China Mountain Zhang Page 6

  Georgia, tall and heavy-hipped, my tech, takes the kite, lifts it off my shoulders. She doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. What’s to say?

  I feel heavy, dirt solid. I take off my facemask and gulp air. God, I’m tired.

  Cinnabar is flushed with winning, he’s been having a so-so year, he’s been hungry for a win. But everybody is always hungry for a win. He comes and finds me where Georgia and I are packing up my broken kite. It’s nice of him to think of me. He’s a little embarrassed to be standing there while we finish crating it, it takes a long time because part of the frame is bent and it won’t fit.

  I compliment him on his win and he says “Nalinali,” making a don’t-talk-about-it motion with his hand, looking away across the park. But he’s wound up. “Come meet me, by my crew,” he says, too tense to wait, and why should he when there are people waiting for him?

  So I go to find him, and a bunch of us go out to a place on La Guardia where we can drink and make a lot of noise. It’s called Commemorative, and fliers hang out there. Cinnabar’s picked up two guys; a blond and an ABC, both clearly bent. So’s Cinnabar. They aren’t fliers, of course. Cinnabar has the hots for the blond, whose name is Peter. He isn’t tall, not for, you know, a non-flier, I’m not good at heights, maybe 1.7? And not heavy. But next to him Cinnabar looks like nothing but bone and hair. He’s pretty, too. And scrawny Cinnabar is not pretty.

  They’re talking about going to see some jailai, but I figure they don’t need me along, so I say I’m tired and have to get up tomorrow to look at the kite. The ABC says he’s tired, too, which surprises me.

  “How are you getting home?” he asks me. It’s the first time he’s spoken to me all night, but then Cinnabar and the blond have been doing all the talking.

  What’s he think, I’m going home by limo? “Subway,” I say.

  “I’ll walk with you,” he offers.

  There are the usual protestations, the don’t gos and if you musts. Then I find myself going down the stairs and out onto the street with this gay ABC in his mirrors and his sharkskin jacket. ABC all act like their faces are made out of ice. We walk west. I’m not sure of his name, sounded like the blond kept calling him Rafe or something, so I ask and he says, “Zhang,” real flat.

  Fuck it, I think, I didn’t ask you to take a walk.

  We cross Sixth Avenue, and then all the sudden he says, “I’m sorry I wasn’t synched with you tonight.”

  I’m a little caught off, so I say, “Were you synched with Cinnabar?”

  He shakes his head. ” Israel.”

  Israel? Who the hell is Israel? It must be the rookie. “She’s okay,” I say, “once she has some experience.” The kind of stuff one says.

  “She was okay until you dusted her,” he says.

  Neither of us says anything more until we’re in the lighted subway. Then to be polite I ask, “What do you do?”

  “I’m a construction tech,” he says, which is hard to imagine because he doesn’t look or talk like the kind of person who spends his days on construction sights, if you know what I mean. He takes off his shades and rubbs his eyes, adding, “But I’m unemployed,” then puts them on.

  I mumble something about being sorry to hear it. He’s chilly and distant but he keeps talking to me. I can’t imagine him wanting me to invite him home, and I sure as hell don’t want to anyway. So I look at the track.

  Down the track I see the lights of the train.

  “When the kite went,” he says, “did you think about that zhong guo ren, Kirin?”

  The flier that just died. That’s why he wanted to be synched to me. “No,” I say, “I didn’t think about anything but getting it under control. You don’t have much time to think. Did you ever fly a kite?” As if I had to ask.

  “No,” he says.

  “It’s not a cerebral activity,” I say.

  The train comes in fast and then cushions to a stop. We get on. He doesn’t say anything else except ‘bye,’ when he transfers for Brooklyn.

  I always forget that half of the people who watch us fly are waiting to see us die.

  I was thinking, or rather, I had something in the back of my head when the kite shuddered. I was thinking of my first year flying the big kites. I was flying in the New York City Flight, it was only my third or fourth big race and it was the biggest race I had ever been in. I was a rookie, the field was huge-twenty-six fliers. I didn’t have a chance. And I had a crush on Random Chavez. Five fliers were killed in that race.

  That was the first time I ever felt afraid to die. When the kite shuddered, whenever something goes wrong and there’s that instant of having no control, I’m always back at that race.

  I ride the subway home to Brooklyn. It’s not far from the subway to my building, but I’m glad to get to the door. Safe in the entry, safer in the elevator. I’ve been living here for two years, and the building knows me. I have an affinity for machines, call me superstitious but I think it comes of spending some of my waking hours as a kind of cyborg. I think my building likes me. I get in the apartment and the lights come on dim, I get myself something icy and bitter to drink and throw on my rec of that race. The chair hugs me, and I prop my feet up and the apartment darkens. I don’t synch in with anyone, so it’s like watching it from a floater keeping pace with the race. Like being God. Or maybe God is synched in to everyone. Same thing, though, total objectivity. I’m back in the thick of the pack, flying about ninth. Jacinth has just snapped a connection, and her kite falls behind, then clear, then disappears off the screen. She dropped out just before anything happened.

  Fox is in seventh, Random Chavez is in fifteenth, Fox dolphins to rise over Watchmaker and just as she begins the swoop over him she slips it-looks away, loses her concentration, who knows. Anyway, she clips Watchmaker and he waffles, would have pulled out of it maybe but he loses too much speed, and Malachite, in front of me, tries to pull his kite over and they collide, I hear the rip of silk, even though flying is really too noisy to hear anything. I don’t remember anything after that, but in the tape I slip sideways, inside, and shoot past them. The pack parts around them but Random is boxed, so he drops nose first into a steep vertical dive deep into a crack between fliers and is gone underneath all of us, streaking, until he tries to pull up. If his kite had been braced the way they are now he’d have made it, but that’s five years ago, and the silk sheers under the stress, and he tumbles. And he was dead. And Fox, Malachite, Hot Rocks and Saffron were dead, and Watchmaker never flew again. And Angel finished seventh.

  I run it through a second time, in synch with Random Chavez. I just want to feel the plunge when he saw no way through ahead of him, but being in synch is really not the same as being there. I don’t see the space he knew was there, feel only the amusement park sensation of drop, the shoot and cut out when the kite starts to tumble.

  The lights start to come up, but I want it dim. I think about my kite, and where I’m going to get money to fix it. Mr. Melman of Melman-Guoxin Pipe is one of my sponsors, I’ll go to him, sign a note. Oh damn, I’m so deep in debt already. But it’s just a frame and silk, everything else would be all right. And I have silk.

  In Chinese, silk is si, first tone. Four is si, second tone-as in Siyue, April (fourth month.) Death is si, third tone. Four is a bad luck number for Chinese. But I’m from Brooklyn.

  My synch numbers pick up for the next race, but it’s always like that after a crack-up. People like that ABC in Commemorative. I fly a careful race, come in fourth, just out of money. Afterwards I think that if I’d flown a more spectacular race-worried less about winning and more about how it synched-I could have picked up my numbers. But how can I go out and fly without planning to win?

  It’s two weeks before I hit money, and that’s only second. Pays rent for Georgia and me. Nights I’m out with Cinnabar. He’s been hitting, and his synch numbers are way up, with the requisite loss of privacy. He needs somebody to go places with, he surely can’t pick up some bent groupie if a synch
crew is likely to come out of the walls and snatch a shot or an impression.

  Cinnabar and I share a fondness for kites and a reverence for his dead brother. Late at night, clear out to the vacuum, we talk about how wonderful a flyer he was with that combination of seriousness and hyperbole the sober can’t abide.

  We go out dancing the night before the New Haven Flight, Cinnabar in his brother’s red sharkskin jacket-so what if it’s five years out of date-and me in a black dress cut so low in back you can see the copper bruise of the synapsis junction in the base of my spine. We go to someplace way downtown in the area they’re reclaiming, you know the place, where you have to fit the mix to get in. The building likes us, I told you I have an affinity for buildings, because we just saunter past all the people it won’t let in and whoosh, the doors open. Dancing with Cinnabar is nice, on the sultry numbers I don’t find myself regarding the middle of his chest and on the fast numbers he isn’t as stiff as most straights. Or maybe it’s because he’s a flyer.

  We dance a lot, and then get synched, I see the crew from the vid. Some woman from the vid drags us in back for an interview with Cinnabar, and we sit in the kitchen. Cinnabar’s soaked with sweat with his hair all stuck to his face and I can feel it trickling down my back. She asks all the silly questions about racing and if he expects his streak to continue. He just shrugs. It always amazes me that they ask that, what do they expect people to do, say yes?

  She asks how he got from Brooklyn to flying kites, and he tells her Random was his older brother. I tell her that the jacket is Random’s, I figure it will make good media. The kitchen is environmented, and it’s cold. Cinnabar puts the jacket around my shoulders and sits with his arm around my waist. I can feel his fingers on my ribs tapping nervously. She asks us if we’re ready for the New Haven tomorrow and says she notices we aren’t drinking. I tell her it’s too many calories. I don’t tell her we’re iced to the gills (no calories in chemicals.) But we’re iced enough that we aren’t really watching what we’re doing.

  She asks Cinnabar if he feels he has a good chance for the New Haven, and he makes like to spit over his shoulder, just like they do at home to ward off bad luck, then he says, “Gargoyle’s going to beat me.”

  We all laugh.

  Citinet calls me after the synch is on vid next evening, but I’m already out at the park, patching my old Siyue. I’m hoping the vid exposure will raise my synch numbers, but I’m thinking about my kite, not my publicity. I don’t even see the vid until later, and in it we look like a couple of seventeen year olds cuddling, which hooks all the romantics, and there’s that red jacket going from owner to owner to catch all the disaster addicts. Just shows nobody cares about how you race so much as what they think about your life.

  There are bunches of people around my pit watching Georgia and I work, and another synch crew shows up. They want to know what it feels like to be racing against my boyfriend and how serious Cinnabar and I are. I say a race is a race and shrug.

  “Do you think Cinnabar is right when he says you’re going to beat him?”

  I stand up and faced the synch crew, put my hands on my hips. “Well, I’m going to try,” I say, “but I’m flying a Siyue, and he’s flying a Liuyue.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “His is a newer kite,” I say, “Now I gotta get ready for a race, si?”

  They don’t stop asking me questions but I stop answering. The pick-up chirps, and I leave Georgia testing systems.

  “Angel,” Cinnabar says, “Esta loco aqui.”

  “Aqui tambien amigo. I don’t know how I can get anything done.” It’s so noisy I have to plug one ear with my finger. “We did good, huh?”

  “No shit.” He laughs. “Synch numbers are going to be great. Got an idea, going to send you the jacket, okay? Make a big fuss. Then, when you fly in that crate tonight, you make it look good, okay? Maybe somebody will pick you up and you can fly a real kite.”

  “Go to hell, my Siyue is a real kite.”

  “You like antiques.”

  “You’re doing me a great favor,” I say to him.

  “Favor hell, the bigger this is, the higher my numbers, comprende?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  Fifteen minutes later, as I’m putting on my face mask and getting ready to take the kite out, one of Cinnabar’s crew arrives carrying the red sharkskin jacket. I make a big show of staring at it, then put it on slowly. Then I jog the Siyue out.

  I’m out early, I need the time to remember I’m flying a race. It’s cold up there, it feels good. It’s empty, I take a lonely lap out across The Swath and Union Square. For the first time since I got out to the Park I get to think about the race.

  I fall into line when I get back out over Washington Square, take one lazy lap with everyone. I’m back at eighth, Cinnabar is second. He’ll go shanglou and so will Orchid. I haven’t a chance against them if I fly their race, not in a Siyue. We flash over Washington Square Park. I climb a bit, but when we go over The Swath I put my kite into a long flat drive, pumping forward. It’s not an all out sprint, but I’m pushing faster than my usual pace. I ride far out, all the way down till I’m close to the 200 meter altitude limit and when we flash over Union Square I’m low and way out in front. Everybody is still jockying for shanglou which is ridiculous, because Cinnabar is going to be the best power diver, at 48 kilos he’s got mass on his side. I’m using my light weight-damn few fliers lighter than 39 kilos-and sprinting. I don’t expect anyone to dive until we’re over The Swath, but Israel breaks and is diving after me. As we go into darkness, the pack breaks above me.

  Is that ABC synched with me tonight?

  In the darkness. I climb a bit, maybe twenty-five meters. Kites are diving in the dark, and when we flash over Washington Square the second time, I’m third, and the field is a disaster. People are strung out shanglou to xialou and Orchid is first. Her kite is pearlized silver. She’s in trouble because I know I can out power her. I’m above her, she’d down around bottoming out.

  We go back into the dark. I’m pushing, I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. But I’ve made this goddamn race my way. I’m still third when we come out over Union Square, but three people dive in front of me including Cinnabar. I dive into the middle, still not as low as Orchid. She tries to dolphin up and rises into Medicine. We go into darkness.

  It’s the worst point of the race under the best of circumstances because one is half blind and acclimating, and the next floater is too far to see and I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I know things are a mess. I feel someone over me, and Medicine and Orchid have to be tangled in front of me. The disaster lights go on and I have just time to see Orchid’s kite waffle into Cinnabar and see the silk shred away from the left front strut. Polaris is above me coming down outside. Israel is coming fast inside me. I take the space in front of me, nose first and start a screaming, too deep dive.

  I know I’m below two hundred meters, but I’m more worried about pulling the kite out. My bones/frame are screaming with strain and the cross strut breaks away. I drop out of the harness to provide drag, and come into Washington Square too low, too fast. At twenty meters I try to throw the nose up, no longer trying to save the frame and the silk, and the frame distorts as easily as an umbrella turned inside-out by a high wind. But the silk holds like a slack sail taking up air. I try to land on my feet, the ground makes my foot skip off it, I can’t get far enough in front of the kite, the balls of my feet keep skipping off the pavement as I try to run, I tumble and the ground comes up hard…

  I come to when they’re cutting the harness off. They cut off the sharkskin jacket, too, because I’ve dislocated my left shoulder. “What happened,” I keep saying, “what happened?”

  “An accident,” Georgia says, “you’re okay, honey.”

  They’ve given me something, because I’m way out to the vacuum, and I can’t think of the questions I want to ask, so I keep saying, “What happened?”

  “Or
chid got in. Almost everybody’s in,” Georgia says.

  “Who’s not in?”

  “Cinnabar,” she says, “he went down in The Swath.”

  Well, of course, you probably remember everything else since it was all over the media. How Cinnabar Chavez broke his spine. That they did surgery, and that it was awhile before they were sure he would live.

  He was in bad shape for a long time but he’s okay now. He lives in Brooklyn with his lover, I still see him a lot. He doesn’t fly anymore. Surgery is wonderful, so is therapy, and he’s still a sweet dancer, but he couldn’t trust his reflexes in a race. He has a job as a consultant for Cuo, the company that makes the big kites, and he does commentary for one of the big vid organizations. His income is steady these days.

  Mine is pretty good these days, too. I fly a big black and red kite for Citinet; a Chiyue, the new one. My synch numbers are in the 50’s, and my picture’s on the front of Passion next month. I’m wearing the red sharkskin jacket-I had it fixed-and the article is titled “Gargoyle’s an Angel!” which is kind of cute.

  I fly better these days. Cinnabar bitches about it, he says I’m too far out in front of myself. Sometimes when he says that I think of bringing that Siyue in and trying to get in front of it to stop it. But that’s what the people want, right?

  Besides, I can’t say it to him, but I’d rather be dead than not able to fly.

  BAFFIN ISLAND (Zhang)

  I am unemployed.

  The man who hands me the application says, “Filled out one before.” It’s supposed to be a question. He doesn’t look up to see my answer so I don’t say anything. I hope my interviewer will be waiguoren-not Chinese. Or if Chinese, at least huaqiao, like me. Perhaps an overseas person will be more sympathetic to another overseas person, unless, perhaps they have to prove that they’re as tough as a Chinese with citizenship. You can never tell, but I always feel Chinese are the worst.