Demon Box

  RUN INTO GREAT WALL

  Verses appearing here are from the Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu. An older contemporary of Confucius (551-479 B.C.), Lao-tzu was the Chinese historian in charge of archives at the royal court of the Chou dynasty. He wrote nothing of his own but taught by example and parable. When the famous sage was at last departing his homeland for the mountains of his end, the keeper of the mountain pass detained him.

  "Master, my duties as sentry of this remote outpost have made it impossible for me to visit your teachings. As you are about to leave the world behind, could you not also leave behind a few words for my sake?"

  Whereupon Lao-tzu sat down and filled two small books with 81 short verses, less than some 5,000 characters, and then departed. No one ever heard where he went.

  There is a thing confusedly formed,

  Born before heaven and earth.

  Silent and void,

  It stands alone and does not change,

  Goes round and does not weary.

  It is capable of giving birth to the world.

  I know not its name

  So I style it "the way..."

  Man models himself on earth,

  Earth on heaven,

  Heaven on the way,

  And the way on that which is naturally so.

  The dark was already pressing down out of the eastern sky when Yang at last swung off the main road from the village and opened up for his finishing sprint down the canal path. A hundred and thirty meters away, at the end of the row of mud-and-brick houses crouching along both sides of the dirt lane, his uncle's dwelling was tucked back beneath two huge acacias. A large estate compared to the other 10-by-10 yard-with-huts, the building housed his uncle's dentist shop and cycle-repair service, as well as his uncle's wife and their four children, his uncle's ancient father, who was Yang's grandfather and an inveterate pipe-smoker, wind-breaker, and giggler... also Yang's mother and her bird and Yang's three sisters, and usually a client or two staying over on one of the thin woven mats to await the repair of their transportation or recuperate from the repair of their molars.

  Yang could not see the house as he ran toward the looming acacias, but he could easily picture the scene within. The light would already have been moved from above the evening meal to the dishwashing, and the family would be moving to the television in the shop room, trying to find places among the packing crates of dental molds. The only light there would be the flutter of the tiny screen beating at the dark like the wings of a black-and-white moth.

  Yang knew just how they would look. His uncle would be cranked back in the dentist chair, a cigarette cupped in his stubby hand, his shirt open. His wife would be perched beside him on her nurse's stool. On the floor, in half lotus, Grandfather would be leaned forward, giggling, his long pipe only inches from the screen. Farther back his four cousins and his two youngest sisters would be positioned among the paraphernalia on the floor, trying to appear interested in the reports of how the flood along the Yangtze might affect rice quotas. Along the rear wall his oldest sister would be preparing the infants for the night, wrapping their bottoms and sliding them, one after the other, onto the pad beneath the raised cot. The bird would be hung near the door, covered against evening drafts.

  In the other room his mother would be cleaning the dishes as quietly as possible.

  His uncle would be angry that Yang was late again, but nothing would be said. A quick scowl turned from the television. No questions. They all knew where he had been. The only dalliance he could afford was the public library. For one-half fen a reader could rent two hours on a wooden bench and enjoy the kind of privacy a library creates, even when the benches were packed, reader to reader.

  Yang had hoped to borrow one of the newly allowed classics of Confucius. He'd heard that their library had received the very first shipment to honor at last the birthplace of the great philosopher. But the books were all already on loan. Yang instead had to choose a more familiar work, Wang Shih-fu's Romance of the Western Chamber. It was a novel his father had continued to teach even during the harshest criticism of the "slave-ridden classics."

  The last loan date on Western Chamber was almost five years ago. The last borrower was his father.

  Without slackening his stride, Yang pushed the book into his trouser tops and buttoned his jacket over it. Not that his uncle would not know a book was there, of course. He almost certainly would. Therefore it was not that he was concealing it, Yang told himself. He carried it in his belt to have both hands free, for his balance.

  For his sprint.

  Fists clenched, he pumped hard against the descending gloom, trusting his feet to avoid the rocks and ruts in the dark path. He could have run it blindfolded, navigating by sound and smell - Gao Jian's machine, sewing there to the left; Xiong-and-son's excrement wagons parked in reeking rows, ready for the next day's collections; half-wit Wi snoring with his sows. He ran harder.

  He was small for his nineteen years, with narrow shoulders and thin ankles. But his thighs were thick and his upper arms very strong from the weight work of wrestling. Beneath the book his belly was like carved oak. He was in good shape. He had been running home from school every night for almost four years.

  With a final burst of speed he ducked beneath the curtain of acacia and into the yard of his uncle's shop. He nearly stumbled in wonderment. Everything was lit, the whole house! Even the bulb above the false teeth - still lit. Something had happened to his mother! Or one of his sisters!

  He didn't go to the gate but hurdled the mud hedge and rattled across the brickpile. He charged through the door and the empty front room to the curtain across the kitchen and stopped. Shaking, he pulled aside the dingy batik and peered inside. Everyone was still at the dinner table, the bone chopsticks waiting beside the best plates, the vegetables and rice still steaming in the platters. Every head was already turned to him, smiling.

  His uncle stood, a tiny glass of clear liquid in each hand. He handed one to Yang and lifted the other in toast.

  "To our little Yang," his uncle declared, the big mouth beaming porcelain. "Ganbei!"

  "To Yang!" The aunt and sisters and cousins all stood, lifting their glasses. "Ganbei!"

  Everyone tossed the swallow of liquid into their mouths except Yang. He could only blink and pant. His mother came around the table, her eyes shining.

  "Yang, son, forgive us. We have opened your letter."

  She handed him an elaborately inscribed paper. He saw the official seal of the People's Republic embossed at the bottom.

  "You have been invited to go to Beijing and race. Against runners from all over the world!"

  Before Yang could look at his letter, his uncle was touching the rim of his refilled glass to Yang's.

  "It is going to be televised all over the world. Ganbei, Yang. Drink."

  Yang started to drink, then asked, "What kind of race?"

  "The greatest kind. The longest kind -"

  That must be a marathon, Yang realized. Now he swallowed the mao tai in a gulp. He felt the strong rice liquor blaze its way to his stomach. A marathon? He had never run a marathon, not even half a marathon. Why had they picked him? Yang didn't understand.

  "We are all so proud," his mother said.

  "All over the world," his uncle was saying. "It will be seen by millions. Millions!"

  "Your father would have also been proud," his mother added.

  Then Yang understood. The provincial chairman of sports had been a friend and colleague of his father: an old friend, and a man of honor and loyalty, if not too much courage. It was surely he who had recommended young Yang. A grand gesture of cleaning up. For things that had happened.

  "He would have gone to the square and played his violin and sung, son. He would have been that proud."

  Yang didn't say so, but he thought that it would take more than a grand gesture or a televised footrace to clean up that much.

  When the best student hears about the way

  He practices it assiduo
usly;

  When the average student hears about the way

  It seems to him one moment there and gone the next;

  When the worst student hears about the way

  He laughs out loud.

  If he did not laugh

  It would not be worthy of being the way.

  The American journalists sipped their free drinks in the deep divans of the Pan American Clipper Club room, an exclusive lounge located above the lesser travelers of the San Francisco International Airport terminal.

  Exclusive indeed. Not only did one need to know of its esteemed existence and whereabouts, one needed as well to produce evidence of acceptable prestige before gaining entry. While the journalists were not exactly first class, they were in the company of those who were. This was enough to get them to the secret door, past the doorman, and into the free booze.

  "How do you visualize," a fellow club sipper insisted on knowing, "hanging this gig on a hook? So it is not just another dumb road race? I mean what are you hoping to hang it on?"

  The sipper was a ranking executive in the business that owned the magazine paying for this journalistic jaunt to China, so everyone acknowledged his right to be a trifle insistent.

  "The hook I have in mind," answered the first of the journalists, a big bearded boy who was the editor of said mag as well as originator of the jaunt, "is sport as detente. Remember it wasn't really Nixon or Kissinger that initially broke through the bamboo curtain; it was the Ping-Pong ball. This race is the first international sporting event in China since before World War Two. To me, that has meaning."

  Meaning he really had no idea at all what to hang it on. The second journalist, bald, unbearded, bigger and older than the first, muscled his brow in a Brandoesque attitude of heavy consideration.

  "Let me think on that a minute," he begged. He turned to the third journalist, absolutely enormous, with big blue eyes and a monstrous camera hanging over his belly. "What about you, Brian? What do you plan to aim at?"

  "I can't take any point pictures until my writer comes up with something to make a point with, can I?" was the way the third journalist avoided the question.

  The eyes turned back to the second journalist; his knotted brow indicated he nearly had his answer tied down.

  "One of the main characteristics," he began, "about a bamboo curtain... is it's so damn thick. The only thing it lets show through is politics. For years no idiosyncrasies, no quirks, no personality has been allowed to show through."

  "Until now?" asked the editor, proud of the way his man had wiggled off this hook business.

  "Right. Until now. Now they are sponsoring this big marathon with top runners from all over the globe, even though the best Chinese marathoner is slower than the mediocre from the rest of the racing world. This may be the crack in the curtain for us to go angling through."

  "Gotcha!" the ranking exec said. "Like ice fishing back in Minnesota: hafta hook something before the hole freezes back." He raised his martini to the trio. "Well, fishermen: here's to a successful trip. Bring us back a biggie -"

  " 'Tenshun, Clipper Club membahs," the speaker over the bar drawled, "Pan Am's Clipper flight for Beijing is now available for boarding. Y'all have a nice trip."

  In his every movement a man of great virtue

  Follows the way and the way only.

  As a thing the way is

  Shadowy, indistinct.

  Indistinct and shadowy,

  Yet within it is an image;

  Shadowy and indistinct,

  Yet within it is a substance,

  Dim and dark,

  Yet within it is an essence,

  And this is something that can be tested.

  From the present back to antiquity

  Its name never deserted it.

  It serves as a means for inspecting the fathers of the multitude.

  How do I know what the fathers of the multitude are like?

  By means of this.

  In the dew-heavy dawn outside one of Tanzania's 8,000 ujamaa villages, tall handsome Magapius Dasong (best time: 2:20:46) sat beside the road on his wicker suitcase. He was waiting for the local bus that would take him to the central station in Dar-es-Salaam, where he was to meet his coach for the ride to the airport. The Dawn Express Local was already tardy by nearly forty minutes of daylight and Magapius would not be surprised if it became later by twice that time before the bus arrived. By then, his two coaches and three trainers would have proceeded on to China without their athlete.

  How like the Tanzania of recent years, he thought; everybody gets in on the race but the runner. Such inefficiency. Such bureaucracy. Poor topheavy Tanzania, swaying and teetering. Even the most avid supporters of President Nyerere's socialistic progress were beginning to admit that the nation's economic strife was caused by more than increased oil prices or the recent droughts and floods. Oil prices had increased for all nations; droughts and floods had always been. And if sweeping socialist reform had increased life expectancy by 20 percent in a decade, it had probably increased the social woes by 30 percent! More thefts and less to steal. More schedules set and less of them met.

  This decline of care for time was what most troubled Magapius. His countrymen once were proud of their timing. If a bird was to be netted, the netman would be tossing the net as the bird flew by. It was an appointment to be kept, a pact between netman and bird. A courtesy. What was the joy in a longer life when that tribal respect for time was becoming as rare as the old stylized dream dances?

  As much as the race itself, Magapius was looking forward to visiting the People's Republic of revolutionary China. If the dream were to live, reaffirmation must be found there, in that mightiest stronghold of the experiment. Everybody knew there was no juice in Russia any more, no Kunda as the Bantu put it. No baraka, as the Arabs said. And the boatloads hysterical to escape Cuba and Haiti for the capitalistic coasts of Florida did not speak well of Castro's collective. But China... ah, China... surviving Mao's madness as well as Brezhnev's belligerence. Great China. If China could not accomplish it, perhaps it could not be accomplished.

  He heard a motor and stood to wave at the approaching headlights. It was not the bus. It was a loaded sisal truck that had encountered the bus miles back, stuck crossways in the middle of the tiny road, front wheels in one ditch, back wheels in the other. The bus had been turning around to return to pick up last week's mail that the driver had again forgotten.

  One of the sisal truck's three drivers boosted Magapius's luggage to the top of the load of fiber and invited him to join them for the ride on to the city. He couldn't join them in the cab, however. There was no room. In the nation's battle against rampant unemployment, there were now three drivers required in every vehicle of transport, whether they could drive or not.

  Magapius thanked them and climbed the heap of fibers. How particularly Tanzanian - three men in a clean cab in filthy work aprons; one on top in the blowing white fluff in the only suit the family owned, black...

  In the cramped kitchen of his uncle's house, Yang was studying mathematics. He had less than a week before the trip to Beijing, and his instructors at school had decided he could best prepare for his absence by staying home and studying on his own. From the adjoining room came the whir of the motorcycle motor as his uncle drilled away at the day's collection of cavities. It was a clever setup. Raised on its kickstand, the rear wheel turned freely against a simple wooden spool that in turn drove the gears that powered the drill cables. The drill speed could be adjusted by the bike's throttle, and the whir of the little two-cycle engine helped blanket the occasional groans his patients made in spite of the bristle of anesthetic needles in their necks and arms.

  Yang was seated near the window. If the sun had been out it would have fallen across his high-boned face and bare shoulders, but it was overcast. It had been overcast for weeks. Since before the floods.

  His sister came in from the backyard carrying a pan of green leaves and dumped them in a large kettle of cold
water, singing as she did. Yang recalled the stanza. It was from a skit his sister's class had performed for National Day a year ago. The girls had learned the song from a play that was mailed out to all the primaries, a short musical dramatization emphasizing the value of early warning and treatment of stomach cancer, China's number-one killer. His sister had stopped attending school after that year, speaking of plans to join the People's Liberation Army. Now she washed cabbage leaves and stacked them beside her aunt's wok - delicately, as though arranging expensive silks - while she sang:

  Esophageal cancer must be thoroughly conquered.

  The pernicious influence of the Gang of Four must be wiped out.

  Prevention first, prevention always, prevention first!

  Thus we prevent and treat cancer of the revolution.

  How very fine, Yang agreed without raising his head from the work text; how commendable. But please explain if possible how one uses the principles of Prevention First when dealing with the diseases of the revolution itself? Wouldn't the very cure be dangerously counterrevolutionary?

  He closed the big paperback on his finger and turned to watch his sister. She was long past fifteen and rounding out rapidly. In a few months someone would accompany the girl to their communal market for her first binding undergarment. In a few years Yang would not be able to pick her from dozens her same age - the same white shirt, the same black pants, the same pigtails. Perhaps that was why she wanted to join the PLA; if the uniforms were always ill-fitting and baggy they at least were less uniform than what all the other girls her age would be wearing.

  Now his sister sang and swayed in unfettered innocence, still flushing with young patriotism. Yang could recall the sensation - a thrill to be part of something vast and exciting. He could remember feeling that his blood was tolling in cadence with every heart in the village, to a great shared rhythm. When he was nine, he remembered, there had come a dreadful plague of flies throughout all the land. To deal with the problem their Great Chairman had done a mighty and yet simple thing. Mao had launched an edict proclaiming that while it was not required it would be a very good thing if all the schoolchildren in the land should bring to their schoolteachers every morning dead flies. Yang had dedicated himself to the chore with all the fervor of a warrior of old serving his emperor.