The Dog (13 page)

No one looked back to see that the captain held Claire in place. When the room had emptied, she said in Chinese, “What? What did I do?”

The officer rolled the cigarette around in his mouth. He had been posted to the embassy in Ottawa for several years, and spoke careful, slightly accented English.

“Scholars are China's great pride,” he said. “They are the heart of modernization. So much excitement today. I think perhaps too much for you?”

“Yes,” Claire said.

“Yes, this is old-fashioned behavior. We must modernize our attitudes.” The captain thrummed his chest and nodded.

Claire nodded, too.

“Do not worry about your teachers,” he said, waving his finger at the stairs. “We will speak with them for a little while. Perhaps they will spend the night. Please accept my apology for any problems,” the captain said. “We are here to protect you and to promote friendship.”

He offered his hand with such gusto and camaraderie that without thinking Claire took it and pumped right back. The captain then swept his arm toward the stairs, a master of ceremonies directing her to affix her gaze upon the opening curtain.

“For your safety, you should remain here for a while,” the captain said.

“Up there?” Claire said.

“Yes,” he said, then pointed at the stairs until she began moving in that direction. Halfway up, she glanced back at him, and he smiled and urged her on with both of his hands, as if shooing children out of a kitchen.

On the second floor she was met by an officer who first saluted her, then shook her hand. There was something adolescent about him, his face a bevy of angles, his twiggish wrists and hands so small they disappeared up the cuffs of his coat like moles darting into their burrows. He motioned stiffly that she should follow him, and he marched off down the hall.

The reeducation classroom's white walls were cracked, but scoured clean. They were the cleanest walls Claire had seen in China. She squeezed into a desk. There were bars on the windows. The officer straightened his uniform.

These were, for him, highly unusual circumstances. He'd been told only to escort the white woman to the classroom. No further instructions. Perhaps it was a test of his allegiance to the Party, if, as they said, a Western woman could corrupt a pure heart with a flutter of her eyelashes. He looked sternly at the woman and she smiled at him. His stomach jumped. She was, indeed, powerful. Suddenly he wagged his finger in the air, a gesture he'd seen in a movie—sit tight, I'll be right back—and hop-skipped out the door.

He returned carrying a vacuum bottle of hot water and a teacup, which he placed on the desk before her with the decorum of a waiter at a four-star restaurant. As he poured the water, Claire noticed he had a small bandage on his right index finger. It was grimy, and she felt like that was all she needed to know about this poor boy. He probably wasn't much older than she. Her fingers brushed the back of his hand. He tensed, and when the cup was full, he left the room, ran down the stairs, and out the building via a side door, where he vomited against a low wall.

Claire understood that he wasn't coming back and that she was to remain in the hard wooden chair and self-criticize or something. The whole day had been a waste, and she was about to get up and leave when she thought of Alicia. She picked up the teacup and took a sip, and as she did, her mind glazed over, wandering from one torture scenario to the next. What would Alicia think if she were to return to the dorm black and blue, her stomach dotted with cigarette burns? By the time she'd emptied the bottle, it was dark outside. She'd been there long enough. She stepped into the hallway. It was as if the place had been evacuated.

There were no signs of life in the corridor, no creaking desk chairs, no scraping pigeons on a windowsill. The station's windowless interior was lit by bulbs in wire cages screwed to the wall. She walked to the stairwell and at the bottom stopped and imagined what it would be like to be subdued for attempting to escape. The front room was dark and quiet as a deserted theater. A streetlamp's orange light cut through the window, and in its glow she made out the desks, returned once again to orderly rows, the papers stacked neatly. Slowly she made her way toward the door, her hands trailing from the cool surface of one desk to the next. At the last one, she let her hand drift to the stack of reports. She ran her thumb along the edge of the pages, and, looking the other way, flicked her fingers outward. The reports fluttered down in the dark. She walked to the door, grasped the smooth brass bar, and pushed.

It was dark outside, and beyond the courtyard endless waves of commuters rattled by on their bikes. Blurs, insubstantial as ghosts, they flashed through the cone of light cast by a streetlamp and were gone. The paving stones clucked beneath their tires, shifting like a rickety wooden bridge. The door clattered closed behind her. She passed unnoticed out the gates of the PSB compound.

At the college gates, the old watchman didn't even glance up from his movie magazine when she walked by the guardhouse. She made her way toward the dorm through pools of light separated by spaces of abyssal black. The adrenaline from the police station had long worn off, leaving in its place the cold exhaustion of a long swim. After all that tea she needed a bathroom, and began to worry she wouldn't make it from one yellow disc of light to another without wetting herself, and she kept moving, dashing ahead to the box of light proscribed by a window, then to the murky glow of a series of bulbs dangling over the glass cases where the newspaper was pinned up, eventually, gritting her teeth, reaching the chain-link fence around the athletic field. The dormitory lay just on the other side of the field. Claire laced her fingers through the cold metal diamonds and pressed her lips against the back of her hand. She clenched her legs together, pausing to imagine again that she'd been tortured at the PSB station and was just going to make it back to the dorm before passing out. Weak, disoriented, her back covered with bruises, she'd stagger into the lobby and collapse in a twitching heap on the dirty floor.

But then she realized she could have stayed out all night—handcuffed to a radiator at the PSB station, for all anyone knew—and no one would have even noticed she was gone. Not one of her classmates would have said, Hey, where's Claire? It stunned her a little, the unbidden cruelty of this thought, and, lacking anyone other than herself to blame for its formation, she felt for an instant that there must be something wrong with her.

So no one missed her. So no one cared. That was freedom, wasn't it? She reached for the button of her jeans, unzipped, pulled them down, squatted, and released a stream of urine onto the packed dirt. She groaned with relief. Mud splattered against the insteps of her shoes. The puddle grew beneath her, and she tipped forward to grab the fence. She didn't care who saw her. She knew no one would see her.

 

DONATE!

 

Yang had come home from the factory for lunch. The courtyard was covered in brown peach blossoms, exactly as it had been when he'd left that morning. He was standing beneath the old peach tree, debating how best to punish his daughter, who hadn't even touched the broom he'd left leaning against the trunk for her, when the earthquake hit. The branches above him shivered and dropped petals and twigs on his head. Must be something big up there tearing around after a pigeon, he thought. He was looking up, hoping to spot a yellow weasel, which would have been good luck, when suddenly the tree shook off its remaining petals and he found himself staring directly into the sun. He felt unsteady on his feet, as if, in the middle of choppy seas, he'd decided to stand up in his rowboat for a better view. He threw his arm around the tree's rough trunk just in time to catch himself from toppling over backward. His stomach churned. Across the courtyard, a terra-cotta roof tile landed with a thunk on the packed earth. The mahjong players who congregated outside his neighbor's gate, an excitable bunch to begin with, were yelling like madmen; the public toilet attendant, a Korean War vet in his seventies, reliving a nightmare of American shelling, cried out for the mahjong players to take cover. Horns wailed on Fuchengmen Street as traffic locked up. Dogs yelped. A windowpane popped. A single clay flowerpot tipped over and fell from its perch by the front gate, landing with a thud-crack against the pavers. Wind chimes clattered in the still air. Yang crouched down and felt around on the ground in front of him, trying to steady himself with his free hand. The broom fell over and whacked him on the shoulder, and he saw his wife coming toward him from their bedroom, waving her arms and shouting. At first he couldn't make out what she was saying over the storm of noise in his ears.

“Bing Yang! It's an earthquake!” she was saying.

He looked down at the fresh blanket of pink petals on the ground. “Are you hurt?” he said.

“I'm fine,” she said. “It's only tremors. Nothing serious.”

“You know my inner ear is unhealthy,” Yang said.

“Watch the horizon,” she said.

“I'm doing what I can,” he shouted.

“Be calm.”

He looked up at her with the eyes of a wounded animal turning to its predator.

“What?” she said.

“Help me up?” Yang said.

Gong crossed her arms. “Get up yourself. You're fine. Given any thought to Little Li?”

“Do I look like I've had time to make a phone call?” His knees cracked as he stood, and a wave of light-headedness washed over him. “Where's my phone?” he said.

Gong waggled her cell phone at him. “She already sent me a text. They're evacuating to the soccer field. The epicenter was hundreds of miles from here. This isn't such a big deal. It's over.”

Yang moved away from the tree and swept flowers off his shoulders, bits of bark from his shirt and trousers. Gong reached out and brushed some blossoms from his hair. Yang fished around for his phone and dialed his daughter.

“You've evacuated?” he said when she picked up.

“What?” she said. “We're on the soccer field.”

“Did the school collapse?” he said.

“Yang!” Gong shouted. “Leave her alone.”

“I'm asking serious questions here,” he said. His daughter was laughing, but not at anything he'd said. She was fourteen, a cipher to him.

“Bing Li,” he said, “come home right now.” He made a face at his wife. “And when you get here, sweep up these peach blossoms like I told you.”

Gong grabbed the phone away from him.

“Hey!” Yang said.

Gong put the phone to her ear. “Little Li, stay put. Don't move a muscle until your teachers tell you to. Goodbye.” She sighed and crossed her arms.

“Well, let's go see what this is all about,” Yang said. “And you can rub this knot out of my shoulder.” The broom's blow, glancing enough, had hit the site of an old injury.

“Who in heaven did I offend to get stuck with you?” she said, laying her hand on his back.

“Clearly you're cursed from a former life,” he said, giving her a weak smile.

*   *   *

When Little Li arrived home from school, the first thing she did was ask Yang for a donation.

“My class is sending money to the victims,” she said.

“How do you know about victims?” Yang said. “What victims?”

“Daddy. I'm not five.”

“Yes. Sure,” he said. He turned the television back on.

“It'll be a miracle if anyone survived. And this isn't the end of it,” she said. “After Tangshan in 1976, the aftershocks were five-point-zero on the Richter scale, and they kept coming back for months and killing more and more people.” She shook her head.

“You weren't even alive in 1976.”

“And you were still a peasant in 1976,” she said. He didn't respond.

“Daddy, there's not a building left standing in some villages. Everything's collapsed.”

“Such unshakable optimism,” he said. “Who told you this? Your teachers?”

“What would they know? They've been teaching all day. I got texts. Ming Weilin's cousin lives in Sichuan. He told her everyone's dead.”

“Everyone's not dead,” he said. “The administration organized the donations?”

“No. We did it ourselves while we were waiting.”

“That's very industrious of you,” Yang said, pulling a ten-yuan note from the roll in his pocket. “Let this be a seed that grows tall.”

“Okay,” Little Li said. “Embarrassing.”

“You're welcome.”

“Mama,” she called. “Mama, I need money for the earthquake victims.”

“Hey,” Yang said. “That's a family donation. Ten-kuai family donation,” he shouted after her as she crossed the courtyard, bound for her parents' bedroom, dragging her feet through the peach blossoms.

“Zhou Hao's dad gave him fifty kuai when he came to pick him up,” she shouted back. “Mama! I need money! Daddy's being a tight-ass!”

“Watch your mouth,” he muttered. On the TV, rescue workers in red jumpsuits and hard hats stood precariously atop slabs of gray rubble. A scene of unimaginable destruction, the newscaster said, and Yang thought, It's not unimaginable. The camera zoomed in on a woman covered in gray dust, clawing at chunks of concrete, desperately plunging her bare hands into the tangle of rebar, glass, jagged planks of wood, stone. She was digging for her child. The camera remained on her until Yang had to cough down the ache in his throat and look away.

“Come here,” he called hoarsely.

After a while, Little Li slouched back in.

“Here.” He pulled a hundred-yuan note from his pocket and closed her hands around the crumpled paper.

“That's more like it,” she said. She looked at the TV, which was replaying images of the mother digging in the rubble. “Nobody's alive in there. That woman must be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She's going to end up in an asylum.”