Hour of the Rat (41 page)

I think about all this, and I have an idea. Maybe it’s a really bad one.

I have a cheap cell phone I carry with me, ever since what happened last year. No GPS. No regular account. No way to trace it to me—I buy new SIM cards and minutes when I need them.

Just in case.

I wait an hour and use it to call Vicky Huang.

“I have a big favor to ask Mr. Cao,” I say.

“O
F COURSE
,
OF COURSE
!” Sidney’s gotten on the call himself. “Certainly I can help you with this.” I can picture him smiling on the other end of the line. “My jet is your jet.”

Y
EAH
, I
TAKE
S
IDNEY
Cao’s jet to Guiyang. I’d take it to Kaili, but the airport there isn’t finished yet. I sit in the leather
seat, sip some crazy overpriced Bordeaux, eat filet mignon, and think, Fuck, well, that’s another Lao Zhang painting I’m probably going to have to give Sidney for his private museum. I drink some more wine, and I think, This whole thing—the jet, the palace, Sidney’s World—it’s the stuff Lao Zhang likes to skewer in his art, and here I am, going along for the ride.

I realize something else. I haven’t logged in to the Great Community for … days? Weeks? How long has it been? Sometime in Yangshuo.

I’ve hardly even thought about it all.

I guess because I’ve been getting my ass kicked in the real world. The electronics dumps in Guiyu. The bird sanctuary. New Century seeds. My mom. Creepy John. The dog.

Except—it occurs to me as I’m sitting in a leather seat on a private jet, sipping this crazy-good, way-overpriced wine and eating my filet—what’s “real” about any of this? I think about Guiyu, about Wa Keung and Mei Yee and Moudzu, about how they live.

This relates to the kid who fixed my laptop … how?

How did I get here?

Don’t think about it, I tell myself. Think about the mission.

I
GET TO
G
UIYANG
at around 1:30
P
.
M
. The white-gloved flight attendant waves good-bye to me as I limp down the boarding ramp, the hangar for Shining Star Aviation in the background.

I take a taxi to the Guiyang train station. Just manage to catch the 3:00
P
.
M
. train to Kaili. It gets me there at 5:30
P
.
M
.

The Kaili train station, not your first- or even second-tier-city train station. It’s this dumpy two-story building, ceiling fans hung by skinny poles from a whitewashed concrete ceiling, smelling like decades of cigarettes and piss. I push my way through the metal-grilled gate, stumble down the shallow
cement stairs, out to the curb, blinking. Into another city where I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing.

Kaili looks kind of small, I think. The train station doesn’t even have a real parking lot, just some spaces in a half circle out in front. A little chilly. I turn up the collar of my jacket. Stand there, daypack on my back, duffel on my shoulder, looking for a cab. Not a lot of traffic. Some blocky white buildings. It hardly feels like a city at all.

I
T
’
S A CITY
,
BUT
a small one, for China, wedged into a space blasted out of granite mountains. Modest storefronts mostly. A larger indoor mall advertising brands I’ve never heard of that sits across what looks like the center of the city, where a bunch of streets run into each other, forming almost a circle. Occasional signs in English that make no sense, like 300
SEATS OUT OF PRINT WATERFRONT MANSION
. It might be for real estate.

“
Ni shi naguo ren?
” the cabbie asks. Where are you from?

“
Meiguo.
” I am too tired and too fried to have this conversation now.

“Oh, American! I haven’t met Americans before. Not too many come here. Welcome you to Kaili!”

“
Xie xie ni.
”

“Every day is a festival in Kaili, have you heard that saying?”

His accent has a lilt to it, like it’s Irish Chinese or something. Mandarin isn’t the native language here.

“I haven’t. I don’t know very much about Kaili.”

The cabbie grins. He’s a few years older than me, small, receding hair. “Then I’ll tell you, every
third
day is a major festival.”

Good to know.

M
Y HOTEL IS THIS
cheap place that I’m guessing used to be government-owned, and maybe it still is. There’s thousands of hotels in China that look like this: chunky, maybe ten stories, faded white walls, long halls, broad wooden railings, gilt trim. Worn red carpets. The kind of place where there’s a piece of paper stuck on the door of my room that says, “
HINT! Honorific Guest, please give the product cash to stage to take care of, before sleeping invite anti the lock the door lock, the door bolt comes the door bolt, close the window and put on to put the, otherwise, the risk is complacent. Camp Dish Guest House.
”

Inside, it’s two beds, a pressboard desk with a TV, an electric teakettle, and musty white curtains.

Not bad for twenty-four bucks, I tell myself.

I do what I always seem to do every time I find myself in a city I don’t know, half asleep and half hungover: throw my stuff on a chair, kick off my shoes, and collapse on the hard bed. Sleep.

I
WAKE UP TO
gunfire.

I’m on the floor before I know it, crouching by the side of the bed.

Firecrackers. It’s firecrackers, dumbass.

You’d think I’d be used to that by now, living in China, but they still get me every now and then.

I haul myself to my feet and hobble over to the window. The firecrackers are still going on. Maybe a new business opened up. Maybe there’s a wedding. Maybe it’s part of today’s festival.

I need to check out the places in Langhai’s video. See if anyone knows him. But first I need to figure out where those places are.

I have to decide how I’m going to handle this.

Lunch, I decide.

M
Y HOTEL IS UP
a little hill. I head down it. With my knit hat on and a sweater, I’m pretty comfortable. It’s funny, because Kaili looks like a lot of other small Chinese cities. A little run-down. Lots of concrete and red brick, round grey roof tiles. Maybe a few more trees. But there’s something kind of pleasant about it. I’m not sure what. It feels relaxed, I guess. Not so many cars. The air is clean.

I wander down a narrow street with no sidewalks. There’s a market here, tables selling fruits and vegetables, meat, tofu, spices. Noodle stalls. I’m tempted to stop at one of those, but I keep going. I hear people talking, and I don’t have a clue what they’re saying. It doesn’t sound like Chinese at all. Kaili is the capital of the Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture—at least that’s what the book in my hotel room said—and I guess most of the people here aren’t Han.

And then I hear this crazy music. It’s like … I don’t know how to describe it. Pipes. A drone. High-pitched women’s voices. I mean, I’ve heard plenty of Peking Opera, and it’s nothing like that. This slips into my head. That musician who used to live across from Lao Zhang back in Mati Village, he’d love this stuff, trance music, with a beat.

As I approach the intersection, I see the parade.

It’s not a big parade. Just a line of musicians and singers. The men are wearing, like, bell-bottomed pants with embroidered trim. The women, red-embroidered skirts and silver headdresses, big silver necklaces that drape over their chests like floppy collars. The men carry these pipes fringed with red yarn and ribbons, and the pipes are so tall that they brush the leaves of the trees.

Is this the every-third-day big festival, I wonder, or just the normal daily one?

I follow them.

They go through a gate, weaving into a parking lot. I think it’s a restaurant. Or maybe restaurants—there’s more than one building. Lots of restaurants are like this in China, where you have different levels of service and price. Private dining rooms for special groups. Public rooms for everyone else.

With the musicians and all, I’m guessing they cater to tourists.

Straight ahead is a one-story building painted a kind of greenish turquoise, with a mural on the front that’s this psychedelic design of dragons and flowers, so intricate that it makes me dizzy.

Or maybe that’s because I haven’t eaten.

I go inside.

Y
OU KNOW
,
THEY
’
RE PRETTY
used to foreigners in most of the places I’ve been in China, but not here. Everyone stares. It’s like I’m some kind of celebrity or something, maybe the kind that gets loaded and ends up on the cover of the
National Enquirer
.

Then the hostess, who’s wearing an outfit that looks like the female musicians’, except without so much silver, breaks into a smile. “Welcome, welcome!” she says, and indicates a table. “
Qing zuo!
”

I sit. The other customers check me out. They seem friendly anyway. A lot of smiles. They’re small, most of them, short and trim. I never think of myself as tall or big, but here I am.

“Rice wine.” The hostess has returned with a younger waitress in tow, who’s bearing a small clay jug and a cup, like a sake cup, on a tray. “Local specialty. Please, try a little.” At least I’m pretty sure that’s what she says. Her Chinese is hard for me to understand.

I’m not crazy about Chinese wine, but I don’t want to
be rude. “
Xie xie
,” I say. “I am interested in trying local specialties.”

She pours me a cup. And it’s good. Kind of sweet, but not syrupy, and without the chemical burn of
baijiu
. “Very good to drink,” I say, and she pours me another one.

Great. Is this one of those situations where if I don’t drink, I’m being incredibly impolite and they’ll hate me? Maybe I should go ahead and risk being hated, considering that I am on a mission here.

I drink it. The mission’s not going to happen till after lunch, right?

I have a fish with sour cabbage and pickles and sesame-flavor tofu, some more rice wine, and it’s all really good. A couple of guys at the next table ask me where I’m from. “Beijing,” I tell them. They laugh. “Your Chinese sounds like a Beijing person,” one of them says.

What brings me to Guizhou? they want to know. Vacation, I tell them. “I’ve heard Guizhou is very beautiful.”

Oh, yes, they tell me, and proceed to rattle off a list of places I need to visit: Xijiang Village, Langde Shang, Shiqiao, Zhaoxing Dong Village, some cave whose name I miss, and Huangguoshu Waterfall—“biggest waterfall in Asia.”

“Many things to see in Guizhou,” one of them tells me. “You should stay here awhile.”

I nod. But there’s not much chance of that.

“I saw this video about Kaili,” I say. “Very beautiful places. If I showed you, could you tell me where they are?”

I
RISK SWITCHING ON
my iPhone. The GPS is off, I tell myself. So is the Bluetooth, and I have a VPN installed on the browser. What are the odds that someone can find me, just because I turned my phone back on?

I really have no idea. I never did figure out how the Suits kept tabs on me last year.

Buzz Cut, though, he can’t know what the Suits know about me, right?

Assuming Carter didn’t fuck me over.

I’m suddenly feeling like drinking more rice wine.

“Is that a new iPhone?” someone asks. “How much does that cost? Very expensive in China!”

Another time, I’d maybe try to explain American cell phone company contracts, but not now. “I don’t know. It was a gift.”

I find the video and play it for the crowd.