Demon Box

One sensed that beneath that Western suit and patient Eastern smile an irritability was beginning to bubble. Though Mr. Mude never said so, it was obvious to all that whatever affection he had ever held for Mr. Bling was now in rapid decline. Whenever he acquired tickets for a tourist attraction he no longer included the scraggly little student. Bling had to fork over his own fen to get in the Forbidden Cities and Summer Palaces. When Bling was finally fenless the journalists forked over for him. This made Mr. Mude twitch and fidget in his unfamiliar cowboy clothes.

The tour had taken a turn not to Mr. Mude’s liking: too many Yankee guffaws at Bling’s sardonic commentary on the Beijing scene; too much talk from which he felt excluded, especially track talk.

“You are also a runner, Mr. Wu?”

They were coming out of Beihai Park, with its white dome and holiday throngs of colorfully clothed school kids scampering about like escaped flowers. Mude had been mentioning the park’s renowned reputation for centuries of quiet beauty; Bling had been filling in with notes of more recent interest that Mr. Mude had neglected to mention. Until two years ago, Bling had told them, the park had been closed completely to the general public, the lovely quiet of the lake undisturbed by rented rowboats, the massive gates barred and guarded. No one was allowed in except Mao’s wife and her personal guests.

Bling had been explaining what a turn-on it had been, after years of jogging past the prohibited paradise, to one day, out of the blue, have the doors swung wide and be allowed to jog inside—when Mr. Mude interrupted with that question about running.

“Damn straight I’m a runner,” Bling answered. “One of your hometown heroes. Three years varsity, Beijing U. Come to a meet sometime, Mude; be my guest.”

“A runner of distance?”

“I’ve done fives and tens. I hold the school record in the 1,500.”

“Then you must be entered in tomorrow’s heroic event?”

“Sorry. Tomorrow’s heroes will have to run without Bee Wing Lou’s company.”

“Surely you must have applied? A running enthusiast residing in Beijing as you do?”

“It’s an invitational, Mr. Mude… remember?”

“Ah, true,” Mude recalled. “I had forgotten. Too bad for you, Mr. Wu.”

Bling pulled down his blue shades to study Mude’s face; it was impossible to tell if the mind behind that guarded smile were conniving, condescending, or what.

“Talk them into a 1,500 around the Tien An Men—like the Fifth Avenue mile in New York—then you’ll see me out there busting my little yellow balls.”

“That would be very enjoyable.”

To get Bling off the hook, the editor asked if it might be possible to take a drive out to the Beijing campus to look over the sports scene, maybe catch a track practice. This time it was Bling who was reluctant and Mude who was suddenly permissive. True, he admitted, he did have preparations to make for the banquet, but saw no reason why they could not drop him off and continue on with Mr. Wu to his track practice. Everyone was left stunned by the sudden turnabout, and a trifle uneasy. When they dropped Mude off at the stark brick building he had directed the driver to, Bling became downright unnerved.

“That was the Bureau of Immigration Records!”

“Wonder whose name he’s looking up?” the photographer wondered.

“I couldn’t say for certain, but I’ll bet you all a buck,” Bling said unhappily, “it turns out to be Mud.”

Nobody would cover the bet. The bus ride the rest of the way to the campus was somber and quiet.

In spite of the bright bustle of students, the campus was as grim as the pot-lid sky sitting heavy over it. One expects lawns on a campus, but most of the grounds were the same packed dirt that surrounded the rest of the city’s dwellings, only not as well swept. The rows of gray-green gum trees made the walks and ways dim, like light undersea. The sullen looks of the workers did not help. Bling told them that there had been a lot of strife between students and laborers, who also lived on the sprawling campus. Bicycle tires slashed. Rapes. Gang fights between workers who considered the students arrogant and lazy and students who saw the workers as the same, only less educated. Without police protection the students would have been in sorry straits. “Out of a live-in population of about forty thousand, less than eight thousand are students.”

“Sounds like the clods have the scholars unfairly outnumbered.”

“In China,” Bling moped, “t’was ever thus.”