Ariel’s apartment was located in a weathered brick tenement on the South Side. It was around eight million degrees that day and seemed hotter inside the tortuous hallways. Michael had been told Ariel had something for him, nothing more. It could have been materials or it could have been information. After winding his way through the building’s infernal interior, he was prepared for just about anything, except what greeted him there.
A beautiful, young black woman with a natural, wearing a wine-colored Chinese silk robe, answered the door. She escorted him in without a word. The apartment looked like the interior of a souvenir store on Grant Avenue, full of things Ariel had brought back with him-lanterns, screens, embroidery, bronzes, scrolls. Ariel, in a black robe, waited for Michael in the inner room, seated with one knee upright on a kang, smoking from a copper water pipe, writing in a notebook. Michael didn’t know how old Ariel was, but he looked a hundred, and not a good hundred. He’d lived a hard, uncompromised life, and he smoked from that water pipe nonstop.
Ariel and the woman exchanged some words in what must have been Mandarin. She left and then returned with a freshly brewed pot of tea and performed what seemed like a brief ritual involving pouring the tea from the pot into variously sized cups and then repouring them into other cups. When she was done, she left the room.
“We met in China,” his host explained, going into no further detail. “Drink up. This pot and these cups are made of yi-hsing clay. It’s said to enhance the flavor of the tea. Let me know if you taste anything. My taste buds are shot.” He stuck his tongue out.
Michael declined because he was dying in the heat, but his host insisted, saying the Chinese believed drinking hot tea actually cooled the body, which sounded like utter madness.
“You’re to be sent somewhere,” Ariel declared. “You’ll be traveling with me to pick up some money. I can’t say when or where, for now. Everything will be conducted on a ‘need to know’ basis. We don’t want you to lose your job at the post office, where you’re doing good work. So as we get closer to the date, we’ll tell you how long you’ll be gone.”
“It won’t be that long then?”
“About a week.”
“Will it be just you and me?”
“There will be checkpoints and handoffs. But yes, most of the time it will be just you and me. That’s all I can tell you for now.”
Michael nodded. Ariel stopped talking. It was very odd, regardless of the bizarre trappings of the apartment, to see this rough-hewn man taking such delicate sips from a teacup the size of a thimble. Ariel didn’t have any materials for him to bring back. Probably the purpose of this visit was just to check Michael out. Michael took a sip of the offered tea, now lukewarm, before he left. It was green and stronger than it looked.
On his way back, he felt an uneasy sense of elation. When Ariel mentioned money, he immediately thought of the $600,000 the old man had delivered from China. Michael could only assume they were going there for more. That he was being sent to the command center of world revolution at this juncture in his young career, for such a sensitive task, was quite unbelievable. Very little in his life, besides a few trips to Chinatown to discuss tactics with Francis, had prepared him. “China” had always been to him more a revolutionary ideal than an actual place, existing only in cloudy rumors he and the other local cadre, like courtiers stationed in a distant colony, attempted to decode, or else otherwise in those abstract, stiffly translated tracts they were sent, their lifeline to inter-pretation. Very few of them had access to cleaner information-Francis, who could understand some Chinese, and Ariel, with his contacts there, among them-and even their throughlines were questionable, though enough to lend them a certain priestlike authority. But the more Michael thought about it, the more he was convinced his life, so far, had been a preparation for such a trip. What, for instance, had led him that night to the lecture by the former Red Guard, which sent him off on his own trajectory into the revolution? As an advocate of science, Michael didn’t believe in fate, but he trusted the unconscious. His life so far had been defined by great, blind leaps. He had gone from the Midwest to the Ivy League to San Francisco. He had never left the country before. Now he was going to China.
When he thought of why he had been selected to go, though, the picture grew darker. It was clear he was going, on the one hand, to take care of the money and keep it from capitalists and opportunists, in case Ariel, who was old as shit, had a heart attack or otherwise dropped dead. On the other, and this was the part of his job he was uncomfortable with, he was probably there to keep an eye on his companion. Or rather, they were to keep an eye on each other, in case either person, and the people who backed them, tried to muscle out the other. This was not something he liked to think about. Ariel had built factions within the organization, probably based in the Midwest. Things were lining up, Michael understood though only very vaguely, along the same faults that were fracturing the CPC. Everyone knew Ariel was a Chou En-lai guy, but which way did Chou go? With Liu Hsiao-chi? Lin Piao and the PLA? Or the radicals? Michael had been selected, he believed, because he was trusted on all sides. That had always been his best trait: he got along with everybody. And he could also take care of himself, if he had to. Certainly he could against an old man. But he did not want to think he couldn’t trust Ariel, or the organization. He was sure of his own commitment. He believed the group was sure too and would take the necessary precautions for his safety. One good sign was his receiving only the information he needed to know, which, he understood, was for his own protection.
On returning to the Bay Area, he ran into Francis. Michael was on his way to the People’s Bookstore on Brenham Street, off Portsmouth Square. Francis was coming out with some books tucked under his arm. On that gray day, he looked uncharacteristically like an ineffably old Chinese scholar, strolling through Tien An Men on his way to the Forbidden City.
The two of them talked among the pigeons. The square was unusually empty. Droplets of mist condensed in the air. Playing their game of one-upmanship, Michael mentioned the job he was being assigned and that he was traveling with Ariel. His disclosure was strategic as well. He wanted to gauge how much Francis knew.
“Well, you know the score,” Francis replied, unperturbed. “Don’t let Ariel out of your sight once the two of you pick up the money.”
Michael nodded. He couldn’t tell if Francis was playing the same game, talking as if he knew more than he did. All of them did that to some degree, Michael supposed. But maybe Francis did know things about Ariel that Michael didn’t.
Without having mentioned that China was the place he was being sent, he asked Francis where he might buy a decent Chinese phrasebook and maps. “I came here for that, but I was thinking there are other places in Chinatown I could look.”
“There are places you could buy maps,” Francis replied, without missing a beat, “but because most of them are printed in Hong Kong or Taiwan, they’re inaccurate.” They depicted nonexistent rail lines and provincial boundaries, he explained, and some still drew the national borders as if it were the height of the Ching Dynasty. “The capital is Nanking, while Peking doesn’t exist at all. It’s called ‘Peiping,’ the Pacified North. You’re better off sticking to our own bookstore.”
“All right then.”
Michael went ahead and bought all the maps he could find anyway. When he went home and compared them all, including the one in the World Atlas in his local library, he wasn’t surprised to find the discrepancies Francis had mentioned. He was no stranger to political fictions. In practice, he lived to fight against them, but he had to admit, he was dismayed to encounter such a black-and-white instance of contested reality. On the one hand, there was the version promulgated by the United States, which pretended a government representing one billion people practically did not exist. On the other, there were remote areas in the southwest of China the size of California that he knew could not be considered under Communist control, no matter how cleanly delineated. The maps, far from providing a composite picture of something resembling the truth, only made the place he assumed he was traveling to seem all the more unreal.