The Dog (23 page)

Witnessing this is like watching a songbird with a broken wing flapping in the dust. Yet his comrades keep their fingertips on their pants seams and do not reach to help him. He is a fire immortal, an old master, more than capable of handling his own snot rag. Most hold handkerchiefs concealed in their hands. No one would dare spit on the floor of Chairman Mao Memorial Hall.

More coughing down the first rank. Zhou Yuqing. Shang Min. Zhu Meiling and Song Jianfeng, the technicians who threw themselves on the searing slab to save it from damage, their coats tight, lumpy from the bandages beneath. Gu brings his big mitts back up to his mouth, coughs, spits, encloses, folds. They are a chorus of bronchitics. Outside in the world it is late August, but inside the Memorial Hall it is fall, the atmosphere cool as the recesses of a cave, and it is arid, gentle on their ravaged lungs. The sixty-four stand at the end of their battle, burned and blasted, weak with exhaustion, suffering from exposure to hydrochloric acid vapor.

Soon the hall will open for public viewing of the departed Chairman. The line will snake through Tiananmen Square, doubling back endlessly before spilling onto The East Is Red Avenue.
People's Daily
will report that the carpet surrounding the sarcophagus itself becomes sodden with mourners' tears, requiring daily extraction and replacement. Many lower-class peasants, the most exalted of the Five Reds, will, upon viewing their Chairman, find themselves felled by heartrending grief and will have to be carried from the inner chamber on stretchers by memorial guards. Many will sink into despair. They will refuse food. There are many who still follow as the child follows the parent, without questioning, with incorruptible love.

While the sixty-four have worked so diligently to complete the sarcophagus, so have the people of China labored to construct this Memorial Hall. Farmers have run snap lines for cornerstones laid by a troupe of actors from the Political Department at Beijing University. Rebar has been cut and installed by bus drivers, submerged in concrete mixed by printing press operators. Electrical panels have been wired by schoolteachers. The Memorial Hall is a shambles. Chairman Mao will lie in state for one week, and then the hall will close for another year of repairs.

But the coffin is flawless. It is unbreakable. It gives off no reflection. It is otherworldly, a miracle, a triumph of the revolution. The workers of the 505 have defeated the laws of physics.

Look upon the coffin, the sixty-four say, each of its eight seams milled to a tolerance of two-tenths of a millimeter, the thickness of a sheet of paper, joined with astronautical-grade silicone sealant, earthquake-resistant to a magnitude of 8.0. If Beijing were to be struck by an earthquake as powerful as the one that leveled Tangshan, this Memorial Hall would collapse around the intact sarcophagus. Several months from now, the pillow of silicone gel between the quartz slabs and the titanium base will be stripped and reinjected by technicians. The gel will be examined for fatigue and chemically reconfigured, if necessary. But the coffin itself will need no improvements. It is, and will remain, as glorious and eternal as the Forbidden City.

After a time, they are called in, all sixty-four, a single corpus. The room is not designed to accommodate so many, and quarters are tight.

The tan carpet muffles their footsteps. The walls are faced in light fir, and small potted pines from Yan'an line the walls, infusing the room with the antiseptic smell of an evergreen forest. The crystal coffin is set atop a base of Taishan black marble, into the sides of which have been laid the hammer and sickle; the emblems of the state and the army; and the dates of Mao's birth and death. Three borders of Kaffir lilies surround the base, in turn enclosed by a low glass parapet. The effect is that of a parade float parked in an opulent bedroom.

Within hours of his death Chairman Mao's doctors had shot his corpse so full of formaldehyde that it oozed from his pores and caused his ears to rise out from the sides of his head like an elephant's. His fingers and toes had swelled like sausages, as had his scrotum and penis. Since that early triage, the process has undergone refinements, and the Great Helmsman's face is pink, hale, a countenance of peace and slumber, the result of careful embalming and tuned xenon lighting in fiber-optic tubes hidden along the inside of the coffin's seams. He is at rest, the Party flag as tight across his chest as a soldier's bedsheet.

The sixty-four are close enough to the Standing Committee to see the hairs in their nostrils as they collectively gaze on Chairman Mao's corpse. Deng Xiaoping dips his chin and a tear rolls down his cheek. For what? The folly of political life, the fear that he would yet again find himself thrown in prison, the Chairman's ghost for a cellmate? Chairman Mao's is a heavy death, like that of a massive tanker sinking, pulling down with it anything unfortunate enough to stray into its watery vortex.

A camera shutter clicks. Hua Guofeng makes a wrinkle of his mouth, as if he's chewing on a bitter root. His reign as premier will be brief, and he knows it. He makes no effort to weep over the dead body in the glass case. Even the humble workers from the 505 can see he is a marked man.

The march into the inner sanctum aired some of the cobwebs from their lungs, but the glue's settling again on those ruined alveoli, and the chorus starts up anew. They struggle to maintain proper attitudes of respectfulness, but their bodies rebel. Stifled, controlled expectorations only lead to more retching, gagging. The room fills with gasping, pained hacking. The PLA special guards' eyes wheel left and right at the noise. Hua Guofeng has had enough and begins to shuffle out of the inner sanctum, but is stopped by a guard, who points at the photographer on the other side of the crystal coffin. One more. The camera clicks and the Central Committee files out. The coughing explodes now, filling the room. They are drowning. All decorum is lost. Bent double, faces flushed red, purple, their cheeks balloon and webs of sputum fly out. The guards hiss at them to be quiet and wave their white gloved hands, but what can the workers do? Finally, unwilling to lend witness to this catastrophe of mourning, the guards usher the workers out, herding them through the narrow door like cattle.

 

AN EVENT AT HORIZON TRADING COMPANY

 

No one had seen Boss Zhou for weeks. After the markets tanked he disappeared. Rumor was he'd hit the road, looking to unload the firm on some unsuspecting Russians. Only the top earners would survive a sale, so everyone was scrambling to stake out his little patch of scorched earth. Other firms were jettisoning their traders by catapult. Things were bad. Above the waterline, we were in flames. Beneath, the structural integrity of lace. Then word got around that Boss Zhou had been spotted at a Hanfu ceremony, and suddenly Brother Kang was the most popular guy in the office.

Brother Kang was head of the institutional sales desk, and since discovering the glory of the Hanfu lifestyle movement, he'd tried to convert anyone who'd listen. Before festival weekends, he'd show up for work in his flowing robes and putou hat and pass out instructional pamphlets on leading an ethical life and returning the motherland to her once-exalted status. He was solicitous, bordering on shy, in his recruitment efforts, but if he managed to catch your eye, he'd add on a pocket copy of the
Analects
, and you could be sure he'd be back to ask if you'd read it. According to his brochures, from Xinjiang to Shanghai, the movement was gaining momentum. So far at Horizon Trading Company, only the most desperate cases had walked the Hanfu path—guys who missed their monthly bogeys or wanted a promotion or transfer out of institutional sales, or were otherwise in hock to Brother Kang. That's how he'd gotten me. My accounts bombed when the markets turned, and he'd made me a little company loan until everything recovered, on the condition that I join him at an archery ceremony, which was how I wound up spending a long Sunday sweating into a set of secondhand robes. My Hanfu reeked of mold and the hat's strap gave me a rash on my jaw. Except for the ones I shot into the ground, all my arrows sailed over the target, and Brother Kang took care to explain that my bad aim was the result of my spiritual shortcomings—not because I hadn't held a bow and arrow since my elementary school days. The ceremony was a test of virtue, and I had been found lacking. When it was all over I didn't ask to sign up for another ceremony—no one ever did—but now there was a stampede to get in on the action.

Across the trading floor, Kang's office looked like a rush-hour subway car, guys spilling out the door, jostling for position.

“It's moments like these that make me proud to be Chinese,” Slick Lips said.

The glass wall shuddered as more guys wedged themselves in. I could see Kang waving his arms above his head.

“Look. He's drowning in happiness,” I said.

“Oh, boy,” Slick Lips said. “He's got the album out.” Indeed, he was holding it over his head so everyone could see. As a primer for my outing, he'd shown me photographs of all his previous historical reenactments. He could get so worked up about someone's glue-on beard or sash fabric. All the serious lifestylers made their own Hanfu, sewing the belts and undershirts, some even going in for embroidery classes. It was tricky business getting the geometry of the robes correct, according to Brother Kang. I envied him a little. I personally didn't have many outside interests. Girls, maybe. I pretty much lived at the office. Kang had blacked out the faces of some reenactors whose historical accuracy failed to meet the standard.

“There is honor in the Hanfu,” he'd told me. “It's not just an old style of dress. It's not just about a family tree proving you're Han Chinese. This is a system of beliefs. Rule one: live as a gentleman. Two, filial piety. Three, behave honorably and reciprocate acts of honor. These are the principles we've lost. The rituals of our ancestors provide a solution, a new path.”

“Technically, the new path is the old path, right?” I'd said.

Brother Kang had stared back at me like I'd kicked over his sand castle.

What did I know about Brother Kang? He lived alone. His face had an adolescent sheen, and whenever I saw his thick fingers fumbling through a stack of research reports, I couldn't help thinking of him in his apartment, his face blued by the computer screen, those stubby digits attacking his little JJ with the same disorderly haste. God help any woman he got his hands on. His tongue had a way of curling out of the corner of his mouth when he was concentrating. His favorite saying was, “I'm not here to make friends,” and by any measure he'd succeeded wildly. He spoke to his subordinates as if addressing dementia patients. When in the presence of a superior, he was the first to throw blame onto an absent colleague. Naturally, he was a rabid nationalist.

Across the floor we could see him slowly turning the pages of the album, tapping specific photos with his index finger. About this time, Ai Ai sidled up. He crossed his arms.

“Well, this makes me puke,” he said.

“What doesn't?” Slick Lips said.

“This especially,” Ai Ai said. “I went with him on Saturday. Worst experience of my life. Two hours on a bus so I could stand in a field all day and observe the proper attitude for ethical rejuvenation. I said, ‘What the hell ancient ceremony is this?' and he says, ‘No ceremony today. We're doing spiritual maintenance so that we'll be prepared to fully engage in next weekend's ceremony.' Can you believe it? I didn't even get to go to a real guan li! Did I mention this took place in a field? The grass is ankle-high, and all day long harvest mites are having a buffet on my legs. Then it starts to rain. Finally the thing shuts down and we leave, and by the time I come home, Mei Lin's gone. She got bored and went out with her friends. All night I'm calling her. My legs are driving me crazy and I'm developing a sinus issue from the rain. She never picks up. Turns out she's met this guy, some longhair Australian—”

“I've heard this part,” Slick Lips said. His feet were up on the desk and he was flipping through an auto magazine. His shoes were some kind of lizard skin with silver buckles. Definitely Italian.

“Same here,” I said. If we hadn't exactly heard it before, we knew where it was going. This was Ai Ai, after all.

Ai Ai looked at us with wounded eyes. “Well, I couldn't remember what I'd told you. But you see why this makes me puke extra.”

“Easy come, easy go. You'll get a new girlfriend,” Slick Lips said.

“The worst part of it is,” Ai Ai said, “Kang gave the Indo accounts to Liu Weifang this morning, so it was all for nothing.”

“The injustice! Brother Kang must pay,” Slick Lips said without looking up from his magazine.

“Don't make light,” I said. “Poor Ai Ai, abandoned again. What kind of person are you, beating a wounded dog?”

“Who's making light?” Slick Lips said. “Fuckers like Brother Kang only react to strong countermeasures. Revenge is the only solution.” He flipped the car magazine into the trash and pulled a soccer magazine from the top of the stack he refreshed every Monday. He never seemed to do any work, but consistently led our desk in profits. “If you don't have the balls to do what needs to be done, don't flop around on the deck like a fish, moaning about how you lost your girlfriend and Brother Kang's ruining your career.”

“You're an asshole,” Ai Ai said.

“You better believe it,” Slick Lips said. “But I've never had to play dress-up with Brother Kang, either. Here's my advice. Swear off women for a while. Maybe you'll have better luck with men.”

I laughed into my collar.

Ai Ai looked at the ceiling. “I'll tell you what, you bastard. Grow a dick and you can be first in line,” he said.

Slick Lips looked up. “Oh, Little Ai, so forceful.”

Ai Ai stared pensively in the direction of Brother Kang's office. “I hate that guy.”