Mei Yee waits for me there on the nonexistent sidewalk, texting on her phone.
“You better now?” she asks.
“Yue lai, yue hao.” Getting better and better.
“Wa Keung come and pick us up. Take to our home.”
“You’re too polite. It’s not necessary. I should go back to Shantou.”
She covers my hand with hers. “Come to our home. Have a rest.” She grins at me, her smile revealing tea-stained teeth. “Moudzu can fix your computer.”
AND THAT’S HOW I end up in the back of the tractor again, this time with my leg propped up on a couple bags of fertilizer. I really don’t want to go to these people’s home, but I can’t think of a polite way to refuse, especially after all the trouble they went to, saving me from getting my ass kicked and all.
Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to try to find out a little more about what’s going on around here.
I know I should just give up on this whole thing. Haul my gimpy ass back to Beijing and… I don’t know, deal. With the business I can’t run. With my mom, who’s going to see me on crutches and freak out or, alternatively, is so busy practicing navel denting with Anal Andy that she won’t even notice.
That’s the thing. I like having a mission.
Yeah, it’s helping a buddy, but it’s more than that. It’s having a puzzle to solve. Having something to do. Something that matters.
And maybe they’ll have beer.
YOU CAN STILL SEE some of the original structure of the Laus’ farmhouse: blond brick with the texture of sand, crumbling in places, peaked grey tile roofs. Concrete smooths over the brick on a couple of the walls, and stuck on the walls here and there are little block-shaped rooms made out of cement, with flat tin roofs. Topping off the whole thing is a satellite dish, which I’d bet is aimed toward Hong Kong. There are outbuildings, sheds and a barn, and though it’s getting dark, I can catch glimpses of fields behind the house, other farmhouses in the distance.
“Welcome, welcome,” Mrs. Lau says, clasping her hands, her head bobbing up and down.
I shake off her offer of help and manage to hop over the beam across the threshold with the aid of my crutches. I’m thinking I can get by with just the one of them, really. My leg hurts, but it feels better than it did. Give me a couple of days and I’ll be as good as… well, as good as I was before this happened.
Inside, the main room has battered whitewashed walls decorated with posters, mostly of Chinese folk figures: the woman who holds up a lantern in one arm and a rabbit in the other; a big, red-faced dude with a fancy outfit and a sword; plus a print of the Mona Lisa. In some places the flooring is old stone-who knows how old? I can see the wear from centuries of footsteps. There’s a battered wooden table and a couple of chairs; a newish-looking TV across from a couch; a refrigerator; a water dispenser next to that; and a chest of drawers that’s painted white with gold trim and curlicues, with books stacked on top of it. I glimpse the kitchen off to one side, one of the add-on rooms, and a tiny bedroom, the entire space taken up by quilts and whatever kind of mattress is beneath them.
“You like to drink something? Some tea? Coke? Maybe beer?” Mrs. Lau asks.
Score.
“Thank you, I very much like to drink beer.”
I settle myself on the couch.
“Wa Keung and I make dinner,” she says after opening a bottle and pouring a measure into a plastic cup.
“Please don’t go to any trouble.”
“Just something simple. Wa Keung is very good cook. Better than me. You want to watch TV?”
“That’s okay.”
She switches it on anyway. Oh, great, a Chinese soap. Cue the giggling ingenue and the inevitable crying child. I dig into my backpack for a Percocet. It’s been… what? A couple of hours since the last one?
“Moudzu!” Mei Yee yells. “Come in here!”
Moudzu emerges from a room across from the bedroom.
“You can fix the computer?” she asks.
He grins and nods. “Sure. Very easy. I already get parts.” He stands there in his outsize sneakers, waiting for me to hand it over.
I’m not crazy about letting him have my laptop, but if he can really fix it, maybe it’s worth the risk. I try to remember: Is there anything on the hard drive that might get me in trouble? Anything about the Great Community? I’m careful about how I log on, using the VPN and all, but maybe there’s some cookie, some hidden file, something that you could find if you copied the hard drive and dug deep enough.
“Do you need to take it someplace?” I ask.
“No,” he says, his grin getting broader. “You want to see? I show you.”
Better than watching TV, I guess. I push myself to my feet with one of the crutches, grab my cup of beer in my free hand, and follow him.
Moudzu’s lair is one of the newer additions: a spare concrete block. But that’s not what I notice when I part the curtain made from a patterned sheet and peer inside.
It’s dark, lit up by battered computer monitors and a bunch of blinking diodes, from modems, from power strips, from who knows what. The computers sit on a makeshift desk consisting of a detached door propped on top of crates against one wall and another ad hoc desk made out of a shipping crate against the other. One monitor has a game going on, explosions and flashing swords, another a series of chats against a background of noisy, cluttered Flash animation-for some reason a couple of cartoon rabbits drinking cans of cola. There are anime and gaming posters on the wall that I can just make out in the dim, bluish green light. Books are piled everywhere there aren’t computers or pieces of computers. Between the desks and the bed, there’s about six inches of clearance through which to walk.
Moudzu switches on a lamp that shines down on the larger, door desk. Aside from the two monitors, there are a bunch of electronic parts and components, a couple of portable hard drives, and what I think is an internal one, some circuit boards, rectangles of RAM. Now I can see that the crates holding up the door are subdivided into plastic bins, like they had at the workshop that was New Century Seeds, with additional bins beneath the desk.
Moudzu rummages around and holds up a small Phillips-head screwdriver. “I can fix.”
I am a little fuzzy because of the Percocet and the beer, not to mention the fucking weird day I’ve had, and also maybe a little more euphoric than I should be to make a decision like this, but as I try to think it through, I figure there’s really no way these guys can know who I am and what may or may not be on my computer.
“What do you think is wrong with it?” I ask.
“Motherboard. And you need new screen.”
I watch for a while, sitting on the bed with my bum leg stretched out under the smaller desk, the one made from the shipping crate, Percocet spreading through my veins and nerves and muscles like warm, narcotic honey, as Moudzu expertly takes my laptop apart, removing a series of tiny screws with his magnetized Phillips head, lifting off the top case, and sticking his fingers in its electronic guts. The scents of garlic and scallions and meat drift in from the kitchen.
Moudzu retrieves a pencil-thin soldering iron from one of his bins.
“So you like computers,” I say by way of small talk, an activity at which, admittedly, I suck.
He nods, focused on the components strewn across the desk, the soldering iron in his hand.
“Is this the kind of work you want to do in the future?”
He smiles but doesn’t look at me, touches the tip of the soldering iron to a coil of solder and the edge of a circuit board. “Not only this.”
The smell of singed metal fills the room. He holds the soldering iron down a moment longer to seal the connection, lifts it up with a flourish.
“I want to be like Steve Jobs,” he says. “Make new Apple. Something better.” He grins. “Maybe I call my company Peach.”