Year of the Tiger (24 page)

This one is more ambitious. It’s called ‘The Parthenon,’ and it looks like a Greek temple – that is, if the temple’s architects had dropped a lot of acid before they built it. Marble columns with flashing strings of green and red diodes snaking around them, naked statuary lit by colored spotlights, and a fountain that dances around vaguely in time to the latest Taiwanese pop blaring from the outdoor speakers.

I pay the taxi driver, thinking this might be an appropriate occasion for a Percocet.

Inside is a large main room, a dance floor encircled by booths, with a long bar cutting the space practically in half. Illuminated plastic signs at the back of the room, where the private rooms are, read ktv. It’s still early, and the place is pretty empty. The DJ plays Mandarin rap in a mash-up with the Carpenters. I decide it’s definitely time for that Percocet.

I’m supposed to meet Chuckie at the bar. I try the local draft, called ‘Yingze Cleaning Flavour Beer.’ I’m a little disappointed that it tastes like any other bland Chinese lager.

I’m about halfway through my pint when Chuckie shows up.

‘Hey, Chuckie.
Hao jiu bujian
.’ Long time no see.

‘Yili,
ni hao
. How’s it hanging?’ he adds in English.

‘Dude, you don’t say ’how’s it hanging’ to a girl,’ I say, exasperated. ‘Because you’re asking about, you know, which side of the pants your
jiba
and
dan
are hanging on.’

Chuckie’s face flames red. ‘Oh. I thought this was same as hanging out.’

‘Well, maybe, sometimes,’ I relent, because this really isn’t the time for me to try and upgrade his English slang. ‘You want something to drink?’

‘Beer is good.’

I order two more.

‘So, how’s Taiyuan?’

‘Okay,’ he says nervously. ‘Kind of boring.’

The beers come. I lift my mug. Chuckie lifts his in return, leaning back on his barstool and eyeing me over the mug’s rim.

‘So, Yili,’ he says. ‘You say you need some help from me. Right now, maybe it’s bad time for me. But tell me anyway.’

Good, he’s not in the mood for
keqi hua
either.

‘Okay, here’s the deal. You know my character in
Sword of Ill Repute
? Little Mountain Tiger?’

Chuckie nods.

‘Well, she got killed. I need you to help me bring her back.’

Chuckie takes a swallow of his beer, frowning. ‘So, that’s easy. You just have to play some rounds in Hell. Meet Horse-face and Ox-head. You know how to do that.’

‘I don’t have time.’

People are starting to arrive, groups of students and middle-aged men accompanied by much younger women wearing stilettos and short skirts. I figure they’ll be ordering up the Courvoisier or Dom Pérignon or whatever overpriced bullshit middle-aged Chinese yuppie guys buy to impress their hooker girlfriends.

The music’s changed too: it’s harder-edged, faster, and the volume’s cranked up to the point where I start to get nervous. I chug the rest of my first beer and start on the second. I can do this. I just need to have the rest of this conversation, and then I can get out of here.

‘See, Chuckie, the thing is, my character was a lot higher ranked than before. And … I kind of need her to be that high-ranked again, and right away.’

I can tell that Chuckie’s having a hard time absorbing this, considering that I’d never shown much interest in the game before. ‘What level?’

‘Ummm … eight … I think.’

‘Eight? But you only … you are just level one or two before.’

‘Yeah. But, you know, I, um, played a lot after you left Beijing, and –’

‘You can’t just become level eight after so little playing time,’ Chuckie protests. ‘Takes maybe a few months of playing, and playing many hours.’

‘Yeah … well … it just kind of happened.’

Chuckie stares at me, aghast. ‘You cheated?’

‘No, I didn’t cheat. Somebody helped me out. That’s not cheating.’

‘This is what ruins games!’ Chuckie says furiously. ‘You can just buy what you want, not earn it.’

‘Hey, you lent Ming Lu your whatever-the-fuck-level Qi sword! How’s that different?’

Chuckie slams his beer mug on the bar. ‘It was for specific quest! That is part of this game!’

‘Okay, so this was part of a specific quest too,’ I retort. ‘And things got fucked up, and they need me for this quest, and you gotta help resurrect me!’

‘So, what kind of quest?’ Chuckie asks.

Oh, shit.

Chuckie ran all the way to Taiyuan to get away from whoever was threatening him in Beijing. To get away from me. He’s not exactly thrilled to see me as it is. If I tell him any portion of the truth, he’ll probably bolt to Tibet.

But lying to him? I can’t do it. For one thing, I suck at lying.

‘It’s important,’ I say. ‘And it’s really better if I don’t tell you what it’s about.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Chuckie says with a frown. ‘If this is for the Game, you can tell me. Maybe I can help you on the quest.’

Is Chuckie a part of the Great Community? It would make sense. It’s his Game too.

But what if he’s not?

I take a deep breath. ‘I can pay you.’

Chuckie bows his head, practically resting his chin on his beer mug. I’m pretty sure he’s deeply offended.

‘’Cause I got these cool weapons,’ I continue. ‘This really tall staff that shoots Qi energy. And, um, this tortoiseshell shield. And I get those back once I’m resurrected, right?’

Chuckie’s head pops up. ‘Turtle shield? You got a turtle shield?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That protects against almost anything,’ he breathes in wonder. ‘So, how did you die?’

‘Nine-Headed Bird.’

‘Ah.’ Chuckie nods in sympathy. ‘Almost impossible to kill Nine-Headed Bird. You must use turtle shield and Mutual Rings, if you have them. And call for phoenix intervention.’

‘Oh. Phoenix intervention. Forgot about that.’

I’m feeling a little calmer. Probably because the Percocet’s kicking in. ‘Look, Chuckie. You can have my turtle shield just as soon as I’m through with this quest. I promise.’

Chuckie sighs heavily. He doesn’t like it. But you know what they say: every man has his price.

Trey came home five months after I got blown up. He was still a soldier, so he found an apartment for us near his base, in one of those sixties or seventies tilt-up complexes with parking underneath, held up by skinny metal poles. Before that, I’d been living with my mom, which hadn’t worked out too well. It was a long way to the VA Hospital from where she lived, and every time I rode in a car I worried about getting blown up again.

Trey’s and my apartment was pretty basic, a cheap, two-bedroom place with shiny beige walls and pressboard wood paneling. Minimally furnished, half from Wal-Mart, half from thrift stores. It was clean, at least, thanks to Trey, who, whatever other shitty things I could say about him aside, was always neat and tidy and made the bed every day – well, he made it on the days I’d get out of it, at least.

The one thing I insisted on was a high-speed Internet connection. I’d gotten kind of hooked on Web surfing during my recovery. It was an activity that pretty much fit my level of concentration, which is to say transitory and fragmented. Plus there was always the possibility of some kind of connection. That one of my buddies would write me. That dog Turner, or Kim, or Mayer. Pulagang or Torres, Palaver or Madrid. And then I could write back. And we could maybe talk about how we were feeling and what we were going through, but we could still hide, from each other and the world.

We had about six months together before Trey was redeployed. That time was okay. We were both trying. I went to the base for physical therapy, three, four times a week. I wasn’t ever going to be a hundred percent, but the PT helped, and it gave me something to do. Trey kept the house clean, brought me little presents now and again.

But it seemed to me that we had a lot of silence between us. Because what we had in common was the war. Was Camp Fucking Falafel. And neither one of us wanted to talk about that.

It was like before, where we’d fuck and not talk about it. Except that the fucking part, which was one thing we really had going for us before, wasn’t the same. I was still pretty messed up, and Trey would treat me like a piece of spun glass, because he never knew what was going to hurt me.

I didn’t like leaving the apartment. Hated having to do pretty much anything. Shopping, forget it. I’d get too nervous. Paying bills, hated that. Taking out the trash, could barely manage it. Doing dishes, making the bed, no way. Too much effort.

Though I liked going to the base, actually. I liked entering through a guarded gate, liked being protected by razor wire and guns. Seeing guys in their battle dress, seeing Humvees, going to the PX; all that stuff felt familiar. Safe.

Just throw in some mortars and IEDs, and I would’ve felt right at home.

Turns out I’m going to have to pay Chuckie some real money in addition to a virtual turtle shield. ‘Not for me,’ he insists. ‘For some other guys.’

I’m not thrilled about somebody else being involved with this. ‘What other guys?’

‘Some other guys. Don’t worry. They do this all the time.’

‘I’d have to give them my password?’

‘Soon as they finish, you can change it.’

‘I don’t know.’

At that, Chuckie takes a big swallow of his Cleaning Flavor beer and shrugs. ‘Maybe, if this is too much trouble, we should not do it.’

I’m tempted to agree with him. Give some stranger my password? Maybe I should forget the whole thing and run like hell to Outer Mongolia. I could live in a yurt. Ride camels.

Chuckie must see the doubt on my face, because something shifts in his. Maybe he’s thinking about that turtle shield slipping from his grasp.

‘Look,’ he says, ‘these are okay guys. Friends of mine. You can come meet them. Bring them some Jack Daniels or something. You’ll see.’

‘Okay,’ I finally say. ‘Okay.’

I ride with Chuckie on the back of his moped, which can’t go very fast with the two of us on it, so at least it’s not too scary. We stop at a little 24-hour market run by Koreans, and I buy a bottle of whiskey. Then I hang on to Chuckie’s waist, and we ride down Taiyuan’s wide coal-choked streets.

Eventually, we come to what looks like an older area of town: random twisted pipes, rusting oil cans, and busted chairs piled in front of cement and white-tiled-front buildings, cracks and holes in the Day-Glo-colored plastic signs, everything greasy with black grime. There’s a night market here, tumbling out of an alley, a burst of music and noise, sizzling meat and garlic.

We drive around the back of the market. Chuckie parks the bike and locks it to a rack. Trash spills out of bins. There’s one pathetic sodium light over a doorway, bathing the entrance in a sickly yellow glow.

‘This way,’ Chuckie says, and he leads me through the door and down a flight of stairs.

In China they don’t believe in lighting hallways unless they have to. Apparently we’re supposed to make our way here by the light that seeps out from under the doors of the occupied offices. Or, given the hour, we aren’t supposed to be here at all.

But here we are.

At the end of the hall is a double door. Chuckie raps his knuckles on it a couple times. After a minute, the door opens. A skinny guy wearing a stretched-out V-necked undershirt, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, claps Chuckie on the shoulder. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘What’s up?’

‘Not much.’ Chuckie gives a nod in my direction. ‘Li Ke, this is a friend of mine, Yili. She has a little problem. Maybe you can help her.’

Li Ke nods noncommittally, and we follow him inside.

It’s a big room, divided into cubicles, maybe a hundred or so, and at first I’m thinking particularly sleazy Internet bar, because every cubicle has a computer with a guy sitting in front of it, and there’s a lot of noise from various games: music and combat sounds and animated screams and laughter. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air; there are junk-food wrappers and soft-drink bottles lying on the ground, and the place has this funky smell of smoke, sour sweat, stale grease, and mildew.

The weird thing is – and it takes me a few minutes to figure this out – nobody looks like they’re having any fun. They’re just sitting there in front of the terminals, hollow-eyed and bored, punching keys and toggling joysticks like they’re transcribing medical records or something.

Meanwhile, Chuckie leans in close to Li Ke’s ear and explains my problem.

Li Ke shrugs. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘We can do that.’

He pivots and heads down an aisle, taps a guy on his back, mutters some explanation, and points in my direction. The guy stands, sees me, smiles in an embarrassed way, and nods at me like a bobble-head doll.

‘What is this, Chuckie?’ I ask in a whisper.

‘Gold farm,’ Chuckie says tersely. ‘They play for you. Kill monsters. Get you gold and spells and treasure. Then you can move up levels.’

Okay. I try to wrap my mind around this. ‘So, they play as me? As Little Mountain Tiger?’

Chuckie nods. ‘Right.’

‘And they do this for a living?’

‘Sure. Lots of rich players want to move up fast, go on better quests, without taking the time.’ Chuckie snorts. ‘It’s cheating, I think. People with more money, they don’t have to work. Have these guys farming for them. Get high-level spells and weapons, and they don’t earn them at all.’