by
Te-Ping Chen
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The reporter, a young woman with green spectacles, ran up to him with a pen. “Old Cao,” she said, “did you expect this to happen? Has the plane ever taken off successfully before? How much did you spend to make this plane?”
He sat and stared straight ahead into the camera lens as her photographer arrived and stood in the plane’s path, clicking away; it was easier than looking at the crowd. A great wasteland of sorrow was opening up in him, unfolding dozens of tiny shacks, terrible squatters setting up residence, banging their miniature liquor bottles against his chest, a hundred feet trampling his organs. It was the same feeling he’d had as a teen when his father had died, a suicide during a year of bad harvest, and only a dirt mound to mark his grave. He’d failed. He’d failed. He’d have to try again.
Later that night, he and Anning lay in bed under their duvet, which had started life as a white blanket trimmed with pink flowers but had since gone gray with dirt and age. The moonlight spilled in from the window across the floor. Beside him, Anning’s snores vibrated the room. Cao Cao turned on his side and tried to make out her outline. In the darkness it was easier to pretend that neither of them had aged, that it was just the two of them, twenty years old and childless; life had yet to leave its scars on their bodies, they lay as pure and fresh as infants.
I missed work and didn’t mind. After the Tunnel of Love’s initial success, Hongxi wanted me to design more rides; they’d sent me to Europe, to Australia. I’d had other ideas, lots of them. But all they wanted were flying ladybugs, Tilt-A-Whirls, and the like. I had no interest! These days an amusement park shouldn’t just fling people about on mechanical arms, I told them. There were new VR technologies that would allow us to conjure up any environment: a glamorous cocktail party, bullets whizzing on a battlefield, even (yes!) a bridal chamber. These days, people wanted more: to feel connected, to taste life deeply!
Instead, after six years they moved me to a back office here in Atlantic City and gave me a new title, quality inspector, and I spent days in the field with a clipboard making careful ticks.
lol
If only he had more money to invest, he thought. Li Xueshi had recently bought a brand-new speaker set, and the two of them spent hours listening to the sounds of rappers paying frantic homage to places they’d never seen, New York, London, São Paulo. They had beautiful women in their beds and the best of everything: Lamborghini, Rolex, Versace. Together, the two of them mouthed the syllables.
No, there wasn’t much for men like Zhu Feng here. He had ideas. He had ambition. He had taste. He liked that phrase, taste. It was something that belonged, emphatically, to his and Li’s generation. Not the shabbiness of his parents’ lives, their shuffling steps, the curtailed hopes that seemed to express nothing more than a desire to chide bao, chuan de nuan—to be full in the belly, to be warmly clothed.
At first he’d tried moving 1,000 yuan to his account. He let it sit there for a month before moving it back, and no one noticed. Gradually the dawning realization set in. As long as the books added up when they were tallied at the quarter’s end, the money, it seemed, was his. And why not? Why let the money sit there, inert, when it could be spent, used, transformed and multiplied? All those disbursements across the province—there were dozens every month, and who was going to notice an extra account getting its share? No one, that’s who.
Swagger swagger get that cash, he chanted to himself. Swagger swagger make a stash.
He took out 10,000 yuan and doubled it. The next time, he siphoned off 50,000 yuan and made an additional third on top of that. Every week, he watched the new columns of numbers in his account grow. At the end of every quarter, he moved the original sum of money back to the government’s account and plowed the profits back into the market. Eight months passed like that, his mind a whirl of giddy arithmetic. In the mornings, as he walked to the subway, passing ranks of old men gambling on the street over their chessboards, he wanted to crow aloud, Fools! We have better games now.
uhoh
The thing was, he told himself, of course the market was up and down, of course he knew that—he wasn’t stupid. But the government would never let the market drop. It had happened before, three years ago, and people still talked about it. The market had dropped by more than 40 percent and people were panicking and rushing for exits, but then the government had ordered the country’s top hundred companies to buy up shares, push, push, push, make the line hold, and it had. No way the market would be allowed to fail. The government was not very good at a lot of things but it was very, very good at ensuring profits.
The problem was time. There were just two more weeks before the books would be tallied at the end of the quarter by Old Lou, who was drunk most afternoons and deficient at the job, but even he would notice if 100,000 yuan was missing. Two more weeks and four of those days were the weekend—okay, ten more days.
Zhu Feng didn’t know what to say. “So he stopped driving a taxi?”
“They wouldn’t license him,” she said matter-of-factly. “It took him years to get back on his feet again.”
“Anyway, it was a long time ago,” she said. Outside the television was playing a commercial for luxury men’s cologne.
i like the background detail
He looked uneasily at his father. “Dad,” he said, trying to recall his resolve from earlier that afternoon, “I wondered if I could maybe borrow some money.”
His father grunted. “What for?”
Zhu Feng didn’t meet his eyes. “It’s complicated,” he said. He thought of what his mother had said in the kitchen—too many rotten officials—and felt something twist in his chest. Maybe they didn’t need to hear the whole story.
Give it a few more days, he told himself. Just a few more days and you will be fine. All that anxious refreshing, all that marking of time—what was the point? He had days to work with, which were made up of hours, made of minutes, made of seconds—he was young, he had time. This was the way the world worked: you couldn’t buckle over, couldn’t be afraid. Something would step into the breach, he told himself. The market would straighten itself out, the government was going to intervene. The world was a profusion of opportunities waiting to be unfolded, he thought as he drifted off to sleep. He had only to stretch out his hand.
I look at Eric and wonder what he’s thinking, but don’t ask. When we first started dating, I’d ask him all the time, and finally he told me to please stop. “I’m an open book,” he said. “What you see is what you get.” He was that way, too, when I first found out about the woman he’d been seeing a few years ago, a client of his: after I confronted him, he had nodded and said, in just as straightforward a manner, that they had slept together twice and he was very sorry. “I wish it hadn’t happened,” he’d said matter-of-factly, as though describing something that hadn’t actually involved him.
Outside, the rain starts coming down hard and fast. “We should maybe find a place to pull over,” he says. It’s a narrow two-lane highway, not forgiving for skids. He told me once that his grandmother’s parents had both died in separate car crashes, and so he’s always been a careful driver, ever since he was a teenager. It’s one of the things I like about him, his caution on roads, the safety that comes with him behind the wheel. I tried explaining that to Jessica once, how happy I feel with him when we’re together in the car.
“Sure,” she said. “It’s the feeling that you’re moving forward.”
guessing at the page