Demon Box

He slowed when he reached the steep path at the corner of the feng. It had drizzled again that morning and the worn dirt would be slick. The last thing he wanted to do before tomorrow’s trip was slip on the red mud. To soil the beautiful blue warm-ups sent him from Beijing would have been close to traitorous.

The climb made his heart quicken in his ears and brought a light beadwork of sweat to his lower lip. That was good. He did not perspire easily, even in this French-made suit of artificial fibers, and he needed a sweat to flush the poisons and rinse his head. He ran harder.

When he at last achieved the flattened square at the peak of the dirt pyramid he was sweating hard and his panting was no longer feigned. His father had first brought him here, just a babe, carried piggyback. He had played with the milkweed pods at the edge of the little flat square while his father and his grandfather went through the complicated sparring dances with wooden swords or bamboo pikes festooned on each end with colored ribbons to better describe the swing and swirl of the maneuver. His grandfather still came, though rarely, and without the mock weapons. The routines the old man did were simple sequences and might be seen in any park or yard.

Yang went immediately into his tai chi quan routine. He did all the basic maneuvers plus some his father had created—Stand By to Kick Monkey Nuts, and Feed the Dog That Bites You. Then he moved on to the new National Routine that had been instituted since the fall of the Gang of Four. Much like football warm-ups—jumping jacks, toe touches, neck twists. After these exercises he commenced scurrying around the little earth square in a crouch, shadow wrestling.

He was a good wrestler. The summer before he had placed third in the Torch Festival in his age/weight, and for a time his instructors at middle school wished him to concentrate on that sport, leave distance running to those with longer legs. He demurred but kept in wrestling shape. When there was a wedding in the village he was the one called on by the bride’s family for the traditional bout with the bridegroom’s supporters. The families knew he could make a good showing against the surrogate suitors and, more important, when pitted against the groom himself, Yang could be counted on to lose.

Spreading his towel, he finished off his workout with forty pushups from his fingertips, then forty fast sit-ups, hammering his stomach muscles as he finished.

He forced his mind to calm as he pounded the familiar knots from his abdomen. Forget those cheering townspeople. What was there to worry about? No one expected victory. Only continuity: run from here to there and back, however long it took.

His fists drove out the embolism and at last he fell back, the clean clothes forgotten, and sent his breathing up into the sky. It was all one color. There had been no sun all day. There would be no stars that night. For months now the heavy sky had shut them out, like a pewter lid on a shallow pot.

He rolled over and gazed past the checkerboard grid of cotton and cabbage in the direction Zhoa had informed him that they would fly tomorrow to reach Beijing, thousands of miles away. Yang could not conceive of such distance, nor of the towering mountains and terrible gorges where, Zhoa had claimed, no one lived. No green fields crawling with work units like aphids on a leaf; no jam of smoky huts; no roads, no bicycles, no people. Just lifeless space, clear, the way it was on the rare winter evenings when the clouds were driven south by the cold, and the long flank of the night between his bed and the stars was laid naked.

He heard the girls laugh again and stretched to see over the milkweeds. The other runners were approaching at last along the road, meeting Zhoa on his way back from the turnaround. The girls were laughing at the way the team grabbed at Zhoa’s belly to make him smile. Everyone liked to tease Zhoa so they could see his smile. It was spectacular. He had been blessed with an extra tooth, diamond shaped, right between his two regular front teeth. Bright and healthy too, his uncle had said of the phenomenon. Yang could see it flash even from his distant seat.

The giggling suddenly ceased and Zhoa’s smile fled. Looking back up the road Yang saw three young men, carrying shotguns and examining the road ruts, pretending that they were on the trail of the runners. A joke, certainly, but no one except the three with guns laughed.