Molly was sitting in the big red chair with a bowl of cereal, watching television, lightly touching the bandage on her head, when Richard walked in. “Can we talk a little?” he said, smiling; he turned the set off without waiting for an answer.
Molly put the bowl on the floor and struggled to sit more upright in the enormous chair. Her brother stood in front of her, still smiling, his hands folded. His hair was cut very short now; in fact, Molly was pretty sure he was cutting it himself.
“Molly, I’m worried about you,” he said.
“It’s just a cut. And the fainting thing, the doctor said I just needed some more iron,” she said, even though she knew that wasn’t what he was talking about.
He shook his head. “I’m worried about your soul,” he said.
The room was filled with sunlight at that time of day, and the carpet showed so threadbare in the glare that you could see through to the heavy skeletal weaving underneath it.
“My soul?”
“You’re drifting. You’re drifting badly.”
“And this is because.”
“I think you know why.”
“Because I’m not saved?”
Richard said nothing.
“And who’s going to save me? You?”
“Who does it is not the question. The question is how. And there’s only one way.”
“What way is that?” Molly said angrily. “What are you, Jimmy Swaggart?” She didn’t understand the defensiveness she felt all of a sudden.
Richard’s smile weakened. “Molly, you have to admit I’ve never broached this with you before. I’ve never pressured you. You’ve been living in our house for six months and I’ve let you go your own way. But you’re my sister and I can’t watch you drift toward damnation like this and not do anything about it. Look at what happened yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
“Are you going to tell me you didn’t feel some despair? That you didn’t feel lost? Don’t you think there’s some sort of message for you in all that?”
“I fainted,” Molly said, exasperated. “I fainted and hit my head. A nice man took me to the clinic, and I had a hard time getting home. That’s all.”
Richard shook his head. He seemed close to tears now. “Don’t you see the connection?” he said.
In People’s Park, overgrown and unmowed, piebald with bare earth and strewn with bottles and condoms, there was a pro-democracy rally during exam week. Molly stopped to watch. The day was overcast and cold; under the familiar bright-red flag on a homemade banner tied between two trees, students took turns standing on a milk crate and declaring their support for their fellow students suffering under martial repression in China. A Chinese-born exchange student briefly interjected a note of authenticity with a speech about the conditions in the smelting plant where his uncle worked; but the speech went on quite long, and people began moving away. All of a sudden three students from the Berkeley Communist Party pushed through the small crowd, shouting their support for Zhao and claiming CIA involvement with the Tiananmen Square occupation. They were quickly shouted down by the others, energized by this suddenly visible opposition, and the three Communists marched off again, red-faced.
Molly lingered at the back fringe of the gathering, hands in her pockets. After a while she noticed another man standing on the fringes, twenty feet away; and when she noticed him, he quickly turned his head away from her.
It wasn’t just his age that made him look out of place there — he might have been thirty, but it was not unusual to see grad students around the city that age or older. He had red hair cut to a kind of military bristle; his face bore some old acne scars. He wore a pristine white turtleneck under a long windbreaker, and creased navy-blue pants, though slacks might have been a better word for them. Even under the windbreaker he had the overdeveloped arms and shoulders of someone who spent a lot of time in a gym. When Molly turned back to face the speaker she could see the man’s face turn again toward her.
“We will not waver,” said a young woman in a green field jacket whose head was shaved on the sides, “in our mission to topple the fascist lords of China, and tyrants everywhere.” There was such an element of longing in their anger, a frantic dismissal of the idea of inconsequence.
She turned to look at him again; and this time, when she turned away, the red-haired man ambled over casually and stood beside her.
“I will now read the text of a letter the committee has drafted to Premier Li Peng and to Boutros Boutros-Ghali.”
“You a part of this?” the red-haired man asked her.
Molly shook her head.
“I didn’t think so,” he said.
After the letter was read and its contents approved, the meeting ended. Molly continued looking at the empty space above the milk crate.
“What’s your name?” the man said.
She turned to look at him.
“Why should I tell you that?” she said.
He stared at her for a long moment as the others filed past, out of the park. Then he stepped closer to her, quite close. With a quick glance to either side, he unzipped the windbreaker and held one side of it away from his body to reveal, clipped next to the buckle of his wide belt, a policeman’s badge.
He zipped up the jacket again, and stared at her.
“You shouldn’t be hanging around here,” he said. His voice was inflected to suggest that he was indulging a rare desire to do someone a favor. It was his cop voice, clearly, or at any rate the one he used to indicate his moral remoteness from non-cops. But in his small eyes, behind this affected benevolence, Molly detected some more genuine cruelty; and she determined to get at it.
“Where should I be hanging around, then?”
“I don’t know. A beautiful girl like you. Where do you normally hang around?”
She could see right into him, that was the best part. She knew that all she had to do in order to cut herself to his idea, his fantasy, of what college girls were really like was to not go away — just stand there, as he became more forward, stand there and not be repulsed. He thought he was seeing the essence of her, of all women really. Well, maybe she was showing it to him but he still wouldn’t see it, blinded as he was by his vision of himself. She didn’t need to make herself say something complimentary about his physique, which would have been hard to do without laughing; he took it for granted that she would admire him, and nothing in her silence violated that idea.
The park was empty now, except for a few derelicts who had been there before the rally began.
“You’re married,” Molly said flatly, looking at his hand.
“Very observant,” he said. Look at that, Molly thought, with a kind of detached awe. Look how he hates me.
His clothes were perfectly spotless and pressed — which pretty much spoiled the undercover effect he was apparently going for — and Molly wondered for a moment about the spirit in which his wife did this for him; but then she jerked the thought of this pathetic woman’s existence out of her mind.
“You need a ride home, or anywhere?” he said. Every remark pushed him further into a zone where his own fantasy and what he took to be the real nature of men and women grew indistinct.
“Yeah,” she said. “I do need a ride.”
“Well, good. I’m sure you’ll tell me where you want to go.”