Читать книгу Year of the Goose - Carly J. Hallman - Страница 8

1.

WE NEED MONEY AND WE NEED IT NOW

KELLY HUI, THE TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER OF BASHFUL Goose Snack Company’s founder and China’s richest man, Papa Hui, strode through the Jiangsu government building’s entrance, gave her name to the teenage security guard, and plopped herself down on a rickety chair. The meeting she was waiting for, certain to be a snore-fest, was tragically the most exciting work-related thing she’d done since her father had made her the head of corporate social responsibility—a department in which she was the sole employee—two years before. To be fair, this was also the only work-related thing she’d done.

She rummaged through her Hermès bag, found her iPod, stuck her earbuds in her ears, and put on a Radiohead song. She tapped her foot in rhythm on the floor. She listened to another song, and then another, and then another. Swatted at a fly that buzzed around her head. Glanced down at the time—ten past—and sighed loudly. The guard, a scrawny kid who couldn’t have been more than seventeen and who, Kelly thought, probably spent most of his day secretly masturbating under his little podium, looked up. That’s right, she thought, flipping her hair over her shoulder, store this one away for later.

Then she thought: Did I really just invite a teenage peasant to deposit my image in his spank bank? Did I really wake up at seven a.m. to ride all the way out to this craptastic Communist-era building with no air-conditioning to meet with a government official who is probably just going to ask me for some sort of favor but who can’t be bothered to show up on time to do so? Did I really study my ass off at USC to head up a nonexistent department in a polluted city that doesn’t even have a California Pizza Kitchen? Did I really think Papa Hui was going to set me up in a decent job, train me to run the company, and then, ha, leave the company to me? Do I still think that? Do I still hold on to this false hope? Why? Why am I here? What am I doing? Is my iPod going to run out of battery?

She began to sweat slowly, drop by drop, and then profusely. Breathed in, out. Removed a tissue from a small pack in her purse and dabbed her forehead. Turned off her iPod. Just as she yanked the buds from her ears, the guard barked her name.

She rode up in the wobbly metal box of an elevator to the eleventh floor, where a serious-looking middle-aged official with an unnaturally lustrous head of hair met her. He led her down the dim hallway. A sour stench, not unlike that of rancid meat, hung in the air. She held her breath and wondered why these assholes couldn’t bear to spend a little money sprucing up their workplace; heaven knows they spent enough on their cars and women and watches and weird medicinal foods.

“How is your father?” the official asked. He stepped briskly in his crocodile-skin shoes.

“Healthy as an ox,” Kelly answered, and wasn’t that the truth. At almost sixty years old, his cholesterol was lower than hers, his skin showed not a wrinkle, and he’d jetted off to Cuba the previous year to have his heart preemptively replaced with that of a twenty-two-year-old. “Yeah, he’s sure going strong,” she added in a tone that did little to hide her disgust.

The official paid this tone no heed. “Good to hear,” he said. They entered his dusty closet of an office. He sat down behind a cheap laminate desk and gestured for Kelly to sit across from him. The chair creaked under her weight. I know I’ve packed on a few since L.A., she thought, but come on.

The official cleared his throat into his hand, obviously a rehearsed gesture that provided him an opportunity to flash his Rolex. “Now look, I respect your father a great deal, and I don’t wish to waste any of your time, so let’s get down to it, shall we?”

Kelly nodded. Here it comes.

“As I’m sure you’ve heard, our great province recently made national headlines for having the chunkiest children in all of China.”

Yeah, she’d heard and vaguely remembered; it’d been the talk of Jiangsu social media for a few hours, until some other headline came along and then that became the talk, and then another headline, and on and on.

The official continued. “Obesity has many causes. For instance”—he counted them off on his fingers—“pregnancy, laziness, capitalist greed, drinking too much cold water, being born under an inauspicious moon. But doctors agree that the most prominent cause of obesity is consumption of fatty junk foods.”

Beads of sweat burst from Kelly’s forehead, and a tremble seized her hands—this was why he’d called her here. Of course. He was going to blame the Bashful Goose Snack Company for childhood obesity and try to force it to pay what would surely amount to a hefty fine, and Papa Hui would be furious at her for agreeing without his consent to attend this meeting. His majesty would, of course, refuse to pay the fine (he viewed all fines as bribes, and not paying bribes was one of his “core principles”), and then the government would shut the whole empire down, and then what would she do? Return to America and attend graduate school on high-interest student loans? Stay in China and be forced to move in with her newly impoverished family in a one-room hovel in the countryside where she’d be pecked to death in her sleep by that damn goose?

Sweat oozed from her skin, and she could feel the color draining from her face and her mascara bleeding into and stinging her eyes, and she reached into her bag to dig for another tissue, and she considered just running away, hauling ass for good, but she feared if she stood she would faint and—

The official, looking concerned, pulled a bottle of Evian from a pack under his desk and handed it to her. She unscrewed the dusty cap and took a big gulp.

“Now, don’t worry,” he said. “The last thing we want to do is to shut anyone down over this. After all, I myself know that the occasional Bashful Goose Chocolate-Cream-Filled Snack Cake or, say, the rare Bashful Goose Fried Corn Dough Ball in the context of an otherwise healthy diet is a perfectly reasonable indulgence.

“In fact,” he went on emphatically, “Bashful Goose treats are my personal favorite brand of snack food. When my wife and I got married many moons ago we decided to forgo the wedding candy and instead serve our guests Bashful Goose snack cakes. Now you may ask: Why tempt fate in that way? Why throw caution to the wind in the face of such dire potential consequences? But to that I say: you must do what you love, and to hell with tradition and superstition and the rest of it. And, I’ll tell you, my wife and I are still together to this very day.”

Kelly tried not to snort. Ha, and exactly how many mistresses do you have? How “together” are you, really? She couldn’t quite bring herself to speak these thoughts aloud though; in all her days, she had never seen a government employee appear this excited about anything.

The official stared past her with dreamy eyes, thinking fondly of either his wife or processed balls of carbohydrates. The tiniest bit of drool gleamed in the corner of his mouth and then Kelly knew for certain which one it was.

“Cool story,” she said dismissively. Her sweat production slowed. She glanced down into her bag at her iPhone, at the time. She had a hair appointment in the afternoon, and if the official kept on like this, she wouldn’t make it and she’d be left to go about her life with ratty-looking extensions until Stefan, who was quite booked up these days, could find another slot for her. “Now, what is it that my company can do for you?”

The official ran his fingers through his own gorgeous head of hair. His Rolex reflected a flickering beam of fluorescent light. “Well, it’s safe to say that all of us here in Jiangsu Province have lost a fair bit of face in this obesity crisis, wouldn’t you agree?”

Kelly nodded. Sure, yeah, cut to the chase.

“And so we in the government have decided the best way to save face is to save our children from being swallowed up by their own hungry mouths! And that is where you come in.” With flourish, the official yanked opened his desk drawer and removed an old, clunky Dell laptop, which he opened to reveal a slow-loading PowerPoint presentation. “We would like to invite you, the Bashful Goose Snack Company, to donate funds to start our province’s very first government-certified weight-loss reeducation center!”

Thoroughly convinced of the rightness of it all, and with a couple of hours left until her hair appointment, Kelly ordered her driver to deliver her to Bashful Goose headquarters, where she would ask Papa Hui himself for the funds. The city went past in a blur, all skyscrapers and steamed bun shops and trees and Volkswagen taxis. She sprawled out in the backseat of her Audi, stuck her earbuds in, and hit Play on a guided meditation track she’d downloaded. Prompted by a soothing female voice, she tried to focus on all things good and pure: this project and what it could mean. The state-of-the-art fitness facilities, the virtual reality weight-loss visualizer, the flown-in European chef. Rehabilitating the province’s fattest kids as an act of charity, as an act of kindness, as an act of selflessness. Proving herself capable to the old coot, proving to him that she should be the one to someday run the company.

And keep focusing on those positive things, keep focusing, the voice said, stay with it, stay with it.

But at that, Kelly’s thoughts shot to the reason she was listening to this stupid hippie’s amateur track in the first place; to the reason she played host to all these anxieties, and she always burst into nervous sweats, and she insisted on living across town from her family in a shitty neighborhood her mother didn’t feel comfortable in, and she normally avoided going to her father’s office at all costs—why her life, her miserable excuse for a life, had long ago taken a turn for the pathetic: the goose, that bashful goose.

THE LEGEND OF THE BASHFUL GOOSE

FROM THE BASHFUL GOOSE SNACK COMPANY OFFICIAL WEBSITE:

ONE AFTERNOON, MANY YEARS AGO, WHEN OUR GREAT NATION HAD officially opened up but most of us still toiled in her fields, Papa Hui, our company’s dear founder, found himself strolling around the willow-lined Three Horse Lake in his hometown of Old Watermelon Village.

Yes, Papa Hui stepped forward, crunching autumn leaves beneath his feet. But philosophically, he found himself at a standstill, at a crossroads in his life. He had just paid off the 20,000 yuan loan he’d taken out to open Papa Hui’s Snack Shop, Old Watermelon Village’s first grocery-like store. In this way, he was a free man. But, as the saying goes, when life removes one set of chains, it usually, and happily, snaps a new set into place: the local doctor had just confirmed that his beautiful young wife, Mama Hui, who had missed her visiting aunty for the second consecutive month, was indeed pregnant with the couple’s first child.

With a child on the way, Papa Hui pondered as he strolled: Can I really just go on selling dusty bags of State-owned-factory-produced snacks? Don’t I owe the next generation something more, something better? Is there a kingdom I can build, he mused, worthy enough for this child to someday inherit?

Tangled in his thoughts, Papa Hui hadn’t heard the footsteps that had been following him for some time—until now. Startled, he whirled around, but whoever, or whatever, it was ducked behind a willow branch. Never mind, Papa Hui thought, it’s just some devilish child playing pranks, maybe one of those Wang children, whose parents had miraculously avoided fines or forced sterilization despite their blatant violations of family-planning laws.

Papa Hui, tickled by the thought of one of those little buggers hiding, cried out, “Bashful child, come out, come out!”

But no child emerged; no child answered these shouts.

He slapped at a mosquito that landed on his arm. A breeze rustled the willows, and a dark cloud moved across the sky.

Papa Hui’s thoughts took a sinister turn. He contemplated other potential pursuers: Another aspiring snack-shop entrepreneur who hoped to kill off the competition. A weirdo from a neighboring village who had decided to take a step up from torturing field mice and try his hand at murdering thirtysomething men. The Gang of Four. The Hong Kong mafia. An escaped convict. A Soviet spy. And if it is someone dangerous, he thought, what then? Who am I to fight off such an enemy? I am no one, just a simple man; I am no one.

Resigned to this fate, he turned back around—his helpless body trembling, his shoulders slumped in defeat—and continued on his walk… toward what?

And again, he heard the footsteps. He paused. A sliver of golden sun peeked through the clouds and shone down on him. Enveloped in this light and warmth, a sense of bravery flooded his body. I am not no one, it struck him, I am a father-to-be, I am the boss of Old Watermelon Village’s most successful snack shop, I am a husband, I am a man, I am a Chinese, I am someone! He shook out his trembles. He pushed back his shoulders. Bursting with pride in his own humanity, which he felt then for the first time, he charged toward the nearest willow branch and, with both arms, swept the leafy limb aside. Nothing. He swept aside another droopy branch, and another, and another, until at last he found his pursuer.

Papa Hui, looking down at the little devil who’d caused him so much fear, couldn’t help now but laugh. “Bashful goose, come out, come out!” he said, and the goose did come out, and it followed him home.

“Good night, bashful goose!” Papa Hui called out the window that night to the bird. Mama Hui just rubbed her belly and rolled her eyes.

From the other side of the window, nestled in the dirt, the goose honked in response and bashfully covered its face with its wing, in what is now the bashful goose’s most famous pose, pictured in our great company’s logo.

The next morning, our dear founder Papa Hui set off to begin his first debt-free day at the snack shop.

“Good-bye, Mama Hui!” he called. “Be safe!”

“Good-bye, bashful goose!” he called, opening the door. “Be good!”

But as soon as he had taken a step out, that bashful goose lunged at his canvas-clad legs. Papa Hui slapped the goose away, but it only came back at him more aggressively. It pecked. It bit. It honked.

“Bashful goose, what’s wrong with you?” Exasperated, Papa Hui bent down and looked directly into those beady little eyes. “Why are you suddenly so outgoing?”

In place of an answer, the goose hid its face behind its wing, honked, and then took off in a waddle-run toward the field that led to Old Woman Wu’s house.

Old Woman Wu once had a reputation as a very skilled baker, and in the old days of revolution and reeducation, she had generously baked for the ravenous village children all manner of pies and cakes spiced with creative famine-time ingredients including but not limited to: grass, tree bark, pond algae, and sparrow’s feet. But when her husband died in a railway construction accident, Old Woman Wu devolved from her cheery, anything-is-possible self into a weepy recluse. Her long raven-black hair turned gray, and the now well-fed children took to calling her “Witchy Wu.”

Papa Hui chased after the goose, running and running across that field, sweat sprouting from his pores, all the while trusting fully, inexplicably, in this goose and where it would lead him.

The goose at last stopped at Witchy Wu’s gate, honking furiously and flapping its wings. Papa Hui bent over at the waist, clutching his knees, panting. He looked up just in time to spot Witchy Wu throwing open the door, seeking the cause of the commotion that had violently woken her from her midmorning nap. When Papa Hui’s calm eyes met her frantic ones, they both knew it was fate that had brought them together.

The rest, as they say, is history. Papa Hui joined forces with Witchy Wu and rebranded the store with a new mascot and a new name. The two tossed out those dusty, old packages of State-owned-factory-produced snacks and began developing and producing their own original snack products to wild acclaim. Villagers simply couldn’t get enough of Bashful Goose Snack Company’s Watermelon Wigglers and Tangerine Crumbly Cakes (one whole tangerine in every bite!), among other delights. The company’s good luck turned to great luck when Papa Hui took a bet on a new form of advertisement—a TV commercial, one of the very first in a nation where the hottest new must-have product was a TV set. The Bashful Goose logo soon became as iconic as Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Square, and the first Bashful Goose jingle, a catchy ditty composed by Papa Hui himself, became the anthem of a generation with money to burn. Factories were erected to meet the surging demand and trucks were dispatched and the snacks were soon available in all corners of our great nation, from the ports of Shanghai to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia to the mountains of Tibet.

In the late 1990s, Witchy Wu sold her shares of the company to Papa Hui and retired with her many-decades-younger boyfriend, a former Australian soap opera actor, to Canada, where the happy couple still resides today.

Thanks to that fateful encounter with that bashful goose, Papa Hui is now the richest man in China. And to this day, the goose who led him to his fortune continues to follow him everywhere he goes…

ENOUGH ABOUT THAT DAMN GOOSE!

WHAT CUTESY, QUAINT LORE, BUT THAT WASN’T THE GOOSE KELLY knew. In the backseat and now just mere kilometers from headquarters, hyperventilation seized her.

This “bashful” goose had brazenly tormented her throughout her childhood—pecking at her armpits, biting the backs of her knees, yanking out her hair, shitting in her bed, tearing her homework to shreds, and cleverly framing her for a variety of devious acts (including but not limited to: smashing a precious Ming dynasty antique vase and clogging the toilet with the jagged pieces, eating four tins of expensive caviar that had been given to Papa Hui by Boris Yeltsin, leaking information to the press about possible insider trading committed by some of Papa Hui’s New York friends, scratching Dr. Dre lyrics into the paint of Mama Hui’s Lamborghini, and purchasing marijuana from a Nigerian drug dealer [how the goose pulled that one off, she still wasn’t sure]).

Trying to explain to her parents that none of this was actually her doing had proved an impossible task. Any time she even so much as hinted that the goose might not be a perfect angel, Papa Hui burned red in the face and shouted about what a spoiled girl she was, and how things were different when he was growing up, and how they wouldn’t have any of this—not the cars, not the apartments, not the vacations, not the hired help, not the electronics, not any of it—if it weren’t for that goose, and “Don’t you dare blame the goose!”

Frankly, Kelly had been relieved when, following the marijuana incident, her fed-up father made the decision to send her to Los Angeles for high school. She lived there in a big, empty house in Culver City with a nanny who spent most of her time either on the phone yapping in a baby voice with her boyfriend back in China or working to improve her English by watching endless episodes of Law and Order; attended a snooty school for rich troubled girls who found her dull and called her “Slanty-Eyes McGee” and “Sucky-Sucky Blow Job Five Dollar,” among other charming names; slouched on city buses beside men who reeked of urine and women who muttered incoherently to themselves—and these were the moments that comprised the best years of her life. This was her era of safety, of stability, of freedom, and then when she went on to USC and ditched the nanny and moved into an off-campus condo, she felt even freer still.

Why she’d chosen to leave that paradise of palm trees and traffic jams, and why she thought there would be anything here in China for her, she still didn’t fully understand, but she inhaled deeply, got out of the car, and began the long but pleasant enough journey through the headquarters grounds, passing fountains, multiple goldfish ponds, a bamboo forest, and then, at the front of the building, a gigantic gold-coated statue of enemy number one.

From behind the mahogany desk he’d had custom crafted in Sweden, Papa Hui greeted his daughter with a terse, “In a moment.” Kelly shut the door and stepped inside. The old man was hard at work on a Sudoku puzzle haphazardly torn from a newspaper—a sizable corner of the puzzle was missing, rendering the thing unsolvable. Kelly shook her head. Why on earth did he not just buy a book of them? Or get an iPad and download an app? Or at least hire someone with better ripping skills, or perhaps, you know, just employ a pair of scissors to properly remove the puzzle in its entirety?

Principle, that’s why. Here was a man whose net worth was in the billions, but who often humble-bragged to the media about spending less than one hundred renminbi a day. Fifteen bucks. Yeah, sure. She always shook her head when she skimmed such articles—such a limited budget was easy to adhere to for someone whose meals were provided for him at the office by the country’s top chef, and who had a driver so therefore never had to pay cab fare, and who had already purchased everything he could possibly need, and—

Kelly jumped involuntary, her legs jelly. A familiar honking sound snipped its way into her thoughts. The goose waddled up from behind her and nipped at her calf. She swatted its beak away, shouted, “Off!” The goose ducked and lunged for her fingers. She threw her hands up in surrender, took a few careful steps back, and lowered herself to sit on a chair, the goose standing its ground, watching her with unblinking eyes.

In all this commotion, her father, still concentrating on that unsolvable puzzle, never once looked up.

HAIR EXTENSION APPOINTMENT—KELLY HUI—THREE P.M.

“SO YEAH, MY DAD AGREED TO GIVE THE MONEY. AND I THINK THIS IS going to catapult me to fame. It could, I mean.” Kelly studied the way her face moved in the salon mirror as she spoke. Her eyes appeared dead and dull as she delivered this information, very unlike those glitzy girls on TV—so she wasn’t quite ready for her close-up. Oh, well. She would get there. There was always something new to work on, a million yet-untraveled roads to self-improvement.

Stefan smiled and nodded.

Kelly continued: “Imagine, I could host a weight-loss TV show. Help children shape up in front of a live studio audience. You could come to the studio and do my hair. Maybe the network would hire you on full-time as, like, a staff stylist. I don’t know. Maybe your job now is better. I’m just throwing out ideas.”

Stefan smiled, snapped a cape around her neck, and pumped up her chair—a comforting routine. Her once-thick mane had never fully recovered from a goose-related “accident” many years before, and instead of struggling through life a victim of partial baldness, she relied on Stefan, who in his docility had also become a close friend and confidant, to add both length and volume with top-notch extensions. These babies today were from the Lulu batch—much coveted and cut from the head of the girl with the loveliest locks in all of China. As the old saying goes, a woman’s power resides in her hair. And if you can’t make your own power, make do. Yes, Kelly was soon to be set. The best of the best.

“And all of those losers I grew up with, they’re going to be so sorry. I mean, what are they doing now? Crashing their Ferraris into over-passes? Snorting horse tranquilizers? Dancing the night away in the same clubs they’ve been dancing all their nights away in since high school? Oh, and that Jenny Tao—her dad is the CEO of Happy Mart—all she’s doing is directing dumb art films that her parents fund and no one goes to see. I heard her dad tried to pay Spielberg to meet with her to give her career advice, but Spielberg refused, even though he was going to pay him, like, ten million dollars just to have coffee with her.”

Stefan raised an eyebrow, lifted the corners of his mouth, and then ran his fingers through her hair. “So, let’s get these old ones out first, and then we’ll see what we have to work with.” His whispery voice tickled her ear canals. She nodded in response, shut her oversharing trap and her eyes, and let him begin his work in peace.

A pair of tiny scissors slicing through elastic string. Fingers untwisting, tugging. An MGMT song from her hooked-up iPod played softly on the speakers. Stefan’s was a totally private salon, owned by China’s number one hair extension company and catering to those who sought and/or required total privacy: film stars, pop stars, national icons. She belonged here. The best of the best.

She relaxed. Relaxed, relaxed, relaxed.

Until that meditation track began to echo through the blankness of her mind—breathe in, breathe out—and then a goose honking in rhythm in the background, and anxiety shot up from her fingertips and from her toes, and she opened her eyes and grabbed for the distraction of her iPhone to run a few research-related searches. Childhood obesity. Risk factors. Basics of nutrition. Fitness for beginners. She read and read, scrolled and scrolled, and she wouldn’t let herself stop reading and scrolling until a phone call came through. She picked up, and the person on the other end answered before she could say a word. “Hello? Is this Kelly Hui?”

“It is.”

“This is Government Official Fang. Were you able to meet with your father?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror. Her old extensions were all out. Stefan was examining her natural roots. “And I think we have a deal.”

The official inhaled sharply, excitedly.

“On one simple condition,” she added.

The official cleared his throat. “What’s that?”

“I want a hands-on role in running the camp.”

Silence.

“Hello?”

“While we appreciate your generous financial contribution, Ms. Hui, the actual administration of the camp is a very gritty and difficult job, and one that I’m not sure somebody like you would actually be interested in.”

Stefan met her eyes in the mirror.

“What does that even mean?” Kelly rolled her eyes, making her best are-you-kidding-me? face for Stefan’s benefit. He winked back at her, cheerfully humming softly along to the one guilty-pleasure Lady Gaga song she’d loaded on her iPod. Fucking shuffle. “Somebody like me?”

The official cleared his throat. “My meaning is that you seem like a very busy and very classy woman. Based on our research and the experience of some of my colleagues, fat camps can be very ugly, very stressful places.” Perhaps sensing skepticism in her silence, he added, “Let me put it this way. Have you ever had a two-hundred-pound child bite your ankle because you wouldn’t allow him an extra ration of dressing with his lettuce?”

“No,” Kelly said. “But one of my classmates in Los Angeles had her arm licked by a crazy guy on the subway and—”

“Well,” the official interrupted, as though he hadn’t even heard her, “this very thing happened to a man my colleagues met in their research. Let’s call him Mr. Li. This Mr. Li served as a first-time fat camp administrator at a private camp in Shanghai—he was hired with experience as a hospital dietitian. On only the fifth day of the camp, when Mr. Li refused to allow one of the children to add extra salt to his boiled vegetables—”

It was Kelly’s turn to interrupt: “I thought you said it was dressing on lettuce.”

“Look, what it was is irrelevant. The point is the child became belligerent, falling to the floor, kicking, screaming, carrying on, before savagely sinking his teeth into Mr. Li’s ankle. The child’s jaw had such a hold on him that it took four counselors to unhinge it. Mr. Li was then rushed to the hospital where he had to undergo rabies vaccination, which, as you may know, is a series of shots that takes two weeks to complete. And he still has the incisor marks on his ankle, and, ahh, don’t even get me started on how much the hospital bills came to—”

“Oh,” Kelly grunted, adjusting her posture in the mirror. She eyed Stefan’s extension handiwork, which was coming along quite beautifully if she did say so herself. “Well, rest assured that if I am savagely bitten by a rabid little rascal, I can certainly cover my own medical expenses. As you may be aware, in addition to being ‘busy’ and ‘classy,’ I am also very ‘wealthy.’”

“Indeed,” the official said flatly. He audibly yawned. Kelly thought she could make out the sounds of an action movie playing in the background. Was he speaking to her from a cinema? No wonder they didn’t care what their offices looked like—they didn’t actually work there. Or anywhere.

Kelly sighed. Her scalp was uncomfortable. Her ear was getting sweaty. “So, how about we arrange for transfer of funds and then you send me all the details about date and location and so forth.”

“Ms. Hui, look, what I’m trying to tell you is—”

“No address, no money.” Kelly hung up to the muffled boom of an explosion.

KINDHEARTED BOY LOOKING FOR NICE GIRL! ENJOYS SURFING THE WEB, CHATTING WITH FRIENDS, AND COLLECTING SEASHELLS…

A COUPLE WEEKS LATER, ACROSS TOWN, ZHAO, THE TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD son of a cleaning woman and a late construction worker, sat at his bedroom desk, opened a web browser, and entered the address of the dating website he frequented. He’d not yet sent any messages to any girls, but he felt confident that he might soon work up the courage, or cowardice—whichever it may be—to do so. He browsed a few profiles, all pretty and therefore all out of his league, and then stood up and smoothed out his shirt. Oh, well. It wasn’t the day for finding a girlfriend anyway. Today was the day of his big interview.

He’d been matched to the position by an online agency he’d registered with out of desperation a few weeks before. Sure, it was paying for a job (the agency guaranteed placement within three months), but wasn’t it true that everyone had to pay for his job in one way or another? Money was at least a clean way of doing so—this method didn’t involve unethical acts or shady dealings, just a simple online escrow payment.

And anyway, he needed this: two months before, he’d walked out on his job as an assistant at a fitness equipment sales company. He was far too old to still be a mere assistant—all the other assistants were girls fresh out of college. He’d been promised promotion eight years before when he was hired; however, he was overlooked time and time again. He was a good worker, efficient if not sharp, and therefore attributed his lack of upward mobility primarily to his appearance—deep acne scars pocked his face, his front teeth were turned in at an odd angle, and no matter how hard he washed he always gave off the impression of being deeply unclean. Regardless, it was humiliating being left behind, and on a day like any other, a Tuesday, the absurdity of it all hit him. Very suddenly and for no instigating reason, he snapped. He walked into his boss’s office and issued a firm “I quit.” That was all he said. His boss, young and handsome and therefore valued by the world, didn’t ask why or any other questions. He offered a pleasant, “Okay,” and that was that.

On that Tuesday like any other, Zhao gathered his belongings from his desk, shoved them inside his bag, and left without saying good-bye to anyone, not even the mousy accountant whom he’d had a crush on for over a year and who earned three times his salary. He spent the subsequent weeks “sorting things out.” He locked himself in his room for days at a time, reading the news on the Internet and following with interest a great number of microbloggers who spewed on the topics of politics, social issues, and cute animals. He became deeply engaged in a few TV series set in various dynasties. He bought a potted plant and tended to it daily. He quit smoking. He got back in touch with his mother, whom he had begun officially totally ignoring a couple years before because she nagged him to an annoying degree about why he hadn’t bought an apartment, why he hadn’t found a wife, why he wasn’t a top-level executive, and so on. He called her up (not at all surprised that she had the same phone number all these years later—she never let things go) and told her he’d quit his job, and that he was still renting that crappy room in that crappy shared apartment, and that the future still looked uncertain, and that the only women he’d ever slept with were prostitutes or otherwise irreversibly ugly and/or deformed. Oddly enough, his mother hadn’t seemed to mind all of these highly inappropriate confessions. In fact, she only grunted in response, told him to take care of himself, hung up, and then picked up their relationship right where it had left off—sending snapshots of eligible bachelorettes in the post, calling to gossip about the nouveau riche whose houses she cleaned, e-mailing links to travel agency websites (she’d developed a fondness for spaghetti and dreamed of being sent on a senior citizens tour to Italy), and so forth. Three weeks after he’d first called, she even made a trek into the city to stay with him a weekend. She scrubbed and reorganized his room, cooked hearty meals for him and the surprisingly friendly flatmates he’d never really spoken to before, and told him, albeit in a vague way, that she was proud that he was her son and happy to have him back in her lonely life.

And then she was gone again. His plant grew. His TV series turned to reruns. This two-month period of his life had been nice, had been necessary, but he knew it couldn’t last forever.

Dressed in his crispest button-down shirt, a Playboy bunny belt buckle, and navy-blue slacks, Zhao lumbered down the dusty stairwell to the street, planted himself on the sidewalk, and flagged down a taxi. He arrived at his destination twenty minutes early, paid the driver, and got out. He paced before the bleak white structure, Communist-era architecture at its finest.

So there was the job, this tangible possibility here before him, but there was also the feeling of wanting to be somebody, a sense of this being a last chance, and there was the weight of guilt at the pit of his stomach and the desperation of wanting to be rid of this weight, unburdened. To be employed at all wasn’t ideal; employment meant setting an alarm and getting properly dressed every morning and spending less time surfing the Internet, and it meant letting go of all the tiny freedoms that he had so recently fallen in love with. But he could waste his whole life away floating in ideals, freedoms. He could wake up a ninety-year-old man, unmarried and unaccomplished—with nothing to show for himself and no one there to love him—and say, “Well, at least I stayed true to my ideals.” But where was the freedom in that?

The very next week, the government officials who would be overseeing his position invited Zhao to a restaurant to make their formal employment offer. His eyes skimmed the contents of the contract. Hereby referred to as the employee. Can do. Can do. If this contract is broken, a penalty of 100,000 yuan will be assessed. Boring. Boring. Over the course of the summer, the employee must rehabilitate a minimum of two fat kids.

He glanced up from the printed pages and into the stale eyes of the government officials sitting around the white-clothed table. The waitress, a dark-skinned country girl with shapely legs, brought a plate of salted duck’s feet and set it before the men.

“If my wife would allow it,” one of the officials said, eyeballing the waitress, “I would take that one home and keep her.” The men laughed collectively. The waitress blushed and scurried away. Another of the officials, an older fellow with crinkly skin and beady black eyes, poured Zhao’s cup full of rice wine. Zhao nodded, acknowledging this act, and then felt his phone vibrate against his leg. He slipped it out under the table as the old man filled the others’ cups. His mother. He rejected her call and shoved the phone back into his pocket.

The waitress brought another dish, fried peanuts. “Zhao here could take her home. No old lady to worry about, is there?” The first official socked Zhao in the arm. There was laughter, and there was a glint of envy in each of the laughing officials’ eyes. Zhao did not notice this glint. He only heard the laughter and then felt, again, a vibration on his leg. He slid his phone from his pocket. A text message from his mother. It read, “How about her?” Embedded within the text message was a blurry photo of yet another anonymous woman’s face, probably snapped at the supermarket or the Grand Ocean department store or in line for a five-mao public restroom. A wave of regret washed over him; he was sorry he’d ever taught his mother how to use her phone’s camera function.

“Now, you do understand, Zhao, that if you fulfill the terms of the contract, there is an opportunity to move up the ranks. It’s not usual, to skip the test, but these are special circumstances and this is a club, you see, and in a club, members make the rules, but we can also break them.”

Zhao nodded. A set-for-life cushy government job? No Party exam necessary? Yes, please.

Satisfied with his mute response, the officials returned to their chatter. Zhao excused himself. He strolled into the bathroom, pissed, rinsed his hands in the sink, and studied himself in the mirror. His perfectly round face housed eyes so deeply set that they verged on sunken in. He stroked his cratered, stubble-less chin with his hands—he couldn’t grow a beard, but his toes were coated in hair. He took a step back and eyed his figure—not exactly an ideal shape: extraordinarily slim in the limbs, sure, but playing nurse to an ever-growing gut akin to that of a pregnant woman.

But oh, well, and never mind.

Zhao inhaled and mouthed, “You deserve this,” into the mirror. He puffed his chest and sauntered out, passing the waitress. She leaned against the wall outside the private banquet room in limbo between the kitchen and the officials’ table. Zhao studied her: thin arms that jangled from her body like those of a marionette, slight overbite that forced her lips into a perpetual pout, shiny black hair slicked into a bun, skin the sandy color of unfinished plywood. He thought, Me and this waitress, we could be good together. He briefly entertained snapping a quick picture of her with his phone and sending it to his mother with a text that read, “Her.”

He didn’t. He sat down. The men chattered on. He stared, still, at the waitress.

“Zhao, what do you think?”

The chatter stopped. The air was thick, silent. The officials, each one a door to a new life, sat before him, sat around him, awaiting his answer.

A voice from the kitchen shouted in a countryside dialect, and the waitress disappeared.

Zhao cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, and he felt freedom flee his body. He said, “Yes. We have a deal.” He felt his phone vibrate again. She was relentless. He slipped it out and rejected the call. The waitress returned with two dishes—real dishes, not appetizers or snacks, but wonderful, steamy, spicy Hunan food. The crinkly official, the one who’d poured the wine, removed a pen from his shirt pocket and placed it in Zhao’s hand. Zhao signed the contract and stuffed himself full. And he drank. And they drank. And they drank and they drank.