Which is pretty fucking stupid, actually. Because there’s nothing I can do to help.
“Lookin’ good, Ellie,” he repeats.
“Thanks.”
“I want…” He screws up his face again. “I need… I have this…”
I wait.
“My brother,” he manages.
“HE’S IN CHINA, SOMEWHERE,” Natalie explains. She’s taken over for Dog, who got all agitated when the words he wanted wouldn’t come. “We got a postcard a month or so ago from some place called… Yang shoe?”
“Yangshuo?” I guess.
“I don’t know.” She rolls her eyes, impatient. “Someplace with weird-looking mountains.”
She’s a San Diego girl, I know. A couple years older than me. Thin and tan, with that whole “I jog and do yoga” body and the beginnings of hard lines on her face: around her mouth, outlining her cheeks.
“Probably Yangshuo.”
“Whatever.” She heaves a sigh. “The thing is…”
She glances over her shoulder. Dog is there, hovering, scooting around in an office chair like it’s a bumper car, occasionally waving at the screen.
She runs her fingers through her highlighted hair. “He wants Jason to come home.”
“So why doesn’t he?”
She pauses. Looks sideways for a moment. “Jason has some problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“He’s…” Her voice drops. “He’s not stable. He’s on meds. And we think maybe he went off them.”
“Meds for what?” I ask. “What’s the diagnosis?”
Not like I’m an expert, but when I trained to be a medic, we covered the basics.
“I…” She hesitates again. “Manic depression. Doug doesn’t like to-”
“What?” Dog says. “What don’t I like?”
“He’s a little in denial,” she whispers. “But it’s made Jason… He’s acted out before. We’re just worried about-”
“It’s FUBAR!” Dog shouts in the background. “Jason’s not a head case!”
“Okay, okay,” I say. “So you don’t know where he is?”
“No.” She glances over her shoulder at Dog, then back to me. “I know it’s crazy, even asking you. I tell him China’s got a billion people or whatever, but he won’t… he won’t listen.”
“Doesn’t fucking hurt to ask,” I hear Dog say.
I think about it.
“It’s not totally crazy,” I say.
OKAY, THE ODDS AREN’T great. But it’s not impossible.
Here’s the thing: China is a big country. Huge. With more than a billion people.
But most of them are Chinese.
There are a lot of Westerners who live here, for sure. And tourists. I don’t know how many, but enough so that in most popular tourist places it’s not like a Westerner is a total Martian or anything. In Beijing no one notices or particularly cares. Yeah, some old auntie might remark to her buddy on the neighborhood committee, “Hey, laowai laile!” but it’s hard to keep track when there are so many of us.
That said, someone is still watching.
Places like Yangshuo, a major hub on the banana-pancake backpacker circuit, known for its weird, beautiful mountains, “quaint” villages tucked along rice paddies, rivers where you can float down a bamboo raft, sucking down beer-yeah, lots of foreigners go there, for sure. But they tend to congregate in certain establishments.
It’s possible I could find someone who’d seen Jason. Who maybe had even hung out with him. Who might have an idea where he is.
WHAT I SAY TO Natalie and Dog is, “Yeah, it’s pretty much a long shot. But, you know, send me whatever you got on him and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks,” Natalie says, brushing her hair out of her face again, which I think she’s doing because she’s tearing up and she doesn’t want me to see. “Thanks. It means a lot to Doug. I know you guys are friends. I mean, I know…” She blinks rapidly. “He’s said a lot of really nice things about you.”
“Heh,” I say. “Doug’s a good guy.”
There is a long and somewhat awkward silence. Natalie stares into the webcam, blinking now and then. In the background Dog scoots up to the screen on his office chair, puts his only arm around Natalie’s shoulders, and squeezes.
“I’m an asshole!” he says, grinning.
JUST TO CLARIFY, IT’S not because I feel guilty or something that I am thinking about helping Dog out. It’s because you help your buddies. That’s just the way it is. You help the people who were there for you, is all. And Dog… well, yeah, he’s kind of an asshole on the one hand. On the other, he was a buddy to me during my first duty assignment in Iraq, in Mortaritaville. I was as young and dumb as they came, nineteen years old, a good Christian girl.
Maybe he acted like a friend primarily to get into my pants, which I gotta say worked well for him. But when I think about those times now, mostly what I remember is that he was still my friend.
Plus, Yangshuo is supposed to be beautiful. And warm. As mentioned, it’s ass-freezing cold here in Beijing, and the air is “crazy-bad.”
Then there’s this: “Ellie, are you ready to go to Walmart?”
Here’s my mom, hovering in the doorway, with a stout Chinese guy standing slightly behind her, his hands clasped in front of him like he’s a singer in a choir waiting for his cue.
“Do you mind if Andy tags along?” my mom asks, a little hesitantly. “He needs a few things.”
“Yes.” Andy nods vigorously. “Socks. And candles.”
“Sure,” I say. “Fine.”
I insist we take a subway there, even though Andy claims to have a car and my mom doesn’t understand why we don’t just cab it-“But, honey, the taxis are so cheap here!”
“Because if we take a cab, we sit in the same fucking traffic as everyone else, that’s why,” I say, not for the first time. “And people here drive even worse than in Phoenix.”
Plus, I still don’t like riding in cars very much. I’m better about it than I was, but I don’t like being stuck in traffic, a sitting target. That’s how you get blown up. Outside the wire you haul ass.
Okay, I know where I am and that I’m not going to get blown up in a Beijing taxi, probably. Sitting in traffic just makes me nervous sometimes.
We pass the random bronze statues of little kids playing on the dead grass, the tiny kiosk where the guy makes jianbing, which is sort of a Beijing breakfast burrito and one of my favorite foods ever, and trot down the long staircase to the subway.
“Yi zhang piao,” I tell the attendant behind the Plexiglas window. I have my yikatong card, but my mom hasn’t taken the plunge, so I buy her tickets whenever we go someplace. It’s like neither of us wants to admit that she’s staying here.
“Anal constriction,” Andy says in English, carefully sounding out each syllable. “Anal constriction is key.”
“Oh, really?”
We put our bags through the X-ray machine that no one pays attention to and head down another set of stairs to the platform. It’s not too crowded this time of day. We line up at the shortest queue I can spot, toward the back of the train. I watch the ads for banks, cell phones, and real estate flicker on the dark wall across from us.
“Yes,” Andy says. “Anal constriction. And denting naval.”
“It’s a part of the religious practice,” my mom explains. “Kind of like tai chi.”
“What does this have to do with Jesus?” I mutter.
“Brother Jesus wants us to be happy,” Andy explains. “With anal constriction, you can say good-bye to sad feelings. And take back your youth.” He turns to my mom and smiles. “Increases staying power.”
She blushes a little as the rush of warm air from the inbound subway hits the platform.
And this is another reason I need a break from my mom: the longer I’m around her and Andy, the more I feel like a pissed-off teenager. As opposed to, you know, a pissed-off twenty-seven-year-old.