I score four points and never once touch the golden ball. Liu Wen scores more often, but is hit with the silver too many times. He scores six points only by taking the gold ball. And immediately after that, Haitao, at seven points, reaches past where Liu Wen and I are playing with the black lacquer ball and effortlessly sets the red spinning into the gold. I reach reflexively for the golden ball, and Liu Wen sends the black careening to cut it off but I end up interfering with the black and it collides with the red and both skid off on tangents towards empty parts of the table. And Haitao effortlessly takes the golden ball.
We break contact. Haitao’s head is thrown back, his eyes closed, his back slightly arched. His hands remain resting lightly on the edge of the table. He sighs, a shudder more like a sob, then opens his eyes and looks at us and smiles. “Ten points,” he says.
Liu Wen starts to say something, clears his throat, “Do you want to keep playing, Zhang? I’m sure they can find a table for you.” He isn’t looking at me.
I should be good, I should disappear, as Liu Wen did the last time, but I wait, because it is Haitao’s night. It is Haitao’s choice. I swallow. He looks at Liu Wen, and then at me, and then back down at the table. I am reminded of the boy who led us here, and the way he didn’t look at me. I think I have read something in Haitao’s look, my heart begins to hammer. He will choose me. Choose me, Haitao.
The lights on the table flicker, and the lights above us dim, for a moment I see the bare bones of the building, normally hidden by a scrim of light and color, and this is an old, not very attractive place. The light comes back even brighter, distantly I hear the sound of glass shattering.
We look towards the sound, through the opening we see other people listening, and then I see someone yank off their contact.
“Turan soucha!”
Liu Wen hisses, Police raid! He peels the contact off and flings it, it jerks at the end of the cord and swings. Liu Wen does not wait to see if we are coming, but goes into the room next to ours.
Haitao is motionless.
“Come on,” I say. Liu Wen will know how to get out of here.
Haitao looks at me.
I grab his hand and pull him into the next room, I think I see Liu Wen. People begin shouting and pushing past us towards the entrance, but I am counting on Liu Wen to know a back door. We are buffeted by two men and a woman running into us. I can’t see Liu Wen, so I go in the direction I think he went. There is a service door, and I know I have found the exit, I open it.
A stairwell going up.
“Fuck,” I say in English. Behind me the sound has changed. A woman screams. And some of the shouts have a different timber, the voice of authority. Reform Through Labor, or that old-fashioned penalty, a bullet in the back of my head. I panic and take the stairs, Haitao a weight I pull behind me. It’s only one flight up to another door, a heavy industrial door, the kind they
don’t make much anymore. I try it and it opens and we are in a huge, dark space. Along one edge, far to our left I see a faint line of light.
The ceiling doesn’t seal against the wall, that’s the light from the club below us. I put one hand against the wall and start to jog to the right. This is the godown, the space could be huge, but there would have to be an office and from the office an entrance.
Haitao is breathing hard, sobbing for breath. “Zhong Shan,” he whispers, “Zhong Shan—”
“Hush,” I say in English and run hard into a pole, face and shoulder. The pain staggers me, brings tears to my eyes.
“Zhong Shan!” he says loudly.
“Xing xing,
” I say, it’s okay.
Madre de Dios,
I think, Mother of God, help us. “Watch the pole,” I say, and guide him around. Then go more slowly along the wall. I find a door, try it, it’s locked. Of course. We keep on and get to a metal stair going up. “Careful,” I say,
xiao xin,
in Chinese, small heart.
It seems to me that our feet are very loud on the stairs. We go up twelve steps, a door? A landing. Up twelve more steps. Around the landing. Up twelve more steps. I’m a construction tech and I’ve built a godown. I know I’ve fucked up; this is the stairs to the catwalks and the grid they use to hang the tackles to move heavy things. My cheek throbs. I have a grip on Haitao with my right hand, and hold on to the railing with my left.
The stairwell rings mutedly with our footsteps and we climb blind in the dark. At the back of the catwalk maybe there’ll be another set of stairs to the loading bay.
Madre de Dios,
I pray in the language of my mother, who believed in Mao Zedong and Kierkegaard. We had a tortured Christ on a crucifix in the hall when we lived in Brooklyn.
Dios te salve, Maria, llena eres de gracia,
Hail Mary, full of grace. We are at the top, the landing is different. I feel the railing, find the catwalk. I can’t do it in the dark, can’t walk an industrial catwalk.
I follow the railing to the wall, nothing else, we are standing
on a square platform with the wall behind us, the stairs to our right, the catwalk in front of us. The only thing to do is to go back down.
Below us there is a sudden surprisingly distant square of light. It is the door we came in. I sit down, pulling Haitao down against me, and a moment later lights flicker across the walls and ceiling, heavy search lights. I pull Haitao’s head against my chest and he draws up against me. Perhaps we should make a break for it, run across the catwalks. At worst they will shoot us or we will misstep and we will fall and die. If they come to the stairs that is what we should do.
I can’t do it. I can’t move from this spot. If they climb the stairs they will find us here.
Their voices are distorted by space and distance. They will find us wrapped here in each other’s arms and there will be no question of guilt or innocence. I don’t really believe any of this. I have been picked up by a policeman once, when I was fifteen, for loitering, being out after curfew at Coney Island. He knew what I was there for, but just gave me a lecture and called my mother. And I was beaten up by nighthawks once in almost the same place where I was arrested. Both times I had the same sense of unreality.
I am rocking, rocking Haitao tight in my arms, but I can’t stop myself.
The lights have stopped but I still hear voices.
“Sigue,”
I whisper, I can’t think in Chinese, when I try to think of Chinese it comes out Spanish. Go on. Do it. Arrest us. Anything, just make it end.
They stop talking. I listen for the sound of their feet. I can’t tell if I hear them or not, an empty godown is not a silent place. I can hear our breathing. I can hear my heart. I think I can hear Haitao’s heart.
I listen to the words running through my head,
Padre Nuestro, que estas en los cielo, santificado sea tu nombre. Venga a nos tu reino.
Hagase tu voluntad asi en la tierra como en el cielo … .
Meaningless snatches of prayer. I think they are on the stairs, I can’t exactly hear them, but I think I do. I count again. They are coming without lights. They wouldn’t come without lights. I rock Haitao, he has my jacket clenched in his fists and he is hyperventilating. I can’t hear over the sound of his breath.
Will Peter ever find out what happened to me? He will call Mama, and she’ll tell him. She knows Peter is my friend. She may even suspect that there is more, she has never admitted that she knows what I am. She doesn’t ask me about my life, I don’t ask her about hers and every Christmas when I am home in New York I go and see her second husband and my half-brothers, and Craig came to stay with me when he was eleven and I still had a place. We went to the kite races.
They will tell her, will she tell Craig that his
huaqiao
half-brother is a fag?
It has been a long time.
Maybe they aren’t coming.
But we wait for a long time.
Even when we know they aren’t coming, we wait. Haitao begins to shake. “I want to die,” he whispers, “I can’t stand it. Stop it, please, make it stop.”
I stroke his hair and rock him. I kiss his hair as if he were a little boy. “Hush,” I whisper, “they’re not coming.” They may still be downstairs, we’ll wait. “We’re okay, nothing’s going to happen to us here.”
He shakes and shakes. I doze, and wake, and he is still trembling. My arms ache. My back aches. I shift, try to shift Haitao and he grabs hold of me. “Shhh, shhh. It’s okay, here, lie this way. Shhh.” I rub his back and his temples and soothe him as best I can. His face is wet. “I want to die,” he whispers, “I’m so afraid.”
But he stops shaking eventually, and we doze together. We stay there until dawn comes in through the dirty skylight.
I am so stiff I can barely move. In the night I have slid down on my side and Haitao lies curled beside me. The light is not very good, only enough to make out shapes. Haitao’s white suit is a little more visible.
“Haitao,” I whisper.
He stirs.
“Now we should try to go,” I say.
He sits up but doesn’t look at me. I try to work the cramps out of my back and arms, stand up and try to move about a bit. I am chilled to the bone and my teeth start chattering. Haitao sits woodenly.
“Come on,” I say, “stand up.” I reach down and take his upper arm and he stands up.
The catwalk is too narrow for us to stand side by side. It’s wider than an I-beam, of course, but we are high above the floor and it looks narrower. I take Haitao’s wrist with my left hand and start across it. I can see the control panel on the other side and a set of stairs going down, but that side of the building is shadowed and I can’t see if there is a loading dock. There should be.
“Hold on to the railing,” I say. Haitao does what he’s told. I wish he would think a little for himself, I am cold and I ache and he’s acting like a child. Damn it, I ought to leave him here, let him find his own way out.
Anger is good. Anger is better than what Haitao is feeling, than apathy or, what did Maggie Smallwood call it?
Perlerorneq,
the awareness of the futility of it all. Despair. Underneath my anger I am all too aware that I’ve been just as paralyzed as Haitao is now.
There is something exhilarating about being the one who is intrepid. I think, I have done it, I have saved us. We go step by cautious step across the catwalk and I am exhausted and angry and full of a hard, terrible joy. We have survived. Yes, it was luck
as much as anything else, but we made our own luck. The chain and tackle system dangles in lines and shadows all around us, the light slowly brightens above us. There is a purity of form and line; reality, hard lean reality is very beautiful.
We take the stairs down. I’m so tired my knees are shaking, but Haitao follows me without complaint. The door to the loading dock is bolted shut, but it isn’t meant to be safe from the inside. And then we are outside and we walk away, not going around the front but climbing the fence in the morning half-light. I make a stirrup of my hands and boost Haitao up, then climb the chain link and drop, shaking with fatigue, on the other side. Haitao’s white suit is streaked with rust like old blood, but we come out on a street two blocks away.
And then, it is all too normal. It is Sunday morning.
“It’s okay,” I say to Haitao. “We’re okay.”
He nods, listlessly.
“I’m never going to play pressball again,” I say, grinning, but he doesn’t respond.
I start watching for bus stop signs. “What is our bus?” I ask Haitao.
He doesn’t act as if he heard.
“What number is our bus,” I say. And when he doesn’t answer, “Haitao!”
“Seventeen,” he says. “A seventeen or a seventeen Special.” It is too easy, I find a stop for the seventeen and we stand, Haitao slumped against the wall with his eyes closed. The bus comes and the driver eyes Haitao’s stained suit but nobody says anything. “Nanjing University,” I say.
“Back,” he says, “Up.”
We climb up and go back and collapse into seats. Haitao nods. I stare out the window. Eventually his head comes down against my shoulder. The bus is warm and slowly the warmth creeps into me. I doze with my head against the glass, waking when we separate from the front, then again when we join another bus. I
awake the third time when our segment peals off to go up, and I know we are close to the University so I wake Haitao. He is bleary-eyed.
We get off, the stop is familiar, and yet different. Just as the morning, which would usually be a beginning, is an ending to the night.
“I’ll come up with you,” I say to Haitao.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“No problem.” I go up in the lift with him, and when we get to the flat, I send him in for a shower. “I just want to go to bed,” he protests, but he has no fight in him. While he is in the shower I make tea and sweeten it. I check out the bruise on my face in the mirror in Haitao’s bedroom—I have a blue knot and the side of my face aches. Tea and aspirin. I take my hair down.
Haitao comes out in his bathrobe and I feed him sweet tea and aspirin, and remembering Maggie Smallwood, talk to him softly. “It is a pretty morning,” I say and, “you are warm now, and tired, and you’ll sleep well. Finish your tea, the sugar will make you feel a little better, and then into a warm bed. We’ll darken the windows, and I’ll call this evening.”