The Swing of Beijing Novel Excerpt In the beginning, the heavens were unloosed and the earth uprooted.    —Chinese proverb "Wei!" Jordan Welp surprised himself with the aggressiveness of his articulation of the Mandarin word for "hello." Of course, he had strained himself to answer the cell phone within the first three notes of the ring tone—a point of pride—and perhaps he should've expected his voice to reveal his annoyance. Cell slammed to his ear, he was both stretched and cramped in the tent, balanced precariously on the balls of his feet and his right hand, with Lu Lu arching up beneath him. In the interstice between his salutation and the response, it occurred to Jordan that now was not the time to answer the phone. "Where's the report, Welp?" Roland Highball's voice came through with a clarity that Jordan could only think was sinister. Jordan was camping in a guard tower on the Great Wall in Huairou district, where cell phone reception was typically spotty, even without the added obstruction of the rainstorm that was currently raging outside. Jordan fleetingly considered hanging up on Roland and blaming the disconnect on China Mobile's uneven service in bad weather. But Lu Lu moaned and, as Jordan rushed to muffle her mouth with his hand, he blurted, "What report?" hoping to cover her sound with his question. Roland paused meaningfully before replying, "The Roid Lab report." "I knew that. I meant," Jordan gave up, lowered himself and rolled over onto his side, away from Lu Lu and the consternation gathering in her face, "it's done, but I wanted to re-read it with fresh eyes in the morning." Jordan picked nervously at a speck that'd settled on his eyelash. "We promised them they'd have it by 9 a.m. L.A. time. That's two hours from now. Tomorrow morning is twelve hours too late." Roland spoke each sentence as if it was a tight coil he was prying apart by means of controlled force. "I didn't know," Jordan said lamely. "Read your e-mail." "I can't get it to you in two hours, I'm nowhere near a computer, I'm camping --" "-- As fast as you can. I'm waiting." "As fast as I can," Jordan promised before Roland dismissed him with a curt click. Jordan rocketed upright and collided with the tent's rounded top. His 6'1" frame challenged the tent's capacity and, feeling claustrophobic, Jordan thrashed uselessly until Lu Lu shrieked in Mandarin, "What is it?" "My boss. I have to go," Jordan barked, grasping for these basic sentences in Mandarin, while he wriggled into his underwear. "You can't leave me here," she objected. "Sorry," Jordan snapped, gathering his hiking boots and backpack. He couldn't take Lu Lu with him; he needed to get home to his computer as fast as possible, and Lu Lu would slow him down. "Get a ride with Sven or Clyde tomorrow," Jordan instructed, referring to his two co-workers who, along with their lady friends, rounded out their camping party. "I said, you can't leave me here!" Lu Lu screeched, throwing Jordan's jeans in his face. A stud or button on the jeans stung Jordan's brow. He saw himself as the kind of man who wouldn't hesitate to slap Lu Lu in response, but he didn't have time to scrap with her. "Shut up and decide how much money you want," he spat and barreled out of the tent. The floor of the guard tower was littered with sharp gravel and brick shards that had been chilled by the rainy night air to a degree that would've been ideal for a martini, but was unbearable to the exposed soles of Jordan's feet. He hopped twice, trying to step into his jeans, tangled his leg in the denim and crashed to the ground beside Sven's tent, skinning his upper thigh. Sven lifted the tent flap and appraised Jordan's mostly unclothed body, writhing on the prickly ground. "A snake, yah?" he asked. "Worse," Jordan grumbled, managing to fit his feet into his trouser legs. "Roland." From inside Jordan's tent, Lu Lu emitted a scream so impressive in its expression of frustration that it'd taken half a minute to incubate. Seconds later, Jordan's hiking boots and backpack flew out of his tent. "Roland?" Sven repeated incredulous. "Not Lu Lu?" An unzipping sound preceded Clyde's head, emerging from his tent's entryway to investigate Lu Lu's scream. "Can you tell Lu Lu that I love her?" Jordan asked nervously, pulling his jeans roughly over his skinned thigh. "Why? Where are you going?" Clyde asked. "Roid Lab report for Roland," Jordan grimaced, thrusting his feet into his untied hiking boots and rummaging through his backpack. "Take my stuff back, ok?" "Ok. But didn't you know that Roland would call? Roland always calls," Sven scolded. "I didn't know the client was expecting it in two hours!" Jordan retorted, removing an empty whisky bottle from his backpack and hurling it into a corner of the guard tower. The neck broke off upon impact. "You're screwed," Clyde said laconically, though not without sympathy. All Highball & Associates employees dreaded finding themselves—inevitably—on the receiving end of Roland Highball's disapprobation. Roland was an impressive boss who, by his example and his impossibly high standards, inspired the awe of his employees. A 30-year veteran of China with flawless Mandarin and unerring judgment, Roland counted Henry Kissinger and Hugo Chavez among the diverse multitude of clients who were only too grateful to exchange shipping containers of cash for his advice. An international assortment of neophytes (Jordan was American, Clyde was Singaporean, Sven was Swedish) considered their jobs at Highball & Associates as their luckiest break, a springboard from which they expected to catapult into the best jobs in Asia—provided they could stay on Roland's good side. That Jordan found it harder than most to find Roland's good side didn't prevent Clyde from empathizing. Fishing his t-shirt from his backpack, Jordan shot back, "Say something helpful and tell Lu Lu I love her." Then he donned the t-shirt, shouldered the backpack and, calling out a final "Gotta fly," tore out of the guard tower into the pouring rain. "All fine for Lu Lu, but what about Pip?" Clyde smiled mischievously at Sven. Sven frowned and retreated back inside his tent. Galloping along the Great Wall in the rain, Jordan huffed, "Faster, faster," but the next moment a bolt of lighting made him flinch. His tripped over his shoelaces and his feet gave out on the wet stones, sending him thudding onto his side. He rolled into a sitting position, tied his boots, and resumed his speedy, lurching pace. "Flashlight," he growled. He found his torch just as he approached the hiking trail and brandished its beam to cut through the pitch that gripped the downward slope. In the end, a misstep left him slicked with mud and punctured by thorns, but also crumpled at the right-front tire of the 4x4 Jeep. Shakily, he stood. Leaning against the vehicle for balance, he dropped his keys in a mud puddle at the 4x4's base. He was feeling drunker now than when he'd last had a drink an hour ago, and he despaired finding his keys. With his strong jaw, blue eyes and reddish-blonde hair, Jordan had taken to picturing himself as a young Robert Redford. People who look like a young Robert Redford, he thought with drunken logic, don't have to search in the mud on their hands and knees for their keys. He stood stubbornly in the rain until the rivulets of water coursing down his face made him reconsider. If in fact the indignities of lost keys in mud puddles were unequally apportioned, luck—and not looks—was the likely basis of the distribution, he mused. He was bending over the puddle, preparing to dive in, when another flicker of lightning revealed that he was lucky, as well as good looking, and Jordan snatched his keys gratefully. But as he rose, he caught sight of the Great Wall, backlit by a strobe of lightning. In that spectral moment, the ancient edifice loomed, terrifying in its resilience, gorgeous in its decrepitude. The afterimage glowed before Jordan's eyes as he heaved himself behind the wheel. He shook off the sense of foreboding and tried, unsuccessfully at first, to start the 4x4. Once he managed to get the vehicle moving, Jordan reminded himself that he didn't have to dodge the windshield wipers. He squirmed in his soaked pants and squinted when the lines on the road began to look like they'd been painted by Jackson Pollock. For the second time that night, he ejected prematurely when he exited Beijing's Airport Expressway at the Third Ring Road. Cognizant that more than an hour had already elapsed since Roland's call, Jordan raced south and ducked off the Third Ring at Guanghua Road, where—cursing profusely—he alternated between braking and accelerating jerkily through the traffic signals. Losing patience, he sped through the red light at Dongdaqiao Road and ran over a pedestrian. Jordan had noticed the dim figure out of the corner of his eye, just as he'd jammed his foot on the accelerator. The dull thwack that followed brought to mind the image of a ribcage being crushed in a garbage disposal, and Jordan's heart battered his own chest in aghast horror. Now the 4x4's wheels were dragging and, feeling frenzied, Jordan lead-footed the gas pedal. The vehicle shot through the intersection. Hyperventilating, Jordan scanned his rear-view mirror frantically, but he couldn't make out the intersection behind him. "Stupid stupid!" Jordan cried. He peered behind him intently. Nothing. An angry honk brought his attention back to the road ahead of him. He swerved needlessly, righted the 4x4, and stared pointedly through the front windshield. Hunching forward, gripping the wheel and clenching his teeth, Jordan breathed determinedly through his nostrils until his breath slowed and his heart calmed. Not until he'd parked the 4x4 at the Jianwai Diplomatic Compound did he consider that collisions involving cars and people are the kind of event for which you stop. By then, however, he'd convinced himself that he'd imagined the accident, that the splat on the road was just another effect of Jackson Pollock's drip technique. Once home, Jordan was distraught. He couldn't locate his laptop. He was constantly losing his possessions in the apartment, a problem he attributed to the fact that the place technically belonged to his girlfriend, Pip. She was a foreign correspondent for The Seattle Globe, and the apartment also served as her office. Jordan was forever returning home to discover that Pip had once again rearranged the interior for some ostensibly work-related reason. Pip's laptop now sat on the kitchen table. Opening it with a distracted air, Jordan found himself reading her notes for an article about generic drug manufacturing in China. In his job as a consultant, Jordan's portfolio included pharmaceuticals, and he was often required to write industry reports that were supposed to contain original research. Jordan hated doing research. He attached Pip's notes to an e-mail that he sent to himself; then he erased his e-mail from Pip's sent file. Looking up, he saw through the window a green light flashing atop the antenna rising from the roof of a nearby office tower. It was because of this light, and also because there was a second diplomatic compound two blocks East, that the expatriate residents of the Jianwai Diplomatic Compound had nicknamed the complex "West Egg." Jordan scowled at the green light. He'd needed a green light, but tonight the light at the intersection had been red. Coffee! That was the thing to dispel these thoughts. Jordan slapped a filter in the machine, dumped ground coffee into it, and flipped the switch. While he disrobed and tried to recall where he'd left his laptop, the sound of the coffee dripping through the filter intruded on his deliberation. IV drips. Blood drips. Unnerved, he left his mulchy clothes in a pile on the kitchen floor and blundered into the bedroom in search of boxer shorts. These he found, but Pip was missing. Heedlessly snapping on the lamp, Jordan had too late glanced guiltily at the bed to see if he'd woken her, but the blanket was as pristinely spread across the bed's expanse as it had been after Pip had laid it there this morning. Puzzled as to why she wasn't asleep in their bed, he returned to the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee, and was about to devote serious concentration to the question of Pip's whereabouts, when the thought of the report for Roland banished Pip from his mind. Roid Labs was one of Highball & Associates' important pharmaceutical clients, and both they—and Roland—were waiting for this report on the risks and benefits of moving their research and development facilities to the Mainland. Notwithstanding what he'd told Roland, Jordan hadn't finished it. "Laptop, laptop," Jordan grumbled, patrolling the apartment. He swept newspapers off the coffee table. He tossed magazines from the top of the wide-screen television and peered disapprovingly at the DVD player: why wasn't it his computer? When he finally located his laptop, it was on the kitchen table next to Pip's, and he clenched his jaw at this latest evidence supporting Pip's frequent criticism that he never saw what was in front of his windshield—eyes. Eyes. Jordan stared at the laptop fretfully. Time to stop procrastinating. The two-hour deadline was upon him. He was definitely going to miss it. In which case, maybe a nap? Ten, or better yet twenty, minutes—say a half hour—would clear his mind and allow him to blast through the task of finishing the report. Fear, not discipline, however, kept his eyes open because, whatever Jordan's other blind spots, he at least knew he didn't want to be fired. Jordan had imagined himself leaving Highball & Associates to become vice-president of one of its key clients. Flubbing this report would jeopardize that fantasy. Since they'd spoken, Roland had sent him no fewer than three menacingly polite mobile phone text messages, alerting him, Jordan, that he, Roland, was waiting up. Jordan knew that, even having missed the deadline, he could still save his job if he turned in a stellar report. Of course, given that Roland was waiting in the middle of the night for a report that was due to the client—now, Jordan realized, glancing at the time—Roland wouldn't be disposed to read the report with a generous eye. The report had to be good. But, seated in front of his laptop, Jordan was again distracted, this time by the rain spritzing through the screen window onto his arm. As he moved to close the pane, he saw the drops pooling in the windowsill, dark with the accumulated soot on the windows, oozing towards him like blood. Jordan swallowed. Someone was going to have to clean the sill. Forcing the window shut with a definitive bang, he swore, "Where the fuck is Pip?" * * * Pip Alonzo stared through the dark at the tacky chandelier hanging in Tyler's bedroom. Why were gaudy chandeliers ubiquitous in Chinese apartments? Could she find significance in the fact that Beijing landlords uniformly had abominable taste in lighting fixtures? And most importantly: was there an angle to the "Beijing chandelier" phenomenon that would interest The Seattle Globe's readers? She nervously balled her fists and tapped them against the mattress, aware that she felt puny in this enormous, foreign bed. Pip was used to feeling small. She was barely 5'2" and, in her opinion, diminutiveness characterized all her features. She had brown eyes, a button nose, and doll-like hands and feet. Her straight, dark hair was cut short and layered in a style that was trendy but, she feared, would not be out of place on a Japanese comic book heroine. She had friends, like the Marquise, who without effort had freed their senses of self-esteem from the limitations of their similarly petite frames, but Pip had had to adjust the average size of the population around her—by living in China—before she'd been able to assuage her size sensitivity. Even living among Lilliputians wouldn't have helped now, however; having caught herself considering writing about interior design, she felt acutely small. She'd come to China to be, as her parents put it, a "save-the-world journalist"; from her own perspective, whatever she'd come to China "to be," she'd imagined that it would be big. She'd arrived in Beijing as a foreign correspondent for The Seattle Globe, a job she'd lucked into. The paper—which had historically sourced its international coverage from the newswires, like Reuters and AP—had decided that China's massive, post-Tiananmen economic growth warranted a reporter on the Mainland, but it'd had trouble staffing the position. Its seasoned reporters were all Seattle natives, and nothing interested them more intensely than Seattle's school system and mayoral politics; none were willing to move overseas to a city devoid of coffee shops that roasted beans on the premises. So the foreign correspondent position had fallen to Pip, who was an entry-level reporter at the time; and she'd been ecstatic. She'd thought it was an opportunity to do something meaningful, to be part of something epic. But six years later, Pip was reluctantly concluding that her career trajectory was stalled. She'd thought she'd be writing historic dispatches, but she'd yet to write anything that would so much as ruffle her Seattle audience's provincialism. She'd covered Beijing's public school system and the operation of Beijing's city government; she'd reported on the Olympic mascots, the rising numbers of cars and corresponding pollution, and the astonishing success of Starbucks in China. Pip worried that, based on her articles, The Seattle Globe's readers might well believe that Beijing—a mega-opolis of 17 million people that had exploded over an urban blueprint first set down 800 years ago during the Yuan Dynasty—was just like Seattle, with more Chinese-looking people in it. But Beijing was not like Seattle; it was ground zero for a country undergoing modernization at a pace so rapid that in other contexts it would have been termed "malignant." Pip yearned to make China's singular modernization the theme of all her work—or at least of a Pulitzer-worthy series of articles—but her writing for The Seattle Globe seemed the wrong vehicle. Because of space constraints, Pip's articles ranged in size from 300 to 800 words, far too short to explain anything of China as she experienced it. Beyond which, the very act of trying to explain her experiences made Pip feel a fake. Bewilderment was her predominant response to China, and any honest header on her reports—"Good luck figuring out how corruption impairs the work of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games"; "Enforcement of food safety standards a complete, impenetrable muddle thanks to rampant lying and bribery"—would have resulted in a brisk e-mail from marketing, reminding her of the importance of cultivating reader trust in The Seattle Globe as a source of reliable, clearly-explained and readily-understood information. But, so far as Pip could gather, no information about China was reliable or susceptible to lucid explanation or ready comprehension; and all her "explanations" of the hubbub surrounding her were conjectures. Her uncertainty was a perennial annoyance to her editor, Silas Holderman, who didn't believe that facts could correlate to ambiguous meanings, and who demanded that Pip stretch the facts of China to correspond to meanings that were unequivocally accessible to U.S. readers. Pip's efforts invariably yielded awkward results and occasionally, her China strayed from (both reality and) reader expectations. "Did you pop a graduate student pill?" Silas would complain when he thought readers wouldn't relate. "Where's Mulan in this story?" As soon as Pip had realized that journalism was too flimsy a format for any in-depth explanation of the dynamic way China was developing, she'd decided to write a book, instead. This job is just to pay the bills now and save up for the future, so I can quit my job and write, she promised herself, every time Silas axed another intriguing story with one of his dismissive barbs. But the years had slipped by, and she'd written nothing worthwhile, let alone a book. And, although she wanted to quit her foreign correspondent's job and write seriously, she hadn't. She told herself that she needed to save more money—six years of labor had allowed her to save only $10,000—but she also rationalized (contradictorily, but no less satisfyingly) that saving up the money had itself been an accomplishment, a secret pride that almost substituted for the achievement of a substantial written work. Recognizing that many people wrote books while they had jobs, and that—if money was both an obstacle and an excuse—she should do the same, she nonetheless found herself unable to muster the discipline, time and energy to do so. She blamed her inertia on the flyweight journalism she'd been doing for The Seattle Globe. Her theory was that writing for such a narrow audience had, over time, eroded her own capacities. It'd sapped her confidence, shrunk her ambition, exhausted her. And now this: chandeliers in Beijing apartments! Plainly, she was in a rut. While Pip was taking stock in the bedroom, Tyler Winger was avoiding looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. He regretted his buzz cut, which made obvious his need to trim his ear and nose hair. But mostly he didn't want to see the turmoil on his face. Hailing from the mid-West and looking "all American"—blonde hair, straight teeth, barrel chest—Tyler was earnest and honest, the man who's a little shorter than average and doesn't lie about it. He'd never imagined himself as the sort of man who'd have to deal with a fucked-up life. But a fucked-up life was what he had: Point 1. He'd always valued family and married young, but now at 41, he was alone. His wife, Molly—having returned to their home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, eleven months ago—was divorcing him and refusing to allow their three children, Sarah, Juniper, and Caleb, to visit him in Beijing. He still didn't understand what'd gone wrong. Point 2. He had a strong work ethic and had enjoyed the satisfaction of earning money to support his family, but now he was unemployed and had no job prospects. After Molly had left, he'd felt so overwhelmed that he'd resigned his job, and all he could show for the past eleven months was a marked improvement in his martial arts skills. Point 3. Tyler thought casual sex was degrading and had slept with only four women before his wife, but he'd just had what undoubtedly would be a one-night stand because no woman would return for seconds after his lousy performance. The worst of it: he genuinely liked Pip. Adored her, even. Point 4. But why go on? Tyler frowned at his image in the mirror. He was failing to live up to every principle he believed in. He didn't know why he couldn't seem to do better, and he had no game plan for dealing with the situation. His life was definitely fucked-up. Emerging from the bathroom, Tyler saw Pip stretched out in his bed, staring up in a reverie. The bedroom was dark, but from his vantage point, the expression on her face seemed rapturous. He feared that she was fantasizing about sex with a competent lover. Tyler needed some alone time, but he couldn't see his way to asking Pip to leave. Chucking women out of your apartment after sex is rude, no matter how bad you may have been in bed. Seeking refuge in the kitchen, Tyler stood rooted in front of the refrigerator, confused. What was the "I like you, and I'm not a bad guy, but please leave now" etiquette? Dear Miss Manners, Tyler composed in his head, as he opened the freezer and stared at the vodka. He put his hand on the bottle, feeling its cold comfort. Then he shuddered. He didn't want to be a middle-aged guy drinking alone in the kitchen while a woman's lying in his bed. Decamping to the living room, he flipped on the television to watch CCTV-9, the Chinese government's English-language station. Back when he'd been married and employed, Pfizer had paid his living expenses at a garish "villa" in a gated community, one of scores of such developments in Beijing's northeast, clustered around the airport. In villa-land, you could pretend you weren't in China: your neighbors were expatriates, the nearby shops sold imported food, and the English-language television selection had included HBO and CNN. But his current digs were definitely in China: the clingy odors of his neighbors' cooking wafted in through the air vent; his bathroom had a showerhead affixed to the wall above the toilet, without the niceties of a curtain and tub; and cable was a luxury of receding memory. But the apartment's deficiencies were irrelevant. He couldn't have afforded anything better. CCTV-9 was broadcasting Travelogue, a program that showcased China's many tourist destinations. Like all CCTV programming, Travelogue featured CCTV's characteristic blend of sentimentality, humorless pomposity and amateur production values. Tyler's attention drifted: why had he swept Pip into bed? When they'd met three months before, he'd known immediately that it would a mistake to befriend such a lithe, young woman. He'd had this thought as he watched her sail over the handlebars of her bicycle and roll expertly onto her feet. She'd run him down as he'd been crossing the street by Ritan Park, a swatch of landscaped nature, replete with lakes and pagodas, which dated from the Ming Dynasty. They'd both been distracted before the collision. Tyler had been absorbed by his iPod, on which he was listening to "China Girl," an old favorite that he'd almost forgotten with the passing of his cocaine years; Pip had been engrossed in a mobile phone conversation with her ayi, an earnest peasant from Anhui province who cleaned Pip's apartment and who, in her eagerness to please, had been creeping out on the apartment's exterior ledge to wash the windows—a practice that Pip was emphatically trying to dissuade her from continuing. After the collision, they'd both been riveted by one another. Pip always went melty around chiseled men, however much they might be sprawled contortedly in the street. For his part, Tyler was enthralled by the agile manner in which Pip recovered from her fall; his hunch that this pixie of a woman might be a martial artist inspired equal parts excitement and wariness. He'd brushed away her breathless apologies with the question: "How'd you learn to fall like that?" His hunch had proved correct. Pip, like him, practiced wushu, Chinese martial arts. Her parents, who Tyler gathered were some sort of counter-culture types, had strongly approved of aggressive fight training for girls, since it "subverted anti-feminist stereotypes of femininity," and Pip had studied a wide variety of different martial arts disciplines in her youth. And, although Tyler had felt wary as much as excited by the prospect that Pip was a martial artist, he'd forgotten his initial caution in his happiness at having found a wushu partner. In the three months that they'd been meeting regularly in Ritan Park to practice wushu forms side-by-side, he'd worried only that he'd crush her delicate ribcage with a wayward kick. He hadn't given thought to the other danger latent in their interactions, until the June sky had unleashed a torrent on their workout earlier that evening. Then he'd noticed that, in addition to a ribcage, she had breasts: pert ones with erect nipples, to which her shirt was fetchingly plastered. He'd grabbed her wrist and ran. He'd dragged her from the circular arena, where they'd practiced martial arts next to old Chinese men flying brightly painted kites, to a nearby stone trellis around which a gnarled grapevine had wrapped itself in a lonely embrace. Pressing her against the stone column, he'd kissed her—a mouthful of rainwater—and then they were running again. Tyler had tugged her under the middle archway of the park's imposing north gate, around the pit of a construction site, and into the entryway of a drab six-story building. He'd bounded up all five flights of stairs, pulling her firmly behind him. Pip had been giggling as Tyler flung her into the front hall, where she lost her footing as she stepped backwards onto Tyler's many pairs of scattered shoes. Tyler had grabbed her biceps to steady her; then hooking his fingers into her panties, he'd peeled off everything she was wearing below the waist. Pip had laughed uproariously, leaning over his head as he gripped her ankles and lifted her feet, one-by-one, out of her pants legs. She'd been as pliant and happy as if she were drunk, but he knew she hadn't had a drink. He hadn't either, and he'd felt momentarily astonished that, without alcohol to bolster his courage, he'd nonetheless followed his impulse to carry her off. With a pang, Tyler had realized that he needed to rush or he'd lose his nerve. He'd bounced up decisively and marched Pip into the bedroom, shedding his own clothes. Pushing her onto the bed, he'd grasped her with a neediness that made Pip think he couldn't resist her. She hadn't felt so desired in years, and an urgent exhilaration seized her. A joyful smile overtook her face at the rediscovery of sensations that she'd almost forgotten in the grind of her long-standing relationship. Giving herself over to a flurry of kissing, nibbling, and licking of her face and breasts, Pip had been feeling, with a contraction around her waist and a quickening of her breath, that she was ready, when Tyler came. Hands pinned to the pillows, hyperventilating, Pip had wondered what had just happened. Tyler had had the same thought. Failure on this scale hadn't occurred since adolescence. He'd felt like a teen with Pip—virile, immortal, over-stimulated. And now: embarrassed. "Gosh, I'm sorry --" "—It's fine—" "—Let me can I—" "—No really, don't worry about it," Pip had blushed. "It's been a long—always awkward the first—I'd forgotten, I mean, wasn't expecting," Tyler had stumbled, struggling to conceal his disappointment at having disappointed her. But he'd had no control: his orgasm had ripped through him with a violence that had seemed vengeance for his extended abstinence. The vengeance, he mused, seemed to be continuing in the Travelogue rebroadcast of "Dunhuang III," an episode about huanglüemian, Dunhuang's local delicacy: donkey meat with noodles in yellow sauce. Disgusted, Tyler rose to examine his DVDs—where was his boxed set of 24, seasons 1-6? As he pawed through scores of counterfeit DVDs, he considered running downstairs to the DVD shop on the first floor of his building. A buzz alerted him that he'd just received a mobile phone text message. His drinking buddy Elton Baker, a former colleague from Tyler's days at Pfizer, had sent him an invite to meet at a bar. "P-a-s-s," Tyler typed back with his thumb. Moments later, Elton replied, with a message saying, "Hope you're laughing." Tyler grunted. Elton's remark alluded to their oft-spoken catchphrase: "Beijing's a city that forces you to laugh, or else you'll cry"—a sentiment that had impressed itself upon them as they'd both attempted to adjust to the place. Elton knew Tyler well enough to guess that, if Tyler wasn't coming out for a drink, he was probably crying. Tyler certainly wasn't laughing. Looking from his mobile phone screen to his stack of DVDs, he realized that he was reluctant to leave his apartment for any reason, whether to buy a decent DVD or to get a drink with Elton. Tyler didn't want to feel like he was running away. More than he already did. He shook his head sadly, realizing that he was scared to go into the bedroom. He didn't want to face Pip's disappointment, or his own. With a sigh, he continued: Point 4. He'd always wanted to be brave. Throughout his life, he'd been aware that, as tests of his character, certain experiences showed him to be a coward. He remembered, as a boy, stumbling across a rattlesnake that had been run over by a truck on a dirt road. The snake had had the misfortune to live through the accident, which had squashed the back third of its tail. It'd writhed in the bloody dust, bits of its skin and muscle pounded into the truck tracks in the road. Despite its fangs bared in pain, Tyler had felt sorry for the creature and wanted to help it. Killing the snake would've been the most humane option, but also the most distasteful and dangerous, since the only weapon Tyler had in his possession was a garden trowel. (A good boy, he was on his way to dig up some wild sweet peas to transplant in his mother's garden.) Tyler pictured himself beating the snake's head to a pulp as he cried. He walked away. His conviction that he lacked bravery had impelled him to learn martial arts because he'd thought it would give him the confidence of knowing he could fight off any attack. But even that choice, he felt, was cowardly. As skilled a martial artist as he was, he couldn't confront his ex-wife, Molly. He couldn't even confront poor Pip, and he owed her better. He rose, switched off the television and walked dutifully to the bedroom. She was sleeping. Immediately, Tyler flushed with shame for having abandoned her in the bedroom. Walking slowly around the bed, he knelt in front of where she lay sweetly in a ball, her hair tousled. He felt the urge to enfold her and make love to her properly. Then he smiled wanly, mocking himself for having a younger man's fantasies. Even on the first night, after more than a year of celibacy, he couldn't come twice in two hours anymore. He stood and, after making his way to the other side of the bed, lay down carefully beside her. He didn't want to wake her. Nor did he want to stir anything in himself; Pip had provoked a yearning that Tyler didn't think wise to encourage. After lying tensely in the bed for a moment, though, he caved: rolling over, he stretched his arms to her.