Year of the Tiger (7 page)

I open my eyes. Here’s John standing in front of me, holding two bottles of beer. He’s actually pretty handsome, not really baby-faced; he has a strong jaw, bright eyes, light stubble on his chin. And he’s taller than I am. Solid, with some muscle. I think I can see the outline of his chest beneath the T-shirt.

One World, One Dream.

‘Do you feel okay?’

‘Sure. I’m just a little tired.’

John hands me a beer, already opened, like the last one. ‘We could go sit down somewhere,’ he says, ‘if you are tired.’

‘Okay,’ I say. I’m tired of all the noise, anyway.

We make our way outside. ‘I know a good place,’ John says. I stifle a giggle. Does he want to make out or something? I might be up for that. It might be fun, messing around a little. He’s cute, I’ve decided. I take another swallow of beer.

It’s a nice night. I’m warm enough with just my light jacket. John leads me down a bricked path that leads to a garden of sorts. I’ve been here before. There’s a fountain and a marble wall inscribed with calligraphy, the grooves highlighted by gold paint. Some fucking proverb about wisdom and self-cultivation, probably.

We sit on the stone bench by the fountain. I can hear the music from the party, but it’s so faint that I feel like I could almost be imagining it, making up music from the gurgle and flow of the fountain’s water.

‘This where you used to take girls?’

John grins slyly. ‘Sometimes.’ He takes a pull of his beer and leans toward me a little. ‘Do you have a boyfriend, Yili?’

‘Maybe. Sort of. I don’t know.’

‘What does that mean?’ John sounds curious. Like he honestly wants to understand.

I have to really think about it for a minute. I look up, through the haze of dust and city lights. Haloes surround the streetlights, the stars. It’s all so beautiful, in an ugly kind of way.

‘He’s a good guy,’ I finally say. ‘A really good guy. I like him. And I know he likes me. He’s nice.’

Then I can’t help it: I start laughing. ‘That sounds really lame.’

‘No, Yili, it doesn’t sound … lame.’ John has to work a little to get that last word out, like it sticks somewhere on the middle of his tongue. ‘But you say you don’t know about him.’

‘I mean, I don’t know …’

My head feels funny. The sound of the fountain thrums in my ears, or maybe it’s the music. I swallow some more beer. It goes down like it’s something alien, cold and coppery. ‘What he wants from me. I mean … we spend a lot of time together. But I’m not sure why.’

‘You think he wants you to do something for him?’

‘No. No, I …’ I squeeze my eyes shut. Everything feels funny. My eyes are too big; they’re sticking out, and I need to cover them up. ‘He’s nice,’ I repeat. ‘Maybe he just feels sorry for me.’

‘Yili?’ John says. ‘Yili?’

It’s too loud. I put my hands over my ears. ‘I feel kind of weird,’ I manage.

‘Are you ill?’ John asks anxiously. ‘Should we go to the doctor?’

‘No. No … I just …’ There’s a beer bottle in my hand. I’m holding it. It’s solid and cold, and I can feel the damp from the condensation. Like, the beer that’s inside the bottle wants to get out, and it’s squeezing through tiny holes in the glass. I take another sip. Free the beer!

‘Feel weird.’

‘I think maybe you should go home, Yili.’ He holds out his hand. ‘Come. I’ll take you.’

I stare at him. His eyes are bright, sparkling almost, even in the dark. I stare at his hand. It looks too big.

‘I don’t want to go home,’ I say.

‘Here.’ His hand reaches down. Finds mine. Closes over it, dry and hot, like some trespasser from the desert.

‘Stand up,’ he says.

I do what he tells me to. I don’t even think to argue about it. I stand up, and my bad leg buckles, and I pitch forward.

John catches me. I see his face as I fall; he looks surprised and almost embarrassed.

‘Sorry,’ I mumble. ‘My leg’s messed up.’

‘I’ll help you,’ John says. ‘Here, I take your arm.’

He has me drape my arm around his shoulders, and he threads his arm across my back and under my armpit. He won’t quite look at me, I notice. That’s funny, I think. Why should he be embarrassed? I’m the one who’s somehow gotten so fucked up that I can’t walk.

How’d that happen, I wonder?

It finally occurs to me, as we mutually stagger down the path that leads out of the garden and into the campus proper, that I’ve been dosed with something.

‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Wait. I don’t wanna go with you.’

‘What, Yili?’

‘Let me go,’ I say. ‘Let me go. I just wanna … Let go of me.’

‘Yili, I think maybe you are a little sick,’ John says, sounding very sympathetic. ‘I help you to get home. That is all. You don’t need to worry about me.’

I don’t believe him. I try to pull away. The arm encircling me holds me tighter against him. We stumble down the walkway, through the quad of dormitories, past the take-out window of the Xinjiang restaurant where students line up for lamb skewers and sesame bread.

I should yell. I should scream. I should kick him in the nuts and run. But I don’t. I can’t. We keep walking, his fingers pressing hard against my ribs, until we’ve reached the campus gate, where teenage security guards in stiff gray polyester jackets stand nominal sentry.

‘Come on, Yili,’ John says. ‘This way.’

A shiny silver car waits for us on the other side.

I picture the finger-shaped bruises John’s hand is making on my ribcage as he guides me toward the silver car. There’s a guy leaning against it, smoking a cigarette. John gestures angrily at him. ‘Off my car!’ he snaps.

‘Fuck your mother,’ the guy mutters. But he lifts himself off the car, takes one last drag on his cigarette, and flicks it into the gutter before ambling away.

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Wait.’

‘Now, Ellie, you don’t want to talk to that guy,’ John chides me. ‘He is just some rascal.’

‘It’s all a show,’ I say, ‘isn’t it? That guy drove the car here.’

John does his best puzzled squint, but I’m not buying it any more. ‘Of course not. He is just some local rascal.’

‘But there’s no parking here,’ I say, and I’m feeling like this is maybe the most brilliant thing I’ve ever said.

John laughs as he opens the passenger door. ‘Oh, Yili! You are very funny. Now, get into the car.’

I don’t want to get in. I plant my feet, but I’m really messed up, and my leg isn’t that stable anyway, and John somehow knocks me off balance, and I fall across the seats, hitting my cheek against the gear-shift, and John swings my legs into the car and slams the door.

The car has an open moonroof. I stare up, trying to see through the haze to the stars.

The driver’s door opens, and John gets in, putting the keys in the ignition before his butt hits the seat. My head’s touching his thigh as the car pulls away from the curb.

‘Where’re we going?’ I mumble. My mouth feels like it’s full of stones.

‘I told you, Yili. To your home.’

I can’t even sit up. I just lie there, head pressed against John’s thigh, feeling his muscles bunch and relax as he brakes and accelerates. Streetlights pass over us.

I don’t know how long we drive.

Finally, it seems, we get somewhere. John rolls down his window, mutters something to another teenage security guard in a gray polyester jacket, I don’t hear what. I stare up through the moonroof. I can see the tops of tall buildings, satellite dishes, a square of sky. But no stars.

‘Here we are, Yili.’

He gets out and opens the passenger door. I lie there. I don’t think I can move. John’s face looms over me. ‘Oh, Yili,’ he says. ‘I think maybe you are very sick.’

‘I … I …’

‘Here. Take my hand.’

I try, feebly grasping at it like my fingers have gone boneless; they’re just these white worms, jellyfish fingers, waving around in a black sea.

John scoops me up, hands placed beneath my shoulder blades and butt, lifting me out of the car. My feet touch the ground but don’t want to stay there.

‘Here,’ John says. ‘I carry you.’

And he does. My arms circle around his neck, because they don’t know what else to do.

I rest my cheek against John’s leather jacket and close my eyes, lost in the rock and sway of his steps as he carries me along like I’m some little kid in her daddy’s arms. I catch his scent beneath the smell of cheap, tanned leather: sweat mixed with some bad cologne. I like the sweat better.

‘Yili,’ John says, his breath warm in my ear. ‘What is your apartment number?’

‘What?’

‘Your apartment number. What is it?’

I open my eyes, and it’s the weirdest thing: my apartment building looms above us.

Wait, I think. Wait. He doesn’t know my apartment number, but he knows where I live. That doesn’t make sense. How does he know where I live?

‘You told me this, Yili. At the party. Don’t you remember?’

Did I just say that out loud? I guess I did.

‘Twenty-one oh-five,’ I slur.

I just want to lie down.

I just want to go home.

We take the elevator upstairs. It’s empty, the tall stool where the
fuwuyuan
sits when she’s on duty unoccupied. I stare at it, the empty stool surrounded by mirror tile, fake wood paneling and fluorescent light, and try to conjure up some meaning to it, but I can’t.

Here we are in the foyer.

As John fumbles at my door (Does he have my keys? Did I give them to him?), I see a sharp beam of white light, and fucking Mrs Hua pokes her head out from her apartment.

‘What sort of things are going on now?’ she hisses. ‘This is really more than anyone should bear!’

John turns his head in her direction. ‘Your business ends at your eaves, old Auntie.’ The way he says it, so cold and matter-of-fact, would scare me – that is, if I could feel afraid right now.

Mrs Hua can. She pulls back behind her door. ‘Show some respect,’ she mutters as she slams it shut and locks it with both chain and bar.

John carries me inside.

He steps carefully through the maze of computer parts, the cardboard Yao Ming, the piles of clothes and books in the near-dark, the only light in the room what’s leaking in through the windows from a Beijing sky that’s never really dark any more.

‘Which room, Yili?’

Now, suddenly, I do get scared. ‘Chuckie?’ I say. But my voice is weak, weak like in a dream where you can’t cry out, where you can’t make anyone hear you. ‘Chuckie?’ I try again.

‘No one is here,’ John tells me. ‘Besides, you shouldn’t worry.’

He takes me into my room and lays me down on my futon. He doesn’t turn on the light, but the nightlight by the door has come on.

For a moment, he stands over me. His face is in shadow, but he’s staring at me, I can tell.

‘I am going to make you more comfortable,’ he says softly.

He kneels down by the futon. First he takes off my sneakers and socks, balling up the socks and putting them in the shoes, placing the shoes in the closet, lined up neatly.

Then he hesitates before reaching for the top button of my jeans.

‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘Don’t.’

‘Now, Yili, you cannot be comfortable in these.’

I can’t stop him. I can barely move. He unbuttons my jeans, lifts me up, and slides them over my butt and then off. He folds them up, looks around, and then puts the jeans on the room’s one chair.

He kneels down next to me again. His eyes fall on my bad leg, and he reaches out and lightly touches a place where two long scars cross, then the hollow from the chunk of missing muscle. ‘Oh,’ he says, in a curious voice. ‘You were badly hurt, I think.’

I bite my lip and nod. Tears stream from my eyes, and I can’t control that either.

He gives my leg a final, gentle pat. Then he reaches under my back, beneath my shirt, and unhooks my bra. He rocks back on his heels. ‘Yili, I have to take this off too,’ he says, with a trace of apology. Then he peels my shirt up and over my head. For a moment, the shirt catches on my chin, collapses on my face like a death-mask, and as I breathe in, the cotton sealing my nostrils, I think maybe it will suffocate me, and that’s what John wants to do to me. But no. He frees the shirt from my head. Turns it right side out, folds it, and lays it neatly on top of my jeans on the chair.

He turns back to me, smiling awkwardly. He pulls one bra strap down along my arm until it clears my hand. Then the other. He holds my bra in his hand, and for a moment he stares at my tits. Then he looks away and drapes the bra over the back of the chair.

I’m lying there naked except for my panties. I’m shaking. The room seems to vibrate.

John’s back is to me. He’s rummaging through the little dresser next to my closet. ‘Ah,’ he says, satisfied. ‘This is good.’

He has in his hands a large T-shirt. ‘I think maybe this will be comfortable for you.’

He puts it over my head, lifts me up a little, and I can feel the dry heat radiating from his hand pressed flat between my shoulder-blades.

After he gets the T-shirt on me, he finds the light blanket I use most warm spring nights and covers me with it.

‘Just a minute,’ he says, and leaves.

I lie there. The room is still vibrating, but not so quickly.