China Mountain Zhang (35 page)

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Authors: Maureen F. McHugh

BOOK: China Mountain Zhang
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“No message, just tell you he called.” I flick on the vid. “I went down to the housing office today, the nearest available housing is upstate Pennsylvania. And it doesn’t have running water. I got a prospectus for you.” Now I have to think of an excuse for an errand so I can get out of here and Peter can call this flier person.
 
 
I develop the habit of walking the boardwalk. The air smells salty these days. It doesn’t have that burnt smell anymore, the project to clean up the harbor must be working. Reassuring to know that something is working. But I miss the smell, for me it’s exciting. Sexual. Not that I’m cruising these days. Hell, even if I wanted to, where would I take them, back to Peter’s couch? And I’m too old to climb under the boardwalk and let some kid do me in the sand.
I remember kneeling in the sand, shivering, with the light coming down between the cracks in the boardwalk. Going to
school in the day, pretending to be like everybody else, feeling like I had some secret knowledge, some understanding of the real world that the people I went to school with didn’t have. Gooseflesh and the smell of ash. Some chickenhawk with his fingers locked in my hair.
I walk every night from eight until almost nine, regular as clockwork. The first couple of nights it’s all right, but Friday night it’s altogether too hot, and the boardwalk is crowded with people. Couples, girls in cheap flashy clothes, bright flimsy things. The young girls are shaving high up the backs of their necks, up even with their earlobes, and just leaving a tail of braided hair hang down.
“Ever had a hot dog?”
I’m leaning up against the railing, watching the kids go by. He’s older than most of the kids, but only by a few years.
“Si,”
I say,
“Yo habito aqui.
” I live here.
For a moment he looks confused. He looks Hispanic, but that doesn’t mean he speaks Spanish. That will teach me to try and be clever.
Then he grins.
“Donde?”
“Coney Island,” I say.
He shakes his head. “For a moment I didn’t realize what you were saying, you know, I just didn’t expect you to speak Spanish. Chinese clothes and all.”
“I grew up on Utica Avenue,” I say. He’s handsome. Dresses cheap, short matador jacket (no shirt) and tights. He has a tattoo of a tear at the corner of his left eye, it hangs on the edge of a sharp cheekbone. He’s darker than I am. “So you were going to poison a foreign guest with a local hot dog.”
He shrugs. “I just thought, here’s this foreigner, all by himself on the boardwalk. Somebody ought to give him a taste of the ethnic cuisine.”
We walk a bit. He struts, gestures as he talks. The boys seem spaced along the walk at regular intervals. They lean against posts
and watch us. Coneys. The couples become static, white noise. The salient features of the landscape are the boys, and this amazing young man walking with me who talks about growing up out here on the edge, in the part of Brooklyn some people call Bangladesh.
“See,” he explains, “there’s always going to be a group of people who aren’t ideologically sound. There’s always going to be a bad element fringe. So the party doesn’t mess with Bangladesh. We’re a safety valve surrounding Coney Island. So out here we can be free.”
“What about all the communes being established?” I ask. The girls dress in bright colors, the coneys dress dark. A coney in dark pants, dark sleeveless shirt watches us from the corner of his eye. He rests one muscled arm on a post.
“They won’t stay,” he says, airily. “Out here it never really changes. They pretend to clean it up, but they just pick up a few deviants and everybody else hides and two hours later the meat market is back in business.”
Hot night for a meat market. I’ve seen it change. Used to be there wasn’t anything out here, no couples, no hot dogs, just boarded-up stands, the coneys and the chickenhawks and the squatters. The squatters are mostly gone and the whole place is now free marketeers and the people who want housing in the city bad enough to stick it out. They clean up the two-hundred-year-old buildings, then make the neighborhood domestic.
He’s so fresh and young. Is he waiting for me to make a move? I would if I could. “I have to get back,” I say, regretfully.
“Good talking to you,” he says.
“I come out here and walk pretty often,” I say. “What’s your name?”
“Invierno,” he says. In Spanish that means winter. What kind of name is Invierno? Obviously not his real name. Not giving one’s real name or number is a time-honored tradition out here on the boardwalk.
“I’m Rafael,” I say. “Like the angel.”
He grins and makes the sign of benediction, standing at the top of the steps.
When I glance back a second time he has already turned and stalks back down the boardwalk, prowling.
Back at Peter’s building two women are carting boxes out the front door and piling them on the sidewalk. They watch me, flat, hostile faces. Their belongings make the usual pitiful pile on the sidewalk. I step over blue-green pillows like the kind Peter has tossed on the floor, palm the door.
The hallway and the elevator are hot and airless, in China even the hallways were kept cool. I wonder how much money it would cost to keep the halls heated and cooled. There are old ducts, at one time the halls of this building were temperature controlled. In an old building like this it would help the tenants keep their own costs a little lower.
“Hey,” I say, “someone is moving out of the building.”
Peter is flicking through vid programs. “Who was it?”
“Two girls. No one I know.” Peter must be as frustrated as I am. I leave coneys on the boardwalk, he talks to his flier. “Maybe I could rent their place.”
“Don’t rent, save your money until you get a job,” Peter says.
“You need your own place back,” I say.
“You’re no problem, and you pay half the rent.”
“How’s what’s his name, the flier.” I say pointedly. How’s your love life? I’ve got this roommate and he’s driving me crazy.
Peter glances up at me, back at the vid. “Cinnabar’s just a friend. He’s not a flier, he’s retired.” He sits stiff and defensive. I shouldn’t have said it.
“I need a place of my own,” I say and sit down next to him.
“You don’t get a job,” he says, “you’ll start borrowing money from me. Pretty soon they’ll kick both of us out.”
“Hey,” I say, “I’ll rent for a few months and then we’ll move to Pennsylvania together.”
Then I get him a beer and rub his shoulders.
“A regular Florence Nightingale,” he says.
The room has ghosts.
 
 
So I become a tenant. I move to the fifth floor, griping about having to take the psychopathic elevator to the top of the building. Moving is not difficult; as Peter remarks, for a man with a truly astounding wardrobe, I seem painfully short of possessions. (Not that my wardrobe is really much, it’s just Chinese.) The flat is two rooms, not counting the tiny kitchen and bathroom, both about the same size.
I live in a dump. “The floor has to go,” I say. Someone painted the walls aqua, the floor is blue-green slip, it’s like living under water on a bad film set. Cheap. But this building was built before the second depression, when they built to last, and underneath that garbage is a solid floor, underneath the walls is good solid wood frame. I wonder what would happen if I knocked the wall out between the two big rooms. The little front room, which is supposed to be the main room, has no window. The back room is barely big enough for a bed. Together they would make one decent room.
But it’s my own. Once moved in I decide I have to take my life in hand. I’ve been home for two weeks and haven’t done anything but sleep on Peter’s couch and walk the boardwalk.
The morning after I move in I put on my black suit and go to the Office of Occupational Resources.
The office has carpeting, something that marks it as a step up on the scale of bureaucracy, but why is it all so ugly? This office is dirty green; gray-green carpeting (the kind that doesn’t show dirt, wear or aesthetic value) pond-scum green halfway up the wall and scuffed white the rest of the way. I meet a middle-aged woman, dressed in a boxy beige suit with tails that come precisely to the backs of her knees.
“Comrade Zhang?” she says, “I’m Cecily Hester. I’m the counselor who will be assigned to your placement.”
I have a counselor assigned to me. I am not certain how to feel about this. “Counselor,” I say, politely.
She indicates a seat, not at the desk but at the flyspecked window that looks out on the street, and sits down beside me. “Tell me, just exactly what does an organic engineer do? Are you a medical engineer?”
So I launch into a description of my training.
“We’ll have to start looking around to see who could use your particular skills,” she says, thoughtfully. I suspect she still isn’t sure just what I do.
“What kind of people do you usually place?” I ask.
“Doctors and highly technical people like yourself.” She gets up. “I’ll need to get some information on the system.” I follow her over and we sit, she behind the desk.
“How long does it take to place someone?” I ask.
“That depends on what they do. A few months. Do you have a preference as to what part of the country you’d work in?”
“New York City,” I say.
“East Coast,” she says, entering the information, “Northeast.”
“I’d really like to stay in New York.”
“Engineer,” she says, “you have a very specialized skill. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a firm in the city that is interested in you, but it’s not very likely.”
“Do you mean I won’t be able to get a job?” I ask. “They offered me work in China.” Marx and Mao Zedong but I sound desperate.
“You’ll be able to get a job,” she says. “Off the top of my head, I can think of two places that will probably be interested in you. One is in California, one is in Arizona.”
“The corridor,” I say. Baffin Island, only permanently.
“They have a beautiful compound,” she says.
She asks me to repeat my education, enters it all. I give her a rec with my resume and final project, my beach house, on it.
I sense dislocation ahead. Moving. I feel so tired, life was a hell of a lot easier when I was just a job engineer, another dumb construction tech.
What the hell am I going to do? All that time, Baffin Island, Nanjing. All that, so I can work in the corridor? “Ah, if this is going to take a few months, can you help me get some sort of short-term work, maybe as a construction tech? The only housing available is in Pennsylvania, and they told me it doesn’t have running water, so I’m living in a commune out in Coney Island and I have to help with the building maintenance.”
“I’m sure you don’t need to be a construction tech,” she says, sounding a little as if I were a research scientist who just offered to be a janitor. “Let me think about it and I’ll call you.”
The ride out to Coney Island takes forever.
All this time on my hands. When I finished the job on Baffin Island and passed my exams, I waited ten months to go to China, but I worked construction jobs for all but the last month. I don’t remember time hanging on me during that month. Since then I have been in China, always struggling to catch up, struggling with language, with taking three years’ worth of courses in two regular school years and a summer.
China falls into two neat halves in my memory—not chronologically, the first “half” is really only about three, four months, the last “half” the better part of two years. But there is Haitao, and then there is the time after Haitao, the white time. That’s the way I think of it, I don’t know why. Or rather, I know some of the reasons why, but they don’t seem sufficient to describe the feeling.
The white time is crowded with activity. I have never studied so intently as I did in the year after Haitao died, I don’t suppose I ever will again. For a year I was this amazing creature, the envy of my classmates, Zhang, the
huaqiao
who destroys grade curves. I read the assignments, did supplemental readings. I got tutoring
assignments because I discovered having to explain systems analysis to some martian made it clearer in my own head (especially because Alexi had an agenda of his own, he asked questions that made me think about systems in different ways than the textbooks did).
I did it the way you’ll play solitaire for an afternoon, because the alternative was being alone with myself.
The apartment is depressing. All that green. I try to read, but I start thinking about what I could do with it. On a job once, we used this sandstone flooring. The flat isn’t very big, the flooring wasn’t outrageously expensive and it would be better than blue-green slip. I wonder what the subflooring is like.
I shut off the climate control, open the door and put my new bed and boxes out in the hall and tear up a corner of the flooring. Underneath the flooring is hundred-year-old thinsulation and under that was chipboard. Imagine having so much wood you can use it as trash building material.

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