Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Read online

  Claire, however, straightened her posture, crossed one leg over the other, and gave a small toss of her head as if gearing up for a job interview. “We’re scholars, Officer. From Brown University. Thank you for asking.”

  Her voice had the creamy, artificially sweet cadence of a beauty contestant. Back at school, she’d once mentioned she’d never gotten a speeding ticket even though she’d been pulled over three times in Pawtucket. “It’s no biggie,” she’d said airily. “You just talk.”

  Like many of my classmates who’d been educated at exclusive prep schools, Claire seemed perfectly at ease with authority and had a reflexive talent for winning over her superiors with cleverness and charm. She seemed to approach people in positions of power not as entities to be thwarted, feared, or defied, but as equals to be reasoned with.

  As we sat there in the anemic light of the Dinghai guest room, I watched her slip on her good breeding and pedigree like a camel hair coat. Twisting around to face the officer directly, she smiled at him winningly—her white teeth winking—then spoke to him as if he were an old, familiar friend. I had to admit, she had nerve. It was really something to see.

  “Please understand. We’ve meant no disrespect or offense by coming here,” she said, touching her hand to the milky hollow of her throat, her tone caramelizing. “As two scholars from one of America’s top universities, we’re just so eager to see as much of your beautiful country as we possibly can. And it is such an honor to be here, Officer. Really, it is. And we are so grateful to be welcomed here by you like this, to be shown such hospitality and concern.”

  As Jonnie translated, she unsnapped her wallet, pulled out her old Brown University ID card, and presented it to the officer like a diplomatic credential. Taking my cue from her, I poked through my money belt to do the same. However, I’d left my old college ID back in New York, so I handed him my International Youth Hostel Association and Student Discount Travel cards instead, hoping he wouldn’t be able to discern the difference. “You see, we come from a very elite academic institution in the United States of America,” Claire pressed. “And it’s our hope that our presence here will only bolster more goodwill and understanding between our two countries.”

  The officer nodded and looked at our ID cards. For a moment, he seemed prepared to acquiesce.

  But then he gave a little grunt and took a step backward. He’d arrayed on the desktop many of our possessions: our fourteen different Berlitz phrase books for languages ranging from Cantonese to Urdu; our Michelin maps of various Southeast Asian countries; our cameras, film, and batteries; our hastily marked homemade cassette tapes; our Swiss Army knives; our electrical adapters; our flashlights and notebooks; our water purifier; Claire’s miniature binoculars.

  Something among them had caught his eye anew. He turned around and picked up Claire’s canteen. It had belonged to her stepbrother Dominic, who’d purchased it years ago from a camping and military surplus store. It was still snapped in its original, khaki-colored canvas case with “Property of the U.S. Army” stenciled on it in fading black letters.

  Until that moment, I’d assumed the officer’s visit was mostly a formality, a bureaucratic ritual designed to impress and intimidate visitors. As he’d questioned us, I’d even started imagining how I was going to embellish this story later telling it to loved ones back home. It seemed obvious to me that Claire and I were innocents; what’s more, we were U.S. citizens with valid American passports—golden tickets, I’d presumed. What could the Chinese really, possibly do to a couple of red-white-and-blue girls armed with nothing but backpacks and good intentions?

  Yet seeing all of our travel gear displayed atop a cold metal desktop in the eerie half-light of Dinghai, it suddenly didn’t look like innocuous crap to me anymore so much as it looked like incriminating evidence. Property of the U.S. Army? All those wires and documents? A twisty unease came over me as I began to see Claire and me not as the bright, lovable Americans we believed ourselves to be, but as Chinese eyes might view us instead. From their vantage point, we were two aliens half a world away from anyplace where we were supposed to be, who’d arrived in Dinghai with unconvincing student ID cards and what appeared to be a cache of rudimentary surveillance equipment. If this Chinese military officer thought we were guilty of espionage—well, I couldn’t say I blamed him.

  I glanced anxiously at Claire. “That’s not a real U.S Army canteen, Officer,” she said, straining to sound mollifying.

  “It’s just a decorative trademark they put on,” I interjected. “You know, a brand name, like Coca-Cola or McDonald’s?”

  Claire made a quick, decisive slicing gesture with the side of her hand as if to say either “shut up” or “decapitation.”

  The officer turned to us, set down the canteen, then presented us with another object he’d unearthed. “What is this?” he asked.

  He held up Claire’s waterproof Sony Sport Walkman encased in bright yellow plastic.

  “That’s for listening to music. See?”

  Claire stood up hurriedly. Unfolding the headphones, she placed them gently around his chin and over his ears, then directed him to press the turquoise play button. I guess the volume had been set on 10 because a second later, the synthesized drum-machine riff from Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Right Round, Baby” could be heard blaring through the headphones, and the officer winced and pulled them off.

  He then picked up our two cameras, shook them, and opened the film compartments. “Did you know that foreigners taking photographs in Dinghai was strictly forbidden?” he asked.

  The fact that Claire and I had somehow managed to break both cameras within a day of arriving suddenly seemed like a phenomenal stroke of luck.

  While Jonnie translated, we proudly showed off the jammed shutter button on my Instamatic and the cracked plastic chassis of Claire’s. “See? See?” we nattered. “They’re broken! They don’t work! We couldn’t take any pictures even if we wanted to—which we don’t!”

  Then, in case we hadn’t driven the point home clearly enough, Claire pantomimed sitting down on the cameras by accident. In her nervousness and desperation, she delivered quite a performance; it was practically an opera. She leapt up from the bed, rubbing her backside in distress, then faked crying, rubbing her eyes with her fists and pointing melodramatically at the broken equipment.

  This must have convinced the officer that he was not dealing with two international military spies at all, but with a pair of world-class dimwits, because after that, he stood up, sighed, massaged the bridge of his nose, and wearily announced that we were free to stay—providing that Jonnie accepted responsibility for us as our officially sanctioned host.

  “But if Chinese officials give you orders, remember, you must obey,” he warned us. “You must follow all instructions, rules, and laws. You must respect all representatives of the People’s Republic of China. And again, no pictures.”

  Claire and I nodded puppyishly. “Tell the officer that of course we will obey everything and cooperate fully,” I said to Jonnie.

  “Tell him that not only do we thank him,” Claire added with a regal flick of her hair, “but that my father does as well. Tell them that my father is a very rich and very important businessman in America.”

  When she said this, I made a face.

  “What?” she said defensively, touching her hand to the base of her throat again and fingering her gold chain. “It’s true. I think they should know exactly who they’re really dealing with.”

  Ignoring us, the officer walked over to our nightstand, picked up the clunky plastic telephone, and called someone. Then, inexplicably, he remained in our room, lingering wordlessly by the window with his hands clasped behind his back. Unsure of how to proceed, Jonnie and Claire and I remained frozen in our places, glancing furtively at him, then at each other.

  The stark hotel room felt like a morgue. Its two twin beds were bandaged in white sheets and swaddled in thick, gauzy mosquito netting. Except for the metal desk, the m
etal chair, and a lone dented metal nightstand, the room was empty and bathed in jaundiced light. There was absolutely no sound in the hotel at all, either, except for the occasional haatcch of someone spitting in the street below and the rattle of the elevator shaft.

  Finally there was a knock on the door. A second military officer arrived with two alien travel permits filled out for Claire and me, which were presented to us as if they were some sort of civic award.

  After wishing us a pleasant visit, the two officers smiled, nodded, and left.

  As soon as we heard their footsteps fading down the corridor, the three of us exhaled in unison like criminals who’d just barely pulled off a heist.

  “Wow.” I laughed nervously. “Talk about a welcome wagon.”

  “And they didn’t even bring a Bundt cake,” Claire said drily.

  Jonnie stood up and wiped his hands on the thighs of his pants.

  “Everything, it is okay now, yes?” He smiled anxiously, his eyes darting between Claire and me. “Everything is now official?”

  Claire and I nodded. “I suppose,” she said abstractly.

  “Now I must go home to see my family. You stay here, yes?” said Jonnie. “You have very nice lunch here. Overseas Hotel have number one restaurant in Dinghai.”

  Claire frowned and crossed her arms. “Well, wait a minute. I thought we were going home with you,” she said. “I mean, isn’t that why we just went through all of this questioning? I’d much rather meet your family than hang around here all day.”

  “Jesus, Claire,” I murmured. “The guy hasn’t been home in seven years. Let him have some alone time.”

  “You want come home with me now?” Jonnie said. Although he was smiling, I could see the distress blooming in his face, the calculations scrolling in his head. “My mother, I tell her you coming tomorrow. Tomorrow we make special feast. My brother, he take car back to his company already. Now I walk home. Over one hour. Special friends should not walk home over one hour.”

  “Jonnie, please, don’t worry about it.” I glared at Claire. “We’re actually very tired and would prefer to stay here. Right, Claire?”

  Claire shrugged noncommittally. When I shot her a prompting look, she managed to fake a yawn. “Sure,” she said.

  “Yes?” said Jonnie uneasily. “You do not mind? You are comfortable?”

  “Go see your mom, Jonnie,” I said. “We’re happy to meet her tomorrow.”

  “Yes, yes, okay,” Jonnie nodded, clasping his hands together. “But if you want, maybe I still come back for you later today, yes? This afternoon, I see if my brother, if he can reserve car again, okay?”

  “Whatever,” Claire said with a little flutter of her hand.

  “Okay,” he said, but he sounded unconvinced. Even as I began to close the door behind him, he insisted on poking his head back in and waving. “Okay, Miss Crair?”

  When he was finally gone, I scowled, but all Claire did was smile at me fakely and curtsy. “There. He’s gone, and we’re not. Better?”

  She pushed back the mosquito netting around her bed, flopped down on it, and exhaled toward the ceiling. “I can’t believe you’d rather stay here all day. We’re in the middle of nowhere.” She stretched, feline and indolent. “So. Who did you think was more annoying just now?” She settled a pillow beneath her head. “Jonnie or the cop?”

  “You weren’t nervous?” I said. “When he emptied our backpacks—”

  “Please. We’re Americans, for Chrissake. One call to my father or the U.S. embassy—” Suddenly she sat bolt upright. “Wait, let’s not lay down,” she said. “Let’s go out.”

  “Out?” I motioned to the window. All there appeared to be outside were a few dilapidated yards and a jade-green mountain with a radio tower impaled on it. We had no map, no guidebook, nothing even scribbled in our journals to indicate where we were.

  Claire picked up her silver Windbreaker and knotted the sleeves around her waist. Then she hoisted the strap of her shoulder bag over her head. “Let’s just explore,” she said. “Maybe I can do some research here. Make some contacts for the world curriculum. Grab the phrase books. I’m sorry, but there’s just no way we’re sticking around here all day, even if we’re not going to Jonnie’s. Let’s face it.” She smiled. “This place is about as interesting as a cryogenic freezer.”

  ———

  Back home, when Claire and I had first dreamed of venturing into uncharted territory, we’d somehow assumed that uncharted meant exotic—lush jungles dripping with vines; toucans; natives in feathers; and some sort of untouched Eden at the end of a dirt trail.

  Certainly neither of us had imagined that uncharted territory might instead mean being stranded in a dusty industrial park on the outskirts of a Chinese military installation without any street signs or a road map.

  Downstairs, the lobby of the Overseas Chinese Hotel was deserted and as spartan as our room. Certainly there were no little information racks by reception full of pamphlets for petting zoos, coal mining museums, miniature golf. Nor was there so much as a “You Are Here” sign tacked to a wall. From the rows of keys hanging behind the reception desk, it appeared that Claire, Gunter, and I were the only guests in the entire hotel.

  Neither Claire nor I had the faintest idea where we were. When we’d left Shanghai the night before, the shoreline had been on our right, so we knew we’d sailed south—but just how far? That morning the boat had seemed to dock in some sort of estuary. Was Dinghai an island or on a delta close to the sea? We’d been too frazzled to take much notice of our surroundings. At the pier, we’d simply squeezed into the van Jonnie’s brother had borrowed, then headed away from the dockland in a whirl of dust into what seemed like the countryside. At the time I’d been captivated by the surrounding mountains, majestic blue-green peaks, soaring and angular like those a child might draw, and by a grizzled man walking barefoot along the road, a crude wooden yoke across his shoulders with an enormous basket of cabbages suspended from each end.

  Now when Claire and I walked outside the hotel, we saw that it was a desolate concrete high-rise built on a small hillock of asphalt flanked by a shuttered gas station and two cinder-block shells of half-constructed buildings. A driveway leading down from the hotel fed into a road lined with weeds and piles of gravel. Behind it were dilapidated stone houses and one ugly modern apartment complex. Small yards were crisscrossed with laundry lines. A rusted cement mixer sat abandoned in an empty field. In the distance were mountains. But there you had it. That was pretty much it.

  The sky was overcast, so it was impossible to tell east from west, north from south. There was no way of telling where the road in front of the hotel led to, or where we were in relation to the rest of Dinghai. Jonnie had said that it took an hour to walk to his family’s house, which meant that the town center was probably between three and four miles away. Our only option was to randomly pick a direction, just start walking, and hope to God we didn’t get lost.

  Claire looked at me. I looked at her. We stared out at the gritty, unappealing pavement. Despite traces of domestic life, there was absolutely no one around. The eerie silence was punctuated only by a strange intermittent crackle of static and high-pitched whistling that seemed to be coming from the transmission tower atop the mountain.

  On the ferry from Shanghai, the lights and the loudspeakers had remained on all night. The elderly couple in our cabin had stayed up talking and chain-smoking. When Claire had hissed, “Could you please be quiet?” they’d only smiled and encouragingly offered us cigarettes. We’d ended up pushing open the rusty porthole as far as it would go, filling the minuscule cabin with frigid, pickle-scented air and the grinding sound of the engine. When Gunter began snoring, we gave up trying to sleep entirely. For the duration of the trip, we sat up shivering in our sleeping bags and listening to our Walkmans, ticking off the hours by watching the sky outside the porthole dissolve from black to indigo to amethyst.

  Now my cough had sunk deeper into my chest, and Claire’s ha
ir hung lankly against her cheekbones. The prospect of blindly hiking along an asphalt road for an hour in the middle of nowhere seemed thoroughly unenticing.

  “You know something,” said Claire, pressing her slender wrist to her forehead, “suddenly I’m feeling hungry and maybe a little tired.”

  “How about instead of exploring, we check out the number one restaurant in Dinghai, then go take a nap?” I suggested. “I promise I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”

  ———

  If our brush with the Chinese military police was jarring, lunch at the Dinghai Overseas Chinese Hotel was simply bizarre. After we waited in an empty, curtained antechamber on the top floor for ten minutes, a silent young woman materialized and led Claire and me into an antiseptic dining room overlooking the mountains. Everything in the room was a glaring, retina-searing white: walls, floors, tables, chairs, linens, upholstery. It was as if someone had run a gargantuan roller of white reflective paint over the entire room. The effect was that of dining in a decontamination center. We were seated alone at a round white banquet table big enough to accommodate eight people. The place was utterly silent. Claire and I sat on our white chairs and waited.

  And waited.

  Both of us grew increasingly antsy, hungry, and quietly distressed, but what were we supposed to do? We had no idea where else we could possibly eat. Certainly we had no language skills.

  After a while, Claire said sullenly, “Wow. This must be what purgatory’s like.”

  I nodded glumly. “It’s like Waiting for Godot: The Restaurant.”

  Finally the waitress reappeared from behind a large, greenish white scrim. Without a word, she placed on the table a whole cooked silvery-brown fish on a bare white plate—then vanished. Claire and I looked down at the fish. Its head was still on and its eyes were still open, so it appeared to be looking back at us. When I studied it more closely, it seemed to have some kind of whiskers, a fringy fish mustache. We wondered if perhaps there wasn’t something more to go with this fish: sauce, perhaps, or a bowl of rice? Surely, a utensil to help us cut it up? But the waitress never reappeared. We were left alone with only our white chopsticks and our white plates and a fish that looked so alive, we expected it to jerk and writhe when we poked at it.