JPod (25 page)

We could
hear
John simmering.

. . .

I have to say, it's a blast making SpriteQuest as we simultaneously secretly sabotage it. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I'd felt-pen doors and windows onto Ritz Cracker boxes and then set fire to them while providing colour commentary.
Oh no, the wedding party of
fifty and thejunior lacrosse team on the seventh floorare trapped! Somebody forgot
to replace the smoke detector batteries!

Every time we do something to make SpriteQuest "sparkle" (Management's term), such as building an interesting mesh frame for a turret, we build leaks and vulnerabilities into that turret so that Ronald can use them as a means of generating carnage.

Gord-O has been so impressed by the jPod enthusiasm level that he's taken me off Cheerios duty and has grudgingly had to admit that I'm assistant production assistant material after all.

. . .

A week later, out of nowhere, Cowboy said, "Isn't time weird? I'm already forgetting about Steve."

Time to go back to Kam and his exclusive alpine hideaway. I rang the bell and the acupuncturist opened the door and nodded me inside. In the living room, a sweatshop-like crew of six women, seated at folding bingo-hall tables, were busily weighing and bagging white powder that came from a Road-Runner-cartoon-FREE-BlRDSEED-like mound in the centre of the floor.

"Kam."

"Ethan."

Kam had an Ikea desk set up in the corner, and he paused a game of AmmuNation. "AmmuNation!" I said. "All right! What do you think of it?"

"It's the best. It allows me to park my evil in one place so I can be a better person in the real world."

"That's thoughtful of you."

The sound of little scales clicking and the rustling of ziplock bags amplified the silence. Kam said, 'You're here about Steve."

'Yup."

'You're in luck. I heard this morning that he's fine. Do you want to go get him?"

"Sure. Where is he?"

"China."

"What?"

"Too late. You said you'd go. You can't back out now."

"What's he doing in China?"

"Having the experience of a lifetime. He'll thank me for it."

"I don't have the money to go to China."

"Relax." He reached into a desk drawer and removed a wad of twenties. "Done. Do you need a passport? I can get one made for you in a few minutes."

"No. I got one three years ago for my trip to Mexico."

"I'll put you on a China Airlines flight tonight. You'd better pack, and for God's sake, don't wear any of your dorky outfits. You wouldn't believe what my ..."—he looked over at the women—" . ..
helpers
have been saying about you in Chinese. Go to a fucking Gap and stock up."

"I don't know anything about China."

"I'll take care of all that. I'll courier the ticket to your office, and there'll be people helping you all over the place in Shanghai. Just be at the gate and ready to go."

A woman across the room made a hissing sound.

Kam, returning to his game, said, "Who says I'm not a kind soul?"

. . .

"How come?"

"Any time you have a coincidence happen to you, it means you've entered a luck warp—for the next short while everything you do will be touched by it."

John Doe gave a snort from behind his cubicle wall and left it at that.

"Kaitlin, you know what? Let's stop this search for info. I'm simply going to show up for the plane, like when you go see a movie without having seen the trailer."

"Good idea."

I went home, looked at my clothing from the Kam Fong point of view and then went out to a Gap. I stocked up on new duds and packed. I'm not proud to say it, but when I looked at my new waffle-knit T's, my washable merino wool sweaters, my groovy herringbone blazers, my unpleated olive khakis and my low-ironing stress-free shirts, it made me feel, you know . .
.freshhhhh.

. . .

A lumber delivery for Kaitlin's hugging machine arrived just as Kam's car came to get me. When I kissed her goodbye, she smelled like a house under construction.

At the airport, it turned out Kam had booked me into first class—
woohoo!

It was a brilliant early evening, with magic light beaming in through the windows of the silent, thick-carpeted first-class lounge. I sipped Veuve Clicquot and surveyed the airport, appreciating its wonderful made-of-Lego quality—high-tech brightly coloured ramps and cones and poles and carts and movable stairways. Walking onto the plane, I felt like I was entering the world of Lego in a way I hadn't since I was eleven.

The flight took off without any complications, and I lolled in my sprawling 180-degree reclining seat, wishing I could live in a house that was just like a first-class cabin.

But then, while I was trying to decide which of many sumptuous meals to order, I looked over to the seat opposite mine, and I couldn't believe my eyes—it was Douglas Coupland in 3K. What a bringdown. I saw that he was tapping some sort of crap into a laptop, and suddenly I wasn't hungry any more. I ordered tri-coloured penne pasta with Italian funghi in a lemongrass reduction and spent an hour optimizing my laptop's animation pipeline, but my heart wasn't in it. So I ordered a Scotch because it seemed like a first-classy drink to order, and tried to choose which Hitchcock classic to watch on the in-flight video service—but I couldn't help obsessing about Coupland. What bad luck that he was on this flight. And what
was
he typing? I may never have flown in first class before, but I do know it's the one place on earth where you shouldn't be working. I figured that if I went to the bathroom and walked back past him, I could get a clear glimpse of what he was working on. My eyesight is good.

In any event, after my fake pee, I walked quietly down to where Coupland was sitting, and on his laptop was a photo of that guy standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square.

A flight attendant passed by with a load of hot perfumed towels, and I reached for one, but I fumbled and it landed on Coupland's left arm.

"Sorry about that."

"No problem." He handed it back to me.

"Hey, aren't you Douglas Coupland?"

"Uh, yes. That's me."

"I've read all your books. I think they're great."
Oh God, I just soiled
myself

"Oh, well, uh, thank you."

Awkward silence.

More awkward silence.

I said, "I'm Ethan. So you're off to China, huh?"
Did I really say
something that dorky?

"For a few days."

"A special project?"

"Yes. It's a piece for
Wired
magazine."

Wired? How 1996.
"Really?"

"It's about this new design trend coming out of China. Well, technically it's not simply China—it's the PRC—the People's Republic of China."

Boring.
"Fascinating."

"It's called 'designer prisoner-of-conscience labour.'"

"Huh?"

"Manufacturers locate people famous for political activism, and then they have that person make something and sell it as a value-added good."

"I don't get it."

"This guy here on the screen—" Coupland turned up his laptop to show me the JPEG of the Chinese guy in Tiananmen Square. "Know what he's doing now? He's working out this co-sponsor deal with Verizon Wireless and Pizza Hut. He'll be attaching faceplates to a series of cellphones that come with Pizza Hut promotional meals. They're trying really hard to get that cheese-inside-the-crust idea going but it's just not catching on."

"My brother told me about that!"

"Cool. And on this trip I'll also be visiting Aung San Suu Kyi."

"Who?"

"She's that woman from Burma who won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years back."

"Oh right."

"She's negotiating a deal with Wal-Mart. She's going to be manning the pressure-moulding machine that stamps out white plastic stacking chairs."

"How would you know the chairs were hers and not somebody else's?"

"Each chair would come with a frameable hand-signed certificate of authenticity."

"That's a lot of certificates to sign."

"No kidding. Wal-Mart is two percent of China's GDP. I think these chairs would have to be limited edition, though. Prizes for Wal-Mart cardholders who shop above a certain amount per year."

"Wow." Dinners were being served. "Talk to you later."

"Sure."

After my penne I got a bit too tipsy on Scotches and began cycling through the video screen's programs. Let me say something right now: I speak neither Japanese nor Mandarin, but I
do
know that Japanese TV is really cool to watch and Chinese TV is appalling. Even on a plane, they show factory tours. After maybe my tenth visit to a microchip factory, I fell asleep for a bit.

When I woke up, I was a bit fuzzy but feeling expansive—me, a world traveller! I remembered Bree in the coffee room once, talking about Coupland's books as I was waiting for some soup to heat. She said that Coupland said that unless your life was a story it had no meaning, that you might as well be kelp or bacteria. I wondered if Coupland knew the answer. He certainly owes me for that time we had to read one of his books in my third year at university.

His eyes went a bit wary when he saw me coming.

"So, Mister Coupland. This friend of mine said that you said that unless your life is like something in a story there's no point in being alive, that you're basically no more important than kelp."

"But kelp
is
important."

"That's not what I meant. See, I think that . . . " Locating the words was harder than I'd estimated.

"What's your name again?"

"Ethan."

"Ethan, why are you going to China?"

"I've got to go pick somebody up."

"Who's that?"

"Steve."

"Who's Steve?"

And suddenly it all came spewing out of me—Mom, Steve, Dad, Kam, Kaitlin, Bree—everybody and everything. I have to hand it to myself: I think I told my story well. Coupland seemed to be pretty enthusiastic while I was talking—he even took notes!—and asked lots of questions. And then, at the end of all this, Lord forgive me, I asked him whether he could write a mini-story about me and my life.

"I don't know if that's such a good—"

"No, do it. It'd be fun."

"Okay. Bring me your laptop."

I set him up with Word, then went back to my seat to order one last Scotch. Suddenly it was hours later, the sun was blazing in the windows and all the passengers were chugging bottled water, applying moisturizing balms and doing stretches. The by-now familiar per-tussive hackings of older Chinese nationals kept me from going back for a snooze cycle. And then . . . thorn by thorn, my chat with Coupland came back to me. I cringed and looked his way; he was obliviously making cellphone calls (in mid-flight) while stuffing a stolen flotation vest into his carry-on baggage. Sociopathic shit. My laptop was in the magazine pouch in front of me.

Just then the plane did a slight lurch, and I couldn't even look out the window while we landed. My bloodstream felt fetid, like time-expired dairy products. I waited until everybody else was off the plane, then two annoyed flight attendants bunted me towards the gate.

. . .

There was a Word file from Douglas Coupland on my laptop's desktop. It said,

Ethan, thanks for telling me about your life and everything.It's intriguing. There's probably even a book there. You werealso probably drunker than you think, and so you told me personalstuff that may or may not have been true, but most ofwhich is shocking and actionable. More to the point, you let atotal stranger have full, unguarded access to yourlaptop?Areyou a fucking idiot? What were you thinking? I trawledthrough your emails (snooze) and porn stashes (cheerleaders?How vanilla) and Google cookies (potpourri gift baskets?)and . . . I'm appalled. Absolutely appalled. You comeacross smart, but then you do stupid shit like this. Does beingupgraded to first class screw you up this much? I have no idea. So maybe you really
want
to be caught doing all theweird stuff you do. Fuck, I feel like Lisa Simpson giving youan on-the-spot quickie analysis but . . . are you a moron?How damaged are you?

You live in a world that is amoral and fascinating—but I alsoknow your life is everyday fare for Vancouverites, so there's nojudgment that way. But, for the love of God, grow up. Or readsomething outside your normal sphere or use what few savingsyou have ($23,400.06, if your files are correct) and go toa college or university and rebuild your hard drive.

This is weird diagnostic shit coming from a stranger, but,Ethan, you're on a one-way course to utter fuckedupedness.I'm not suggesting you stop—but I am saying
wake up.

Doug

What an asshole.

. . .

Immigration procedures were essentially non-existent. Kam had arranged for a driver to pick me up, and we wormed our way through the traffic on a dull grey Asian morning. My first impression was that there wasn't a square inch of land that wasn't being used to grow defeated-looking crops of spinachy plants. The city was an endless Sim-like blend of shacks, bikes, more bikes and still more bikes, tour buses, black-windowed Mercedes-Benzes and gaunt people smoking and standing around in front of concrete apartment buildings, most of which looked like they were built out of grey playing cards and seemed seismically unequipped, dreaming of the day gravity would take them back to Mama. And the air! Okay, imagine that you've built a bonfire of telephone poles—the ones dripping with creosote—and throw in a fax machine, a photocopier, some asbestos stacking chairs and a roasting chicken. That pretty much sums up the air quality, though it changes moment by moment depending on where you go. Turn a corner and—
thwack!
—different items are thrown into the flames: a load of running shoes, four thousand plastic bags, hog carcasses and a Dumpster of barbershop floor sweepings. And it's thick—a few blocks down the street, buildings vanish like in a fog effect in a memory-impaired videogame from the early 1990s. And it's humid, and I
hate
humidity.

What a relief to check in to my hotel—all five stars of it—and fall down on my bed's cool sheets.

Just twentyfour hours ago I was schlepping about my cubicle, and now Tm on
the other side of the planet
—
on a mission, no less.

I opened my luggage to get a fresh shirt, but when I pulled back the black nylon flap, I saw that my clothes had been replaced with about forty pounds of white powder. I—

Words failed me.

I phoned Kam—I had no idea what time it was in Vancouver, and I didn't care.

"Hello?"

"You asshole! I could have ended up in prison for this."

"Stop snivelling. You made it through okay."

"Where the hell are all my new clothes?"

"Go to a Gap. They're the same everywhere."

"And what do I do with all this . . .
stuff?"

"Store it with the concierge, and relax, okay? Order a cheese platter and a hooker. Go stroll the Bund."

"When do I get Steve?"

"My driver will pick you up at eight a.m. tomorrow."

. . .

It was late afternoon and sleep was pointless. I tried going online, but the Ethernet feed was dead. When I called the concierge, he said, "It's the Great Firewall of China. Nothing you can do. Shall I send you up some green tea?"

I showered and walked out into Shanghai proper, once called the Whore of Asia, now called the Pearl of Asia, though it might just as well be called the Tire Fire of Asia. It's like shopping inside an active ball barbecue.

At a Gap I bought the exact same things I had bought before the trip (at a third of the price), then I wandered the streets a bit. I tried to find the bootleg videogame district but failed. Beside a pork-on-a-stick booth, I bought a bootleg DVD of outtakes and bloopers from the making of
Schindler's List.

The crowds began to irk me. Everyone in the city spits and coughs and wheezes. People jostle you everywhere. The Chinese notion of private space has no connection to my own, and I tried not to be irked, but then I got paranoid about my kidneys going missing. I went back to the hotel and ordered room service, breathed fresh hotel-room air and watched CNN Asia. The weather report was so odd. There's a map of maybe half the planet on the screen, and the weather woman says, "Let's see what's happening in the 'Stans'"— meaning Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan. She made it sound like, "Let's see what my close personal friends, all named Stanley, are up to."

Around midnight I went downstairs and poked my head out the front doors. Onto the cosmic tire fire, the Chinese had recently tossed a boxcar load of leaded enamel paint, a hopper of pesticides and some rendering plant scraps. I ended up falling asleep watching the
Schindleti
List
bloopers DVD.

Slept like a dog.

. . .

I woke up at seven a.m. on an alpha wave high. Jet lag? Not for me, Ethan Jarlewski, citizen of the world. I had coffee and a breakfast plate that featured a selection of fruit geometrically cut and arranged to create the feel of a Zen garden. Clothed in my new Gap duds, I waited for my driver down in the foyer. He showed up precisely on time in a crisply pressed outfit like Batman's butler, Alfred. I asked where we were going, and the driver said, "Not to worry. We're taking good care of you." It quickly became clear to me that we were headed
away
from the city.

After an hour the superstructures of Shanghai were gone, and we were in a semi-industrialized ghostscape of worker housing, rice paddies, shacks, monochrome grey office buildings—actually, everything on the outskirts of a Chinese city is grey. All you'd need to portray the place is an HB pencil, and then dip your brush in a spittoon.

We stopped at a tea shop for a break. A TV bolted onto the ceiling blared out factory tours at full volume while a trio of women looked at me with profound suspicion. One of them had a frog in a plastic bag, hopping on the ground at her feet.

We drove for maybe another three hours, and I began to feel unnerved. "How much farther?" I asked.

"By your North American standards? Not far at all."

"How far would you say, then?"

"We'll be there soon."

An hour later we pulled up to a three-storey cinderblock hotel that stood sentry over several thousand acres of rice paddies. Just over the crest of a naked hill, four smokestacks belched out the remains of deep-fried neurotoxins and the ground-up dust of a million or so non-stick cooking pans.

"You are to wait here, Mr. Jarlewski."

"For how long?"

"Not too long. Have a tea. I'll be out in the car."

I ordered a tea in the lobby and watched as the driver started up the car and pulled away. Uh-oh.

Over the next several hours I ordered a few more glasses of tea, and then had to use the toilet. After much gesturing and an eight-yuan tip, I was directed to a dilapidated wooden unisex shack, where I ended up crouched over the bowl with a shoe firmly placed on each side of the seat. Sanitation was an issue. Fortunately, I had a packet of Kleenex with me.

I made a mental note:
keep buying Kleenex.

Around sundown a busload of factory workers singing in unison pulled up to the hotel, and a woman holding up a yellow flag got out of the bus, blew a whistle and herded the workers into the restaurant, where they ate a meal built of chicken feet, mystery dumplings and glasses of a beverage from a box labelled HAPPY LOQUAT.

Thirty minutes later, a whistle blew and everybody shuffled back to the bus. The woman with the yellow flag looked at her passenger manifest, looked at me and motioned for me to come. I said, "No, I think you've got the wrong person," but she showed me a piece of paper that had the following written on it:

Having no desire to spend my night sleeping beside the unisex shack, I got on the bus. The workers had been loaded to allow a three-row gap between them and my poxed Western self. I was suddenly dead tired. I stretched out on the first row of seats and was lulled to sleep by the sound of the sputtering diesel engine.

Sometime in the night we crossed a mountain range, and at six a.m., we stopped at a roadside canteen for a breakfast of green tea, a pasty semi-sweet nodule the size of a fist and an orange. I tried asking the driver for a map, but no go.

Around noon we entered one of those industrial instant cities they write about fawningly in business magazines as the core of
China
—
the New Asian Tiger!
A massive sign the size of Dodger Stadium's Jumbotron told me in English:

WELCOME TO SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE

SEZ

we Love thopping world

We pulled up outside a concrete building—five storeys with no signage—and I was escorted to a separate entrance from the rest of the bus passengers. After intense haggling between the desk clerk and the woman with the yellow flag (and the handover of a plastic bag filled with yuan), I was given a key and shown to a second-floor room. It was essentially a zero-security jail cell: a single bed, no TV, a chair, a mirror and a penitentiary-style bathroom down the hall. I sat on my bed and was about to have a good cry when I noticed a box on the small bedside table. It contained a Toblerone chocolate bar and a message from Kam, which said,
Isn't travel glamorous? p.s.,
look under the bed.

I looked and found a suitcase with my Vancouver clothes in it. I experienced a burst of happiness and then fell asleep.

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