Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Read online

  Through a conversation conducted in ellipses, improvised code, and verbal charades, my mother grasps that although Claire has disassembled, neither of us can simply stay put and wait for help to arrive. I have to get us out of China as quickly as possible. She promises to contact the Van Houtens, who are currently in Hilton Head, and get everyone on standby, ready at a moment’s notice to receive overseas phone calls, wire money, book airplane tickets.

  As soon as I hang up, Sandy sticks her head out of the bathroom. “Hey, can you please come here for a moment and bring in some clothes?” Her voice, I notice, has the same artificial cheeriness that I have just used with my mother. It is the tone of people aware that they’re under surveillance.

  In the bathroom, I see that Claire’s pallor is returning and her eyes are less vacant, though her expression is now increasingly that of someone being persecuted. She refuses to look at me or acknowledge me in any way. Shame shoots through me. This is all my fault, I think.

  Since she no longer owns any pants or shoes, I give her my violet tank dress to wear, along with her own blue rubber flip-flops and her wrinkled gray cardigan. Sartorially, it’s only one cut above the souvenir T-shirt and the Mao uniform. After Sandy dresses Claire, she leads her like a child over to the chairs in the corner and asks Eckehardt to watch her for a few minutes. She steers me out into the hallway to a deserted alcove by the elevator thrumming with white noise from the air shaft.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” she whispers. “When I gave Claire a bath, I took the opportunity to give her a medical exam. She’s got scratches on her hands, arms, and chest from a tree branch. But otherwise, physically, she’s fine. No sign of anything broken or sprained. No sign of any sort of abuse. Nobody’s mistreated her at all.”

  “Did she tell you what happened?”

  Sandy exhales. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that your friend did not try to commit suicide. She did not jump off a bridge. She told me that she walked into the river very calmly.”

  “I knew she wasn’t suicidal!” I exclaim with a little clap, feeling vindicated. “So what’s the bad news, then?”

  “She walked into the river,” says Sandy, “because she believed it would help her escape the assassins sent by the CIA. And she insists that the water was calling to her.”

  ———

  Back in the room, Eckehardt sits beside Claire, holding her hand and whispering to her. While he talks, she stares straight ahead, seemingly captivated by molecules dancing in the air before her.

  Sandy kneels before her with a cup of tea and a pill. “Here, take this.”

  Mechanically, Claire obeys.

  Eckehardt pulls me aside. “I think you should know, when I went to sit with her, she told me that she is hearing voices. She asked me to just keep talking to her so that she does not have to listen to them. I did not know what to say, so I just talked about the weather.”

  I lean back against the wall for a moment. “Christ.” I blink up at the ceiling tiles. How did it come to all this?

  “I think the Chinese, they are nervous,” Eckehardt continues. “They do not want a foreigner to kill herself in their country. That would be very embarrassing for them, yah?”

  I pull Sandy into the bathroom, turn on the faucet to drown out the sound, and relay this latest bit of information.

  “Your friend may be schizophrenic, psychotic, or just having your basic garden-variety breakdown,” Sandy says. “I don’t know. I’ve just given her some Valium that I picked up in South Korea.” She waggles an amber-colored vial of pills. “But she’s not the only one I’m worried about. Can this guy Ecke-hardt go with you to Guangzhou and Hong Kong?”

  I shake my head. “I’ve only just met him, really.”

  Sandy looks worried. “Then I think you need a Valium, too, lady. No offense, but this is way too much for anyone to handle by themselves, and you’re not looking so good. I don’t like the sound of your cough, either.”

  “I don’t need Valium,” I say. “If Claire’s like this, I need to remain as clearheaded as possible. I’m from New York. I’m tough. I’ll deal with it.”

  Sandy sighs. “Yeah, but, honey, we’re not in New York City now,” she says delicately. “We’re in China. Trust me. I’ve lived here a year. You have no idea what you’re up against.”

  Of course she is right. “Well, if that’s the case, then what I really need is for you to come with me,” I say. My own brazenness surprises me. “Come with me to the airport or to Guangzhou, even to Hong Kong if you can. Help me, and I promise I’ll put you up in four-star hotels and pay all of your expenses, both there and back.” Opening my money belt, I pull out a fistful of cash. “See? I’m good for it. I earned this as a waitress. I’m not going to stick you with the tab.”

  Sandy crosses her arms and frowns.

  “Let me get this straight. You’re asking me, a total stranger, to accompany you and your nutcase friend to another city, possibly all the way to Hong Kong, on a moment’s notice?”

  Before I can plead my case further, she hoots, “Jeez Louise. How wild would that be? I love it. The look on Kyle’s face alone might be worth it.”

  “So you’ll actually consider it?” I cannot believe my great fortune. Sandy might as well be a superhero landing before me with a bright red maple leaf emblazoned on her chest, a gold lasso at her hip.

  “On three conditions.” She holds up her hand. “One”—she ticks off on a finger, “absolutely no whining. We’re going to have our hands full with baby Claire here, and I can only care for one infant at a time. You whine, I leave, got it?”

  I nod.

  “Two. I am Canadian. This is not only a separate nationality from America, but a superior one. If I ever hear you pulling that American crap—you know, saying that Canadians are really just Americans except more boring, or making wisecracks about county mounties and ice hockey—so help you God, lady, you and your friend will be out on your Yankee doodle bums in a heartbeat, understand?”

  “Okay,” I say with mock disgruntlement. “No Canada jokes.”

  She smiles mischievously. It feels both good and strange to joke with someone again, to feel that easy camaraderie.

  “Lastly, three, I want us to make this as fun as possible. Treat it as an adventure, not a tragedy, okay? Because believe you me, I need a vacation so badly, I’m even willing to sign up with you two, that’s how desperate I am. Between living here in China and traveling with Kyle, I’m just about ready to jump in a river myself.”

  “Really?” I say, genuinely surprised. “But I thought you said you were having such a great time.”

  Sandy drops her pill vial into her toiletry bag. “Sure I am. That’s why I just happen to be traveling with a bottle full of South Korean tranquilizers.”

  ———

  Within fifteen minutes, Sandy’s overnight bag is packed, Eckehardt has hailed a taxi to the airport for us, and the three of us have coaxed Claire down to the lobby with her backpack. Yet at checkout, George, the manager, refuses to relinquish Claire’s passport.

  “Yes, I am so sorry,” he says, “but that will not be possible.”

  First he insists that he does not have permission to release the passport. Then he claims he no longer has the passport. Finally he implies that the authorities have confiscated the passport. Whatever, it has vanished, and without her passport, Claire is unable to check into another hotel, purchase train or bus tickets, or board an airplane even domestically. Technically she is no longer in police custody, yet the Chinese have managed to incarcerate her by fiat.

  I start panicking, but Sandy remains unfazed.

  “What did I say about whining?” she says, slinging her small purple knapsack cavalierly over her shoulder. “Trust me, if I’ve learned one thing after a year in this country, it’s how to get around the system.”

  “I’m putting these girls on the next plane to Guangzhou,” she announces breezily to Kyle, who has arrived to see us off. “I’m not
sure when I’ll be back. If I can’t get on the flight with them, I’ll be back in two hours. If I can get on, I’ll see you in two days. If I wind up going as far as Hong Kong, I’ll see you at the end of the week.”

  Kyle stands there in his hospital scrubs and his jute sandals. “You want me to continue sightseeing here without you?”

  Sandy rolls her eyes. “No, Kyle. I expect you to do nothing but sit around the Osmanthus waiting for me indefinitely.”

  My farewell to Eckehardt is distinctly more heartfelt: I kiss him desperately; he touches my face tenderly and tells me to please be careful and to write to him in Germany as soon as I get home. The two of us hug, and I bury my head in his shoulder weeping, “Thank you. Danke. Shay shay nee,” until Sandy says, “Jeez Louise, you two. Enough with the mushy stuff.”

  Then, Eckehardt and Kyle are hoisting up our backpacks with those purposeful, heroic motions men use whenever they’re required to lift anything, and they parade the bags out to the waiting taxi and deposit them in the trunk while Sandy and I slowly escort Claire across the lobby. We’ve put her Walkman on her with the volume turned up to the max to drown out the voices in her head, and the Valium is kicking in. She is in such a daze now that Sandy and I each have to take an arm and lead her like an invalid through the glass doors. Once we have lowered her gingerly into the backseat of the cab, Sandy slides in beside her. “See. That wasn’t so bad at all, was it? We’ll have you home in no time.”

  Claire snuggles against her with her eyes closed. “Sandy. Mm. Like Mother,” she murmurs.

  I give Eckehardt one last kiss goodbye and begin crying all over again.

  “You’ve saved my life,” I whisper.

  “It was not so terrible,” he laughs.

  He shuts the door with a sad little smile, and the taxi pulls away from the curb with a jerk. The two of us watch each other wistfully through the mud-splattered back windshield until the cab lurches over the speed bump in the driveway and turns into the street, and we are abruptly cut off from one another’s view and that is it. Auf Wiedersehen. It is likely that we will never see each other again.

  ———

  The Guilin airport is little more than a drafty airplane hangar with a couple of counters and offices set up along one wall. In 1986, China’s only airline is CAAC, which Westerners joke is an abbreviation for “China Air Always Crashes.” Rumor has it that if you manage to survive a CAAC flight intact, you get candies and a present from the crew upon landing.

  No matter how much wangling Sandy does, the CAAC representative insists that there are no more seats available on the afternoon flight to Guangzhou. I sit with Claire in the dismal, empty waiting area nervously eyeing the clock as Sandy demands to speak to one agent, then another. Finally she stalks back over to where we’re sitting, hoists Claire’s pack onto her own shoulders, and commands, “Come on, we’re boarding.”

  “You got a ticket?”

  Sandy’s ability to navigate China continues to wow me; she is thoroughly undaunted by the culture or her own limited linguistic abilities. “Nope. We’re just getting on.”

  “Without checking in or anything?”

  “Look, I’ve had enough of this bureaucracy. I’m sorry, but I’m Canadian. There’s only so much incivility I can take. We’re just going to board the plane. What are they going to do to us?”

  I look at her incredulously. “Put us in jail? Arrest us?”

  “Please. We’re foreigners. No one will dare. Besides, your friend here doesn’t have a passport, so what else can we do?”

  For a moment I wonder if perhaps Claire is not the only delusional person among us. But Sandy charges toward the security area and motions for us to follow, and so we do.

  The security area consists of a lone Formica table and a turnstile with a couple of young Chinese officers lingering behind it. They smile at us agreeably.

  “Nee how.”

  “Nee how,” we parrot back—even Claire, who’s now bobbing her head spasmodically in time to the music blasting on her Walkman. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” emanates tinnily from the headphones.

  “Ticket, please,” says the head officer. He examines mine and Claire’s, then looks expectantly at Sandy.

  “I am their official government escort,” she announces coolly, holding out her Chinese ID card from the university where she teaches English. The officer studies the card uncertainly but, to my great relief, does not challenge her. He asks instead to see our passports. When Claire does not produce hers, the officer frowns and says something in Chinese. His colleague leans over and demands, “Where is other passport?”

  “She lost it,” I say.

  “No get on plane without passport.”

  “But that’s exactly why we’re going to Guangzhou. To go to the American consulate to replace her lost passport.”

  The officer looks confused.

  “We can’t show you a passport if you don’t let us through,” Sandy seconds, louder and more slowly, as if this might in any way clarify the situation. “She needs a new one. And she can only get one in Guangzhou.”

  “Get new passport? Where is old one?” says the officer.

  “It’s in the river,” I tell him.

  Sandy looks at Claire and me. “Oh, fuck it,” she says. “Run.”

  The three of us bolt through the turnstile and dash out onto the tarmac into the hot wind, our backpacks jiggling on our shoulders. The plane is already revving its engines with an ear-piercing whistle; the propellers are beginning to rotate lazily, and a lone worker in a Mao uniform is just about to disengage the mobile stairway away from the fuselage.

  “No! Wait!” Sandy yells. For some reason, all three of us are laughing wildly, running as fast as we can across the asphalt.

  If this were fiction, of course, I could embellish this scene. Chinese military officers would begin chasing after us across the tarmac with their guns drawn, calling hurriedly for reinforcements while the three of us dramatically scramble up the stairs to the airplane, tumbling breathlessly into the cockpit at the very last minute amid a hail of bullets.

  But the fact is that when we run, I glance back to see that only one of the officers has walked out onto the tarmac after us. After a moment he shrugs and wanders back to his post behind the security table, where he and his colleagues proceed to light cigarettes and watch us through the plate glass window with only mild interest. Perhaps they assume we won’t make it onto the plane; perhaps they just don’t feel like running; perhaps they have decided that it’s easier to let three crazy Westerners become somebody else’s problem in Guangzhou.

  Whatever the reason, they let Claire, Sandy, and me race up the staircase at the last possible second and stumble into the airplane just as the hatch is closing. Already strapped into their jump seats, the startled flight attendants leap up, grab our tickets, then look at us, bewildered.

  Glancing around the cabin, we see that the CAAC representatives were not lying. There are exactly two seats left on the entire flight—1A and 1B—which have been reserved for Claire and me. Otherwise the plane is full. There is absolutely no place for Sandy to sit. Yet the doors have been shut and the plane is already pivoting slowly around on the tarmac.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Sandy says, smiling prettily at the panicked flight attendants. “I’ll just share a seat here with my friend Claire.”

  Somehow she manages to raise the armrest, wedge into the space between Claire and me, and stretch the seatbelt across both of them. “See?” she laughs, scrunching her nose and clipping in the buckle. “All snug as a bug.”

  With our backpacks piled on the floor by our feet, we are breaking every standard passenger safety rule in commercial aviation. And yet nobody halts the plane. China Air Always Crashes! As the cabin shudders and vibrates, we feel it accumulating velocity until the engine shrieks and the entire body seems to release, catapulting forward. We are suddenly aloft, airborne, lifting higher and higher up over the jagged karsts, over the metallic rivers
and soft green rice paddies, over the misty pearl-gray city of Guilin, until the view from the tiny window is nothing but blurred patchwork, and we have left Guangxi province, with all of its terror and beauty and heartbreak, behind.

  ———

  As soon as we land, we have other problems. We have to go through passport control in Guangzhou, which, unlike Guilin, appears to be highly functional, with a Plexiglas booth staffed by military police who are actually paying attention.

  Mercifully, the checkpoint official seems to be used to frantic Westerners appearing before him empty-handed and teary-eyed, explaining that they’ve come to Guangzhou for replacement passports. The moment we launch into our tale of woe, he pulls out a mimeographed map of the city with various foreign consulates circled on it in red. But as he issues Claire a special transit waiver that allows her to leave the airport, he warns us that she has to obtain a Chinese emergency visa as well. It doesn’t matter that we’re planning on leaving for Hong Kong the next morning. Without an emergency visa in her replacement passport, he explains, the Chinese will prohibit her from exiting and detain her. The government has a distinct sense of irony: If you don’t have official proof that you’ve been admitted into the country in the first place, they’ll refuse to let you out of it.

  What’s more, the official explains, if Claire does not obtain an emergency visa on the very same day as her new passport, she will be considered illegal and risk being arrested or detained that evening. We have to proceed to both offices immediately.

  As luck would have it, the American consulate and the Chinese foreign visa office are on opposite ends of the city. And, like good bureaucracies everywhere, their doors come down like guillotines at precisely five o’clock. It is currently 2:54 p.m.

  “Why you arrive so late?” the official scolds. “Most people, they need new passport, they arrive Guangzhou first thing in morning.”

  “Gee, thanks. Okay then. Telling us this is really helpful,” Sandy snorts as she pulls Claire through the turnstile. “We’ll just go jump in our time machine now.”