Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

“Where to?” I said into the intercom.

“Peking,” Jane said. “The Imperial City.”

We landed in darkness a few hours later. I was drowsy now and in need of food and rest. My seat on the plane was designed for a smaller race of person than I, and my ass was sore from it. I hadn’t had anything to eat since that breakfast coffee. When we started coming down I asked Jane if I could get a sandwich at the airport.

“No time for that, Mr. Kwoo,” she said as we banked into a landing curve.

Two girl soldiers marched us from the plane to a black electric Mercedes. My stomach growled. I lit a cigar. We drove down a dimly lit airport road and then through suburbs of row houses with an occasional corner grocery lighted brightly, where old people shopped. Where were the young? We crossed Chang An Avenue and came into a downtown district with a few bright lights but not many people. It was only nine-thirty, and this appeared to be Peace Blooms Square right in the heart of downtown. A few blocks from Tien An Men. Everybody must be at home watching television. I was gratified to see what appeared to be a drunk, asleep on a bench near a closed bookstore. An American tourist? We drove on. A few blocks from the square we stopped in front of what appeared to be a hotel.

“Where are we? “I said.

Jane answered in Chinese. “You will be a guest in the House of Comradely Love.”

I was marched past a grim lobby with four male clerks at a desk. We went into a gritty freight elevator and stared straight ahead as we went up eighteen floors and creaked to a stop. The door opened. The hallway had a gray linoleum floor, with cigarette butts. A dead geranium sat in a cracked pot near a barred window to my right; we turned left, past metal doorways to the end of the hall. There were four locks on the door. The girl who had brought us here produced four electronic keys and unlocked them one by one without getting any of the locks wrong. She stepped aside. Jane pushed open the door into a single room. A bare twenty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling, illuminating the ugliest hotel room I had ever seen. A cockroach scurried along a broken baseboard; the air smelled of cabbage.

“What the hell are you trying to do to me, White Heron?” I said.

She looked at me a moment and then spoke in English. “You should have been more cooperative. Aboard the ship.”

“Wait till Mourning Dove hears about this.”

“Mourning Dove Soong,” White Heron said, “is enjoying a long vacation in Tibet, at a monastery without viddiphone. She will be there meditating, indefinitely. I have been given charge of your case.”

I stared at her.

“Welcome to China,” Jane said, and clanged the door behind me. I stood transfixed in that cold, cabbagey room. In dim light I saw an oak dresser, a straight-backed chair and a sagging bed. A toilet without a seat was in one corner, and a dirty washstand with one tap at the other. There was no telephone, no TV, no bathtub or shower. There was no food. The one window had bars an inch thick.

I managed to sleep anyway, with my clothes on. There was a cake of rough yellow soap and I got fairly clean with it in the morning and then used the wet towel to wash some of the grit off the window. I looked down between bars eighteen stories to a park. It looked like Gramercy Park, in fact. I was stiff as a board and frightened. My joints ached and I was trembling with cold. I did situps and knee bends for ten minutes, trying not to think about breakfast. Trying not to think at all. They would hardly bring me to China just to starve me.

When I’d finished and was wiping off the sweat with my one other towel the door started unlocking. This time two men were waiting for me, in noncom uniforms. They escorted me silently to the elevator and punched the up button. We arrived at a kind of penthouse on the twenty-sixth floor, which turned out to be the cafeteria. A few old people were sitting at tables, drinking tea.

The guards continued to flank me while I went to the serving counter. The food was piled in steel trays and lit by flickering light bulbs. I got six hard-boiled eggs, a cup of soggy rice and a mug of black tea. There was no cream or sugar.

I took a seat by the balcony with a view of Gramercy Park, and cracked my eggs while the guards watched. The eggs were awfully dry in my mouth, and when I tried to wash them down with tea I spilled some on my beard because my hand was shaking. Don’t weaken, Belson , I told myself. But there was a gnawing going on at the roots of my soul. I knew what it was I had begun to want the minute I saw that room, that scurrying roach, that awful bed. Morphine.

When I finished, the men marched me back to the elevator. In the lobby two other soldiers met us, both with rifles, and the four of them escorted me out the door and across the street to a building with a big sign that read PEOPLE’S CLOTHING AND AIDS TO HEALTH.

Inside, a chubby middle-aged man looked me over. “Mr. Kwoo?” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Well, we can certainly make you more fashionable than that .” He frowned at my yellow spacesuit.

“You’re going to make me an outfit?” I said.

“Absolutely!” he said in English. “The very best. We know about you from the newspapers, Mr. Kwoo, and we know your importance.”

Thanks a lot , I thought, remembering my hotel room.

The five of them took me to a back room where a big metal box stood, like an upright coffin.

“Just step inside,” the man said. “It works like a dream. An absolute dream.”

I stepped in. He threw a switch and I heard a hum. An invisible beam must be scanning my body, doing a contour map. “All right now,” he said and turned it off.

“How long does it take?” I said.

“About ten minutes. Do you like midnight blue? For the trousers, I mean?”

“How about blue jeans?” I said.

“Sorry,” he said. “This isn’t Los Angeles. I was planning flannels. We’ll cut four or five shirts in different pastels, and then, to cap it all, a simple down jacket in gray silk.”

“Don’t make it look Italian. And I’ll need shoes.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Kwoo,” he said, “but our shoemaking equipment isn’t working. We can give you fresh hose for those…” He looked at my feet with distaste.

“Adidas,” I said.

“I’m sure they’re marvelous for speed.” He turned and walked over to a wall where bolts of fabric hung above one another, reached his short arms up, and with some dexterity pulled down a heavy bolt of gray cloth. He smiled benignly toward me and then lugged the fabric over to a large gray machine, slid it into a hopper at one end and delicately pressed a green button on the side. There was a low whirr for about fifteen seconds, a click, and then another louder whirr. A folded pair of pants slid out onto a red enameled tray. He walked over and picked them up. “Perfect,” he said. “It’s really a superb piece of equipment. Japanese.” He handed them to me.

I slipped out of my spacepants right there and pulled on the flannels. They were of good fabric, but they fit over my narrow ass like a glove. “Jesus!” I said, “they’re tight .”

He looked me over, pursing his lips. “Well,” he said, “this machine does make them snug. That’s the truth of it.”

“Isn’t it working right?” I said. “I haven’t seen anybody on the streets wearing anything like this. The men outside are wearing good Communist baggy pants.”

He blushed a little. “To be frank,” he said, “I’m under orders from the Army. From Major Feng.”

I stared at him. “White Heron?”

He looked up at me helplessly. “Yes, Mr. Kwoo. White Heron Feng. You are to be dressed as a… as a courtesan.”