Demon Box

Mude’s mood was still cheerful the next day, his outfit more informal yet—a jogging jacket and Levi’s. He stopped the bus whenever the photographer asked. He laughed at Bling’s acrid observations on roadside China. He beamed well-being. He knew his assignment had been successful. No bad incidents, and he had learned a good deal about Yankee ways. He was getting with it, as they say. So after their stroll back down from the Great Wall, when Bling asked would it be all right if he and Mr. Yang took a little run together before they got in the bus for the long ride back to Beijing—“to loosen the knots”—Mude responded with his most with it expression, a phrase he’d been saving for just such a time:

“All right, you guys. Do your thing.”

Bling was still laughing as he and Yang jogged around the bend out of sight.

The journalists played with the swarms of school kids in the bus lot while Mr. Mude smoked with the bus driver. The tourists teemed. And the Great Wall writhed across the rugged terrain like some ambitious stone dragon, bigger than the sandworms of Dune, heavier than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Not greater, though. Not nearly. As a World Class Wonder the Great Wall is really more awe-inspiring than uplifting. One feels that it had to take some kind of all-prevailing, ill-proportioned paranoia to drive that stone snake across three thousand miles and thirty centuries. The Great Pyramid says, I rise to the skies. The Great Wall says, I keep out the louts. China says, The twentieth century must be allowed to enter! The Wall says, Louts will be everywhere—shooting beer commercials, buying Coca-Cola, strutting their ugly stuff. The twentieth century says, I’m coming in, louts and all, wall or no… I’m coming in because Time can’t just walk off and leave behind one fourth of all the people in the world, can it now?

The Wall doesn’t answer.

It was almost an hour before the two runners came back into sight, walking. And Bling was no longer laughing. When his eyes met the writer’s he nodded and mouthed, “He’ll do it.” Morosely. Somehow the kick had gone out of the conspiracy. Bling put on his blue glasses and climbed in to look out the bus window. Yang took a seat on the other side of the bus, looking at the other side of the road.

The ride back, Mude finally decided, was silent because everybody would be leaving tomorrow. It must make the heart very solemn, leaving Beijing after such short weeks. He embraced them all tenderly when he left them for the final time in the hotel lot. He told them if they ever got fed up with capitalistic landlord mentality to contact their friend Wun Mude in Beijing. He would see that China took them in.

Bling kept quiet up the steps and across the hotel lobby. In the elevator the journalists finally demanded in unison, “Well?”

“I’m to pick him up in a taxi when he goes out for his run tomorrow morning. He’ll have his papers on him.”

“Far out. The Prince and the Pauper do Peking.”

“What did he say? When you asked…?”

“He told me a story. How his father died.”

“Yea… ?”

“A few years ago there was a thing—a fad, practically—started by members of the intelligentsia who had taken all the shit they could take. Doctors and lawyers and teachers. Journalists, too. They would be found guilty of some crime against the Cultural Revolution and paraded around town with nothing on but a strip of paper hanging from their necks. Their crime would be written on the paper. People—their neighbors, their families—would come out and insult them, throw dirt on the poor dudes, piss on them! We Chinese are fucking barbarians, you know? We aren’t really disciplined or obedient. We’ve just never had any damn freedom! If we could suddenly go down to our local Beijing sporting goods store and buy guns like in the States, man, there would be lead flying and blood flowing all over town.”

“Bling! What about the kid?”

“A fad, like. Here in Beijing it was doctors. They were catching a lot of crap for catering to the landlord element, treating bourgeoisie heart attacks and so forth. Finally, twenty top physicians, the cream of the nation’s doctors, man, poisoned themselves by way of protest.”

“Some protest.”

“Yeah, well, in Yang’s province it was teachers. The kid’s father was a professor of poetry. He was condemned to humiliation for teaching some damn out-of-favor tome or other. After enough insults he and a dozen other maligned colleagues walked into the provincial university gymnasium in the middle of a Ping-Pong tournament… walked in, lined up, took out their swords, and staged a protest.”

“Like dominoes.”

Bling nodded. “The man at the end of the line had to do double duty: first dispatch the man in front of him, then do himself. They tried to keep it out of the papers, but there were pictures. And things like that get talked around even in China.”

“Jesus.”

“That anchor man was the kid’s father.”

“And that’s why the kid went for our plot?”