It is dated for Friday and it is open. Haibao has seen it, knew about, but hasn't said anything. And Saturday night he was in a better mood than I have seen him in a long time. I think of his exhilaration at pressball. How he glowed gold and white.
I assume I have misunderstood the letter, read it again. My Chinese causes me to make mistakes, perhaps it is telling him he has been cleared? No, I go through the sentences carefully, my head beginning to throb from fatigue and strain. He is suspended, they are investigating him. Maybe he hasn't read it? But why would he print it out on Friday and then not read it?
I put the letter down and go, closing the door softly behind me. I am too tired to care now, I'll call him this evening and ask him. In the lift I put my hands in my pockets and find something in the right. The gold box with the tiger-eye lid that Haibao gave me the night before.
Xiao Chen is watching the news when I open the door.
"What happened to your face?" he asks.
"Very good party," I say, grinning. "Except that I walked into a door."
He shakes his head appreciably.
I shower and sleep. I awake a little before dinner. The sun is strong through the window and I am disoriented and still tired, but I know if I keep sleeping I won't sleep tonight. When I sit up all my joints all crack like old sticks.
I wander out to the kitchen and flash heat some fried rice. Xiao Chen kids me about my dissolute life, tells me I've got mail. I figure it's Peter, I owe him a letter. Guilt makes me avoid printing the letter before I eat.
It's only one page-Peter's letters run to four or five pages and use every type of punctuation available.
Ghost,
Not to fret, I have sent this to you from the arcade, it is not on my system. This is just to say thank you. I have received my suspension notification and I cannot go through Reform Through Labor. I cannot face my family.
I wish to thank you for all you have done, I believe you will understand. From the first you have always understood, even when no one else did. Even your choice of names. I think perhaps I hoped that last night would show me I made the wrong decision, but when we were almost arrested I knew that I had been a fool to wait.
Think of me with kindness.
Haibao
"What is it?" Xiao Chen asks.
I don't know what to say, I am not sure what it is. He has run away, I think. Where will he go?
I call, there is no answer. The letter is dated today and the time on it is 5:15. It is a little after 6:00, which is marked as the delivery time, meaning he sent it at 5:15 on a forty-five minute delay. He can't have left this fast, unless he sent it on his way out.
I pull on my coveralls.
"What is wrong?" Xiao Chen asks.
"I don't know," I say, "I don't understand this message from my tutor."
On the arcade I pass where he would have sent the letter and catch the lift. When the lift opens the hall is full of people and there is a strong breeze. People are standing around chattering, their arms crossed, the way people stand around an accident.
There is a police tape blocking the hall right before Haibao's door and the breeze is coming through the door. It is more than a breeze, it is a strong wind. They have arrested him, I'm sure. The wind is like being up on the super structure when a building is going up.
"What happened?" I ask two women standing there.
"The person in that apartment," she points, "he broke his window and jumped out."
"Jumped out," I say, and then stupidly, "did he die?" We are over 150 meters above ground level standing in this urban cliff.
"Oh, yes," she says.
"He is my tutor," I say. And then add, "I am an engineering student."
"Why did he do it?" she asks.
"I don't know," I say.
We stand there for a minute and then I duck under the police tape. I should not, I should get on the lift and go back downstairs, but I have to see. The wind is strong in the doorway, it is coming from the great shattered starburst in the window. Police are picking through the pieces of glass or standing talking.
A man looks up at me, "Hey, what are you doing here! Don't cross the barrier!"
"He, h-he was my tutor," I stutter, "I am an engineering student."
"There is no tutoring today," the officer says.
On the floor, covered with crystals of glittering glass, are a pair of shoes, neatly folded white tights and white shirt. As if he had taken them off there, in front of his window.
"How did he break the window?" I ask. The windows are supposed to be shatterproof.
"He used a softening agent on it, then heated it with a hairdryer until it was brittle," the officer says. Then his expression softens. "Where are you from?"
"America," I say. "I'm American."
"Well, tongxue," 'student,' "there is nothing you can do here. You should go home.
"I can't go home," I say, "I have eighteen more months until I finish my classes."
He looks at me oddly. "No, no, I meant your dormitory."
A woman comes into the room, "He wiped his system," she says, "He made sure that we couldn't use the trace, either." Her feet crunch in broken glass.
I don't know what they are talking about. I back up. I duck under the police tape again, walk through the crowd with my head down. I am afraid. There are people in the lift. I look at the numbers and then at the floor.
In the arcade, I sit down for a moment on a bench, because I don't want to go back to my dormitory, and then I get up and make a call to New York. It is five-thirty in the morning in New York, Peter is not up.
"Rafael!" he says. "Hey! How are you doing!"
"My friend," I say, "You remember the one I wrote you about? My tutor."
"What happened?" he says.
"He killed himself," I say.
"How?" he says.
Why do we always have to know? What difference does it make? "He broke his window and jumped."
"Are you going to come home?" Peter asks.
Well, yes. I hope so. I don't want to die here. Then I think, he means right now.
"No," I say, "I have to finish school. I did well on my engineering examination."
We talk, I cannot say why so I say I don't know and talk around it. I think, it's good to talk, better than being alone, the money doesn't matter.
But all our words are empty.
HOMEWORK (Alexi)
The inside of Martine's house is pretty, after two years of living here it still seems a luxury to live in this place. A lot of the homes on the Ridge are pretty. I never pictured life on Mars like this-I grew up in a frontier town on the edge of the Corridor, my daddy was a scrap prospector, not a farmer but there were a lot of farmers and so I had an idea of what frontier farming was like. Some years they got crops, some years the People's Volunteers brought drinking water into town in trucks and when I was in senior middle school I used to go get water for my mother. We had two big 50 litre plastic containers that we put in the back of an old three wheel bike. I'd get them filled and then have to stand on the pedals to get the bike to go anywhere. I wanted to join the PV, but after I finished school and married Geri there were too many applicants. Then the Party said that the drive to reduce carbon dioxide use was working. That the global temperature was falling, and it would be possible to resettle the Corridor. So we went. A few years of hardship, and then, see, we'd be sitting on good, farmable land. When I left Earth they were still talking about global temperatures falling, maybe a degree in fifty years. Three degrees, and they'll get back to temperature levels in the 1900's and it'll rain in Idaho, and across north central Africa and who knows, maybe it'll rain carp in Beijing, and flowers will bloom in the Antarctic but Geri still died and Theresa spent half of her childhood in resettlement camps.
The Ridge is hard work, Martine and I are up by five. I don't know if I've ever worked so hard in my life. But it's not like the Corridor, where it didn't make any difference whether you worked or not, it all died. Martine and I put in another tunnel and goatyard to increase the goat herd, and now there are nineteen nannies and four of them are pregnant. And we added a room for Theresa. I didn't really want to do it, but I felt then as if it was really Martine's decision and if she wanted to take the risk, I was pretty well along for the ride. We're into negative credit, it'll take us a couple of years to pay the Commune back and if those goddamn goats get sick we'll spend the rest of our lives paying it back, but so far we're making our contributions. Martine's honey business is steady and I keep getting sidework doing re-programming. Even if the nannies all dropped dead tomorrow we'd probably get by. Give up beer and sell the strawberries instead of eating them, but get by.