Tiananmen Square
Wu-Long was nineteen when the Tiananmen Square Incident boiled through Beijing. His unit, the 27th army, was mobilized and moved down in time for the culmination of numerous months of tension and escalation on the 4th of June. It struck him then, staring into the hankerchief of concrete enthronged in its protesters and flanked by the cruel bird's eye of foreign newscasters' cameras, that he could just as easily have wond up on the other side. There were boys his age, his height, with his propensity for mathematics and memory for dates, and they even had his face, sort of: dark and hard with the breathless resolve that often characterized youth when it demanded to be listened to. There were men and women like his parents, those who had lost or never learned to play the political inning of the economic game. Summer's squalid heat had blotted everybody's armpits with sweat patches. The civilians faced down tanks and rifles carrying plastic water bottles.
Like most of the others, his unit initially hesitated to fire on their unexpected enemy. Like most of the others, too, they got over it. Wu-Long killed — really killed — for the first time. It wasn't the hardest thing he'd ever done. He survived to tell the tale.
Not that anyone asked for him to tel it, of course. The incident cast a pall over his unit that almost matched the outrage that emanated through the international stage. Many of his fellow soldiers fell apart in small but measurable ways, aggregated drinking problems, excused their departure from service with concerns from their wives, transferred across departments. It wasn't that the bond between the men had been dissolved, but the one event that had sealed it once and for all was so unimaginably painful that they fought to bury it with distance and the promise of a higher calling than those base acts. Wu-Long didn't find himself susceptible to such symptoms of existential crisis. He did, however, feel unusually tired about the prospect of having to forge so many new friendships. He decided it was about time to get married.
His mother had told Wu-Long years ago that she had loosely arranged a bride for him from the port town of Tanggu. It was an old practice she had engaged an old friend in: during pregnancy, they had pointed at one another's swollen bellies and promised each other that if the infants they produced were of opposite sexes, they would be wed. So it was: the other infant had arrived in the world outfitted with a vagina and all limbs intact. His parents approved because her parents had retained wealth equivalent to where the Zhangs had started off. Wu-Long purchased several gifts of tobacco and Russian balet tickets and went alone to see her family. Once he reached Tanggu, he promptly became distracted by the woman who he would marry.
And Love
She was only a girl then. Eight years his junior, she was twelve. She was standing outside a brothel, watching water from a problematic pipe edge along the top of the doorframe until it dripped down on the dying pot plant they had outside. She looked to see him eyeing her doubtfully, then came across the street while he was trying to assemble an appropriately sincere bouquet. They introduced themselves in brief. Her name was Lau Mu-Qian and she was the daughter of a madame, he a soldier in the People's Liberation Army in proud service to the country, on his way up. Why are you here? she asked. Why are you buying so many roses?
I'm going to ask a woman to marry me, he said.
You should marry me.
His finger stopped above the ruffled red blossoms, their inbred, genetic disaster of vortexed petals clenched like a vegetable sphincter too tight to allow the propagation the species through natural means, beautiful but utterly hopeless. He stared at her.
Chin jutted, she pressed one sandalled foot against the base of a tub full of water lilies, nudged it closer. He asked her how old she was; she answered with the truth. He pointed out she was but a child; she answered she would tolerate his advancing years, would grow up beautiful herself— like her mother, and she was entirely certain she would be a good wife. She didn't know her father or anything about him except that he was a bai gui, a white ghost, Caucasian man. Perhaps even an American. He noticed then; she had his big straight nose while the rest of her face was flat, narrow-eyed as a fox. She said, You're too young to get married now, anyway. You're just feeling bad instead of thinking straight. He felt self-conscious; he had done his best grooming himself, and couldn't decide whether she was a little con artist, perceptive, or both. I know the look. Wait for me.
It was outrageous. Hilarious, also. He didn't bother explaining it to his mother, no matter how much face she thought they had lost. A single calla lily cost less than the dozen or so six-course meals the courtship would have required, never mind the wedding, and the smokes and liquors went to his superiors to favorable effect. He rededicated himself to his duties, displaying leadership capabilities in addition to field prowess, which resulted in comfortable pay bumps, financial assistance for his father's slow-recovering business from nebulous corporate entities, and a few months interesting months overseeing Zhao Ziyang's house arrest.
Once a high-ranking Party official, Zhao had been a sympathizer with the Tinanmen protesters' cause, stripped of all of his titles and authority after the crackdown. He lived effectively imprisoned between golf field visits and carefully supervized visits. It took the man a few weeks to discover that his latest and youngest warden— the one who seemed to smell like durian— had been one of the soldiers at the massacre. Zhao suffered the slap in the face gracefully. He was polite, cooperative, tragically good-humored, and occasionally offered the young man old books and carefully, elliptically-phrased insights into that bloody chapter of recent history in exchange for more recent news. Wu-Long admitted to hearing talk. A lot of the protesters and their associates had disappeared from the public eye. The prisons were terrible: the beatings, the abuse. Wu-long wasn't really sure how many times a living person could be raped before the appeal was worn out along with the division between orifices or whatever. Zhao gave him a look that reminded him of his mother's face when he had killed the dog. Some atrocities are motivated by desire, others by hate.
At twenty-five, he commanded a small contingent as sergeant. At twenty-six, he led a series of raids on several villages in Southern China, suppressing a brief revival of the Tiananmen Square movement with swift and decisive action. He spent the following year on the stony border of India, courting altitude sickness and quelling and catching small detachments of enemy troops who weren't wearing the enemy's colors. Much to his mother's dismay, he married Mu-Qian at the end of that year, and with more conviction and joy than could easily be dismissed as a side-effect of one too many leathery mountain whores. Father liked her. They wed in Guilin. Wu-Long was disconcerted to discover she was a virgin, to which she responded with an open hand, then laughed scornfully when he reciprocated. He warned her not to laugh at him, and she sobered only then. I'm sorry, she said. That was cruel. For reasons he never tried to articulate, those words went right through him. He was never happier than when in the circle of her arms. He proceeded to spend the next six years getting to know the basic things about her and much longer being perplexed by the rest.
Importantly, she had grown up as beautiful as she had promised. Always one to be contrary, his mother noisily asserted more than once that she didn't like Mu-Qian's nose, that it was enormous and ugly, and she insisted he was blinded by infatuation, but Wu-Long philosophically pointed out he revelled in his blindness as much as he would enjoy sight and clarity, should they eventually return. It was a win-win situation all around.
She had a somewhat creepy sense of humor that was probably linked to how hard she was to impress. She found it completely absurd that some foreigners couldn't bear to eat the flesh of an animal that still had its head or other parts recognizably attached or its eyes still in. A live duck got away from her in their apartment, once, and she pinned it by the neck and removed its bill in one deft movement, announcing, Got your nose.
Other than that, she was an impeccable hostess. The duck was plucked, basted, and summarily transformed into a Peking-style delicacy in the space of a day.
She alternated between the classic Tianjinese loquaciousness and protracted silences. They came in and out like circadian rhythms that he adapted to comfortably. Neither of them were really the type to laugh aloud or underestimate the importance of remarking monosyllabically on the weather. There was rarely too much quiet between them.
She enjoyed long walks through sunset. By 'long walks,' four hours was not unusual, occasionally modified by taking the metro out parts of the way. She normally held his hand during these.
She enjoyed surprises too, but she preferred doing things together. Once, they went through the whole apartment with sixteen bottles of transparent nail varnish and practiced their calligraphy on the plywood edges of the walls. When the sun caught the angle just right, you could see the words: I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, over and over glittering there. They were ridiculous.
Of all things, Mu-Qian wanted to be a doctor. It was both surprising and not. She had little of the sweetness or predeliction for science that seemed to characterize most who took to that career track, and yet, she proved remarkably competent at soothing away worries and pain with her small hands and was curiously sympathetic to it. It took Wu-Long a considerable amount of time to realize this was because she had any sort of supernatural ability. Years.
In those years, his mother had time to change her mind. Initially, she felt, perhaps rightly so, that the woman brought out the worst in him. Still, she gave the younger woman the gift that was rightly hers, a family heirloom from Hong-Long's mother: a small red jade piece of the bodhisattva Huanyin, a hole bored through her floral nimbus to hold her up on a jewelry clasp if she cared to get one. Whether to mollify Mrs. Zhang or for her own vanity, Mu-Qian did, hanging the pendant around her neck on a gold chain despite its gaudy bulk and tendency not to fit stylistically or in color scheme with anything that modern women wore. This, combined with her domestic abilities and deeply respectable career ambitions as well as the birth of their first child, a son, won her Mrs. Wu's confidence over the course of her four years' schooling at Tianjin University. It wasn't an easy ride by any stretch of imagination— a private investigator from Shanghai was at one point involved, and the women spared each other a few looks that would have bloodily exfoliated any number of debutantes from the Western hemisphere, but they reached a truce.
Which only ended when Mu-Qian decided to go to the United States for graduate school. This, at least, was the lipservice and public explanation. The deeper truth involved a government inquest that had come to alarming proximity with Mu-Qian and people like her. It was a large-scale covert operation, a secret so secretive that everybody knew about it. Six-year-olds who could open up locks without opening the boxes they were shut inside, old generals who kept their positions by digging up dirt on their peers that should have been invisible, two generations of village-born daughters who had vanished under the one child policy only to resurface incessantly on the rosters of government-operated hospitals, or in Hong Kong, or adopted by the wealthy, orphans whose illegal origins and inferior gender were overlooked, whose lives were fraught with odd shadows and sudden relocations.
They asked Wu-Long about his wife at work, once, a brief, casual conversation held across a desk, and he was not asked to have a seat. They wanted to know if she had ever made him sick. If she was prone to unusual recovery rates from illness or injury, if she suffered from mysterious ailments often; if she had an unusually robust metabolism, was emotionally erratic— or moreso than the average woman, whether she was unusually courageous. Miserable implications of chauvinism aside, he knew her to be all these things. He said, No. No, sir. No, no. No sir.
Blackwater Worldwide
He deserted the People's Liberation Army, his parents, his home city, in the spring. The Americans took him before they left, thanks to word on the grapevine. Blackwater USA they were called at the time, a privately-funded mercenary compan which had landed its first major contract at the beginning of the Iraq War — fighting on behalf of the American government. As it was, they had an unfilled niche for a thirty-year-old sociopath with veteran experience in ground warfare, particularly in urban settings. He had about one month to settle his son and wife into their apartment in downtown San Diego and meet some of his comrades. He took a crash course in English, acquainted himself with Budweiser, mango-glazed mahi-mahi, and Blackwater's various security protocols, wound up grouped with a few bilingual operatives, and shipped off to the desert. Thirteen years after he joined military service, he had his first taste of 'real' war.
Like a duck to water. Though choppy water, to be sure.
Compared to the ground forces of the PLA, Blackwater was a pack of thugs, patchworked together from some of the worst escapees of military justice from all over the world and they behaved as such: almost undisciplined and frequently disorderly, yet pitilessly competent for it, every man and woman aware that they were below the laws and iconographed principles of decency that gentlemen liked to pretend governed warfare. Bringing relief supplies and sewing bombs into the bloated bellies of starved children were equal within the scope of their industry, and of their business they were leaders if not monopolizers, glorified butchers without the glory, shunned by the armies, naval and air forces of their government-administrated counterparts, hated by the local villagers who fully realized that their interference couldn't even be excused by what they viewed as flimsy and petty sanctions of President Bush. The military wouldn't lift a finger to help them; a mob of Iraqis caught two of his men once, beat them, burned them, and nailed them to a bridge for international television broadcast. Mu-Qian saw it.
While Wu-Long cut a bloody swathe through Fallujah and Baghdad, she fell in with the small and peculiar social circles of the Blackwater wives. Despite the initial lockout from ethnic cliques and common interest groups, she made a few friends. They spoke of their husbands frequently. Whispered about the possibility of sueing Blackwater for unlawful death, wept over the nightmares that violently awoke their bedmates after had liquor had put them down, the tribulations of raising one's children as a widowed mother, the abuse and shame that secretly tormented the mercenaries underneath their hard exoskeletons, years and toil and laughs that the salary could not redeem.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mu-Qian didn't have a lot of experiece with which she might empathize or share with these women. Still, she prayed to Buddha for them, held their hands and stroked their hair, and when Aaliya received the dark news of her husband's death, Mu-Qian brought matches and red paper to leap over, cleansing the threshold of her home after the funeral.
For three years, Wu-Long shipped between Iraq and domestic services. He came home to find his son had joined the little league and skipped a grade, that he had a daughter forming, a Filipino housekeeper employed, and his wife had systemmatically seduced and blackmailed a way for him up the echelons of Blackwater Worldwide.
Always, there were always peaches, apples, and incense for his grandfather's shrine, dense medical journals stacked on his wife's bedstand, Internet camera feed that lagged and crackled with static but enabled him to discipline his son and read enough anatomical and posturing clues to tell when it worked. Usually, it did. He enjoyed a number of raises and wrote to Tianjin sometimes. In one of the rare moments of actual inebriation, he had Huanyin tattooed on his chest, and the mantras of the Heart Sutra and the six Dharmas of Enlightenment flanking her, semi-circle, like an anatomical analogue for the pendant his wife wore. He also had a goldfish inked onto his right ankle. She learned how to fire a gun. They took their long walks in San Diego. For three years, Wu-Long was happy.
Darkness
Quadriplegia changed all that, as quadriplegia is wont to do. They were outside Ramadi and the lookout screwed up, a bomb went off underneath the truck in front of his and the vehicle armoring prevented the shrapnel from carving much deeper than his skull and his spine.
He was captured, imprisoned, interrogated until they realized he could not properly speak, tortured until they realized he would not ever scream, and forgotten at the bottom of a square room with six-foot edges. He could not will his hands to move. Not the next day, either. Not even after the blood on him turned brown and indistinguishable from the mess in his pants. This slow and hard-won revelation coccooned him in a curious fugue state. He forgot what his face looked like, and then he began to forget the names of things. When Mu-Qian got him back she had to remind him, and he wasn't sure how she did it. Got him back. None of the other soldiers in his unit made it out. He had vague, almost impressionistic watercolor image of her standing in a burqa, framed by the lopsided doorway, and the outline of her silhouette scorched to curling black by the scalding, blinding midday sun.
It was so bright out, Wu-Long thought he must have died.
The next time he remembered himself, he was in a wheelchair in Munich and his children were gone. She fed him through tubes and needles, checked his breathing apparatus, and spoke very little, moving his hands and feet before he bumped into the corners of things while she pushed him toward the bed. There was a scar healing on her long neck and she was still ludicrously beautiful. They had little furnitre, he saw. No books. She caught his eye and her flat, dark eyes went bright, half a second before his slid out of focus.
The time after that, he surfaced out of the haze to the sight of himself in a wheelchair in Munich, seated before a full-body mirror. He did not know how long he had been watching himself, but it must have been awhile. Long enough to recognize this thing he had shrunken into. His breathing sounded like that of a train. Rasping, rattling, a thing that wasn't meant to know how.
By the next time, she hated him. He failed to inspire such passionate sentiments in himself, but he couldn't really blame her, not really: at thirty four, he was wearing an impotent, emaciated sack of bones, an unforgivably poor conversationalist, prone to pains and infections that would have led to amputation if it weren't for Mu-Qian's abilities, siphoning away what damage she could without killing herself. Her hatred grew stronger as the years lengthened. One night, she stripped two durians down and fed them to him; his throat collapsed twice. She forgot him on the balcony in the winter once, and let a bed sore rage on his thigh for a week before removing it with her fingertips. She put him in a closet, once, and brought some German asshole home — possibly two, it was hard to hear anything through the closed door and moth-ball haze except the noisy farce of their tryst. When she chose to speak, she chose to lie: about where their children were, how his mother was doing, how his father's business fared, the seasons, how he felt, what that meant. They were not her lies to tell.
Out of the confusion, and over years of physical deterioration, he gradually came to realize that she blamed him for his inability to recover. He was, among other things, brain-damaged. The sort you could work around and perhaps almost recover thanks to neuroplasticity, if you happened to be the one miracle out of a thousand men, who were powerful of will, not discouraged by the brain clots, crushing odds, the enemas, the strangely uncomfortable quiet, and privvy to hundreds of hours of physical therapy that they could not afford. He thought it was very unfair, but he couldn't speak well enough to tell her so. Instead, he hated her back. That much inspired passion in him. This changed him.
Understandably, Mu-Qian thought it was her imagination for weeks. The specter of depression, perhaps, finally, finally displacing the quiescent void she had had in place of a recognizable human soul for twenty-six years. Shadows walked across her peripheral vision, leapt, spun empty in the air, and the twitter of passerine songs seemed to die away mid-coda despite that she could see their tiny bills still moving outside the window. Sunlight would grow cold near her silent husband and she had to say things twice to hear them outside her own head. She had no way of knowing that she had sent him somewhere very dark, though she was aware that he was disinclined to go without her.
It was impossible to tell whether she would have behaved the same way regardless. They were not, after all, on speaking terms anymore. She sulked; he practiced. For years, he practiced.
The day after Christmas, a column of perfect darkness shot out of the heart of Munich in the middle of a street. It was thirty meters in radius and two hundred meters in height. Inside, there was neither light nor sound, and scent did not travel far. It moved haltingly, stopped frequently, jigged to and fro like a blind person. Mu-Qian was in the geometric center of it. It moved with her, and caused three car collisions and a dozen other injuries as she fumbled her way back into the apartment complex, groped her way up the elevator, and tripped around the couch to slap him upside the head or punch him dead, it was difficult to tell. Equally deaf and blind in the sensory blackout, he was left with the understanding that she had renewed her anger with him, moments before the life blew back into his limbs and her body toppled slack and white onto his lap.
Wu-Long thought she was dead. He was a soldier and a good one — he knew how to tell. He did not have the medical training, and she had only kept him alive through a combination of that and personal talent. He peered down into her ashen face and convinced himself that she had taken him by surprise. There was a more insistent thought in his head also, and there had to be a reason for it somewhere, he felt — that he had never meant to fill her deadly little hands with failure, and they looked so ugly now, wasted, thin. He wept though the sky outside did not.
Kazimir Volken
When he turned off the darkness, there was a man who studied him with the stark-cold clarity of a Cheshire moon. "I can save her," he said. He was not German, to be sure. Nor was he Chinese, or Wu-Long would have assumed he was an ancestor come to reward the peaches and incense sticks. His clothes were old but respectable in fashion, a dirty watercolor origamied across a body that was drawn the way they had calligraphed once, fluid, bold, balanced within a straight-shouldered square. Upon initial examination, Kazimir Volken was as non-descript as the knife that Wu-Long considered grinding in through his ribs for all of twelve seconds. The likeness to a knife was not altogether unflattering.
Wu-Long blinked his eyes. Shut, then open. That much, he had never forgotten how to do. He asked, "How?"
The short of it involved money and medicine. The long of it went much longer. He became one of Kazimir's Vanguard, a dragon slithering after the wolf, a shadow trailing his guiding light, as brittle, steeled, and set in his ways as the younger ones are robust with potential, but no less resilient.
