Hour of the Rat Read online

  Also by Lisa Brackmann

  Rock Paper Tiger

  Getaway

  Copyright © 2013 by Lisa Brackmann

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brackmann, Lisa.

  Hour of the rat / Lisa Brackmann.

  p. cm

  eISBN: 978-1-61695-235-8

  1. Art dealers—Fiction. 2. Americans—China—Fiction.

  3. Missing persons—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.R333H68 2013

  813’.6–dc23 2012046282

  v3.1

  To my parents, Carol and Bill. Thank you, for everything.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Acknowledgments

  “IS IT JUST ME, or is this bullshit?”

  The ducks sit on top of a large metal grill, a skinny rectangle as long as a pool table. Glowing coals underneath. The duck at one end is crispy brown, like Peking Duck. Which I love, but who knows how long it’s been sitting here? Moving down the row, the next duck is … I don’t know, boiled, maybe, the flesh a little greyish. The one after that is raw, I think, its feathers plucked, the naked skin yellow and pimply.

  Harrison Wang shrugs. “As a piece, I think it’s not terribly sophisticated.”

  Harrison, who knows from sophisticated, has dragged me along to this art opening. Some new-artists collective way the fuck out in Tongzhou, an eastern suburb of Beijing, in a patchy area of old red brick buildings and white-tiled storefronts between high-rise developments where the buildings are named “Rotterdam,” “Bordeaux,” and “Seattle.”

  I mean, Seattle?

  The opening is in a tumbledown warehouse across the ring road from the fancy developments, behind a row of cheap restaurants, electronics stores, foot-massage joints and “barbershops.” —chai, the character for “demolish”—is already slapped up with white paint on the exterior walls.

  Inside, it’s a dirty concrete slab, some lame performance pieces, big acrylic paintings with a lot of naked butts, cartoon farts, and McDonald’s references. It’s freezing, which is why I was drawn to this stupid duck thing in the first place, because the lit coals make it warm. Guests and artists mill around, drinking Yanjing beer and eating yangrou chuanr, which normally I’d be all over, but the meat on these is so small and gristly that I wonder if it’s actually mutton and not dog instead. Or rat.

  I was born in the Year of the Rat, and eating my birth animal seems like it would be bad luck. So I stick to the beer.

  “Why are we here, again?” I ask.

  “I’d heard good things about the painter,” Harrison says, flicking his hazel eyes at one of the giant canvases, one where a fat naked guy whose face is done up in Peking Opera makeup lies sprawled across a red Ferrari, his guts spilling out of his sliced-open stomach.

  “Really?”

  “I agree with you, it’s disappointing.”

  I hold my hands over the grill. They’re red with cold, throbbing like I’ve had them dipped in an ice bucket. I should have kept my gloves on.

  Harrison doesn’t seem cold. He’s wearing a knee-length coat, black, some kind of soft, thick wool, and a black-and-red cashmere scarf. He looks like the centerfold in some men’s fashion shoot.

  He’s my boss, sort of.

  I manage the work of a Chinese artist. An important one. Which is pretty funny, considering that I know fuck-all about art. Which is why, I guess, Harrison keeps trying to get me to learn.

  “This duck thing is lame,” I mutter.

  The next duck, predictably, is a dead one with all its feathers still on. Just a whole dead duck. Lying on the grill. Long neck stretched out at a weird angle where I have to think, Oh, they killed it by breaking its neck. The exposed eye looks like dead, rubbery plastic. Some feathers have fallen onto the coals. They smell like burned hair.

  “But why is it lame, Ellie?” Harrison persists.

  “I don’t know, because it’s a bunch of dead ducks lying on a grill,” I say.

  Except the last one isn’t dead.

  It’s wrapped in Saran Wrap sealed with duct tape. Hardly even struggling by now. Lying on the grill, making little duck noises, you can’t even call them quacks. Shuddering.

  “This is fucking disgusting.”

  “You don’t think that it is perhaps a statement on the reality of what we consume?” Harrison asks mildly. “Stripped of its packaging?”

  “I don’t care.”

  I’m going to do one of two things. I’m going to run out of the room, or I’m going to pick up the duck.

  I pick up the duck. It quacks and convulses in my arms.

  “Hey!”

  Somebody—the artist, I guess, some tall guy with glasses, wearing a green Mao jacket over a Polo shirt, a real one, with the little horse (I think it’s supposed to be ironic)—comes running over. “You can’t do that!”

  “I’m responding to the piece, asshole.”

  He tries to grab the duck, and I kick him in the shin.

  “Saobi laowai!” he yelps.

  “Yeah, your mother, whatever.” I’ve been called worse.

  The duck squirms in my arms.

  A couple other guys coming running over, and suddenly it seems like most of the crowd has turned toward us.

  Hey, it’s a better show than the art.

  “How much for the piece?” Harrison asks.

  “What?” Asshole Artist stutters.

  “How much for the piece?” Harrison pulls out his wallet. It’s this beautiful soft leather thing that’s thin enough to disappear in his back pocket. And yet I’m sure it holds plenty of money.

  THAT’S HOW WE END up at a veterinarian’s office in Sanlitun with a dehydrated, malnourished duck.

  “Stay overnight, I think she is okay after that,” the vet says.

  Afterward, we go to a rooftop bar where the “mixologist” does a pretty good margarita.

  “There’s a wildlife sanctuary in Yanqing County that I think will take her,” Harrison says.

  I stare out the window. There’s a great view from here of Sanlitun Village, this upscale shopping mall with edgy smoked-glass buildings, overpriced hamburger restaurants, and all kinds of luxury shops including an Apple Store, where people line up and riot over the latest iPads.

  “Thanks,” I finally say.

  Harrison shrugs. “You were right. It was bad art.”<
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  CHAPTER ONE

  I SERIOUSLY NEED TO get out of Beijing.

  There’s the fact that the air is trying to kill me. No joke. The American embassy over in Chaoyang does readings of the air quality in Beijing, since the Chinese government doesn’t, or won’t reveal the results anyway. A while ago it was so polluted that they ran out of normal descriptions and came up with one of their own, so what went out over Twitter was that the air was “crazy-bad.”

  Thanks, guys. Remind me not to breathe.

  There’s also the fact that it’s been another long winter, and while you think I’d know what’s coming after three years, it still takes me by surprise: months of wind so cold and dry that sometimes I feel like I’m breathing razors. Now that it’s the last day in February, temps are getting up above freezing at least, but it’s still the kind of cold that settles into your bones and makes my leg ache even more than it usually does.

  My apartment’s comfortable. There’s a central furnace that controls the radiators in the living room and the two bedrooms; the enclosed balconies provide a buffer against the chill. I broke down and got a cheap flat-screen at Suning, and I have a stack of DVDs from my favorite DVD store off Andingmen, every American movie or TV show you could want. I’ve got take-out menus from half a dozen restaurants, and right at the end of the alley there’s a great jiaozi place and some snack stands, plus there’s a tiny store about the size of my bathroom that sells toilet paper and Yanjing beer and a bunch of snack foods, including my favorite spicy peanuts, that’s just across from the entrance to my apartment complex.

  So it’s not like I really have to leave my apartment all that much right now. Or go very far if I do.

  It’s just that I can only take so much of my mom without a break, and I’ve about reached my limit.

  “Ellie, do you know where’s the best place for me to find peanut butter?” she asks from the doorway to my bedroom. “And chocolate chips?”

  “Any of the foreign supermarkets’ll probably have them,” I say. I’m sitting on my bed with my laptop propped on a pillow on my legs. I don’t really look up. She’s always asking questions like this, and I admit I tune them out a lot of the time.

  “Really? Because I went to … what’s the name of that French one? Carrefour? And they had peanut butter, but it was chunky and I need smooth. And I didn’t see any chocolate chips at all.”

  “I don’t know,” I mutter. “You could always buy chocolate bars and hit them with a hammer.”

  “I guess I could.”

  Now I do glance away from my screen. There’s my mom, her streaked, bleached hair rising in a halo of static, wearing a Sunrise T-shirt (I’VE FOUND MR. RIGHT AND HE’S PERFECT! ISAIAH 62:5) and sweats, solid through the middle like a pound cake, the bramble-rose tattoo above her elbow sagging a bit, which is what happens to a tat inked twenty-five years ago.

  “Aren’t you cold?” I ask, because even with the radiators on I’m wearing a sweatshirt.

  She snorts. “Not right now. I’ve got my own heat.” She mimes fanning herself. “Hot flashes.”

  Like I needed to know.

  “The thing is, I want to make my special chocolate chip cookies for Andy,” she continues, cheeks flushing.

  And that’s when I know I’ve got to get out of Beijing: That nice Mr. Zhou next door has become Andy.

  Given my mom’s track record with men, no good can come of this.

  “Maybe try Walmart,” I mutter, and turn back to my laptop.

  I LOVE MY MOM.

  Seriously, I really do. She did the best she could do with raising me, which maybe wasn’t always very good, but she comes through when it counts, like after I got blown up in the Sandbox, for example, leaving my leg busted in too many places to count and the rest of me not much better.

  It’s just that a month now, living in my apartment in Beijing? That wasn’t what I had in mind when she said she wanted to come and visit me.

  “Just to see how you’re doing,” she’d said, “since you don’t have time to come home.”

  This of course was a lie on my part. I didn’t want to come home. Long story.

  After a couple of weeks, where I did my best to show her the tourist sites—the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall, the Silk Market for fake Prada, and the world’s largest IKEA store—she showed no sign of going anywhere, other than to the guest room in my apartment by the Gulou subway station, which used to be my office. I finally asked, “So, Mom, when’s your flight home again?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s really up to you.”

  “What about work?”

  “Well …” She hesitated. As I recall, she twisted her hands together. “The job didn’t really work out.”

  IT’S NOT HER FAULT, I tell myself now. She worked hard for years. It’s not her fault that the US economy is in the toilet, that she’s fifty-one years old and no one wants to hire her for anything. Not her fault that Refinancing Roulette didn’t pay off. The condo was a shithole anyway. Sometimes it’s even sort of cool having her here, like when she makes tacos, cooking being an activity at which I suck.

  But I seriously need some away time from her right now.

  “Don’t talk to me about Jesus,” I said about three days after she got here, Jesus being one of the things that we used to have in common, but that pretty much got blown up along with the rest of my life, in Iraq. Mostly she’s been pretty good about it, but every once in a while Jesus slips out.

  For example: “You know, that nice Mr. Zhou next door belongs to a church. And I think it’s Christian, more or less. They worship Jesus anyway. He invited me to attend their service. Would you like …?”

  “No thanks.”

  Like I’m going to go to some weird-ass Chinese underground house church, featuring Brother Jesus Christ of the Righteous Thundering Fist, or what have you.

  Like I’d set foot inside Sunrise, for that matter.

  Sunrise is the church that my mom and me used to go to in Arizona. It’s a big church, in this fake-adobe complex that always reminded me of an Indian casino. But I still used to believe in it all. Take comfort in Reverend Jim’s air-conditioned sermons. Snap my WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? rubber bracelet against my wrist when I needed an invisible helping hand.

  When people talk about how your faith gets tested, they always say that trials make your faith stronger. What they don’t say is that sometimes faith just dissolves like desert sand between your fingers.

  “Do you feel like going to Walmart?” my mom asks. “You know, you could use a few things for your kitchen. You don’t have a single spatula.”

  It’s fucking cold outside, and so far the lack of a spatula does not seem to have negatively affected my life. “Sure,” I say anyway. “Just let me finish some emails.”

  I should get out of the house, I tell myself. Two P.M. and I’ve done nothing today but sit on my ass, surf the Net, drink coffee, and eat spicy peanuts and shrimp chips.

  It’s right about then I hear the underwater gurgle signaling that a contact of mine has signed onto Skype. I don’t bother to look who it is. I do have a couple of emails to answer: a request from a San Francisco gallery for a couple of Lao Zhang’s paintings to exhibit for a show titled A Remix of Progress: The Disjunction of the Status Quo; somebody named Vicky Huang representing some Chinese guy I’ve never heard of, Sidney Cao, claiming he’s a big art collector who wants to arrange “a private viewing” of Lao Zhang’s work, and Lucy Wu wanting to know if I can make her opening in Shanghai on March 12. I guess I should do something productive today. That is, other than buying a spatula.

  I decide to answer Lucy first. Sure, I’ll go to her opening. She usually has good wine, and maybe she can explain to me what “the disjunction of the status quo” means.

  Besides, Shanghai would be getting out of Beijing, right?

  That’s when the Skype phone rings.

  I switch windows. It’s my buddy Dog Turner calling.

  “Hey, Bab
y Doc!”

  “Hey, Dog. Hang on a sec. Lemme put on my headset.”

  Dog twitches on the screen while I untangle my iPhone earbuds.

  “Lookin’ good, Ellie,” he says.

  “You, too.”

  He doesn’t, really, but what am I supposed to say? Even with the low-res camera on his computer, I can see the indentation in his skull where the RPG hit. If he sat farther back from the camera, I’d see the arm that wasn’t there, but frankly, I’d rather not. I think about that too much, and my own arm starts to hurt, and my leg, which pretty much hurts all the time, although I’m getting better at ignoring it. Thanks in part to the fresh supply of Percocet my mom brought me. When I asked her about it, she just giggled and said, “Well, I still have friends.”

  In the aquarium light of the computer screen, I see Dog twitching in his chair. Spasms cross his face like sudden ripples on a still pond.

  “What’s up, man?” I ask. “How’s the family?”

  “Mostly good.” His mouth twists.

  “Mostly?”

  “Kids are good. Wife … I make her crazy.” He grins lopsidedly. “You?”

  “Fine,” I say.

  I know something’s up with him. We’re buddies and all, we keep each other posted, but it’s not like we talk all the time. It’s hard for him to talk, for one. The TBI, the traumatic brain injury, really fucked him up. Plus, there’s the whole thing where we messed around back in Iraq, and even though it didn’t really mean anything, I still feel a little weird talking to him too much when he has a wife and a couple of kids. It’s almost worse since he got hurt in Af-Pak, because I wish I felt comfortable talking to his wife. Like, if the situation were different, I could say, “Hey, Natalie, what can I do to help?”