China Mountain Zhang

RAFAEL (Zhang)

"I'm sorry, the only housing we have available is in upstate Pennsylvania." The clerk looks over my yellow tunic and gray tights, my Chinese boots. "Where are you staying now, comrade?"

"I am staying with a friend in the city," I say.

"Well," the young man leans forward and lowers his voice, "if I were you that's where I'd stay. We've been getting a lot of complaints about the buildings."

I nod. "Put them up too fast?"

"Overextended the water table. The water pressure is so low that only the first five stories get water."

"How many stories are there?"

He pulls out a brochure, white buildings off in the middle distance, trees. "Nine," he says, showing me the brochure.

"What do you do for water if you're on the ninth floor?"

"There are taps in the yard. You take a bucket downstairs and fill it up." He shakes his head. "It's crazy."

"Ah," I say, nodding. "Can I have this?"

"Sure," he says, handing me the brochure.

Back in New York. All I wanted was to get home and here I am, standing in line in the housing office so I can be offered a flat without running water. I turned down job offers in Wuxi for this. This is my second office this morning, I've already waited an hour and fifteen minutes to see an Employment Counselor at the Bureau of Employment, only to be told that since I was specialized labor I needed to make an appointment with the Office of Occupational Resources. And now I've waited in line for twenty-five minutes to be told the only thing available is a frigging flat in Pennsylvania without running water. I wonder if the architect that designed this office designed Pennsylvania housing. It's institutional green and needs painting. The floor is concrete, once painted green. Behind the counter hangs a fly strip, curled into a helix by age.

There had to be flies in China, I think, climbing a narrow stairway surfaced in black, industrial no-slip material, I just never noticed them. (Right, flies in the Wuxi Complex. A fly in Wuxi would have realized it hubris and died of embarrassment.) Every public stairwell in New York seems to be surfaced in that squishy no-slip stuff. I don't use it when I design because disposing of it cleanly is difficult and besides, it's ugly. New York has gotten around the disposal problem by never disposing of it. It's nearly indestructible, but going into the subway it's worn to holes. The holes provide slippery spots and heel catches, which contradicts the only reason for using it, that is, to provide a non-slip surface.

New York, in fact, the States seemed to suffer from a serious lack of follow through. I understand that maintenance is expensive, but what about the apartments out in Pennsylvania? When they found there was insufficient water pressure, why did they keep building? (Because where else are they going to put people.)

The subway station smells, a familiar, reassuring stink. Home again, home again. People talk all around me, their voices rise and fall, get to the end of the sentence and sing a bit, falling to say this is the end, rising to ask a question. Not like Mandarin, the staccato clatter of tones. I lean against the door, under the sign that says 'Do not lean against doors' in English, Spanish and Chinese. Like the warnings in Chinese stations not to push, some things are meant to be ignored.

A woman sits under one of the signs that tell you where to call for information about resettlement on Mars, she is reading a textbook on med tech. She's very serious. She wears a waitress uniform, all day she flash heats cheap food. I imagine her on fire in her class, going into work the next day and watching the elaborate physics of the bodies around her, the balancing act of a woman leaning down to get something off a shelf, her whole body flexing and relaxing in symphony. The waitress amazed, her whole world expanding outward, suddenly complex and fascinating.

I know she's studying to be a med tech, a job not really different from flash heating food in terms of intellectual stimulation. She's doing it so she can get her certificate and get out of her free market job, get real benefits. The train stops at De Kalb, she gets out and crosses the platform to wait for the M train. The Mystery train we used to call it when we were kids, because we didn't know anything about the places it went.

I get out too, and upstairs to cross to the Atlantic station, connected by tunnel to De Kalb. At Atlantic Avenue someone says, "Zhong Shan?"

It's a young woman I don't recognize, an ABC, I think. Short hair in the style that all the girls in New York seem to be wearing, shaved high at the temples and glossily varnished everywhere else.

"You don't know me, do you," she says. "It's San-xiang. Qian San-xiang."

For a moment I can't place her, the face doesn't go with anyone and then I remember San-xiang. Ugly little San-xiang. She has had her face fixed. She looks normal.

"San-xiang," I say, "you're very pretty! How are you?"

"Okay," she says. "How are you?"

"All right. What are you doing, still working at Cuo?" I remember the place where she worked, that's good.

She nods, "For now. I'll be leaving in March."

"Transferring?" I ask.

"No," she says, "I'm going to Mars. I'm going to join a commune called Jingshen." She says it flatly, without excitement, watching my reaction.

"Shentong de shen?" I ask. Which meaning of jingshen? It can mean 'essence' or 'profound' or a host of other things.

"Vigor," she says, which sounds like a Cleansing Winds name.

"I remember you were always interested in communes," I say lamely, wondering why anyone would go to Mars, wondering if she has any idea what it will be like. Of course, she has moved before, when she was a girl and her family came from China, but surely she doesn't realize how wrenching it will be to exile herself from home.

"You look like you are doing well," she says.

"I've been studying in China, I've only been back a week."

She asks the usual questions, where in China, what did I study. She's changed, she seems older. She is older, it's been four years since I saw San-xiang, she must be, what, twenty-six?

"Let's go get coffee," I suggest.

She hesitates a moment then shrugs. "All right."

We find a place to get coffee on the concourse between the Atlantic and Pacific stops. It's a depressing little place that, like most places in the subway, never sees sunlight. We sit down at metal tables with pressed simulated wood grain. "How is your father?" I ask.

She smiles. "About the same. Still believes he has the right to run everybody's life."

We don't talk about the last time we saw each other, when her father came to collect her at my apartment, but we do talk a little about kite racing. The conversation lags.

"Why are you going to Mars?" I ask.

"I've been corresponding with someone there for years," she says. I admire the philosophy of the commune, it is a good compromise between the ideal and the practical. I think it would be a good thing to start over in a place where people pay attention to what is important."

It's a set speech, she must say this a lot. "So you'll go alone?"

"Yes," she says, a little defiantly, "they'll be my community."

"What does your family think?" I am sure Foreman Qian has not taken this quietly.

"They're adjusting to the idea," she says, evasively.

The conversation sputters again, we both sip our drinks. We were strangers when we met, strangers when we parted, we are strangers now.

"What are you doing," she asks, "now that you are back from China?"

"I don't know. Waiting until I get my life in order. I have to go to the Office of Occupational Resources and see about getting a job."

"Here in New York?" she says.

"Oh yeah." I say. "I found out in China, I'm really a New Yorker." I laugh, "Even if it is a dump."

She doesn't say anything to that and I remember again that San-xiang is Chinese. I don't think of her that way, she's been here so long. If she could, would she go back to China? I wonder if she'd find it foreign, she's been here for longer than she lived there.

I try to think of something to say, the only thing I can think of is to tell her how nice she looks, and I'm not sure whether I should say that or not.

"I'm sure you're very busy," San-xiang says.

"Oh," I say, "not so busy, but I know you're working and you don't have much free time."

Politely we dance through the formulas of ending, of parting. We walk back to the platform and say things like, "It was really good to see you again."

The trains, of course, don't come and we are left hanging there gracelessly.

"You know," San-xiang says suddenly, "I'm sorry about the way it worked out, but I'm glad we went out together."

"I enjoyed your company," I say.

"Was it because of my face?" she asks.

"Was what because of your face?" I say, knowing I don't want to hear her question.

"That you couldn't really like me?"

I could say that I did like her, but that isn't what she means. I look up, the board says her train is coming in. I want to explain, but I don't know how she will react, if she'll be disgusted. It is hard to break silence, it's a habit not to.

"Was it because you're only part Chinese?" she asks.

Her train slams into the station, cushions to a stop. "Good luck on Mars," I say, as people push around us. I am unable to think of how to answer her, of what to say. She has pretty eyes, now, turned up at me, asking, what is so wrong with her that I wouldn't do the dance, the dance that men and women are supposed to do? She starts to duck her head, to get on the train.

I touch her arm, "San-xiang," I say, "it didn't have anything to do with you."

Her face is closed. It sounds like everything else I have said to her, a polite lie to escape feelings. The doors will close any time now. "San-xiang, I'm gay," I say, and gently push her on.

She stops in the door and looks back at me, looking in my face, while her mouth shapes the word. She doesn't understand right away. Then as the doors close I see a look of wonder as she begins to realize. The train starts up, accelerates away. I hope that in this moment she feels some sort of absolution, some understanding that it was not her lack.

I am relieved that I didn't have to see if that look of wonder was followed by disgust. And now, I tell myself, it doesn't matter anyway.

I get back to Peter's flat and there's a call. I barely catch it, slap the console. I am looking at the reason that I have to find another place to live.

"Hello," says the reason, "is Peter there?"

I glance at the clock. "He's running a little late, probably stopped for something," I say.

"Tell him Cinnabar called," he says.

"Sure," I say and he cuts the connection. So now I know his name. Peter is involved, a fact he keeps secret from me. It is hard to come back and find that Peter is in love. I've been gone on and off for four years, and I had thought, maybe, when I came back, that Peter and I could try again, that we've matured and now maybe it will work. But I never said anything to him, and he never said anything to me. It probably wouldn't have worked for all of the same reasons it didn't before. And now we're good friends.

This Cinnabar, he seems, well, short. I don't know how to explain how someone looks short on a monitor, but he does. I think he's a flyer. Peter always had a thing about fliers. He's not very good looking, I'm a lot better looking than he is. He seems nice. If he seemed like a son of a bitch it would be different. (Different from what, Zhang?)

I've hardly been home a week, and my life is so complicated already. Peter's flat is so small; tiny kitchen, main room, bedroom. I'm sleeping on the couch, which isn't very comfortable (I wake up some mornings without having the slightest idea where I am.) I should stay here, save my little bit of money left over from my Wuxi salary, wait until I get a job placement, but I don't know how long I can stand living here. I have to get out. I can't stand Peter pretending I don't complicate his life, I can't stand any of this.

"Hey, Rafael," Peter is at the door, balancing the canvas bag he uses for groceries. "Did you clean the flat?"

"And painted."

He looks around, "And you matched the old color exactly, down to the smudges."

"Hey," I call as he disappears into the kitchen, "I'm an engineer."

"Pijiu?" He tosses me a beer. "There, shook it for you."

"Cinnabar called," I say.

He comes back around the door again. "Oh yeah?" Not knowing what to say or how to act. Even though it's July, he's wearing the yellow jacket I sent him from China, shining with silk thread, embroidered with long-life medallions and stylized phoenix. Everybody wears jackets all the time. Fashion.

"No message, just tell you he called." I flick on the vid. "I went down the housing office today, the nearest available housing is upstate Pennsylvania. And it doesn't have running water. I got a prospectus for you." Now I have to think of an excuse for an errand so I can get out of here and Peter can call this flier person.

I develop the habit of walking the boardwalk. The air smells salty these days. It doesn't have that burnt smell anymore, the project to clean up the harbor must be working. Reassuring to know that something is working. But I miss the smell, for me it's exciting. Sexual. Not that I'm cruising these days. Hell, even if I wanted to, where would I take them, back to Peter's couch? And I'm too old to climb under the boardwalk and let some kid do me in the sand.

I remember kneeling in the sand, shivering, with the light coming down between the cracks in the boardwalk. Going to school in the day, pretending to be like everybody else, feeling like I had some secret knowledge, some understanding of the real world that the people I went to school with didn't have. Gooseflesh and the smell of ash. Some chickenhawk with his fingers locked in my hair.

I walk every night from eight until almost nine, regular as clockwork. The first couple of nights it's all right, but Friday night it's altogether too hot, and the boardwalk is crowded with people. Couples, girls in cheap flashy clothes, bright flimsey things. The young girls are shaving high up the backs of their necks, up even with their earlobes, and just leaving a tail of braided hair hang down.

"Ever had a hotdog?"

I'm leaning up against the railing, watching the kids go by. He's older than most of the kids, but only by a few years.

"Si," I say, "Yo habito aqui." 'I live here.'

For a moment he looks confused. He looks hispanic, but that doesn't mean he speaks spanish. That will teach me to try and be clever.

Then he grins. "Donde?"

"Coney Island," I say.

He shakes his head. "For a moment I didn't realize what you were saying, you know, I just didn't expect you to speak spanish. Chinese clothes and all."

"I grew up on Utica Avenue," I say. He's handsome. Dresses cheap, short matador jacket (no shirt) and tights. He has a tattoo of a tear at the corner of his left eye, it hangs on the edge of a sharp cheekbone. He's darker than I am. "So you were going to poison a foreign guest with a local hotdog."

He shrugs, "I just thought, here's this foreigner, all by himself on the boardwalk. Somebody ought to give him a taste of the ethnic cuisine."

We walk a bit. He struts, gestures as he talks. The boys seemed spaced along the walk at regular intervals. They lean against posts and watch us. Coneys. The couples become static, white noise. The salient features of the landscape are the boys, and this amazing young man walking with me who talks about growing up out here on the edge, in the part of Brooklyn some people call Bangladesh.

"See," he explains, "there's always going to be a group of people who aren't ideologically sound. There's always going to be a bad element fringe. So the Party doesn't mess with Bangladesh. We're a safety valve surrounding Coney Island. So out here we can be free."

"What about all the communes being established?" I ask. The girls dress in bright colors, the coneys dress dark. A coney in dark pants, dark sleeveless shirt watches us from the corner of his eye. He rests one muscled arm on a post.

"They won't stay," he says, airily. "Out here it never really changes. They pretend to clean it up, but they just pick up a few deviants and everybody else hides and two hours later the meat market is back in business."

Hot night for a meat market. I've seen it change. Used to be there wasn't anything out here, no couples, no hotdogs, just boarded up stands, the coneys and the chickenhawks and the squatters. The squatters are mostly gone and the whole place is now free marketeers and the people who want housing in the city bad enough to stick it out. They clean up the two hundred year old buildings, then make the neighborhood domestic.

He's so fresh and young. Is he waiting for me to make a move? I would if I could. "I have to get back," I say, regretfully.

"Good talking to you," he says.

"I come out here and walk pretty often," I say. "What's your name?"

"Invierno," he says. In Spanish that means winter. What kind of name is Invierno? Obviously not his real name. Not giving one's real name or number is a time-honored tradition out here on the boardwalk.

"I'm Rafael," I say. "Like the angel."

He grins and makes the sign of benediction, standing at the top of the steps.

When I glance back a second time he has already turned and stalks back down the boardwalk, prowling.

Back at Peter's building two women are carting boxes out the front door and piling them on the sidewalk. They watch me, flat, hostile faces. Their belongings make the usual pitiful pile on the sidewalk. I step over bluegreen pillows like the kind Peter has tossed on the floor, palm the door.

The hallway and the elevator are hot and airless, in China even the hallways were kept cool. I wonder how much money it would cost to keep the halls heated and cooled. There are old ducts, at one time the halls of this building were temperature controlled. In an old building like this it would help the tenants keep their own costs a little lower.

"Hey," I say, "someone is moving out of the building."

Peter is flicking through vid programs. "Who was it?"

"Two girls. No one I know." Peter must be as frustrated as I am. I leave coneys on the boardwalk, he talks to his flier. "Maybe I could rent their place."

"Don't rent, save your money until you get a job," Peter says.

"You need your own place back," I say.

"You're no problem, and you pay half the rent."

"How's what's his name, the flier." I say pointedly. How's your love life? I've got this roommate and he's driving me crazy.

Peter glances up at me, back at the vid. "Cinnabar's just a friend. He's not a flier, he's retired." He sits stiff and defensive. I shouldn't have said it.

"I need a place of my own," I say and sit down next to him.

"You don't get a job," he says, "you'll start borrowing money from me. Pretty soon they'll kick both of us out."

"Hey," I say, "I'll rent for a few months and then we'll move to Pennsylvania together."

Then I get him a beer and rub his shoulders.

"A regular Florence Nightingale," he says.

The room has ghosts.

So I become a tenant. I move to the fifth floor, griping about having to take the psychopathic elevator to the top of the building. Moving is not difficult; as Peter remarks, for a man with a truly astounding wardrobe, I seem painfully short of possessions. (Not that my wardrobe is really much, it's just Chinese.) The flat is two rooms, not counting the tiny kitchen and bathroom, both about the same size.

I live in a dump. "The floor has to go," I say. Someone painted the walls aqua, the floor is bluegreen slip, it's like living under water on a bad film set. Cheap. But this building was built before the second depression, when they built to last, and underneath that garbage is a solid floor, underneath the walls is good solid wood frame. I wonder what would happen if I knocked the wall out between the two big rooms. The little front room, which is supposed to be the main room, has no window. The back room is barely big enough for a bed. Together they would make one decent room.

But it's my own. Once moved in I decide I have to take my life in hand. I've been home for two weeks and haven't done anything but sleep on Peter's couch and walk the boardwalk.

The morning after I move in I put on my black suit and go to the Office of Occupational Resources.

The office has carpeting, something that marks it as a step up on the scale of bureaucracy, but why is it all so ugly? This office is dirty green; gray-green carpeting (the kind that doesn't show dirt, wear or aesthetic value) pond-scum green halfway up the wall and scuffed white the rest of the way. I meet a middle-aged woman, dressed in a boxy beige suit with tails that come precisely to the backs of her knees.

"Comrade Zhang?" she says, "I'm Cecily Hester. I'm the counselor who will be assigned to your placement."

I have a counselor assigned to me. I am not certain how to feel about this. "Counselor," I say, politely.

She indicates a seat, not at the desk but at the flyspecked window that looks out on the street, and sits down beside me. "Tell me, just exactly what does an organic engineer do? Are you a medical engineer?"

So I launch into a description of my training.

"We'll have to start looking around to see who could use your particular skills," she says, thoughtfully. I suspect she still isn't sure just what I do.

"What kind of people do you usually place?" I ask.

"Doctors and highly technical people like yourself." She gets up, "I'll need to get some information on the system." I follow her over and we sit, she behind the desk.

"How long does it take to place someone?" I ask.

"That depends on what they do. A few months. Do you have a preferences as to what part of the country you'd work in?"

"New York City," I say.

"East Coast," she says, entering the information, "Northeast."

"I'd really like to stay in New York."

"Engineer," she says, "you have a very specialized skill. Hopefully I'll be able to find a firm in the city that is interested in you, but it's not very likely."

"Do you mean I won't be able to get a job?" I ask. "They offered me work in China." Marx and Mao Zedong but I sound desperate.

"You'll be able to get a job," she says. "Off the top of my head, I can think of two places that will probably be interested in you. One is in California, one is in Arizona."

"The Corridor," I say. Baffin Island, only permanently.

"They have a beautiful compound," she says.

She asks me to repeat my education, enters it all. I give her a rec with my resume and final project, my beach house, on it.

I sense dislocation ahead. Moving. I feel so tired, life was a hell of a lot easier when I was just a job engineer, another dumb construction tech.

What the hell am I going to do? All that time, Baffin Island, Nanjing. All that, so I can work in the Corridor? "Ah, if this is going to take a few months, can you help me get some sort of short term work, maybe as a construction tech? The only housing available is in Pennsylvania, and they told me it doesn't have running water, so I'm living in a commune out in Coney Island and I have to help with the building maintenance."

"I'm sure you don't need to be a construction tech," she says, sounding a little as if I were research scientist who just offered to be a janitor. "Let me think about it and I'll call you."

The ride out to Coney Island takes forever.

All this time on my hands. When I finished the job on Baffin Island and passed my exams, I waited ten months to go to China, but I worked construction jobs for all but the last month. I don't remember time hanging on me during that month. Since then I have been in China, always struggling to catch up, struggling with language, with taking three years worth of courses in two regular school years and a summer.

China falls into two, neat halves-not chronologically, the first 'half' is really only about three, four months, the last 'half' the better part of two years. But there is Haibao, and then there is the time after Haibao, the white time. That's the way I think of it, I don't know why. Or rather, I know some of the reasons why, but they don't seem sufficient to describe the feeling.

The white time is crowded with activity. I have never studied so intently as I did in the year after Haibao died, I don't suppose I ever will again. For a year I was this amazing creature, the envy of my classmates, Zhang, the huaqiao who destroys grade curves. I read the assignments, did supplemental readings. I got tutoring assignments because I discovered having to explain systems analysis to some Martian made it clearer in my own head (especially because Alexi had an agenda of his own, he asked questions that made me think about systems in different ways than the textbooks did.)

I did it the way you'll play solitaire for an afternoon, because the alternative was being alone with myself.

The apartment is depressing. All that green. I try to read, but I start thinking about what I could do with it. On a job once, we used this sandstone flooring. The flat isn't very big, the flooring wasn't outrageously expensive and it would be better than bluegreen slip. I wonder what the subflooring is like.

I shut off the climate control, open the door and put my new bed and boxes out in the hall and tear up a corner of the flooring. Underneath the flooring is hundred year old thinsulation and under that was chipboard. Imagine having so much wood you can use it as trash building material.

"What are you doing?" Someone says from the doorway. It's Yoni, one of the two people who chair the co-op's managing committee.

"I'm going to replace the floor," I say.

"You should have cleared it with the committee first," he says.

"I'll pay for it," I say.

"That's not the point. What if you get halfway through and stop. The co-op would have to replace the rest of it. You're damaging the building." He strokes his walrus moustache.

"I'll put some money in an zhuazhu account until I get it finished," I say.

"A what?" he asks.

"Zhuazhu." I say. I'm not exactly sure how to translate. "An account to hold money. A holding account. I'll put the cost of replacing the floor in a bank account in the co-op's name. When I'm finished, you can give it back. It's what they do in China. Look at this, you know what's underneath this floor? Chipboard."

"What's chipboard?" he asks.

"Pressed wood chips. Look at it."

He comes and crouches next to me. "Hey," he says, "it's kind of pretty. Do you think that's under most of the floors?"

I shrug. "Depends on how the place was put together, if this flat was remodeled. I'd say they have it next door, it looks like these two flats used to be one. See how it goes under the wall?"

"Vanni might like this stuff on her floor," Yoni says.

"You have to seal it." He wants to know why and I explain how wood is soft and damages. Then I explain about sealers.

He goes next door and gets Vanni, my neighbor. It's noon but Vanni is a bartender and at first she's not at all thrilled about being woken up to look at her neighbor's floor. She's come by a couple of times to see what I was doing, she's a little dark thing, not more than twenty-five.

She crouches down sleepily. "There's that under the blue stuff?"

"Hard to tell," I say, "but probably. These old buildings are like archeology, they come in layers."

"Hey Yoni," she says, grinning, "do you think there's another layer under that garbage I've got for plumbing? Some sort of decent pipes? Maybe copper?"

"Most archeology is done on garbage dumps, isn't it?" Yoni asks.

"You mean under the garbage is more garbage. Rafael," she says, "want to come rip up my floor? I can't pay much."

"If I don't get a job soon I'll rip it up and if you've got chipboard I'll seal it."

I don't seal the chipboard on my floor. I knock out the dividing wall and repair the wallboard at the break, paint the walls white and then lay pale sandstone squares from somewhere out in the Corridor. The whole job takes six days, mostly because I don't have much in the way of tools. I rent a cutter for four hours for the wall, and buy a little hand cutter to trim stone, but other than that the whole thing is pretty much done by hand. Once in awhile I find myself looking for shapes of states in the insulation and stone. Divining my future. Some people read tea leaves, I read building materials. The stone is a bitch to haul in, but when I'm finished the place is light and clean looking. Next job will be making the window bigger.

For a few minutes I feel pleased with myself. I haven't felt adrift all day, and sitting in this apartment I now have a place where I can escape the oppressive shabbiness of everything.

But hell, there's not a lot to do. Watch my little vid. I have a kitchen table and two chairs, and a bed. Nothing to do but think about the interview and all the questions I should have asked. Why did I even bother to redo the place? I'm not going to live here. I've done it all for a stranger, who will probably hate it because there's no bedroom. Time to get out, otherwise I'm going to brood myself into catatonia.

I wander downstairs to see if Peter is in. To talk, to tell him about the interview.

"Zhang," Peter says when he opens the door, surprised. He doesn't usually call me that. "Come in. How's the place?"

"Bucuo." Not bad. "Mostly finished, you should come up and see it sometime when I have beer in the cooler. You busy?"

"No, a friend just stopped by," he gestures to come in.

It's the one who calls. He is short, short and tiny. Stringy. Definitely a flyer. "Hi," I say, "I'm Zhang, or Rafael."

"I met you once a couple of years ago," the he says, "Cinnabar Chavez." He stands and offers his hand. "You and Peter were at Commemorative."

"I remember," I lie. There were a lot of nights at Commemorative, a lot of flyers. But this time I connect, maybe it's the last name. I guess the reason I didn't connect before was that I had it in my head that he died. Obviously not.

"Pijiu?" Peter says, elaborately casual.

"Sure," I say. It occurs to me that I'm not going to talk to Peter about what to do with my life. At least not tonight. "So you are Peter's secret," I say.

Peter pops out of the kitchen, looking irritated. Somehow this delights me, makes me feel wicked. Peter ducks back in the kitchen.

"I've heard a lot about you," Cinnabar says. "You and Peter have been friends a long time. Which do you prefer, Zhang or Rafael?"

"Which does Peter call me?"

"Mostly Rafael."

"Rafael is fine. Peter's a good guy," I say, "a good friend. The best."

"I can see that," Cinnabar says softly.

From the kitchen Peter calls, "What is this, my eulogy?"

"Except, of course," I add, "he thinks he's everybody's mother."

This strikes some cord in Cinnabar, he starts laughing. Peter comes out of the kitchen scarlet with embarrassment, silently hands me my beer, and glares at Cinnabar when he gives him his.

"Don't look at me!" Cinnabar protests, "I didn't make him say it! I didn't say a word!"

I am in trouble. This job thing, I have too much time to think about it.

I read and watch the vid. In the evening I walk on the boardwalk, sometimes late at night go back out and on Friday night I even end up underneath the boardwalk with a kid who looks seventeen but says he's twenty. We're at a stretch where the stands are boarded up for the night and there aren't as many couples, but still, above my head there are the click-click-click of heels. The act is fast and depressing, sordid without being thrilling.

I remember being a coney. Hawks seemed old.

White time. Baffin Island time. Two weeks of my life slide by. A couple of evenings I go downstairs and talk to Peter and Cinnabar. Cinnabar is having a party, I agree to go to make Peter happy. Instead, the Friday of Cinnabar's party becomes a landmark, a navigation point, something happening. It's like a white out, where the wind is blowing the snow sideways, and the windows of the observation station might as well have been painted white. We came back from Halsey Station in one, using instruments to navigate. I got so disoriented I had trouble standing up when we got inside, I'd lost all sense of right and left, up and down.

Then Cecily Hester from The Office of Occupational Resources calls. "I have lots of news," she says. She is excited. "Western Technologies in California. They're offering ninety-two hundred, but I think that's low. It's only to get you to come and talk to them anyway. And I think I've got you something to tide you over."

"In California?" I say stupidly. Ninety-two hundred? I made eleven hundred a year as a construction tech. Thirty-two in my year of 'hazardous duty' on Baffin Island. My father lives somewhere in California.

"Right, Western Technologies. But the place that's really going to be interested in you is New Mexico-Texas. That's where you're going to get the real offers. They're both multinationals, with headquarters in the free economic zone in Hainandao. That's why they can afford to offer the salaries. Of course, when your salary is paid by a free market corporation, you're taxed. I imagine you've never been taxed. It's a lot of money, thirty, forty percent, but that's still a very good salary." Comrade Cecily Hester smiles at me, "I've learned a great deal about Organic Engineers in the last three days, Engineer Zhang. There aren't very many of you outside of China. It's nice to see that you came back."

The braindrain to China. All the brightest and best go there. How funny that she lumps me in with molecular biologists who go to China to do grad work and never return.

"Also," she says, "Brooklyn College would like to have you teach an Engineering course. They were very excited when I told them you were in the city." She looks thoughtful, "It's a pity they don't pay much, that would allow you to stay in the city. But they're not going to be able to come anywhere sixty."

So much money. "Thank you," I say.

Cinnabar's Party. I'm not sure I'm in a party mood. I'd really like to talk to Peter about this New Mexico-Texas thing, but I probably won't get much chance. I have a bad feeling about this party.

I decide to wear the black suit Haibao said was so conservative it wasn't. I wonder if Liu Wen still plays jiaqiu, I never found out if he was arrested or if he escaped that night when the club was raided. If he did escape, I don't know if he ever found out that Haibao was dead. What would they think of Liu Wen at Cinnabar's party? Would they understand how decadent it was to be beautiful and appear to throw it all away?

I take the train down to Brooklyn Heights where Cinnabar lives. Peter is helping to host so he's been there all day. I carry beer, my contribution.

Cinnabar lives in an old building, it was probably once a single family residence, now apartments. Cinnabar has the top two floors. The hallway is cluttered with kite frames, a bicycle, a couple of chairs turned on their sides. He's a consultant for one of the companies that supplies kite frames. The door is open. Cinnabar's place is pretty big, rather dark and cool. I haven't been to many places the size of this, Cinnabar Chavez obviously does pretty well, but I've been to a lot of places that looked much the same, if smaller.

It's an old building, built strong and decaying slowly. Inside seems shabby and cheap. It's not, not by New York standards, I know. (I think of the Wuxi complex, beautiful red tile roofs.) On one wall is a short vid loop. It's a flyer hooking into a kite harness, talking to a kid on his crew. The flyer isn't Cinnabar, although he's hispanic. After a moment I realize the kid is, a young Cinnabar. There's no sound, just this flyer jacking in, a real short clip of him taking off in an old looking kite with bright blue and violet silk. Then a clip of another flyer, probably Cinnabar, touching down in a kite with red silk. Then repeat.

There's music, that tinkly, percussion stuff for pattern dancing. I take my beer into the kitchen and stuff it into a cold box already full of beer and wine. Nobody's dancing yet. I see Peter talking to a couple of people and say hello. I go back and get a beer so I have something to do with myself until I fit into the party. I see Cinnabar talking to another flyer, a woman with long crinkly hair, a red jacket and hips like a twelve-year-old. I don't recognize many flyers, I know some of their silk colors and that's all, and I haven't been to a race since before China.

Cinnabar doesn't seem to have much furniture. Makes a great space for parties.

I drink my beer and say hello to a couple of people I know from Peter's building. I end up talking to Robert, who doesn't know anybody here either. "You're in the building? How come I haven't see you at the meetings?"

"I've only been there a couple of weeks."

We make small talk. It's eight-thirty, I figure I can sneak out at eleven, maybe ten-thirty.

I glance around and to my astonishment make eye contact with the guy from the boardwalk, Invierno.

"It's the angel!" he says and saunters over.

"Hey," I say, delighted. "Are you a friend of Cinnabar's?"

He is, well not exactly, he's a friend of a friend. "I almost didn't come tonight," he says.

"I'm glad you came."

He knows a lot of people at the party. "The woman talking to Cinnabar? That's Gargoyle, the flier. Only her name's really Angel. And that guy over there? That's Previn Tabat, the guy on the news."

He tells me that the flyer in the vid is Cinnabar's elder brother, dead in a flying accident. He flirts with me. He flirts with Robert. He has large dark eyes and very long eyelashes. He's dressed in his matador's outfit again.

"I haven't seen you on the boardwalk," I say.

"I don't get out too much." He shrugs. "I work at a bank, I work weird hours in Routing." Something about keeping track of credit.

Robert drifts off while we stand talking. Invierno's such a kid, full of himself, aggressive, almost obnoxious. But I keep finding him funny.

"Dance with me," he says. People have started dancing.

"I don't know how," I say, amused.

"I don't believe you."

"It's true," I protest, laughing. "I really don't know how."

"I'll teach you a pattern," he promises, and taking me by the wrist, pulls me to the center of the room where we are most noticeable, and teaches me a pattern, a simple one. We dance and I think he'll get tired of me, but he doesn't. He changes pattern dancing into something baroque, to go with his Spanish clothes. He invests the steps with a stiffness, machismo. He holds my hand high and when he looks at me, he has veiled his eyes under those lashes. He looks like a willful boy who is sensitive to slights. And the more I laugh, the more he warms under the attention.

So, of course, late in the party I take him home. We slip down the steps to the subway and sit on the train, casually uninterested in each other, my left knee touching his right, while an old man sleeps across from us and a girl in a waitress' uniform knits next to us.

I take him into my room, out of the dark hall where the lights go off the moment you open your door, and he says, "This is where you live?"

I imagine it's too bare for him, I don't even have a chair. "I haven't been here long."

Then he surprises me. "This is really nice," he says softly, enviously. "Is this the way they do things in China?"

"No," I say, "in China you'd program lights and wall colors. And there'd be more furniture."

He nods, touches the walls with the tips of his fingers. "It's white. Doesn't white mean death?"

"It also means life. It depends on whether you're eastern or western."

"What are you?" he asks.

I shrug. "A little of both."

He stands there, looking at me. Waits for me. I am the older man, I make the first move. That is a shock, too. I've always been the pick-up, or we were both young and there was no older/younger, like with Peter. But now we are in my place and I have Invierno.

So I take him to bed.

I sleep and wake, turn carefully on the bed not to bother him, sleep again, coming half-awake to shift. He shifts against me a couple of times, often only a moment after I do. We didn't sleep until four or five. The light through the one window is bright by mid-morning. He has a lovely shoulder, hairless, the color of tea. Broad flat shoulder bone like an ax.

Used to be I'd be lying here wishing he would leave. Young men leave, don't even sleep, they grab their tights, stand in the bedroom like one-legged storks, getting dressed. Once I'd have shifted around until he woke up, then I'd offer him breakfast. I'll be thirty-one in four months. I'm tired but I like him here, sleeping on his stomach, his face turned away from me.

He told me the tear tattoo was a prison thing a hundred years ago. Fashion now. After the liberation, gay men doing reform through labor had the tattoo. A totem. A sign. A signal. I don't touch him, he'd wake up.

Someone knocks on the door and Invierno sits straight up.

"Just a minute!" I call.

"Shit," Invierno says, rubbing his face. "What time is it?"

"Around ten-thirty." I drag on the pants to my suit-lying on the floor next to the bed-and push my hair out of my face, open the door just wide enough to see out. It's Vanni, my next door neighbor. She's fresh, brown face turned up, big eyes, wild black hair caught back.

"Oh," she says, "were you asleep?"

I slip out in the airless hall, the heat hits hard, makes me feel as if I can't breathe. "What are you doing up so early on a Saturday morning?" Vanni works late hours, I hear her come in at two, three in the morning.

She's embarrassed, "I was just up, I was wondering about if you could help me strip my floor this weekend. I didn't mean to wake you."

"Sure, I'll help you strip it." I say, "I'm so bored I don't know what to do with myself. Look, I've got company, are you going to be home later this morning?"

"Oh God," she says, covers her mouth, "Oh Rafael, I'm really sorry. I'll be home."

I smile at her, "Okay, I'll see you later." I guess I should be irritated, but I'm pleased. I like the idea of having neighbors.

Invierno is still sitting on the bed, bare feet on the floor. "I didn't know it was so late," he says.

"Are you late for work?"

"No, but I've got to do some stuff first." He grabs his matador pants. In the bathroom my reflection is a revelation, haggard face, hair stringing all over the place. I splash water on my face, drag a brush through my hair and tie it back.

While he's in the bathroom I make coffee. He downs a cup, refuses my offer of breakfast. I tell him to call me if he's free, give him my number. He stuffs it in the pocket of his jacket without looking at it or me. The morning after. But he smiles at me in the hallway.

Smiles are like tears. Totems. Signs. Signals.

In the white time, you cling to signals.

I become a teacher.

It's laughable, in a way. The way I become a teacher is simply to have someone say 'you're a teacher.' A professor no less.

Brooklyn College is an old school with a long and illustrious tradition. They say that even before the liberation, anyone who had a college diploma could go to Brooklyn College and that it was free. There's a statue of Christopher Brin in front of Martyr's Hall and a plaque explaining that and that Brin was a graduate of Brooklyn College. I don't exactly understand the logistics of all this. If anyone who wanted to could go to school, how did they keep from having classes of 200 or 2000 students?

My preparation for teaching my course, a course titled "Engineering-Systems Applications" is an interview with Dean Eng. Dean Eng asks me my teaching experience and the only thing I can think of is tutoring. I tell her I tutored a Martian settler and she asks me if I could possibly get him to enroll in my class here. He could audit for free.

I use the terminal in her office to send Alexi Dormov a telex.

Her major piece of advice is to wait until to class has started and then walk in without looking at the class, walk straight to the blackboard and write my name. Then announce my name, the class name and call numbers and say that anyone who needs to add the class to their schedule should see me afterwards.

I assume this is some method of intimidating students with professorial manner.

"Not at all," she explains, smiling in a kind of motherly way, "it's a method of reducing stage fright. This way, when you turn around and look at all those faces you'll have something to say."

She is absolutely correct. There are fifteen people officially registered for my course, but when I turn around after writing 'Zhang Zhong Shan' on the board there are easily thirty people in the classroom. I've never talked in front of so many people in my life and the minute I start with my lecture they're going to know that I'm a fraud. I make my announcement about which class this is and nobody moves. Thirty faces, almost half of them ABC, all looking at me, most of them Invierno's age. My knees are shaking. I stand behind the desk.

I glance back at the board behind me. The class before mine is a required politics class, someone has diagrammed the classic Marxist historical progression on the board: Primitive Society to Feudalism, Feudalism to Industrial Revolution to Capitalism to Proletariat Revolution to Socialism to Communism. All sorts of irrelevant things run through my mind. My first year in China, my roommate, Xiao Chen, was a Scientific History major. I can remember helping him study for exams. I can still remember the three major advancements in pure science in the twentieth century: Relativity, Quantum Physics and Chaos Studies.

"I know you are all going to be disappointed," I say, "but this is an Engineering course, not a politics course."

Some of them smile politely.

"There is a member of the class who is present but several minutes behind us," I say. "We will have a Martian auditing the class by monitor, so please speak up loudly so Alexi can hear your contributions to class." My voice sounds very shaky. They cannot possibly believe I am a teacher. But they all sit very expectantly. When I start to talk, they all start their transcribers, highlighters ready.

When I wrote it, my opening lecture seemed brilliant. I don't really want to teach anything today, I just wanted to get my feet wet and entertain them a little. Looking at my notes I realize I'm going to bore them all bonkers. I talk about how we think of using systems, and how we assume that we jack into the machine.

"Stimulation of your nervous system from an artificial system is illegal," I say. "Why?"

There is silence. Madre de Dios, what do I do if no one answers the question? Then one young man raises his hand and I call on him gratefully.

"Because it's addicting," he says.

"How many of you have ever been to see a kite race?" I ask. It sounds like one of those teacher-questions (I am amazed at how much I sound like a teacher.) Most of them raise their hands. "Well, a flier experiences the kite as a kind of second body," I say. "The flier feels the kites sail as if they were the flier's wing, and if the kite develops a structural problem then the flier feels it as an ache. Something has got to be stimulating the flier's nervous system," I say. They glaze over. Did you know you can see boredom? I have other examples, the medical stuff in China, for one, but I decide to just finish up on fliers and forget other examples. I tell them about the system at Wuxi, where people didn't jack in. Some of them look interested but nobody uses their highlighters. "In the future we might all be cyborgs linked into systems. In that future, we would all be organic engineers." This sounds like a teacher lecture. Amazing how you don't have to have any training to sound like every dull teacher you ever had in middle school.

I explain about organic engineers. I expected the lecture to take an hour, but I find it's only taken twenty-five minutes. I tack on a little about the relationship of science to society, about how social thought always lags behind scientific change. Mostly because of thinking about Xiao Chen. Then I realize I need an example.

What's an example of how social thought lags behind scientific change? I mean, it's a cliche, but other than talking even more about how everyone is afraid of feedback but how it is the way things will go in the future, I really can't think of anything. Religion. But everybody knows about religion, and it's not relevant to them.

"Take for example the diagram behind me on the board. Does anyone recognize it?"

They all look at me, blank. Of course they all recognize it. But it's politics. Nobody in their right mind is going to volunteer anything about politics. Keep your head down, don't get into trouble. Nervousness makes me a tyrant, I point at one young woman. "Tell me what it means."

She looks around, hoping for escape. Normally I'd feel sympathy for her but now I am only concerned with how to fill another fifteen minutes.

"Ah, it's Marx's analysis-"

Her voice is so soft I can barely hear her. "Sweetheart," I say, trying to put her at ease, "you've got to talk loud enough to be heard on Mars."

Louder she says, "It's a Marxist diagram of historical progression."

"Right. Now, what the diagram says is that primitive society eventually organizes into feudal society. Usually as a result of farming. That society eventually allows a few landlords-whether you call them lords or landholders or whatever-to accrue enough capital to invest in something other than farming. That capital forms the base for an industrial revolution, which paves the way for capitalist society. Capitalism exploits workers the way Feudalism exploits serfs. But capitalism is an unstable system, with it's boom and bust cycles, it's violent corrections, and eventually there is a proletariat revolution and a socialist system is established. So far so good?"

I expect them to be bored out of their minds, they've been chanting this relationship since junior middle school, but they are rigid with attention, the glaze of boredom is gone. Apparently there is some novelty in having an engineering teacher lecture them on politics.

"Okay," I say, "when did China move from primitive to feudal?"

"The Emperor Qin," someone says dutifully.

"From feudal to capitalist?"

There is a moment of silence. Finally an ABC raises his hand.

"Laoshi," he says formally, 'Teacher,' "Mao Zedong changed the diagram. The revolution in China was a peasant revolution, not a proletariat revolution."

"Wrong," I say. The young man's eyes get large. "Lenin changed the diagram. Other than that you are perfectly correct." I sound like Comrade Wei, my calculus teacher in middle school. Marx and Lenin I hated that man.

There is a nervous laugh. I find it very exciting to have their attention. "Can you name me an example of a country that did have a proletariat revolution?"

A young woman pops out without raising her hand, "We did."

"Right. In the early twentieth century the national debt and the trade deficit of the old United States precipitated the second depression. In effect, the country went bankrupt, and as a result, so did the economy of every first world nation at the time except for Japan, which managed to keep from total bankruptcy but lost most of it's markets, and for Canada and Australia, which created the Canadian-Australian alliance, a holding measure to preserve their own systems which survives until this day. The Soviet Union also went into bankruptcy because it was deeply invested in the U.S. bond market, whatever that was," they all laugh, we've all been taught that the U.S.S.R. was deeply hurt in the economic collapse because of their involvement in the U.S. bond market, but I'll be damned if I ever met anyone who really knew what that meant. "And what did China do?"

"Went back to a soft currency system," someone volunteers.

"What is soft currency?" I ask.

Silence.

The boy who called me laoshi has his nerve back. "Ah, it is an economic system which does not tie it's own currency into the world market."

"Meaning?" I ask.

"Meaning," he takes a breath, "that a Chinese yuan inside the borders of China had value-that it bought things-but that outside the Chinese border it was just a piece of paper."

"Ah," I say. Then I tell the truth. "You're the first person ever to explain that to me. Unless I slept through it in Middle School, which is possible." Honest laughter this time.

I continue. "The U.S. could no longer provide social services, keep schools open, hospitals, banks. Eventually, the Communist Party organized well enough under Christopher Brin to take over portions of New York City and attempted to provide basic social services. We will skip over the struggles of the early party, which was, as everyone knows, given a major shot in the arm by the help of the Chinese who had managed to get their economic shit together."

Grins in the room.

"Along comes the Second Civil War, led by Brin until he was killed in Atlanta and after that by Darwin Iacomo and Zhou Xie-zhi and the United States becomes a socialist country. So there we have it, Capitalism to Proletariat revolution to Socialism. Now," I ask, "where is the American Feudal period?"

Actually, it was a Canadian who first asked me that, Karin, happily poking holes in my education. The class has the same answer I do, which is to say that they have no idea.

"Well," I say, enjoying myself immensely and not giving Karin any credit, "unless you count slavery, which was regional, there was no feudal period. And the only American primitive period was the Native Americans, and their economic history is discontinuous from ours."

A young woman who hasn't spoken thus far raises her hand. "Our feudalism was in Europe," she says.

I nod. "Okay," I say, "I'll give you that."

Up until now everything I've said has been fine. I stop. I don't really have the nerve to go on. I look up, there are students in every seat, and there are two people leaning on windowsills. They are all waiting, waiting for me to make my point. "But now, all of this so far has been very fine from a political point of view. But from a scientific point of view it is clearly a very Newtonian way of thinking."

They all watch me. I don't know what they are thinking.

"Newtonian," I say, "From Newton. The guy with the apple." Marx and Mao Zedong, I am the last person anyone would ever expect to be standing here lecturing on science and politics. Maybe I can just explain why it's Newtonian and stop there, that doesn't seem too dangerous.

"Newton thought of the Universe as like a giant clock. He said that the universe was rather like a mechanism, wound up and set in motion by God and therefore moving in grand patterns, much like planetary orbits. The nineteenth and twentieth century were mostly involved with trying to figure out Newton's patterns and describe them all.

"Marx attempted to reduce society to it's component forces. For Newton, the forces that described the universe were basically gravity, motion and inertia. Marx's major forces were economic. He thought that an analysis of economic relationships would explain the movement of history. And when he had analyzed these relationships he could extrapolate to predict the way society would move in the future." I tap on the board. "This is his analysis."

Some nods. I notice the flicker of highlighters. "I would appreciate it you didn't take this down," I say softly. "You will not be tested on any of this."

The young man who calls me laoshi grins and leans back.

"Marx assumed that either things were predictable or they were random. Things are either predictable or random, aren't they?" It is a trick question, these are engineering students. Engineering tends to work with things we can solve. Things we can solve are usually predictable. "What are the two kinds of predictable equations?" After I ask it I realize they may not know.

A young man, "Linear or periodic."

"Right. Linear. If I drop this book you can calculate the speed of the book as it falls. Correct? Linear or periodic?"

"Linear," he says.

I tap the blackboard behind me. "Linear or periodic?"

"It's not an equation," says the woman who said our Feudal period was in Europe.

"Ah, but it looks like a graph, would the equation be linear or periodic?"

"Linear," a couple of people say. Obviously. It's a line, from primitive to the communist utopia.

"Give me an example of periodic?"

The laoshi young man. "The seasons."

"Right, spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall, winter. Capitalism assumed that an economy cycles in a boom and bust cycle. Expansion, adjustment, expansion, adjustment. After all, economics is not unpredictable, is it? The law of supply and demand holds true, reduce the supply and demand will force prices higher. A system that's predictable isn't random.

"So which was right, Marx with his linear view of history, or capitalism with it's cyclical view? Obviously not capitalism, because history didn't repeat. We did progress from primitive society to feudalism, to capitalism. Unless the cycle is just longer than we realize and we are all going to drop back to primitive and start the climb all over again."

"But a periodic equation is a loop," the feudalism woman says, "it has to repeat exactly."

"We're using mathamatics as metaphors," I explain. "Science filters into the general public as metaphors that describe out world, our history. For Marx, there were only two possibilities, that history was either predictable or it was random. If it was random, then it should have behaved in a random fashion, but Newton had described the universe as governed by natural laws. Marx's genius was in determining that social history was also governed by recognizable factors. He set out to systematically define those factors-the basic ones economic-and then, once he thought he had, he did for society what Newton's system did for planetary motion, he predicted the future."

I should stop. But it would sound ridiculous if I stopped. And there's something exciting about standing up here, thinking all this, saying all this.

"That is what you have been taught, and that's the prevailing social view. It's basically a Newtonian view. Since Newton we've had a number of major revolutions in the way we think the universe works, three of them in the twentieth century. The first was Relativity, the second was Quantum Mechanics, the third was Chaos. What is chaos?"

Laoshi says, "The study of complex, non-linear systems."

"Good. What's the Butterfly effect?"

"Laoshi, Pardon me?"

"Any of you interested in Physics?" I ask. "Can someone describe 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions'?"

The young woman who said American feudalism occurred in Europe says, "Sensitive dependence on initial conditions' refers to the way small factors affect non-linear systems." The definition is textbook, the voice is Brooklyn. She and the ABC, I like them.

"Right," I say, "The most classic example is weather, which is not random-for example thunderstorms occur at the leading edge of low pressure system. But weather is not cyclic, if it rained on August the ninth last year that doesn't tell you what it will do this year. The mean average temperature for this year is not the mean average temperature for last year, nor this century for last century. In fact, the climate of the earth has changed radically, through ice ages and warm periods, and no one has ever been able to identify a pattern that repeats itself.

"If I am trying to predict weather, I can feed huge quantities of information into a system; temperature and wind direction and humidity for places all over the globe, the effect of the earth's rotation, land masses, mountain elevations, oceans, and get a fairly reasonable representation of weather. But if I change one temperature in one location by one-tenth of a degree, pretty soon my model's weather will start to diverge from actual weather conditions. In a few months, the system and the real world won't resemble each other at all. Weather shows sensitive dependence on initial conditions. It is so sensitive to variables that the movement of air by a butterfly's wings in New York eventually has an effect on dust storms in Beijing.

Stop now, the conclusion is obvious. I pause. But they are waiting, thirty people willing me to finish. And I want to, I am proud of my theory, I don't want to be careful ths one time.

"History is also a complex system. It is not random, but it is non-linear. Marx's predictions were based on the assumption that history is a linear system, and using those assumptions he predicted the future. But if weather is a complex system, it seems reasonable to assume that history is also a complex system. History is sensitive dependent on initial conditions. You cannot predict the future."

There is a sigh in the classroom. I have said what everybody knows but no one says. It is in the room, hanging.

Marx was wrong.

"For class on Thursday please read the first chapter and prepare problems two, six and seven," I say. "I know we haven't discussed how to do the problems, but I want to see how you tackle engineering problems using systems. That's it, I'll see you Thursday if I'm still a teacher."

They sit for a moment. I check the time, it is a little over an hour. I am wringing wet under my black suit, exhilarated, more than a little scared. Suddenly they all start getting up and six or seven people are standing around my desk asking to be admitted to the class.

Apparently nobody says anything, because come Thursday, I am still teaching. Nobody that is except Alexi Dormov, who leaves me his usual list of questions and a note. "If you keep this up, you're going to end up here. Hope you like goats."

Comrade Cecily Hester from the Office of Occupational Resources calls me. I can feel see her excitement. "I've been reviewing the responses I'm getting, I think you had better come talk to my supervisor," she says. "I think you're rather out of my league. Congratulations. How about today?" she says.

Today is fine. Around ten.

I get dressed in my Chinese suit and go downtown where I meet with Comrade Cecily Hester's superior, Comrade Huang. Comrade Huang is ABC. As one goes further up in any hierarchy, one meets more and more ethnically Chinese. We discuss what kinds of things the companies will offer me, what should be important to me. Comrade Huang talks about the difference between paid salary and the value of benefits. "When you enter a big multinational," he says, "you are entering a community. You should be aware of the kinds of environments the managerial philosophies create."

Whatever that means.

"If I decide on a company, can there be a three month trial?" I ask. "Can we set something up so that either I can get out of the company or they can let me go if I'm not comfortable or right for their environment?" He says it's possible.

Comrade Huang calls two corporations, Western Technologies and New Mexico-Texas Systems and talks to them while I wait in a shabby green waiting room with dusty slipcovers on government issue chairs.

"Engineer Zhang," he says when he comes out to get me, "would you possibly be able to fly out to Arizona for an interview Friday?"

No, I am thinking, I'm not ready. "I have a class to teach," I say.

"I understand that is Tuesday and Thursday, this would be only Friday and Saturday."

There is nothing to say, no defense.

I fly to Albuquerke to meet representatives of New-Mexico Texas Light Industrials. I am met at the airport by a driver and a representative. Ms. Ngyuen is as brown as my mother and despite her Asian name looks Chicano. She has a short bob of hair, conservative, and wears a tan short sleeved shirt and pants; like a geologist or an archeologist. Albuquerke is in the Western Corridor, water is a constant problem and Ms. Ngyuen, and I talk water all the way to the headquarters.

I expect something dramatic like Wuxi Technologies, perhaps an oasis of green in the middle of this rocky landscape. We come to a chainlink fence and drive parallel to it for miles. Beyond the chainlink is nothing, the landscape is the same on either side. We stop at a guardhouse, turn in and go through a gate. The sign says 'New Mexico-Texas Light Industrials' but it's very small.

It is ten in the morning and light sears the landscape. I keep hoping for the oasis, but we drive for fifteen minutes and see nothing but rock and brush. The brush looks dead; Ms. Ngyuen informs me that it comes alive in the spring. Like Baffin Island, I imagine, the living things live their whole lives in that narrow time when conditions are favorable, and all the rest of the time they wait.

Eventually, far ahead I see a complex of buildings. They are low, the same color as the land, a kind of bleached brown. When we get closer I see they're surrounded by gravel. Well, why waste water on grass? It's untended, nothing like the raked garden of stones at my flat in Wuxi. The site is a cluster of half-a-dozen buildings. But the size is deceiving, buildings I assumed were a story high are actually three stories. We drive under one right into the garage.

When Ms. Ngyuen opens the door the heat is not nearly so bad as I expected, although, of course we are in the shade. We take an elevator up three stories.

Inside, the floor is polished and painted concrete, the walls are adobe, it looks a little pinched. The offices are drab, the only color comes from calendars. The staff wears khaki; crisp brown and tan, short sleeves. I'm not sure if it is exactly a uniform, because even in one office it's sometimes coveralls, sometimes shirts and pants or skirts. Some people wear white blouses. A few glance up as we walk by, the rest seem engrossed in their work. We come through a double door into what must be the executive offices and things look better. Our footsteps are muffled by sand colored carpet, wooden desks have Native American pottery on them, plants are growing out of Native American baskets. Prettier, but Wuxi it's not.

I meet Vice President Wang. He is from the main office in Hainandao, here for five years. He is a small, neat man with a short brush of hair. His office is all sand colored, with huge windows that look out at miles of scrub. In his khaki he gives an impression of military correctness. He leans forward, smiling, and shakes my hand. "Engineer Zhang," he says, his voice forceful and full of energy, "we are pleased you could come." His English is accented but good.

We have tea and discuss my journey, and then the water shortage. Finally he gestures towards a tube on his desk, the kind for storing plans and large flimsies. "My engineers have been looking at your project from Nanjing University. It is very impressive. You designed this using the techniques of organic engineering?"

My beach house. I explain that it was an assignment during my internship. (Woo Eubong's design was the one eventually accepted, mine, I tell myself, was not to the taste of the owner.) Vice President Wang explains that New Mexico-Texas has an organic engineer. "I don't suppose you have much need for a man who can design beach houses," I say.

"We don't need too many beach houses, although we have one in Hainandao, and plan to have one in San Antonio." Vice President Wang smiles. "There are other things you can do, I am sure."

"What would you need?"

"How about if I have you speak with our Engineer after lunch, she can explain."

We break for lunch, which is red snapper Veracruz and icy cold Mexican beer. The cafeteria is sand colored, with soft accents of mint and melon. Very institutional. The windows look out on scrub. The noon landscape is blasted white with sunlight.

After lunch I meet Mang Li-zi, the organic engineer, trained in Shanghai. Her office is also carpeted, but her desk and tables are metal. She is finishing the second year of a five year rotation from Hainandao. She is Chinese and her first words to me are, "Ni shuo poutonghua ma?" 'Do you speak Mandarin?'

"Shuo," I say, 'Yes.'

"Good," she says in Chinese. "It's easier that way. Do you need augmentation?"

"No," I say, "I think I can understand. You speak very clearly." Actually she has a heavy Shanghai accent, the kind that changes 'Shanghai' into 'Sanghai.'

She is the first person I have seen who is not in khaki, she wears a pale green tunic over yellow pants, soft spring colors. She is pretty, has an oval face with a rosebud mouth and small nose. Very polished, very Shanghai, which is, after all, the fashion capital of the East. She sighs. "It's not like China," she says. "But the system is good, we're connected with Hainandao, it's as good a system as you'll find here in the West."

"What kind of work do you do?"

"Mostly I run the Engineering Department, administration. Once in awhile I modify plans, or do some design work. It's all right.

Not what I expected, I'm looking forward to getting back to Hainandao. I still keep my hand in, though. In the evening I do some systems work, for recreation. Let me show you some."

The system is conventional, not like Wuxi where I didn't have to use a contact. We jack in and she shows me some designs she's done. Two, which she tells me have already been accepted, are for office complexes. She talks about using available materials. It's obvious that the office complexes will be used here, not in China or Japan. She's at work on an industrial complex right now. She takes me through it using the system and flimsies. She has an interesting touch, very Chinese but very different from Woo Eubong. Woo Eubong's pieces are subtle, sometimes with bits of fancy technology. Mang Li-zi's pieces are less complicated. They have the virtue of appearing gracefully simple but not cheap.

"You did these for New Mexico-Texas?" I say. They don't look like desert designs, I wonder where else the company has offices.

"Yes," she says, as if admitting something. "I've gotten bonuses for both works."

They're nice, but I don't think particularly worth bonuses. Of course, I have to remind myself, she did this on her own time. Do they expect her to design office complexes for them? It seems to me they ought to have her do it on their time. "Do they come to you and tell you they need the plans, or do you ask them for the work?" What I am really trying to discover is if New Mexico-Texas will expect me to give them all of my free time.

"No, they have to be posted, let me show you." She uses an outside access and shows me a list of competitive bids. There are listings and specs for hundreds of jobs all across the nation, from hundreds of corporations. It's some kind of national posting. She keys an index and pages through screens of proposal requirements. None of the jobs listed today are projects for New Mexico-Texas.

"What do you do," I ask, "watch until New Mexico-Texas posts a job?" Seems foolish to me, why couldn't they just offer it to her?

"No," she frowns at me. "You don't understand. New Mexico-Texas didn't post these. They're office complexes for other companies, not for New Mexico-Texas. The first one is for Intek, the second is for Senkai's Western Division. I find a posting that looks interesting to me, and I submit a bid in New Mexico-Texas's name. It's a way to keep my hand in."

"What about the fees? How do they pay you if you submit the bid as New Mexico-Texas?"

"Well, the company gets the fee, then they give me a bonus."

It takes me a moment to figure out. She is looking up postings, designing complexes on her own time, and New Mexico-Texas gets the fees. "But you do all the work," I say.

"I use the company's system," she says. "I work for New Mexico-Texas. I'm not a company. If I sell a project, good, I get a bonus. If I don't," she shrugged, "it doesn't matter. They still pay my salary. And I get all the benefits, medical, housing, all of it. If I was on my own, I'd have to take care of all of that."

I nod. I understand. But it bothers me. "So most of the organic engineering you do, you do at night or on weekends?"

She shakes her head. "Mostly I run the department. There's not enough time to do it all."

"Do you teach?" I ask, thinking of Woo Eubong.

"No," she says, looking at the readout hanging in the air in front of us, the clean, spare lines of her office complex. Without looking at me she says, "It is not like China. Why didn't you stay in China?"

"I wanted to come home," I say.

That evening, over dinner, Vice President Wang explains salary and living arrangements. He tells me that I would work with Mang Li-zi until she goes back to Hainandao, after which I would be Senior Engineer. It is, he points out, only three years until I would be Senior Engineer. "I understand you were offered a job with Wuxi," he says. "May I ask why you didn't take it?"

"I was grateful for the opportunity, but I did not feel comfortable. Comrade Huang is fond of saying that a placement is like a marriage." I know better than to say to this man that I didn't want to live in China.

"If you were interested in the position, when would you be available?" he asks.

"I am teaching a class at Brooklyn College," I say. "I would not be able to come until the class finishes."

That's fine. "You look very Chinese," he says casually.

I know he has access to my records. "Gene splicing," I say. And add in Chinese, "It does not matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." An old political saying.

Vice President Wang laughs appreciably. The dinner is a spicy southwestern dish; chicken in mole with a salad of avacados, tomatoes and onions. As there was at lunch there is icy Mexican beer. Outside the window the sun sets. The landscape glows brilliant and beautiful red, then lavender, and as we sit talking over coffee and a sweet chocolate desert, it grows black. We are reflected in the glass of the window. Someone who didn't know better would look at us and say that I, in my Chinese suit, was the one with citizenship and he, in his khaki, the ABC.

"You are not married, Engineer. Anyone special in your life?"

Just a fag I met on the boardwalk in the part of New York City they call Bangladesh. I don't know if he'll ever call me again. "No," I say, "I think I've been moving around so much I haven't had much chance,"

He nods. "This might strike you as a difficult place to meet someone but you'll be surprised. We have number of single women on staff." He smiles, "I think that you are already a topic of discussion, an eligible bachelor. Someone like yourself should have no trouble making friends."

I am shown a comfortable room in the guesthouse. There is a big double bed, carpeting on the floor, fantastically colored prints of the southwestern landscape. All very nice.(I wake up alone in the middle of the night, disoriented, and it takes me a moment to settle myself, to think, 'The door is THAT way, the window THIS way, the bathroom in the direction of my feet.')

We discuss salary and living conditions in the morning. The salary they have offered is extraordinarily high, 103 hundred. There would be a tax rate of forty percent, they will take care of all taxes. After taxes my salary would be in the area of 62 hundred. Plus they would provide housing, and I would have unlimited system time.

I tell them I think the offer is very generous. I will give it very serious consideration and I will be in touch with them through Office of Employment Resources. I am very polite, I thank Vice President Wang in Mandarin. I hear my own voice, my old-fashioned phrasing, my northern pronunciation. Haibao always found it so amusing.

Vice President Wang seems impressed, maybe pleased.

I am, in fact, terrified. I cannot live that way, I can't live in a compound in the middle of the desert, surrounded by chainlink. Like Baffin Island, except for the rest of my life.

I have to think. What do I want?

I want to keep teaching. None of my subsequent lectures have been as exciting as the first, but I like the work. I don't want to end up in a corporate compound. So I must make some money.

While I am thinking, I use the number Mang Li-zi showed me to access the job postings. There are well over a hundred of them. I go through them, stopping to look something up when it strikes my fancy. I get a call while I'm in the middle of the proposal specs for an office complex and I just switch over audio.

"This is Zhang," I say, trying to decide if this complex is too big.

"Pardon me? I was given this number for Rafael?"

It is Invierno. I flick over to vid. "That's me."

"Rafael," he says. "Rafael Zhang. Or Zhang Rafael, which?"

I laugh, "Neither. Either Rafael Luis, or Zhang Zhong Shan."

"Okay," he looks cautious. "Which is your real name?"

"Both, my mother is hispanic and my father is ABC. I use Zhang when I work, but a lot of my friends call me Rafael."

He bats his long eyelashes while he considers this.

"Hey, a man with a name like 'Winter' doesn't have a lot of space to complain. What are you doing?"

"Nothing much," he says. "My first name is Jeremy. Invierno's my last name, but I like it better."

"Let's go to the kite races," I say.

He ignores that. "That's why you speak Spanish?" he says.

"Street Spanish. Nothing they would understand in Bogata."

"You sure as hell don't look Spanish." He is frowning.

"I'll tell you all about it at the kite races."

"One more thing," he says. "Where the hell have you been?"

"What," I say, "you left your wallet over here or something?"

He gets visibly flustered, "No, it's just a friend of mine had a party last night and I though you'd like to go. Look, I was just asking." The matador look is back, pouty and sensitive to slights.

"I was in Arizona interviewing for a job."

"Arizona," he says, aghast. "What the fuck do you want to go to Arizona for?"

"I don't."

"Then why did you go," he says, reasonably.

"Who made you my mother?" I ask, laughing. He makes me laugh, Invierno, and as usual, he doesn't really take offense. So we go to the kite races, and Invierno comes home with me since it's Friday and he doesn't have to work on Saturday.

He rolls over in the morning and I'm staring at the ceiling, thinking of Mang Li-zi. Thinking of myself stuck out in Arizona.

He pillows his chin on his arms. "You sure as hell don't look like much fun."

"I'm worried," I say.

"Oh," He says.

After a long bit of silence he says resignedly, "What are you worried about?"

"I just had a job offer to make about sixty a year, but I have to live in a compound in Arizona and be an administrator, and incidently they'd really like me to marry someone within the company." I climb across him and pad into the kitchen to start coffee.

"Sixty a year?" his voice follows me to the kitchen, he is astounded. "I thought you were a teacher!"

"I'm an engineer," I say.

I hear him shift on the bed. "Are you going to take it?"

"No."

"How can you turn down that much money?"

"Because if I live there I'll go crazy. I'd have to be a monk, those people live in each other's hip pockets."

"I can see how that would be a problem." Invierno's says. "Couldn't you just work there a couple of years? You know, save it all or something?"

"No," I say.

"Why not? That's what I'd do."

"Because I just couldn't do it." I'm irritated.

"Okay," he says. I bring him coffee. "Why do you always wear your hair in a tail?" he asks sitting up, "I like it down."

"Because I was in love with a guy one time and he told me he liked it back."

Invierno sips his coffee, considering. "Do you still see him?"

"No," I say. "He's dead. He jumped out a window, one of those big complexes in China." I put my coffee down on the floor and rub my eyes. It's too complicated, too early in the morning to get into this with a twenty-two year old.

"Hey," he says, "Rafael, I'm sorry." He sits up and rests his cheek against my back, a pleasant scratchy feeling. "I just asked you because I wanted to change the subject."

"Don't worry about it," I say. Invierno doesn't ask anymore questions (although he's dying to) but he does stay for breakfast, which is very sweet of him. "I'll call you," he promises in the hallway. "I will, I'll really call you."

I'm suddenly invested with tragedy. The poet, Byron, once told a friend of his that he wished he had consumption. The friend-who had consumption-was appalled and wanted to know why. Because the women would think he was so interesting, Byron told him. Probably preening.

I'm not at all displeased to think that I have become interesting to Invierno.

I go back to the postings, thinking of Mang Li-zi. It would be better if I did some laundry, but I'm too lazy to go down to the basement. There is a proposal for an office complex, not very big. I print out the information and suddenly decide I should do something so I go down to the library and buy time on the system.

It's not a very good system, too many users. Sometimes you have to wait for it to do something. And it's expensive to use for long periods of time. I don't have that much money anymore. It's exasperating to think of something and have to wait for it to happen, knowing that I'm being charged for the time I wait. But it's the only system I have access to.

It's interesting, building this little office complex. It's crazy to try to build on a public system, but I have the advantage of knowing there aren't many organic engineers in this country. I can probably do a better job than the usual team.

I could start my own business. I wouldn't have to make that much, if I kept teaching that would just about pay my rent.

I spend about five hours Saturday and another three on Sunday working on a little office complex. The fee wouldn't be very much, I'm hoping not many companies would take the time to do it.

Monday Mr. Huang from the Bureau of Resources calls and tells me that Sung of Wisconsin wants me to come out to meet them.

"They have already said they cannot match New Mexico-Texas," he says, "you might as well not go."

My first inclination is to agree, for one thing I want to work on my design. Of course, Sung's system is going to be a lot better than the library's, if I could just get a few hours on it I could get a lot done.

"I'd like to hear what they have to say. I'm not certain I would be comfortable in the Corridor," I say, hearing in my voice the softness that Haibao mistook for courtesy. Duplicity. I whisper when I have something to hide, to protect. In China I was protecting myself from mistake, from derision, eventually from exposure. Now I am merely lying. I am hoping for something from Sung. "I could fly out Tuesday afternoon, after my class, come back on Wednesday."

I fly out to Eau Clair, Wisconsin, pretty place, green and full of flowers. I am met by a polite young man and a driver and driven to the corporate headquarters where I spend the day talking in the same soft voice to the Executive Officer, Comrade Cui. Sung does not have an organic engineer. It's more comfortable than New Mexico, not so severe, there are more people around. But both of them are strange to someone like myself, an urban person, and it's overseeing the engineering department. What makes them think my degree has anything to do with administration?

I am fed trout and creamed potatoes. The windows of the executive dining room look out on a green meadow.

Comrade Cui, the Executive Officer, is a woman with a firm handshake. She is ABC. She does not make any comment about my hispanic mother, but does say something about my being single. The room in the guesthouse is blue.

And in it I have access to Sung's system. I do not get much sleep, and at a little after four, I dump my work back into the file I use in the library system. I'm surprised when I look up and the room is blue, I've been in a red and cream office complex.

Then the trip back home. I sleep in my seat, and leave the airport in a fog. But there is too much to do and not enough money or time.

The project swallows my life. I have to do material estimates. At Wuxi I could have asked the system for some information, and had a clerk do the calling on the rest. But now I must call supply places and ask them, 'How much a ton?"How much a square meter?' I calculate by hand because I cannot afford wasting expensive system time on calculations and I can do them in the evening when the library is closed. Some of the answers I get force me to change my ideas. Back to the system.

I assign my class a project: design a room that they couldn't design without using a system. My ABC comes to me and asks if he can design a sound system instead. "It's my senior thesis," he explains. I tell him to do it.

I run out of money.

Completely. I don't even have the money for coffee and rice. And I'm not finished. I need to get the proposal submitted in four days and I am out of money. So I call Peter.

"What's up," he says.

"I have a problem," I say.

Eyebrows quirk. "What's wrong?"

"I'm trying to start my own business. Doing organic engineering."

"Oh?" Peter says, his voice neutral. "What happened to the idea of getting a job?"

"I've gone on two interviews," I explain, "one in New Mexico, one in Texas. I don't want to leave New York. I like teaching, I like my flat, I like having friends. I'm sick of starting over again, even in this country. Lenin and Mao Zedong, Peter, do you know what it's like to be alone in a country where being bent can earn you a bullet in the back of your head? I want friends, I want some sort of community!"

"Okay," Peter says gently. "Why don't you come downstairs and talk. Or I'll come up."

"I'll come down," I say. Then I smile for him. "I'm out of beer."

He grins. "Okay, China Mountain."

Peter makes me a loan. And two hours later, Cinnabar Chavez calls and says, "I talked to Peter. Listen, how about a partner? You have this specialty, this engineering thing, and I have a little money."

And after that, the only thing left is the work.

I dump my submission at deadline, six p.m. Friday night, and leave the library. Down the steps, past the lions and into Manhattan. I think about going for a drink, but I don't feel right spending Cinnabar's money that way. So I call Cinnabar and tell him we've submitted our first project.

"What do you think?" he asks.

"I think it's positively inspired, but who knows what they'll think." I shrug. "Actually I'm sick of it. But it's done. Did I ever show you my beach house?"

He says Peter's on his way over for dinner, why don't I come, but I'm tired and I beg off.

Then I call Invierno.

It takes awhile for him to answer.

"Hi," I say, "It's Rafael."

"Hi," he says, disdainful.

"I got your messages, I've been meaning to call you back but I've been caught up with something."

"That's all right," he says. "I'm kind of in a hurry."

"Look, I'm sorry I haven't called you for awhile, I've been trying to get a business started."

He's contemptuous. "Well, good luck." He reaches for the cutoff.

"Hey," I say, "wait. Are you busy tonight?"

"Yeah," he says, "as a matter of fact, I am."

"Yeah," I say. "I guess you're not sitting around waiting for the phone to ring."

He purses his lips. "I, ah, I'm not busy tomorrow night," he says finally.

"Great. What do you want to do? I'm broke."

He is incredulous. "You call me for the first time in two weeks and ask me what I'm doing and have the nerve to tell me you're broke?"

"That's right," I say. "But I'm real fun to be with. Why don't you take me to the kite races?"

He laughs. And then we talk some, he asks me about my business and I tell him a little.

"So you won't have to go to Arizona," he says. "What's that noise?"

"It's a train. I'm calling from the subway. I've been working on something for two weeks and I just finished it, so I called you right away."

"Oh yeah?" The idea tickles him, that I called him right away.

"Yeah, I just submitted the damn thing, not fifteen minutes ago. I haven't eaten dinner yet."

"Rafael," he says, "did you eat lunch?" I must be attracted to motherly types. I pretend to consider. "I probably did," I say. Of course I ate lunch, I had a sandwich.

"Listen," he says, "I was going to go to this party, but it's no big deal. How about if I pick up some noodles or something and come by your place."

"Okay," I say, "I'd like that."

I catch the train and go home. The old D train all the way out to Coney Island, underground (except for the bridge) to Prospect Park and then up into the evening light. It's the second of November. In Baffin Island the days are almost gone. In Nanjing it's six in the morning. I don't have a dime, but I feel curiously light.

If this project sells, the fee will allow us to put a down payment on a system. A small system, but that will be better than going to the library. And I can talk to someone at Brooklyn College, maybe my ABC or my girl from Brooklyn could get credit as a student intern and I'll have someone to do some of the donkey work; the checking up on materials and all that. Eventually we're going to need a clerk. And Cinnabar said we'll have to file papers and get permits for the new company. We're going to call it Daoist Engineering.

I wonder if I could hire someone from the building? Maybe somebody like Vanni.

"Una luz brillara en tu camina." Used to be subway advertisements for the church that said that. During the Great Cleansing Winds religion was dangerous, but about five years ago they lifted the restrictions on religion. For awhile every time I got on the train I'd see one of those ads. "Una luz brillara en tu camina. Descubre lo que te has perdido." A brilliant light in your path. Discover what you have lost.

The light angles across Brooklyn, red now. It comes through the train windows. Sunset used to depress me. But I learned in Baffin Island, you've just got to remember the light, keep it inside you, and wait. The sun comes back every morning.