“What time will you be home, hon?” she asks.
“Not sure,” I mutter. “Don’t wait up.”
She’s about to pop the quiz, I can tell, so I hustle myself out of there.
How the fuck did things end up like this?
I had my own apartment. I was making decent money, and I was even doing something kind of cool, representing “emerging” artists. No DSD on my ass or anyone else trying to fuck with me. I can’t say I left the war behind-it’s always going on in my head somewhere-but I wasn’t thinking about Iraq so much. I had this brief period where I wasn’t scared all the time, or numb. I was thinking maybe I’d actually found a place for myself.
But that wasn’t the main thing, I realize. The main thing was, I felt free.
I’d gotten over my ex-husband, Trey, sort of. I didn’t have to worry about whether I was Lao Zhang’s girlfriend or just one of a number of girlfriends he fucked, or if that was something I was even entitled to care about, because wherever he was, he wasn’t around-and when I interacted with him online, in a chat room, he was pretty much the perfect boyfriend.
And I sure wasn’t worrying about what lie to tell my mom this time.
I was unattached, and I liked it.
The army shrink, the guy I had to talk to after I got blown up, would probably tell me that I was “isolating” or something.
I sit on the subway, thinking about all this, surrounded by texting twenty-somethings, stylish women carrying shopping bags from Apple and Starbucks, migrant workers with browned faces hauling overstuffed duffels made from plastic grain bags.
I hate thinking about this kind of shit.
To get to where I’m going, I have to take the Line 2 to the 13 to the 15. When did Line 15 happen? I can’t even keep track anymore.
The segment they’ve built runs northeast, from Chaoyang District to Shunyi District out around the Sixth Ring Road, but not as far as where I need to go.
I don’t know this part of Beijing very well. When you get out close to the airport, it’s villa land, where a lot of the wealthier folks live, Chinese and expat alike. I’ve met with collectors out here a couple of times: “I want a piece that compliments my color scheme!” kind of people.
Line 15 runs aboveground on this leg. In the dark what I see are flat, empty stretches of land, patches and lines of ghostly trees, remains of older villages surrounded by construction cranes, half-built high-rises, clusters of gleaming mirrored skyscrapers. At one point I glimpse a golf course.
I get off at the end of the line, at Houshayu station. Ribbed grey ceilings, rows of industrial spotlights casting white dots on the grey marble floors, broken up by red columns, all shiny and new. Not many people. It’s just past 9:00 p.m.
No taxis either.
“Come on,” I mutter. Why are there no taxis? Don’t the folks who live past this subway stop need to get home?
They probably all drive their Audis or Beemers or whatever.
On the north side of the station, there’s a parking lot. An expanse of cars, most of which look new. I guess they belong to the fancy car dealerships across the street. A ways farther, there’s some stadium-size mall thing that might sell furniture.
On the other side of the station, a bank of trees and a broad street, with signs pointing to the Airport Expressway and some other highway. Is this the Sixth Ring Road?
There’s a bus stop, but I don’t know which bus to take.
I could make a phone call and ask for a ride. But I don’t want to do that. Because when it comes to attachments I’d rather not be dealing with, this one is high on my list.
I start to walk to the bus stop when I hear a high-pitched honk.
“Miss! Miss!”
I turn. It’s a modi, a motorcycle taxi: basically, a three-wheeled motorcycle surrounded by a tin box, the kind of transport you take when you’re too broke for a taxi. Not what I’d expect to see out here in Expatlandia.
The driver is an older guy wearing People’s Liberation Army cast-off camouflage. He mimes a steering wheel. Even though it’s a motorcycle with handlebars.
These things are so totally unsafe.
Oh well, what the fuck.
I stare out the little square window of the modi, low enough to the ground so that I’m at eye level with the wheels of the massive blue trucks roaring past us, bouncing up and down on the wooden bench with every little bump in the road. It sounds like someone’s hammering on the tin-can cover surrounding me, but maybe that’s the backfiring two-stroke engine. We skid around a traffic circle, spraying gravel.
Maybe this was not such a good idea.
But finally we turn off the highway.
New construction. Cranes. A couple rows of old village buildings surrounded by a crumbling brick wall. Clusters of villas, low-rise housing. Developments with names like “Yosemite” and “Palm Beach.”
My destination: Fiji Palace Estates.
I’m hoping for hula girls in grass skirts and maybe some tiki torches, but no. It’s a cluster of high-rises, maybe ten or twelve stories each. Only two of them look completed. The others are still wrapped in green netting.
I’m looking for Number 5.
There’s a guard in a box by an unfinished wall, and once he sees a foreigner inside the modi, he barely looks at me, just waves us through.
The landscaping isn’t done, but there’s a line of skinny young trees in front of an artificial lake and, around the lake, finished town houses with designs that look like a drunken hookup between a Greek temple and a Bavarian castle.
The driver pulls up in front of Number 5.
I pay him. Grab the flimsy metal doorframe for balance, plant my good leg on the ground, and haul myself up and out. Take in a deep breath.
“Man zou,” I tell the driver. The Chinese equivalent for “Drive safely,” but what it actually means is “Go slowly.”
Too late for that.
“Yili.”
“John.”
He steps aside, and I step across the threshold. I almost stumble, which I tell myself is because my bad leg’s still cramped up from the ride in the modi. He reaches out to steady me, seems to think better of it. His hand drops.
I steady myself on a low wooden cabinet in the entry and kick off my shoes. Not because I’m comfortable with John. Far from it. But it’s rude to walk around in a Chinese home with your shoes on, and I guess I’ve been here long enough now where it’s habit with me, too.
“Slippers,” John says. He points at a shoe rack across from the cabinet. Like the cabinet, it’s plain, dark wood.
I find a pair that look to be my size. Quilted black cloth, with embroidered flowers on them.
John doesn’t look at me, and I don’t look at him. I walk past him, into the living room.
Like the rest of the complex, it doesn’t feel finished. The walls are white, bare except for one large framed piece of calligraphy, black ink on white paper in a black frame. The floors are some kind of blond wood, or maybe bamboo, or most likely Pergo. There’s a couch. Black. Plain. A table by the kitchen, with two black wood chairs. All the same stark design as the stuff in the entry.
“Nice place,” I say.
John shrugs. “You like some tea? Maybe beer?”
He knows me. He knows what I like, and it isn’t tea. I’m tempted to ask for it anyway, just to fuck with him. But I don’t.
“Sure,” I say. “A beer would be great.”
I watch John retreat to the kitchen. He’s wearing fitted black jeans and a T-shirt, his usual. Trim, taut, with some muscle. If I got up close, I’d see a white scar cutting across one eyebrow, a slight shadow of beard framing his sharp cheekbones. A good-looking guy.
His business card says his name is Zhou Zheng’an. I doubt if that’s his real name.
Either way, he’ll always be Creepy John to me.
Blame it on the first time we met. There I was, thinking I was maybe going to mess around with a cute guy at a party. I had no fucking clue what his agenda really was and what would end up happening between the two of us.