Authors: Andy Oakes
‘Ask him … ask him,’ saying it to herself in her head. But he was already past her, joining the crowd. Their clothed bodies hiding his nakedness. Shoed feet, blotting, drying his footprints. The endless flow of people passed and he was gone. She walked a little further; the sun still on her back, but not warming her.
The beat of rotor blades unpicked itself from the background and moved forward, encompassing everything. With each revolution, Bobby moving further away … losing him. Needing the pain as a reminder of him. Needing the pain to still hold onto him, but it couldn’t be found in her dream. She woke herself, wanting to hunt it down and teethe on it.
*
The Sea of Bohai falling away. Crossing the Shandong Peninsula, rounding Mount Lao and its wooded hills. Qingdao in its grip … the town’s back pressed hard against the Yellow Sea. Its beaches lost in darkness. Only the electric weave of street lights a witness to a population of one million. They were already losing altitude. Barbara rubbed her eyes, dust and unresolved dreams filling them. The Senior Investigator watching her. She could see him, as a child does, through the gaps between her fingers, just across the main cabin from her.
Ask him
…
ask him
.
Acting on a dream for only the second time in her life, and both at her son’s request.
“Tell me about Bobby?”
Piao feeling the question jolt him. Something that he recognised in it that was more than a question and more about a premonition.
“He was in a privileged position, and Heywood, to take many very special cultural relics …”
The Senior Investigator held out his palm, the button coin at its centre.
“… I do not know exactly what they could have taken, but Mingqi such as this are found in the Emperors’ tombs and longevity graves. In such places many important artefacts can be found that were buried there to help and defend the Emperor in the life after death. I have a contact in the Bureau for the Preservation of Cultural Relics. Such things they treat most seriously. A team will be sent out on the next plane to investigate …”
He smiled. A weariness stranding it across his face for longer than seemed justified.
“… the Bureau for the Preservation of Cultural Relics has a large budget, they will not be dependant on hitching a ride for the price of a few packets of Marlboro and a few bottles of Southern Comfort .”
Barbara took the coin from his palm, a finger tracing its outline.
“How old would this be?”
“Two thousand years. Perhaps more.”
He hadn’t even blinked. The Senior Investigator took the coin back.
“The Bureau are very thorough, their investigation will tell us much. I still do not know about the girl, Ye Yang, and the others … the four who have died twice. What the girl’s involvement in the operation was I cannot say, our reports on her are insignificant as yet. The other four are as weeds in the paddy field, they do not appear to be a part of what surrounds them. Time might make their story known.”
“I’ve got contacts too. I’ll ask the American Ambassador to get me a profile on Ye Yang and her family. I haven’t wanted to do it. I guess I’ve been fooling myself, pretending that Bobby and the girl were innocent of everything. That their deaths were some sort of mistake. That they were drawn into something that was nothing to do with them …”
She stared out of the porthole, the lights getting closer, taking on more detail. Streets. Houses. Lives being lived.
“… but the coin says it all, doesn’t it?”
Still a question. Still an element of denial. Piao wanting to rescue her. He didn’t answer.
Ask him
…
ask him.
Barbara looking across the cabin. The Senior Investigator averting his eyes, the report on fire in his pocket, and with it, a sense of knowing what was coming next.
Ask him
…
ask him.
“But you’re not telling me everything about Bobby, are you?”
The promise of the dream put to the test. She wouldn’t be able to read the report, but he handed it to her. At moments such as these you didn’t want your hands to be free, you needed something, anything to hold onto.
“Pan, who examined the bodies, Bobby and the others … there were some points that he needed an expert opinion on. A clarification of some abnormalities. These examinations … what he found was beyond him …”
She was beginning to feel ill, a fever at the core of her.
“… he was a professor at Pan’s Institute and is now a government adviser in Beijing …”
Running out of space, the edge of the abyss, toes over it, looking down. The Senior Investigator’s lips dry.
“… much of the report is difficult to understand. Our medical professors, I am sure, are like yours, they attempt to explain things in unexplainable ways …”
He tried to laugh, it came out as a nervous cough.
“… there are conclusions to his report. The four who were in Gongdelin and who it is said were executed, he found that they had been shot. But the entrance and exits of the bullet holes were disguised by the mutilations that they had received. The paths that led to their deaths, someone has tried to sweep them clean. Pan had missed this, it was not difficult in the circumstances …”
Her eyes were held firm, her gaze screwed to his. Attempting to prepare for the pain. Piao drew a breath, a tattered edge to it.
“… these four and the others, including Bobby. Analysis showed that all had been anaesthetised. Opioids. Hypnotics. All had undergone a major medical procedure …”
The heartbeat in his chest, a thunder. Its echo in his inner-ears, his temples. Each word released to, and finding its way through its salvoes.
“… Bobby, Ye Yang, Heywood, Qingde, the professor has concluded that their deaths were due to the trauma of these major medical procedures. That they were allowed to die on the operating tables following on from invasive surgical techniques. The mutilations, they were meant to hide this from us and to make our identification of the bodies more difficult.”
Barbara’s eyes, their hue shifting from turquoise to slate grey, and filled with questions.
“Medical procedures. Invasive surgical techniques. I don’t get it. What are you saying, what’s this professor saying? Why the hell should they have had operations?”
The Senior Investigator bit the inside of his lip. Untangling the words. Spitting them out …
“Their organs, they had been removed. Removed by surgical procedures. Removed systematically.”
*
“Fucking helicopters.”
Piao wiped the vomit from his lips. The rag, oily, causing nausea’s wings to beat more rapidly. A hot hand on his shoulder. A smell of alcohol, candy and cough mixture, cutting through the reek of bile.
“Here Boss, drink. We thought we’d open a bottle. Check that it’s what it says it is on the label …”
Grand Old Southern Comfort. The Senior Investigator took the candle ridged neck of the bottle and drank deeply. Slapping the Senior Investigator firmly on the back.
“… some drinker, that pilot. Half a bottle. Half a fucking bottle in three snorts. The thirst of an Emperor.”
The Zhi-8 took on more altitude. Shuddering. Piao shuddering. Taking another slug. Sugared Napalm. Wedging himself against the rear bulkhead. The Zhi-8’s heartbeat deep into the small of his back.
“So Boss, what the fuck was that about?”
Nodding toward the centre of the cabin, Barbara Hayes … her eyes looking beyond steel and through the years. Piao had no appetite for words. Words. But perhaps they would still the nausea.
“Telling a mother how her son was slaughtered. Telling a mother that he died on an operating table …”
Another slug. Its heat expanding in his head.
“… telling a mother that his organs were surgically removed.”
Yaobang taking the bottle.
“That was in the report, Pan’s old professor’s report?”
“Last page.”
“Last fucking page?”
Piao nodded. Head swimming, like a dog in a canal.
“Shit, sorry Boss. Never read a last page in my life. Always thought they’d be a fucking let down.”
The Zhi-8 dropped. Piao pushing tighter against the bulkhead. Heartbeat racing the rotor’s metal pulse.
“Not this last page.”
Slipping to the plate floor, the Senior Investigator tracing the run of crescent moon welds with his finger.
“So what’s it about Boss, what the fuck’s going on? Operations. Organs missing. It feels like fucking madness.”
Piao took the bottle. Finishing the bottle. Staring deeply into the label. Imagining himself in the buggy, passing the grand old house. Passing the grand old riverboat. Steaming just off the banks of the grand old Mississippi.
It feels like fucking madness.
Outside, beyond the metal confines of the Zhi-8, a constant flow of land. Formless wilderness, frontier, pecked into by the electric reasoning of villages, towns, cities. A flight from madness to sanity. From madness … the lands of the north east, the far north. The lands of the silent tears. The unheard cries.
PINGFANG.
“We flew over it, a tiny village. Thirty kilometres out of Harbin. Hardly noticeable now. Buildings, just buildings. And madness.”
Letting the bottle slip across the metal deck in an arcing gash of colourless shards.
“They experimented on human beings there. Injecting them with deadly viruses. Freezing them, slowly. Observing the prolonged effects of frostbite. Dissecting them while they were alive. Conscious. Removing their organs.”
“Pingfang, the secret Japanese research place during the last war. That’s what you’re fucking talking about, isn’t it Boss?”
Eye contact enough. The Senior Investigator not needing words. Not needing to nod.
“You’re saying that the bodies were experimented on, like there? Fucking cut up while they were still alive?”
Piao laboured to his feet. Across glass, making his way back to the centre of the cabin … to Barbara.
“Another Pingfang,” was all that he said. Lands of silent tears. Lands of unheard cries.
*
She didn’t talk. The rest of the journey to Hongqiao … a constant beat of steel wings through air. Her hand laced in Piao’s. Sometimes tight, knuckles white; sometimes loose. The sole barometer to what she was feeling. That, and the tears. His mother, his wife, and now Barbara. Women, a bottomless well of tears. He had often drunk there.
*
The car was waiting on the tarmac. They sat in the back, her hand still in his, not daring to let it go. A feeling that she would be washed away if he did. And every time that her gaze caught his, a flash. Like sun trapped in water.
The corridor of the Jing Jiang was dark. Silence, except for the city breathing. The sound of the key turning in its lock, a comfort. Inside the room, curtains billowing, tumbling as kites tethered by a fine cord.
Sometimes, a single thread is all that holds us to where we are and want to be.
She touched him. Undoing his shirt buttons. Her hands across his chest, down his arms; the shirt released to the floor. Not for a second her eyes leaving his, breathing in every feint of his irises. Breathing in unison. The buckle of his belt. The zip pulled open in a slow purr. Her hands moving down his flanks in a firm stroke; trousers, briefs, shoes, socks, kicked aside. He was naked and not trying to hide himself, his arms by his sides. Kissing him once on the shoulder as she slipped out of her dress, her underwear … silk moving down her skin to the floor. Nothing about her that wasn’t perfect. Piao moved toward her, the pupils of her eyes widening. The breath torn on their lips. A shock … electricity as they held each other. She was heat against his ice. Softness against his hardness. She tasted of flowers and sleep. Tears and toothpaste. Drunk on her feel, her taste, her touch. He entered her before they had laid down on the snowfield of the duvet. Her legs around him in an unfolded whisper, a secret word. Everything that he was, had been, or would ever be … inside of her. The night, a seam of purple velvet and heaven. A catch of disjointed, out of time, memories and images.
She said only one thing as they had travelled the night together. One thing as her tears silently baptised his chest, as he had come inside her for the first time.
“Let me steal this moment from you now.”
He had never heard more honest words in his life. He would have, should have, cried right there and then, but he didn’t know how.
Treat death as life.
The stink was rampant. Piao held his breath until he was deep inside the building.
The Headquarters of the Bureau for the Preservation of Cultural Relics straddled uncomfortably the borders of the Putuo District and the Changning District, in the far west of the city. There were no fences, but the district boundaries were there. And with them the disputes that divisions seed. The roads that surrounded the Bureau were clean. The road that it sat on, dirty. Rotting vegetables, paper, oil, shit, two dead dogs in the gutter … jawbones grinning. Which district would meet the bill of cleaning the road that sat exactly where the boundary fell? The argument had been running for two years.
Things move slowly in the People’s Republic of China.
*
“How is your mother?”
Piao had known that the question would come. How would it not, from a man who had known her for more years than her own son? Fifty years. But still the Senior Investigator felt shame and humiliation. The Director’s eyes fired with memory, and more.
“She was the most beautiful girl in Songjiang, as beautiful as you, Madam Hayes. And how she sang, like a canary. Did I ever tell you Sun Piao?”
He had, every time that they had met.
“She is well, but I do not see her as often as I should …”
It sounded as pretty as a bouquet of barbed wire; Piao feeling the need to justify himself.
“… work keeps me very busy. I have important commitments.”
The Director turned to Barbara, palms to the ceiling.
“And a mother is not an important commitment in this new world that we live in …”
The verbal slap across the face only eased as the Director poured the tea, hands shaking, and passed a cup to Barbara. A smile engraved across his face, as seemingly permanent as the words etched onto a pocket watch’s inside case.