Emerald City (3 page)

“Is this a train to the worriers, Daddy?” Kylie asked.

“The warriors are for tourists,” I said.

“But wasn’t that the whole point of coming here?” Melissa asked. “For the terra-cotta warriors?”

“You’re welcome to stay and see them,” I said. “Personally, the obsessions of some whacked-out king are about the last thing I’m in the mood for.”

“Why don’t we wait in the first class lounge so the girls can sit down?” my wife suggested.

“We’re riding hard-seat,” I said. “It’s only eight hours.”

The girls looked aghast. I watched them cast baleful looks their mother’s way, and saw, in their silky, seamless faces, the thick patina so many years of privilege had left behind. Suddenly I was enraged—enraged at both of them for not knowing what these privileges had cost.

“You can wait in line with the rest of the world,” I said. “It won’t kill you.”

Crestfallen, they gazed at me—their father, who rarely let them ride a bus for fear of all the germs and scrofulous characters they might encounter.

“Your father’s afraid that if we ride first class, his friend will be disappointed in us,” Caroline said acidly.

“He’s not my friend,” I said.

“Then whose friend is he?” she asked.

For every square inch of hard-seat, there were roughly twenty-five people anxious to sit down, bringing to mind the phrase “lousy food and not enough of it.” The majority of passengers were peasant boys, barefoot, their rolled-up pants exposing those dark round scars they all seemed to have from the knee down. They’d been shopping in Xi’an and now were loaded up with identical cheap zippered bags half bursting with booty. There were no seats for my daughters, and I watched their faces fill with fear at finding themselves caught in the press of sweating, seething humanity I’d taught them to avoid. To my relief, several peasant boys leapt from their seats to make room for the girls, who ended up next to a window, facing each other. Caroline sat near them, still angry, avoiding my eyes. Stuart stood off to one side, already looking weary of us.

The hours drifted past. I kept an eye on my daughters, watching their sullenness give way to a kind of solemnity, acknowledgment of a situation that was obviously bigger than they were. Each time the train eased to a stop at a platform, food vendors swarmed around outside its windows, pushing tiny carts. After the first two hours, Kylie and Melissa were in there with the best of them, dangling fistfuls of limp bills to buy homemade popsicles on toothpicks, plastic bags full of tiny green apples, and squares of coarse yellow
cake. Everything they bought, they offered to their neighbors. This broke my heart.

The land got very strange. Gray hills bulged from the earth in such a way that their middles looked wider than their bases. “It’s like Dr. Seuss,” I overheard Kylie say. Caroline sketched in her notebook. I stared out the window at the weird hills and told myself that we lived in San Francisco, in a house on Washington Street that I’d bought for a million in cash six years ago, that our house existed right now, the burglar alarm on, automatic sprinklers set to keep the garden alive. It’s all still there, I thought. Waiting. But I didn’t believe it.

We reached our destination late that afternoon—the sun still high but pouring out thick, stale light. Our presence seemed more of a novelty here than it had anywhere else we’d been, and as we tottered toward the street, passersby gathered around to stare at us in unabashed amazement.

The
binguan,
or tourist hotel, could easily have doubled as a jail: small rooms each containing two narrow, squeaking beds; dirty concrete floors; communal “bathrooms”—a row of holes in the concrete—no paper, no doors, big flies drunk on the stench from below. “My God,” I told Caroline, frantic when I saw the arrangements, “there’s no way we can stay here.”

“I should think you’d be delighted.”

“There’s got to be a better hotel in this town!”

“This is a tiny little town, Sam. Why should there be another hotel?”

“Shit.” I was starting to sweat. “What’re we going to do?”

“Relax,” Caroline said. “It’s one night.”

“But the girls. Jesus!”

“We’re okay, Daddy,” piped Kylie from the next room.

I rushed over there to find her hunched on her cot, looking out the grimy window at a long outdoor trough lined with faucets—our sink—where Melissa was washing her face. I sat on Kylie’s bed and put my arm around her. “I love you, baby,” I said. “You know that.” She nodded and slumped against me. Melissa returned to the room, dripping water and shivering.

“It’s cold,” she said.

“Get a towel,” I told her.

“There aren’t any.”

I looked around. “How can there not be towels?”

“There’s no hot water either, Dad,” Melissa said. “Or soap.” She threw herself on her cot to a yelp from the rusty springs and stared at the ceiling.

I watched helplessly as her long hair gathered on the grimy floor. Then I felt Kylie shaking beside me and peered at her wet, streaked face. “Oh, baby, stop,” I said. “Please, what’s wrong? Tell Daddy.”

“I’m scared,” Kylie said through chattering teeth.

“Scared of what? What’s scaring you?”

Melissa sighed from her bed.

“What if we never go home?” Kylie asked in a small, strained voice.

“Of course we’ll go home,” I said. “This is just a vacation.”

For a long time no one spoke. I held on to Kylie and stared challengingly at Melissa, my oldest, waiting for her to snort or wince—to betray her scorn in the smallest way. But Melissa lay still, her eyes closed, arms crossed on her chest.

What exactly Stuart made of the bedraggled and downcast group he led to dinner, God only knew. I sensed that we amused him. The
city felt like a place the world had forgotten: dusty streets, a department store whose listless, utilitarian window displays reminded me of South Dakota, where I grew up—those yellow sheets of plastic they hung inside store windows to keep out the glare. I remembered kicking stones as I peered through that yellow plastic at outdated transistor radios that I didn’t dare even ask my luckless father to buy me, and promising myself I’d have enough money someday to buy the whole fucking store, if I wanted.

At a restaurant bizarrely named Wine Bar, we dined on bowls of scalding broth mixed with soy sauce and two raw eggs, which instantly boiled. The other diners ceased eating and gathered around to more fully enjoy the spectacle of our presence. Soon a modest crowd pushed in from the street through the open door or pressed faces to windows, peering in at us.

Stuart turned to the girls. “How much do you hate China?” he asked.

They glanced nervously at me. “Just a little,” Kylie said.

“More than anything.” Melissa, of course.

“What’s the worst thing about it?” Stuart asked.

After some consideration, they agreed that the raucous throat-clearing and spitting on the pavement were the worst.

“In India, they spit red,” Stuart said.

“Gross,” said Melissa. “Why?”

“They chew a red nut, and it makes them spit. So they spit red.”

“Do you hate it here, too?” Melissa asked in a sweet, bantering voice I almost never heard her use anymore.

“Me, I love it,” he said. “You know every minute how far away you are.”

“Isn’t that true anywhere in the Third World?” Caroline said. “India, say, or Africa?”

“Too much suffering,” Stuart said. “Unless you’re there to help the people, what’s the point? But in China, everyone eats.”

“Our dad did that,” Melissa said. “He went to Africa and he fed the kids.”

There was a respectful pause. “Peace Corps?” Stuart asked.

“We went together,” Caroline said, taking a sip from my bowl.

Outside, the night fell dingy and red. Trailed by a small crowd of spectators, we walked to a market where vendors displayed piles of black grapes on thin cloths spread over the pavement. We hadn’t seen grapes in China before, and Melissa and Kylie each bought a bunch. The grapes were hard and sweet. Stuart bought some fresh walnuts, which he carried over to us in his untucked plaid shirt. The girls each took one. “But how do we break it?” Kylie asked.

“Ah, that’s the best part,” Stuart said. He placed a nut on the pavement and split it with the heel of his boot. It made a satisfying crack. The meat inside was a glistening white. We all got into it, cracking walnut shells with our shoes, pulling the sweet white meat from inside while a crowd of our Chinese hosts eyed us with bemused perplexity. “Americans,” I imagined them saying, afterward. “The poor sons of bitches have everything in the world, but they’ve never tasted fresh walnuts.”

As we walked back toward our
binguan
in the quiet dark, Melissa stopped, turned suddenly to all of us, and announced, “This was the most fun day in China.”

Night in that town was heavy and black as the ocean. Caroline and I lay on our separate cots, both wide awake. “I’m having a disturbing thought,” she said. “A feeling, really.”

“I’ll lie with you,” I said, finding the floor with my feet.

“Wait,” she said. “Let me say it.”

I lay back down. There was a long silence, during which I
discovered that I was afraid—physically afraid—for the first time in as long as I could remember.

“You did it,” Caroline said. “Isn’t that right?”

“Did what?” But I knew.

“Took the money. Or whatever it was.”

“Jeffrey Fox has been whispering in your ear.”

She ignored me. “I started thinking it a couple of days ago,” she said. “I don’t even know why. Tell me,” she said, and I heard her turning to face me. “I won’t blame you.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Sam. Why?”

“I don’t know.” It was the truth.

“Did you feel pressure? Financial pressure?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

I listened for some sound, some relief from any direction, but there was nothing. We were alone in the middle of nowhere. Of course, I thought—I’d dragged them to a place where they couldn’t help but see it.

“Remember that prick who ripped me off?” I said. “That friend of Harry’s who turned out not to be?”

“Yes …”

“He was—That was—It started then.”

I heard a rustle of coarse sheets, and Caroline was beside me—her warm, familiar skin, the soft shirt she slept in when we traveled. “Sam, I’m so sorry,” she said. She held me, her strong warm arms around my neck, and suddenly I was sorry, too, to see, for the first time, what I had become.

It looked like the dead of night when Stuart roused us. Loudspeakers filled the streets, blaring some awful, tinny wake-up music accompanied by saccharine female singing. The street lights were a
stark, fluorescent white. We sat on an empty bus, sat and sat, waiting for it to fill. As the first light streaked the sky, we finally started to move.

Caroline and I were in opposite seats, Kylie beside me, Melissa next to her. Stuart sat directly in front of me. By now he felt like family, somehow—enough to eliminate the need for talk at this hour. At last the bus swung out of town. The sun came up. Peasants got on, some carrying chickens, one clutching a pig. Most were folded into sleep the instant they sat down. My girls slept. After a while Stuart slept, too, his head back against the window, mouth open slightly. I got a long, close look at his face in profile, studied his pores and Adam’s apple, and found myself wondering who the hell he was. He looked like anyone. I tried to remember Cameron Pierce at Harry’s party, but the vision of him that had haunted me these past two years was gone. So then, how did I know this guy was the one? I tried to put myself back in Kunming, where I’d recognized him. Eyes? Chin? But that encounter, too, was murky now. Stuart was a guy sleeping inches away, his expression not much different from my daughters’. And then I was terrified: of having put my family in the hands of a total stranger—not the man who had robbed me.

By the time we hit the wooded hills, the sun was up. The land looked unkempt, trees pushing and shoving against each other like people fighting their way through lines in China. Stuart woke and glanced at me, then turned to the window. “Almost there,” he said.

We got off near a cluster of flimsy kiosks that marked the beginning of a path into the hills. The kiosks apparently doubled as overnight shelter for their proprietors, who were just beginning to stir. I heard more wake-up music from somewhere, but a powerful wind gushed through the trees and drowned out most of it. I was
filled with a sense that something was about to happen. As Stuart led the way uphill, I took Caroline’s hand. I saw Kylie reach for Stuart’s hand—she’s confused, I thought; she thinks he’s me. But Stuart took her hand, and they walked together so naturally that I was sure he had a daughter, and a wife, too. He must have all this, somewhere. My legs burned as we climbed.

At the top of the hill, we came upon the base of a towering wall of sheer cliff, red-tinted like clay, pocked with rows of small openings that had to be the caves. A scaffolding of sorts had been erected for scaling this vertical surface, and we mounted a set of stairs and began to climb, Stuart first, still holding Kylie’s hand, then Caroline and me. Melissa came last, looking tired and unsteady. I decided then to end my campaign against her.

We got off the stairs at the very top. There, beyond a series of curved openings in the rock, were the caves, their walls stained with bright, extraordinary colors, massive painted wooden Buddhas and Buddha-like attendants towering within each. “My Lord,” Caroline said. Kylie and Melissa just stared.

My wife and daughters went ahead. I let them go, stopping before three caves that had been linked to accommodate one massive Buddha lying horizontally. He was half sleeping, it seemed, his almond-shaped eyes just slightly open, his head wider than the length of me. For a long time I stared at the Buddha. Then I turned to lean over the railing and look back down the mountainside.

Stuart joined me. “Well, here it is,” he said. “As promised.”

“You outdid yourself.”

“So. What happens now?”

“Good question,” I said, and laughed. “Now I go to jail.”

There was a startled pause, then Stuart laughed, too. “Hell,” he said, “don’t do that.”