Preparation for the Next Life (18 page)

She stood up on her toes to look inside the cupboards, her full bare calves flexing. Her t-shirt, which said I’m Fallin’ for Juicy, rode up to the edge of her rear.

Does that answer your question?

She tsked and folded her arms.

The typical boy. No dish. What you will eat? Maybe I will buy for you. Pot, dish, bowl.

During the day, he bought beer and condoms at a gas station on Northern Boulevard and they drank together at the round table in his kitchen. He did not buy groceries. She got drunk and rubbed his hair. So cute. She pointed at the empty shelves. No cooking pot. No nothing. You are just like man. Make your muscle. He flexed his arm and she felt it. Like my father. How’s that? Acts like man. She leaned in and stared fixedly at him, her eyes thick with liquid. Good man. Skinner agreed the way you do with someone drinking. He give everything to me. To us. To my mother. Everything he will do
for us, even he has nothing. He is poor man. She told Skinner one of her small stories about things her dad had done. There were just a few to share because he hadn’t stayed with them very much.

He give everything to me.

I know, Skinner agreed.

Tears ran out of her eyes.

It’s all right.

She took another drink from her can and finding it empty, cracked open another. Whoa. Skinner stuck his cigarette in the side of his mouth and took it away from her. She took it back and took a slug out of it. Okay, he said. There’s always more beer. He took it away from her and put it as far away as he could reach.

She had started sobbing, her face in her arms crossed on the table. He reached over and squeezed her shoulder and shook it gently. You’re gonna be okay. She said something he couldn’t hear. She repeated it:

I never going to see him again.

It sucks. I know.

He helped her into his room and put his poncholiner around her.

But she was happy after all. It was a long time ago, losing him. I drink too much. She indicated their empties all around the place. Shed blood, not tears was the rule in the northwest—except if you were drinking. Or you could show yourself through a song. However, she did not sing. She sang Skinner’s name at work and the boss-wife said, What are you so happy about?

Frogs, she said.

She showed herself through her actions, by coming over to his basement every day after work and then going all the way home at night. I have energy a lot. She did not buy him pots and pans. She was not the mother type. When she collected their empties one day and took them to the redeemer, it was because she was enterprising, not because she felt she should clean up after him. With the dollar and change she made, she bought a chicken skewer and saved it for them to eat together, half each, the meat cold by the time she had walked there with it through the small houses covered in Spanish graffiti. She was logging all these miles and it was good. Spring was coming, the big wheel of the city starting to turn.

I can’t get rid of you. Maybe it’s the pizza. Or maybe it’s something else you’re getting from me, he said.

It was his camouflage, she told him. His army jacket. It was his poncholiner. It’s your boots. I love your boots.

Howbout this? he asked and pulled his shirt up. Is it the shrapnel in my back? Is it my war?

I love your war, she said.

11

W
HEN
I
AM A
little kid, my father tells me all about it how to be the soldier. There is a lot of duty that you must perform. All the men live in poor conditions, but they must not mind it. The people live in poor conditions, so the soldier has to be the same. He cannot have more than they do. He will work to give them a better life. So they say: we are like the out-of-town cousin. When he comes to town, he comes to stay with us and we feed him. Only after he is fed does the army eat its dinner. So the army is skinny and society is fatter.

A long time ago, the whole country is in disaster and we have enemies inside and outside the border. United States, Soviet Union, Japan all attacked because our country is weak. Criminals take advantage of this weakness to steal from us. The army saved us and punished the criminals.

The people and the army are joined together, though they are not the same. Everyone when he gets to be eighteen is supposed to serve the army. I want to serve the army when I am eighteen. Actually, I cannot do it. There are so many Chinese, it is hard to join the army. Even though it is very hard, it is a good job and everyone wants to do it.

I don’t know about the American army, but in the People’s Liberation Army, it is very strict. The soldiers come from poor places and they are all used to it. Some of them have never seen a toilet before in their lives. Don’t know how to read.

But in those days, the quality of the soldiers is very high. They can survive on just a small ration of food. I don’t know about the American army if it can do that. The Americans have big bodies and I think they would be too hungry. But in China we are used to it.

The situation is changing since I am a kid. Before, we don’t have any technology. Now, the technology is getting stronger. We can use cyberwarfare—it’s very popular now. And we have many nuclear
weapons, almost equal. We depend less on the individual soldier. Maybe, as we become greater, the individual is getting weaker.

Whenever disaster happens to our country, the army can do its best to save the people. If the river floods or the land slide. It happens countless times in our history. When it happens, no one will save us but the army.

Really, all the people must thank them or we would not be able to exist. When a farmer drives a truck filled with vegetables, the oil to run the motor is coming from the pipeline. I think if you are a woman in the market and you buy vegetables, you must thank my father.

I don’t think anyone remembers this. Even I forget, but I shouldn’t. Everything comes from somewhere.

I’m saying my father, but of course it wasn’t him alone. I mean the Lanzhou Regiment and the Western Development Project are responsible for providing oil. They made sure we got it instead of Russia.

They built the pipeline in the beginning with no equipment except shovels, picks, and baskets. The oil is covered by a mountain range called the Onion Mountains. If you can imagine, they dug through the mountains. It’s a little bit like when the Chinese built the railroad here, only in this case, they were serving their own people. So much dynamite was used that the herdsmen were superstitious. They believed a devil is trying to terrify them. Then they got used to them after a while. They called the soldiers the Thunders. This gave my dad an idea. He named me Thunder for good luck.

In China, if you ask what is the most dangerous job, everyone will tell you the job of coal miner is number one. The truth is, this job was even worse. Sometimes you can be working and someone is putting dynamite right next to you, and you don’t even know it until it goes off. The mountain can collapse at any time. Once, it fell in and trapped a lot of men. My father is lucky that he went to drink some water. Just at that place where he was before, it fell in.

Immediately, they all try to save the ones who are trapped. I think in a rich country, someone would bring some special equipment. Today, maybe in China they can have this equipment as well, but at the time, it is impossible. All that they can do is dig with tools in their hands. Of course, there’s no way it can work and the friends of theirs die. Actually, they have to let them die. The leaders cannot waste the time to save them. They were ordered to go back to work.
It’s the same as war. The country is in a war to modernize, and many people have to give up their lives.

Including my father had to give his life. So, by what he did, he taught me what it’s all about to be a hero.

Look, it’s me and you.

Yeah.

Macky D.

This is my screensaver.

She reached over his arm, her breast against his arm, and clicked to the next photograph. It was Skinner with New York behind him at night. Empire Building, she said. She studied the solitary white face in the camera’s flash, surrounded by the black sky and galactic skyline, a week before she had met him.

Then she clicked again and saw dull land and sky, blue over brown, dark palms, a blurred shadow of a vehicle, a striding figure in a robe. She clicked again and saw a haze of dust hanging over mud buildings. A mosque, a truck driving by in the glare. A goat lying on a rubble of bricks in a ditch, the blur of a child carrying a bucket, and a soldier looking the other way.

He had gotten silent. She kept clicking.

Those are the guys.

An angry face in a helmet. She clicked. Someone giving the camera the finger. A laugh. A picture of a military vehicle with the hatches open and gear everywhere as if it had been torn apart in a hurricane. The soldiers’ heads were down. They looked confused and disorganized. A focused man spoke on the radio.

The next picture was of a soldier sitting in a wooden latrine closet holding a roll of toilet paper in his filthy coal miner’s hands. He was speaking at the camera.

Damn. That’s Sconnie.

There was a picture of what was a human foot lying on the sand and another picture in which the object was shown from a greater distance and you couldn’t tell it was someone’s foot. But you could see something else, a pile of drenched clothing at a distance. In the pile, she made out a beard, a face—she thought. Blurred soldiers smoking. She saw animals, dogs. A woman covered in a nun-like
robe, except for her fearsome face in mid-yell, her thick hands lifted and about to come down in the act of hurling curses at the picture taker.

She tapped the key again. She saw a platoon all sleeping like homeless men in shallow graves that they had dug in clay, lying in a spill of camouflage, each man’s boots next to him.

As she kept clicking, the disorder of everything seemed to reassemble itself in reverse. She saw them in shades, posing with their weapons, dressed as if for the beach in flip-flops and towels, sunglasses and guns.

There was a photograph of a young man asleep with his mouth open and someone holding a hotdog in front of his crotch and putting it to the other’s mouth.

Neither she nor Skinner laughed. She murmured, kept clicking. A photograph appeared of a young man, shirtless, in motion, close to the camera. He was extremely fit. Lines separated all the muscles of his torso. A gold light surrounded the subject. He bore a likeness to the man sitting next to her on the bed. A cousin, she thought. But his tattoos were the same.

Yeah, that’s me, he said. I know I’m not as good now.

Seeing a magazine under his bed, she said, Hm, what’s this? And she picked it up and started flipping through it. It contained pictures of people having sex in high resolution. There were two women having sex with one man, and two men having sex with one woman.

Aw that’s nothing serious. Well, you know what that is.

She knew what porn was, yes, she did. Chinese men had these kinds of magazines, showing Japanese women tied up with clothesline, men’s hands pinching their breasts. They included educational articles on the mechanics, significance, and health requirements of various sexual acts, such as so-called flute-blowing, which was described as the ultimate way to show appreciation of the man’s yang force by a devoted female on her knees. Bachelors read these stories when they came home from restaurant work and needed to relieve themselves. That was just men for you. The sound of them masturbating came through the plywood walls when she was trying to sleep.

The Western magazine she was now looking at was a Club International. With a raised eyebrow, she examined the scenes of double penetration and gazed long and skeptically at a woman sticking out her tongue with a proud and satisfied expression showing that the men had ejaculated in her mouth.

At length, Zou Lei tossed the magazine back on the floor. This kind of thing was fine for other people, but it was not for her.

You sure? Skinner asked, and she hit him. But he was serious.

You might not always know yourself.

Well, anyway, he said, take a look at this. Check this out. He stuck his cigarette in his mouth and rummaged on the floor, eyes slitted against his smoke, and found his Ironman and opened it for her. See this is what I’m doin now. And she joined him in looking at the lifters: athletes dividing their anatomy into logical sections and applying resistance to each section in accordance with a disciplined schedule. The lifter on the cover was straining and bulging, his skin straining and flushed red, his teeth bared in a grimace of ultimate effort, his face flexed and flushed and bulging with veins as if even his forehead were yet another slab of muscle.

Good, she said. How much is the weight?

He’s got like 650 on the bar. See it bend. You don’t get like that on MREs.

How can he do it? He use drug?

He showed her the pages of supplements. Creatine, glucosamine, mass builder—that’s a protein bomb. When it goes off, you just get big.

She pretended to stick a needle in her vein and made a popping sound with her mouth.

This is the shit I’m talkin about. He tapped it with his cigarette. I gotta remember to get this.

You will look like him?

I probably won’t.