Year of the Tiger (21 page)

I wind up my staff like I’m swinging at a baseball and nail the thing. The owl flutters to the ground, losing a few speckled feathers in the process.

I have to give them credit for some killer animation.

The owl lies on the stone path, yellow feet sticking up in the air. I guess it’s dead. What was
that
about, I wonder? I’m anonymous. Why am I getting attacked by homicidal birds?

I use my wisdom to verify that it’s dead and that it’s no longer dangerous. Then I pick it up, on the off chance that it contains some hidden power or message for me.

Nothing.

I start walking up the path again, thinking maybe I’ll try to find the Yellow Mountain Monastery, which I haven’t actually seen yet.

I’m trying to remember the significance of owls in this game. It isn’t wisdom, I don’t think. I have the vague memory that it’s something bad, bad luck, a bad omen, something like that.

This notion is confirmed for me when a pack of Hopping Corpses comes at me from out of the woods.

‘Shit.’

I remember the Hopping Corpses. They’re these zombies that have long tongues and will try to suck the life force out of you. They’re dressed up in fancy, if rotting, robes, like Qing Dynasty officials, and they get around by, well, hopping. They’re pretty easy to kill, though. I reach into my knapsack and get out my sheaf of yellow spell paper and type the ‘attack’ command. The yellow sheets peel off and fly toward the Hopping Corpses, clinging to their faces like Saran Wrap. One by one, the Hopping Corpses collapse. I don’t know if you can say that they die, because technically they were already dead.

I take a couple hits from their tongues, which weakens me slightly, but I more than make up for it with the points I get for – I guess – re-killing them.

By now I’m just a bit pissed off.

‘What’s up?’ I type. ‘Did I do something wrong? Give me a hint, okay? Did I talk to somebody I shouldn’t have? Not do something I was supposed to? Come on, this sucks!’

No response. I start walking up the path again, looking for the Yellow Mountain Monastery.

Then, at the edge of the screen, I see a figure – a man – with reddish hair. Cinderfox?

‘Hail, Little Mountain Tiger.’

‘Hail, whoever you are.’

‘Cinderfox,’ he confirms. ‘Something wrong. Log out and try again later.’

‘OK.’ I type in the command.

But nothing happens. I’m still there, still standing on the mountain path, looking at Cinderfox in the distance.

Right about then, something really nasty swoops down from the sky.

This thing, it’s sort of a bird, but it’s huge, and it has a bunch of heads – I can’t even count how many – and it’s spitting fire from each of them, and even though I raise my tortoiseshell shield, I can’t protect myself from all of them.

‘Log off!’ Cinderfox types. ‘LOG OFF!’

I try to log off again, but I’m still stuck here. And I’m remembering something, something about the game, about one of the strongest demons in it, something called a ‘Nine-Headed Bird.’

I run down the mountain, holding my shield over my head, throwing every spell I have at the demon, but it’s too fast and too strong, and I make a stupid turn and practically run into a granite cliff face. I think: cave. Maybe there’s a cave I can hide in while I try to log out again. But there’s no cave, and finally what happens is the Nine-Headed Bird catches me in one of its beaks, and though I manage to slice off two of its heads, the one that has me in its mouth tosses me against the granite rock face again and again, and the hit points keep climbing, and, all of a sudden, Little Mountain Tiger goes limp in the Nine-Headed demon’s beak. It drops me to the ground, and I’m dead.

Little Mountain Tiger is dead.

I mean, what the fuck?

The way the military determines if you have post-traumatic stress disorder is, they look at how many traumatic and stressful things you personally experienced. Things like being in combat, seeing your buddies get blown up, things like that. So, I wasn’t in combat, and even though I was a convoy medic for a while and that was pretty fucking stressful, I never saw my buddies get blown up, only some already blown-up hajjis and the soldier nobody knew who blew his brains out. As for the gunfire and mortars and RPGs going off all the time, almost everybody in the sandbox had to deal with that, so that wasn’t enough. You try to make a claim based on that, they say either you’re faking it, or you had some pre-existing mental health problem, which, if true, might lead you to ask, then why the fuck did you send me off to war in the first place?

Trust me, they don’t have a good answer to that.

Of course, I did get blown up myself. Here’s why that didn’t count:

I was on my way to the DFAC for chow. Middle of the day. And what happened was, some hajjis decided to launch a couple mortar rounds, just to show they could, I guess, because they almost always did that at night. And one of them landed close by me, and I got hit pretty good by shrapnel and the concussion from the explosion. But I don’t actually remember that part.

What I remember is leaving my hooch and being kind of hungry and hoping there were still some tacos left, because Pulagang had already eaten, and she’d told me the tacos were pretty good. And then I remember lying on my back, staring up at the yellow sky. Everything was really quiet, I guess because I was deaf from the shock or the explosion for a little while. It was actually kind of peaceful. I just lay there, blinking at the sun, watching clods of dirt rush toward me and land in little puffs of dust.

Next thing I remember, I was lying in the aid station. Blanchard was working on me, and in spite of his being a dickhead, he was actually a pretty good medic, and he got me packaged up and ready to go in record time, all wrapped up in tubes and gauze and air-filled plastic like I was some kind of extra-fragile FedEx. I was so fucked up, I can’t even describe what I was feeling as pain; but I got some morphine, and I could nod and respond and grab his hand, and holding somebody’s hand never felt so good or important, like it was going to save my life.

After I was more or less stabilized but before the copter got there, Blanchard let Trey come in to see me.

‘Oh, Ellie. Oh, Jesus.’

He was crying. Tears streaming down his face. He covered my hand with his, gently, like he was afraid he might break it. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I promise. I swear.’

I didn’t see Trey at the hospital at Camp Screaming Eagle Whatever, and he didn’t come to Landstuhl, which is where I went next. He couldn’t request emergency leave under the circumstances – technically, we weren’t supposed to be fucking.

But not too long after I got to Walter Reed, when it still wasn’t clear whether I’d keep my leg or lose it, I was lying in bed in a haze of morphine, watching some dumb-ass reality show about celebrities eating bugs, and I looked up, and there was a man standing in the doorway. He was tall, broad through the shoulders, wearing an Army dress uniform, and juggling this oversized bouquet of yellow roses, a teddy bear, and something else, I couldn’t see what.

‘Trey?’

‘Hey, Ellie.’

He stood there awkwardly. I couldn’t do anything much, as I still pretty much felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I think I smiled a little.

Trey put the roses on the nightstand by my bed, where I could smell the sap from their fresh-cut stems. He held on to the teddy bear for a moment, chewed on his lip, and finally placed it on the pillow next to my head. Then I could see the other thing. He’d somehow gotten my red Beanie squid, the one I’d taken over there with me. I almost cried when I saw it. Maybe I did cry. He put it in the teddy bear’s lap.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘How’re you doing?’

‘Okay.’

‘I miss you,’ he said.

‘Me too. I mean, I miss you too.’

Trey bowed his head. Like he was ashamed about something.

‘Ellie,’ he said abruptly, ‘I want to take care of you. Let’s –’

On the TV, some supermodel shrieked about having snakes crawling on her.

Trey found the remote and turned it off. Then he knelt down at the side of the bed.

‘Do you want to get married?’ he asked. It was weird the way he asked it, like it was something that had just occurred to him.

He stared at his hands. They were clasped together, resting on the edge of the bed.

‘I know I’m a sinner. And I don’t think I deserve you. But … I want to get better. I want to be a better man.’

I can’t really say that I thought about it. I was on so much morphine that thinking about much of anything was beyond me.

But what I felt, for just that moment, was that I was finally safe.

‘Sure, Trey,’ I whispered. ‘I’d like that.’

Anyway, back to my PTSD claim. Like I said, they base it on the fucked-up shit you personally experience. And I wasn’t in combat, I didn’t see my buddies get blown up, and I couldn’t even remember much about my own injury.

What about what happened in the Admin Core, you might ask?

Well, here’s the thing. In order for it to count, you have to tell them about it.

I walk out of the
wangba
, and I’m pretty shook up about being dead.

Of course, being dead isn’t permanent in the Game. I can resurrect Little Mountain Tiger if I’m willing to put in the playing time. But the whole other aspect of it, the idea that Cinderfox claimed to be Lao Zhang’s friend, that I joined their Guild, and then out of nowhere just about every bad demon in the game arrived to take me out …

Well, that’s disturbing.

I can’t even begin to sort out what it all means.

I see the green-and-white Starbucks sign, and all I want to do is sink into that familiar environment, with the wood-grain tables and the cool jazz music and the nice coffee smell and the hiss of steaming milk.

I go in, order a Grande Mochachino from the cheerful barista, and sit by the window that faces the train station.

The Beijing train station is big and brown and flanked at intervals by towers topped with pagoda roofs – another attempt to put Chinese lipstick on an architectural pig. It’s still better than the Beijing West train station, which is like the same thing but on steroids and gray, with a massive upside-down U at its center that squats there like some kind of Stalinist wet dream, as British John would put it. But hey, who died and made me Beijing’s architecture critic? Especially considering that right now I’m dead myself.

Sometimes I lose track of where I am. I’ll end up someplace and wonder how I got there. Or I’ll be somewhere and completely space out. Disassociate. Part of the fun of PTSD. It’s what happens when I’m exhausted from being hyper-vigilant.

Which is why I don’t notice the two guys coming up from behind until they sit down on either side of me.

‘Mrs Cooper,’ one of them says briskly.

It’s the Suits – the GSC guys.

The thinner, younger one – Carter or Macias? I try to remember – does his best impersonation of a concerned expression. ‘Sorry to intrude, Mrs Cooper. Or do you prefer McEnroe?’

‘What do you want?’ I say, as soon as my heart stops hammering enough for me to speak.

‘You’ve been spending some time out in Mati. And with some interesting people. We were hoping you might have news for us.’

‘I already told you –’ I begin.

‘And we don’t believe you,’ says Suit #2, the bulky, meaner one.

‘Why not?’ I don’t have to fake sounding angry. ‘It’s just a coincidence that I even met the guy. You think I’m some kind of terrorist?’

‘We think you have information that you’re not sharing due to some misguided loyalty to your boyfriend,’ Suit #1 says. ‘And while we understand that, we just don’t have time for it right now.’

‘What, the Uighur’s gonna set off a nuke in Manhattan?’ I snark.

Suit #2 clamps his beefy hand on my forearm.

‘I’ll scream,’ I say.

Suit #2 shrugs. ‘Go ahead. You think anyone will care? Let the foreigners deal with their own problems. That’s what they think around here.’

‘We really need your help, Mrs Cooper,’ Suit #1 says. ‘We thought, with all the time you’ve been spending in Mati, that you might be trying to help us. It’s disappointing that you’re not.’