurants, who clean its fancy hotels, the migrants who come here to make money and who can’t possibly afford a real apartment in the city, the college grads and dreamers and artists who’ve ended up in tiny cubicles in the basements and subbasements of high-rises and former fallout shelters. I mean, there are worse things than being called a rat in Chinese culture. I was born in the Year of the Rat, and everybody says that means I’m a clever survivor.
So, hey. Embrace the suck.
I don’t get the feeling that there are that many people here right now. No conversations. No laughing, or shouting, or crying. If I listen hard, I can hear a faint strain of some Chinese pop music, so quiet it’s like I’m almost imagining it, like maybe I’m hearing something else, a pump or a rattling air conditioner, and I’m conjuring music out of it.
I guess most everyone’s at work this time of day. Or sleeping.
We walk down the makeshift hall, John checking out the numbers stenciled and in some cases scribbled in thick black marker on the wallboard. It’s pretty dark, with the only light coming from behind us. No hint of daylight anywhere. How could there be? We’re in a fucking basement fallout shelter.