A Cup of Light (20 page)

“And then these,” she said, looking down at the rows of photographs. “They're beautiful in a strange way.” She picked one up. “Who is this?”

“Hu Meiru. She lives over in the western district, near the zoo. Seven and a half.”

She looked at him. “Does she have lead poisoning?”

“Yes. They all have elevated levels.”

“All of them? That's terrible.”

“All I've gotten back,” he corrected himself. “I haven't collected teeth from all of them yet.”

“It's awful.” She picked up another one. “Who's this?”

He stepped closer to the table. “Zhang Yeh.”

“Him too?”

“Him too.”

“And what about you?” she said, because in his eyes she was sure she saw an accumulation of sadness. “You think about it all day long.”

“It's different for me.” He straightened one of the pictures. She saw his hands were careful, precise.

“You care for what you're doing.”

“I can't care for them.”

“Look at this.” She swept a hand above the table.

“I just record them.” He picked up one of the pictures and balanced it in his palm.

She took it from him. “What's his name?”

“That's Little Chen.”

She looked at him over the top of the picture. “Special,” she said. “He's special to you.”

He smiled, caught. “Yes. He's one I've gotten to know. He's been in and out of the hospital, though for other reasons.”

She looked down at the picture as if it were animate, as if it had a soul, and to his surprise pressed it to her cheek. Then she handed it back. “This one's good to care about,” she said. “I think you're doing the right thing.”

He put the picture back in its spot. “I just record them.”

“That's right,” she said, and he could hear the grin in her voice. “The whole world knows that's all you do.”

He pushed the fine sandy-gray hair off his forehead and swallowed a smile of his own. She turned away from him, looking down at the pictures, and there was something about her long back, bent over a table, interested, distracted, that made him see her in other rooms in other places. He could imagine her in a room that belonged to them. It was a strange feeling, indistinct, powerful. An involuntary glimpse. He hardly knew her. Yet it felt real. He walked over next to her, as close as he could. “Ready, Lia?” he said, and now she turned to him, happy, looking the same way she looked in the picture on the wall, and they went out together into the hutong.

They walked on the side to stay out of the way of the cars bouncing and honking down the uneven pavement, the bicyclists and pedestrians separating in a constant tide for them, people going to work, and other people, old people and small children, out for the early air, sauntering, talking, sitting. Along the way people were opening their shops and rattling out their metal awnings.

They walked down the hutong to his favorite vendor, an old lady with a starched white cap behind an iron griddle. “She's very particular,” he said. “She only comes in the morning, and just for a few hours.” He smiled at the lady.
“Zaoshang hao,”
he said to her, Good morning.

“Zao,”
she boomed back, and then looked at Lia. “You're now bringing your wife! Very good.”

They both ignored this. “Two with egg,” he said, and paid.

“Two with egg.” She reached into the warmer and pulled out a pair of sesame
bing,
palm-sized disc-shaped flatbreads crusted with seeds. She split them, and little clouds of steam puffed out. Eggs were frying on the griddle. She turned them a few more times, until the yolk was almost set and the whites flecked with brown, and then dropped an egg into each of the pockets. She folded them in twists of paper and passed them across the counter.
“Man man chi,”
she said.

“It's hot,” Michael warned Lia, but then immediately took a bite of his anyway.

She took a bite of hers too, and thought it might have been the best thing she'd ever eaten. Just a fried egg, with salt, in split chewy bread, but it made her feel for a minute like she belonged on earth. “Michael,” she said. “Can we come here every morning and eat for the rest of our lives?”

He laughed. “I will if you will.”

She couldn't believe she had just said that. “I was kidding,” she said.

He touched her foot with his. “I know. Let's go sit down.” And they took a few steps to a low stone wall and perched, eating. “How's the job?” he said.

“Done, almost done. But I can't quite let go of it.”

“Why's that?”

“I've found fakes, you know. I think I'm right about everything. But what if I'm wrong?”

He looked at her, chewing, thinking. When he had swallowed he said, “Let's consider it, then. What if you are?”

“Well—“”

“What's the worst that could happen?”

“It could mean a lot of money.”

“I guess that would be bad.” He dropped in the last piece of
bing
and smiled, his round mouth making an amused bow. “But that's just money. Do we really think it would be all that bad?”

She smiled at his saying “we,” at the warm sense that someone stood in the ring with her. It was not real, she knew, just a transient kindness, but it felt good. “I guess not. It's just money. Then there's reputation.”

“That's a little harder. But still not a killer.”

“It's just we never do these alone.”

“Well. Tell you what I'll do.”

“What?”

“I'll come and stand beside you and we'll look at them, and I'll tell you you're right. Unless of course I think you're wrong. In which case I'll tell you that too.”

She laughed.

“Would that help?” He cocked his head at her.

“No. But thank you.”

“You're always thanking me. Now I have to go to work.” He stood up.

“I do too.”

“So.” He stood across from her.

“Good luck today,” she said.

“Thanks. See you later?”

“Sure.” She brought the flat of her hand up to shield her eyes against the climbing sun. Watching him walk away down the hutong, she wished she knew when later would be and what he wanted to do with her then. When she turned the last corner back to the guesthouse, she saw her driver waiting.

At the villa she went to her big room, flooded with morning, and looked up and down the rows of crates. There was number nineteen, with the gold-decorated white-glazed dish from the Yuan Dynasty; number thirty-one, with its pair of blue-and-white dragon roundel bowls from the reign of Kangxi. She loved them especially.

She sat in the front, before her pots, and clicked on her laptop. She opened the inventory and scanned through it. Everything was there. It was finished and it was cleaned. She scrolled down through, fast, the digital photo images blinking past her subconscious. She had it, okay, she could believe in it. She thought of him standing beside her, large and comforting, telling her yes, she was right. And sometimes telling her she was wrong. This made her give just the tiniest bubble of a laugh. For a second she let herself imagine them together.

In a careful set of keystrokes she encrypted the long document and then entered Dr. Zheng's most private electronic address. Good-bye to all of you, she thought from her heart to the pots in the room; thank you for having come through my life. And she pressed
SEND
.

Jack and Anna had eaten, steak and asparagus off hundred-year-old Limoges. They liked eating alone. They had personal assistants who prepared their food and served it, but then they preferred for those people to leave. They liked to wash the dishes together by hand, listening to public radio. They didn't want employees in the house overnight. They did not even like having guests. They had always been like that, since they'd been together. It was one of the many small resonances that made them happy as a pair.

It was when they were watching sports, later, that he told her. First he turned down the TV.

“What?” she said.

“I want to buy it. Are you agreed?”

“What?” Although she knew.

“The porcelain.”

“How much?”

“Seven hundred ninety pieces. She found ten fakes.”

He felt the little snort of laughter lift her shoulders, next to him. “I meant money.”

“They are quoting one hundred ninety million dollars. I wouldn't expect to pay that.”

“I should hope not.”

“No,” he said. The real offer would never be made up front. They didn't expect that and neither did he. The most interesting and climactic part of the deal would begin now, the mutual pushing and posturing and retreating that would bring them eventually to an agreed price.

He would find the negotiation diverting, maybe even obsessive, and with any luck it might sharpen him, polish him a little, but the real match was with his wife. All manner of obstacles in the outside world had proven surmountable, but Anna Sing presented a lifetime of challenge. With her he felt alive. He gave thanks every day for having a woman who was his equal.

At this moment she was giving him the raised eyebrow. “You know what I think. It's fashion, taste, art—fundamentally unstable.”

“But it doesn't often lose.”

She closed her eyes and smiled privately, into herself. They'd been covering the same ground for days. “It's not worth a hundred ninety million.”

“No,” he said softly. “Actually it's worth more than that. It's worth two hundred million, three. Ten. It's the past. It's objects adored by an emperor. That is something that will never come again. Ever in the world. Xuanfei,” he said, deliberately using her Chinese name and feeling her start, because he never called her that. He dropped his hand down from behind and covered her gently curving abdomen. He was calling on her deeper obligations, and he knew it.

“It's not that day,” she said.

“Sure it is,” he said, and she laughed, and they slowly moved into a different position on the couch.

“You've seen the inventory?”

“All of it.”

“Photos?”

“Everything. Well—I just got it. I have to study it.”

“And?”

“It's magnificent. Come on. Let's go look.”

“In a minute.” She smiled that smile he knew, because he was a connoisseur of the many moods of Anna Sing. This smile meant she wasn't ready to say so, she was going to torture him quite a bit longer and get maximum oppositional points out of it, but eventually she was going to warm to his plan.

“Just wait,” he said, catching her legs on either side of him. “In ten years, if the market continues this way, it'll be worth three hundred million.”

Bai brought the truck to the address on the north shore of Houhai Lake before dawn, as he had been instructed. He pulled up to the gatehouse, cigarette dangling casually from his hand, and called a gruff, complicit greeting to the guard, who stood drinking tea from a jar. The guard waved him ahead. Wide gates at the rear of the court lay open to a long drive rustling with trees. He could see a rambling white house with curving red roofs. Workmen were waiting.

Bai pulled up to them and shut down the engines.

“The cargo goes in the back there?” said the head man.

“Just so, but let me show you.” He took the man behind and opened the gleaming double doors. He had turned off the freezer before he set out. Still, it was cold. They climbed in and Bai unlocked and slid open the hidden doors in the back. Bai heard a northern expletive of surprise slip from the other man's mouth.

“The cargo goes in here,” Bai said, flipping a switch to light up the main compartment. Then he turned and stepped back onto the shiny-speckled metal floor of the freezer. “And when you are finished, this compartment must be left completely clean! This is a hygienic carrier!”

“Yes, sir,” the man said, faintly confused. “You can depend on it. Here.” And he gave Bai a stapled, fifty-page document. “The manifest.”

Bai had understood all along that this was a big shipment, many pots, but until he saw this forest of typeset entries he had not truly known. “May gods witness,” he said softly, rifling through it.

“Just get them there,” the man said.

“In this lifetime and the next ten afterward, with ease! Do you think I have ever failed?”

“No. But, younger brother. You'd be well served to move as quickly as your wheels can carry you.” He looked meaningfully at the incredible value implied by the numbers running down the manifest's right-hand column.

Not until they close the deal, Bai thought, but he wouldn't say this to this man, whom he did not know and who—he had to assume—knew less than nothing. “Come on.” He placed a brief brotherly hand on the guard's back. “Let's load it.”

16

Once Lia turned in her appraisal, she had to wait all through that day and night and until the next morning. Dr. Zheng negotiated. Apparently no pots questions arose, for her phone was silent.

The first morning she had gone out to pick up her dress. It was lovely; it molded to her exactly, and it was a mix of green and russet that brought her to life. She tried it on in the store and then she had to put it on all over again the second she got back to her room. After that she folded it away. It was a dress for an occasion.

There, in the room, she noticed a change on the TV. News, a cut-in; something had happened. She turned it up. Commentators were talking in hushed whispers while the camera showed an empty podium. Finally, the subtitle in English and Chinese: a joint statement by the Chinese Minister of Civil Affairs and the head of the Civil Aviation Administration of China. Two men came out. The Minister started to speak. She leaned closer.

“After careful study,” the Minister said, “the Civil Aviation Administration of China has determined that the crash of China International Airlines Flight Sixty-eight was an accident. It was a single-aircraft event with no complications or interferences from any ship, plane, or other conveyance; or any person or outside parties. The exact cause of the accident is still under investigation.” He gave a curt nod and then turned away; they both walked off camera. It was over. The screen cut back to the anchors, talking excitedly.

And she stood staring. So that was the official statement. That was the answer: an accident. Was this answer real or fake? And would all the ill feeling on the street now evaporate away? Until next time? She felt her usual stab of guilt at how little she really understood certain things here. There was only one facet of China she could fully and responsibly tackle; that was pots. Pots were celestial and endlessly varied and to do them justice took the full force of her mind.

The second morning she took a taxi up to Houhai Lake—just to be there, just to be near the pots—and sat outside, on a bench facing the lake. She watched pleasure boats on the far shore drift under the shade of overhanging branches. Snatches of conversation rose and fell behind her as people passed on the walkway. It was not until she had let go of waiting for it that her phone finally rang.
“Wei.”

“Lia.” It was Dr. Zheng.

“Hey.”

“We have a close.”

“How much?”

“One hundred and twenty-six million.”

“What a deal for him!” she cried. “He's so lucky!”

“Yes. Gao could have got more with multiple buyers. But he wanted it done and over. I don't suppose we can complain.”

She returned the twinkle in his voice with her own. “No. I don't suppose we can.”

“Lia,” he said. “Congratulations.” He let the word hang, warm with fondness.

She felt the filial satisfaction of pleasing him, the sense that all the world's geometry was right, and she secure within it. “Thanks,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Thank you. Did you see the statement?”

“Yes! Yesterday.”

“Too late to send Phillip.”

“I guess so.”

And they both laughed at the same time, her glassy peal and his age-cracked chortle. “Ah, it's well done. But you're not finished. Your flight leaves for Hong Kong tomorrow night. You meet the pots there.” He gave her the locator numbers. “Your room's at the Mandarin.”

“No problems with the flights, I suppose?”

“No,” he said. “All back to normal.”

“Okay, then.” What else could she say? That was it, she was leaving.

“And Lia?” Zheng said.

“Yes?”

“Good job.”

“It was just what I was supposed to do,” she said.

They clicked off and she put her phone back in her pocket. It was over. Why didn't she feel any different than before? The water kept moving in front of her under the line of willows, the majestic, wind-ruffled pace of its surface unchanged. She had done it. She had wielded her principal sword—intelligence, memory, knowledge—and the deal had worked. It had come to pass. But pleasure boats still passed, the seasons advanced with every minute, and she was sitting alone on a bench.

After a time she walked back up to the road to get in a taxi. She could go somewhere and celebrate by herself.

Bai sat on an overturned metal pail beside his rig, smoking. He was parked in an empty drying barn in the countryside outside Wuhan. The arduous drive had brought him much of the way to Changsha, and here he rested. The arrangement had been made through Huang, one of his crew in Jingdezhen. Five hundred
yuan
for the use of the barn, no questions asked. He sat there with his cell phone on, waiting, smoking. When the deal was done they'd call him. Then he'd go further south.

In the meantime he reviewed every facet of his fiction: the false wall, the frozen chickens, all the documents.

He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. He thought about the manifest. There was a chicken cup there, one from the reign of Chenghua. Was destiny not smiling on him, to put one of the world's eighteen cups in this shipment? Had he not just, by purest chance, managed to buy a copy of the Chenghua chicken cup so perfect, so bright in the firmament that only a few people on earth could separate it from one that was real? No one could say he had planned it. This was certainly luck. It was the will of heaven.

He had taken careful note of the cup's location in the shipment. It was number four hundred thirteen, crate twenty-seven. He looked up at the truck speculatively. Should he switch the cups now?

Just then his cell phone rang.
“Wei,”
he said.

It was Gao Yideng. “The deal has closed,” he said. “You can leave.
Zou-ba,
” Go.

“Hao,”
he agreed, and as he closed his phone and put it in his pocket he was already climbing into the back of the truck. Indeed he would go. First he had to take care of one small matter.

Late that afternoon Michael and An walked down the hospital corridor. The day had not been good. The head of their hospital was preparing a summary of the city's public-health issues for the fall meeting of the National People's Congress. The two of them naturally hoped lead poisoning would be included. But a few minutes in his office had suggested this hope was unrealistic. Not only were reports from every researcher and department head piled up on the desk, but the harried director had made a pointed reference to the need to avoid those issues that the leaders had already recognized, on which they had already taken action, however insufficiently, and about which they had made it clear they did not wish to hear more.

“At least he was straight up front about it,” Michael said later.

“That was for you,” An said morosely. “You're a foreigner. Not expected to get it.”

“Wonderful. Insult to injury.”

“So let's get something to eat,” An said.

“You always say that.”

“Exactly right,” said An. “What else? What better?”

“Not tonight for me, though, thanks. I've got something on.”

“You're going to go see that woman.”

Michael smiled. An was right. He so liked it that she had come to his room the day before. He liked the way she just stepped in. He had awakened thinking about her and there she was. “I might call her,” he admitted.

“Ah.” An was staring at him, fascinated. “Well, good luck.”

“Bici,”
Michael gave him back, Same to you, and they each grinned in good-bye. Their eyes met and exchanged an understanding of what had just happened in the director's office; it was disappointing, but they'd go on working. An continued down the corridor and Michael turned to the elevators.

He pressed the
DOWN
button. He'd never worked in a hospital before. Always he'd been in institutes and research labs. It had been eight months now and he'd gotten used to the faint chemical smell, the constant disembodied voices, the hard fluorescent light. It felt different from when he was a patient himself. Now, in a dogged and unpleasant way, working here felt good to him. It neutralized his balance sheet a little bit. He'd seen things here; he'd seen children die. Nothing had ever affected him like that. He'd seen that the young ones died quickly. He'd heard the staff talk about it. When they were ready they let go. Not like adults. Adults took a long time. It was as if adults had built such a thick, petrified husk around them that this alone gave them the strength, the form to hold on. And by the transient revival that so often came to the dying, adults seemed to find a last little puff of life before the end. They had a term for it here at the hospital—
hui guang fan zhao,
the reflected rays of the setting sun. Children were lacking in this. They went quickly. He watched as the
DOWN
light came on and the elevator door slid open.

He had a fear that his life now was just an interlude of
hui guang fan zhao,
a brief moment before it all came back, worse. And for so long now he had been in this state by himself. He stared up at the digital floor numbers flashing, descending.

He stepped out the big front doors onto a busy boulevard clogged with traffic. All over him was a pall of thick, brown-tinged air, gritty with particulates whose names he knew by heart. He fitted on his headphones, dialed up Cheb Mami, and walked against the insinuating Algerian rhythm, a sound that first emerged in the port town of Oran in the 1930s and now was electrified into the modern world, pulsing in his mind as he descended into the subway station at Chongwenmen.

Bai stopped at a chicken farm outside of Changsha. It was a place where he had made an arrangement. He pulled into the dirt yard and right away caught the pungent scent of blood and slaughter. He'd picked this place over many others for its low prices.

He pulled up to the guard and handed down his paperwork. “Preorder,” he said. “Two thousand pounds.”

The guard with a round face and brushy stand-up hair took the lot number down and punched it into the computer. He squinted at the machine. His face was indifferent. “How are you going to pay?”

“Cash.” Bai counted out from a wad of bills.

The guard took it. “Gate forty-six,” he said.

Bai backed the truck up to the portal. He had already secured the central compartment where the art was stored. Now he opened the freezer in the back and stood to the side while young men, migrant workers, illiterates, faces dark from growing up outdoors, eyes leathered already at twenty, hands swathed in big rough gloves of undyed cotton, numbly packed a ton of frozen chickens into the back of his gleaming, purring, ice-fogging truck. The plucked, stiff carcasses made a stacked wall against the door. Bai watched, his dizzying ambition lifting him high and his cold death fear whispering to him from hell. He smoked to contain himself. When the men were done he tipped them and he drove away.

By that afternoon, Lia had ended up at a bar she knew on Dengshikou, called Counter Culture. It was one of the theme places that had become so common here as proprietors resorted to gimmicks to draw crowds. It had a sixties motif in the U.S. style, with psychedelic posters, a folkie jukebox, and black lights, none of which especially spoke to Lia. But it also had a pinball machine so light and hair-trigger it might have been brand-new, though it was definitely an antique.

She walked over to the corner, behind the tables, and got out her two-
yuan
coins. The machine was called DMZ, and its back panel had comic-book graphics of American soldiers slogging through a Vietnamese jungle. A little hip humor, she thought, not without edge. She dropped in the coins and felt the machine pop with a satisfying bass thunk as it credited the game. She leaned in, pressed the
GO
button, and slammed the first ball up the chute.

It rocketed up the side and exploded all over the lit-up bumpers flashing at the top. She used just enough shiver to keep the ball moving, high up, pulling it into pockets and then popping it out again to bounce off bumper pins and side flippers. Not thinking. That was what she liked. Keeping it in play.

She felt her cell in her pocket and was aware of how much she wanted it to ring. She got the ball over to the flippers and caught it, belayed it, held it while she took a long look at the board. This thing with him was only a brief meeting. Or maybe he liked her, but not
that
way. She stood rock-still and looked down at the perfect ball she held on her flipper, the color and glimmer of mercury, breathless and ready for the moment she would let it go. She could feel her phone against her leg. She did want him to call her, though; this was her true and
hoi moon
feeling. Maybe it was just a moment, but she felt connected to him. She just wanted to be where he was, and talk to him. She rolled the ball back, snapped the flipper in the middle of the right millisecond, and sent the ball out into its world of finite space.

Bai drove straight on to his first wife's farm, the next place where he could safely park the truck. He roared into Daoqi Township, shaking with exhaustion, gripping the wheel at the sight of the familiar road at last. Those curves those passes those hillsides, unrolling in front of him, black road in the dissipating light . . . his steering slipped into unconsciousness. He'd lived here as a young man, newly married. The roads were better now, there were more buildings in the village, but it hadn't changed so much. He circled the terraced paddies in full yield. He wound around green-tufted hills. It was almost dark. The world behind fell away in steps. At the bottom, barely visible in the shadows, ran a silver ribbon of river.

He climbed up and up and finally steered into a small valley: fields, gardens, and animals. Yujia lived here with her brother and his family. They worked the farm. He pulled into the driveway and parked under the mat-shed.

As he stepped across the mahogany earth, smelled the honeysuckle and the gardenia and the rustling wet bamboo, and saw the lit doorway across the packed barnyard ahead, he let joy overtake him. He strode forward, thinking of his wife's round arms, her knot of dark hair, and the meal, spiked with fried hot peppers, she would prepare for him later.