China Mountain Zhang (8 page)

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Authors: Maureen F. McHugh

BOOK: China Mountain Zhang
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There are the usual protestations, the don’t gos and if you musts. Then I find myself going down the stairs and out onto the street with this gay ABC in his mirrors and his sharkskin jacket. ABC all act like their faces are made out of ice. We walk west. I’m not sure of his name, sounded like the blond kept calling him Rafe or something, so I ask and he says, “Zhang,” real flat.
Fuck it, I think, I didn’t ask you to take a walk.
We cross Sixth Avenue, and then all the sudden he says, “I’m sorry I wasn’t synched with you tonight.”
I’m a little caught off, so I say, “Were you synched with Cinnabar?”
He shakes his head. “Israel.”
Israel? Who the hell is Israel? It must be the rookie. “She’s okay,” I say, “once she has some experience.” The kind of stuff one says.
“She was okay until you dusted her,” he says.
Neither of us says anything more until we’re in the lighted subway. Then to be polite I ask, “What do you do?”
“I’m a construction tech,” he says, which is hard to imagine because he doesn’t look or talk like the kind of person who spends his days on construction sites, if you know what I mean. He takes off his shades and rubs his eyes, adding, “But I’m unemployed,” then puts them on.
I mumble something about being sorry to hear it. He’s chilly and distant but he keeps talking to me. I can’t imagine him
wanting me to invite him home, and I sure as hell don’t want to anyway. So I look at the track.
Down the track I see the lights of the train.
“When the kite went,” he says, “did you think about that
zhongguo ren,
Kirin?”
The flier that just died. That’s why he wanted to be synched to me. “No,” I say, “I didn’t think about anything but getting it under control. You don’t have much time to think. Did you ever fly a kite?” As if I had to ask.
“No,” he says.
“It’s not a cerebral activity,” I say.
The train comes in fast and then cushions to a stop. We get on. He doesn’t say anything else except “bye,” when he transfers for Brooklyn.
I always forget that half of the people who watch us fly are waiting to see us die.
 
 
I
was
thinking, or rather, I had something in the back of my head when the kite shuddered. I was thinking of my first year flying the big kites. I was flying in the New York City Flight, it was only my third or fourth big race and it was the biggest race I had ever been in. I was a rookie, the field was huge—twenty—six fliers. I didn’t have a chance. And I had a crush on Random Chavez. Five fliers were killed in that race.
That was the first time I ever felt afraid to die. When the kite shuddered, whenever something goes wrong and there’s that instant of having no control, I’m always back at that race.
I ride the subway home to Brooklyn. It’s not far from the subway to my building, but I’m glad to get to the door. Safe in the entry, safer in the elevator. I’ve been living here for two years, and the building knows me. I have an affinity for machines, call me superstitious but I think it comes of spending some of my waking hours as a kind of cyborg. I think my building likes me.
I get in the apartment and the lights come on dim, I get myself something icy and bitter to drink and throw on my rec of that race. The chair hugs me, and I prop my feet up and the apartment darkens. I don’t synch in with anyone, so it’s like watching it from a floater keeping pace with the race. Like being God. Or maybe God is synched in to everyone. Same thing, though, total objectivity. I’m back in the thick of the pack, flying about ninth. Jacinth has just snapped a connection, and her kite falls behind, then clear, then disappears off the screen. She dropped out just before anything happened.
Fox is in seventh, Random Chavez is in fifteenth, Fox dolphins to rise over Watchmaker and just as she begins the swoop over him she slips it—looks away, loses her concentration, who knows. Anyway, she clips Watchmaker and he waffles, would have pulled out of it maybe but he loses too much speed, and Malachite, in front of me, tries to pull his kite over and they collide, I hear the rip of silk, even though flying is really too noisy to hear anything. I don’t remember anything after that, but in the tape I slip sideways, inside, and shoot past them. The pack parts around them but Random is boxed, so he drops nose first into a steep vertical dive deep into a crack between fliers and is gone underneath all of us, streaking, until he tries to pull up. If his kite had been braced the way they are now he’d have made it, but that’s five years ago, and the silk sheers under the stress, and he tumbles. And he was dead. And Fox, Malachite, Hot Rocks and Saffron were dead, and Watchmaker never flew again. And Angel finished seventh.
I run it through a second time, in synch with Random Chavez. I just want to feel the plunge when he saw no way through ahead of him, but being in synch is really not the same as being there. I don’t see the space he knew was there, feel only the amusement park sensation of drop, the shoot and cut out when the kite starts to tumble.
The lights start to come up, but I want it dim. I think about my
kite, and where I’m going to get money to fix it. Mr. Melman of Melman-Guoxin Pipe is one of my sponsors, I’ll go to him, sign a note. Oh damn, I’m so deep in debt already. But it’s just a frame and silk, everything else would be all right. And I have silk.
In Chinese, silk is si, first tone. Four is si, second tone—as in Siyue, April (fourth month). Death is si, third tone. Four is a bad luck number for Chinese. But I’m from Brooklyn.
 
 
My synch numbers pick up for the next race, but it’s always like that after a crack-up. People like that ABC in Commemorative. I fly a careful race, come in fourth, just out of money. Afterwards I think that if I’d flown a more spectacular race—worried less about winning and more about how it synched—I could have picked up my numbers. But how can I go out and fly without planning to win?
It’s two weeks before I hit money, and that’s only second. Pays rent for Georgia and me. Nights I’m out with Cinnabar. He’s been hitting, and his synch numbers are way up, with the requisite loss of privacy. He needs somebody to go places with, he surely can’t pick up some bent groupie if a synch crew is likely to come out of the walls and snatch a shot or an impression.
Cinnabar and I share a fondness for kites and a reverence for his dead brother. Late at night, clear out to the vacuum, we talk about how wonderful a flier he was with that combination of seriousness and hyperbole the sober can’t abide.
We go out dancing the night before the New Haven Flight, Cinnabar in his brother’s red sharkskin jacket—so what if it’s five years out of date—and me in a black dress cut so low in back you can see the copper bruise of the synapsis junction in the base of my spine. We go to someplace way downtown in the area they’re reclaiming, you know the place, where you have to fit the mix to get in. The building likes us, I told you I have an affinity for buildings, because we just saunter past all the people it won’t let
in and whoosh, the doors open. Dancing with Cinnabar is nice, on the sultry numbers I don’t find myself regarding the middle of his chest and on the fast numbers he isn’t as stiff as most straights. Or maybe it’s because he’s a flier.
We dance a lot, and then get synched, I see the crew from the vid. Some woman from the vid drags us in back for an interview with Cinnabar, and we sit in the kitchen. Cinnabar’s soaked with sweat with his hair all stuck to his face and I can feel it trickling down my back. She asks all the silly questions about racing and if he expects his streak to continue. He just shrugs. It always amazes me that they ask that, what do they expect people to do, say yes?
She asks how he got from Brooklyn to flying kites, and he tells her Random was his older brother. I tell her that the jacket is Random’s, I figure it will make good media. The kitchen is envi-ronmented, and it’s
cold.
Cinnabar puts the jacket around my shoulders and sits with his arm around my waist. I can feel his fingers on my ribs tapping nervously. She asks us if we’re ready for the New Haven tomorrow and says she notices we aren’t drinking. I tell her it’s too many calories. I don’t tell her we’re iced to the gills (no calories in chemicals.) But we’re iced enough that we aren’t really watching what we’re doing.
She asks Cinnabar if he feels he has a good chance for the New Haven, and he makes like to spit over his shoulder, just like they do at home to ward off bad luck, then he says, “Gargoyle’s going to beat me.”
We all laugh.
Citinet calls me after the synch is on vid next evening, but I’m already out at the park, patching my old Siyue. I’m hoping the vid exposure will raise my synch numbers, but I’m thinking about my kite, not my publicity. I don’t even see the vid until later, and in it we look like a couple of seventeen-year-olds cuddling, which hooks all the romantics, and there’s that red jacket going from owner to owner to catch all the disaster addicts. Just shows nobody
cares about how you race so much as what they think about your life.
There are bunches of people around my pit watching Georgia and me work, and another synch crew shows up. They want to know what it feels like to be racing against my boyfriend and how serious Cinnabar and I are. I say a race is a race and shrug.
“Do you think Cinnabar is right when he says you’re going to beat him?”
I stand up and face the synch crew, put my hands on my hips. “Well, I’m going to try,” I say, “but I’m flying a Siyue, and he’s flying a Liuyue.”
“What’s the difference?”
“His is a newer kite,” I say. “Now I gotta get ready for a race, si?”
They don’t stop asking me questions but I stop answering. The pick-up chirps, and I leave Georgia testing systems.
“Angel,” Cinnabar says,
“Esta loco aqui.
”
“Aqui tambien amigo.
I don’t know how I can get anything done.” It’s so noisy I have to plug one ear with my finger. “We did good, huh?”
“No shit.” He laughs. “Synch numbers are going to be great. Got an idea, going to send you the jacket, okay? Make a big fuss. Then, when you fly in that crate tonight, you make it look good, okay? Maybe somebody will pick you up and you can fly a real kite.”
“Go to hell, my Siyue is a real kite.”
“You like antiques.”
“You’re doing me a great favor,” I say to him.
“Favor hell, the bigger this is, the higher my numbers,
comprende?”
“Okay,” I say.
Fifteen minutes later, as I’m putting on my facemask and getting ready to take the kite out, one of Cinnabar’s crew arrives
carrying the red sharkskin jacket. I make a big show of staring at it, then put it on slowly. Then I jog the Siyue out.
I’m out early, I need the time to remember I’m flying a race. It’s cold up there, it feels good. It’s empty, I take a lonely lap out across The Swath and Union Square. For the first time since I got out to the Park I get to think about the race.
I fall into line when I get back out over Washington Square, take one lazy lap with everyone. I’m back at eighth, Cinnabar is second. He’ll go
shanglou
and so will Orchid. I haven’t a chance against them if I fly their race, not in a Siyue. We flash over Washington Square Park. I climb a bit, but when we go over The Swath I put my kite into a long flat drive, pumping forward. It’s not an all-out sprint, but I’m pushing faster than my usual pace. I ride far out, all the way down till I’m close to the two hundred meter altitude limit and when we flash over Union Square I’m low and way out in front. Everybody is still jockying for
shanglou
which is ridiculous, because Cinnabar is going to be the best power diver, at forty-eight kilos he’s got mass on his side. I’m using my light weight—damn few fliers lighter than thirty-nine kilos—and sprinting. I don’t expect anyone to dive until we’re over The Swath, but Israel breaks and is diving after me. As we go into darkness, the pack breaks above me.
Is that ABC synched with me tonight?
In the darkness. I climb a bit, maybe twenty-five meters. Kites are diving in the dark, and when we flash over Washington Square the second time, I’m third, and the field is a disaster. People are strung out
shanglou
to
xialou
and Orchid is first. Her kite is pearlized silver. She’s in trouble because I know I can out-power her. I’m above her, she’s down around bottoming out.
We go back into the dark. I’m pushing, I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. But I’ve made this goddamn race my way. I’m still third when we come out over Union Square, but three people dive in front of me including Cinnabar. I dive into
the middle, still not as low as Orchid. She tries to dolphin up and rises into Medicine. We go into darkness.
It’s the worst point of the race under the best of circumstances because one is half blind and acclimating, and the next floater is too far to see and I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I know things are a mess. I feel someone over me, and Medicine and Orchid have to be tangled in front of me. The disaster lights go on and I have just time to see Orchid’s kite waffle into Cinnabar and see the silk shred away from the left front strut. Polaris is above me coming down outside. Israel is coming fast inside me. I take the space in front of me, nose first and start a screaming, too-deep dive.

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