Year of the Tiger (35 page)

I’m lying on my back on a cement floor, one arm flung out, the other shading my eyes from the fluorescent glare.

My leg hurts; my hips and shoulders ache. I remember … what?

My mouth tastes like copper.

I try to sit up. Oh, shit, I think I’m going to throw up. My head pounds like it’s about to burst.

I lie back down and close my eyes.

When I open them again, I pull my legs up, knees bent, feet on the ground. My legs are bare. I’m wearing a T-shirt. That’s it.

Then I remember. My jeans. Blood. And I think maybe I pissed in them. I kind of remember doing that.

I remember a little more. The car. John’s head in my lap.

They drugged me.

Where am I?

Small room. White walls. Cement floor. One door. Two metal chairs, one with short legs, like it’s built for kids.

I try to sit up again. Slowly. I lean against the wall. Wrap my arms around myself. It’s like a meat locker in here.

The door opens. A guy comes in, wearing a tracksuit and a mask – a ski mask – and rubber gloves. The tracksuit is red with yellow trim. Adidas. I can still see his eyes. He’s Asian, thick, squat, built like a wrestler.

‘Sit in the chair,’ he says. He sounds American.

I try to stand up, but I just can’t. I’m too dizzy and my head hurts.

He grabs my wrists and pulls me to my feet. I feel the rubber on my skin. He pushes me into the low chair.

‘You do what you’re told. Understand?’

I think he might be the guy who came to the Liangs’ place, to Tongren Village. I nod.

‘Stay there.’ And he leaves.

So I sit. I sit for what feels like hours, shivering. I stare at the white walls. I think I hear something, the call to prayer from a mosque, so faint I’m not sure, and it reminds me of those times. I think: I can’t be there, but maybe I am. How long was I out? I don’t have a clue. I could be anywhere. I strain to listen. The chair is hard and too small, the seat at a funny angle, and after a while it hurts for me to sit in it. I’m cold, and I’m so thirsty. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. I think: I can’t stand this; I really can’t.

Finally, I think: fuck these people. I stand up. My legs and back are so cramped that I almost fall over, but I stay on my feet.

Immediately, the door opens. The Chinese (American?) guy strides across the room. Puts his thick hands on my shoulders and shoves me into the chair. ‘What did I tell you? What did I tell you?’ he yells.

‘Fuck you,’ I say, voice cracking.

He slaps me across the face. I smell rubber and talcum powder.

‘You’re going to do exactly what we tell you. Sit in the fucking chair. Don’t fucking move.’

He leaves me there.

After a while, I start crying. I don’t want to. I know they’re watching me. I don’t want them to see me cry, but I can’t help it.

Then I stop. Wipe the snot off my face with the back of my hand. I stand up.

And in pops the same guy. In my head, I name him Charlie. ‘Sit in the fucking chair!’ he screams.

I laugh.

He doesn’t hesitate. He grabs my wrist and forces it behind my back, pushes down, and the pain nearly drops me to my knees, and I’m in the chair. With his free hand, he pulls a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket. Metal this time. He fastens one ring around my wrist, threads the cuffs around one of the chair’s back struts, then secures my other wrist.

‘You’re going to sit,’ he says. ‘You wanna play it this way, then that’s how we’ll play it.’

And he leaves me there.

Hours go by. Maybe days. I notice the subtle gradations of white on the walls. My teeth chatter. My hands feel numb. My shoulders burn. I’ve got to pee again.

I think: if I don’t drink something, I’ll pass out.

Then I have a new idea. I’m cuffed to this chair, but that doesn’t mean I can’t stand up.

I stand. I can’t stand up all the way. The cuffs slide along the strut to the backrest, and the fucking chair is heavy. I take a few steps, hunched over, dragging it behind me.

The door flies open, and here’s my new best friend.

He hits me. I sit. He yells: ‘You think this is some kind of game?’

I look up at him. ‘Yeah,’ I manage. My lip is bleeding. ‘It’s called, I stand up and you come running.’

I wait for him to hit me again, but he doesn’t. So I keep going: ‘It’s like, it’s like …’ I laugh; I can’t help it, but I can’t catch my breath, and it’s more like a wheeze. ‘… musical chairs. You know? Musical chairs. But there’s no music. You should work on that.’

Even with the mask on, I can still see his eyes. He looks confused.

‘Hey, I need some water,’ I say.

‘You need to sit down and shut the fuck up,’ he says, trying to recover his inner bad-ass.

‘I’m dehydrated, you stupid fuck,’ I say. ‘You wanna keep playing here, you’d better get me some water.’

His fists clench and unclench, like he really wants to do something, but he doesn’t know what.

‘Come on,’ I say. ‘What’s your problem? You don’t wanna get me some water, you can just hit me again. I’m sitting right here. Not going anywhere. Come on, you fucking pussy. Don’t you wanna hit me?’ I stand up again, lift the chair legs off the ground, take a couple steps balancing the chair on my back like I’m some Chinese peasant with a bushel basket of rice. ‘Look, I’m not sitting! Come on! Do your job, asshole!’

He puts me down, of course. It takes a couple of seconds, and I couldn’t even tell you how he did it, except suddenly the chair’s on the ground, my butt’s in the chair, and I feel like I’m going to puke.

He has a roll of duct tape. He doesn’t say anything, just pulls off lengths of it, looking pissed off, and he wraps it around my ankles, securing them to the chair legs.

But he doesn’t hit me again. He doesn’t meet my eyes.

‘Heckuva job, man,’ I say. ‘You should be real proud of yourself.’

He tears off another piece of tape and stretches it across my mouth.

‘Shut up,’ he says.

Fuck, I am so thirsty.

I guess I do pass out, finally. I can’t breathe that well through my nose, and then I can’t hold my head up. But when my head falls forward, that wakes me up, and I jerk my head upright, and think, okay, I’m still here.

I can’t really stand up with my ankles taped to the chair legs. I can scoot the chair across the cement a little, which makes a really irritating scraping noise. I do that for a while. No one comes in.

Come on, I think. Come on. You can’t just leave me here. You can’t.

Days go by. Years.

I can’t hold it any longer, and I piss myself. The puddle spreads out on the metal chair, drips down my thighs. I stink. I’m wet. I’m cold.

The pain between my shoulders feels like a hand reaching beneath my skin and twisting the muscles. Spasms travel down my back, down my legs, the nerves on fire.

I can’t stand it.

I just want to lie down.

I push myself hard, and I fall to one side. I crack my head against the concrete, and the last clear thought I have is: maybe that wasn’t so smart.

The door opens; everything seems to be dissolving around the edges, and it’s hard for me to hold the picture together. Somebody, Charlie, I think, squats next to me, frees my hands, then my ankles. He half-carries, half-drags me over to the wall and leans me up against it, which is what you’re supposed to do with a head injury, keep the head elevated, and I feel like congratulating him for doing the right thing, but then he rips the duct tape off my mouth, and that really fucking hurts, and the pain is like plunging my head in ice water, and all of a sudden I can almost think again.

He checks my pupils with a little flashlight, probes the area around my temple with his fingertips, then says over his shoulder, ‘Yeah, she’s okay.’

The person he says it to crouches down into my field of vision. He’s holding an open bottle of water. I take it, suck it down.

‘Told you I needed water,’ I say.

It’s Suit #1 – the younger, thinner one. Macias.

‘You’re in a serious situation,’ he says.

I want to laugh. ‘Really? No shit.’ I look around the cold, white room. ‘Where’s your buddy? Beating on women seems like something he’d like.’

Suit #1 blinks and furrows his brow. ‘Why are you escalating this?’ he asks.

The weird thing is, he sounds genuinely puzzled.

‘You threaten me, you kidnap me, and
I’m
the one who’s escalating? That is just fucking hilarious.’

Suddenly I realize something. This isn’t the scenario they gamed for.

‘Oh, I get it,’ I say. ‘You think I’m this loser headcase, and the minute you started playing Gitmo with me, you figured I’d cave.’

Now I do laugh. ‘I mean, you let me keep my T-shirt. That’s pretty fucking lame. Don’t you get how it’s done?’

‘You want to us to take it?’ Macias asks. ‘Because we can make this a lot worse. Is that what you want?’

He stares at me, unblinking.

He’ll do it, I know. He’ll do whatever needs to be done.

‘No,’ I say.

He stares at me a moment longer. Then he takes the water bottle out of my hand. Puts it down beside him.

‘I want to be very clear with you,’ he says. ‘We have everything we need to lock you away someplace where you’ll never see the sun. You’ll live in a cell. You’ll never see a lawyer. You won’t get visits from the Red Cross, or from your friends and family either. We can do that. Do you understand?’

I don’t say anything. I don’t nod. I stare back at him. My heart’s pounding in my chest, the sweat’s pouring off me like water, and I know I’m not fooling him. But I’m not saying anything. I’m not.

He reaches into his suit pocket. ‘We have this paper,’ he says, ‘assigning you authority to manage Zhang’s artwork and finances. Where did you get it?’

I shrug. ‘He left it for me.’

‘Who gave it to you?’

‘I found it.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘At his place,’ I improvise. ‘In the frame of one of his paintings.’

Okay, it sounds like a bad spy movie. But I see the doubt in Suit #1’s eyes.

‘I don’t know where he is,’ I state, and this should sound plausible, because I really don’t know. ‘I don’t know where the Uighur is either.’

‘Then what was it you were doing? You said you could get us the information we needed. We gave you time to cooperate. You went to Taiyuan, Pingyao, Xi’an, and Chengdu. You had us chasing you all through China. You wasted our time. Why?’

I stare down at the bare concrete floor. Is this it? Is this what I’m going to see, from now on? White walls and gray cement?

‘I got scared.’ I make my voice small. It’s not hard. ‘I didn’t know what to do, and I got scared. I got on the first train I could catch. Then, I just, I just kept going.’

I look up at him. I figure I must look pretty pathetic. His expression is a blank. I can’t tell if he’s buying this or not.

‘The man you were with,’ Suit #1 says flatly. ‘Zhou Zheng’an. Who is he? How do you know him?’

‘Oh, John?’ It suddenly comes back to me, John’s bloody head on my lap. ‘He’s just, he’s just a guy. A guy I met in Beijing. He, he kind of has a thing for me. He was going to Chengdu, for business. He said maybe I should go there. We could …’ I look away. ‘You know. Get together.’

‘Why did you get off the train?’

‘Because of the temple. The, the Moon temple. John said it was nice. And a good place for us to, just, hang out.’

Suit #1 stares at me. He knows I’m lying, I’m pretty sure.

‘Look, I was lonely. I needed … I needed someone … to just …’ My voice trails off, caught in my throat.

‘Is John okay?’ I ask then. And I really want to know. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s being taken care of,’ Suit #1 says.

For a moment, I’m so scared that I almost tell him everything.

No, not scared. Hopeless. Like, what’s the point? Just tell him. We’re all fucked anyway. What difference does it make?

You said you wouldn’t tell, I tell myself. So, don’t.

He stares at me. I look into his eyes, and I see it all. What he’s done. What he’s willing to do.

I know I can’t win.

But I don’t look away.

Then, a funny thing happens: Suit #1’s phone rings. His ring tone is a song by Tupac.

‘Yeah?’

He listens. Something in his expression shifts. He stands up and paces toward the door.

I just sit there.

Suit #1 signals to my buddy Charlie, who’s been standing beside me like a block of wood. The two of them leave.

And here I am, by myself again. But nobody’s ordering me to sit in a chair.

I lean against the wall, shivering. Tilt my head back, close my eyes, and think about things. I think about sitting on the couch at Lao Zhang’s place, watching him paint. I think about these goofy Chinese girls who got up that last karaoke night at Says Hu and tried to do some ghetto hip-hop number.

I think about Trey, and the things we did together.

Finally, Charlie comes back in, a pair of sweats draped over one arm. He’s holding something else too, a tall plastic tumbler.

He tosses the sweats at me. ‘Put these on.’

I do, teeth chattering.

‘Here.’

He holds the tumbler out to me. It’s pink, with cartoon characters on it. I can smell the alcohol.

‘Wow, Hello Kitty,’ I say.

‘Drink this.’

I think about objecting. I think about spitting it in his face.

What’s the point?

I take it. I drink. Vodka.

I get about halfway down and stop. ‘I can’t drink any more.’

‘Finish it.’

I can feel the tears, and I tell myself, don’t. Don’t give in.

Keep playing.

‘Why? What are you gonna do?’

‘Drink it.’

I think: he’ll pour it down my throat if I don’t.

I take a few more swallows. I have these weird thoughts, like this is a movie, right? Where they get somebody drunk, and then, I don’t remember what happens after that. A car crash or something.

My stomach twists. Bile rises up in my throat.

‘That’s it,’ I manage. ‘I can’t drink any more.’

He takes the cup. Looks to see how much vodka is left. Looks at me.

I’m feeling kind of loaded.

‘Okay,’ he says. He reaches into his pocket. ‘Put these on.’