Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

They chose west without even discussing it, and started to walk. From time to time they came on benches set on the downhill side of the road overlooking the sea, and they sat on each of these and rested. When they passed creeks clattering down the hillside near waterfalls, Fred stuck his face in the water and drank, and suggested that Qi do the same.

“What if it’s contaminated?” she asked anxiously.

“Let’s worry about that later. You need to stay hydrated.” He drank again to show her. “Usually water in the hills is cleaner than you think.”

She stared at him as if he were crazy. “Not in China!”

“Well, but this is Hong Kong. And this little creek must be spring-fed, or recent rainwater. And you need to stay hydrated. So try just a little. We can eat some antibiotics later.”

She drank. Fred felt hungry as well as weak, and assumed she must too. He was worried about her pregnancy. If it weren’t for that, they would be okay; but that had to be a worry for her, and so it was for him too. What could pregnant women withstand? He had no idea. Probably a lot. He recalled reading stories in his childhood of peasant women harvesting crops right up to their due dates, giving birth in the fields and going back to work the very next hour, and so on. Those could have been stupid stories, he had no idea. An example of this Orientalism Qi had mentioned, attributing to peasants the toughness of animals because they were not quite human. Well, humans were animals. He recalled the brief period he had tried swimming with an adult swim group, another experiment suggested by his brother, and watching a woman eight months pregnant fly by him for lap after lap, complaining during their rests that the kid was kicking her after her flip turns. People were animals, sure, and strong as such; or could be strong. As for this particular woman, he didn’t know. She was tough, he knew that. But strong? Well, she had held on to that slope and made her way down as capably as him. But now he was wasted, and she could be too.

There was nothing to do but walk on.

After an hour or so they came to a little knot of buildings lining the road, and fortunately, at least in some senses, these were tourist establishments, meaning outdoor restaurants and cheap gift shops, overlooking what was apparently the reservoir Qi had remembered hearing about; in any case, a big lake. There were very few people or cars around, but the shops were open, and Qi had some paper money in her pockets to give to the workers at a food stand window. They ate and drank like starving people. Fred worried about the sesame chicken and ate mostly rice, gagging a little as he did. The previous night’s ordeal was still vivid to him, a body memory, but also he was starving.

They both noticed at the same time the other one scarfing down food, and they shared a glance, almost smiling; but they weren’t yet there. After that Qi made a long trip to the bathroom, and when she returned she looked more normal. Fred tried to clean up in a similar way in the men’s room. The food and soda felt okay in his stomach, not great but not sickening. He wondered how Qi had felt during that last long walk along the road. She hadn’t said a thing, hadn’t complained, hadn’t wondered aloud how much longer it would be, nothing. Not a word. He came back out to where she was sitting and leaned over and kissed the top of her head, surprising them both. She knew by now it wasn’t like him.

“You’re tough,” he explained, looking up the road.

She ducked her head, dodging the compliment. Such a round face, such a sultry face. She looked like a prima donna. Looks were so often deceptive, he wondered why anyone ever tried to take anything from them. She was glowing in the midday air. They were both still sweating.

“This is no time to get a case of yellow fever,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know—white male tech nerd falls for mysterious Chinese female? Yellow fever, they call it. A total cliché.”

Fred felt his face burning. He blinked hard, tried to think.

She looked up at him and said, “Hey! Joke! I was joking!”

“Oh.”

She tugged on his arm and got him to sit down on the bench beside her. He stared at the asphalt of the road, which had little lines of grass growing through it this way and that. After a while he cooled down a little, but it was too humid for sweat to help much by way of evaporative cooling. Certainly his face was still hot.

After a while they got up and walked west again. Fred felt a pinching on the back of his right heel, sign that a blister was on its way. The food he had eaten was lumping in his belly, and he was afraid he might get sick again.

The road curved north and became a street, and farther on they came to a bus stop. They plopped onto the bus bench under its rain roof, wordlessly enjoying the shade. When a bus came, headed north toward the city proper, they got on it and Qi paid again. The bus hummed into the westernmost end of Hong Kong, which was mostly residential, with skyscraper apartment buildings lining the road on both sides. It was amazing how many skyscrapers there were, even out here on the edge of the city.

Fred said something to this effect, and after a while Qi replied. “Someone told me that all of Australia has six hundred buildings that are taller than thirty stories, and Hong Kong has eight thousand.”

“I guess when there isn’t much land, you go up.”

She didn’t reply.

They watched the city flow by them. Stop after stop. People got off and others then got on.

“Where are we going?” Fred asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe we can stay on the bus for a while. It’s like a motel on wheels.”

“Except for no food or bathroom.”

“I know. But we can get off and get food and go to the bathroom, then get back on another bus and sit down again.”

“How long can we do that?”

“Till I figure out what to do next!”

“Okay okay. You’re right. I don’t have a better idea, and in the meantime it’s what we’ve got.”

They sat there pressed side to side. They were spending a lot of time in physical contact, it seemed to Fred. He was getting familiar with her heft, her smell. The sheen of her black hair. The details of her body’s shape, such as the way the flare of her hips was about as wide as her shoulders. Her abilities as an athlete. Her character. She rested her head against his shoulder again; she seemed to feel no hesitation in doing that. She accepted him as a known quantity.

At a stop somewhere near Central, with a view up one wide street to the ferry terminal where they had debarked from the boat the previous evening, three men got on the bus and came back and stood over them. They spoke in Chinese. Qi spoke back sharply, looking surprised.

Fred stared at them, at her. Qi said something to them in a low choked voice, and they looked startled, then annoyed.

Fred almost asked what was going on, then almost stood up, but she took his hand in hers and squeezed it, keeping him in place while she was saying something sharp to them.

Finally she glanced at him. “Come on,” she said. “They’ve got us.”

Iwalk the streets of my town and look at its people. My fellow citizens. Here a gang of young men in rainbow shirts, slouching by in their foxi Zen whateverism, white baseball caps worn at a tilt. I like them. Women’s black hair everywhere gleaming in the sun. I like black hair in all its variety. Also the white hair that follows black hair in old age. I am a white-haired old man, but I still like black hair. An old man, even older than me, sits at his corner brazier cooking pork strips for sale. I exchange greetings with him, I stop to look around. Street trees in the sunset, their fake silk blossoms incandescent in horizontal light. Green Beijing is always such a joy to see, and also to smell: the clean air, dinners cooking, and no traffic exhaust, strange but true. The old north-south orientation of the city, with the elite in the north and the poor to the south, has mostly gone away. The Maoists built great Chang’an Avenue to cut that north-south orientation in half, marking the new China with an east-west stroke of immense calligraphic power. Broad tree-lined boulevard, big public buildings monumentally flanking it, orientation directing the eye to the sinking sun like some Paleolithic astro-archeology. This powerful feng shui was the work of some great geomancer, possibly Zhou Enlai, I don’t recall.