Year of the Tiger (22 page)

I’m still more pissed off than afraid. ‘So what are you gonna do? Dress me in an orange jumpsuit? Fly me in a Gulfstream to Bumfuckistan?’

‘You think we can’t take you out of here if we want to?’ Suit #2 says in a low voice, fingers tightening on my arm. ‘You think we can’t make you disappear? Who’d blink twice if we did? You’re
nothing
, you get that? We can find you any time we want, and we can take you any time we want.’

‘People’d notice,’ I say in a small voice.

Suit #1 nods in agreement. ‘You’re pretty close to your mother, aren’t you? The two of you seem to communicate pretty regularly. I gather she’s been having a rough time lately, with her employment situation. And her relationship isn’t going so well either. But that’s a pattern with her, right? Bad choices with men.’

I stare at the hand on my forearm. It’s rough and reddish and has the kind of spots you get from sun and age. The weird thing is, the nails are neatly trimmed. Polished, even.

‘First thing,’ I say, ‘take your hand off me, or I really will scream. You want a scene in Starbucks? Go ahead. I’ll make one.’

Suit #1 nods slightly. Suit #2’s hand withdraws.

‘I don’t know if I can help you,’ I finally say. ‘I really don’t. Maybe I can try. But first you gotta tell me some things.’

‘If we can.’

‘Why do you want Hashim? The Uighur guy. What did he do?’

‘It’s what we told you before,’ Suit #1 says. ‘He’s connected to Islamic extremist organizations that are working against U.S. interests.’

‘What’s that mean, exactly? He wants to blow up the Mall of America or something?’

Suit #1 hesitates, but only for a moment. ‘I’m afraid I can’t discuss specifics.’

Well, no surprise there.

‘What about Lao Zhang?’ I ask.

‘What about him?’

‘I mean, what do you want with him?’ I feel like my gut’s stuck in my throat. ‘You want to take him to some recycled gulag, or what?’

Suit #2 barks out a laugh. ‘I wish. We lost the EU facilities thanks to that bitch from the
Washington Post
. Now,
there’s
somebody I’d like to render unto Caesar.’

‘Ha-ha,’ I say uncertainly.

‘Mrs Cooper,’ Suit #1 says, ‘we all know there were some abuses in the past. But that’s not how we do things now. We’re very careful about how we proceed.’ He smiles at me. ‘We’re just after the bad guys.’

‘Lao Zhang’s not a bad guy.’

‘I don’t get why you’re protecting him,’ Suit #2 says suddenly. ‘You’re just a piece of ass to him, don’t you get that? His token white girl. He dumps you in a pile of shit and leaves. When are you gonna wise up?’

My hand makes a fist, like I’m not controlling it. ‘What do you know? What the fuck do you know about it?’

The businessman at the next table stares at us.

‘Everybody calm down,’ Suit # 1 says. ‘We’re not after Lao Zhang. We want to find the Uighur. That’s all.’

Funny, but I don’t exactly believe him.

‘Okay,’ I finally say. ‘Maybe I can help you find the Uighur. But that’s it. I’m not helping you find Lao Zhang. And you’d better not fuck with my family.’

Suit #1 gives me this wide-eyed look. ‘Who said anything about that?’

You
did, asshole, I think; but I don’t say anything.

‘All right, Mrs Cooper. When can we expect to hear from you?’

‘If you can find me any time, why are you even asking?’

He lifts his hands. ‘We don’t want to crowd you. We’ll give you some time to do what you need to do. Within reason.’

‘A couple of days,’ I say, my thoughts scrambling around in my head like panicked mice. ‘Till the weekend.’

‘Agreed.’

The two of them rise. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ says Suit #1.

After they leave, I sit at my table for a while, sipping my Grande Mochachino and staring out the window at the train station across the way, thinking: I just gave myself four days to do something, and what the fuck am I going to do now? Because Little Mountain Tiger is dead, which means I can’t go to the Yellow Mountain Monastery. I log on to the game, and I’ll be in Hell, and I’ll have to face Ox-Head and Horse-Face, the guardians of the Underworld, and it will take hours of playing time just to resurrect myself to a basic level, which I don’t think will get me into the Yellow Mountain Monastery, and who’s to say every monster in the game won’t show up to kill me again?

I could try resurrecting myself and going to the Teahouse where I met Cinderfox, but I don’t know if he hangs out there at all or whether it was just a convenient place to meet a low-level player like I was before.

Maybe he’ll send me an e-mail, I think. He’s got my address. I don’t have his. The invitation came from the Game, not a private e-mail address.

And if he did write me, then what?

He’s my only connection to Lao Zhang right now, and I don’t even know what that connection means.

Even if I could contact Lao Zhang, there’s no way I want to put the Suits onto him. Even if he did leave me in a whole heap of shit.

He didn’t mean to. I don’t think.

That’s the thing, the real pisser of it all. A part of me thinks Suit #2 is right.

Not that Lao Zhang meant to get me in trouble, but that it doesn’t really matter to him that I am.

How can I know? What are we to each other? Right now, I don’t have a clue.

Then I remember the painting, the portrait he did of me. I don’t get what it means, with the three-legged dog and the scared cat and all, but I remember how he made me look: strong. Calm.

That’s how he sees me. Even if I’m not.

How do I see him?

I picture him painting. I think about sitting on his couch, watching him, and how that made me feel.

Like I was welcome someplace. Like I was home.

So, okay. That leaves the Uighur. Maybe he really
is
some kind of major terrorist. Which would mean my helping the Suits find him is the right, moral,
patriotic
thing to do.

Ha-ha.

Or I could just tell the Suits about the Game. Hey, look, guys! Terrorist sympathizers hatching their plots through PlayStations! That would be enough, wouldn’t it? Enough to take care of me and my family, and fuck everyone else.

After I finish my latte, I walk over to the train station. I can’t help it. The thought that there’s this place with trains getting the fuck out of town every few minutes attracts me like some kind of drug. I walk into the main lobby, into the hordes of people going here and there, riding the escalators up and down, the migrants from the countryside clutching their cardboard suitcases and faded striped shopping bags, the giggling students sharing iPod earbuds and ringtones, the middle-class Beijingers in their Polo shirts and fake Prada, the PA announcing arrivals and departures, all punctuated by the red diode signboards blinking destinations, and I think: how far away could I get? Is there someplace I could go where they can’t find me?

How
did
they find me? Can they find me when my phone is off? Can they track my e-mail to whatever Internet bar I happen to log in at? Or was it from using the ATM, from getting money out of my U.S. account?

Or maybe it’s something more low-tech. Like Harrison Wang works for them, and he told them I was at his place, and they followed me from there.

I stare at the red diode signboards above the escalators to the second floor. I just missed a train to Harbin. Too bad. Harbin is pretty far away. In three hours, I could catch a train to Xiamen. People tell me Xiamen is nice. Warm. It has a beach. That’s tempting. Here’s another going to Inner Mongolia. Could I get to Outer Mongolia from there? That might be far enough.

Here’s a train to Taiyuan, in Shanxi, leaving in thirty-eight minutes.

Taiyuan, I think. Chuckie’s family lives around there.

Chuckie, with his seventh-level Qi sword. His hacking skills. Chuckie, who’s played
The Sword of Ill Repute
way longer than I have.

Maybe he’s not part of the Great Community, but who better than Chuckie to help me get Little Mountain Tiger back in the Game?

I watch the red letters on the signboard shuffle and reassemble. Train to Nanjing in an hour. One to Lanzhou in two.

I think: maybe Chuckie won’t help me. I think: even if he does, maybe I won’t get anything more from the Game than I already have, which adds up to pretty much nothing.

But what else am I going to do? Stumble around Beijing for a couple days? Wait for the Suits to pick me up in some random Starbucks?

Right now, the Game is all I’ve got.

And leaving town in thirty-eight minutes sounds good.

I was lucky. My leg was totally busted up, multiple fractures, shredded muscles, lacerated blood vessels, but I didn’t lose it, even after the post-op infection and complications from blood loss; they did skin grafts put in an intramedullary rod and five titanium screws to hold it all together. I had broken some ribs and fractured two vertebrae too. I had a major concussion but no long-term brain injury, at least that’s what they said. At first they weren’t sure, because for a while I had a hard time putting sentences together, and I’d get these headaches that were so bad I’d want to die. That made them wonder if some of the psych symptoms I exhibited were organic, as opposed to just me being crazy. But they cleared me of any permanent brain injury.

I know I was lucky. I told myself that every time I saw some of the guys in the hospital. The guys with ‘polytrauma.’ That’s what they call it when you have more than one serious injury at once, usually an amputation combined with head trauma. The guys who had to learn to both talk and walk all over again. The guys who couldn’t get that far. Who would never be able to hold a real job, because their brains just wouldn’t work right any more. Smart guys, funny guys, with chunks out of their skulls, indentations like somebody’d taken an ice-cream scoop to their heads, who’d smile sometimes when they couldn’t keep up, like they knew they were missing something, but didn’t know what. The guys who were worse than that. The ones who weren’t really there at all any more, who needed tubes to breathe and tubes to suction out their mucus and tubes to pump liquefied pudding into their guts and take away their piss and what passed for their shit. I’d go by those rooms on my crutches, the pain in my leg so bad that even through the haze of narcotics I’d have tears streaming down my face and not even realize I was crying, and I’d see families in there sometimes, sitting around the bed, holding the guy’s hand, telling him how he was going to get better soon, and they were going to take him home. He’d be home, and it would all be better.

People kept telling me how brave I was. I didn’t get that. I mean, how brave do you have to be to get blown up? But I’d smile and nod anyway. I just did what I was told. Walk to the end of the rail; lift your leg; tighten your belly; four more times; come on, you can do it; pump, pump, pump! I worked my ass off, like a good little soldier.

But the first time I really saw myself in the mirror, when I was finally able to go into the bathroom with the help of an attendant, no more bedpans and catheters, I could hardly believe the face that stared back at me. I’d lost something like twenty-five pounds, and I hadn’t been heavy to begin with. I looked like a little old man. Some shriveled-up circus monkey. My eyes were sunk into their sockets, surrounded by bruised, black lids, black holes that were going to swallow me up inside them.

‘Hey,’ I said to the attendant, this Haitian guy who was built like a statue. ‘Hey, I look like shit, don’t I?’

‘You don’t look so bad,’ he said, resting his heavy hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ll get better. Don’t you worry.’

I was in the hospital for over a month. After the first two weeks, my mom had to go back to work. She said she could come and see me on the weekends, but I told her she should save her money. As much as a part of me wanted her there, wanted my mommy to stay and take care of me, another part of me wished that she hadn’t come. Because I could see how much it hurt her to see me like this, her little girl, how painful it was for her. I could see her eyes fill with tears as she looked at me, when she didn’t turn away in time. I didn’t want to be responsible for that.

Trey couldn’t stay long either. He had to get back.

I’d wanted to wait and have a real wedding, that whole princess fantasy, me all in white; but Trey had more sense about this than I did.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We should do it now. Just in case.’

‘Don’t think that way,’ I said.

‘Ellie, we
have
to think that way. If something happens to me, you’ll have my benefits. That’s not much, but it’s something.’

I finally decided that he was right. That it was practical. Or maybe I just wanted to please him. It was what he wanted, after all. And I wanted to make him happy.

A chaplain came and married us, me lying in my hospital bed, Trey in his dress uniform, my mom and his parents standing by. This was the first time I’d met his parents, naturally, and in my morphine-addled state it was hard for me to form much of an impression of them, except that I could see Trey in them both, distorted, fun-house mirror versions of Trey anyway. They smiled a lot. They seemed tense.