Narcopolis (9 page)

One afternoon, Lee came home to find his parents sharing a bed for the first time in years. It was not because they had made up their differences but because the bed was the only item of furniture left in the house, other than the shrine and his father’s pipes. Money was short and his father had been selling things, small and not small, family heirlooms and clothes and furniture. In the newly spacious room his parents seemed to be strangers to each other and to him, damaged strangers with no claim to make and nothing to say. His father had placed a pipe on the bed. There was a tray with a lamp that tilted precariously on the lumpy mattress. When he took a drag his cheeks appeared to cave in. He had become very thin and it seemed to Lee that his father no longer resembled a human being. He was a pipe attached to a head with stick arms and legs. Or he was an inanimate object, a piece of knobbed wood, a walking stick or polished figurine. He was an insect, possibly a dangerous insect, a succubus with vertical eyes and internal antennae. Even the sounds he made were insect sounds, clicks and sucking noises. It was very interesting that the transformation which had overtaken his father had occurred so gradually that his family hadn’t noticed. When exactly had his father stopped being human? Was it a permanent transformation or would he return one day to his natural state? While his father smoked, his mother lay on her back with her eyes open, pinching the fingers of her left hand with her right. Though she said nothing she managed to convey a sense of immense dissatisfaction with her surroundings and with the man who lay beside her. Lee climbed into the bed and turned his back on his parents and went to sleep. He dreamed he was an orphan who lived on a mountain inhabited by dragons. There was no food or water and for his survival he depended on one of the dragons to bring him bits of meat and fruit. The years passed and he grew tall, but the bigger he grew the more his dragon protector seemed to diminish, until one day he realized that his friend, the dragon, had become a living skeleton, an intricate network of interlocked bones without flesh or blood or breath. He woke one morning and found a pile of broken bones beside him, and then he felt a rumble under his feet and he realized that the mountain was heating up from below, that there was smoke emanating from its crevices and the trees had dissolved into ash and the sun had disappeared. He resolved to walk off the mountain and keep walking until he found food or he died, but no sooner had he started to walk than a rain of cinders began to fall around him. He ran faster and faster until, exhausted, he lay down to mourn and die. He woke to the sound of drums. There was a fog so thick it was difficult to breathe. When his eyes adjusted he was in his parents’ house. He might as well have been outdoors because the weather had come inside. He heard someone knocking and he stumbled across the room, unable to see through the fog. His eyes were streaming and when he took a breath he coughed. He walked slowly in the direction of the knock and then he saw a shape coming towards him, a shape that pushed him back on the bed. His
terror
vanished when he recognized his mother and he wrestled her to the ground and opened the door. The fog thinned and many people rushed in. His uncle and another man poured pails of water on the smoking mattress. They took his father outside, where, sick with fever, he shivered uncontrollably in the warm sunshine. His uncle was overcome by a rush of emotion and he took off the silk jacket he was wearing and cut off the sleeves with a pair of scissors. He slipped the sleeves over Lee’s father’s legs. They took his father to a hospital, where he died the next day, not of asphyxiation but from malnutrition. Rich Uncle Lee came to the funeral with a two-storey house made of paper. As the house burned, Uncle said, Brother, I give you a big house. Lee laughed at his uncle. He said, Rich Uncle, you should have given my father a house when he was alive.

Lee and his mother went home after the funeral. Under the charred mattress on the bed he found a copy of his father’s last book and he read aloud the first sentence that caught his eye: ‘No remnants remained of the old ship except a splintered mast that the villagers planted in the sand, and so it happened that the rocky shores of the South China Sea became a deterrent to all but the most desperate of seafaring men.’ He turned back to the beginning and started to read the book through. What kind of story was it? It was presented like a biography but there were things in it that no biographer could know, for instance the things that men and women were thinking at important moments in their lives; and there was secret information as to how many years in the future one or the other important personage would die, and of which ailment; and there were wide pronouncements regarding the final outcome of Chinese history when unchecked enterprise would turn its cities into repositories of waste and poison; and there was a timeline for the world that charted how many years it would take for different parts of the planet to crack up and boil over into waste gas; and at the centre of it all was a character who was neither man nor woman, a charismatic autodidact who changed identity at will. Was it a kind of imagined autobiography? Or was it a historical novel, true fiction, because so much of the detail was accurate, no, more than accurate, it was indisputable? Lee read a page or two and then, overcome by sudden melancholy, he closed the book and put it under the mattress. Over the next few days he would pick it up and read as many pages as he could before sadness got the better of him and he put it away. It took him a long time to finish and when he got to the end he understood that the book had been his father’s true life’s work.

Prophecy
begins a hundred years in the future, in 2056, when a young archaeologist, a Cherokee, fleeing an unnamed cataclysm in an unnamed city, arrives in a landscape that’s somehow familiar to him. He recognizes it from the remembered stories of his tribe, though the stories are no longer heard because the elders who knew them have died. He is in the land of his ancestors, the ancient place described in song and prayer. It is now an abandoned urban mesa. He wanders around for days. He is the only living thing. There are no coyotes or birds or insects. There is no running water. When he feels hunger or thirst he injects himself with vegetable extract, animal protein and sugar, and when tired he takes a four- or eight-hour sleep tablet that allows him to stay alert for as long as he needs to. One morning his belt pack emits a warning buzz followed by a mild siren. He starts to dig, reciting the names of the colours in his dye pack. Alice Blue, he says. He says, Mayan Sun. Then, very quickly, Electric Pink, Flesh Pink, True Pink. He says, No Colour Blue. He says, Medium Bastard Amber. When he runs out of colours he starts again, Alice Blue, Mayan Sun, and so on. Late in the afternoon he finds what he’s been digging for, the object that set off his siren, a cache of blue and white porcelain crockery in a rusted chest and a small brass medal with an inscription:
Authorized and awarded by the Great Ming
. He dates the medal to the late fourteenth century and then he makes another discovery. The porcelain was brought to the United States by the explorer Zheng He on the last of his seven voyages around the world. The first section ends abruptly at this point with the young Cherokee lifting the tiny brass medal to his eye in the fading light of the sun.

The second section is told from the point of view of an
assistant
to a Chinese shipbuilder. The assistant is one of thousands of men working in shifts to complete a flagship junk to the emperor’s specifications. There are pages of minutiae about shipbuilding, contentious passages as to the best wood, the ideal conditions for varnish and tung trees, the correct method of instruction for carpenters, how to make the lightest possible armour plating and how to make certain that the compartments below decks are watertight. There are knowledgeable references to the giant junk’s unique design and the exact dimensions of its enormous poop deck and cunningly placed storage cabins. The most revolutionary features are the masts, of which there are nine, a number considered wasteful by traditional shipbuilders. There is talk that the old builders are jealous but the emperor demands more junks, he wants a thousand in all and there’s no time for jealousy. Every shipbuilder in the land is called in to help build the new fleet. At the worst possible moment, after completing the design and some of the construction of the flagship, the master shipbuilder dies. The young assistant, who is never named, takes over. He works all day and sleeps in snatches and as the junk nears completion he begins to talk in a voice that is not his own. He talks with the authority of a seafaring man, or a man who knows the secret of ships at sea, who knows how to recognize the traits that make each vessel unique. The men look to him for instruction though his ideas are radical and not entirely feasible. The rumour spreads that the young assistant has been possessed by the spirit of the dead shipbuilder. How else would he know the things he does? The assistant does not address these whispers: he has no time. When the junk is completed it is four hundred and seventy-five feet long and a hundred and ninety feet wide. It is at this point in the story – that is, at the very end of the second section – that the author’s voice is heard, Lee’s father’s authentic voice, which tells the reader that the junk ‘was larger by far than the
Santa Maria
, which was a mere ninety feet by thirty, a dwarf in comparison’, and that ‘Zheng He commanded sixty such ships and many smaller ones, with more than twenty-seven thousand soldiers, shipwrights, poets and physicians, whereas Columbus commanded fewer than a hundred men’. Then the author makes a controversial suggestion: ‘I do not make the comparison with Columbus lightly, I make it deliberately and with forethought, for it is my contention that the voyager Zheng He discovered America seventy years before Columbus.’

The third and last section is the shortest and most problematic in political terms. It concerns the life of a young Muslim named Ma, who is born in a province on the south-western border. The boy is captured by the Ming, castrated, renamed, and made a servant to the prince. He is taken to the imperial court, where he is instructed in the ways of the Sons of Heaven. When the prince becomes emperor he decides to announce his ascension by beginning the sea voyages that have been planned for years but never attempted. He makes the Muslim eunuch (now called Zheng He) the admiral of his fleet and tells him to sail to the end of the horizon, beyond the known earth, to spread the glory of the Ming. The story is told in the third person but for long passages it dips into the head of the admiral, who is not above making political forecasts: ‘The Emperor believes China is the centre of the world and he is the centre of China therefore he is the centre of the world. Try as he might to disguise it, he suffers from the ailment peculiar to Chinese leaders – the delusion that they are the most important form of life in the universe and their struggles and idiosyncrasies are worthy not only of emulation but of reverence.’ But the admiral also composes poems of praise that are craven and banal:

The narrator of the third section is a young grand-nephew of Zheng He’s, a boy named Soporo Onar, who sets off to find his illustrious relative’s final resting place. The quest is ultimately unsuccessful and most of the last section is taken up, not by Zheng He’s triumphant early voyages, but by his desperate final one. It ends with his death in India and his burial at sea and Soporo’s decision to build a monument to him in the pages of a book. Where in India did Zheng He die? Somewhere on the west coast, possibly some spot that wasn’t too far from present-day Bombay, said Lee to Dimple, which may have influenced my own decision to live here. Then he said, I wish there was a translation of my father’s book, because if there’s anyone who would benefit from reading about the life of the eunuch admiral, it’s you.

He told Dimple he had been thirty-eight when his life changed in a way he could never have foreseen. That year, at a banquet in Peking, he found himself seated beside a slender woman whose hair was curled in the new style. She wore a plum-
coloured
suit with white lapels and she accompanied a navy commissar who chain-smoked unfiltered foreign cigarettes. Early in the evening the commissar switched to brandy and soon he became silent and unexpectedly agile for such a heavy man. He told the waiters to replenish the teapot and the wine and water glasses. He spoke only when giving orders; he didn’t converse with his dinner companions. Then, his elbow slipped off the table and he spilled the slender woman’s wine. A deep stain spread across the tablecloth and the commissar watched in fascination, as if it were the stain of communism itself, the unstoppable stain that had spread across the world and dyed it the colour of blood. The woman – or girl, since he thought she couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-one – picked up the glass and placed it beside her untouched plate. She refilled it with a little wine and took a sip. Then she asked Lee to help her with the commissar. They took the man to a room above the banqueting hall, where the girl put him to bed and took off his shoes. He was already asleep. The girl smoothed her skirt over her hips as she regarded the man on the bed. She sighed in an exaggerated way and put her hands on her waist and didn’t look at Lee. She said: The first Ming, Tai Zong, drew up a list of capital offences for government officials that included such things as the formation of cliques and flattery. Public drunkenness too was a capital offence. Do you know what the punishment was? The official was flayed and his skin was stuffed with straw and installed in a government building to serve as a warning to other officials. She sighed once more in a slow, theatrical way and it must have felt good, because she did it again. She said: Light me a cigarette if you’re going to stare like that. Lee did as he was told. She stood in the middle of the room and blew smoke at the ceiling. He thought: Even her silence is expressive, even the inhaling and blowing out of smoke. See how animated she is. Is she an actress? Is it too bold a question to ask? Before he could say anything, she led the way back to the banqueting hall, then, some time afterwards, she left the table and didn’t return. A few days later he saw her wheeling her bicycle into the commissariat compound. She had her hair up in a bun and she was wearing work pyjamas. She looked very different from the girl with the cigarette whose image had taken up residence in his head. He went to her and blurted the truth, that he had brought something for her. She seemed so disoriented that he wondered if she knew who he was. He gave her a carton of cigarettes, half a cooked chicken and some stalks of sugar cane. She looked towards the compound and hesitated for a moment before putting the gifts into a carrier bag on her bicycle. She said, I am twenty-three years of age. I’m not interested in being a kept woman. Thank you for the gifts, she added, speaking so solemnly that he wondered if he had displeased her in some way. He watched as she pushed her bicycle towards the commissariat. Was she telling him to leave her alone? Did she think he wanted to pay her for sex? The idea put a ball of fear in his stomach. Then it occurred to him that she was saying something very different. She didn’t want to be a kept woman: she wanted to be his wife. This idea also filled him with fear. She was a kind of classical Chinese heroine, a prototypical leader, and she wanted to be his wife. It was hard to believe. He had to talk to someone, someone senior whose advice he could trust. The next morning, unrested, he went to the administrative governor of the region, his boss, Wei Kuo-ching. Wei wasn’t alone and Lee asked permission to marry in the presence of his boss’s colleagues. What is the woman’s name? asked his boss. Lee didn’t know. He described her and how they had met. Oh, said the administrative governor, you mean Pang Mei, Commissar Hu’s assistant. The older man clapped Lee on the shoulder and told him to go ahead if that was what he wanted. Then he said, I hope you know there’s no need for such a drastic step.

Lee’s quarters were out of the question. There were too many people around at all times and if she was seen coming out of his rooms there would be trouble, an official investigation perhaps, followed by humiliation, punishment, even prison. The only way they could be alone was to meet in his office, late, when there was no one around. He waited nervously until she came and took her to the supplies room, where he had arranged blankets and a pillow behind a desk in the back. He locked the door and turned off the lights and they held each other in the dark, the girl’s slim form like a child’s in his arms. There was some inadequate illumination from the street lights outside, just enough to see her face. She seemed very serious, which only made him more nervous. When she reached for his dick he jumped and when she put it in her mouth he whimpered, he actually whimpered, and then he was ashamed. She took a tube from her purse and smeared a small amount of cream on herself with a single deft gesture. In the ass, she told him. Fuck me in the ass. Then she straddled him and guided him into her and played with her clitoris while she rode him. He came instantly and again he was ashamed. Later, as they lay beside each other, she said: I am taking a precaution. In case we’re caught a medical examination will prove I’m still a virgin. Then Pang Mei turned on her side, curled herself into a small ball and went to sleep. Lee thought he’d let her sleep for half an hour, then wake her and tidy up and get out of the building. If he fell asleep too it could be catastrophic. He propped himself on an elbow to look at her. He thought about the Yellow River’s
summer
floods and the steamed buns he bought sometimes from the railway terminus. He thought about the horses of Mongolia, about the Tartars’ subjugation of Russia, and about the wise and solitary dragons that live in the heated air above the mountains of Szechwan. The girl’s lips were moving silently in her sleep and he could see her eyes flickering under the lids. He thought about the melancholy dragons of Szechwan and just then a tremor struck the room. The air seemed to shift and the temperature dropped and there wasn’t enough oxygen. A sound of waves or mosquitoes washed against his ears. The floor shook as if a large animal was trapped under the building. Every object in the room, the standing lamp, the desks, the chairs and filing cabinets, everything was shaking. He took a deep breath but couldn’t fill his lungs. He stood up and fell to his knees. When the earthquake stopped he was kneeling on the blankets with his hands clasped around the girl’s ankles, and he knew her as his saviour.