The Incarnations (2 page)

The ID on the fare receipts means any theft would be traced back to him, so Wang turns everything in to the taxi company’s lost-property depot. In nearly a decade he has stolen only one thing: a self-assembly kite in a box, the frame slotting together to make a magnificent dragon with a one-metre wing-span. Wang saw the forgotten kite in the back seat. Then he saw the receipt of the old man who owned it, poking like a tongue from the meter at the journey’s end. A stroke of luck. That weekend Wang and Echo flew the kite together in Chaoyang Park, the crimson dragon fluttering its tail as it darted over the lakes and trees. As he watched Echo that day, smiling and gazing up to the kite in the sky, Wang thought of the old man and tried not to feel bad. What’s the good of one person clinging to his morals when everyone else is so corrupt? What’s the good of that?

Wang is driving east down Workers Stadium Road when, squinting in the sun, he flips down the visor above the driver’s seat and an envelope falls on to his lap. Must be Baldy Zhang’s, he thinks. Then he sees his name. Wang pulls over into the bicycle lane and slides his thumb under the adhesive seal. The letter is printed on four sheets of A4. As he reads a woman dragging a suitcase on wheels taps on the window. Wang switches off the for-hire sign and waves her away. After reading the letter he refolds it and stuffs it back in the envelope. Workers Stadium Road reverberates with engines as cars flow to the east and to the west. Ignitions growl, rickshaw bells
brrring
and horns beep. Migrant workers with greasy hair and padding spilling out of ripped jackets trudge up the pedestrian overpass, shouldering heavy bags. The street seems changed somehow. As though everything is a façade for something hiding beneath. He wants to call Baldy Zhang, but knows that he sleeps until dusk. Wang smokes a cigarette, then calls his wife instead.

Yida is at work and the phone rings and rings. Wang sees her in one of the private rooms at Dragonfly Massage, under the sensual, dimmer-switch-on-low lighting, standing over a customer on the massage table in her clinical white uniform. Wang sees her as a customer sees her. A pretty 29-year-old masseur with bronzed skin and a wilderness of curls that tumble and fall from any barrette or butterfly clip she uses to hold them back. Firm calves. Lips that don’t need lipstick. Hazel eyes flecked with gold. ‘Where are you from?’ customers ask when they hear her accent. And as she tells them, they nod and recoil slightly, as though the soil and toil of peasant life still clings to her skin. There are facts about his wife’s occupation Wang can’t stomach. The fact that her male clients strip to their underwear. The fact that with her bare hands (moisturized, the nails clipped) she kneads and caresses every part of the male flesh. Shoulders, lower back, buttocks, inner thighs. Her upper-arm muscles rippling with strength as she attends to her bare-chested customers in the aromatherapy-oil-scented room. Wang knows what’s on a man’s mind when he is massaged by a pretty girl. And so does Yida. When she was a teenager, new to Beijing and ripe for exploitation, she worked in a parlour where bringing a client to a climax with her hand was an ordinary part of the massage routine. She’d wiped up the semen afterwards, she confessed, as casually as a waitress mopping up a spilt drink in a café.

She answers on the seventeenth ring.

‘How come it took you so long to answer?’ asks Wang.

‘The phone was in my locker . . .’

‘Were you with a customer?’

‘No. I’ve had no customers yet . . .’

She sighs, weary of her husband’s jealousy. ‘What is it, Wang? Is something wrong?’

‘No. Nothing’s wrong . . .’

And Wang changes his mind about telling her. He says, ‘I was thinking of you. That’s all.’

Yida softens. ‘Are you sure that there’s nothing wrong?’

‘Yes. I’m sure.’

In the Public Security Bureau in Tuan Jie Hu, there are three policemen behind the enquiries desk. Two of them are Wang’s age. Thugs with crew cuts, fogging the police station with wreaths of cigarette smoke. The third policeman is sixtyish with kind-looking eyes. Wang takes the letter to him. He tells him where he found it and describes the contents. The policeman reads the first page: ‘I don’t understand.’ Wang shows him the part where the writer confesses to stalking him.

‘Do you remember driving a fare to Purple Bamboo Park? After talking to the recycling collector?’ the policeman asks.

‘No. I don’t remember.’

The letter is put under the photocopier lid and reproduced for police records with mechanical whirrings and flashes of light. The policeman then asks for Wang’s ID card. He taps his ID number into the computer and Wang’s personal file comes up on the screen. When the policeman looks at Wang again, the kindness has gone from his eyes.

‘Mr Wang,’ he says, ‘why don’t I take a look at your car?’

The policeman checks the door handles and windows for signs of forced entry. He opens the glove compartment and, rummaging about, finds Baldy Zhang’s baijiu. He opens the brand-new bottle and sniffs, then pockets it without a word. He looks at Wang as though he is wasting his time.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘someone is having a joke with you.’

‘Whoever it is has been following me. They know where I live. They’ve been watching my wife and child.’

‘Unless a law has been broken, there’s nothing we can do.’

Passengers slide in, front seat or back, sighing with relief to be in the stuffy car-heater warmth. As Wang navigates the streets of Beijing, steering through the arrhythmic stop–start of traffic, they
tap tap tap
, messaging on phones. They crack knuckles, popping sockets of bone. They yawn and yawn again. They struggle in with backpacks, unfolding German maps, naming a street in strange Teutonic tones. They scowl at Wang, blaming him for slow traffic. A teenage girl points to a plastic bag cartwheeling in the wind and remarks dryly, ‘That bag will get there before us.’ The radio says, ‘There are 66,000 taxi drivers in Beijing. A figure the government intends to reduce by a third by 2010.’

The sky is stark and white as though bled dry. A woozy woman, her head swathed in bandages, staggers in from outside a plastic-surgery clinic. Mute, she hands Wang her address on paper. Throughout the journey Wang senses her watching him through the eyeholes in her gauze mask. He imagines the reconstructed face beneath. The surgeon’s stitches and the sag of age drawn taut. He longs to call it a day and go home.

The canteen is east of the Third ring road, between a carwash and a garage. Crowded around Formica tables, cabbies hunch over bowls, chopsticks tugging noodles to mouths. Smoke from the poorly ventilated kitchen and crimson-glowing cigarettes swirls above them in a stratum of clouds. Hacking coughs cut through the dinnertime clatter, and lighters spark and flare as though pyromania, not nicotine, is the addiction here. Wang stands in the doorway, his pupils dilating in the dimness. Cabbies are not a healthy breed; slouching and overweight and in the high-risk category for coronary thrombosis. Irritable from hours of grinding traffic and liable to fly off the handle at the slightest thing. Wang hopes he doesn’t look too much like these bad-tempered, wheyfaced men in the canteen. ‘It’s freezing! Shut the fucking door!’ shouts Driver Liang. Wang steps inside.

Baldy Zhang grunts at Wang, frowning beneath his bald, ridged cranium as he peels a clove of garlic and grinds it between his molars. Baldy Zhang can get through a bulb of garlic a night and leaves the taxi so pungent Wang has to wind the windows down before his shift to air it out. (‘Germ-ridden, passengers are,’ Baldy Zhang once explained. ‘Garlic protects me from the germs.’) Baldy Zhang has been a cabbie since the eighties, back when Beijing was a city of bicycles and driving a taxi a prestigious job, and though he is arrogant and rude, Wang likes co-renting with him. Baldy Zhang never works during the day, for one, which means Wang hasn’t worked a night in three years. Though fares are fewer, Baldy Zhang prefers the night-time, when there are less of the things that he loathes: traffic, policemen and people. (‘There’s too many people in China,’ he says. ‘The One-child Policy isn’t enough. They should ban childbirth for a few years.’) Baldy Zhang usually works from dusk until dawn, parks the Citroën outside Wang’s building, then goes home to down a few beers and sleep. Baldy Zhang isn’t married. ‘Women aren’t worth the hassle. Not even prostitutes. This right hand is all I trust,’ he says, waggling his fingers at Wang.

They each own a set of keys, and Wang avoids him most days. But today he texted, asking to meet.

‘Know anything about this? I found it in the sun visor.’

Wang tosses Baldy Zhang the letter, watching for a spark of recognition in his eyes.

‘What it is?’ Baldy Zhang asks.

‘Read it.’

Baldy Zhang skims a page, then tosses the letter back, lacking the patience to read on. ‘What is it?’

As Wang tells him, Baldy Zhang reaches for Wang’s pack of Red Pagoda Mountain, sticks a filter between his lips and sparks the lighter. ‘Mutton noodles!’ calls one of the Sichuan girls who works in the kitchen. ‘Who ordered mutton noodles with chillies?’

‘I once knew a driver who got a letter like this,’ Baldy Zhang says. ‘Driver Fan was his name. Few days after he got the letter he was found dead in his taxi. Murdered.’

‘Murdered?’

Baldy Zhang slits his eyes as he inhales, tobacco and cigarette paper crackling.

‘Stabbed fourteen times in the chest. The inside of his taxi was like an abattoir. Everything sprayed with blood. It was on the news. Never caught who did it . . .’

Wang falls for it. Only for a second, but that’s long enough for Baldy Zhang. He wallops the table and guffaws. Other cabbies look over.

‘Very funny,’ says Wang.

He waits for the cackling to die down. He has a headache from the stale, recycled air and can’t wait to get out of the canteen and breathe in the cold winter sky.

‘Tell me the truth. Is this letter anything to do with you?’

‘’Course not. Do I look mad?’

‘How did it get there then?’

‘A piece of wire’s all it takes to pick the lock. Done it myself when I’ve locked in the keys.’

Tilting his chin, Baldy Zhang blows a plume of smoke to the ceiling, then smiles.

Yida is in the kitchen. Rice-cooker steam fogs the window and the radio talks of Beijing’s preparations for the Olympic Games. A cotton rag pulls back Yida’s tumbleweed curls, and one of Wang’s old T-shirts hangs loosely from her slender frame as she slices a green pepper on the chopping board. Standing in the doorway, Wang watches her move between the kitchen counter and stove, adding the peppers to the onions sizzling in the wok, as rings of flame blaze beneath. Wok handle in one hand, spatula in the other, Yida looks over her shoulder. ‘That you, Wang?’ Wang says that it is.

The TV is madcap with cartoons. A hyperactive playmate that Echo ignores as she sits in her Zaoying Elementary tracksuit, copying illustrations from an anime comic into her spiral-bound pad. She is pretty like her mother, but her eye-teeth have come through crooked. Little Rabbit, they call her at school, and Wang winces at the orthodontist’s bills yet to come.

‘Ba, you’re back,’ she says, not looking up from the spiral-bound pad.

Echo wants to be a comic-book illustrator when she grows up, an ambition of which Yida disapproves. ‘Stop praising her. Don’t encourage her to waste time on art,’ she tells Wang. ‘Not when her grades in every other subject are so poor.’ Yida is harsh on Echo. Back when she was pregnant, she had bribed a doctor to give her an ultrasound. When she was told the foetus didn’t have a penis, Yida had debated having an abortion. ‘But what if the ultrasound was wrong?’ she fretted. ‘What if I abort a boy?’ ‘Carry the baby to term then,’ Wang suggested, ‘and if you give birth to a girl, drown her in a bucket.’ Wang had shamed her into keeping the baby, and he suspects Yida is strict with Echo because she regrets not having a son. But Wang has no regrets at all. He couldn’t be prouder of Echo. He pats her messy hair, thinking he couldn’t have been blessed with a better child.

‘Not so close. You’ll ruin your eyes and need glasses. Then you’ll never get a husband,’ he says.

‘Good,’ says Echo. ‘I don’t want a husband.’

‘You will,’ Wang says. ‘Finished your homework?’

‘Yes,’ she fibs, knowing he is too lazy to check.

After dinner, Wang opens his laptop and scrolls through blogs online; mentally fidgeting, his attention span narrowing with every click. Yida curls up on a cushioned chair, her baggy, holey jumper tugged down over her knees, her wire-rimmed reading glasses perched on her nose and a best-selling paperback on Confucianism on her lap. Yida has started misquoting
The Analects
, and Wang can’t wait for her to move on to something else.

On the living-room wall is a framed photograph of Wang and Yida, nine years younger, posing in the marble foyer of a five-star hotel. Yida is in an ivory wedding dress and Wang in suit and tie selected randomly from the photography studio’s clothing rails. They don’t look like themselves in the photo. Their smiles are forced and unnatural and may as well have been pulled off the rack with their clothes.

The actual marriage had been months earlier. Wang was twenty-two and Yida twenty, and they had been together for six weeks. Wang remembers how young Yida looked that day at the registry office, her hair scraped up in a ponytail, not a scrap of makeup on her joyful face. Afterwards they had ordered steaming-hot bowls of Lanzhou noodles at a nearby stall. ‘This is our wedding banquet,’ Wang had told the noodle-maker, and he had poured out shots of baijiu and they’d all drunk a toast. Wang and Yida had drunkenly kissed, and an old woman had scolded them. Yida beamed and waved the marriage certificate at her: ‘We got married today. Here’s the evidence. I’m allowed to kiss my own husband, aren’t I?’

They were proud of their wedding day. It was proof they were far more in love than the couples with dowries and guest lists and parental approval. Which was why, when Yida later confessed her regret that they’d not had a traditional ceremony, Wang was disappointed. They went to a photography studio for some professional wedding portraits, to make their marriage seem more conventional. They were nowhere near as ecstatic on the day of the photo shoot as the day they were married. A miscarriage and many late-night fights had brought about a loss of innocence; the sadness of romantic expectations fallen short. Yida is pregnant with Echo in the photo. Queasy with morning sickness and holding a bouquet to hide her bump. The fact that she is also in the photo, as a foetus in the womb, fascinates and delights Echo. Every so often she points at the slight bump visible under the bouquet and cries, ‘There I am. Tucked away in Ma’s belly! Guest of honour on your wedding day!’