Ken Kesey - Demon Box

The American runners had been in Beijing for nearly a week, wishing their budgets had been a little less well-heeled. The Oriental food had loosened their lower intestines and the Beijing air had plugged their lungs: "When you run into the wall in this venue," observed Chuck Hattersly of Eugene, Oregon, when he came in from a light workout, wheezing and spitting, "you get to see what it's made of!"

The Americans were quartered in the modern Great Wall Hotel, complete with elevator Muzak and hot-and-cold running houseboys assigned to each room. The visiting Orientals, the Japanese and Koreans, were in the Beijing Hilton. The Europeans were scattered between. The Chinese were in a large compound dorm with most of the other Third World entries. The day before the race, everybody had arrived except the Tanzanian, Magapius Dasong.

In his tiny double room at the compound, Yang lay exhausted and sleepless after the day's flight in the old Russian turboprop. It had not been the lofty joyride he had expected, this first trip off the earth. The old airplane had been noisy and drafty, the seats confining, and the windows too small. At first he had been thrilled by the great mountains, so steep and terrible looking, but when he examined the range through the field glasses passed him by his father's colleague, he saw that the wild slopes had been tamed. Centuries of hungry toil had chiseled them into steps, thousands of descending agricultural terraces.

Tossing now in his narrow bed, he wished he had never looked. Every time he closed his eyes to try to sleep, he saw those terraced mountainsides, each few feet of retaining wall and few inches of soil the effort of so many hands and years, for another precious ton of corn, another trailer of cabbage.

It had always been a peculiar thing to Bling, his first name. His father had called him Ling Wu, after his father the stone mason, and his mother had called him Bill, after her father the missionary. So his name had never really been William.

Yet from his first day of school in Pittsburgh he had been called William by his sixth-grade teacher. By his classmates, Willy Wu, as though it were all one word, an American Indian word perhaps, certainly not half-Irish, half-Chinese-an Indian name for an uncertain wind: Willawoo.

Then when he wearied of Yankee gook wars abroad and left-wing American breastbeating at home and transferred from the University of Pittsburgh back to his birthplace at the University of Beijing, his teachers had called him Bee. Bee Ling Wu. Because he had used the letter B as his first initial on his application. This name had in turn become, to the members of his track team, Bee Wing Lou, thanks largely to the persistence of the only other English-speaking member of the ragtag squad, a girl from Sydney. "Bee Wing Louie, as yer such a dashing little black-eyed bug," she had explained with the typical Australian love of wordplay, "yer more the sprint from-flower-to-flower sort, it looks to me, than a long-runner."

Indeed, his position on the Pittsburgh team had been in the 100 and the 200 around-the-bend. No world-beater there, either. He had moved to the distances as age and embarrassment forced him out of the dashes. He found a whole new track career in China. Modern Yankee know-how in the form of vitamins, shoes, and training techniques had made him the top 1,500-meter man in all of the eastern provinces. Times that would have been barely mediocre in the States won him in China ribbons and respect. From all but the saucy Aussie.

"Go it!" she would shout at him around the last turn of the 1,500, waving her watch in the air. "Yer pressin' Mary Decker's time me little Bee Winger, go it!"

And now the American journalists, after he had been introduced to them as Mr. B. Ling, were calling him Bling.

Bling Clawsby.

"Have your droll yucks," he admonished the trio, "before I tip them you're all KGB agents."

The photographer shook his head. "Nobody'll go for it, Bling. Mr. Mude told us we have the unmistakable landlord look of American capitalists."

Mude was the interpreter appointed to the American press for the upcoming special. He was forty and fastidious, with an impeccable Western hairstyle and outfit. For the same reasons that the famous pictures of Marx and Engels were to be taken down for the day of the race, Mude had been advised that it would be acceptable to wear something less jarring to the American public than the gray garb of the Red Menace. Something Western. So Mr. Mude had tailored a powder-blue Western outfit, replete with pearl buttons and embroidered longhorns. Taiwan-made cowboy boots glittered from beneath the blue cuffs. A six-shooter tie slide held his neckerchief tight to his throat. He would not have looked out of place on Hee Haw.

In the customs terminal at the Beijing Airport, however, there had been nothing funny about his attire. If anything it made him somehow all the more ominous, especially when he waltzed them past the customs guard with one word: "Dipromatic."

It had been clear from the first that he did not like English. But he had been assigned the odious language, so some test must have indicated aptitude; therefore, he must be qualified; thus he had conquered it.

Hence he could translate – after a stiff fashion – but could not quite communicate. He couldn't chat. He couldn't joke. He could only smile and say "No," or "One cannot," or "Very sorry, I fear that is not possible."

So the journalists had been relieved indeed to come across Bling in the lounge of the hotel, reading a Spiderman comic and listening to a tiny tape machine play "Whip It" by Devo. The journalists had skidded to a gaping stop. Here was a young Chinese wearing a pair of skinny blue shades, short pants, a crewcut uncut so long it stuck up in random twisted quills. The journalists were impressed.

"Isn't this a splendid surprise?" they applauded. "A Pekingese punk."

"Far out," Bling responded. "A pack of Yankee Dogs, escaped from the pound. Do have a seat. I can see you are about to buy a poor student a drink."

After repeated rounds of gin rickeys and ideological argument they enlisted him as a go-between, with an offer of free running shoes and a promise not to reveal his true identity in their story. "Have no worry," they assured him. "No one will ever know that Bling Clawsby has defected to the Orient."

The deal was struck and Bling was with them from then on. Mude didn't care for this New Wave addition to the retinue, but he tried to make the most use he could of it. In a way, Bling afforded Mr. Mude the opportunity to be even more inscrutable. He found he could relegate random questions to Bling. When asked "How does the sports academy select students?" Or "Is there legal recourse in China if, say, this crazy bus driver runs over a bicycle?" Or "Why is China doing this event anyway?" Mude could pass these difficult questions on with a curt nod. "Mr. B. Ling will explain this you."

"Explain me this, then, Mr. Bling," the writer pressed on. "If China wants to put her best foot forward, as you say, then why a marathon? The Chinese entries are going to get creamed."

Bling leaned across the aisle of the rocking bus to answer out of Mude's earshot.