Dragon Day Read Online Free

Maybe he’s inspired by the 18th Party Congress coming up, ’cause he’s dressed like every single one of those Standing Committee guys you see displayed in awkward lines in the official photographs.
    I focus on the tie. If I stare long enough, the dots look like they’re moving.
    â€œYou know, your status here can change at any time,” he finally says.
    Like before, he speaks to me in Mandarin. I don’t know how much English he understands, if any. My spoken Chinese isn’t bad, but I’m not sure it’s up to this.
    â€œWo zhidao.” I know.
    I try to hide the shiver. Because he could just mean, We’re revoking your visa and kicking you out of the country. Which would suck. But lately I’ve been thinking about leaving anyway. It’s just getting too weird here.
    But he could also mean, We’re throwing your ass in jail. An official prison or a black jail, off the books.
    And that whole prospect, I don’t do so well with that.
    â€œI can only tell you what I know,” I say. “I know Zhang Jianli’s email address. I already gave it to you.”
    â€œBut you manage his art.” He smiles, baring his teeth. “Hard to understand how you can do this without knowing where he is.”
    We’ve been over this before.
    â€œHe left me instructions. It’s not so hard.”
    â€œYou sell his art, then.”
    â€œI sold some art,” I correct. We haven’t sold a thing since February. When this whole “fun with the DSD” game started.
    â€œYou sell his work,” Pompadour Bureaucrat repeats. “Then how does he get paid?”
    My heart thumps harder. This is a sensitive subject. “I just collect the money. He hasn’t taken any yet.”
    A frown. “But this is a little strange. This is his money, after all. His work. He behaves . . . almost like a man who is no longer alive.”
    Oh, shit.
    I do not like where this is heading.
    â€œAll I know is what he told me. What I told you . He wanted some time away from Beijing, so he could work. Get fresh ideas. Too many distractions here.” I risk a tiny smirk, ’cause I just can’t help it. “See, he likes coffee. He’s not so fond of tea.”
    I stumble out of there in the late afternoon, into the yellow-grey haze of a hot May afternoon. Smog mingles with the dust of a construction site, where this huge jackhammer thing rises like an insect on steroids above temporary metal walls covered with photo murals of new, modern China: sleek high-speed trains, spaceship skyscrapers, and, to show proper respect to tradition, and tourism, the Temple of Heaven.
    I’m pretty sure it’s a subway they’re building. They’re building them everywhere. I wish it were done, so I could ride down some long escalator, past ads for Lancôme and real estate and cell phones and socialist modernization, into some shiny new train that would whisk me away, underground, below all the traffic and noise, and I’d emerge in my own neighborhood, safe at home, like magic.
    Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen.
    I limp past a yellow Home Inn and signs for some sports complex left over from the ’08 Olympics, and I can see a line of tall, straight trees in an empty field at the side of an expressway, maybe a ring road, but I don’t know which one, because I’ve hardly ever been to Fengtai before, except for the Beijing West Railway Station, a place I hate that’s hard to avoid: ugly Soviet mainframe built like a cheap brown suit topped with Chinese pagodas. I’m a lot deeper into Fengtai than that, though, right at the edge where it turns into crumbling old villages and farmland.
    A taxi, I think. I need to find a taxi.
    Either that or a drink.
    I buy a bottle of Nongfu Spring water at a newsstand and take a Percocet.
    I need them, I tell myself. It’s not like I’m some addict who just wants to get high. I’m in