The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 14

Some part of me must have been expecting it all along. When I saw the four Marines the next morning standing in the lobby at the foot of the stairs, it had some of the quality of dèjá vu. Big sons of bitches. I stared at them and froze. When one of them took me by the right arm I came out of it and tried to pull away from him. It didn’t work. I suppose I’d been imagining myself as one of the strongest men in America; this was a rude brush with reality. This youth with the perfect shave was bigger than I in every way. His fingers on my forearm felt like rocks. The other three looked about the same.

When they took me past the desk to the door the clerk looked away, busying himself with some records. Outside the hotel was a gasoline-powered military jeep. I sat in back with a Marine on each side of me and we drove off down Broad Street while people on the sidewalk stared.

I got back a bit of my composure in the jeep. “Men,” I said, “where are you taking me?”

“Air base” was all I could get, from the only one who seemed to know how to talk. He had sergeant stripes. “You’re not supposed to do this,” I said, “I’m a Chinese national.” I might as well have been speaking to the wind.

They took me about twenty miles to Kissinger Air Force Base, put me on an F-611 jet fighter, and flew me to Washington at four times the speed of sound. Those military sons of bitches; they burn jet fuel as if it were seawater.

It’s quite an experience to fly like that, let me tell you. The Isabel could zip through her warp at two hundred times the speed of light, and light goes fast enough to circle the earth seven times in a second; but even so, that little white jet felt a hundred times faster. Zoom, Pennsylvania! Zoom, zoom, New Jersey! Zoom, Maryland! Zip, Washington! Good afternoon, Senator.

I wore one of those white spacesuits for altitude and was handcuffed to my seat, feeling like a nailed-down snowman skimming the stratosphere in this military frisbee. When we slowed for a landing the G forces pressed my body like the hand of death. I sat strapped in a tiny cockpit, feeling like hell, feeling like a childish fool, and unable to say a thing to anybody. I couldn’t even hear my own voice over the roar of those fuel-wasting jets. Damn the military. They could have sent me back on a Pullman and saved everybody a lot of grief. But I grudgingly had to admit what they were doing made Baynes look good, the son of a bitch. There was class to this operation.

Four MPs at the Washington Air Base got me out of the white suit and into another jeep. They drove me straight to the Reagan Detention Center, where Baynes was waiting, dressed elegantly in gray tweeds. I checked my watch; less than two hours since they’d picked me up. If only they could handle mail like that. “Hello, L’Ouverture,” I said, rubbing my wrists where a cop had just taken off the cuffs. We were in a steel-walled room without windows, sitting on wooden benches facing one another through plastic; our voices came through speakers. There was no humanity to this; I’d have felt closer talking to him by viddiphone.

“Ben!” L’Ouverture said, shaking his head in mock dismay. “What a nuisance! What a waste of taxpayers’ money!”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking,” I said. “How did you find me?”

Baynes shook his head again. “Ben,” he said, “it was simplicity itself. You left clues everywhere. People recognized you in Philadelphia and called the FBI. The Chinese Embassy filed a report.” He looked at me in a kind of bemusement. “Ben,” he said, “I don’t see how a man so careless could be so rich.”

I felt myself blushing. Caught in my fool’s paradise again, playing games. Tom Sawyer Wins An Election.

“Quit rubbing it in,” I said. “What is it you want from me?”

“I want to know where that uranium came from, Ben.”

“I figured as much,” I said, “and I’m not going to tell you.”

L’Ouverture leaned toward me, with his elbows on his knees. He was wearing a pale-blue oxford-cloth shirt and I could see silver cufflinks. He folded his long black fingers together. “That’s no way to talk, Ben,” he said. He smiled amiably. “If you don’t tell me, you’ll spend the rest of your days in this building.”

“The Chinese Government…”

“The Chinese Government doesn’t know where you are, Benjamin, and I don’t think they care. Mourning Dove Soong is a busy woman. She has more to do than keep up with your whereabouts.” He smiled again.

“What are the charges against me?”

He threw back his head and laughed, stretching out his long arms from his body. Then he shot his cuffs and set his bony elbows on his knees again. “Oh my my!” he said. “Resisting arrest, twice. Assaulting a police officer, four times. Illicitly importing dangerous drugs. Using same. Telephone fraud. Crossing state lines as an unregistered alien.” He laughed again. “There are friends of mine on the bench who would give you ten years at hard labor just for burning up Aynsley Field.”

I just looked at him. What was there to say? I knew he was at least partly wrong about Mourning Dove, if only because Lao-tzu needed me for future supplies of endolin; but I wasn’t going to tell Baynes that. I wasn’t going to tell Baynes anything this time.

“Well, L’Ouverture,” I said, “you seem to have all the cards.”

He nodded and smiled grimly. “You dealt them to me, Ben.”

“L’Ouverture,” I said, “I don’t need this. I’ll give you sixty percent of my uranium…”

He looked at me very coolly. “I don’t want it.”

“You don’t want it? My God, it’s worth a king’s ransom.”

He shook his head. “I’m a king already, Benjamin.”

I looked at him. He was certainly dressed like a king. “It’ll triple your wealth, L’Ouverture. It’ll put America back on top of the heap.”

He looked at me calmly. “Who are you to talk that way?” he said. “You’re Chinese.”

“Come off it,” I said. “That’s an expedient, not a political choice. We can be partners. Belson and Baynes.”

He sat there awhile, looking very collected, very urbane. Finally he spoke. “I like things the way they are. I enjoy my work, Benjamin. The United States is doing very well under its energy laws, and I helped frame them.”

“And you profit from them.”

“They are good laws, for the resources we have.”

I just looked at him, feeling nothing. There was no way to get through to this man, and I knew it. He did not want to be partners with anyone, and the only way I could bargain with him now would be to tell him about Juno and how to get there. But then, thinking about that, I realized something I had missed before: if he really wanted to know where my uranium came from he would have found out from the crew. He could have locked them up as conspirators, or pirates, and pressured them until someone told him. And he hadn’t done that. “You don’t really want to know where I got that uranium,” I said.

He looked at me and smiled tiredly. “How perceptive you are, Benjamin.”

“You just want to keep things the way they are.”

“In a nutshell.”

I sat there awhile. Finally I said, wearily, “Can you get me some cigars?”

He smiled. “I’ll have a dozen boxes sent.” He stood up to his full height on the other side of the plastic. What a hugely tall man he was, and how light on his feet and flexible for his age! The goddamned devious son of a bitch.

“Sacre Fidels,” I said. And then, “Do you ever use Nautilus machines, L’Ouverture?”

He smiled down at me. “Daily.” He straightened his jacket and patted the pockets with his huge hands, smoothing them. “I have to go now,” he said.

I stood up. “What will you do with the Isabel?”

“It can stay where it is. Its hatch has been welded shut. And the portholes are covered. It is under perpetual guard.”

“Like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?”

“Exactly.”

“And it’ll just stay at Aynsley?”

“I have no interest in football.” He turned to leave.

“L’Ouverture,” I said, “when am I going to get out of this place?”

He turned back to me and shook his head sympathetically. “Benjamin,” he said, “I’d tell you if I knew.”

I nodded. It all seemed eerily natural, this conversation with the thick transparent plastic between us. “I know I was spotted in Philadelphia,” I said. “But how did you find out I was in Columbus?”

He stood silent for a minute before speaking. Then he said, “Sue Kranefeld. She called my office.”

The Reagan Stir is a wretched place—a kind of flophouse of prisons. I was given a cell with a tiny TV and a cold-water shower. There was a library and, thank God, a gym. I worked out with weights and an LAT machine twice a day and sometimes did pushups in my cell. They had me in Diplomatic Isolation, which meant no visitors and no newspapers and no news shows on my TV. I was in Washington, but I didn’t know if the public at large knew where I was. After a week I quit caring.

I hate to admit this, but a part of me warmed up to prison. I shifted into the psychic gear I had been in on Belson and all I really missed was my vegetables. I got the complete short stories of Henry James out of the prison library and spent my days between working out, reading and playing chess. At level eight. There was a UV booth in the gym; I added to my Belson suntan, which had faded a good deal. I wasn’t allowed to talk to other prisoners—although I always nodded at a woeful Arab who worked out on the LAT machine next to me—and that suited me fine. Ever since Father’s forget-me-nots I had known the game of spiritual Robinson Crusoe; I found sweet sadness in playing it yet again.

Sometimes at night I would watch TV, after getting weary with Henry James’s games of ethical chess and of people who responded to moral crises by not finishing sentences. The Chinese TV channel was doing a thirty-part dramatization of European history, shot in Peking, and I got hooked on it. It wasn’t the European history I had been taught and it was amusing to see it from a Chinese perspective. One Sunday night after a supper of frankfurters and beans I sat on my bunk drinking coffee from a plastic cup and idly watching a segment of the sixteenth century in England, when something about Queen Elizabeth caught my attention. Her walk seemed eerily familiar. I stared. It looked like Isabel in a red wig. I sat upright and turned up the volume. It was Isabel, in lace, pearls and heavy silk, looking like an authentic queen, even though it was ludicrous to hear her voice dubbed in high-pitched Chinese.

The Chinese view of Elizabeth was as a kind of virginal nymphomaniac. She was shown turning on Essex, and Cecil and Raleigh. Drake was trying to get into her pants. All of this was very disturbing, and when a scene came on where she was lying in bed with Essex, both of them naked, and she fending him off with chatter, I nearly choked. I wanted to kick the idiot who was playing Essex, grab Isabel by her lovely waist and demonstrate the folly of coyness. I could have pounded my head against the wall for the waste of my five months’ impotence with her. There I sat in my cell, staring at her electronic image with an erection—the only erection the sight of her body had ever given me and as useless, now, as an airplane on the moon.

I’d been happy enough with Henry James, chess and weightlifting before that, but it changed everything. I wanted to get out of prison and back to life again. It was toward the end of October; I’d been in stir six weeks, with no trial scheduled and no word from anybody. I stepped out of my Robinson Crusoe daze like stepping out of a pair of dirty socks and found myself in reality. It was awful. I was in prison, horny, angry, and ready to go, but I couldn’t get out. Four walls. Bars on the windows. Guards. Frankfurters, beans and instant coffee.

This kept up for two weeks and would have been the death of me if they hadn’t, suddenly and without notice, let me out. The eighth of November. Two guards came into my cell after breakfast and told me to pack. That took three minutes, including brushing my teeth. They took me to a desk where I signed papers, got back my billfold, was admonished to “watch my step” and taken to a coal-gas black Maria. I didn’t know what in hell was going on, but suspected it had something to do with the election. My prison had been well heated if nothing else; it was icy and gray outside. Glad as I was to get out, a part of me was sorry to leave the warmth of jail. We drove past the Washington Monument, looking bleak in the winter air, and then a few blocks later I looked down a side street and saw sticking up proudly into the sky above tall buildings, covered with snow, the Isabel! That cheered me up. I blew her a kiss as we went by.

They pulled up at the Chinese Embassy and the guards ushered me into a back door, where four Chinese soldiers took me into a room with painted screens and modern furniture. Two Chinese ladies fingerprinted me, in red. A tall, thirtyish one who seemed in charge handed me rice paper forms to sign.

“What’s all this about?” I asked, in English.

She pulled a cigarette from her robe, lit it and blew smoke toward me. “I am taking you home, Mr. Kwoo.”

“Kwoo?” I almost jumped out of my skin. “What the hell is this Kwoo?” I still hadn’t signed the papers. “Let me have one of your cigarettes if you don’t mind, and then explain to me what going home means and about this Mr. Kwoo.”

She gave me a cigarette and lit it with a little red electronic. “Mr. Kwoo is your Chinese name,” she said.

“That’s not what’s on my passport,” I said.

“We have a new passport. It seemed expedient to change your identity.” Her face was hard-looking but the voice pleasant enough. Except for the hardness she was a beautiful woman. “The United States does not want you to leave its shores. Senator Baynes would like to keep you under lock and key until… how do you say it in America?”

“The cows come home. Hell freezes over.” I began to pace around the room, hands in my jeans pockets. “I wasn’t planning to leave any shores, anyway.” But it had already dawned on me; they were going to take me to China. What the hell; it beat prison. And Isabel might be there. “Is ‘home’ China?” I said.

She nodded.

“Okay,” I said, “okay. I’ll need some clothes.” The prison jeans and dungaree shirt I was wearing were all I had. “Does this have to do with endolin?”

“Our interest in you, Mr. Kwoo, is not pharmacological. It is your other cargo that occupies our attention. It has caused us to go to some lengths to take you from prison.”

Shit. They wanted the Juno uranium fields. For a moment I chilled with the image of a Chinese dungeon somewhere. What if they had revived the water torture? Meltdowns were a scandal to the People’s Republic and the old ladies who ran it; there were radioactive villages and ruined rice paddies sprinkled all over that ancient geography. My well-being, in that context, would mean very little.

“Is Mourning Dove Soong behind this?” I said.

“Madame Soong is Deputy Chairman for the Honshu District. I do not know her position with respect to your case.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go to China. How do we get there?”

She took another cigarette and lit it from the butt of the first. “We’ll go by ship, Mr. Kwoo.”

“All right,” I said. I stubbed my cigarette out in a little jade dish. “But tell me. What does ‘Kwoo’ mean?”

The shorter woman spoke up, in a quiet voice. “It’s an old Mandarin word. It denotes an ancient coin. You could translate it as ‘cash.’”

I looked down at her and fingered my beard. “Well,” I said, “you people do know how to name the newborn. I accept Kwoo.” Ben Kwoo.

It was a Chinese jet that took us to the Embarcadero in San Francisco. This time my stratosphere suit was crimson. There was a valve in the mask, so I could sip oolong through a straw during the two-hour flight. My cigarette-smoking friend was seated behind me, but had little to say on our intercom. I tried to get her to talk about her family, but she wasn’t interested. I sipped my tea and brooded a bit. Then I did some knee bends just as we were zooming over the Rockies and started figuring out ways of getting back into the search for Isabel from wherever we were going in China.

A gray Mercedes was waiting for us; we drove in silence from the airfield to a dock. The car pulled up at the gangway to a coal-burner with rusty sides. On the forepeak lettered in red was PRS KEIR HARDIE. It was a Scottish ship! “What the hell?” I said to my chain-smoking companion. She was climbing the gangway alongside me with her short black hair blowing in the offshore wind. “Why aren’t we sailing Chinese?”

“This was available,” she said, stepping briskly aboard.

My stateroom was ready and she ushered me right to it. My heart lifted when I walked in. The parlor had a screen painted with blue morning glories; there were walnut tables and blue silk poufs. Along one bulkhead was a galley with a refrigerator, a molecular cooker and a freezer. “How long will the trip take?” I looked at her. “And what’s your name?”

“My name is White Heron. Many call me Jane. It will take us two weeks to cross the Pacific.”

There was a bar with relief carvings of birds on its front and two crystal decanters and glasses. I crossed over to it and sniffed one of the decanters. Scotch, sure enough. I started to pour. “Would you like a drink, White Heron?”

“Jane,” she said. “I’m on duty.”

“Suit yourself,” I said and made mine larger. I went to the refrigerator, filled my glass with ice and clinked it around. I was still wearing my red stratosphere suit. I took a drink and a ship’s whistle blew, loud, clear and thrilling. Nothing in this world sounds better than a ship’s whistle. “Are we leaving?”

Jane nodded and the deck beneath our feet began to vibrate. I drank another musty slug of scotch, spreading out my big feet into a seaman’s stance. “Jane,” I said, “who assigned me to these quarters? It wasn’t you, was it?”

She looked at me coldly. She’d have had me in the bilges if she’d been in charge. Then she shrugged. “It was Mourning Dove Soong,” she said. “Your partner at Lao-tzu Pharmaceuticals.”

“Yes,” I said, and drank off my scotch. “Bless her heart.” I thought of Arabella Kim and her woodlot in Washington. Old Chinese mothers, the two of them, as good as gold. Maybe there was something in matriarchy after all.

I played a lot of solo chess during the next few days and then began to suntan myself on deck when we got far enough into the South Pacific. I read a few twenty-first-century Chinese novels, but their vigor wore me out. Everybody was productive and brave in those books, and nobody made love except after a Confucianist wedding, and then they did it solemnly and in the dark. Puritanism is like the wheel; if it ever got lost it would be reinvented fast.

I was allowed no access to the ship’s communications equipment, which was probably just as well. I wasn’t ready to do business just yet. I managed to borrow some recent Scottish magazines from one of the mates and entertained myself with stories of love among the fens, or brawls on collective farms in the lowlands. Still dull stuff, but better than the Chinese. More balls.

The ship plowed across the blue Pacific as if in a dream, leaving a wake like a glory in that awe-inspiring surface. At night the stars were magnificent—nearly as bright as from my toilet seat on the Isabel. When we got to our southernmost point I could see Fomalhaut, near the horizon.

Nobody talked to me much and I didn’t try to make friends. They were probably under orders anyway. There were some other passengers, all well-to-do Chinese families. It seemed the Keir Hardie was used by the higher ranks of the Party. As much as they officially excoriated one another, the Chinese and the Scots could work things out when it came to luxury. There’s nothing new in that.

I took my meals alone and ate with chopsticks. The officers’ mess supplied what I ordered, and once offered a haggis if I wanted to try one. I declined politely. I had no television and no newspapers and didn’t care. It was shipboard lull and fine with me. But I worked out in the ship’s gym daily and did pushups in between, coiling up for whatever lay ahead.

I would see families sometimes standing in a row along the gunwale, wrapped in their heavy overcoats, staring out to sea. The children were touching—so solemn and oriental, with their bangs and quiet black eyes. Sometimes a beautiful child would peek toward me as I stood nearby, in one of my crazy capitalist outfits, but there was never any conversation. I’d like to have adopted about six of those kids. I’d have loved to cook pot roast for a bunch of them and taught them how to play chess.

Well. Children are hostages to fortune, as Bacon said. But what else is there to do with your time?

I can see myself dying by coronary in a parlor suite, clutching my throbbing shoulder and mumbling, “Hey! I need time to think about this!” I would be ninety and still in good shape but without a home or family, without a profession. Tycoon is no profession. All I do is make money and chase women. And travel. “I haven’t done anything with my life!” I would say in that hotel suite, thrashing about in the kitchen in terminal anguish, falling dead over the truite fumée.

One evening at the beginning of my second week there was a knock on my door. I was at the table, playing king’s gambit against Myra’s board. I got up and opened the door. It was Jane, wearing a pink silk dress. She was lighting a cigarette.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello. I’ve come for that drink.”

“Sure,” I said. “Come in.”

It was one of those tight traditional dresses with a slit down the side. The amount of leg she displayed coming in the door was alarming; a voice in me immediately said, Watch it.

“I’m in the middle of a game,” I said.

She nodded and seated herself on my lavender pouf. Her black hair shone and she wore scarlet lipstick; her face was dead white and Chinese-round with perfect Mongolian eye-folds. She looked like a poster ad for a twentieth-century movie. The Dragon Lady. She watched me silently. I returned to the sofa and lit a cigar. I was in my prison dungarees—comfortably faded now since I washed them at nights and hung them on deck to dry. If they got rained on I wore my red silk stratosphere pants and went barechested, like an Italian trapeze artist. She was looking me over the way Fu Manchu might look over a captive American spy. We have ways of making you talk, Mr. Belson. “I like big men,” she said.

“You’re a tall person yourself,” I said. “What will happen when we dock in China? To me, I mean.”

“You’ll be interrogated and given living quarters. Much depends on your cooperation.” She lit another cigarette from the butt of the first, and then ground the old one out in one of my jade ashtrays. There was silence for a while, except for the rumble of the ship’s engines. I turned back to my game.

I was going for a back-rank checkmate with my queen’s rook, but I couldn’t get the proper file cleared of pawns. I leaned forward and tried to concentrate. Just as I found the move I wanted, she spoke. “I’ve never had an American lover,” she said.

I brought a knight to bishop five and looked over the board at her. “I’m not American anymore.”

“Nonsense. You’re the most American person I’ve ever seen. Like Abraham Lincoln.”

“That’s good company,” I said, “and I thank you for putting me in it. Lincoln was a genius and a man of heart.”

She looked at me as though appraising a minor artwork. “A big American man with a big sad soul.” She crossed her legs with the sound tight silk makes. “Just like you.”

“I feel more affinity with Billy the Kid,” I said, nervously. “But thanks anyway. If that actor hadn’t plugged Lincoln at the play it would be a different world. What if Chairman Mao had been gunned down in the fifties?”

“Chairman Mao made many errors.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But Mao was what China needed. You were lucky to have him all those years.”

“If one didn’t spend one’s time being rehabilitated.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Where is this ship going to dock?”

“At the Port of Celestial Winds, District Four.”

“I never heard of it.”

“Newly built by the People.” She looked me over silently again. I turned back to Myra’s board and tried to concentrate. Abruptly she said, “I’d like sex.”

“Jane, honey,” I looked up again, “I’ve got other things to think about. My heart wouldn’t be in it.”

She ignored that and stood up languidly. Then she arched her arms behind her back and unfastened the neck of her dress. I have a great weakness for the upper arms of beautiful women and I could hardly not see how fine hers were. Firm and perfectly white. While I watched in reluctant fascination, she let the dress drop to her ankles and stepped out of it. She kicked off her sandals. She was wearing scarlet panties and a thin gold necklace. Her body was as white as snow and without a flaw. Tiny white breasts and tiny white feet. I was getting hard. “Come on, Jane,” I said. “I’m not in the mood for this kind of thing. I’m fifty-three years old and well past my prime and I’m in love with a Scottish actress.”

She walked over to the sofa and sat beside me. “Take off your pants.”

“Come on, Jane,” I said, panicking. The tops of her shoulders were the best I’d ever seen. I blinked with unease.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said. And then, “Is your pubic hair blond too?”

“It’s got a lot of gray,” I said.

“You can lie back on the couch and I’ll undress you.”

“I tell you, Jane, you’re a splendid-looking woman. Enough to drive a man right out of his skull. But I wasn’t cut out for this… this gigolo thing. I have to pick my own times.”

She laughed at the word “gigolo.” “There’s nothing wrong with your servicing me. Chinese men enjoy the opportunity. Many of them are trained for it, in schools.”

At the word “servicing” I stiffened. I could run out onto the deck, or lock myself in the bathroom. Except that my perverse member was now so rigid there was no way I could stand up in those tight prison jeans.

“Mr. Kwoo,” Jane said, coolly, “you’ll need a good report from me when we arrive in China. If I say your thinking is confused it could cause you hardship.”

Jesus Christ! I thought. Am I going to have to do this like a whore? Can a man really do that and satisfy the lady in a state of panic? My member was answering this silent inquiry in the affirmative; it was undaunted. The eager son of a bitch. I felt betrayed by the same partner who had betrayed me the other way with Isabel.

I looked her over. She sure had a fine body, even though it looked as cold as ice. And I loved the red panties. What the hell, I thought. I used to sleep with a horse. “Okay, Jane,” I said. “But let’s go into the bedroom and do it right.”

“Here is adequate,” she said. She began to unzip my pants.

“Look,” I said, pushing her hands away, “I’ll do this myself.” I unzipped with care and freed myself. I slipped the pants off, and then my shorts. I was already barefoot. I started to get up.

She had already stood. Now she pushed on my chest, with alarming strength from a smallish person, and I sat back. “Just lie back, Mr. Kwoo,” she said. “I think your pubic hair is charming, with all those curls.”

“Jesus Christ, Jane, I’m no courtesan. I can’t just…”

“Yes you can. Clearly. Just lie back and relax.”

I think I was blushing. She was aroused to where she looked dangerous. Her nipples stood out like little Marines. “Okay,” I said, defeated. “Okay.” I lay back awkwardly, bending my knees to fit my frame to the couch.

She had peeled off her panties by the time I got there, and then she mounted me in a gung-ho way, as though she were a sailor and I a B-girl. I didn’t like it at all, but my sexuality was in another world, doing its business in the dark like an Old Testament fanatic. I wriggled despite myself and ground up into her with a twist. “That’s it!” she whispered and began pumping in earnest. I pumped back. She began kissing me open-mouthed, smelling of booze. Her nipples pushed into my chest. I began to feel smothered. She pulled back just in time and I could see her face twisted in some kind of unearthly concentration, her eyes upward and sweat on her porcelain forehead, with the bangs now sticking to it. I froze at the sight.

“Don’t stop now,” she said.

I started pumping again. From the waist down I was a satyr. But my better part was watching in alarmed detachment.

“Yes!” Jane hissed—not to me but to the ceiling. She grabbed my shoulders and I winced when her nails dug in. Then she went slack and fell across my chest.

I don’t know why that orgasm of hers didn’t provoke one on my part, but it didn’t. Suddenly I felt a physical need that was as potent as the need for air when you find it cut off. I started pumping against her limp body.

Abruptly she grew rigid, and then pushed off of me. “What the hell…?” I said, throbbing.

“I’m finished,” she said.

“Well, I’m not,” I said and reached out to grab her. She stepped back nimbly. I sat up, furious. My groin was beginning to ache. “I can rape you,” I said.

“I’d kick you first. You’d never forget it.”

She stood there sweating like an Olympic gymnast and I believed her. I leaned back on the sofa. I’d had a lot of practice at sexual frustration—at Isabel’s and at the Pierre afterward—and for a moment I gave up. “Suit yourself, White Heron,” I said.

“I have suited myself,” she said. She bent elegantly to the table by the pouf and took a cigarette. Her back was to me.

I was off the couch and had her around the waist before she could straighten up. I was careful not to hurt her or break a bone; but I had her on the floor in ten seconds. I looked down at her face. It was flushed but composed.

“If you rape me,” she said, “I’ll put you in prison.”

“Mourning Dove Soong likes me,” I said, breathing hard. “If you try that, she’ll have you in front of the Central Committee.” That was mostly bluffing, but it seemed to work. Her face for the first time lost some of its composure. “Then enjoy yourself, Mr. Kwoo.”

“I’m Ben Belson,” I said, “and I’m not going to rape you.” And I wasn’t. My member had finally bowed out of the fray.

Jane stayed out of my cabin for the rest of the trip. I didn’t see her again until a cold morning when I passed her on deck after coffee and then looked through mists over the port bow to see the coast of China. Right over there. Despite apprehensions and uncertainties, the thrill was exquisite; to sail the Pacific and then see China distant in the mist is an experience that goes right to the marrow of your bones and tingles the back of your skull like a morphine rush. I stared for a moment and then started doing side-straddle hops by the gunwale, wearing my red spaceman’s pantaloons, barefoot on the slippery metal deck. Jumping jacks, some people call them. I slapped my hands together over my head and hopped my legs out and in, saying hello to China. The ship’s whistle blew. I stopped and held my breath. We were turning starboard and I felt a heartrending throb as the screws adjusted to a new course. We steamed straight toward the China Coast.

The Keir Hardie docked at a long gray pier late that afternoon. The rain had changed to sleet and it was freezing cold. I had no coat. The dock city looked like Cleveland in the nineteenth century—dark satanic mills and grit in the air. Coolie longshoremen lounged on barrels at dockside, in Ghengis Khan hats and overcoats, smoking what might have been opium. The ship was docked by computer, and when it was done a huge red display suddenly lit up on the side of a plastic warehouse, spelling out in neon-like letters: WELCOME TO THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA. My teeth chattered. I had thrown a blanket over my shoulders and was wearing my electronic running shoes, but I had no socks, having lost them sometime before in the Reagan Stir, and my toes were freezing.

One of the female crew members found me like this, swigging from my decanter. She approached me warily, as one might examine a sick grizzly.

“If you don’t watch out,” she said, pronouncing the word “oot,” “you’ll have pneumonia in the lungs.”

“Honey,” I said, “I have no coat or socks. This is it.”

“I’ll bring you something against it,” she said. “Hold on now.”

She jogged back to a stairway and down. A minute later she came back with a jacket, two pairs of socks, a pair of mittens and a tam. “The mate had these put by,” she said, handing them to me. The coat looked pretty small, but I thanked her from the bottom of my heart, went into my cabin again, and managed to get it all on—although my wrists stuck out of the sleeves of the mackinaw and it wouldn’t button over my chest. But the mittens were stretchy enough and the tam fit. It had a damn-fool red pom-pom on the top, which I managed to bite off and stuff in my pocket. I looked at myself in a closet mirror before going back out again. It was terrible, with the red silk pants and the rest of it. But what the hell; I stepped back out on deck, head high.

Jane was waiting for me, wearing an army uniform this time with the long gray overcoat and epaulets. A major’s insignia and a gray garrison cap. She looked like the Empress of Austria, or a Chinese Greta Garbo in Ninotchka.

“Well,” I said, holding my composure pretty well, considering my outfit and hers. “So you’re a soldier. I had no idea.”

“You look a fool,” she said, not without some pleasure.

“White Heron,” I said, “use your sadism on the troops. I’m not afraid of you.”

She lit a cigarette and said nothing. A moment later the gangway went down and the First Officer left the ship. There were four male noncoms with rifles standing at dockside. They must have marched up while I was changing clothes. One signed a paper the officer handed them, returned it, shouted something to the others and then led them up the gangway to where we stood. The leader saluted Jane, who returned it casually, her cigarette between the fingers of the saluting hand.

We marched down the gangway and onto the ancient soil of China. I didn’t exactly march, but stumped along because of the two pairs of wool socks stuffed into my running shoes. I was arriving in China even more clownishly than I’d arrived at Aynsley Field by spaceship. Well. Dignity was never my object in life.

They had a staff limousine—an actual nineteen-nineties black Cadillac with power windows and a glass partition; as far as I knew, the only one like it in America was under glass at the Smithsonian. Two flags of the People’s Army flew from fenders. A sergeant opened the door and I got in. It was a billionaire’s car if there ever was one; I felt immediately at home.

Two soldiers got in back with Jane and me, and sat on the jump seats. We drove in silence away from dockside. The coolie loafers puffed their long pipes and stared at us through the sleet. I relaxed against glove-leather upholstery and lit a cigar. Willynilly, I had my dignity back.

We drove about five miles past industrial buildings before hitting open country. The sleet had lessened; it was getting late in the day. There were houses surrounded by perfectly groomed fields. Pink tile roofs glistened wetly. I saw children playing in front of a barn; they stopped to wave as we drove by. I waved back. Old men drove gray steam tractors or red nuclear jeeps; there were vehicles everywhere. We passed a house with a table in its front yard where four old women sat at tea, their heads together in gossip. Pigs rooted at the edge of the house. An old man sat on the porch in an overcoat, reading a newspaper. Everybody was Chinese. A whole country full of Chinese!

A few miles later we drove by a four-story factory building painted bright blue. The sun was setting behind it. There were hundreds of electric cars in a lot near the gate, a sight America hadn’t seen for sixty years.

“What do they make there?” I asked Jane.

“Toy airplanes,” she said. “For export.” My God, I thought, Myra has one of those. I bought it at F.A.O. Schwartz.

Our destination turned out to be another airport. In a grim, institutional waiting room I changed into a fresh stratosphere suit—yellow this time—and was taken without ceremony to a Confucius 433 jet. Jane was my fellow passenger again. She stubbed out her cigarette while the pilot zipped down the runway; she covered her bangs with her helmet as we shot up for altitude like an arrow of Apollo, leaving behind us a plain that stretched twenty miles from the sea and ended in a vast range of blue mountains, now glowing in the setting sun.

“Where to?” I said into the intercom.

“Peking,” Jane said. “The Imperial City.”

We landed in darkness a few hours later. I was drowsy now and in need of food and rest. My seat on the plane was designed for a smaller race of person than I, and my ass was sore from it. I hadn’t had anything to eat since that breakfast coffee. When we started coming down I asked Jane if I could get a sandwich at the airport.

“No time for that, Mr. Kwoo,” she said as we banked into a landing curve.

Two girl soldiers marched us from the plane to a black electric Mercedes. My stomach growled. I lit a cigar. We drove down a dimly lit airport road and then through suburbs of row houses with an occasional corner grocery lighted brightly, where old people shopped. Where were the young? We crossed Chang An Avenue and came into a downtown district with a few bright lights but not many people. It was only nine-thirty, and this appeared to be Peace Blooms Square right in the heart of downtown. A few blocks from Tien An Men. Everybody must be at home watching television. I was gratified to see what appeared to be a drunk, asleep on a bench near a closed bookstore. An American tourist? We drove on. A few blocks from the square we stopped in front of what appeared to be a hotel.

“Where are we? “I said.

Jane answered in Chinese. “You will be a guest in the House of Comradely Love.”

I was marched past a grim lobby with four male clerks at a desk. We went into a gritty freight elevator and stared straight ahead as we went up eighteen floors and creaked to a stop. The door opened. The hallway had a gray linoleum floor, with cigarette butts. A dead geranium sat in a cracked pot near a barred window to my right; we turned left, past metal doorways to the end of the hall. There were four locks on the door. The girl who had brought us here produced four electronic keys and unlocked them one by one without getting any of the locks wrong. She stepped aside. Jane pushed open the door into a single room. A bare twenty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling, illuminating the ugliest hotel room I had ever seen. A cockroach scurried along a broken baseboard; the air smelled of cabbage.

“What the hell are you trying to do to me, White Heron?” I said.

She looked at me a moment and then spoke in English. “You should have been more cooperative. Aboard the ship.”

“Wait till Mourning Dove hears about this.”

“Mourning Dove Soong,” White Heron said, “is enjoying a long vacation in Tibet, at a monastery without viddiphone. She will be there meditating, indefinitely. I have been given charge of your case.”

I stared at her.

“Welcome to China,” Jane said, and clanged the door behind me. I stood transfixed in that cold, cabbagey room. In dim light I saw an oak dresser, a straight-backed chair and a sagging bed. A toilet without a seat was in one corner, and a dirty washstand with one tap at the other. There was no telephone, no TV, no bathtub or shower. There was no food. The one window had bars an inch thick.

I managed to sleep anyway, with my clothes on. There was a cake of rough yellow soap and I got fairly clean with it in the morning and then used the wet towel to wash some of the grit off the window. I looked down between bars eighteen stories to a park. It looked like Gramercy Park, in fact. I was stiff as a board and frightened. My joints ached and I was trembling with cold. I did situps and knee bends for ten minutes, trying not to think about breakfast. Trying not to think at all. They would hardly bring me to China just to starve me.

When I’d finished and was wiping off the sweat with my one other towel the door started unlocking. This time two men were waiting for me, in noncom uniforms. They escorted me silently to the elevator and punched the up button. We arrived at a kind of penthouse on the twenty-sixth floor, which turned out to be the cafeteria. A few old people were sitting at tables, drinking tea.

The guards continued to flank me while I went to the serving counter. The food was piled in steel trays and lit by flickering light bulbs. I got six hard-boiled eggs, a cup of soggy rice and a mug of black tea. There was no cream or sugar.

I took a seat by the balcony with a view of Gramercy Park, and cracked my eggs while the guards watched. The eggs were awfully dry in my mouth, and when I tried to wash them down with tea I spilled some on my beard because my hand was shaking. Don’t weaken, Belson, I told myself. But there was a gnawing going on at the roots of my soul. I knew what it was I had begun to want the minute I saw that room, that scurrying roach, that awful bed. Morphine.

When I finished, the men marched me back to the elevator. In the lobby two other soldiers met us, both with rifles, and the four of them escorted me out the door and across the street to a building with a big sign that read PEOPLE’S CLOTHING AND AIDS TO HEALTH.

Inside, a chubby middle-aged man looked me over. “Mr. Kwoo?” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Well, we can certainly make you more fashionable than that.” He frowned at my yellow spacesuit.

“You’re going to make me an outfit?” I said.

“Absolutely!” he said in English. “The very best. We know about you from the newspapers, Mr. Kwoo, and we know your importance.”

Thanks a lot, I thought, remembering my hotel room.

The five of them took me to a back room where a big metal box stood, like an upright coffin.

“Just step inside,” the man said. “It works like a dream. An absolute dream.”

I stepped in. He threw a switch and I heard a hum. An invisible beam must be scanning my body, doing a contour map. “All right now,” he said and turned it off.

“How long does it take?” I said.

“About ten minutes. Do you like midnight blue? For the trousers, I mean?”

“How about blue jeans?” I said.

“Sorry,” he said. “This isn’t Los Angeles. I was planning flannels. We’ll cut four or five shirts in different pastels, and then, to cap it all, a simple down jacket in gray silk.”

“Don’t make it look Italian. And I’ll need shoes.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Kwoo,” he said, “but our shoemaking equipment isn’t working. We can give you fresh hose for those…” He looked at my feet with distaste.

“Adidas,” I said.

“I’m sure they’re marvelous for speed.” He turned and walked over to a wall where bolts of fabric hung above one another, reached his short arms up, and with some dexterity pulled down a heavy bolt of gray cloth. He smiled benignly toward me and then lugged the fabric over to a large gray machine, slid it into a hopper at one end and delicately pressed a green button on the side. There was a low whirr for about fifteen seconds, a click, and then another louder whirr. A folded pair of pants slid out onto a red enameled tray. He walked over and picked them up. “Perfect,” he said. “It’s really a superb piece of equipment. Japanese.” He handed them to me.

I slipped out of my spacepants right there and pulled on the flannels. They were of good fabric, but they fit over my narrow ass like a glove. “Jesus!” I said, “they’re tight.”

He looked me over, pursing his lips. “Well,” he said, “this machine does make them snug. That’s the truth of it.”

“Isn’t it working right?” I said. “I haven’t seen anybody on the streets wearing anything like this. The men outside are wearing good Communist baggy pants.”

He blushed a little. “To be frank,” he said, “I’m under orders from the Army. From Major Feng.”

I stared at him. “White Heron?”

He looked up at me helplessly. “Yes, Mr. Kwoo. White Heron Feng. You are to be dressed as a… as a courtesan.”

“Jesus Christ!” I said. Inwardly I had a sense of my life—my tired and crazy life—coming full circle, with a kind of preordained click. Okay, I thought, I can follow this out to the end.

They made me a down-filled gray jacket and one of those Ghengis Khan caps, with the earflaps. It all fit well and looked good. They were far better clothes than you could buy in New York. The truth of it is there’s nothing first-class made in America except television and French fries. Television equipment, that is; the shows are for cretins.

Outside, it was bitter cold and I tucked my head down and started toward the hotel. One of the guards grabbed me by the arm and stopped me. “We go elsewhere,” he said in English.

“That’s a good thing,” I said.

They walked me four blocks through streets crowded with Chinese. Men, women and children, and they all stared at me politely. Most of them looked well-dressed and well-fed. Some carried gold-headed walking canes. There were occasional groups of Japanese among them, in business suits and double-breasted Chicago overcoats, with lapel cameras. I got snapped a half-dozen times, standing out because of my height and my clothes and my rifle-carrying escort. The street we walked along was full of black passenger cars and red taxis. Vendors sold dim sum and tea at street corners. There were bookstores and newsstands on every block. Some people walked along reading. The bustle enlivened me, brought back my love of cities. I strode with bounce in my feet and made my escorts scurry to keep up with me in their heavy overcoats and rifles and short legs. The sun was out fully now and the streets were clean, lined with trees, and busy. I began to whistle. Così fan tutte. We passed a park with grandmothers and children and swings. Trees everywhere—so unlike New York. Bright theater posters adorned a fence. A big one for Macbeth caught my eye, but I didn’t stop to read it. The architecture was dreary Old Stalinist, but the feel of Peking was lively—far more so than I’d remembered it. There were soldiers and sailors of both sexes, pretty girls, old Arabella Kim types with shopping bags full of celery and tomatoes, lovers. From time to time electric limousines passed in the street with red flags, carrying Party members. We walked by a shu mai vendor with a stack of books on his little wheeled stand. Looking closely I saw The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy and The Novels of James M. Cain next to the dumplings. I still had a few American dollars in my billfold; I bought a copy of Mildred Pierce in Chinese and stuck it in my shopping bag.

After that, we turned a corner by a construction site and came upon an enormous white marble building, set back in a park where a dozen armed soldiers were patrolling. The building was about thirty stories high, with an entrance like a Turkish mausoleum. Over the doorway hung a huge silk banner with black ideograms: THE DEFENSE OF THE PEOPLE IS THE DUTY OF THE PARTY. Ten-foot-high statues of Mao and a dozen of his successors stood on the grass, surrounding an ICBM of the kind that carries a dozen R-bombs. My God, I thought, this is the Chinese Pentagon. The headquarters of the most powerful military force in history.

The fence was of wrought iron and twenty feet tall. We stopped at a guard box where four dour matrons in army uniform checked out the papers of my guards and then, steely-eyed, let us pass. They looked at me as though I had been found in a slag heap somewhere. I took a cigar from my pocket and started to light it. One of the women snatched it from my hand. “No smoking,” she said, in a bullfrog voice, in Chinese.

“Let me have that back,” I said. “I won’t light it.” My voice sounded hostile as hell; I’d have slugged her if I hadn’t been surrounded by rifle butts.

“When you leave,” she bullfrogged back, and put the cigar on a metal table in the guard box.

Shit, I thought. I had only one more left, and the Chinese didn’t trade with Cuban deviationists.

We crunched our way down a gravel path bordered in peonies, blooming crazily here in winter. I bent down and felt the ground. Warm. My God, they must use electric wires to heat it. I’d never seen such profligate use of power in my life. The path was about five hundred yards long, and not a candy wrapper in sight. Bright-green grass all around in the compound too, and no pigeons on the statues. They gleamed in the sun.

Two workmen were polishing the brass on the doorway when we came up. They stood aside, nodding deferentially to my guards, and we went into an enormous Romanesque anteroom with groined arches. This led into a still larger room, a foyer with a ceiling eight stories high, and narrow windows that let light slant in and glow on pink marble columns that seemed to be everywhere, like a forest. It was as vulgar as hell, but impressive. A kind of junk cathedral with pink marble floors and crystal chandeliers and the echoing sounds of officers striding around in military boots. A crew of men was polishing the floor over at one side, while men and women officers, natty in uniform, strode from hallway to hallway like Prussian officers under Frederick Wilhelm. About six corridors fed into this grand room and the traffic was heavy.

We took a left and entered a long hall, only three stories high this time but still lit by crystal chandeliers. We walked down it, past posters celebrating victories: the Urals Campaign of 2007, where the Chinese had routed half the Russian Army in a week; the Japanese Peace Mission of 2037, where the Great Fleet of the People had sailed into Tokyo Bay to explain to the Diet that Japan must stop rearming. At the end of this hall was something that stopped me in my tracks. A simple old realistic painting of young Mao, almost slim, squatting by a hut with a pitifully small bowl of rice in his hand and his eyes dark with fatigue. Near him sat Lin Piao. The caption read “The Long March.” I could have cried. What men—what men they were!

My guards took me by the arms and led me to an elevator. “You sons of bitches,” I said, “don’t you have any respect?” But I said it in English and nobody tried to answer me.

The elevator was an express; it shot us right to the top of the building; we stepped out onto a red-carpeted hallway where two female guards checked us out again before taking me from my male ones. The men who brought me were awed by their surroundings. They were told to go back and return to their base. I would be watched over from here. The two new guards took me down the red carpet to a simple teakwood doorway and knocked. A male orderly let me in.

I looked around. I was in some kind of outer office, something like a doctor’s waiting room, with Scandinavian-style chairs and magazines on coffee tables. The orderly took me across the room to a teakwood door and knocked softly. We waited a minute until it opened. A middle-aged woman, with a general’s star on her collar, stared at me. “My God,” she said, in English, “it’s Belson.”

Thus began one of the strangest episodes of my bewildered life: my five weeks as a Chinese whore. There was a certain fascination to it. They weren’t monsters; they were hardworking and competent army officers—the Underchiefs of Staff of the Army of the People’s Republic. Several were very attractive. There was a bedroom down the hall from one of their conference rooms; it was decorated in a Chinese idea of Western Macho. There was a giant fieldstone fireplace at one end with a moose head over it and crossed dummy rifles by the hearth. A huge brass bed sat in the middle of the room. The place was ludicrous, but a lot more pleasant than the House of Comradely Love, and the steaks sent up from the senior officers’ mess were splendid. As long as I behaved myself with these ladies I could stay there and be left alone at night. Nobody asked me about uranium, the Isabel, or endolin. We had little conversation; all they told me was that White Heron had recommended me to their attention.

So I tried to accommodate myself to it as best I could. They must have had erection pills ground up in my food and drink; I had a hard on whether I liked it or not at almost all times. My physical health was excellent and I found myself on my back for hours a day, my mind often totally divorced from the movement of my hips and the sensations of my bruised penis—pleasuring one general or the other, with my eyes squeezed shut and lines of Shakespeare in my head:

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings…

Sometimes my thoughts would be jarred by the orgasm of my partner. I had become a thinking dildo, a mournful captive of my adolescent dreams.

Sometimes when alone in the room I would stand back from the bar, a drink in my hand, and look at myself in the big mirror. My work had narrowed my waist and firmed my abdomen even more than the Nautilus machines could, and I was still tanned. The smell of jasmine and of just-departed flesh might be in my nostrils. A line from Yeats would sometimes come into my head:

In dreams begin responsibilities…

and then I would wonder how long it would go on. In a fashion time-honored in the trade of prostitution, I found myself going to sleep drunk every night and so hung over in the mornings that my first two or three tricks might have been a continuation of the night’s unpleasant dreams. My God-tricks! I had no endolin and no morphine. I ate, drank, slept and copulated. I had quit exercising, since my work was vigorous enough. No. I had quit exercising because I didn’t feel like a man anymore. My underwear was always returned to me perfumed, and sometimes flowers were sent to the room by one of my lovers. When we drank together the woman would pour the drinks. The oldest of them—a wiry brigadier in her fifties—liked to feed me my desserts with a spoon. I ate them greedily.

It ended as quickly as it had begun. One Thursday morning, in the week before Christmas, my first visitors were a pair of policemen in gray uniforms and red armbands. They were polite and clearly intelligent. I had no idea where they were going to take me and didn’t particularly care; my main feeling was relief that I didn’t have an erection when they woke me. I dressed and left without breakfast.

The day was horribly raw, a Chicago-in-January day in Peking, with ice everywhere in the streets. Everybody but me was wearing puffy overcoats and boots and enormous caps. Fortunately, the limousine was parked near the building and I made it inside without frostbite. It felt like thirty below. In the car I was glad to be in the company of men again; I felt I could live without women forever. I leaned back in the middle of my seat.

It was a long trip. It took an hour to get out of Peking, and we followed a winding road through bare, ice-covered trees for another hour before turning down a narrow path and beginning to climb a series of hills. At first there were scrubby bushes flanking the narrow road, then snow. The gray pavement had been plowed flawlessly, although there was no sign of habitation. After an hour the snow was high on each side of us and we were humming at a smooth thirty miles an hour through what felt like a cloud tunnel. I was shockingly hungry. Little spots whirred in front of my eyes against the dead white of the world outside. It was spooky and peaceful, like a shared dream, and no one spoke for over an hour. The driver was a wiry old Chinese with a chauffeur’s cap; he kept both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road. Once I cried out when a jackrabbit shot across in front of us like an apparition. The car was very warm; after a while I fell asleep.

I was awakened by a stop. Outside the driver’s window two guards, so muffled around the faces I couldn’t tell whether they were men or women, were standing like huge chessmen. The driver opened the back door with a switch; icy air stung my face; one of the guards bent down toward me, staring over a high collar and muffler and from under an enormous furry cap. Sunlight glinted on a bayonet. I stared back into sharp, ambiguous eyes; the guard nodded, said something to the driver and closed the door. We drove on.

We were on top of the hills now, rumbling through plowed snow along a flat plain. There were no features, no sign of life. It was like a snow-covered Belson. I stretched and rubbed my eyes. Somehow my hunger had gone. The sun was out; we drove through streamers of mist that were now lambent, along a perfectly straight road across the plain. After ten minutes I could see in the distance a red pagoda roof.

As we came closer and slowed, I made out a house or temple about the size of my parents’ home in Ohio, with a few wooden steps and a simple door in front. Snow had been cleared away from all around for a radius of about fifty feet. The roof was bright in the sun. On it sat a large bird or the image of a bird, head tucked under its wing. A dove.

Our car pulled up to the front steps. A tall, muffled guard was waiting, with no rifle this time. He held an enormous greatcoat open for me. I stepped from the warm car into it, pulling its huge collar around my ears. The guard took me firmly by the elbow and led me up the steps. The door opened. I walked inside, the weight of the coat giving gravity to my movement. I felt astonishingly calm, and the wearing of that coat for only a minute conferred dignity on my spirit as well as heft, as though it had been the robe of a Manchu emperor or Prospero’s magic cloak.

I was in a small room with no furniture. The bare floor was teak; ink brush drawings of birds hung on the walls.

There was a wide, green-lacquered door at the far side of the room. I walked toward it and as it swung open I saw daylight and green foliage. I heard the sound of falling water. Standing in the doorway I looked up at a skylight, with a willow tree brushing its top against it. Through ferns, light sparkled on water. I took a step forward and saw the surface of a pool. A gravelly, womanly voice said, “Come in, Mr. Belson.”

“Mourning Dove!” I said. “I hoped it would be you.”

I stepped forward onto gravel, turned at the feathery stand of ferns, walked around the pond and its small waterfall. A couple of abrupt chunks startled me; frogs had jumped into the water at my approach and were now peering at me from wet bubble eyes, the rest of their dark bodies floating below the surface in subaqueous murk.

At the other side of the pond on a raised wooden dais between willow trees sat Mourning Dove Soong in a white wicker chair. Her hair was white and she wore a plain black robe. She looked much older and terribly frail. Her face was chalky and, as I came closer, massively wrinkled around the intelligent black eyes. She was looking at me steadily. On her lap slept a gray cat. I walked to the chair across from her and took it.

She looked at me for several moments. Then she said, in English, “You are calm now, Mr. Belson.”

“Yes. A lot has happened since we first met. Some of the experiences have been calming.” I wondered if she knew what I had been doing in that room back in Peking. “I hope your life has been a pleasure for you.”

“It has not been,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, truly feeling sorry. “Is it the endolin?”

“I am not concerned with endolin,” she said. “Would you like tea?”

“Yes. And food too, if I may?”

“You were not fed in Peking?”

“Not since last night.”

She nodded. “That would be Major Feng. I told her to treat you well, but she believes I do not care anymore. I will remind her eventually.” She pressed a button on the arm of her chair, and I heard a soft buzz in another room. A boy of about twelve came in, dressed in a black robe like Mourning Dove’s. He stood before her and bowed slightly.

“Bring us food from the kitchen, Deng,” she said gently, in Chinese. Then to me, in English, “There will be no meat, Mr. Belson, since I do not eat it. But what we have is good.”

I said nothing and watched Deng as he walked across the gravel and left. When he was gone I said, “Mourning Dove, I am very seldom calm. All my life I have been in a hurry and I’m not even sure what for.”

“You make the simple difficult,” she said. “Perhaps because the difficult is simple for you.”

A voice in me was saying Fortune-cookie wisdom. Yet if anyone on Earth was wise, it was this woman. I could feel wisdom around her presence like a magnetic field. “I’ve been bored with making money,” I said. “But when I stop I just seem to crash around and hurt other people, like Isabel.”

“Miss Crawford is a strong person and can profit from the experience.”

“You know Isabel!”

“I had your history examined when I learned of your cargo.”

“The uranium?”

“Yes.”

“And you know where Isabel is now?”

Mourning Dove nodded, stroking her cat. The cat stretched itself and yawned.

“Mourning Dove,” I said in agitation, “I’d be relieved if you’d tell me where she is.”

“Mr. Belson,” she said, “I do not wish to play cat and mouse with you and I wish you well in life. But I am not ready to tell you that. Maybe later.”

I stared at her. “Mourning Dove, I love her. I need to know where she is.”

She looked at me calmly. “Mr. Belson,” she said, “China needs safe uranium. Our sources of power have caused far more pain than you feel for your Isabel.”

The way she said it gave me pause. “Has something happened?” I said.

She took her hand from the back of the cat and laid her thin arms on the arms of the chair. “While you were crossing the Pacific there was an accident in the North, near the village of Wu. Thousands of cubic feet of radioactive gas were emitted and many died. Wu is my home village and it was I who ordered the reactor built forty years ago, to show good faith in my policy.”

“Your policy?”

“I am one of the sponsors of the use of nuclear fission in China, Mr. Belson. I agreed that the price in lives would be worth the profit—in the contribution to China’s future.”

I could feel her pain, even though her face didn’t show it. “And you had family members in Wu?”

“Yes. My daughter and three sons. Seven grandchildren. They are dead now, or in hospitals dying.”

“That’s unbearable,” I said. I wanted to hold her and try to comfort her. “Do you blame yourself?”

She looked at me. “Who else is to blame?” she said. “I championed nuclear fission. I had the plant built near Wu.”

I just looked at her. What could I say? “What are you going to do?” I said, eventually.

“I am going to have lunch,” she said.

Deng had come back from the kitchen carrying a flat basket and a low table. He set the table between us and put the basket on it. It was full of fruit and vegetables. Another boy, who might have been Deng’s brother, followed with a ceramic teapot and two cups. He set the cups down and poured.

“I don’t see how you stand it,” I said, watching the boy pour the steaming tea and thinking of those corpses and of a provincial hospital somewhere, with the ruined faces of the dying.

“The big things are simpler than the small. One doesn’t complicate them. I went to a monastery in Tibet and fasted. Necessities arrive unbidden, like dreams. It was necessary to grieve properly and I have grieved.” She handed me a cup of tea. “I planned to greet you in Peking, Mr. Belson, to buy your uranium. I am sorry to have caused you a long wait.”

“That’s unimportant. I too underwent a kind of… purgation. I hope your pain will relent. I wish I could help.”

“I see that you do,” she said calmly and sipped her tea. “The broccoli is nourishing. It has been steamed in ginseng.”

I took a bite. It was delicious and my appetite returned in a flash. “Did you visit Wu afterward?”

“Yes,” she said, drinking tea. “I took endolin to the survivors. They are not in pain.”

“I’m glad it helped,” I said. I finished a floret of broccoli and then took a big peach and ate in silence, looking at the water of the pond and at the green ferns that surrounded it. I thought of Juno, of all that safe uranium there, enough to power our world forever. “Mourning Dove,” I said, “I still love America, even though it has treated me badly. And I’m crazy about New York. I don’t want my country to be an outpost of a Chinese empire.”

“Your country is China now.”

“By adoption. And I think I could be a Confucianist. But right now I would like to settle in New York, with Isabel if she’ll have me, and devote the rest of my life to making it into a great city again.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Crashing around?”

“Maybe I can do it calmly.” I said this with surprising passion. “I’ve learned a lot in the last year, Mourning Dove. I may be ready to enjoy the rest of my life.” My head was feeling very clear, and there were no more spots in front of my eyes. This was one of the loveliest rooms I had ever been in and I felt I was with the oldest and best of friends.

She nodded. “‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’”

“That’s William Blake!” I said. “I hope it’s true.”

“It is true. I was excessive when young, as you are, Mr. Belson, and I have become wise. I believe that in my case one brought about the other.” She returned her attention to the cat. “I read Blake in college, in London. I desired to know everything when I was young, and to be infinitely rich and to become a member of the Central Committee of the Party. I have had four husbands and alienated them all. They are all dead now and I have forgotten them. But I got what I desired.” She looked at me. “I have not forgotten my mother and my father. My mother would beat me for nothing…” Suddenly her old face tightened alarmingly. “For nothing, Mr. Belson. She has been dead fifty years and I hate her still. I hate my father for letting her do it, and he too is long dead.”

“Jesus!” I said. “It sounds familiar.”

“It is not uncommon. The thing is to rule it and not to let it rule.” She paused. “One cannot attract the attention of the dead, though many try.”

“Oh yes,” I said, blinking, “many try.” My voice sounded strange.

“You are crying,” Mourning Dove said. “As much as I hate my mother I also love her. With a mother it is hard to do otherwise. Perhaps you love yours still.”

Orbach had tried to tell me that, but I wouldn’t listen—not in my stomach or heart or wherever it is. I looked at Mourning Dove through tears. They were pouring out, some of them slopping down on my big hairy right hand that held a half-eaten peach. I could see my mother’s face, lost in self-regard. Grief suffused my body, starting in my stomach and spreading to my chest and shoulders and heaving the muscles of my abdomen and my face.

Gradually it subsided. I heard the pond waterfall again. I leaned back and stretched. I could feel the strength of my limbs, the soundness of my heart. My beard was wet. I took a bite from the peach, letting the juice mix with tears.

“You are a remarkable man, Mr. Belson,” Mourning Dove said.

I nodded and swallowed. “Would you call me Benjamin?”

“Benjamin,” she said, “I want your uranium.”

I nodded. “You can have half of it.”

Her voice was quiet. “No. All. China needs it.”

I looked at her. Her face was unshakable. “I can’t do that. There will be enough to go around. I can send the Isabel back.”

She just looked at me. “You can be made to tell us where it is from. Chemicals…”

“I know. But they aren’t reliable.”

“Torture,” she said, as if mentioning a stock option.

I shuddered. “Oh, I know. You could do that and it would work. But it wouldn’t give you what’s on the Isabel. That’s in Washington, and L’Ouverture Baynes is no fool.”

She had finished her tea but was still holding the cup. She leaned over now and set it on the table beside the basket. “L’Ouverture Baynes will be out of office next week. He was defeated in November, Benjamin.”

I stared at her and said, “Mattie…?”

“Miss Hinkle campaigned with tales of the Isabel’s uranium, claiming the needs of employment in Kentucky. She will be sworn in in January. You will be able to recover the Isabel. I want it brought to Honshu.”

“Mourning Dove,” I said. “I can’t do that. I can let you have half of it. That’s thirty tons. You can replace all the U235 in China with thirty tons and it will keep you till I get more.” My heart had begun beating wildly again, thinking of how L’Ouverture had been defeated and that I could get hold of my spaceship again.

“Why would I want the United States to be powerful?”

I stared at her. “Oh Jesus, Mourning Dove,” I said. “Don’t do to us what the British did to you, with the opium and all that bullying. The world doesn’t have to be run that way.”

“There is danger in a house without a master.”

“Oh, come off it,” I said, exasperated with her. “That’s fortune-cookie wisdom and it sounds fascist.”

“It’s Confucius.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s still no good. Remember your mother? She was a master, wasn’t she? Who needs that?”

That seemed to touch her. She pursed her lips silently for a moment. I waited. “America will waste the fuel,” she said, “as it wasted the oil of Texas and of the Persian Gulf. America built tall buildings with sealed windows and burned oil to cool them in summer.”

“You sound like L’Ouverture. It doesn’t have to be that way anymore. America has changed. We’re more civilized, less crazy about dumb toys. Cheap power can permit a beautiful life as easily as a crass one.”

Her face had softened a bit, but now it hardened. “Benjamin,” she said, “the person who supported me as a child and comforted me after Mother’s beatings was my great-uncle, Too Moy. The boys who served us are his great-great-grandsons and my nephews. They are all the family I have left.”

“I’m glad you had someone to comfort you,” I said. “With me it was a horse named Juno.”

“One takes what one can find. Too Moy was very old and crippled. He had seen Mao himself. He was a peasant. In Wu our water power came from the power of human legs. A man or a woman sat astride a device like a wooden bicycle, across a stream, and pedaled the water into rice paddies. Sometimes for ten or twelve hours a day. There is slight fulfillment in such work and a great deal of pain. My great-uncle walked little and took much aspirin for the cramps in his legs. I was able to get medication for him, and it helped, but at times he would lie on his pallet in the room behind my mother’s house and groan. Paddling was all he ever did, and he did it for over fifty years. Yet he was an intelligent man, with a loving heart. I might have been a cruel person without his love.”

“It’s awful to spend a life like that,” I said.

Her face was rigid. “Yes,” she said. “All the labor that Too Moy did in his lifetime could have been done better by one of the motors Americans were cutting their lawns with when he was young.”

I nodded. I had nothing to say.

“You Americans did not create that oil you used for your cars, your air conditioners, your lawn mowers, or for the plastic films you wrapped toys and pens and vegetables in. The oil was made by the world itself, when great ferns covered Texas and the Persian Gulf. It took millions of years to make it. You and the Arabs threw it away in a century, on foolishness. With that oil, my great-uncle could have had a happier life. There were many like him all over China. When my great-uncle was young, people like you in America called such people the ‘yellow peril’ or ‘faceless millions.’” She leaned over toward me in quiet fury. “My Great-Uncle Too Moy was not a peril, was not faceless. He did not mope in impotence. He was a better man than you, Mr. Belson.”

I sat there stunned for a long while. I stared at the water, trying to spot the frogs. But they were out of sight now. Minutes passed in silence. I thought of counterarguments, thought of mentioning the cars and jets the Chinese had transported me in, the luxurious life that Party members like Mourning Dove herself lived, the red flag limousines and the graft in the military. But I could not get that great-uncle out of my mind. My vision had somehow become very clear; on an impulse I took off my glasses and slid them into my shirt pocket. I could see everything with a preternatural sharpness, every wrinkle in Mourning Dove’s impassive face, every leaf of the willow. Back at the other end of the pond were the eyes of a frog, just on the still surface of the gray water, looking toward me.

“Mourning Dove,” I said, “I would like to be your son.”

She did not look at me. “I have no son now.”

“I know. I would like you to adopt me.”

She raised her eyes slowly. “Why?”

“I need a mother.”

She kept looking at me for a long while. “Perhaps you are only trying to win an argument.”

“God, no!” I said passionately. “I have let that go for now. I truly love you and want you to be my parent, the way Too Moy was yours and saved your soul for you.” I paused and looked at her, not crying now but feeling as though the slightest breath of air could bring tears. “I want my soul to be like yours. I want you in my memory to drive away the drunken fool who lives in there.” I kept looking at her.

She remained impassive for a long time. Then she reached out a fragile white hand and placed it on the back of mine, on the arm of the wicker chair. “Benjamin,” she said. “Benjamin. You may keep half of the uranium.”

I felt as I had felt when, naked to Fomalhaut, I had slept on the grass that fed me and awakened to the magnificent yet distant rings of Belson.