We make our way to the ticket hall. The lines aren’t too bad, a sort of halfhearted mob that gets funneled into lines by aluminum crowd-control rails up by the windows.
“We can go back to Beijing together,” John says. “Or someplace else for a few days. If you want.”
“I have to go to Shanghai.”
He elbows a guy who tries to cut in front of us. “I can come with you.”
I think about it, and I don’t know whether I’m being stubborn or smart or if I just don’t want to be around anybody.
“If you really want to help me… go to Beijing, John. Let me know if you think it’s safe for me to go back.”
He’s not happy about it. But at least he listens.
“Okay,” he says. “I can do that.”
I get a ticket on the last train to Shanghai leaving at 8:00 p.m., a fast D train that will get me to Shanghai Hongqiao station just after 11:00 p.m. John’s train for Beijing doesn’t leave until right before 10:00, and it’s a long ride, nine and a half hours. The high-speed line’s not opening till next year.
I almost wish my ride was that long, so I could just sleep on the train and dodge the whole hotel passport-registration issue one more night. But I’m hoping Sidney’s already done what he said he would, that he’s gotten Uncle Yang off my back already. I’m betting either Tiantian or Dao Ming has talked to him, too. Maybe both of them.
Who knows what any of them said? How it might make Yang react.
“You should take some food and things on the train,” John says.
“What?”
We’ve gone inside the station proper, through the metal detectors, me with a daypack, John with a messenger bag.
“Here,” he says, pointing to a convenience store next to a fast-food noodle joint.
“I don’t need anything.”
John rolls his eyes. “So just wait here.”
He goes inside the convenience store. It’s your basic rectangle, like a gas station mini-mart, except the long side is an exposed wall of Plexiglas.
I watch him go inside and walk purposefully down the aisles, grabbing things here and there, his image slightly blued by the thick Plexi, and I feel like I’m on the other side of an aquarium wall. Or maybe I’m the one who’s in it.
He comes out with two plastic bags tied at the handles. “Here,” he says, handing me the smaller of the two.
“Thanks.”
“We can talk by the end of the day tomorrow.”
“All right. Sounds good.”
He stands there looking down and shifting back and forth, like he’s trying to calm himself.
“Please take good care,” he says, meeting my eyes. “I think you need some time to rest.”
After I settle into my seat, I open up the bag. A giant cup of noodles. A bag of spicy peanuts. Some “biscuits,” which might be crackers or might be cookies. A big bottle of water. Two cans of Snow Beer.
Halfway through the ride, I call Lucy Wu. To warn her I’m coming.
“How about lunch? There’s a soup-dumpling place near my apartment,” she says.
“Okay,” I say. I crack open the first of my Snow Beers. “If I don’t make it… you know what to do with that thing I left you, right?”
A pause. “Yes. Right.”
I find a cheaper hotel downtown off Huaihai Road, a “business-class” place called the Celebrity Garden. It looks like a thousand other Chinese hotels I’ve stayed in: marbleized lobby, clocks on the wall set to Beijing, Moscow, London, and New York times, a room with a hard bed, a particleboard desk covered with plastic wood veneer, a desk chair, an electric teakettle.
I take the desk chair and wedge the top under the doorknob. Put the chain on the door. I don’t know what difference it makes, really. A chair and a lock aren’t going to stop Uncle Yang if he knows where I am, if he wants to bring me in.
I drink a bottle of beer. Watch TV. Doze off now and again. Think about what Marsh said.
You want it to be over. You know you do.
The dumpling place is in the bottom floor of a ramshackle two-story building draped with loose electrical wire and a painted wooden signboard for a menu, just around the corner from a glassy California Pizza Kitchen, a four-story art deco apartment, and something called “Privilege Banking,” advertised in glowing white letters against a blue-lit aluminum wall.
Lucy beats me there. When I arrive, she’s sitting outside at a white plastic table, perched on a white plastic stool. There’s room for only three tables inside.
Our dumplings arrive in blackened, water-stained bamboo steamers, along with soup and a side dish of sliced green garlic and strips of marinated pork. I catch a whiff of steam from the first set of dumplings, and I’m suddenly starving.
We don’t talk too much until the food is nearly gone.
“Sidney Cao is probably going to contact you about the museum project,” I say.
Lucy wipes her lips with a square of tissue paper. “Oh?”
“Yeah.”
I don’t tell her much about what happened in Xingfu Cun. Just the part where Sidney wants to spend his fortune on buying beautiful things to share with “the people.”
“My,” she says. “Well, of course I’d be interested in helping him spend his money.”
“You need to really think about it. Sidney’s trying to separate himself from Yang Junmin, but… I don’t know. If there really is some kind of big power struggle going on with the leadership transition coming up… you just don’t want to get caught out on the wrong side of that.”
“I know,” she says. “But the idea of a project like this… The things that could be created…” She stares at me across the table, and I can see the light in her eyes, the excitement. “We’ll have to be careful, but if we keep some separation between our businesses…”
I shake my head. “I can’t do it.”
“But… why? You’re the one who created this opportunity.”
“I’ve been faking it this whole time. I don’t know what I’m doing. And… I need a break.”
“But you’re smart,” she insists. “You’ve already learned so much, in a short amount of time. Why not take advantage of chance like this?”
“I can’t,” I repeat. “I just…”
I look at her. It’s funny to see her like this, no makeup, wearing light cotton pants and a girlie-cut New York Yankees T-shirt, eating dumplings at a neighborhood dive. Completely at ease, in a way I’ll never be.
“You can do bigger things,” I say. “I can’t.”
John meets me the next morning at the Beijing South Railway Station, standing on the other side of the turnstiles that separate the arrival gates from the rest of the subterranean level of this massive complex.
“I came on subway,” he says. “Traffic is terrible.”
“Subway’s fine.” I’ve only got my daypack, and we’re right by the subway concourse anyway.
“Where do you want to go?” he asks.
“Just back to my place.”
We cram onto the Line 4 subway car, dodging gigantic wheeled suitcases and stuffed plastic grain bags, squeeze into the relative spaciousness of the vestibule connecting two cars, and I lean back against the wall and close my eyes until we get to Xizhimen Station, take the long jog to the Line 2, then just two stops to Gulou.
Finally we emerge from the long escalator into the smoggy daylight.
John walks with me through the tangle of jackhammers and piles of bricks, cars, and temporary walls and white construction dorms, until we reach the alley that leads to my apartment.